Tag: Solo / Solitaire Game

Barrage

| OTSG Staff

In the dystopic 1930s, the industrial revolution pushed the exploitation of fossil-based resources to the limit, and now the only thing powerful enough to quench the thirst for power of the massive machines and of the unstoppable engineering progress is the unlimited hydroelectric energy provided by the rivers.

Barrage is a resource management strategic game in which players compete to build their majestic dams, raise them to increase their storing capacity, and deliver all the potential power through pressure tunnels connected to the energy turbines of their powerhouses.

Each player represents one of the four international companies who are gathering machinery, innovative patents and brilliant engineers to claim the best locations to collect and exploit the water of a contested Alpine region crossed by rivers.

Barrage includes two innovative and challenging mechanisms. First, the players must carefully plan their actions and handle their machinery, since both their action tokens and resources are stored on a Construction Wheel and will only be available after a full turn of the wheel. The better you manage your wheel, the earlier your resources and actions come back to you.

Second, the water flow on the rivers depicted on the board is a shared and contested resource. Players have to intercept and store as much of the water as they can, build dams (upstream dams are expensive but can block part of the water before it reaches the downstream dams), raise the dams to increase their capacity, and build long tunnels to channel the water to their powerhouses. Water is never consumed — its flow is just used to produce energy —, it is instead released back to the rivers, so you have to strategically place your dams to recover the water diverted by you and the other players.

Over five rounds, the players must fulfill power requirements represented by a common competitive power track and meet specific requests of personal contracts. At the same time, by placing a limited number of engineers, they attempt to enhance their machinery to acquire new and more efficient construction actions and to build and activate special unique-effect buildings to forward their own developing strategy.

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.12

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

| OTSG Staff

Something evil stirs in Arkham, and only you can stop it. Blurring the traditional lines between role-playing and card game experiences, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a Living Card Game of Lovecraftian mystery, monsters, and madness!

In the game, you and your friend (or up to three friends with two Core Sets) become characters within the quiet New England town of Arkham. You have your talents, sure, but you also have your flaws. Perhaps you’ve dabbled a little too much in the writings of the Necronomicon, and its words continue to haunt you. Perhaps you feel compelled to cover up any signs of otherworldly evils, hampering your own investigations in order to protect the quiet confidence of the greater population. Perhaps you’ll be scarred by your encounters with a ghoulish cult.

No matter what compels you, no matter what haunts you, you’ll find both your strengths and weaknesses reflected in your custom deck of cards, and these cards will be your resources as you work with your friends to unravel the world’s most terrifying mysteries.

Each of your adventures in Arkham Horror LCG carries you deeper into mystery. You’ll find cultists and foul rituals. You’ll find haunted houses and strange creatures. And you may find signs of the Ancient Ones straining against the barriers to our world…

The basic mode of play in Arkham LCG is not the adventure, but the campaign. You might be scarred by your adventures, your sanity may be strained, and you may alter Arkham’s landscape, burning buildings to the ground. All your choices and actions have consequences that reach far beyond the immediate resolution of the scenario at hand—and your actions may earn you valuable experience with which you can better prepare yourself for the adventures that still lie before you.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.55

Glass Road

| OTSG Staff

The game Glass Road commemorates the 700-year-old tradition of glass-making in the Bavarian Forest. (Today, the “Glass Road” is a route through the Bavarian forest that takes visitors to many of the old glass houses and museums of that region.) You must skillfully manage your glass and brick production in order to build the right structures that help you keep your business flowing. Cut the forest to keep the fires burning in the ovens, and spread and remove ponds, pits, and groves to supply yourself with the items you need. Fifteen specialists are there at your side to carry out your orders…

In more detail, the game consists of four building periods. Each player has an identical set of fifteen specialist cards, and each specialist comes with two abilities. At the beginning of each building period, you choose a hand of five specialists. If during this building period, you play a specialist that no other player has in hand, you may use both abilities on that card; if two or more players play the same specialist, each of them may use only one of the two abilities. Exploiting the abilities of these specialists lets you collect resources, lay out new landscape tiles (e.g., ponds and pits), and build a variety of buildings, which come in three types:

  • Processing buildings
  • “Immediate” buildings with a one-time effect
  • Buildings that provide bonus points at the end of the game for various accomplishments

Mastering the balance of knowing the best specialist card to play and being flexible about when you play it — together with assembling a clever combination of buildings — is the key to this game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.96

Ginkgopolis

| OTSG Staff

2212: Ginkgo Biloba, the oldest and strongest tree in the world, has become the symbol of a new method for building cities in symbiosis with nature. Humans have exhausted the resources that the Earth offered them, and humanity must now develop cities that maintain a delicate balance between resource production and consumption. Habitable space is scarce, however, and mankind must now face the challenge of building ever upwards. To develop this new type of city, you will gather a team of experts around you, and try to become the best urban planner for Ginkgopolis.

In Ginkgopolis, the city tiles come in three colors: yellow, which provides victory points; red, which provides resources; and blue, which provides new city tiles. Some tiles start in play, and they’re surrounded by letter markers that show where new tiles can be placed.

On a turn, each player chooses a card from his hand simultaneously. Players reveal these cards, adding new tiles to the border of the city in the appropriate location or placing tiles on top of existing tiles. Each card in your hand that you don’t play is passed on to your left-hand neighbor, so keep in mind how your play might set up theirs!

When you add a new tile to the city, you take a “power” card of the same color, and these cards provide you additional abilities during the game, allowing you to scale up your building and point-scoring efforts.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.91

Ghost Stories

| OTSG Staff

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game in which the players protect the village from incarnations of the lord of hell – Wu-Feng – and his legions of ghosts before they haunt a town and recover the ashes that will allow him to return to life. Each Player represents a Taoist monk working together with the others to fight off waves of ghosts.

The players, using teamwork, will have to exorcise the ghosts that appear during the course of the game. At the beginning of his turn, a player brings a ghost into play and places it on a free spot, and more than one can come in at the same time. The ghosts all have abilities of their own – some affecting the Taoists and their powers, some causing the active player to roll the curse die for a random effect, and others haunting the villager tiles and blocking that tile’s special action. On his turn, a Taoist can move on a tile in order to exorcise adjacent ghosts or to benefit from the villager living on the tile, providing it is not haunted. Each tile of the village allows the players to benefit from a different bonus. With the cemetery, for example, Taoists can bring a dead Taoist back to life, while the herbalist allows to recover spent Tao tokens, etc. It will also be possible to get traps or move ghosts or unhaunt other village tiles.

To exorcise a ghost, the Taoist rolls three Tao dice with different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white. If the result of the roll matches the color(s) of the ghost or incarnation of Wu-Feng, the exorcism succeeds. The white result is a wild color that can be used as any color. For example, to exorcise a green ghost with 3 resistance, you need to roll three green, three white, or a combination of both. If your die rolls fall short, you can also use Tao tokens that match the color in addition to your roll. You may choose to use these after your roll. Taoists gain these tokens by using certain village tiles or by exorcising certain ghosts. One of the Taoists has a power that allows him to receive such a token once per turn.

To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game. There are also harder difficulty levels that add more incarnations of Wu-Feng, in which to win, you must defeat all of them.

There are many more ways to lose, however. The players lose if three of the village’s tiles are haunted, if the draw pile is emptied while the incarnation of Wu-Feng is still in play, or if all the priests are dead.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.91

Gentes: Deluxified Edition

| OTSG Staff

“Gentes” is the Latin plural word for greater groups of human beings (e.g., tribes, nations, people; singular: “gens”). In this game, players take the role of an ancient people who are attempting to develop by building monuments and colonizing or founding new cities in the Mediterranean sea.

The game is played in six rounds, each consisting of two phases: action phase, and tidying up. There are three eras — rounds 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 — with new monument cards entering the game at the beginning of rounds 1, 3 and 5. Each player has a personal player mat with a time track for action markers and sand timer markers. In the action phase of a round, the players take their turns in clockwise order, conducting one action per turn. Each action requires an action marker from the main board that is placed on the time track. Depending on the information on the action marker, you have to also pay some money or take sand timers that are placed on the time track. When you have no free spaces on your time track, you must pass for the remainder of the round. Therefore, the number of actions per player in a single round may vary significantly if, for example, you choose double sand timers instead of two single ones or take action markers that require more money but fewer sand timers. Single sand timers are dropped in the tidying up phase, while double sand timers are flipped to become single sand timer markers and stay for another round. The actions are:

Buy new cards from the common display
Build monuments (playing cards from your hand to your personal display for victory points and new options)
Train/Educate your people
Build/found cities
Take money
To play a card, you must meet the requirements printed on that card, such as having specific persons on your personal board (e.g., two priests and four soldiers). These requirements are why training — i.e., getting specific people — is important, but that is not that easy because there are six different types of people — three on the left and three on the right side of your personal player board — and you have only six spaces in total for the two types in the same line. If you have three merchants, for example, you move your marker for counting merchants three spaces toward the side of the soldiers and thus you have only three spaces left for soldiers. By educating a fourth soldier and moving your soldier marker forward to its fourth space, you automatically lose one merchant because that marker is pushed back to its second space.

It is crucial to generate additional actions by using the specific functions of monuments in your display and cities you have built. Cities are expensive, but they create benefits at the end of each round or provide new options for taking an action without acquiring an action marker, gaining only a sand timer marker instead.

Try to have a steady income to avoid wasting actions to take money. Pay attention to the display of common cards, which is new in every single game, because the monument cards are shuffled randomly within the decks of eras I, II and III. Collect identical achievement symbols on the cards to benefit from the increasing victory points for a series of symbols. Build cities to enlarge your options!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 75 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.25

Genotype: A Mendelian Genetics Game MISSING

| OTSG Staff

Gregor Mendel is the 19th Century Augustinian Friar credited with the discovery of modern genetics. In Genotype, you play as his assistants, competing to collect experimental data on pea plants by trying to control how the plants inherit key Traits from their parents: seed shape, flower color, stem color, and plant height. The observable Traits of a Pea Plant (its Phenotype) are determined by its genetic makeup (its Genotype). The relationship between Genotype and Phenotype and the nature of genetic inheritance are at the heart of Genotype: A Mendelian Genetics Game.

During the game, players get Pea Plant Cards which show a set of Phenotype Traits they hope to produce and collect (such as pink flowers and tall height) in order to score points. Each round, Dice are rolled to represent Plant breeding, which may result in the Traits players are looking for. After the Dice Roll, players take turns drafting Dice towards completing their Pea Plant Cards or advancing their Research. The Traits produced during the Dice Roll come through the science of Punnett Squares, which show how the parent genes combine, one from each parent plant. By changing the genes of these parent plants, players can influence the likelihood of rolling the Traits they need. The completion of Pea Plant Cards via the Dice Draft is the main way players score points.

Each round consists of 3 phases: Worker Placement, Dice Drafting, and Upgrades.
1) During Worker Placement, players take actions to get more Plant Cards, change the genes of a parent plant, Garden, Research, stake Phenotype claims, gather new Tools, or even position themselves ahead of other players for the Dice Drafting Phase in a couple of ways.
2) Dice Drafting features a couple of interest steps, including the possibility to get first pick of dice, but only for one type of Trait (like plant height), or the possibility to get a pick of any dice, but only after those first picks have happened. De Novo Mutation Dice allow players to change the Trait of other Dice or gain additional Research.
3) The Upgrades phase lets players spend their Research to gain upgrades that let them work on more Plant Cards, draft more Dice each round, or gain additional Workers to be used during the Worker Placement Phase of each round.

Players work to match their Pea Plant Cards to the outcome of the Dice Draft and complete the cards for points. If they’ve placed a Phenotype marker, they will earn bonus points for every completed card that matches their claim. At the end of 5 rounds, the player with the most points wins.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.78

Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game

| OTSG Staff

It is the late 1930s, and the world is in turmoil. Humanity is on the brink of war as imperialist nations in the Far East and Europe work aggressively to expand their domination. The Nazis have taken control of Germany and now spread darkness across the globe in their hunt for powerful occult artifacts that can give them the upper hand in the days to come. But the spirit of adventure and freedom won’t be stamped out so easily.

Heroic adventurers from around the world answer the call, racing against time to hunt down ancient artifacts, explore deadly temples, and fight back the powers of darkness from engulfing the world in flames. It is a race of good versus evil, and only a cunning and agile explorer can claim the ultimate prize of… Fortune and Glory!

Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game is a fast-paced game of high adventure, vile villains, edge-of-your-seat danger, and cliffhanger pulp movie action. Players take on the role of a treasure hunter, traveling the globe in search of ancient artifacts and fending off danger and villains at every turn in a quest for the ultimate reward of fortune and glory!

Featuring a beautifully rendered adventure map of the world as the game board, eight pulp adventure heroes to choose from (such as Jake Zane the Flying Ace, Li Mei Chen the Night Club Singer and Martial Artist, or Dr. Zhukov Master of Science), an army of ruthless villains and thugs (including the Chicago Mob and the dreaded occult-hunting Nazis), ancient Mayan temples to explore with a zeppelin hovering overhead, a wealth of coins to horde as heroes collect fortune and glory throughout the game, and a unique mechanism of dangers to overcome and the classic cliffhanger moments of suspense that can result. Fortune and Glory is designed to create a pulp serial cinematic feel as the story and game unfold.

So strap on your adventure boots and goggles, fire up the engines on the seaplane, and grab some extra ammo for your revolver…the Nazis already have a head start and in this race for fortune and glory, and there’s no prize for second place!

Features:

  • Designed for strong Competitive and Cooperative play as players race against one another or work together to overcome a Vile Organization bent on world domination through powerful occult artifacts.
  • Photographic artwork for Immersive Pulp Adventure movie action.
  • Thirty-nine highly detailed plastic 28mm miniatures including Heroes, Villains, Enemy Soldiers, Mayan Temples, and a Zeppelin air ship.
  • Comes with an original cd soundtrack to creep its way into the players’ subconscious and raise tension and excitement.
  • No two games are ever the same! Many Heroes, villains to fight, game cards, and dynamically generated artifacts to hunt for offer limitless combinations.
  • Expandable design allows for many expansions and strong web support to create a loyal fan base/community.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 8 Players
  • 90 – 240 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.87

Fallout

| OTSG Staff

Fallout is a post-nuclear adventure board game for one to four players. Based on the hit video game series by Bethesda Softworks, each Fallout scenario is inspired by a familiar story from the franchise. Survivors begin the game on the edge of an unexplored landscape, uncertain of what awaits them in this unfamiliar world. With just one objective to guide them from the very beginning, each player must explore the hidden map, fight ferocious enemies, and build the skills of their survivor as they attempt to complete challenging quests and balance feuding factions within the game.

As they advance their survivors’ stories, players come across new quests and individual targets, leading them to gain influence. Who comes out ahead depends on how keenly and aggressively each player ventures through the game; however, if a single faction is pushed to power too quickly, the wasteland will be taken for their own, and the survivors conquered along with it.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 120 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.01

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