Best Games of Q3 2024 - Santa's Workshop!

About Santa's Workshop (Second Edition), from BoardGameGeek:

It's late in December, and Santa is gearing up for his big night. His elvish helpers are busy making sure he's ready to deliver joy across the world! The elves have a lot to do: toys to be built and assembled, reindeer to be tended in the stables, and the North Pole's own Christmas tree to decorate. It's a time of unbelievable hustle and bustle! After the Christmas season is over, Santa always takes his own holiday, somewhere sunny and warm, and he brings along the most industrious team of elves as a reward. Can you lead your elvish crew to earn a spot with Santa on vacation? Santa's Workshop is a reimplementation of a game by the same name released in 2017. This new edition comes with two game modes: the standard game for families, and an advanced game for ages 10 and up. Santa's Workshop is a worker-placement game, taking place over nine rounds, in which players use their elves to collect materials in order to build gifts, and tend to the reindeer. Players may customize their workforce by sending elves to be trained in certain aspects of the game, which provide a benefit for the rest of the game. For some gifts, plastic may be substituted for the standard materials of fabric, wood or metal. This will cause those gifts to score fewer "Christmas Cookies", but may allow a player to build more gifts in a shorter amount of time. This can be helpful when Santa comes around three times during the game for an inspection to see which team has made the most gifts. Players will have to decide when to visit the mail room in order to pick which gifts to build, and when to tend to the reindeer. The reindeer accumulate points the longer they go untended - and each of the eight reindeer provides a unique bonus to the player. -description from the publisher