New Game Round-up: Build Castles, Constellations, Allies, Factory Goods, and Roads to Hell

フタリシロ (Futarishiro) is a castle-building game set in the age of warring states. To win, you must build a castle that's harder to overcome that the opponent's. Perhaps you can build a moat, arrange a tower, store weapons, train soldiers, and prepare for battle.

It's difficult to build a castle exactly as desired, though, as you have to read the psychology of your opponent to get the castle tiles that you want and design your territory in the best way.

Players are dealt a role card which is human, fox, or the fox spirit, and a battle is fought between humans and the fox spirit. Foxes are fluid; they ally with the fox spirit if it exists, otherwise they ally with humans. The game is played like UNO; players take turns playing a card which has the same color or number as the top card of discard pile. Each time a card is played, its effect is activated. Players could be forced to change their roles or even eliminated from the game.

The game ends when a player gets rid of all cards in their hand, in which case that player wins the game. All of that player's allies win together, but only if there is an opposing side of the winner. The game also ends when the deck runs out, in which case the side with the lower total value in their hands wins the game if there are two sides. Otherwise the player with the lowest total value in their hand wins the game.

Sometimes you are required to co-operate to win as a team, but you win anyway if you go out. It is an effective strategy to focus on winning alone.

Build a factory by hiring specialists, completing jobs, and buying new equipment. Be careful what jobs you finish, though, because everyone can piggyback on your contracts to raise capital for themselves.

Each turn in Piggyback × Factory, players can either add a free specialist to one of their three production lines or take a gamble that their factory can complete an order. If an order does get completed, that production line is reset to zero and all specialists are returned, while the player gets the value of the goods. At that moment, any other player can also piggyback on that order, although earning one fewer good. Players can then spend their money to either get victory points or buy more machines for their factory. At the end of a turn, each player advances all their production lines by one step, preparing more parts to run next turn.

In Noboribetsu, each player wants to build a fine city, but you never know what you're going to get — and in the end your plans might just get shot to hell anyway.

Each player starts with an onsen (hot springs) card, and a deck of twelve locations, twelve characters, and four Hell cards is shuffled. On a turn, the active player rolls the die. On a roll of 2-5, they take the top card of the deck and add it to their city. If it's a location, they place it on the road from their hot springs; if it's a character they place it in a location or hot springs; if it's Hell, hey, it's also a location, so it gets connected to the road.

On a roll of 1 or 6, the first player to call "Noboribetsu!" gets to take the taxi (which allows them to draw two cards on a roll of 2-5) and move one top card in a city. They can steal an opponent's location or character; they can move a character to a matching location; or they can place a lone Hell card on an opponent's location.

When the deck runs out, players score nothing for Hell-inflicted locations, 2 points for each location and matching character card on it, and 1 point for all other cards. Whoever scores the most points earns 1 victory point, and after multiple games whoever earns 3 victory points first wins.