Category: Ω Board Games

Scythe

| OTSG Staff
Scythe

Scythe

It is a time of unrest in 1920s Europa. The ashes from the first great war still darken the snow. The capitalistic city-state known simply as “The Factory”, which fueled the war with heavily armored mechs, has closed its doors, drawing the attention of several nearby countries.

Scythe is an engine-building game set in an alternate-history 1920s period. It is a time of farming and war, broken hearts and rusted gears, innovation and valor. In Scythe, each player represents a character from one of five factions of Eastern Europe who are attempting to earn their fortune and claim their faction’s stake in the land around the mysterious Factory. Players conquer territory, enlist new recruits, reap resources, gain villagers, build structures, and activate monstrous mechs.

Each player begins the game with different resources (power, coins, combat acumen, and popularity), a different starting location, and a hidden goal. Starting positions are specially calibrated to contribute to each faction’s uniqueness and the asymmetrical nature of the game (each faction always starts in the same place).

Scythe gives players almost complete control over their fate. Other than each player’s individual hidden objective card, the only elements of luck or variability are “encounter” cards that players will draw as they interact with the citizens of newly explored lands. Each encounter card provides the player with several options, allowing them to mitigate the luck of the draw through their selection. Combat is also driven by choices, not luck or randomness.

Scythe uses a streamlined action-selection mechanism (no rounds or phases) to keep gameplay moving at a brisk pace and reduce downtime between turns. While there is plenty of direct conflict for players who seek it, there is no player elimination.

Every part of Scythe has an aspect of engine-building to it. Players can upgrade actions to become more efficient, build structures that improve their position on the map, enlist new recruits to enhance character abilities, activate mechs to deter opponents from invading, and expand their borders to reap greater types and quantities of resources. These engine-building aspects create a sense of momentum and progress throughout the game. The order in which players improve their engine adds to the unique feel of each game, even when playing one faction multiple times.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Economic
  • Grid Movement
  • Tableau Building
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 90 – 115 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.43

Sabika

| OTSG Staff
Sabika

Sabika

On the hill of Al-Sabika in Granada, the Nasrid dynasty created one of the most impressive constructions in history, the Alhambra.

In Sabika, you play the role of one of the Nasrid nobles who contributed to the construction of the towers, gardens, and palaces of this ancient monument. In addition to this honorable task, you have to establish trade routes through Europe and the Maghreb. These routes will provide you with sufficient income to be able to take on the demanding tribute that has been commanded by the Catholic Monarchs. In exchange for your work, you will receive military protection against the various conflicts of the Taifas Kingdom.

Sabika implements a novel mechanism that integrates three interrelated rondels. Each rondel focuses on a different scenario: the construction of the Alhambra, the carving of poems in its halls, and the export of goods along the trade routes. All of this takes place over five eras (rounds), and at the end of the fifth round, the player who has accumulated the most prestige points takes the victory.

Game Mechanics:

  • Rondel

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.91

Root

| OTSG Staff
Root

Root

Root is a game of adventure and war in which 2 to 4 (1 to 6 with the ‘Riverfolk’ expansion) players battle for control of a vast wilderness.

The nefarious Marquise de Cat has seized the great woodland, intent on harvesting its riches. Under her rule, the many creatures of the forest have banded together. This Alliance will seek to strengthen its resources and subvert the rule of Cats. In this effort, the Alliance may enlist the help of the wandering Vagabonds who are able to move through the more dangerous woodland paths. Though some may sympathize with the Alliance’s hopes and dreams, these wanderers are old enough to remember the great birds of prey who once controlled the woods.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the region, the proud, squabbling Eyrie have found a new commander who they hope will lead their faction to resume their ancient birthright. The stage is set for a contest that will decide the fate of the great woodland. It is up to the players to decide which group will ultimately take root.

Root represents the next step in our development of asymmetric design. Like Vast: The Crystal Caverns, each player in Root has unique capabilities and a different victory condition. Now, with the aid of gorgeous, multi-use cards, a truly asymmetric design has never been more accessible.

The Cats play a game of engine building and logistics while attempting to police the vast wilderness. By collecting Wood, they are able to produce workshops, lumber mills, and barracks. They win by building new buildings and crafts.

The Eyrie musters their hawks to take back the Woods. They must capture as much territory as possible and build roosts before they collapse back into squabbling.

The Alliance hides in the shadows, recruiting forces and hatching conspiracies. They begin slowly and build towards a dramatic late-game presence–but only if they can manage to keep the other players in check.

Meanwhile, the Vagabond plays all sides of the conflict for their own gain, while hiding a mysterious quest. Explore the board, fight other factions, and work towards achieving your hidden goal.

In Root, players drive the narrative, and the differences between each role create an unparalleled level of interaction and replayability. Leder Games invites you and your family to explore the fantastic world of Root!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Area Movement
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hand Management
  • Racing
  • Wargame

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.74

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

| OTSG Staff
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a game created by Ignacy Trzewiczek, the author of Stronghold. This time Trzewiczek takes the players to a deserted island, where they’ll play the parts of shipwreck survivors confronted by an extraordinary adventure. They’ll be faced with the challenges of building a shelter, finding food, fighting wild beasts, and protecting themselves from weather changes. Building walls around their homes, animal domestication, constructing weapons and tools from what they find, and much more await them on the island. The players decide in which direction the game will unfold and – after several in-game weeks of hard work – how their settlement will look. Will they manage to discover the secret of the island in the meantime? Will they find a pirate treasure, or an abandoned village? Will they discover an underground city or a cursed temple at the bottom of a volcano? Answers to these questions lie in hundreds of event cards and hundreds of object and structure cards that can be used during the game…

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is an epic game from Portal. You will build a shelter, palisade, weapons, you will create tools like axes, knives, sacks, you will do everything you can to… to survive. You will have to find food, fight wild beasts, protect yourself from weather changes…

Take the role of one of four characters from the ship crew (cook, carpenter, explorer, or soldier) and face the adventure. Use your determination skills to help your teammates, discuss with them your plan, and put it into practice. Debate, discuss, and work on the best plan you all can make.

Search for treasures. Discover mysteries. Follow goals of six different, engaging scenarios. Start by building a big pile of wood and setting it on fire to call for help, and then start new adventures. Become an exorcist on cursed Island. Become a treasure hunter on Volcano Island. Become a rescue team for a young lady who’s stuck on rock island…

Let the adventure live!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Movement
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Narrative Choice
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.80

Praga Caput Regni

| OTSG Staff
Praga Caput Regni

Praga Caput Regni

Charles IV has been crowned King of Bohemia and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. From his castle in Prague, he oversees construction of new fortifications: a bridge across the Vltava River, a university, and a cathedral rising within the walls of the castle itself. Prague is already among the largest cities in Europe. King Charles will make it the capital of an empire!

In Praga Caput Regni, players take the role of wealthy citizens who are organizing various building projects in medieval Prague. By expanding their wealth and joining in the construction, they gain favor with the king. Players choose from six actions on the game board — the “action crane” — that are always available, but which are weighted with a constantly shifting array of costs and benefits. By using these actions, you can increase your resources, improve the strength of your chosen actions, and build “New Prague City”, the Charles Bridge, or city walls. You can possibly gain additional actions or even participate in the construction of St. Vitus Cathedral.

Clever players will discover synergies between carefully timed actions and the rewards from constructing civic projects as all of the mechanisms mesh together. At the end of the game, the player who most impressed King Charles wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • City Building
  • Puzzle
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.74

Polis

| OTSG Staff
Polis

Polis

Polis is a two-player civ-lite game set in the beginning of the conflict between the two major poleis of the 5th century B.C: Athens and the Delian League against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. The winner will be the Empire with more population and prestige at the end of the game.

Both players must secure their supplies and the routes to five markets to trade with them. Every turn you get goods from a territory where you have population supporting your Empire, but you should feed them.

You can fight to control the territories and siege other polis or you might use your diplomacy to convince a polis to join your league. But polis are proud of their independence so you will have to create some projects to gain prestige needed for your military manoeuvres.

This new edition of Polis has updated revised rules and new art that will enhance your game experience.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Area Movement
  • Dice Rolling
  • Economic
  • Wargame

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.86

Pipeline

| OTSG Staff
Pipeline

Pipeline

The refinement of oil has long been part of the government-controlled energy sector. Amassed with an incredibly complex and inefficient system of refineries, the government has felt the severe pressures of worldwide demand and the ever-increasing global standards for refinement. Unable to keep up with demand, the government has only one option: privatizing the oil industry.

This is where you come in. Seeking to capitalize on this new opportunity, in Pipeline you start a company in the oil business. You will focus on building a much more efficient pipeline network in your refinery, hiring experts that provide valuable benefits over your competitors, and managing the logistics of purchasing and selling your refined oil in the various markets. You will need more than strong economic skills – carefully crafting an interweaving network of pipelines just might ensure your victory!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Drafting
  • Economic
  • Network Building
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.89

Pax Pamir

| OTSG Staff
Pax Pamir

Pax Pamir

In Pax Pamir, players assume the role of nineteenth century Afghan leaders attempting to forge a new state after the collapse of the Durrani Empire. Western histories often call this period “The Great Game” because of the role played by the Europeans who attempted to use central Asia as a theater for their own rivalries. In this game, those empires are viewed strictly from the perspective of the Afghans who sought to manipulate the interloping ferengi (foreigners) for their own purposes.

In terms of game play, Pax Pamir is a pretty straightforward tableau builder. Players spend most of their turns purchasing cards from a central market, then playing those cards in front of them in a single row called a court. Playing cards adds units to the game’s map and grants access to additional actions that can be taken to disrupt other players and influence the course of the game. That last point is worth emphasizing. Though everyone is building their own row of cards, the game offers many ways for players to interfere with each other directly and indirectly.

To survive, players will organize into coalitions. Throughout the game, the dominance of the different coalitions will be evaluated by the players when a special card, called a “Dominance Check”, is resolved. If a single coalition has a commanding lead during one of these checks, those players loyal to that coalition will receive victory points based on their influence in their coalition. However, if Afghanistan remains fragmented during one of these checks, players instead will receive victory points based on their personal power base.

After each Dominance Check, victory is checked and the game will be partially reset, offering players a fresh attempt to realize their ambitions. The game ends when a single player is able to achieve a lead of four or more victory points or after the fourth and final Dominance Check is resolved.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Area Movement
  • Economic
  • Hand Management
  • Negotiation
  • Open Drafting
  • Tableau Building

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.83

Ora & Labora

| OTSG Staff
Ora & Labora

Ora & Labora

In Ora et Labora (Latin for ‘Pray and work’), each player is head of a monastery in the Medieval era who acquires land and constructs buildings – little enterprises that will gain resources and profit. The goal is to build a working infrastructure and manufacture prestigious items – such as books, ceramics, ornaments, and relics – to gain the most victory points at the end of the game.

Ora et Labora, Uwe Rosenberg’s fifth “big” game, has game play mechanisms similar to his Le Havre, such as two-sided resource tiles that can be upgraded from a basic item to something more useful. Instead of adding resources to the board turn by turn as in Agricola and Le Havre, Ora et Labora uses a numbered rondel to show how many of each resource is available at any time. At the beginning of each round, players turn the rondel by one segment, adjusting the counts of all resources at the same time.

Each player has a personal game board. New buildings enter the game from time to time, and players can construct them on their game boards with the building materials they gather, with some terrain restrictions on what can be built where. Some spaces start with trees or moors on them, as in Agricola: Farmers of the Moor, so they hinder development until a player clears the land, but they provide resources when they are removed. Clever building on your personal game board will impact your final score, and players can buy additional terrain during the game, if needed.

Players also have three workers who can enter buildings to take the action associated with that location. Workers must stay in place until you’ve placed all three. You can enter your own buildings with these workers, but to enter and use another player’s buildings, you must pay that player an entry fee so that he’ll move one of his workers into that building to do the work for you.

Ora et Labora features two variants: France and Ireland.

Game Mechanics:

  • City Building
  • Economic
  • Network Building
  • Tableau Building
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.89

Operation Mercury

| OTSG Staff
Operation Mercury

Operation Mercury

Early in the morning on 20 May 1941, as 30,000 Commonwealth soldiers on Crete were finishing breakfast, hundreds of German transport aircraft—some towing gliders—rumbled over the Mediterranean island. The air above was suddenly filled with parachutes as thousands of elite German paratroops—Fallschirmjäger—descended from the sky.

The invasion of Crete was one of the most dramatic battles of the Second World War. Over a nine-day period in May 1941, a mixed force of Commonwealth and Greek troops desperately tried to fight off the German assault. Despite appalling casualties, the paratroopers and glider-borne troops managed to secure a foothold and the critical Maleme Airfield to open the door for the German Gebirgsjäger (mountain troops) to land under fire. Together the Fallschirmjäger and Gebirgsjäger pushed the Commonwealth troops to their breaking point and forced a deadly battle of delay and pursuit.

This was a true soldier’s battle, with both sides in desperate situations often lacking higher-level control and support. The Germans had to quickly secure a usable airfield or face the annihilation of their entire airborne force. The Commonwealth needed to crush the German landings or—failing that—evacuate the bulk of its forces to continue the fight in North Africa and Syria.

The German invasion of Crete in May 1941 stands as a landmark in the history of airborne warfare. Up until that point, airborne operations were tactical operations to seize key objectives in advance of the ground forces. The German invasion of Crete (codenamed Operation Merkur) was the first strategic airborne operation.

Although casualties would mean Crete was the last hurrah for the German airborne in a major air assault, it set the stage for even larger future Allied airborne operations in the Mediterranean, Western Europe, and Asia.

Operation Mercury maintains the same level of detail and scale as other Grand Tactical Series (GTS) games. Players command divisions and maneuver company-sized units to fight one of the most desperate battles of the war. Using the GTS 2.0 rules, Operation Mercury offers two players or teams a wide range of scenarios ranging from a single small map with a few units on each side to the full battle including up to two German divisions and several Commonwealth and Greek brigades. Operation Mercury covers all the major airdrops and fighting across the island from Heraklion in the east, through Rethymnon, and from Maleme to Suda Bay then south to the Askifou Plain, scene of the last major fight during the withdrawal.

As the Commander of Allied forces on Crete, can you deny the Germans a precious airfield and negate their much-needed air-landing reinforcements for a quick victory? Of all operations of war, a withdrawal under heavy enemy pressure is probably the most difficult and perilous. Can you get the bulk of your forces to the southern evacuation ports? As the German, how quickly can you force the collapse of the Commonwealth morale and trigger their withdrawal?

Features include:

  • Shifting Allied morale state based on relative casualties and key events, which can trigger evacuation and end-game victory conditions.
  • Random events, including tank breakdowns, misdirected airstrikes, and partisan attacks.
  • An option for Commonwealth naval support at the risk of losing precious ships to German air attacks.

Thirteen scenarios include:

  • Separate one-map battles for the airdrops at Rethymnon, Heraklion, and the Maleme/Canea sector.
  • A one-map battle for the New Zealand counter-attack to retake Maleme airfield.
  • One-, two-, and three-map battles for the difficult German advance and Commonwealth delay and withdrawal.
  • The full campaign on all five maps or just the main event from Maleme to Askifou Plain on three maps.
  • Hypothetical German precision drops as well as a German free drop scenario.

Game Mechanics:

  • Chit-Pull System
  • Dice Rolling
  • Wargame

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • ~300 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.53