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Who will you invite to tea? Be careful who you invite as sometimes the characters will disappear as soon as they arrive!

In Tea Time, players collect characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and each character card (other than Alice) is double-sided, with a normal image on one side and a reverse "mirrored" image on the other. Each round, an array of characters is laid out, with normal and mirrored images alternating. The round's start player takes one character, adds it to his collection, then places the Alice card in that spot of the array. The next player takes 1-2 cards, but if he takes two, the cards must be adjacent. From the third player on, each player takes 1-3 cards; again, you can take multiple cards only if they're adjacent. If you ever have a normal and a mirrored image of the same character in your collection, *poof* they both disappear.

After five rounds (with two players) or three rounds (with 3-4 players), the game ends. Players score 1-15 points for collecting 1-5 cards of the same character – with zero cards of a character being worth five points, so sometimes you do want them to vanish quickly! Alice herself is worth four points, and whoever has the most points wins.

In Home Sweet Home, players have five diving bells and want to get as many sea creatures into them as possible – but crabs don't like octopi and vice versa, so keep those two species separate if you don't want trouble.

To set up the game, each player lays out diving bell cards in front of them, numbered 1-5, and receives four cards from the shuffled animal deck; crab and octopus cards are also numbered 1-5. At the start of a round, a player lays an animal card from her hand in the center of the table and states the sum of all cards played. The next player does the same, making sure that all animal cards are visible. This continues until the sum of the animals played totals twelve or more. The player who laid the last card takes the stack, then places the animals in her diving bells based on the number on the cards. If you would lay a crab in a diving bell that already holds one or more octopi cards (and vice versa), you must discard one card of each type.

Once the deck rounds out, players finish the round, if possible, then sum the animals in their diving bells. The player with the highest total wins!

In the dice game Next!, players try to roll specific combinations of colors/symbols in order to claim target cards. The harder the target is to claim, the more points that card is worth.

To set up the game, shuffle the 45 target cards, then lay them out face up in stacks of 15 in the three card trays. On a turn, a player can roll the dice up to three times, setting aside any dice that she wants to keep after each of the first two rolls. If a player could claim a target card after the first or second roll – such as a card showing three-of-a-kind – but decides to roll again, she can no longer claim that card after a future roll. Once a player claims a card, her turn ends and the next player goes, rolling all six dice to start the turn.

If a player doesn't claim a card, however, the next player has the option of immediately claiming a card that matches the dice previously set aside or keeping those dice set aside and having only two rolls on his turn to try to claim a card.

Some cards have icons that allow whoever wins it to take a special action, such as a bonus turn or theft of a card from an opponent.

After a player has claimed a certain number of cards (4, 5 or 7 with four-to-six, three or two players), that player can decide to end the game. The game ends automatically once a player has claimed six, eight or ten cards (again, based on the number of players). Players then tally their points, and whoever has the high score wins!

In Panic Lab, the player-scientists have their hands full trying to figure out which amoeba to catch and where it might have oozed off to. To set up the game, shuffle the 25 cards, then lay them out in a circle.

At the start of a round, one player rolls four special dice which indicate the color, shape and pattern of the amoeba being sought as well as the color of the lab it left and in which direction it was traveling. Competing at the same time, players need to find the lab, then move in the right direction to spot the amoeba (which may, of course, be striped and not spotted).

But wait! If you encounter a vent after leaving the lab, you need to skip to the next vent in the circle before continuing your search. (Amoebas prefer to travel in the dark when possible.) Plus, if an amoeba passes through one of three mutation devices in the circle, you need to alter the criteria for your search, looking for a tentacled amoeba instead of one with a tail, for example, or an orange/red amoeba instead of a blue/purple one. Zap!

The first player to lay her hand on the correct card collects a token, and the first player to collect five tokens wins!

In Stratopolis, players want to build wide, while also building big.

Each player starts the game with twenty L-shaped tiles comprised of three squares; one player has tiles showing all green squares, green and neutral squares, or two green squares and one red square, while the other player's tiles reverse red and green. Players shuffle and stack these tiles face down, revealing only the topmost tile.

To start the game, a two-square tile (one red, one green) is placed on the table. Players then take turns adding their topmost tile to the display. A tile can be placed (1) on the table with at least one edge adjacent to an edge in play or (2) on top of at least two tiles already in play. When placed on a higher level, each square of the tile must be supported, the tile must be level, and red and green squares cannot cover one another. (Every other color play – such as green on neutral or red on red – is legal.)

Once all tiles have been played, players count the number of squares in the largest contiguously connected area of their color, then multiply this number by the height of the square in this area that is at the highest level. The player with the highest score wins!

The game board consists of an inclined plastic holder that holds ten racks, with each rack holding ten colored tokens. Tokens come in five player colors (19 each) and the white Jokers (5). To set up the game, slide the tokens into the racks, then place the racks in the holder so that no more than color has more than five tokens orthogonally connected. Each player then receives a token that reveals her color for the game, a token that she keeps hidden from other players.

On a turn, a player chooses a group of two or more orthogonally connected tokens and pushes on these tokens so that they fall through the racks and down the holder. (A player can choose to make a joker any color, so she can include or exclude a joker as she wishes during her turn.) Any tokens that were above these will slide down inside the racks. The player keeps all the tokens removed.

Players take turns removing tokens until either a player is eliminated from the game or no groups of two or more tokens remain. At this point, the game ends and players reveal their secret colors. Whoever has the fewest tokens of her color on the board wins! If two or more players are tied, they compare the tokens they collected during the game; whoever collected fewer of her own color wins.

"All Animal Comrades believe that 1984 was a great year for the Animal Farm – at least the Ministry of Truth claims so..."

1984: Animal Farm presents a dystopian reality in which animals have overthrown their human masters. When the fires of the revolution died down, a political game began to establish the only proper totalitarian regime. The players take the roles of animal dictators who will stop at nothing to gain absolute power over the global Farm.

1984: Animal Farm is a modular negotiation game for 3 to 5 players that's based on the concept of forced cooperation. On one hand, players share some business with their neighbors; on the other hand – they are divided by the will to win. The game favors efficient strategy, slick negotiations and successful bluffing. At the same time, it forces the players to form temporary alliances with their enemies and keep an eye on their friends. All this makes each round of the game abound in heated talks (both public and secret), pacts, promises and betrayals. Special abilities drawn before the game, along with the winning conditions, guarantee that no two games will be the same.

Bitcoin gets its power from a network of individuals and not from a central authority, so those individuals are the ones who must fight to spread the word. Others have compared Bitcoin with the printing press or even Napster, and have said that Bitcoin will be widely adopted when it gets "easier" to use. IMHO, this is not true. Bitcoin will be widely adopted when it becomes the only way to get something that you want.

Let me explain. Let's go back to the days of Napster. It was not easy to use. You had to download it from a non-user-friendly site, install it in your computer, look for servers, configure the ports...but it was a success after all. Why? Because it was the only way to get music for free! Not because it was easy to use. People wanted free music, but music was not available for free anywhere else. That was the product people were looking for – free music – and only Napster gave it to them.

So I decided to support Bitcoin by using my best skills (designing and producing board games) and bringing a product to the "real" world that can be purchased only in Bitcoin.

UNITY is a board game for 2 to 3 players in which each player strives to unite his pieces at any cost. By sacrificing the right pieces at crucial moments, you can shatter your opponents' groups as they coalesce, or eliminate a pesky splinter group of your own pieces — anything to create unity.

Why "Unity"? The game name is a call to all to awaken to join this technological wonder. Even if Bitcoin fails, others will come afterwards as this technology is here to stay.

I don't expect to sell thousands of copies. I expect others to follow this path or bring some new ideas to wipe out the central planned systems. This is not a giant leap – but a giant leap is made of these tiny steps.

In Mice and Mystics players take on the roles of those still loyal to the king – but to escape the clutches of Vanestra, they have been turned into mice! Play as cunning field mice who must race through a castle now twenty times larger than before. The castle would be a dangerous place with Vanestra's minions in control, but now countless other terrors also await heroes who are but the size of figs. Play as nimble Prince Colin and fence your way past your foes, or try Nez Bellows, the burly smith. Confound your foes as the wizened old mouse Maginos, or protect your companions as Tilda, the castle's former healer. Every player will have a vital role in the quest to warn the king, and it will take careful planning to find Vanestra's weakness and defeat her.

Mice and Mystics is a cooperative adventure game in which the players work together to save an imperiled kingdom. They will face countless adversaries such as rats, cockroaches, and spiders, and of course the greatest of all horrors: the castle's housecat, Brodie. Mice and Mystics is a boldly innovative game that thrusts players into an ever-changing, interactive environment, and features a rich storyline that the players help create as they play the game. The Cheese System allows players to horde the crumbs of precious cheese they find on their journey, and use it to bolster their mice with grandiose new abilities and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.

The year is 3012. It's been a millennium since the Armageddon. Deep in the Yucatan jungle, humanity has mutated, degenerated, and segregated into five clans: Jaguar, Snake, Monkey, Gar, and Bat. These clans now battle it out for dominance in the region, cooperating when it suits them and actively working against each other when the opportunity arises.

In 3012, players start the game with small decks of Scout cards, which provide gold to make purchases. Two piles of cards – an Ally deck and a Weapon deck – provide static cards to buy, with three cards from each deck always available to purchase each round. Cards that are not bought remain there for other players to buy. Two non-static Action decks – one with cheap cards, the other expensive – are also available, and at the start of your turn, you reveal one card from each of these two Action decks. You get the benefits of the Action cards you reveal, whether you buy them or not, and they're removed from play if you don't buy them.

Dungeon Command: Sting of Lolth is a card-driven skirmish game played on modular interlocking map tiles that uses action cards, creature cards and miniatures. The object of the game is to remove all of the gold from your opponent's vault.

Each player controls a faction comprised of 12 miniatures, while also having a deck of 12 creature cards and a deck of action cards, the number of which varies by faction. Play begins with each player choosing, then putting into play creatures whose combined levels total no more than seven, with and no creature exceeding the third level during this initial placement. Each player then draws three action cards and three creature cards, then places 20 gold into his vault.

Creatures are put into play from your hand by paying gold from your supply equal to the creature's level. Action cards can be played by creatures whose stats match the card. (For example, a creature with Dex as its main stat can play any action card that has Dex as its requisite stat.)

When a creature is killed, the creature's controller moves gold from his vault into his supply equal to the creature's level. The game ends when a player can no longer move gold from his vault to his supply. Players receive victory points (VP) for gold in their vault, and the player with the most VP wins.

Fantasy Flight is publishing a new version of Netrunner, a standalone game rather than a trading card game. I am not involved with the design – Fantasy Flight offered to involve me but the time frame seemed too tight. I have not yet seen the design though it has been described – and based on its description and Fantasy Flight's excellent handling of many classic games, I am sure it is in good hands.

Android: Netrunner is an asymmetrical Living Card Game for two players. Set in the cyberpunk future of Android and Infiltration, the game pits a megacorporation and its massive resources against the subversive talents of lone runners.

Corporations seek to score agendas by advancing them. Doing so takes time and credits. To buy the time and earn the credits they need, they must secure their servers and data forts with "ice". These security programs come in different varieties, from simple barriers, to code gates and aggressive sentries. They serve as the corporation's virtual eyes, ears, and machine guns on the sprawling information superhighways of the network.

In turn, runners need to spend their time and credits acquiring a sufficient wealth of resources, purchasing the necessary hardware, and developing suitably powerful ice-breaker programs to hack past corporate security measures. Their jobs are always a little desperate, driven by tight timelines, and shrouded in mystery. When a runner jacks-in and starts a run at a corporate server, he risks having his best programs trashed or being caught by a trace program and left vulnerable to corporate countermeasures. It's not uncommon for an unprepared runner to fail to bypass a nasty sentry and suffer massive brain damage as a result. Even if a runner gets through a data fort's defenses, there's no telling what it holds. Sometimes, the runner finds something of value. Sometimes, the best he can do is work to trash whatever the corporation was developing.

The first player to seven points wins the game, but not likely before he suffers some brain damage or bad publicity.

Courtier began its game life as Henry the Great. This title may bring to mind Henry VIII of England, however my game was about the much-revered Henry IV of France (1553-1610). Champlain's Dream, David Hackett Fischer's engaging history of French-speaking settlements in the New World, inspired me to make a game about the complicated court intrigue surrounding Henry IV.

Fischer describes a world populated by strange but important-sounding figures such as Intendant, Chancellor, and Marshal who sought to administer the kingdom of France. Many religious groups, both Catholic (Jesuit and Recollet orders) as well as Protestant (Huguenot), and numerous artisans and businessmen all vied for the patronage of their king. Added to this web were several layers of nobility and those supporting the Queen, Marie de Medici (yes, those Medicis). In 1600, the famous Cardinal Richelieu was only a bishop, yet he had already begun to maneuver his way into the royal court. And hardly anything was done without the consent of the powerful Minister Maximilien de Bethune, duc de Sully. Champlain, the great explorer and founder of Quebec, routinely wove his way in and out of this complex mess to secure needed permissions, capital and supplies.

I admired Champlain's skill at navigating this sea of bureaucratic red tape. It seemed like a compelling setting: the kind of story that could be told by a board game.

In Tokaido, each player is a traveler crossing the "East sea road", one of the most magnificent roads of Japan. While traveling, you will meet people, taste fine meals, collect beautiful items, discover great panoramas, and visit temples and wild places but at the end of the day, when everyone has arrived at the end of the road you'll have to be the most initiated traveler – which means that you'll have to be the one who discovered the most interesting and varied things.

Through a unique zen mood, Tokaido is a strategic game while being extraordinarily peaceful and easy to apprehend by everyone.

Aztlán is a strategy game with bluffing and challenging mechanisms set in the mythical land of Aztlán, ancestral home of the Nahuatl (Aztec) people. In Aztlán, four tribes strive to survive and prosper, under the scrutiny of the Aztec Gods themselves.

The game develops during five different epochs, each one divided into four phases. Players try to conquer the largest realm, using an intriguing and highly interactive mechanism. In each epoch, the tribes have uneven and secret strengths, so the players' strategy must be based on intuition and bluff.

When winning a conflict, you are faced with the difficult choice between eliminating your enemies, or deciding to co-exist with them. Peaceful co-existence brings the opportunity to develop your own civilization and gain future advantages, but can you trust your opponent?

Road to Enlightenment gives players control of great scientists, artists, philosophers, religious leaders, politicians and military leaders, bringing them uniquely and individually to life.

You play as one of the great monarchs from 17th and early 18th century Europe representing one of the seven top powers of the era: Austria, England, France, Poland, Russia, Spain or Sweden. Your objective is to be recognized as the most prestigious monarch by producing the most admired art and culture, lead the continent in scientific innovations, spread or resist the spread of Catholicism, and attempt military expansion beyond your historical borders. All of this is accomplished by marshaling 134 historical "luminaries": important historical figures covering every relevant domain of human achievement during the period.

The luminaries are rated in between one and seven different areas of endeavour: military, politics, religion, ideas, science, art or wealth. Additionally, each luminary has a unique Action, Enhancement or Response based on their real historical achievements to be brought to bear in service of your nation.

In order to create a game that simulates the battle between nations for prestige - covering war, politics, religion, science and art - while focusing on many of the diverse people of history, we've mashed up aspects from wargames, Euro games, deck building games, and statistical sports simulations. While it is an eclectic mix, this broad spectrum approach to the game's design enabled this diverse and richly detailed set of conditions to come together in a game that is epic in scale but doesn't take all day to play.

In Town Center, players build a city – in particular, the town center. They add cubes on their personal board and try to arrange them as best as possible in order to score the most victory points. Each cube represents a different type of module. Flats, shops, offices, generators, lifts, car parks, town hall can be built and stacked during the course of the game. Each module generates influence on adjacent land and on cubes directly below or above.

Each round, players will gain two cubes of different colors through a non-random mechanism, build them on their game board, then eventually stack them in order to make towers according to the building rules. If the players have done their job well, some modules will be able to evolve, becoming bigger in three dimensions. The last phase is an income phase in which players gain money from the shops and parking lots if they are supplied with electricity.

The bigger and higher your city is, the more victory points players will have at the end of the game, which lasts ten rounds – but do not forget to provide electricity to all your flats, shops, and lifts to make them more efficient.

You're one of the Great Old Ones – beings of ancient and eldritch power. Cosmic forces have held you at bay for untold aeons, but at last the stars are right and your maniacal cult has called you to this benighted place. Once you regain your full powers, you will unleash your Doom upon the world!

There's only one problem: You're not alone. The other Great Old Ones are here as well, and your rivals are determined to steal your cultists and snatch victory from your flabby claws! It's a race to the ultimate finish as you crush houses, smash holes in reality, and fight to call down The Doom That Came To Atlantic City!

You and your fellow players are Great Old Ones competing to be the first to destroy the world. There are two ways to achieve this:

• Any Great Old One can win by obtaining six gates, at which point the game instantly ends. You have only five gate markers because if you open a sixth gate, you win!

• At the start of the game, each Great Old One receives a Doom card providing a shortcut to victory. If you land on one of your gates and meet the preconditions, you may attempt the action listed on your Doom. If you succeed, you win!

It's good to be the Overlord. You have minions to grovel at your feet, limitless wealth, and absolute power over all the lands – but you know that your subjects are plotting. They envy your wealth and hope to steal it for themselves, specifically by removing you from the picture.

So you've decided to secure your power and eliminate these individuals by sending your executioner out with orders to kill the first person he meets. Unfortunately, your executioner is a gullible fellow who's extremely enthusiastic about his job – easy to dissuade and misdirect, if you're clever enough.

Who will be the first player with no excuse to miss his own funeral? Once the axe starts swinging, not even the Overlord is safe!

Kill the Overlord is a fun, fast-paced game of political murder for 4 to 8 players that can be played in about twenty minutes. The goal of the game is simple: Eliminate other players by sending the Overlord's executioner after them, while at the same time saving your own skin. Each time a player dies, his survivors climb another rung up the political ladder, taking the deceased's title and all the wealth and power that comes with it. The player who can secure enough wealth and the title of Overlord first will become the True Ultimate Supreme Overlord (and win the game).

Paris, XVIIth century. Cardinal Richelieu is centralizing power in the name of King Louis XIII and defends France against those he considers its enemies: the English, the protestants, the Habsburgs and French nobles scheming against him and the crown. Will you side with the cardinal, or will you be seduced by the promise of wealth and power from the queen and foreign nations? Be warned that the cardinal will hinder too ambitious intrigants. Become an influent noble in the court by accumulating prestige and favors. The player most helpful to each faction is also rewarded at the end of the game.

Richelieu is a tactical game with a lot of bluff and interaction, with intrigue everywhere. Every instance of intrigue will pit Cardinal Richelieu against his enemies. The players are nobles taking sides in these intrigues by placing agents with secret values and thus influencing the intrigues. Will you choose to side with Richelieu or the conspirators – or perhaps even help both? You can keep your support secret or make it directly known to others when placing your agents at the intrigues. It costs money to place agents, but the winning faction gives higher rewards for the players that helped them the most.

The Cardinal's mood is influenced by his success or failures, and he will become intolerant against too influential nobles (i.e. the players), who will have one fewer action to spend during a turn as a result.

There are many possibilities and opportunities to score points for the player who foresees and thwarts the plans of other players. During the game, you will constantly have to choose your side: Will you side with the Cardinal, or will you be seduced by the promise of wealth and power from the Queen and from foreign nations?