Be Wicked & Wise, Place a Bet on Reapers, and Control the Bug Council of Backyardia

Dragons compete in a variety of ways, but one of their favorite ways to compete is by playing trick-taking games.

In Wicked & Wise, players are either the dragons who are playing a trick-taking game OR they're a mouse allied with a particular dragon to help manipulate the trick-taking game. Over the course of three rounds, each team of mouse and dragon fight over tricks, treasures, and coins to see which team ends up on top!

The game isn't all about wining tricks; it's about setting goals and utilizing magical treasures. If you can make enough of your goals or sabotage enough of the other team's goals, you'll have the most coins at the end of the game and be crowned king of the caves!

Necromancy isn't all fun and games, which is why once a month that deadly cabal gathers to blow off steam. Most popular with these nefarious ne'er-do-wells is a card game known as Reapers, and as might be expected the stakes with which they wager are the souls of the damned acquired through their dark dealings.

Rooted in traditional trick-taking games like Hearts or Spades, Reapers has some major differences that set it apart:

—Every hand is drafted from face-up piles of three cards rather than dealt to players.
—Winners of tricks score the lowest value card in the trick rather than the trick itself as a point.
—The game includes four suits — daggers, poison, plague, and pistols: each related to the method by which the damned souls died — as well as two different special cards called "Reapers" and "Demons".

Players place a wager as to how they think they will do in each hand, with options for scoring the fewest points, scoring the second most points, or not trying to predict — all of which can be viable strategies.

In the vast realm of Backyardia, the Bug Council convenes to discuss important things like picnics, how to ruin picnics and, of course, income tax reform. The different factions of bugs — ants, flies, bees, mosquitos and cockroaches — find themselves in an ever-shifting balance of power and only those who ally themselves with the most powerful will seize the day.

Bug Council of Backyardia is a trick-taking game that utilizes a mancala mechanism to dynamically shift which suits are powerful throughout the game, which is played over three rounds. Each round, players receive eleven cards to play ten tricks. During the tricks, the leader plays a suit and the rest of the players follow with a card of the same suit, if possible. Whoever plays the strongest card of the strongest suit wins the trick and collects it for scoring!

Meanwhile, whoever plays the lowest on-suit card gets to visit the Bug Council; this player chooses a faction tile, collects its strength cubes, then distributes them in a clockwise fashion around the council, thus altering the strength of the suits.

At the end of ten tricks, players use their remaining card to claim their allegiance to the faction matching its suit. If you play your cards right and manipulate the council to your favor, you can get a nice allegiance bonus to add to the tricks you've won.

At the end of three rounds, whoever has the most points wins the game and will be forever remembered in the annals of Backyardia history!

Melody Station is a solo drafting and placement game in which you take on the role of a musician commissioned by the East Japan Railway Company to compose new melodies for one of Tokyo's busiest and most important train lines, the Yamanote Line.

You will have to create the most suitable melody, or your piece will be disregarded and the existing composition will remain that station's staple tune.

The West: Ascendant, which combines set collection and hand management with a multiple scoring avenues, is the second card game set in the world of The North: Provenance. Two players take turns acquiring unique Facilities that are then used to acquire new cards and to carry out a variety of different in-game scoring opportunities.


In more detail, during the game, players take turns acquiring Facility cards and playing the cards they've acquired several ways. Game play is driven by the turn sequence card, which is passed back and forth throughout the game. As the game is played, players lose points, acquire new cards for their hand or Zone (play area), and score points at the end of the game for the cards in their Zone. Additionally, players lose points at the end of the game for unused Facility cards in their hand.