New Game Round-up: Pit Dinos Against One Another in Duelosaur Island, and Hope Your Sheep Aren't Washed Away in Lowlands

Duelosaur Island is built around a clever hand-management mechanism. Each card in the game serves three potential purposes. They contain the DNA sequences for dinosaurs you could create, the blueprints for attractions you can build, and certain actions that you can take by discarding them. Do you create the dinosaur on the top of the card to attract guests to your park? Or do you build the attraction on the bottom of the card, which can add to a player's hand-limit, income, and end-game victory points? Or do you discard the card to combine DNA towards creating another dinosaur?

Duelosaur Island comes with five new full-color "DNA dice". You can mix and match dice between Dinosaur Island and Duelosaur Island for even more variability in both games, such as the new security symbol that can appear on dice to upgrade your security level instantly!

In Lowlands, you carve your farm out of this unforgiving land, gathering and spending resource cards to transform your farmyard into pastures that allow you to profit from breeding sheep. Adding expansions to your farm will unlock new options and score you victory points, but helping to build the dike that collectively protects all players is also rewarded. No matter what, the tide will rise and, if the dike isn't high enough, it could rush in and sweep away your hard-earned profits. Will you sacrifice your own farm for the good of the community, or will you pursue your own agenda? The choice is yours.

Even without the poor weather, life on a farm is one of constant work where you find yourself tending flocks of sheep, extending their pastures, and looking for the right moment to sell them for a profit. To complete all these tasks, Lowlands gives you a group of farmers that you can assign to various tasks around your farm. To get the most out of them, you must think strategically, deciding which actions you want to take and the best time to take them. Once they've been assigned, your farmers help you build a bustling farm where there was once scrubby bushes, trees, and lakes. You begin the game with only two sheep and a small pasture, but your farmyard is rife with possibilities, its many empty spaces inviting you to customize your farm as you see fit.

While you could simply focus on creating more area for your sheep to roam, the game also provides plenty of options for customizing your farm with various buildings and features. Not only are these tiles worth victory points at the end of the game, they also make your farm more efficient and more profitable. You might add a feeding trough to your farm, for example, to immediately earn another sheep and the ability to house two sheep per pasture space instead of just one. Or you could construct a lake cabin on your property to get away from it all for a bit. While this tile doesn't give you any special abilities, it increases the value in victory points of the farmyard spaces immediately adjacent to it. Ultimately, you are free to pursue whatever strategy you see fit, building a farm wholly your own.