It is the eve of Carnivale on the magical Victorian isle of Ludobel, and you are all invited to the fantastical festivities!

In the card game Belle of the Ball, players take on the roles of party hosts, seeking the best mix of guests to make their gala the greatest by the end of the night. In order to ensure that they stay one step ahead of the other hosts, players will have to carefully watch the growing line of guests at the door, inviting those in that seem to share passions with party-goers already inside, all the while handing out their precious stash of Regrets to those who should seek refuge elsewhere. Of course, other hosts may find it advantageous to invite a rejected guest inside just to collect their accumulated Regrets for later use.

Hosts may also choose to ignore the competition for guests and instead try to earn the favor of the Belle of the Ball herself, whose charms can make or break any party.

2 to 4 players
ages 8 and up

It’s a time of regrowth in the old urban center, and the hippest and best beer crafters have gathered both hops and hopes in building the best brewery in the city. It won’t be an easy task, as players compete for precious resources such as malt, hops and yeast in the local markets, all while managing and optimizing their growing bottling empires.

In Brew Crafters, players assume management of a local craft brewery, working hard to manage resources, use their workers wisely, and develop their brewing line to create the best local brews. Brew Crafters honors the tradition of classic Euro games such as Agricola and Puerto Rico, but at its heart beats a unique brewery processing system that must be constantly improved, monitored and manned in order to keep the beloved beverages rolling off the line. Each brewery has access to a variety of equipment upgrades, local farms, markets, and a plethora of specialty workers, ensuring a high level of replayability and strategic avenues. In addition, each player is studiously working to be first to develop several rotating gold label specialty brew recipes that will earn them extra points and prestige at the end of year three when the best local brewer will be honored.

2 to 5 players
ages 12+

In Brew Crafters: The Travel Card Game, you’ve opened your own brewery and are competing with other brewers in town to be named the Brew Crafter of your city. You’ll build your brewery by installing equipment and hiring workers, and then get to work brewing your beer! The player that earns the most reputation as the city’s best brewer will win!

Brew Crafters: The Travel Card Game is based on the Dice Hate Me Games release Brew Crafters.

2 to 4 players
ages 10+

A card & dice game of set collection for 2-4 players.

Think Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, carousels, flying swings, and bumper cars! Open your Carnival for business before the other carnies do by building four of the five available rides along your Midway. Then cue the Carnival music and watch the crowd rush in!

Carnival is Dice Hate Me Games’ first publication. It is a product reflecting the designers’ dedication, philosophies, and most importantly, their passion for games.

Step right up. Enjoy your ride.

Play
Carnival is a card game of set collection for 2-4 players, ages 12+, that utilizes dice to determine actions.

Players take on the roles of carnival bosses, trying to build rides along their Midway and open for business before all the other carnies can! Each turn, a player has the choice to roll three dice and chooses two of them to perform various actions that will allow them to gain cards from the deck, discard pile, their opponents’ hands or even steal valuable ride parts from other Midways. The coveted Wild cards are versatile: players can use them to fill in for missing parts on their rides or can discard them to refresh the cards in their hand. Each player also has three Tickets which may be discarded to affect the dice rolls or block other players’ actions.

This six-card addition to Carnival contains cards designed to replace the Wilds from the base game that feature a character from the sideshow.

Compounded is a game about building chemical compounds through careful management of elements, a fair bit of social play and trading, and just a bit of luck. In Compounded, players take on the roles of lab managers, hastily competing to complete the most compounds before they are finished by others – or destroyed in an explosion. Some compounds are flammable and will grow more and more volatile over time; take too long to gather the necessary elements for those compounds and a lot of hard work will soon be scattered across the lab.

Although Compounded does involve a fair share of press-your-luck tension and certainly some strategic planning, the most successful scientists will often be those who strike a good trade with their fellow lab mates. Players are able to freely trade elements, laboratory tools and even favors – if there is truly honor among chemists!

2 to 5 players
ages 13+

Better Gaming Through Chemistry!

Expansion for Compounded, Chemical Chaos includes 15 cards (14 new Compounds and an additional Lab Fire).

The first full expansion for Compounded, the Geiger Expansion gives experienced scientists even more to consider in the lab with the introduction of radioactive elements and compounds. As productivity in the lab increases, so does the chance for radioactivity levels to rise.

If You Build It, They Will Come!

Get your lumber and your tools - it's time to build the deck you've always wanted! You and your neighbor are competing to make the best deck possible given the materials at hand, and only one of you can win!

Diner is a fast-paced game about waiters in a friendly competition to make the most money in tips. Take orders for the tables in your section, gather the plates to fill those orders, and serve your tables, and do it as quickly as possible while showing up the other players.

Diner features a pseudo-real time mechanic that has players passing action tokens whenever they take an action; if a player does not have a token, that player can’t take an action. At times, action tokens may accumulate in front of a player, allowing them to take multiple actions at once.

Diner is the winner of the Dice Hate Me Games 54-Card Challenge – a contest that challenged designers to create a game using only 54 cards and very minimal components. It was selected as winner among over 100 participants.

Diner puts players in the shoes of someone serving patrons at a greasy spoon. The goal is to earn the most in tips by gathering plates of various types from the kitchen and then serving them to a table of patrons in your section demanding certain orders. The real magic of the game is in the pseudo-real time action system.

When you want to take an action – say, seat a table in your section – you have to have an action token in front of you. When you perform the action you pass the token to the player next to you. Sometimes those action tokens can pile up allowing you to do multiple things at once. Other times you’re urging the other players to hurry up a bit so you can serve your tables.

It’s a very madcap, social experience, with lots of table talk. With the action tokens, though, it’s not total chaos like many real-time games – there is a lot of of control worked into the mechanics. It’s a brilliant design, and one that will appeal to many gamers whether they like real-time games or not. Guaranteed.

2 to 4 players
ages 10+

J. Alex Kevern’s Easy Breezy Travel Agency was awarded first runner-up in the Dice Hate Me 54-Card Challenge, and for good reason: Along with Diner, it was a certified crowd-pleaser, with players walking away from the game still talking about it hours later.

Set in Sheboygan of 1974, Easy Breezy has players acting as travel agents trying their best to provide tickets for customers going to one of four locations: New Orleans, New York, Chicago and Miami. As customers line up in the queue, certain fares will rise in price, creating a greater demand and, in turn, a greater commission for the agent that is able to provide the ticket. The hand limit comes into play heavily in this game, and players will often have to put some of their customers into their waiting area — an area in front of them where other players might be able to coax travelers over to their ticket counter.

2 to 4 players
ages 12+

Graham Russell’s The Fittest tied for second runner-up in the 54-Card Challenge, and was certainly the best of the social games in the competition. In The Fittest, you’ve been selected for the most rigorous, cutthroat reality competition on TV. As a contestant, you’ll compete in challenges and work with and against the other competitors for a shot at fame and fortune. You won’t win if you go it alone, but don’t get too friendly; you’ll have to do a bit of backstabbing to emerge victorious.

The Fittest features fierce social play and shifting alliances. Players will have to evaluate a challenge each round and convince other players to work with them in order to best the challenge for variable rewards. The player who has best managed their alliances and achieved the best rewards at the end of the game will be the victor.

4-6 players
ages 12 and up

In The Great Heartland Hauling Co. players take on the role of medium haul Midwest truck drivers doing their best to make a living by hauling goods for big suppliers. Players truck to various locations around America’s Heartland, picking up and dropping off goods using matching cards from their hands. Most locations have native goods that require fewer cards to load; other locations may pay a premium for those goods but may also require more fuel – and time – to get there with the cargo. With limited space in each trailer and only five cards in hand at a time, players will have to expertly manage their resources, as well as play the odds and press their luck to be the best trucker on the road.

The Great Heartland Hauling Co. will offer a lot of replay value through the use of cards to create a variable board set-up each game. The game will include 60 goods cubes, 4 wooden trucks, and 46 resource cards – required for pick-up and delivery – that are drawn from a shared draft board, as well as 20 fuel cards, which are used to move about the Heartland.

2 to 4 players
ages 10+

In Isle of Trains, players are train operators, building trains with the right mix of freight cars needed to complete delivery contracts before your opponents.

Cards are used in multiple ways: they can be built as train cars or buildings supporting your train line, used as currency to pay the cost of building those new train cars and buildings, or used as cargo to load on available train cars.

When loading cargo on an opponent’s train, players receive an immediate benefit or action, but they are also giving their opponent the cargo they just might need to be able to complete a delivery contract and score big!

Balancing the need to upgrade your train, take advantage of benefits from loading other players’ trains, and complete delivery contracts first is the key to being the most successful train operator on the Isle of Trains!

2 to 4 players
ages 10+

Set in the mid-1800s, the historical age of whaling, New Bedford gives 1 to 4 players the chance to build the Massachusetts town of the same name into a thriving community.

Gather resources to add buildings with new actions, and launch ships to go whaling. Go out longest for the best choice, but wait too long and the whales become harder to catch. And don't forget to pay your crew when ships return! Carefully balance risk management and timing to become a leader of industry in this medium-weight worker placement and resource management game.

1–4 Players
75 Min Playing Time
Age: 12+

Bryan Fischer (co-designer of Chicken Caesar, and one of the heads of Nevermore Games) has been working on the design for Pie Factory for the past couple of years, and approached Dice Hate Me Games about publishing his delicious little title long before the 54-Card Challenge.

As workers in a pie factory, players are competing for the big promotion to be announced in two days’ time. In order to be selected, players must box the most value in pies and influence the higher-ups to choose them. Pie Factory’s heart and soul is the Assembly Line mechanic from which players draft ingredients for their pies. Each ingredient takes a certain amount of time to prepare and player order is rearranged each round to reflect time taken, so players must time their actions just right to make sure they get the ingredients they most want. This is the one where grandma will crush everyone at the table — we’ve seen it far too many times.

2 to 4 players
ages 12+

Unpub: The Unpublished Card Game is a 20-30 minute party game for 3 to 8 players.

The game comes with 54 cards, each featuring a possible game theme, a core mechanic, and game components that the players will use to craft a game idea.

Each round, one player acts as publisher and uses an element from one of their cards to inspire the designers to pitch a game using two of the other three elements on cards in their hand. The best game pitch gets a publishing contract!

VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game, or, more simply, VivaJava Dice, is the successor to the well-received 2012 release of VivaJava: The Coffee Game. Just as in its predecessor, players of VivaJava Dice take on the roles of employees at the VivaJava CoffeeCo., scouring the globe for the best beans to keep the company on top while keeping themselves one step ahead of the rest of the executives.

Also as in VivaJava, VivaJava Dice has players making the crucial decision between blending beans and research, but with a quick, new twist. Players must now use the dice in their pool to blend – using the beans to create a best-seller for quick points, and then whether to press their luck in subsequent rounds for bigger points but less dice as the blends degrade – or to research, and use their valuable beans to gain an ever-changing variety of dice-manipulating abilities, new ways to score, and paths that lead to aiding a competitor for a later payoff or hindering that competitor for immediate gratification. VivaJava Dice also offers a unique system of cooperative dice-rolling that can help you rise to the top, but at the price of someone else riding your coattails.

With an astounding mix of plug-and-play research abilities, subtle social play in semi-cooperative mode, and the chance to hog all the glory and blend the best for yourself, VivaJava Dice is all about choice, making each game fast and furiously different.

2 to 4 players
ages 10 and up