Each player controls one of nine alien races, each with a completely different economy. Your race has converter cards that turn input resources into output resources — but you probably can't produce the inputs you need. So you trade. Trading happens simultaneously and in real time. There are no turns during the trade phase. Everyone is negotiating at once. "I'll give you three white cubes for two green." "I need a colony ship — who has one?" "I'll swap you my small converter for your large one and throw in two cubes." Deals can be anything. Any resource, any promise. After trading, everyone simultaneously runs their converters, produces new resources, and scores points. Then a new set of technologies becomes available through a shared bidding system. Repeat for six rounds. The asymmetry is deep. The Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl (yes, that's a name) have a biological economy that literally grows. The Faderan have intellectual technologies that create resources from nothing but need other races' outputs. The Yengii are good at pure trading but produce little on their own. Each race needs different things from different races. This is a heavy game. The teach takes 30-40 minutes. First-time players will be confused for the first two rounds. But the trading is so inherently social — it's literally just making deals with people — that most groups find the energy even through the learning curve. Plays 4-9. The 9-player game is the full experience — every race at the table, maximum trade options, maximum noise. Games run about 2 hours. It's one of the very few heavy strategy games that actually gets better with more players.

A question card is read out — something like "Name a fruit" or "Name something you'd find in a teenager's bedroom". Everyone secretly writes their answer. Then all answers are revealed simultaneously. If your answer matches the majority, you score. If you wrote something unique, you don't score. If you wrote the only unique answer, you get the Pink Cow — a rubber cow token that blocks you from scoring until someone else takes it from you. That's the whole game. You're trying to think like the group thinks. Not the cleverest answer. Not the funniest answer. The most average, predictable, boring answer. Which sounds simple until you realise that everyone else is also trying to be average, and second-guessing what "average" means gets messy fast. "Name a fruit." You think Apple. But does everyone think Apple? Or is everyone thinking that everyone will think Apple, so they'll write Banana instead? By the time you've spiralled through three layers of meta-thinking, you write Orange and hope for the best. The Pink Cow is the perfect punishment mechanic. It's physical, visible, and silly. The person holding it is always trying to get rid of it. The threat of getting it keeps people playing conservatively. Plays 4-20 with no real upper limit. The game takes 20 minutes and can stop at any point. Question quality varies — some cards produce boring unanimous answers, others split the group in unexpected ways. You can also make up your own questions, which older groups often prefer.

A flip-and-write game where everyone draws the same Tetris-like shapes onto their own map grid. Each card tells you which shape and which terrain type (forest, village, farm, water) to draw. You pick where it goes on your grid. Scoring rotates across four seasons, with two of the four scoring cards active at a time. So in Spring you might score for "largest forest cluster" and "number of villages on the edge". In Summer, one of those cards rotates out and a new one comes in. This keeps you adjusting your strategy throughout the game. The twist is the Ambush cards. When one is drawn, you pass your map to your neighbour and they draw a monster shape on it. Monsters score negative points in areas that aren't filled — so a well-placed monster can ruin a carefully planned section of your map. This added interaction is the main difference from Welcome To. You can't just optimise in isolation. Someone might deliberately wreck the scoring zone you've been building toward, and you can do the same to them. Games run about 30-40 minutes regardless of player count, since everyone draws simultaneously. Works from 1 to 100 players. The solo mode is solid — you're competing against your own score — and the large-group experience is essentially the same game with more laughing about monster placements. The fantasy theme (you're mapping the kingdom of Nalos for the queen) is light but gives the drawing more personality than filling in abstract boxes. There are several map pack expansions that add new scoring goals and board layouts.