Earthborne Rangers is a customizable, co-operative card game set in the wilderness of the far future. You take on the role of a Ranger, a protector of the mountain valley you call home: a vast wilderness transformed by monumental feats of science and technology devised to save the Earth from destruction long ago.You begin by building a deck that reflects your Ranger's interests, personal history, and personality. Then, as you explore the open world and your story takes shape, you augment your deck with improved equipment, refined skills, and the memories of your journey.The story of Earthborne Rangers is presented as a branching narrative campaign consisting of a main storyline and a multitude of side stories. In it, you can choose to follow the critical path or to strike off on your own to discover the Valley's many engaging characters, mysterious ruins, and beings both familiar and strange.Each game session represents one day in the Valley, and you'll pick up in the same location on the map where you rested the night before. Your goal is to either complete one of your available missions or to explore the open world. The session ends when you're either forced to rest (through either fatigue or injury), or you choose to rest for the night.An individual game session is played in rounds, and those rounds consist of turns. On your turn, you perform one action: either play a card from your hand, or choose an action from a card on the table. Each action allows you to interact thematically and narratively with the world, and each time you take an action, the world comes to life around you. Predators stalk their prey, rain pours from the sky, rocks tumble down the mountain to block your path, and much more.—description from the publisher

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You built and defended your kingdom, and now that winter is here, you need to battle the harsh elements and chillingly scary monsters.Dwar7s Winter is a hand-building, resource management game with tower defense elements in the gameplay. Each player wants to achieve more victory points, but the only way to survive the winter is to work together.While Dwar7s Winter is a sequel to Dwar7s Fall, it is an independent, standalone game that includes 64 highly-detailed miniatures.

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In Dungeons & Dragons: Builders of Baldur's Gate, a city-building game from acclaimed designer Matthew Dunstan, you are the head of a powerful family in the iconic city. You grow your prestige by building new businesses within the nine districts, both as one large network and across all the districts. You must also extend your influence with the three main factions of the city: the Council of Four, the Flaming Fist, and the Thieves' Guild. But Baldur's Gate is not only a city of industry in the Forgotten Realms, but a city of mortal danger. Mobs of monsters regularly attack the outer walls or from the harbor, forcing temporary alliances to fend off the incursions. Each family tries to take advantage of the crises, using them as stepping stones to advance their own agendas.When you place buildings, you place an influence cube on them to indicate your control. This also applies to special keeps, gates, and watchtowers, which are represented by miniatures with slots for your influence cubes, allowing you to see the city grow in three dimensions!—description from the publisher

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Dungeon Mayhem: Battle for Baldur’s Gate unleashes two brand new characters from Baldur's Gate: beloved ranger Minsc with his miniature giant space hamster Boo and the shapeshifting druid Jaheira.

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Dune: Imperium is a game that finds inspiration in elements and characters from the Dune legacy, both the new film from Legendary Pictures and the seminal literary series from Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson.As a leader of one of the Great Houses of the Landsraad, raise your banner and marshal your forces and spies. War is coming, and at the center of the conflict is Arrakis – Dune, the desert planet.Dune: Imperium uses deck-building to add a hidden-information angle to traditional worker placement.You start with a unique leader card, as well as deck identical to those of your opponents. As you acquire cards and build your deck, your choices will define your strengths and weaknesses. Cards allow you to send your Agents to certain spaces on the game board, so how your deck evolves affects your strategy. You might become more powerful militarily, able to deploy more troops than your opponents. Or you might acquire cards that give you an edge with the four political factions represented in the game: the Emperor, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the Fremen.Unlike many deck-building games, you don’t play your entire hand in one turn. Instead, you draw a hand of cards at the start of every round and alternate with other players, taking one Agent turn at a time (playing one card to send one of your Agents to the game board). When it’s your turn and you have no more Agents to place, you’ll take a Reveal turn, revealing the rest of your cards, which will provide Persuasion and Swords. Persuasion is used to acquire more cards, and Swords help your troops fight for the current round’s rewards as shown on the revealed Conflict card.Defeat your rivals in combat, shrewdly navigate the political factions, and acquire precious The Spice Must Flow cards to lead your House to victory!

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Featuring the co-operative game system used in Portal's award-winning Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, Dune: House Secrets delivers a deeply thematic experience that drops one-to-four players in the middle of the highest stakes unfolding on the harsh desert planet of Arrakis.In this story-driven adventure game, players take on the roles of rebels who must solve a series of challenging missions with a finite amount of time and resources. Players cooperatively make decisions on how to progress the story as they decide to explore different regions of the world, follow leads, leverage allies, and overcome opposition of all kinds. During gameplay, players use a variety of physical and digital game components — a deck of cards with essential clues and plot twists, a dozen physical handouts, and a dedicated website with additional resources — to steer the narrative in fun and surprising directions for a truly immersive experience.Beginning with an introductory prologue designed to get players acquainted with the massive Dune universe, the game then continues with three big adventures, each taking roughly two-to-three hours to play. During each episode, players can earn experience points to level up their characters in between missions and unlock new options in future gameplay. Each adventure can be played separately as standalone episodes, yet should players complete all three episodes, they will unravel a master game narrative with an epic climax and unforgettable resolution with lasting impact on the future two games in the trilogy.—description from the publisher

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Arrakis: Dawn of the Fremen is a brutal, cutthroat game about tribal control of Arrakis, more than a hundred generations before the Atreides come to Arrakis.In the game, you control a tribe of Fremen warriors who are struggling to gather the scarce resources of Arrakis, develop the weapons and sietches you need to survive, and harness the power of sandworms for battle. Gameplay is split into three sections: Harj — the final part of the game set-up in which players jockey for position Initiation Cycle — the first cycle of the game, with a few restrictions to ease into gameplay Cycles — each cycle is split into several phases, with cycles continuing until the game is wonYou can conquer Arrakis two ways, by controlling the winning number of sietches at the end of the action phase or by unanimous decision of the council when all players agree that you cannot be prevented from winning...—description from the publisher

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The evening dragon shows are a definite highlight of the annual fair! Players must decide which dragons they want to perform in their shows. It’s not an easy choice. Each performer comes with its very own special skills and features. There are also some goblin helpers amongst the dragons, who can help with preparations for the show. Putting on the best dragon show needs forward planning and the right strategy. The player who has been able to attract the most spectators by the fifth evening show wins the game.With a fun twist on card drafting, Dragondraft is the perfect way to introduce some strategic drafting to your family game night.—description from the publisher

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After the great success of Dorfromantik: The Board Game, the next part of the Dorfromantik world is no longer about working together, but about friendly competition. The basic principle of the Spiel des Jahres 2023 is retained, but now both sides continue to expand their own landscape with the tile they have just revealed. Two new types of assignments also come into play with double and all-around assignments, which can also be combined with Dorfromantik: The Board Game. Two independently playable modules also provide more challenge, more variety, more interaction. Four of the new special tiles can also be integrated into Dorfromantik: The Board Game and played cooperatively.Dorfromantik: Das Duell allows two players or two teams to compete. And with two copies even up to four people can play. Who will create the most beautiful world of hexagonal landscapes? Who will be better at fulfilling the villager's orders while also mastering the challenge of new assignments?—description from the publisher

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Rippling rivers, rustling forests, wheat fields swaying in the wind and here and there a cute little village - that's Dorfromantik! The video game from the small developer studio Toukana Interactive has been thrilling the gaming community since its Early Access in March 2021 and has already won all kinds of prestigious awards. Now Michael Palm and Lukas Zach are transforming the popular building strategy and puzzle game into a family game for young and old with Dorfromantik: The Board Game.In Dorfromantik: The Board Game, up to six players work together to lay hexagonal tiles to create a beautiful landscape and try to fulfill the orders of the population, while at the same time laying as long a track and as long a river as possible, but also taking into account the flags that provide points in enclosed areas. The better the players manage to do this, the more points they can score at the end. In the course of the replayable campaign, the points earned can be used to unlock new tiles that are hidden in initially locked boxes. These pose new, additional tasks for the players and make it possible to raise the high score higher and higher.—description from the publisher

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Don’t the fall for the fake answers to avoid the drop! Players form into two teams and take turns guessing which 5 of 11 items on a list are actual examples of a category on the card (e.g., Bears, Best Picture Oscar Winners, McDonald’s Menu Items). They pull a tab that keeps the answers hidden. If they guess right, the other team takes a turn. If they get one wrong, the tab will reveal a color that matches one of the planks they need to remove from a cardboard cube tower full of 21 wooden cubes. Any cubes that fall from the plank drop are collected by the team who removed the plank. Whichever team collects 11 cubes loses.

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90,000 B.C. — A great ice age is fast approaching. Another titanic struggle for global supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species. Dominant Species is a game that abstractly recreates a tiny portion of ancient history: the ponderous encroachment of an ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth. Each player will assume the role of one of six major animal classes—mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, arachnid, or insect. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won’t last: It is indeed "survival of the fittest".Through wily action pawn placement, players will strive to become dominant on as many different terrain tiles as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. Players will also want to propagate their individual species in order to earn victory points for their particular animal. Players will be aided in these endeavors via speciation, migration, and adaptation actions, among others. All of this eventually leads to the end game—the final ascent of the ice age—where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have his animal crowned the Dominant Species. But somebody better become dominant quickly, because it’s getting mighty cold...Game PlayThe large hexagonal tiles are used throughout the game to create an ever-expanding interpretation of earth as it might have appeared a thousand centuries ago. The smaller tundra tiles will be placed atop the larger tiles—converting them into tundra in the process—as the ice age encroaches.The cylindrical action pawns (or "AP"s) drive the game. Each AP will allow a player to perform the various actions that can be taken, such as speciation, environmental change, migration, or glaciation. After being placed on the action display during the Planning Phase, an AP will trigger that particular action for the owning player during the Execution Phase.Generally, players will be trying to enhance their own animal’s survivability while simultaneously trying to hinder that of their opponents’—hopefully collecting valuable victory points (or "VP"s) along the way. The various cards will aid in these efforts, giving players useful one-time abilities or an opportunity for recurring VP gains.Throughout the game, species cubes will be added to, moved about in, and removed from the tiles in play (the "earth"). Element disks will be added to and removed from both animals and earth. When the game ends, players will conduct a final scoring of each tile—after which the player controlling the animal with the highest VP total wins.

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