THE BIG BOARD
"I... I don't know exactly how to put this, sir, but are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean, he'll see everything, he'll... he'll see the Big Board!" -Gen. Buck Turgidson

Around the Bend	Players:	2 to 4.
	Age:	Old enough to do crossword puzzles.
	Mood:	Mind-bending.
	Theme:	Words.
	Play:	Word-formation, frame shifting.
	Luck:	Some.
	Folks say:	"I just played that and I have no idea what it says."
	Fragility:	Unbroken but some plays are tedious.
	Cost:	$25

Hue and Cry	Players:	4 or 6.
	Age:	Old enough to read three-digit numbers.
	Mood:	Silly, argumentative.
	Theme:	Colors.
	Play:	Describing colors.
	Luck:	None.
	Folks say:	"You call that peach? Are you out of your mind?."
	Fragility:	Cheating is easy, and generally breaks after ~10 plays.
	Cost:	$10 (A basically identical game, Hues and Cues, is available from Op Games Their version costs $25.99, but the production quality is better.)

Intrigue	Players:	4 to 6.
	Age:	Old enough to handle sudden but inevitable betrayal.
	Mood:	Conversational.
	Theme:	Fantasy novels / world domination.
	Play:	Diplomacy, haggling, backstabbing, strategy.
	Luck:	Some.
	Folks say:	"In the game of thrones, you win or you die." (Folks say this, I would point out, to folks' husbands.)
	Fragility:	Unbroken but prone to meta-gaming the win.
	Cost:	$20 (Might take awhile)

Tryptic	Players:	2 to 5.
	Age:	Old enough to do arithmetic. A 9-year old once destroyed me at this game, I'm not gonna lie.
	Mood:	Intense, focused, sometimes mentally overwhelming. Potentially obsessive. This is by far the game that I recieve that the most weird communication about.
	Theme:	Abstract.
	Play:	Bluffing, pattern recognition, hiding in plain sight.
	Luck:	None.
	Folks say:	"This is a horrible, horrible game, I hate you for making it, let's play again."
	Fragility:	Broken, but not in a way most people notice.
	Cost:	$30

Toxic Gnome	Players:	2 to 5.
	Age:	Old enough to spell.
	Mood:	Focused, quiet.
	Theme:	Linguistic.
	Play:	Vocabulary, pattern recognition, planning.
	Luck:	Hits everyone the same.
	Folks say:	"It's like Boggle meets Tetris."
	Fragility:	Unbroken.
	Cost:	$16 (Might take awhile)

Petri Dish	Players:	2 to 3.
	Age:	Old enough to drink from a grown-up cup.
	Theme:	Microbiology.
	Mood:	Fast-paced, silly.
	Play:	Spatial strategy, rapid reversals.
	Luck:	None.
	Folks say:	"Boom!"
	Fragility:	Totally broken, but not for its target audience of very young kids.
	Cost:	$20 ((Might take awhile)

Conspiracy	Players:	2 to many.
	Age:	Old enough to overuse the word "technically".
	Mood:	Silly, geeky.
	Theme:	Conspiracy / espionage / world domination.
	Play:	Card collecting, deck optimization, strategy.
	Luck:	Some.
	Folks say:	"This changes everything."
	Fragility:	Unbroken without trying really hard, but QANON makes it feel kind of icky.
	Cost:	$1

Pathology	Players:	2 to 4.
	Age:	Old enough to not knock over a block tower.
	Mood:	Intense, focused.
	Theme:	Abstract.
	Play:	Pattern recognition, planning.
	Luck:	Hits everyone the same.
	Folks say:	"So I used to go to these underground raves at ____ and I'd bring Pathology and I always wound up playing it with naked people on Ecstasy."
	Fragility:	Broken in stalemate scenarios with house rules to fix them.
	Cost:	$10 ((Might take awhile)
Coming Soon
Venndetta	Players:	2 to many.
	Age:	Old enough to completely BS a school assignment.
	Mood:	Argumentative, silly.
	Theme:	Absurdist logic.
	Play:	Persuasion.
	Luck:	Some.
	Folks say:	"Every time I walk by those people playing your game, they are like in the middle of some heated argument about whether or not a walrus can have religious beliefs. I don't know, man."
	Fragility:	Too silly to break.
Ordering
Someday, perhaps, this will be a Very Fancy Website which accepts all sorts of credit cards and automatically converts from bitcoins to Euros, and has a complex series of drop-down menus that you need to fill out before you can buy anything. But today is not that day. I can take Paypal (to trelevenfarm@gmail.com), checks (to The E.M. Shop) or cash, mailed to 38 Mitchell Drive, Vergennes VT, 05491. Let me know what you want and where to send it, either by email or letter. If you want to buy a lot of stuff at once, I'll knock some money off the shipping. Make sense? I mean, it's not Amazon, but on the other hand, it's not Amazon.

THE BIG BOARD