WARNING: READ BEFORE PLAYING

Liar's Bar contains intense and graphic depictions of violence and death, themes of suicide, and other mature content that may not be suitable for all audiences. Player discretion is adviced. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of self-harm or suicide, please seek help from a qualified professional or contact a local mental health service. Your well-being is important to us, and we encourage players to prioritize their mental health while engaging with our game.

The game features mature themes, and is intended for adult audiences only. If you are under 16, please step outside.

This warning is one of the first things you see after booting up Liar's Bar. I want to stress, and I don't care what you think of "trigger warnings", this warning is not kidding. This is a messed up, repugnant game; I think I kind of love it. (It also contains depictions of tobacco use.)

Okay, real talk, this is kind of a dark streak of submissions from this contributor (thank goodness for animated movies ... with jokes about infant mortality!), this game might be the most worrisome yet. I retweeted some fan art of the game, then realized, out of context, that might not look like something entirely, well, healthy to be reposting. Because the marquis attraction of Liar's Bar is that it's basically a furry Russian roulette simulator. Just so you know what you're getting into.

Liar's Bar is published by Curve Animation, and is currently available on Steam for $6.99, where it is still an "Early Access" game.

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Last week we received Hues and Cues from The Op Games. We recently finished playing through Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion (a fantastic game in The Op Games catalogue designed by Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim, and Kami Mandell that you should absolutely pick up to play with your family) and wanted to give another game from the same publisher a go. I picked Hues and Cues because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by other “test whether our minds think the same way” games such as The Mind  and Wavelength.

In Hues and Cues, players gather around a large central board comprised of 480 graduating colors of the rainbow surrounded by an x-y axis and scoring table. White and black (which are technically not colors) are conspicuously absent as are shades (mixtures of color + black; e.g., grey) and tints (mixtures of color + white; e.g., cream).  On each player’s turn, they draw a card with four colors and the x-y axis codes of those colors depicted and they select one.

They are in the role of the clue giver. They attempt to convey which one they selected using a one word clue without directly pointing to it, naming its x-y axis, or using basic color references such as “yellow” or “green”. After they’ve provided their clue to everyone, each of the other players gets to select and mark a color on the board with their token that they think is the one to which the clue giver was referring. Then the clue giver gets a second shot at leading everyone to the correct color and this time they follow the same rules except that they can use a two word clue if they wish. Once again, all of the other players select and mark a color. After everyone has finished marking colors, the clue giver lays a 3x3 square cutout over top the board so that the color they were giving clues against lies directly in the middle. Any player who has a marker in that spot gets 3 points, any player who has a marker in one of the surrounding 8 spots gets 2 points for each marker of theirs in that area, and finally, any player who has a marker in one of the 16 spots surrounding the cutout gets 1 point for each marker of theirs in that area. Meanwhile, the clue giver scores 1 point for every marker (of any player)
inside the cutout.

Just as with Wavelength, Hues and Cues reinforced the absolute truth that we all think a bit differently. When I say lilac and imagine the corresponding color, it’s likely that it’s at least a few steps away on the board from the color you imagine. Ditto for emerald and periwinkle. And don’t get me started on apricot, as we had a big debate among 4 players on exactly which color square corresponds to that. Then there are misunderstandings in the clues themselves. In our group this happened when a clue giver said robin and I assumed they meant the dominant color of the bird (orange) but they were thinking of the iconic eggs of the bird instead (a shade of blue). It also happened that time a clue giver said bazooka and I assumed they meant the rocket launcher (brown) and they were thinking of the bubble gum (pink). 

Overall, I think Hues and Cues is a fine party game. My core gaming circle enjoys heavier strategy games, but we often look to a party game to start off our evening and get everyone comfortable before breaking into smaller groups to play the brain busters. Hues and Cues  works well for us in that role. I prefer Wavelength ever so slightly over Hues and Cues so if you’ve only got the budget to add one more party game to your collection I’d lean in that direction, but if you’re open to a couple of games or if you already have Wavelength and want something a little different, pick up Hues and Cues. One thing I really appreciate about Hues and Cues is that its language independent. As long as all players speak a common language, it doesn’t matter what that language is. You could even easily use sign language to give the clues. In this way, it’s especially a great game to bring into your collection if you host international board gamers (I’m looking at you, game cafe owners and Air B&B hosts!). Please note: while it should be obvious, this is not a game for the colorblind.

You can pick up Hues and Cues  at Amazon for under $25.

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Publisher: The Op Games
Players: 3-10
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): ~25 minutes
Game type: party games

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Earlier this summer, Tokyo Sidekick arrived on our doorstep from Japanime Games. I knew absolutely nothing about the game before it showed up. Turns out, it's a big game, with a big board, in a big box. Unpacking everything, I was pretty impressed with the breadth of inventory. Check out the pic below from the publisher of the core game components beyond the board and cardboard standees.

My copy also included a comic book giving the origin stories of the heroes, as well as upgraded acrylic standees. The components are well made and I particularly like the acrylic upgrades; you’ll want these for sure if you can get them.

 

Perusing the rulebook, I started to get a good understanding of Tokyo Sidekick. It’s a cooperative game designed by Yusuke Emi where 2-4 players take on the role of heroes and sidekicks who battle against villains, supervillains, and menaces, while also navigating around the central board to deal with incidents as they crop up. There’s a lot going on at once for players to manage, and that’s part of the fun. It feels a lot like playing Pandemic, if the characters we played in Pandemic  were more personable and relatable. 

Turns pass back and forth between players and during the active player’s turn they must do their best using their array of selectable actions (actions that are paid for with energy cards  from their deck) to thwart evil and handle critical incidents that have been revealed. We didn’t find there to be much analysis paralysis during turns. At the end of each player’s turn, during the End Phase, new incidents are added to the board, the player redraws their hand, and circumstances are evaluated to determine whether additional steps grouped under something called “Crime Time” will occur. If it does occur, special effects on enemy cards activate, towns on the map get destroyed, a subset of incidents on the board become critical (if you leave these unresolved on the board for too long, you lose the game automatically), new enemies are revealed from the enemy deck and placed on the board, and new incidents are added to the incident row (to be added to the board on future turns).

What I love most about this game is the detailed descriptions and backstory on every hero and sidekick. Chamaru is my absolutely favorite sidekick to include on my team. Look at his adorable profile!

There’s even a mind map at the end of the rulebook showing the intricate connections between each hero and sidekick in the game. The artwork is lovely too. Sometimes I’m a bit hesitant when a new Japanime game is released because I never know if the artwork is going to push boundaries a bit too far out of the family friendly genre (which is always a shame when it happens because the gameplay is usually solid). Happy to report that while the game isn’t going to win any awards from the feminist corner for empowering representation, it’s nothing too risque; tweens and teens can play this without being scandalized.  Another thing I really enjoy about Tokyo Sidekick is the free lesson in Tokyo geography. All the locations on the board are neighborhoods of Tokyo, like Otsuka, Waseda, or Shinjuku. If you thought Pandemic was good at teaching you world geography, this game is really good at teaching you the areas of Tokyo as you move between them.

The rulebook is very detailed and well written. We didn’t have any trouble understanding the instructions and we weren’t left with any unanswered questions after reading it.

The myriad of hero-sidekick combinations and the variety of enemies in the enemy deck make the game highly replayable. We’ve played a handful of times and have yet to even eke out a win but we never got tired of trying. The first time we played we didn’t stay on top of incidents and then after that we tried to manage our incidents better but were overrun with villains. I’m sure there some clever strategy to score a victory in Tokyo Sidekick, but we haven’t stumbled upon it yet. Which is another plus for the game as far as I’m concerned; there’s no easy win to be had here. You’re going to have to collaborate closely with your team partners and really put your heads together to beat this thing.

This is definitely a game to put on the shopping list, if you’ve not ordered it yet. The Kickstarter for Tokyo Sidekick  just closed the first week in September, but Japanime has already started taking pre-orders for the retail version of the game on their website. If you’ve got tweens, I especially think this is a must-have. The whole family can work together to save Tokyo and learn Japanese geography in the process.

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Publisher: Japanime Games
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 75 minutes.
Game type: deck building, cooperative, hand management

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Before the pandemic trapped us all in our homes, I spent many an hour at our local United Action for Youth center in Iowa City volunteering as a board game coordinator. Every month, I’d bring a few games with me and introduce them to the teens who hung out at the center after school. One of the games that got rave reviews from the group is Artsee.  Designed by J. Alex Kevern, and published by Renegade Game Studios, it’s an easy to learn, quick playing card game with a small table footprint for up to five players. Each player takes on the role of an art gallery curator, attempting to build the most prestigious gallery in order to win the game. Galleries are built from individual exhibits (cards) that depict two or three paintings from different categories (abstract, landscape, portrait, or still life). In addition to the paintings, each exhibit also indicates a featured category. Each time an exhibit is played to one of the four columns in a gallerist’s tableau, all opponents of the active player may deposit a meeple, representing a gallery visitor, on each exhibit in their gallery that has the same featured category as the exhibit the active player just laid down. Next, the active player scores points (prestige) for any visitor meeples that were previously located on the top most exhibit of the column they just added their exhibit to. The meeples are removed and returned to the active player’s general supply when this occurs. The active player also scores prestige for the number of  paintings in the column to the left or right (as indicated by the direction of the arrow on their exhibit card) of their just-placed exhibit that match the featured category of the exhibit card. If the player earns enough prestige during their turn (5-9), they may also claim a masterpiece painting token. These tokens are worth prestige at the end of the game during final scoring and also count as another painting of the chosen category when added to a column in the  gallerist’s tableau. Once a player has played an exhibit, earned prestige, and claimed a masterpiece token (if eligible), they draw a card and play passes to their left.

The gameplay continues until there are no more cards left to draw and all player hands are empty.  We found that turns progressed pretty quickly, with little to no analysis paralysis. Prestige bonuses are calculated at game end based on the number of masterpiece tokens accumulated. Each player adds their bonus to the prestige tokens they earned during the game. Don’t forget to also count the prestige on each masterpiece token. The player with the most prestige is the winner. 

While the components for Artsee  are nothing special, the artwork is well done (it’s comprised of reproductions of famous artwork with humorous twists). And it’s true that the art gallery theme seems to be just pasted on.  But at core,  Artsee  is a relaxing and fun little logic puzzle that doesn’t get boring, even after repeated plays. It’s especially fun to play with tween and teens and at under $25, makes an affordable holiday gift.

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Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
Players: 2-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): about 30 minutes per game
Game type: card game, set collection

Rating:

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I was so excited when Jamey Stegmaier’s Plans and Ploys  expansion for Tapestry  (published by Stonemaier Games) showed up in the mail. I’d  played a lot of Tapestry games with my social isolation pod (see my review for Tapestry  here) over the summer and I was eager to explore the new Tapestry cards and civilizations promised in the expansion. Beyond these updates, the Plans and Ploys expansion also includes a new game element (Landmark cards), new space tiles, a handy bag for drawing exploration tiles, and landmark place marker tokens which offer an easy way to identify which landmarks have already been claimed just by looking at the central board.

As soon as we unboxed Plans and Ploys, we invited a few of our friends over to give it a go. Our previous social isolation pod had disbanded with the spike in new COVID cases in our state (Iowa: ground zero for the pandemic once the fall semester of school started) and none of the members of our newly formed pod had ever played the base game before. So we weren’t sure whether we should play the base game without the expansion first or if the expansion was straightforward enough to merge into the base game in a way that didn’t prove too complicated for new players to understand. We spent a bit of time going over the base game rules with our friends and then read the rules addendum for the expansion together and decided to jump straight into playing with the expansion. It was a good decision. Everyone got into the flow of the game without any difficulty.

I played the Advisors civilization. This is a new civ from the expansion and I wasn’t sure if I was in love with its special abilities as compared to the other new civs I’d peeked at before we shuffled all the civs and randomly drew for each player.  One point per Tapestry card didn’t seem to amount to much, and at first I didn’t see the power in forcing others to take my Tapestry cards instead of drawing from the deck. But as the game unfolded, I quickly realized that I could use the giveaway power to purge less helpful Tapestry cards from my hand and churn through the Tapestry deck much quicker in search of the really powerful cards. Plus, I could influence my opponents’ behavior by giving them Tapestry cards that would encourage them to favor certain actions over others and then use the knowledge of what they were likely going to do for my benefit. For example, I might give someone a Tapestry card that strongly encouraged military track advancement and then play a Tapestry card myself that allowed me to pick an opponent and a track and copy the opponents movement on that track. Knowing that a specific opponent would likely play heavy on the military track for their next several turns allowed me to be more confident in my bet on that player and that track in conjunction with the track+opponent copy power of my Tapestry card.  Overall, the Advisors are well balanced and constructed civilization, as are all the others from the expansion that I’ve studied closely.

At the beginning of the game, each player was given a Landmark card and building. These are personal goals that allow a player to place a building on their Capital city map once the goal is met. All of the goals are fairly straightforward, but as with other games that feature personal player goals, players have to be careful not to become overly focused on their goal at the expense of general game strategy.

 

All of the new components packaged with the Plans and Ploys  expansion feature the same artwork style and the same quality of construction as those of the base game. The additions integrate very well in terms of gameplay and strategy too. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Stonemaier revealed Jamey had done a Peter Jackson: Lord of the Rings  move with this game, designing everything all at once and just releasing it in separate parts as the base game and an expansion. I especially appreciated the new landmark tokens that saved me from that grumpy feeling that wells up inside of me when I realize someone else has already taken a track landmark I was eyeing. Now as soon as they claim a landmark from one of the tracks, the landmark token is removed, signaling its unavailability. Nice. 

Our game was really close in score as far as everyone could tell for most of its duration. I wasn’t sure I was going to win, but I was having a hell of good time playing the six, count them, SIX, civilizations I’d managed to acquire in the game due to some crafty manipulation of my technology cards in conjunction with track actions. I felt powerful. Very powerful. 

In the end, my husband Christopher won (but not by much) and I came in second. Our newbie players did pretty well at final scoring, especially considering they’d never played before and were playing against veterans.

I loved everything about this expansion. If you haven’t picked up the base game yet, call/email your local game store to reserve a copy (or order online from Stonemaier) and add Tapestry Plans and Ploys  to your order at the same time. You’ll want them both. And if you already own Tapestry, this expansion is calling your name. There’s still time for you to add it to your Christmas wishlist and if no one gifts it to you, you can give yourself a copy (you deserve it after surviving 2020!) when the new year rolls around.

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-5 (We played with 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 3 hours per game
Game type: tile placement, hand management, dice rolling, area control
Retail Price: $27 direct from the publisher https://store.stonemaiergames.com/collections/tapestry/products/tapestry-plans-ploys

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

We’ve had our eye on Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated since its debut in 2019 from Renegade Game Studios. In our house, we love legacy games and we own most of the other Clank! editions, so it seemed like a good fit.

Boy, was it ever! We finally got the game a couple of weeks ago, and immediately fell for it so hard during the first few minutes of the game that we played it nearly every day with our 11 year old twin sons, Max and Locke.

In Clank! Legacy: AI, designed by Andy Clautice and Paul Dennen, players take on the role of employees at a small organization. At the beginning of the legacy campaign, the organization is in the process of applying to become a franchise of Acquisitions Incorporated, a megacorp famed for its for-profit adventuring services. We loved the narrative and appreciated the touches of authenticity,  like the franchise charter agreement.  We’ve played through other legacy campaign games over the past year where the narrative fell flat at times (I’m looking at you Aeon’s End Legacy), but Clank! Legacy: AI doesn’t suffer from that problem. Every game session (mission) introduces new and compelling twists in the ongoing storyline and is able to hold our interests. And the gameplay - including choices, restrictions, and goals-  makes sense within the narrative universe Clautice and Dennen have constructed for us. We found that the narrative so captured our kids attention that they were better about staying in the game each mission long enough to explore the terrain to everyone’s satisfaction as compared to their more typical race to the finish behavior when playing the standard edition of Clank! .  I was very pleased with that aspect of this edition as I really enjoy exploring the far reaches of the board.

The game mechanisms here are based on those in the base game (primarily deck building and point to point movement), with players descending into lower depths on the central board, tasked with obtaining rewards and escaping to safety before the game ends. But the legacy edition of this midweight strategy game introduces additional non-player characters, rewards, perils, and side quests as play unfolds. Spaces on the board have narrative icons indicating passages, from the Book of Secrets, which are to be read when a player lands on the space for the first time. These passages will often direct players to apply stickers to the game board, cards, or the rule book.  They may also reveal new game components such as additional cards or tokens. Clank! Legacy: AI  also utilizes both sides of the central game board, providing a lot of real estate for legacy modifications.

I didn’t notice a lot of analysis paralysis during our plays of Clank! Legacy: AI. The requirement to play all cards each hand coupled with the movement restrictions on the board provided only a few reasonable options to choose from each turn in terms of movement. Occasional delays were seen when players selected cards to recruit using skill points, but even then, it was never more than a few moments of hesitation. Each game session wraps up in a couple hours or less.

The components (the central board, the cards, cardboard tokens, etc) are of average quality for the price point. Our franchise board (where you deposit clank, hold market items for purchase, track dragon rage, and track player damage) arrived slightly warped and seems to have warped further as it has sat out on our game table (we’ve had some wild temperature swings here in snowy Iowa), but otherwise everything arrived in and remains in excellent condition.

The artwork (implemented by a full team of artists, including Clay Brooks, Anita Burrell, Derek Herring, Raul Ramos, Nate Storm, and Alain Viesca) is on point. It reinforces the narrative, is kid-friendly, and is generally unobtrusive, which is just what I’m looking for in this price range. It also blends seamlessly with the artwork in the base game, so when the legacy campaign is finished and players want to mix components of this game with the base game, it works visually.

The rulebook was generally clear and we didn’t need to look up much online, although we did have a few questions about some of the language on the cards that we didn’t feel the rulebook addressed (and we also couldn’t find a clear answer online, so it might just have been a brain block unique to us).

Every aspect of Clank! Legacy: AI  has been well planned and executed by Clautice and Dennen. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing this edition with my family and I’m hoping they’ve got additional legacy campaign expansions in the works for this IP as I can’t wait to see what they come up with next. Solid storytelling, from start to finish.

   -------------------------------------------------

Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
Players: 2-4 (We played with 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90 minutes per game
Game type: deck building, point to point movement, legacy, campaign
Retail Price: $75-100

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

When Wingspan was released in 2019, it caused quite a stir. It's a compelling board game that detours far far away from the usual themes of conquest or agriculture. The game romanced me with its beauty, mechanics, and unique subject matter (see my review here). Later that same year, the first expansion (Wingspan: European Expansion ; review here) was released. It proved to be more of a subtle change to the footprint of the game versus a turn-everything-upside-down-and-wow-you kind of addition. It took me awhile to warm up to it, and I wasn’t sold on it as a must-have item. More recently, Wingspan: Oceania Expansion, was released in 2020.  After several games, I’ve taken to this expansion much more than the previous one. That might be, at least in part, because my expectations have evolved for the series. Taking a lesson from my experience with the previous expansion, I assumed when opening the box that the designer (Elizabeth Hargrave), wasn’t likely to include any major disruptions in the mechanics that would upend the game as we know it. Instead, I expected another subtle shift in the mechanics and a widening of the bird inventory, both of which we did get.

Oceania  introduces:

• New bird cards from the Oceania range (some with spiffy game end powers)
• New round goals
• New bonus cards
• Eggs in a new color

As in the base game and previous expansion, the artwork is stunning. Here are some of my favorite new birds, based solely on appearance:

The cute and cuddly Little Penguin

 

The exquisitely beautiful Many-Colored Fruit-Dove

Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo (this badass will totally steal your lunch money)

Guild’s Finch (performing at the Copa Cabana nightly)

The punk rocker Crested Pigeon

Beyond my expectations, this expansion also introduced a new type of food - nectar. Nectar is both more useful than then other types of food (it can be spent as a wild food, substituting for other foods in most cases, and putting spenders in line for end game “biggest spender” point awards in the process) and more restrictive (any nectar left in your supply at the end of a round must be discarded). Along with the nectar comes new dice with nectar depicted and new player boards with spaces to hold spent nectar.  Elizabeth also provided a detailed explanation for the reasoning behind including nectar in the expansion rulebook and I thought that was a nice touch. I found that playing with nectar changed the emphasis of my actions to acquiring and spending nectar as much as possible in order to get the bonus points at end game for most nectar spent per action row.

The new player boards provided with Oceania also make it possible to refresh the dice in the feeder, refresh the cards in the face up draw pile, and have changed the resource quantities harvested when completing actions. There’s been an overall shift to more food and more cards while scaling back egg production. This may have been done to address concerns with egg spamming in the base game– a powerful, late game strategy in which players spend their last few turns laying eggs in order to capitalize on the point value of the eggs and the bonus cards that focus on egg production. We didn’t feel any pain in the reorientation away from egg laying because we played our games with only the new round goals and the new bonus cards (none of which focused on egg laying) to get a good feel for the expansion. But I’m not convinced that weakening the egg laying action row was really a good idea. On the surface, it seems to heavily discourage egg laying at all except as minimally needed for playing more birds. And it feels like a heavy disadvantage if you’re saddled with a bonus card oriented toward egg laying and your opponents aren’t. Oceania  also introduces some birds with egg laying powers, so that might balance out the action row weakening somewhat, but it would probably take hundreds of games across varying player counts to properly evaluate the net effect of these changes.

Despite my reservations about how the egg laying engine seems to have been crippled in this expansion, I still highly recommend it based on the twist in play the nectar brings and the replayability gains from the new card and goal inventory (especially for players who’ve played through the base game a ton and are getting a bit bored with the goals). I understand that the automa mode has also been updated quite a bit with this expansion, although I haven’t played that yet and am not covering the solo mode in this review. 

I’m three games into the Wingspan franchise and as a completist, I'm firmly committed to maintaining a complete collection; it’s certain I’ll be picking up the next expansion when it’s released.

 

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90 minutes per game
Game type: card drafting, dice rolling, action selection, set collection, solo

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Almost a decade after my interest was first sparked in reviewing games for Rio Grande Games, I finally met someone on the inside of the company in a mutual FB industry group and made a connection. Soon after, a review copy of Beyond the Sun by Dennis K. Chan was at my door.

Game Reviewing as a Hobby: A Peak Behind the Scenes I have always had a soft spot for Rio Grande Games. I spent part of my childhood growing up in New Mexico, and graduated from New Mexico State University, where the actual Rio Grande itself was practically in my backyard. Because of my time in the area, I really enjoy supporting New Mexico businesses. So there's that. And the first "serious" board game I ever played was the Rio Grande distribution of Power Grid, which is still one of my favorites. We own over 30 games from the Rio Grande catalog, including Dominion, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, Race for the Galaxy (another favorite), Stone Age, Underwater Cities (this game is amazeballs), and more. But I've never done a review for Rio Grande Games before. A million years ago, before I was ever a board game reviewer, I regularly reviewed books for publishers. When I first fell in love with board games, I thought I'd approach the publisher of my favorite games - Rio Grande Games - and establish a partnership. I was very used to the review procedures at major book publishing houses where the marketing departments are run by MBAs (who may or may not enjoy reading books themselves), the review process is formally structured and well publicized for reviewers, and introductory discussions between reviewers and publishers are focused on marketspeak like "demographic penetration". I remember feeling exasperated at the time that the Rio Grande Games website didn't have a marketing page with straightforward information on requesting review copies, nor contact info specifically for their marketing department. I had to do a bit of digging to reach someone at the company and that's when I found out that it wasn't a cold corporate monolith, but a small company where people wore many hats and everyone involved loved board gaming with all their heart. I didn't know any of those people personally (I hadn't been to a gaming convention yet) and trying to approach them from a traditional marketing relationship perspective (I think I sent a formal email about demographics!) went nowhere so I just gave up. I loved board games so much that I just started writing reviews for new games we purchased and played and didn't make any more attempts to establish connections with publishers after my run in with Rio Grande Games that left me spooked. A few years into the hobby, I started attending Gen Con, where I met a lot of publishing folks face to face and made a lot of great connections based on a shared love of gaming. It was only then that I started receiving review copies and maintaining formal relationships with the various board game publishers. While it's true that the board game industry has become more sophisticated in its marketing and organization as it's matured, a lot of board game publishers are still small time operations and when I connect with these folks, it feels like being part of a family.

My first observation: the cover art, by Franz Vohwinkel, is phenomenal.

In Beyond the Sun, players take on the role of faction leaders on the move, colonizing space and researching new technological breakthroughs in a post apocalyptic universe.  Each turn, players make decisions on what action to take and what resource to produce. However, most of the action spaces on the board are initially blocked off. A blocked action space can only be used by a player once they’ve taken the prerequisite actions on previous turns of researching the technologies associated with the blocked action. These technologies and associated actions are presented in a tree display with the level 1 technologies/actions branching off into level 2, 3, and 4 technologies/actions. 

After the action and resource phases of a player’s turn, they may claim an achievement, if they’re eligible. There are multiple achievements laid out for each game and players compete for the limited spots on each achievement card. When 4 achievement discs have been placed, the final round is triggered, followed by scoring.

 

After a thorough read through the rulebook, I got the game on the table pretty quickly. It’s a well written rulebook by the way, with humor to boot. I especially love the rule for determining first player (see #13 under setup).  

With the pandemic in full swing and social isolation in effect, I’ve focused on 2 player games of Beyond the Sun between my husband Chris and myself. During our first game, we spent the first few rounds aggressively fighting over one system we both wanted to colonize. Back and forth, back and forth, the control shifted. At some point this power struggle became more about a matter of stubborn will between the two of us and less about strategic play and I have to admit, I got a kick out of the ability to passive aggressively annoy and rattle my husband in this way. Eventually I gave in on that and moved on to focus on claiming the easier achievements while Chris focused more on building his engine through research and got caught up in trying to get to level 4 on the technology tree. That proved to be his downfall. Focusing on colonizing and the low hanging fruit of completing more level 2 research in lieu of making it to level 4 won that first game for me, 59 to 49.

I occasionally ran into a bit of analysis paralysis in during my plays of Beyond the Sun, but nothing too severe. And the components (dice, plastic coated cards, wooden tokens, ore crystals, player boards, player aids, and the central board) have held up well. They’re not as beautifully designed as the cover art, but the illustrations on them fit the theme and carry the story as intended.

We really enjoy this game at 2 players. It’s a solid engine builder that’s quick to learn but variable in play to keep the boredom at bay, and quite thinky. Our only complaint is that the game doesn’t come with a score pad to do the math at the end to determine the winner (the publisher would like to you know that you can download scoresheets on their website). A great addition to any well curated board game collection, I highly recommend Beyond  the Sun.

 

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Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90 minutes per game
Game type: worker placement, point to point movement

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Years ago, on a snowy winter excursion to Bavaria, I took a tour of King Ludwig (Mad King Ludwig) II's  castles. I really feel for the poor chap Ludwig II. He was very excited to be king and wanted to be a *real* king of the old order with power and dominion. Alas, he was born much to late in Germany’s evolution for such things and was reduced constitutionally to being a mere figurehead (such as Queen Elizabeth II is in England today). So he consoled himself by building castles throughout the countryside where he would escape and  fully immerse himself in his pretend kingdom where all subjects worshipped him and did as they were told.  Linderhof was one of the first castles he built and it was pretty modest so the taxpayers didn’t really bat an eye. This was the first stop on our tour.

The same could not be said for his next building project: Castle Neuschwanstein. This grand and glorious castle (just up the hill from his parents’ country castle) was the castle to end all castles. He fancied he’d build himself a castle in medieval style (probably because that was a time when subjects dutifully respected their king or perhaps because it appealed to his alpha-male decorating sense) and he spent his way through a good portion of the national treasury before the impoverished taxpayers had enough and called shenanigans. The castle was never finished, King Ludwig II came to a premature end and within a year the political leadership had turned the castle into a tourist attraction. It was *this* castle, by the way, that Walt Disney held in his mind’s eye when designing the Disney Princess Castles. With the snow falling softly around it, it was truly an amazing site to behold. So beautiful!

With the happy memories of the castle tour, I was drawn to Castles of Mad King Ludwig  when it was released by Bezier Games a few years later.

Another Bezier release – Suburbia – is in my top 10 list, so the positive track record with the publisher was another indicator that I’d probably enjoy Castles. After a bit of research, I found the general consensus in the board game community is that Castles  plays so similar to Suburbia that it feels like a reskin of the game with a castle theme. Players purchase tiles from a market to build a great infrastructure, with various points awarded based on which tiles are used and how they are arranged. After this discovery, I actually didn’t follow through with the purchase, as I’ve never been one who is keen to get every iteration of a game. For example, I rarely keep both the card game and board game version of a given game in my collection – I force myself to pick one and let go of the other. Since Surburbia was so close to my heart, I let go of any ideas to purchase Castles.

A year after Bezier released Castles, Stonemaier Games released Between Two Cities. In BTC, players draft tiles and then use them to build cities collaboratively with other players.  We build one city with the player to our left and a separate city with the player to our right; each of our partners also contributes tiles to our respective cities in common. At the end of the game, all cities are scored and the lower scoring city of the two we helped build is assigned to us as our final score. The player with the highest score at the table wins. It’s a pretty unique approach to scoring and forces you to give both of your cities equal attention throughout the game. I don’t own a copy of this game either, mostly because I only began collecting Stonemaier games after I fell in love with Scythe in 2016, and have focused heavily on acquiring new releases (vs picking up their earlier games). 

In 2018, Stonemaier (in collaboration with Bezier) released Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig. This game is designed by Ben Rosset and Matthew O’Malley and it takes the best of Between Two Cities and Castles of Mad King Ludwig and marries it all together. Now we find ourselves at the game table, working to build two castles at once, simultaneously but separately collaborating with our left and right neighbors. At the beginning of each round, each player draws nine tiles, comprised of various indoor and outdoor room types. Each turn, we select 2 tiles to keep (one destined for the castle we are building with the player to our left and the other for the castle we are building with the player to our right).  We pass the rest of the tiles to our neighbor (to the left in round 1 and to the right in round 2). Once everyone has selected their tiles and passed the leftovers, we begin collaborative discussions with each of our neighbors regarding the tiles we selected and where they should be placed within our castles. There are a few straightforward rules governing placement (for example, downstairs rooms can only be placed below the ground level) but generally the selection and placement decisions should be guided by maximizing victory point scoring. Also of note, when the third or fifth regular room tile of the same type is placed, a placement bonus is earned and redeemed immediately. These bonuses provide either additional tiles (including specialty room types) or bonus cards that award conditional victory points at the end of the game. After tile placement, the turns repeat in the same fashion three more times, except that on the last run, there is only 1 tile left after selecting two for placement and that tile is discarded out of the game. Round two begins, and follows the same process as the first round, with the only change being the direction the unselected tiles are passed around the table.

In anticipation of the upcoming Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig  expansion release (Secrets and Soirees), I received a review copy of the base game from Stonemaier.

Opening the eye-catching box (with artwork by Agnieszka Dqbrowiecka, Laura Bevon, and Bartlomiej Kordowski), we inventoried the components (cardboard tiles, wooden tokens, plastic coated cards, and score sheets) and set up our first game. The rulebook was easy to follow (as it always is with Stonemaier) and the handy player aids included proved valuable as we worked our way through the game. There were five of us playing that first time, including two teenagers, and I was surprised to see just how varied each team’s castle was from the others.

I worked really hard to give my all to both castles I was constructing, knowing that I would only score for the one that brought in the lower victory point total. I had to to correct my efforts a few times as it started to feel like one castle was building to a much higher score than the other. With both my neighbor on my left and right, I focused on bonus cards and tiles to increase point totals, whereas the competing castle builds leaned more heavily on amassing points directly through the regular room tiles. My strategy worked, and both of the castles I helped build were higher scoring than everyone else’s, giving me the victory even when taking the lower score of the two. In later games, my husband Chris and I played against each other, using the special 2 player rules in which a dummy player (“Ludwig” of course) is controlled by one of the players during the first round and by the other player during the second round. I focused on the same things in these two player games that I had previously at higher player counts. Meanwhile Chris focused almost exclusively on standard room tiles to accumulate points. Every time we played, the castle that Chris and I built together was by far the highest scoring one in the game (scoring highly on regular room tiles thanks to Chris and on bonus tiles and cards thanks to me), and my castle with Ludwig was runner up, giving me the victory again. 

I really really love this game. Much more than I thought I might, given its straightforward and simplistic mechanisms (I usually prefer complex strategy games).  Pick two tiles and arrange, rinse repeat. Sounds like it should get boring fast, but it never does.  I think the real draw of Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig,  that keeps engagement and enthusiasm high even among experienced gamers, is the puzzle of having to work both castles at once. Dividing your time between two equally important projects simultaneously that will be scored against each other is a personal challenge, regardless of your skill level, because you’re competing against yourself. That’s genius, and I can’t think of another game I own that implements this kind of scoring. The only drawback to this scoring mechanism is that players who are significantly weaker in strategy or skill than the rest of the group will drag down the scores of their partners, giving a clear advantage to the remaining players who weren’t yoked to the underperformer. Tactfully, since the game scores average in the direction of the weaker player on each team, this is a game to play with a group of your intellectual peers, unless you want to stew in resentment over how irrelevant all of your hard work turned out to be when it came to scoring.

In addition to the puzzle aspect of the game, the quick gameplay (less than an hour), family friendliness, and low level of analysis paralysis all help to make it an excellent go-to game, even on weeknights. 

I’m glad I gave Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig  a chance on our game table, and our friends who played with us have already asked when they can come over to play again. I’m quite excited to see what the upcoming Secrets and Soirees expansion adds to the game.

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 2-7
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 45 minutes per game
Game type: card drafting, tile placement, set collection

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I had a board game first this summer: I read an entire series of novels in preparation for playing a board game. When Jamey Stegmaier announced he was designing a new game with Alex Schmidt based on the award winning Red Rising  series by Pierce Brown, his excitement was so palpable that I wanted to understand the draw of the saga held for him. I checked my local library and the first book was already reserved, with a long waiting list in line before me. So I took the plunge and purchased the whole series from Amazon, hoping it would captivate me as it seemed to have done for Jamey.

Start with a narrative universe politically ordered by a tightly controlled color coded caste system;  pull in the concept of a boarding school with quirky teachers (like Hogwarts from Harry Potter) but introduce some structural changes to the school so that only the most socioeconomic elite in the caste system are permitted to attend; have the students compete in fight to the death brutal competitions (evocative of The Hunger Games but more violent and rape-y); explore the dynamic of class struggles and the penchant for revolution the lower castes foment; and you’ve got a good understanding of the Red Rising series that details the life and times of our protagonist, Darrow O’Lykos. To be honest, it’s an intense and difficult read due to the graphic nature of the violence (definitely not a story I want to see acted out on the big screen). But it’s well written literature and it makes you think.

Once I finished the book series, I was emotionally charged and ready to play Red Rising. I unboxed my review copy, invited over a few friends, and sat down for my first game. Jacqui Davis, Miles Bensky, and Justin Wong designed the artwork for the game and I’d describe it overall as futuristic, with a cartoonish bent when it comes to the character cards.

Before we get into the mechanics of the game, the components for Red Rising  Collector’s Edition warrant a discussion. I loved the weight of the metal influence cubes and fleet tokens handed out to each player. Likewise, the start player token, sovereign token, central board, and house cards are well constructed. And I appreciated the gold foil on the character cards. However, our first group of players gathered around our game table (and subsequent groups I played with) identified nuisance problems with some of the components. Each player’s set of metal influence cubes is  a different color and the yellow and gold sets are difficult to distinguish from across the table. The card holders included exclusively in the Collector’s edition are a disaster.

Every single person I played with managed to accidentally knock over their holder several times during a game, spilling out their hand for all to see repeatedly. Finally, the character cards reveal some questionable graphic design and font choices. For example, it was very difficult for all of us in the middle age cohort to read “obsidian” printed on the black cards.  None of these issues are significant enough to downvote the game, but I hope to see them corrected in future print runs.    

Onto the mechanics… Red Rising  is a mid-weight board game with a primary focus on cards and hand management. At the start of the game, each player is dealt 5 character cards and a house card (which grants a special ability). One of the primary goals is to build a hand of highly valued character cards (tabulated at the end of the game using the interaction formulas printed on the bottom of each card). To build this hand, players will use most of their turns to discard a character card from their hand to the board (called deploying) and then pick up a character card from a different column of the board. 

To spice things up, each card has a deploy ability that is triggered when the card is deployed (for example, a card might let you banish another card, move a card from one column to another on the board, immediately choose another card on the board to redeploy, etc). And each time you pick up a character card, you get a bonus immediately that edges you closer to victory along the path of one of the other strategic goals established in the game – either the receipt of helium tokens (worth 3 VPs each), forward movement along the fleet track (increasing VPs for each step forward), the possession of the sovereign token (10VPs if held at end of game), or influence cube placement on the influence area of the board (worth 4/2/1 VPs each, depending on your player’s rank in the influence cube area population). Instead of discarding+picking up on your turn,  there’s also an option, called scouting, to simply draw from the deck, place the drawn card on a column on the board, and then gain the bonus for that column. This option might be used when you are completely satisfied with your hand and can’t bear to part with any of it, or when you’re trying to pad the columns with cards of certain colors (some cards give you end game points per card of X color on the board) and crossing your fingers you can draw them.  It should be used sparingly since you miss out on the deploy ability when scouting.

I didn’t encounter a lot of analysis paralysis when playing this game, and it plays in under an hour (maybe 90 minutes for your very first time at higher player counts).  There’s plenty of replayability in the box given the large assortment of cards, but I do wonder if they’re going to eventually release an expansion for Red Rising  to keep things fresh for experienced players with different character card abilities or new point tallying interaction rules.

Jamey and Alex have hit on an accessible and winning combination by supporting a large spectrum of player counts (1-6), providing mid-weight complexity, keeping the gameplay tight enough to finish in under an hour, and selling it for under $60 at launch. And perhaps most importantly for players who worship theme and backstory, playing the game feels incredibly personal after you’ve read the books. I felt connected to the characters as they were revealed from the deck because of my experience reading the series. I was delighted to have the Sevro card in my hand, giddy to be given the House of Mars player role, and I flushed with anger when the Jackal card appeared on the board. I spent a lot of the game explaining the highlights of each character to my friends as new cards were laid down. Pretty sure I had to fight back tears when Eo’s card came up. In one of our games, my friend Malinda played Apollo and probably didn’t understand why I worked so tirelessly to thwart her efforts. Red Rising  is a solid OUI! OUI! OUI! from me for those who have read the series (and a OUI! OUI! for those who haven’t). Get the Red Rising  book series and read it and then get the game and play it. In that order. And consider pairing  the series with the game as a generous present for someone you love who loves board games and great dystopian novels.

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-6
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 45 minutes per game
Game type: hand management

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I had the opportunity to play a preview edition of Quests & Cannons: The Risen Islands  from Short Hop Games in advance of the game’s upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Designed by Eric and Shannon Geller, the preview edition arrived in a bright and colorful cover box that hinted at the beautiful artwork within.

We got it on the table for a family game straightaway. As we unpacked the contents of the box, I was impressed with the quality of the wooden components. Especially for a preview copy, everything was incredibly well made and sturdy, which speaks to the care and enthusiasm Eric and Shannon have put into the game. The illustrations on the components are just lovely! The artists (Lily Yao Lu, Tony Carter, Regis Torres, Sita Duncan, and Lilia Sitailo) did a really great job integrating the theme into the materials. 

Quests & Cannons  is very easy to setup and the rules are straightforward,  so you can get started playing pretty quickly; no one is going to be stuck spending an hour reviewing the rules upfront. The only thing you really need to work out is whether you want to play the game solo, cooperatively, free for all, or in teams.  Regardless of the mode you choose, you’ll sit down as a leader of a kingdom, tasked with bringing prosperity (i.e. victory points) to your people as you explore new islands that have suddenly cropped up in the sea. The revelation of the islands has coincided with devastating famine and drought hitting the kingdoms to varying degrees, so you’re also on a quest to find a way to reverse these plagues.

And since prosperity can be gained through attacking other leaders during explorations, you’ll need to be thinking about battle defense and offense.  My kids are teens, so they handled the attacks pretty well, but your mileage may vary with your youngsters, depending on their age and temperament.

The underlying mechanics of the game are pretty simple:

• Explore to gather resources across the islands and turn those resources in to complete quests (pick up and deliver)
• Follow explicit instructions on map clue cards to do X action at X location
• Attack rival ships

Players can do three actions on a turn, choosing freely between move, gather resources, and attack. 

All of the how-to and particulars governing these actions are detailed in the rulebook (and in video play-throughs online). Variability in movement rules, attack/defense power, and resource storage capacity is dictated for each player by the leader card they’ve chosen at the beginning of the game (each one comes with special powers and differing stats) and the upgrades performed on their ship.

I did find a few issues with the mechanics for the Geller team to address before the final version is distributed:

• Explain in the rulebook what should be done if the map clue drawn cannot possibly be used
• Add a 0 space to the action point track on each player’s ship to track the exhaustion of the final action point
• Implement monsters or other descriptive elements with differing effects into the treacherous sea spaces to add more complexity

Outside of these issues, I recommend Quests & Cannons as a family game for gateway gamers (i.e. new to the hobby) or those who gravitate toward light strategy games. It’s kid-friendly and there isn’t any analysis paralysis inherent in the game.  It plays in under 90 minutes, gives kids exposure to different play modes within the same game, tackles conflict resolution, and comes with a variety of board layouts to keep things interesting over multiple plays. Note that this is not a game I’d recommend for players who prefer deeper strategy. Highly experienced gamers drawn to seafaring themes and beautiful artwork can find similar mechanisms with a bit more depth and complexity in other games such as Islebound (designed by Ryan Laukat from Red Raven Games).

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Publisher: Short Hop Games
Players: 1-6 (We played with 4 and 5)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): about 90 minutes per game
Game type: pick-up and deliver,hand management, action points, kid-friendly, solo

Rating for Gateway Gamers: 

Rating for Advanced Board Gamers:                                          

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I really love the card game Lost Cities, designed by Reiner Knizia. When my husband Christopher and I were first getting to know each other, we used to meet up at Starbucks sometimes and play games. Lost Cities was one of our frequent picks. It’s a head to head, two player game in which both players are trying to outscore each other by laying down ascending runs of card suits on a small board between the two of them. There’s a theme laid over the mechanism (completing expeditions in the lost world) but it’s basically pasted on and so that is the last we will speak of it. So there we were, newly in love, eyeing each other across the table, smiling and flirting, and doing our best to beat one another at Lost Cities. It was awesome. And now, with the roll & write genre having made an impressive rebound a few years ago (let’s not forget the mechanism has actually been around since the 50s with Yatzee), Knizia has ported his award winning game Lost Cities  into this format, releasing Lost Cities Roll & Write  in 2021. 

You can play the new Lost Cities  with up to 5 players, but in an ode to our romantic beginnings, Christopher and I played it exclusively with one another in successive matches.  The components are compact, lacking the pretty illustrations of the original game, and few in number – the rule book, a scorepad, three pentagonal trapezohedron dice (that’s 10 sided dice for the uninitiated), and three 6 sided custom dice with color suit symbols. Oh, and some pencils. That’s it. We could have played on an even smaller Starbucks table if we had this back in our dating days.

The cards from the original game (wager cards and numbered cards 2 to 10, in five different suits) have been translated into dice roll results. On each turn, one player rolls all the dice and chooses one of the six sided dice to represent the suit and one of the ten sided dice to represent the number. A zero on the number die can represent either zero (mimicking the wager card from the original game which serves as a multiplier for the total score in the selected suit) or ten (mimicking the highest card in each suit).

In place of the tableau built up on a central board, each player tracks the progress of wager and number cards they’ve collected for each suit in color coded columns on their individual score sheet. Wager cards have been transformed into little circular boxes to be marked off from a suit column when rolled, while the numbered cards from the original game have expanded to include the number 1 and are recorded as numbers written manually in the square boxes running up each column. Whereas in the original game, only cards higher than the last card played in a suit were permitted to be played on subsequent turns by the same player, in Lost Cities Roll & Write, numbers that are higher than or equal to the last number recorded for a suit may be written into the column after future dice rolls. Expanding beyond the concepts from the original game, Knizia has included artifact icons on select spaces in each column and when those spaces are filled by a player, they may fill in one of the jars in the artifact column. Likewise, he’s included arrow icons on select spaces and when those spaces are filled by a player, they may fill in the next box in one of their suit columns with the number from the previous box in the column – note that it does not have to be the same column in which the arrow was filled.  There’s also a column for filling in dice shapes to represent rolls where a player could not or did not want to use any of the dice results. The latter column is particularly tricky to manage effectively, as it provides a similar point progression as the rest of the columns (negative scores for the first 3 boxes filled and then positive score for the rest) up until the last box in the column. If you color in that box, your score for the dice shapes column drops from 70 to 0. The bonus points awarded in the original game (20 points for laying down at least 8 cards in a suit) have been implemented in Lost Cities Roll & Write  for each column (including the artifact and dice shape columns) as a 20 point bonus to the player who is the first to fill in 7 boxes in the column on the scorepad. The roll & write game ends when either both players have filled in the dice shapes column completely or all eight columns have passed the bonus point marker. In our experience, the completed dice shapes column is a much more common trigger.

I’ve played a ton of roll & write games over the past few years. Some are instant objects of adoration, while others are infuriating piles of poo (I’m looking at you Imperial Settlers R&W). Lost Cities Roll & Write is fantastic; a great addition to the genre. Knizia did an excellent job of translating the feel of the original game into the new mechanism. The iconography is clean and easy to read and the game can be taught and played in less than a half hour. And of course, it takes up very little table real estate, making it perfect for travel or tight spaces (when traveling as a passenger, simply roll the dice into the box cover). If you twisted my arm and forced me to choose between Lost Cities or Lost Cities Roll & Write, I’d be forced to pick the original, but only because of the lovely artwork on the cards and the sentimental value I have attached to the game after my love and I played it in our early days. But who would go around doing such arm twisting? Nobody. Therefore, with a retail price point under $15 for each of these, unless you’re down to your last $15, I recommend you pick up both. Play the card game with someone you love when you have a little more table space. Play the roll & write anywhere, with up to four additional friends. 

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Publisher: Kosmos
Players: 2-5 (We played with 2)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): about 20 minutes per game
Game type: roll & write, dice rolling

Rating:

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig is one of our board game library essentials. There’s a great puzzle aspect to the game, it plays in under an hour, it’s family friendly, and it keeps analysis paralysis to a minimum. It also plays up to seven players, filling that niche when so many other games are capped at 4 or 5. For all of these reasons, when the Secrets and Soirees expansion debuted, we knew we had to have it.

The expansion offers additional room types for your castle, extra bonus cards, two new solo modes, higher player count (up to 8), and a new variant of head to head castle building where each player builds their own exclusive castle.

My personal favorite bit of the expansion is the puppy room!!! Adorable little corgis, just like we have at home.

We have played the expansion dozens of times. The first few months we had the game, we stuck to standard play, with everyone building two castles, and just focused on the fun of the new room types. These are activity rooms, secret rooms, and ballrooms. The activity rooms are thematically just that – clever little rooms themed around activities that give you points for each other room adjacent or penalize you if the listed prohibited room type is within the radius. The secret rooms are quite innovative. Each one has a little arrow printed on the tile pointing up, down, left, or right and takes on the same identity as the room indicated by the arrow, giving players a lot of flexibility based on placement in the castle. The ballrooms score points for specific room types in your neighbors’ castles. I really enjoyed these plays with the expanded room types and have not ever wanted to go back to playing with just the base game tiles again.

More recently, we’ve explored the new variants provided by the expansion. The Mad King’s Demand variant has players each build a single castle instead of managing two castle builds at once. It solves the problem of weaker players bringing a section of the entire table down in scoring and it plays so much more quickly than the regular game, so it can be a good choice for player counts larger than two. While it’s also easier and smoother in a two player game to play this way versus playing with the 3rd NPC player normally required in a two player game, I’m much less fond of using this variant with two players. I like the extra tiles to choose from when a third castle is in the mix; it helps make it a bit more challenging and feels more interactive.

The Automa solo mode is very easy to learn and it’s the most enjoyable solo game I’ve ever played because it feels like you’re actually playing against other players.  I played on level 3 – normal difficulty – and won 58 to 55/55. I actually found myself wishing for longer rounds. The other solo mode (which is dubbed the Introvert variant and noted by the rulebook as technically not an Automa mode) feels less like a game against peers and more like a game of solitaire puzzling. It’s faster than the Automa solo mode and has the quirky hack of allowing you to force the NPC opponent to take a specific tile you don’t mind it having when there’s only one that meets the selection filter used to draft a tile for them. This is because, in this mode, the NPC follows an algorithm to pick between a tile you’ve marked as favored and desired for yourself and all the other tiles in demand under its selection filter that round. If there’s only one tile that meets the filter and you mark another tile you actually want, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll lose your coveted tile to the NPC. However, if you mark the tile that meets the filter as if you wanted it for yourself, it’s forced to select it. Then you can choose whatever tile you actually prefer for yourself instead. The introverted solo mode is pretty great if you like that sort of thing, but I prefer the feeling of playing against others, so I’ll stick with the Automa solo mode, or competitive play against real life opponents.

With a retail price of just $15 on the Stonemaier website, and having so much quality content in the box, the Secrets and Soirees expansion is a must-have.

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-8
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 45 minutes per game
Game type: card drafting, tile placement, set collection

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

At every company, there’s some guy trying desperately to figure out a way to harness a current wave of consumer demand and somehow direct it right onto the doorstep of the company. “Even better…”, that guy explains to rest of management, “If we can deliver something on *that* demand that our customers will gobble up and that will drive their demand up for our *other* established products, we’ve gone above and beyond! A cross-promotional windfall!”  Well, it looks like someone at Stonemaier put that guy in charge of roll and write game development and Rolling Realms was the result. It’s meta game of sorts that mostly serves as an advertisement for the rest of the Stonemaier product line, as each card in this roll and write game is named after a different Stonemaier game title. 

 

On the plus side, Rolling Realms is a pandemic friendly, easy to learn, and quick to play roll and write that plays as easily over zoom with 20 people as it plays in person with a few people around a table. Every card presents a different way to earn victory points as it’s filled in, and in a standard game, 9 cards from the supply of 11 varieties are chosen and used (3 cards per round x 3 rounds).

Environment sparing bonus: the cards are all laminated and dry erase markers are provided, so you can play unlimited games without killing endless trees. The Tapestry card gives me a headache with its Tetris like spatial relations exercise, but otherwise I enjoyed all the cards and their creative use of point collection.

   Despite its positives, Rolling Realms does not make the cut for my recommendations list. I played many, many games of Rolling Realms to give it a fair shake, and here’s the thing – it’s a perfectly adequate roll and write game. But in this modern era of board gaming, there are a ton of roll and write games on the market or in development and adequate just doesn’t cut it. Add on the creepiness factor of the cross-promotional marketing gimmick (BTW, can anyone tell me why the card for Red Rising is named “The Society” instead of RR?) and yeah…just no. Keep the game if someone gives it to you I suppose (I’m probably keeping mine), but don’t go out and spend your own money on Rolling Realms when there are so many other better roll and write games out there you could buy instead. I’m talking Cartographers. I’m talking Hex Roller. I’m talking Qwixx and Quinto. I’m talking Railroad Ink. I’m talking Noch Mal. And for the ultimate challenge, I’m talking Fleet or Hadrian’s Wall.    

As a final note, I want to let you know that I’m very sad I finally met a Stonemaier game that didn’t bring me joy. I mean, it was inevitable that it would happen someday, but it’s still sad. I've been reviewing games from Stonemaier for a few years now. I got drawn in by Scythe initially (amazing area control game) and then, with each new game the company released, I crossed my fingers and hoped that it would be awesome. I really respect Jamey Stegmaier as a designer and a business owner and I'm rooting for his continued success. And so far, it's all worked out, because I've fallen in love with each Stonemaier game that's come my way, outside of Rolling Realms. For example, Tapestry and Between Two Castles are amazing, as are their expansions, and I urge you to give them a try. Also, I hope Jamey doesn’t listen to any more bad ideas originating from the guy with the marketing gimmick idea that was behind Rolling Realms, whether he was one of the voices in Jamey’s creative imagination or an actual employee at the company.  

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1 - many
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): about 20 minutes per game
Game type: roll & write, dice rolling

Rating:

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

The good folks at Stonemaier Games sent us a review copy of the newest expansion for Tapestry recently. We have the base game and the previous expansion, Plans and Ploys, in our game library. Arts & Architecture is designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Mike Young, with artwork by Andrew Bosley and landmark sculptures by Rom Brown. The expansion adds more of the familiar components: five new civilizations, six new capital city mats, 5 new landmark cards with landmarks, twenty new tapestry cards, and eleven new tech cards. Arts & Architecture also adds completely new features to the game, including an arts track with accompanying landmarks, twenty masterpiece cards, twenty inspiration tiles, and an upgraded science die to include iconography referencing the arts track.

The new arts development track is quite useful and thematically blends well with the overall concept of the game.

It gives you the opportunity to place more of your income buildings, score victory points for tech cards and exploration tiles, acquire masterpiece cards which provide benefits during income turns, and place inspiration tiles on your income mat over existing income tracks to improve the rewards gained during income turns. In the first few games I played (2 player), I concentrated heavily on the arts track, progressing to the end of it easily before game end, all the while also making steady progress on two of the base development tracks.

In the most recent game (4 player), I didn’t use the arts track much at all, which was a huge mistake, landing me in third place while the frontrunners leaned on the arts track significantly. I’ve previously noted in my review of Tapestry (https://www.thatswhatjennisaid.com/2020/07/board-game-review-tapestry.html) and Tapestry Plans and Ploys (https://www.thatswhatjennisaid.com/2020/12/board-game-review-tapestry-plans-and.html) that to win the game, you must diversify and progress on at least two tracks simultaneously, but to be careful trying to do much more than that or you’ll spread yourself too thin. With this expansion, I’ll amend that to note you’re unlikely to win the game unless you focus on the arts track as well as two of the base development tracks, as the arts track is really an enhancer for all the other tracks. It will be interesting to see how development track focus will need to be adapted when Stonemaier releases additional expansions for the game (anticipating a religion track at minimum; every civilization has its religious scholars).

The additions to the tapestry deck include a new ability type - continuous. These abilities begin when played and continue for the duration of the game instead of just the current era. There are also new tapestry cards that allow you to place landmarks on them for scoring as an alternative to placing the landmarks on the capital city (or on the map as some civ powers allow you to do). I did not have a chance to play any of the continuous tapestry cards during my recent games (although they look useful), and I passed over playing any of the landmark tapestry cards I acquired as they did not seem as beneficial as the other tapestry cards I had in my hand.  I don’t think I’m a big fan of any of the cards that let you place landmarks on the for points (including the new tech cards with this feature); I prefer to prioritize my city map for landmark placement first. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but I haven’t made use of my landmark cards at all, even in the games where I won by a large margin. They seem to be an entirely optional aspect of the game and not necessary for a win.

 

One more change with the Arts & Architecture expansion is another refinement of the civilization adjustments first introduced in the Plans and Ploys expansion. This fine tuning of civilization powers comes as a result of extensive real-world player testing and aims to rebalance the game for greater fairness. I think it might need further refinements because my husband Chris played the Architects civilization in our last game and the adjustment afforded him 30 VPs at the start of the game as some sort of handicap to balance out perceived weakness, but his city mat was so perfectly attuned to his civilization (the mesa) that he won in a landslide (80 points above the second place player).

Overall, I think that the Arts & Architecture expansion is a great addition to the Tapestry portfolio. It adds more variety, layers in additional ways to strategize and score, and provides some new opportunities for player interaction on the map, without causing any additional complexity. While it’s not a must have for the base game, it’s certainly a nice-to-have addition that I’m happy to recommend.

Beyond the details of the new expansion, I did want to take this opportunity to mention that with repeated plays of the base game as well as across the expansions, I’ve noticed that 4 player games are much more competitive than two player games (at least in our household). There isn’t a single time Chris and I have played the game by ourselves that I haven’t walloped him by 100+ points, yet when we play at 4 players, he has won twice or been neck in neck with the winner, whereas my scores are significantly lower. That’s got to be tied to the dynamics of how this game plays at higher player counts because it doesn’t make any sense that all on my own I could go from being a genius at 2 player to just average at 4 player.

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-5 (We played with 2 and 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 3 hours per game
Game type: tile placement, hand management, dice rolling, area control
Retail Price: $45 direct from the publisher https://store.stonemaiergames.com/products/tapestry-arts-architecture

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I'm completely obsessed with Obsession! I received a review copy of the updated second edition along with all the expansions (Wessex, Useful Man, Upstairs Downstairs) and from the moment I took everything out of the boxes, my excitement was over the top. Actually, that's not even the half of it - I remember I was already quite excited before the game even arrived. I'd wanted to get my hands on a copy as soon as I learned there was a game that brought the lifestyle that we all fell in love with watching Downton Abbey to the gaming table. Back in 2021, I was having a great time at the Dice Tower Summer Retreat and a new friend Bonnie sang the praises of Obsession. She had seen me eyeing the box on the shelf and gave me a summary of the game mechanics as she owned the first edition. She explained that the theme is centered on running an estate in Derbyshire and competing against others to have the best home, reputation, gentry guests, etc. Based on her enthusiasm and description of the game, my husband and I sat down to play it that afternoon. I ruthlessly squashed him 96 to 78 in our first game and I was hooked.

 

Back at home, months later, with the second edition and the expansions in front of me, my first task was organizing everything into one box. The publisher had included all of the expansions to ensure I had the complete experience, but as far as I could tell, some of the materials sent were duplicate cards or tiles. And that was true, even after carefully reviewing and incorporating the items that seemed to be dupes but turned out to be replacements for base game components with subtle changes. I think this happened because the Upstairs Downstairs expansion comes with materials to update the 1st edition of the base game, but those materials are already included in the second edition of the base game that I received, resulting in duplicates. I mention it in case you order the newer edition and all the expansions and find yourself wondering what’s going on with extra items you find. I just set them aside in my spare parts box.

Anyway, let’s start by cataloging the components in the base game, shall we? The 2nd edition comes with:

• Supply Board
• Used to hold the Builder’s Market of improvement tiles available for purchase, as well as the guests, servants and objective cards that may be acquired as the game unfolds.
• Round Track Board
• Keeps the progress of the game flow through each round and season (a season is 3 rounds plus a special round called a courtship). There are 16 or 20 rounds to a game, depending on whether you play a standard or extended game. The Round Track also holds the theme cards, the victory point cards, and the two very special guests every estate is dying to get an audience with – Mr. Charles Fairchild and his sister Elizabeth Fairchild. 
• Player components (given to each player)
• Family board to organize and process their estate’s reputation, servants, improvement tiles, and hosted events
• Starting estate tiles (improvement tiles)
• Set of basic servants
• Small hand of family guest cards + 2 casual guest cards designated as starter guests
• Reputation wheel counters
• Reminder tiles
• Player aids
• Any addl bonus guests, rooms, money, or servants granted by the family’s unique profile
• Other components
• Money (pounds)
• Scorepad
• Improvement tile bag
• Components for solitaire play
• Rulebook and Glossary

These components are all well made and under normal use should last a long time and wear well. The rulebook is well written and the glossary makes it evident this was a passion project for the designer, as it goes into great detail regarding the historical significance of the various tiles and guests. Absolutely love it! Both the font and the artwork help to carry the theme across the components, which was a great point of detail.

Gameplay is relatively straightforward. Across their turns, players are responsible for managing estate tiles, guests, and servants while seeking to conform to courtship themes, improve their reputations, and complete objectives. At the end of the game, the player with the most victory points is the winner.

Managing Estate Tiles

During the game, each player will be responsible for managing the improvement tiles on their estate. Initially, each player only has a handful of starter tiles, but over time their estate will expand to include additional tiles purchased from the supply board. Each tile confers one or more benefits (called favours) when played, in the form of money, the ability to draw additional guests or dismiss guests one already has, the ability to hire additional servants, increased reputation, and end game victory points. Improvement tiles are flipped over after first use, typically revealing different favours on the backside. Most tiles remain on their backside after initial use, but some improvement tiles are designed to be flipped after each use. Note: each improvement tile has requirements as to which type of guest[s] and servant[s]  are required to host an event with that tile so it’s essential that players approach estate tile management in a coordinated fashion with guest and servant management.

Managing Guests

In addition to their estate tiles, players must also manage a hand of guest cards (which are discarded individually after use to a personal discard pile and recalled en masse when passing). At the beginning of the game, the hand is comprised of family members and casual guests dealt directly to players, but as with the player estates, as the game continues into successive rounds, it will expand. Additional cards added to the hand will be drawn from the casual and prestige guests on the supply board. Just as improvement tiles provide favours, so do guests.  Prestige guests give better favours and are generally worth more end game victory points. Some guests, based on their thematic description, have destructive favours that you have to watch out for. For example, a male guest labeled a cad might lower your reputation should you invite him to an event and offer negative victory points if you find him in your hand at game’s end. Adding a bit of complexity to the puzzle, guests may often have requirements for servants printed on their card; this is in addition to any servant[s] specified on improvement tiles used to host events.

Managing Servants

With improvement tiles to host prestigious events and guests to attend those events, of course servants will be needed to keep things proper in high society. After all, the guests aren’t going to serve themselves! Not to worry; players begin with a few starting servants, and will hire on more help as they wish to during the course of the game.  In this way, staff management becomes the third leg of family affairs.  Servant management can be especially tricky. This is because you typically cannot hire additional servants without having one of your most useful servants available (the butler). Additionally, to be kind to our staff and not overwork them, after a servant has been used during a turn, it’s not available again until two turns later (although a player can spend reputation if they are desperate and force a servant back to work early). It’s very easy for a player to back themselves into a corner with plenty of improvement tiles and guests ready to go and a shortage of servants to make the event happen.

Courtship Themes

At the beginning of each season, an event theme is drawn, revealing the improvement tile category that will be evaluated at the end of that season, during the courtship round. During evaluation, the player with the most victory points showing on the tiles in their estate matching the theme will be awarded a victory point card and their choice of the Fairchild guest cards.  The victory point cards offer a player the choice of a useful one time in-game benefit or a chunk of end game victory points. And while the player must give the Fairchild guest back at the end of the next season, having them in hand during the next season to take advantage of their favours is very beneficial. Hence, tailoring improvement tile purchases and tiles selected for hosting (to flip them and reveal their higher VP side) to the theme each season is an essential tenant of good strategy and game winning players tend to correlate with VP card awardees.

Reputation

You cannot win this game without paying attention to reputation. Every improvement tile and guest card has a minimum prestige rating printed on them (or implied as in the case with family and the Fairchilds) which represent the minimum reputation required to use them for a hosted event. If you don’t improve your reputation as the game plays out, you’ll eventually be shut out of using the tiles and guests that have the greatest impact on final scoring. Additionally, a player’s reputation level at game end directly confers victory points, ranging from 1 point (for having a reputation level of 1) to 45 points (for having the maximum reputation level in an extended game). Finding ways to steadily increase reputation through favours found on improvement tiles and guest cards is very important. In every game I’ve played, the winner was among those with the highest reputations at game’s end.

Objectives

At the beginning of the game, all players are dealt a number of objective cards. These are end game goals, that if accomplished, reward victory points. They may be variable, such as x VP per servant on staff, or fixed amount, such as 16 VP for a player if they have tiles x,y, and z in their estate. While objectives are a great source of victory points and should not be entirely disregarded, I have generally found that the winners in our games are not the players who attain the most VPs from objectives. For example, in our most recent game, my friend Brian won a 5 player game with a total score of 221 (next closest player had only 189) and yet he brought in 28 of those points from objective cards while I had 38 points from objectives and two of the other players also had higher VP totals from their objectives than Brian.

Player Turns

On a player’s turn, they begin by rotating their servants a step toward active service. If they’re currently resting in the servant’s quarters they move to active service and if they were in the expended service area they move toward the servant’s quarters. Next, the player observes any round events (for example, some rounds designated as village fairs provide income and some tiles provide favours at the beginning of each round). After that’s completed, the player decides which tile they’d like to use to host an event, moves it to the active event box on their player board, and decides which guest[s] (of those that meet the requirements) will attend the event. To be eligible, the guest[s] must be in the player’s hand and not their discard pile. This is the point where they most also provide the required servants – placing those required by the tile on the tile and those required by the guest[s] on the guest[s] card. To be eligible, the servant must be in the available service area of the player’s board. Once servants have been placed, it’s time to collect favours from the tile and the guests (gathering or giving up money, reputation, additional guests, and additional servants as indicated). As a final step in the turn, a player may buy an improvement tile from the market. The market is setup with tiles that have been drawn randomly from the tile bag and placed in market slots with prices listed above. When a tile is purchased, tiles in higher priced market slots are shifted over to fill the gap and a new tile is drawn from the bag and placed in the most expensive market slot. Normally, each player is limited to buying only one tile during a round, except during a special round that represents the Builder’s Holiday that allows them to buy as many tiles as they can afford and wish to purchase. Once a player finishes their turn, play passes to the next player. Once every player has had a turn during a round, the round marker is moved to the next round and the process begins again. During the courtship round of each season, no player actions are taken; this round is used exclusively to evaluate player performance against courtship themes.

So that’s the nuts and bolts of the base game. It’s on point and the gameplay is both a challenging puzzle and entertaining adventure at the same time. Highly recommend! I can’t find a single fault in the game. Not a one. I could probably play Obsession dozens and dozens of times as presented in the base game and still be enthusiastic about it, just like my friend Bonnie was. But I was lucky enough to have all the expansions in front of me from the get go, so of course I started incorporating them as well, in the second or third play of the game. Let’s go over those now.

Wessex Expansion

Wessex adds a fifth family to the game, giving players an additional choice when selecting starting families. Dan provides a great deal of narrative backstory for the new family in the expansion insert booklet and I just love that. Again, great attention to detail, and it’s really appreciated by players like myself who care about theme and want to understand the backstory of who we are playing in a game and what our motivations are all about. This expansion also includes two new improvement tiles and an extended mode solitaire option. You’re going to want to pick up this expansion for the variability it provides. I have a personal goal to win the game as each family, so this adds to my challenge.

Upstairs Downstairs Expansion

This is a major expansion that adds complexity, variability, and extra joy to the base game through a lot of new and updated components. There are four new servant types, each of which has a variety of effects when integrated into the game. Very clever and all seamlessly thematically appropriate. There are dozens of new guests (including very unique promotional guests), objectives, and improvement tiles. There’s a new set of cards called milestones that offer in-game shared objectives that award victory points to the players who complete them first. There’s even a new round track board to facilitate a new game variant.  For those who aren’t madly in love with the cute little mini sized VP and Objective cards included in the base game, this expansion provides a duplicate copy of these decks in a larger format. It’s actually a little debate in our group as to which set of decks to use every time we sit down to play as I really like the little cards but some of my friends appreciate the easier-to-read larger cards. As an added bonus, the expansion also allows the game to scale to 5 or 6 players (by providing an additional family/extra improvement tiles/extra basic servants). You’re going to want to pick up this expansion because it’s nothing short of amazing. It's a can’t live without.

Useful Box Expansion

This expansion is mostly a correctional tool, updating tiles from the base game (both the 1st and 2nd printings) that have errors as well as problematic tiles from the Upstairs Downstairs expansion. There are also a few new tiles and some components to expand solitaire variants. While this expansion was necessary for me, I would expect the entirety of the  corrections and new tiles to be folded into the next printings of the respective games (base or U/D expansions) and likely unnecessary for future buyers. Just make sure to check your edition to determine if this expansions provides value for you or not before you spring for it.  

Etsy Stickers

I might be on the dark side of the publisher for recommending these (as they appear to be unlicensed) but I found these adorable meeple stickers on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/listing/1008836394/obsession-meeples-upgrade-kit-free) that really took the servant components over the top. Highly recommend them.

I just want to add a final note about theme. Obsession is so perfectly themed, that it lends itself to glorious costuming around the game table in historical period appropriate attire. If you’re not willing to take it that far, at least consider hosting a formal tea with gourmet sandwiches and delicate sweets for your friends who come to play the game. It really elevates the whole experience.

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Publisher: Kayenta Games
Players: 1-6 (We played with 2,3,4,and 5)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 3 hours per game
Game type: worker placement, hand management, tile placement games
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Whenever Martin Wallace designs a new game, I am all over it. This is because I absolutely love Brass Birmingham (another MW designed game); in fact Brass Birmingham is my #1 board game of all time. Over the years, his other games I've tried have been pretty good, but not necessarily amazing must-buys. Still, I keep trying each new release of his, searching for that next star performer. That's why I'm excited to report that Anno 1800 is, in fact, a star performer, and an amazing must-buy board game.

Anno 1800 was adapted by the publisher (Kosmos) from a Ubisoft video game of the same name. In the board game, players take on the role of industrialists, charged with developing their island economies and exploring other islands. Each player begins the game with a personal industry board with trade & exploration ships, a shipyard, and industrial goods tiles printed on the board.

A starting collection of workers (wooden cubes) of various types to produce the goods is also provided to each player. A specific type of worker must be placed on a goods tile on a player’s personal industry board to produce the good, and it remains there until an action is taken (the festival action) to move all the workers back to their unused (“residential”) area. Each player is also dealt a hand of population cards and a couple of trade and exploration tokens. The population cards have a requirement that must be met (depicted on the face of the card; typically the production of a good, or the relinquishment of trade or exploration tokens) before they can be played. The trade tokens are a prerequisite for using an opponent’s goods and the exploration tokens are a prerequisite for sailing to other islands.

In the center of the play area, there is a common industries board, with a limited number of each type of goods tile stacked in little piles for the taking, as well as shipyard and ship tiles. If you’re familiar with Brass Birmingham, the layout on the central board in Anno 1800 is somewhat akin to how the industry tiles are stacked on your personal playing board before you remove them to place on the central board in Brass.

To round out the setup, there are stacks of population cards (sorted by the type of worker each card is associated with), new world cards (basically a twist on population cards; given out as a benefit when you explore new world islands), expedition cards (provide opportunities for additional end game scoring; these are given out as a benefit by population or new world cards but can also be purchased with exploration tokens), and a handful of common objective cards (each one provides end game scoring bonuses for players who meet the objective).    

During a player’s turn, a player chooses from among several actions:

• Expand industry by adding the ability to produce new goods to their island (construct new industry). To do so, a player will take a goods tile from the central board, flip it over, and place it onto a free space (or over top an existing goods tile they are willing to lose the ability to produce going forward). Some goods tiles have prerequisites that must be met in order to construct them on a personal industry board. For example, to gain the ability to produce soap, a player must place the required type of workers on their personal industry board to produce pig fat and coal. Once they’ve done so, they may take the soap tile from the common industries board.
• Expand industry by adding a new shipyard to their island (construct a new shipyard). To do so, players will take a shipyard tile from the central board, flip it over, and place it onto a free space along the coast of their island (or over top an existing shipyard tile they are willing to lose the ability to produce ships from going forward). There are level 1, 2, and 3 shipyards, corresponding to the type of ship they can produce. Like goods tiles, shipyards have prerequisites that must be met in order to construct them on a personal industry board.
• Expand industry by adding new ships to their island (construct one or more new ships).  To do so, players will take as many ship tiles  as they’d like to build from the central board, flip them over, and place them onto free spaces in the harbor of their island (or over top an existing ship tiles they are willing to lose). There are level 1, 2, and 3 ships, corresponding to the type of shipyards that produced them. Like goods tiles, ships have prerequisites that must be met in order to construct them on a personal industry board. Additionally, ship production is limited to 1 ship per established shipyard on a player’s personal industry board.
• Increase the workforce by up to three new workers by meeting the prerequisites for recruiting each worker. When this action is taken, a player takes the worker cubes from the central supply that they have met the recruiting prerequisites for and adds those workers to their home island, placing them in the residential area. Note that each type of worker taken also requires the player to draw a population card corresponding to that worker type from the central card stacks. This card is added to the player’s existing hand of population cards.
• Upgrade up to three workers by meeting the prerequisites for upgrading each worker. When this action is taken, a player takes the worker cubes from the central supply that they have met the upgrade prerequisites for and adds those workers to their home island, placing them in the same general area that the worker they are replacing was located. This means if a player upgrades a worker from the residential area on their personal industry board, the upgraded worker should be placed in the residential area as well. But if the player upgrades a worker that was already in place on a goods tile, the upgraded worker should likewise be placed back on that same goods tile.
• Play a population card from their hand and fulfill the card’s requirement to receive a one time benefit (more workers or worker upgrades, gold, trade or exploration tokens, expedition cards, an extra turn,  new world resources,  or the ability to discard cards in hand without otherwise playing them first). Most of these benefits can be redeemed (“activated”) at any time after playing the card – on the current turn or on a future turn – and these activations are bonus actions, so you can do as many of them on a turn as you wish. Once they are activated, they are turned face down and kept in a player’s personal area. Playing a population card also amasses victory points (called influence points in Anno 1800) to be scored at the end of the game; these will make up the bulk of a player’s influence points when the game is concluded. 
• Swap up to three population cards from their hand with the same number of cards from the communal population decks. This might be done if a player didn’t find the cards in their hand useful and wanted to gamble for better cards from the central decks.
• Sail and explore an old world or new world island by expending exploration tokens.  Exploring old world islands extends the manufacturing spaces of a player’s personal industry board and provides an immediate one time bonus as depicted on the old world island drawn. Exploring new world islands provides access to three new raw materials (such as cotton, coffee beans, or tobacco) per island that can be obtained using trade tokens. These materials are accessible only by the player who drew the island (a private relationship with the island natives). If a new world island is explored, the player must also draw three new world cards from the central stacks and add them to their hand.
• Take an expedition and draw up to three expedition cards by expending exploration tokens. Each of these cards show an animal and an artifact discovered on the expedition. At the end of the game, assuming the player holding the expedition cards has the requisite workers in their supply to oversee the animals and artifacts depicted, they will receive influence points for the specimens.

For any of the above actions that require a prerequisite good that the player cannot or does not want to produce, the good can be obtained from an opponent by trading the required number of trade tokens in exchange for the production of the good. Likewise, for actions that require a worker that the player cannot currently supply because it has been exhausted already, the necessary worker can be returned to its residential district before the action by paying the required amount of gold to entice them home. 

• Celebrate a festival to reset all workers and replenish trade and exploration tokens. When this action is taken, a player moves all of their workers back to the residential area of their personal industry board and refills each of their ships with the type and number of token specified.   

The game continues, turn after turn, action after action, until a player plays or discards their final population card. Once that happens, that player gains the 7 VP fireworks token, and the rest of the players are allowed to complete their turns in the current round and one additional round, prior to final scoring. Scoring is detailed in the rulebook, but to summarize, it consists of points from population cards, expedition cards, gold, the fireworks token, and the objective cards. Note that scorepads are not included in the game, but can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.

It’s suddenly clear to me that when I really really REALLY love a game, I get so excited about it that I take the time to explain in detail all of the rules of gameplay like I’ve done here for Anno 1800. For most games outside my top 10, I stick to my opinions on the game overall and simply comment on the rulebook (which is well written in this case, by the way) and advise you to read it yourself if you want details on all the gameplay.

Let’s talk components. Highlights of the Anno 1800 component artwork include the box cover and the reproduction of the box cover art on the back of the player boards. The rest of the artwork across the components I’d classify as adequate; it does its job to reinforce the theme without being overly distracting. The component construction and durability are adequate also, and should hold up fine over several plays, except for the population cards. We’ve played less than 10 times and the cards are already bending at the edges. They don’t seem to be high quality I know it’s a little unfair to compare the quality of cardstock used in the high end Kickstarter games I’ve gotten used to with that of the cardstock used in a retail edition of a board game like this one, but it’s really an area that Kosmos could have put a little more care into. You might want to sleeve your population cards to prevent damage if you play this game frequently.

Getting into the gameplay, there’s lots of strategy to explore, game after game. Reading over strategy forums online, I see a lot of discussion on trying to win the game by hoarding all the red workers, getting architect workers first to build ships, creating a strong feedback loop of acquiring new workers and 8 point population cards, etc, etc. Everyone thinks they’ve devised the very best strategy to ensure victory and there is much debate. And of course, the effectiveness of any given strategy varies across different player counts. What works exceedingly well in a 4 player game may not work at all in a 2 player game.

I didn’t face a lot of analysis paralysis in my plays of Anno 1800, and since I’m prone to AP more than most, that bodes well for the rest of you. There just isn’t the complexity here to induce a brain freeze and because you must consume all resources in the same turn that you produced them, long term resource planning isn’t a possibility.

The one drawback in the mechanics of the game is that a player can hijack the entire spirit of the game by attempting to rush the end conditions by disposing of their cards as soon as possible after the game starts. All they need to do is go out first, and if they can do that before any other player has laid down many of their population cards, they can easily come out ahead if no one else is paying attention, given they’ll also be awarded the 7 point fireworks token. What I want to say about this is that if you pay attention when you spot a player trying to do that, you can switch your strategy to focus on completing the 3 and 5 point population cards before they go out instead of the 8 pointers you might otherwise be prioritizing and you should still be able to come out ahead of them when they bring an early end to the game. Alternatively, you can just stop inviting over the friend who sucks the fun out of the game by rushing the ending.

Just as with Brass Birmingham, what we have here in Anno 1800 is a well themed (love me some industrial action) board game with mechanics that are easy to learn, yet in their interoperability, provide depth to the game, especially when combined with the scarcity of certain resources like the red workers. There’s also  a highly addictive quality to Wallace’s games like this one, wherein you construct a thing that produces things, and then you produce those things, and then you use the things you produced as input to construct another thing or produce more things. I love that resource chaining in Brass and I love it here!

Anno 1800 is a strong buy recommendation from me; pick up the game online or from your FLGS (shout out to mine: https://www.geek-city.com/) and get it on the table. I’d love to know what you think of it also – you can comment here or tag me on IG @thatswhatjennisaid .

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Publisher: Kosmos
Players: 2-4 (We played with 2 and 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 2 hours per game
Game type: worker placement, hand management, card games
Retail Price: $69.95 direct from the publisher https://store.thamesandkosmos.com/products/anno-1800

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat).

Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers.

During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds the glory scoring track, some reminders for end game scoring, and serves as the physical start point for player mechs. Each player also has a small board – their faction board – in front of them, featuring both a guile (turquoise) and power (orange) marker as well as a track for these markers to move up and down during the game. A player keeps their hand of cards face up to the left of their faction board and plays cards from their hand to their tableau on the right side of their faction board.

All players perform their expedition work using mechs and meeples. The mechs are used to venture out from the basecamp, traveling from hex to hex (the move action) to gain access to the benefits printed on the tiles (the gather action). Mechs also provide asymmetrical powers for each player.  The meeples are used in conjunction with laying down cards in your tableau (the play action); most cards have a special ability that can be activated by placing a meeple of the matching color on the card when it is played. As with Scythe, players must select a different group of actions (choosing from move, gather, play, and refresh) to complete each turn. For example, if you moved and gathered last turn you cannot do so again this turn, but you could move and play, or gather and play, or refresh (this is where you pull all your cards from your tableau back into your hand and all your meeples back onto your player mat). A nice bonus is that on the turn after each refresh turn, you may do three actions instead of two.

The play action is the most complex action in Expeditions as it involves so many different abilities. You play a card from your hand to your tableau, gain the card’s core value (bump up your power and/or guile by moving your token up the track), and then optionally activate the card’s ability using a corresponding meeple from your available pool. Both the core value and the ability of a card may be enhanced if you meet certain conditions as specified on the card. As detailed in the rulebook, the card abilities can be instant or ongoing and include:

Rescue: take a card from your tableau and put it back into your hand and return any meeple to your available pool.

Gain: take a card from the indicated location (either one of the faceup cards between the hexes or the draw pile) and place it in your tableau; do not gain the core value or activate its abilities.

Discard: discard a card from your hand to your tableau; do not gain the core value or activate its abilities.

Trash: return the indicated component (card or token) from your player area to the box; it is out of the game.

Activate: activate another card’s ability without placing a worker on it.

Solve: pay the indicated solve cost on the card, gain the benefit shown below the solve cost on the card, and tuck the card under the top of your mat in the solved quests area; you must be on the indicated numbered hex to do this action and you can only solve 4 quests during the game unless otherwise indicated. The number of quests you complete is a factor in your end game scoring.

Vanquish: spend your power or guile (moving your token down the track on your faction board) to take the topmost corruption tile on the hex your mech is on; spend power to vanquish power corruption tiles (orange) and guile to to vanquish guile corruption tiles (turquoise). These corruption tiles are drawn blind from a bag and placed when the hex tile is first flipped.

The move action is pretty straightforward and most of the spicy adventure here is moving onto unexplored hex tiles to flip them over and see what benefits they offer and how much corruption someone will need to vanquish in order for everyone to gain access to all the benefits on the hex tile.   Because most of the game tiles are shuffled randomly and placed facedown, there is always variability in the layout and you never know what is going to be on the other side of an unflipped tile you’ve moved onto. Maybe the hex tile has the benefits you’ve been searching for, or maybe it’s no help to you at all right now.

The gather action is also pretty straightforward. You simply collect the benefits visible on the hex tile where your mech is located. These benefits are varied and include options like gaining more cards into your hand, gaining new meeples, and playing cards from your hand.  There are three special benefits that can be gathered: upgrade, meld, and boast, but these benefits only become available once all corruption on the tile is vanquished. Upgrading a card lets you pull an item card from your hand or tableau and tuck it under your player mat so that only the ongoing ability is visible. Now the item’s ability is permanently activated for you and at the end of the game each upgraded card is also worth victory points (coins). Melding a card is almost the same as upgrading one except you meld meteorites instead of items and when you tuck them under your mat you get a meld bonus as specified on the card, plus you receive all your previous meld bonuses again. Boasting is the action of putting one of your scoring stars on the basecamp boasting track, selecting one of the glory categories for which you have met or exceeded the goal. Once a player puts down their 4th scoring star, the end game is triggered and each player gets just one more turn. If you’ve played Scythe, or other Stegmaier designed games, this end game triggering mechanism and scoring is very familiar to you.

It’s easy to outline and teach the basics of how to play Expeditions, as I’ve done above, but solving the puzzle aspect of the game more efficiently than your opponents is hard to master and the answer to winning the game. It’s also what makes the game so enjoyable. The artwork is pleasant, the components are well made (as with all Stonemaier games), but the reason to buy this game is for the logic puzzle at the heart of it. You’ve got to take into consideration your mech special ability and how to leverage that to improve the efficiency of your process flow. You’ve got to time your refreshes just right in order to extract maximum value from your play, move, and gather activities. You’ve got to balance your work toward solving quests, upgrading items, and melding meteorites so that you’re in a position to place glory tokens for meeting the goals in these areas. And the unique aspect of this game wherein your hand is always laid down in front of you on the left of your player board means your possible play action choices are laid out for all to see, so you’ve got to keep a close eye on what your opponents are doing and how close they are to meeting the glory token goals and ending the game before you can complete everything you want to. And unlike in Scythe, nobody is coming to steal your resources, so it’s all thinking and no fighting.

I’ve a half dozen or more games of Expeditions under my belt, and some very close to winning scores, but I’ve yet to win a game. Still, I keep coming back for more, and I know that someday I might finally crack the puzzle wide open and figure out how to make every step of the process work together for my win.

Please note, for all you solo players out there, Expeditions comes with a robust automa mode.

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Publisher: Stonemaier
Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Artist: Jakub Rozalski
Players: 1-5 (We played with 3, 4, and 5)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90 minutes per game
Game type: worker placement, hand management
Retail Price: varies; direct from the publisher https://stonemaiergames.com/games/expeditions/

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Last year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption, and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them.  That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions for marketing and distribution.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the components and features in Gears of Corruption:

 

• 2 new mechs
• Both new mechs use map tokens as discards to gain a benefit. The Scarecrow adds an extra action to your refresh turn while the Mole lets you access hex actions covered with corruption tokens. The Mole felt especially powerful in play.
• Replacement mech mats for the original mechs + 2 new mech mats for the new mechs
• The new mech mats are GREAT. They have inset spaces for the guile, strength, and action tokens to prevent player components from sliding off the mat during player.
• Hero worker meeples
• These meeples function as wildcards, and everyone is given one at the start of the game. This speeds up play and helps avoid the heavy disadvantage for the 3rd player and after who can’t get to the gain worker hex on their first turn.
• Replacement discovery card for one of the original cards in the base game + 5 new discovery cards
• The cards are all items and most if not all of them provide ongoing benefits in the form of when you do X also do Y
• 7 mech cards
• These cards are used for drafting/assigning a mech mat to each player and they also provide a list of starting resources to shorten the length of the game
• 12 corruption cards
• These cards are used both to control an additional mech on the main board (representing a malicious presence among us) that inflicts penalties on players whose mechs it would otherwise bump into AND to provide additional corruption targets for vanquishing by players. If all the corruption cards are vanquished, the corrupted mech wandering the board returns to the box, the threat eliminated. Three cheers to the player who accomplishes that!
• 4 pairs of new starting cards (character + companion)
• The new character/companion combos are pretty standard but one of the pairs (Baaliahon & Zephon) plays off the corruption card scoring added with this expansion. I played as this fellow and was competitive in all my games. A+ would recommend! ***Interesting side note: While I was researching the origin of the name Baaliahon (turns out to be a Phoenician name that means so that Baal will favor), I came across the website for the artist and worldbuilder on Expeditions, Jakub Rozalski. He’s got fantastic stories and lore for the game as well as additional artwork on the site and I encourage you to check it out at https://jrozalski.com/projects/JvAvPZ
• 6 new corruption tiles in lower values that the base game
• These tiles have a strength of only 2, making it easier to remove them.
• 6th player capacity
• Playing with an additional player DOES increase the game length, but this is well balanced by the time saved thanks to the new hero worker meeples and mech cards
• Additional coins & map tokens

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Expeditions Gears of Corruption is a fantastic (although not absolutely mandatory) expansion for players who love the base game, like me. But this is not one of those expansions that fundamentally alters the overall feel or play of the game so if you’re among those that didn’t go gaga for the base, this will do nothing to change your mind. Yep, I see some of you over there complaining about the solitaire racing aspect of Expeditions and lack of strong player interaction, and to you ladies and gents I say go back to Scythe where you belong.

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Publisher: Stonemaier
Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Artist and Worldbuilder: Jakub Rozalski
Players: 1-6 (We played with 3, 4, and 6)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90 minutes per game
Game type: worker placement, hand management
Retail Price: varies; direct from the publisher https://stonemaiergames.com/games/expeditions/gears-of-corruption/

Rating:

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Three years ago Japanime released an English version of Dynamite Nurse (originally published in 2011) via Kickstarter. Although we added this take-that deck building game to our collection earlier this year, it took a bit of time to find some friends from our various gaming circles willing to play the game given the boundary pushing artwork. The character illustrations are in the style of anime - colorful and detailed - but bordering on pornographic.

In making a case for the game's merits, I pointed out that Dynamite Nurse is centered on strong female characters (sure, the nurses are barely clothed and poses provocatively but they’re the main focus of the game and hold all the power). Also, the game has an interesting storyline. In Dynamite Nurse, players take on the role of nurses competing to save patients who have been severely wounded while out exploring dungeons. Fun fact: in an odd parenthetical note, the rulebook states the characters are actually doctors that are simply referred to as nurses in the fantasy realm of the game.

Components for Dynamite Nurse include 214 double sided glossy cards, 30 cardboard tokens, and a 34 page rulebook. You’ll definitely want to sleeve the cards for frequent use.

Gameplay is straightforward and easy to learn. In the first phase of each player’s turn, they do the following:

(1) play cards from their hand

(2) decide between treating patients in their hospital or purchasing a new card to add to their discard pile

These two main actions can be done in any order. If a player elects to treat patients, the treatment points on cards in their hand are used to conduct surgery (to fully heal a patient and add them to their victory point pile) or treat with care (to bring a critical care patient about to die to stronger health, while still leaving them in their hospital for further treatment). If electing to buy a card, a player is limited to purchasing a single card from the purchase decks, as is common in a traditional deck builder.

In the next phase of a player’s turn, they draw a patient from the Dungeon Deck and lay them out in the back of the ambulance, ready to be moved to a waiting hospital. When a patient is admitted to the ambulance, they are tagged with the hospital marker of one of the players, signifying they are under the care of that nurse. If there is no room in the ambulance for the patient (the ambulance can hold a number of patients equal to the number of players in the game), instead of drawing a patient from the Dungeon Deck, the patient in the front of the ambulance is flipped over, entering critical condition. This is bad for the player whose hospital tag is on that patient as the patient may eventually die and accrue Kill Mark Cards (also known as penalty points) for the associated player.

To wrap up a player’s turn, they complete hospital admissions (optional) and check for patients in critical condition in their hospital. If a player decides to admit patient(s), they move one or more patients tagged with their hospital token with from the ambulance to their hospital. Admissions must be carefully balanced as a hospital only has 2 beds. If there are more patients than beds available, the player must select a number of patients equal to the bed shortage and put them in critical condition. Patients in critical condition are at risk for death if bed shortages continue over subsequent turns.

The title of Dynamite Nurse is held by the player with the most dead patients. It’s initially acquired by the first player to have a patient die. It’s a traveling status, in that, it will immediately shift to any player whose dead patient count exceeds the player who previously held the title. The designation provides some strategic advantages during the game (perhaps as a catch up mechanism) but earns -2 victory points at the end of the game for the player still holding the title.

The game ends when either the Dungeon Deck or the Kill Mark Card deck runs out. A player wins by amassing the highest victory point total. Victory point formula: healed Patient Card VP total – Kill Mark Card penalty point total. 

Dynamite Nurse is subject to a bit of analysis paralysis, but it’s very limited because the pressing tasks required to keep from losing (treating sick patients) clearly take priority.

I really enjoyed the gameplay here. It was competitive without being too complicated, which is just how I like my card games to be (card games always have a bit more of a casual feel to me and I turn to them when I want a relaxing game). We had a lot of laughter during our games and the take-that actions didn’t upset anyone too much as they were pretty evenly distributed among all players. I love almost everything about Dynamite Nurse. That being said, I’m disappointed Japanime doesn’t publish a family-friendly version of the game so that I can play with a wider audience. I’m not naïve; I understand that racy artwork adds to the appeal for a certain demographic but the sexualization of the characters in Dynamite Nurse isn’t subtle – it’s right in your face on every card and a major turn off for players who are more conservative, have strong feelings about portraying women as sexual objects, or those who want to play the game with the under 18 crowd. There is no way we could play this with our kids and it’s only because of the artwork. During one of our games, we spent four minutes debating what the inanimate object was between one of the nurse’s legs pressed up against her panties (cell phone was the consensus but one of my friends insisted it was a cheese grater). Another minor complaint - we found the included rulebook to be a bit confusing. Multiple times we had questions that the rulebook did not seem to provide a clear answer on and so our group had to come to a agreement on a house rule. For example, under Transport, the rulebook notes to draw a Patient Card from the top of the dungeon and place it in the ambulance in “the furthest location from the dungeon”. As the dungeon is left of the ambulance, this would mean placing the card to the right of any existing patients in the ambulance like so:

D   P1  P2 P3 NewPatientHere

However the drawing two pages later in the rulebook meant to illustrate how to transport shows the new patient being added to the ambulance in the the location closest to the dungeon like so:

D NewPatientHere P3 P2 P1

Aside from the rulebook confusion and the risqué illustrations, Dynamite Nurse is a compelling game that can be played in under an hour.  I’m giving it a OUI rating (take note Japanime – the rating will climb to a OUI OUI should a family friendly version be released).

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Publisher: Japanime Games
Players: 3-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About an hour
Game type: deck building, take-that
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Japanime recently sent me a review copy of their storytelling game Cartooner  from designer Jason Thompson, and as soon as I read the detailed description of this real-time drawing game I was a bit anxious about playing it. In Cartooner , players take on the role of cartoonists tasked with creating comic strips that carry their artistic vision and the narrative demands of their readers. I am a terrible artist. Stick figure level artistry, if we are being honest. My fragile ego doesn’t always react well to attempting tasks I am terrible at (hello shame and feelings of self-loathing). But all three of my kids love to draw and were quite excited about the game so I reluctantly brought Cartooner to the table one recent afternoon and we gave it a go as a family.

In the first round of the game each player is dealt three theme cards which represent their core artistic vision and they must draw a comic strip with two panels during the allotted time period (in student mode, which we played under, it’s eight minutes). Fame points are awarded for drawing in every panel (scribbles don’t count), incorporating the themes, and using no more than three word balloons (unlimited sound effects and symbols are allowed). In the second through fourth rounds, the rules and point qualifications are the same except that there are additional panels that must be filled (four panels total in the 2^nd round, six in the 3^rd, and eight in the 4^th), the storyline must logically follow from the first round’s comic strip, and additional fame points are available for adhering to the guidelines on selected trend cards which represent the content demands of our comic strip readers.

After each round of Cartooner, fame points are awarded to players by the consensus of all competitors as to how well each player qualified. At the end of the 4^th round, the player with the most fame points is declared the winner.

Components include 136 theme cards, 52 trend cards, 160 fame tokens, 64 pages for drawing comics, and the rulebook. Everything should hold up well under typical usage. There are colorful illustrations from Konstantin Pogorelov on the trend cards and the cover box but as this is a game designed for the players to create their own artwork, illustrations and print design are otherwise quite limited. Players will want to photocopy the comic book pages (or order additional books from the publisher) as the initial supply extends only to four games, assuming four players each game.

I was a ball of self-doubt going into round one as everyone began drawing, but once my storyline starting flowing out of my pen, I got lost in the creative process and really began to enjoy myself. Over each successive round I cared less and less that my drawings were Highlights magazine submission quality. I was heavily invested in the development of my characters and the evolution of my storyline. I also took a lot of pleasure in reading the comics of my competitors. Everyone did an amazing job with their strips and the stories were funny and fascinating.

My husband Chris drew a comic strip about a deadly virus, the bad guys who want to unleash it, and the team out to save the world from it. Our son Locke created a lighthearted strip about puppets dancing in space while our other son Max devised a comic about an agoraphobic lock that was being pursued by evil keys wanting to pry it open. Our daughter Helenipa shared her thieving ghosts at the heart of her comic strip and I terrified everyone with my tale of the unfortunate twins separated at birth who are reunited only when the one left at the orphanage returns to seek vengeance.

By the time we were finished, we didn’t even care much about the points and winning. We were really happy with our stories and the experience of sharing them. No one at our game table experienced any analysis paralysis but there was a low-level undercurrent of anxiety that progressively increased each round as we all wondered if we would get our panels completed before the time ran out (spoiler: we frequently didn’t).

Cartooner is the re-implementation of a previously released game, Mangaka, from the same designer and publisher. Therefore, while its mechanisms are not unique, the subject matter has shifted from anime to American style comic strips. This is a significant enough change to justify adding Cartooner  to your collection, even if you already own Mangaka. If you’re trying to decide between the two, note that Cartooner  features simpler themes and trends that will appeal to a broader age base and cultural demographic. We only needed to remove a handful of cards to keep the game family-friendly.

I’m really glad I pushed through my anxiety and played Cartooner. It’s a great game for stimulating creative ideas, building a cohesive narrative, and honing the ability to work under tight deadlines. The sharing portion of each round fosters good will and allows players to encourage and build up one another, making it a great family game or even a good icebreaker for less familiar groups. This is definitely a game that’s going to come out to our gaming table again and again.

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Publisher: Japanime Games
Players: 1-8
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About an hour
Game type: real-time, storytelling
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

T he kind folks at Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG) recently sent me a preview copy of Old West Empresario, which will debut at GenCon 2019 today. We already have about ten TMG games in our collection that we thoroughly enjoy (with Crusaders and Gentes being the most recent additions) and so my husband Chris and I were both feeling pretty good about the chances of this new release being a good fit for us as well.

Old West Empresario  picks up its narrative where its prequel, Pioneer Days (also from TMG) left off. Players take on the role of Empresarios, settling the old west. They are charged with building new towns so prosperous and populated that one will be chosen as the state capital, winning the game for its Empresario.

As with Pioneer Days, the  artwork from Sergi Marcet reinforces the Western theme and uses bright, appealing colors. I appreciated the racial diversity depicted in the illustrations.

Components include double sided building cards, currency tokens, victory point (i.e. population) tokens, and die number tiles (all constructed from heavy cardboard); as well as a set of eight brown dice, a wooden first player token, thin cards for the wanted and character cards, a scoring pad, and the rulebook.  Most of the components should last a long time under regular use but the character cards and wanted cards should possibly be sleeved to prevent bending or tearing.

The gameplay here is a bit reminiscent of Suburbia in that victory points (VP) are partially earned based on the placement of constructed buildings in a player’s town relative to other constructed buildings in the town. For example, the Mine scores 2 VP at the end of the game if adjacent to at least 1 Inn and 1 VP per adjacent Distillery. In addition to victory points earned based on the adjacency rules, a number of constructed civic buildings award end game points to the owning player based on meeting certain qualifications such as owning x amount of cash, y amount of victory tokens, or z amount of native settlement buildings. There are also four other ways to earn victory points in Old West Empresario :

• owning the largest contiguous block of native settlement buildings
• construction of buildings tied to the railroad, stock, or oil industries
• accumulation of wanted cards (awarded for being the first or second player to accomplish the objective listed on the card)
• accumulation of wealth (1VP for every 3 coins)

So how do we construct buildings in our towns and what else can they do for us besides award end game VP? Well, each round, the starting player rolls the set of dice (2 for each player + 1 extra) and then places each die on top of the corresponding die number tile. Each die number tile has two buildings positioned underneath it selected from the pool of unconstructed buildings and native settlements.  Unconstructed buildings can be activated later in the game once added and constructed in a player’s town.  Native settlements do not require construction and have a one time activation effect when added to a player’s town.

Taking turns beginning with the start player, each player selects a die from a die number tile and then either (1) collects one of the buildings underneath the die number tile to add to their town (2) activates all the buildings in their town that have the same number on their die icon as the die selected, or (3) discards one of the buildings underneath the die number tile to the game discard pile and collects $3.

Each player begins the game with only one constructed building in their town – the town hall – which has, as one of its activation effects, the ability to construct another building in the town for the resource cost of $1. In addition to the town hall, each player selects a native settlement or unconstructed building to add to their town at the start of the game. Note that the town hall can be activated by any die number. This means that on any player’s first turn, they are able to activate their town hall to construct an unconstructed building already in their town. If the first building they construct is the Carpenter building, they now have two constructed buildings capable of constructing new buildings when activated.

Aside from construction as an activation effect, the accumulation of VP tokens, cash, or additional building tiles are also possible, depending on the specific building under activation. One building (the Church) allows a player to activate another building from their town that otherwise would not be activated that turn for a small fee. And the Undertaker building forces opponents to discard cash (Aha! Take that!).

The game ends and victory points are tallied after the round in which one or more players host at least 15 buildings in their town, or the building supply deck or VP token supply runs out.

In my first game of Old West Empresario, I played against my husband. His strategy was to turn the game into some kind of massive engine builder. He worked hard to construct buildings in his town that ALL had the same activation number. I took the opposite approach and tried to cover all the dice outcomes so that I knew I always had at least one building other than my Town Hall to activate if desired. I focused on earning VP tokens through building activation effects and the wanted cards while he focused on earning VP through adjacency rules. I beat him by one point.

In another game with friends, I took the same approach and won again even though my friends also tried to focus on these items. Rinse repeat across a few more games. But when I played against my husband a second time and he focused less this time on adjacency rules and more on building activation effects to collect VP tokens, he was able to beat me. This is where his ploy to have several buildings with the same activation number gave him the edge – I might activate one building on a turn that gave VP tokens as an activation effect while he activated four on a turn that did so. I’ll need to match his strategy in grouping activation numbers if I am going to have a chance to beat him.

I have now played the game several times since receiving it, across all players counts. A few summary takeaways from these plays of Old West Empresario:

1. The game is easy to learn but it takes awhile for players to memorize the activation effects of each building. It can be helpful to photocopy the back cover of the rulebook that documents this information and give one sheet to each player for reference.

2. Game time consistently hovers around an hour, regardless of player count or number of previous plays under the players’ belts.

3. There are multiple paths to victory and winning strategies to explore due to a myriad of ways to earn victory points.

4. Huge spreads across the final player scores are unlikely. They never occurred in our games. It’s very much a neck and neck competition till the end and no one is certain of the winner until the final scores are tallied.

5. The iconography can be confusing for new players. The designer overlays a circle with a a slash through it on top of a picture of a resource to indicate the cost of an action. However, almost every new player interpreted the image at first glance to mean none of the resource was required to perform the action (perhaps thinking normally one  or more units of the resource is required by default).

Overall, Old West Empresario  is an engaging, lightweight to medium strategy game that can work with many different play groups. It’s a good game for drawing non-gamer friends into tabletop gaming and to give hardcore gamers a more relaxing hour of gameplay. I am going to keep the game and I’m thinking of picking up Pioneer Days  to set up a back to back gaming event where we begin with PD and move onto OWE, perhaps with a viewing of a film like Rio Bravo wedged in the middle. The $60 retail price point is a bit steep but strategy gaming market pricing continues to trend upward with the rising demand for new games so it would be a mischaracterization to imply TMG isn’t pricing games competitively; they are on par with other large publishers. 

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Publisher: Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG)
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 60 minutes
Game type: tile placement, tableau building

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me

My favorite board game as a child in the early 1980s was Clue. Put the clues together, use your deduction skills, and solve the mystery before anyone else. Aha, now you’ve got it! Aren’t you the smart one! Board games have come a long way since then, with increasing complexity in structure and mechanics; deduction games are no exception. If you liked Clue as a child, you’ll probably love Cryptid.

Released by Osprey Games, Cryptid is a deduction game designed by Hal Duncan and Ruth Veevers. Players take on the role of cryptozoologists searching for an unidentified cryptid (an animal that people claim exists, but which has yet to be verified) in North America.

The geographic search area in Cryptid is comprised of six modular board tiles, which are arranged in rows of two tiles each stacked to form a 2x3 grid, which looks like this:

Because the boards can be rotated and moved around, this results in around 46,000 different board set-ups. There are five terrain types possible for each hexagonal space: water (blue), mountain (gray), forest (green), swamp (purple), or desert (yellow). These colored spaces are clustered and liberally distributed all over the board. The geography also includes cougar territory (outlined with red) and bear territory (outlined with a dashed black line). Finally, there are structures placed within the territory- standing stones and abandoned shacks - which can be blue, white, green, or black. A deck of cards is provided to guide players in arranging the boards and selecting clues to be used in the game. Each time Cryptid is played, a new card is selected from the deck. One side of the card has a picture depicting how the boards should be arranged and the other side has, based on player count (3, 4, or 5), an assigned clue from the player clue books given the arrangement.

Players can also use the Cryptid app to generate the maps and clue assignments. Using the deck of cards or the app, the game designers have carefully assigned each player only one piece of information from a set of 24 clues, such as “The habitat is within one space of forest” (this is for the normal game; the advanced game allows negative information such as “The habitat is not within one space of forest.”, which pushes the set of clues to 48). These pieces of information, when coupled with the constructed game board, result in only one possible space for the cryptid to be located, out of 108 spaces. The seemingly innumerable variations and possible combinations are truly dizzying. Cryptid is a game that would be difficult to create and implement outside of the modern computing age - I’m certain the designers used an algorithm to generate all the possible combinations.

At the start of the game, each player chooses a space on the board where, according to their clue, the Cryptid could not be located, and places a cube on that space. This action is repeated one more time, so that every player has 2 cubes on the board before the game begins. Over the course of the game, players take turns selecting a space on the map and then either (1) asking another player whether, according to that player’s clue, the Cryptid could be located there, or (2) initiating a search to indicate they think the Cryptid is likely there. If asking another player, the player who is to answer does so by placing a cube in the space (if it can’t be there) or by placing a circle in the space (if it could). If the player answers with a cube, then the asking player must also place a cube somewhere on the map to share information with others. If a search has been initiated, the player places a circle in the space and then the player to the left of the player whose turn it is places either a cube or circle in the space to indicate the possibility of the Cryptid’s presence. If a cube is placed, the searching player must place a cube on the board as when they are asking, and the turn ends. If a circle is placed, the next player in line, going clockwise, places either a cube or circle, and so on. If all players place a circle on the space, the searching player has found the Cryptid and won the game. Otherwise, play continues with the next player’s turn.

The components in Cryptid are well constructed. The modular boards are sturdy cardboard and the wooden pieces (five colors for each of the possible players, and pieces for the standing stones and abandoned shacks in four colors) are high quality. The artwork is functional, and I would have liked to see more detail put into the shacks and stones, but because this game is one-step away from an abstract deduction game, the artwork isn’t the focus. The real focus is on the critical thinking aspect of the game, which is where it really shines. Every single time I played this game over the past six months, I watched my opponents, both on their turns and between their turns, quietly furrowing their brows and cycling between examining the board and examining the set of possible clues, as they frantically tried to deduce which clue belonged to which player, based on the cubes and circles presently laid out on the board. That’s because once you have discerned what each player’s clue is, you just need to find the one spot on the map that satisfies all of them, and you’ve won the game.

A big debate around our gaming table was whether to allow players to take notes during the game. My husband drew a big advantage over others during a game in which we house ruled that notes were ok. That isn’t surprising since he has a PhD in statistics. Once you reduce Cryptid to a math problem on paper, the more adept mathematicians will likely pull into the lead. After that, I came out strongly against note taking and remain in the no notes camp still today. Of course, your experiences and preferences may vary. If you’ve a whole crowd of math gurus, having a “math off” might be fun for you.

Cryptid is subject to a significant amount of analysis paralysis. It never seemed to bother any of the players around our table though, because while the active player is deep in analytical though, so are the rest of the players. It isn’t as though you spend the time between your turns twiddling your thumbs growing impatient. In fact, it’s nice to have the time to work out what your next move is going to be while the other players are taking their turns.

Cryptid is not my favorite board game. My top picks in the category all provide rich theming, a deep narrative, and detailed artwork. That’s just my personal bias toward those types of games. But Cryptid is my favorite abstract game. I can’t think of a single abstract game that outshines Cryptid. It’s worthy of a spot in any serious gamer’s collection.

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Publisher: Osprey Games
Players: 3-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): 60 minutes
Game type:  deduction

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me

That second slice of cheesecake when the Cheesecake factory was running their $0.88 a slice promo. The late night boardgame marathon when I had to work early the next morning. Hosting a dinner party every night for 12 days during the 12 days of Christmas. I fell in love with the idea of all these things, but once I experienced them, I realized they were mismatched to my temperament. They were so enticing, and they whispered to me with promises of fun, but I couldn’t love them the way I wanted to. That’s what Shadows in Kyoto did to me too. I picked up a copy of the game based solely on the artwork. It’s beautiful, as we have come to expect from Maisherly Chan. I should have known what I was getting into because we already own other games that lean heavily toward the abstract - such as Hanamikoji (another game for which Maisherly provided artwork; see my review for it here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1718238/what-jenni-said-about-hanamikoji) - and I have never come to love those games the way I do others in my collection. Perhaps it is because my frustration tolerance is pretty low for repeatedly losing game after game and that’s what happens with these 2-player abstract games in my collection. I play them against my husband (who holds a PhD in statistics) and I bend and twist and strain my brain to outwit him and it doesn’t work. I just end up with a headache and feelings of self-loathing. That’s exactly what happened every time we played Shadows in Kyoto.

The game puts players in the roles of Spy vs Spy in a battle between Oniwaban agents (backed by the Japanese Shogunate or military government) and ones employed by the new government that replaced the Shogunate. It’s a great theme that wraps around the strategic gameplay well. In our household there was much speculation as to whether the designers started with the historic theme and designed a game that fit it or created a theme around an abstract game they designed first.

The components are well made and include a sturdy center board, high quality thick cards, and wooden pawns.

The gameplay for Shadows in Kyoto is deceptively straightforward. Each player places their six pawns on the six starting locations on their side of the board as they see fit, with the markings for which ones are carrying real intelligence and which ones are carrying fake intelligence facing the player, so that the opposing player cannot see the markings. To win, a player must complete one of the following objectives:

• trick the opponent into capturing three of the player’s agents carrying fake intelligence
• capture both of the agents carrying real intelligence from the opponent
• get one of their agents carrying real intelligence to the back row of the opponent

Movement is controlled, in part, by playing location cards, which allows players to move to the designated type of space, following the movement rules (move only forward, move only 1 space at a time, cannot move into a space already occupied by your own agent). Instead of playing a location card, players can also play tactic cards that trigger movement. For example, the tunnel card allows a player to move any 1 of their agents horizontally to any other space on the same row, stopped only by an encounter with another pawn.

Encounters between pawns (when a pawn of one player moves into the space of the opposing player, “attacking” it) are resolved by revealing the markings on the back of the defender’s pawn and then comparing it to the markings on the back of the attacker’s pawn (which remains visible only to the attacker). If the comparison reveals the attacker’s pawn wins the encounter (3>2, 2>1, 1>0, and 0>3), then the attacker captures the defender’s pawn. Alternatively, if the defender’s pawn wins the encounter, it stays in its location on the board with its markings revealed and the attacker moves his pawn back to the location it was in before the encounter.

To spice up the game, Shadows in Kyoto also includes Charisma and Equipment cards. These cards can be distributed to the players to provide enhanced powers or abilities that alter some aspect of the rules in favor of the player. For example, the Ayane card allows a player to return a location card to their hand after playing it instead of putting in their discard pile.

No matter which way I placed my pawns initially, my husband was able to deduce my hidden information (i.e. the markings on the back of my pawns) after just a few encounters or find a way to move one of his agents carrying real intel quickly to the back row of my board. Again and again, I tried to make some kind of strategic progress and always failed to do so. I wanted to cry. I’m pretty sure I did cry at one point.

How could something with so few components and such basic rules be so difficult? Really, that’s the beauty of the game, if you’re one for elegant logic puzzles. In this way, Shadows in Kyoto is a fantastic game that should be highly appreciated by its target audience. It’s simple to learn, plays quickly, and requires a great deal of reasoning and strategy, both in the initial placement of one’s pawns and the ensuing gameplay. And the artwork is an exquisite bonus. The game’s just not right for me though, and that’s why I’m giving it one “oui”.

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Publisher: Deep Water Games
Players: 2
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 20 minutes
Game type: abstract deduction
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Black Skull Island is a quick playing 2-9 player card game from Strawberry Studio (now under the publisher Board and Dice).

I was sent a review copy of the game and it only seems to make it onto the table when we need a filler game to serve as an appetizer before a meaty Euro. The gameplay is extremely simply: each player gets 2 pirate themed character cards and selects one of them to play during a round, keeping the other one in hand. Every card is numbered from 0 to 15. All players reveal their character cards simultaneously and then the actions on the cards are executed by the players who hold them in sequential order of the the card numbers. Most actions focus either on (1) drawing booty (treasure cards or coin cards), (2) stealing or deactivating other players’ character cards, (3) stealing or swapping booty cards  from/with another player or (4) an order for all players to pass a character card to their left or right. Over successive rounds, booty cards worth 0-4 coins build up in players' hands and as soon as a player acquires their 7th booty card, the game is over. At that point, whichever player has the most coins in their booty collection wins the game.

Black Skull Island  is a lot of luck mixed with a little take-that and honestly, it all feels very random by the end, regardless of what cards you’ve played. I couldn't muster up anything but apathy for the outcome as I felt it was completely divorced from my actions.

The components consist of 109 well-constructed cards (no sleeving is necessary as the cards are coated unless you play very frequently), with cutesy artwork that I'd deem adequate but unremarkable.

That's really the best way to summarize the entire game - unremarkable. If you're into take-that filler games, there are much more compelling and entertaining options out there and likewise if you love point collection card games, there are many I'd recommend over Black Skull Island. The saving grace for this game is that it's kid friendly, so if you need an easy and accessible game to teach to your little ones and give them something to do with their friends, you could pass this their way. An inexpensive birthday gift for a tween perhaps or the kind of thing you might bring to a secret Santa exchange. Otherwise, meh.

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Publisher: Strawberry Studio
Players: 2-9
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 10 minutes
Game type: point collection, take-that
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

The team at NSKN names (now Board and Dice) sent me a review copy of Teotihuacan and I’ve had the opportunity to play several times in the months since, across all player counts, including solo against the Teotibot.

Scholars tell us that Teotihuacan was, in its prime, the largest city in the Americas as well as the sixth largest city in the world. It’s only fitting that a prominent board game designer should make it the focal point of a compelling strategy game. Daniele Tascini is that designer, and in Teotihuacan, players take on the role of noble families working to build the great city and its Pyramid of the Sun while accruing wealth and glory.

Odysseas Stamoglou is the artist behind the illustrations and tile carvings in this game. A casual glance from a player like myself (who is not steeped in deep knowledge of Mesoamerican art but has visited the Teotihuacan ruins) observes that the illustrations are reminiscent of the decorations found on structures and items from the famed city. With a bit of research I was able to track down further information on the genesis of and inspiration for the artwork, as explained by Odysseas in a BoardGameGeek.com (BGG) thread:

“All the symbols, masks and murals you see in the game are original Teotihuacano art, with some minor adjustments. The temple icons as well as the various patterns you see are not just random decorations. For example, the red pyramid, associated with the pyramid of the Sun has the fire god as its symbol. The red patterns and decorations are symbols associated with the fire god (like triangles, pointed or romboid shapes, etc). So I went out of my way to make sure each visual element is thematic and as true to the theme as possible. The great pyramid symbol and the dice icons are invented, following the style of Teotihuacan with goggle eyes and headdress for the Pyramid and Maya signs for the dice. I used the mural of the Great Goddess as inspiration for the pyramid symbol.”

Clearly, Odysseas has put a lot of time and effort into his work here and it reinforces the game’s theme extremely well. The theme and the artwork are woven together beautifully. It might have been nice to include custom dice that feature thematic Mesoamerican etchings in place of ordinary pips, but that can drive up the retail price of the game, so it may have already been discussed and dismissed by the design team as too costly. I would also like to see obsidian incorporated into the theme somehow (perhaps in a future expansion?) as that was prominent in Teotihuacan art.

Components for the game include cardboard and wooden tokens, a large main board, 4 sets of dice, and beautifully made tiles (construction material feels and looks similar to dominos) used for building the pyramid. I really love the color palette used on the main and action boards. Player aids would be nice and such an obvious plus that it’s hard to understand why they were overlooked. The good news is that there has been a collaborative effort on BGG to create effective player aids; we downloaded the latest version from beonyourway (shown below; https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/177055/yet-another-teotihuacan-player-aid) and found them to be very useful.

Getting into the gameplay, Teotihuacan is predominantly a worker placement game (with set collection aspects) that features dice deployed as workers utilizing a rondel. Players begin the game with 3 worker dice each and take turns moving a worker die they control 1-3 spaces around the main board, from one action board to another, completing the desired action(s) on the action board their worker lands on and earning any associated victory points.

Most actions also allow the player to increase the numeric value of the worker die by 1 and when the die reaches 6 in value, the worker “ascends”, allowing the player to choose from a selection of valuable bonuses (including the acquisition of a 4^th worker die) and resetting the die back to 1 in value. The actions represented on the various action boards include earning resources (cocoa, stone, wood, gold), constructing the pyramid, decorating the pyramid, building houses, worshipping to advance on temples and earn discovery tiles, and securing technology.

Extra actions or bonuses may be granted to a player when they have more than one die on an action board at the time they complete the action on that board – this is usually a result of moving a die to an action board where the player previously moved a die but some discovery tile bonuses allow players to move more than one worker die at a time, which can also lead to the accumulation of multiple dice belonging to one player on an action board. It’s not exclusively take, take, take in Teotihuacan. Players must give up resources in order to complete most actions. Additionally, they must pay resources – specifically cocoa - at the end of each phase or “eclipse” of the game (payment is proportionally to the number of worker dice they control and the numeric value of those dice) as well as whenever they wish to take an action where other players currently have worker dice positioned (payment is proportional to the number of other players who have worker dice already on that action board).

Almost every game has gone down the same for me– I find creative ways to pull out far ahead of the other players in the beginning, but I usually struggle with building an engine and eventually their engines take off and they overcome me. I couldn’t even pull off a win against the Teotibot on the easiest level. I finally had a win last week by focusing heavily on the construction action board, as three of the technologies gave bonuses for that action.

There are many ways to score points in Teotihuacan and it opens up a lot of avenues for creatively driving point accrual. The many options also allow for replay experiences that feel like a different game each time. Of course, a multitude of choices can also lead to analysis paralysis and Teotihuacan can suffer from this, dragging the playing time out typically anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes on average in our house.

Strategy tip: players need to be flexible and adapt tactics each game, taking  into consideration the action board arrangement and the available technologies on the alchemy action board.

Teotihuacan is the only game in my collection with a Mesoamerican theme, one of the few incorporating a rondel, and as an added plus, it includes solo mode.  It has so much to offer including a well-researched and implemented theme, a consistent intellectual challenge across all player counts, and quality components. All of these features suggest it would be a great addition to any game library, but it’s the ever-changing gameplay created by the variable action board placement and technologies that really compelled me to give Teotihuacan a permanent home in my game collection.

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Publisher: NSKN Games (now Board and Dice)
Players: 1-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): 90-120 minutes
Game type: Worker Placement, Rondel, Set Collection

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me

Deep Water Games provided me a review copy of Mystery of The Temples , an abstract area control game designed by Wei-Min Ling. It's one of three games in my collection from the Deep Water Games catalog that were originally published by EmperorS4 and feature artwork by Maisherly Chan (Shadows in Kyoto and Hanamikoji are the other two).

In Mystery of the Temples, players take on the role of adventurers on a quest to collect ancient runes protected by dark curses.  In order to break the curses, crystals must be collected and aligned. During game setup, five temple cards are arranged face up in a circle and two wilderness cards are placed in between each pair of temple cards (the picture below shows an alternative arrangement for a 2-player game). A stack of rune cards (4 cards per stack; these cards provide valuable crystal bonuses) are placed face down above each temple card and the top card in each stack is flipped face up. Temple objective cards are laid out; these cards provide additional victory points for breaking temple curses. Each player is given a grid to collect crystals on.

During the game, each player moves their curse breaker meeple clockwise across the temples and wilderness, obeying the detailed rules provided in the rule book. Ending a turn on a wildness card allows a player to collect crystals to carefully arrange on their grid.

Ending a turn on a temple card allows a player to turn in crystals (which must be connected on their grid sheet in the precise order specified on the temple card) to break a curse and earn victory points. There are multiple strategic decisions to be made during a turn as each wilderness card offers up different crystal gathering opportunities and each temple card provides victory points ranging from 3 to 8, depending on how many crystals a player is able to pattern match and discard. Each of the various crystal combinations on the temple cards can only be claimed once so a player must decide whether to amass the minimum amount of crystals to quickly fill in the lower victory point slots before their opponents can, or work at a slower pace, giving themselves time to collect and arrange longer chains of crystals on their grid sheets that will be worth more victory points.

The game ends at the conclusion of the first round in which a player has broken their fifth curse. Victory points are then tallied and the player with the highest victory point total wins the game. Once players are comfortable with the standard rules of play, they can experiment with the advanced rules, which provide for more complexity and variability in play and scoring. As with most area control games, scaling player counts can be an issue. The designer has addressed this in Mystery of the Temples by providing a 2-player variant that uses extra player markers (to block off temple curse claim spots), less wilderness cards, and an extra player meeple (to occupy random temple and wildness card spaces and block movement to those spaces; the meeple moves after each player’s turn). We found these adjustments allowed for the 2-player game to be just as compelling as with higher player counts.

Replayability is high due to the abstract nature of the game play in Mystery of the Temples. There are no narrative cards to tire of and the unique move combinations that can be sequenced to earn victory points are numerous as the temple and wilderness card layout vary each game. There is a moderate amount of analysis paralysis but it is manageable. Game play lasts around 45 minutes on average.

Game components include beautifully illustrated plastic coated cards (everything Maisherly Chan creates is visually appealing and the card and box cover art here are no exception), cardboard tokens, wooden player markers and meeples, and acrylic crystals. Everything should hold up well under regular use. The crystals are sparkly and fun; I absolutely love them.

While the other Deep Water Games titles didn’t work for me (too frustrating in the depth of analysis required), this one is a keeper. It’s the only one of the three games that hits the conceptual sweet spot for me of challenging but still fun. There is a nice flow to the game; the rhythm of moving my meeple each turn and collecting crystals is pleasant.  Mystery of the Temples provides plenty of intellectual challenge in a small box (this game is not easy by any means) with beautiful artwork and an affordable price point.

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Publisher: Deep Water Games
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 45 minutes per game
Game type: area control, abstract

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

There are some games in my collection that I get excited about when they arrive at my house but it takes me months to get them to the table. Typically in these cases the artwork is lovely, the theme is interesting, and the mechanics look promising but there is something standing in the way of playing the game right away. For Triora: City of Witches (designed by Michael C. Alves), what stood in the way is the game’s rulebook. It absolutely flummoxed me.  Even with the errata notes released a few months ago, it’s hard to make sense of the rules. It made a mess of things. And look what’s it’s done to my review – I usually like to start with a nice overview of a game’s theme, cover the components and artwork, and then dive into the gameplay.  But the rulebook is so awful in this case, I’m forced to lead with that. The publisher needs a skilled editor to rewrite the rulebook entirely. It’s laden with spelling errors and unclear language.

So that’s the bad news; the rulebook is subpar. The good news is the game itself is quite interesting. In Triora: City of Witches, players take on the role of witches and their familiars who have traveled to the city to face off against the nobility and the inquisitor, both of whom have been persecuting local women they suspect are witches. To win the game, a player must have the highest total victory points (referred to as doom points and sometimes ruin points in the rulebook) at the conclusion of the game. The end of the game happens at the end of the round in which one of two conditions are met:

[1] three of the four main locations in the city are destroyed,

or

[2] a witch is captured by the inquisitor after they have already accumulated the maximum inquisition points. Note that a witch captured this way is out of the game and ineligible for victory, as all of their doom/ruin points are forfeited.

Gameplay centers on making and using potions toward strategic ends. Players can create potions both by simply moving their witch meeple to a new location (grants 1 cauldron automatically, which can be used to make one type of potion from the requisite herbs held by the player) and by visiting a location with their witch or familiar that grants a cauldron as part of the action of that location. Note that there is an entire subroutine for generating the requisite herbs on a player’s board; once used to make a potion, herbs shift to a seed state and then must pass through planting and harvesting phases before they transform into usable herbs once more. Potions are consumed when visiting locations on the board that require a potion to complete an action at a location (either as an upfront cost to initiate the action or as an input to the action such as when changing potions into silver or taking control of villagers).  Certain locations on the board are defined targets for destruction; when players move their witch or familiar to these locations (there are 4 of them), as part of the location’s action, they place one of their wooden player tokens on the location. When the required number of tokens have been placed, the location is destroyed.

I’ve mentioned players moving their witch or their familiar on their turns. A player gets two turns per round; one turn to move their witch and the other to move their familiar. It is up to the player to determine which to move first. There is more freedom in moving witches (familiars cannot be moved to a location where a witch or another familiar is currently located) and moving a witch grants extra benefits (the automatic cauldron as mentioned above but also there is a witch’s bonus at each location that is granted only when a witch is moved to the location). However, there is also more risk in moving a witch and so it must be done with great attention to detail. This is because in addition to the witches and their familiars, there is also an Inquisitor meeple moving around the board (up to 2 spaces per round; it moves after all players have finishes their witch and familiar movements for the round). If the Inquisitor lands on a location where a witch is standing, the controlling player of the witch receives a penalty, which can include the immediate loss of the game if they have sufficiently high inquisition points already (inquisition points are assigned when completing certain actions as well as each time the Inquisitor catches your witch). In fact, in all of the games I played, the ending was triggered because a player didn’t carefully consider the Inquisitor’s upcoming movement when moving their witch on their turn and thus they found themselves caught by the Inquisitor and disqualified from winning. And these were smart opponents with several years of experience playing strategy games. So remember to be mindful of the Inquisitor’s current location and movement possibilities before you pick up your witch to move her.

In addition to the Inquisitor, there is a meeple representing the spirit of Morgana, the great witch who drew the witches and familiars to Triora. If Morgana catches up to a player’s witch on the board, the player is granted doom points or shovels (used in the seed to herb subroutine) if they are willing to accept some inquisition points as the cost for these benefits.

There is a moderate amount of analysis paralysis inherent in the game, but it’s not extreme. What will cause slowdowns during gameplay is trying to determine consensus on the rules as questions arise that the rulebook fails to address. For example:

1 . For the two player setup, the rulebook notes that two extra familiars should be placed on the board; these will move around the board each round and serve to occupy spaces and simulate the limitations on familiar movement that players would normally encounter during a three or four player game. Once they are initially placed (instructions say each player should place one familiar), are players limited to controlling the extra familiar they placed or can they select either of the extra familiars to move? The rulebook just states that before or after a player moves their own familiar they should move one of the extra familiars. We had much debate on this; I thought you should be able to move either familiar but my husband thought it made more sense that you should only be able to move the one you initially placed otherwise you could just move the one your opponent placed each turn to get it out of your way.

2. Do players alternate with other players their turns in which they place their witch and their familiar or does play pass from one player to another only after a player does both their turns?

3. When and how often do villager bonuses trigger? The rulebook states that they grant a bonus to the player in the final round, which implies the end of the game. But the bonus list includes “produce 1 shovel”, which would do no good in the final round so that doesn’t make sense. We think it should have read in each round, but we can’t be sure. Also, it’s a high price to play for a villager if you get its bonus only once per game as most villagers cost 3 potions.

4. More villager confusion: the rulebook notes that villagers may be used for actions in the Swamp House. But the only action available in the swamp house is to corrupt and acquire more villagers. It’s not clear how a player would use a villager to corrupt and acquire another villager.  And the rulebook also states that villagers may be used for the action in the City location. But the City is the other location where you corrupt and acquire villagers. Based on this, we think the rulebook was trying to convey that these 2 locations are where you get villagers, not where you use them as is actually written.

5. If a player is not at max inquisition points but the result of the Inquisitor catching their witch would take them over 32 points, does that also trigger the end of the game?

Once players get the rules sorted out (they will likely will need to decide on house rules for the questions above or request feedback from the publisher), they can dive in and enjoy the mechanics of the game. The artwork is lovely and the components are pretty well made (components include plastic coated cards, wooden meeples, wooden and cardboard tokens, cardboard player boards, and the large central board hosting all the locations).

I’m really indecisive on the final rating I should award Triora: City of Witches. A perfect rating (oui! oui! oui!) is out of the question because there are some minor problems with the game independent of the rulebook. For example, a round begins with nightfall and the movement of the Inquisitor and Morgana come after that during the day phase but on the top of the main board the Inquisitor’s movement is the very first item shown on the left, followed by Morgana’s movement; nightfall is shown at the end of the line. Why does the sequence of phases on the board not match the actual sequence of play? Is it possible that in earlier drafts of the game nightfall marked the end of the round instead of the beginning and the board was designed based on those drafts?  If the rulebook wasn’t a disaster the game could absolutely be worthy a oui! oui! rating.  So how heavily should the rulebook factor in here? It’s entirely possible that the problems with the rulebook aren’t the result of shoddy work but simply language translation issues (the game originated in Brazil; I am assuming the English rulebook is a translation). That makes me feel bad about dropping my rating down a notch. But with an oversaturated board game market (I heard last week that approximately 3000 new games are published yearly), I can’t in good faith recommend folks invest in a game that is such a headache to sort out how to play. So Triora: City of Witches gets a oui! from me for now. I’m going to hold onto the game and may play it occasionally and I’m happy to take another look at the game as a courtesy to the publisher should they fix their rulebook and ask me to re-evaluate.

Bonus side story: when posting pictures of the game to Instagram, I found out the village baker in Triora and other folks interested in the city track the #triora hashtag. This came to my attention because these individuals began to send me private messages on IG. They had heard a game was being made about their village but they didn’t know the details. They wanted to know the locations in the village depicted on the board (to see if they corresponded to actual locations). They wanted to know how one wins the game (imagine how awkward it was to explain that one of the goals of the game is to destroy the city). They wanted to see pictures of the game. It was a very entertaining series of conversations and now I’ve actually made a new friend from overseas after having chatted with him at length about the game and the village and its historical events regarding witchcraft.

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Publisher: Meeple BR Jogos
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): varies widely depending on whether the game ends via Inquisitor or destruction; 10-60 minutes.
Game type: worker placement, area control

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

It might be mildly offensive to the scores of board game designers out there, but until just recently, I’ve never played a board game that was so unique it made me want to learn more about the designer and why they designed the game. A lot of games are exceedingly wonderful, and they push me to stay tuned for what the designer might release next, but that's altogether different from wanting to understand what motivates the designer and makes them tick.

And then along came Wingspan, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, and released by Stonemaier Games. We have close to a thousand in our collection, and I’ve never seen anything like Wingspan before. It’s a game centered on birds. Beautiful, fascinating birds of all sizes, habitats, colors, and species. One hundred and seventy birds to be exact, in this first release of the the base game. It’s so richly and specifically themed; even with Jamey Stegmaier’s signature stamp of influence (goal oriented worker-placement game with win-win actions and well implemented solo mode), the designer’s innovative, well researched, and creative output takes center stage. I wanted to know more about her.  It took me just a few minutes online to find this interview of Ms. Hargrave that Punchboard Media released earlier this year and when I read it I was astonished to discover that she is not, in fact, an ornithologist who had that one great idea, but a board game designer by trade who takes inspiration from across her many interests. Her idea for Wingspan grew out of the charts she created to track birds she’s spotted in nature.

In Wingspan, players compete with one another (or against the automa during solo play) to build the most attractive aviary. The winning aviary will prove itself in victory points from the birds it hosts (birds are worth varying amounts of victory points as printed on their cards and birds tucked under other birds are worth 1 point each), their eggs and cached food (1 point each), and the goals met (detailed on bonus cards and round tracker; goals are usually oriented toward collecting birds with a certain quality [such as name includes a color or having a certain type of nest], toward numbers of birds in certain habitats, or toward having eggs in certain habitats or nests).

Components include plastic coated cards; cardboard player aviary mats, food tokens, goal tiles, first player token, and goal board; custom wooden dice, action cubes, and eggs; a scorepad; a bird tray to hold bird cards during the active game; a custom dice tower; and all components needed for playing against the automa in solo mode. All of these components are well made and the eggs are some of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. Likewise, the artwork is phenomenal, with illustrations by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, and Beth Sobel.

My review copy of Wingspan arrived at my door back in late July, when I was still on vacation in Europe. As soon as we got home, I tore into it, excited to see what all the buzz was about (the game has been on the lips of every board game enthusiast for months; I first spotted a copy back in December when it was still under hush hush review copy only distribution in the hands of a fellow reviewer). We invited our friend David over to play our first game and he fell for these birds so hard that he ordered his own copy the very next day from Stonemaier’s website.  My husband and I were hooked after just one game as well and we’ve gone on to play several games since then, across all player counts, including solo against the automa.

As I mentioned above, Wingspan is a worker placement game, where you use wooden action cubes to execute one of the four basic actions each turn:

• Play a bird to your aviary
• Gain food used to attract new birds
• Have your birds lay eggs
• Draw new birds

Each action, save for playing a bird, is tied to a specific row (i.e. habitat) on a player’s aviary card. Gain food is associated to the forest habitat, lay eggs is tied to the grassland habitat, and draw cards is paired with the wetland habitat. To complete the action, a player references the first empty space (reading from left to right) in the action’s habitat, and follows the visual instructions. In the picture below, I’ve circled in red the 4 action types on the player board. The habitat type for each action is indicated by the icon to the left of the action.

One of the genius mechanisms deployed in Wingspan is the reduction of actions available over each successive round. When the game begins, everyone has eight wooden action cubes they may exhaust to complete eight different actions. At the end of the first round, players give up one of their cubes to mark their first round results on the goal board. Each follow on round sees players doing the same thing, so that by the time the last round rolls in, there are only five actions available for a player to execute. Brilliant! Luckily, Wingspan provides plenty of opportunity to build a strong engine and so the pain of only having a handful of actions during the final round isn’t too severe. It does so by assigning powers to bird cards (these powers often include the ability to take one of the four actions in a specific limited way such as “gain a cherry”; such action powers are color coded brown) and having players re-execute the brown powers of all the birds in a given habitat, from right to left, anytime a player chooses to use that habitat action during a turn.

Wingspan is not subject to much analysis paralysis. There’s usually a bit of hesitation when deciding which bonus and bird cards to select during the game setup as well as when drawing or playing bird cards during the game but it was rare that I ever sat waiting for someone to decide which action to take overall.

Both the competitive and solo modes of Wingspan are challenging and engaging. I’ve averaged 80 points across my competitive games and my solo games have seen me come in just slightly higher at about 85 points a game. I found the solo mode to be very relaxing.

Lessons learned:

• First and foremost, prioritize adding birds to your aviary with star type nests. These are wildcard nests, which will count for every type of nests with regard to achieving goals. Every winner I’ve witnessed included an assortment of wildcard nest bird cards in their aviary.
• Follow the advice printed in the rule book; in the beginning of the game focus on adding birds to your aviary that give resources when activated (in my first few games I focused more on high point birds instead and lost).
• Work hard to win end round bonuses – their point differentials can swing the game in your favor.
• Build a better engine over focusing on bonus completion if you have to choose between birds that will do one or the other.

I love that every game of Wingspan comes with a free biology lesson on birds. This bird lives in this habitat and that  bird eats that prey and that other bird has a wingspan of x number of meters. Fascinating, and it makes the game great to play with kids as a learning experience. My favorite type of bird encountered in the game so far is the Yellow Breasted Chat. It’s power allows it to move around from habitat to habitat, allowing you to use its characteristics to meet goals across any habitat from round to round.

I can only offer one complaint against Wingspan and it’s quite minor – the round goals are two sided tokens but their shape indicates a front versus a back side; they should be perfectly flat if no side is to take precedence.

Stop what you’re doing right now and make and take a step toward building your love for Wingspan. If you don’t own it yet, drop by your local game store to pick up a copy or check availability on Stonemaier’s website. Seriously, like right now. If you do own it and you haven’t gotten to the table yet or in awhile, commit to playing it at least once this week. Text your friends (up to 4 others) to come play with you, or set it up for solo mode. The important thing is to get it on the table, because as soon as you do you are going fall a little more in love with it.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

~Mary Oliver

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Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 90 minutes per game
Game type: worker placement

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

After I reviewed Railroad Rivals , the publisher (Forbidden Games) sent me Raccoon Tycoon to evaluate. It’s by the same designer, Glenn Drover. He’s an award winning, well known designer credited with the creation of more than 25 different board games. I’ve only ever played one other game of his (Railroad Rivals) so I’m not sure if it’s the case across all his games, but there’s definitely a similarity in creative style evident in these two games. Like Railroad Rivals, Raccoon Tycoon is a mid-weight strategy game that can be played in under 90 minutes, featuring elements of auction/bidding, set collection, and price speculation.

In Raccoon Tycoon, players take on the role of capitalists building businesses, towns, and railroads, financed by speculative production and selling of commodities. This all takes place in a land populated by adorable anthropomorphic animals -raccoons, skunks, cats, and dogs, just to name a few. One thing I wondered during play was whether we were also animals in this story. I assume so, and in that case, it would have been extra awesome if identity cards giving each player an animal persona and backstory were included in the components. Identity cards would help reinforce the theme and pull players deeper into the story. An idea for an expansion perhaps, with differing special powers granted to each persona?

Kickstarter exclusive expansion: at the beginning of the game, each player is dealt a mission card, which gives them an objective to complete to earn additional victory points.

Over a series of rounds, players take turns completing actions, until either all the railroads or towns are sold, which marks the last round of the game. At that point, play continues until each player finishes the current round and victory points from railroads, towns, buildings, and building bonuses are tallied to determine the winner (victory points from mission objectives are tallied at this time if playing with the Kickstarter exclusive expansion).

Drover shows restraint in the action options available to players; there are only five possible choices on a turn. Players can produce various commodities and raise commodity prices (as directed by the price/production cards in their hand), sell a self-selected quantity of a commodity to reap the financial reward, start a bidding war to buy shares in one of the railroad companies, purchase a building (a business), or purchase a new town. Sometimes the action selection is limited by one’s financial resources – if you don’t have enough money to buy anything you’re going to need to produce or sell. Other times your options are wide open (these are the moments when a bit of analysis paralysis can creep in) and you’ll need to make careful decisions to optimize your economic fortunes. Strategy tips we’ve learned along the way:

• The Auction House is a great building to purchase if it comes up early in the game. So much of Raccoon Tycoon centers on buying railroads and if you have this building, you’ll make $5 every time one is purchased. That money can really come in handy for buying towns or winning railroad auctions.
• Unless you’re worried about a competitor tying your score or you’ve got a mission card that specifies cash as a victory point condition, it’s best to focus the last few rounds on spending your cash to purchase towns and railroads (or stockpiling commodities if you’re playing with the Kickstarter exclusive expansion and commodities are tied to your mission). Money is otherwise worthless at the end of the game.
• It’s better to win auctions when it’s not your turn. Let others start auctions on their turns while you focus on winning them. This will force your competitors to use their valuable turn action to attempt a rail purchase while you gain the chance to buy one and still have your turn action available to accomplish other tasks. Of course, to do this, you’ll need to ensure you always have a pile of cash at the ready in case a railroad you need to complete a set comes up for bidding.
• Each building owned extends the owning player’s commodity stockpile limit by 1, so if you’re playing with the Kickstarter exclusive expansion and your mission card is tied to amassing commodities, focusing on building purchases (especially the warehouses which each increase the limit by 4) in tandem with stockpiling commodities will allow you to get the maximum amount of victory points.

The artwork for Raccoon Tycoon is provided by Jacoby O’Connor and Annie Stegg. It’s quite nice; there’s a Thomas Kinkade kind of feel to the railroad and town card illustrations, while the box cover art is reminiscent of folk art.

The components for Raccoon Tycoon are well made. This seems to be a hallmark of the publisher, Forbidden Games. There are thick cardboard tiles (buildings), plastic coated cards (railroad, town, price/production cards, and mission cards), wooden tokens (commodities), plastic coated paper money, a giant artsy wooden raccoon (start player token), the rule book, and the main game board.

I want to especially call attention to the plastic-coated paper money because it’s a brilliant way to provide economic resources that approach the quality and enjoyment of metal or clay coins, but at a fraction of the cost. Kudos to the design team member who made that decision. The only deficiency in the components is the lack of player aids. This is a problem with many games published today so I don’t want to beat up too much on Forbidden Games specifically, but it’s just so frustrating. They’re such a valuable item to offer players and they don’t add much to the cost of production, so I don’t understand why so many times player aids are not included. To get us through our first game, I photocopied the action choices from the bottom of page 6 in the rulebook and handed out the sheets to each player.

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of games with people outside of my core game group. I volunteer at a local youth center playing games with teens once a month, I play with relatives who visit from out of town, and my husband and I bring games on work or personal travel to play with people we meet. There’s a strong demand in such situations for games that can be taught and learned easily but are complex enough in strategy to keep myself (or any other advanced gamers who end up in the mix) engaged. Raccoon Tycoon meets that demand. It’s fun, it’s clever, it’s adorable in its theme and artwork, and it can be played in a reasonable amount of time; a great choice for an addition to any game library.

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Publisher: Forbidden Games
Players: 1-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): 60-90 minutes
Game type: set collection, auction/bidding, price speculation
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Earlier this year, the team from Wyvern Gaming provided me with a review copy of Sojourn. This solo game was designed by Philip Loyer and released in 2019.

In Sojourn, a player takes on the role of a time traveler trying desperately to return home. To travel to a specific named time period (such as the one in which the traveler’s home exists), the traveler must use a Timesphere, which has unfortunately shattered into fragments that have been scattered across different time periods. Luckily, the traveler still has a handful of temporal charges at the ready that allow them to jump into random time eras in search of the fragments that can be reassembled into a working Timesphere. Before running out of the charges, or dying from injuries sustained in the various destination time periods, the traveler must find all of the fragments and make the leap home.  

The premise here is very good, even if it does evoke classic time travel tropes (Quantum Leap anyone?). The problem is in the execution. I got Sojourn to the table several times over the past couple of months, and each time I hoped I’d have a better experience than before, but it never worked out that way. The components feel cheap – while the wooden cubes are adequate, the included cards are very thin and poor in quality (easy to bend and tear). The artwork is unremarkable. 

The rulebook is lacking. It doesn’t include an inventory of items, which is one of my pet peeves. How are you supposed to know if anything is missing or what things are without a proper inventory? For example, the rules reference Lockout cards, but without a visual inventory, I had no idea what these were until I thumbed through all the cards (turns out they are part of the Timestream card deck). The rules also reference the traveler meeple, but don’t indicate whether that is the blue or red meeple included in the components. I’m assuming it is the blue meeple based on a picture in the rulebook showing the game set up for play, but it would be nice if the designer included specifics in the text of the rulebook. More unanswered questions – how many Paradox cards are in the deck? This is important since a Paradox card lets you make a time jump without using a temporal charge and thus is the only way to win the game if you’ve run out of charges.

A lot of these problems might be possible to overlook if the gameplay itself was engaging. It isn’t.

At any time during the game one can play Timestream cards from one’s hand (these cards have positive effects such as restoring temporal charges, healing the traveler, etc.), open a new destination in the timeline, or travel to a destination in the timeline. You must travel to multiple destinations to collect the fragments, but each time the traveler makes a jump to a destination, they risk injury, which is calculated by rolling dice and comparing the outcome to the injury risk value printed on each destination time period card. There are so many destinations with 50% or higher values that it makes it very difficult to survive for long in the game. I felt as though I was just going through the motions as each game progressed, and there wasn’t any joy in it. Perhaps executing the game in two player competitive mode would spice things up, but that requires two complete copies of the game, and I don’t think it’s worth the $30+ gamble to find out. 

I have another game from this designer on my “To Play” shelf, and I’m willing to keep an open mind and give it a try (because everyone has ideas that don’t work out well in practice from time to time) but I cannot endorse Sojourn as a game that belongs in anyone’s collection.

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Publisher: Wyvern Gaming

Players: 1

Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 15 minutes

Game type: solo game (competitive and coop modes available by combining decks), dice rolling, action queue

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:

OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.

OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.

OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.

NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I love a good area control game. I'm crazy about Islebound, Scythe, Spirit Island, Blood Rage, Forbidden Stars, Vindication, Fate of the Elder Gods, and Twlight Imperium IV (my FAVORITE game outside of Brass Birmingham).  So I had high hopes for Kemet. It’s an older game (released in 2012), designed by Jacques Bariot and Guillaume Montiage and it’s been on my wishlist since I started playing board games at a neighborhood gaming store about a year after its release. My best friend and I would be at the store playing whatever new game we’d bought that month, and I’d admire the Kemet cover art from where I sat. It just looks absolutely thrilling.

Because we were heavily into the cult of the new at that time, we never prioritized adding an older game like Kemet to our collection. This was finally rectified when Matagot sent me a review copy.  I was so excited to open the box, especially when I discovered the artwork on the inside was just as well illustrated as the box cover I’d admired all those years before.

In Kemet, players are Egyptian Gods, fighting against each other in dynamic power plays using their troops and temples. The first player to earn eight victory points is declared the winning God.  Players start the game with three pyramids dedicated to them and must decide to allocate three points  (called “prayer points”; theming is really well implemented) - among the pyramids – either three level 1 pyramids, or one level 2, one level 1, and one level 0 pyramid. Note that the designer has cleverly chosen to use gigantic D4 dice for the pyramids.  Level 1+ pyramids are placed onto the main board and grant the controlling God additional powers shown on corresponding tiles, which they may purchase using prayer points. Some of these tiles automatically provide victory points for the owner while others aid in battle or give other benefits. The cost to raise pyramid levels is also paid in prayer points, and victory points can be earned by raising a pyramid level up to level 4. Prayer points are handed out automatically during the beginning of each round (called the Night phase), so there is always an opportunity to prioritize increasing pyramid levels and buying new tiles. Players are given an action board to track prayer point balance and actions across the rounds. During the second half of each round (Day phase), players take 5 turns choosing  and executing an action (gain more prayer points, raise a pyramid, buy a power tile, recruit units onto the main board for battle, and move/attack). Moving and attacking opponents allows a God to win battles and earn more victory points. Recruiting units is important to overpower the other Gods in battle because unit count in an attack is one of the base factors in determining the victor and earning those coveted victory points. Moving and successfully attacking also bring victory points from  controlling the areas where various temples are situated on the main board.

So that’s the gameplay- a restorative Night phase followed by an active Day phase, rinse and repeat until one of the Gods has 8 victory points. It sounds kind of dull when laid bare yet it’s anything but that during gameplay thanks to a plethora of choices available to players during the game. The decision tree of choices and outcomes for just one game is quite complex. Will you rush to build up your red or blue pyramid and power tiles first to improve your battle outcomes? Or take a chance that you won’t be attacked immediately and build up your white pyramid and power tiles to maximize prayer point accumulation (which in turn let you build up the other pyramid and powers faster)?  Another exciting part of the game are the battles and anticipation of them.  You sit there, watching your opponents amass units and powers on their turns and wonder when they’re going to come for you, while you are silently calculating when and where it will be best for you to strike in battle yourself. And I haven’t even told you about the creatures yet.

 

The creatures might be the best part of the game for many players. There are several power tiles tied to creatures – when you procure the power tile, you control the associated creature. It’s added to one of your group of units (a troop) on the main board and has special powers. For example, the Phoenix and any troops with it can ignore walls, walking right through them. Bonus: if you own Cyclades (another board game from Matagot) and purchase the C3K Creatures Crossover (also from Matagot), you can use the creatures from Cyclades in Kemet.

It took me a few weeks to schedule our first game. There’s a specific subset of our gaming friends that enjoy aggressive conflict and area control games and being busy professionals it can be hard for them to carve out time to play.  We gave everyone the homework assignment to read up on the game and its rules before we got together for the first game. That’s my strong recommendation for anyone playing Kemet for the first time, as it’s important to become familiar with all the different power tiles and creatures  in order to do well at the game. Fortunately, the rulebook is well written, so everything within is fairly easy to understand.

The first time we played, we all agreed that the game was brilliantly fun with lots of tension, especially toward the game’s end. I struggled with prioritizing which pyramids to level up but it was enjoyable to experiment with the different creatures and their effect on battle.  Our scores were all very close throughout the game, and it was anyone’s guess who the winner was going to be. We played with 4 players that first time and it took us 5 hours (all our games take forever because we have 2 players with severe analysis paralysis; plus there was not a lot of attacking in the first few rounds and attacking is the quickest route to earning victory points).  Subsequent games went faster as we got more familiar with the game, but we never managed to get under 2 hours in any of them.

The game plays well at all player counts because the designers have taken the time to customize the board, offering a 2 sided board with one side to be used for 2/4 player games, and the other side for 3/5 player games. This is really important in an area control game, which can otherwise suffer from too large a playing field under lower player counts.

Kemet  is a game I’m keeping in my collection and will be in the steady rotation of area control games that come to the table. The theming of the game and uniqueness of the creatures make Kemet distinct enough from other games that feature warring factions and special creatures (like Blood Rage or Cyclades) to not feel duplicative. The game is subject to a ton of analysis paralysis but I’m ok with that. I’m interested in exploring the different strategy paths available and whether a consistent pattern of decisions leads to victory in most games or whether every game’s decisions have to be carefully tailored to the choices opponents are making.

I hope you’ll pick up Kemet (and the C3K Creatures Crossover if you own Cyclades already) and give it a try with your game group and let me know what you think.

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Publisher: Matagot Games
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): 2 hrs+
Game type: are control, card drafting, action points
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Machi Koro  was one of the first games my husband Chris and I played together. It was released in 2012 and when we started gaming together in 2013, it was still a popular game on reviewer blogs and videos as we sought guidance in what to play and what to buy. Once Machi Koro  was in our collection, I spent every game trying my best to outthink Chris and acquire the best combination of establishment types to ensure victory. As we were enticed by other new games coming out and were drawn deeper into heavy Euros, we left Machi Koro on the shelf more frequently, with an occasional wistful comment about how we should play again.

At GenCon earlier this year, Machi Koro Legacy  was the talk of the town. Designed by Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, and Masao Suganuma (Masao is the original designer of Machi Koro), it promised to breathe new life into Machi Koro through a campaign style series of ten games, revealing new aspects of gameplay in each session at the table. We love legacy games, so we were sold on the idea right away.

The artwork for Machi Koro Legacy  features two of the principal artists from Machi Koro , Noboru Hotta and Jason D. Kingsley, and the signature cutesy cartoonish illustrations from the original are dominant in this legacy edition as well.

In Machi Koro Legacy, players take on the role of mayors competing to build the most attractive town on the Island of Machi Koro. During each game, every mayor is vying for the title of Best Mayor and must also work with the other mayors to build a landmark on the island. Players are given a starting assortment of establishment cards to select from for their town, and on each turn the following steps are taken:

(1) The active player rolls a die or a pair of dice, depending on the phase in the campaign.

(2) All players activate the establishment cards in their towns that match the sum of the die/dice roll and are applicable. Activating an establishment card means gaining the benefit listed on the card (usually collecting income). 

(3) The active player takes one action. Actions to select from vary widely depending on the phase of the campaign but always include purchasing new establishments from the market to add to one’s town, building a landmark in one’s town (landmarks are special buildings that change one aspect of the rules for the owning player), or contributing toward the community landmark. 

When one player has built all of their landmarks and contributed to the community landmark, they are declared the best mayor and win the game. As the legacy campaign progresses two main effects are felt. First, an overarching narrative slowly reveals itself. Second, as new legacy components are unboxed, the complexity of the game grows. The gameplay never grows in difficulty beyond a lightweight strategy game, but the new components present additional factors to consider when making decisions and also introduce more variability in the marketplace.

We decided to play through our review copy with our ten year old son, Max. We thought it would be a good fit because he’s quite adept at board games and loves Space Base, which features a similar mechanism (drafting cards+rolling dice to collect benefits based on the card numbers that match the dice rolls).  He also understands the concept of legacy games as Chris is playing through another legacy game, Zombie Kids, with him and our other children.

As we settled into our first game, I got a good look at the components. The coins are plastic, which I’ve never seen before. It’s a good middle ground between cost saving cardboard coin tokens and the more luxurious clay or metal coins some games includes. Besides the coins, the starting components include cardboard tokens for player flags and town boards, two standard d6 dice, a sticker sheet, 65 plastic coated cards, a legacy deck of plastic coated cards (which must be opened  and worked through in sequence when instructed), and six “mystery” boxes to be opened as instructed during the course of the campaign. All the components are sturdy enough to hold up to repeated play.

My son Max was enthusiastic about Machi Koro Legacy from the first turn and his enthusiasm continued to blossom as he won game after game. He quickly capitalized on the obvious strategies – buy up establishments that are statistically more likely to be activated during dice rolls, then push toward dice (vs die) rolls as soon as possible. This meant collecting a lot of establishments that activate when 7 or 8 are rolled.  My husband followed the same strategy but didn’t always remember to build his town landmarks in a timely fashion, so he only won a few games. Me, I was a tragic tale of bad strategy. I opted to corner the market on single die roll establishments during my first few games, which didn’t work out well at all. Even in future games when I shifted to a 2 dice strategy, I was unable to gain any ground as some of the legacy components unboxed that Max and Chris had quickly scooped up gave a strong advantage over the rest of the campaign. At times, I felt it was impossible for me to win and I felt frustrated that Machi Koro Legacy  doesn’t provide a good catch up mechanism or some way to balance out the power of the more powerful legacy components. Without giving away any spoilers, I want to offer this essential tip: when components are unboxed that you have to prioritize taking specific actions to earn, TAKE THOSE ACTIONS AND EARN THOSE COMPONENTS. Some of the components won’t prove to be game changers, but some will and if you let your opponents take all of them you will be at a serious disadvantage the rest of the campaign with no way to rebalance the game.

Max loved Machi Koro Legacy so much that we agreed to binge play. We ran through the entire campaign of 10 games in just one week. We didn’t face any serious analysis paralysis during gameplay, so each game took no more than 45 minutes. In the end, Max won six games, Chris won four, and I didn’t win any. The game offers a great amount of replayability - when the legacy campaign is over, players can continue to play the game using a modified set of rules and a subset of the components. Chris feels that the permanent game we are left with is a bit more interesting than the original Machi Koro  edition, so would be purchasers should consider Machi Koro Legacy  an investment in not only ten distinct game session experiences, but also a fun, kid-friendly, permanent, upgraded edition of the original game. I have to agree that Machi Koro Legacy  is one of the most kid-friendly legacy games in the board game marketplace. You absolutely want to add this to the Christmas present pile for your under 18 set, where the gift becomes not only the game, but the time you’ll spend playing it with them. And while hard core Euro gamers will likely skip over the game in pursuit of heavier strategy picks, gamers who enjoy lightweight strategy games will enjoy the easy-to-learn, quick-to-play experience that Machi Koro Legacy  offers. 

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Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): 30-45 min
Game type: card drafting, dice rolling
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I don't keep my finger on the pulse of all the independent Kickstarter campaigns running at any given time. There's just too much unique content being produced month after month for me to sift through everything. I leave that to those who write previews and reviews for a living (I am an IT Consultant for a living; I write reviews as a hobby because I'm passionate about board gaming). The only way an independent Kickstarter campaign is going to be on my radar is if the designer/publisher reaches out to me to let me know the campaign is running or if it's created a bit of buzz already in the key circles that I frequent. I definitely wasn't closely monitoring Kickstarter campaigns four years ago when the original edition of Middara  was initially funded. It was an adventurous dungeon crawl that promised to be so much more than an ordinary dungeon crawl. With options to run in campaign mode for an ongoing narrative or crawl mode for one off gameplay, it could work as a long term project for committed game groups as well as a fun game for casual players. It was a long road from its 2015 campaign to its 2019 fulfillment with a lot of unhappy backers along the way who voiced frustration at the late fulfillment of the game. In early summer 2019, a few months after delivery of the original Middara  game was completed, Succubus Publishing launched their Middara: Unintentional Malum Triology  Kickstarter campaign. This offered a reprint of the original game (retitled Middara: Unintentional Malum Act 1), expanding it to over 80 hours of content, as well as two new adventure expansions (Acts 2 and 3) and a host of other Kickstarter exclusive add-on and stretch goal content. It also promised a faster turnaround on delivery to backers. Suddenly Middara  and its designers (Clayton Helme, Brooklynn Lundberg, Brenna Moncur, and Ian Tate) were the talk of the town and my husband Chris and I had an intense discussion about backing the second campaign. We were torn - yes the game sounded really cool, but we already own one behemoth campaign dungeon crawl (I’m looking at you Gloomhaven). Did we really need another? We hemmed and hawed and let the decision hang in the air. And then then publisher decided for us, by sending us a review copy of Middara: Unintentional Malum Act 1 (M:UMA1).

As soon as the box arrived at the end of June, I poured over all the components. So much stuff! Such a huge box! The artwork (conceived and illustrated by Stephanie Gustafsson, Alex Hansen, Hector Sevilla Lujan, Rhett Mason, and Jon Troy Nickel) is absolutely beautiful. The illustrations are well drawn, well detailed, and bursting with color.
The game could have an audience in the tween set if the drawings were a little less risqué, but as marketed to older teens and adults, everything is within decency standards.

The minis are of good quality; well sculpted. I do wish that at least the starting adventurer minis came pre-painted (I always wish that because I have no painting skills or supplies) especially when M:UMA1 is priced at $150. The components are sturdy and should hold up to regular usage. We haven’t sleeved our cards yet and because of the sheer quantity of them (hundreds) they’ll likely remain unsleeved. I especially enjoy the custom dice, separated by color to indicate which dice should be used during dice rolls.

After examining all the game contents, my interest was definitely on the upswing and Chris and I  set about assembling a crew to play the game in adventure mode. It’s daunting to find others willing to commit to 80+ hours of gameplay, but soon enough we had a happy foursome. One of the players, Craig, actually owned the original edition of Middara but hadn’t found the time to assemble a group and get it on the table. Our other player was his coworker and friend Matt.
Craig showed up for our first night of gameplay with a sweet surprise – he had ordered the fancy game mats and was happy to share them with us for our adventure.

In M:UMA1  adventure mode, players begin the first game by taking on the roles of young students preparing for their Magical Aptitude and Skill Test (MAST). We spent that first evening getting to know the four starting characters (called adventurers) and deciding who would role play each one. Every adventurer has their own unique backstory, motivations, starting equipment (armor, weapons, relics, consumables, etc.), and vivid personality.  I chose Nightingale because I saw myself in her and thought I would really enjoy playing her. Chris chose Rook, Craig took Remi, and Matt selected Zeke.
M:UMA1  adventure mode breaks down the overall campaign (called the adventure) into many sessions called encounters. We typically play one or two encounters each evening we get together, with each encounter lasting anywhere from one to two hours. To start an encounter, all players gather round the table and lay out their adventurer cards and equipment. The narrative is read from the Adventure book, or alternatively listened to on the Middara app. We all really love the app. It’s available on the Apple App store or Google Play store and allows players to hear the narrative bits of the story without requiring one of them to do the reading aloud. The voice actor Succubus Publishing hired is fantastic; she is an expressive reader who brings the characters alive. While the entire adventure in M:UMA1  is narrative driven and so every encounter advances the plot at least a little bit, there are some encounters that have several pages of story so using the app is really nice. After the narration is finished, the location boards are set up for the encounter, forming the terrain, similar to any other dungeon crawl. Directions for setup are given in the Adventure book with modifications in the Diagram book. Some elements of the terrain may have their details partially hidden, such as loot tokens (which hide the exact reward until a character performs an encounter adjacent to the token) and totem tokens (which hide what they represent until an adventurer comes within line of sight of the token). The starting spaces on the board for each adventurer and the monsters (called combatants) are specified in the Adventure book. Once everything is setup, the game begins; turn order for adventurers and monsters is driven by initiative cards that were shuffled and randomly laid out in a row during setup.
During the encounter, players spend their turns moving their adventurers around the terrain, following movement rules, as they work to complete the encounter goals. Usually this involves reaching the exit token, but other goals are possible. Since players typically get rewards (gold, equipment, experience points, etc.) each time their adventurer slays a monster, most will want to prioritize battling the monsters over making a quick run for the exit token. There isn’t a lot of analysis paralysis during game play as the best options for next steps on a player’s turn are usually fairly obvious. Combatants spend their turns completing actions as specified on their description cards. Those that are designated as adventurer opponents are called intelligent combatants and have intelligent combatant cards, while the ones that players control and that fight on behalf of adventurers are called command combatants. 

Exploring the terrain and battling intelligent combatants are governed by an extensive set of rules (60+ pages!) provided in the rulebook. It took us at least three encounters before we really understood most of the basic rules and even now, we find ourselves frequently checking the summary poster we printed out as a giant player aid. There’s just too much information to memorize it all, especially when the information is subject to change due to errata. Which brings me to one of the few complaints I have about this game -the large volume of errata. You either have to remember to frequently check the long list of corrections and changes (to the 1.0 rulebook and to the text printed on various components such as equipment cards, combatant cards, etc) and update gameplay as you go along,  or dedicate a session to reviewing all the changes and corrections and marking up the components with the correct text in one sitting. We started off trying to do the former but it was so frustrating that we switched to the latter and it took me at least an hour.  For the rulebook errata, you can take a shortcut to getting the updates in place (if you don’t mind the ink and paper expense) by printing out the updated 1.08 rulebook from the Succubus website. Another note on the rules- deciding which rule set to play under has become a complicated issue that players will need to come to agreement on as Succubus has compiled and released an entirely new version of the rules (v1.1) that changes several of the fundamental aspects of the game. This was done in response to the feedback from players who have extensively played through the game using the original 1.0 rulebook with errata corrections. The major overhaul is meant to strengthen aspects of the game that felt too weak and weaken aspects that seemed overpowered, but not all players agree on the changes. Also, the 1.1 changes are still in Beta release and so they are subject to change as they continue to be finalized. Our little group likes to keep things simple, so we opted to stick to the 1.08 rule set, at least for now.
Theme is really important to me, so I was very happy to discover that Middara’s theme is well implemented across all components and the gameplay thus far in M:UMA1 . This is where the game really shines over its competitors. Its narrative is extremely detailed and offers so much depth in the characters. More so than Gloomhaven. More so than any other board game I’ve played. An experienced  screenwriter could easily adapt the storyline into a fantastic adventure film for the big screen and I’d go see it. My two year stint playing through the Pathfinder Skull and Shackles Adventure Card Game is a distant second in plot development, and even then, that game only had such a rich narrative track because we employed a user written storyline that we found on BGG (the publisher offered little in the way of quality narrative for the game). I come back to the table each week to play M:UMA1 , not just for the fun of fighting monsters and gaining rewards, but also to find out what happens next in the story. Bonus: as the plot unfolds, adventurers grow in skill and discipline and new content becomes available.
At the time of this writing, we've played through all of Chapter 1 and are partway through Chapter 2 (about 10 distinct sessions). Once we are finished with M:UMA1  in adventure mode (we estimate it will take us over a year, meeting weekly) there are plenty of scenarios and special content for us to replay M:UMA1  in crawl mode.  In fact, a large portion of the Kickstarter promo box is content exclusively for use with crawl mode and I’m excited about eventually digging into that.
Based on my experience with M:UMA1  so far, I highly recommend the game. Not only is the game worthwhile on its own merits, but the friendship building that comes from playing a year+ long adventure with others is wonderful. You can make a full afternoon or evening out of each session, sharing a meal together before sitting down to play the game. Although I was given a review copy of Act 1, I like Middara so much that I’ll be purchasing Acts 2 and 3 myself (or putting them on my Christmas list). You can pre-order the entire trilogy or any part of it on the Succubus Publishing website once the publisher reopens wave 2 pre-orders.
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Publisher: Succubus Publishing
Players: 2-4 (We played with 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 1 - 3 hours per encounter
Game type: narrative driven, dungeon crawl, campaign, action points, role playing, cooperative, dice rolling, grid movement
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Because I love a good story and groove on rich immersive themes, legacy games really appeal to me. The chance to be part of an unfolding narrative is wonderful. It provides a structure for friends to commit to an investment of their time together on a regular basis. It holds everyone's interest over time (when the story is well written and executed). Especially valuable for me is that it lessens the bitter taste of a loss; I get so interested in the plot that I don't care as much about winning. I'm trying to tamp down my competitiveness and narrative driven games help. Finally, I’m a huge fan of Inka and Markus Brand (we have a number of their games in our library already, including all of the Exit  games, Encore, and Raja of Ganges). For all of these reasons, I was really excited when Ravensburger sent me a copy of Inka and Markus’s newest legacy game, Rise of Queensdale, to review.

I actually received my review copy early in 2019, but our RoQ group consists of parents with busy schedules so we can only get together about once a month to play. We've made our way through 13 games so far, and with only 2 or 3 more to go before we finish the legacy series of games, I thought it was a good time to sit down and share my thoughts on the game (Especially in light of Christmas approaching).

Rise of Queensdale  is a legacy worker placement game set in Medieval times. Players take on the role of subjects to King Nepomuk II and Queen Margaret and are tasked with building a new city, Queensdale, on behalf of the royal family. Each player is given jurisdiction over one quarter of the city and is competing against the other players to build the best borough.

As the legacy series of games progresses, players continue to build different types of structures to earn favor with the royal family (fame points) in the midst of dealing with political drama, disease, and other Medieval happenings. Each game in the series sees players attempting to reach their next epoch goal (a target number of fame points). If they are successful, they will have a new, higher epoch goal during the subsequent game.  Note that multiple players can reach their epoch goals during the same game as gameplay continues through the end of the current round once one player reaches their goal. The winner of each game is the person who surpassed their epoch goal by the most points.

The artwork in the game is illustrated by Michael Menzel with graphic design provided by the Fiore GMBH studio in Germany. Michael is probably most familiar to the US based board game community as the illustrator for the Legends of Andor series of games. He brings the same fantasy style drawings he used in that game, with their romantic fonts and soft palettes of color to his work here and it’s lovely. There are a lot of components included in Rise of Queensdale   and Michael does a good job of tying them all to the theme as a cohesive set with the artwork.

Components include dozens of different types of wooden tokens (huts, meeples, player score markers, etc.); the city building board,  scoreboard (epoch tracker, fame counter, and more), action board, player boards, building tiles, and other pieces made out of cardboard; and wooden dice. Everything has held up wonderfully as the months and games have gone by. The rulebook is flipped through frequently and while it’s showing signs of wear, it’s still holding together, staples in place. The rulebook is straightforward and we haven’t had any issues understanding the nuances of the rules.

The narrative in Rise of Queensdale is well written.  It’s memorable and everything that happens makes sense in the framework of the fictional universe laid down by the designers. We’ve played a lot of narrative driven games (Pandemic Legacy, Betrayal Legacy, Middara, Aeon’s End Legacy, Legacy of Dragonholt, Charterstone,  and Seafall, just to name a few) and Rise of Queensdale ranks near the top for narrative driven games that do a good job of incorporating the game play into the storyline. Some legacy games feel more like a story was loosely slapped on top of the game mechanisms, but that isn’t the case here. At the same time, this isn’t an RPG with some board game elements thrown in. The mechanics of the board game have been adeptly planned and implemented; they’re challenging and provide a compelling experience. As the legacy series unfolds, more actions are added to the action board; no one gets complacent or bored because new options keep coming available. Our game group has agreed that there seems to be enough components and actions to allow for replayability as a standard board game even after we’ve reached the very end of our last game in the legacy series.

Rise of Queensdale is a great board game for bringing friends and family together. It’s competitive, so those who turn up their noses at cooperative games and like to win against others will find it enjoyable. Everyone is working toward their own epoch goal and multiple players can reach their goal during a game, so everyone can feel accomplished even when they don’t win. This also creates a brilliant built-in catch up mechanism as the player in last place has the nearest epoch goal to reach. The further a player gets ahead of others in the series of games, the farther their epoch goal becomes and the greater the chance that the players behind them will reach their goals before the leader does. In our games, no one has been able to run away with the scoreboard so far. That helps the game stay family friendly. The narrative turns the game into a shared adventure where everyone is an active participant. Better than going to a movie is feeling like you’re starring in one. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this review, because Rise of Queensdale  is a series of games,  right from the beginning, it fosters a commitment for players to spend time together on a regular basis. That’s the best gift to share with friends and family – our time – and anything like Rise of Queensdale that can make that happen is a wonderful Christmas present to place or find under the tree.

Strategy Tip: If the narrative provides a new shared goal, PAY ATTENTION and work toward it. There’s usually penalties for everyone if it doesn’t get done and rewards for the players who successfully complete it.

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Publisher: Ravensburger
Players: 2-4 (We played with 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 1 hour per game
Game type: narrative driven, legacy, dice rolling, worker placement
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

At Gamicon , I was introduced to Sentient, from Renegade Game Studios. My friend Katie was manning the session and teaching interested attendees how to play, so with her encouragement, my husband Chris and I sat down and gave it a try.

It was love at first play for me. That probably sounds a bit odd to those who know the game and who know me well because I often emphasize that theming is really important for me and Sentient’s theme is wholly unremarkable. Something about acquiring and programming bots …blah blah blah… but the theme quickly fades from memory as I begin to play and am pulled into the logic puzzle that is at the core of the game. Do you remember those logic puzzles wherein a group of friends go to a movie and a few facts are laid out about each person and where they sat and you have to figure out the precise order of their seating across the row of seats in the theatre? Sentient  feels a lot like that, but with beautiful pastel colors and striking custom dice and it taught me that I’m not as wedded to theme as I thought. If a designer presents a compelling enough game, I’m willing to let a poor theme slide.

Sentient  is played over three rounds, which flow pretty quickly for all but the most deliberating players. I frequently suffer from analysis paralysis and didn’t find myself getting too hung up on decision making. In each round, players must select bots (cards) from an available pool of 4 to add to their network (individual player boards). Players take turns selecting their bots, as dictated by turn order, and prior to selecting bots, all players roll their custom dice and add the dice to their network (each die is placed into the network on top of the square the matches the color of the rolled die).

Each bot provides a condition for network placement, that if met, scores victory points at the end of the round. These conditions are mathematical and relate to the numbers on the dice on either side of the bot position in the network. Once the network is evaluated at the end of a round and points are scored, the bots in a player’s network are taken out of the network and placed into a pile on the side of their network; they will come into play for end game scoring. For example, one bot specifies this condition,  <—EVEN ODD—> ,  which means that when the network is evaluated, the die to the left of the bot in the network must be an even number and the die to the right of the bot in the network must be odd.

Here’s where the game gets tricky – bots cause an immediate effect on the network when placed; they can force an adjustment of the dice to the left and right of the bot’s placement. Adjustment possibilities are +1, –1, or no change. This means that even if you have some of your bots already perfectly placed in your network, ensuring that they meet the conditions specified, the dice they are evaluated against could change in value as the round progresses, upsetting your glorious plans for victory. There is an option to block one or both of the adjustment effects of a bot when placed using assistant tokens distributed at the beginning of the game, but doing so greatly handicaps your ability to score crucial victory points through the investor multiplier mechanism (IMM) at the end of the game. What is the IMM? Well, Sentient  implements an area control game that is conducted simultaneously in conjunction with bot placement. When a bot is selected from the market, the selecting player places one of their 4 agent tokens plus as many of their assistant tokens as they choose above the market space where the bot was taken from.

In this way, the player is competing to dominate the play areas above the market board with their influence (each agent and assistant token provides one influence). At the end of the round, the player with the most influence surrounding each investor token above the marketplace gains that investor token. These tokens are then used as victory point multipliers at the end of the game – each investor token provides 1 victory point for each bot of matching type (color) that the owning player has in their collection at the end of the game. 

I love puzzling out which of the 4 bots I should select on my turn. I evaluate each bot carefully, noting its type (color) and whether that could be useful to me based on the investor tokens I already have.

I also have to consider the point values each bot could bring – my favorite are the bots that specify a die value and offer 7 points if BOTH the die to the left and right of the bot in your network have that value. Finally, I need to survey the investor tokens up for grabs above the marketplace to decide if there are any I must prioritize, either because they help me or because they would help my opponent too much if I don‘t grab them first. If there are, I might need to take a bot I like a little less and figure out how to successfully plug it into my network in order to place influence next to the investor token I want. Note that there’s also an option to select none of the bots and send them all to the discard pile; each player must choose this option at least once during each round. If you’re not happy with any of your choices, it’s a good time to use that option.

Another thing I enjoy about Sentient  is that it doesn’t have a lot of player interaction. I am competing against my opponents to build the best network, but other than swiping a bot or investor token they might want, there isn’t any take-that element to the game. I like take-that games as long as they are light strategy and high luck, but it really stinks in a heavy strategy game to have someone screw you over and render impossible your well planned optimal path to victory. I much prefer the “I do my thing over here and you do your thing over there and we see who did a better thing in the end” style of strategy games.

Sentient  is designed by J. Alex Kevern, with artwork by Anita Osburn, Chris Ostrowski, and Gordon Tucker. As I alluded to previously, the artwork is lovely, with a futuristic vibe and soft color palette. I’ve got at least one other game in my collection designed by Kevern – ArtSee - and I really like it as well, so I’m going to make some time upcoming to check out his other games (he has 9 games released according to BoardGameGeek.com). I’m trying to get better at paying attention to the designers behind the games. I am realizing that game designers, just like great film directors, establish a pattern of style and technical mechanisms in their work,  and so if I really enjoy a game by a designer, it’s likely I will like their other games as well.

The components for Sentient  seem to be well made and I adore the custom dice. There are wooden and cardboard tokens as well as 60 large cards used in play.

The cards are probably the weak point in overall component quality; ours are starting to bend and wear quite a bit. I’d suggest sleeving them for regular use, using standard Tarot card sized sleeves. The rulebook is very easy to follow, grammatically correct, and laid out well.

I haven’t played Sentient  yet with our kids (10 year old boys and a 14 year old daughter), but it feels like it would be a good fit for them as well.  The guidelines on the box list ages 12 and up but I think 10 and up is a better guideline. It’s a solid family game, that plays in less than hour, without any objectionable content. And of course, the bonus is that it helps youngsters improve their logical thinking skills. 

 Strategy Tip: If playing against just 1 other player, it’s ok to pick out a few of the bots it would be nice to have and mentally work out optimum placement in your network of those bots to ensure the dice values are adjusted, if necessary, to score points for all the bots. If all goes well, and your opponent doesn’t select the bots you want most, you can stick to your original plan or select the new bot your opponent reveals at the end of their turn. This strategy does not work nearly as well in a 3 or 4 player game, as by the time your turn comes around again it is likely any bots you had your eye on will be gone. In games with more than 2 players, you need to be much more flexible in what bots you put into your network and perhaps focus more on the area control aspect of the game. 

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Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 40 minutes per game
Game type: dice rolling, set collection, card drafting, area control, math
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Let's take a moment to talk about the series Exit: The Game, which debuted in the United States in 2016.

Designed by Inka and Marcus Brand and published by Thames and Kosmos, the games are advertised as an Escape Room in a box. In an escape room, you and a group a friends are placed into a room (you may literally be locked in, depending on the fire code of the city where you book the room). Then,  a timer is set, a story is told to you to provide context and atmosphere for your puzzling adventure, and you attempt to solve a series of puzzles, the answers to which will eventually lead you to a key or combination to escape the room - hopefully before time runs out. These rooms typically book for $30+ per person, so the promise of replicating the escape room experience out of a tiny little box for a fraction of the cost is very appealing.

But does Exit: The Game live up to its promise? It does. It absolutely does, with one caveat - some of the games have you puzzling to solve a mystery within the time limit, but you aren't trying to escape anything.

Earlier titles in the series are fairly straightforward. A paper booklet of puzzles; a set each of riddle cards (pair with the booklet to solve the puzzles), answer cards (used to validate puzzle solutions and lead you to new riddle cards),  and help cards (hints for solving the puzzles); a decoder wheel (used to input codes derived from the puzzles); a simple rulebook; and various accessories (usually constructed of cardboard or paper) provide the core of the game experience. Players need to come equipped with scissors (destruction of components is required in nearly every game), pens/pencils, rulers, and a sharp wit to finish the game and calculate their score (measured in stars). The puzzle mechanisms vary, but they will be at least somewhat familiar to players who have done escape rooms or puzzle hunts before.  Depending on the title chosen, the puzzles also vary in difficulty. There is a difficulty rating printed on each box. We found that on average, we finish every Exit title in about 75 minutes; what varies for us across difficulty ratings is how many hint cards we lean on to solve the puzzles.

As the series has progressed in maturity, Inka and Marcus have been able to deliver titles with creative new puzzle mechanisms, changes in solving methodology (such as varying whether the puzzles in the paper booklet must be completed in sequential order or not), and meta puzzles. Meta puzzles are those which you cannot solve without getting a piece of the solution from some or all of the other puzzles included. For example, a puzzle that has you solve for a sentence comprised of words derived from other puzzle solutions is a meta puzzle. A good example of a title from the Exit: The Game series with a meta puzzle is Exit: The Game  - Dead Man on the Orient Express. It includes a meta puzzle that requires players to pay close attention to the passengers, their possessions, and locations throughout the game in order to solve it successfully. That game also introduced envelopes to open as the game progressed and it’s one of the titles that doesn’t see players escaping anything; instead they are trying to issue a code at the end to transmit the identity of a killer to authorities.

By the time the series release of Exit: The Game – The Catacombs of Horror  came around, I really thought the Brands couldn’t have any new tricks up their sleeve. I was wrong. With Catacombs of Horror, they have introduced the two part adventure, giving players a longer puzzling experience in one box. You can play straight through the entire game (allot yourself at least 2 hours) or play the first half and come back to the second half another time. There are also some fantastic new twists on the puzzling mechanisms (a candle is included and must be lit to solve one of the puzzles, for example), and the components got an upgrade (I’m holding onto the adorable little skulls indefinitely). Alongside the puzzle elements, the theming in the series has gotten better and better as new titles are released. Catacombs of Horror provides a well written narrative, albeit very very dark. As we solve puzzles, we find ourselves chasing down what happened to a friend of ours who disappeared into the Catacombs of Paris. It seems he may have met a dark end after having crossed paths with some demonic forces. This title is definitely not for the kiddos, which might be its only drawback. We have clever tweens who enjoy puzzle games, and this isn’t something we can share with them.

There have been at least three more titles released in the Exit: The Game series since Catacombs of Horror  was published in 2018 and more are on the way for 2020. If you’ve previously purchased any of the series, I’d strongly recommend adding Catacombs of Horror  to your must-play list. If this is the first you’ve heard of the series, do yourself a favor, and start with one of the easier titles, such as Exit: The Game – The Sunken Treasure. Then if you have a good time, move onto Exit: The Game – The Pharoh’s Tomb, before sinking your teeth into the most difficult titles like Exit: The Game  - Dead Man on the Orient Express or this one (Exit: The Game – The Catacombs of Horror ).

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Publisher: Thames and Kosmos
Players: 1-4 (we always play with 2)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 2 and a half hours
Game type: puzzle, cooperative
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

  We got Cities: Skylines – The Board Game  a couple of months ago and I really didn't know what to expect before my first play. Sometimes there is a game on the horizon that's all the buzz in my circles and I'm super excited to order it, get it home, and get it on the table. Other times, it's my husband who catches the fever for a game and brings it into our house. And every now and then, a publisher asks me to review a game I've never heard of and haven't built up any anticipatory excitement for yet. Such was the case with Cities: Skylines – The Board Game. The team at Kosmos sent this cooperative game my way and asked me to give it a try. It’s designed by Rustan Hakansson (other works of his I am familiar with include HexRoller and Tribes: Dawn of Humanity) and based on a video game of the same name that’s popular across multiple platforms (Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, & Nintendo Switch).

  I remember opening the box for the first time and setting everything up. The box cover art is nice but the rest of the artwork (provided by the German design studio Fiore) is easily described as adequate. We're not handing out any awards here for most beautiful game, is all I'm saying. I thumbed through the rulebook as we readied for our first game and at least that was a win - I found it to be concise and well-written. I especially liked that the rulebook author made a point to highlight that even though Cities: Skylines – The Board Game is a cooperative game where it's important to collaborate, it is up to the active player to make the decision on their turn. Way to nip that Alpha gaming in the bud!

Once my husband and I started playing the game, I quickly realized it’s very different from other games. It gives me the same feeling of zen as putting together a Stave wooden jigsaw puzzle. We’re not battling a monster or racing against the clock or trying to fend off a pandemic. We’re urban planners, carefully and thoughtfully placing building tiles into our city districts in an effort to score the most happiness (points) possible by the game’s end.  Very relaxing, yet still intellectually challenging.

The game begins with players selecting a set of game board tiles (4 unless you are playing the introductory game with just 3) and arranging them facedown. One of the tiles is flipped over (there is a $$ cost associated with flipping each tile, which is deducted from the starting city treasury funds) and development may begin. Each tile is divided up into districts, formed by the street borders, and all construction takes place within these districts. When new city game board tiles are flipped over (at checkpoints - called milestones - that may only be triggered once every district visible has a building constructed within it), land surfaces must face up against land surfaces and water must face water.

To build out the city, players they use construction cards (dealt in the beginning of the game and also drawn each turn) to put up residential, commercial, industrial, utility, service, and unique buildings.

Placing buildings can trigger increases or decreases in the city treasury; utilities (power, water, garbage); employment; happiness; and negative externalities (pollution, traffic, crime). If the placement would trigger a decrease beyond what the planners have in the treasury, the building cannot be constructed. You also cannot construct a building if it would cause any of your utilities to drop below -5, cause any of your negative externalities to increase beyond 5, or cause your employment to go out of the range of -5 to 5. And while there is no cap on happiness increases, any construction that lowers your happiness beyond -4 ends the game with a loss immediately. At the milestone checkpoints, utility shortages decrease happiness just before the happiness is transferred to the main score track and at the end of the game negative externalities do so as well. So our first consideration in construction must be how it will impact all of these measures.

Several buildings trigger effects based on having met prerequisites. For example, building a residential zone might trigger an increase in the city treasury if you already have a park constructed in the same district. Or a building a commercial zone might increase the city treasury and happiness if you have both a park and a medical clinic in the district and you can place the zone adjacent to both of them. In order to get the most benefit from these types of constructions, planners need to carefully think and rethink building placement before selecting a building site and so this is a second consideration in construction.  

When selecting residential, commercial, or industrial zones to build, there are a dozen or more tetris-like shaped tokens to choose from. Because buildings can only be placed in a district if they physically fit, and we want to maximize the number and type of buildings we can place into each district, a close examination of the shapes during selection is a third consideration in construction.

In addition to the game tiles, buildings, and construction cards, Cities: Skylines – The Board Game  includes role cards that grant special abilities to each planner, policy cards that provide a one time benefit when played, and news cards that add difficulty in the form of disadvantages. It’s recommended to leave these three card types out of your first game to keep things simple, but they definitely make the game more fun, so I’d recommend incorporating them into your subsequent games.

I want to make an important note regarding player count. The box notes that 1-4 can play Cities: Skylines – The Board Game but there’s no way I’d play this with more than 2 players total. We didn’t even attempt a 3 or 4 player game because it was easy to see it would be frustrating – just too many people to negotiate with on implementing a coordinated plan. I guess if you’re the type of person who would work on a jigsaw puzzle with 4 people at once, you might give it a try? But I’m definitely not that kind of person. As a 1 or 2 player game though, Cities: Skylines – The Board Game is great. We could all use more calm during this crazy COVID-19 pandemic and puzzle games like this one provide it.

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Publisher: Thames and Kosmos
Players: 1-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): 1 hr
Game type: cooperative, tile placement, hand management, puzzle games, solo games
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Cities: Skylines - Cooperative City-Building Board Game from Kosmos | Based On The Hit Video Game | for 1-4 Players Ages 10+ | Develop & Manage Cities & Neighborhoods

I have been playing board games since I was a kid. Chinese Checkers, Chess, Monopoly, Clue, Skipbo, Taboo, and Pictionary  were in regular rotation on our table when my parents and I or my friends and I sat down to play. Into my adulthood, and over the years since, I have continued to enjoy these games. And then, about ten years ago, I was introduced to "serious" board gaming. I began to play board games from small publishers where the designer and artist are a topic of discussion, as are game mechanisms (e.g. worker placement, area control, etc.), weight of the board game, replayability, and other concerns. I started with Settlers of Catan and then fell for PowerGrid, Puerto Rico, and Robinson Crusoe. Then I joined a few board game meetup groups in my community and my passion for the hobby really bloomed. 900+ games in my collection later, I've come to understand there's a bit of snobbery in board gaming circles. The games I knew and loved as a child are lumped into a category referred to as mass market games and sneered at by the board game elite. What defines a mass market game?  Typically published by a major toy company (vs a dedicated board gaming publisher), it has a lower price point, cheaper components, uncredited or corporate designers and artists, weak narrative, and is light to medium weight in complexity. I have several mass market games from yesteryear in my existing collection and am happy to play them with anyone who asks, so I don’t consider myself a board game snob. On the other hand, I don’t purchase new releases in this category anymore so maybe I’ve got one foot in the elite circle?

Recently, Ravensburger sent me Horrified . Released in 2019,  the game garnered high praise from Tom Vasel, who raved about it on Dice Tower. That piqued my husband’s interest, and he asked me to request it for review. Horrified  is easily classified as a mass market board game but since I’m no board game snob, I looked forward to playing it.

Spoiler: turns out I am becoming a little bit of a board game snob.

If you’ve read my reviews before, you know that theming and narrative backstory are important to me. Why has my character come together with others in the story setting laid out in the game? Do the game objectives make sense in the context of the story? What drives the behavior of the bad vs good guys in the game? What era in time do we exist in? Where are we geographically? None of this is explained in Horrified . In this cooperative game, players just find themselves dropped into a nameless town, fighting a hoard of monsters and escorting villagers to safety. How did we get to this town? Where is this town? When is this happening? Why this particular grouping of monsters? Turns out the answer to the last question is: because it’s a bunch of Universal Studios IP mashed together (but that doesn’t provide an in-game narrative explanation).  “Universal Classic Monsters is a name given to the horror, fantasy, thriller and science fiction films made by Universal Pictures during the decades of the 1920s through the 1950s. They were the first shared universe in the entire movie industry in Hollywood and around the world” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Classic_Monsters). The monsters include Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride, Wolf Man, Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Invisible Man.

I had additional questions on why our characters would be in this cookie cutter town (I played the archaeologist, whose picture clearly indicates he belongs on a dig somewhere in Egypt) but my husband was able to explain that the characters are straight out of the Universal Studios movies (mine is from The Mummy)  and it only made sense they would be in town if the monsters were also in town.

Setting my problem with the narrative aside, let’s talk about the components. A portion of them are poorly constructed - there are flimsy cards and monster mats that bend easily and there are cheap plastic figurines without much detail – but most of the components are just fine. The cardboard player tokens are well made, there are custom dice (nice touch), and the central game board is easy to read, well laid out, and features bright colors. The rulebook is orderly and sensible and player aid cards are included (always a plus – I get irritated when publishers leave these out). And good news, there’s a fix for shoddy figurines. Someone came up with the brilliant idea to use Funko Pop! Universal Monsters Series mini figures in place of the included figurines and it really elevates the game. Unfortunately, there’s no fix for the flimsiness of the cards, so if you want to play regularly, you’re going to need to sleeve them.

The artwork is simple and cartoonish. I wouldn’t describe it as beautiful, realistic, or haunting; more like family friendly and what you’d expect from a mass market game.

What about the gameplay? I’d sum it up like this – it’s a lot like Pandemic but here we are dealing with monsters instead of ambiguous diseases and the gameplay is less complex. It’s engaging and fun. At the beginning of the game 2, 3, or 4 monsters are selected and placed on the board. On each player’s turn, after the player completes their actions, new items are spawned in various locations on the board (items are gathered by players and used to defend against and defeat the monsters), a special action occurs, and then the monsters move and attack. One of the special actions that can occur is to place a named villager in an assigned location. These villagers add additional depth to the game – players must escort them safely to their designated destination location and then are rewarded with perk cards that offer special abilities. If villagers are left to fend for themselves and are attacked by one of the monsters, they die, and our terror level goes up (terror level also goes up if any character is attacked and doesn’t have enough items to discard to fend off the attack). If the players defeat all the monsters, they win. If the terror level gets to the farthest point on the terror track, or if the monster deck runs out, the players lose. The whole game plays in less than an hour, it’s simple enough for kids to understand, and it plays up to five. The player count is a big plus for us as we have five family members once you count the three kids and so any four player games force us to leave a kid out. Because there isn’t a lot of complexity in Horrified , there isn’t much of a problem with analysis paralysis. Turns flow smoothly and quickly. There are several monsters to choose from when setting up monster combinations at the start of the game and each monster must be defeated in a unique way (thematic to the movie plot from which the monster is borrowed), so there is a good degree of replayability inherent in the box.

Providing a review rating for Horrified  is proving difficult. I’m realizing now that I have become a bit of a board game snob and so the flimsy cards and cheap plastic figurines really turn me off (the Funko Pop! minis fix the figurine problem but I resent having to go track them down at extra expense). And the lack of narrative really irritates me. So for my readers who are serious board gamers and only play with other serious gamers, I think a single Oui! is fair. On the other hand, the gameplay in Horrified  is much better than in your average mass market game. Its monster theme is different from all the other monster themes in the board gaming community (which mostly trend toward Cthulhu or space aliens). The gameplay is engaging – especially for my kids – and so it makes me happy to play it again with the family or with casual gamer friends. For those audiences (families and casual gamers), I’d give it a Oui! Oui!

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Publisher: Ravensburger
Players: 1-5
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): about 45 minutes per game
Game type: dice rolling, cooperative, pick-up and deliver, mass market

Veteran Board Gamer Rating:                                          

Casual Gamer and Family Gaming Rating:

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

My husband Chris and I played another game of Disney Villainous last night.

It’s another mass market game release from Ravensburger.

Refresher: mass market games are those that are typically published by a major toy company (vs a dedicated board gaming publisher),  have a lower price point, cheaper components, uncredited or corporate designers and artists, weak narrative, and are light to medium weight in complexity.

In Villainous, players take on the role of Disney Villains who are competing against each other to be the first to complete their character specific objectives. These objectives align neatly with the narratives of the Disney movies from which the characters have been borrowed. For example, Ursula must find the Trident and the Crown and place them in her lair. And she gets rid of her enemies by using binding contracts! There are six villains included in the base game (more are available through the expansions) and turn sequence for each villain is pretty simple. There are 4 actions spaces on every villains board, and a character token is used to move between them. On your turn, you move your token to a new action space, take as many of the actions visible in the space that you wish, and then draw back up to your hand size limit. Actions include:

• gaining power tokens (the game’s currency);
• playing a card from your hand as a one time effect or to your villain tableau (the 4 columns below your actions spaces);
• activating a card in your tableau;
• moving a card in your tableau to another column;
• playing a card from another player’s fate deck as a one time effect or to their fate tableau (the 4 columns above their action spaces; when you play a card here it covers up some of the actions on the action space below, hampering their success);
• moving a card previously played to your fate tableau;
• vanquishing (discarding) a card previously played to your fate tableau by matching/beating the strength value of the card with eligible card(s) in your villain tableau (cards used to match/beat must be discarded).

The game ends as soon as a player has met their objective.

Since The Little Mermaid  is one of my favorite Disney movies, I played Ursula the first time we got Disney Villainous  on the table.

I really thought I had a great strategy to bring home the victory. That was a six player game that took hours and hours and I lost, as did everyone else, to the Queen of Hearts. But that first game was all it took for me to get hooked; I really enjoy playing this game. Which is odd, because I was worried it wouldn’t click with me after my last foray into mass market gaming (see my review for Horrified, also from Ravensburger, here). So how is it that a gamer girl who thought she was done with mass market games fell for a new one? I think it’s the connection I have with the Disney IP. The iconic artwork. The characters and their backstories provided in all the Disney movies I’ve watched. Their cast of allies and foes. I also feel like every player is immersed in their own narrative when playing Disney Villainous and the narratives are good. We’re all playing simultaneously but each of us is wholly encapsulated in our own storyline that makes sense, based on the movies. Horrified  presented differently; in that game all the IP was mashed up together in one setting and it didn’t make any sense. I also love the component quality in Villainous, especially the artsy character tokens, cast in jewel toned acrylic. Lovely! 

Even though Ravensburger sent me the game to play a few months ago and we’ve played with the kids and our friends before, last night was the first time Chris and I played 1 on 1 against each other. Chris played Jafar and I played Prince John.

His character’s goal was to find and arrange some specific cards in his villain tableau while mine was to accumulate power tokens. I needed to attack him repeatedly with fate cards to stop him but for several turns I was limited in doing so because of a rule we unfortunately misapplied. We didn’t permit consecutive fate attacks against the same player. This is a rule designed to protect players from being attacked repeatedly by multiple opponents but it applies only at higher player counts. Because we learned how to play the game at 6 players, we internalized the rule and forgot to drop it when playing with just 2 players. We didn’t realize and correct our error until halfway through the game and I’m convinced that is at least part of the reason Prince John (and I) lost. I also think that my character is better suited for higher player counts as it’s easier to use the cards in both my villain and fate decks to grab power tokens when there are multiple players gathering tokens themselves (one of my cards lets me get 3 tokens anytime another player has 6 or more) and when there are several players laying fate down against me (one of my cards lets me gain 1 token for every hero fate card laid down against my tableau.  By the way, you’ll be happy to know the two player games takes less than an hour. Four players is probably the sweet spot when it comes to player count for Disney Villainous  - large enough to provide more opportunities to make the most of villain and fate decks, but not small enough to allow for a reasonable length of game.

There isn’t too much analysis paralysis in the game, but players can stretch out turns from time to time when they’re grasping for a winning strategy.

Replayability might be the one weakness in Villainous. No matter which of the six characters are selected for a given session, it’s likely players will run through their entire villain deck by game’s end, leaving nothing new to discover in future games. As soon as you’ve played the game a few times, you start to understand the strength and weaknesses of each villain and fate deck and things feel less exciting. This is definitely a game where you’ll want to pick up one or more of the expansions to reinvigorate gameplay.

My kids love this game. They enjoy playing with the adults and also with each other. It’s very kid friendly. It’s easy to learn and I like that it’s a pretty gentle introduction to the take-that mechanism (as compared to say, Broom Service, which is marketed to kids but is SO BRUTAL in its take-that actions that my kids end up in tears every single time they play).

Components include plastic coated cards, paper player pamphlets, cardboard player boards and power tokens, and the aforementioned acrylic character tokens. Everything is bright and colorful and the raised lettering and fancy font on the box and other components lends an upscale feeling to the game. The rulebook is well written with detailed explanations and setup instructions.

Disney Villainous  is equally challenging and fun for all ages.

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Publisher: Ravensburger
Players: 2-6
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): varies widely depending on player count, 45 minutes to 3 hours per game
Game type: take that, hand management, mass market

Rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

“Death Stranding” is one of the oddest, and one of the best, games of 2019.

The game ably emulates the manic tempo of being young, smart (and stupid) and having a wild night out.

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