"New" Game Round-up: Run More Factories, Trade More Companies & Stocks, and Hire More Famous Renaissance Artists

In the 18th century the Industrial Revolution starts. The first factories are founded by businessmen like Richard Arkwright, who runs the first factory for spinning wool with machines like the Spinning Jenny and the water frame.

In Arkwright: The Card Game, you run a business and will employ workers in your factories to produce and sell goods. The more workers that have a job, the more goods that can be sold — but be prepared for crises and competitors.

The game is played over three decades (1770/1780/1790) with four rounds per decade. On your turn, you play new cards to open factories and upgrade existing ones, select improvements, improve factory quality, build machines, and employ new workers. You can also pay money to improve your stock holdings, and take out loans if you require more money for production costs. After the card playing phase, you can improve abilities by marking improvements on your score sheet.


Now each factory for each type of good produces those goods. The market fluctuates with demand, so the demand may be lower than the value you produce, decreasing your profit. Workers in these factories must be paid, and machines operating in your play area need regular maintenance, so you can possibly lose money instead of turning a profit. Selling enough of one good improves your share holdings, and there are bonuses for having the highest appeal. Lastly, if you can’t sell in England, you can ship goods overseas or store them for future rounds.

After the final round of decade 1790, the game ends. Players then sell all storehouse goods, reduce the number of shares they hold by the number of loans, and reduce further based on their personal shipping track. Then each player multiplies the number of their shares by the value of those shares to determine score. The player with the highest score wins.

Rolling Stock is a card game about stock and company trading. Players are investors buying private companies in auctions, which they may later use for an IPO (to turn them into corporations) or sell to already existing corporations (to turn them into subsidiaries of that corporation). The majority share holder of a corporation controls its actions: issuing new shares, paying dividends, and buying more subsidiaries from other corporations, players, or an ominous foreign investor.


The companies are transportation themed, starting with the early Prussian railroad. As more companies are bought, the scope of the game expands to Germany, later Europe, and ultimately even space. With expanding scope, older companies become less and less profitable until they have to be written off eventually, severely hitting the book value of their owner.

As a pure card game, Rolling Stock has no game board to simulate actual transportation. Instead, networking effects are modeled by synergies between geographically adjacent companies that are subsidiaries of the same corporation. This simplistic model merely sets the stage for the trading of stocks and companies, which is the heart and soul of the game.

Rolling Stock is vaguely inspired by the 18xx series of games, but it is clearly not a part of it. Obviously, track building is missing entirely, but even the stock market with all its superficial similarities turns out to be fundamentally different.

Compared to the 18xx series, Rolling Stock has extremely simple rules. Strategically, however, it is comparably deep and complex.

In Florenza, the players are the heads of the most powerful families in Florenza during the Renaissance period. The goal of the game is to become the most famous patron of the arts by hiring the most famous artists of the period and financing their works.

Each player can commission artworks in his own district, the Cathedral, or in the civic buildings of the city. Each artwork requires money and resources to complete. To earn the money and resources the artists need, the players send their workers to labor in various workshops, possibly even in their opponents’ districts. Additional workers can be earned by offering charity to the church. During the game, players will earn prestige points, primarily by completing artworks. Prestige points can be spent during the game, but at the end of the game they will be the player’s primary source of victory points.

NEW RULES
---• New Workshops for an increased strategic diversity
---• Addition of Captains of Fortune for an increased tactical diversity
---• Smoother and more elegant management of different aspects of the game
---• Reduced duration compared to the original game, with no loss in game depth

SOLO MODE
---• Option to play against one or more virtual opponents
---• Four difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, Masterpiece

NEW GRAPHICS AND MATERIALS
---• Modern and captivating style
---• Improved visibility of key elements on the table
---• Upgraded game materials
---• More than 500 game elements