Pegasus North America

The Dawn of

by Beth Erikson Marketing Manager Pegasus Spiele North America Humanity

The sun rises slowly to dawn on a new day full of opportunities for early humanity. The bushes are full of fruits to be gathered, animals roam in the forest, and new lands are waiting to be discovered. It’s time to explore!

Travel back in time to the Stone Age in Fire & Stone, a brand-new game from Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, the award-winning designer of Carcassonne. This approachable exploration game is another great family-friendly title to add to game night.

A land of opportunity awaits the tribe willing to venture out and explore! As hunters and gatherers, you’ll gradually move outward from the African cradle of humanity, discovering new lands and establishing settlements. As you explore, you’ll learn new skills and be faced with unexpected events, but careful and strategic planning will help your tribe expand and push forward to a new era for humanity.

The game begins with the discovery tiles being placed face down on the board across the map. With random selection each time, every game will develop differently as you explore. Starting from Africa, tribes can venture out, working their way through Africa and Europe, into Asia and India and eventually into the Americas. As you send your scout forward, the facedown discovery tiles will be flipped up, revealing forests filled with animals to hunt, vegetation to gather, fire to tame, or perfect locations for building huts.

Discovering a location suitable for a hut is vital to win. Each hut you own at the end of the game will score a victory point. Once a location has a hut it becomes a settlement, meaning anyone can build additional huts there, but it will cost them! The more huts, the higher the cost to build there.

Besides the randomization of discovery tiles in each game, there will also be a mysterious cave location. With 24 different cave options, each game will present a new experience since only one is put out. A cave card could allow players to exchange food at a market, create fire with a thunderbolt from a storm, or become a source of inspiration to allow players to buy inventions.

Each player will have their own tribe mat. As you discover tiles with fruit, nuts, and other resources, you can collect these tiles and place them on your tribe mat, filling up the spaces on your gathering stores track. Once you cover the card icon at the top spot on your mat you can gain 1 invention card or 1 victory point card. Inventions give a permanent effect that affects your ability for obtaining more food in different ways, increasing movement, building huts easier, and storing food. While victory points are important for the end game, inventions are essential to compete with other tribes.

Carefully manage your resources and take advantage of the discoveries you make to lead your tribe to victory in Fire & Stone!

Crime

Zoom from Lucky Duck is a game of mystery and deduction. Lay out the crime scene illustration, decide what you want to investigate, and then flip that card to take a closer look. The scrap of paper that caught your eye might be a clue! Follow this lead to another card in the deck, or keep exploring the crime scene? The choice is yours! MSRP $14.99. retailers@luckyduckgames.com

Return to the mysterious island of Arnak with the Expedition Leader expansion from Czech Games Edition! Give your expedition an edge by choosing one of six unique, asymmetrical leader characters, each equipped with different abilities and skills; and starting decks that offer different strategies and styles of play for you to explore. justin@czechgames.com

Birds of Prey from Ad Astra is the ultimate game of air combat maneuvers. With a full aerodynamic flight model, Birds of Prey rewards flying like actual fighter pilots; managing energy and drag to line up that gun or missile shot. Endorsed by actual military dogfighting instructors, there’s nothing else like it. design@adastragames.com

In Vivid Memories from Floodgate, you’ll take turns collecting fragments of childhood memories, weaving a tapestry of colored threads in your mind. There many various methods to score points. If you’re looking for the next step-up in complexity and challenge, compared to Sagrada, Azul, or similar games, Vivid Memories is for you! Contact your distributor for more information on this or any other titles from Floodgate Games After half-a-year of daylight, we must now prepare for the dark season. The roads will be treacherous but they will still need to be braved by a select few in order to keep our cities thriving. In Merchants of

the Dark Road

from Elf Creek Games, 1 to 4 players assume the role of these brave few merchants that travel the dangerous paths between cities. While the job is perilous, fame and fortune await! patrick@elfcreekgames.com

It’s Not Too Late to Make These Technology

by Andrew Long

The beginning of the year brings many resolutions. What should we cut back on, or what should we start doing? Business resolutions are a great way to improve your growth and happiness. While we are just a month into the New Year, it’s never too late to add a few resolutions we may have overlooked. Here are some often overlooked technology habits you may want to add to your list in 2022.

Resolve to optimize website speed

No matter where you fall in the tabletop industry, one of the best things you can do this year and every year is to optimize the speed and performance of your website. Old, slow websites are going to start to cost your business if they aren’t already. People are more likely to convert, do the things you want them to – purchase, register, download – if it is easy and quick for them to do so.

Beyond conversion, website speed is a measure that Google is now taking into consideration when ranking pages. Slow sites will be pushed further from consumer views. This includes the mobile version of your site. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, start there. Consumers today are more likely to visit you from a mobile phone.

Resolve to provide accessibility in everything you do

If you haven’t performed an accessibility audit, now is the time. Accessible systems allow you to connect to more people and will give a much better life experience for others. The best place to start on this is your website. Simple things like adding “alt” descriptions to images will allow visually impaired people to read and understand images. Publishers have gotten better at understanding color in games; these ideas also translate to website colors. If this feels daunting, find a consultant that can do an assessment and make recommendations.

Resolve to reengage your mailing list

Newsletters are often started with the best intentions, but often fall by the side as other priorities come up. Don’t make this mistake. Email marketing is a great way to reach your audience directly. And now is a great time to re-engage your mailing list as we build toward the end of the year.

The first step to restart your mailing list is to understand what your goals are. Why are you contacting them – sales? Brand loyalty? Engagement? Understanding your goals will make it easier to create content and messages to help you reach them, especially if you turn those goals into something that is measurable: “Our goal is to increase online sales by 10 percent,” or “We would like to get 10 new Twitter follows a month.”

Once you have measurable goals, commit to a frequency you or your team can handle. Once a month is a good place to start.

Resolutions

Now for the hard part: create content your customers will value. Think about why you open and read emails. If you continually give value, your list will be a success in 2022.

Resolve to create an actual online strategy

Businesses often do online things at the spur of moment without having an actual strategy attached to them. Get that Twitter account now!

Resolve this year to attach a strategy to all the things you do online. “Why do we need a Twitter account?” “What are we going to accomplish by having an account?” “What is our Twitter strategy?” An even more important question is, “How does that Twitter account fit into the rest of our online strategy? Can the Twitter account help us reach our goal of growing e-commerce sales?”

Resolve to think about digital security

Businesses create and use all sorts of data. Most of that information isn’t particularly interesting to anyone, especially hackers, but some is. This is the year to resolve to take a closer look at how you protect the data you collect.

Much of how to go about this will depend on the size of your business and the systems you use. Everyone in your company should understand malware, viruses, and phishing. Train them to keep your networks updated and safe. Encourage using strong passwords and tools such as 2-factor authentication, which requires additional information from a mobile phone to sign into an account.

If you are taking payments, be sure you work with banks and vendors to make sure you are using the latest security protocols. Restrict access to both online accounts and physical data. And make sure you are regularly backing up critical files.

Digital security is a growing responsibility of every company. Any effort this year will help you for years to come.

Resolve to think about how technology can make you more productive

Take a moment this month to think about how technology can help with productivity. Automation is a powerful tool that can help you be more productive by allowing you to focus on other things. The key to this is identifying the processes that are taking up most of your time. Make a list of all the things you and your team do manually to see if there is a way to automate them. Can game part replacement requests be automated with a form and emails? Can you automatically schedule meetings to that show? Can common questions be answered by a chat bot? Some of these may take more technical savvy than others but start with the easy ones and work your way up.