Game Mechanic: Push Your Luck

Codenames: Marvel combines the hit social word game Codenames, while featuring characters and locations from the Marvel Universe including, Spider Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers and Doctor Strange. In Codenames, two teams — S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra in this case — compete to see who can guess all of their field agents (identified by either a word or picture) correctly first — but those field agents are hiding in plain sight in a 5x5 grid that includes the agents of the other team, neutral words, and an assassin that will cause you to lose the game immediately if you guess it. One person on each team is a spymaster and only these two know which agents belong to each team. Spymasters take turns giving one-word clues that can help their teammates identify multiple agents on the board. Their teammates try to guess agents of the right color while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team — and everyone wants to avoid the assassin.

"Crossroads" is a game series from Plaid Hat Games that tests a group of survivors' ability to work together and stay alive while facing crises and challenges from both outside and inside. Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game, the first title in this series, puts 2-5 players in a small, weakened colony of survivors in a world in which most of humanity is either dead or diseased, flesh-craving monsters. Each player leads a faction of survivors, with dozens of different characters in the game. Dead of Winter is a meta-cooperative psychological survival game. This means players are working together toward one common victory condition, but for each individual player to achieve victory, they must also complete their personal secret objective, which could relate to a psychological tick that's fairly harmless to most others in the colony, a dangerous obsession that could put the main objective at risk, a desire for sabotage of the main mission, or (worst of all) vengeance against the colony! Games could end with all players winning, some winning and some losing, or all players losing. Work toward the group's goal, but don't get walked all over by a loudmouth who's looking out only for their own interests! Dead of Winter is an experience that can be accomplished only through the medium of tabletop games, a story-centric game about surviving through a harsh winter in an apocalyptic world. The survivors are all dealing with their own psychological imperatives, but must still find a way to work together to fight off outside threats, resolve crises, find food and supplies, and keep the colony's morale up. Dead of Winter has players making frequent, difficult, heavily-thematic, wildly-varying decisions that often have them deciding between what's best for the colony and what's best for themselves. The rulebook also includes a fully co-operative variant in which all players work toward the group objective with no personal goals.

Hold Your Breath! is the final chapter in the "Get Bit Casual Trilogy" by Mayday Games, but you don't need to know ANYTHING about the first two games in the series to play this one other than that we are revisiting the dumbest pirates known to man. They have been kicked off the ship by their captain in Walk the Plank and chased by sharks in Get Bit, and now they face their final challenge. In Hold Your Breath! each player assumes the role of a pirate treading water in the ocean. These brilliant tacticians have decided to play a game of "Hold Your Breath" to see who is the toughest pirate because, you know, what else are you gonna do in the middle of the ocean facing certain death? The game is played in two rounds. In the first round, each player may dive deeper, providing they have the "Swim" and "Air" cards to do so. Players press their luck each turn since it is the pirate who dives the deepest in round one AND resurfaces in round two who is the winner. What about the losers? Who cares, they are losers. But if you really want to know, well, they dove down and ran out of oxygen before they could resurface, so now they are just "resting" underwater until the next game, okay? But we digress... Players can play "Panic", "Shark", and other nasty cards on the other players, slowing their progress. In the second round each player struggles to reach the surface before he runs out of air and therefore decides to take a rest. Most of the pirates may not make it back to the surface, but the one who makes it back alive AND dove the deepest is the winner. Be careful, though, because if you dove the deepest in the first round, you will surely have the toughest time getting back to the surface since A) you swam the deepest and B) no one else wants to see you make it back alive.

Your mission, Martians, is to swoop down on the pathetic denizens of the primitive planet Earth and scoop up as many of the inhabitants as you can manage. We are interested in samples of the Chicken, Cow, and Human populations so that we can determine which of them is actually in charge. The Earthlings might manage to put up a feeble defense, but surely nothing that a small taste of your Death Rays can't handle. Make Mars proud – be the first Martian to fill your abduction quota! In Martian Dice you will roll 13 custom dice in an effort to set aside ("abduct") Humans, Chickens, and Cows. With each roll you must first set aside any Tanks, representing the human military coming to fend off your alien invasion. Then you may choose one type of die to set aside as well - one of the earthlings to abduct, or Death Rays to combat the military. At the end of your turn, if you have at least as many Death Rays as Tanks, then you may abduct the earthlings you've been setting aside. You can't pick any type of Earthling twice in one turn, but if you manage to abduct at least one of each you'll score a bonus! With each roll you will ask yourself, do you feel lucky?

AS FOOD TRUCK TITANS… Send your food truck team to score sales at various venues throughout town. You can only visit each venue once and will need to carefully plan your route and take sales opportunities when they are arise. Drive efficiently and score bonuses, or race to the finish and hit the big-time payouts on the way. Plan your route but expect the unexpected in your path to food truck infamy! Truck Off: The Food Truck Frenzy Roll and Write is a stand alone game and follow-up to the original Truck Off: The Food Truck Frenzy. It throws navigation, risk mitigation, and press your luck into the same meal pack for you to digest. In Truck Off Roll and Write, all players are driving their food trucks around a grid system town map, and marking off venue locations in a secondary location called a route tracker for each venue they visit. All players will visit a new venue each turn and then mark the value of their corresponding venue dice directly scoring them points. If you mark three venues in one row or one column of the route tracker, you gain a bonus. Bonuses help you navigate around town, allow you to reroll your dice more, drive farther, drive faster, and promote venues to make them more valuable. Each turn, the active player rolls the set of polyhedral dice. The active player may reroll up to one die to help the sales on their route or hurt the sales on their opponents route. Then all players select one open venue to drive to if possible up to 4 spaces away following a grid movement system. Each player then marks the value of the die on the corresponding location of their route tracker always progressing their route tracker. Route Tracker: The route tracker is made up of six columns, one for each of D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20 venues. However, the route must always progress forward from D4 to D20 and snake back to D4. If you skip a venue in your route, then you may not return to that venue on the route tracker. The route tracker will play a big role in your pathing around the town and also allows you push the game toward end quicker than your opponents expect. To win the game and score the most sales, you'll need to plan your efficient route, take high sales opportunities when they present themselves, and figure out how to reroute your food truck if you deviate from your plan. -description from designer

Eat brains. Don't get shotgunned. In Zombie Dice, you are a zombie. You want braaains – more brains than any of your zombie buddies. The 13 custom dice are your victims. Push your luck to eat their brains, but stop rolling before the shotgun blasts end your turn! Whoever collects 13 brains first wins. Each game takes 10 to 20 minutes and can be taught in a single round. Each turn, you take three dice from the box and roll them. A brain symbol is worth one point at the end of the round, while footsteps allow you to reroll this particular dice. Shotgun blasts on the other hand are rather bad, cause if you collect three shotgun blasts during your turn, it is over for you and you get no points. After rolling three dice, you may decide if you want to score your current brain collection or if you want to push your luck by grabbing new dice so you have three again and roll once more.