Category: Ω Board Games

Candy Land

| T3d-1978

Created by Eleanor Abbott in the early 1940’s to entertain children recovering from polio and first published by Milton Bradley (now Hasbro) in 1949, Candy Land encourages young players to socialize, exercise patience, recognize colors, learn rules, and follow directions.

Players race down a rainbow-colored track to be the first to find the lost King Kandy at Candy Castle, but watch out for obstacles like the sticky Molasses Swamp! Start by placing your plastic Gingerbread Man (or other character marker) at the beginning of the track. Each turn, players draw a simple card and move by matching the color on the card to the next color on the track. Some cards show a named location on the board; players who draw these cards move forward or backward on the track to the named location. The game ends when the first player arrives at Candy Castle by reaching or moving beyond the last square on the track.

Game Mechanics:

  • Family
  • Racing

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.15

Campy Creatures

| T3d-1978

Players are mad scientists in need of precious mortals for future experiments. Rather than getting your hands dirty, your army of campy creatures awaits to do your bidding. Capture the most valuable mortals over the course of three nights to win. But be warned — the mortals won’t go down without a fight.

Campy Creatures is a ghoulish game of bluffing, deduction, and set collection for 2-5 players. Players begin each round with the same hand of creatures. Their goal is to capture valuable mortals by outguessing their opponents with the creatures they play. Each player has perfect information at the start, so knowing what a person might do in a particular situation is key.

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction / Bidding
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection
  • Simultaneous Action Selection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 20 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.54

Campsite

| T3d-1978

Campsite has players competing for the best camping spot. Play cards on top of each other to link elements like forests, mountains, and camping trails together to score the most points.

A clever card-based “tile” laying game that focus on maximizing your limited space!

Luck and strategy combine in the great outdoors (no actual camping required). Includes 72 cards 42 tokens, scorepad, and pencil.

Game Mechanics:

  • Connections
  • Map Addition
  • Melding and Splaying
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 20 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.00

Campbell’s Alphabet Dice Game

| T3d-1978

From the can: “Warm up your evening with a satisfying, yet simple, anagram word game for the whole family to enjoy. Simply throw your dice and start to spell. When you’re stumped, everyone rolls again. This is not just another alphabet game. It’s M’m M’m GOOD!”

Kind of a cross between all the other letter/dice games and Scrabble. This clever little dice game uses terms from cooking for the gameplay. Game turns are made up of “servings” (rounds). The choice of moves when you roll your dice are: 1) Building, 2) Slurping, and 3) Passing. The last round of dice play is called “scraping the bottom”.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Spelling

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 15 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.25

Camel Up: The Card Game

| T3d-1978

Camel Up The Card Game brings a new way to enjoy the camel race with a racing deck! While keeping the same excitement as the board game, the card game experience gives the players a little bit more insight and control on the race. Don’t forget about the crazy camel!

One of them has been added and adapted exclusively in this new edition to make the unpredictable even more unpredictable!

Game Mechanics:

  •  Betting
  • Hand Management

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Bridges of Shangri-La, The

| T3d-1978

In Shangri-La, the mysterious and isolated utopia nestled high in the mountains, a strange struggle for dominance has begun. Once peaceful and neighborly, the Masters of the competing mountain-folk train their students and send them out across bridges to control neighboring villages. To take control of a village, the students must come together in uncomfortable alliances, regardless of their tribal origin. Eventually students become Masters themselves, train new students and expand to other villages.

There is one thing each student must keep in mind as they travel from village to village — the mystical powers of Shangri-La mysteriously cause the bridges to collapse, separating villages forever. One crucial question will decide the winner: who will control the most Masters of Shangri-La?

Players take on the roles of leaders of a specific tribe. There is a battle raging over the empty villages of the land and players must quickly fill those villages with their tribal leaders. As players migrate tribal leaders from one village to the next, they must not become too weak or they risk losing leaders to opposing tribes. The ultimate object of the game is to have the most leaders on the board at the end of the game.
It is an abstract game with many options and tense until the end.

2004 Mensa Select

Thematically, players are adding masters and students, and trying to have the students migrate to nearby villages to become masters. Functionally, this is essentially a military game. Players either spend their turn reinforcing a village (adding more tokens there) or invading a neighboring village (expanding influence if you have more total tokens than the victim). The unique twist is that, after each invasion, the connecting bridge is removed. So over the course of the game, attack options become more and more limited, until the game naturally comes to a conclusion

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence,
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.72

Arctic Scavengers: Base Game+HQ+Recon

| T3d-1978

In the year 2097, the entire Earth was enveloped in a cataclysmic shift in climate, plunging the globe into another ice age. Nearly 90% of the world’s population was eliminated, driving the survivors to band together into loose communities and tribes.

In Arctic Scavengers, you are the leader of a small tribe of survivors. Resources, tools, medicine, and mercenaries are all in scarce supply. You and your tribe are pitted against up to four other tribes in a fight for survival. Build up your tribe, skirmish against other players head-to-head, or even bluff your way to victory. The player with the largest tribe at the end of the game is declared the winner!

As the competing tribes develop and grow, headquarters are established for each tribe thanks to the components in the included HQ expansion. This base camp consists of a Tribal Leader (complete with special abilities) and the potential to construct buildings that can be used strategically during game play. Additionally, the game introduces alternative victory paths, new mercenaries, new tools, and the addition of the “engineering schematics” pile.

As the tribes evolve further and struggle for dominance, information becomes the most valuable currency. In the new world mapped out in the Recon, deception reigns, leading to a need for reconnaissance. This expansion adds new tribe leader roles, new mercenaries, new equipment, and new levels of player interaction (i.e., new ways to make your opponents feel pain).

Arctic Scavengers: Base Game+HQ+Recon comes with a plastic insert to organize all your cards for ease in play setup.

Game Mechanics:

  • Deck, Bag, and Pool Building
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.26

Anachrony 🟠

| T3d-1978

It is the late 26th century. Earth is recovering from a catastrophic explosion that exterminated the majority of the population centuries ago and made most of the surface uninhabitable due to unearthly weather conditions. The surviving humans organized along four radically different ideologies, called Paths, to rebuild the world as they see fit: Harmony, Dominance, Progress, and Salvation. Followers of the four Paths live in a fragile peace, but in almost complete isolation next to each other. Their only meeting point is the last major city on Earth, now just known as the Capital.

By powering up the mysterious Time Rifts that opened in the wake of the cataclysm, each Path is able to reach back to specific moments in their past. Doing so can greatly speed up their progress, but too much meddling may endanger the time-space continuum. But progress is more important than ever before: if the mysterious message arriving through the Time Rift is to be believed, an even more terrible cataclysm is looming on the horizon: an asteroid bearing the mysterious substance called Neutronium is heading towards Earth. Even stranger, the scientists show that the energy signature of the asteroid matches the explosion centuries ago…

Anachrony features a unique two-tiered worker placement system. To travel to the Capital or venture out to the devastated areas for resources, players need not only various specialists (Engineers, Scientists, Administrators, and Geniuses) but also Exosuits to protect and enhance them — and both are in short supply.

The game is played in 4-7 turns, depending on the time when the looming cataclysm occurs — unless, of course, it is averted! The elapsed turns are measured on a dynamic timeline. By powering up the Time Rifts, players can reach back to earlier turns to supply their past “self” with resources. Each Path has a vastly different objective that rewards it with a massive amount of victory points when achieved. The Paths’ settlements will survive the impact, but the Capital will not. Whichever Path manages to collect most points will be the new seat for the Capital, thus the most important force left on the planet…

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Solo / Solitaire Game
  • Variable Player Powers
  • Variable Set-up
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.01

Café

| T3d-1978

During the reign of King John V, Portugal was a major European power. From Brazil, the king ordered Sergeant Melo Palheta to travel to French Guiana to formally establish the Utrecht Treaty of 1713 and to secretly bring coffee seeds to Brazil. The Sergeant was successful and by 1800 Brazil was one of the largest coffee producers in the world.

In the early 20th century, coffee from Brazil, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Timor is largely appreciated in Portugal and inspires the appearance of prestige coffee shops in emblematic locations that attract the elite. Through dedication, hard work and skill, the Portuguese 20th century witnesses the birth of one of the biggest coffee industries in the world.

In Café, 1 to 4 players represent coffee companies that from plantation, drying, roasting and distribution try to create and control the best supply chain of coffee.

Game Mechanics:

  • Layering
  • Melding and Splaying
  • Solo / Solitaire Game
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.05

Cactus Town

| T3d-1978

Cactus Town is an asymmetric action programming game for 2 to 4 players (1-5 with the Lone Ranger Expansion). A highly interactive game of fast paced chase & escape.

Sleepy little Cactus Town is going to see some action: you can put yourself the Sheriff’s badge, join a group of dangerous bandits, seek ransom as a bounty hunter or even use the power of seduction being an avenging Can Can dancer. Each party has its own objectives and its own special actions, making this a perfect gateway game for asymmetric gameplay. With playing time of 10-15 minutes per player, you can swap and play various parties each session.

Players program their actions with 3 out of 4 action cards each turn. Sounds easy enough, right? But careful, actions alternate between players and action cards are programmed in reverse order, meaning the last card programmed comes up first. Mastering this is a real challenge. Can you out-think your opponents, guess their moves and get in your own. Or will you out-think yourself and create some hilarious chaos?

Each player’s characters move through a 5×5 building-card grid, which is set up randomly face down each game. The game includes an advanced version with building effects and several variants, giving you even more replay value.

Are you ready for a duel? Will you plunder for gold? Are you in the mood to dance a Can Can? Going to steal a horse, are you? A lot of things are going to happen in Cactus Town, create your own cinematic Western story!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Queue
  • Modular Board

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.93