Vendor: Spiel-ou-Face
Type: Board Games
Price: 22.95

Metromania is a game of placement and connection which allows 2 to 4 players to build a subway network between different cities.

Each player builds 2 different subway lines, trying to go through the city and connect important places of housing, work, and leisures. After a construction phase, trip-tests verify the best and quickest lines.

The mechanism is easy: during his turn, a player puts 3 line counters on the board. If his line meets another line, a station is built where the two connect. The subway network is developed through this process. Because the grid on the board and the line counters are triangular, players have some real placement questions.

The game is very interactive, with players sometimes trying to cooperate and sometimes trying to stop other lines. They also choose, during the construction phase, the start and the end of the final trip-tests. But it's never the same player who places both start and end, so a player must anticipate and guess carefully.

Vendor: Spiel-ou-Face
Type: Board Games
Price: 25.95

Oss is a skill game based on jacks, with players trying to perform certain tricks in between tossing their jack into the air and catching it.

The game lasts four rounds, with three solo challenges and one duel challenge laid out each round. Each player has a hand of five tribe cards (from a set of eight), and going clockwise from the chief, each player lays down a tribe card in front of one of the solo challenges. If two players play on the same solo challenge, their tribe cards are moved to the duel challenge, then all other tribe cards are placed on solo challenges.

Starting with the chief, each player attempts to perform the trick shown on the challenge, with the value of the tribe card played showing how many jacks on the table must be used in the challenge. A challenge might have you setting jacks on edge, throwing a jack over a wall formed by your other hand, move jacks from the table into your other hand, and so on. If at any time, you fail to catch your jack, your turn ends — although you can twice discard a tribe card from your hand to replay the challenge. If you succeed, you keep the tribe card you played.

In a duel, the first player to complete the duel keeps one of the two tribe cards played.

After all solo and duel challenges are complete, everyone participates in a final challenge to determine who will be chief for the next round. After four rounds, players tally the points on the challenge and tribe cards they collected, and the player with the high score wins.

Reimplements: Knucklebones
Reimplements: Jacks

Vendor: Spiel-ou-Face
Type: Board Games
Price: 24.95

From fire to smartphone in less than an hour!

S-Evolution is a unique combination of a classic card game — with tricks, colors and trump — and of a typical "Eurogame" of resources management and civilization. Each player has a deck of 24 cards, and in each of the six rounds, he draws a hand of four cards from this deck. Each player starts the game in Age 1 and adds the progress card of this age to his deck.

Each round consists of a card phase, lasting 4-5 tricks among all the players, followed by an individual management phase. During the card phase, players try to (1) gather resources (which are on the cards) to pay for the needs of their civilization and to construct buildings, (2) avoid diasters, and (3) collect discoveries. However, the value of a player's cards are affected by which Age he occupies. In Ages 1 and 2, for example, his cards have no color, so they automatically lose to cards of players in Age 3 and above as those folks have discovered the awesome power of hue. What's more, in the primitive Age 1, you can't see the cards before you play them. That's how primitive you are! In Ages 5 and 6, a player can start using trump to beat out those in lower ages.

The advantages in the card phase are balanced by the needs of your population, which is much greater in later ages. In each trick, each player collects one played card based on the value of their card played, and players then use the resources on these cards (food, tools and science) to satisfy the needs of their population, erect buildings (which supply additional resources), gain advantages (which can protect you from disasters or earn you victory points), or advance to the next Age of S-Evolution. Players score points each round depending on how well they meet the needs of their population, suffering penalties if they fail to do so.

At the end of the sixth round, players score points for their sets of discoveries, and the player with the highest score wins!