Family Games

Wingspan is a competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game from designer Elizabeth Hargrave and Stonemaier Games. It is the winner of the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres award. You are bird enthusiasts; researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors, seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats (actions). These habitats focus on several key aspects of growth:

• Gain food tokens via custom dice in a birdfeeder dice tower
• Lay eggs using egg miniatures in a variety of colours
• Draw from hundreds of unique bird cards and play them
• The winner is the player with the most points after 4 rounds

This version of Wingspan has the Swift Start Pack, which includes first-round walkthrough guides and specific new bird cards to use with them.

It is the year 1400 and you are Abelard Lavel, a knight living in Paris. Since you were a child, strange prophetic dreams of past and future crimes have haunted you. You managed to put your power to good use, solving mysteries that nobody else could. Now thanks to your growing reputation, the people of Paris seek your help. Will you come to their aid? The Chronicles of Crime: 1400 standalone game brings back well-known mechanisms of the original Chronicles of Crime game while adding some new twists. Now you can deduce not only from the evidence you find or the testimonies given by various characters but also from the mysterious scenes depicted on new Vision Cards. These scenes can be either from the future or from the past and they usually involve characters and objects yet to be revealed. During your investigation, you can also count on your family members to share their knowledge with you. You can ask your uncle, a monk who has a wealth of knowledge about written texts, your sister a merchant who knows something about almost any object you’ll find or even your brother, a king’s spy, who knows a story or two about many of the people you will meet. Finally, your faithful dog is always willing to trace a suspect for you, just bring him an item belonging to the person in question and he’ll track them down! NB: This game requires an app to play, but once downloaded no Internet connection is needed to play. You currently need Android 4.4 or newer, or iOS 8.0 or newer to run the app.

In Kodama 3D, players will grow trees in three-dimensional space. Players move Kodama pieces around a grid of branch tiles to pick the branches they want to add to their tree. When players have placed 12 tree branches, score all goal cards. The player with the most victory point wins. All the fun and beauty of Kodama: The Tree Spirits brought to the third dimension!

In this first expansion to Wingspan, Stonemaier Games increase the scope of the world to include the regal, beautiful, and varied birds of Europe. These birds feature a variety of new abilities, including a number of birds with round end abilities, abilities that increase interaction between players, and birds that benefit from excess cards/food. Along with the new bonus cards, they’re designed to be shuffled into the original decks of cards (and cards from future expansions). The European Expansion also includes an additional tray for storing the growing collection of birds (past, present, and future), as well as 15 purple eggs, extra food tokens, and a colourful new scorepad designed for both multi-player and single-player scoring.

In Patchwork, two players compete to build the most aesthetic (and high-scoring) patchwork quilt on a personal 9x9 game board. To start play, lay out all of the patches at random in a circle and place a marker directly counter-clockwise of the 2-1 patch. Each player takes five buttons — the currency/points in the game — and someone is chosen as the start player. On a turn, a player either purchases one of the three patches standing clockwise of the spool or passes. To purchase a patch, you pay the cost in buttons shown on the patch, advance your time token on the time track a number of spaces equal to the time shown on the patch, move the spool to that patch's location in the circle, then add the patch to your game board. You're free to place the patch anywhere on your board that doesn't overlap other patches, but you probably want to fit things together as tightly as possible. If your time token is behind or on top of the other player's time token, then you take another turn; otherwise the opponent now goes. Instead of purchasing a patch, you can choose to pass; to do this, you move your time token to the space immediately in front of the opponent's time token, then take one button from the bank for each space you moved. In addition to a button cost and time cost, each patch also features 0-3 buttons, and when you move your time token past a button on the time track, you sum the number of buttons on your game board, then take this many buttons from the bank. What's more, the time track depicts five 1x1 patches on it, and during set-up you place five actual 1x1 patches on these spaces. Whoever first passes a patch on the time track claims this patch and immediately places it on his game board. When a player takes an action that moves his time token to the central square of the time track, he places the purchased patch (assuming he had purchased one and wasn't passing), then takes one final button scoring from the bank. Once both players are in the centre, each player loses two buttons for each blank square on his game board. Whoever has the most buttons wins.