CardsLab Countries is an award winning game from the Novabase Gameshifters 2016 gamification event held in Portugal. This new edition includes a total re-branding and new game mechanics/components.

CardsLab Countries is a turn-based game and the goal is to reach a certain amount of mission points or conquer all the opponents' country cards, which are evenly distributed, forming an upside down stack in front of each player. Each turn has a turn owner that has advantages in the mission and battle phases described below.

Each country card features its national flag, world location and capital, as well as stats like population, life expectancy or GDP.

At the beginning of the game, three mission cards are distributed and placed in front of each player, which allow them to score points and earn special cards by forming combinations with their country cards in hand. There are two types of missions which score points based on their difficulty: easy (1 point) and hard (3 points). The first player to achieve 10 points wins the game (for the fast game mode - average duration of 30 minutes).

There are 5 types of special cards that players earn by completing missions:
- Steal the turn (become the turn owner)
- Double the turn prize
- Exchange all hand cards between 2 players
- Search for a card in your own pile
- Cancel any of these effects

Each turn consists of 5 phases: Draw, Mission, Special, Battle and Prize.

Draw phase: Each player draws cards from his stack until having 5 country cards in hand.

Mission phase: Starting with the turn owner, each player tries to accomplish missions with their country cards. When a mission is completed, the country cards used to accomplish that mission are placed at the bottom of the players' card pile and the accomplished missions are placed at the bottom of the missions pile. The player can also discard one or more missions. At the end of the phase, players update their scorecard and receive new missions.

Special phase: Each player can play his special cards, one at a time.

Battle phase: The turn owner chooses a card from the hand, puts it upside down on the table and decides between asking a question about the card to an opponent (flag/location/capital, depending on the thrown dice value by the opponent) or choose a statistic that will have to beat all opponents' cards. For the latter, after the turn owner announces the chosen statistic, each opponent picks a card from their own hand and plays it face-down on the table, to win the battle. This adds an element of suspense and bluffing on each turn, forcing players to carefully choose their plays. Note: the number of possible questions depends on each players' difficulty level. For the easiest level, the player only has to answer the cards' continent.

Prize phase: The winner of the Battle phase receives a number of cards from opponents' hands, based on the number of special cards played, the duel type (question or combat), and player count.

CardsLab is a fun, educational, trivia and strategy game for ages 8-80, designed with simple mechanics that can easily bring together three generations of players to the same table. It features difficulty levels tailored to a variety of gamers, and without noticing it, they are learning as they play.

Pedro Gordalina, CardsLab Designer.