BoardGameGeek News

Halloween Dice comes with a set of big orange-and-black six-siders, with custom Jack o' Lantern designs on each face. Your goal: roll those dice and try to reach the lucky total of 13. (Normally 13 is considered an unlucky number, but for Halloween, when darkness and otherworldly things are celebrated, luck stands on its head.)

On a turn, you choose one, two, or three dice and receive respectively $2, $5, or $9, with money being represented by tokens. You then roll those dice. If the sum on the dice equals 13, you end your turn and keep the money you collected. If the total is less than 13, you can stop and pay $1 times the difference between your sum and 13, or you can again choose 1-3 dice (receiving more money) and roll again, adding the newly rolled sum to your previous sum. You again face the same options of stopping or choosing more dice and rolling again. If your sum goes over 13, however, your turn ends and you pay $2 times the difference between your sum and 13!

The player with the most money after three rounds wins.

In Castellan, two players work together to build a castle. Finely-detailed wall and tower pieces link together to form courtyards, and the player who finishes a courtyard claims it with a Keep, scoring points for that courtyard equal to the number of tower pieces surrounding it.

In more detail, each player starts the game with two decks of cards: a wall deck and a tower deck. Each card allows a player to play the components shown on it, with the wall deck cards always depicting at least one wall (and some combination of walls/towers) and the tower deck cards always depicting at least one tower (and again some combination of walls/towers). On a turn, a player can play as many cards as she wants, but she draws only one card at the end of her turn. The goal is to create courtyards – and subdivide existing courtyards – while keeping your opponent from doing the same. Players have the same cards in their decks, so the challenge is all about what to use when. The game ends when all the castle pieces are used up, and the player with the most points wins.

Two different pairs of Keep colors are available in Castellan, so with two copies of the game – and the right combination of bits – up to four players can play.

Pluckin' Pairs embodies the same spirit as the classic party game Compatibility in that you want to match images with other players in order to score points, but the game play is more free form with everyone competing individually instead of in teams.

At the start of a round, eleven images are laid out on the table. All players secretly pair off images – say, coins and a manhole cover because they're both round, or a mirror and a building because they both reflect light – and write these pairs on their player sheet. One image will be leftover as the outcast.

After everyone has finished, you compare your pairs with those of other players. If no one – or conversely if everyone – created the same pair as you, you score no points for that pair. If only some of the players created that pair, each of those players scores as many points as the number of players who record the pair. (You can optionally compare outcast images as well, scoring points based on who had the same outcast as you.) The player with the most points after a certain number of rounds wins.

As the name suggests, Pass-ack Words turns the long-lived game of Password on its head, with players now giving clues that they hope their "partner" will not decipher in the right way.

As in Password, four players compete in teams of two; unlike in Password, you and a member of the opposing team take turns giving clues to the remaining player on the opposing team. How this works is that the clue givers have a device that shows a list of clues. Each turn, one clue giver chooses one of the listed clues, presents it to the opposing guesser, and hopes that he presented it with the wrong intonation so that the guesser won't guess the secret code word. As the crummy clues are used up, the clues will get better and better, so your challenge as the clue giver is to quickly figure out what might give a hint to your partner without giving the thing away entirely – which again is pretty much like Password!

Double Take is a charades game built for two, so to speak. Each round, time willing, two players will present clues for a half-dozen familiar phrases that all have something in common. A sample category, for example, is "Something's Wrong" with the words to be guessed being divided as:

• Play | Foul
• In the Closet | Skeleton
• Sheep | Black
• Gun | Smoking

Each clue giver acts out one side of the card, and since they're facing the guessers, the phrases will be acted out in left-to-right fashion ("Black Sheep", "Smoking Gun", etc.) If someone guesses one side of the card, that player scores – but the clue givers score only after both sides of a phrase have been guessed, so they need to work together – but separately – to make their clues clear.

Massilia the beautiful – its strategic location on the Mediterranean has made it an important trading port of the Roman Empire, bringing prosperity to the city. Its market has become one of the most popular on the coast, and merchants are fighting to be able to install their stalls. Competition is tough to make a fortune, especially since the customer is demanding. This requires having well-stocked stalls to attract the wealthy customers and increase its reputation. But be careful not to incur the wrath of the consul as this could cost you. However, you can always count on the gods and goddesses to give you a boost, with, of course, some offerings. And yes, everything is paid in this world ...

In Massilia, each player will be able to use different colored dice to perform actions. There are four different colors corresponding to four different actions. On his turn, a player can choose a die and perform the corresponding action: Buy goods at the port, move a client or the consul on the market, make offerings to divinities to recover bonuses (cards), and buy reputation. The value of the die shows the number of times that the action may be made. The goal is to obtain the highest reputation at the end of the day by setting up stalls on the market to sell goods at the best price that the player will have bought in port.

1814: Napoleon Buttonaparte and General Ludwig Von York Buttonburg wage a war without mercy, and a new battle is about to begin. The armies are deployed, awaiting orders to move, and in both headquarters the same speech is being presented: "For you, Buttons, the goal is clear: End up on top!" Soon the battle will commence, with each general trying to use the available spies as well as he possibly can to dominate the final battlefield.

As you might guess from the punny names, Button Up! is a non-serious look at combat during war – so non-serious, mind you, that the pieces are buttons, none of which are eliminated due to sucking chest wounds during play. In fact, Button Up! is an abstract game in which players try to manipulate the button troops to score more points than the opponent.

To set up each round of the game, randomly arrange nine buttons in a circle: three red for Buttonaparte, three black for Von York Buttonburg, and three neutral white spies. On a turn, the active player takes one stack that contains a spy, then distributes that stack clockwise one button at a time, with the buttons coming off the bottom of the stack as they're placed. Thus, the first move is a single white button being placed on its neighbor to the left; if that stack is moved on the second turn, the bottom button is placed on its left neighbor, then the white button on top placed to the left of that. If the last button placed matches color with the button it covers, the player who moved it takes another turn. (This doesn't apply if the stack being moved contains more buttons than remaining stacks; in this case, the final buttons are placed on the last stack without rearranging their order.)

When only one stack remains, the round ends. Each button has strength equal to its height in the stack; players sum their strength, and the player with the most strength earns points equal to the difference between the two sums. If one player now has 15 or more points, he wins; if not, shuffle the buttons and start another round with the player who has the fewest points going first.

In Empire Express, designed to be an easy-to-play introduction to the Empire Builder series of games, players create competing railroad empires by drawing railroad tracks with crayons upon an erasable board. You win if you utilize your network of rail lines to acquire and deliver goods efficiently to accumulate the largest personal fortune!

The base game provides pre-programmed routes on a board depicting a north-eastern portion of the U.S. with demand cards providing players with an easy way to learn the system through play. Players start with the bare bones of a railroad: an empty train and track connecting some cities. Each turn you and your fellow players take turns building track, operating trains, and delivering loads. The bank will pay you for each delivered load.

With the starting route guided by the board, only two loads per card, and a visual pick-up and delivery guide on every card, the learning curve is greatly shortened.

In Noé the flood is at hand, and to save as many species as possible, Noah will need your help – with only the most deserving of players being saved from the waters!

Each round, players start with eight animal cards in hand; five ferries are laid out in a circle, with one animal placed on board from the top of the deck. Noah himself stands on one ferry. On a turn, a player plays one card from hand onto the ferry where Noah is located, following two rules: (1) the total weight of all animals on board cannot exceed 21 and (2) animals on a ferry must be placed either in alternating gender order or must be all of the same gender. After placing an animal, the player moves Noah to a different ferry; if he played a female animal, Noah goes to either adjacent ferry, while if he played a male, Noah goes to either ferry on the other side of the circle.

If a player can't legally play an animal, he must first take in hand ''all'' the animals on the ferry where Noah is located, then play an animal.

In addition to moving Noah to a nearly full ferry, players have two other ways to benefit themselves or mess with other players. If a player plays an animal identical to the one last played on that ferry, he moves Noah, then takes another turn. If a player brings the weight of a ferry to exactly 21, that ferry launches from shore to meet the ark located in distant waters, a new ferry becomes available for loading, and the player distributes 1-4 cards from the deck among his opponents. finally, some cards have special animals, such as the giraffe that lets you peek at an opponent's hand and the woodpecker, which stupidly pokes holes in the ferry and reduces its maximum weight to 13. Bad woodpecker, bad!

The round ends when a player runs out of cards in hand or a fourth ferry launches. Players receive penalty points for cards still in hand, scored according to the number of tears on each card, those tears representing Noah's sadness at the animal being left behind. Then players shuffle all the animal cards and begin a new round. The player with the fewest points after three rounds wins!