New Game Round-up: Blue Orange Rustles Up Longhorn and Battle Sheep & Nestorgames Brings Bees, Blocks and Black Holes

1870 – Somewhere deep in Texas, the rearing of Longhorn cattle from northern Mexico is booming. It has now become a major source of income for the Texan farmers, while at the same time attracting cattle thieves of all kinds.

In Longhorn, the players assume the roles of two particularly feared outlaws: Eagle Perkins and Jessie Artist Byrd. The aim of the game is simple: to steal cattle (and a few gold nuggets, if possible) to see who can amass the most money by the end of the game — or who can get his opponent arrested by the sheriff!

In the abstract strategy game Splits, players start the game by constructing the board from eight identical four-hex tiles, then each player places her tall stack of discs on one of the border hexes. Players take turns removing some number of discs from the top of one of their towers and moving that stack of discs as far away as it can go in a straight line from that tower. A player must leave at least one disc behind when moving, so the board gradually fills and movement opportunities vanish. When a player can't make a move, she loses.

Battle Sheep uses the same rules as Splits, but includes enough pieces that up to four players can compete, whereas Splits was a game for two players only.

Black Hole, initially designed as a paper-and-pencil game, is played on a triangular board of 21 cells. Two players alternate turns placing a numbered disc of their color onto an empty space. Discs are numbered 1-10 and must be placed in numerical order. When all the discs have been placed, the game ends. The one board space that remains empty is the "Black Hole"; each player sums the values of his discs surrounding the Black Hole, and the player with the lower sum wins.

Black Hole includes two rule variants: In the first, players can place their discs in any order, and in the second players place their discs face down and shuffle them, drawing a disc at random each turn, then placing it.

The 32 pieces in Chex represent the 16 chess pieces on each side of a normal chess game. Each player shuffles his own 16 tiles and places them face down, then white draws his top tile and places it, with the piece oriented so it looks upright to him. Black then draws the top tile in his pile and places it so that it touches white's piece, either orthogonally or diagonally, and oriented so that it looks upright to him.

At that point, white can either add another piece or move his piece on the board. A move must be a legal chess move and may not separate any element of the board; all pieces much remain touching, even if just diagonally, when a move has ended. Thus you can "pin" a piece by placing a new piece on the far corner of a piece already in play.

The game ends in checkmate or stalemate, with a stalemate occurring when you must place your king into check when you draw it.

In Abeja Reina ("Queen Bee"), two players take turns moving their bee pieces on the hexagonal cells of the game board. Whoever eliminates the opponent's queen bee first wins.

The game board depicts a shared hive of sorts, with players starting on opposite sides of the board with a trench between them. The hive spaces hold only a single piece, while the trench can hold two layers of pieces. The queen bee and three workers move only one space to an adjacent hex space; the six drones move "diagonally" along a line leading away from the hex to the next hex. If you move a token onto an enemy piece in the hive, you eliminate that piece from the game.

If you move a token onto a piece already in the trench, you pin that piece; if you move a token onto an enemy that's pinning another piece, you eliminate that enemy token. When moving from the trench, workers and drones can move any number of spaces, allowing for long-range attacks. A queen can never step onto the lower level of the trench. After all, she's the queen!