Parfum

(led by Aaron) 2015 game of fragrances by the team that designed Fresco and introduced to me by Herb & Lynn Lamb Levy at a Long Island Gamenite.  Dice represent ingredients like vanilla, lavender, or violets, as the players distill precious essences in order to create unique perfumes. The tension here is how turn order is handled….go early in the turn order and receive fewer actions, go later and you have more actions but fewer choices as fragrance notes and customers don’t get replenished until each round ends. Only players catering to their clientele’s preferences will be able to sell their perfume for VPs. 

Blueprints

(led by K-ban) 2013 game where players are architects, who must use different colored dice (representing wood, glass, stone and recycled materials) to build three different structures from blueprints, with the dice providing different advantages to you. In each of 3 rounds players roll and draft dice one at a time to fill the 6 spaces on their blueprints. Points are tallied to discover who wins the gold, silver and bronze prizes (and their resultant VPs) as well as earning VPs for achieving four public objectives. After three rounds, players tally their awards and prizes to see who wins. A good 30-minute opener.

Sagrada

(led by Ethan) 2017 puzzle game where colored dice representing stained glass windows are drafted in serpentine fashion and placed onto a 4×5 grid with restrictive placement rules on color and number. Players have both public and private objectives to score their VPs. We used the 5-6 player expansion so all could play together and it worked quite well.

Roll for the Galaxy

(led by Aaron) The 2014 version of Race for the Galaxy is a dice game of building space empires for 2–5 players. Dice represent your populace, directed to develop new technologies, settle worlds, and ship goods. The player who best manages his workers and builds the most prosperous empire wins!

Fantastic Factories

(led by Ethan) 2019 race to manufacture the most goods and/or build the most prestigious buildings. Dice are rolled to represent worker placement, engine building, resource management, tableau building, simultaneous play, and some card drafting. Each round is split into two phases, the market phase and the work phase. During the market phase, players choose to either acquire a new blueprint for free or pay to hire a contractor. Blueprints are used to construct new factories during the work phase. Contractors can be used to reinforce your strategy by providing resources or allowing you to roll additional dice. 

Liar’s Dice/Perudo/Call My Bluff (led by Drew)  In 1997 Richard Borg tweaked the rules/board for 1800’s bluffing dice game, Perudo.  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. A great closer that always elicits laughter.

Steve