Dorfromantik: The Board Game is
on sale at MiniatureMarket for $24 (I don't know what it is normally). (Shipping is $7 or free at $99+.)
(The title translates as something like "idealised village.")
It's a tile-laying game played as a series of games in which you can unlock new elements by meeting goals
(e.g. "Score X points from such-and-such") and by earning general progress along a chart, which depends
on your score in each game. Those new elements typically enable higher scoring, and so on and so forth.
A few things to note:
1. It is not Shabbos/Y"T-friendly. You don't write as part of playing the game, but
scoring is typically done using a sheet and progress is tracked by marking spaces.
2. It is not played against the other players but as a single team (or by yourself). Additionally, there is no winning
or losing - you just try to score as many points as possible (some players consider a game successful if their score
is higher than in their last game, although the rulebook makes no such suggestion). This model is more typical of
video games, such as Tetris, than board games; this is in fact based on one, hence the "The Board Game" in the title.
Image (from the end of my 4th play - the little icons mark tiles that are placed
with "task" tiles on them, removed as you complete the tasks during the game):
They also have the
The Great Mill mini-expansion for $4, which comes with a plastic windmill. I don't know if an extra
way to score points throws off the campaign's balance (or rather pacing, since balance isn't really a consideration here).
Anyway, what you see there is a decent indication of what game elements are like (no plastic miniatures like that, though).
They also have Pandemic: Hot Zone - Europe for $2. This is a shorter
version of Pandemic. Some people are decidedly unimpressed by it.
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