Assorti is a new card game for 2-4 players ages 6 to adult. The 100-card deck and the rules come in a very compact box for easy storage and transportation. After everyone is dealt a hand of cards, on your turn you draw a new card and then discard a card face up in front of you. Once you have enough stacks in front of you, your tableau is complete. The object each round is to match the cards in your hand to the tableaus in front of one's opponents. You can also issue a challenge, declaring that you have the fewest unmatchable points in your hand, and you take a penalty if you are wrong. Deciding which cards to keep and which to discard while keeping track of your opponents' tableaus is the challenge. A round can often be played in 10 minutes.
Hybrid Dungeon is a cooperative role-playing game for 2-8 players, ages 10 to adult. You and your fellow players are on a quest to find out what happened to the queen's potion master. The potion master's lab has been trashed, and a door is ajar leading downward into a dungeon where players will draw three cards (head, body, and legs cards) that will determine their character's abilities from among 19 possible creatures. (You might have an owl head, elephant body, and a mermaid tail!) Each time you open a new door, you discover the trap or guardian blocking your way. If you meet the challenge successfully, you could win potion bottles to randomly transform your character further and/or weapons and tools for future challenges. Collect all three of the magical gems in the dungeon without losing any of the characters. With variations in the size, configuration, and difficulty of the dungeon, play can last from two to several hours.
Laundromat is a card game for 2-6 players, ages 8 to adult. You have a hand of laundry cards and gremlins you have to get rid of before other players do. You wash your laundry and lay the gremlin cards on the machines to slow down other players. If you don't finish by the end of the day, the repair people come to fix the machines, and the next day you have more laundry to wash!
Hexsylvania: The Lords of Lumber is a board game for 2-6 players, ages 8 to adult that involves area control and resource management. Players use a fleet of up to three trucks to deliver lumber to the market in Hexsylvania, and use the profits to buy more forest land and plant more trees. But each season brings new challenges -- flooding in spring, summer forest fires, diseases in the fall, and winter road closures -- and if you don't get to market when demand is high, you might not make a profit. The rules are fairly simple, but the strategy is challenging. Play can last from 30-60 minutes. Working on developing a game that uses the same components (and possibly the opposite side of the board) called Hexsylvania: The Princes of Paper.
Pipefitters is a tile-laying game for 2-4 players, ages 7 to adult. Your mission is to lay pipe to keep the water from up to 4 tanks from flooding. If you close off all the spigots, you gain points. If any of the tanks floods, you lose points. Most games last around 30 minutes, and points can be carried from one round to the next for tournament play.
