Enjoy National Board Game Day 2024 with Wayland Games!

In recent times, board games have experienced a surge in popularity, driven by the rise of social gaming and the desire to disconnect from screens and digital gadgets. National Board Game Day, celebrated every year on April 11th, offers an ideal chance to set aside your phone or tablet and indulge in classic fun with friends and family.

National Board Game Day is a player’s chance and excuse to connect with the hobby. Players could head off to their FLGS for an event, invite some friends over for a game night, or spend their evenings doing something a little different.

So whether that is starting a long historical playthrough of Khora: Rise of an Empire, cracking open the box for some Freeride, bringing the family around the table for some Ominoes or relaxing with a classic and testing your brain in Trivial Pursuit - you may even want an excuse to get a title out that you have not had a chance to play yet!

To celebrate, we’re focusing our This Week Only sale on National Board Game Day and giving you the chance to grab a new game for up to 30% off RRP! We’ve picked some great board game manufacturers to showcase, so check them out below.

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Thunderworks Games

Thunderworks Games has been creating innovative board games since 2013 out of Madison, Wisconsin. Whether you're new to board games or an enthusiast, you'll enjoy their award-winning strategy games for years to come. They have published 12 original games with 7 expansions and sold over 700,000 games worldwide.

Dawn of Ulos

For untold eons, the mortal races lived in separate planes, unaware of other worlds beyond their own. But now the dragon god Azema forges a new world by opening rifts to other planes…

Dawn of Ulos is an economic tile-laying game for 1-5 players set in the world of Roll Player and Cartographers. You compete in a game among gods of the planarverse, wagering on and manipulating the rise and fall of mortals.

Control the fate of Ulos! Develop a new world, invest in your favorite factions, and pit armies against each other. Choose wisely when to exert your influence. As factions rise and fall, will you earn the most favor with the world creator?

Cape May

In Cape May, players traverse the city streets as entrepreneurs, developing property while building wealth over four seasons to earn prestige.

Build cottages, develop them into Victorian homes, and upgrade them into historic landmarks. Establish shops and grow them into profitable businesses. Carefully move around the city, and make strategic use of activity cards. Complete bonus goals, then take some time to relax and spot wildlife in the best place for birdwatching in the Northeastern United States.

Whoever best balances their income, development, movement, and personal goals will go down in history as the most successful developer of Cape May!

Lockup: A Roll Player Tale

Lockup: A Roll Player Tale is a competitive worker-allocation game for one to five players. In the game, players manage groups of minions -- gnolls, kobolds, bugbears, goblins, or insectoids -- locked up in Kulbak Prison.

Each round, players try to keep their suspicion from the guards under control while allocating their crew to different locations within Kulbak. The player with the strongest crew in each location at the end of each round gains the most resources, hires the most powerful crew, and builds the most powerful items, increases their reputation. The player with the highest reputation at the end of six rounds, wins the game.

Lockup is a worker placement game set in the Roll Player universe.

Lockup: Breakout

Everyone in Kulbak has heard rumor of secret passages that run beneath the prison. Ages ago, the catacombs carved into these mountains were used to house fallen heroes. Queen Gimnax built a prison over this sacred site during the Great War, enclosing those ghosts and their treasure behind its walls.

Some say the catacombs lead to the tomb of Khathandor, greatest of the Dragul warriors. Others swear that the real treasure to be found in the tunnels beneath Kulbak is a crack in the prison’s outer wall. To find the truth, you’ll have to send your seeker to explore the crumbling catacombs by lantern light.

In Lockup: Breakout, players can earn reputation stars in new ways by sending their seekers to explore the catacombs beneath the prison and by dedicating crew to influence the legendary inhabitants of Kulbak.

Gain the most reputation stars over six rounds by crafting items, recruiting goons, influencing legends, and exploring the catacombs — all while avoiding the suspicion of the guards.

As in the core game, the player with the most reputation stars wins!

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Stonemaier Games

Stonemaier Games is a tabletop game publisher based in St. Louis and distributed worldwide. They strive to bring joy to tabletops worldwide through memorable, beautiful, fun games. Their games seek to capture the imaginations of all types of people, as their goal is to build games and communities.

Red Rising

Enter the futuristic universe of Red Rising, based on the book series by Pierce Brown featuring a dystopian society divided into fourteen castes. You represent a house attempting to rise to power as you piece together an assortment of followers (represented by your hand of cards). Will you break the chains of Society or embrace the dominance of the Golds?

Red Rising is a hand-management, combo-building game for 1-6 players (45-60 minute playing time). You start with a hand of 5 cards, and on your turn you will deploy 1 of those cards to a location on the board, activating that card’s deploy benefit. You will then gain the top card from another location (face up) or the deck (face down), gaining that locations benefit and adding the card to your hand as you enhance your end-game point total. If at any point you’re really happy with your hand, you can instead use your turn to reveal a card from the top of the deck and place it on a location to gain that location’s benefit.

Expeditions

The sequel to Scythe sends players on a new adventure into Siberia, where a massive meteorite crashed near the Tunguska River, awakening ancient corruption. An expedition led by Dr. Tarkovsky ventures into the taiga to learn about the meteorite and its impact on the land. Itching for adventure, heroes from the war privately fund their own expeditions to Siberia, hoping to find artefacts, overcome challenges, and ultimately achieve glory.

Expeditions is a competitive, card-driven, engine-building game of exploration. It is designed to evoke similar feelings to Scythe even though the mechanisms are different: Play cards to gain power, guile, and unique worker abilities; move your mech to mysterious locations and gain cards found among the tiles; use workers, items, meteorites, and quests to enhance your mech; and use power and guile to vanquish corruption.

This standard edition of Expeditions features plastic mech miniatures and plastic base snaps.

Pendulum

In Pendulum, each player is a powerful, unique noble vying to succeed the Timeless King as the true ruler of Dünya. Players command their workers, execute stratagems, and expand the provinces in their domain in real-time to gain resources and move up the four victory tracks: power, prestige, popularity, and legendary achievement.

Players must use actual time as a resource in managing their strategy to best their opponents, using time on different action types and balancing it with time spent planning and analyzing. The winner will be the player who manages and invests their time most effectively and who builds the best engine, not the player who acts the quickest.

Euphora: Build a Better Dystopia

In Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, you lead a team of workers (dice) and recruits (cards) to claim ownership of the dystopian world. You will generate commodities, dig tunnels to infiltrate opposing areas, construct markets, collect artifacts, strengthen allegiances, and fulfill secret agendas.

Euphoria is a worker-placement game in which dice are your workers. The number on each die represents a worker's knowledge—that is, his level of awareness that he's in a dystopia. Worker knowledge enables various bonuses and impacts player interaction. If the collective knowledge of all of your available workers gets too high, one of them might desert you. You also have two elite recruit cards at your disposal; one has pledged allegiance to you, but the other needs some convincing. You can reveal and use the reticent recruit by reaching certain milestones in the game... or by letting other players unwittingly reach those milestones for you.

Your path to victory is paved with the sweat of your workers, the strength of your allegiances, and the tunnels you dig to infiltrate other areas of the world, but the destination is a land grab in the form of area control. You accomplish this by constructing markets that impose harsh restrictions of personal freedoms upon other players, changing the face of the game and opening new paths to victory. You can also focus on gathering artifacts from the old world, objects of leisure that are extremely rare in this utilitarian society. The dystopian elite covet these artifacts—especially matching pairs—and are willing to give you tracts of land in exchange for them.

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Pegasus Spiele

Pegasus Spiele is a German board game publisher and distributor known for producing a wide range of high-quality tabletop games. Founded in 1993 by Karsten Esser, they have become one of the leading companies in the European board gaming industry. They are committed to promoting the joy of tabletop gaming and continue to innovate and release exciting new games for players of all ages and interests.

Bonfire

The bonfires are sources of light, energy and warmth created by the guardians of light in order to brighten the cities on the otherwise dark planet. The residents of the cities, however, took the bonfires for granted and exploited them for their personal gain. Disappointed the guardians of light retreated and let the bonfires extinguish. The citizens could no longer live in the now dark cities and were forced to leave.

You are a group of gnomes living close to the cities and you also need and the light of the bonfires. Missing it now, you try yourself to visit the cities and learn how to ignite the bonfires once again: You must visit the guardians of light on their holy islands and ask for tasks to prove your goodwill. For each completed task, they will re-ignite one extinguished bonfire. Whoever manages to earn the greatest trust from the guardians and manages to brighten their city the most will win the game.

Swindler

Life in London isn't easy. The city is run by moneybags, though, and now it's time to seize opportunities as swindlers and cutpurses to claim your share of their wealth.

Swindler combines press-your-luck with take-that mechanisms for a fun and thematic game set in Victorian London. Each round, players must steal from one of the five moneybags, drawing tokens from the chosen bag. Each bag is filled with coins, jewelry, and other loot - but each bag also contains at least one skull! If you draw a skull, you've pressed your luck too far and got caught in the act. Not only will you lose the loot you stole that round, you also lose everything you stole from the same bag in previous rounds. The moneybag not only found your hand in their pocket, but they also recognized the small but precious ring on your finger...

It's wise not to sit on the loot too long in case you get caught. Dealers will pay you for the loot you turn in, giving you points. You can also use your loot to complete orders, but one of your fellow swindlers might be faster and push you aside to complete a task, costing you valuable points. Thankfully, you don't have to swindle on your own! Hire accomplices to gain advantages or affect the other players with disadvantages.

The player with the most points after a set number of rounds will be recognized as the most notorious swindler of London and thus win the game.

Istanbul: Choose & Write

Welcome back to the Istanbul Bazaar!

Once again, players take on the role of shrewd merchants whose goal is to gather goods and lira, then trade them for the precious rubies needed to win. In Istanbul - Choose & Write, instead of a common set of locations in the middle of the table, each player has a bazaar in front of them as a game plan, a personal tracking sheet where players will mark their choices as they play.

On their turn, players must choose to play either a Location card or a Guild card. Location cards will allow all merchants to perform the action of the specified location, or the action of an adjacent space on their sheet. If a player would rather prevent others from taking this follow action, they can instead play a Guild card, which is expensive but triggers powerful effects.

Fans of the Istanbul game series will recognize familiar locations in Istanbul - Choose & Write, such as the Large Market and the Gemstone Dealer. However, thanks to the innovative Choose & Write mechanism, this visit to the bazaar will challenge players in a completely new way.

Skymines

Fifty years ago, humanity began mining the Moon and the asteroids, and for decades that task was firmly kept in the hands of the World Government. But the turmoils of recent years have caused this enterprise to collapse. Now, adventurous companies and private investors take to the sky to revive this mining network.

As investors, you try to earn the most CrypCoin over the course of seven rounds. You do this by investing mined resources in companies and by spreading their outposts. You can improve your earnings by supporting your scientists’ research and by having them collect precious helium-3.

The heart of Skymines is a unique card programming and hand management system that requires careful and clever planning. It provides deep player interaction by letting you invest in any of the four companies as you see fit.

And as the combination of company abilities changes each game, there are endless synergies and strategies to explore.

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Our This Week Only sale ends on Sunday 14th April 2024, so make sure you get your discounted board games now! If you’ve missed out this time you can always get board games for a great price on the Wayland Games website with up to 20% off RRP, free UK shipping on orders above £20 and loyalty points with every order. Happy playing!