Big Top
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2 Plays (3 & 4 Players)
Taiki Shinzawa is a Japanese game designer who puts out very interesting stuff. Frequently, he takes a simple concept like trick taking or ladder climbing and gives it a novel twist. He’s done this with games like Ghosts of Christmas, 9 Lives, and Maskmen; and now he’s applied a similar formula to the auction genre with Allplay’s new release, Big Top.
Big Top is all about using your precious coins to bid on and gain attraction cards. These attractions will earn you points and put you in contention for the victory, but not straight away. After you win an auction for a card, it is then placed in front of you — providing you with a new objective of covering all the spaces with your coins. Once you cover all the spaces, then you can reclaim your coins and set the card aside into your score pile. But the only way you can cover a space is by bidding that exact amount in a future auction. It should be noted here that you don’t have to win that future auction, you merely have to make that exact bid.
It is a rather simple and standard auction game where the economy is closed, bidding goes around the table until everybody but one person passes, and players take turns auctioning off a card from their hand and receiving the winning bid (unless they buy the card themself). But the attraction cards and their incentivized bid amounts do all the heavy lifting to make this a refreshing filler game.
Do you bid 9 bucks just to cover up that last space on your attraction? And what if the card that is up for auction is one you don’t even care about? What if everybody else passes and sticks you with the bill? Money can be hard to come by when you only earn during your auctioneer turns, and doubly so if you want to buy the cards in your hand.
More clever moments can be found in the other subtle rules at play:
- When a player makes a specific bid that matches a space on the card that is up for auction, then a coin from the bank immediately covers that space, thus making the card easier to complete and more valuable to the players.
- You have the flexibility to spend the coins that are currently tied up in your in-progress attractions (if you desperately want to win an auction), but you’ll make it that much harder on yourself to complete those cards if you keep wiping them clean
- Many cards offer more than just points — some have end-game point goals, others have one-time bonuses like covering spaces on your other cards, and some come with ever-important stars. A player needs at least 1 star in order to qualify for victory, and stars can be surprisingly tricky to earn when everybody is competing for bonus points for having the most stars.
As the draw pile diminishes, the pressure piles on for players to finish their attractions. Among the bottom 5 cards of this attraction deck, an immediate game-ending card is buried. If you’re not careful, it’ll catch you long before you’re ready.
For my tastes, Shinzawa and Allplay have conjured another small-box spectacle in Big Top.
Prognosis: Good
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Hallertau
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1 Play (4 Players)
Playing an Uwe Rosenberg game is like wrapping oneself in a warm, soft blanket — it’s familiar and cozy.
Following in the legendary footsteps of Agricola, A Feast for Odin, Le Havre, and more, Hallertau is a medium-heavy Euro game ripe with worker placement, farming, and resource management. Here, players are in nineteenth century, hop-producing Germany competing to increase the wealth and prestige of their humble village, Hallertau.
The main focus of the game is in growing crops and improving your workshops. As you plant and harvest crops, your fields will drop down in their potency making them less productive in future rounds. Yet you can fallow fields (leave them alone for a round) to help them become more fertile; or you can simply lunge for fertilizers actions own the worker placement board.
As you slide your workshops up their tracks, spending your hard-earned resources to do so, a large cottage tile will follow that increases the number of workers you can use in a round. Eventually, these upgraded workshops will get you into point-scoring territory where the bulk of your points will likely come from. But for those who really wish to race up these tracks, you’ll be forced to deal with boulders which require tools to push them out of the way.
But of course, Uwe couldn’t resist the opportunity to cram the game with loads of cards and potential card combos. For being a wide, open game with many possibilities to pursue, the cards offer strong incentives to chase specific strategies.
The bulk of your interaction comes from the worker placement board, where many actions abound yet grow in cost as more players go there. The first person to use the action spends 1 worker. The next person spends two. The next person spends three. You’ll constantly find yourself adapting to the changing board state as you try to get the most out of your workers. It’s a great feature that keeps you on your toes while you try to execute on long-term goals and strategies.
By weaving together this system of crop rotation, workshop sliding, card comboing, and worker placement, Uwe proves once more why he is a master of this genre.
As much as I thoroughly enjoyed Hallertau, far mare than most Eurogames, it still merely scratches the same itch as Uwe’s other classics. I only ever need a blanket when I’m cold, and it’s hard to justify collecting an entire closet of blankets when I always reach for my favorite of the bunch. But I’ll happily embrace this blanket any time the opportunity lands in my lap.
Prognosis: Good
My City: Roll & Build
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12 Plays (2 Players)
Review copy provided by the Publisher
Alright, this one is going to be less of a first impression and more of a full review. That’s because I didn’t just dip my toes in My City: Roll & Build. I played through all of it — every single episode and chapter of this legacy-esque roll & write. And I did it all in less than 2 weeks. Yes, that is a very good sign for a game.
Those who have been following my blog for a few years, or who simply went back and read through the old ones, know that I’m a huge champion of the original My City board game. I said it then and I’ll say it again: My City is the best polyomino and best legacy game ever made. Its the best polyomino game because of how it prods you to plan out your city with a preset supply of uniquely shaped tiles, and then it torments you each and every turn by forcing you to place these tiles in an inconvenient order dictated by the bingo-style deck of cards. In no other polyomino game have I found the tile arrangement decisions to be more deliciously agonizing. On top of that, each episode riffs on the concept with brilliant little tweaks to the rules or objectives that result in dramatically different incentives and strategies — keeping this low-interaction experience fresh and exciting.
My City is the best legacy game not because it has an immersive branching story or dramatic plot twists, rather it simply gets out of its own way and lets the act of play be the star of the show. No other legacy game that I’ve encountered has been as smooth, approachable, and agile as My City. One of the great weaknesses of this genre is the fact that many legacy games get bogged down under layers of added rules and fiddliness — the core experience starts to feel less like fun and more like work over time. My City never loses its addictive, quick-to-jump-into quality. It never feels like a chore to revisit or a long-term commitment standing in the way of other gaming opportunities. In fact, it was one of the easiest games for this tired parent to get to the table after the kids are in bed.
Needless to say, I was ready to embrace more of that My City goodness when Roll & Build arrived on our doorstep. What new concepts and challenges has the good doctor cooked up in this polyomino universe? The three-year wait for a spin-off or sequel has all led to this… well, this and My Island (a full-fledged sequel coming later this year). But I was certainly eager to see what 12 more episodes with a dice-chucking, pad writing twist would provide.
If I had shared my early impressions of My City: Roll & Build after the first episode, or heck, even the first chapter (episodes 1 through 3), then it would have been a reaction of mild amusement mixed with mild disappointment. Where Reiner set out to make an approachable legacy game in My City, it seems that he intended for My City: Roll & Build to be the training wheels for its big sibling. At least that is how the initial episodes play out.
Episode 1 features a map that is nearly identical to the one you find find in the larger board game, only with even more of the strategy stripped out. In the starting episode, all you are trying to do is cover all the rocks and empty spaces. Connections or adjacency between different types of building doesn’t matter at all. This proves to be a much less interesting version of My City, but it’s over in the blink of an eye and the dice rolling brings its own bit of novelty, so I can’t fault the game for offering a quick tutorial episode. Granted, this is exactly how Episode 1 of My City is played, but Roll & Build makes it feel even more trivial by removing the preset tile shapes and substituting them with randomized dice rolls where probability replaces planning. It also doesn’t help that we are coming in as My City veterans who are then forced back into the tutorial.
Episode 2 immediately feels like a huge improvement simply by making building adjacency matter (scoring points for your largest group of each building type), yet it brings another worry that continues on… all of Chapter 1’s objectives and episodic additions are the exact same between My City and My City: Roll & Build. The same is true for Chapter 2. It is only in the second half of the campaign, especially the 4th chapter, where things really start to diverge from the board game.
So the fun of My City: Roll & Build is initially overshadowed by the feeling of Reiner playing it perhaps too safe, particularly for anyone who already played My City. Admittedly, that’s not as bad as it sounds thanks to several factors:
- It’s been roughly 3 years since we played through the original My City. That’s more than enough time for us to forget the progression of the campaign and enjoy it anew in Roll & Build.
- While the general map layout is the same between both games, there’s something to be said for “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Anybody who has played enough My City would likely agree that the map is perfect… Perfect in how the intentional arrangement of trees, rocks, and obstacles make no two areas of the map feel alike.
- Although the campaign progresses through the same beats in the early episodes, the feel of the game is different enough thanks to the dice rolling and pad drawing. The dice, although far from the most premium dice on my shelf, are surprisingly fun to roll — two of the dice link up to form one single polyomino shape, the other die shows one of three building types. Drawing these building shapes and types onto your map brings its own inherent pleasure — where you get all the satisfaction of drawing out a city with none of the shame of being a poor artist.
- As you play through the early episodes, you gain a feel for the probabilities of each building shape that can possibly be rolled. As you catch on to this trend and cadence, you’ll improve your city planning in later episodes yet still be surprised and delighted (or frustrated) by unlikely dice results, which in turn fosters an emotional investment from the players.
- Where each episode requires an entirely new sheet, this allows Reiner to play with the features on the map — adding rocks here, removing trees there, re-routing rivers, and so on. So although you are not adding permanent changes to your map like in My City, the shifting landscape still keeps you on your toes from one episode to the next as the overall legacy rules and objectives evolve.
- Rather than losing one point for not constructing a building, you fill in a bubble on a negative point track which quickly scales up — jumping by one then two then three point intervals. Skipping your first or second building isn’t nearly as painful as skipping your fourth or sixth. Once you skip six buildings, you’ll max out at a negative 10 point penalty and be unable to skip any more buildings (after that you’ll either have to build it or quit for the episode).
- The late-stage feeling of push-your-luck is heightened because no particular building shape or type is ever depleted. There’s always a chance that the next roll is exactly what you need… So do you keep pushing for perfection, or do you give up and move on?
So although My City: Roll & Build seemingly starts off on too-familiar ground for those who want something entirely new, the only episode that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy was the first one due to its tutorial-like feel. Beyond that, the solid foundation combined with all of the subtle twists to the formula added up to a delightful roll and write campaign. For $20 or less, you absolutely get your money’s worth here. Anybody that is a fan of the original My City will find much to appreciate in this box, especially if it’s been long enough for you to rediscover its clever core.
Those who weren’t able to try My City for various reasons, this spinoff certainly lowers the barrier to entry. The game is cheaper, the box is smaller, the player count ranges from 1-6 (rather than 2-4), the episode rules are even easier to keep track of because it is all right there on your sheet, and the competitive legacy elements are less in-your-face for those players who value the major campaign competition above the minor episode victories.
As a gamer who is generally tired of this crowded genre, any roll and write that gets me to play it a dozen times in under 2 weeks is an absolute triumph. The alluring campaign variety and clever city building challenge kept us hooked on the experience all the way to the epic, high-stakes climax. While those who want something wildly different from My City will have to wait until My Island hits shelves later this year, My City: Roll & Build still lives up to its predecessor’s high standard by becoming my favorite game in this roll and write genre.
Prognosis: Excellent
Yokohama
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2 Plays (3 and 4 Players)
I’ve now tried Yokohama twice — once in 2020 and another time more recently. Yet on both occasions, I failed to write about the game before the details quickly faded. It has now been nearly a month since my last play of the game, and I can’t recall any of the specific tile names or resource types without cheating and looking up images online. But what I can recall is a very similar experience between my first and second play.
In both cases, I started out feeling dread. Dread at the massive splay of tiles and icons that reached far and wide, and the obviously many rules that I needed to learn (and later relearn). But as the teach transitioned into the play, my dread quickly melted away as I discovered a satisfying challenge to dig into.
Yokohama has a bit of that Istanbul Eurogame vibe in that you are moving your main pawn across various unique tiles and deciding which ones to land on and activate. Furthermore, you are leaving a trail of smaller pieces to follow or pick up along the way.
With Yokohama, you are only allowed to move along the tiles that contain your cubes, and you can only put out two or three cubes each turn (onto the same tile or different tiles, respectively). The catch is that you want the tile you stop on to have as many of your cubes as possible, as this will make that triggered action all the stronger. Yet this is further complicated by the fact that opponent pawns are getting in your way, and dropping a cube on or passing through their current location will require you to pay them money as a sort of apology for stepping on their toes.
Everything else here is fairly standard Eurogame stuff. Collect a bunch of different types of resources, and use them in various ways to score points while wisely managing your money. The fact that these elements are all a bit fuzzy a few weeks after my play only serves to highlight their generic application. But in the case of Yokohama, the core mechanism of plopping down cubes and planning your route is all that the game needs to stand out and feel worthwhile. It’s refreshing, interactive, tight, and rewarding. While I don’t necessarily feel the urge to add Yokohama to my collection, it’s one of the few Eurogames not in my collection that I’ll happily play any time somebody suggests it. Hopefully I’ll remember enough to skip the 30-minute teach next time.
Prognosis: Good
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Earth
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1 Play (3 Players)
Earth. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, oftentimes it helps to unplug and get away from it all. Slowdown, disconnect from the world, and reconnect with Mother Nature. No other word sounds as natural, refreshing, or rejuvenating as the word Earth. Ironic, then, that the game Earth evokes the opposite feelings.
Much like our modern, screen-infested, notification-intrusive society, Earth is a game that sees you endlessly doom scrolling through an ever-growing tableau of pinging icons and bonuses. Every time a colored prize pops, a drop of dopamine hits the brain with a splash, and in Earth there’s enough drips to form a brainstorm.
The reason for this is all thanks to the core premise of the design — select one of four possible actions on your turn, and trigger the effect for yourself and everyone else at the table. Although you indeed get a stronger benefit from the main action when it’s technically your turn, there’s never really a moment where it isn’t your turn. In addition to triggering the action’s core effect for everyone, the chosen color will also trigger all of the card actions in everyone’s tableaus that match that color.
So while there is a formal action token that gets passed around for the clockwise player to choose which color pops next, the actual experience of playing Earth is more akin to a fleet of caffeinated droids in a tableau assembly line. The light flashes green or blue or orange or yellow, and off you all go — heads tilting, necks swiveling, lenses scanning, brains computing, and arms waving. Some cubes here for points — bleep — some face-up cards there for points — bloop — some tokens here for points — blorp — some face-down cards there for points — blop.
There’s no time to stop and smell the roses under this relentless firehose of activations and triggers. What was I actually planting into my island tableau? I couldn’t tell you. Some mushrooms and trees, I think. What was I feeling while playing the game? I couldn’t tell you. There’s no space for emotions in a game that is packed to the gills with calculations and dopamine rushes. Was I enjoying myself? I believe so. There honestly wasn’t any chance to consider it during play, but in hindsight I recall the feeling of pride that a robot has over its meticulously-arranged work station.
And if robots can feel pride, then surely they can also feel irritation. Particularly, irritation at being interrupted from their all-important work. This happened every time I remembered that the fauna board existed. This public objective board consists of in-game and end-game goals — text-heavy cards with obnoxiously specific yet easily forgettable requirements. Things like: have 6 or more cards with 3 or less sprout spaces, or have 7 or more cards with 2 or less growth potential, and so on. I’m not sure which was more grating… reading the entire card multiple times to understand and remember its objective (only to forget it seconds later), or slamming the brakes on the game’s break-neck pace to tally my cards that meet the criteria. The competitive interaction that this fauna board brings is so imperceptible that I honestly believe the game would have been better off canning this board entirely. Don’t get me wrong, the points to gain on this board are significant, but it merely serves as a fiddly speed bump to the game’s tempo.
And what a tempo it is. While Earth obviously borrows liberally from genre titans like Terraforming Mars, Ark Nova, and particularly Wingspan, it manages to best them all in terms of game length and downtime. The bonuses per second (BPS) is at an all-time high here. If deck-digging, engine-building, bonus-popping point salads are the marijuana of modern board games, then Earth is straight up cocaine.
After all, the points are to be found in every nook and cranny of the design. Points for your sprout cubes, points for your trunk towers, points for your planted cards, points for your composted (tucked) cards, points from your private terrain objectives, points from your public fauna objectives… the totals add up into the hundreds once you start tallying everything. Yet even after raking in all those scrumptious points, part of me is still left wondering what was the point? As a hobbyist who gravitates to a more methodical, old-school, shared board style of gaming, I’m having a hard time finding the point needle in this haystack of 200 points that I managed to score.
Perhaps I’m looking for something that isn’t even there. I’m fruitlessly trying to slow down and soak in the scenery of gaming with friends, when Earth simply wants to flood my senses with as many spinning cogs as possible.
It seems that if one wishes to embrace Earth, they must unleash their inner, mechanized cyber-self.
Prognosis: Fair
Inside Job
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4 Plays (4 & 5 Players)
Review copy provided by the Publisher
After taking the world by storm with cooperative trick-takers The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, publisher Kosmos is aiming to reach the same crowd with the newly released Inside Job. Although this game is not from the same designer, it does share much in common. Specifically, you are cooperating together to complete missions within the restrictions of a trick-taking game. But Inside Job takes things in a different direction by throwing a hidden traitor into the mix.
In addition to dealing out a fairly standard deck of cards (4 suits, values ranging from 1-13), you’ll also deal out hidden identity cards. One player will become the traitorous Insider, while everyone else is on team Agents. The agents are trying to cooperate and complete enough missions to collectively win the game, while the Insider is trying to win enough intel tokens to claim an immediate solo victory. If neither of those things happen after a set amount of tricks, then players will cast their votes and try to catch the insider with majority votes.
Inside Job walks an impressively fine balance between all of these hidden roles and competing objectives with the help of trick-taking. Every player starts out with one intel token, and they earn another one each time they win a trick. You can even prove your innocence as an agent by earning enough intel tokens to reach the Insider victory threshold and then revealing your innocent identity. But that is quite hard to accomplish. More often, you’ll have to prove your innocence by the way in which you contribute to each mission’s success. Sabotage one too many missions, and you may start hearing traitorous accusations thrown your way.
Whoever wins a trick not only collects an intel token, but they also start the next trick by drawing two mission cards from the pile and selecting one to be that trick’s mission. The card will display two things: a trump suit and a mission objective. These objectives are things like: “The last card must win the trick” or “The first card must be the lowest number played” or “The first and third cards must be the same suit” or “All cards played must be odd numbers” and so on. Some are easier than others, especially when you all have a full hand of cards.
As classic trick taking goes, you must follow the lead suit if possible. If you don’t have the lead suit, then you can play any card including the trump suit. But the two little wrinkles that really elevate Inside Job are the following:
- The Insider doesn’t have to follow suit, ever. Of course, if they aren’t careful about it then the Agents will catch them in their lies when they break from suit and then play that color later.
- Players can wager an intel token on top of their card (when played) to make it trump suit. This can be a way to bend the rules and succeed in winning a trick or completing a mission, but it’s also risky. It’s possible that multiple cards of the same value are played as trump suit (when intel tokens are wagered) and the last card played breaks the tie and wins the trick. Even worse, the player who wins the trick takes all the intel tokens that were wagered plus a victory token from the supply. If that person just so happens to be the insider, then you’ve just handed them an easy victory.
Despite the thousands of offerings in this genre, designer Tanner Simmons successfully proves, like many others before him, that trick-taking has yet more to offer. The trick taking manages to be a perfect fit for hidden roles and social deduction thanks to the ability to claim innocence in a sabotaged mission due to the restrictions of your hidden hand of cards. Where many trick-taking games will see your teammates cursing you for not performing up to their high standards, Inside Job transforms that experience from shame to game by replacing disappointment with suspicion. Inside Job makes the most of its combination of mechanisms, and it takes things even further with optional advanced modules, identities, and missions. I’m excited to see where those lead.
Prognosis: Good
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Pollen
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3 Plays (2, 3, & 4 Players)
If the world needs more of anything, it’s almost certainly Pollen. I’m not referring to the kind of pollen that induces widespread misery via seasonal allergies, rather I am speaking of clean and cutthroat games like Reiner Knizia’s Pollen. Where the wave of new releases in our hobby seems to be drifting toward more mechanical fluff and less meaningful player interaction, Pollen cuts against the blowing current with a card game that is surprisingly sharp.
The beautiful illustrations by Beth Sobel and stunning production by Allplay work wonders to welcome newcomers in while hiding the true essence of this competition. Although it may look the part, this isn’t your stereotypical nature game of gentle drafting or cozy tile arrangement. Rather, Pollen is an area majority cage match that embraces the predatory circle of life.
Turns are as simple a playing a single card from your hand and then drawing back up to 5 from your personal draw pile. Each player has the same deck of cards, but how, where, and when you use them makes all the difference. The objective is to surround pollinator tokens with matching cards in order to win that majority competition. You’re competing to earn bees, beetles, and butterflies, and whoever surrounds that insect with the most matching symbols will claim the bug meeple.
But earning a bee here and a butterfly there doesn’t earn you points on its own. The overarching competition is in holding the majority of each bug type. If you don’t have a majority of bees or beetles or butterflies at the end of the game, then you are simply eliminated from victory. And if you have the majority of 2 or 3 bug types, then you straight up win. Most often, you’ll have 3 players who tie by each having the majority in a different bug type. This is where the rest of your bug tokens matter, as you’ll see who has the most tokens in their 2 non-winning categories.
So with newcomers, it’s important to make these victory conditions crystal clear before diving into the fun. This double-layered contention of majorities is what makes Pollen sing, and it’s a welcome callback to Knizia’s legendary tile-layer — Samurai. In fact, Samurai is the entire reason that Pollen exists, as this game was previously published as Samurai: The Card Game.
While the gameplay is unchanged, Pollen has a massive advantage over Samurai: The Card Game with a gorgeous production that takes up far less table space. The pollinator tokens and the cards that fit around them are a stroke of genius by publisher Allplay in how they cut the table spread of the game in half. It’s also much faster and easier to bring to the table compared to Samurai while still providing much of the juicy tactics and familiar maneuvers.
The painful decisions are plentiful as you must decide where to give up on pollinator battles, when to jump in on budding competitions, and when to lock down areas before an opponent swipes a bug right out from under your nose. Any player who grows attached to a particular pollinator token (by surrounding it with one or two strong cards) might quickly turn grumpy if another player happens to have the perfect hand to steal their hopes and dreams away.
The standout feature of this flavor of Samurai is found in the unbound spread of cards and tokens. Any time I place my card next to an opponent’s card, where we create an empty half circle between our corners, that space will immediately pull in the pollinator token that is “on deck” from the supply. If the pollinator token has a bee on it, then I’m looking to place my bee card next to an opponent’s non-bee card, giving myself and instant advantage over them as the bee pollinator sidles right up to us. It feels even better to trigger the placement of multiple pollinator tokens in one turn — where you get to draw extra tokens out the bag and decide where each token goes. As always, Knizia finds a way to lace his simple rules with brilliant nuances and delightful discoveries.
Many Kniziaphiles might balk and wonder why they would ever play Pollen over the more strategic Samurai. But I find that this card game benefits from its new makeover by reminding us all that it is meant to be taken less seriously than its board game sibling. Those who approach Pollen looking for a quick and casual yet spicy filler game are likely to come away the most satisfied.
Prognosis: Good
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Prognosis: a forecast of how the game will likely fare in my collection, and perhaps yours as well.
Excellent– Among the best in its genre. This game will never leave my collection.
Good– A very solid game and a keeper on the shelf.
Fair– It’s fine. It’s enjoyable. But I’m not likely to seek it out or keep it around.
Poor– Really doesn’t fit my tastes; not one I want to revisit… but hey, that’s just me.
Hopeless– Never again. Run & hide. Demon be gone.
Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite, including the critically acclaimed Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney and upcoming Zoo Vadis by Reiner Knizia. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share classy board games with a bite.
Disclaimer: When Bitewing Games finds a designer or artist or publisher that we like, we sometimes try to collaborate with these creators on our own publishing projects. We work with these folks because we like their work, and it is natural and predictable that we will continue to praise and enjoy their work. Any opinions shared are subject to biases including business relationships, personal acquaintances, gaming preferences, and more. That said, our intent is to help grow the hobby, share our gaming experiences, and find folks with similar tastes. Please take any and all of our opinions with a hearty grain of salt as you partake in this tabletop hobby feast.
