Tag: Set Collection

Games with Set Collection mechanics require players to collect resources in sets to achieve various rewards.

Five Tribes

Five Tribes

Five Tribes

Crossing into the Land of 1001 Nights, your caravan arrives at the fabled Sultanate of Naqala. The old sultan just died and control of Naqala is up for grabs! The oracles foretold of strangers who would maneuver the Five Tribes to gain influence over the legendary city-state. Will you fulfill the prophecy? Invoke the old Djinns and move the Tribes into position at the right time, and the Sultanate may become yours!

Designed by Bruno Cathala, Five Tribes builds on a long tradition of German-style games that feature wooden meeples. Here, in a unique twist on the now-standard “worker placement” genre, the game begins with the meeples already in place – and players must cleverly maneuver them over the villages, markets, oases, and sacred places tiles that make up Naqala. How, when, and where you dis-place these Five Tribes of Assassins, Elders, Builders, Merchants, and Viziers determine your victory or failure.

As befitting a Days of Wonder game, the rules are straightforward and easy to learn. But devising a winning strategy will take a more calculated approach than our standard fare. You need to carefully consider what moves can score you well and put your opponents at a disadvantage. You need to weigh many different pathways to victory, including the summoning of powerful Djinns that may help your cause as you attempt to control this legendary Sultanate.

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction/Bidding
  • Set Collection
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 40 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.85

Everdell

Everdell

Everdell

Within the charming valley of Everdell, beneath the boughs of towering trees, among meandering streams and mossy hollows, a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding. From Everfrost to Bellsong, many a year have come and gone, but the time has come for new territories to be settled and new cities established. You will be the leader of a group of critters intent on just such a task. There are buildings to construct, lively characters to meet, events to host—you have a busy year ahead of yourself. Will the sun shine brightest on your city before the winter moon rises?

Everdell is a game of dynamic tableau building and worker placement.

On their turn a player can take one of three actions:

a) Place a Worker: Each player has a collection of Worker pieces. These are placed on the board locations, events, and on Destination cards. Workers perform various actions to further the development of a player’s tableau: gathering resources, drawing cards, and taking other special actions.

b) Play a Card: Each player is building and populating a city; a tableau of up to 15 Construction and Critter cards. There are five types of cards: Travelers, Production, Destination, Governance, and Prosperity. Cards generate resources (twigs, resin, pebbles, and berries), grant abilities, and ultimately score points. The interactions of the cards reveal numerous strategies and a near infinite variety of working cities.

c) Prepare for the next Season: Workers are returned to the players supply and new workers are added. The game is played from Winter through to the onset of the following winter, at which point the player with the city with the most points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 40 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.81

Endless Winter

Endless Winter

Endless Winter

Designed by Stan Kordonskiy (Dice Hospital, Rurik, Lock Up), developed by Jonny Pac (Coloma, Sierra West, Lions of Lydia), solo mode by Drake Villareal (Solani, Spook Manor), and illustrated by The Mico (Raiders of the North Sea, Paladins of the West Kingdom, Valeria), Endless Winter: Paleoamericans takes place in North America, around 10,000 BCE. Players guide the development of their tribes across several generations—from nomadic hunter-gatherers to prosperous tribal societies. Over the course of the game, tribes migrate and settle new lands, establish cultural traditions, hunt paleolithic megafauna, and build everlasting megalithic structures.

Endless Winter is a euro-style game that combines worker placement and deck building in an innovative way. Each round, players send their tribe members to various action spaces, and pay for the actions by playing cards and spending resources. Tribe cards grant additional labor, while Culture cards provide a variety of unique effects. As an alternative, cards can be saved for an end-of-round Eclipse phase, where they are simultaneously revealed to determine the new player order, and trigger various bonus actions.

The game features a novel blend of interwoven systems and mechanisms, such as multi-use cards, area influence, tile placement, and set collection. Plus, there are many viable paths to victory. After four brisk rounds, scores are tallied, and the tribe with the most points wins!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.22

Endeavor: Age of Sail

Endeavor: Age of Sail

Endeavor: Age of Sail

In Endeavor: Age of Sail, players strive to earn glory for their empires. Sailing out from Europe and the Mediterranean, players will establish shipping routes and occupy cities the world over. As they do so, players will leverage their growing industry, culture, finance, and Influence, building their engine and extending their reach into the far-flung regions of the world.

In this second edition, players will experience:

  • Double-sided board to accommodate different player counts
  • Variable starting set ups with new buildings
  • Exploits to enhance the mechanisms and story of the different regions
  • Updated visuals by the original artist and graphic designer, Josh Cappel

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.81

Eleven

Eleven

Eleven

Eleven — the number of players you have on the pitch at any given time, with those players making all the difference between being the best team and the worst. But every team knows that to be the best in the league it takes a lot more than players; it also takes an incredible manager.

Eleven: Football Manager Board Game is an economic strategy game set in a world of sport. Your task is to manage and grow your own football club over the course of a season. During the game, you hire staff members, including trainers, physical therapists, PR specialists, and directors. You acquire sponsors, expand the stadium infrastructure, and take care of your club’s position in social media. Among the many tasks on the list are transferring new players and choosing the right tactics for each of the upcoming matches.

Eleven can be played multiplayer or solo. The solo mode includes six different scenarios that challenge players with different starting situations and goals for the season. In the beginning, the task is simple: You have to climb the steps of the football leagues and achieve the appropriate experience. You may have to manage the club in a crisis, and at other times you will have to rejuvenate a football team of players that are not so young anymore. You may also have to fight against time to try to complete the stadium before the deadline!

Game Mechanics:

  • Campaign
  • Closed Drafting
  • Dice Rolling
  • Economic
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.27

Distilled

Distilled

Distilled

Distilled is a highly thematic strategy card game about crafting spirits in a distillery, with resource management and push-your-luck elements. In the game, you have inherited a distillery and are hoping to someday achieve the title of master distiller through purchasing goods, building up your distillery, and creating the world’s most renowned spirits.

Use cards to purchase new ingredients and invest in upgrades to your distillery, all while eventually distilling the spirit and sending it to the warehouse. Once in the warehouse, age your spirit to enhance its flavor and bottle it to sell it for major profits!

Achieve the title of Master Distiller by having the most victory points at the end of the game. Points are obtained by distilling and selling spirits.

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Hand Management
  • Push Your Luck
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.89

Dinosaur Island

Dinosaur Island

Dinosaur Island

In Dinosaur Island, players will have to collect DNA, research the DNA sequences of extinct dinosaur species, and then combine the ancient DNA in the correct sequence to bring these prehistoric creatures back to life. Dino cooking! All players will compete to build the most thrilling park each season, and then work to attract (and keep alive!) the most visitors each season that the park opens.

Do you go big and create a pack of Velociraptors? They’ll definitely excite potential visitors, but you’d better make a large enough enclosure for them. And maybe hire some (read: a lot of) security. Or they WILL break out and start eating your visitors, and we all know how that ends. You could play it safe and grow a bunch of herbivores, but then you aren’t going to have the most exciting park in the world (sad face). So maybe buy a roller coaster or two to attract visitors to your park the good old-fashioned way?

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Dice Rolling
  • Economic
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 90 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.03

Dice Settlers

Dice Settlers

Dice Settlers

With a piece of land to call your own, a handful of resources, a few families and a head full of dreams you embark on a journey of a lifetime. Beyond lies the New World full of opportunities to make your dreams of a new home a reality. But beware, other settlers have come here as well, and although their beginnings are as humble as yours, each of them will want to influence these new lands as much as you. Will you become the most powerful?

Dice Settlers is a civilization dice game of pool building, resource gathering and area control. Each turn players reach into their bags of dice, roll and choose their own actions: from exploring new lands and building the board, through gathering resources and trading, to developing technologies which offer new abilities, each player chooses their own path to victory.

A changing board, a set of different technologies every time you play, and a vast array of available strategies await!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Deck Building
  • Dice Rolling
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.93

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory

As the nameless girl returned to consciousness, she found herself lying in an egg-like space pod, holding a bowl of luminous blue flowers, and her forearm was tattooed with some kind of alien symbols. “What is this place? Who am I?” She did not remember anything. In the space pod’s computer was a black box with records of all the planets it had visited. Bewildered but resolute, she set out to revisit all the planets in reverse order in the hope of retrieving all her lost memories.

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory is about memory, but it is NOT a memory game; instead the game focuses on tableau-building and set-collecting, and to win the game, you must perform well both tactically and strategically. In the tactical part, players collect wooden tokens on the map with various combinations of color and shape, and both the color and shape are essential to success! The process of collecting is a pleasantly perplexing mind puzzle.

In the strategic part, players use the wooden tokens they gained to add cards to their tableau, building up their “card engine”, which serves to generate victory points, reinforce their resource-collecting ability, and improve the engine itself. Should you increase your selection of cards first? Or create more space to save up resources? Maybe you should plant more cosmic flowers? Balanced and efficient long-term planning is the key to victory.

The central cosmic map, aside from being a place to hold resources, is also a battlefield to contest precious memory fragments which, when paired with the right cards, can earn enormous amount of victory points for you!

Game Mechanics:

  • Deck Building
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.64

Cyclades

In this latest collaboration between Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc, players must buy the favor of the gods in their race to be the first player to build two cities in the Ancient Greek island group known as the Cyclades.

Victory requires respect for all the gods – players cannot afford to sacrifice to only one god, but must pay homage to each of five gods in turn. Each turn, the players bid for the favors of the gods, as only one player can have the favor of each god per turn – and each player is also limited to the favor of a single god per turn.

  • Ares allows the movement of player armies and the building of Fortresses.
  • Poseidon allows players to move their navies and build Ports.
  • Zeus allows his followers to hire priests and build temples.
  • Athena provides her worshipers with philosophers and universities.
  • Apollo increases the income of his worshipers.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Auction/Bidding
  • City Building
  • Civilization
  • Dice Rolling
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.82