Valeria: Card Kingdoms

The land of Valeria is under siege by hordes of monsters. You and your fellow Dukes must recruit citizens and buy domains to build up your kingdoms and slay the foul creatures that lurk in the surrounding lands.

Valeria: Card Kingdoms is a tableau-building game for 1-5 players and will feel familiar to deck-building fans. The cards you buy can work for you on your turn and on all the other player turns, as well. On your turn, roll two dice and activate citizen cards with the result of each individual die and the sum of both dice. Other players will simultaneously activate their citizen cards based off of the roll. Next, take two actions from the following: slay a monster, recruit a citizen, buy a domain, or take 1 of any resource. The player with the most victory points at the end wins the game.

Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge

You and your fellow voodoo spirits have traveled back in time to poke a little fun at the hepcats of the 1950s cocktail culture. Your mystical influences will link these lounge-goers into social cliques that give you access to the coolest party-people that all the hipsters want to be near. Mix a few drinks, rack up the magical monkey points, and crown yourself king of the Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge.

Score monkeys to hang on your martini glass by adding Jivecat contacts to your clique and claiming Trend cards through skillful manipulation of your lounge contacts. Be the player with the most monkeys at the end of the round in which a player scores their fifteenth monkey and be crowned the winner!

Players are dealt a hand of four cards and on their turn use those cards for their face value to claim low-brow contacts in the lounges or use the card’s special powers to claim Jivecat contacts and cast spells (Zombie, Rada, Cheval, and Voodoo). For example, a 4 Zombie can be used to claim a “4” contact in the Lava Lounge. Card values can be added and subtracted from each other, allowing players to pinpoint just the right contacts to advance their plans.

However, the player could use the card for its Zombie spell, instead. By paying a skull, they can place the card in their tableau as an extension of their hand allowing them to use that card’s value for many turns in the future.

In these ways, players create “cliques” of linked contacts in and among the four cocktail lounges (Lava, Cocoa, Tiki, and Neptune) trying to schmooze their way to the Jivacat contacts that score points. The contacts are limited though, so several players may be angling for a specific Jivecat.

During play, a series of Skull Cards allow players to gain skull token reward that power their voodoo spells, and a Trend Card track presents players with monkey rewards for achieving specific contact configurations. The Trend cards also provide special bonus abilities to the players if they can maintain the required configurations.

Each player has a martini glass to hold the contact chips and scores are kept through hanging cocktail monkeys on the rim of the player’s glass. Orange monkeys are 1 point and blue monkeys are 5 points.

Game end is triggered when one player reaches fifteen monkey points. The round is completed, bonus monkeys are rewarded for trends that have been maintained, and the player with the most monkeys wins.

To add to the cocktail themed fun, each card also has a different cocktail recipe for adult players to mix and enjoy.

 

Sky Tango

In Sky Tango, you trace the cycles of the moon and the sun by creating series of cards that illustrate the passing of time. Eclipses can appear and ruin your paths, but don’t let them discourage you for the sun and moon will always reappear. Will your solar and lunar cycles lead you to victory?

 

In game terms, the deck of cards consists of numbered sun and moon cards (some of which feature animals) as well as eclipse cards. Players place the cards in stacks in ascending order, either in front of themselves or in front of others. When a stack is five cards high, it can be removed and scored for points. Stacks can be interrupted by eclipse cards, which in turn can be covered by the appropriate sun or moon cards. Playing a card with an animal allows a player to play again, which is sometimes advantageous, but sometimes not. The player who removes the most cards from play wins!

 

ION: A Compound Building Game

ION: A Compound Building Game is a card drafting game where players select from a number of available Ion Cards and Noble Gas cards with the goal of creating sets of compounds and inert noble gases.

Here’s how the game is played: Each player is dealt eight cards, must select one of those cards and then passes the remaining. Players must choose to either bond (pair) their selected card with another Element Card or set it alone (possibly to form an ionic bond at a later time). Throughout the game, players gain additional points for building specific compounds which are listed on the Compound Goal Cards and have available a set of Action Tiles which award them additional moves throughout the game. Players score points based upon the quantity and type of neutrally balanced compounds they construct and noble gas sets they collect. After three rounds, players add their total scores from each round, subtract points from Action Tiles used, and the player with the most points wins!

Peptide: A Protein Building Game

Peptide is an open-drafting card game with resource management elements. Basically, players compete to link amino acids side-by-side, forming what’s called a Peptide Chain (in biology, this process is called RNA Translation). In order to do so, players must first select from a number of available open-drafted face up cards, which in the game represent cellular organelles. Each organelle rewards players with either molecular resources or cellular actions. Final scores are based upon the types of amino acids in your Peptide Chain, and the player with the most points at the end of the game wins!

 

Linkage: A DNA Card Game

Linkage is competitive card game that is simple to learn, yet offers lots of depth, forward thinking and replay-ability for 2 to 4 players. But best of all,Linkage was designed and themed around a process normally taught in high school biology, DNA Transcription, (when an RNA copy is made from DNA for protein synthesis or other in a cell) and in this way offers a unique, engaging and tactile experience for someone to familiarize themselves with this fundamental concept of biology.

In Linkage, DNA cards are randomly aligned side-by-side creating a DNA template strand. Players compete to build the most accurate RNA copy of this DNA Template by connecting their own RNA Cards side-by-side to match the DNA Template.

During a turn, players choose between one of four actions: Building onto their RNA Strand, Fixing their RNA strand, Mutating an opposing players RNA Strand, or Mutating the actual DNA Strand. Players can also pay (discard) cards from their hand to take extra actions during their turn.

Players are awarded points based upon the number of RNA Cards in their strand that correctly pair with the DNA template. The game can be played in as little 10 to 20 minutes but additional rounds can be added for a longer, more in-depth game. Multiple decks can also be added together for a game with more than 4 people, or a longer overall game.