Castle Combo is a tableau-building game that combines simplicity with deep, engaging gameplay, offering highly satisfying experiences.Each player will spend coins to draft 9 cards from 2 open markets on the table (the lower and upper city), creating along the game a 3x3 square of people interacting with each other to trigger instant effects and end-of-game bonuses.Each turn, you add a character to your tableau — a seemingly straightforward action that packs a punch regarding strategic decisions. You'll need to carefully manage your Keys to influence the Messenger pawn at critical moments, as it controls which characters are available for recruitment from two different areas – peasants and nobles.Balancing your Gold reserves is equally important, ensuring you can afford the characters that best suit your strategy throughout the game. Selecting the right characters is crucial to maximising their immediate effects and the points they will contribute at the game's end. Finally, carefully arranging these characters on your 3x3 board is key to unlocking their full potential.After everyone has played 9 turns (i.e., everyone has 9 characters in front of them), the player with the most points in their tableau wins the game.

Read more less

Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.In the game, you take turns building out your own terrain area and populating it with wildlife. You start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with five types of habitat in the game), and on a turn you choose a new habitat tile that's paired with a wildlife token, then place that tile next to your other ones and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat. (Each tile depicts 1-3 types of wildlife from the five types in the game, and you can place at most one tile on a habitat.) Four tiles are on display, with each tile being paired at random with a wildlife token, so you must make the best of what's available — unless you have a nature token to spend so that you can pick your choice of each item.Ideally you can place habitat tiles to create matching terrain that reduces fragmentation and creates wildlife corridors, mostly because you score for the largest area of each type of habitat at game's end, with a bonus if your group is larger than each other player's. At the same time, you want to place wildlife tokens so that you can maximize the number of points scored by them, with the wildlife goals being determined at random by one of the three scoring cards for each type of wildlife. Maybe hawks want to be separate from other hawks, while foxes want lots of different animals surrounding them and bears want to be in pairs. Can you make it happen?

Read more less

Beneath Nalos’ capital city Sabek lies Undercity, a twisting labyrinth of corridors, caverns, and passageways, populated by local criminals and renegades living on the fringes of society. No formal study of its layout has ever been done. The queen has charged you with exploring Undercity’s depths: locating underground rivers, settlements, and the strange mushroom forests that bloom in phosphorescent caverns. The last cartographer never returned — but I’m sure you’ll have better luck.This map pack can be played with either Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale or Cartographers Heroes.It includes 75 double-sided new map sheets featuring above ground and below ground regions and 3 new scoring cards specifically for use with this map pack.-description from publisher

Read more less

Carcassonne: Hills & Sheep is the ninth numbered expansion for the Carcassonne base game, and now players get to be shepherds on the hills in addition to the usual thieves, knights, monks and farmers. By placing the tiles in this expansion, players build hills and vineyards, trying to plan ahead to claim the sweetest meadows for points — bringing sheep and shepherds while keeping watch for the wolf that waits to be drawn among the tiles...Whenever a tile featuring a hill icon is added to the playing area, it is placed on top of another randomly drawn tile, elevating it above the playing surface and creating a hill. Hill tiles act as tie-breakers: if two or more players occupy the same feature equally (a "shared majority"), but one of the tied players has a follower standing on a hill tile, that player will have an advantage over the others, and will score all the points for that feature.Vineyards are designed to increase the importance of monasteries. Each vineyard tile placed around a monastery adds three points to that monastery's score. However, these bonus points only count if the monastery is completed, so players are more likely to sabotage their opponents' monasteries in order to prevent them from being finished.Shepherds are new pieces that can only be placed in fields. Each time a player expands the field occupied by his or her shepherd, that player has two options: 1. Draw a sheep token out of a bag, placing it near their shepherd; or 2. Trade in all their accumulated sheep for points. Each sheep token is worth 1-4 points, depending on the number of sheep depicted. However, hidden among the sheep tokens are two wolf tokens, and if a player draws one of these, all of their sheep are lost and placed back into the bag. This introduces a push-your-luck aspect to Carcassonne, as players can choose to either "cash-in" the sheep they have, or try to add more sheep and risk losing them all.The goal of Hills & Sheep remains the same as in basic Carcassonne: claim the most points to win the game. Part of the Carcassonne series.

Read more less

The sixth large expansion to Carcassonne released in Europe by Hans im Glück is actually a compilation of three existing small expansions and a new one. Before Z-Man Games, Inc. picked up the Carcassonne license, this compilation was only available in the US from Rio Grande Games as part of the Big Box 2, or each small expansion was available individually.Part of the Carcassonne series.This compilation contains: 7 tiles out of Carcassonne: King & Scout (the King & Scout tiles extending Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers are not included in this expansion) Carcassonne: The Count of Carcassonne Carcassonne: The River II Carcassonne: The Cult, which was first made available in this compilation.

Read more less

The fifth major expansion to Carcassonne, Abbey & Mayor adds 3 new wooden piece types, 6 abbey tiles, and 12 landscape tiles. The Abbey tiles act as Cloisters but do not have to match adjacent tiles and they complete adjacent features when placed. Mayors can be placed only in cities, with their strength determined by the number of pennants in the city. Barns allow players to score fields during the game rather than just at the end. Wagons are placed on roads, cities, or cloisters, and can move to an adjacent open feature when their current feature is completed.Part of the Carcassonne series.Expands: Carcassonne

Read more less