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In this game for 2-4 players, you and your teammates are mole rats on a research station that has been invaded by snakes. You need to collect four pieces of equipment and leave the station in an escape pod before you're bit or time runs out.
On a turn, you carry out the instructions on the card in front of you, perhaps moving yourself or your teammates, moving one or more snakes, or adding a new snake to the board. Land on the bottom of a ladder, and the character (or snake) advances one level toward the escape pod; land on a chute, and you descend a level — or are shot out into the vast reaches of space where you die slowly of asphyxiation. Make sure that only snakes suffer this fate or you lose the game!
If you land on a snake, you're bit and must return to your starting location; get bit a second time, and you die. Run out of cards, you die. Let a snake board the escape pod, you die. In case that threat of death isn't enough for you, the game includes a pack of cards to add to the deck once you've triumphed a few times so that you can increase the challenge. Snakes on a pod!
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Prototype artwork
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To set up the game, place all of the blocks face down and shuffle them. Each player then takes fifteen blocks and turns the blocks so that only they see what's one them. They take turns placing the blocks into a two-dimensional pyramid-shaped structure, again seeing only their blocks, then they take turns removing any one block from the pyramid and placing it into one of three poker hands that they're constructing. Each poker hand is competing against the one opposite it that's being built by the opponent.
If a player draws a pharaoh, they draw three face-down blocks that weren't initially chosen, discard two of them, then add the third block to one of their poker hands.
Once all the blocks have been removed, the player who wins two or three of the poker hands wins!
Even with all of this wood in the box — well, nothing but wood really! — R&R Games plans to market this game with a $20 MSRP to make it an autobuy for anyone with even a slight interest in the game.
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The Automobiles: Racing Season expansion adds multiple elements to the Automobiles base game. First, players can adopt the role of a driver who has a special power unique to that character. Players can also acquire sponsors during the game, and each sponsor has an array of actions available to them.
Automobiles: Racing Season includes three new tracks, two smaller ones on half of the game board and a larger one on the reverse side of the entire board. Cards are included for these boards and those in the base game, and now players can compete in a season of multiple tracks, keeping their driver for the entire season and (more importantly) keeping their bag intact as they move from one track to another, thereby supercharging the race right from the starting line for each race past the first.
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More specifically, In the Year of the Dragon — now dubbed In the Year of the Dragon: 10th Anniversary — will include The Great Wall of China & The Super Events expansions from the alea Treasure Chest.
Notre Dame: 10th Anniversary will contain the Notre Dame base game, the New Persons expansion from Treasure Chest (now dubbed "New Persons I"), and a new "New Persons II" expansion. Each of the "New Persons" expansions consists of nine character cards, with three of each labeled A, B or C, and you can choose to use particular characters in a game or draw three cards at random from shuffled A, B and C decks.
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Mock-ups of New Persons I & II at BGG.CON 2016
What's more, Notre Dame: 10th Anniversary will include a small expansion for The Castles of Burgundy called Trade Routes. The gist of this twelve-card expansion is that each player starts with three cards in a row above their player board, with each card depicting three actions. When a player takes the first action depicted on their leftmost card, they receive a bonus and cover this space; when they now take the second action, they receive a bonus and cover this space; etc.
To answer some of the questions asked in that original post, these new editions of Notre Dame and In the Year of the Dragon will bear the same numbers in the alea big box series as the original releases. These expansions — both the new ones and old — will likely be available separately, possibly through the BGG Store, according to Ravensburger's Florian Baldenhofer, who I spoke with at BGG.CON 2016.
Mock-up of the Trade Routes cards at BGG.CON 2016
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