New Game Round-up: Garden Building, Doodle Jumping and Safe Cracking from Ravensburger & Nuggets Returns as Armadöra

Your task in the tile-laying game Sanssouci is to create a flower garden for the world-famous Sanssouci Palace. Competing against up to three other landscape architects, you'll have your own garden layout game board on which you'll build rose gardens and vineyard terraces, labyrinths and fountains – but not just anywhere, mind you. No, the landscapers must meet certain building requirements, and unfortunately you won't always have at hand everything that you might need.

In game terms, each player has a personal garden that's divided into rows and columns; each row shows a color, while each column shows one of nine garden elements, such as the wells or a pavilion. Players start with one noble at the top of each column. A shared tile supply board has five rows – with colored spaces matching the colors on each player board – and two columns, which are unlabeled. At the start of the game, ten tiles are placed on this supply board; each tile depicts one of the nine garden elements.

Each turn, a player plays one of his two cards in hand, which determines the tile he can take from the supply, e.g. take a pavilion tile, take a tile from the red or gray spaces, etc. The player has only a single card that lets him take any tile – but if he plays a card showing a garden element that isn't present, then he can instead take any tile! The player must place this tile on his player board in the column that matches the image on the tile and the row that matches the color from which the tile was taken. If this space is already filled, he flips the tile to show the gardener on the other side, then places this tile on any free space in the same row or the same column. After placing the tile, he may move one of his nobles along a path of placed tiles as long as the noble ends up in the same column in which it started, but on a lower row. The player scores points equal to the row reached.

The player then refills the supply and draws a new card. The game ends after 18 rounds. Each player then receives bonus points for each completed row and column. Furthermore, each player has received two order cards at the start of the game, each of which shows one of the nine columns; each player receives bonus points for the row reached by the noble in that column. The player with the most points wins.

In Doodle Jump, players need to push their Doodler to the top of the board faster than anyone else. To do this, you'll need to use the dice well and take risks during play. The first player to reach the top level of the board wins!

On your turn, you roll six dice – five standard d6 dice and one symbol die – then use either the symbol on that special die or the sum of one or more numbers to jump your Doodler to an open pad that's horizontally adjacent or close overhead on the next level. (Each pad has a number on it, and to jump to a pad, you need dice that sum to that number.) If you fail to do this, you fall straight down to the highest unoccupied pad – which might take you all the way to the bottom of the game board! The symbols on the dice let you slide a row left or right one space, reroll your other dice, or move an unoccupied level to the top of the game board (effectively pushing players down). If you do jump or use a symbol, you can reroll the remaining dice to try to move again or you can stop where you are.

If you land on another Doodler, that player falls straight down. If you land on a power tile (which are not recommended for the first game), you acquire a propeller hat, shield, jetpack or jump shoes to use on a later turn; flip over a trampoline or springs, and you jump again immediately. Doodle Jump also includes monster, UFO and black hole power tiles for expert play.

You are security experts trying to get a job at a bank. To do this, you must prove that the current security system is not sufficient. How? By robbing the bank. You have forty minutes to unlock doors, deactivate security systems, and find out the combination to the vault. The bank is well-protected, though, and you had better not encounter the guard or trigger the alarm.

Der Millionen Coup is a cooperative game with a real-time engine. Every action takes time, and players can perform only one action at a time. The game is split into two phases: preparation for the coup and the coup itself. During preparation, players can explore the bank, learn additional skills, and forge one of the available plans. Players freely decide when to switch to the coup phase and carry out their plans. You have only forty minutes total for both phases, so plan carefully!

Der Millionen Coup includes 32 scenarios and 12 bank plans, so the next coup won't be the same as the last...

In Armadöra, 2-4 players – acting as orcs, elves, mages and goblins on the hunt for dwarven gold – try to surround the "gold mines" on an 8x5 grid board. On a turn, a player either places a numbered warrior tile face down or places two fence sections on the board; these fences determine the borders of each claim, and each claim must be at least four spaces large. At the end of the game, all tiles are revealed, and each gold mine is awarded to the player whose tiles in that claim have the largest sum, with ties resulting in an equal division of points. Whoever collects the most mine points wins.

In the advanced rules for Armodöra, each player receives one reinforcement token and 1-2 special power tokens. Instead of placing a warrior or erecting fences, a player can place a reinforcement token on one of his warriors in a territory that's not yet filled, boosting the strength of that warrior by one. A player can use his special power before taking one of the three normal actions, with the elf shooting an opposing warrior in an unfilled territory (lowering his strength by one), the orc placing an additional fence that turn, the goblin placing a second warrior (with this one being face-up), and the mage looking at the value of an already placed opponent's warrior.