Category: Ω Board Games

The Haunted Mansion

| T3d-1978
The Haunted Mansion

The Haunted Mansion

Disney’s beloved The Haunted Mansion comes to life — err, death — in this hauntingly fun family board game! Explore all the classic rooms of the ghost-infested manor, from the festivities-filled Ballroom to the Attic and out to the Graveyard and beyond in search of spirits. Beware, though, of the Hitchhiking Ghosts, who are notorious for “following you home” as that may spell your doom in the end!

Players gain points by socializing with ghosts around the Haunted Mansion. Players move around the mansion by rotating the Endless Hallway around Madame Leota’s Séance Room, collecting Ghost cards in front of them in sets, each of which are worth different point values. Players want to avoid Haunt cards, as the most “haunted” player will lose points. The player with the most points at the end wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Push Your Luck
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.83

Hadara

| T3d-1978
Hadara

Hadara

Hadara carries you off into the world of cultures and countries of this earth. Over three epochs, you will experience the transformation of your new world from a small settlement to a high culture. You want to populate this world with people who come from different cultures and continents as well as different ages. To bring glory and honor to your world, you should choose the persons and accomplishments skillfully. But you should not ignore agriculture, culture, and military power, otherwise one of your competitors might get bigger and more successful than you. Who will succeed first in creating a new flourishing high culture?

Game Mechanics:

  • City Building
  • Civilization
  • Memory
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.20

Habitats

| T3d-1978
Habitats

Habitats

In Habitats, each player builds a big wildlife park without cages or fences. The animals in your park need their natural habitats: grassland, bush, rocks or lakes. The zebra needs a big area of grass and some water adjacent, for example, while a bat needs rocks and bush and water, a hart needs bush and grass, and a crocodile needs mainly water. There is a snake, baboon, bee, elephant, otter, lizard, turtle, eagle, meerkat, scorpio, hog, catfish, rhino, etc., each with its own landscape requirements — 68 different animals in total.

Each player starts their individual park with an entrance tile, and they are each represented in the marketplace of animal tiles by a ceramic figure (or a wooden ranger meeple in some editions). On a turn, a player takes the tile to their left, right or front; moves their figure to the space just vacated; then draws a tile to place where their figure started the turn.

When adding an animal tile in your park, you add its main landscape — the base space for the animal — to your park, too. While placing this new animal, its own piece of landscape can help to fulfill the requirements of your other animals’ requirements, e.g., the water on a hippo tile fulfilling the adjacent otter’s need for water. Thus, fulfilling every animal’s desire for land becomes a more and more difficult task with each tile you add.

Aside from expanding your park with different landscape types, flora and animals, you can improve its profitability by building extra entrance roads, trek spots, and watchtowers.

Habitats lasts three seasons, with each season giving each player 6-9 new tiles for their parks. Whoever has best met the goal of the season receives bonus points, with a smaller number of points for second and third place. At the end of the game, each player scores for each tile in their park based on whether that tile’s requirements are satisfied. Whoever scores the most points wins!

Game Mechanics:

  • Grid Movement
  • Open Drafting
  • Pattern Building
  • Puzzle
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 50 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.25

Guildhall: Job Faire

| T3d-1978
Guildhall: Job Faire

Guildhall: Job Faire

The not-so-Dark Ages is blowing up! Skilled workers clamor to get into your Guildhouse. Organize them into chapters and put them to work. Each additional worker you add to a chapter provides a bigger bonus to the workers you play in the future – but look out as your opponents might steal your valuable workers for their own chapters!

In Guildhall: Job Faire, 2–4 players compete to create a prosperous kingdom by recruiting skilled laborers into their guild chapters. Collect sets of cards with unique abilities. Use completed sets to claim victory cards. But will you go for points or use a special power? Which will lead to ultimate victory?

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.18

The Guild of Merchants Explorers

| T3d-1978
The Guild of Merchants Explorers

The Guild of Merchants Explorers

In The Guild of Merchant Explorers, each player starts with one city on their personal map board.

Shuffle the deck of terrain cards, then reveal most of these cards one by one. Based on the terrain revealed, each player places on their board cubes that are connected to their starting city or other cubes. You want to complete areas on your board, cross the seas to new land, and establish new cities on the board. You can explore capsized ships for treasure — which gives you special placement capabilities — and create linked connections between locations to score bonus points. Common objectives can be completed by all players, with those who complete it first scoring more points.

At the end of a round, all cubes are removed from each board, leaving only the cities behind, so if you don’t establish new cities, you’ll be stuck in the same places.

The Guild of Merchant Explorers contains multiple copies of four different maps, and the game is designed so that you can play remotely with one or more copies.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bingo
  • Line Drawing
  • Network Building
  • Pattern Movement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

The Grimm Forest

| T3d-1978
The Grimm Forest

The Grimm Forest

Welcome to The Grimm Forest, where family members of the legendary Three Little Pigs are having an epic house building competition. But this is no ordinary competition as all the most famous Fairy Tale characters will be looking on and occasionally lending a hand.

Who will benefit most from the cunning of Robin Hood, the beauty of Snow White, the bountiful gifts of the Golden Goose or the dark witchcraft of the Evil Queen?

Using only their wits, a handful of sharp steel tools, and a few stacks of resources gathered at great risk from fields, brickyards, and even the dark and deadly Grimm Forest itself, each player must compete to be the first to build 3 Houses and gain the title of Royal Builder.

Players are encouraged to use any of the devious tricks they have read about in the many books of Fables found throughout the land. Some will have their plans wrecked by that villain of old, the Big Bad Wolf, while others will gain bricks, straw, and wood by the cart load.

Who will brave the dangers, avoid foul monsters, and bring home the victory? There is only one way to find out… get ready to venture into …The Grimm Forest!

Grimm Forest is a 2-4 player strategic game of Hidden Movement, Resource Gathering, and House Building. It is a medium weight game that plays in approximately 45-60 minutes.

During the game, players will play cards secretly to move to various Location boards where they attempt to gather resources. Using their deduction skills and a hand full of Fable cards, players attempt to guess each other’s plans and make the most of their actions while disrupting the other player’s plans.

After resources are collected during the Gather Phase, players will enter a Building Phase where they can use those resources to build Wood, Straw, or Brick Houses. Whenever a player builds a Wall Section on one of their houses, a helpful Friend from the nearby forest comes to lend a hand. Players may choose to accept the help of that Friend, but occasionally it makes more sense to send that Friend to a different player, sometimes discarding their current Friend in the process.

With 16 unique Fable cards and 12 powerful Friend cards, gathering resources in the Grimm Forest can be a difficult and challenging endeavor.

Work hard, deduce correctly, avoid the treachery of the other builders and the sharp teeth of the lurking monsters, and you just might have a chance!

Game Mechanics:

  • Set Collection
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.92

The Great Split

| T3d-1978
The Great Split

The Great Split

In The Great Split, you draft cards to collect riches such as gems, gold, artwork, and tomes, adding them to your collection to make it the most prestigious of all!

You start each round by splitting your cards into two groups, then you pass your wallet to the player on your left — but only one group of cards will be given back to you. You split, they choose! Don’t despair, though, because while your opponent is looking at your split, you also receive a similar offer from the player on your right, so choose wisely. When your hand is complete, play your cards to add all those riches to your collection.

Each type of riches awards you prestige points in different ways, so maintain a balanced collection of gems, keep an eye on the value of the art market as it evolves, and pile up priceless tomes. Depending on how each player builds their collection, different riches will take on a different value for each of them. Show off your best haggling skills in crafting your split, and create the perfect offer to push your opponent to take what you want them to take…leaving you with the tastiest loot!

Be prepared for when the mid-game scorings are triggered. Manage your gold reserves sensibly to get additional riches, and make your collection just right!

Game Mechanics:

  • Closed Drafting

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 7 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

GraVwell

| T3d-1978
GraVwell

GraVwell

In Gravwell, players command spaceships that have been pulled through a black hole, transporting them into a different dimension. With each ship lacking fuel to get home, each player must collect basic elements from surrounding asteroids, using the gravity of the dimension and what little resources they have in order to reach the warp gate that will take them home. But in this dimension, moving ships will travel towards the nearest object, which is usually another ship, and when those objects are moving either forward or backward, reaching the warp gate isn’t always easy. Time is running out to save your crew and your ship! As a grim reminder of the cost of failing to escape, the frozen hulks of dead spacecraft litter the escape route — but with careful card play, you can slingshot past these derelict craft and be the first to escape from the Gravwell!

Gravwell uses 26 alphabetized cards to determine movement order and thrust; most cards move your ship towards the nearest object, but a few move you away from it. At the start of each round, players draft fuel cards, picking up three pairs of two cards, with only the top card of each pile being visible; you get some information as to which moves you can expect from the other spaceships, but you won’t know which moves you’ll be forced to make when you draft your cards!

During a round, each player will play all of their fuel cards in the order of their choosing. During each phase of a round, each player chooses one card, then all cards are revealed and resolved in alphabetical order. When your opponents move in ways you didn’t expect, you won’t always be heading in the direction you thought you would! Each player holds an “Emergency Stop” card that they may tactically play only once per round to avoid such a situation.

Whoever first reaches the warp gate wins, but if no one has escaped after six rounds, then the player who is closest to the gate wins.

Gravwell: 2nd Edition features the same gameplay as earlier editions of the game, but now 40 fuel cards are included, which allows up to six players in the game at the same time. (Earlier editions maxed out at four players.) Additionally, ship ability cards are included that can give a unique power to each ship’s captain trying to find their way home.

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 20 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.83

Goryo

| T3d-1978
Goryo

Goryo

Goryō is an asymmetrical game of investigation and deduction for two players, set in the mystical feudal Japan. One player will play the role of the Samurai guarding the Imperial Palace, charged with hunting down a dreadful spirit of vengeance, the Goryō, played by the other player.

The Goryō appears in the palace in the form of a cat, bound to a specific type of object. To get a revenge and win the game, the Goryō player must smash 5 objects in the palace’s rooms, without being defeated by the Samurai. To win, the Samurai must instead exorcise the spirit for good by finding out what type of object the Goryō is bound to, or by catching the spirit’s essence three times.

Each round, both players alternate in asymmetrical turns:
the Goryō plans the route to break a new object and mislead her opponent, placing movement cubes on a secret dry-erase board. Then the Samurai use their available actions to chase the Goryō along her path, moving the Samurai pawns on the map and using a special board to organize the catch.

However exorcising a spirit isn’t a simple task at all…

Game Mechanics:

  • Deduction
  • Grid Movement
  • Programmed Movement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 20 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.11

Godzilla: Tokyo Clash

| T3d-1978
Godzilla: Tokyo Clash

Godzilla: Tokyo Clash

In Godzilla: Tokyo Clash, you play as the Earth’s most fearsome Kaiju — Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah, and Megalon — battling for dominance as the most terrifying monster in Japan. With detailed miniatures of the legendary monsters and a modular cityscape of 3D buildings to destroy, it’s an epic battle every time you play!

In more detail, each player has their own deck of cards unique to the kaiju they control. As you throw trains and tanks at the opponents and attack them directly to cause damage, you can burn cards out of their deck, reducing their options on future turns. As you stomp through the city, you can earn energy, which can help you lay out permanent enhancements to your abilities.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Hand Management

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.24