New Game Round-up: Gain Infamy, Thwart Aliens, Build New Civilizations & Keep the Grannies in Line

In the Martian mining colony of ARES-6, crime pays. Three factions vie for control of this corrupt new world and everything within it. You are a mercenary known as a "freelancer", here to profit off the conflict, to make a name for yourself – but ambition alone isn't enough. A network of seedy contacts will assist you in undertaking the dangerous missions necessary to bolster your rep. Whether it's hiring henchmen to carry out your dirty work or plotting with secret schemes, you'll let nothing stand between you and your squalid goals.

In Infamy, players find that nearly anything can be bought for the right price. Players attempt to win the game by being the first to reach 15 Infamy points or by reaching the highest reputation level in any one of three factions: the Harada Cartel, the Trust Megacorp, or the PKD Militia. The core of this auction and influence game is the "Pay to Play" mechanism in which players must sacrifice bidding power in order to place any bids at all. Spend too much time bidding against an opponent, and your currency will dwindle – but if you refuse to bid, you'll be forced to watch your opponent acquire all those things that only the criminal underworld can deliver.

Here at the end of the world, where everyone and everything has its price, there is but a single ambition that endures: Infamy.

Tensions have been high with the alien "bug" races of the galaxy – the Zothren – and your ship has crash landed on the planet Hive IV, one of the more renegade "bug" planets. You quickly set up perimeter force fields and begin surveying the surrounding terrain for debris from your ship, only to find it scattered everywhere. Then you see them – at first only a few "bug" scouts, but then the numbers begin to increase all around you: archers, slashers, and even the monstrous brutes. This is more than a scouting party; this is a war party! They begin to attack the shields as the crew starts to retrieve debris. The SOS has been sent and a ship in the sector has responded, but can it get to you before the "bugs" overwhelm your crew? Can you repair parts of the ship and use it as a defense? Can you repair the hull and fire up the engine to lift off? It's all in the hands of the crew – your hands.

In Alien Uprising, the player crew must either hold off the Zothren attacks until the rescue ship arrives, or repair the ship and lift off from the hostile planet before being destroyed. To achieve either of these goals, the crew must work together, using their unique skills and chosen actions to perform a number of tasks, defend themselves, and retrieve and repair equipment and the ship.

To establish the actions available each turn, the first player rolls custom dice, then each player chooses an action for the turn, starting with the first player. The available actions include combat, engineering, reload/recharge first aid, scout, and wild; the dice also have an alien icon that shows the speed of the enemy while limiting the actions that players have available to them. Players also have unique character skills, and the game can be set to higher levels of difficulty for more experienced players.

Your Granny's position as the town's top handicrafter is threatened by upstart contenders from a new retirement community. Your task is to try to help her, while distracting and sabotaging her competitors – but if you don't keep your loyalty hidden, the other players will definitely stitch you up!

At the beginning of Granny Wars: A Game of Tit for Tat, you receive a loyalty card matching one of the Granny cards on the table, and you are dealt ten cards which range from -5 to +5 points. The deck also includes Gold cards, which grant a special Granny power (like "Nana Nap") in addition to points. Players take turns adding cards to the Grannies, and the "Tit for Tat" mechanism allows a player to "bounce" an equal and opposite card from one pile to another, e.g., playing a +3 on a -3 lets you move the -3 to another pile of your choice.

After everyone has exhausted his cards, players reveal which Granny they supported and sum the points in her pile of cards. The player with the highest sum wins!