Ascension: Deckbuilding Game
1-4 Players 30 min Age 13+ Ascension: Deckbuilding Game — originally released as Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer — is a fast-paced deck-building game designed by Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour champions Justin Gary, Rob Dougherty, and Brian Kibler, with artwork by Eric Sabee. Ascension is a deck-building game in which players spend Runes to acquire more powerful cards for their deck. It offers a dynamic play experience where players have to react and adjust their strategy accordingly. Each player starts with a small deck of cards, and uses those cards to acquire more and better cards for their deck, with the goal of earning the most Honor Points by gaining cards and defeating monsters.
5-Minute Mystery
1-6 Players 5-30 Min Ages 8+ 5-Minute Mystery is a high-intensity, deductive, mystery game in which players work together to find a culprit hidden in a line-up of suspects. Just moments before the Museum of Everything was set to unveil its newest exhibit, the priceless MacGuffin, some criminal snuck in and stole it! Now it’s up to you, a team of detectives, to crack the case, find the culprit, and recover the missing MacGuffin. Start by searching for hidden symbols in each room of the museum and find the matching symbols on the codex. Once you’ve found all of the symbols in the room, you’ll unlock a clue about the culprit. Match the barcode of the clue tile against the culprit tile to discover valuable information about the crook. Does the miscreant have an umbrella? No? Well, that eliminates the shifty Mr. Braxton, doesn’t it? Quickly sort through the suspect cards in your hand to narrow down who the criminal can be. You’ll have to make it through as many rooms as it takes to figure out exactly who is responsible for stealing the MacGuffin, but remember, time is not on your side! Case files change the rules to each time you play, making every game a new challenge. Do you have what it takes to be the detective to crack the case and solve this five-minute mystery? Only time will tell!
Cryptid Cafe
1-5 Players 30-60 min Ages 10+ You are a lead server at the Cryptid Cafe, a Sasquatch-owned restaurant packed with legendary creatures from all over the world. Gather food. Fill orders. Earn the most tips and be crowned, dare we say, the most “legendary” server. Strategically dispatch your team of Sasquatch servers to the different food stations, gathering the much-needed items to complete your customers’ orders. As you serve the customers they will give you tips based on their satisfaction level. However, with each passing round, the Cryptids get more and more frustrated waiting for their food and will leave smaller tips. Eventually, they’ll leave the restaurant if they are not served fast enough. If that happens, plan on giving the owner some of your tips at the end of the night, he doesn’t like to lose customers. Sounds simple, right? Not so fast, because you’re not the only lead server working tonight. You’ll be competing with other players who are trying to serve their customers as well. Spaces are limited. Food stations are breaking. The orders are piling up. Customers are getting angry! It may be wise to share some of your tips with the chef, so you get the food you need first. If all goes well, at the end of the night you’ll be the player crowned the most legendary server.
Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
2-8 Players 10-30 min Ages 8+ Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is filled to the brim with hand-slapping mayhem! As in Snap and Dobble, each player places a card from their hand face up into a community pile while saying taco/cat/goat/cheese/pizza in player sequence. When the card matches the mantra — boom! — everyone slaps their hand on the deck, with the last one to slap picking up the cards. Whoever rids themselves of cards first wins! For extra fun, special action cards – the gorilla, narwhal, and groundhog — force players to make certain gestures before racing to slap the deck!
Tokyo Ghoul: Bloody Masquerade
4-8 Players 15-20 Minutes Ages 14+ In downtown Tokyo, ghouls are on the move, and they can quench their thirst only with coffee…and their bloodthirst only with human flesh. Humans are easy prey, but the investigators from the fearful CCG are on the lookout. Their job: Make the ghouls out in the crowd and hunt them down. In the bluff-and-deduction board game Tokyo Ghoul: Bloody Masquerade, you play as one of fifteen different characters from the anime, including Kaneki, Touka, Juzo, and Rize. Whether you are a mere human, a ghoul, or an investigator, roam the streets of Tokyo, keep your identity a secret, investigate, and cover your tracks. The investigator and the ghoul want to find and kill each other, while the humans are trying to collect two or three of the same card. Players take actions during the game to pass around cards, which gives them information bit by bit about who each player might be. It is up to you to uncover the other players’ real natures and come out on top. In the hostile environment, always keep in mind: Everyone you run into might be a killer!
Munchkin Deluxe
3-6 Players 60-120 min Ages 10+ Go down in the dungeon. Kill everything you meet. Backstab your friends and steal their stuff. Grab the treasure and run. Admit it. You love it. This award-winning card game, designed by Steve Jackson, captures the essence of the dungeon experience… with none of that stupid roleplaying stuff. You and your friends compete to kill monsters and grab magic items. And what magic items! Don the Horny Helmet and the Boots of Butt-Kicking. Wield the Staff of Napalm… or maybe the Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment. Start by slaughtering the Potted Plant and the Drooling Slime, and work your way up to the Plutonium Dragon… And it’s illustrated by John Kovalic! Fast-playing and silly, Munchkin can reduce any roleplaying group to hysteria. And, while they’re laughing, you can steal their stuff.
The Legend of the Cherry Tree that blossoms every ten years
2-4 Players 20+ Min Ages 8+ Do you know the legend of the cherry tree that blossomed every ten years? The story goes that once every decade, the cherry tree would shroud itself in beautiful flowers during the first days of spring. Thousands of buds grew on its branches and stretched elegantly toward the sky before becoming magnificent flowers of inestimable quality. When the flowers on the cherry tree begin to fall softly to the ground, you rush to collect them before they wither: The one who can gather the most flowers will have their wish granted by the cherry tree. But if you are too greedy, the cherry tree will find you unworthy of its gift, and you will lose the chance to make your dream come true… The flowers on the cherry tree have begun their delicate fall and are ready to be collected. Each turn, draw one or more flowers from the bag and try to gather as many as possible without being too greedy. At the end of your turn, put your flowers either in front of your screen to gain victory points based on your sets of flowers, or behind your screen to gain victory points by having the largest groups of flowers. The player who has the most victory points at the end of The Legend of the Cherry Tree that Blossoms Every Ten Years wins.
Lanterns – The Harvest Festival
2-4 players 30+ min Ages 8+ The harvest is in, and the artisans are hard at work preparing for the upcoming festival. Decorate the palace lake with floating lanterns and compete to become the most honored artisan when the festival begins. In Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, players have a hand of tiles depicting various color arrangements of floating lanterns, as well as an inventory of individual lantern cards of specific colors. When you place a tile, all players (you and your opponents) receive a lantern card corresponding to the color on the side of the tile facing them. Place carefully to earn cards and other bonuses for yourself, while also looking to deny your opponents. Players gain honor by dedicating sets of lantern cards — three pairs, for example, or all seven colors — and the player with the most honor at the end of the game wins.
Annapurna
1-4 Players 30-60 Players Ages 12+ Climb the most dangerous massif in the world! In Annapurna you co-operate — or compete — with your fellow climbers to achieve balance on this treacherous, ever-changing mountain. As you explore your mountainside made of cards you will encounter rockslides, yetis, and danger at every turn! You start with a deck of 18 mountain cards, laying out 15 of them face down in a pyramidal mountain and keeping the rest as your backpack. Each card has a yin or yang value of 1-4 on it as well as a special effect. To start the game, each player reveals a card in their bottom row, carries out the effect, then places their meeple on the card. On a turn, you explore an adjacent card on a non-lower level by flipping it over, carrying out its effects, and placing your meeple on it; trade a card from your backpack with a card in your mountain, pacing the replaced card in a cache; or hide a card, which is the same as trade, but on another player’s mountain. If your face-up mountain cards have a balance of yin and yang, you can remove them from play. Once you reach the mountain’s peak, you add your cache to your hand, then you can spend your turns doing nothing, dropping cards from your cache face up on the mountain to better balance your yin and yang, and throwing cache cards onto another player’s mountain, who then flips up one of your remaining face-down cards. In the competitive game, when everyone is at the peak, players score 3, 2, and 1 flags based on who is most balanced, with ties being broken in favor of whoever ascended their mountain first; play multiple rounds until someone collects nine flags and wins. In the co-operative game, you end the game after everyone has scaled their mountain, and you all win only if everyone has an even yin-yang balance. There are also rule books for Cooperative, Solo, and Team play.
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Card Game
1-4 Players 45-60 Min Ages 13+ So why grow up anyway? Is it really worth it? Don’t you have better things to do? Why does it matter whether or not your indie-rock band gets that great gig? You started a band to have fun, and now you’re going to get your butts kicked by robots. And who wants to deal with the headache of dating? Look, we’ve all got baggage. Some of us have drama that likes to pick fights and exes that like to throw punches. Love is a battlefield! So you’d rather sit on the couch throwing punches in your favorite video game. Hey, who’s going to stop you? Demons, fireballs, giant purple dudes?? Sounds like a bummer! If you want to keep living your precious little life, maybe it’s time to get it together and go up against the world! Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Card Game is a deck-building game that challenges you to grow up and prepare for your finest hour. Players assume the roles of their favorite characters in the Scott Pilgrim universe, each of whom comes with a unique starting deck. Innovative double-sided cards let you decide whether to solve your problems with hard work and empathy, or whether to embrace the unpredictable world of gratuitous video game violence. Defeating the Evil Ex and collecting Power-Ups will help players inch their way towards victory.