Clans of Caledonia - The Greater Cinematic Franz-verse

Clans of Caledonia - The Greater Cinematic Franz-verse
Designed by Juma Al-Joujou
Artwork by Klemens Franz
Published by Karma Games
1-4 Players ~ 90-120 Minutes (shorter for solo)
Review by Jack Eddy

In spite of all of its efforts, I really dig Clans of Caledonia.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s designed to be enjoyed. Games should be designed to be enjoyed! But the DNA that makes up this game isn’t really my jam. Drawing heavy mechanical inspiration from economic euro predecessors like Terra Mystica, Agricola, and The Voyages of Marco Polo, Clans appears to be a dry, complicated, and punishing game of agricultural domination, which it absolutely is. The big difference, though, is empowerment.

The Economy of Sheep (Gameplay)

Clans of Caledonia effectively boils down to producing resources to fulfill orders. Those resources can either be bought from the market with some hard earned scratch, or you can deploy your pieces on the board. There are two types of pieces, ones that produce stuff: wool, milk, wheat, or cheddar* (*money); or there are factories which change your stuff into bigger, better, processed stuff: bread, whiskey, or cheddar** (**the cheese).

Obviously, putting pieces on the board is the sound investment, but this is a game where every penny counts. Deploying pieces is slow and costly, and with only 5 rounds in the game, it’s hard to gauge exactly how beneficial their production will be.

Fortunately, guidance is provided via asymmetric powers. Each player has a clan, and that clan’s powers will often provide general nudges in a direction without entirely dominating a player’s game. Maybe you can buy and sell more goods at better prices, or producing and aging whisky will net you continuous money, or maybe your clan knows the secret and covetted recipe for butter; allowing you to convert milk into hard earned cash at a fixed premium. That said, all of this will usually be in service of allowing you to fill more orders; which is really the major goal of the game.

First off, in order to fill orders, you must have orders, and typically each player can only hold one order at a time. And these orders, requiring various goods including the slaughtering of your poor milk and wool producing livestock, will make up the majority of your points. While each round has its own bonus point award, like 2 points for every deployed worker; the orders give you intangible commodities; cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco. These all score at the end of the game, where the one that players collectively own the least of is the most valuable, setting up a sort of internal economy.

And speaking of economy, the market is by far the most innovative system in Caledonia. Whenever you sell or purchase goods, the monetary value of that good moves up or down. In other words, if you sell tons of cheese, cheese supply is high, which means it will reduce in value. The more people buy wool, the price skyrockets with demand. This imbues you, the player, with the awesome and terrifying power to control the free market, employing it’s whims as an aspect of your economic domination; Milton Freeman would be proud.  

Reaping what you sow (How it Feels)

 This precision of choices and impact on the internal economy sets up a sort of rhythmic deliberation to the game. You have to really commit to what you’re doing and work with the consequences. That isn’t to say that there is a set path to victory, but victory is reliant on you remaining focused on one objective at a time, chaining consecutive actions together. Get my cows placed here; convert milk to cheese there; purchase a wool, slaughter a cow and fill this order, all so I can start focussing on my next objective.

That said, Clans constantly beckons you to change your plans. Can you really pass up a deal if whisky prices are THAT low? Maybe filling your order would get you some points but the current price of cheese is so high that you’d be a fool not to sell! This is compounded by a proximity bonus that happens when you build next to a neighbor. If one of your pieces is placed next to an opponent’s, you can immediately purchase what their piece produces from the market at a cheaper price. This encourages strategic, clustered, and hopefully mutually beneficial placement on the board.

It’s this precision and immediate impact of your decisions that I love most about the game. Every choice has a consequence for everyone at the table, and you are constantly making meaningful decisions as you build, produce, purchase, and fulfill your way throughout the game. There's a really empowering sense of manifest destiny, trusting that every action is leading to  some larger outcome, even if you aren’t always sure what it is yet.

A subjective duality (Art & Presentation)

 When I say that Caledonia looks fine, It’s with a degree of bitterness as I compromise the good and the bad. I’ll start off by saying that I really like how the game looks on the table. A lush green and blue world of hexagons adorned with appropriately vibrant and thematic meepl’lified components. Best of all, the game does a phenomenal job at conveying information in a really succinct, intuitive way. So why the duality?

I’m really not feeling the character artwork in this game. Yes, Klemens Franz is a wildly popular artist in the board game biz, and his presence here lends a sort of legitimacy to the first major release by Karma Games, but it just doesn’t really do any favors for the game. While I’ve never been wowed by Franz’ artwork, I’ve respected the sheer amount of work that he’s produced over the years, including, perhaps most notably, the majority of Uwe Rosenberg’s classic games. But in Caledonia, whether it's the juxtaposition of Franz’ characters against the much less stylized backgrounds, or it’s just not his best work, the characters feel disjointed, uninteresting, and out of place.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are a die-hard Franz head, the characters will fit within the greater cinematic Franz-verse, but their integration into the card and box artwork feels out of place, which is a shame for a game that feels otherwise so incredibly cohesive. Fortunately, this never detracted from my enjoyment of playing the game, it just never amplified it either.

An Invigorating Shot (Final Thoughts)

In a surprise twist that I never expected, Clans turned out to be one of my favorite euros of the last few years. Perhaps it’s because, unlike many of its predecessors that it draws heavy inspiration from, it feels restrictive yet never punishing; there are few things that you can do in the game that will fully derail your ability to participate in the rest of the game; some people will call this too forgiving, I call it fun.

Furthermore, the asymmetric powers are subtle but substantial changes, modifying how you approach the game, making sure that each time it hits the table it feels both familiar yet new. Lastly, it plays fantastic at each player count, never really feeling like you are having the compromise the core loop of the game to seat a certain number of players.

That said this game won’t be for everyone. If you absolutely can’t stand economic euro games, steer clear! This is an abstract game of resource collection and conversion, and no amount of forgiving player empowerment is going to change that.

But if you love games with tons of successive decisions, with loads of depth, skill, and (indirect) player interaction, with adorable pieces and great table presence, Clans of Caledonia is an excellent, and surprisingly approachable, entry point into the world of heavier economic euro games.

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The Tale of Ord (Chapters 3 & 4) - Counting on Venison

The Tale of Ord: Chapters 3 and 4 - Counting on Venison
Designed by Rita Orlov
Artwork by Rita Orlov & Ayodhya Ouditt
Published 2018 by PostCurious
Review by Jack Eddy

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*Note* This spoiler free review is a continuation of our Tale of Ord: Chapters 1 and 2 review that you can find here. If you are completely lost as to what this is, you might want to check out that review first.

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Given our incredible experience with Tale of Ord chapters 1 & 2, we thought ourselves veteran sleuths ready for whatever PostCurious could sling our way; expecting the unexpected and confident that now that we had the hang of it, finishing the remaining chapters would be a breeze! After all, it’s probably just more of the same. Right?

We were so wrong...

The Game is Afoot (Gameplay)

Inside the now-familiar sleek black box, the conclusive chapters of this narrative puzzle adventure lie in wait. We took some time off from chapters 1 & 2, largely because, well, life can get in the way of continuity, but also because we wanted to savor the experience. It’s no joke that solving the first two chapters was among Christina and I’s all-time favorite gaming experiences. When we finally decided to break into it, the objects within were stranger, the visuals were more esoteric, and the writing was more cryptic than ever.

Chapter 3 continues to defy your expectations with gusto by demanding that you unshackle your brain and begin interacting with physical objects more in the way that you approach building a lego set with no instructions; if you haven’t bent, broken, torn, disassembled, and written on three quarters of the components by it’s completion, you did something wrong.

Finally, after two long nights of scrutinizing every last detail like a content starved Song of Ice & Fire Fan searching for clues, we cracked the case and found our way through chapter 3. This was by far the most mentally exhausting of the chapters; thrilling, yes, but you will feel like you need some sleep after making it through a session. Except you won’t, because you’ll be so busy talking about what could possibly happen in the supersized chapter 4 envelope, given everything you’ve seen.

Chapter 4 is… well, it’s exactly what you want it to be. You know how in the best stories (and math classes)  the final challenge is a summary of everything the hero has been learning up until that point, except cranked to 11? That’s what you’re looking at here. The challenges in chapter 4 are a robust, wholistic summary and progression of the whole adventure so far, that will have you recontextualizing and employing clues from each chapter before it. And that’s not even talking about why the envelope is so big.

Suffice it to say, when we read the letter attached to chapter 4, Christina and I both said “No…” in disbelief. “Surely they don’t mean...”. And yeah, they did. I’m not going to spoil it, but the main obstacle, the ultimate finale of the game, is one of the most incredible, intricate, and mind-blowing components that has come across my table, and all the myriad of supporting documents in chapter 4 relate to it.

Chapter 4 also took two sessions, both because of the mental taxation, but also due to us being old fuddy-duddies who have a toddler, jobs, responsibilities, and too-often-ignored bedtimes. That said completing chapter 4 was as satisfying of a narrative and tabletop gaming experience as I’ve ever had, immediately causing us to video call people and gush wildly while desperately trying not to spoil a single detail. If chapters 1 and 2 made a promise, 3 and 4 delivered.

One thing that particularly struck me about these latter two chapters is the breadth of disciplines involved in creating the puzzles, while not really reliant on the players knowledge of those disciplines to solve them. This lent itself well to group dynamics, where people naturally good at spatial arrangement, math, linguistics, or research could best employ their skills, but the logic is never so prohibitively difficult that you'd fail if your team lacked an accountant or philologist. These are STEM activities for adults. 

That said...

Facing the Jabberwocky (Difficulty)

“it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don’t exactly know what they are!” - Alice, Through the Looking Glass

In our initial review, I encouraged players to avoid becoming lost in the woods by making liberal use of the awesome hint system on PostCurious’ website. Now that we’ve managed our way through the latter half, I’m begging you.

While we clearly loved our time with the game, chapters 3 and 4 were notably harder, and one of my biggest criticisms of the overall experience is it didn’t feel like a natural progression of difficulty when we got to the latter half. In these final four sessions, we more often found ourselves teetering further from the realm of exciting mystery into opaque befuddlement. Fortunately, with rest, perspective, and a heavy dosage of clues, we were always able to steer ourselves back on course, but there were more than a couple times where a clue made me go “There is never in a million years that I would have thought of that!”

And like I said earlier, it’s not because of a lack of knowledge or skill when it comes to analyzing text or knowledge of Norse Mythology; our greatest challenge was often (and still) due to us underestimating the parameters of the game, not employing real world logic and assuming everything is textual information available on paper. The key to solving one particular puzzle was a simple as matching symbols and seeing what the cuts revealed but in spite of solving seemingly far more complex things, the disparity between the objects involved threw us off. Ultimately, it was a minor logical jump that seems so intuitive in retrospect, but without the hints, who knows if we’d ever get there.

Which can be frustrating, you know? I’m a gamer! I want seamless progression that relies on my wits and cunning; taking hints can feel like I’m cheapening the experience!

But it didn’t.  Yes, I wish the puzzles nudged you just a little bit more toward the goals without having to rely on a clue system online, but those “never in a million year moments” were accompanied by a healthy dose of bewilderment at just how clever and nuanced the puzzles were, and for each puzzle that really busted our brain and we needed a ton of help, there were several more that a polite nudge was enough to send us along our path of triumph.

Evidence & Artifacts (Materials)

Straight up, The Tale of Ord is remarkably tight. Whether it’s indicative of mad genuis, black magic, or the combination there-of, it’s astounding at how cohesive the overall experience is. Characters have consistent voices, references are well researched, information is presented in tantalizing ways, and the solutions and resulting narrative developments are wilder and wilder with each puzzle you solve.

More than anything, I appreciate the layering and nuance throughout. Narrative themes are recalled, characters have arcs, puzzles are reliant upon clues within earlier chapters, and your skill at understanding both the sheer mechanics and narrative complexities grows, which deepens the game and really makes the story resonate.

And the quality of materials doesn’t end with the writing, chapters 3 and 4 include a couple physical objects that blew us away. These totems of bewilderment fit so cohesively in the narrative that it gave the experience a real world feeling unlike anything we had done to that point. Describing them further would spoil the fun, so all I’ll say is that they are functional, beautiful, and intricate in ways that showcase the enormous skill, craft, and creativity that went into designing the Tale of Ord.

Honestly, I still can’t believe what was included in that final package.

Disparate Elements (Odds and Ends)

Look, I still think The Tale of Ord’s biggest hurdle is sticker shock. $165 is a big ask for most people, and the masses aren’t used to the idea of spending $165 on a physical product meant to be played once. But for 7 total sessions, 2 or more hours a piece, we managed to have some of the most riveting, memorable, and immersive gaming experiences we’ve ever had, that (much to the annoyance of parents/coworkers/cats/strangers on the street), we cannot stop talking about.

That said, if you are still wanting to know more about what you’d be getting into before throwing down, you can request a free postcard from the publisher that will be a sort of prelude puzzle unto itself.

Another thing to mention is that the experience has shifted slightly, in that the publisher is now sending either 4 monthly packages or all 4 chapters in one shipment (exclusively the latter for international audiences), rather than two at a time as they’ve done until now. Not a huge shift, but my recommendation is that you not binge it. Savor the breaks in between, allow the mystery to percolate and let the suspense build. After all, the narrative tension is what makes the payoff to the puzzles so much more magnificent.

A very late night snapshot commemorating our victory with a particularly mysterious souvenir. 

Ragnarok (Final Thoughts)

The Tale of Ord is so much more than I imagined it could be. I mean, yeah, the game could be summarized as an excellent narrative mystery full of cryptic puzzles to solve,  sounds cool, right? That’s how I labeled it going in, but I found that once I got going, I really had no idea what I was in for.

By the time we were done, our notebook was full of translated runes, numerology, symbology, astrology, astronomy, and so many deer. Yeah, if you weren’t counting on venison going into this thing, you have another thing coming.

Really, it’s the connective tissue binding each chapter that impressed me the most; The Tale of Ord is a nuanced, layered mystery that challenges and empowers players with all the tools to succeed. While I wish that the progression of difficulty were a bit more seamless from chapter to chapter, the level of skill and creativity necessary balance such a complex intersection of fantastic narrative, challenging and clever puzzles, and bespoke materials makes it easy to look past the occasional brain-numbing difficulty; and the sense of triumph at its completion was sweeter than any win I’ve ever had at a table.

If you have a heart for adventure and a mind for mystery, or you love great stories and want to rethink what gaming can be, The Cardboard Herald heartily recommends The Tale of Ord.

*A review copy a the Tale of Ord was provided by PostCurious. You can learn more about PostCurious and the designer, Rita Orlov on their site https://www.getpostcurious.com.

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Azul - The Little Abstract That Could

Azul
Published by Plan B Games - 2017
Designer: Michael Kiesling
Head Artists: Philippe Guerin and Chris Quilliams
2 - 4 players ~ 30-45 minutes
Review written by Luke Muench

People are quick to assume that I fall under the ambiguous and recently somewhat negative label “hipster”. I tend to not like a wide variety of things the general public praises, actively fighting against any residual nostalgia fighting for air at the back on my mind, and I’m often asked why I can’t just “turn off my brain and enjoy stuff”.

In truth, I often wish I could find more joy out of the things others do; for one thing, it would mean I’d be a lot happier a lot more of the time. So it’s a pleasant surprise when a game like Azul comes along. While it’s monumental critical acclaim and  2018 Spiel de Jahres win does little to excite me (aside from a sort of minor-academic tickle), the brilliant game hidden within it’s glossy and colorful exterior deserves every bit of it’s acclaim. Azul is downright brilliant; elegant in function and hilarious fun in practice.

And no, I didn’t like it before it was cool.

… Is That It?
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.” - Darth Vader

Azul, in premise, is mind-numbingly simple; each round, you collect colored tiles to try and fill in the pattern on your board. On your turn, you’ll take all tiles of a single color from one of the circles on the table, pushing the remaining pieces to a central pool. Once you start filling a row with a specific color, you cannot fill it with any other color until it’s completed. If, at the end of a round, you have filled one of the left-most rows to capacity with a single color type, you get to place one of those tiles on the appropriate place on your pattern.

Abstract puzzling at its most banal?  Yes, or at least it seems that way on the surface, with every review and picture online doing little to shake that impression. Yet as the praise kept pouring in, I felt it my duty to give it try, if only to have an excuse to talk some sense into the rambling masses. Surely there was some sort of drug coated across these little, shiny squares that had gotten into everyone’s blood-systems, surely there was a noxious gas hidden within each box, brainwashing anyone who dared open it, surely…

Only when you start to handle those tactile little pieces of plastic do you begin to grasp the true mastery and understanding of game design hidden within those cardboard player mats, for there is so much to grasp and grapple with turn to turn it will drive you batty. I don’t think I’ve won a single match of this game, yet I absolutely adore what it does.

Picking and Choosing

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - Gandalf The Grey

Each decision in Azul impacts everyone at the table, creating a sort of rippling effect where actions have deeper, drawn out meanings that you may not see the full ramifications of until several turns later.

The first and most obvious decision is which color you choose to put where on your board. Do you think you can gather five of them this turn, or are you going to play it safe and just fill in your two-slot row now? Every row is a precision commodity, allowing you to harbor only so many of a given color, but they’re also a perilous restriction. The moment you place a red tile in a row, you are dedicating that row to red until it is completed. You better have a means of doing just that, or else you’re going to be seeing red for many turns to come as you rage over how you can’t just… I just want to put it… Come ON, why can’t I complete this freakin’ row?

The reason is because every other player is aware that you need those last 2 red tiles to get points for that row, and they just so happened to take them, even if it is a subpar move for them. Blocking other players is a huge part of how Azul is played; it’s a mean, cutthroat, often laugh-out-loud hilarious affair.

In one memorable game, I was awaiting my turn to scoop up the last blue tile I needed for my fifth row, which was going to score me a ton of points. As each player when about their business, a drop of sweat dripped from my brow in anticipation. It was only when my neighbor looked at my board did he decide to remove that precious commodity from the table. One. Turn. Before. Mine. And in that moment, I erupted in a flurry of heated exclamations too saucy to be repeated here. And I loved it, every second of it; this game made me feel that intense loss, and all because of the actions I had taken as well as those of my blood-thirsty opponents.

Easy Come, Easy Go

“You never know when some lunatic will come with a sadistic choice.” - The Green Goblin

But the truly evil, the most diabolical players, are those who orchestrate the massive loss of points possible in any given game.

There are two ways of losing points, the first of which may seem quite tame. As players take tiles, any leftovers are pushed to the aforementioned central pool, slowly building until one player can’t help but pull from the tantalizing pot of riches. When they do so, they also receive the first player marker, a prize that is promptly placed in the first of their negative points slots.

This does two things; firstly, it provides small but meaningful factor to consider as you play; will you sacrifice a point to go first next round?. And secondly, removing that first player token is like opening a floodgate, with the other players throwing themselves into that ocean of tiles, now freed from the threat of lost points. Quickly, this becomes a game of chicken as everyone sees how long they can wait before succumbing to the temptation of those five tiles of a kind while also recognizing that if the next player chooses to pull, you’re going last next round, an awful punishment in its own right.

The second and most damaging way of losing points is when, inevitably, players begin to pull tiles that they can’t legally place on their board anymore. In this case, any and all overflow tiles become negative points, splaying out on the bottom of your board like a line of bullet wounds. Take enough and you could lose up to negative fourteen points in a given round. In the immortal words of Phil Swift, “That’s a lotta damage!”

What’s more, forward-thinking players can begin to orchestrate such outcomes, so if you’re not careful, you could be stuck with a pile of eight tiles with no place to go. This past Origins, my buddy Quinn went from being in first place to just barely pulling up in third, as he was forced to take the full negative fourteen points in the final round of the game. It was hilarious, brutal, and engaging for everyone huddled around the table, desperately trying not to be the player who was bound to get skunked.

What’s The Score?

“If winning weren’t important, nobody would keep score.” Al McGuire

If there was one thing that could be defined as “complicated” in Azul, it would be scoring. At the end of each round when adding tiles to your pattern, each tile earns points equal to itself and any additional tiles in the same row and column. So while at the start of the game you’ll be earning single points, towards the end you’ll hopefully have orchestrated a board capable of forking over massive amounts of points.

Additionally, you’ll earn seven points for every completed column at the end of the game and ten points if you collected all five tiles of a given color. Lastly, a completed row will only earn you two points, but this is also the method of ending the game; the moment a single player completes a row, that means that the round you are playing will be the final round, leaving up to the players to determine how long a game will last.

A Winner, Through and Through

“The dude abides.” - The Dude

Azul is a beautiful game that anyone can pick up and play with ease, but with the design and choices that allow for competitive play. It has just enough player interaction to keep everyone on their toes, but each individual has their own little puzzle to solve. The flipside of the player boards, which removes the color restrictions of the boards, allows for some truly crazy and interesting plays, but can easily stump the unobservant player. It plays quickly and easily, facilitating some truly memorable experiences.

If ever there was a flaw, it would be that a single bump against your player board and all your progress can be flung across the room, which has happened to me once before. Yes, there are accessories to fix this, but it’s still an annoying quirk that can hamper your game.

Also, it should be noted that this isn’t the most color-blind friendly game out there, though replacement pieces have been released to better allow for anyone to tell the tiles apart. Still, someone shouldn’t have to pay additional money to play the same game as everyone else.

Yet if these are the only bad things I have to say about it, there must be something special about this compact, unassuming box full of gorgeous tiles and intense, unbridled emotion. Yes, for once the masses were right; Azul is a gem that should be in everyone’s collection. You win this one, society.

Who Should Get This Game: Anyone who can appreciate Azul’s smooth, seamless gameplay and the colorful style.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those who can’t stand a lack of theme or games that can be particularly mean at times. Hipsters.

Small World - Power Pop Fantasy Disco

Small World
Designed by Philippe Keyaerts
Artwork by Miguel Coimbra & Cyrille Daujean
Published by Days of Wonder - 2009
2-5 Players ~ 40-80 Minutes
Review by Jack Eddy
For Peter

Among the towering giants of the industry, there stand certain iconic games that have managed to straddle the line between niche and mainstream. At first, Small World may seem the unlikeliest of this group (too strategic for the casual, too simple for the core), yet it’s popularity persists, and upon closer examination, it’s not hard to understand why; straddling that line is exactly what Small World is meant to do.

The Score

Small World pits players against one another, vying for control of regions in a landmass fine tuned to be just about 15% too small, meaning that, whether you like it or not, you are bumping heads with your neighbors, which makes sense, since controlling territories nets you coins every round and coins are both a currency and your points in the game.

The first and most important decision you’ll make on your first turn is selecting one of several races on display, determining your abilities and number of units that you can conquer regions with. Interestingly, Small World handles balance of variable powers through a sort of bidding system, where you can take the lowest race on display for free, or drop a coin on each race that you pass up. If you pick up a race that one or more players passed, you get those sweet, sweet coins. Considering that players will return to selecting races several times throughout a game (more on that later), the incentive to pick less powerful races can be substantial.

From there, the core gameplay is unexpectedly simple; on your turn, you can withdraw as many of your units from regions as you like (leaving at least one if you want to retain control), then conquer regions adjacent to you by slamming your units into them. Once you run out of units or decide not to expand, you end your turn, get yer gold, and redistribute your units amongst your controlled territories.

This redistribution is important because, unlike most “area control” games, entering territories (empty or otherwise) just requires you to spend 2 units + 1 for each other piece of cardboard residing there. Is there a mountain token? Spend 3 units. Is there a mountain token and 2 enemy units? Spend 5. If you happen to conquer an opponent’s territory, one of their units dies a horrible (yet honorable) death, while the remainder retreat back to the player so they can be used during future, totally not vengeance-related, conquests.

Harmony

The magic of Small World comes from the variable player powers that you purchase throughout the game. From two shuffled stacks, pairings of fantasy races and abilities are created, each side granting their own abilities. For instance, Flying means you don’t have to obey adjacency, Orcs give you points for attacking players, and Flying Orcs means you have a really nasty problem on your hands.

These combinations present a huge amount of flavor and replayability, which, given the highly stylized artwork of the game, the particularly preposterous combinations are especially welcome. Dragon-Riding Halflings? You bet. Seafaring Ghouls? Awesome. Underground Wizards? Saw them live in ‘72; changed my life. 

Probably the coolest system in Small World is that as you further expand your units, you will begin feeling thin, stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. At this point, you can choose to go into decline, flipping your units upside down and choosing a new race/ability mashup on the next turn. Your forsaken race will still net you money for controlling a territory, but they are forever immobilized, diminished, decaying until they are eventually wiped out.

N’Sync

For all the fighting, there is a beautiful harmony to Small World; the core concept is simple and easily grasped, and all the powers simply feel in tune, resonating wonderfully in concept and theme. Seafaring races behave identically to everything else EXCEPT that you can conquer the water territories on the board; makes sense! Dwarves have less units, but double the amount of production on mines even while in decline; great!

Within this narrow framework, there is a staggering amount of variability, presenting interesting combinations that are as dynamic and wild as the rich fantasy setting, but it’s so damn intuitive that it never feels overwhelming.

Acoustics & Tone

Everything in this game is flippant, and I love it. From the artwork to the way the powers reference the theme, this game is as much a loving parody as it is an homage to classic fantasy tropes, but done with far more elegance than is typically found in this hobby. Too often, characters in games look like statues, devoid of action and life, evoking no personality, which in turn makes their worlds seem hollow. Not so here; Small World is vibrant, alive, and every character, and even the very landscape, seems to have an (albeit negative) opinion of everyone else.

Furthermore, this flippancy reflects your state of mind in Small World. In many area control games the stakes are high, and if someone brings their dudes to your doorstep, you feel personally attacked. But here, if you lose your region, you get most of your units back and can happily reclaim it or shove off in a different direction next turn. This is one of the reasons that Small World has had such broad success; that in spite of the core concept being full of confrontation, conflict feels fun rather than mean.

To me, this is reflective of a success in the design, and what separates Small World from so many other area control games in the wild. From the mechanics to the artwork, and even to the incredible insert and the way the tokens feel in your hands, everything in Small World feels so intentional, crafted with function and aesthetic in mind.

Sour Notes

For all of it’s saturated beauty, not all is sunshine and violent daisies in Small World. Once you play a few times, you’ll realize that experienced players can bust out a game in 30 to 45 minutes. “But that’s a good thing!” you say, which is true. The problem is that all of the materials that you took out of the box, all of the tokens and maps and cardboard… they can make the game feel much more to contend with than the lighter heart of the game deserves.

Whether it’s after 5 games or 50, it’s easy to start seeing the “variety” that you initially loved as minor riffs on the same song and dance. The races and powers that were so imaginative and thematic are now just abstract calculations for how best to capitalize on your turn. In a world of way more complex and immersive games, it’s easy to become jaded to this Small World.

And while there are way more creative and dynamic powers in the expansions (and believe me, there are a ton of expansions), the addition of new content undermines the elegance of the original design; whether it’s because it just won’t fit into the original, perfectly sculpted insert, or it’s because 15 new races made it so you couldn't keep track of who does what without 6 different reference sheets, the game loses it’s polish, making it a bit too much of a hassle to bother with for the level of experience it provides.

*After owning several expansion, modules, and other Small World paraphernalia, I can definitively say that the Base Game, or maybe the Base Game + a few of the purely race + power expansions is the way to go.

Furthermore, the same things that give Small World such broad appeal hold it back from really shining in any one light. Sure, the conflict is tolerable for people who normally hate combat, but it is still a conflict heavy game. And for people who LOVE conflict? Combat enthusiasts (ninja’s, vikings, Jeffery, etc…) will find the lack of stakes a bit lackluster.

In many ways, Small World feels like a compromise, something everyone can enjoy, but fewer gamers will love.

A Well Crafted Pop Song

That said, there is a comfort to Small World, and it still holds an important role in my collection as well as in my heart.

Years ago, when I first played Small World in my friend Peter’s apartment, it was the biggest looking game I’d ever played. Tons of powers and combinations and tokens, with maps specific to each player count; it looked like the most complicated thing that I’d ever seen. But within a few short rounds, (with my Forest Amazons as the definitive MVP) I had a firm handle on the mechanics of the game and the rest was exploration of strategy and discovery of clever design.

My final conclusion? Small World WAS a huge game, the biggest game ever, something with so many resonant and cool aspects that completely dwarfed (dwarved) contemporaries like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Dominion; yet it never felt beyond my grasp. Unlike other, more nuanced and hardcore games with similar styles of area control, Small World is inviting, approachable, and eases players into foundational concepts that are often completely obtuse for newcomers to the board game world.

The leap from Carcassonne to Cthulhu Wars is a big one, but is much more manageable with Small World in between.

That is the success of Small World, and why it’s remained such a constant touchtone for hobbyists of all types. Inevitably, many people grow beyond it’s grasp, and admittedly, it doesn’t hit my table nearly as often as it once did, but it was invaluable in my gaming journey, and still remains a satisfyingly solid game in my collection that is worthy of returning to a few times a year for a reminder that fun can be simple, innocent, and specific.

Whether it’s with new players, taking their first steps beyond the gateway into the world of gaming, or it’s with longtime friends and gamers who want a polished experience that feels big without the baggage and time that comes along with it, Small World continues to hit the table. And each time I see those unmistakable character designs, gaze over the saturated and yet-unclaimed territories, and select my initial power combo full of potent thematic and strategic implications, I’m reminded that Small World is designed exactly the way that it needed, and needs, to be.

Addendum - Digital Music: While I’m very much a physical components kind of guy, the Small World app is beautiful and resolves the issue of setting up and managing such a big game that otherwise moves so quick. It hasn’t replaced the tabletop version for me, but it is easily one of my favorite tabletop gaming apps that allows the strengths of the game (it’s beautiful artwork and fast/flippant gameplay) to shine.

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Tokaido - I Walk an Overcrowded Road

Tokaido and Tokaido: Crossroads
Published by FunForge - 2015
Designer: Antoine Bauza
Head Artist: Xavier Durin
2 - 5 players ~ 45-60 minutes
Review written by Luke Muench

In 2014, I fell in love over Tokaido.

At the time, I had just started dating someone who I met in college. We warmed up to each other and decided to spend some of winter break with their family in Chicago. Upon arriving, I was surprised with a Christmas present; a copy of Tokaido. We tore open the box and were playing in no time, whether it be with their parents, their brother, or just the two of us.

As the weekend went on, I found that with each movement of our meeples we moved closer and closer together, bonding as we chatted over the game, laughing at our inability to pronounce various words, and finding ourselves unable to see a life without each other.

By the time that relationship ended some two and a half years and a failed engagement later, we had grown tired of Tokaido. We deemed it too simple, too obvious,  a game of style with too little substance. We had tread that road too many times and didn’t want to return.

But something changed when a few weeks back I felt a renewed urge to tour an ancient Japanese Highway. Thus with much more experience granting a new lens, I decided to see what destinations I’d discover in Tokaido Deluxe Edition.

Note: The miniatures and board in these pictures are from the Deluxe Edition of Tokaido; the minis are purely cosmetic and available to owners of the base game through expansions. The extended board, which combines expansion content, as well as the higher quality cards, are the only exclusive pieces of content to this edition.

A Vacation to Remember
“Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!” - Bilbo Baggins

Tokaido pits players against one another in an intense and vicious battle to… have the nicest vacation? It’s a calm and serene theme that tends to take most players off-guard at first, but leads to some funny exchanges. “My vacation’s gonna be the *%&^& best, don’t even THINK about going to the spa again!”

You earn points by doing various activities along the way, each as their own sort of mini-game:

• The store allows you to purchase between zero and three trinkets drawn off the top of the deck. Collecting a set containing each of the four types can earn you up to 16 points.

• The shrine will allow you to make donations; you’ll get one point for each coin donated and up to 10 at the end of the game for having the most coins donated.

• The spa will earn you two or three points depending on the card you draw into.

• The bank will let you replenish your money, earning you three more coins to spend.

• The three panorama locations will allow you to paint parts of their respective landscape; earn points for each section you paint, and get a bonus if you’re the first to finish that panorama.

• The travellers location helps you meet others on the trail, providing you with a random bonus related to one of the other actions.

Each of these actions have their strengths and weaknesses, but how helpful one spot may be over another is dependant on the movement mechanic.

To throw another wrench into your axles, each player has their own entirely unique characters, providing abilities that may buff certain actions, reduce the cost of certain items, or provide additional points in specific categories. These characters also determine how much money each player starts with, establishing how flexible you can be early on.

Hey, Catch Up!
“Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind.” - Lilo Pelekai

Rather than taking traditional turn order, whoever is furthest back on the path takes a turn, taking their pawn and moving it up the path to a spot of their choice, blocking others from using that spot alla worker placement games. Additionally, players can move as far up the path as they choose up until the next tavern, where everyone is forced to stay the night.

This means that some players may get multiple turns in a row if everyone else passes over enough spaces, leaving one person behind. This is further helped by the double spots; some locations can have up to two stopping points, depending on the player count. The first player to reach the destination must take the primary spot, whereas the second person will take the spot jutting out from that location.

Despite having reached that spot second, they are considered further back on the path, and will get to take another turn sooner. This results in players being forced to weigh out their options; do I go to this spot, knowing that someone else will come along and leapfrog over me in a few turns?

Thus, a big aspect of how the game plays out is jockeying for a good position, setting yourself up for strong plays down the road while also keeping in mind that players can block you out of specific locations.

A Super Supper
“May all your bacon burn.” - Calcifer

Tokaido is split into 4 rounds by the various inns you are forced to stay the night at, ensuring that players don’t jump too far ahead of the others while forcing everyone to consider an all too important question; “what am I eating tonight?”

When the first player reaches a respective inn, they draw a certain number of meal cards, depending on the number of players. Each meal, regardless of the cost, is worth 6 points, meaning you need to partake in meals or risk losing a ton of points.

This may sound simple enough until you realize that each time someone buys a meal, the next person will be purchasing from the same pool of options, limiting what they may be able to afford. Additionally, you cannot eat the same meal twice over the course of the game (we, being connoisseurs of the Japanese palette, would not dare to experience the same food twice). he last attendee will get two meager options to select from, but, like the rest of the movement in the game, they’ll also be the first to leave the inn the following round.

All Journeys Must End
“Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.” - Proverb

Once everyone reaches and resolves the last inn, the game concludes, with players adding up their points, but not before a few awards are given. Players who have the most spa cards, friend cards, store cards, and the most expensive food will receive an additional 3 points, potentially pulling you into the lead at the last second.

As you look back on the journey, though, some things can become pretty clear; while Tokaido actively asks you to make choices, those choices aren’t often terribly meaningful. Often, when looking further down the road, there are one or two locations that will stand out to you as your best options. And unless you’re looking to sit around waiting 6 minutes for your next turn, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to jump too far ahead, usually helping to make your next play fairly obvious.

Sure, going on a vacation is supposed to be relaxing, but in my eyes, it should also be interesting. I should want to be there, with the days holding a certain amount of excitement and anticipation for what comes next; Tokaido doesn’t really do that… at least, not in the base game.

A Different Path
“It is our choices that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” - Albus Dumbledore

Tokaido: Crossroads brings a cavalcade of options to the table, turning what was once a rather straightforward, sometimes absent minded game into something worthy of repeated exploration.

While having a bunch of new characters to play with is great, each with their own unique abilities, the real addition here is that every location on the board now has an alternate, optional action you can choose to perform:

• The store now houses legendary items; instead of drawing blindly from a deck, you may select and purchase any single legendary item, either capitalizing on your item card collection or giving you bulk points.

• The shrine is now giving out talismans which you can buy; spend a coin to the bank, and you can choose one of these passive abilities that you can use to buff a future turn.

• The spa has recently been upgraded; pay a coin and you can go to the bath house, awarding 4 points consistently as opposed to 2 or 3.

• The bank now houses a gambling house; spend two coins and see if you earn more than you would normally, just break even, or lose it all.

• The three panorama locations feature some beautiful cherry trees; take one of these and earn 2 victory points and a precious coin.

• The travellers location now provides some long-term goals; pay a coin, and you can select one, potentially earning you a bundle points end-game.

In this way, Crossroads not only provides some flexibility and decision-making, but the options themselves revolve around making meaningful decisions; a stark contrast to many of the luck-of-the-draw base game actions. Not to say the new actions are inherently better than the old ones, far from it, simply that they promote a different way of approaching the game, one that makes Tokaido a far more complete and varied experience.

Some Slight Roadblocks
“Maybe it’s time we all stop trying to outsmart the truth.” Alfred Pennyworth

Tokaido has its faults, sure, but they’re more about how you approach than it is about the content. Even with the added choices brought on by Crossroads, there isn’t an extreme amount of depth to the game. and some victories will amount to a lucky draw. That doesn’t make this a bad game, only one that relies on chance a little more than some, like myself, care for.

Similarly, some character abilities will inevitably be better than others. I don’t mind this all too much, though, as the variety is helpful in providing this game with a bit more staying power.

Make Your Own Path
“You can’t stop change any more than you can stop the suns from setting“ - Shrri Skywalker

For a time, I distanced myself from this game, not because of its content, but what it represented. In my eyes, it was a door someone slammed shut in my face, cutting off a path that I once viewed as a happy inevitability. I was set in my ways, both good in bad, and I saw only one way to move forward. Since then, I’ve found that perhaps this jarring transition is exactly what I needed; life doesn’t always work out for you, and you need to be willing to adapt, work with what life has to offer, and don’t dwell on the things that don’t go your way.

Tokaido is a game about choosing your path, if only for a moment. It acknowledges that you won’t have time for everything in life, and that sometimes you need to make difficult choices about what you want out of it. You may get stymied out of those precious coins or panorama cards you desperately need, but you’ll find other ways of making ends meet. And even when you’re stuck in the far back, there’s only one way to go; forward. It is, at its core, an art piece, and one that I celebrate, keeping it not just as a melancholy journey to travel from time to time, but as a reminder of how far I’ve come and where I’m going next.

Who Should Get This Game: Players willing to embrace the now, people who want a relaxing experience.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those looking for a complex, involved puzzle or need high level of strategy in their games

PostCurious' The Tale of Ord - A New Type of Gaming...

The Tale of Ord
Designed by Rita Orlov
Artwork by Rita Orlov & Ayodhya Ouditt
Published 2018 by PostCurious
Review by Jack Eddy

Like em’, hate em’, one-and-done puzzle games are here to stay. I mean, the genre isn’t exactly new, but thanks to the rise of exciting experiences both on and off the table, interactive narrative puzzles and mysteries of all sorts have become a revitalized and burgeoning staple of tabletop gaming. The thing is, while fun, these games never really clicked for me, climbing their way out of novelty and truly cementing themselves as a legitimate format, demanding innovation and teasing endless potential.

That is, until I played The Tale of Ord.
 

What is it?

The Tale of Ord is the first adventure being published by PostCurious, a subscription service that sends out installments in the adventure by mail. While it’s easy to draw comparisons with other tabletop adventures and puzzles like Exit The Game and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (perhaps with a dash of Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego thrown in for good measure), The Tale of Ord feels altogether like a beast unto itself; exciting and new.

This is going to be a bit different of a review, but then again is a bit different of a type of game... puzzle... mystery tabletop thingy(?). I’ve been sent the first two chapters which I’ll speak to here, and I’ll write a follow up after receiving and playing the next two.

Also, because so much of what makes this game great is the mystery and subsequent sense of discovery, I’m steering clear of spoilers (aside from the basic premise of the story). My main focus will be about my groups feelings navigating these puzzles, the type of experience we had, and help explain just what made this wonderful package so incredibly special.

Ominous Portents

The contents within my stylish and foreboding PostCurious box were three items: Two manilla envelopes labeled Part 1 and Part 2 (each full of all kinds of other stuff), and a branded PostCurious notebook full of blank pages, as if to say “Yo dude, you’re going to need this”. Without reading a single instruction, I was already in the mood for adventure.

The “Read First” attached to each envelope explains what you might need, encourages you to check the contents when you open it, and confirms that the scope of this game extends beyond what’s in the box. Sure, most of the tools are there, but as I’ll explain a bit later, don’t for a single moment think that the experience is confined to the table.

Once we made sure all the components were there, we dived into chapter one with pens, notebook, laptop and french press coffee in hand. One by one, we skeptically looked at each item: cards, clippings, half written journals, diagrams, and most importantly, a letter. More than anything, this letter is the portal between our world and that of the story. Mikhail Soterman, The Chairman of the Emerens institute, is hiring your team of private investigators to help find two missing professors and uncover the mystery of their disappearance.

There is no time limit, there are no rules, there is no structure - You truly are the investigators and you can use whatever resources are at your disposal to solve the mystery; by merely opening the package and reading the letter, you’ve effortlessly entered the magic circle.  

Playing the Game

So what do you get? Again, it’d be a spoiler to even describe it to you; other than to say nothing is meaningless. I was astounded by the skill and effort put into coming up with so many bespoke and wonderful components. And I’m not talking about the structural quality, which is fine, I mean the immersion and sense of place. These things actually look and feel like weird items taken from someone’s apartment.

Some items are overtly cryptic, others may appear meaningless or like they exist strictly for narrative purposes, only to become immensely important later on as you stumble upon some revelation. In our group of three, we went through each item as a group and then naturally gravitated to individual items that each of us would turn our attention to.

This is one of the biggest strengths of the Tale of Ord; even though there is a grand mystery within each chapter, individual puzzles can be solved in parallel. Countless times over our first session, one of us would loudly exclain “guys, guys! Check this out” and we’d excitedly detail a theory for the others’ consideration. Often this led nowhere, but with each attempt, new connective tissue was uncovered. What if the cards mean this? What are those weird numbers? Isn’t this formatting strange?

Our excitement was further compounded when we realized that our freedom to explore beyond the components of the game wasn’t just possible, but was encouraged. The puzzle has a few really smart moments that have you utilize a device connected to the internet, and you begin to see that many of the things referenced in the game are from the real world. Not only did looking into the subject matter of our missing archaeologists help contextualize some of the clues on the table, it did a fantastic job of immersing us in this fiction; we used real world tools, rather than arbitrary game rules, to complete our adventure.

Throughout the three hours it took us to tackle episode one, numbers, ciphers, patterns, metaphors, codes, they all begun to reveal themselves, sometimes leading us to new tools that would let us crack another puzzle, or give us one of piece of the chapter’s overall solution. In both episode 1 and 2 there were each at least three moments that felt like it completely blew the case wide open, offering a deluge of new possibilities to explore. And all of that is great, if you are successful...

Some of the materials from session one with our notes blurred. By the time we were done, we had notes on EVERYTHING!

Staring into the Abyss

The big risk in PostCurious’ formula is that you constantly feel like you are on the precipice of understanding, which is great because it makes success feel so incredibly rewarding. The flipside of that, though, is that the game has you teetering on the edge of failure; tempting you to give up out of frustration. Fortunately, the game does some really smart things in order to make sure that you can grab a foothold.

First off, the components themselves are disparate but offer several context clues as to how they may interact. Either through language use, their dimensions, or even nature of existence, you will have some natural inkling as to how to begin your experimentation.

Next, the PostCurious website has a fantastic system for providing hints for each of the chapters’ puzzles and a way to make sure that your solutions are correct. Remember, in each session there are multiple smaller puzzles that have independent solutions, leading to one overall solution; the ability to check your work before tackling the final beast is a must.

And those hints? There are a ton for each puzzle and each will progressively reveal just a little bit more information each time. With each click, you can check your assumptions and reorient your group. In our first game, we completed the puzzle without a relying too much on the clues, but the second adventure they became a must; making sure we weren’t out in the weeds with our wild theories. They really do a beautiful job of nudging you in the right direction without taking agency and the sense of accomplishment out of your hands.

(Our) Final Countdown

Our group had an absolute blast with both chapters. I think it’s worthwhile to note that while all three of us enjoy puzzles and may occasionally be accused with being clever, none of us would consider ourselves gifted or even particularly inclined to the sort or mental gymnastics that one would associate with decrypting secret messages and assembling three dimensional puzzle boxes.

But that’s what made this experience so wonderful and so rewarding. The game is designed in such a way that encourages experimentation rather than simply relying on base intellect, tantalizing you with clues that inspire an adventurous heart. Each time we finally understood how a puzzle was meant to be solved it was a triumph, a moment of clarity that felt so empowering that we needed to chase the threads to their end.

And the end itself was satisfying, the victory after finishing chapter one left us talking at the table for another hour about how awesome of a time we had. It felt remarkable how clever each puzzle was, seemingly opaque, yet giving you just enough intuitive crumbs that you could see yourself through, resulting in one of the most intense cooperative gaming sessions I’ve ever had.

Our second session was admittedly more difficult. Not only did the challenge seem to ramp up, but one of our teammates was about to move. After about 2 hours of puzzling on the eve of her departure, we hit a wall and decided to finish in a subsequent session, culminating in the awesome final resolution via skype; and I wouldn’t trade how we tackled it for the world.

Our expressions as we solved the last puzzle in chapter 2, witnessing the final reveal. The sense of triumph, excitement, and intrigue was at a 10, in spite of us now operating in two different states.

Overall Thoughts

Again, this game’s greatest strength is that it does such a wonderful job blurring the lines between the game and reality. There are no arbitrary turns, time limits, or action points to confine you. You use time, space, cooperation and creativity to uncover the secrets held within these objects, little artifacts ranging from the mundane to downright bizarre.

That said, I don’t think this is for everyone. Choose carefully what group you do this with, as I think the sense of collaboration of working with a team is a huge part of the experience. Too big of a team and some people may feel like they are just along for the ride, too small and you’ll lose the advantage of different perspectives. I think the sweet spot is 2-4 players, maybe 1 if you are really into puzzles. Speaking of which, if you don’t like puzzles, word games, or cooperative experiences, I don’t think this will be the game for you. Also, The Tale of Ord requires grit; resilience; a sense of defiance to carry you through those moments where it feels like the answer is just beyond your reach. I promise you, whether by hint or hard work (probably both), you’ll get there; but if you have to be able to buck up to push yourself through; it’s worth it.

Finally, there is no avoiding the cost. The Tale of Ord in full costs $160 for 4 chapters. This is atypically expensive in the realm of tabletop gaming when you consider that you will likely only go through the puzzle once. And while it is technically possible to preserve the components for future use, it’s likely you’ll have bent, torn, broken, marked, and otherwise changed most of the components before you’ve seen it through.

But for us? Three gamers hungry for discovery, looking for a fantastic way to spend a couple nights together, the experience was irreplaceable. The Tale of Ord has so far proven to be a masterclass in puzzle design, allowing us to embark on a challenging and rich adventure that all three of us consider well worth the cost. Furthermore, this game has contextualized a new format of tabletop gaming for me; showcasing the limitless possibilities of what narrative-based collaborative puzzle solving can be. And for that reason, I’m on the edge of my seat. I can’t wait for the next chapters and to see what next PostCurious, let alone this entire genre, will bring.

Review copy of The Tale of Ord parts 1 & 2 were provided by PostCurious. You can check out The Tale of Ord at http://getpostcurious.com/ and learn about designer Rita Orlov at https://www.ritaorlov.com/

Special thanks to Jennifer Kelley, part of our trio, for help with photography and gif-ifying our review!

Five Flavors of Merpeople - An Abyss Review

Five Flavors of Merpeople - An Abyss Review
Designed by Bruno Cathala & Charles Chevallier
Artwork by Xavier Collette
Published by Bombyx
2-4 players ~ 60 minutes
Review written by Jack Eddy

I was recently talking with friend and reddit user u/meeshpod about Abyss. It really got me thinking about the core tenants of a designer; little mechanical flourishes that one can often see like signatures imprinted upon a game.

When it comes to Bruno Cathala, one of his greatest strengths is that he is so willing (and often seeks) to work collaboratively with other designers which keeps his output fresh, and Abyss attributes its success as much to co-designer Chevallier as anything else.  That being said, it’s those bits of Cathalian familiarity and occasional subversion that make his games so interesting to me.

We’re no strangers to talking about Cathala and his collabo projects around here, so get your gilly suit on; it’s time to dive into the Abyss.

The Design

“Under the sea you fall up. I know, I know” - Patchface

Abyss is a game of political intrigue in a sunken kingdom of merpeople. You’ll attract supporters, court leaders, and hopefully hold the most political clout by the end of the game. The basic structure is simple; on your turn you can perform one of three actions:

• Initiate an auction that will give you a supporter (your main currency for buying leaders)

• Freely pickup a pile of supporters who were unclaimed during previous auctions

• Buy one lord.

Right off the bat, the framework of the game is classic Cathala; there are a handful of  basic and understandable choices of what you can do, and each of them propel you in some way to victory. The meat of the game is the internal decision process between what you gain, what you miss out on, and what you present your opponents with while taking any turn.

By far, the most risk, player interaction, and the overall heart of Abyss comes from the auction system. When you “plunge the depths” in search of followers, you reveal the top card of the deck. These cards, aside from their amazing artwork, have one of five colors (corresponding to different flavors of merpeople) and a value. This value is both for purchasing lords and a possible source of points in the game.

Once you kick off the auction, each opponent is given the opportunity to buy the newly revealed card by giving you one pearl (which is the game’s secondary currency, largely used for trade purposes). If no one takes it, you can add the card to your hand at no cost, which will also end the auction. But if you choose not to take it or someone else purchased your card, you flip the next card and, again, everyone who has not purchased a card can buy this from you, though the purchase price goes up with each player who’s already snatched a card from your grasps.

This goes on until you choose to keep the most recent revealed card, or the auction slots have filled up, forcing you to take the final card and a consolation pearl. Then, the magic of Abyss begins, as all other cards get divided up into their respective colors (think suits) and put into their respective council piles. On a future turn, an opponent can freely bypass the whole auction-thing and just pick up one of these piles. With each sequential auction, the piles of formerly unworthy 1 and 2 strength followers become more and more tempting to grab, so you have to be thinking not just about what you want, but what you might by freely presenting to everyone else.

The rest of Abyss is about resource management, namely the effective use of your single action turns; choosing when to give up a good deal like a pile of council members for grabbing something that you need, like purchasing lords.

These lords are not only what creates the timer in the game, with 7 leaders triggering the “final round”, but they are also the key to the majority of your points. Every leader falls into one of the merpeople types, which is one of the aspects of the theme that feels most intriguing; each “species” of merpeople also belongs to a societal caste, like the crab people who are exclusively warriors, the mollusk merchants, etc...

In addition to having a cost and point value, most leaders have one-time or ongoing effects, and some of them have keys. The most opaque element of the game happens when purchasing these lords; not only must you pay for them using followers of the matching caste (color), but in some cases you must use followers of their faction plus one or two other colors. If the total of your followers falls short of the leader’s cost, the difference can be made up in pearls. Furthermore, the lowest value follower you use gets “affiliated” with the leader, like their own personal psychophant, and the highest value affiliated follower of each of the five colors adds to your points at the end of the game. Got it?

There are a couple other systems in Abyss; a moree based, push-your-luck infrastructure that feels relatively inconsequential due to the “trigger” only occasionally happening during an auction (though it occasionally presents some meaningful choices), and a system for securing locations. Locations are like point amplifiers, but unlike the lords, their sole purpose is to get you points.

Remember those keys I mentioned? When you get three of them, they unlock one of these locations, which then must cover up the abilities on the lords who gave you those keys, forever locking away their sweet, sweet, mechanical benefit. Just pretend you’re sending your politician out on a diplomatic mission; they still contribute to your strength of influence, but their skills are no longer readily at your disposal. What this means is that you’re again faced with an interesting decision; do you buy the lord you can afford who has a key, locking away your other benefits, or do you wait to buy one without a key, sacrificing the points on the location?

Again, this game showcases some of the design philosophies that has made Cathala such a rockstar in the industry, bridging the gap between casual and core players alike. Every turn  presents only a handful of easily understood options that will in some way affect the state of the board for each other player, but at the same time you constantly feel propelled forward; every turn gives you more tools to play with. Furthermore, by limiting your turn to one action, opportunity cost becomes every bit as important as resource cost. Rarely is there a turn in Abyss where you aren’t desperately wishing you could take two actions back to back.

But on the other hand, it’s the ebb and flow of your very capabilities that feels completely new and fresh, which is the magic of a collaborative design. I’m not saying that each designer’s contribution to the game is easily distinguishable, and in fact, I’m betting that the authors work was much more organic, but it’s like listening to Clapton. Whether it’s guesting on the White Album, listening to Derek and the Dominoes, or maybe picking up a John Mayall the Bluesbreakers Album, there are little identifiers and signature that showcase the artist’s contribution, let alone their taste for collaborators, woven into the whole.

The Presentation

“I’ve got whosits and whatsits galore” - Ariel

Abyss is by far one of the best produced games in my collection, and the publishers Bombyx made a big deal of that when it came out. This is best seen through the box-art, which, like a 90’s X-Men comic book, comes in several different variants, one for each of the different factions in the game. Already, the publishers are establishing that even the retail edition of this game has a degree of collectability, that it’s artwork is so good that it should come in five different versions; encouraging players to hunt down their favorite, and it at minimum worked on me (I picked the one with the mysterious squishy mages)! This is further emphasized by the fact that the face of the box has no text, just the beautiful yet alien portrait gazing back at you from the… well... the Abyss.

And this production carries through the rest of the game. The cards are large, vibrant, and high quality. The locations are on super chunky cardboard that feel like they are less locking away the powers of your leaders and more casting them to the depths of the ocean for eternity. The pearls though… the publisher had the audacity to include a spherical currency. These pearls are no doubt a frustration for many people, due to their penchant for hitting a table and scattering like marbles, but the little cups supplied by the game do just fine. It’s worth mentioning that there are few things sweeter than the sound of another player dropping a pearl into your cup at the auction, rattling around as it settles into the depths of your purse.

Come to me mt sweet.

For all of the rich theme, gorgeous illustration, and high quality components, there is little resonance between the setting and mechanics of the game. The only real connective tissue is that each caste of lord has a general type of ability, such as squidly politicians manipulating the lords in play, the clammy merchants getting you pearls, and the aquatic equestrian farmers just getting you PHAT POINTS. This is a prime example of a “pasted on” theme, which caused a bit of a stir when the game first came out.

Somewhere in the minds of gamers, they thought Abyss was going to be more. Something more than a handful of actions that you can take on your turn. Most of the time, big production values are reserved for robust games with numerous interweaving systems, and all kinds of mechanics designed to connect the theme to the game. The amazing production set up expectations that were impossible to be met, all for daring to put such a premium look on a relatively lightweight game; but I love it.

For me, the production in Abyss is so strong that even with a very abstract connection to the theme, it feels extremely immersive. Something about the game’s visuals and physical presence  is so enchanting that you suspend disbelief and begin to postulate reasons why things are the way they are, even if the design seldom helps your reasoning. And for that, I’d say that the presentation of Abyss is an absolute accomplishment.

Final Thoughts

“We would be warm below the storm, In our little hideaway beneath the waves” - Ringo

Abyss is no doubt a game that’s going to stick in my collection for a long time. It’s fast, intelligent, and beautiful. Furthermore, I think this is a shining example of the designer’s best traits, utilizing competing player desires and opportunity costs as the main fulcrum in which all decisions in the game rest on while presenting some advanced strategy and trickery that is not typically seen in Cathala’s solo designs.  

That said, not everything is pure elegance. The push your luck seems under utilized, and the way that affiliated followers attach and then score feels counter intuitive every time that you play; but the areas in which the game succeeds far outweigh any shortcomings, and have helped it remain one of the most interesting, and thought provoking, specimens in the sea.

The Nordic Shuffle - Raiders of the North Sea Review

The Nordic Shuffle - Raiders of the North Sea
Published by Garphill Games - 2015
Designer: Shem Phillips
Head Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
2 - 4 players ~ 60-90 minutes
Review written by Luke Muench

The worker placement genre is rather crowded these days. With titans like Agricola, The Manhattan Project, and Viticulture towering over the competition, it can be hard to make any newer titles stand out from the pack. So when Raiders of the North Sea hit the scene with a recently overused theme of being vikings (they’re totally the new zombies), one couldn’t blame anyone from passing it by. In fact, most people did until Renegade Games recently re released the title under their banner, providing it with some much needed buzz.

Which is a good thing, because this game is not only polished, not only beautiful, not only well-paced, but this elegant design may be one of my favorite worker placement to date.

Your goal as a would-be viking is to pillage as many villages with the spillage of much blood… age. The victor is whoever gathered the most glory, but this can be obtained through a few avenues, which we will get to… But first!

There is much work to be done, young Norse childling, for you have barely two silver pieces to your name and a gaggle of crewmates unprepared for the voyage. So how does one go about obtaining such important wares?

On your turn, you place a meeple and remove a different meeple, taking both actions in order.

This simple loop is the crux of this game, making every move a dance to try and figure out how to do the actions you want, in what order, how to stymie your opponents in the process, and gather what meager scraps you can find before racing to the seas to take on whatever awaits on the other side.

What adds to the puzzle as that there are three meeple colors that do not indicate player ownership, but rather the actions they can do. Later in the game, you may find yourself taking a sub-par move if only to get that grey or white meeple you need for a specific move on your following turn.

When placing a meeple, each location either earns you resources or allows you to spend resources for even better stuff. In other words,  this is a game about hoarding as much as you can before spending it all on a single grand voyage:

• The Gatehouse allows you to draw two cards from the deck of crew members, allowing you to use them at either the Town Hall or Barracks.

• The Town Hall let’s you have access to a card’s one-time ability, allowing you to steal from others or potentially change the board state, before being discarded.

• The Barracks, on the other hand, let’s you recruit said card as a member of your ship for (for a nominal fee of silver upfront), providing a passive buff for being on board.

• The Silversmith earns you silver pieces, the Mill bags of food, and the Treasury let’s you discard a card for two silver or two cards for a piece of gold, a rare and useful resource.

For once you have enough crew members to pilot the ship and food to feed them, you can spend your entire turn taking your meeple and placing it on a location across the sea, gathering points through your military might, collecting various resources, and earning a meeple of varying color to use on your next turn.

Yes, there are different meeples, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The black meeples you start with can gather silver pieces more easily from the silversmith and are required for some of the lower level raids, but the gray and white workers will help you earn more food, cheap gold, and even give you access to standard spots in town you couldn’t otherwise reach.

The first of these is the Armory, the sole way of earning victory points on the red points track, representing military might. By spending silver or iron, you can make your way up the track, earning both end-game points and strength to add to your dice rolls when on raids.

Depending on the location you raid on a given turn, you may be able to earn a variable amount of point dependant on the strength of those you’ve brought to the fight. Each crew member contributes anywhere between 1 and 4 strength naturally, while some may have abilities that help the process along. In addition to this, you’ll be forced to roll dice (dependant on the location you are raiding) during the more trying tests of viking-ness. This allows you to potential hit higher and higher strength values, earning you even more points. Lastly, every point of armor you’ve acquired is added to your total, potentially providing the last few points needed to gain the bigger bonus.

The other of these two exclusive locations is the Long House, providing two options. The first allows you to spend a cow to gain two food; simple enough and an efficient use of one of the weaker (albeit tastier) forms of loot you can obtain on a raid. The other let’s you spend an assortment of silver and loot to earn Offerings, which are tucked away and add to your score at the end of the game.

There are a few different kinds of loot one can earn:

• Cows are worth ½ a point a pop if saved until the end (and can only be cashed in as a pair) but can, as mentioned, be slaughtered for some quick (and yummy) food.

• Iron is worth 1 point is saved and can upgrade your Armor.

• Gold is worth 1 point but must be spent to reach some of the grandest and most daunting of raids.

• Valkyries are not collected, but rather fought, defeated soundly in battle but killing one of your own crew members in the process. Each defeated Valkyrie adds to the black victory track, gradually earning you up to a whopping 15 points.

The game concludes when either two of the three Fortress areas (the most difficult of them all) have been emptied, all the Valkyries have been fought, or the Offering pile runs out, making it an experience that ramps and slows down just as it needs to, feeling like a natural progression.

All of this is accompanied by a gorgeous, cartoony art-style, metal coins that come in the box, and a sprawling board to race across, making each game a joy to look at as well as to play. The rules are succinct, only a few pages long, and help explain the game well enough. The box is smaller than most, allowing for it to fit nicely on the shelf without it feeling like it takes up too much space. All in all, production quality is high, and it makes the game feel that much more rewarding.

Now, when I first came across this, I wondered to myself, “Do I reeeeeeeeally need to buy this? I already own Champions of Midgard after all.” There have been a number of comparisons made between the two titles; both are viking-themed worker placement games with great art and production, and each have two expansions that were released on Kickstarter at the same time.

But beyond those superficial attributes, these games feature dramatically different takes on worker placement, with their own unique mechanics, visual identity, and overall game cadence. Ultimately, they each scratch different itches in a way that leaves me happy to keep both on the shelf.

If there was a complaint I had for Raiders of the North Sea, it would be that some games can drag a bit. If people are building slowly or trying to capitalize on as many raids as possible, it may take some time for anyone to gather the resources to tackle enough Fortresses to trigger end-game. Additionally, some of the cards have take-that mechanics that can put a sour taste in one’s mouth.

This is only compounded by the random nature of the crew deck, with each card having between 3, 2, and 1 copies contained in the deck, the highest rarity attributed to heroes that, while only one can be equipped, provide tons of points that can feel kind of unfair. This can easily be remedied if it bothers you, though; I’ve personally removed the heroes from the crew deck, which greatly reduces the luck-factor of what you draw into, as there are duplicates of every other card in the deck.

Raiders of the North Sea is, in my eyes, a must-own game for any fan of worker placement games, far outpacing predecessors like Stone Age while doing enough different from its competition to feel wholly unique and exciting each time it hits the table.

Who Should Get This Game: Those who appreciate an elegantly designed, visually beautiful, and well crafted worker placement game.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those who will grow tired of the repetitive nature of the game after an hour or so.

A Quest-ionable Adventure - Tiny Epic Quest Review

Tiny Epic Quest
Published by Gamelyn Games - 2017
Designer: Scott Almes
Head Artist: Miguel Coimbra
2 - 4 players ~ 1 hour - 1 and ½ hours
Review written by Luke Muench

For me, it’s become nearly impossible to disassociate Tiny Epic Quest from the Legend of Zelda franchise. The art style and theme are obviously inspired by the Hyrulian realm, with faux Triforces appearing on occasion. The various items feel like they’re ripped straight from an N64 cartridge, including a fairy, boomerang, and rupee-shaped gem. The dungeons are often simply referred to as temples in passing conversation. And, most importantly, it retains the light-hearted, puzzley feel that the games have always maintained.

That being said, these two entities are wildly different. If Ocarina of Time is a operatic romp through a world-ending, time-turning adventure, Tiny Epic Quest is more of a cutthroat race to see who can be the best damn hero of them all. Ideally, that hero will be you, but more often than not, the decision isn’t really up to you.

By far the most polarizing aspect of this game is the learning curve. Tiny Epic Quest is not for the faint of heart, and I’ve seen fans of Zelda and Tiny Epic series alike walk away disappointed. The various minute details can feel overwhelming, and the press-your-luck aspect is the most finicky I’ve seen to date. It doesn’t make this a bad game by any stretch, but it makes it an acquired taste, one you’ll have to play at least two or three times to really appreciate.

At the start of each of the five rounds, the first player gets to select one of five movement patterns, each allowing you to move one of your three meeples across the board. No, you are not simply one hero, but a kingdom sending out a band of adventurers in your stead; hoping to stop the world from falling into chaos around you. So, after a player selects, each player will get to, in turn order, apply that movement type to one of their meeples, sending them running, flying, or sailing across the randomly generated map in hopes of reaching one of five destinations:

• Castles act as your starting location and  hub; healing those who stop there for one point of health or magic. Additionally, if you choose not to move on a given turn (idling), you may gain the same bonus if one of your meeples is standing on a castle.

• Goblins are the bouncers of this fantasy world. At first, they appear green, unaggressive and content to sit unbothered. If they are not defeated in a given round, however, they become red with anger, forcing players who move past them to spend a magic in order to do so. Those who land here intend to fight them in the press-your-luck phase of each round, which occurs after all movement as concluded.

• Magic obelisks allow you to learn spells on the spell track. A player can learn up to three spells in a round, but only if you survive long enough in the press-your-luck round and if you have a meeple on the appropriate icon. Each spell that you learn increases your max magic by one.

• Grottos act as one-time buffs, giving the player who lands on it an immediate ability that will affect their board state in some manner, such as shifting around your other meeples, gaining resources, or providing buffs prior to the press-your-luck phase.

• Lastly, you can delve into dungeons to obtain legendary items, each of which provide you four victory points. This is the only location at which there is a limit to meeples, as only two unique meeples can remain on these spots.

Ah yes, quests. Each round, three quests are shown face-up, either asking that you move your meeples in a certain way or complete certain dungeons. Upon completion, you will get a certain bonus. For dungeons, you will always get an item of a given type, whereas any other quest will get you health, magic, or some other useful ability.

Once four of the five movement cards have been selected, it’s time to delve into the various obstacles your characters will be facing, represented by dice, to see if they survive. When it’s your turn to roll, you may either choose to continue or pass. When passing, most of your meeples will return to your castle, depending on where they are located, healing you for one health or one magic each. Additionally, this is when most of your tasks are officially completed. Spells and dungeons are only completed once you pass, meaning you always have to remain on your toes.

But you’re not going to pass, are you? There are things do be done, and who cares if you die in the process?!? … Well, you do, honestly. Death nullifies most the hard work you’ve done that round (other than quests and killed goblins), reduces your spell level by one, and sends all your meeples back to your castle, restoring your health and magic to six and three respectively. This can be a huge loss, and will easily lose you the game if you aren’t careful.

In order to press your luck, you get to toss five dice into the box lid ONCE, and once only. Whatever results you get are what they are, which can give the game an air of, “Welp, I guess that’s that.”

Don’t lose all hope yet though, for this is a community press-your-luck game; the dice you roll will affect the others around the table. Due to this, there are a specific order in which symbols resolve:

1. Red goblin faces will do one, two, or three damage to players, depending on how high the community magic is. When rolling multiple, the player who rolled them gets the first, then passes the next to the following player in turn order, then so on. Luckily, players can spend two magic to block the full effects of a single die-face, providing mystic hoarders some longevity.

2. Magic symbols regenerate magic up to a point. Once the magic level has gotten too high, they become dead dice. Just like the red goblins, these are passed around the table, spreading the love along with the pain.

3. Mushrooms accelerate the spell level for that round, establishing how much damage red goblins do, if magic can be produced or not, and whether or not a spell can be learned when a player passes. The higher the level, the harder it becomes for everyone to survive, especially once mushrooms start doing one point of unblockable damage.

4. Finally, the last three faces resolve simultaneously, and are accessible to all players. Every player can use each icon once. Scrolls and torches are what enables players to progress through dungeons. Goblin punches allow you to deal a single damage to a goblin you’re fighting. Each defeated goblin increases your max health by one.

Once every player passes, meeples are returned to castles, a quest is removed depending if any weren’t completed that round, undefeated goblins are flipped to their red side, and the movement cards are reset.

Play continues like this for five rounds until scoring; points are the summary of your quests completed, goblins defeated, spells learned, and legendary items earned. Do none of a specific task and you’ll receive negative points, encouraging you to diversify. There are some interesting choices in what you go after, too: pound for pound, goblins give you the most points, though they are by far the most difficult to earn; contrast this with spells which are easy but ultimately less valuable.

If you haven’t already noticed, there is a ton of stuff going on here, meaning that teaching this tiny game a bit of an epic chore. This is summarized beautifully in the incredibly awkward way that movement works and the far too busy board. Since two locations are on a given card, it needs to be clarified that movement are from card to card, and then you can stop on one of the two sides of said card. Additionally, you cannot move from one side of the card to the other side, potentially locking a meeple out of a particular action. Couple that with the amount of symbols present, and it all gets to be a bit much.

The components of Tiny Epic Quest are a mixed bag. The card quality are solid across the board, the little attachable items are cool to look at, and all the art looks stellar. That being said, the itemeeples, a word I still cannot say with a straight face, look cheap when compared to their wooden brethren. Also, the items, while neat to look at, are incredibly irritating to use in practice. With so many little pieces and places to contend with on the board, even attaching tiny plastic items to meeples or keeping track of your health becomes a test of your dexterity, making what should be fun and fanciful fiddly and frustrating.

Yet the real nail in the coffin, for me, is the fact that, at the end of the day, there is a single, obvious strategy that works best, one that the very mechanics of the game practically forces on the player; spreading out your meeples so that each is working on a different icon type. Not only does this consistently allow you to complete every task you aim for, it ensures you don’t get any negative points end game. It can be tempting to try for getting three goblins every round, but the likelihood of getting the rolls you need before being forced to pass is very slim.

Unfortunately, this means that every game feels almost identical, barring a handful of moments when the rush of uncertainty hits you, begging the question of if you can roll well enough to get out with all your stuff intact. After having played this game seven or eight times, each game has left me with an uncertainty over how much fun I really had with the game.

At the end of the day, I feel similarly to this as I do to Five Tribes; both are casual, light-hearted games disguised behind confusing and visually dizzying mechanics that you can overthink with little to no payoff. It’s nice to look at, but I don’t have any deep desire to pull it off the shelf again any time soon.

Who Should Get This Game: Those who love the Zelda theming, press-your-luck, and can handle the amount of mechanics at play.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those who are expecting a short game out of a small box, are easily overwhelmed visually, and who look for variety game to game.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube channel.

Carcassonne, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mega Castle

Carcassonne
Designed by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede
Published by Z-Man Games
2-5 Players ~ 30-60 minutes
Review written by Jack Eddy

I am terrible at Carcassonne. Sure, it’s one of those evergreen gateway games that is friendly and approachable for the whole family. I mean, yeah, I know some of the "hot strats"; how to seize the moment-to-moment opportunities to get quick points. But something about drawing tile after tile turn after turn urges risky behavior in me, driving me to press my luck in this not-really-a-press-your-luck game. In the end I think it comes down to the fact that I am a sucker for the mega castle.

Tile Laying 101

There are two main things you need to know to get your Carcassonne on. First - this is a tile laying game where all players are building the expansive, beautiful, and cutthroat French countryside, populated with winding roads, breathtaking castles, and serene monasteries. On your turn, you draw a tile and place a tile which must connect to at least one tile already in play. The catch is that like sides must always match like sides. The open face of your castle can never butt up against a wandering road.

The second thing you need to know is that to score points, you gotta employ your little posse of wooden workers, commonly called “meeples” (speaking of which, the now ubiquitous term meeple was coined by Alison Hansel in reference to these Carcassonne figures). When you place a tile, these duders can be set on a road, castle (actually called cities, but let’s be honest, they are totally castles) or monastery, or laid down in the grass, so long as that feature is not already claimed by another player (ie. the road you are connected to doesn’t already have some dude). Aside from the farmers lying down, whenever a feature is “completed” (castle walls surround the town, roads have two ends, or monasteries have been completely surrounded), your meeple is removed and you score points based on the size of the feature.

But here’s the thing you REALLY need to know about Carcassonne, and the secret sadistic nature hidden just underneath the game’s pastoral pleasantries; in the right hands, this is a game of sabotage and hostile takeovers. If you build a road with your meeple, spending time to carefully curate a nice long stretch of 9 tiles, and I have an unrelated road with my own meeple that I manage to connect, now we both get those points. Thanks! I hardly needed to do a thing! Alternatively, let’s say you are working hard on this beautiful castle, your own little sanctuary in the countryside. I can drop down a tile in there, or even nearby, that makes it nearly impossible to complete; condemning your poor worker to isolated doom.

And speaking of doom and the end of all things; the game ends when a the final tile from the pool is placed, at which time the farmers and incomplete features are scored. Whoever has the most farmers in a field (connected green area), gets 3 points for every castle bordering that field. The thing is that in Carcassonne, there may be several fields due to well distributed infrastructure, relying on roads and castles to divide the landscape -OR- there could be only two or three MEGA fields, and the farmers in control get all the dough. As is true in real life, it is true in Carcassonne; do not underestimate farmers.

I see fields of green

But great gameplay on its own does not imbue cardboard with the longevity and acclaim that Carcassonne has enjoyed. This game has a spectacular table presence, looking more like a puzzle or patchwork quilt than a snappy strategy game, which has undoubtedly played it’s own part in converting new gamers to the hobby. As you’re nearing the end, the minimalist and abstract design is breathtaking, with patterns familiar but wholly unique to each game that you play.

And while this may be the prototypical “dry euro” theme so often vilified in the hobby, I think that’s missing the point. The simplistic, elegant, and most importantly, abstract theme is what makes this game so damn approachable. For those who want die hard competition, the theme is thin enough for you to “see through the matrix”, and begin considering each turn as a number of points and possibilities. On the other hand, less competitive types may enjoy the simple pleasure of watching the peaceful and welcoming landscape develop before their eyes. Either way, the look of the game facilitates the type of experience players want out of it.

I tend to get crafty with the games I love the most. Here's an early example of some player bags I made and a razorblade's attempt at making a custom insert for the 6 mini expansions.

Why I love the Mega Castle

But here’s where my aforementioned struggle comes in. Sure, not everyone is going to want to play full contact Carcassonne, but the advantages for being cutthroat are tempting. In a game with three complete carebears, one scheming opportunist can really take advantage of everyone else’s hard work. Personally, I fall somewhere in between. I won’t hesitate to connect our two features if it’s convenient, but rarely will I make it an object of strategy. No, I focus on the Mega Castle.

You see, unlike the other features in Carcassonne, castles have a unique property. They score 2 points per tile that comprises your castle and an extra two points for each pennant* housed within the castle, but only if completed during the game. The castles suddenly drop to half their value at final scoring if they remain incomplete, meaning you take great risk and great reward for completing a castle.

And there are few things in this hobby as satisfying, nor as terrifying to witness, as someone completing their 10+ tile mega castle. Rocketing 20-30 points in one shot can be devastating, but it relies on so many things going right; your opponents not finding a way to sneak in, you drawing into the right tiles, there being enough tiles in the game to reasonably accomplish your monumental goal…

But that’s the awesome thing about Carcassonne. It’s so simple and encourages you to take risks because it intends to be a friendly game that wants ALL players to succeed. Heck, my version of the game even has a rule that when you draw your tile, you are to reveal it to all players and as a group discuss where the best possible placement is. Carcassonne is as idealistic and naive as the peaceful and universally prosperous depiction of 18th century French country life; and I really dig that.

No, my castle won’t always succeed, but at least I’ll always get some points. And sure, I’ll claim other features as sensible because I want to win, but Carcassonne is one of the few games in my collection that understands that winning can be a secondary goal to having fun, and the fun of the game is what you make of it. With very limited tools, the game throws me into a sandbox and says “knock yourself out, kid”. So whether I’m looking to risk it for the biscuit with a big point win, or I’m just looking for the tabletop equivalent of doodling, I’m always happy for a game of Carcassonne. After all, I can always find comfort and purpose in my pursuit of the Mega Castle.

I See Felds of Burgundy - Castles of Burgundy Review

Castles of Burgundy
Published by Alea - 2011
Designers: Stefan Feld
Head Artist: Julien Delval
2 - 4 players ~ 60 - 75 minutes
Review written by Luke Muench

At first glance, Castles of Burgundy is not a terribly appealing game. With a box cover that can’t help but force your eyes to glaze over, a pile of tiny, finicky pieces that you have to constantly reorganize, move around, and reset, an art style that isn’t particularly appealing, and a theme that’s as thin as the player boards, I could understand why a person might pass on a game of this. For a long time, I avoided the title like the plague, despite its status as one of the top ten games of all time on BoardGameGeek.

Fifteen games later, and this is perhaps one of my favorite board games of all time.

Seriously, Castles of Burgundy grips you from turn one and pushes you to make intelligent, thoughtful, and rewarding choices each and every turn, but never to the point that it feels overwhelming. With just enough luck to keep things from getting predictable, and enough ways to mitigate said luck so you rarely feel burnt, this design makes each session a memorable experience.

Each player starts the game with a castle, presumably filled to the brim with dark red tapestries and rugs, and a straightforward goal; fill your board with as many tiles as possible. Much like any tile-laying game, you have to build off of your starting tile, and different colors dotting your board indicate the tile type that can be placed there.

The game is separated into five rounds, with each round composed of five turns, with players completing two actions each turn. So, from the very start you’re aware that you have exactly 50 actions unless you play tiles or spend silverlings to activate more. (silverlings being the pre-eminent method of rushing your opponents base as they were busy focussing on harvesting vespene gas)

Before a round commences, everyone rolls their two dice; the determining factors of their actions. Then, in player order (dictated by your seafaring level), each individual may spend their dice in one of four ways; taking a tile from the board in your reserve, placing a tile from your reserve onto your board, selling a set of goods, or taking two workers.

To take a tile from the board, one must spend a die, taking said tile from the area that corresponds to the number on the die used. Depending on the number of players, there are a limited amount of tiles in each section, and once they’re taken, they won’t be replaced until the following round, pressuring you to rush to the tiles you’re desperately lusting after, even if no one else wants it.

This pressure is made all the more prevalent when you realize that, after five turns, the board will be completely wiped for the new round. So, within the next moves, you NEED to find a way to get that precious four-sheep tile, or, regardless of if anyone else wants it, it will be lost to the ether, potentially replaced by an awful two-chicken tile. Let’s be honest; four sheep are WAY better than two chickens.

Now, you can’t just place your tiles on your player board! That would be uncouth. Shame on you for even considering such a thing. We are nobles after all, meaning all of our tiles need to first be placed in our reserve. But not too many at once; we aren’t greedy after all. No, only three tiles can be held in your reserve at any time, meaning that, once again, you feel the tension of how far you can push yourself before you need to start moving those tiles to your board. Just like how you first obtained them, players send a die to place their tiles onto a spot that matches both the color of said tile and the number on the die, like a precious little puzzle piece.

Being the upstanding people we are, we pride ourselves on our collection of lands, so much so that just how quickly we gather them could mean how well our kingdoms will ultimately be scored. First, those who complete a colored section will receive points based on how many tiles are contained in that section and what round it is. So, in the first round, completing a tiny one tile gray section will earn you 11 points; one for your single tile and ten because it’s the first round. On the other hand, building up a six tile section until finishing it in the fourth round will earn you 25 points; 21 for the tiles and four because of the round.

On top of this, if you are so lucky as to be the first the collect all your tiles of a single color, you will earn a burst of bonus points, dependant on the player count, with whoever completes that color second earning a smaller amount of points. Thus, the hierarchy of “oh-god,-I-need-to-get-that-tile-NOW” came into being, and it was good. At least, for whoever is really good at optimizing their moves.

A large part of this is taking workers, tokens that can modify a die-roll by +1 or -1, thus widening your options turn-to-turn extensively. Are you going to take a tile, or spend any single die to hoard two more worker tokens to try and get the modifiers you need down the road? Quickly, players realize how precious these resources can be, fending off the RNG* demons and their nasty results. This also makes it so getting two of the same number isn’t immediately terrible, depending on the board state.

*RNG being Random Number Generation. To go down the RNG rabbit hole, please see here

The last action, selling goods, allow you to spend a die to sell a pile of goods from your board of the same number. In doing so, you will both get points based on the number of goods collected and a silverling.

“What are silverlings?” you may ask. Well, just the best and most precious currency in the lands of Burgundy. Two of these bad boys will allow you to purchase from an exclusive store in the center of the board, selling tiles only obtainable through this action. What’s more, this is a FREE action, meaning you get both a difficult-to-obtain tile, potentially with little competition, while also getting an extra action out of your turn.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here already, but wait! We haven’t even talked about each of the tile types and what they do:

• Castles, immediately after being played, allow you to take any action as if you played a die of any value.

• Mines generate one silverling at the end of every round.

• Ships adjust the player order and allow you to take all the goods at a single location.

• Livestock gives you straight points, which can be built upon if you consistently obtain the same livestock type in a contiguous area.

• Buildings provide points, extra workers, or may allow you to immediate take or play tiles of specific types. You may only have one of each type of building in a given colored section (“town”).

• Knowledge gives you special abilities, ignoring rules, empowering certain actions, or providing bonus points for collecting specific buildings over the course of the game.

Needless to say, Castles of Burgundy is a game of deep, thoughtful strategy that feels rewarding regardless of whether or not you win. Much of this boils down to the fact that,no matter what your point total is, you built your little board. That’s YOURS, and more often than not, you’ll feel attached to it, proud of what you’ve made. It’s an aspect that keeps you invested, regardless of the score.

But even still, the scores are often incredibly close, within a handful of points of one another. At certain moments, it may appear that someone has the lead, but someone will inevitably complete a massive seven-tile section that will bring them barrelling up the points track as if they just activated a jetpack fueled by their patience and the smug looks they give everyone else present.

That said, this same mechanic can cause despair in the hearts and minds of a newer player. If, within the first few turns of a game, a player sees that they’re already 20 points behind, some might throw in the towel then and there, not understanding the general flow or pace of the game. And, for some, I can appreciate why they might feel that way, but I also know that this can rob people of having a fantastic gaming moment of leaping from last to first in a single action.

Similarly, others will see the bland artstyle, dominated by uninteresting structures and washed-out colors, and walk away from the table, requiring only the best of art to adorn their games. And, in some ways, I can see where they are coming from. Castles of Burgundy isn’t a pretty game, but its art has grown on me over time, with a certain rustic feel all its own.

The number of tiles present may also send some running, as the box “insert” is abysmal, and with very few, see-through baggies being included, it becomes a chore to organize and randomly select the tiles each round without investing in some form of organizational system. The lack of felt bags is a HUGE oversight, and makes the game less enjoyable until a satisfactory solution is found, a task that shouldn’t be put on the players.

And there are those who will hear just how many rules and details there are, paw through the rules briefly, and rush back to the safety of Codenames, and that’s equally valid. While the play cycle is rather simple and never burdens you with too many options, the details to keep in mind can feel overwhelming. This can be particularly prevalent with the building and knowledge tiles, as each have more unique and specific rules. After the first few games, these will become easily identified, but when you first pull this out, they can feel like hieroglyphics.

Castles of Burgundy isn’t a perfect game. No game is. But it’s perhaps the perfect game for me; a game that consistently challenges me mentally, features elements of luck manipulation, is easy to teach but difficult to master, provides a unique experience every game, and is a joy to play with any of its player counts. It’s a game that is clearly well-loved by the community, and with good reason. What the game lacks in flavor and style, it more than makes up for with one of the best gaming experiences to date.

Who Should Get This Game: Those who are looking for a deep, engaging puzzle that rewards patience and attention to detail.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those value aesthetics and theme over a tight gameplay system, easily overwhelmed by choice and rules.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube channel.

Ex Libris - Being Shelfish Has Never Been More Fun

Ex Libris
Published by Renegade Games - 2017
Designers: Adam P. McIver
Head Artist: Jacqui Davis
2 - 4 players ~ 45 minutes - 1 and ¼ hours
Review written by Luke Muench

Roughly translated, the Latin phrase “ex libris” means “from books,” a concept that permeates the very being of the board game of the same name. Every detail shows a passion for the medium, an understanding of what makes such narratives special, and masterfully channels that passion into a gaming experience that tells a story.

Ex Lirbis is a worker placement game in the same vein as Harbour in which players work to build the most elaborate, organized, and varied library in the kingdom. I say “kingdom” because the theme is set squarely in a fantasy world, although not your typical dwarves-and-elves type setting. Rather, ghosts, gelatinous cubes, and Sasquatch help curate your libraries, immediately injecting character and humor into the experience at large.

At the start of the game, each player gets to select a library, receiving two standard workers and one special worker associated with their library. These figures present variable powers that may change how you play the game, with some effects being aggressive in screwing over your neighbors while others work hard to simply maintain your own shelves manageably.

Then, a variety of locations are laid out on the board, and it’s off to the bookstores! On your turn, you simply place one of your workers at a location, either one of those randomly revealed or your personal library. If you go to your library, you may either draw a card or shelve a card, whereas the other locales will provide a variety of effects. Each of these can be boiled down to instant actions that resolve immediately, or delayed actions which resolve at the end of the round.

At the end of each round, all locations are discarded except for that with the lowest number associated with it, becoming a permanent location. Then, a new set of locations are added, meaning each round presents one more option than the one before. Once someone builds their library to a certain size, depending on the player count, one more round is played through, and the game concludes with scoring.

The Building Process

To shelve your first card, you place it on the table, declaring defiantly, “THERE! My library grows ever larger!” And then you have to place the next card, and you remember that it must be place adjacent to any that you’ve already placed. Your library is refined, and thus well organized, so you can’t place cards willy nilly! Alphabetical order is key, and any cards misplaced will be ignored at the end of the game.

Alright, so you’re starting to expand your great compendium empire after realizing you can only have three levels of shelving, an important detail when considering your alphabetization, and things couldn’t be going better… except now you notice that the books you’ve gathered consist almost exclusively of Monster Manuals, and that just won’t do. For one, your library needs to contain all sorts of books, presenting a variety of tomes. Due to this, at the end of the game, players will receive points based on the type of book they have the least of multiplied by three.

Well, any type of book except for those accursed BANNED books. Depending on the game, one type of book will be considered the least popular in town, and must be purged from the collective unconscious, such as Historic Volumes. Screw history! We CLEARLY don’t need that information anymore. Because of this, you will lose one point for each banned book in your library. This sounds easy in theory, but considering there are between two and four books on every card you’ll be placing, sometimes you’ll find yourself placing that card to fill in an empty spot or because the other books on that card provide enough points to make up for the negatives.

“How is this possible?” you may ask. Well, when there is banned books, there are also prominent books, because people in this town are OBSESSED with learning the dark arts from corrupted codices. For the player who has the most of these at the end of the game, they will receive fifteen points, with second place earning nine points and third place earning four points.

Additionally, everyone has their own secret focus, establishing that, by collecting as much of a specific type of book, they will receive points equal to that number of books times two.

Lastly, if you’re going to have a library filled to the brim with books, you best have the stable shelves to support your collection. For your largest contiguous block of books shelved from top to bottom, players receive one point for each book included in that section.

And he puzzled and puzzled ‘till his puzzler was sore.” - Dr. Seuss

A Real Page-Turner

As you can probably tell, there is a lot going on in Ex Libris, and while that might be off-putting to some, I find that this makes for one of the most engaging board game puzzles I’ve come across in some time. Sure, there are a lot of factors to consider, but they are generally thematic and easy to remember. And much like games such as Castles of Burgundy, throughout the game you are building your own collection, so at the end of the game, win or lose, there’s a certain satisfaction over the final result.

The art and theming are marvelous, immediately eye-catching. I was stunned by how many people were immediately on board with a game whose tagline is “build a library,” but most of those I talk to find the concept exciting. The whispy, mystical images associated with the different location tiles look awesome and add to the lighthearted, bright atmosphere the game looks to convey. Each of the characters have a ton of personality to them, encouraging me to try a different one each time I play. The books are all clearly defined by color and symbol, making this game accessible to the colorblind, and all 510 books catalogued on the 152 cards have their own titles, often utilizing wordplay or parody that make them gratifying and hilarious to read, with players often taking breaks just to chat over their favorites.

Similarly, the production of this game is fantastic, with a bunch of unique components that make the game feel high-quality. The two components that stand out most in my mind are the meeples and scoreboard. While there are the standard meeples of each of the colors, each character has their own customized meeple associated with it, making them particularly visually pleasing and satisfying to place.

And this game is built to last, too. The scoreboard (formatted thematically like an inspectors clipboard)is a dry erase board, meaning you’ll never run out of scoring sheets when playing. The location tiles are made well, the cards are of good stock, and there’s even a board that, while unnecessary, acts as a thoughtful reminder of the various scoring rules of the game. And the sides of the box are designed to look like the binding and sides of a book! The attention to detail here is downright astounding.

On top of all this, for those who like playing board games locked in their attic avoiding all human contact, there’s a solo mode that pits you the unorganized mess of a public library that the town has been tolerating for years. While there is the feeling that luck plays a bigger role here and that certain characters, even those set aside for the solo game, are useless in this mode, it’s still fun to build your library and see if you can’t out-book the discard pile. This is helped by the very easily implemented difficulty system, allowing you to modify how hard your opponent will be by discarding more or less cards at the start of each round.

A Couple of Caveats...

Now, I could sing this game’s praises for a while (see above), but there are a handful of issues that can be found within the confines of this generally tight experience. First, some of the variable abilities feel a bit better than others. Sure, all abilities are limited to the one specialty meeple, but due to the general categorization of powers into two departments (help yourself or hurt others), it can feel like some abilities are stronger at their respective category than others. That being said, I don’t really mind this much, and am looking forward to the opportunity to play this game a ton more to find which characters I prefer.

Next, the fact that the game has lots of intricate and situational rules, you’ll be referencing the rulebook regularly even after your first few plays. Between each set of tiles needing to be explained, the character abilities occasionally needing clarification, and some steps vacant from the initial game setup explanation, I still find myself looking through on occasion to remind myself of some of the smaller details.

This can also lead to this game being a little much for those learning, especially if no one at the table has tried it before. This is a game best experienced like 7 Wonders; you need to play it at least once to fully grasp the games mechanics and ideas, then played again to be competitive, with each subsequent game allowing you to learn more and more. While I love this progression in games, that first time may be hard for some.

Lastly, you will see every location in the game every time you play, guaranteed, meaning that there will be no mystery to come back to each time you play. While I find the puzzle, abilities, and random setup to be enough for me, others may be put off by the fact that the same conundrum dominates the game rather than a sea of new.

The Bookend

But I’ll tell you what, I don’t think I’ve played such a polished, refined, intelligent, and downright fun game in a very long time. Ex Libris is, hands down, my game of 2017, easily. The quality of components included, the depth of the ideas at hand, the amount of humor and personality injected into the experience, it all just brings me back to it, makes me want to play more and more, makes me want to play it solo, something that I generally do not enjoy doing whatsoever. If you have not given this a try, I highly recommend giving it a chance, to at least see this book for more than its cover.

Who Should Get This Game: Puzzle-lovers who want to be swept away by the production quality and depth contained in a concise and memorable game.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those easily overwhelmed by rules who find eurogames to be tedious and boring.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube channel. You can also hear Luke's Champions of Midgard review as well as behind the scenes deliberations on our recent episode of the TCbH Reviews podcast.

Bull Moose: 1912 Election Game

Type: Deck Management / Card Driven
Time to play: 60 – 90 minutes per game (Teaching: 5 – 10 minutes)
Best played with: 3-5 players (Best with 5
Review by Robert Crowter-Jones

Wanting that authentic American election experience? Found a game that was limited to two players but a group of 3-5? Well perhaps the solution is a slightly less well known 1912 election – where the US splits between Prohibition, Socialists, Progressives and the two traditional Democrats and Republicans. This election year is known as the Bull Moose election and that’s where the game takes its name.

Bull Moose then is a multiplayer fast paced deck management game with a series of really interesting mechanics. The aim of the game is to win the most votes in the electoral college at the end of 7 rounds of campaigning. In each round you will have a hand of four cards which you will play for either Action Points or for their Events. If you go for the points you will have your traditional move and support options for your candidate – shifting around the board and building support. You can also use these action points to drop cubes in one of the special benefits for the end of the game!

If you use the events though, you might travel long distance through the railway or use the text event on the card to trigger a benefit for your party. The events are normally worth more than the action points, but you have to be in a specific location to trigger it. Using your points to enable these events and combining this in an efficient balance is key. Watch out though – well tracked plans can be taken apart with some cards allowing the player to remove other players’ cubes!

So you start the game with 28 cards – 7 rounds of 4 cards. However, the first really interesting mechanic at play here is that at the start of each round you draw 8 and select the four to be brought to your hand. That’s important because you can keep pushing cards down the deck to manage your hand now and your future hands. Also, you know where you need to start the next round to trigger the events! This foreknowledge of your campaign plan is instrumental to success – moving across the South with the right cards can shift your points by 40+ in a single turn as can taking a key state like Pennsylvania or New York.

The second really interesting mechanic at play here is the trade off between placing cubes on the map and the three special end game events. Firstly, cards with the newspaper allow you to play cubes into empty states at the end. Will there be states left empty, or will players exploit events to cover the map? Pushing for this early will put others off, but leaving it late allows a better cost/benefit analysis! Likewise, the senate seal cards allows you to grab swing states at the end or at least contest them. Tricky to know if these will be worth while, but there will be some medium sized points to be taken here. Lastly, if you are the player who loses cubes from other players’ cards then you get a benefit of voter sympathy – a benefit to place the difference between your losses and the second highest losses on any space on the board.

So forecasting and late game manipulation are key in this game; but there’s a core mechanic at play here that makes this game manageable and effects the player strategies. How do you win a state? Well at the end of the game you contest a state if you have more than half of the lead player’s total support – i.e. if the Republicans have 3 cubes in Texas, the Democrats have 2 and the Socialists have 1 … here the Socialists are below half of the lead and eliminated but the state is contested between the Republicans and Democrats. Contested? Throw the cubes in a bag and draw out the winner!

This is absolutely core to the game – you will try and position to push other players out of key states, and then make late game gambles to put yourself back in the race for your opponents highest value states! That means the end game is a probability distribution and at this point I have to admit that this is great and upsetting. Sometimes this is just going to go horribly against you. You are competing across the map and winning very little. The short answer is that’s just going to happen sometime and you need to factor that in when considering this game. The long answer is that perhaps you could have pushed your cubes to be more than double other players and therefore won the state outright. Even if you push out the third player in the state, this moves the odds significantly in your favour – perhaps even moving you from a minority to a majority.

If all of that isn’t exciting enough, there’s one last big mechanic to mention. At the end of each round of four cards there is an asymmetric power for the players. That could be moving support cubes, placing new support cubes or breaking ties across the map. These powers are meaningful and playing to their advantage is really important.

Other than the probability distribution at the end, this game has good balancing mechanics and an ability for the group to chase down a leader, but it’s not a simple ten our of ten. It scales well, but the game can become a little frantic with more players as there can be a few players who lose cubes and two other players who rush away with the lead. Also the cards feel broadly balanced, but some powers will feel slightly unbalanced. Now I don’t think they are unbalanced, but I understand that the perception can creep in for any asymmetric game and this is know different.

Last notes;

• If you like election games, and don’t mind a luck factor at the finish – this is a good and scale-able game
• If you hate that late game shift, having worked hard on your plan, then you are going to struggle to enjoy that last 5-10 minutes
• If you win – take another faction and try again!

This review comes with authorization from Robert Crowter-Jones, the writer behind Elusive Meeple. Elusive Meeple provides reviews and strategy tips for old and new games, for players just starting to explore them or thinking about purchasing them

Telestrations - For the Stressed Doodler in All of Us

Telestrations
Published by: USAopoly
2 - 8 players ~ 15 - 30 minutes
Review written by Luke Muench

Party games have, categorically been my least favorite genre of board games to date. Games with no sense of strategy like Battle Wizards and Cards Against Humanity actively bore me to tears, Codenames has far too much downtime in-between turns to keep my attention, and some titles like Monikers and Dixit feel less like games and more like excuses to sit around the table with friends.

My blatant distaste for party games is so palpable, that I sometimes sit out on them at my Friday night gaming group, knowing that my inclusion in the roster of players will simply dampen the mood and game experience. Simply put, I wear my heart on my sleeve, so when I’m having a bad time with a game, everyone knows it. And I’d rather wait patiently for a game I’ll have fun with than bring down the mood during a game they love and I loathe.

So it’s a rare sight when, three Friday’s in a row, I come bounding into the room with the same marvelous, gut-busting, absurd party game that consistently brings a smile to my face. (Some in my group may even assert that it’s rare to see said smile on my face period, but that’s another issue). And it’s not just the fact that it’s a party game that makes that makes my mirth so unusual, it’s that it’s Telestrations; not a game of skill or logic, not of mind-bending puzzles and thoughtful choices, but of awful, AWFUL drawing and the stupid words that are eventually associated with them.

Telestrations brings the best of drawing games to the table, overthrowing the likes of Pictionary and it’s ilk for a far more rewarding and consistent experience. The gameplay loop is simple; at the start of the game, each player gets a word or phrase, either one they come up with or randomly chosen from the provided cards. Everyone has until the provided sand timer runs out to draw that word/phrase before passing their pad on to the next player, while receiving a new pad as well. Then, with only the newly drawn picture to reference, each player must write what they think the word or phrase that is associated with the picture is. This loop occurs a few more times, depending on the number of players around the table, until you finally receive your garbled mess of a pad back.

At which point everyone gets to tell the confusing, often hilarious narrative of how their train-of-thought was taken in the wrong direction and the person three seats away from you took your original premise and threw it right out the window. As you turn each page, showing everyone the drawings and reading the ridiculous things people wrote, it’s hard not to crack a smile at least once. Phrases like “wine stack,” “Egyptian xylophone,” and “Harry Potter and the Whatever” have since become memes within our group, due to their absurdity and how off-base they were from the original ideas.

Now, understandably, there are some caveats to a game like this. First, the dry erase markers provided are kind of terrible. Within the first couple months of owning the game, at least half of them have died. These can fairly easily be replaced, but it’s still kind of a pain, especially when it’s been a month and a half and you still CONSISTENTLY forget to go out and get some. This has resulted in some silly games where, due to the reduced number of markers, some people give themselves the handicap of only having as much time as the fastest player who has a marker provides them. Still, this is a small irritation that I wish had been rectified.

Secondly, this is the epitome of a game that’s only as good as the players around the table. If you have a stellar group of inventive, goofy, and generally amiable folks, you’ll have a great time. And while this can be said for just about every game, here that is especially important, as one bored or unpleasant player can put the kibosh on everyone’s stories, not just their own. (see above, where I normally elect to sit out of party games to not poop on said parties)

Caption: Yoda’s Looking a Little… Under the Weather

And third, there are seldom occasions where the stories are obscenely boring, often when people pick words that are far too easy. This can often stem from the cards provided, as a word like “bird” is fairly easy to translate in a consistent and understandable manner. I personally make up a word/phrase for every single prompt I do, but some players who have analysis paralysis when making such decisions rely on the sometimes drab and unexciting cards.

Still, these are less of negatives and more of points of note. All in all, when Telestrations gets rolling, it’s fast-paced, hilarious, a great exercise in storytelling, and one of the best icebreakers to start off a game night. And it’s a game, I’ve found, that you can’t just play one game of, players requesting at least three before moving on to something else. Simply put, Telestrations is, in my eyes, the exception to the rule, the best of its kind, and is worth everyone at least giving a chance to see if they find the magic in it that so many others already have.

Who Should Get This Game: Those who frequently hold parties or events and need a good way to break the ice.
Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those who dislike simpler games where the points don’t matter and there’s very little “strategy” to be had.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube channel. You can also hear Luke's Champions of Midgard review as well as behind the scenes deliberations on our recent episode of the TCbH Reviews podcast.

Five Tribes - Merchants and Djinns and Viziers, Oh My!

Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala
Published by Days of Wonder - 2014
Designers: Bruno Cathala
Head Artist: Clement Masson
2 - 4 players ~ 1 - 1 and 1/2 hours
Review written by Luke Muench

It’s hard not to turn the corner of a BoardGameGeek page without seeing the name “Bruno Cathala” written reverently, and with good reason. A designer that’s helped create some of the most noteworthy games in the industry, including Shadows Over Camelot, 7 Wonders: Duel, Kingdomino, and, my personal favorite, Cyclades. So it goes without saying that Five Tribes was a title that immediately grabbed my attention; with such a talented man at the reins and a unique and colorful theme, it was hard not to get pulled into the experience, and it’s clear that I’m not the only one. As of writing, the title stands as the 48th highest ranked game of all time, and has spawned multiple expansions and promos.

Yet, as time has stumbled forward, I’ve found myself growing less and less interested in bringing it to the table, and when I do bother to bring it out, it ends with a certain frustration, a light irritation in the back of my head. It’s a thought that prods at my mind, asking, “Why did you ever like this game in the first place, and what about it irritates you so?” And while it’s a disappointing question to ask, I think it’s worth exploring.

It’s not unusual for modern games to iterate on the classics, but Five Tribes is unique in that is one of the few games to adapt the core concept of Mancala, whose mechanics have surprisingly gone untouched over the years. The main crux of each round is bidding for turn order with victory points, followed by players picking up a handful of meeples and procedurally dropping them, one at a time, on adjacent tiles, creating a breadcrumb path leading to your ultimate destination. Once you reach your final tile, you pick up the meeple you dropped and all matching meeples, a requirement being that at least one meeple of the same color must be on that last spot. Each color of meeple acts as a form of currency, interacting with the various systems and forming the strategic core of this “kitchen sink” style of game.

By that, I mean that are a bunch of loosely connected ways of getting points, each more or less sectioned off from one another:

• The yellow meeples are viziers, which rewards the player who has the most at the end of the game. Each vizier is one victory point alone, but your collection provides an additional ten for each opponent who has less than you.

• Elders, the white meeples, are used to pay for djinns, mystical entities who provide players with game-breaking abilities and beautiful art. They’re also worth two points each if you keep them, but that’s highly unlikely, as most djinn provide at least four points plus their ability at the cost of two meeples.

• Green meeples are merchants, allowing you to scoop up and collect goods from a market. Successful set collection can result in a massive 72 points, encouraging you to get the rare cards while they’re available. You can also obtain snake charmers this way, acting as a currency for different card effects or obtaining djinn.

• Blue meeples are builders, rewarding players by giving you some extra cash immediately. By multiplying the blue meeples you pick up by the number of blue spaces surrounding and including your tile, players can earn a lot of victory points, giving you more victory points to bid with as well.

• Finally, assassins, the red meeples, allow you to kill meeples off the board or those that your opponents have collected, allowing you some control over the board state. More often than not, these will be used to claim territories.

Oh, that’s right, territories. Each tile represents a different location, each with their own victory points and abilities. When you end a turn on a specific tile, two things happen. Firstly, if you claimed the final meeple on that tile and it isn’t already claimed, you get to place one of your camels on that spot, earning that many points. Secondly, that tile provides the player with an ability. Some are mandatory, such as placing palm trees and buildings on that tile, earning the owner of the tile more victory points. Others are optional, such as buying a djinn or goods from the market. These tiles act as the only way of obtaining these resources, meaning they will often be fought over in some capacity.

The game ends when either a player runs out of camels or there are no more legal moves in the board, at which point the humongous pad is pulled from the box and points are arduously scored over the course of five minutes while everyone else cleans up. Whoever has the most points wins. Which, frankly, is a rather boring and anticlimactic way to end any experience, bringing a halt to all the action to do some lengthy arithmetic. It’s an aspect that wore on me over time with 7 Wonders as well, making the end results feel somewhat underwhelming.

Regardless, there is a lot going for Five Tribes. Each game feels different due to the djinns and market cards that appear, as well as the randomized board set-up, changing the game dramatically. There are a huge variety of ways to score, and it just feels like an enormously complex game.

Emphasis on “feels.”

See, for all its technicalities and the thoughtfully laid plans that you can lay out, Five Tribes is a game of randomness with a layer of thought lightly draped overtop. First, the bidding system presents itself as interesting and intense, as players are asked to spend precious victory points to vye for their place in the que. Yet, due to the enormous number of options in the early game, most players choose to bid zero coins if possible, as there’s almost no value to picking a certain move over someone else. I’ve seen players win solely from bidding nothing and saving up their money while selecting from what moves are leftover.

And even when you do bid for turn order, there’s the issue of the board state. Much like Potion Explosion, Five Tribes is a game in which every action you take affects the actions of others in an immediate way, resulting in pre-planning becoming moot. You may have the perfect move laid out, but unlike Cyclades, you get one bid, and if you’re outbid, you don’t get to set your bidding marker elsewhere. This causes players to be forced to take tediously long turns after their initial choice is completely stymied, either by someone else taking that same move or placing meeples in a way that makes it impossible.

Then there’s the issue of the meeples themselves. Beyond making this game impossible for the color-blind to play, the meeples are not made equal in the slightest. Blue and green meeples feel particularly weak due to a reliance on uncontrollable aspects of the board state, whereas Viziers (yellow meeples) can practically guaranteed 30+ points endgame if a player gets enough traction early on. Assassins can easily be exploited to snipe extra territories, but are rarely used otherwise. This leaves the elders, by far the meeple type that I’ve seen fought over the most, with the board being devoid of them within the first three rounds. I can’t say I’m surprised; the djinn look amazing and feel awesome when you start collected them in front of you… until you realize how little they do.

Most djinn do one of two things; give you a lot of points and a very situational action or give you a handful of points and a powerful action. There are a couple of exceptions, but they are few and far between, often interacting with a very specific mechanic in the game. This leaves many of the djinn feeling interchangeable, despite the beautiful art and emphasis the game puts on them. After the first few games, I would often ignore them for dominating territories, by far the most rewarding aspect of the game in my eyes.

By far, the most enjoyable part of Five Tribes is finding fun ways to manipulate the board, embracing the best parts of Mankala. Not only is it satisfying to make clever and seemingly powerful moves, but it also pushes the game forward, both in terms of scoring points and satisfying one of the endgame conditions.

That being said, every aspect of this game is miniscule. Five Tribes stands out through its visuals and theme, but to some gamers, the sheer quantity of systems and possibilities will be completely overwhelming. Due to this, most games I’ve played require that players take a ten minute sabbatical in order to take their turn, deciding between the seemingly infinite combinations of movement.

To combat this, Bruno Cathala has been quoted in the comments section of Shut Up and Sit Down to encourage players to just guess at what the best move is and have fun with it. And to some, that’s more than enough, but for me, that speaks to an experience that you don’t learn from. At the end of each game, I never feel like I obtained any insight or knowledge that I can carry over to a future playthrough. The set-up results in a randomness that makes me hesitate, and the inability to plan ahead makes each turn feel like it drags.

That being said, this game is fantastic in its presentation and functionality, and it has every right to be where it is. I know many people who gush about this game, because they aren’t looking to learn or improve game to game. They just want to have fun, and that’s perfectly okay.

Hilariously enough, TCbH’s founder Jack and I are very opposed on our thoughts on Cathala’s games. While I can’t stand Five Tribes any longer (a game he continues to adore), I have fallen in love with the depth and intelligence of Yamatai, a game that improves upon everything I’ve seen here and makes it a brain-burning delight of an experience (you can find Jack’s woefully misguided opinions on Yamatai here). And honestly, I think that speaks to Cathala versatility as a designer, capable of making games that appeal to all sorts of players.

Components for the expansion - Artisans of Naqala.

Five Tribes, at its core, is a beer and pretzels game disguised behind a complicated veil. It presents a lot of smart and heady ideas, but encourages you to just take a risk and have fun with it. The expansions simply include more of the same, adding a new type of meeple and a bit more randomness, embracing the essence of what the game is. Much like a djinn, the game’s strategy is somewhat ethereal, a wisp of energy everyone is attempting to grasp before it slips back into a dirty old lamp, and drawing players into the world of Naqala again and again.

Who Should Get This Game: Those who value aesthetics, theme, and fun over the nitty gritty of a game’s strategy.

Who Shouldn’t Get This Game: Those looking for a deep, complex game that challenges them every time it hits the table.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube channel. You can also hear Luke's Champions of Midgard review as well as behind the scenes deliberations on our most recent episode of the TCbH Reviews podcast.

Elder Sign - Dice Duels with Doom-laden Deities

Elder Sign
Designed by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson
Published by Fantasy Flight Games
1-8 players 1-2 hours
Review by Cheyenne Morse

Many games have you wrestling with Lovcraftian horrors, risking life and sanity as you battle creatures from worlds beyond (namely the Public Domain), but my absolute favorite is Elder Sign. Elder Sign is a cooperative dice game in which players try to seal an Ancient One out of the world, using wits, cunning, and a few lucky dice rolls; even as the horrific evil desperately tries to struggle free. Set in Arkham’s Miskatonic Museum, it’s up to players to search each room, battling monsters and crazed fanatics in hope of discovering Elder Signs -  the only thing that can save the world.

How to solve a mystery… (Basic Turn Structure)

Each player’s turn starts by choosing an adventure card. These outline the thematic and mechanical goal for your turn, granting rewards including helpful cards, tokens, or the all-important Elder Signs! The various cards and tokens offer boons to future dice rolls or otherwise help your character as they explore the university.

There are monster tokens as well. Monsters are chosen at random during the game and they get added to the adventure cards to increase their difficulty. These get put into play by various means. Sometimes a card will specify a monster is added but it can also be a penalty for failing to complete a task.  

To succeed in an adventure, the player needs to roll dice and match the symbols on the card within a certain number or rolls. Again, this is where the various accoutrements that you’ve picked up can aid you.

Failure results in penalties; usually causing you loss of health and sanity but it can also add on EVEN MORE monsters or progress the Doom track. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, doom is not good; each step on the Doom Track brings you closer to the Ancient One awakening.

Even victory can demand sacrifice. Some tasks can only be defeated by giving up some health or sanity. No one said saving the world was going to be easy.

One of the coolest aspects of the game is the combined use of theme and mechanisms to create a wonderful sense of apprehension. At the close of each turn, the hands of the clock march inexorably towards midnight, at which time a card is revealed and players react to it’s ghastly effects. Usually this means more monsters or another token added to the doom track, signifying the Ancient One’s impending arrival. There is something both delightful and nerve wracking about having a clock counting down to your doom.

Don’t get intimidated

At first glance this game looks complicated, there are lots of little pieces and a couple decks of cards. Often when I’m trying to explain the mechanics to a new player I inevitably get a look of “How am I going to remember all of this” dismay. But the game has a nice flow to it that quickly feels very intuitive, even to beginners. Keep things simple and just run through a couple mock turns, but really that’d help for teaching just about every game...

Read the Cards

I say this for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that you have to read them to know if there are any special effects that take place during a certain phase of the game; such as when the clock strikes midnight or if you roll a Cthulhu image on the dice. Secondly they almost all have text on them that really helps set the tone. It might describe what you hear or see or it might just creep you out. “Memories flooded my thoughts when I saw the thing. I knew I deserved the awful death that it would bring.”

The art is just fantastic. Every time I play I admire the deep colors and stirring images. The physicality of monsters entering the fray can throw your plans into disarray and force the group to change their tactics. Honestly the art is one of the things that makes this game my favorite.  

Oh no I’ve been devoured!

Once you run out of sanity or health your character is devoured by the very eldritch horror you’ve been trying to contain. When this happens a doom token is added to the doom track and you say goodbye to your player character along with all the sweet loot you’ve gained over the course of the game. Take a moment of silence for your fallen character and then draw a new one out of the pile. This is a mechanic of the game that I really like. The game isn’t outrageously long but it’s not short either and when a couple of bad rolls of the dice can end your life it’s good to know that you won’t spend the next forty minutes watching your friends have all the fun while you’re slowly digested over a thousand years. Everyone is all in until the end.

The Ancient One Has Awakened

You have failed in your attempt to seal the Ancient One away. It has risen up and is ready to devour humanity. What can you do? Mostly you just die. Each Ancient one has different weaknesses and for most of them you can keep fighting. The chances of you winning are extremely slim but you can always try. Unless it Azathoth, then you and the entire world are just devoured. Om nom nom!

Number of players

This game plays the same no matter how many players you have. It can accommodate small to largish groups of players. You can even play the game solo, face to face with all that darkness, alone as madness slowly consumes you. As a nerd and an introvert this pleases me greatly. Sometimes you gotta go solo against some monsters.  

Replay-ability

One of the things that makes this game so great is that it’s a little different each time you play. Since most of the systems in the game are driven by decks of cards, games will feature new and interesting combinations of player characters, adventures, and monsters; all the while maintaining the same overall flow and ease of play.

Overall

This game is super fun to play. It’s the kind of game you can play a lot without getting tired of it. The art is beautiful, there is always a new challenge, and I just love rolling dice. It’s always satisfying!  Now go out there and slay some monsters.

Cheyenne Morse is one half of the Fictional Females podcast, which can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, and www.fictionalfemales.com. This is her first ever board game review! 

Gumshoe Struggles - a Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective review

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
Published by Ystari Games - 2012 Edition
Designers: Raymond Edwards, Suzanne Goldberg, Gary Grady
Head Artist: Arnaud Demaegd
1 - 8 players ~ 1 - 2 hours
Review written by Luke Muench

I never understood why people liked Sherlock Holmes. Not the super-popular BBC show, mind you, I mean the character in general. His personality extends little beyond an intense intellect and a love of pipes, puzzles, and violins . His adventures, have something of an expiration date, lacking the same punch on multiple go-arounds. And his world, while filled with a fantastic cast of dastardly villains, can feel constrained and largely unexplored. Holmes feels more like a vehicle for a story than he is an interesting story in and of himself.

Needless to say, I was rather hesitant when first faced with the prospect of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. It was unlike any game I had encountered before; a game that boasted legacy- and escape room-like elements way before the genres came into their own, that pitted you and your friends against the wits of a man we so often were encouraged to root for, and did so in a world that was potentially as open as the worlds of large-scale video games like Skyrim or Fallout. Yet it was these very reasons of hesitation that eventually coerced me into picking it up, making me wonder if such an experimental idea might work.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective has one of the most accessible gameplay systems in the industry. When sitting down to play, your group will select the next mystery booklet from a series of adventures, each mystery leading to the next in chronological order. After being prompted by a brief introduction, including a narrative full of clues and red herrings, players are let loose, allowed to explore as much as they’d like for as long as they want.

Your tools for dissecting each story are the mystery booklet, a London directory, each published newspaper to date (every mystery includes a newspaper that has clues for the current and future cases), a sprawling map, and your own wits. Much of the game hinges on you deducing which locations you need to visit to gather information, looking up the names of people and places in the directory to then lead you to the appropriate paragraphs of dialogue in the booklet. While many of these are false leads or wastes of your time, a few provide hearty chunks of story to be sorted through and discussed liberally. My friend and I clutched desperately to a notebook throughout our escapades, jotting down anything that seemed remotely relevant or worth considering. The map can be occasionally useful, allowing you to trace the pathways of certain characters, deducing who could have been where on a given night. The newspapers often contain pertinent articles regarding the mystery at hand, but sorting through previous editions can lead to some fruitful and insightful discoveries.

In this way, each scenario has the same general flow; regardless of what’s happening, players can do this to their heart’s content until deciding to reveal the end-scenario questions, forced to answer them with what little knowledge you’ve gathered. Its each story and the way they are presented that really makes each entry stand out in my mind. With titles like The Tin Soldier and The Lionized Lions, my friend and I were jittering with anticipation as we opened each book, enthralled in what they might contain. Introductions can give you a vast network of ideas to consider or next to nothing at all, directing you to peruse what resources you have with little direction. Paragraphs of dialogue and observations open you up to the various secrets the tales contain.

Yet what breathes life into this mystery-themed box of choose-your-own-adventure novels is the player interaction. With every piece of new information, we would puzzle out every detail, fine-combing each sentence for some thread of logic to grab hold of, creating lengthy and convoluted conspiracy theories, leading us further and further down a rabbit-hole we were more than happy to be lost in. It felt fantastic to feel so connected to another human being mentally, your minds entangled with the same exasperating quandary that surely had a solution, if only we could find it.

Getting caught up in the tales of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective was by far the best parts of the experience. The worst were when each scenario came to a close.

After literal hours of searching for answers, me and my friend would finally puts our minds at rest, flipping to one of the back pages to the booklet to see what questions we needed to answer. And while some were to be expected, asking us the circumstances of a murder, others left us profoundly puzzled, referencing people we had never heard of, scenarios that had never reached our thoughts. Slowly we realized that, despite our hard work, we had no clue what had truly happened, a fact that Sherlock quickly and painful made clear. Each game ends with the great detective rattling off a grand speech as to how he solved the case, presenting what little evidence he needed to come to his conclusions, mocking us in the most heartbreaking of ways. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about being outsmarted and learning from the error of my ways. But when EVERY session ends in this way, the game starts to grate at you, make you feel like you’re simply wasting your time.

You can score yourself against Sherlock, seeing how many leads you followed versus his and adding up what meager points you get from correctly answering the questions. Our first game, my friend and I received -5 out of 100 points, which we found hilarious. Despite our outright loss, we knew that this was a special game, one that would test our mettle. It made us ready to take on another challenge, see what more the game had in store for us. By game five, we barely felt there was a chance of us coming close to the right answer. And in that moment, we put the scenario back in the box, closed it, and never looked back.

A few weeks later, I decided to take it upon myself to introduce the game to one of my weekly game night groups. We made an event of it, cooking English-themed dishes and playing some thematic music. I got dressed up for the occasion, acting as the narrator, as I had already played the first scenario and knew most of what was to come. And while the experience was fun enough, it was clear to me that four players began to push the envelope of the player count. A good portion of time was spent while players silently perused the newspaper while others waited their turn, or in chaotic noise as everyone tried to speak their mind at once.

Something else I noticed was how this crew marched to every location they could think of without abandon. While my two-player team carefully selected which handful of places to investigate, these four ran back and forth across the map in search for as many details as they could find, putting me to work as the narrator. And, ultimately, they received the better score of 25 points because of it, having gathered all the knowledge they could before attempting the solution.

While this certainly is a valid strategy, it felt like it undermined the intent of the game. Rather than carefully picking through what you know and slowly moving to a few points of interest, it seems that bulldozing your way through as much as possible will likely get you the better results unless you are a particularly observant player.

The last thing worth noting is just how many typos there are in the game. I’ve heard talk of some that render some scenarios impossible, though I personally didn’t note any, but these can be a pain to slog through, giving pause in the middle of a five-paragraph entry that can throw your train of thought. It’s also rather hard to comment or judge based on this, as there are so many editions of the game in existence that I can’t say if these typos are in every copy universally or just some of the earlier editions.

The best thing about Sherlock Holmes, is that it truly makes you feel like a gritty sleuth in a full realized, lived-in world.

It’s undeniable how unique and worthwhile this game is. With one of the best story-telling structures in tabletop gaming as a whole, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective will take you on a ride unlike any other. Yet the amount of resilience and patience required will test you, and for some gamers, they’ll wonder if the purchase was really worth the investment. So if I am to recommend this game at all, it’s with a couple of caveats. First, recognize that you will almost inevitably lose at some point over the course of the game, and decide whether or not you will be okay with that. And second make an event of it; make Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective into your own personal movie, a grand narrative for you and your friends to intimately explore and immerse yourselves in this engaging game.

Who should get this game: Narrative-focused players, aspiring investigators, those searching for a free-form adventure.

Who shouldn’t get this game: Those who need structure, the easily deterred by defeat, short-form gamers, anyone who balks at the thought of legacy games.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube channel.

Yamatai: For Queen Himiko’s Smile

Yamatai: For Queen Himiko’s Smile
Designed by Bruno Cathala & Marc Paquien
Published by Days of Wonder - 2017
2 - 4 players ~ 60 - 90 Minutes

Oh, how our expectations can betray us. Back at the beginning of 2017, I listed Yamatai among my most anticipated games of the year. Early previews showcased beautiful art, an evocative theme, great looking components, and above all, a fascinating design team bound to make a sleek, clever game. And crazily enough, like Seuss-ean elephants, they managed to deliver on each of those promises. Yamatai is skillfully crafted and gorgeously realized, like a beautiful mechanical watch, if a mechanical watch also had samurai and boats.  

The problem is that in all that I hoped that Yamatai would be, not once did I think to wish the game would also be fun…

How to Make Queen Himiko Smile:

In the Yamatai Archipelago, fans reign supreme. No, not avid followers of pop culture icons, I’m talking about the kind of fans that a courtesan might whip out upon accusations of dishonor. The game end is triggered by a player running out of buildings, running out of boats in the supply, or like 4 other things running out, but boats and buildings are most likely why the game will end, at which point the player with the most fans wins.

Over the course of the game, players are going to build trade routes represented by ships of all types of colors, surrounding islands in order to build their holdings. While each player has a personal supply of buildings, the boats (both on the board and in the supply) are communally owned, meaning you care not only about how the boats you place help you, but also what opportunities you present for others.

Every turn flows basically the same,  each player collects one or more boats, can buy or sell a boat, places boats on the board, chooses to either build a building or take culture tokens from islands you built boats next to, then you discard down to one boat. Did I say this game is all about fans? I meant boats. This game is all about boats.

There are two things that can make your turn considerably different, and both are by far the coolest things in Yamatai. First, those culture tokens? They can buy Specialists, who grant you permanent ongoing effects ranging from increasing fans from various actions to changing how many boats you can purchase / sell / keep at the end of your turn. While some of these are nice bonuses, others will have a monumental effect on how you proceed with the game.

The other thing, and the most clever aspect of the design, is the fleet selection. At the start of each round, five of ten fleets will be face up, and, in turn order, each player selects one and resolves their turn. These determine:

1. The boats you collect at the start of your turn.

2. Some special boon, like reducing the cost of buildings or moving boats in ways you couldn’t otherwise. (this will largely shape what you do on your turn)

3. Future turn order, with more powerful abilities making you go later next round.

4. How much you hate other players. (Damnit, Jeffrey! Why’d you have to take THAT one?)

Why you gotta do me like that, Jeffery!?

The main puzzle to solve is that buildings (your main source of fans) can only be built when you place boats next to an island, and that island now has the quantity and colors of boats surrounding it, corresponding to a building cards in the display.

The other nut to crack is that, when placing boats, you must either start from an entry point (all on the left hand side of the board) or your first boat must match the last boat in a chain you are continuing. Got it?  Yes, this is just as nebulous as it sounds, but you needed something to agonize over as you selected your fleet token, didn’t you? In truth, it becomes more intuitive after a few rounds, but never to the point where it felt instinctive or natural.

Speaking of Feelings...

Look, I really want to emphasize that this game is really well balanced, clever, and presents you with plenty of choices. But for all it’s efforts, it never really gave me a reason to care about what I was doing.

It’s hard to plan on future turns, since the available fleet tokens, buildings on display, routes to build off of, and specialists rapidly change. The boats, which are tactically oh-so-important at the beginning of a turn, are rendered meaningless by the end, since your ownership ceases once they’re in play. Even the buildings, your only piece of distinct ownership, communicate little more than “Hey bub, you can’t build here”. There are some minor bonuses depending on where you build, and certain specialists can make building placement more important, but largely they feel like derelict silos, devoid of meaning and purpose. So while you may have some choices that will have immediate ramifications, It’s hard to feel like you are ever invested in the game.

But for all the mechanical dissonance, the biggest problem I had connecting with Yamatai was the theme. While illustrated magnificently, the theme constantly butts heads with the mechanisms in the game. Why do ships only start on the left side of the board? Why does this specialist get me more points for money at the end of the game? Why can I only buy one boat per turn? This isn’t an issue of being an abstract game or having a “pasted on” theme, it’s that having an apparent emphasis on theme makes the completely abstract elements feel all that much more counter intuitive, breaking the narrative boundaries of the game.

Fit and Finish like a Cherry Blossom Grove:

Aesthetically though, this game is amazing. The bits are high quality, it is profoundly colorful, and is completely stunning on the table. I also have an affinity for the Days of Wonder house style artwork, which as per their usual standards is top-notch here. Even the insert is superbly designed to keep components in check,(though for me it'll be sadly wasted in the trade pile). 

That said, there are two things about the components that most likely don’t apply to you, but feel worth mentioning. First off, this game will be completely unplayable for many colorblind players. From the buildings to the boats which act as both a component and sort of currency in the game, vital information is primarily communicated via color. The second is that there are only two character/color choices that have enough components for a 2-player game. I totally understand manufacturing limitations, but it feels frustrating that a company as family friendly as DoW couldn’t come up with accessibility options or splurge for a few more chunks of wood.

Final Thoughts

I really wanted to like Yamatai. I think Paquien is a fascinating up-and-comer in the designer world, and many of Cathala’s previous efforts, including Five Tribes (the spiritual ancestor to Yamatai), are among my favorite games of all time. Refusing to accept the facts, I was convinced that the problem was with me. So I played again and again, which only served to further cement my thorough ambivalence toward Queen Himiko’s mood.

That's not to say that that there aren’t cool aspects of Yamatai. It features many original ideas, feeling unlike almost anything else on the market. The way fleet tokens and turn order are selected are an especially great system. But for all it’s clever mechanisms, fantastic visuals, and crunchy decisions, it felt hamstrung by counter-intuitive design and lack of player investment. In the end, Yamatai turned out to be a great puzzle, but for me, never managed to be a fun game.

Expansion Mini - Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium

Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium
Designed by Jacob Fryxelius
Published by Stronghold Games & Fryx Games - 2017

Hellas & Elysium is NOT an expansion. It does NOT expand the game, it does NOT add more mechanics, heck it doesn’t have a single component outside of the double sided board! And you know what?  I’m totally cool with that! For a game as systems heavy as T.M., I was actually a bit relieved when I found out that this new “expansion” is more of an officially produced variant. Like the best remix albums, Hellas & Elysium gives us a new way to enjoy the same great game.

What’s New?

Hellas & Elysium is about as sparse as you can get; a double sided board vacuum sealed with a rule sheet, serving as both reference and sleeve. Both sides of the board are new maps to explore, each with their own unique geography, awards, milestones, and color schemes. As with the colonialists of old, it’s thrilling to see new uncharted land to pillage and sculpt into the industrial paradise that our mega-corporation hearts desire. But to be clear, these are not side boards added to the game, each is a replacement that can be swapped out with the basic Mars board; otherwise setup remains exactly the same.

While the new layouts of mars present fresh opportunities and challenges, encouraging the terraforming process to take shape in different ways, it’s the new awards and milestones that make the expansion come to life. Some, like Elysium’s “Desert Settler” (which grants points for having the most tiles in the bottom four rows), encourage you to interact with the game in ways specific to the map you’re playing on, forcing you to judge the value of investing in a land entirely devoid of precious plants. On the other hand, others like Hellas’ “Diversifier” or “Tactician” (which require that you have 8 different tags or 5 cards with requirements in play), are fantastic ways to completely reassess the cards from the base game that you’ve become so familiar with.

Is it good?

The two things I love most about these boards are the new “achievements” and the color scheme. I know it’s a petty thing to harp about, but back in my Terraforming Mars review I did bring up how garish the “Disco Thanksgiving” pallette was, and it’s amazing how much more cohesive the blue and green point tracks makes the whole game look. As for the awards and milestones, they are brilliantly designed. Simultaneously intuitive yet completely fresh, they revitalize the game by giving much more situational value to your cards. As with the base game, I think the awards and milestones are what create the most tense moments and drive player interactivity in the game.

On the other hand, I’m pretty underwhelmed by the new topography of the boards. Not that they’re bad, mind you. It’s just that it really hasn’t made the game feel any different. Sure, some cards like Capital City will feel more or less powerful depending on the map, but overall it just feels like the same ol’ barren landscape from before. The only reason why these new maps need to exist is so that some of the aforementioned achievements make sense, and even those could have been re-tooled to not rely on the board.

Should you get it?

if you were only on the fence with the original, or were hoping that this expansion would somehow fix the game, you’re out of luck. Hellas & Elysium add exactly 0 new mechanics to the game, instead remixing concepts in place from the start. But, for the diehard Terraformer such as myself, yeah, I think these new boards are great. While wholly unnecessary, they still manage to preserve the purity of a game I love, while giving me totally new ways of enjoying it. If you love Terraforming Mars but your corporate greed is no longer sated by the base game alone, I think Hellas & Elysium is a no-brainer.

Can't get enough TCbH Terraforming Mars content? Check out our base game review, our interview with Stephen Buonocore of Stronghold Games, or our Hellas & Elysium first impressions video on youtube.
 

Cyclades - Auction House of the Gods

Cyclades
Designed by Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc
Artwork by Miguel Coimbra
Published by Matagot - 2009
2-5 players ~ 60-90 minutes
Review by Luke Muench

There are few genres more polarizing and ambiguous in their definition than what the community has dubbed “Dudes on a Map”. Some have intricate, detailed rulings on movement and attack patterns, using rulers to measure out grand battle plans, full of nitty gritty details. Others are like Risk; long, sometimes tedious ventures that test one’s patience as much as it tests your strategic wiles. It’s not a genre for everyone, and the in-your-face nature of these games aren’t necessarily inviting to those who are unsure of what these games have to offer.

But hark, what’s this? Down from the heavens does Cyclades drift, as if the gods themselves deemed it worthy to be cast in their own image. For truly does Matagot’s first big box mythological extravaganza stand out from the crowd as a wholly unique, invigorating, and inviting package to players of all sorts.

Cyclades is a game that, at first glance, appears like any other “dudes on a map” game. A board dotted with soldier minis of various colors? Check. Dice set aside for combat encounters? You bet. But beside this typical layout is where the game really happens; a rather colorful and elaborate board featuring a mighty pantheon. Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Ares, and Apollo sit, stoically waiting for players to fight feverishly over them, not with troops, but coin.

At its heart, Cyclades is a bidding game. Each round, players will have a chance to claim one of the gods for themselves, spending their limited pool of coins in attempts to gain their power for the given round. While a seemingly simple task, players who take their turn after yours will have the opportunity to outbid you, forcing you to bid on another god altogether. Timing and planning is a player’s best friend in this vast realm of seas and islands, usually meaning the difference between a victorious military march and the swift and catastrophic destruction of your plans.

This is further compounded by the fact that the order the deities activates in changes round to round at random, meaning that turn order becomes quickly important. While you may desperately need Poseidon’s help, he’s not going to activate until it may be too late. You may want Athena’s help, but she’ll be going first, allowing you to manipulate the board just enough where it might be worth it. This balance of figuring out when to strike and what sacrifices to make only assist in creating an atmosphere of thoughtful strategy.

While each deity provides different abilities and resources, they also allow you to build one of the four structures that combine to form a Metropolis; control two Metropolises at the end of a given turn and you win. This scoring system is simply marvelous in how it can keep all players involved for the duration of the game. Your opponent just built a Metropolis, sure, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t try and march over there next turn and take it for yourself. Or perhaps you’re building a band of Philosophers to erect your own Metropolis in due time. Every single building you build is like a neon sign announcing what’s up for grabs, with the exception that a player’s last island can’t be attacked unless it would win the attacker the game.   

Poseidon and Ares largely control the militaristic portions of the game, but do so in a slow, methodical fashion. In order to invade a given island, you must first invoke Poseidon to build and line up your ships in a manner to create a clear path across the ocean from where your troops are to another location. Only then can you, on a future turn, bid on Ares, who allows you to build an army and actually march those troops to their ultimate destination. This makes combat less of a sudden and jarring experience, instead forcing players to telegraph invasion plans well in advance, allowing others to gather defenses in hopes of discouraging such attempts. Players can also have their ships fight, potentially destroying that once convenient pathway to victory.

Zeus and Athena handle the more passive effects, generating priests and philosophers. Priests make it so a player has to pay fewer coins when bidding, making it much easier to outbid your opponents for a fraction of the cost. Philosophers apply steady pressure to your opponents, as they create a Metropolis once you have gathered four. These act as catalysts for tension, pushing each player to be that much greedier as they struggle for supremecy.

At the end of the day, coin is all that matters in Cyclades. It’s what you use to buy the buildings you need to create Metropolises, to afford the abilities of each god, to accrue more troops or ships if need be. Other than some slight bonuses, money is the only way you’ll have any chance of victory. Luckily, Apollo is here to help, providing one player with an extra cornucopia to place on the island of their choice. Cornucopias produce one coin at the start of each turn, rewarding those who have settled on plentiful islands or placed their ships on trade routes. Additionally, players can receive monetary donations from Apollo, depending on the state of the board. Most players will only gain a modest one coin hand-out, but those who only have one island left will get a whopping four coins for their troubles. Because of this, I’ve spent some games barely getting by with a single island in hopes of gathering a sizable treasury for the late-game.

I say barely getting by because each island limits how many buildings you can have on it, meaning that it’s near impossible to build a Metropolis with a single island. On top of all this, each building besides Athena’s will give a player the appropriate passive buff. Ares’ and Poseidon’s structures give a plus one buff to any land or sea battles respectively, as long as they take place on or next to the island on which the building resides. Zeus’, on the other hand, provides discounts for creature cards.

Yes, the mythological beasts of yore make an appearance as well, some as gorgeous and gargantuan minis that stomp about the board, making their presence known. Each round, as long as a player doesn’t bid on Apollo, they may purchase one of the creature cards laid out, gaining an immediate boost, potentially stealing resources from others or flying your troops to a specific location. Creatures can be powerful and devastating allies when used correctly, leading to some of the most exciting and gratifying plays of a given game.

As you might have guessed, there is a fairly varied pool of strategies to pull from, allowing players to attempt different methods and ideas with each playthrough in hopes of discovering all the secrets held within Cyclades’ watery catacombs. That isn’t to say this is a complicated game; the rulebook is about four pages long and new players catch on to the basics quickly. But within this simple format, there is a ton of options and ideas to touch upon, only further supported by a few expansions.

Speaking of which, I’ve seen a lot of reviews and blogs claim that Cyclades isn’t good without the Titans expansion, and while I won’t go into too much detail as to what that pertains, I’d like to address the allegation. Titans, amongst other things, adds a new board to play on, one that, rather than being filled with little islands, is comprised of a couple land masses. This, by and large, is an attempt to make the combat of the game much like any other “dudes on a map” game. Rather than being limited by the sea, combat plays more like a game of Risk than anything else. Poseidon’s role in the game is also greatly diminished, although there are some profitable trade routes to place your ships on. On top of this, a new unit that is introduced, the titans, allows players to fight on any player's turn by spending coins. Again, this works to remove the value of what the base game introduced, making it easier to just fight your way to victory.

In other words, Titans takes away much of the unique identity that the base game fosters, turning it into just any other “dudes on a map” game. While some may claim that this is the only way to play the game, I heartily disagree; in my eyes, the grand strategies and ocean voyages are what give this game such a strong and individual identity.

Now, Cyclades certainly isn’t perfect, with a handful of flaws ultimately holding it back. The first and most prominent of these, in my eyes, is how combat is handled. While the number of troops you have present in a fight does matter, each adding one strength to your attack, each player does roll a single die, adding between zero and three to their total strength. As one might expect, this can lead to your battle strategy falling apart due to crummy luck, but a wise player can account for this and bring enough troops or hedge on the odds. This hasn’t greatly affected any of my recent playthroughs, but this is a very real possibility that might put off some players.

The other primary issue comes from the balancing of the various creatures, as there are some beasts that are clearly superior to the others, namely the pegasus. With the ability to instantly transport any number of troops from one island to another island, the pegasus can be a wildly powerful and game-changing card, one that’s often fought over the moment it appears. Due to this, entire strategies can be shaped or around to stymied by the sudden, opportune appearance of the card. Fortunately, Cyclades allows for some self-balancing through the auction system - if there is a very powerful monster available, players will pay dearly to go first. Still, this card has warranted deep discussion on BoardGameGeek and is worth talking about.

But if those are my only concerns about the game, it’s abundantly clear to me that Cyclades is a clear stand-out within the board gaming hobby, having become my favorite game to date over the last couple of years that I’ve owned it. The unique way it handles the “dudes on a map” system makes it a thought-provoking and brain-burner of a game, yet provides a certain accessibility to anyone who tries their hand at it. The theming and artwork is marvelous, the components generally of high quality, and the design is built in such a way to keep me coming back to it time and time again. It is a wholly immersive and rewarding experience to invest oneself in this world of islands and the warriors that inhabit them, and one that I intend on revisiting for the rest of my board gaming days.

Luke Muench is a regular contributor to The Cardboard Herald and host of the Budget Board Gamer youtube series.

Love Cyclades? Check out The Cardboard Herald's review with co-designer Bruno Cathala on episode 14 of our podcast. You can listen to all of our interviews by finding The Cardboard Herald on iTunes, Stitcher, or www.cardboardherald.com.