1st Impressions of Wandering Towers, Pick-a-Pepper, 7 Wonders: Architects, Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces, and more!

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Wandering Towers

2 Plays (4 & 5 Players)

When Kramer and Kiesling put out a new title, I tend to pay attention. They’ve earned my respect as proven designers who adhere to the old-school German style of simple and approachable yet deeply clever strategy games. They’ve already had a few solid releases through Capstone Games including the deliciously nasty Renature (which is set to see an expansion board this summer) as well as the charmingly tight Savannah Park.

Their next release, Wandering Towers, follows in the footsteps of Savannah Park in being a rather light, tactical game with some sneaky depth all wrapped in an endearing production. In Wandering Towers, players are racing to fill their potions and land their wizards in the Raven’s Keep. The player who accomplishes both feats first triggers the final round, giving remaining players one last chance to match their feat and usurp them in the tiebreaker (whoever used the least potions wins the tie).

You’ll spend your turns playing 2 cards from your hand to move a tower or a wizard, and then simply draw your hand back up to 3. Each card gives you a number that you can move one or the other feature, or it displays a 6-sided die which you will roll to determine your movement fate. Dead simple as it is, this one is perfect for any gaming group as a lively filler with a quick teach. Yet there is still plenty of nuance to the tactics to prevent the entire thing from feeling like one big luck-fest.

When you move a tower, it can stack on top of other towers wherever it stops. You can also choose to pluck only one or a few levels off the top of a tall tower to advance around the circle, thereby creating two smaller towers out of one. These towers can not only carry any wizard figures that rest on top, but they will cover any wizard figures on the space or tower that they stop on. For players who are too careless, tired, distracted, or drunk to commit information to memory, it creates a comedic effect when you or your opponents forget where your hidden wizard ended up. Things can quickly change when your wizard on a 3-level tower gets covered by a 2-level tower, creating a 5-level tower which later gets split into a 4 level tower that travels around the circular board. Where was that dang wizard again? The fact that you have a few of them to keep track of makes it all the funnier.

There’s a delightful rule that players are encouraged to enforce with an iron fist: the moment a player picks up a tower to move it, there are no take-backs. This is necessary because picking up a tower reveals what wizards (if any) are hiding underneath it. You’re even encouraged to bury wizards under tall towers, as that is the only way you can fill your potions — cover one or more wizards and fill a potion.

You not only need to fill potions to qualify for victory, but you can use them to activate bonus actions. Each game has a couple bonus action tiles that cost one or more potions to use and can be key to wrestling your hand of cards toward your next objective. 

The wizards become harder to cover over time (and thus the potions grow harder to fill) because they gradually end up inside the Raven’s Keep tower, their final destination. This tower only moves whenever a player drops a wizard inside — causing the keep to jump to the next empty raven icon. Yet some raven icons are displayed on top of certain towers, allowing a player to move the keep by moving the tower underneath it.

With its refreshing tactical experience (roaming tower stacks and traveling wizards) and its charmingly tactical gameplay, I imagine Wandering Towers is going to be a major hit at a lot of tables when it releases in the US later this year.

Prognosis: Good

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Pick-a-Pepper/Sauscharf and Abluxxen/Linko!

1 Play of each (3 Players)

Speaking of Kramer and Kiesling, they had a solid presence at this year’s GAMA Expo. In addition to Wandering Towers and the upcoming Renature expansion from Capstone, they also had card games being shown off by Amigo. So of course I had to sit down to try Linko!/Abluxxen as well as Pick-a-Pepper/Sauscharf (although Pick-a-Pepper is notably designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Christian Stohr, not Michael Kiesling). Both of these designs were similar enough that it feels easier to talk about them together.

Fundamentally, Linko and Pick-a-Pepper are games about bidding using sets of cards from your hand. They are also about drafting or earning more cards to assemble a better hand. As a result, that means these designs are quite similar in concept to Reiner Knizia’s Cat Blues. But the beauty of cards is that they can be used in many different ways, and so even the slightest tweak in rules can result in a surprisingly different flavor. 

Flavor is the name of the game, particularly in the case of Pick-a-Pepper — the game of collecting chili peppers and converting them into hot sauces. Each round, players bid sets of cards to determine drafting order, with the highest bidder getting first dibs on the card row. Importantly, the cards you bid with can either be trashed out of your deck or placed into your own personal discard pile (along with whatever you claim from the card row). This first phase of the game is essentially all about upgrading and pruning your hand into large, juicy sets of peppers of the same type. Once everybody has used up their hands, then phase 2 begins.

In phase 2, you pick up your pile of used and earned cards — a new and improved hand — to start bidding on point-scoring hot sauces. Again, the player who bids the largest (or highest valued) set gets first dibs on either scoring a hot sauce (trashing the cards you bid on it) or taking more cards from the card row (keeping or trashing the cards you used to bid). The game will end once a player has claimed enough hot sauces and trashed their entire deck of cards.

While Pick-a-Pepper is the longest and slowest paced game when compared to Linko and Cat Blues, it still manages to charm me with the decisions and theme that it presents. In my first play, I found myself falling into the trap of chasing too many different types of peppers and keeping too many cards cycling through my deck. If you can cycle through your deck faster, then you can more frequently pick back up your kept cards to bid with your strongest sets again. I came away from this introductory game hungry to revisit this spicy little card game when it soon releases in North America.

Similarly, I quite enjoyed my first play of Abluxxen, which felt like a lighter and speedier card game in comparison to its younger brother, Pick-a-Pepper. In Abluxxen, players take turns laying down sets of cards in front of them, each card promising to score you one point at the end of the game. But your latest set is always vulnerable to being removed or reclaimed by an opponent. If I play a set that matches the quantity of cards in your latest set, and the value of my set is higher than yours, then I can claim your set into my hand. If I choose to do that, then you must take cards from the display or the draw pile (one for each card I stole). If I choose not to steal your set, then you must either return your set to your hand or discard it and draw a card for each card discarded.

Getting “abluxxed” (stolen from) in Abluxxen doesn’t feel too bad precisely because that gives you the opportunity to draw other cards into your hand and improve those unplayed sets. Yet increasing your hand size isn’t necessarily a good thing, because each card in your hand is worth negative one point if somebody else manages to play their entire hand first and end the game. The best part about Abluxxen (in comparison to Pick-a-Pepper or Cat Blues) is that the turns are very fast paced and this game is the most approachable. The worst part is that the presentation and theme are hands down the most generic of all. That’s not a huge deal when all of these designs are simple card games about playing and claiming numbers, but it’s nice when publishers go the extra mile to provide charming touches like hot sauces or jazzy cats.

I imagine that your average gamer does not need Pick-a-Pepper and Abluxxen and Cat Blues all in their collection. But where these designs are all so clever, quick, and small, I’m certainly tempted to add Pick-a-Pepper and Abluxxen to my shelf (next to Cat Blues) when Amigo releases them later this year. If I could only have just one, it would be Cat Blues because I find that it provides the spiciest bidding and tension (yes, even spicier than Pick-a-Pepper), and it plays incredibly well at 2 and 3 players. But the biggest takeaway here is that these German game designers know how to make a great card game.

Prognosis: Good

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Circus Flohcati

2 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

On the topic of Cat Blues, when the game originally released in 1998, it seems that Reiner had a few ideas within this style of set collection card play, because he also released Circus Flohcati in the same year. Circus Flohcati has probably been the more popular of the two games, indicated by the many colorful versions it has seen from various publishers around the world. While Playte published the latest version in English and Korean just last year, that one is rather hard to track down in North America, so I had an easier time picking up the New Games Order edition from Amazon Japan and printing off the English rules from another version.

While Reiner has done plenty of push-your-luck or set collection type card games, Circus Flohcati stands out as one that is extremely easy to get anybody into. Straight from the first session, participants should easily grasp what is going on and how to play fairly well. Of course, there’s still enough hidden depth here to keep hobbyist gamers from getting bored (more on that in a later game).

On your turn you’ll simply pick a card from the face up display or reveal cards from the deck (adding them to the display) until you pick a card or bust. You bust if you ever reveal a suit that is already out in the display. Fortunately, there are 10 suits in the game, so the odds of busting are quite low, at least until there are 4 or 5 cards out. If you bust, then you discard the card that led to your demise and then it’s simply the next player’s turn. If you pick a card before busting, then your turn is also over, but you are allowed to form trios (sets of cards of the same value) or a Gala (play all 10 suits of cards) and score 10 end-game bonus points for each trio or for the Gala. Of course, playing the Gala is one way to trigger the end of the game (the other is to simply deplete the deck).

Where each of the 10 suits ranges from 0 to 7, players will gun for three cards of a number. But playing a set of 4s, 5s, 6s, or 7s, can be inefficient, because you might be trading up to 21 points for 10 points. This is where the final scoring wrinkle will take place (at the end of the game) — you will score your highest value card of each suit, and nothing else. So if I have a 5, 6, and 7 of a single suit, I’ll only score the 7, but it’s worth a whopping 7 points. That means that ideally I form the 5 and 6 into a Trio or Gala so they aren’t wasted. But if you don’t have three 5s or 6s, then you might be better off forming a trio with your 7 — losing one point on that suit but gaining 10 bonus points out of your redundant suit cards.

With its rapid-fire turns and crunchy decisions, Circus Flohcati is an easy recommendation as a tiny-box filler game that serves up a lovely time on a circus platter. The worst thing about it is deciding which version of the game you want — horrifying anthropomorphic bugs from the Grail Games edition, nostalgic summer vibes from the New Games Order edition, cute clean animations from the Playte Edition, eyeball-burning stripes from the oook! edition, etc. — and then actually tracking down a copy.

Prognosis: Good

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Trajan

1 Play (4 Players)

When my Eurogame group told me we were playing Trajan, I honestly thought I had already tried it. Just goes to show how much these Stefan Feld designs blur together for me (and the fact that many of them are now being rethemed and renamed to generic cities doesn’t help either). So I was surprised to discover that I hadn’t tried this game, and I was even more surprised to see that it is Mr. Feld’s second best ranked game on Board Game Geek.

With this first encounter, it was my pleasure to discover how and why Trajan has earned such a solid reputation among gamers. As much as I moan and groan over soulless point salads, Stefan Feld deserves credit for making some of the best designs in this genre. Even if it’s not my preferred type of food, this chef makes a mean salad.

Trajan lands a spot among my favorite Feld designs because it uses the mancala action selection rondel to great effect, and because the shared board features some meaningful interaction. The mancala rondel is all about landing your last token of a cluster right on your desired action space — and occasionally triggering a bonus when you get the right colors of tokens onto that space.

Like most Felds, the challenge of the game is in easily understanding what you want to do and then working backwards to figure out how to most efficiently execute your plan. Puzzling out the order of token clusters to pick up and spread around the rondel is the name of the game. Maximizing your points scored in each turn and each round is the sole Feldian focus.

It’s an interesting approach to game design, particularly from the perspective of a Knizia fan like myself. I enjoyed a recent conversation on the Reiner Knizia Enthusiasts discord server where the community was chatting about action selection and how different designers approach it:

Some legends, such as Stefan Feld or Uwe Rosenberg, focus on making the action drafting or selection the core part of the challenge. You sacrifice much to get to your desired outcome in order to squeeze maximum point juice out of the system. These designers pit the players against the game in a competitive struggle to best overcome the puzzle. Meanwhile, other legends like Reiner Knizia and Wolfgang Kramer emphasize the action performance over the action selection. Your action options are easy, free, and few… but what you decide to do with that action means everything. These designers pit the players against each other, and the puzzle is in figuring out how to exploit your opponents’ weaknesses and oversights.

Trajan is a perfect example of how the action performance is not the priority for Mr. Feld. Any action you take Is going to net you a few points or gain you a resource or bonus action which is simply another detour to points. When anything you do results in a different shade of points, it can all start to feel pretty bland and soulless. But Trajan thrives on the challenge of action selection within a mancala rondel. The joy is in figuring out which actions score the most points given the game’s current state and then puzzling out how to chain those actions together using your personal token wheel.

Within this narrow design space of player versus game (rather than player versus player), the games that come out on top will be the ones with the most dynamic, compelling, and novel action selection mechanisms. All others are quickly forgettable, especially once the puzzle feels “solved”. Trajan is fortunate that its mancala rondel hits the sweet spot for myself and apparently many others. When I’m craving a good salad, Trajan promises to satisfy.

Prognosis: Good

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QE: Commodities (expansion)

1 Play (5 Players)

My first play with the QE: Commodities expansion proved to be a surprisingly bittersweet experience for me. Bitter because I realized that after finally revisiting QE (my first play of it in nearly 3 years), I have had my fill of the game. Yet sweet because the Commodities expansion brings a lot of clever changes to the formula, and it successfully breaks up the meta that I recall from past plays.

The base game of QE seemingly takes a lot of inspiration from Reiner Knizia’s classic High Society: players bid on one item at a time, gaining those for points, but trying not to spend the most of all players… because whoever spends the most money is eliminated at the end of the game. High Society’s bids take place in the form of matching hands of cards, while QE’s auctions take place in the form of hidden auctions with blank checks — write any number between 1 and infinity.

As QE usually goes, players start out bidding small, conservative amounts like 400 or 7000 in early rounds. But inflation rapidly accelerates and before you know it you might be bidding a cool billion or a dozen trillion just to try and win something in an auction. 

The base game of QE rewarded players a few meager points for bidding zero once per round, but the expansion tosses that rule out entirely. Now players are hoping to be the highest or second highest in order to earn a juicy reward. The highest bidder gets the industry tile, as usual, but the second highest bidder now gets to take a commodity of their choice — gold, Crypto, or oil. You don’t know exactly what points a commodity will give you, but you have a decent idea. Gold is reliably high unless players greedily take them all, then each gold is worth 3 points less. Crypto is all over the place, ranging from super low to super high. Oil is middle of the road, but whoever has the most oil gets bonus points at the end of the game.

So now there is a strong incentive to be the second highest bidder in QE. And if you are the auctioneer of the round, then you hope that this second highest bid is nice and high because you are essentially selling that commodity to them (meaning you get to subtract their bid from your final spending total). Suddenly, a high valued auction in one turn can free up your spending total and allow you to feel comfortable writing a giant check in the next turn. 

The levers found in the Commodities expansion are quite fun to pull, yet they admittedly slow down the pace of the game. Now the auctioneer has to write the highest bid on the industry tile and the second highest bid on the back of their own board (to be subtracted from their spending later) and determine the two winning countries where one of them decides on a prize and writes their bid amount on the back of that tile. Because of all of this bookkeeping, QE might be the slowest paced auction game I have ever played — which is fine if your group has plenty of banter to throw around between turns, but awkward if you are all eager to get on with the game.

For my tastes, I tend to value a quick tempo and succinct playtime in the games I bring to the table, so QE has a hard time competing with High Society which can scratch the same itch and elicit a similar style of banter, yet doesn’t have the risk of slowing down or overstaying its welcome. But for those who have the group and enthusiasm for QE, the Commodities expansion is a great way to mix up the formula.

Prognosis: Fair

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7 Wonders: Architects

1 Play (4 Players)

Well, I promised you game that is too simple and dull for me to appreciate, and here it is. When a game like 7 Wonders sells gangbusters, the creators are motivated to keep on milking the cash cow. Sometimes that results in excellent spin-offs like 7 Wonders: Duel, and other times that leads to stripped down offerings like 7 Wonders: Architects.

Before I give you the wrong impression, I should clarify that I believe this game is fine. It’s fine for kids, it’s fine for families, it’s fine for casual gamers, it’s fine as an introduction to 7 Wonders. It just gives me, a board game extremist, no reason to care for it.

In this flavor of 7 Wonders, you are aiming to construct your unique wonder by gathering resources (the same type or different types, depending on the section of your wonder) while improving your science and military. All the old familiar faces are still here, although they seem to have suffered a Benjamin Button fate in that they’ve grown younger in age and complexity. On your turn, you’ll simply pick the face-up card on your left, the face-up card on your right (between you and your neighbors) or draw the face-down card from the deck and add it to your mini tableau. The newly acquired card may allow you to claim a bonus or construct a section of your wonder (which will earn you points and possibly bonuses), but that makes up your entire turn.

Much of the experience is about lucking into the right card options at the right moment. If the neighbor on my right takes the card between us, they might uncover a fantastic (or horrible) option for me. If both cards on my left and right are horrible options for me, then I’ll simply be top-decking from the draw pile and hoping for the best. Occasionally, I’ll have two good card options available to me, and then I must decide which one my neighbors might want more (and which one will hopefully survive another round so I have time to take it as well). That is where the interesting decisions of 7 Wonders: Architects begin and end for me.

Fortunately, the game knows better than to extend beyond 20 or 30 minutes. So some will find it to be a great filler option for casual crowds. But I’m lucky to have dozens of other filler games that are more interactive, dramatic, clever, rewarding, and/or engaging for me. If I want a more interesting and consistently tense style of predictive drafting, I have Azul. If I want to scratch that 7 Wonders itch, I have 7 Wonders: Duel. I can see that there is a justifiable audience for 7 Wonders: Architects, but I don’t fit in that crowd.

Prognosis: Poor

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Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces (expansion)

3 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

Sometimes your impatience gets the best of you, and you decide to order a new expansion to a game that is only available in Europe for the next year or so. So it was that I went out of my way to acquire a German copy of Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces expansion and print off the English rules. Fortunately, my strenuous efforts were worth the trouble. This expansion is a banger.

Mille Fiori was one of my Top 15 Board Games of 2021, and frankly, it has only gone up in my rankings since then. It has held up as a supremely satisfying game in its own right, but I suppose its rise and my appreciation can mainly be attributed to the new expansion which enhances the experience in several ways.

With the base box of Mille Fiori, despite my love the game, I had perhaps two general complaints:

• The two-player experience seemed to be lacking. At least that’s what I had heard most people report, so I never bothered to try it.
• Turn order could be massively influential at times, and the rotating first-player card seemed a bit too lucky for my tastes. This is also what pushed me to prefer the more tactical variant of players selecting their card on their turn (rather than committing to a card simultaneously, as the normal rules suggest).

It appears that the Masterpieces expansion solves both of these issues. I still haven’t tried the 2-player game, but that’s at least what early comments are reporting. As for my turn order complaint, I can definitely attest to this dramatic improvement in the expansion (more on that later).

The Masterpieces introduces several new features to this spicy, interactive, combo-tastic point salad. The most noticeable one is a side board that extends the Sea Route track and adds a Council track. Players are strongly incentivized to race up both of these tracks, as whoever reaches the end will score up to 20 bonus points. Yet as the base game likewise featured so well, you’ll have to specialize in a few areas and neglect others if you want to really thrive.

The Council track displays different colored tiles that were randomly arranged during setup. It drastically influences your turn-by-turn drafting decisions because if you happen to play a card that matches the color of the Council tile that your pawn is on, then you will get to advance your pawn— leapfrogging opponent pawns to the next available space and gaining the bonus that you stop on. These bonuses include earning 5 easy points, cruising 5 spaces up the Sea Route track, or claiming a Dogressa or Masterwork card.

New cards are the other main feature of this expansion — some get mixed into the main deck while others are displayed in their own side market. Masterworks are cards that can either be earned from the side market or drafted directly from your hand, and they will grant immediate points plus massive end-game bonus points if you arrange a grid with rows or columns of matching colors or items. The temptation to pursue this strategy is real when you see somebody rake in sums like 50 or 60 bonus points at the end of the game. The catch is that these cards never put out a tile on the board or advance your council pawn or merchant ship.

Doge cards are similarly shuffled into the main deck and can fairly regularly be found rotating through player’s drafting hands until somebody claims them. When a Doge card is played, it has 3 main effects:

• Score immediate points (if the card displays any)
• Advance on the council track (exactly 1 or 2 spaces) and earn the bonus
• Claim the start player card

That last effect is juiciest of all. The start player card no longer rotates between rounds like it did in the original game. Now it only changes hands when somebody plays a Doge card. What this leads to is moments of brilliance and moments of tragic hilarity. Brilliance when somebody claims the Doge right before the start of the next round (when all player’s hands are replenished and the combos on the board are ripe for the picking). Tragic hilarity when one player steals the start player card only to have somebody else steal it from them in the same round (when they both play Doge cards).

Now you have nobody to blame for the turn-order disadvantage but yourself. You’re the one who passed that Doge card to your neighbor, after all. And if the player in front of you keeps playing the Doge before you get the chance at one, then being second in turn order for free is still pretty dang good. This new system works so well that I’ve naturally reverted back to the original rules of the game — everyone drafts their cards simultaneously and deals with the consequences thereafter. Speaking of passing your neighbor a really good or really bad hand, the Dogressa card type manages to solve yet another quibble that some might have encountered in the regular game…

Sometimes the cards that are passed or dealt to you are simply hot garbage. Not a single one helps you in a region that you are specializing in, or grants you a combo, or provides you with an ideal ship movement. These instances are rare, but they do happen. Especially when the entire hand is all the exact same card. Normally you would have to scoff at your hand, curse your righthand neighbor for passing it to you, and simply make the most of it. But now you can call upon the Dogressa’s aid, if you are prepared for it.

Dogressa cards can only be earned by moving onto specific spaces on the Council track. When you land on a Dogressa card symbol, then you are allowed to claim one of these cards from the face-up display or the face-down draw pile. These cards are insanely powerful and genuinely exciting.

One Dogressa simply shows a combo star, letting you claim an extra card from the display as if you had just triggered a combo. Another lets you move up the Sea Route by anything from 1-7 spaces — your choice. Another lets you claim 2 Masterwork cards. Another acts like an extra-powerful Doge card. And another simply scores you a whopping 15 points. The way these cards are utilized is brilliant: when you earn one, you must store it for later. On a future turn, rather than activate the card you drafted from your hand, you will simply choose to discard that card and play a stored Dogressa instead. Once you have one or more Dogressa cards at your disposal, you’ll find yourself constantly tempted to play these powerful substitutes. Spend your Dogressa too quickly, and you might find yourself regretting that decision when a horrible hand of cards later comes your way. Wait too long, and you may find the end game sneak up on you before you can use it at all.

Speaking of the end game, this expansion seems to make the experience last longer than before, not that I’m complaining. Because Masterwork cards don’t put out tiles, and the longer Sea Route encourages players to forfeit their tile placement for a ship movement, the tiles simply don’t diminish as quickly as they did before. Yet the decision space of each turn is richer than ever thanks to that Knizian trademark of wanting to do everything — incentives pulling you in every direction — yet being restricted to one thing per turn. 

While the expansion perhaps nudges the game’s complexity up a peg with the added mechanisms, I’ve had no trouble introducing the entire bundle to newcomers (several of which were extremely competitive in their first play). At the end of the day, Mille Fiori plus the expansion is easily still a medium weight, approachable, Euro-style point salad drafting game. But thanks to the expansion and the exciting enhancements it brings, Mille Fiori might just be one of the greatest point salads ever crafted. Chalk it up as yet another genre conquered by the good doctor.

Prognosis: Excellent

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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 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.