Friday
7-8 pm: Castle Dice
(Michelle Hymowitz)
Castle Dice is a light worker-placement, dice-drafting game in which the players have been ordered by the king to build castles along the borders of the kingdom. The player who can create the greatest castle will become the new heir to the throne. Players will explore the land by rolling the dice, and then take turns gathering resources from them. These resources are then used to hire workers and improve castles. Players must gather and spend wisely as the Barbarians from the neighboring lands will attack players and steal their resources throughout the game. At the end of seven turns, the player who has built the greatest castle (earned the most victory points) wins the game!
Saturday
11 am – Noon: Bruges
(Eric Hymowitz)
Bruges in the 15th century – culture and commerce flourish and make the Belgian Hanseatic city into one of the wealthiest cities in Europe.
In Bruges (a.k.a. Brügge depending on the country in which you live), players assume the role of merchants who must maintain their relationships with those in power in the city while competing against one another for influence, power and status. Dramatic events cast their shadows over the city, with players needing to worry about threats to their prosperity from more than just their opponents…
The game includes 165 character cards, with each card having one of five colors. On a turn, a player chooses one of his cards and performs an action, with six different actions being available: Take workers, take money, mitigate a threat, build a canal, build a house or hire the character depicted on the card. In principle, every card can be used for every action – but the color of the card determines in which areas the actions can be used or the strength of the chosen action, e.g., blue cards provide blue workers and red cards help mitigate red threats. All of the action is geared toward the gathering of prestige, with the most prestigious merchant winning in the end.
3 – 4 pm: Star Traders
(Perrianne Lurie)
Each player assumes the role of a intra-galactic merchant, traveling from planet to planet in a future where wars are unheard of and “Traders” are the heroes of the cosmos. The board shows 36 planets: six clustered together in the center of the board, six more in each of five arms of the galaxy. Planets are connected by “jump lines”: you can jump to an adjacent planet on an orange line, to a planet halfway down a galaxy arm on a purple line, and from one galaxy arm to another via green lines. The length of the jump line also indicates the difficulty of the jump, so to successfully complete an “orange’ jump you must roll a 2 or better on a single die, a purple jump requires a 4 or better, and the green jumps necessitate a 6.
As the players scurry about the galaxy, they can pick up and deliver cargoes, which pay both in money and in “Prestige.” These “contracts” vary throughout the game, and only one player can fulfill any given contract. This isn’t to say that multiple players can’t pick up the named cargo, though. But only the first player to arrive at the contract’s destination gets the payoff for a contract; everyone else with the cargo is now just stuck with unwanted junk, and may have to pay a penalty to dump it. Players can also build bases on the various planets as they move around. Building bases earns the players Prestige, and when a player tries to make a jump to a planet with a base, the jump is an automatic success if the player has the owner’s permission. Traders obviously have permission to jump to their own bases, but if they want to jump to an opponent’s, they will probably have to pay a fee. And since only one player can have a base on any given planet, bases rapidly become lucrative investments.
6 – 7 pm: X Machina
(Joan Wendland)
X-Machina is the fun party game where you make impossible inventions out of improbable components for unreasonable customers.
Use the components (Cogs) in your hand to try and build the gadget the customer wants (Reqs). Since they are never sufficient you might want to be … inventive … with your explanation of why it works.
Sunday
11 am – Noon and 2 – 3 pm: Gamers’ Choice
Your choice of game demos (by popular vote) from the following:
10 Days in Asia
7 Wonders
Carcasonne
Drumroll
Nefarious
Power Grid
Qwirkle
Saint Petersburg
Settlers of Catan
Small World
Ticket to Ride
Trains
Vegas Showdown
Village
Yspahan