Enough lofty talk—here’s how to play: The box holds 108 chunky black wooden tiles, each with a colored symbol on one face; there are six symbols in six colors, and each of the 36 color/symbol combinations is repeated three times. Players shuffle the tiles face-down, draw six randomly, then take turns placing the tiles in a grid that develops throughout the game.

To place tiles, you must choose one or more tiles that all share a color or symbol, then place them in a single line in the grid so that at least one of these tiles is adjacent to an already placed tile with the same color or symbol. (See the image below for examples.) You can’t place a duplicate color or symbol in a row, which means that at most six tiles will make up one line. Once a line of green tiles includes a starburst, for example, then no other starburst can be placed in this line. Tiles needn’t be placed be placed adjacent to one another, but they must be placed in the same line.

The rules terminology is a bit awkward because “line” doesn’t mean “entire horizontal or vertical row of tiles and gaps” as you might suspect, but only a linear grouping of up to six tiles that share a characteristic. Thankfully, the examples included clarify the meaning of “line” in the rules.

When you place tiles, you score one point for each tile in a line that you created or added to that turn. If you have a row of three red tiles, for instance, and add a red tile with a different symbol, you score four points; if you placed a row of three squares perpendicular to these red tiles, with a red square meeting up with this red row—akin to adding an “S” to a word in Scrabble while forming a new word—you would score seven points: three for the new row of squares and four for the row of red tiles that you enlarged.

Placing the sixth tile in a line nets you six points for the line as well as six bonus points, which means that opponents need to be wary of placing the fifth or even the fourth tile in a line since the average points per turn is far below the 12 scored from a complete line. Due to the placement restrictions—matching colors or shapes, but not having repeated colors or shapes—you can cut off rows that threaten to max out by boxing them in with other rows.

Instead of placing tiles on a turn, a player can choose to hand in some or all of her tiles and draw new ones, mixing the discarded tiles back into the reserves. This move is typically one of sheer desperation or blind hope, with the player hoping for a tile that will let her complete a line, but scoring 12 on a subsequent turn is rarely worth forfeiting your ability to score anything this turn. Still, the move can pay off depending on the board situation.

Tiles in the grid are visible, so you can track which tiles remain to be played and plan your moves accordingly. Initially, the game seems to be determined by luck, that is, whoever draws tiles that complete a line or add to multiple lines will win. After a few games, though, you learn how to play defensively, cutting off opportunities to complete a line by sandwiching the ends of an open line with off-color or off-symbol tiles that render spaces unplayable. You pay more attention to the order in which you place tiles to create opportunities for future plays. You leave a symbol or color dangling open on a line to lure an opponent into adding to it, thereby setting you up for a future play.

Managing the endgame also becomes clearer with repeated play. Once the reserve of tiles runs out, players keep taking turns until someone plays her final tile. This player scores six bonus points, then the player with the highest score wins.

In my first game or two, I played the end the same as the beginning—laying out whichever tiles scored the most points each turn—but with experience I’ve changed my approach to turns from start to finish. I pay more attention each turn to what I can set up for myself in future turns and play more defense. Moreover, I might sacrifice a point or two if I can play more tiles and therefore increase my odds of drawing a tile I really need.

As for the endgame, you ideally want the player to your right to take the last tiles in the reserve as that increases your odds of going out first. You might even keep pairs or triplets of matching tiles in reserve as the endgame nears so that you can rocket out quickly and grab those final bonus points.

Qwirkle resembles Ingenious/Einfach Genial, both in looks and game play, but the similarities should be seen in a positive light rather than a reason to dismiss this new game as more of the same. Just as my playing style in Ingenious has advanced through multiple stages—from making big pools of color to playing defense against opponents to sabotaging a color to monopolize it—I can see the same progression already taking place with Qwirkle. You can make skillful plays if you know what to look for.

That said, players can approach the game with different frames of mind and still have a fun time. You can play semi-cooperatively with family members young and old, not worrying about the risk of someone else completing a line, or you can be more cutthroat and think through each play. Luck will still play a role in determining who wins; drawing duplicate tiles or drawing a tile that you just played (which feels even worse than a duplicate) can hamper your play possibilities. This mix of luck and skill, along with the easy-to-learn rules and clear examples of play, creates a fabulous abstract game that should win over almost anyone who plays games.

One of the intriguing-looking games was Idol Quest from Rex Games. Rex Games is best known for Tangoes, a nice-looking plastic tangrams set with small packs of puzzle cards that’s celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2007. When I worked in a game store in San Francisco back in the early 1990s, I remember selling Tangoes non-stop. The puzzle was always on display on the counter, and once customers started fiddling with the bits, they had to take one home to share with children and friends. Idol Quest is a departure for Rex Games, but based on how the game plays—rather than how it looks in a trade fair booth—I’d advise the company to seek help before publishing board game #2.

The problems with Idol Quest start with the rules. A first reading of the rules seems clear: You want to stack blocks in order to move one of your explorers to the top of the tower, grab the idol, and escape on a boat. But once you pull the bits out of the box—a challenge of its own as the insert holding the chunky cheese-like blocks lacks fingerholes for easy access—and start to play, you realize that implementing the rules is going to be a challenge. The first two instructions for playing the game, for example, are:

1. To begin the game, each player places two blocks anywhere on the lake grid.
2. Each player rolls the die. The player who rolls the highest number goes first. Play continues to the left.

The next line in the instructions causes further consternation: “A turn consists of drawing a card, rolling the die and moving one of your Explorers. If you draw an ‘ADD BLOCK’ card, place one, two or three blocks on the board, then discard the card. If you draw any other card, you may keep it and play it at any time.” The deck contains 35 cards: add one block (6), add two blocks (7), add three blocks (6), climb up to any height (4), jump down from any height (4), push another player (4), and steal any card (4). Each player starts the game with one card, but the rules don’t specify whether an “add block” card in a player’s starting must be played immediately, held, or discarded and replaced. Whether you must play it or can hold onto it, getting one is a huge advantage since you can build a stairway to a heavenly idol quickly.

If you aren’t dealt an add block card, however, and don’t draw any for the first few turns, you’ll be moving your explorers in circles over the two blocks with which you started. Movement of the explorers is determined by the die roll, so both the ability to build towards the tower and the movement of your explorers are determined by factors outside your control.

The tower in the center of the board also invites questions. It’s made of cardboard, for one thing, which is an odd choice considering that the blocks are solid and nicely designed. What’s worse is that the height of the tower is 4-1/3 blocks high. Players can move an explorer upwards or downwards only in one level increments, so it’s not clear whether the tower is meant to be four blocks high—that is, accessible from level three—or whether you have to pile the blocks up four high before you can move onto the tower.

As our game progressed, we had fewer and fewer choices as to where we could place additional blocks. You can trap an explorer under a block, given the right circumstances, but this never happened, which meant the levels were littered with explorers with little open ground. Once all of the blocks are on the board, you move unoccupied blocks whenever you draw an “add block” card. For several turns, we had exactly two blocks free and one place to move them, so we could only shuffle blocks back and forth.

Once a player grabs the idol, he has to move the explorer holding it off the blocks onto a dock, where he grabs a boat and hotfoots it to a museum. But only one of us had placed a block adjacent to a dock—a rookie mistake, I’ll admit, though I will take credit for placing it—which meant that to leave the idol holder had to (1) rearrange a dozen blocks somehow, moving explorers out of the way first, in order to create another dock exit, or (2) try to push past other explorers, who could simply steal the idol on their turns, making the winner simply the person who rolled highest while moving toward the dock.

As you might be able to tell from my dismissive tone, we did not enjoy Idol Quest. Your moves are largely determined by the luck of the draw, the components don’t work well together, your options in the midgame are limited, and the winner was the player who rolled highest. Perhaps with a game’s experience, I’d build the blocks differently next time, allowing for more building opportunities and escape routes—but there won’t be a next time.

One of the other players said, “If I had had this game when I was seven, I would have played it to death.” I agree because I remember the luck heavy games that my brother and I constantly played, yet as a product of 2007 rather than 1977, Idol Quest is a relic that should never have been found.

The multi-color abstracts can’t be classified so easily. Some fall into the thinky end of the pool, while others tromp through the wading section or else sunbathe on the side of the pool, not even deigning to wet their feet.

Spectrangle, a glowingly bright abstract game in a difficult-to-shelve oversized triangular box, occupies the wading section in our pool of abstract games. Game play is as simple as you might expect from any well-designed abstract: Each player starts with a hand of four colored triangular pieces. The pieces vary from having three colors, with one color on each side, to monochrome. The fewer colors on a piece—or “trang” as the rules specify—the more valuable it is; solid-colored pieces are worth 6 points, while three-color pieces are worth only 1 or 2. Five colors are used in the game, which also includes a single all-white piece.

The board, as you might expect, is triangular with as many indentations as pieces in the game. While most of the indentations are hollow, some include a number from 2-4, which is a bonus multiplier that players can receive during the game.

For the first turn, a randomly chosen start player places one of her pieces in any non-bonus space on the board, then draws a new tile. From then on, each player places a piece on the board adjacent to any previously played piece, with the caveat that adjacent pieces must match the colors on the sides that touch. (The all-white piece is a joker that can be played on any turn.)

Each time a player places a trang, she scores points: the face value of the piece (1-6) multipled by the number of pieces adjacent to the space being occupied (1-3) multiplied by any bonus number (2-4) in that space. Therefore, a player scores between 1 and 72 points on each turn, and the game is all about keeping opponents out of the bonus spaces—or at least minimizing the points they earn when they do play in them. All of the pieces are visible, so sometimes easy moves present themselves, such as playing a piece with a yellow edge next to the bonus space while your opponent(s) have no pieces with yellow on them. More often than not, though, each player has all five colors somewhere on her pieces, which means you simply want to steer clear of the bonus spaces. Eventually, someone is forced to set up the following player, and that person scores dozens of points and races into the lead.

Spectrangle works well with families and casual game players, but the huge point swings present in the scoring might limit the game’s appeal to fans of deeper abstract games. The game does include a strudy travel case, which makes it a good choice for kids in the back seat of the car.

Spectrangle might be sold in mainstream locations due to its new publisher, but in case you can’t triangulate its location, here are a few online retailers that stock the game: Boulder Games, Thought Hammer, and Uncles Games.

Builders in medieval times weren’t anywhere near as exacting, if Leo Colovini’s Masons is any guide. Sure, masons had plans, but they weren’t too fussy about where the walls were located. They threw the walls around the landscape left and right, and if they happened to encircle land and form a city, well, that was just happy circumstance.

Now you get to try your hand at masonry. The game board depicts an open landscape with water on two opposing borders and boundary lines slicing the land into three regions. The land is divided into 45 triangular plots, with 15 plots in each of the regions.

On a turn, you place a wall on the border of one of the plots, then roll three dice: one die with the colors white, gray and black on two sides each, and two other dice with six different colors on each side. The first die tells you what color tower you must place at one end of the wall; the two colored dice indicate the colors of houses that you must place on the board, with one house being placed on each side of the wall. (If the wall is on the seashore or the edge of the game board, you place only one of the two houses. If you roll white on a house die, you place a colored house of your choice.) Finally, you place a white, gray or black tower of your choice at the other end of the wall, if that space is open.

If your wall (combined with other walls already built) has now enclosed part of the board, you’ve formed a city. You can then choose to remove walls that separate the newly-formed city from an adjacent city (if one exists) to create a larger metropolis. Any two houses of the same color within a new city are removed from the board and replaced with a palace of the same color.

After any new city is built, all players have a chance to score. Each player starts with a hand of six scoring cards. These cards depict various possible building combinations: a city of exactly one, two or three spaces, white towers that aren’t part of cities, all towers on the seashore, red houses outside of cities, palaces inside cities, all houses in one region, and so on. When a city is completed, you can play one or two scoring cards and score points based on the current board situation. You draw only one card to replenish your hand, however, so be wary of spending your cards too freely. You can also choose to pass on scoring, discard one card, and draw two. After scoring, the player with the lowest total score can discard any number of cards and draw replacements. This catch-up mechanism is a good way for players to dump cards that are unlikely to net more than a few points and possibly end up with more valuable architectural plans.

The game ends when one of the four resources—towers, houses, palaces, walls—runs out. Each player then has a final scoring opportunity, and whoever ends up with the highest total score wins.

Masons really shows off the difference between Eurostyle and mainstream American games. In Masons, the pieces are all wood, and they feel great in your hand and when you plonk them down on the board. The only plastic in the game is the box insert that holds all the beautiful bits in order when you’re not playing.

Although the game length is listed as 45 minutes, game times can vary to extreme degrees. Place 15 isolated walls, for example, and all 30 towers have been used up, ending the game; keep combining cities, on the other hand, all you’re return walls and towers to the general supply to push the game onward.

Rolling the dice after placing the wall certainly adds a random element to the game. You’re playing the odds on what might come up and hoping the results will synch with the cards you hold. As such, adding more players to the game exacerbates the randomness because you have fewer opportunities to direct the building of walls and the general construction of cities. Play with only two, and your influence on the board becomes much stronger.

Masons still works well with four—as an experienced player showed when he crushed three neophytes by a stunning margin—but the two-player game ups the control level and gives the most satisfying play experience.

We prefer building walls with game boxes in place of bricks. To add Masons to your own game wall, stop by any of these online retailers: RC Hobbies, Funagain, House Full of Games, or Thought Hammer.

Admittedly, the nature of your business activities in Go West is completely abstracted. The U.S. is divided into six regions, with New England reaching down to North Carolina, the Great Plains located east of the Midwest, and the entire West Coast labeled “California.” (Phalanx is a Dutch company, and Americans would likely mangle the Netherlands geography just as badly as the U.S. gets it in this game, so we can give them a break.)

The four central regions of the country have a circular track above each of them, with a black partition marker in one of the eight circles in each region. The remaining seven circles represent business opportunities for the players. Twenty wood wagons are placed in New England and aimed towards the western shore.

Each player starts with a bunch of counters, a double-move token, six scoring cards, and a hand of seven cards. In general, the cards each depict one of the four central regions, a number of wagons, and a cost from 1-6. On a turn, a player either plays an action card, plays a scoring card, or sells an action card. The actions in more detail:

• Play an action card: You discard an action card, pay the cost in counters (moving those counters into a central bank), place one or more counters on the region or regions depicted, and move wagons the depicted number of spaces from east to west. (A picture of two wagons, for example, means move one wagon two spaces or two wagons one space each.) When you place counters in a region, you place them clockwise away from the black partition marker and other counters already in the region. If all seven spaces are filled, then you bump the partition marker clockwise the necessary number of spaces and return the bumped counters to their owners.

• Play a scoring card: The cost of the scoring cards starts at 1 and rises to 16 for the final one. You pay counters to the bank equal to the cost of the scoring card, then score each of the four regions. Whoever has a plurality of counters in a region scores one point for each counter as long as an equal number of wagons is in that region. Then the player with the secondmost counters scores points as long as wagons remain, and so on. (Wagons aren’t removed from the region; they simply limit the number of points awarded in a region.)

• Sell an action card: You can discard a card from your hand and return counters equal to the cost of the card from the bank to your counter supply.

Each player has a double-move token, and you can place it in the bank at the start of any turn to take two turns in a row. Once everyone has used his or her token, they’re returned to their owners for further use. When someone passes 50 points or all the wagons leave New England and the East, then the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Go West! can be frustrating with four, or even three, players because your standing in each of the region’s business tracks can be destroyed before you take another turn. Some actions cards, for example, let you place one counter in the depicted region and one counter in any other region; this lets you affect majority standings in multiple ways, which makes the player standings in each region extremely fluid. The double-move token is one way to thwart this fluidity, but if one player never uses this token, then everyone else goes without it for the rest of the game. The solution, naturally, is to play with only two players, which gives each player more control over the flow of the game.

Playing with two also makes the scoring actions more meaningful. Each region scores whenever you play a scoring card, and keeping one opponent down is much easier than quashing three of them. The opponent is still likely to gain a few points when you play a scoring card, but you’ll generally come out ahead if you’re playing smart.

And talk of “playing smart” brings us to the final point. Colovini’s games are generally opaque—that is, how each individual action affects the later game isn’t clear at the time you take the action—and Go West! is more opaque than normal. In your first game, you typically won’t understand how to set up scoring turns, and you’ll constantly be running low on counters, forced to sell cards at bad times and turn down opportunities that your opponent presents.

With more experience, though, you’ll learn how to play the game better. If you play with three players, you’ll see an advantage to always coming in second and letting others pay for the scoring. Go West! isn’t a rah-rah game full of laughs and fun, but it does make for a tricky head-scratcher.

If you get your fill of hardtack while on the road, try playing Go West! instead, which is available at online retailers such as Thought Hammer, Funagain, Boulder Games, and Cardhaus Games.

Despite the name, Submarine also boasts a shallow theme that you’re unlikely to think about while playing. Players are leading underwater expeditions to recover artifacts from the recently discovered world of Atlantis, and whoever recovers 12 artifacts first—or possesses the most artifacts when the game ends—wins.

The board depicts a waterline and an ocean view of some civilizations’ remains, but more importantly for game play is a grid overlaying the picture that’s six boxes wide and five tall. Each player has a recovery ship that will move from left to right in the top row of boxes across the waterline. Players also have a number of bathyscapes that they take turns placing in any of the boxes on the second row. Each box in the second row holds one artifact token; artifacts come in twelve types, and each type of artifact is available with five differently colored borders. Boxes in the third row hold two tokens, boxes in the fourth row hold three, and the bottom row has four tokens in each box. (See, lots of talk about boxes and none about sections of the sea.)

Players are dealt a deck of cards and draw three cards for a starting hand. The cards come in five colors, matching the borders of the artifact tokens.

On a turn, a player first moves his recovery ship across the waterline from left to right, stopping in any column in which you have one or more bathyscapes. Next you must take at least one action, and you may take one action for each bathyscape in the column. The actions are to either move a bathyscape or collect an artifact.

Moving simply involves moving the bathyscape to an box in the same row or in the row immediately above or below the current one. Collecting an artifact requires a player to remove a card that matches the artifact’s border color in his hand from the game; what’s more, the player must transfer a card from the top of his deck to the deck of any player with a bathyscape in the same column that’s at the same height or higher. (Perhaps these opponents are spying on you, and you’re spending resources to throw them off track so that you can collect the artifact unimpeded?) You can collect up to three artifacts a turn, but you must pay cards for each one you grab. At the end of your turn, you draw cards until you have three in hand again.

Playing Submarine is all about knowing when you can afford to throw away cards to opponents. After all, if you run out of cards, you can’t claim any more artifacts until someone has to pay you cards. If you think someone might be giving you cards in the next turn or two, then grab the artifact and hand over the cards. Making this move might even cause the other player to feel more secure about giving you cards, so forming mini-alliances is a good way for both of you to come out ahead of other players.

Wait a minute—other players? Isn’t this “The Fewer, The Better” week. Yes, indeedy it is, and Submarine does play better with three players than with four or five. With more players, you run a greater risk of sitting around waiting after running your recovery ship off the right side of the board. You also are more likely to have opposing bathyscapes above and around you, forcing you to pay out more cards. Each player does start the game with a joker that lets you grab one treasure without paying cards—and duplicate artifacts also serve as jokers—but cards are your oxygen supply in Submarine, and with fewer players you can better plan out future turns.

With more players, the game is more likely to end due to all the artifacts being claimed from one column, which means you have fewer turns to play and consequently less control of your success.

You can search underwater for a copy of Submarine, but you’re probably more likely to find it at online retailers like Funagain, Boards & Bits, Time Well Spent, and Thought Hammer.

In Alexandros, you’re trying to become Alexander’s favorite lackey by claiming as much territory as possible and levying taxes on the poor sods who live in those conquered lands.

At the start of the game, the Persian Empire is large and unified, stretching from Turkey south into Egypt and north and east through modern Iran. The territory is divided into adjacent triangular spaces, with roughly two-thirds the spaces being empty and one-third containing a symbol in one of five colors. Alexander is placed in Constantinople, and his movement through the Empire will divide the territory into more easily claimed pieces.

Each player starts with four guards and one card; the cards boast one of the five colored symbols, matching the symbols on the board. Two cards are then turned face-up, and the game begins.

On a turn, you choose one of the two face-up cards, put it in your hand, and move Alexander to the closest empty space of this color. You place Alexander on any corner of this space, then mark a path from his previous location with boundary walls. When placing boundary walls, you have to use the shortest possible path, but multiple “shortest paths” are usually available, giving you carving options. (Determining the closest, empty spaces is easy at the start of the game, but gets confusing as the game progresses. If a space has a wall, a guard, or Alexander on it, then it’s not empty.)

After moving Alexander, you take two actions out of four possibilities; you can perform the first three actions twice on a turn, if you wish:

• Draw a card. You draw a face-up card or the top card of the deck and add it to your hand.
• Occupy a province. If boundary walls (and possibly the Empire border) have enclosed a number of triangular spaces, you can occupy the area. You place one guard on any number of symbol spaces in the province, then discard a card for each symbol space you didn’t cover. If someone else has already occupied this territory, you first kick out their guards by discarding two cards matching each space where one of their guards stands.
• Take back a guard. Remove one of your guards from the board and return it to your supply.
• Levy taxes. You must discard one card that matches the space where one of your guards stands; each player then counts the number of empty (i.e., non-symbol) spaces in provinces that hold only one guard of their color and scores that many points.

With the levying action, everything else in the game comes together. To score points during levying—whether during your turn or someone else’s—you must have exactly one guard in a territory. If you’ve used multiple guards to claim a territory, then you better pull them out, both to score and to be able to claim more land later. To claim territory in the first place, you need to collect cards and use Alexander to carve up his holdings. To avoid having another player outscore you during levying, you need to either kick him out (which takes cards) or carve up his land (which takes both skillful use of Alexander and a bit of luck in the right cards being available).

The game ends once a player scores 100 points or more or the supply of black boundary walls runs out. If either case, the player with the most points wins.

First-time players typically have no clue what they’re doing. Even the “moving Alexander” action stumps them sometimes because the long-term effects of a move are often hard to determine. With four players, this problem is exacerbated; the game lasts roughly the same number of turns due to the supply of boundary walls, so with more players, you take fewer turns, which gives you less control over the flow of the game.

An additional issue with three or four players is that when you take a province away from someone else, you must pay them half the cards spent in the process—thus giving them much of the fuel they need to retake the land on a future turn! With three players, this twist provides an interesting change from the two-player game; with four, though, the lack of control can be frustrating.

Ideally your first game of Alexandros will be an easy-going test drive in which you pull levers and push buttons merely to see what happens. Don’t worry about winning—save that goal for the next game when you can give Alexander a run for his money in the field of all-conquering tyrants.

Conquering land is expensive; buying Alexandros isn’t. You can find the game at online retailers such as Thought Hammer, Funagain, Game Surplus, and Time Well Spent.

Playing this card game is unlikely to make you feel like a pirate captain, but that’s your job in Corsari. You need to hire a good pirate crew, one better than every other captain in the game. Pirates come in ten different colors, and within each color the pirates are numbered 1-11 based on their role (first mate, lookout, etc.) on the ship.

Corsari is played over several rounds. To start each round, players are dealt 12 cards, then a tavern of 7-9 cards is dealt face-up in a column, and finally one card is revealed from the deck to start a discard stack. On a player’s turn, you draw one card from the deck, the top of the discard stack, or the top of the tavern. You then discard a card to the discard stack, face-up to keep the round going or face-down to set sail and end the round.

When you set sail, you (and all other players) first discard all the pirates in your hands that match the color of the top pirate in the tavern. (Your prospective crew members decided to go drinking with their cronies instead of working.) Next, you form a crew with only two colors of pirates, with only one card in each role. If your colors are green and pink, for example, you can have only one 11 card (scribe) in your crew, one 10 card in your crew, and so on. Every pirate that neither joined your crew nor deserted to the tavern is considered a stowaway. Add up the digits on these cards to create your stowaway total for the round.

Other players can now try to fill in the holes of your crew. If you don’t have a cook, for instance, they can add a cook to your crew if it matches either of the crew’s two colors. Everyone else then forms their own two-color crew and determines their stowaway total.

And here’s where everything gets a bit tricky. Corsari was published in German by Piatnik and in English by Rio Grande Games—and the scoring rules in the two games don’t match, effectively creating two separate games. In the Rio Grande version, if an opponent’s stowaway total is higher than the player that ended the round, the opponent scores points equal to his stowaway total; if the total is equal or lower, he gives those stowaways to the player who went out, dumping his dead weight on someone who went out too early. If the ending player has a lower stowaway total than everyone else, he scores nothing for the round. Players track their points, getting kicked out of the game when they pass a sum of your choosing, and the last player standing wins.

In the Piatnik version of Corsari, you still compare stowaway totals and opponents still dump their stowaways on the ending player if they match or go lower than his stowaway total. The ending player still gets to dump his cards if his stowaway total is lower than everyone else’s. However, instead of scoring points equal to the stowaway total, anyone with stowaway cards simply keeps them on the table for the rest of the game. Future rounds are played without these cards. At the end of a round, if 35 or more stowaways are on the table, the game ends and the player with the fewest stowaway cards wins.

While the Rio Grande scoring rules work, the Piatnik scoring adds more to the game because the deck changes from round to round. You have to consider which cards have been removed from the game when you start building your crew, or else you might find yourself short-handed and looking at a boat filled with slacking nogoodniks. In later rounds, the game is tenser because most of the low numbers have been removed, making it difficult to keep your stowaway total low.

The tavern is larger with four players, but otherwise the game plays the same, which typically increases the number of cards removed each round, thus speeding up the game. This quicker pace increases the chance of fluke hands—initial hands with only a few colors—deciding the winner.

With only two or three players, the game lasts more rounds, giving you more time to try to win on skill rather than luck. Good use of the tavern is key to winning. Everyone knows which colors will potentially be dumped from their hands, depending on when the game ends, so they can use this knowledge when building their crews. If the tavern empties before someone sets sail, though, the round ends with no scoring, so you have to time your launching just right.

Corsari can be find ashore at online retailers such as Boards & Bits, Boulder Games, Fair Play Games, and Funagain.

Clans brings players back to the dawn of time, when small groups of people lived in settlements isolated from their strangely-colored peers. The game board, which consists of four types of terrain divided into 60 regions, starts with a small wooden hut on each region; these huts come in five colors (black, blue, yellow, red, green) which are placed semi-randomly at the start of the game.

Each player’s turn is simplicity itself: You take all of the huts from one region and move them into an adjacent region that still contains huts. (Once a region is empty, it’s empty for the rest of the game.)

If your move isolates a village—that is, if the huts in a region are now surrounded by empty regions or the edge of the board—that village is now scored. Each color in that region receives points equal to the number of huts present. For example, if a village holds two blue huts, one yellow hut, and three red huts, then blue, yellow and red each score six points. Note, however, that if all five colors are present, some inter-tribal strife breaks out and all colors with only a single hut are removed from the region prior to scoring.

The scoring can also be affected by where the village was founded. At first, villages in forests earn each tribe an extra point while villages in mountains are worthless, but once you enter the second epoch, after the founding of four villages, mountain villages are suddenly worth two extra points and the grassland villages are zeroed out. Only twelve villages will be founded by game’s end, and the shifting bonuses and bombs give you something new to consider each turn.

No matter how many points a village scores, the founder of that village receives a scoring token. After the twelfth village is founded, players reveal their colors and add one point to their score for each scoring token they hold. High score wins.

A big part of the game is concealing your tribe’s color so that other players can’t group your huts together, which lessens your scoring opportunities, or isolate your huts, which gives them a scoring token and you only one point. At the same time, you naturally want to figure out which colors your opponents hold. With four players, the elements of concealment and deduction are largely lost since four of the five colors represent players and there’s only one “safe” color to which you can throw points—not that you generally know what that color is, mind you.

With two and three players, however, Clans become a far trickier game because you can make early moves that hurt your color in an effort to convince opponents that you’re a different color. Thus they might later throw points your way, thinking that they’re helping out the dummy color. Of course they might be doing the same…

A more important reason to play with only two or three players is that the game will last roughly the same number of turns no matter how many are playing. With only two players, you’ll take half the turns and have much more control over potential scoring opportunities; with four players, the board can change a lot before your turn comes around again, so you’re often simply making a move and hoping for the best. To pull the most strategy from the game, stick with two players.

You can buy a clan of your own at online game retailers such as Funagain, Troll and Toad, Thought Hammer, and Game Surplus.

Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise to find a game that involves home decoration. Instead we should merely say, “It’s about time.”

The premise of California is that each player has her own freshly built mansion, devoid of any furnishings other than a single piece of flooring. Flooring comes in six types, and each player starts with a different type. Your goal is to install flooring in much of the mansion, then bring in specialty house items such as a swimming pool or pinball machine to attract guests. Ideally guests will bring housewarming presents with them because, as in real life, gifts equal points.

The game lasts twelve rounds, and each round begins the same way. You fill a bank with four gold coins and two retail stores with four randomly drawn tiles each. The tiles are either flooring, a special item like a motorcycle or puppy, or an extra attic. On a turn, you either take a gold coin, which is worth five silver coins, from the bank or else you purchase a tile; the cost of a tile is equal to the number of gold coins currently in the bank. So buying tiles costs a lot at the start of the round, but gets cheaper over time; your opponents might even thank you each time you take money since you’re saving them a buck as well!

If you buy flooring, you must place it in the mansion next to other tiles of the same color, if any. If you buy a special item, you must place it on flooring that matches the color of the special item; pools and fountains go on blue tiles, for example, while pets all go on green. If you can’t place an item immediately, you can store it in the attic; an extra attic lets you store two wares. Purchasing a special item brings an appropriately colored guest to your door. Attract another guest while the first one is still visiting, and the new guest will arrive with a present, presumably to show up the first one as a cheap so-and-so.

A round ends when either the bank or one of the retail stores is empty. After twelve rounds, you count up points, with each piece of flooring and each gift worth one point. In addition, you can score bonus tiles during the game by installing certain combinations of special items. You’re often racing opponents for these bonuses, so money management is critical; spend too much, and you won’t be able to buy the tile you really need before someone else does.

As with most Schacht games, the rules are easy to understand, but you won’t have any idea of how to play in the first game. Should you spend freely or hoard money? How much should you concentrate on one or two colors? Only by playing will these answers become clear, as clear as the fresh air that crosses the Pacific and warms the shores of the Golden State…

No matter where you live, California is available for playtime thanks to online retailers such as Game Surplus, Thought Hammer, Funagain, and Boulder Games.