New Game Round-up: Building a New Community, Leaving Earth, Then Starting a New Five Year Mission

Five Year Mission is a cooperative dice game for 3-7 players who take the roles of crew members of either the USS Enterprise (from the original Star Trek series) or the USS Enterprise-D (from Star Trek: The Next Generation).

In these roles, players try to cooperatively solve a series of Green, Yellow and Red alerts before failing five such alerts, or getting the Enterprise destroyed. Crew members have different abilities, and both the crew and the alert encounters differ depending on the era in which the game takes place.

In Daxu, players collect sets of cards of six different types of shops: bakery, rice wine shop, wood cutter, basket maker, silk dealer, and tea house.

Each round, several cards are flipped and players decide whether they want the cards for themselves or they want to give the cards to their opponent. Obtained cards go into your personal collection, and some of these cards provide (or make you lose) reputation points. If you focus too much on one type of shop, your customers will be dissatisfied and your opponent will gain points instead of you!

At the end of the game, players score points based on who holds majorities in which shops. Holding a majority by only a few cards earns points for you, but from a certain point on, that majority provides points for your opponent instead! Whoever collects the most points from majorities and reputation points wins.

Centerville is a relatively light board game for 2-4 players. Centerville abstractly models the growth and management of a small city — perhaps not unlike the one you're in right now.

Players act as entrepreneurs, tycoons, politicians, and other local movers and shakers working to develop a modern urban area. Fortunes will be made and fame will rise. As time goes by, personal milestones will enrich the players even further.

Throughout the game, players will roll six dice, keeping some and rerolling others, then implementing the various die faces on the game board. This will result in political offices being gained and lost, new vocations learned, new land acquired, or new buildings constructed. The end result is a vibrant community revered near and wide — but only the player who has best balanced their wealth and prestige will emerge the final victor.

Playing time is 15-20 minutes per player.

The year is 1956. Mankind stands at the dawn of a new age, the Space Age, when the flying bombs of yesteryear will become the rocket ships of tomorrow. As the director of a national space program, your country is depending on you for success in this great contest. You may be the first to create an artificial satellite, send a probe to another planet, or even put a man on the moon.

Leaving Earth is a game about planning and about managing risk. With even a single grand journey into outer space, you might claim victory in the game. Consequently, it is your job to plan each journey carefully, finding the cheapest, quickest, and safest ways to reach your objective — but do not spend too long preparing, or another nation might reach their goal before you.

On your turn, you will be conducting research, building spacecraft, and directing journeys into outer space. To conduct research, you buy an advancement that begins with certain flaws, then you test the advancement to find and eliminate those flaws. To build a spacecraft, you purchase components and assemble them into a whole. To travel to outer space, you expend rockets to maneuver from one location to another.