Crowdfunding Round-up: Wok Star, Paperback, City Hall, Alliances, Mayday!Mayday! & Much More

In Wok Star, you and your family (your fellow players) have opened a Chinese restaurant! However, with a review from your investor looming, you must rush to satisfy customers, prepare ingredients, and learn new recipes so that you can build your business and make your restaurant a sizzling success!

Wok Star is a deliciously different cooperative game that serves 2-4 players. Racing against the timer, you'll have to deal with demanding customers who each what something different! Each customer gives you only 20 seconds to fulfill his order – and if you serve too slowly, the customer eats free. Everyone has a different role to play, whether you're the busboy who collects more tips or the chef who's good at stretching the ingredients just a little farther, and everyone will be working on the meals at the same time from different angles. With just four days to impress your investor, you'll need quick thinking, clever investment, and brilliant cooperation.

Paperback blends the skill of word games like Scrabble with the interesting choices of deck-building games like Dominion. There are many ways to win – making short powerful words, long clever words or possibly a double word score. Each card has a distinct ability that can dramatically help your score if used wisely.

In each hand there is usually one perfect word that will use all your letters – you just need to find it! Flexibility comes from two elements: a "common" vowel and wild letter cards. The "common" vowel can be used by all players and changes throughout the game. You will have several wild cards in your deck; wilds also double as victory points, which determine the winner.

In Mayday!Mayday! all players are flight crewmembers aboard flight LK-886, on which the pilot has suddenly died. A heart attack? Poison? Murder? The copilot must now take the lead, but other crewmembers distrust him. The crew believes there are infiltrators amongst them. But who? A skirmish occurs. Will all infiltrators get exposed?

Each crewmember either belongs to the honest crew or is among the few infiltrators on board, all of whom know one another. You receive your secret identity card at the start of the game, and over the course of play, your fellow crewmembers will learn something about your identity – but only in part, which might lead to mistaken impressions about you. How this happens is that in addition to your secret identity card, you receive two other identity cards: one honest and one infiltrator. You mix these three cards and place them face down in front of you. Each player knows something about his neighbors by looking at one card per neighbor – and by placing a knowledge tile on this card, you show (or perhaps lie about) what you saw so that no one has to remember. Seeing a card gives you an impression of another player, but you'll never see more than one of that player's three cards, so you can't be certain of what you think. You must combine your knowledge with the knowledge of others, but who can you trust? In order to keep from being unmasked, the infiltrators will naturally act as if they're trying to deduce who might betray the crew.

During skirmishes, some crewmembers will receive first the "Benefit of the Doubt", then they can graduate to a status of "Reliable", and then one of these two reliable crewmembers will become the new Captain. This Captain must form a final crew that excludes the infiltrators from access to the cockpit. Only then will the flight be safe.

With each skirmish, a player sees one identity card held by another player. With this extra knowledge, the deductive logic gets deeper and deeper as you theorize about who is who, while also holding all the possible lies in mind! Lying is risky as it makes you look suspicious, and if your lie conflicts with the knowledge of other players, your identity as an infiltrator might be revealed. For example, once two players say opposite things about the same card, then everyone else knows that one of them must be an infiltrator – and possibly both of them! The honest players will tell their theories, and the infiltrators will make up theories that sound valuable, too. Will you make it back to the ground safely?

City Hall sees players competing to become Mayor of New York City. They do this by attempting to be the most successful at both bringing people into the city as well as campaigning for the citizens' approval. Whoever best balances these two goals will win the election.

There are seven offices within City Hall. These offices deal with a different aspect of building the city or campaigning, such as the Tax Assessor, Surveyor, or Zoning Board. In a round, each player will get to activate one of these offices. However, just because you activate an office doesn't mean you will get to use it. The other players will have an opportunity to use their influence to steal control of the office away from you. Keeping it will require countering with your own influence. However, you can instead let another player control that office this round and add their influence to your own, giving you a leg up on controlling things later on.

In using these offices, players will buy land and build properties to create attractive neighborhoods which will bring the most people into the city – or they might place a factory next to an opponent's housing complex to drive people out. They will also tax their constituents to raise funds (with the option of sacrificing popularity to tax at higher rates), buy and sell influence to the Lobbyist, and campaign to increase their approval level.

At the end of the game, the citizens of the city will vote based on which player brought them in and that player's approval level. Special interest groups will also collect votes for players based on certain goals, such as Wall Street backing the player with the most money. Whichever player has the most votes on election day will become Mayor of New York and appoint his or her opponents to the Sanitation Department.

In Alliances, you will play a superpower nation seeking world domination along with its ally. The game is mainly based on trick-taking mechanisms, with each trick representing a local struggle to control a country in the world. The world is composed of a vast number of countries, each one represented by a tile on the table. Each country also has its own defensive attributes: a certain military strength, economic strength and political strength which need to be overcome. In order to win, your alliance has to dominate the world by gaining control over the most countries.

Alliances includes three different games in one box:

-----• For two players, a confrontational trick-taking game.
-----• For three players, a game in which each player in turn plays a superpower empire while the other two players fight him off as rebels.
-----• For four players, a game in which you and your ally will team up to fight your rival alliance to control the world!

The Maidens of the kingdom keep disappearing. As an aspiring Hero, your job is to rescue them. You must battle the Monsters that have been capturing the Maidens. But you are not the only aspiring Hero trying to rescue the Maidens. Can you rescue the most Maidens and become the Greatest Hero in the kingdom?

Monsters and Maidens is a fun, easy-to-learn dice game with nine fully customized six-sided dice. Players play the role of the Hero trying to rescue the Maidens from the Monsters.

By rolling the dice and comparing the results, players determine the success or failure of their mission. Players may have some rescued Maidens but decide to push their luck and roll the dice again in an attempt to rescue even more. If they aren't careful, though, they will be overtaken by the Monsters and lose some or even all of their rescued Maidens.