New Game Round-up: Spiel 2014 – Fresh Deus from Pearl Games & Fish Dice from Piatnik

Players in Deus work collectively to build a civilization, but they're each looking out for themselves as they build.

Each player starts the game with five building cards, and on a turn a player either uses one of these cards to construct a building or discard one or more cards to make an offering to a god. Cards come in six colors: red for military, brown for resource production, yellow for trade, blue for scoring, purple for temples, and green for a variety of effects.

When you construct a building, you build it in the appropriate location on the modular game board — which is sized based on the number of players with the hexagonal tiles composed of seven landscape "circles" — then you place the card in your personal tableau in the appropriate stack of colored cards and activate the power of all of those cards already in your tableau, starting with the card at the bottom of the stack.

When you make an offering, you discard cards, then receive the help of a god associated with one of the cards that you discarded, with the number of cards determining the strength of the associated action. You then refill your hand to five cards.

The game ends either when all the barbarian villages on the game board have been surrounded and attacked or when all the temples have been constructed. Whoever has the most points wins.

Espresso Fishing doesn't ask you to fish with caffeinated drinks — no, instead you use the espresso to keep yourself awake when you're out on a hot lake fishing for hours at a time. To get the fish, though, you need to first test your luck with the dice...

Each turn, the active player rolls three blue dice and two red dice. After the first roll, she can roll each die individually at most one more time. After doing this, she can either fish or poach depending on what she's rolled. If she has at least one hook, one worm and a wave, she can fish by rolling the white die — and she rolls it a number of times equal to the product of the hooks and waves that she has. The white die features 1-2 fish, a boot (which nets you nothing for that roll), and the sweet ZZZZZZs of someone who fell asleep; catch the Zs and your fishing time ends immediately. If you use one of your two espresso tokens prior to rolling, however, Zs become boots and you can keep rolling.

When you roll a full house or four- or five-of-a-kind, you can steal 1-3 fish from other players. With a special full house, you can reclaim an espresso chip or move one fish from the lake or another player's pile.

Once the lake is empty, whoever has the most fish wins. In a tie, the tied player holding the yellow fish wins — but if neither of them has the yellow fish, then they're out of the game and the player with the nextmost fish wins!