Tag: Hand Management

Hand Management is a game mechanic in which players are rewarded for playing cards in a specific order. This mechanic often encourages players to hold cards for later turns.

The Princess Bride: Adventure Book Game

| OTSG Staff
The Princess Bride: Adventure Book Game

The Princess Bride: Adventure Book Game

Inconceivable! Climb the Cliffs of Insanity, brave the Fire Swamp, and help Buttercup, Westley, Fezzik, and Inigo Montoya survive the dastardly machinations of Prince Humperdinck, Count Rugen, and Vizzini. Follow the incredible story of The Princess Bride through six chapters and work together to keep the plot on course despite Shrieking Eels, kissing, and constant interruptions! Will the forces of evil — or true “wove” — prevail?

In The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game, players work together to advance the plot and tell all six chapters despite interruptions from a sick grandson. Each chapter is represented by a new board within a “book” of game boards. Instead of each player controlling a single character, players cooperate to complete challenges by moving characters and discarding story cards from their hand.

Each chapter has a series of challenges that require characters to be in specific locations and specific story cards to be discarded from a player’s hand. All challenges must be completed before players can advance to the next chapter. A chapter can be interrupted by different story-based conditions or by the grandson. Players have one more chance to complete the story after an interruption, or they lose the game. Special story cards earned as a reward for completing challenges as well as miracle tokens give players more options and help them along the way.

The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game includes paintable miniatures for Westley, Princess Buttercup, Prince Humperdinck, Count Rugen, Vizzini, Inigo Montoya, and Fezzik.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Movement
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Hand Management
  • Move Through Deck
  • Pick-Up and Deliver

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 15 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.92

Photograph

| OTSG Staff
Photograph

Photograph

Time to walk about town and take some pictures! It’s the 1960s in Japan, and you have a half-size camera that lets you take half-size vertical pictures. Let’s see whether you can put together good shots…

In Photograph!, you’re trying to organize pictures on your roll so that they appear in the right order. Each player has a hand of cards, and on a turn, you’ll add 1-3 cards to the front of your hand (without changing their order), move one card in your hand closer to the front, then discard as many cards from the back of your hand as the number of cards that you added. When the sunset card comes out, you can take no more pictures, and everyone scores for what’s on their camera.

The cards all have numbers and colors on them, and you try to line them up in hand to score the most points possible.

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.07

Plague Inc.

| OTSG Staff
Plague Inc.

Plague Inc.

Each player is a deadly disease and they must battle against each other to spread their plagues, develop new symptoms and ultimately wipe out humanity.

Starting with Patient Zero, you spread your infection across the world by placing tokens in cities – earning DNA points and preventing other players from becoming dominant. Players choose which countries are placed on the board but you must be both climate resistant and connected to a country before you can infect it. Eventually, as countries become fully infected – you try to kill them using the Death Dice.

Each player’s unique pathogen can be upgraded by evolving trait cards onto an evolution slide (with DNA points). At the start, your disease is weak and unspecialised, so you will need to add new symptoms to make it stronger. Choose carefully and plan ahead in order to react to the changing world and exploit opportunities created by other player’s actions.

A simple nosebleed could accelerate things early on, whilst diarrhea will help you thrive in hot countries. Sneezing can infect new continents by air but Total Organ Failure would allow you wipe out multiple countries each turn.

As countries start to fall, use powerful event cards to alter the balance of power. You might try to eradicate a dominant player by bombing their diseased cities, or hold the Olympics to cause huge numbers of infected people to travel to a healthy continent.

When the world collapses, who will be the ultimate plague?

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Hand Management
  • Network Building
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.15

Pandemic: 10th Anniversary Edition

| OTSG Staff
Pandemic: 10th Anniversary Edition

Pandemic: 10th Anniversary Edition

In Pandemic, several virulent diseases have broken out simultaneously all over the world! The players are disease-fighting specialists whose mission is to treat disease hotspots while researching cures for each of four plagues before they get out of hand.

The game board depicts several major population centers on Earth. On each turn, a player can use up to four actions to travel between cities, treat infected populaces, discover a cure, or build a research station. A deck of cards provides the players with these abilities, but sprinkled throughout this deck are Epidemic! cards that accelerate and intensify the diseases’ activity. A second, separate deck of cards controls the “normal” spread of the infections.

Taking a unique role within the team, players must plan their strategy to mesh with their specialists’ strengths in order to conquer the diseases. For example, the Operations Expert can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases and which allow for greater mobility between cities; the Scientist needs only four cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal five—but the diseases are spreading quickly and time is running out. If one or more diseases spreads beyond recovery or if too much time elapses, the players all lose. If they cure the four diseases, they all win!

The 2013 edition of Pandemic includes two new characters—the Contingency Planner and the Quarantine Specialist—not available in earlier editions of the game.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Cooperative
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.41

North Sea Saga: Shipwrights of the North Sea

| OTSG Staff
North Sea Saga: Shipwrights of the North Sea

North Sea Saga: Shipwrights of the North Sea

Shipwrights of the North Sea is set in the early years of the Viking Age, circa 900 AD. As Viking shipwrights, players compete to build the greatest fleet on the North Sea. Players must collect oak, wool and iron, as well as getting other craftsmen on board to help. Gold is a precious commodity and must be spent wisely. As you would expect, the township is filled with an array of characters, bad and worse. Better hope they’re on your side!

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Trading

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.31

North Sea Saga: Raiders of the North Sea

| OTSG Staff
North Sea Saga: Raiders of the North Sea

North Sea Saga: Raiders of the North Sea

Raiders of the North Sea is set in the central years of the Viking Age. As Viking warriors, players seek to impress the Chieftain by raiding unsuspecting settlements. To do so, players need to assemble a crew, collect provisions, and journey north to plunder gold, iron and livestock. Glory can be found in battle, even at the hands of the Valkyrie, so gather your warriors because it’s raiding season!

To impress the Chieftain, you need victory points (VPs), with those being acquired primarily by raiding settlements, taking plunder, and making offerings to the Chieftain. How you use your plunder is also vital to your success. Players take turns in clockwise order, and on a turn you place a worker and resolve its action, then pick up a different worker and resolve its action. Broadly speaking, those actions fall in one of two categories:

  • Work: Having a good crew and enough provisions are vital to successful raiding, so before making any raids, players need to do some work to prepare their crew and collect supplies. This is all done in the village at the bottom of the game board, with eight buildings offering various actions. You must first place your worker in an available building where no other worker is present, then pick up a different worker from a different building.
  • Raid: Once players have hired enough crew and collected provisions, you may choose to raid on your turn. To raid a settlement — whether a harbor, outpost, monastery or fortress — you need to meet three requirements: Having a large enough crew, having enough provisions (along with gold for monasteries and fortresses, and having a worker of the right color. Raiding offers various ways of scoring, such as military strength, plunder, and Valkyries, which is how grey and white workers enter the game.

The game ends when only one fortress raid remains, all Valkyrie have been removed, or all offerings have been made, then players tally their scores.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Hand Management
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.55

Nanty Narking

| OTSG Staff
Nanty Narking

Nanty Narking

Immersed deeply in the world of Dickens’s and Doyle’s literature, Nanty Narking moves you into the realities of the myths and legends of the Victorian era. The events in the game are tied to real and fictional characters and places in Victorian London The same London which inspired so many stories…

The action takes place on the city map, with players placing their agents and buildings on the board through card play. Every card is unique. The cards bring the game to life as they include most of the famous characters who have appeared in the various books. The rules are relatively simple: Play a card and do what it says. Most cards have more than one action on them, and you can choose to do some or all of these actions. Some cards also allow you to play a second card, so you can chain actions.

At the beginning of the game, each player draws a secret personality with specific victory conditions, which means that you can never be sure what the other players need to do in order to win. You need to fulfill your goal while also trying to prevent others from winning!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Bluffing
  • City Building
  • Deduction
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hand Management
  • Hidden Roles
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.27

Mysterium

| OTSG Staff
Mysterium

Mysterium

In the 1920s, Mr. MacDowell, a gifted astrologer, immediately detected a supernatural being upon entering his new house in Scotland. He gathered eminent mediums of his time for an extraordinary séance, and they have seven hours to make contact with the ghost and investigate any clues that it can provide to unlock an old mystery.

Unable to talk, the amnesiac ghost communicates with the mediums through visions, which are represented in the game by illustrated cards. The mediums must decipher the images to help the ghost remember how he was murdered: Who did the crime? Where did it take place? Which weapon caused the death? The more the mediums cooperate and guess well, the easier it is to catch the right culprit.

In Mysterium, a reworking of the game system present in Tajemnicze Domostwo, one player takes the role of ghost while everyone else represents a medium. To solve the crime, the ghost must first recall (with the aid of the mediums) all of the suspects present on the night of the murder. A number of suspect, location and murder weapon cards are placed on the table, and the ghost randomly assigns one of each of these in secret to a medium.

Each hour (i.e., game turn), the ghost hands one or more vision cards face up to each medium, refilling their hand to seven each time they share vision cards. These vision cards present dreamlike images to the mediums, with each medium first needing to deduce which suspect corresponds to the vision cards received. Once the ghost has handed cards to the final medium, they start a two-minute sandtimer. Once a medium has placed their token on a suspect, they may also place clairvoyancy tokens on the guesses made by other mediums to show whether they agree or disagree with those guesses.

After time runs out, the ghost reveals to each medium whether the guesses were correct or not. Mediums who guessed correctly move on to guess the location of the crime (and then the murder weapon), while those who didn’t keep their vision cards and receive new ones next hour corresponding to the same suspect. Once a medium has correctly guessed the suspect, location and weapon, they move their token to the epilogue board and receive one clairvoyancy point for each hour remaining on the clock. They can still use their remaining clairvoyancy tokens to score additional points.

If one or more mediums fail to identify their proper suspect, location and weapon before the end of the seventh hour, then the ghost has failed and dissipates, leaving the mystery unsolved. If, however, they have all succeeded, then the ghost has recovered enough of its memory to identify the culprit.

Mediums then group their suspect, location and weapon cards on the table and place a number by each group. The ghost then selects one group, places the matching culprit number face down on the epilogue board, picks three vision cards — one for the suspect, one for the location, and one for the weapon — then shuffles these cards. Players who have achieved few clairvoyancy points flip over one vision card at random, then secretly vote on which suspect they think is guilty; players with more points then flip over a second vision card and vote; then those with the most points see the final card and vote.

If a majority of the mediums have identified the proper suspect, with ties being broken by the vote of the most clairvoyant medium, then the killer has been identified and the ghost can now rest peacefully. If not, well, perhaps you can try again…

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Deduction
  • Hand Management
  • Limited Communications
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Storytelling

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 7 Players
  • ~42 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.90

Mutants

| OTSG Staff
Mutants

Mutants

In Mutants, 1-4 players have to mix and match genetics to create the ultimate warriors and demonstrate their prowess in the arena. By dominating the arena and freezing the most valuable mutants, you gain Victory Points — and whoever gets most of them wins.

In each round, players take turns until all players have used every card in their hand. At the end of the round, the player whose token is closest to the top space of the arena track scores Victory Points based on the round track. The game proceeds in this way for five rounds, after which players reveal their archives and gain additional prestige based on the freeze value of the mutants they have placed there.

On your turn, you perform three steps.

  • First, you check to see whether you crushed the competition.
  • Second, you move your Active Mutant left or right, triggering the Leave ability of the card being replaced by such movement.
  • Third, you take one action from the following three:
    • Deploy mutant: Play a mutant from your hand to your active mutant slot.
    • Breed: Gain a new mutant card to use in battle this round.
    • Incubate: Prepare a new mutant card to use in battle next round.

The game is also provided with a solo mode called Uprising.
You win Uprising if you defeat the boss. Unlike normal Mutants, you do not win by gaining points. Instead, each time you would gain points you will reduce the life off the boss by the number of points gained. If the Boss ever has zero (or less) life, you win immediately!

Game Mechanics:

  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.55

Munchkin Shakespeare Deluxe

| OTSG Staff
Munchkin Shakespeare Deluxe

Munchkin Shakespeare Deluxe

Prepare to fire the Shakespearean Canon!

Presenting Munchkin Shakespeare, a Shakespeare-themed version of the popular Munchkin card game! Players have requested a Shakespearean version for years, and some of you even helped us brainstorm these puns…

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 6 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00