New Game Round-up: Trade on the Tigris, Pit Union Soldiers Against Confederate in Lincoln, and Dogfight in Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles

Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles is a starship combat miniature game that includes ready-to-play, painted and assembled miniatures, with a special base to support its unique game mechanisms.

In the game, players take control of one or more Colonial and Cylon ships and face each other in furious dogfights and many other different kinds of missions. The game features innovative mechanisms allowing players to simulate space combat using simple and intuitive rules to imitate the unique dynamics of the battles in the TV show.

Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles includes both "Classical and "Reimagined" settings as the publisher's license with Universal Brand Development includes both the classic series, created by Glen A. Larson in the late 1970s, and the re-imagined series developed by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, which aired until 2010.

Lincoln is a fast-paced, light, two-player, card-driven strategy wargame set in the American Civil War that allows you to re-fight the entire American Civil War at a strategic level in under two hours.

Game play uses point-to-point movement and area control, hidden army strengths, and decks of cards providing the command choices and luck; there are no dice. The Union and Confederate players each have their own card decks, reflecting the relative strengths and weaknesses of both sides. The Union player must do all the running to win the game by the time they have cycled through the Union card deck for the third time, having accumulated the required amount of victory points by capturing Confederate controlled areas, as well as squeezing the Confederate player with a naval blockade. The Confederate player must hold on and thwart the North's victory ambitions to win!

Each time the decks are cycled, the Union player adds some better quality cards, becoming stronger as the game progresses, where as the Confederate player adds lower quality cards, becoming weaker. The underlying game mechanism is one of "deck destruction" rather than the more normal deck-building.

Cards have multiple uses and can be recycled if used one way but during the course of the game you have to decide which cards are going to be permanently sacrificed from your deck cycle to allow you to build units.

The Tigris river winds through the cradle of civilization, providing food, water, and a means of transportation for trade and dissemination of ideas between the various cities and towns along the way.

In Trade on the Tigris, you are one of these cities. Each round, you gain development cards that provide new abilities, produce resources (in the form of cards), trade them with the other players, and turn in sets of these for profit (points). An inevitable side effect of this interaction with others is the sharing of philosophies. The primary religion and government of your city may be shaken to its very core as a result, and the ways in which you can develop the abilities of your city will change along with them.