New Game Round-up: Atlantis Rises Again, Beowolf Gets Retold, and Reykholt Redoes Loyang

The isle of Atlantis, your home, is sinking. Will you be able to save your people in time?

Atlantis Rising is a co-operative worker placement game in which you must work together with up to five other players to deploy citizens across your homeland, gathering resources in order to build a mystic gate that can save your people. Workers placed close to the shoreline are more rewarding, but are more likely to be flooded and the actions lost.

Every turn, each player draws a misfortune card that will flood certain locations along the ever-shrinking Atlantis shoreline, or may otherwise work to undermine your efforts to save your people. So you must race to gather the necessary resources to build and power the gate, before the island disappears beneath the waves forever.

Players take on the roles of loyal Thanes to the good King Hrothgar, carousing in the vast and fabulous Mead Hall of Heorot, but powerless to defeat the terrible monster Grendel who nightly attacks their feasting — until a fearless warrior from Geatland arrives to save them: a hero named Beowulf.

The game takes place over four rounds, each representing one night of feasting. During the feasts, players draft cards to collect valuable gold coins and healing balms, receive the honour of Heorot, and sing songs to the glory of Hrothgar in the hope of being rewarded with one of his gifts. At the end of each feast, the next Grendel and Feast cards are revealed to determine who Grendel attacks, inflicting "scratches" on one or more of the players.

After the fourth feast, Beowulf arrives and defeats the monster Grendel, and Hrothgar rewards Beowulf for finally ridding Heorot of Grendel's terror, but Beowulf is generous, and shares these gifts with the players who he considers to be the most honorable. Before the true hero of Heorot can be celebrated, however, the player who suffered the most at Grendel's terrible hand is laid to rest by his comrades, and his gold coins buried with him.

In the final period of the Roman Republic, the expansion of Rome was already such that governance became increasingly difficult. Those more powerful among the lords of the republic sought to establish alliances, some of them clearer than others. Crassus, Pompeius and Caesar first and Marcus Antonius, Octavius and Lepidus later, formed trinviratus that history recalls. But in the most influential and powerful families other strong men and women will have sought to establish agreements with the aim of achieving more prestige, power and wealth.

In Primus, you are the next great name of the family to reach the notoriety in Rome in the last century B.C. Can you be the first in wealth, in peace keeping, in politics and in social prestige? Will you focus your efforts in shaping the provinces or will you cunningly maneuver in the backstage of senate? What alliances will you pursuit and with whom will you establish them?