Kyoto takes players straight into one of the burning issues of our time: climate change ƒ?? and not with a wagging finger, but by putting them into the shoes of the decision makers.

As delegates from different countries, players face a few quick rounds of negotiation at a climate conference. Together, they try to hit reduction targets and provide the needed funding, knowing that each round they fail to do so they inflict severe damage on the planet. But bent on preserving their own country's wealth and following their secret agendas, none of them may be eager to give more than absolutely necessary. After all, the winner will be whoever best preserves their wealth...unless the impending damage to earth becomes too severe, in which case the conference fails immediately and the greediest player can't win.

This game, named after the Swiss psychiatrist Herman Rorschach, uses some of his famous inkblot images (and many new ones) to put 2 teams to the test. The teams earn points by correctly guessing how their members paired randomly selected words with these inkblot images. Reading the other players and learning their associations is the key to success, but the real fascination lies in seeing how differently these images can be perceived, and in discussing and explaining the airings afterwards.

A player secretly pairs three words with 3 inkblot images. That player?s teammates choose one of the images and guess the words. Before the word is revealed, the other team gets a shot at guessing nd stealing points.

In Savannah Park, you each run your own wildlife park, and your goal is to group animals with their own kind ? but everyone takes turns deciding what to move, so you might not be able to shuffle animals into the right spaces.

Each player starts the game with the same set of 33 unique animal tiles, with those tiles laid out at random in your personal wildlife park. Three bush-fire spaces and one rock space will remain unoccupied in your park for the entire game, and six tree spaces and four grass spaces are unoccupied at the start of play.

On a turn, you name a specific face-up tile that all players must pick up, flip face down, then move to a different empty space within their own park. Tiles that have been flipped cannot move again, and once all tiles have moved, the game ends with a scoring round. First, tiles adjacent to bush fires are removed if they depict as many animals as the number of fires (1, 2, or 3) on the bush-fire space. Score for each grass and tree uncovered on your board. Finally, score for each of the six animal species; the bigger the main herd of each of species and the more water holes it contains, the more points you score, e.g. a herd of five rhinos and three watering holes is worth (5x3) 15 points. The player with the most points wins.

Savannah Park includes a solo mode, a set-up variant that allows you to place the bush fires and trees where you wish, and a scoring variant that rewards you for bumping a lion out of the animals' way.

Fifty years ago, humanity began mining the Moon and the asteroids, and for decades that task was firmly kept in the hands of the World Government. But the turmoils of recent years have caused this enterprise to collapse. Now, adventurous companies and private investors take to the sky to revive this mining network.

As investors, you try to earn the most CrypCoin over the course of seven rounds. You do this by investing mined resources in companies and by spreading their outposts. You can improve your earnings by supporting your scientists? research and by having them collect precious helium-3.

The heart of Skymines is a unique card programming and hand management system that requires careful and clever planning. It provides deep player interaction by letting you invest in any of the four companies as you see fit.

And as the combination of company abilities changes each game, there are endless synergies and strategies to explore.