Tag: Deck Building

Deck Building is a mechanic where players build a deck of resources that is randomly drawn and used for future turns.

Gardlings

| OTSG Staff

Cleverly build your garden. Harvest gems and enrich your seed bag with new, amazing creatures so your next garden can grow even more abundant. Combine the unique abilities of your creatures, and be the first to acquire the victory trophy.

Each round in Gardlings, all players simultaneously build their garden in front of themselves. You do this by drawing and placing tiles from your bag. You may stop drawing tiles at any time because if you draw too many gnomes, they will steal gems from you. At the end of the round, use any gems you matched in your garden to buy a new tile, then return all of your tiles to your bag to prepare for the next round. Each tile features potential ways to match gems, as well as a creature with a special ability. Your garden will grow larger and better each round, and the puzzle of placing tiles will become increasingly complex.

The goal of the game is to match enough gems to buy the victory tile.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.47

Galactic Renaissance

| OTSG Staff

Following Inis, Galactic Renaissance is the second installment of the “Political Trilogy” by designer Christian Martinez and publisher Matagot.

Throughout Galactic Renaissance, you build your team, adding new specialists — each one unique — to the core in your deck of cards. With this team, you discover new planets and systems, reconnect with lost civilizations, expand your influence, build embassies, and sow disorder in opposing factions — all in an effort to score victory points faster than your opponents. Sending emissaries to new planets, for example, allows you to discover new civilizations or cement relationships on known planets. Opponents may try to convince a planet to join them instead with their own emissaries, causing disorder in the process.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.75

Friday

| OTSG Staff

Friday, the second game in the Friedemann Friese Series: Freitag-Project (Friedemann Friese), is based on the story of Robinson Crusoe and his loyal partner Friday (Freitag). You play as Friday, and when Robinson Crusoe crashes his ship on your island, your peaceful times are disturbed. You must help Robinson to survive the island and prepare him to defeat the pirates that are coming for the island.

Friday is a solitaire deck-building game in which you optimize your deck of fight cards in order to defeat the hazards of the island. During a turn the player will attempt to defeat hazard cards by playing fight cards from their deck. If defeated, a hazard card will become a fight card and is added to the player’s deck. If failed, the player will lose life points but also get the opportunity to remove unwanted cards from their fight deck. In the end, the player will use their optimized fight deck to defeat the two pirate ships coming for the island, allowing Robinson Crusoe to escape the island and allowing you to finally have your peace back!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 Players
  • ~25 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.15

Freelancers: A Crossroads Game

| OTSG Staff

Congratulations! Humanity is dead! The bad news is that all they left behind is their garbage and a broken gig economy. That’s why we need freelancers like you who are ready to take any job, no matter how loathsome. As a freelancer, you will delve into ruins, brave the wilds, and slay the hordes of hideous creatures that litter the dark forgotten corners of the world. All so you can gather loot and return home, ready to blow it all and start over again the next day. It’s a lousy gig, so it’s perfect for the likes of you.

Freelancers: A Crossroads Game condenses the fantasy RPG campaign experience into a single night of fun and mayhem. Create a character, roll funky dice, and blaze your way through multiple stories set in a world of magic, monsters, and murder. Better yet, no game master is required, as a magical companion app does all the storytelling for you! Immerse yourself in fully-voiced, industry-leading audio as you play. Explore hundreds of branching paths in five highly replayable campaigns. Mix and match a multitude of species and jobs to build your own unique character. Pick up and play, simple rules, low commitment and no prep.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 7 Players
  • 90 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.12

Fort

| OTSG Staff

Fort is a 2-4 player card game about building forts and following friends.

In Fort, you’re a kid! And like many kids, you want to grow your circle of friends, collect pizza and toys, and build the coolest fort.

By doing this cool stuff, you’ll score victory points, and at the end of the game, the player with the most victory points wins! Your cards not only let you take actions on your own turn, but also let you follow the other players’ actions on their turns. Will you devote yourself to your own posse, or copy what the other kids are doing?

But be careful as your carefully constructed deck might start losing cards if you don’t actually use them. After all, if you don’t play with your friends, why should they hang out with you anymore?

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.45

Etherstone

| OTSG Staff

Nobura is a forgotten planet shrouded in mystery. The story told that a cosmic being sacrificed its divine essence to breathe life into its desolate lands. Etherstones shaped the planet’s biomes and interconnected all living beings with nature. Yet, the lurking threat of the Vacuous, a parasitic force born from the depths of Nobura, poses a challenge to life on the surface, weaving a tale of divine sacrifice. Nobura has always been part of a paradoxical loop of life and death, where the forces of creation and destruction dance in an eternal cosmic struggle.

In Etherstone, players embody faction leaders uniting forces to avert the impending extinction, striving to gain the most victory points through various means, such as summoning cards, overcoming threats, and utilizing their abilities as effectively as possible.

The first stage of the game will be drafting your hand of 7 cards and your leader card. Alternatively, for the first few matches, players can take a pre-made hand of cards with the matching Leader. Leaders have a set number of life points, a strength value, and a persistent asymmetric ability.

During your turn, you can take only one action among the following: Dice Draft, Summon, Attack, Rest, Void Pact.

Players will win by gaining victory points while doing several different actions and the game will end if any of the end-game conditions are met:

  • The active player has no cards left in their hand.
  • There are no cards left in the Threat deck.
  • The victory point pool has no more tokens in it.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 -40 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.37

First in Flight

| OTSG Staff

First in Flight is a push-your-luck, deck-building game about the race to early flight. Players take on the roles of the Wright Brothers, Samuel Langley, and other flight pioneers, racing to build and pilot the “flyers” that preceded modern airplanes.

Each player’s flyer design is represented by a deck of cards that they can steadily improve and refine, and which may include unknown design flaws that threaten their success.

Flying is a blackjack-style challenge to test a design, break new records, and gain experience — hopefully without crashing. Then, players head back to the workshop to refine their flyers and improve their chances on future flights. There are dozens of available technologies, pilot skills, and friends in the field available for players to customize their own play style and strategy.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 75 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.31

Expeditions

| OTSG Staff

The sequel to Scythe sends players on a new adventure into Siberia, where a massive meteorite crashed near the Tunguska River, awakening ancient corruption. An expedition led by Dr. Tarkovsky ventures into the taiga to learn about the meteorite and its impact on the land. Itching for adventure, heroes from the war privately fund their own expeditions to Siberia, hoping to find artifacts, overcome challenges, and ultimately achieve glory. Expeditions has completely different mechanisms than Scythe, though the goal was to capture some of the same feelings that Scythe evokes, with a slightly darker, more supernatural theme.

Expeditions is a competitive, card-driven, engine-building game of exploration. Play cards to gain power, guile, and unique worker abilities; move your mech to mysterious locations and gain cards found among the tiles; use workers, items, meteorites, and quests to enhance your mech; and use power and guile to vanquish corruption.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.05

Dune: Imperium – Uprising

| OTSG Staff

In Dune: Imperium Uprising, you want to continue to balance military might with political intrigue, wielding new tools in pursuit of victory. Spies will shore up your plans, vital contracts will expand your resources, or you can learn the ways of the Fremen and ride mighty sandworms into battle!

Dune: Imperium Uprising is a standalone spinoff to Dune: Imperium that expands on that game’s blend of deck-building and worker placement, while introducing a new six-player mode that pits two teams against one other in the biggest struggle yet.

The Dune: Imperium expansions Rise of Ix and Immortality work with Uprising, as do almost all of the cards from the base game, and elements of Uprising can be used with Dune: Imperium.

The choices are yours. The Imperium awaits!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.52

Dominion: Rising Sun

| OTSG Staff

We journey now to the islands to the east – or west, depending on where you are relative to them. Here your title is Emperor. They tell you you’re just a figurehead, though you can still order whatever breakfast you want. They may be right; you did get that breakfast. Your ceremonial sword and armor are made of paper. The samurai never let you into their tea parties, and the ninjas are always tying your shoelaces together. And the epic poem they wrote about you is only 17 syllables long. Rice has been adopted as currency, and no-one seems to even be trying to get your face onto the grains. But when you wake up each morning and look out over the land, life doesn’t seem so bad. Now, what’s for breakfast?

This is the 16th expansion to Dominion.

It has 300 cards, with 25 new Kingdom card piles. There are Shadow cards that leap out from your deck, and Prophecies that will someday happen and change everything. Debt and Events return.

Game Mechanics:

  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00