From the Big Apple to Mr. Cabbagehead's Garden via the Titanic

"The actual business model isn't me sitting around with 20 people designing games," Bergren says. "It’s finding games that are amazing that the designers are unequipped to publish themselves for various reasons. And then swooping in and helping them."

New York City, 1926: Two crime families battle for territory to extort local businesses and control backdoor distribution of spirits during Prohibition. Each family fights dirty, doing all they can to seize ownership of alcohol crates, even if that means sending rivals to sleep with the fishes. You are the "Capodecima" for one of these families. Command your henchmen to gain the upper hand in New York City by collecting crates, eliminating rivals, exposing moles, and tipping off the DA on your opponent. Do you have what it takes for your family to become Capo dei Capi?

Each round in MOB: Big Apple, players take turns rolling two dice, then decide how to execute the results. Each roll allows players to allocate henchmen to the two game boards and perform various dastardly tasks, such as loading cars with henchmen to drive to locations, loading crates of contraband, revealing their rival's moles, and eluding the District Attorney.

In more detail, six key locations of New York City are contested each round, with half being represented by a black die and half by a white die. You roll one of each die on a turn, and the die values denote which locations may be interacted with, and how many henchmen may travel to that specific location, with the white die serving as the location and the black die the number of henchmen or vice versa. During every turn, a player must send at least one henchmen to perform a specific task on the action board, which can help command cars, expose moles, move crates, and influence the District Attorney to move in on their rival’s family.

Once both players have allocated all of their henchmen, the round ends, then a battle takes place at each location, with the survivors remaining to guard the contraband. After the third and final round, whichever Capodecina owns the most crates of contraband gains control of the Big Apple!

In Mr. Cabbagehead's Garden, vegetable cards are drafted and placed in the garden plot, a grid of six cards by three cards.

Depending on which cards are selected, one of the tedious neighbors may interfere with the garden in a variety of ways. Players must be careful in their choice of vegetable to plant, in its position in the garden, and in maintaining their supply of invaluable bees, which give Mr. Cabbagehead more flexibility in planting.

Once all cards have been drawn, the game is over and the Garden Club committee visits to evaluate Mr. Cabbagehead's garden. The number and position of vegetables matter, and players must be creative in developing a garden that is both pleasing to the eye and plentiful in vegetables.

At 23:40 on April 14, 1912 in the North Atlantic, the R.M.S. Titanic strikes an iceberg. Water immediately floods into the liner's compartments and the ship is listing to starboard in a worrying way. There is no hope about the outcome. On board, there is widespread panic.

Alone, or co-operating with other crew members, you must show presence of mind and do the right thing to save as many passengers as possible. Time is short...

The card game SOS Titanic uses a mechanism similar to Patience, with the cards representing passengers who must be arranged on the decks, then placed in the lifeboats in a particular order. As one of the crew members, you and your teammates need to move and arrange these passengers as quickly as you can. Each section of the Titanic holds a pile of cards of which only the first is available.

On their turn, a player draws a few cards from the main deck and tries to move passengers out of the sinking ship onto the lifeboats. Failing to move at least one passenger or needing to reshuffle the main deck might cause one section of the ship to sink, thus reducing the number of piles available as well as the hopes of those still on board. Players can also use action cards to step in at fateful times when things otherwise seem lost. The game ends when the ship has sunk completely or when all remaining passengers have been saved.