Noria
A new era is looming on the horizon. The future of Noria is right in front of you, and you must guide your flourishing trading empire into prosperity. Discover flying islands, buy ships, and build factories. Invest in prestigious projects, and secure their success by passing on secret knowledge to politicians. For even above the clouds, there is still room for improvement…
Noria is the debut title from Sophia Wagner, winner of the Spiel des Jahres fellowship in 2015. The talented, young author created an entirely new steampunk universe specifically for this game, and artists Michael Menzel and Klemens Franz have managed to bring her vision to life. At the center of the game is an innovative mechanism called “wheel building”. Each player has an action wheel consisting of three rings, with slots for a number of different action discs. Over the course of the game, players try to obtain new discs and manipulate the rings of the wheel to optimize their action selection. Additionally, to ensure their investments bear fruit, they also need to bribe politicians with knowledge.
Smash Up: That ’70s Expansion
Smash Up: That ’70s Expansion is a standalone two-player-only game that can also be used as an expansion for other Smash Up titles. The four factions to be included in this set are truckers, vigilantes, disco dancers, and kung fu fighters.
Dance of the Fireflies
Dance of the Fireflies’ is a 2-6 player card game in which players striving to be the next royal gardener bid on flowers around a sundial in an attempt to create the most beautiful gardens and win the coveted title.
In the game, each player is allocated a set of seven fireflies, one of them being a royal firefly, more powerful than the regular fireflies. Each round, the players bid on flowers in the flower clock using their fireflies. They can also plant a flower from their hand into one of their gardens, secretly bid a royal firefly, and also discard one of the cards in their had to the compost heap so they can bid a second firefly on the flower clock. Each of the six types of beautifully colored flowers has a special ability which players can utilize to form combos and add benefits to their play. Additionally, orchid/weed cards can be bid on, and these allow players to add bonuses to their gardens or attack an opponent’s garden.
A round ends once all players have taken their turns and drawn back up to three flowers in their hand and the sundial has turned one card clockwise to see which flowers are coming off the flower clock that round. Once all the flowers have been exhausted from the potting shed (i.e., the draw deck), the game ends and points are totaled for flower beds created to see who wins and becomes the next royal gardener.
Clans of Caledonia
Clans of Caledonia is a mid-to-heavy economic game set in 19th-century Scotland. At this time, Scotland made the transition from an agricultural to an industrialized country that heavily relied on trade and export. In the following years, food production increased significantly to feed the population growth. Linen was increasingly substituted by the cheaper cotton and raising sheep was given high importance. More and more distilleries were founded and whisky became the premium alcoholic beverage in Europe.
Players represent historic clans with unique abilities and compete to produce, trade and export agricultural goods and of course whisky!
The game ends after five rounds. Each round consists of the three phases:
1. Players’ turns
2. Production phase
3. Round scoring
1. Players take turns and do one of eight possible actions, from building, to upgrading, trading and exporting. When players run out of money, they pass and collect a passing bonus.
2. In the production phase, each player collects basic resources, refined goods and cash from their production units built on the game map. Each production unit built makes income visible on the player mat. Refined goods require the respective basic resource.
3. Players receive VPs depending on the scoring tile of the current round.
The game comes with eight different clans, a modular board with 16 configurations, eight port bonuses and eight round scoring tiles.