Tabletopia News

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers is a standalone game in the Carcassonne series set in the stone age.

As in other Carcassonne games, players take turns placing tiles to create the landscape and placing meeples to score points from the map they're creating. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Instead of cities, roads, and farms, Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers has forests, rivers, lakes, and meadows. Players' meeples can represent hunters (when placed in the meadows), gatherers (in a forest), or fishermen (on a river segment). They also have huts, which can be placed on rivers or lakes to get fish from the entire river system.



It includes many of the familiar mechanics from Carcassonne with a few new rules, including:
- A player who completes a forest with a gold nugget in it gets to immediately draw and place 1 of 12 bonus (menhir) tiles.
- A meadow is worth 2 points for every animal in it, except tigers, which negate certain other animals.
- A river segment is worth the number of tiles in the segment plus the number of fish in the lakes at each end.
- A fishing hut scores at the end of the game and is worth the number of fish in all the lakes connected by rivers.

In Lawyer Up, a two-player asymmetrical card game, players take on the roles of attorneys facing off against each other in a courtroom case. One player takes on the role of the prosecution and the other takes on the role of defense. Each case has its own unique mechanisms and story from Murder to Racketeering.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Lawyer Up is a game of arguments, influence and strategies. Players start with Discovery, where they will go through all the evidence of the case and draft what they think is important for them to win. Then Players will take turns calling and questioning witnesses - building arguments by chaining together cards with the same symbols and earning influence. Attorneys then spend their influence to sway the biases of the jury to their side of the argument.

Paleo is a co-operative adventure game set in the stone age, a game in which players try to keep the human beings in their care alive while completing missions. Sometimes you need a fur, sometimes a tent, but these are all minor quests compared to your long-term goal: Painting a woolly mammoth on the wall so that humans thousands of years later will know that you once existed. (Okay, you just think the mammoth painting looks cool. Preserving a record of your past existence is gravy.)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
What might keep you from painting that mammoth? Death, in all its many forms.

Each player starts the game with a couple of humans, who each have a skill and a number of life points. On a turn, each player chooses to go to one location — possibly of the same type as other players, although not the same location — and while you have some idea of what you might find there, you won't know for sure until you arrive, at which point you might acquire food or resources, or find what you need to craft a useful object, or discover that you can aide someone else in their project, or suffer a snakebite that brings you close to death. Life is full of both wonders and terrors...

At the day's end, you need food for all the people in your party as well as various crafts or skills that allow you to complete quests. Failure to do so adds another skull on the tote board, and once you collect enough of those, you decide that living is for fools and give up the ghost, declaring that future humans can just admire someone else, for all you care.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Paleo includes multiple modules that allow for a variety of people, locations, quests, and much more during your time in 10,000 BCE.

Winter Kingdom features seven, double-sided hexagonal map tiles that are randomly arranged into the playing area. After that, three scoring conditions, one economy card (showing how players earn money), and one twist card are dealt, giving the unique features of the game. Each player is dealt five ability cards and one terrain card.



On your turn, you must place three houses in the terrain depicted on your terrain card. If possible, you must place the houses next to previously placed houses. (If not possible, they may be placed anywhere that matches the terrain on the card.) You also start the game with a limited number of forts, which can replace any house and which count as two pieces.

After placing houses, you may use your gold to make one purchase, either paying the cost to put one ability card into play or paying an additional cost on a previously placed ability to upgrade it. Once purchased, the ability may be used once per turn for the rest of the game. You start the game with a little gold to buy abilities and can earn more gold based on the economy card in play for that game.



The game ends once one player is out of both houses and forts. Players score based on the criteria of the scoring cards for that game; in addition, whoever has the most houses next to each castle scores 3 additional points. The player with the most points wins.

To celebrate King Louis' birthday, royal pâtissiers are busy preparing macaron gift boxes for the royal family and guests. At the end of the celebration, the pâtissier who has made the most boxes will win and become the most prestigious pâtissier in France — so you must be watchful for dark currents underneath the cheerful pâtissiers and colorful macarons as an allergen might slip into your box and ruin the pastry. Are you ready to make some macarons?



In the 1-5 player trick-taking game Macaron, players are French pâtissiers preparing macaron gift boxes. In every game, a number of rounds will be played, and each round ends when thirteen tricks have been played or a player has prepared at least eight boxes. Players receive victory points (VPs) at the end of the round based on the number of boxes prepared.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
In more detail, the deck will contain 5-7 suits of macarons based on the number of players, and these macarons are put together into 3-4 groups, e.g., almond and pistachio are in group A, while strawberry and blueberry are in group B. Each round, one group will be determined to be "royal", and the 1-2 suits in that group are trump for the round. In addition, one flavor (not group) of macarons will be the allergen for the round.

Standard trick-taking rules are used, with the leading player being allowed to play anything and with other players needing to follow suit. Whoever wins the trick scores 1 box — or 3 boxes if the trick was won with a 1. If a trick contains an allergen, then no boxes are scored, except if the trick also contains a 2, which negates the allergen. Players track boxes won on a scoring track, and they also use this board at the start of a round to bet on the number of tricks they expect to win, with players winning or losing points based on how well their bet matches reality.



Macaron lasts a number of rounds until someone passes the VP threshold established at the start of the game. The solo rules have you compete against an AI player, Emma, who follows particular rules for deciding what to play.

[h2]Play it now on Tabletopia![/h2]