New Game Round-up: Surviving the Oregon Trail, Maximizing Your Harvest, and Driving Away the Competition

Pioneer Days is a dice-drafting game set on The Oregon Trail. While you pursue your strategy, you must be prepared for impending disasters such as storms, disease, raids, and famine.

Round by round, players draw dice out of the bag, roll them, then take turns drafting one to either collect silver, hire a townsfolk, or take an action based on the die value. Townsfolk confer immediate or constant benefits as well as end game scoring bonuses, while actions help you collect wood, medicine, cattle, equipment, and gold nuggets. The unchosen die each round advances one of the disaster tracks based on its color, and when a disaster gets to the end of its track, all players must deal with its effects.

Mind the fields of Gullsbottom! Plant and fertilize your seeds, tend your crops, and utilize the various buildings at your disposal. You'll need to work smarter, not harder, as harvest season is coming to an end! Who will have the best harvest this year? Will it be you?

Each round in Harvest, you first draft turn order (and the benefits that come with it), then send your two workers into town and into the fields. Plant seeds, tend fields, and harvest crops to make room to plant some more! Utilize buildings and magical elixir to amass a bigger and better harvest than your neighbors at the end of five rounds of play.

The player controls the Parks and Recreation department of a local council who have been challenged to build a suburban course for the general public. Funds are tight and those pesky neighbouring boroughs have the same idea as you, so the gloves are off and dirty deeds abound as players build sewage treatment plants, by-passes and electricity pylons on their neighbours patch in an effort to disrupt their courses. Not to mention those scum-bag locals who dump rubbish all over your lovely course when no one is looking...