New Game Round-up: Smash Up Epic Fantasy Characters, Deliver Sweet Desserts, Fight New Villains & Ship Goods to Osaka

The goal of the game is to defeat your opponent by reducing them to zero life. Players do this by playing moves that act as both attacks and blocks as well as with special cards and abilities granted by the player's choice of class and race.

During a turn, a player adds cards to their "aggression pile", then chooses how many cards to draw from their aggression pile into their hand. The player uses the aggression provided by the cards that remain in their aggression pile to play move cards to block incoming enemy attacks. If an attack isn't blocked, the player takes damage, specifically one damage per unblocked enemy attack. Then all the moves played by that player become attacks for the opponent to deal with on the opponent's next turn. There's more to it than that, but those are the basics...

The guests are here, and they're hungry, so try to be the best waiter at this café by making sure that all the guests get their Just Desserts!

In this card game, each player starts with a hand of three dessert cards while three guest cards are placed in the center of the table; each dessert card shows 1-3 tastes that it satisfies, such as chocolate, fruit, or pastry, while the guest cards show what they crave as well as what they refuse to eat. On a turn, you draw a dessert card, add a guest card to the table from the deck, then take one of three actions:

• Serve (and claim) one or two guests by discarding one or more dessert cards to give them what they want (while avoiding what they don't want); if you give a guest their favorite item, you get tipped with an extra dessert card.

• Draw one more dessert card.

• Dump as many dessert cards as you want, then drawing that many cards from the deck.

At the end of your turn, discard guests from the table so that only one guest of each "suit" is still waiting to be served — but the guest heading out the door (on top of the discard pile) can still be claimed by any waiter. If at any time you've served three guests of the same suit or five guests of different suits, then you win!

Just Desserts includes game variants that allow you to steal guests from another waiter by sending more sweets their way, to force other waiters to each give up one guest, and to hold a surprise party to claim a guest out of turn.

In charge of valuable cargo, you must deliver it from Osaka to Edo — but fierce competition and the Black Tide may sink your hopes for fortune!

Set sail for Japan in Traders of Osaka, a game for traders that's full of opportunities...and opportunists! On a turn, you buy goods, take coins, or reserve a card; whenever you buy goods, you move one or more ships, and when a ship reaches Edo, you sell your goods to score points while sinking other player's cargo under the ocean waves.