Category: General Games

Cult of the Deep

| T3d-1978

You are a cultist, trying to establish your faction’s rise to power. Fight over rituals and mythical monsters as you seek victory and control of the cult.

Roles

 

Each player is given a role that will remain hidden throughout the game, except the High Priest. This role will determine your win condition:

  • High Priest – Root out corruption in the cult. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and survive.
  • Cabalists – Seek to take control of the cult. Kill the High Priest.
  • Faithful – Protect the High Priest from threats to their power. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and the High Priest must survive.
  • Heretic – Burn the whole cult to the ground. Kill the entire cult, yourself included if necessary.

Extra abilities

 

Each player will also be given a:

  • Character card that determines their starting health, special ability, and a power symbol that provides an additional way to gain life from the dice.
  • Secret sigil card, which gives each cultist a once per game power, will also be given to each player.

Mechanics

 

A player will take a turn by first rolling their dice up to 3 times. They then decide where to commit their dice: to rituals to gain altar effects to temporarily empower themselves, finish a ritual in order to gain its powerful effects permanently, stab other cultists, gain life, or give life to other cultists.

If a player is killed, they are not eliminated. Instead, they become a wraith. They will roll dice on their turn still, just less. They cannot commit dice like normal but instead haunt the dice of enemies and allies by giving, replacing, or discarding dice.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Bribery
  • Deduction
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hidden Roles
  • Push Your Luck
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 4 – 8 Players
  • 45 – 75 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.67

Court of the Dead: Mourner’s Call

| T3d-1978

Everyone is already dead in the Underworld. It’s time to join the factions of Bone, Flesh and Spirit as they work to achieve the goal of the Underworld: to gather enough forces to take on the celestials of Heaven and Hell to end their ceaseless war. If the players work diplomatically in Court of the Dead: Mourners Call to maintain a balance, they can ensure the Underworld survives long enough for them to also complete their collective and hidden individual objectives. The player who best contributes to these goals will earn Death’s favor and a place among the elite of the Underworld.

You are a Mourner — an allegiant of Death — dedicated to realizing his noble ambition to end the celestial war and restore balance to the universe. However, Death’s purpose includes your own ulterior motives. You and your fellow Mourners must unite and rise, or fall together. But only one Mourner will achieve their particular vision of the Underworld united. Your task will not be easy. While the Underworld is united in its purpose, it is divided in its strategy to achieve that aim. There are three factions in the Land of the Dead: Bone, Flesh, Spirit. Each is a unique path to rise up against Heaven and Hell.

You will need to strategically manipulate your influence within these factions, their strongholds and guilds, and within the Court of the Dead if you wish to achieve your ends. But beware: The power within mortal souls — known as Etherea — is a perilous substance. Use it carelessly, and you risk invoking the Dreadsgrip – a destructive force within every Mourner that consumes all it touches, including its former master. Failing to satiate the celestials’ war need, or triggering the Dreadsgrip, has dire consequences for all Mourners. Are you strong enough to achieve your own ambitions and be the champion for the uniting force for which all Mourners Call?

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Auction/Bidding
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Take That
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.94

Council of Shadows

| T3d-1978

It’s the year 2200. We’re on the edge of the known universe, and a race for a seat on the mighty Council of Shadows is in full swing, with four civilizations vying for admission. Only those who provide more energy to the council each turn and outdo themselves will be successful.

In Council of Shadows, you take on the role of one of these four civilizations, secure the strongest actions, take control of important areas, and be the first to make three quantum leaps. This is how you win the race for planets and raw materials and become part of the Council of Shadows!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.14

Cosmogenesis

| T3d-1978

In a game of Cosmogenesis, each player creates their own planet system, starting from a star and an asteroid belt. To do this, they use the elements available on the different sections of the central board. In each round, players obtain one element from each of the four sections over four turns and with these elements players form planets and moons. These then collide with each other, causing them to increase in size, develop rings, form atmospheres, and of course create life. Players do all of this in order to fulfill their own objectives, which like the rest of the elements of the game, are obtained from the central board; at the end of the game, these provide the victory points that determine the overall winner.

Game Mechanics:

  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.59

Cosmic Frog

| T3d-1978

Cosmic Frog is a game of collection, combat, and theft on a planetary scale. Each player controls a two-mile-tall, immortal, invulnerable frog-like creature that exists solely to gather terrain from the Shards of Aeth, the fragments of a long-ago shattered world. The First Ones seek to use the lands from the Shards to reconstruct the world of Aeth, and your frogs are their terrain harvesters.

At the start of the game, your frogs descend from the Aether, the cosmic sea between the worlds, onto a terrain-rich Shard of Aeth. Once on the Shard, you harvest land and store it in your massive gullet. When your gullet is sufficiently full, you leap into the Aether and disgorge your gullet contents into your inter-dimensional vault for permanent storage, then return to the Shard to collect more land. Although your frogs’ collective mission is to gather as much land as possible for the First Ones, your private goal is to prove yourself to be the greatest of their harvesters by delivering to them the most valuable vault. To do this, you have to fill your vault strategically in a manner that both maximizes linear sets of identical lands and maximizes the diversity of lands in your vault at the end of the game.

Throughout the game, you’re free to keep to yourself and focus on harvesting at your own pace…or you may attack other frogs and try to take lands directly from their gullets. You may even raid another frog’s vault and steal the lands they have gathered if they have been knocked into the dreaded Outer Dimensions. As you are all immortal and invulnerable, no frog is ever wounded or killed — just irritated and inconvenienced.

But don’t ever get too comfortable with your carefully crafted plans as the Aether is a chaotic and unstable place. Waves of Aether Flux will prompt you to mutate, and you may have to change your strategy in accordance with your new powers. And Splinters of Aeth, tiny slivers of the old world that swirl madly about in the Aether, will periodically fall from their orbit and crash into the Shard, destroying large areas of terrain and blasting apart the very Shard itself!

The game ends when the Shard is stripped of all harvestable land or when a Splinter shatters it. When the game ends, the player with the highest valued vault wins, and the frogs move to the next Shard to gather more land for the First Ones…

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Pattern Building
  • Pick-Up and Deliver
  • Set Collection
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.06

Coimbra

| T3d-1978

In the 15th and 16th century, Portugal is thriving under its leading role during the Age of Discovery. Nestled in the heart of Portugal, the city of Coimbra serves as a cultural center of the country. As the head of one of Coimbra’s oldest houses, you seek to earn prestige by deepening relationships with nearby monasteries or funding expeditions of the era. To reach this goal, you must vie for the favors of the city’s most influential citizens, even if you must offer a bit of coin or some protective detail.

Coimbra introduces an innovative new dice mechanism in which the dice players draft each round are used in multiple different ways and have an impact on many aspects of their decision making. While there are many paths to victory, players should always seek to optimize their opportunities with every roll of the dice. Combined with ever-changing synergies of the citizens, expeditions, and monasteries, no two games of Coimbra will ever be the same!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Drafting
  • Auction/Bidding
  • Dice Rolling
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.27

Cellulose: A Plant Cell Biology Game

| T3d-1978

Cellulose: A Plant Cell Biology Game is a worker placement game that puts 1-5 players inside a plant cell, where they will compete over limited resources in order to undergo photosynthesis, produce carbohydrates, and build the cell wall. With everyone vying for the same actions, players must time their use of proteins, hormones, and cell component cards in order to diversify their strategies and outplay the competition.

Cellulose is the standalone sequel to Cytosis (2017). It has some of the same DNA, but Cellulose expands familiar game systems, allowing players greater control over available resources, strategic paths, and even game length.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Set Collection
  • Solo / Solitaire Play
  • Tech Trees / Tech Tracks
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.55

Caylus 1303

| T3d-1978

A classic game is back! As one of the first worker placement games, Caylus stands among the true board game classics of the 2000s. The original designers’ team, together with the Space Cowboys, have now created a revamped version!

The mechanisms of Caylus 1303 have been streamlined and modernized for an intense and shorter game. Don’t be fooled, though, as the game has kept both its depth and ease of play while a lot of new features have been added:

  • Variability of the starting position for a virtual infinity of possibilities. No more pre-set strategies!
  • Characters with special abilities, with a wavering loyalty, offer their services to the players.
  • And of course, brand new graphics!

The King calls you again, so it’s time to go back to Caylus!

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Variable Player Powers
  • Variable Set-up
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.88

Castles of Mad King Ludwig

| T3d-1978

In the tile-laying game Castles of Mad King Ludwig, players are tasked with building an amazing, extravagant castle for King Ludwig II of Bavaria…one room at a time. You see, the King loves castles, having built Neuschwanstein (the castle that inspired the Disney theme park castles) and others, but now he’s commissioned you to build the biggest, best castle ever — subject, of course, to his ever-changing whims. Each player acts as a building contractor who is adding rooms to the castle he’s building while also selling his services to other players.

In the game, each player starts with a simple foyer. One player takes on the role of the Master Builder, and that player sets prices for a set of rooms that can be purchased by the other players, with him getting to pick from the leftovers after the other players have paid him for their rooms. When a room is added to a castle, the player who built it gains castle points based on the size and type of room constructed, as well as bonus points based on the location of the room. When a room is completed, with all entranceways leading to other rooms in the castle, the player receives one of seven special rewards.

After each purchasing round, a new player becomes the Master Builder who sets prices for a new set of rooms. After several rounds, the game ends, then additional points are awarded for achieving bonus goals, having the most popular rooms, and being the most responsive to the King’s demands, which change each game. Whoever ends up with the most castle points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Pattern Building
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.65

Blood Rage

| T3d-1978

“Life is Battle; Battle is Glory; Glory is ALL”

In Blood Rage, each player controls their own Viking clan’s warriors, leader, and ship. Ragnarök has come, and it’s the end of the world! It’s the Vikings’ last chance to go down in a blaze of glory and secure their place in Valhalla at Odin’s side! For a Viking there are many pathways to glory. You can invade and pillage the land for its rewards, crush your opponents in epic battles, fulfill quests, increase your clan’s stats, or even die gloriously either in battle or from Ragnarök, the ultimate inescapable doom.

Most player strategies are guided by the cards drafted at the beginning of each of the three game rounds (or Ages). These “Gods’ Gifts” grant you numerous boons for your clan including: increased Viking strength and devious battle strategies, upgrades to your clan, or even the aid of legendary creatures from Norse mythology. They may also include various quests, from dominating specific provinces, to having lots of your Vikings sent to Valhalla. Most of these cards are aligned with one of the Norse gods, hinting at the kind of strategy they support. For example, Thor gives more glory for victory in battle, Heimdall grants you foresight and surprises, Tyr strengthens you in battle, while the trickster Loki actually rewards you for losing battles, or punishes the winner.

Players must choose their strategies carefully during the draft phase, but also be ready to adapt and react to their opponents’ strategies as the action phase unfolds. Battles are decided not only by the strength of the figures involved, but also by cards played in secret. By observing your opponent’s actions and allegiances to specific gods, you may predict what card they are likely to play, and plan accordingly. Winning battles is not always the best course of action, as the right card can get you even more rewards by being crushed. The only losing strategy in Blood Rage is to shy away from battle and a glorious death!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Closed Drafting
  • Hand Management
  • Memory
  • Open Drafting
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.88