Board Games

Forbidden Island is a cooperative board game - everyone must work together to win the game. Players take turns moving their pawns around the 'island', which is built by arranging the tiles before play begins. As the game progresses, more and more island tiles sink, becoming unavailable, and the pace increases. Players use strategies to keep the island from sinking, while trying to collect treasures and items. As the water level rises, it gets more difficult- sacrifices must be made. Player move around the tiles, using their individual strengths to shore up tiles and explore for treasure. If the water level gets too high, the island floods and everyone loses. But, if all 4 Treasures have been captured AND all players are at Fools' Landing AND someone has a Helicopter Lift card to save the team, everyone wins! With multiple levels of difficulty, different characters to choose from (each with a special ability of their own), many optional island formats and game variations available, Forbidden Island has huge replay value. The game can be played by as few as two players and up to four (though it can accommodate five). More players translates into a faster and more difficult game, though the extra help can make all the difference.

You are an Italian cheesemaker in the early 20th century making, aging, and selling your artisanal cheeses. Become the most prestigious cheesemaker in all of Italy by running a highly successful creamery and crafting exceptional cheese. Formaggio is a standalone expansion for Fromage. With both games put together, you can combine any 4 board quadrants, and draft any combination of structure tiles for more variety and more paths to victory. Formaggio is a simultaneous worker-placement game where players place Workers to make cheese and gather resources from the quadrant of the board facing them. Once all players have placed their Workers, the board rotates, aging any cheese that was made, and presenting each player with a new quadrant to place Workers into. Score Prestige Points by selling cheese to the four locations, and by efficiently managing and upgrading your creamery. Formaggio features 4 new board quadrants with all new puzzling mini-games: • Pair your cheese with the wines at the Vigneto. • Sell cheese to restaurants along the Venetian canals and attract customers. • Distribute cheese across the Regioni of Italy. • Deposit cheese in the Banca. (Yes, there is a real bank in Italy that accepts cheese as collateral for loans!) Other new features: • Platinum-tier cheeses. • Reap various rewards in each of the Seasons. • All new abilities on the Player Boards and Structure tiles. —description from the publisher

Based on simple and intuitive hand management, Heat: Pedal to the Metal puts players in the driver's seat of intense car races, jockeying for position to cross the finish line first, while managing their car's speed if they don't want to overheat. Selecting the right upgrades for their car will help them hug the curves and keep their engine cool enough to maintain top speeds. Ultimately, their driving skills will be the key to victory! Drivers can compete in a single race or use the "Championship System" to play a whole season in one game night, customizing their car before each race to claim the top spot of the podium. They have to be careful as the weather, road conditions, and events will change every race to spice up their championship. Players can also enjoy a solo mode with the Legends Module or add automated drivers as additional opponents in multiplayer games. —description from the publisher

Ink is an unforgiving medium. However, when mastered with care, its spontaneity and brilliance can create visual effects of astonishing richness. INK invites you to deploy your talent by creating sumptuous paintings worthy of the greatest collections. Combining tile placement, resource and hand management, and pattern recognition, Ink challenges players to complete high-value contracts by carefully placing ink tiles to form harmonious patterns. The trick lies in balancing spontaneity with planning, every move you make affects not only your current canvas, but the options you'll have in future turns.

In Line-it, you build an ascending or descending line of numbered cards to score points. Will you play safe and bank the points to start a new line, or will you keep trying to add to the line to claim a jackpot? The deck consists of cards in four colors numbered 1-100 and six "Bet" cards numbered 3-5. Shuffle the deck, then lay out cards in the market equal to two more than the number of players. Starting with the first player, each player must pick a card, then either start a line/add it to their line or place it in their hand. Your maximum hand size is two, and if you can't add the card to your hand or to your line (because it would break the ascending/descending pattern), you must score your line, then play that card to start a new line. You can add one Bet card to your line without regard for its ascending/descending status or the value of your end card. After drafting a card, you may choose to play one card from your hand into your line, then you may choose to score your line. When you score, if you have a Bet card in the line, see whether you've added a number of cards to your line after the bet that at least equals the value of the Bet; if so, take a positive number token equal to the Bet card, and if not, flip that token to its negative side instead. Next, discard three cards from the line, then flip all the remaining cards face down and place them in your scoring pile. After everyone one has drafted (and optionally played and scored), discard unchosen Bet cards, then place unchosen number cards under the jackpot token that matches their color: yellow under the star, green under the leaf, etc. If during your turn, you add the third card of a color to your line, you immediately claim the cards under the matching jackpot token and place them in your scoring pile. When you can't lay out enough cards, each player in turn plays one card from their hand, then scores their line and tallies their points. You earn 1 point for each scored card, then gain/lose points from the Bet tokens you collected. Whoever has the highest score wins.

Players take part in a contest set in a llama-themed world, where speed and sharp observation are the keys to success. The goal is to be the first to correctly identify shared details between their cards.

The Old King’s Crown is a game of card-driven conquest, where you play as heirs to a vacant throne, vying for control of an ancient, overgrown kingdom. Wield unique abilities and leverage your followers’ traits to best outwit your opponents across a map that stretches from the teetering heights of the castle to the dappled light of the necropolis. As leader of your faction you will be staking claims with Heralds openly as well as positioning your forces in secret, hoping to claim the locations that fit your designs. However, keep an eye on your rivals, as they too have agents and agendas, poised to undo your best laid plans. Royalty, rebels or ruses. What crown will you wear? In The Old King's Crown, players move their Herald to locations, hoping to claim them. Then simultaneously players play cards from their hand, facedown to regions of the board. These are then revealed and resolved. Winning these clashes will result in different rewards that further their position and grant them the game's primary goal, influence. The player with the most influence by the end of a set number of rounds will be declared the winner.

From the team that brought you the card games Point Salad and Point City, Point Galaxy is a fast card-drafting, sequence-building game for the whole family! Point Galaxy takes the same simple concept of drafting cards and building the best combinations, and adds new layers of sequence building, set collection, and racing towards objectives to the mix - making the game easy to learn, but challenging for everyone! Rules are simple: Take any two cards from the dynamic market and add them to your expanding galaxy. As you place cards, create solar systems by arranging planets in numeric order and earn bonuses by collecting suns, asteroids, moons, rockets, and research projects to score the most points! There are over 140 unique double-sided planet/space cards, so you can create a completely different galaxy each and every time you play! —description from the publisher

RA and Write is a flip-and-write game built upon the foundation of the classic RA from acclaimed designer Reiner Knizia. It features the same art and thematic style as the 25th Century Games new edition of the board game. The game is played over three rounds, known as Kingdoms: The Old Kingdom, The Middle Kingdom, and The New Kingdom. Over the course of the game, players advance different aspects of their civilization by filling in spaces on their scoresheet. Each Kingdom ends immediately once three Ra cards have been revealed, then the round is scored. The game ends after the third round (the New Kingdom) has been scored, and the player with the most points wins! —description from the publisher

In Sanibel, players walk up and down the beaches of this Florida island city, collecting a wide variety of seashells and carefully adding them to their bags — with your "bag" being a personal player board. As you collect shells, you "drop" them in the bag, letting them fall to the bottom Tetris-style. Focus on the types of shells and where they land, since they score in a variety of ways. Be sure to collect shark's teeth, too, as they're small and can fit in tiny spaces. Movement on the beach is represented by player tokens that start in a line, with a multitude of tiles splayed into zones on the beach. Whoever is at the back of the line takes the next turn, advancing as far as they wish, then collecting tiles. At the halfway point, players loop around and head back to where they started. At the end of the game, players earn points based on which seashells they picked up and how carefully they arranged them in their bag.

Leave no stone unturned! Nine mystical tiles lie before you in a grid of rocky ruins. Rearrange the tiles to match one or more of the patterns in your hand. The catch is that you must sacrifice a card every time you swap or flip a tile. Carve out the most points in Shifting Stones, and your victory will be set in stone! —description from the publisher

The challenge of Slide is to rid yourself of cards to leave as few points as possible. To set up, deal sixteen cards to each player, who arranges them in a face-down 4x4 grid. Cards range from 1 to 10, with ten copies of each number. To start, each player reveals a card of their choice from the grid. Starting with whoever revealed the lowest number, each player claims a revealed card and slides it into their grid to close the gap they created when they removed a card. The starting player keeps rotating clockwise as players do this fifteen more times, eventually having a fully face-up 4x4 grid. Each number in a grid that's adjacent to the same number is removed, and the sum of the remaining cards is your score. Whoever has the lowest score wins. Alternatively, play multiple rounds until a player reaches 100 points, then once again whoever has the lowest score wins.

Create a strange world inhabited by puzzling creatures. At each creation restriction mistake, dangerous Tzimimes will appear. Obtain the most Stars as you create a world made of 16 cards as you watch for the Tzimimes trying to devour your cards. Each player has a game area in front of them. It is forbidden to play cards in any opponents area. Each turn, draft 3 cards then play, alternatively, your cards, one by one in your world, orthogonally adjacent to a card that was previously played in your game area. Several types of lands have playing restrictions. If they are not met, the card is played face down, Tzimimes side facing up and do not score any Star at the end of the game. Other lands have binding play effects. Some cards will add vertical and horizontal scoring. In Strange World, you have to do your best with the worst. Indeed, with a tight draft of 3 cards, your opponents will certainly give you cards that are not so simple to play in your game area. But from the optimisation of these restrictions comes the gaming fun. —description from the designer

Create brilliant bargello embroidery in Threaded: A Game of Needles and Points, an easy-to-learn worker placement game in which you hunt for the perfect thread, fulfill intricate commissions, seek out artisan equipment, and create stunning canvases. Establish a thriving needlecraft studio by designing and stitching your own gorgeous needlework projects! Can you choose the right tools for the job? Pick the patterns that your customers will love? Will you wait for the perfect threads, or improvise with the colors that tumble to the sale shelves? Send your assistants to the shops that suit your creative flair and gather the thread you'll need for that next pattern! —description from the publisher

Twittens is an old Sussex word to describe the little alleyways and lanes that run between houses and fields. They thread their way through towns and suburbs like veins, walled by red bricks, garden fencing and rusted chicken wire. Elsewhere they're known as ginnels, snicks and vennels. Twittens is a tile laying game set in an everyday English suburb. Work your way through the seasons exploring your local twittens, discovering their houses, wildlife, allotments, playgrounds, railways and electrical substations. Complete your wanderings and get home in time for tea. —description from the publisher

Following the arrival of the Portuguese in Japan, daimyos competed for control of foreign trade and technology. Himeji Castle, a symbol of feudal power, became a strategic center for clans seeking to gain influence. In The White Castle Duel, two clans compete to exert their influence in the White Heron's court, managing resources and building engines. On each turn, you will use their lamp tokens to obtain resources and activate actions. Among the actions available, you can buy and upgrade influence cards, place clan seals on gardens and training grounds, move your courtier between circles of influence, or trade with the Portuguese. These actions will allow you to accumulate a series of icons — flags, katanas, kabutos, and origami figures — that will reward you with points, and whoever ends up with the most points wins. —description from the publisher