Category: Ω Board Games

Le Havre: Complete Edition

| OTSG Staff
Le Havre: Complete Edition

Le Havre: Complete Edition

In Le Havre, a player’s turn consists of two parts: First, distribute newly supplied goods onto the offer spaces; then take an action. As an action, players may choose either to take all goods of one type from an offer space or to use one of the available buildings. Building actions allow players to upgrade goods, sell them or use them to build their own buildings and ships. Buildings are both an investment opportunity and a revenue stream, as players must pay an entry fee to use buildings that they do not own. Ships, on the other hand, are primarily used to provide the food that is needed to feed the workers.

After every seven turns, the round ends: players’ cattle and grain may multiply through a Harvest, and players must feed their workers. After a fixed number of rounds, each player may carry out one final action, and then the game ends. Players add the value of their buildings and ships to their cash reserves. The player who has amassed the largest fortune is the winner.

Game Mechanics:

  • City Building
  • Economic
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.73

In Too Deep

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In Too Deep

In Too Deep

In Too Deep is a unique, narrative that thrusts you into the future in a tense, strategic board game for 1-5 players. Draft characters and spend actions to complete objectives and collect sets. What side of the law will you end up on?

In the year 2087, central governments have fallen. What remains are fragmented citystates like New Dawn City, struggling to keep chaos at bay. The sinister Syndicate targets these weakened cities for domination by usurping, organizing, and enhancing the existing criminal elements. In the world of In Too Deep, you are part of a secret agency dedicated to stopping the Syndicate at all costs.

Cybernetic implants give Syndicate operatives a technological advantage, but you have found a way to exploit that power. By infiltrating their cerebral upgrades, you can gain control of these criminals. Going deep undercover into the minds of your targets, you’ll coordinate crimes of escalating seriousness to get your hands on the critical evidence needed to foil the Syndicate’s looming plot.

Each turn, you can hook into a new criminal and manipulate their activities throughout the city, accessing powerful skills and increased stamina as you grow familiar with their minds. Your physical body is in a secret lab far from the actual action, but you are by no means safe. Entering the mind of criminals takes its toll on your morality.

Orchestrate crimes, strive to put the information you gather to the best use, wrestle with dangerously corrupting dilemmas, and try to hold yourself together. It will take everything you’ve got to avoid going In Too Deep.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Cooperative
  • Hand Management
  • Pick-Up and Deliver
  • Push Your Luck
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.43

Imperium: Legends

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Imperium: Legends

Imperium: Legends

Formidable adversaries are arrayed against you. Your people stand ready. History beckons.

In your hands lies the destiny of one of history’s great civilizations. Under constant threat of attack, you must conquer new lands, oversee dramatic scientific and cultural advances, and lead your people into the era of empire. Expand too rapidly, and unrest will bring your civilization to its knees; build up too slowly, however, and you might find yourself a mere footnote of history. As one of eight radically asymmetric civilizations, you will compete to become the most dominant empire the world has ever seen.

Game Mechanics:

  • Civilization
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Move Through Deck
  • Tableau Building

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.66

Imperium: Classics

| OTSG Staff
Imperium: Classics

Imperium: Classics

Formidable adversaries are arrayed against you. Your people stand ready. History beckons.

In your hands lies the destiny of one of history’s great civilizations. Under constant threat of attack, you must conquer new lands, oversee dramatic scientific and cultural advances, and lead your people into the era of empire. Expand too rapidly, and unrest will bring your civilization to its knees; build up too slowly, however, and you might find yourself a mere footnote of history. As one of eight radically asymmetric civilizations, you will compete to become the most dominant empire the world has ever seen.

Imperium: Classics is a standalone game that contains the Carthaginian, Celt, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Roman, Scythian, and Viking civilizations and an individual solo opponent behaving as each nation. It is also fully compatible with Imperium: Legends for players wanting to expand their pool of civilizations even further.

Game Mechanics:

  • Campaign
  • Civilization
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Move Through Deck
  • Tableau Building
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.48

Imperial Steam

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Imperial Steam

Imperial Steam

The Industrial Age is starting to boom. You are in need of more workers for your factories, and you also need more workers to build railroad tracks to expand your railway network. This, in turn, will enable you to deliver the goods from your factories to cities with high demand — but be sure to earmark goods for fulfilling profitable public contracts because when the connection to Trieste is made, your net worth is all that matters.

Imperial Steam is a highly strategic yet accessible economic and logistics game that sees you making difficult decisions as you manage your business’s operations while navigating fierce competition to ensure your victory!

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Network Building

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.10

Heroes of Normandie: Big Red One Edition

| OTSG Staff

The time is summer 1944. The Sun shines on Normandy hedgerows. Gentle wind, fields of bright flowers, and in the background, the romantic staccato of machine gun fire in the morning. In these typical French countryside landscapes, thousands of men are about to fight. And die. Bravely like heroes, or cowardly like wussies. But only heroes really matter. Those you see in Hollywood Golden Age war movies. Here lies the inspiration for Heroes of Normandie; here is what the game has to offer: explosive and fast-paced battles; the pleasure of butchering your enemies through MG42 walls of lead; and the ability to crush Nazi bastards under tons of shells – basically, blood and guts.

A miniatures game without miniatures, Heroes of Normandie is a fast-paced WW2 strategy war game inspired by Hollywood war movies. A tactical scale board-game opposing two players and two armies, with the Germans on one side and the Americans on the other. Players use order tokens to determine initiative and to bluff. While a single six-sided die determines combat, action cards are played to spice things up. Secretly plan your attacks and outwit your opponent. Block the opposing strategy and surprise the enemies. Deploy your units and don’t turn back!

What’s new in the Big Red One edition:

  • 50-Card decks (instead of 70) with new Alternate Bonuses, for even faster gameplay and reduced setup time.
  • New and improved rule book
  • New scenarios
  • New and improved Aircraft system, available in Bloody Omaha
  • All new artwork for the Heroes
  • New Blast Templates
  • New Heroes
  • New Tactical Objectives
  • And last, but not least, Flamethrowers in the core box (instead of in expansions)!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.50

Great Western Trail: Argentina

| OTSG Staff

In Great Western Trail: Argentina, you own a vast estancia in Argentina at the end of the 19th century, and you will need to travel the plains of the Pampas with your cattle to deliver them to the main train station in Buenos Aires.

Great Western Trail: Argentina features gameplay elements similar to Great Western Trail such as deck management, the rondel mechanism, and the ability to upgrade your player board, along with twists on these elements and new features.

The player board features a new type of worker — farmers — and different paths await on the game board to confront you with more choices. Will you take the road with buildings or a path past farmers? Maybe you’ll have the chance to use your cows — well, the strength on your cow cards — to help farmers, getting them on your side and adding grain, a new type of resource, to your income, with grain being used for boat and city tiles.

Perhaps you can unlock shortcuts that allow you to deliver your herd to Buenos Aires more quickly. Sure, you’ll forfeit the use of action buildings, but maybe you can catch others unaware, with the ships leaving before they deliver. The timing of reaching the central train station to deliver your herd has never been so crucial, and valuable bonuses await on the city’s port tiles.

Money is easier to get in Great Western Trail: Argentina, but you have more to manage in terms of action options, shortcuts, and cards (including the new exhaustion cards), so the challenges won’t let up.

Great Western Trail: Argentina also includes a solitaire challenge in which Pedro is waiting for you to try to beat his score.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 75 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.83

Great Western Trail

| OTSG Staff

America in the 19th century: You are a rancher and repeatedly herd your cattle from Texas to Kansas City, where you send them off by train. This earns you money and victory points. Needless to say, each time you arrive in Kansas City, you want to have your most valuable cattle in tow. However, the “Great Western Trail” not only requires that you keep your herd in good shape, but also that you wisely use the various buildings along the trail. Also, it might be a good idea to hire capable staff: cowboys to improve your herd, craftsmen to build your very own buildings, or engineers for the important railroad line.

If you cleverly manage your herd and navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of Great Western Trail, you surely will gain the most victory points and win the game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 75 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.71

The Great Wall

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The Great Wall

The Great Wall

The Great Wall is a new asymmetric worker/soldier placement game with engine building themes and a twist in form of a constantly attacking AI (Mongolian Horde) that requires players to sometimes cooperate in order to defeat it. This is a new major board game from Awaken Realms.

Players will control ancient clans in China trying to defend against invading Mongolian hordes and build a Great Wall. While every player will want to win (by earning VP = Honor) they also need to sometimes cooperate to defend against the hordes. Each clan will be asymmetric through its chosen Leader (resource production/starting resources/starting workers and units) and this asymmetry will increase as the game progresses (players will hire Advisors with unique skills, often creating unique engines).

In The Great Wall, the players take the role of Generals defending the Wall against the Mongol Horde. The game is played over a series of turns called Years, each divided into 4 parts called Seasons.

During Spring, new barbaric hordes invade the fields in front of the Great Wall and prepare to launch their assault. Summer is the time when generals prepare for the assault and mobilize their forces. During Fall, players take their turns, playing Command cards, resolving their effects and Activating Locations to gain various benefits. In Winter, the last layer of Defense is activated, then, the hordes try to assault the Walls.

During the course of the game, players will create their own unique engines based on their clan strength as well as interact with other players during all phases of the game, trying to get the most Honor points, which can be gained in a lot of different ways.

At the end of the game, the player with the most Honor wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Cooperative
  • Economic
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 120 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.85

Golem

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Golem is an engine-building game by Simone Luciani, Virginio Gigli and Flaminia Brasini, the same team that brought you Grand Austria Hotel and Lorenzo il Magnifico.

The game is based on the 16th-century legend of the Golem of Prague, an anthropomorphic creature that Rabbi Loew animated from a clay statue to protect his people. In the game, players take on the role of rabbis who create and grow these powerful creatures that will be moved around the neighborhoods of Prague under the control of students. Be careful, because if a golem becomes too powerful, it will destroy everything it encounters on its way. Players can also kill their Golems in order to get bonuses.

Players also create powerful artifacts and acquire knowledge by collecting ancient books.

The game is divided into four rounds, and each round is composed of 7 phases:

  1. Refresh
  2. Golem Movement
  3. Actions (2 marble actions and 1 rabbi action)
  4. Turn Order
  5. Influence Character
  6. Income and Development
  7. Golem Control

At the beginning of each round, the players will shuffle the colored marbles into the 3D synagogue that will split them into five lines corresponding to the five main actions available in the game:

  • Work: By paying Knowledge, you can activate the Golem placed in the city of Prague and get bonuses.
  • Golem: Obtain clay to create new golems and upgrade the developments on your personal board.
  • Artifact: Obtain coins and buy gold to build artifacts that offer permanent bonuses in the game and upgrade developments on your personal board.
  • Spells: Obtain Knowledge and perform spells (with a scoring for book collection) and upgrade developments on your personal board.
  • Mirror: Perform one action of your choice by paying 1 coin.

The number of marbles available in the corresponding action line determines how much the player gets from the action. When you choose an action, you collect one marble of your choice in the corresponding line and depending on the color of the marble you chose, you also move your student forward on one of the districts of Prague.

It’s important to advance your students on those tracks to be able to keep your golems under control. At the end of the round, knowledge can also be used to control a golem that surpassed its students, but if one of these creatures is uncontrolled, it may become dangerous and destroy the neighborhood, after which you will have to destroy and bury it!

The marble color also matters, because at the end of the round, if you get the correct combination of two colors, you receive the favor of one of the powerful Prague characters, which will differ each round.

At the end of the fourth round, players score points for active or buried golems, artifacts, books, development on their personal board, and collected goal cards.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 90 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.92