Tag: Set Collection

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

Galileo Project

| OTSG Staff

Thirty years after sending the first colonial ships from Ganymede, humanity decided to launch Project Galileo! Its goal: Settle the four main satellites of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) in order to broaden human presence in the solar system. This project is named after the Italian intellectual Galileo, the first to observe these four satellites in the sky in 1610.

In Galileo Project, you play as the same corporations involved in the events of Ganymede and settle the four satellites of Jupiter by acquiring robots from Earth and Mars, recruiting experts, developing technologies, and building superstructures.

Galileo Project is a standalone game in the Ganymede universe, combining combos and engine-building.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 40 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.77

Fresco: Big Box

| OTSG Staff

In Fresco, players are master painters, working to restore a fresco in a Renaissance church.

Each round begins with players deciding what time they would like to wake up for the day. The earlier you wake up, the earlier you will be in turn order, and the better options you will be guaranteed to have. Wake up early too often, however, and your apprentices will become unhappy and stop working as efficiently. They would much rather sleep in!

Then, players decide their actions for the turn, deploying their apprentice work force to various tasks. You’ll need to buy paint, mix paint, work on painting the fresco, raise money by painting portraits (which you’ll need to buy the aforementioned paint!), and perhaps even send your apprentices to the opera in order to increase their happiness. Points are scored mostly by painting the fresco, which requires specific combinations of paints, so you’ll need to buy and mix your paints wisely, in addition to beating other players to the paints and frescos you would like to paint.

Fresco: Big Box contains all of the material from the original Fresco game, plus all expansions released through the end of 2012 and the all new 2nd expansion (with modules 8, 9, and 10)! You can play without expansions for a lighter family game, or add in expansions – whether one, two, or all – to vary play and to increase the decision-making and difficulty, resulting in a very flexible game with a high replay value.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.75

Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala

| OTSG Staff

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:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 40 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.84

Everdell: The Complete Collection

| OTSG Staff

Dive tailfirst into the world of Everdell with the Complete Collection. Build a city of critters and constructions and explore the Emerald Valley and beyond; celebrate the Bellfaire, wonder at Newleaf’s mechanical marvels, trek into the Spirecrest Mountains, explore the underwater depths of Pearlbrook, and chance the dangers of Mistwood. Play against automated opponents including the dastardly Rugwort and cunning Nightweave and meet heroes of renown like Corrin Evertail himself. Everdell is easy to learn, yet offers satisfying strategic depth and endless replayability. Will the sun shine brightest on your city?

Everdell Complete Collection contains 23 different types of Critter meeples, player powers for asymmetric play, Giant Critters with saddles to ride on, and an amazing array of pieces including wooden twigs, squishy berries, smooth pebbles, amber resin, glass pearls, and more. Featuring deluxe components, including the shiny metal point tokens and the wooden Ever Tree, this Complete Collection is the ultimate edition of Everdell.

Includes all content from:

– Everdell
– Pearlbrook
– Spirecrest
– Bellfaire
– Newleaf
– Mistwood
– Wooden Ever Tree
– Collector’s upgrade packs (Freshwater, Glimmergold, and Trailblazers)
– Everdell Big Ol’ Box of Storage

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • 40 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.07

Endless Winter: Paleoamericans

| OTSG Staff

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:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.32

Endeavor: Age of Sail

| OTSG Staff

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:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.85

Eleven: Football Manager Board Game

| OTSG Staff

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:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.34

Distilled

| OTSG Staff

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
  • Income
  • Market
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.03

Dinosaur Island

| OTSG Staff

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 3.05

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory

| OTSG Staff

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, Bag, and Pool Building
  • Mancala
  • Modular Board
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.67