Strike
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5 Plays (3 and 4 players)
Few moments in this hobby are as thrilling as finding a perfect filler game that sucks your entire table into its wacky antics. Strike was the latest such title to… strike that sweet spot. Across two different game night sessions, it reeled the group in within moments and had us clamoring for more after a lightning quick round of uproars.
Strike is all about tossing a die into a gauntlet with passion, precision, belief, and desperation. This gauntlet is the game box itself with a deep coliseum-like insert and a mat at the bottom for the dice to reside.
When it’s your turn to step up to the plate, you’ll pick up a single die from your pool and carefully hurl it into the ring, often trying to knock the other dice around and form sets of dice of the same number. Any pairs or triplets or quadruplets or so on that you happen to create with your dice striking become instant rewards that you may claim from the box and stash back in your pool. Congratulations, your turn is over.
If you happen to not cause any matching dice to smile up at you, then you can simply cut your losses and call it a turn. Or you can toss another die into the ring… and another, and another, and another until you finally form some sets or run out of dice. Hopefully you don’t run out of dice, that’s how you get eliminated!
But things are brilliantly nuanced in this simple game… each die displays an X instead of a 1. A rolled X means the die is removed from the game entirely, thereby shrinking the stock of dice over time. You can similarly burn a die if it happens to bounce out of the pit entirely (and you can bask in shame while your opponents laugh at you). Furthermore, any player that completely clears out the gauntlet (rolls all matches) forces the next player to throw in all of their dice. It’s like taking a shotgun blast to the chest at point blank, because that player only gets any matching dice back.
These two little ingredients — the X’s and the “All In” roll — are what take Strike from an amusing little thing to a riotous occasion. You’ll cackle as you watch your pitiful neighbor burn all of their dice in one turn through a stream of rolled X’s. You’ll chant as a friend casts their last desperate die into the pit. You’ll shout with glee as the villain of the table is forced to go all-in with their envious supply of dice, and you might even roar with shock if they cast a miracle into the box and GET ALL SIX OF THEIR DICE BACK BECAUSE THEY ROLLED ALL FIVES (this happened in our last game and it was mind blowing).
Strike is a good reminder of why dice are one of the most iconic, timeless, and versatile components in all of gaming. Even the most knuckleheaded of games can harness them in dramatic, captivating, and memorable ways.
Prognosis: Excellent
Sobek: 2 Players
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2 Plays (2 Players)
The designers behind scrumptious 2-player games including 7 Wonders Duel and Splendor Duel (Bruno Cathala) as well as Jaipur (Sébastien Pauchon) have teamed up to make a new 2-player game? That’s enough to put Sobek: 2 Players on my radar.
Even if the credits were kept secret, it wouldn’t be too difficult to see where this game takes its inspiration. The tempo of the game (collecting goods, forming sets, taking one action to avoid taking another) feels very similar to Jaipur. The market board also feels a bit like Splendor Duel in how players claim tiles from it and then eventually refill it when needed.
Sobek primarily stands out in how it lets you claim tiles from the market board. A large chunky Ankh pawn roams around the board to whichever space the next tile gets taken from. Its arms extend outward in opposite directions, and these arms dictate which tiles are available to you. It will point along a single row, column, or diagonal that presents your tile options. These arms are pointed in whatever direction the last tile taken from the board indicated.
This interesting directional restriction is frosted with a perfect final rule: you can take any tile in the line, but if you jump over any tiles then those get added to your corruption board. Adding tiles to your corruption board is as bad as it sounds —you’ll likely give your opponent a lot of end game points if you have more corruption tiles than them.
This core gameplay loop is far and away the most compelling aspect of Sobek: 2 Players. You’ll want to keep tabs on which tile types your opponent is picking up and then try to play keep away with the tile options that you give them. If you’re lining them up with a juicy tile, then you at least want to put one or more corruption tiles between the ankh and their prize to make them think twice. Whenever you both foresee the inevitable — when the next player to take a tile will set up their opponent for an even better tile — that’s when you’ll pull out all the stops to avoid taking the next tile. You have to take an action, and if it’s not taking a tile, then it’s playing a character or selling a set. Back and forth you go until somebody runs out of alternate actions or relents.
There are strong incentives to play a character or sell a set earlier, though. Each time you sell a set, you get to peruse the powerful face-down pirogue tokens to take and use one ability right away. The character tiles (which are also claimed from the market board and added to your hand) present even more situationally useful abilities. Diverse and varied as they are, these abilities present a surplus of exciting strategies and tactics you can explore from one play to the next. But for better or worse, they have a habit of blindsiding you.
Two of the character tiles that can end up your hand allow you to obliterate your opponent’s hand in the right moment (make them discard all of their earned tiles down to six total). As soon as this tile effectively decapitates one player’s chances of victory, neither of you will feel inclined to hold too many tiles in future plays. Depending on how painful this lesson is, the targeted player may never wish to play again.
Another character tile lets the player draw three juicy tiles from the top of the deck. Unless it’s near the end of the game (where unused tiles end up in your corruption stack), this is absolutely one of the more powerful abilities. Others can feel much less useful in most situations. At the very least, they can alternatively be used as a good tile in a set. But the fact that they all stay facedown until you claim them from the board makes characters feel more swingy and unpredictable.
If character tiles were the only swingy aspect of the game, then it would certainly be an easier competition to digest. But that is merely one point in the three-pronged swing fest that is Sobek: 2 Players. The other two elements of luck come from the facedown pirogue tokens and random bag of deben (point) tokens. For some reason, the pirogue tokens stay face down the entire game, yet when a player earns one (for selling goods) they can look at all of the tokens. There are only two players in the game and five tokens available to claim, but for some reason you need to keep this information secret the entire game.
The worst offender is undoubtedly the deben tokens which can grant anywhere from 3 to 9 points. Where final scores usually end up between 50 and 70 points, a couple lucky deben draws can easily swing the victory in a player’s favor.
2-player games are customarily a tight battle of wits, and Sobek is no exception with its cat-and-mouse gameplay via the roaming Ankh pawn. Yet one might feel a bit of disconnect from the gameplay when it regularly cozies up to wild and swingy moments. The satisfying taste of a clever maneuver or well-executed strategy can be undercut by the massive dollop of luck — like too much ketchup on a burger or sour cream in a taco.
The unique core is almost enough to forgive Sobek for overstepping its bounds. The only problem is that I can easily enjoy a more satisfying 2-player meal simply by playing Splendor: Duel, Jaipur, and the like.
Prognosis: Fair
Ingenious (2023 Edition)
2 Plays (2 and 4 Players)
Review Copy Provided by the Publisher
Ingenious is a classic abstract family game by Reiner Knizia that I’ve talked about in the past. It is one that has been in my collection for a few years now thanks to the satisfying simplicity it has provided. I’ve also compared it to Axio (it’s square-based sibling) which seems to be the favorite of the two among Kniziaphiles. Nevertheless, my attention was caught when publisher Kosmos announced a new version of Ingenious that includes new rules.
Those new rules come primarily in the form of an added 2-player dueling variant which I had the chance to try. But I also took advantage of the renewal by testing out the 4-player partnership mode. I’m happy to report that both were good.
The duel mode is an interesting one in how it changes the victory objective. You are no longer competing to have the highest score of your weakest color. Instead, you are playing a tug of war with all of the colors. The player who has more score pegs on their side at the end of the game (or all pegs on their side at any time) wins.
Rather than the usual two-player experience of targeting your opponent’s weakest color (walling it in, preventing them from scoring more), you are wrestling for the favor of all of the colors. It gets a bit tricky if you score a line of a color only for your rival to follow with a matching tile and score an even longer line of that color. The need for tactical blocking while scoring becomes quite apparent. I’m not sure it’s a better 2-player experience than the original Ingenious rules, but it’s certainly a fun way to mix up the formula.
The 4-player partnership mode is a great way to preserve the strengths of the 2-player game while allowing twice as many players to enjoy the fun. The suggested rules are that no communication is allowed. At least not any indication of what is in your hand. But we still found plenty of ways to taunt and banter. The main downside here is that a novice player can make critical mistakes which will leave their teammate withering inside.
For those who already own and enjoy Ingenious, there is no need to convert to this edition. The partnership mode is in the old edition, and the new dueling rules and board are interesting to explore but non-essential. For those who don’t own the game and are interested, there is certainly no better time to jump in. This new box is actually a bit smaller and better in quality too. Of course, if Axio is just as easy to acquire, then you have a much more difficult decision ahead of you.
Ingenious isn’t my favorite tile placement game in my collection… far from it. Yet it carries a regal timelessness to it that I’m happy to keep and break out on occasion. I know I’m always going to have a good time with it, and now I can mix things up even further across the several modes.
Prognosis: Good
World Wonders
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1 Play (2 Players)
I’m not sure exactly how many polyomino games I’ve played now, but it’s gotta be somewhere around 15. 15 games that feature polyomino puzzling — most designs have it as the central focus, but a couple feature it as a supplemental mechanism. I currently own about half that many, and I’ll be the first to admit that nobody needs that many polyomino games in their life.
World Wonders is tossing its hat into very a crowded ring, but this genre is still very hot as the sales of 2022’s Planet Unknown and Foundations of Rome would indicate. Yet these games would also indicate that you need to be desperately unique with stuff like lazy susans or overproduced monstrosities in order to stand out these days. Fortunately, in the case of World Wonders, it brings piles of pretty wood to the table. In fact, it probably stands second only to Foundations of Rome in the contest for prettiest polyomino game. The colorful artwork is punctuated by the chunky wooden wonders (there are over 20 of them).
Unfortunately, the presentation of World Wonders is where its genre superiority begins and ends. That is unless you prefer a game that is three times as slow, three times as convoluted, and three times as bitty as its main counterparts.
You see, I find that I prefer polyomino games that are tight in their scoring, tense in their puzzling, and fast in their playing. The gold standards for me are My City and Patchwork. My City forces you to plan out the placement of your dwindling supply of tiles and then writhe in agony as they enter your board in the wrong order. Patchwork demands laser precision in covering your empty spaces while managing your time and button economy. These games bring out the best of spatial puzzling by requiring discipline from their players while forcing them to adapt on the fly. Importantly, they also do not overstay their welcome.
World Wonders is a very different beast. While it presents itself as yet another polyomino puzzler, it welds a whole bunch of extra mechanisms and considerations onto this experience. Where My City tells you what piece you must use, and Patchwork gives you three options, World Wonders often gives you ten or eleven or twelve options (or up to fourteen in a 5-player game). And you’re not just deciding which of these many shapes to take and fit onto your board. You’re also deciding which tracks you want to advance up, which public objectives you are gunning for, which wonder requirements you are positioning for, what you want to spend your remaining money on this round, and more. There’s enough to chew on that our 2-player game went far beyond one hour… I cannot fathom how long a 5-player game takes.
Yet all these mechanical considerations (and the table presence of the components) add up to a perfectly sensible explanation for why World Wonders is the hottest polyomino game of 2023. We find ourselves in an industry culture where more is more, and less doesn’t often impress. Why have one mechanism when we can have five? Why have two ways to score when we can have six? Why have forty game pieces when we can have two-hundred? An increase in quantity of things doesn’t always lead to a decrease in quality of experience, but it far too often waters down the satisfaction for me.
We enjoyed our play of World Wonders. The wonders themselves are a treat to claim and position on your board. There’s no shortage of decisions to puzzle through. We just didn’t find any reason to bring this one back to the table when the proven titans of this genre cut straight to the good stuff in a fraction of the time and effort.
Prognosis: Fair
Chomp
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2 Plays (2 Players)
In a lot of ways, Chomp feels like Sprawlopolis: Dinosaur Edition. You’ve got the spatial arranging and overlapping of cards that are divided into four quadrants on the front and unique scoring goals and conditions on the back. The key difference here is that Chomp is a competitive game, not a cooperative game. That, and the fact that many of these sections or quadrants contain desperately hungry dinosaurs.
Herbivores want to be next to plants so they can live on in peace. Carnivores want so prehistoric rats to munch on, but if they can’t have that then they’ll settle for the nearest herbivores. For these hungry Dinos, skipping a meal leads to instant extinction (just like my cheerful mood).
So as you puzzle these square cards together, you’ll try to keep all of your creatures happy. The ones that survive do score points after all. Luckily, there are ways to earn extinction points as well…
On your turn you’ll simply take one card that is either face-up (to add to your growing map) or face-down (for another personal scoring objective). You’ll want to cover up the poisonous sludge spaces as you juggle the needs of hungry mouths and demanding goals. If you’re like my wife, then you may find this theme to be an exhausting extension of real life — being a stay-at-home mother of two endlessly snacky toddlers.
This dinosaur wants milk, but it only wants it in a green cup, not the red cup. That dinosaur wants its Stegosaurus nuggets cut up into smaller pieces. This dinosaur has been pestering you for minutes about giving it a snack, but now that you’ve put food in front of it is too distracted by the newly discovered mud pit to eat. Despite preferring simpler games and spatial puzzles, you can probably guess that my wife didn’t love Chomp, haha.
For a little filler game, there are a surprising amount of conditions to keep track of: The hierarchy of dietary needs and resolutions, everything that can kill or feed a herd, when quadrants are adjacent versus when they aren’t (if mountain ranges are blocking the way), what must be accomplished to score goal points, etc. It takes some time to settle all the end-game chomping, exterminating, and scoring.
Nothing here is groundbreaking or flashy. And it certainly lacks the fangs of more interactive fillers. Fortunately, it’s just quick and thinky enough that I don’t mind chomping around for a few minutes. Of course, I’m not the one who has to spend every day feeding hungry mouths. I mostly just fix them.
Prognosis: Fair
Couture
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2 Players (3 & 4 Players)
I’m not well versed in the world of fashion. I like to wear the comfiest clothes in my closet and stopped caring about mixing up my look or style years ago. I have a rack of dozens of ties that I’ve accumulated over the years, but these days you’ll only see me wear one of two possible ties to church on Sunday. I prefer to devote my decision energy to more pressing matters, like which board game I should play on a given game night.
Furthermore, my education on the topic of fashion and modeling begins and ends at the movie Zoolander. But that doesn’t keep me from appreciating the style and presentation of Couture. A game as visually attractive as this can easily break through such barriers. All the easier when the game is a quick filler with a refreshing twist on auctions.
Over the course of seven speedy auction rounds, players must decide where to commit their bidding cards. Rather than permanently spending your bidding power away, you keep it (and even upgrade it) over the game and simply decide how to divide it up from one round to the next. Everybody starts with a hand of four bidding cards and two divider cards. You will divide your bidding cards into three sections or locations: New York, Paris, and Tokyo. This is done in an effort to have first, second, or third dibs on the three cards up for grabs at each site.
The cards you can win are either upgraded bidding cards or various point scoring cards. A majority competition here, a variety set there, a set of pairs here, some negative point flop cards there. Your usual set collection kind of stuff. What’s interesting is that if less than three people bid at a site, then one player could end up with more than one of the rewards there (for better or worse).
So you’ll find yourself making plenty of tough decisions across these seven rounds. Where do I think my opponents are going to bid hardest? Should I spend all of my power trying to outbid them, or should I aim for the easier sites? Now that I’ve gotten first or second place in an auction, which card do I claim? Should I opt for more points or more bidding power?
For a tiny filler game, there is plenty of crunch here. Where many small-box Allplay titles aim to be more breezy and casual, Couture is definitely on the weightier end of the spectrum. The unique setting is also a welcome departure from the usual gaming fare. Those looking for an intelligent and pretty auction game will be pleasantly surprised.
Prognosis: Good
Marabunta
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3 Plays (2 Players)
Normally it seems to take a while for the new year to start giving us killer new board game releases. But in the case of 2024, we are starting off strong straight out of the gates thanks to Marabunta — the most deliciously brutal roll & write I have ever played.
Those who normally lose interest the moment they hear roll & write should stick around a bit longer. This one is genuinely unique within the genre. Yes, there is still rolling, and there is still writing. But in reality, Marabunta feels much more like a Knizia tile placement strategy game… for two players… featuring I split, you choose.
At the center of the table is one of The Good Doctor’s most favorite shapes of all time — the hexagon. Loads of hexagons. These hex spaces make up a grid that is divided into 6 color regions. You and your opponent are competing over these color regions. Whichever player has the highest sum of numbers written across the spaces of that region at the end of the game will score their leaf points for that color.
There are six dice, each one with a unique color matching the six regions. Aside from their unique colors, all of the dice are exactly the same. Their faces display in their color a 1, 2, 3, and leaf banner, plus a wild (colorless) 0 and a crate. If you end up using a blue die that displays a 2, then that means you can write a 2 onto a blue region space. The players each have a dry erase marker of their color, so you know which numbers belong to which player.
So far things sound pretty straightforward. But these next wrinkles are what make Marabunta so agonizing. Each round you’ll alternate which player rolls all the dice and splits them up into two groups. Then the opposing player takes one of the two options and uses everything in that pool, and the player who split the dice then follows suit by using the pool that wasn’t selected by their opponent.
The reason that splitting up the dice or choosing an option is often painful is because players are severely restricted with how they spread their ant-ish presence on the board. You can only write a new number next to one of your existing numbers, and you can only break this adjacency rule twice during the game (once at the start, and again when you decide to spend your remaining anthill).
These tight restrictions open the door for players to be nasty to each other by cutting one another off from areas entirely. It’s reminiscent of Through the Desert — just switch out the camels for ants. The moment you box your opponent out of a color region is the moment you make 1 of the 6 dice effectively 50% useless to them. If they end up with a 1, 2, or 3 of that color, they can’t even use it.
During my first play of the game, my opponent savagely barred me from entry into 2 different color regions. The next several rounds were a procession of the most brutal gaming moments that I can recall in recent memory. Every time the dice showed those searing colors, I felt another punch to the gut. My rival gleefully split them into options that always felt bad for me and good for him. I couldn’t suppress my steady drum of groans. Marabunta was ruthless, merciless, sadistic… and I loved it.
Unlike literally every other roll & write, flip & write, whatever & write game that I’ve ever played, Marabunta has players writing and racing and wrestling and blocking on the same shared map. Unlike most everything else in this genre, players don’t simultaneously apply all of the results the dice give them, like lonely plants absorbing the sun’s rays; rather, one player slices the dice cake as outwardly equal yet secretly selfish as they can and then hopes their rival leaves them with the best piece.
There are individual player boards that let you spend resources, work toward bonuses, and race up point tracks. But these genre tropes are merely the cogs that support this system of mind games and competitive gambits. Notably, the bonuses (earned by collecting crates) and wild zeros (that can be written into any color region) provide just enough wiggle room to pivot tactics and surprise your opponent. Some bonuses grant you extra numbers to write out on the board (like wild dice results). Others bestow upon you a bonus anthill — a much needed boon when your opponent has blocked your access into a vital region.
You’re not just struggling for majority and exclusivity on the map regions, but you are also racing to claim the bonus cupcakes and crates displayed on certain hexes. Each cupcake you earn lets you cross out the next treat on your cupcake track. At first, these spaces grant you nothing. But after claiming enough cupcakes, you’ll be earning 1 then 2 then 3 points at a time.
This is when the tension of the splitting decision is at his highest… when the region control point swings are massive and the dessert stakes are high. If the rewards are split poorly, then one player will come away with a gleeful prize and the other will come away with stinging regret. It’s enough pressure to make your ears steam, and it’s the exact opposite kind of experience that we’ve been trained to expect from a roll & write. Speaking of steam, experienced players are likely to steamroll their opponent due to how much foresight and valuation is required. Marabunta is obviously best for two equally matched players.
As he’s done with other hot genres (most notably legacy games and deck builders), Reiner Knizia took a step back from the trends and observed them from a distance. He asked himself, “What is missing from this genre?” and then proceeded to answer the question with an absolute banger of a refreshing design. It’s one of the many reasons why I like working with him so much and why he remains my favorite designer.
Prognosis: Excellent
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Launching on Kickstarter on March 26
Coming soon from Bitewing Games — three games of cool jazz and cool cats. Follow the Kickstarter page here. Thanks for your support!
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 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.
