Vendor: Goliath B.V.
Type: Board Games
Price: 42.95

In Ta Yü, a sumptuously produced game of connections, one side tries to extend from the starting tile in the center to reach the western and eastern edges of the board while the opposing side tries to reach the northern and southern edges. On your turn you simply draw a tile and decide where to place it, extending the network of tiles already on the board.

Several refinements make this simple proposition into an engrossing game. First, each tile is 3x1 (to be played on a 19x19 board) and has exactly three outlets (potential connection points). Second, your score is not simply the number of spots you've reached on one edge added to the number of spots you've reached on the other, but is the product of those two numbers. So you can't just concentrate on one side and ignore the other, because zero times anything is still zero. Third, on each side of the board there are three special points which score double if reached, adding a dab of focus to the choices.

Interestingly, you need to play both offense and defense and will often have to decide to which use to put a particular tile.

Vendor: Albe Pavo
Type: Board Games
Price: 54.95

MUNERA: Familia Gladiatoria is a boardgame for 2-4 players in which you will play the role of a lanista, an ancient world entrepreneur who has decided to invest his wealth in the constitution of a Gymnasium of Gladiators with the aim of making it the most glorious of the Empire. You will recruit trainers, armourers, medics and even prostitutes. You will train free men, slaves, criminals and war prisoners to become gladiators and you will bring them to fight in the arenas throughout Italy. You will manage not only the duels, but the whole life of your gladiators: lead your champions to glory!

Unwinding of a game

In the first round, after a short preparation, the Players take their Gladiators to the arenas for brief introductory Shows: they approach the first challenges of their champions and place their bets on life or death of duelists. After this initial stage, the game takes on its regular sequence. In the first phase, called Forum phase, Players will play aggressive auction for what the market has to offer them: athletes for training and professionals for Gymansium’s management. In the second phase, called Munus phase, the Players play the Spectacles, trying to participate with their best Gladiators. Not all spectacles are equal: some have more money gain, others provide more glory. The Players need to make the best choices!

During the Spectacles, you will fight the duels of Gladiators. Just like a lanista of two thousand years ago, you will manage many duels and you will place bets and tampering to obtain money. Duel by duel, your Gladiators will grow and become stronger and more popular.Which Gym will be able to prevail and become the most glorious of the ancient world?

Vendor: Albe Pavo
Type: Board Games
Price: 37.95

A few viking warriors sit at a table in smoky long hall, talking and bragging about war axes, women and pillages. Beer flows freely, but not even the cellars of Byggvir, the God of Beer, could quench the thirst of Nordland's greatest warriors. Servants run for cover, knowing full well where all this is going. Suddenly an eerie silence fills the common room. On the table, only one full cup remains. Who will get the last drink? Not a single step back is allowed to the warrior who wishes to enter Valhalla. One single thought in everyone's mind: may Fenrir eat the sun, that beer will be mine! All vikings laugh at the thought of death, draw their war axes, joining the fight at the call of "OOOODIIIIIIIIIIN!"

In Beer & Vikings you are a fierce and thirsty viking warrior, willing to do anything to get the last cup of beer. The winner is the most drunk viking – in game terms, the player who has collected the most beer drink counters – at the end of the sudden death round.

Be wary, though, for drinking too much will dull your wits and mastery with the war axe. Each drink of beer prevents you from using one of your resources, be it a weapon, an item, or even your personal skill! You must always be wary not to drink too much or you risk becoming a defenseless sot in the hands of your enemies. On the other hand, you will be able to burn up some of the beer you have drunk to obtain significant bonuses which may well save your life. Show yourself as the wise warrior you are and balance your strategy with care, not burning up too much beer, thus finding yourself in the rear at the end of the game, when the cup is empty and the sudden death round begins. Those who will succumb to their enemies' blows won't be eliminated from the game, but will become Spirits of Loki, the thirsty god of evil, and team up with the other Spirits to attack the living, aiming to steal their beer. Raise your glasses (and your axes)!

Beer & Vikings introduces 112 brand new cards! including a new type of cards called "Valhalla" which provide you a strong ability during the match – but to obtain them you need to kill an opponent. Thus, to gain this power you must generate a vengeful spirit first. Be careful when you follow the Valhalla way...

Vendor: Zoch Verlag
Type: Board Games
Price: 24.95

The innkeeper of "The Wild Boar" tavern is a sly old dog! While he treats humble guests who don't ask for much to free rounds, for hard-drinking boozers he closes the tap and keeps the cool brew for himself.

Polterfass is a dice-rolling game without dice! Yes, the dice have been replaced by small beer barrels, and the active player each round is the innkeeper who shares his brew with players who keep their requests modest.

The game includes nine barrels — two of them being special ones — that are rolled out of a die cup. The normal barrel bases show numbers, while the special barrel bases show symbols that allow the innkeeper to double other values or cancel them. After each roll, only the values/symbols of "standing" barrels count.

After the active player has rolled for the first time, the other players secretly place cards with numbers in front of them. The active player then decides whether to reroll, change the values, or end his turn. Once his turn ends, the guests reveal their cards and sum them. If the innkeeper's total is less than this sum, he wins this round, keeping all the beer for himself while the guest with the highest card actually loses points! If the innkeeper's total is higher, each player scores the value of his played card, and the innkeeper keeps the rest.

Vendor: Zoch Verlag
Type: Board Games
Price: 25.95

Note: This game includes English, French, Italian and German.

The quick-playing reaction game Geisterblitz takes on new shape — and includes new shapes! — in Geistesblitz 5 vor 12.

In the original game, five wooden items sit on the table waiting to be caught — a white ghost, a green bottle, a cute grey mouse, a blue book, and a comfortable red chair — and the item to be grabbed depends on what's shown on the card revealed that round. Geistesblitz 5 vor 12 increases the challenge by including nine objects in five colors. Each round, a player reveals a card that shows three of these objects, and the player who grabs the object that has neither the same shape nor color appearing on the picture keeps the card — unless, that is:

• An object on the card is in its original color, in which case you must grab this object.
• And if an owl appears in the picture, you must name the object instead of grabbing it.
• And if the ghost appears with a clock, you must give the time on the clock instead of doing anything else.
• And if the magic mirror shows up, none of the other rules apply and you just need to grab whichever object is reflected by the mirror!

Vendor: Days of Wonder
Type: Board Games
Price: 27.95

Small World: 6 Player Board, an expansion for both Small World and Small World Underground, is designed for use with exactly six players, with players competing in three teams of two players. Players can discuss strategy (openly) with their teammate, but each player competes and takes all actions on his own: choosing new races, deciding where to attack and (most importantly) scoring. At the end of eight rounds, each team's score is equal to the team member with a lower score — and whichever team has the highest score wins.

Small World: 6 Player Board features a double-sided game board with a surface landscape for use with Small World and an underground world for use with Small World Underground. The expansion includes one relic and four places — concepts introduced in Small World Underground— specially designed for team play, such as a tavern that lets you collect two coins and share them with anyone you want, a mirror that allows you to change powers with your teammate, and a boneyard that lets you protect all of one player's "in decline" troops from racial and special powers owned by opponents. And then there's the Golden Soapbar...

Vendor: Lookout Games
Type: Board Games
Price: 29.95

Bremerhaven is a clearly structured but complex economic game about the famous harbor town in the north of Germany. Each player builds his own unique harbor and tries to reach the highest combination of money and prestige by the end of the game.

Each round, players are trying to get the most influence on the action fields they want to use. Since you place your influence cards face down, you have to watch closely what the other players might want to do. (You can even place more than one card on one spot.) The options are varied: Get a new ship with new goods into your harbor, close a new contract, change the values of the four different goods, improve your influence card-hand, expand your harbor, buy a new building, or simply rise in the nautical ranks to get more money. But you have to be careful: Every ship and every contract will stay in your harbor only for a short while. (The transporters and trains are waiting!) If you fail to coordinate the incoming and outgoing goods, you might have to pay penalty for not fulfilling a contract!

Vendor: Discovery Bay Games
Type: Board Games
Price: 19.95

Beezi: The S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G Game

This spelling game uses a special six-sided die with different bees on it - Stinger, Queen Bee, Honey Bee, Bumble Bee, Digger Bee, Killer Bee. On a player's turn, the die is rolled and depending on the bee that appears, the player draws a card (different bees have different degrees of difficulty) with a word to spell on it. The card is passed to the player on the left, who acts as Beekeeper and says the word on the card. All other players try to spell the word on their writing pad. If the player whose turn it is spells it correctly the player gets the indicated number of beez which are then placed on a honeycomb board; if that player misspells the word, the other players who spelled the word correctly get a beez, Rolling the Stinger causes a missed turn, and the Queen Bee gives the opportunity to earn double the number of beez.

Vendor: Schmidt Spiele
Type: Board Games
Price: 44.95

Note: This is an import game in German.  English rules can be round here.

The name "Eselsbrücke" literally means "donkey bridge" – as depicted on the cover of the game Eselsbrücke, for example – but the term also refers to a mnemonic, something used to retain a memory, and that's the goal at the heart of this design from Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde.

Vendor: Drei Hasen in der Abendsonne
Type: Board Games
Price: 29.95

Note: This is an Import Multi-language Ediiton.

Seven tokens of seven different colors and one ring are placed randomly on eight spaces of a seven-by-seven grid. Each player has seven disks that correspond to each of the seven tokens.

At the start of a round, each player secretly selects one of the seven tokens. (The disks are used to do this.)

You may do the following on your turn:

• Move any of the tokens Chinese Checkers-style towards the ring
• Guess which token your opponent has chosen

You win the round by:

• Moving the token you have chosen into the ring
• Correctly guessing which token your opponent has chosen
• Choosing the same token as your opponent, and having your opponent move that token into the ring

Best out of seven rounds wins the game.

Vendor: AMIGO
Type: Board Games
Price: 20.95

Note: This game is in German, but the game itself is language independent.  English rules can be found here

Vendor: AMIGO
Type: Board Games
Price: 21.95

Note: This game in in German, but the game itself is language independent.  English rules can be found here

In 6 nimmt!, a.k.a. Category 5 and many other names, you want to score as few points as possible.

To play the game, you shuffle the 104 number cards, lay out four cards face-up to start the four rows, then deal ten cards to each player. Each turn, players simultaneously choose and reveal a card from their hand, then add the cards to the rows, with cards being placed in ascending order based on their number; specifically, each card is placed in the row that ends with the highest number that's below the card's number. When the sixth card is placed in a row, the owner of that card claims the other five cards and the sixth card becomes the first card in a new row.

In addition to a number from 1 to 104, each card has a point value. After finishing ten rounds, players tally their score and see whether the game ends. (Category 5 ends when a player has a score greater than 74, for example, while 6 nimmt! ends when someone tops 66.) When this happens, the player with the fewest points wins!

6 nimmt! works with 2-10 players, and the dynamics of gameplay change the more players that you have. One variant for the game has you use 34 cards, 44 cards, 54 cards, etc. (instead of all 104 cards) when you have three, four, five, etc. number of players. This change allows you to know which cards are in play, thereby allowing you to track which cards have been played and (theoretically) make better choices as to which card to play when.

Vendor: AMIGO
Type: Board Games
Price: 13.95

Note: This game in in German, but the game itself is language independent.  English rules can be found here

1-23: these are the cards that will be played in ascending order over the course of the game, but doing so is trickier than you might expect as there are limitations in doing so – not to mention opponents who will love to thwart you. In 23 whoever makes too big a jump from one number to the next must take penalty chips, and whoever collects the fewest chips after two passes through the deck wins the game.

23 is played with a deck of cards numbered 1 to 23, with one "1" card, two "2" cards, and three each of the cards 3-23.

The game is played in two rounds. At the start of the first round, each player receives three bonus chips. At the start of each round, each player is dealt a number of cards. He then discards three cards face down back to the box. The player that has the "1" begins the round by playing it. After that, each player has to play cards in ascending order.

On his turn, a player can play one or more cards with the same value. If these cards have a value that is equal to or one higher than the last card, this is allowed without any penalties. If the cards are more than one higher than the last card, the player receives one penalty chip for each point of difference. If a player pays a bonus chip, he may play cards that have a value up to five lower or higher than the last card. A player who plays his last card may discard three penalty chips.

Instead of playing cards, a player can also pass. If he does, he receives one penalty chip. Alternatively, he can pass and force the next player to play cards. In that case, he gains two penalty chips.

If a player does not want to play any more cards, he can leave the round. In that case, he receives one penalty chip for each card he has in hand.

After the second round, each player may discard two penalty chips for each bonus chip he has remaining. The player who has the fewest penalty chips wins.

Vendor: AMIGO
Type: Board Games
Price: 22.95

Note: This game is in German, but the game itself is language independent.  English rules can be found here

As you can tell from the name, this game is an off-shoot of the 6 nimmt! family. The cards are numbered 1-100, and each card has a number of bullheads on it. Each player starts with ten cards in hand and is trying to discard those cards to win the round. The player who goes out scores zero points, while everyone else loses points equal to the number of bullheads on their cards.

Instead of playing cards on multiple rows, however, players play onto a single discard stack, with the played card being higher than the top card of the stack but not more than ten higher; if you can’t play a card within this ten point range, you have to pick up the discard pile. Ergo, "11 takes". You then start two new stacks by revealing cards from the top of the deck. The number of piles keeps growing throughout the game.

Each time you take a stack with more than three cards, you get a bull card. For each bull card you have, you can play an additional card on your turn as long as all the cards fall within that ten point spread.

Vendor: Pegasus Spiele
Type: Board Games
Price: 42.95

Note: This game is in German but based on BoardGameGeek, it is language independent.  English rules can be found here.

Mondo Sapiens is a tile-laying puzzle game along the lines of Michael Schacht's Mondo, with players laying down tiles simultaneously in order to populate their worlds (i.e., individual player boards) with people, buildings and roads. the faster you go, the more points you'll score - assuming you placed everything correctly, of course.

Mondo Sapiens includes three levels of difficulty to allow inexperienced and advanced players to compete at roughly the same level.

Vendor: Pegasus Spiele
Type: Board Games
Price: 34.95

Note: This is an Imported Multi-language Edition.

Miniatur Wunderland is a theme park of sorts in Hamburg, Germany, with miniature reproductions of different parts of the world, including Austria, the U.S., Scandinavia, Switzerland, and of course Hamburg itself. The miniatures cover more than 1,300 square meters, with more than 13,000 meters of railroad track crisscrossing the area and 930 trains riding those rails each day.

The board game Wunderland allows players to travel through these miniature landscapes, from Scandinavia to the U.S., from the coast to the high mountains, with the goal of reaching predetermined destinations and collecting postcards. Players travel with their game pieces to different locations on the board, and once these pieces are at all the locations on a destination card, that player earns the points specified. Each area also has a location where a player can collect postcards, for which he'll receive points at the end of the game. Whoever has the most points wins!

Vendor: Ravensburger
Type: Board Games
Price: 49.95

Vendor: Drei Magier Spiele
Type: Board Games
Price: 72.95

This is the winner of the "2013 Kinderspiel des Jahres Winner"

Note: Multi-language Ediiton

Ack, the princess has been captured once again by an evil sorcerer! She should really stop hanging about in places where she can be captured so easily. Well, that's neither here nor there for now – let's get out there and free her from the enchanted tower.

In Der verzauberte Turm, one player plays the sorcerer and at the start of the game he hides a key under one of 16 spaces on the game board. The other players collectively take the part of Robin, who tries to find the key before the sorcerer can reach it. No matter who finds the key first, though, that player gets to try the key in one of the six locks on the tower; if he chooses the right one, the princess jumps free of the tower and that player wins. If not, the sorcerer hides the key once again, and everyone moves back to their starting locations.

The sorcerer starts the game on a supplementary movement board that takes him eight spaces to cover, giving Robin time to search various locations first for the key. (Robin and the sorceror are apparently magnetized, and when the character passes over the key location, the key will "clack" to its underside.) How do the pieces move? Each turn the sorcerer rolls a symbol die that shows which character moves first that turn; the Robin players take turns rolling a number die, which has values for both Robin and the sorcerer. Thus, they jockey back and forth to reach a location that only the sorcerer knows. Will the princess find freedom once again, at least for a little while?

Vendor: Adlung-Spiele
Type: Board Games
Price: 13.95

Note: This game is Multi-languages including English

Palastgefluster translates literally as "Palace Whisperings"

"At the royal court, discontent prevails, the royal household is dissatisfied. The first intrigues are schemed: The marshall lets the treasurer in on his plans, and the lady's maid whispers secretly with the magician. At the worst, persons of equal rank huddle together. In this case, dark whisperings are in the air which the king will penalise with severe sentences. But loyal subjects will secure the King's favour and win the game."

Aim of the game:

Each player tries to play their cards so that each character exists only once in their display. If they do not succeed in doing so, all the others rise in the king's favor and will be rewarded. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins the game.

Vendor: Adlung-Spiele
Type: Board Games
Price: 14.95

Vendor: WizKids Games
Type: Board Games
Price: 20.95

Note: This is not a standalone product and you'll need the base game Mage Knight Board Game to play.

Krang is here! Let Chaos reign!

The Mage Knight Board Game: Krang Character Expansion includes all that players need to add Krang, the mysterious and dangerous Orc Chaos Shaman, as a new playable character to the Mage Knight Board Game, including his prepainted miniature, unique starting cards, and skill tokens.