Dice Realms, Art Decko, & More — Rio Grande Games

Dice Realms, Art Decko, & More — Rio Grande Games

Dice Realms

Dice Realms, a new, innovative twist on “dice customization,” is the latest game from Tom Lehmann, designer of Race for the Galaxy. In Dice Realms, each player rules a small realm, represented by two customizable dice. The removable die faces allow for the strategic improvement of farming, mining, defense, upgrades, and more. Each round, the players simultaneously roll their dice to collect grain, victory points, and coins. Then, they must decide how to upgrade their die faces to improve their realms. But the players must be careful; each round, the Fate Die is rolled, and fate can be fickle. The future of your realm is in your hands: Will it thrive or merely survive?

Dice Realms
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Item Code: RGG563
MSRP: $119.95
Releases Q2 2022

Game features:

  • 18 Customizable dice with more than 650 individual dice faces
  • Hundreds of hours of gameplay with more than 320,000 unique starting setups
  • 3 Custom-made dice trays make setup and cleanup a snap!
  • Easy-to-learn rules and quick, simultaneous gameplay

Art Decko

For some, collecting fine art is a hobby. For a select few, it’s a cutthroat world of buying, selling, and manipulating the market. Can you stay one step ahead of the other collectors and build the most valuable collection?

Art Decko is an artistic new take on deck building. The paintings are beautiful (and expensive) but can become more valuable as the game continues. Showing a painting in a museum increases the value of all works in that genre. All of the players who hold that type of painting benefit, but who benefits most? Players face difficult decisions on every turn. Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder when there is profit to be made with every potential move? Play Art Decko, and see for yourself.

Art Decko
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Item Code: RGG598
MSRP: $44.95
Releases October 2021

The game features:

  • 15 Pieces of original, gallery-quality art in five different genres from Lauren Brown, Alex Eckman-Lawn, Kwanchai Moriya, Heather Vaughn, and Alison Parks
  • Unique starting decks with asymmetrical player powers
  • Innovative deck-building mechanic that replicates amassing an art collection and increasing its value
  • Modular bonus tiles vary end-game scoring, adding to the replayability of the game
  • Buying art, exhibiting at museums, and amassing currency all affect the market values of paintings and gold. Players must be willing to adapt their strategies during the game in order to succeed.

Faiyum

Faiyum is another terrific game from Friedemann Friese, designer of Power Grid and Friday. During the reign of Amenemhet III, you are the pharaoh’s advisors, commanded to harvest goods, build roads, found settlements, and do much more for the good of Faiyum! You are being supplied with the necessary manpower, resources, and money, which means that if another advisor needs to use “your” roads, farms, and other buildings, they may do so since everything you build is owned by the pharaoh. The only thing you will own is the only thing that matters: the respect of the pharaoh.

Faiyum
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Item Code: RGG608
MSRP: $59.95
Releases Q4 2021

Faiyum is a strategic game for enthusiasts of planning games. The basic rules are simple: Play your cards one by one on your personal discard stack. After playing some or all of your cards, you take them back into your hand in “reverse” playing order, so playing cards in the best order is important. Newly purchased cards go directly into your hand, so the timing of getting and playing them is important, too. Each of the individual cards has easy-to-understand actions, but only by creating the best combined “engine” will you be a master advisor of Faiyum.

This game features a card mechanism reminiscent of deck-builders and the market mechanism successfully used in Power Grid. Gain more and more valuable cards, and use the structures built on the game board to your advantage—in other words, for your reputation. In the end, the most cunning advisor who creates the best card combinations will win Faiyum.

Free Ride

Free Ride, another fine game from Friedemann Friese, designer of Power Grid and Friday, takes us to the Golden Age of Railways in Europe. Around the end of the 19th Century, a growing network of railway lines was built in Europe. This allowed people to travel to the major cities to visit beautiful structures influenced by Art Nouveau and Historicism.

Free Ride
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Item Code: RGG600
MSRP: $59.95
Releases Q4 2021

In Free Ride, you are in charge of building the railway lines that will connect the major cities of Europe. Then, you move your train along the growing rail network to carry passengers to visit the famous structures in these cities. Moving your train along your railway lines and state-owned railway lines is free. If you use railway lines owned by your fellow players, you must pay them, which converts their lines into state-owned railway lines.

To collect passengers, you can choose from an open display of city cards representing different travel routes of passengers. Move your train to one of the cities on display and choose that travel route by picking up this starting city card together with the  destination city card. When your train arrives at the destination, you fulfill this travel route and gain victory points for both cards at the end of the game. At first, you can only take care of a single travel route. Later, your train can carry two travel routes at the same time and travels faster along the network of railway lines. The goal of Free Ride is to visit as many different cities of Europe as possible.

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