New Game Round-up: Catching Streams of Numbers, Moving Trucks of Goods & Eyeing Games from CGE

Streams consists of pens, score sheets, and a deck of forty cards (bakelite tiles in the second edition); the cards are numbered 1-30, with two copies of #11-19 and one wild. Game play is similar to Bingo in that someone draws a card and everyone must then mark that number on her scoring sheet. This sheet contains a line of 20 spaces to be marked, and while these spaces can be filled in any order, if she can place them in non-descending order – identical numbers placed side-by-side don't break a stream – she'll score points. The longer the stream of ascending numbers, the more points she'll score.

Once twenty cards have been drawn and the scoresheets filled, players tally their points for each stream of non-descending numbers, and the high score wins.

In The Great Heartland Hauling Co., players take on the role of medium haul Midwest truck drivers doing their best to make a living by hauling goods for big suppliers. Players truck to various locations around America's Heartland, picking up and dropping off goods using matching cards from their hands. Most locations have native goods that require fewer cards to load; other locations may pay a premium for those goods but may also require more fuel – and time – to get there with the cargo. With limited space in each trailer and only five cards in hand at a time, players will have to expertly manage their resources, as well as play the odds and press their luck to be the best trucker on the road.

The Great Heartland Hauling Co. offers a lot of replay value through the use of cards to create a variable board set-up each game. The game includes 60 goods cubes, four thick cardboard trucks, and 46 resource cards – required for pick-up and delivery – that are drawn from a shared draft board, as well as 20 fuel cards, which are used to move about the Heartland.

In the 1970s, the governments of the world faced unprecedented demand for energy, and polluting power plants were built everywhere in order to meet that demand. Year after year, the pollution they generate increases, and nobody has done anything to reduce it. Now, the impact of this pollution has become too great, and humanity is starting to realize that we must meet our energy demands through clean sources of energy. Companies with expertise in clean, sustainable energy are called in to propose projects that will provide the required energy without polluting the environment. Regional governments are eager to fund these projects, and to invest in their implementation.

If the pollution isn't stopped, it's game over for all of us.

In the game CO₂, each player is the CEO of an energy company responding to government requests for new, green power plants. The goal is to stop the increase of pollution, while meeting the rising demand for sustainable energy — and of course profiting from doing so. You will need enough expertise, money, and resources to build these clean power plants. Energy summits will promote global awareness, and allow companies to share a little of their expertise, while learning still more from others.

In CO₂, each region starts with a certain number of Carbon Emissions Permits (CEPs) at its disposal. These CEPs are granted by the United Nations, and they must be spent whenever the region needs to install the energy infrastructure for a project, or to construct a fossil fuel power plant. CEPs can be bought and sold on a market, and their price fluctuates throughout the game. You will want to try to maintain control over the CEPs.

Money, CEPs, Green Power Plants that you've built, UN Goals you've completed, Company Goals you've met, and Expertise you've gained all give you Victory Points (VPs), which represent your Company's reputation – and having the best reputation is the goal of the game ... in addition to saving the planet, of course.

Goblins, Inc. is a corporation dedicated to building unstoppable giant doomsday robots, and it's looking for a new CEO. Do you have what it takes?

Team up with your greed-driven fellow goblins and build the ultimate doomsday robot. Meet other teams in epic battles and blow them up, but always remember, only one goblin can win because there is no "G" in team work!

The game plays over three rounds in which you partner up with each of your fellow players once to try to build the ultimate giant doomsday robot – but the other players don't know which secret achievements you must complete to impress the Boss! During the four phases of the round, the teams take turns designing, building and piloting their robots in order to destroy the other team and get one step closer to becoming the next CEO of Goblins, Inc.

Tzolkin: The Mayan Calendar presents a new game mechanism: dynamic worker placement. Players representing different Mayan tribes place their workers on giant connected gears, and as the gears rotate they take the workers to different action spots.

During a turn, players can either (a) place one or more workers on the lowest visible spot of the gears or (b) pick up one or more workers. When placing workers, they must pay corn, which is used as a currency in the game. When they pick up a worker, they perform certain actions depending on the position of the worker. Actions located "later" on the gears are more valuable, so it's wise to let the time work for you – but players cannot skip their turn; if they have all their workers on the gears, they have to pick some up.

The game ends after one full revolution of the central Tzolkin gear. There are many paths to victory. Pleasing the gods by placing crystal skulls in deep caves or building many temples are just two of those many paths...

Dungeon Lords: Festival Season is a big expansion that includes lots of Dungeon Lording goodness.

The game is still played over two years, but now each year has five rounds instead of four: winter, spring, summer, autumn and festival season. More time to build your dungeon, but also more time for adventurers to gather a larger party. There are new monsters, rooms, and traps to prepare your dungeon for the battle, but also new nasty spells for the adventurers and sneaky bards who encourage them to perform so-called "heroic" deeds – not to mention two paladins for each year, now ready to punish up to two evil players.

Would you like to push other players toward evil instead of moving yourself toward good when visiting the city? What about making an investment instead of traditional gold digging? Or what about repairing conquered tunnels or rooms instead of digging new ones? Only eight actions are still available to you, but each season one of those actions is replaced by an alternate set of spaces that offer new and intriquing options.

And did we mention that it has recently become fashionable for Dungeon Lords to have their own personal pets?