Québec puts you at the head of a rich family who wants to leave its name in history by building Québec city. The game spans four centuries during which you erect the most prestigious buildings and places of the city. Construction is not enough: you also have to ensure your presence in the great spheres of power. It is up to you and your opponents to build Québec City in your colors!A game takes place over four centuries. Each player plays on average 5 to 7 turns per century. On each turn, players choose one of these actions : Start a new building with his architect Complete part of a building Send a worker to a zone of influence Take a leader cardBy contributing to the numerous buildings, players acquire influence with the authorities of the time : religion, politics, commerce and culture. Players also help build the famous Citadelle.At the end of each century, there is a scoring round where players get victory points for the workers they managed to send in the 5 zones of influence. Québec introduces a unique and addictive majority rule. The player with the majority in a zone cascades half of his workers by moving them to the next zone. Workers moved in this way allow a player to score even more points. If a player still has the majority in the next zone, his workers cascade again – a potentially devastating ripple effect. This mechanism illustrates the interrelationship between the great zones of influence. Players must not only fight to get majorities, they must also erect the most prestigious buildings.The game ends after the fourth century. Players then receive points for the buildings they completed. The player with the most points is declared the winner.Québec won the Plateau d'or 2007 and was shortlisted at the 2007 Boulogne-Billancourt International Designer Contest.

Read more less

Mid-22nd century, after 300 years of unconsciousness, the water rising engulfs the last emerged lands. Fighting for their lives, the survivor’s settlements must remain above the sea level. You live in the Otys colony and you must retrieve the past civilizations debris in the depths to build the future of humanity.Your diver’s team is trained to bring up the most useful materials remaining in the depths. You need to use them wisely to fulfill the contracts offered by the Colony and thus obtain more notoriety than your contenders. Your divers lay at different depths; it is up to you to best match their special abilities with the bonuses offered by the Colony. But beware! Your diver’s oxygen is limited, and as soon as they have accomplished their mission, they must go up to the surface. Try to manage all the parameters of your team in a profitable way, so the Colony will reward you more than it will the others!Otys is an optimization and development game co-published by Pearl Games and Libellud. Optimize your game in order to match the depth of your divers, their special abilities and the Colony bonuses. That is how you will supply the best contracts and win.The future is built from the past...In Otys, each player has a team of divers and must use them to take actions, retrieve items, and complete objectives. The divers are stacked in a column on the player's individual game board, and some of them are next to depth gauges that read 1-5.On a turn, a player chooses an available depth gauge on their individual board, then carries out the action at that same depth on the shared game board, then takes the action for their diver at that depth. Afterward that diver moves to the surface, pushing down all the other divers in the queue. That depth gauge is placed at the bottom of the player's board, and they return to the player's board to be chosen again only when that player's gauge meter is full. Initially a player must play all six of their gauges before getting any back, but they can improve their meter so that it takes fewer gauges to fill, thereby giving them more choices for their actions.As divers obtain items, those items are kept at the appropriate depth on a player's board, and when a player has the needed items together at the same depth, they can claim one of the shared objectives revealed on the table or one of their personal objectives (if they've taken any). Players are racing to score 18 points first in order to win the game.

Read more less

Orléans Stories is based on the bag-building mechanism known from Orléans, with this mechanisms having been further developed into a storytelling experience in which players go through different eras and face different challenges. Broadly speaking, instead of focusing on the city of Orléans and trade with the surrounding villages, player are now settling the Loire Valley. Players must farm and produce, found villages, and build fortresses and churches. They will experience times of prosperity and success, but also times of deprivation; they must defy hunger and plague, fight for their land, and perhaps conquer foreign lands to secure the lives of their settlers. In the end, however, there is peace and the joint administration of territories and villages.The game includes two stories: "The First Kingdom" and "The King's Favor". "The First Kingdom" is an epic story that spans eight so-called eras, and each era features different conditions and emphases. Sometimes knights settle down, with whose help you can conquer foreign territories, sometimes the plague threatens to decimate the population of settlers unless all have worked together to develop medicine."The King's Favor" is shorter, simpler, and more suitable as an introduction to the game. Over five eras, certain tasks have to be fulfilled by the end of each era, and those who fail to do so will drop out mercilessly. The threat of having to end the game prematurely provides a constant thrill, but all tasks are achievable, so that (usually) all players experience the end of the fifth era — but those who have concentrated only on the tasks will be punished because at this point everyone's achievements will be compared in the king's castle, and you will receive victory points for territory size, buildings, goods, and coins.The different eras affect the parameters of play as well as the rules of the game, creating new strategic possibilities. This challenges players to constantly adapt to current conditions, giving you the impression of experiencing a story, but unlike in legacy games, these stories can be repeated as often as you like. The changes from era to era require a new way of looking at things from a distance, but this is made easier for players by a story booklet in which players will find not only all relevant information and rule peculiarities, but also hints of how to prepare for the upcoming game in the form of a narrated story.—description from the publisher

Read more less

You are a Dreamwalker, lost in a mysterious labyrinth, and you must discover the oneiric doors before your dreamtime runs out – or you will remain trapped forever!You may wander through the chambers of dreams, hoping that chance will reveal the doors, or you can linger in each type of room. In both cases, you will have to deal with the slithering Nightmares, which haunt the hallways of the labyrinth.Onirim is a solo/cooperative card game. You (and a partner, if you wish) must work (together) against the game to gather the eight Door cards before the deck runs out; you can obtain those Door cards either by playing cards of the same color three turns in a row, or by discarding (under specific circumstances) one of your powerful Key cards. In both cases you will have to decide the best use of each card in your hand and carefully play around the Nightmares. Those cards are hidden in the deck and will trigger painful dilemmas when drawn...Seven mini-expansions, all standalone and compatible with one another, are included with the second edition of Onirim, including these three that were in the first edition of the game: "The Towers" introduces a new type of card that allows more searching and deck manipulation, while also imposing an additional victory condition. "Happy Dreams and Dark Premonitions" adds evil time bombs that will impede your progress at predictable moments of your quest as well as helpful but unreliable allies. In "The Book of Steps Lost and Found", you must find the eight Door cards in a randomly given order and may remove discarded cards from the game to cast powerful spells that will help you complete this difficult task.In addition to these three variants from the first edition, there are four new modules in the Onirim 2nd edition box. Just like previously, each module consists of something that makes the game easier and something that makes the game harder: "The Glyphs" introduces a fourth symbol on location cards (apart from Key, Sun and Moon), which makes it easier to compose the row of unrepeated symbols. Player must then find one extra door of each color (so 12 doors in total) to win "The Dreamcatchers" are four cards that "guard" the Limbo piles. The Limbo pile stays with Dreamcatcher until some effect allows the player to shuffle the pile back to the deck... if all Dreamcatchers are full and new cards should come to Limbo, a Dreamcatcher is discarded and his cards shuffled back. Also, four new "Lost Dreams" cards are supposed to be in Limbo at the end of the game, as an extra winning condition - so discarding all Dreamcatchers means loss. "The Crossroads and Dead Ends" introduce location cards with a given symbol (3 Sun, 2 Moon, 1 Key), but serving as any color "joker". It also contains 10 "Dead End" cards, that remain in players hand (un-discard-able on its own) and block her 5-cards hand limit... until a player discards the whole hand (=the only way to discard a Dead End). "The Door To The Oniverse" brings several one-time abilities cards as "inhabitants of the Oniverse"... and one extra colorless door to find.Apart from all those, there are a few special rules to use the dark meeple in the game (which interferes with Nightmare cards resolving), making the game easier or harder, depending on the chosen variant.

Read more less