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.

Camel Up: The Card Game

| OTSG Staff

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

Arctic Scavengers: Base Game+HQ+Recon

| OTSG Staff

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:

Game Specifications:

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

Boss Monster: The Dungeon Building Card Game

| OTSG Staff

Inspired by a love of classic video games, Boss Monster: The Dungeon Building Card Game pits 2-4 players in a competition to build the ultimate side-scrolling dungeon. Players compete to lure and destroy hapless adventurers, racing to outbid one another to see who can build the most enticing, treasure-filled dungeon. The goal of Boss Monster is to be the first Boss to amass ten Souls, which are gained when a Hero is lured and defeated — but a player can lose if his Boss takes five Wounds from Heroes who survive his dungeon.

Playing Boss Monster requires you to juggle two competing priorities: the need to lure Heroes at a faster rate than your opponents, and the need to kill those Heroes before they reach your Boss. Players can build one room per turn, each with its own damage and treasure value. More attractive rooms tend to deal less damage, so a Boss who is too greedy can become inundated with deadly Heroes.

Players interact with each other by building rooms and playing Spells. Because different Heroes seek different treasure types, and rooms are built simultaneously (played face down, then revealed), this means that every “build phase” is a bidding war. Spells are instant-speed effects that can give players advantages or disrupt opponents.

As a standalone card game with 155 cards, Boss Monster contains everything that 2-4 players need to play.

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Take That
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.85

Bloody Inn, The

| OTSG Staff

France 1831: In a remote corner of Ardèche, the little village of Peyrebeille sees numerous travelers pass through. A family of greedy rural farmers is determined to make its fortune and has devised a diabolical stratagem to achieve this goal: Invest in an inn so they can rob traveling guests, getting rich without arousing the suspicions of the police! Whether or not their plan will work out, one thing is certain: Not every guest will leave this inn alive.

The Bloody Inn is a card game in which you play one member of a family of greedy, murderous innkeepers. At the start of each round, cards are placed face up to fill the inn with guests. Each card carries a cost representing how many cards a player must discard from her hand in order to take an action related to that card. Certain guests have an affinity for particular actions, so those cards return to a player’s hand after being discarded. Cards also show how much money, in francs, each guest possesses. A round has two phases in which players take one action each, in turn order. Players choose one of the following actions:

  • bribe a guest into becoming an accomplice (take a card from the inn to their hand)
  • build an annex (move a card from their hand to their player area; it now represents a structure under which a victim may be buried)
  • kill a guest (move a card from the inn to their player area, awaiting burial)
  • bury a victim (place an unburied victim card under an annex card and take the money from the victim’s pockets)
  • launder money (players may only have a certain amount of cash on hand; excess must be converted to 10F checks by the local notary)

At the end of the round, if any room of the inn contains one of the police, then they conduct an investigation; if a player has any unburied victims, then he must pay 10F per victim to the local gravedigger to hurriedly — and quietly — bury the bodies! Lastly in the round, any cards (accomplices) in each player’s hand must be paid 1F each. After the guest deck has been depleted the second time, players take a final round, then tally their francs. The player with the most money wins!

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Solo / Solitaire Game

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.36

Blitzkrieg!: World War Two in 20 Minutes

| OTSG Staff

Recreate World War Two in 20 minutes! The perfect wargame for non-wargamers, Blitzkrieg! allows two players to battle across the War’s most iconic theatres, winning key campaigns and building military might.

Players draw army tokens from a bag to determine their starting forces and to replenish their losses. Rather than ‘fighting’ battles with dice or cards, players allocate their military resources to each theatre’s campaigns, winning victory points, further resources, special weapons, and strategic advantages as they play. Refight World War Two several times in one evening!

Includes Solo mode by Dávid Turczi.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Race
  • Solo / Solitaire Game
  • Take That
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 2 Players
  • 20 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.92

Big Book of Madness, The

| OTSG Staff

So far your first year at the Elementary College has been slightly disappointing. They taught you to light a flickering flame at the tip of your finger, but other than that you’ve spent much more time reading books than learning powerful spells as future great wizards like you should.

So when you heard about the Big Book of Madness hidden in the great school library, you couldn’t help but to sneak in and peek in this intriguing tome in spite of your professors’ warnings. When you slowly lift the cover of the terrible book, dozens of dreadful creatures rush out, threatening to destroy the world itself! This was your mistake, and only you can fix it now! Learn from the library to fight back against the monsters, and try not to sink into insanity…

The Big Book of Madness is a challenging co-operative game in which the players are magic students who must act as a team to turn all the pages of the book, then shut it by defeating the terrible monsters they’ve just freed.

Each player has their own element deck that they build during the game and use for several purposes, such as learning or casting a spell, adding a new element to their deck, destroy or healing a curse. Spells allow you to support your playmates, improve your deck, draw cards, etc. — but the monsters from the book fight back. Each comes with terrible curses that are triggered every turn unless you dispel them in time. They will make you discard elements, add madness cards to your deck, or lose spells…

If you manage to turn six pages and defeat all of the monsters, you win the game!

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative Game
  • Hand Management
  • Player Elimination
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.68

Bears and the Bees, The

| OTSG Staff

Come join the Hive! Compete to link honeycomb shaped cards to the growing hive. The more sides you match, the greater the payoff. Special cards help earn extra plays and deliver stings to your rivals. Just be careful to avoid those pesky honey-grubbin’ bears!

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.27

Astro Knights: Eternity

| OTSG Staff

You and your group of rag-tag intergalactic scrappers are suddenly faced with the responsibility of defending your home world from those that seek to destroy it. Join forces and work together in this cooperative deck builder to strategically defeat the Boss before they destroy you and all you love. Play through all the scenarios and master the new mechanics introduced in this stand-alone continuation of the Astro Knights series!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.86

Abducktion 🔵

| OTSG Staff

A 15-minute light strategy game for adults of duck matching, a UFO, and logic! Players are all interns on an alien UFO, working for an intergalactic corporation that has one main function: abducting ducks. (For research purposes, duh).

But, ducks need to be collected in specific formations, and you’ll have to use spatial logic and cunning to rearrange your ducks before your opponents to win!

Abduct (collect) ducks in specific formations by using action cards to move your (or your opponent’s) ducks around. Each player gets an individual stream board that can hold 10 ducks. Put the ducks into patterns by moving them around with action cards. When your ducks in a single color match a pattern on one of the shared formation cards, you earn the card and abduct the ducks into the UFO. Grab more ducks out of the UFO and try to make another pattern before the cards run out.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~15 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.33

Arcs

| OTSG Staff

Arcs is a sharp, tactical space opera game, for 2–4 players, set in a dark yet silly universe. Players represent officials from a distant, decaying and neglectful Empire who are now free to vie for dominance whether through battle, gathering scarce resources or diplomatic intrigue. Ready yourself for dramatic twists and turns as you launch into this galactic struggle.

A deck of cards in 4 suits with ranks from 1-7 (2-6 for less than 4 players) defines the action selection system. These cards are played in a trick-taking adjacent system to select actions, take the initiative and declare Ambitions. The 3 declared Ambitions are what will score in that deal. Timing is everything. Bad hands must be mitigated by careful card play and benefitting from other players’ card play.

Battles are resolved quickly with the attacker choosing their level of risk. The defenders must be prepared with adequate defensive ships and cards in their tableau.

Each game contains a hundred wooden ships and agents, 18 custom engraved dice, a beautiful six-panel board, and tons of cards with over 60 pieces of unique art. The base game may be played without the optional Leaders and Lore cards (for an easier teach) or with them for a richer, fuller and asymmetric game. It is also the core of the campaign game (requiring the Blighted Reach Expansion), which provides an epic, more thematic experience.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.40