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Rebirth

3 Plays (2-3 Players)

Between Cascadero, Huang, and now Rebirth, it’s been a very good year to be a Knizia fan, especially if you enjoy tile placement strategy games. 

Rebirth is the latest title in this legacy of tile layers, and a brand new Knizia design at that. Well, it is brand new in the sense that it is not a reskin or reimplementation of a previous Knizia title. On the other hand, it is not so new in the gameplay features that it utilizes…

Similar to Kingdom Builder, you’ll draw a tile into your hand that dictates what type of region you are allowed to place it in. Much like Blue Lagoon, you are only placing out one tile per turn as you seek to score points in multiple ways. Akin to Samurai, you are surrounding valuable spaces with your tiles in order to compete for majority influence. Reminiscent of Babylonia, you are spreading chains and clusters of matching symbols across the board in order to increase your scoring potential. Not unlike Through the Desert, you’ll strive to cut each other off from valuable paths. In parallel with Havalandi, you’ll tactically adapt to each turn’s restrictions while exploiting the strategic opportunities you’ve gradually created for yourself. Perhaps inspired by Ticket to Ride, you’ll gain more private objective cards during the game that will score you a large dollop of end-game points if you achieve them. And even resembling Cascadero, on the Ireland side of Rebirth you’ll race to complete public objectives while sometimes triggering powerful bonuses.

In a lot of ways, Rebirth feels like a greatest hits tile layer. And that’s certainly a good thing. Yet by not leaning too heavily on one of the above mentioned classics, it manages to carve out its own identity and feeling. The end result is nothing incredibly innovative or remarkably new, yet it’s still solidly satisfying. And both maps offer distinct flavors.

The first side, Scotland, leans heavily into a large deck of private objectives that players can earn into their hands. Unfortunately, much like Ticket to Ride, a fiercely competitive game can be swung by lucky card draws. But at least the gameplay itself still feels plenty interactive. You are cutting each other off at bottlenecks, tussling for majority influence around castles, and keeping a close eye on potential threats. As is Knizia’s trademark, it quickly becomes difficult to juggle all of these priorities, especially as your hand of private objectives balloons beyond your mental capabilities to remember them. Much of the challenge of the game lies in knowing which plates to keep spinning and which to let drop.

It doesn’t get any easier on the Ireland side, as there are a whopping eight public objectives to race for with a dozen tower bonuses dangling across the map. Perhaps this only matters for newcomers, but the overwhelming number of objectives seems to be the biggest weakness of Rebirth. When the objectives of a game are few, then all players are able to hone in on the race to complete them and the competition is fierce. When the objectives of a game are many, then it becomes less about clawing your way to the top and more about exploiting the overlooked strategies.

I suppose it’ll depend on your preference whether you like to have a huge variety of objectives to consider or just a few to tussle over. I tend to prefer the latter, as the competition for a few public objectives raises the tension, while the offering of many public objectives waters down their potency. I do wonder if the option was ever considered to feature a smaller, randomized selection of public objectives instead of tossing them all into every game. Then again, maybe it’s easy enough to keep track of everything after several plays.

Ultimately, these are minor quibbles for what is a gorgeous, well produced, and engaging release from Reiner Knizia and Mighty Boards. It draws upon a treasure trove of inspired mechanisms while keeping the gameplay largely streamlined. Rebirth makes for a fine introductory experience or greatest hits celebration of tile placement strategy games.

Prognosis: Good

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Ethnos: 2nd Edition

1 Play (4 Players)

For many years, Ethnos has been one of my favorite board games, especially as an approachable area majority game. You can even find it among my Top 100 Board Games of All Time. Despite having a general presentation that appears both mildly sickly and perhaps overly violent, I’ve enjoyed many exciting plays with friends and family (including gamers and non-gamers). It’s a simple, spicy game of managing a hand of cards and deciding where to compete. The star feature of the experience is mix of unique card abilities and the fact that when you play a set the rest of your hand is discarded to the face-up market.

I’m not the only big fan of this game. For years, others have clamored for a new edition with an updated presentation. Finally, in 2023, the monkey’s paw curled and fans got a new edition in Archeos Society… that replaced the area majority competition with track advancement. Those who adored the area majority half of Ethnos found themselves repulsed by this more solitaire implementation, while others enjoyed the added variety and rules tweaks offered by designer Paolo Mori and the team at Space Cowboys. That should have been the end of this tale (Archeos Society only released last year, after all), but it turns out that the monkey’s paw was just getting started.

Very recently, Ethnos 2nd Edition was revealed by CMON and suddenly releasing very soon. While it won’t be widely available until Q1 2025, it was sold at CMON Expo where I purchased a copy. I still own Ethnos 1st Edition and Archeos Society, but I was keen to explore the new abilities and presentation that CMON cooked up.

On the surface, the presentation looks fine unless you are tired of the ongoing anthropomorphic animal trend. It’s true that board game publishers have now made anthropomorphic animals as generic as the fantasy setting of Ethnos 1st Edition. So was the thematic pivot even necessary from a marketing standpoint? Perhaps not. Was it helpful to the gameplay experience? Absolutely not.

Where Ethnos 1st Edition featured fantasy races with clear identities (hobbits that are individually powerless but strong in numbers, wizards that magically refill your hand, merfolk that swim along a track, etc.), Ethnos 2nd Edition replaces those with various shades of furry creatures dressed up in hats, wigs, and human clothing. Half the time it’s hard to tell what kind of animal you are even looking at because they are cosplaying to the extreme. Thus, their species’ abilities lose any sense of theme or identity that Ethnos 1st Edition once had.

The same clan even has different artwork for each of the six map regions, so the artwork itself makes it nearly impossible to tell which animal belongs to which clan. You’ll have to rely on the icon on the corner for that. But for those of you who splay your hands in the wrong direction (you are probably a lefty), those icons will all be covered up. So it becomes an added burden to figure out what cards you are holding, especially as your hand approaches 10 total cards.

For comparison’s sake, here is how easy it is to read your hand from Ethnos 1st Edition (notice how the region color and faction symbol are easily visible in both corners of the card… the consistent illustrations also help):

Once you figure out a solution to even see the icons in your hand, you might have a hard time telling them apart. For example, these two different clan icons below have nearly identical colors and shapes. I wouldn’t recommend playing with both of these factions in the same game, as it would be easy to confuse one for the other at a quick glance when often so many cards are displayed on the table or in your hand.

The headaches don’t end there, sadly. You’ll probably have to explain to newcomers that the purple rocky region is represented by the black band cards. 

And you’ll have dig through the BoardGameGeek forum archives of a promo pack of Ethnos 1st Edition to find the complete rules of the faction that was originally known as fairies. If you play this faction’s abilities as written in the rules of Ethnos 2nd Edition (like we did, foolishly assuming the rulebook was complete), then you will break the game. Somehow 10 years wasn’t enough time to address the problem in the new rulebook.

That’s not the only error you’ll encounter. If you include the platypus faction (from the new promo pack), you’ll have to decide which rules to follow — the icons on the board or the explanation in the rulebook. Space 15 does not have an ability icon although the rulebook implies it should. On top of that, you’ll have to memorize what each platypus icon space awards (or keep the rulebook handy) because they are all different. Or maybe you don’t mind doing CMON’s job for them and writing the numbers and icons onto the board yourself. At least you have a few options for addressing this problem.

Speaking of writing on components, you might wish that the cards still had text on them to explain the animal abilities. The extremely intuitive and approachable text on the cards of Ethnos 1st Edition has been replaced by complicated icons for 2nd Edition. This effectively adds an additional mental step (especially for newcomers) where players are forced to reference the front and back of their player aid card (or cards… if you have the promo pack aids as well).

A final touch of modernization has been applied to the scoring tokens that get randomly placed into each region during setup. The original game had 0 and 2 point tokens, but now those have been done away with in favor of less region diversity/texture and more feel goods for players.

After only one play of Ethnos 2nd Edition, I am somehow both impressed and depressed. Seemingly every change that was brought to this new edition of Ethnos made it a substantially worse playing experience for me. Every. Single. Change. Perhaps I’m just suffering a strong case of the old rose-tinted glasses — there is still a clever game hiding under all of this… fluffy chrome. But on the bright side, I definitely don’t take Ethnos 1st Edition for granted any more.

Prognosis: Poor

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Fairy Ring

3 Plays (3-4 Players)

Fairy Ring seems like the type of game that would never show up on my radar, but somehow our paths crossed and I was pleasantly surprised. Here you have a simple drafting game of adding mushrooms to your tableau and moving your fairy around the mushroom circle created by all players’ tableaus.

The key decision point is very clear: Do you build your mushrooms tall so that they grant bigger payouts, or do you spread your mushrooms wide so they activate more often? Whenever a fairy (yours or an opponent’s) stops on your mushroom, it activates and you collect the points. It’s not all bad to be giving your rivals points — if you can manage to stop on a mushroom of their tableau which matches a mushroom in your own tableau, then you both rake in the rewards. All the better if your mushroom is taller than theirs, so you get even more points. 

Since this is a simultaneous card drafting game (pick a card from your hand, then pass your hand to the next player), it helps to pay attention to what others are playing and what options you are passing along. There’s a neat element of shared incentives here where players who invest in the same type of mushroom are more inclined to stop on each others’ mushrooms, if possible. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

But it’s not always easy to land your fairy on the perfect mushroom. The card you add to your tableau tells you exactly how far to move your fairy — 3 steps, 5 steps, etc. — and the path may grow longer after you’ve committed to a card but before you’ve played it. Turn order will rotate around the table, and the person in last will have the least control over their destiny. If a player adds their latest mushroom card to an existing column, then the fairy path stays the same length. If a player adds a mushroom card to either end of their tableau, then the ring grows larger (and thus your path becomes longer). So part of the game, especially when you are later in turn order, becomes all about reading your opponent’s intentions. Are they going to play taller or wider? What mushrooms are they most interested in growing? Do you remember which cards you passed them?

The various mushroom types encourage different strategies, as do the bonus objectives. These are interesting to encounter over a couple plays. The game also wisely progresses through two different decks — the second deck allows your fairies to travel around the ring faster as it becomes much larger. It’s a welcome dynamism to the general arc. All in all, it’s an engaging little game that has left a good impression with everyone I’ve shown it to. During my third play, it did feel like some of the novelty was wearing off. There’s not a ton of depth or variety to explore upon repeat plays. But I plan to keep this one around anyway and break it out occasionally for a reliably good time.

Prognosis: Good

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Lure

2 Plays (3 & 5 Players)

Lure is one of the latest small box games from my friends over at Allplay. After hearing how the game works, I had a feeling that Lure might be right up my alley, and I’m happy to report that this is true. 

Lure is all about casting a fistful of dice in an attempt to catch fish. Players are competing over the same fish in the central pond, and goal is to snag the fish of each round first. To begin, a few new fish cards are revealed, and then players decide how many dice to secretly add to their hands. Once players are ready, they simultaneously reveal their hands, and the players who chose less dice get a shot at the fish before the players who chose more dice.

In this designated turn order, players will roll their dice and hope that their dice results meet the requirements on one or more fish cards. Any requirements they achieve are successful catches, and the player can claim one or more fish. Then the next player rolls their dice to try to catch any remaining fish, and so on. Thus, the core decision of the game is determining how many dice to roll. Do you choose less dice for turn order advantage, or more dice for an easier catch? The fish often require you to roll higher than a sum total and specific values (a die with a 1 and a die with a 3, for example).

You’re not only deciding how many dice to roll, but which dice to roll. Most of your dice are standard D6s, but you’ll also have “special dice” including one D12, one D20, and one D4 (although that last one is part of the expansion). The special dice are almost always better than the D6s, but there are a few wrinkles here. If multiple players bid the same number of dice, then they roll at the same time and the lowest sum total gets to catch any fish first. Sometimes that’ll make you regret rolling your D12 or D20. Furthermore, you can never use the same special die in two consecutive rounds — it stays out in front of your screen for one extra round before you get it back. So there will be times where you blow your specials on one round only to find that you needed them even more for the next round.

There will be many turns where you catch nothing but a worm — either because your roll was bad or because some pesky rivals emptied the pond before it was your turn to roll. Normally, this would feel sour, but Lure knows how to turn lemons into lemonade. Any time you come away empty handed, you gain a lure token. These tokens can be spent in future rounds (added to your fist of dice) to give you the upper hand in catching fish and gaining points. It’s tough to decide when to use those tokens — sometimes they are exactly what you need and other times you end up wasting them like a careless fool. 

We’ve also jumped straight into the expansion from our first play. This little add-on introduces three key features: trophies, stubborn fish cards, and special D4s. The trophies have a Knizian flair to them — they only matter to the player with the most and the player with the least at the end of the game. The former gains 7 points, and the latter loses 7 points. As for the stubborn fish, they take two consecutive successful catches to final wrestle out of the water and into your score pile. After the first catch, the fish gets placed in front of you where you can try to catch it again or another player can catch it away from you.

In a lot of ways, Lure reminds me of Gang of Dice (one of my favorite dice games) while still providing a distinct fishy flavor. It’s engaging to decide which dice and how many dice to roll, and it’s simply fun to shake and chuck a fistful.

Prognosis: Good

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Intarsia

2 Plays (2 Players)

Intarsia has been billed as the next Azul by some folks, probably because it comes from the same designer (Michael Kiesling) and features gorgeous components within a relatively abstract game of adding tiles to your personal board. While I’ve kind of burnt out on Azul sequels (because none of them are as good as the original game), I was more than happy to take a look at an entirely new game that tries to catch lightning in a bottle once again.

The most impressive feature of Intarsia jumps out at you the moment you open the box. This thing is packed with dozens upon dozens of huge chunky wood tiles that nestle together with pleasant shapes and patterns. I’ve never seen a production go so buck-wild on wood, so kudos to the publisher for bringing the wow factor.

The game flow is nearly as satisfying as the wooden tiles. Players start each round with a hand of eight cards of various colors, and they’ll spend those colors to build matching colored sections which are worth end game points and help compete for public objective points. The twist here is that when you spend a set of cards of one color, you’ll earn back that many cards minus one of any others colors of your choice. So if I blow three green cards on an expensive tile, then I can refill my hand with two orange cards or one purple and one brown.

The decision of which cards to replenish your hand with and which sections of your board to work on are largely dictated by the public objectives. By earning multiple objectives of the same type, I can keep scoring the old ones of that type that I previously earned. But objectives of the same type force you to venture into different colored tiles and cards. So it becomes a challenge of weaving together the right number and color of cards into the right types of builds to synergize your objective points before your opponents claim those same objectives.

For some reason, there is zero randomness in the setup or the during the game. The only thing that subtly changes over time is the large bonus track that you can activate when you play four cards of a color. This lets the player move the marker one or two spaces ahead on the track to claim the three bonus cards there — and these might even grant you the same color you just played or a wild card. But because the colors are so symmetrical in their function and use, and because players can advance the marker one or two spaces, it rarely feels like a big deal where the marker is located on the track.

That’s the weird thing about Intarsia. There are no surprises or twists to be found during the game or between plays. The public objectives are the exact same each game. Nothing is randomized or mixed up aside from your starting hand which is merely a different arrangement of colors from the previous game. Because the colors have no functional differentiation, and because there is no player interaction outside of the public objectives, it ends up feeling like a one-dimensional experience. It’s quite a satisfying efficiency puzzle, mind you, but it doesn’t beg to played more than once or twice. Notably, there is an advanced side to the player boards. This introduces a new way to score and a more challenging restriction for filling your board. But for me, that only extends its shelf life by one play.

So I enjoyed my two plays of Intarsia thanks to the satisfying puzzle within a stellar production. But if anyone were to ask me, I’d recommend you try it at a convention or something rather than purchase it. Perhaps it’s a symptom of our “cult of the new” culture… because so many gamers only play a game once or twice before moving on to the next thing, the creators don’t see a need to give it life or depth beyond two or three plays.

Prognosis: Fair

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Moonrollers

3 Plays (2 & 4 Players)

Those who have followed my posts long enough may recall my thoughts on Reiner Knizia’s Age of War (aka Risk Express). If not, then perhaps this will jog your memory (or catch you up to speed):

“For the occasional highs that it provides, it certainly wasn’t worth wading through all of those lows. Especially when you see your hard-earned castle get snatch away only moments later. And doubly so when the game drags on as players continue to steal from each other rather than trigger the end by claiming the last castle from the center.

I just don’t see any scenario where I would elect to put myself through Age of War again when so many other games, even Knizia designs, do dice rolling and risk taking and player clashing with far more thrills and far less suffering.”

The reason I’m digging up this old grave is because Moonrollers happens to have a lot in common with Age of War. The biggest difference is that I actually like Moonrollers. I like it a lot.

Just like Age of War, you are taking turns casting a fistful of dice on the table and using them to fill in the requirements of an objective card. You’ll do your first toss and then decide which card to commit to for your turn based on your dice results. Then you’ll work on one requirement at a time and need to roll your remaining dice again each time you complete a requirement or assign dice. If you complete the entire card, then you claim it. So far, so similar to Age of War. But that’s where the similarities end.

With Moonrollers, you can decide to stop between requirements, meaning you are not locked into the card to the bitter end. If your dice supply is running low, then you can call it quits and simply leave your cubes atop the requirements you completed — these will score you points when any player finishes off the rest of the card… the only catch is that they (the finisher) will keep the card (and its power) instead of you.

Another difference lies in the fact that you bust immediately in Moonrollers if you can’t assign at least one die to the current card and requirement you are working on. In the case of Age of War, you can discard a worthless die of your non-matching roll and try again. That makes Age of War sound like the more forgiving game, but let me assure you, it is not. Moonrollers’ dice only have four symbols that you might want to roll, and a fifth symbol is a wild which can often bail you out of a poor roll. The sixth symbol is perhaps the most exciting of all — the extra die symbol. This grants you a bonus die from the supply to add to all future rolls this turn. 

So as you are locking dice in on the requirements, it’s possible to be increasing your hand of dice for the next roll if you get enough of the extra die symbols. This will often tempt you to keep going on the card, knocking out one requirement after another until you finish the card outright or bust. The rough thing about busting is that you have to take back all the cubes for any requirements you’ve completed this turn, thus forfeiting the points for objectives you’ve already accomplished.

But the temptation to finish a card is great when the juicy powers on those cards will upgrade all your future turns. One card grants an extra die to start with. Another lets you manipulate specific symbols when you roll them. Another rewards with a small compensation of points whenever you bust. The list goes on, and I’ve seen players assemble a powerful synergy of cards to help carry them to victory.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Moonrollers is how it accidentally manages to address all of my problems with Age of War while still being such a similar design. I say “accidentally” because designer Robert Hovakimyan created Moonrollers before he ever knew the rules to Age of War. From talking with him (because we’ve collaborated with him on other projects), Robert started with contracts that must be fulfilled by rolling the icons on them, and after trying a bunch of concepts he unknowingly ended up in a similar space to Knizia’s Age of War by forcing players to work on 1 requirement at a time. But the differences are stark…

In Age of War, a “bust” merely results in a wasted turn, and you have no choice but to try and complete the entire card in one go, so things simply feel more depressing and hopeless as your dice supply dwindles. In Moonrollers, a “bust” is much more spicy where the player loses all of their points gained that turn, so you feel the stakes rise with each extra roll of the dice knowing you could have stopped at any point and locked in your current progress.

In Age of War, the crux of the game is in stealing castles that were claimed by your opponents — so players get distracted undermining each other’s progress and drawing out the playtime rather than pushing the experience to a satisfying conclusion. In Moonrollers, the take-that interaction is replaced with shared incentives and a pressure to close out a card. The completed requirements on a card don’t score out until the card is completely finished, and multiple players can work on a single card together, thereby granting those points to everyone and progressing the game. But you also hate to tee up an opponent to gain a powerful card or claim a suit of card that will end the game while they are in the lead on the score track… so you’ll feel the pressure to go outside your comfort zone to finish the card yourself.

With Age of War, the turns end up feeling milquetoast, samey, and predictable because the dice provide no significant hopes or surprises. With Moonrollers, it’s possible to have turns that feel amazing when you roll a bunch of wilds or a bunch of extra dice symbols that snowball into a big play. You’ll also grow in power as you claim more card abilities that let you achieve bigger successes.

Layered on top of the push-you-luck experience of chucking dice, you’ll find a meta push-you-luck system in the end-game bonus points. Certain requirements, when completed, will force players to draw two hazard tokens and keep one. Hazard tokens are great — they grant you 1, 2, or 5 bonus points at the end of the game. The only catch is that the 2 and 5 tokens each display 1 or 2 hazard symbols, respectively. While your token values are kept secret during the game, the player(s) with the most hazard symbols at the end of the game do not get to score any of their hazard tokens. So the challenge here is in reading your opponents’ tolerance for hazard symbols and trying to hoard maximum bonus points without being the hazard symbol leader. Perhaps this feature will be more polarizing for some gamers, but I find that it adds a nice kick of spice to the end of an engaging dice game.

All in all, Moonrollers feels like a symphony of smart design decisions wrapped in a zesty little box. Between the 2-player and 4-player experience, I do feel that the game really wants to be played with more than 2 players so that the shared incentives and hazard token competition can really shine. For somebody who has played an entire spectrum of push-your-luck dice games, ranging from awful to amazing, Moonrollers holds its own as a worthy addition to my collection.

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.

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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 titles Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney and 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.