As an example of that diversity, let me introduce Circles, a late 2022 release from HUCH! for 2-5 players:
On one side of the game board, you dive into the Wild West to mine gold and silver, fight bandits, and fulfill your dream of owning your own ranch. On the other side, you visit the shooting range and try your hand at hitting various targets.
Here's a summary of this new design:
In East India Companies, players manage a large shipping company that trades with far flung trading posts in India. They must manage their ships and invest in buying shares of their own company or those of their competitors. Most importantly, players have to keep an eye on the constantly fluctuating market prices! Is it better to invest your money in the stock market or in buying goods? Do they prefer to use fast ships with low tonnage or slower ships with larger holds? Whatever the players choose, their strategies will influence those of their opponents.
This 2-4 player game is essentially Risk transformed into a quick-playing card game:
Each player starts with five cards in hand, and on a turn you take one of three actions:
—Draw two cards.
—Place a region card from your hand into play face up as long as no one else has already claimed this region.
—Attack a region owned by an opponent. Each of you can choose cards from your hand as reinforcements, revealing them at the same time and adding their value to the die on your attacking or defending card. If the attacker has a higher value, they take the card and add it to their holdings; otherwise the defender keeps it.
At game's end, score 1 point for each card that makes up your largest territory and 1 point for each card in your hand that duplicates a card in this territory.
For now, though, Nostromo Editions will launch with the 1-4 player game Aetherya at the FIJ game fair in Cannes at the end of February 2022, with HUCH! releasing the game in German in the first half of 2022. Here's an overview of the design:
In the game, each player starts with a 4x4 face-down arrangement of cards, and each turn you draw a card to replace something in your playing space.
Aetherya includes three game modes — competitive, co-operative, and solo — as well as variants for players of different ability levels.