Sweet Games

Glory to Rome is a card-based city building and resource management game with a novel mechanism. Each card may act as a building, a patron, a raw material, or a valuable resource, frequently forcing players into difficult decisions regarding how each card should be used. In addition, much of the game is played from the discard pool, giving players some control over what cards are accessible to opponents.

Scoring is a combination of completing buildings and storing resources, with end-of-game bonuses for storing a diverse assortment. Game length is player-controlled, and is triggered in a few different ways.

The game involves a deck-building mechanism which may be familiar to those people who have played another certain award winning card game. Each player starts with a small set of cards. Cards come in two general types, location cards and empire cards. You can add an empire card to your discard pile simply by taking one as an action. Adding a location card is a little more involved. Each location card has a list of locations that it connects to and the transport type required to move to each of those locations. To take control of a neutral location you would have to play a location card with that neutral location on it, then a card that has the correct transport symbol, and then possibly a card with a settler symbol on it if required. You then place a cube in the location and add the location card to your discard pile.

Players take it in turns to perform two actions. There are a range of actions available, such as settling new locations, besieging locations, trading fur, launching Indian raids, and building fortifications. There are also cards that allow you to perform actions to manage your deck, such as getting rid of useless cards and drawing additional cards from your pile. You can also place cards in reserve so that you can use them at a later point in time.

The game ends if a player manages to capture his opponent’s capital city or he has managed to place all of his village or town pieces on the board. In the latter case points are calculated to see who wins.

The game can last from between 30minutes to two hours, depending on how well players pursue the victory conditions.

$55.00

Gears of War™: The Board Game, designed by Corey Konieczka, is based on the wildly popular third-person shooter by Epic Games. One to four players take on the roles of COG soldiers cooperating to destroy the Locust horde, and must work together to complete missions against an ingeniously challenging and varied game system. In Gears of War: The Board Game, you’ll relive classic moments from Gears of War™ and Gears of War 2™. Roadie Run into cover, spray your enemy with blind fire, or rip him in half with your Lancer’s chainsaw!

Gears of War: The Board Game includes –

    Over 30 plastic figures
    Over 200 cards
    35 Locust AI Cards
    17 Double-sided Map Tiles
    Nearly 75 tokens and markers
    1 Mission Reference Sheet
    5 Attack Dice and 4 Defense Dice
    1 Line-of-Sight Ruler

$70.00

Space Empires is a game in the finest tradition of 4X space games - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Make no mistake. All four "X's" are included in this game. This is a wargame where the purpose of building your empire is not to feel good about your achievement, but to destroy your enemies and burn their colonies.

One difficulty in games of this genre is that they are often either overly simplistic or tediously detailed. Space Empires has been almost 20 years in the making and, during that time, many elegant solutions have been developed to keep the theme rich without a lot of rules. The game includes carriers and fighters, mines, cloaking, a very large technology tree, fifteen ship classes from scout to dreadnaught, merchant shipping, colonization, mining, terraforming, bases, shipyards, black holes, warp points, and non-player aliens, yet the rules are short and intuitive and the game can be finished on one sitting. This is NOT a game that is hard to get into. The playtest rules are only 8 pages long for the basic game and increase to 11 pages in length when the advanced rules are included.

Exploration is easy (well, easy for you, it is actually dangerous for your ships) and fun and reveals different terrain (such as asteroids and nebulas) which affect your movement and your combat. The map is mounted.

This is a game made by people who love the genre, but play other games too.

Components:

Four 5/8" counter sheets (704 counters)
One 22 x 34" mounted map
Rulebook
Scenario Book
Four Player aid sheets
One Pad of production sheets
Four 10 sided dice