family

Draft dice & use the tools-of-the-trade to carefully construct your stained glass window masterpiece.

Each player will build a stained glass window by building up a grid of dice on their player board. Each board has some restrictions on which color or shade (value) of die can be placed there. Dice of the same shade or color may never be placed next to each other.

Dice are drafted in player order, with the start player rotating each round, snaking back around after the last player drafts 2 dice.

Special tools can be used to help you break the rules by spending skill tokens -- however, once a tool is used, it then requires more skill tokens for the next player to use them.

Scoring is variable per game based on achieving various patterns and varieties of placement... as well as bonus points for dark shades of a particular hidden goal color.

The highest scoring window artisan is the winner!

Liar's Dice is a dice game where each player is given five dice and cup to roll and hide them with. Players make successively higher declarations regarding the results of all the dice remaining in the game, e.g. "there are ten sixes". However, someone can always contest the bid. When that happens, all the dice are revealed and either the bidder or the caller loses dice, depending on who was correct. The last player with dice is the winner.

As a public domain dice game there are a number of variants or similar games called Liar's Dice. This includes one that is often played with Poker Dice, and differs from the marketed versions in that players only declare on their own hand's value (as opposed to all dice being in play), using poker-hand values.

From the Publisher:

Which team has the biggest brain? The new mental fitness game based on the original best-selling Nintendo™ DS title. Speed and accuracy count - not smarts - when answering questions at the Big Brain Academy. Challenge your brain in five fun categories: Analyze, Compute, Identify, Memorize and Think. Teams collect chips based on the number of questions they answer correctly. Big Brain Academy keeps minds nimble and players laughing! Your team's goal is to collect the most chips. Game includes 330 cards, dry erase pen, puzzle pieces, red revealer, sand timer, scale, scoring chips and spinner. 2 to 6 Players. Ages 8 and up.

String Railway is a unique train game that consists of colored strings, tokens, station tiles, and a board for scoring. To set up, first place the string tied in a big circle on the table to establish the field area for the game. Next, place a small circle of string to represent mountains and a line of string to represent a river. Finally, place the main stations for each player equal distances apart from one another.

On a turn, you draw and place a station tile, then try to place a railroad string between your stations in an effort to connect them in order to form your own train network. Connected stations earn victory points (VPs).

After five turns, the game ends and the player with the most VPs wins.

Grimoire is the French word for "spellbook", and smart use of your spellbook – more specifically, the spells within said book – will determine whether you succeed in this game.

Each turn in Grimoire starts by revealing several cards on the game board; each card has either a victory point (VP) value or is a character with a particular way to earn VPs at the end of the game. Once these cards are revealed, each player secretly chooses which spell to cast in his spellbook by placing a bookmark on the appropriate page. Everyone then reveals which spell they chose, with the spells going off in order from weakest (those with the lowest numbers) to strongest. Some weak spells nerf stronger ones, and the order in which players choose cards from the display can be flipped topsy-turvy depending on who plays which spells.

In the One Draw and Z-Man versions, the game ends as soon as one player has collected either ten character cards or ten treasure cards; in the Schmidt Spiele version, the game ends after a fixed number of rounds. All players then tally their points, and the player with the highest score wins.

Differences between the versions:

As noted above, the game ending conditions differ in the 2012 Schmidt Spiele version.
The Z-Man Games and Schmidt Spiele versions of Grimoire accommodate five players, while the original One Draw release allows only 2-4 players.
The Schmidt Spiele version contains four new character cards and two new treasure cards, includes hardcover books instead of softcover, changes two spells, and uses a more elaborate game board that depicts the spells and allows players to mark the spells chosen with small figures to track who has played what.