Temple of Elemental Evil includes multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and co-operative game play designed for 1-5 players. Each player selects a hero, such as a fighter, cleric, or wizard. On their turn, each player can explore further into the dungeon (turn over new tiles), move through the already explored parts of the dungeon, and fight monsters. When a new dungeon tile is revealed, there is typically an encounter of some sort, and new monsters to fight are added. Slain monsters reward the players with treasure, and experience points, allowing them to level up and increase their skills during play.
Players must cooperate to stay alive, slay the monsters, and achieve the goal of their quest. Each scenario has a different goal, from retrieving a relic to slaying a large boss monster.
If you are the first player to earn $45 in Flea Market, you win!
In the game, players collect news in six newsworthy subjects: home, world, business, politics, sport, and leisure. To do this, they place their reporters on the news they want to publish, but they can be outbid by other newspaper owners with bigger wallets. Copy and photo cuttings can be obtained from "the morgue"; more reporters can be hired; and news sold to raise capital.
Whoever completes his front and back pages first receives a bonus — but will that player have enough Circulation Points to win?
The funny thing about this announcement is that the Catan brand has been unified in its look for the past twenty years with the exception of the titles released in English by Mayfair Games. Those have always stood apart because Mayfair went its own way with original art and component design. Now the game will be unified in its graphic design in all territories and languages.
Whatever the reason behind this change of behavior, the 20th anniversary edition of Catan — which will be losing its "The Settlers of" — will undoubtedly continue to sell and to be introduced to new audiences around the world.
The press release notes that the base game and its expansions have appeared in thirty languages and sold more than 22 million copies, and while that sounds like a lot (and honestly, it is a lot), that number still has a lot of room for growth. Just yesterday, in fact, my hairdresser said that she had played Catan for the first time the previous week — with the game's teacher naturally not using the suggested set-up for first-timers and therefore destroying her and the other players — and she was stunned to discover that the game had been on the market for two decades. "How had I not heard of this earlier?" she asked. It must be the lack of visual continuity throughout the world, I thought. Surely that's the only explanation possible...