The year is 1843, and Great Britain is poised to see the country gripped by a new disease - Railway Mania. Rail transportation to link industrial Great Britain together has captured the public imagination, and thanks to a rapidly expanding affluent middle class, more than enough money is available to build that rail net. Scores of new railway companies spring up. With virtually no governmental oversight, many fraudulent or economically unfeasible railways appear, financed by a tidal wave of cash from starry-eyed investors.   By 1849 the spectacular railway construction bubble completely bursts, thousands of individual investors are ruined, and the surviving well-run rail lines move into the financial wreckage to salvage the workable lines, continue construction through the next decade, and grow stronger.  

1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties is set in this cauldron of railway construction. Players will vie to start railway companies, invest money in railway shares, and attempt to run the railways they control for personal gain, trying to keep them afloat in changeable economic times. Each game played will be unique. Out of 20 available railway companies, only 16 will be randomly selected for each game – and only eight will be available at start. Each company also starts with a randomly chosen Permit to run one of three different types of train. Players then begin the game by investing in some of the available companies. Each company will generate revenue for the majority shareholder by laying track on the board, placing station markers, running any trains it owns, paying dividends or retaining revenue from those trains, and then buying more and more advanced trains. As the game progresses, players can start more companies and can merge companies they control with other companies. When larger and more powerful trains are bought, older trains become obsolete and disappear, causing financial crisis for the unprepared. The game ends after the last band of trains is bought, and the wealthiest player, including shares, but not money in companies, is the winner.

Charioteer is a new game from Sekigahara author Matt Calkins. Like Matt's previous games, Charioteer features simple rules, quick play, and novel mechanisms.

Charioteer is a strategic racing game that plays in one hour. Each player controls a chariot in the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome. There's lots of action, and it happens quickly, with simultaneous move selection.

Movement is determined by melding sets from a hand of cards. Every card does more than one thing, and it takes multiple matching cards to make a move. Choosing to use a card in one set means deciding not to use it in another. Timing when to make a critical move is as important as knowing what move to make.

Moves come in four colors, and each has a special advantage. Play a red move to attack your opponents, yellow to recover from disruption, black to turn a sharp corner, and green to sprint.

Each racer begins the game with different abilities, and they improve their skills as the race progresses, leading to big bonuses in their favorite types of moves. Show the emperor the kind of move he prefers, and a racer's skills will increase even faster.

Players deploy tokens to give their moves a special bonus. More tokens can be earned by impressing the crowd with large matching card plays. Players may choose to delay using their best sets until they're big enough to qualify for a fan token.

Some races will be violent and others calm, depending upon whether the players and emperor behave disruptively. Attacks cause damage, which reduces movement speed. Players who specialize in recovery moves may overcome damage quickly. Others may need to carefully deploy their shields on turns when violence is expected.

It's not always clear who's winning the race. Being in front of the pack may not be as important as developing a critical skill, collecting powerful tokens, or keeping damage low. Whip icons allow those who have fallen behind to surge back into competition.

Charioteer is easy to learn. It can be played by bright kids as well as adults. Despite its accessibility, it is a game of skill.

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Components List

• Two 17" x 22" Mounted Mapboards
• 6 Player Chariot Pieces (wood)
• 147 Card Charioteer Decks
• 24 Card Skills Deck
• 6 Player Boards (thick card stock)
• 30 Player Tokens, 5 per player (screen printed wooden blocks) 
• 60 Fan Tokens (screen printed wooden blocks)
• 24 Skill Markers in 6 colors, 4 markers per player (wooden hex blocks)
• 40 Damage Cubes
• One wooden Round Tracker
• One Draw Bag
• One D6 Custom die

Sixty-Something Millions of Years Ago — A great ice age has ended. With massive warming altering the globe, another titanic struggle for supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species.

Dominant Species: Marine is a game that abstractly recreates a small portion of ancient history: the ending of an onerous ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth.

Each player will assume the role of one of four major aquatic-based animal classes—dinosaur, fish, cephalopod or crustacean. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won’t last: It is indeed “survival of the fittest.”

Through wily action pawn placement, you will attempt to thrive in as many different habitats as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. You will also want to propagate your individual species in order to earn victory points for your animal. You will be aided in these endeavors via speciation, migration and adaptation actions, among others.

 All of this eventually leads to the end game – the final ascent of a vast tropical ocean and its shorelines – where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have their animal crowned the Dominant Species.

But somebody better become dominant quickly, because there’s a large asteroid heading this way….

Game Play

The large hexagonal tiles are used throughout the game to create an ever-expanding interpretation of the main ocean on earth as it might have appeared tens of millions of years ago. The smaller Hydrothermal Vent tiles will be placed atop some of the larger tiles throughout play, converting them into Vents in the process.

The action pawns drive the game. Each pawn allows a player to perform the various actions that can be taken—such as speciation, environmental change, migration or evolution. When placed on the action display, a pawn will immediately trigger that particular action for its owning player.Dominant Species: Marine includes new “special” pawns that can be acquired during the course of play. These special pawns have enhanced placement capabilities over the “basic” pawns that each player begins the game with.

Generally, players will be trying to enhance their own animal’s survivability while simultaneously trying to hinder that of their opponents’—hopefully collecting valuable victory points along the way. The various cards will aid in these efforts, giving players useful one-time abilities, ongoing benefits, or an opportunity for recurring VP gains.

Throughout the game, species cubes will be added to, moved about on, and removed from the tiles in play (“earth”). Element disks will be added to and removed from both animals and earth.

When the game ends, players will conduct a final scoring of each tile and score their controlled special pawns—after which the player controlling the animal with the highest VP total wins the game.

Dominant Species Veterans

For players of the original Dominant Species, this iteration introduces several key evolutions to the system (pun definitely intended):

• Actions are taken immediately whenever a pawn is placed instead of waiting to execute actions after all pawns are on the board. This gives players a bit more flexibility in their strategy, doesn’t increase game time when more pawns are acquired by players, and lessens the brain-burn quite a bit since it alleviates the burden of having to plan out an entire turn in advance.

   

• Domination is no longer on a per-tile basis, and is no longer ‘competitive’ with other players. In this game you check dominance for each element type over the entire earth, and whether or not you dominate an element type is independent of whether one or more opponents also dominate it. Domination of an element is how you acquire – and try to maintain – control of the special pawns.

   

• Animals no longer have default special abilities. Now, players are dealt 3 Trait cards during setup, choosing one to keep and putting the others back in the box. The chosen Trait gives their animal one of eighteen unique abilities spread amongst the Trait cards.

   

• Acquiring special pawns through domination gives a player great flexibility in planning and executing a strategy. Special pawns can ‘bump’ an opponent’s basic pawn in order to take an action that would otherwise be blocked. They can be placed anywhere on the action display (where basic pawns must be placed in top-to-bottom order only). There are powerful action spaces where only a special pawn can be placed. And at the end of the game, each special pawn awards its owner VPs according to its highest achieved dominance value.