Leviathan Wilds

5 Plays (2-3 Players)

Cooperative games can be pretty hit or miss for me. They take the dynamic experience of competing with another human for strategic supremacy and replace it with a cooperative challenge of solving a puzzle. Sometimes the puzzle is too simple or repetitive that it quickly grows old as you find yourself approaching it with the same strategy every time. Other times the puzzle overcompensates for this problem by layering complex and exhausting systems on top. My sweet spot is somewhere in the middle — not too taxing to feel like work, but challenging and varied enough to keep me on my toes. 

My favorite cooperative games tend to be the ones with smooth gameplay, tough decisions, a sprinkling of surprises, and a heaping of variety. This would include games like The Crew, MicroMacro, Sky Team, and So Clover. Indeed, these are all “light-weight” in complexity. I can’t remember the last time I fell in love with a “medium-weight” cooperative game. So it’s a very pleasant surprise to find myself five plays into Leviathan Wilds and hungry for more of this big box and big boss goodness.

If you’re familiar with Shadow of the Colossus, then you’re not too far off from what Leviathan Wilds is trying to accomplish. The mood of this board game is less… dark… than its video game inspiration. Each session your team of adventurers will encounter a gigantic creature and begin the process of climbing this mammoth and purging it of poisonous gems. Despite your good intentions, these leviathans aren’t having any of it, so they’ll spend the entire game trying to smoosh you like the pesky ants you are. Each turn the active player will reveal a threat card (a telegraphed attack from the leviathan), play a card for its action points, and then spend those action points to do things like climb, jump, glide, dodge, strike a gem, rest, recover, and more — all before the leviathan’s attack lands. 

You’ll have a couple spare cards in hand that you can play at any time for their unique ability that always help you and frequently can help your teammates. I love how much flexibility this cooperative system provides — you can literally play a card at any time, whether it is your turn or not, when it is most suitable. The private hands prevent too much quarterbacking from any players that are inclined to such tendencies. You can also pick up helpful mushrooms on the colossi and toss them to nearby players at any time for a powerful bonus ability.

The use of space and gravity is also quite interesting in Leviathan Wilds. Just like in real life, it’s much easier to go down than go up. Scaling the Goliath from bottom to top generally takes several turns, and it’s even slower if you are doing other actions along the way. Conversely, you can choose to let go at any time and start falling straight down and won’t stop unless you hit a ledge or play a card with an anchor ability. You can also use the glide action to fall with style, meaning you can move laterally as you drop in altitude to help you reach a desired location on the beast. These movement rules allow you to play strategically and often skip the low hanging fruit on a turn where your hand is great for quick upward traversal and not so good for striking nearby gems. But like any good cooperative game, you’ll be forced to juggle a lot of priorities including your grip. If your draw pile ever runs out, then you lose your grip on the leviathan and start falling immediately which can be very punishing if there is no ledge to stop your descent back to square one. It helps to navigate to ledges and rest along the way to make sure your draw pile doesn’t get too low, or you can simply choose not to draw your last card and hope the leviathan doesn’t force you to discard it before your next rest action.

The turns play smoothly and the objective is equally simple. The beast is riddled with dice of various values that you’ll need to strike down to zero in order to come away victorious. Meanwhile, you’ll be taking a battering when you finish your turn and the leviathan takes a swipe at you or your friends. Health is at least easy to recover, you just don’t want to let it drop too far because you’ll also be gaining blight (which is much harder to recover from), and if your health and blight trackers cross then you are cooked… well, nearly cooked. Your teammates will have one last turn to try and complete the objective before you all lose. In one of our plays, we had a teammate sacrifice herself with one last mighty blow — succumbing to blight but taking out the highest gem and giving us one last turn to take out the remaining gem and win the game. It was awesome.

While the game has a solid core ripe with challenging objectives and thrilling decisions, its greatest strength might just be the sheer amount of variety on display. The spiral bound book of leviathans boasts 17 monsters with unique layouts and threat decks. The player decks are further seasoned with a whole slew of characters and classes that allow for all kinds of juicy combinations. If that’s not enough, then there is already an expansion with even more content goodness. Best of all, Leviathan Wilds is approachable enough that I’ve been able to teach it to four different groups all while exploring a different leviathan and player deck every session. This would be a much harder game to dig into if I was locked into the “intro” setup until I found a regular group for it.

I’ve only lost once so far, but we immediately reset that particular game and scraped out a thrilling win on our second attempt thanks to an improved strategy. But all of my plays across several leviathans and decks have been a blast. I’m eager to see what challenges await next.

Prognosis: Excellent

Positano

2 Plays (4 Players, 5 Players with the Expansion)

Positano caught my attention immediately when I heard it was a mean, quick, and pretty auction game. It features an eye-catching production with nice chunky buildings and rooftops that stack together well (similar to Tower Up). It has a bit of The Estates vibe where you are bidding to put out buildings, and your efforts at one tower can be rendered obsolete by the scheming of an opponent. Yet Positano is not nearly as brutal as The Estates — there’s bonus point gelatos to be enjoyed and variable objective cards to be pursued.

The central mechanism of Positano is found in the simultaneous bidding that takes place each round. Players are bidding for first dibs on three different rows of tiles. You’ll commit to a combination of two cards — a three-tiered bid plus a modifier. You’ll be forced to prioritize one row of rewards over another, as most the cards are some combination of high, medium, and low bids. The three rows offer specific lots, a number of blocks to replenish your supply, and a quality of rooftop (plus other benefits). The basic objective is to build tall towers with high quality rooftops which increase your tower multiplier. But only the levels that have a seaside view (that aren’t blocked by the towers of in front of yours) will be worth points. So the challenge is to time your high bids in the most critical rounds for your strategy and hope you claim your desired rewards, all while managing your supply of building blocks.

In both plays, I opted for a strategy of building a couple maximum height and maximum quality towers as my point whales, and then defending the spaces in front of them so they aren’t too blocked in the final scoring. This worked quite well. Even with the unique objective cards between each play and the ability to combine bidding cards and modifiers in different ways, both plays felt pretty similar. Because the bidding cards are restricted to exact values and all player hands are the same, you’ll never see a player go unexpectedly high or low on an auction. It’s very much an auction game with the safety bumpers up, for better or worse.

I do appreciate that Positano plays rather quickly, although it’s hard to think of it as a “filler” game with a box that is so necessarily large to hold the chunky pieces. While I enjoyed both plays of Positano, I’ve tried so many different auction games at this point that the bar is high for me to really love one. I’ve got smaller, faster, and spicier options that can satiate my appetite for a filler auction game (see High Society, Ra, For Sale, Hot Lead, Conic, and Money… to name a few). But I had a pleasant enough time and wouldn’t mind visiting this Italian Village again someday.

Prognosis: Fair

Critter Kitchen

1 Play (5 Players)

Critter Kitchen is the latest release from publisher Cardboard Alchemy (Flamecraft, Andromeda’s Edge) and designers Peter C. Hayward (Things in Rings, That Time You Killed Me)and Alex Cutler. While I’ve only tried a few other games from Peter (nothing from the other creators), his designs are always interesting so I was happy to dig into the kitchen of critters.

Immediately we were surprised to see just how much table space this game took up. You have 7 location boards lined up beneath a long central board sitting beneath a row of cards surrounded by large personal player areas of cards and boards and screens and tiles. A large table is a must. Fortunately, these many components are vibrantly decorated by Sandara Tang’s art (same artist as Flamecraft) and fantastical world. She definitely put the “critter” in Critter Kitchen.

But aside from a lot of end-game scoring objectives, this one is rather easy to get into. The standout moment of Critter Kitchen comes in the mad dash for ingredients which happens every round. Players secretly select three different locations to send their chefs to, and they desperately hope that nobody else picked those same locations. Supplies at each site are limited, and if everybody shows up to the same place then most folks will come away empty-handed (save for a consolation soup).

Your smallest chef has top priority, but it only gets to claim one ingredient, while your largest chef goes last in the picking at a location, but they get to take a whopping three ingredients when it is finally their turn (assuming there are still three or more ingredients left to claim). So the entire crux of the game lies in predicting your opponents’ moves and then outfoxing them for the best ingredients. It’s the kind of competitive interaction that I love to see in a literal recipe-fulfillment game.

As the rounds progress on, more key recipes will be revealed, and your objective is to collect the right ingredients and create the highest valued meals possible to earn those precious stars (points). This objective largely occupied everybody’s attention throughout our first play. But it turns out that our group should have been prioritizing the end game scoring much more, because this proved to be the far more lucrative strategy.

During the game, I accumulated a mere 8 points from preparing 4 modest meals from the 6 recipe cards. While the end game scoring was more out of sight and out of mind for the group, I was banking on this being my big breakthrough. I made sure to look at all the hidden cards (information that you can select to learn instead of taking ingredients) and then build my strategy around those objectives plus others. There are also points to be gained for preparing the best dish of each type (basically claiming and saving the best ingredient of each type for the end of the game) among a handful of other final awards. This all took my score from 8 points to nearly 40 while the rest of the group averaged a final score in the 20s.

I highlight this example not to peacock my prowess in the kitchen, but to merely to illustrate that the game perhaps doesn’t do the best job focusing everyone’s attention on the most important scoring opportunities. But this is by no means a critical flaw. Everybody (myself included) had a great time jockeying for ingredients, despite the end result. Critter Kitchen provides plenty of highs and some frequently funny lows, so that’s a win in my book.

Prognosis: Good

Amazonia Park

1 Play (4 Players)

Review copy provided by the publisher

Korea Boardgames is an obviously foreign publisher that has really jumped onto my radar lately due to their sudden output of family-weight Knizia strategy games. In only the past year they’ve cranked out a new version of Indigo (now Butterfly Garden with a spicy new mini expansion and an English localization from Capstone Games) plus two brand new Knizias — one of those being Amazonia Park. This 30-minute competition of wildlife photography is… you guessed it… a tile placement game on a shared board. 

Like many family-weight Knizia strategy games, this one is highly tactical and provides some clever scoring twists. On your turn, you’ll either take a picture or publish an article. In board game language, that translates to place a tile to earn tokens or cash in your tokens to earn a scoring card. Players are racing to collect all six colors of cards first, and each color of card becomes more expensive to claim as opponents snatch them up. If you’re the first to publish a blue article, it’ll only cost you five blue tokens. The next person will have to pay seven, then nine, then a whopping eleven. And depending on the board state, blue tokens might be extremely hard to come by.

When placing a tile onto the square grid board, you’ll look in all four directions for the first tile in line of sight (if there is one). Those visible tiles will each net you one to three tokens of their respective color. So the good spots are obvious, and the tile you put out might set up your lefthand neighbor for an even better turn.

Thanks to the victory objective of collecting all six card colors and the obvious state of everyone’s progress, you’ll try to block your opponents from getting their desired colors too easily. But you can only do so much when you are forced to place out the only tile in your hand and then draw another one for your next turn (much like Carcassonne).

There is some nice tension between lunging for tempting spots and cashing in your tokens before that card type becomes more expensive. Yet the most expensive cards grant you a welcome bonus like a free token of your choice or a permanent discount on all future cards. And if you can’t catch a break getting the color you need, you can always spend two tokens of one color as if they were one token of any other color.

Overall, it’s solid stuff from the good doctor, as expected — a game that flows nicely and doesn’t overstay its welcome. But as a heavily tactical game with fairly obvious decisions, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Amazonia Park has nothing else to show after only one play. Sure, repeat groups could get a little better at ganging up on the leader, but I’m not seeing much potential for strategic exploration or discovery here. This one is best suited as a light and casual filler, yet it lacks personality.

I wouldn’t be opposed to playing Amazonia Park again, but I’m much more opposed to keeping it on my shelf and hauling it to game night. In terms of the box size to gameplay experience ratio, Amazonia Park is one of the worst offenders I’ve seen in a very long time. Yes, it even puts publisher Piatnik’s Trademark Big Boxes of Air to shame. How bad is it, you ask? Well, let’s put it this way: Amazonia Park is the second largest box in my entire Knizia collection of over 125 games. The only game that edges it out is Siege of Runedar, and that’s because Runedar uses its box as a physical castle complete with walls, towers, and courtyards.

Amazonia Park has no excuse for being so large… or at least not a good excuse.  Most of the space in this box is devoted to two completely unnecessary components: a card stand and a tile rack. Sure, it’s convenient to have a spot to fit these giant punchboard stands so you don’t have to disassemble them after play, but their very existence feels wasteful. The cards could easily lay flat next to the board, and the tiles could be made into a few simple stacks. Remove these two stands and the box could probably be 85% smaller.

If you’re going to be a light gaming snack, it’s much better to hide the empty calories in a smaller package and behind a facade of variability.

Prognosis: Poor

Shell We?

2 Plays (2 and 4 Players)

Review copy provided by the publisher

The other recent Knizia release put out by Korea Boardgames is Shell We. Shell We is itself a reimplementation of an older Knizia game that adds in a few new wrinkles. That older game is 2012’s Start 11! The Board Game which itself is a reimplementation of a now 100-year-old game called Elfer Raus (notably, this original game was NOT designed by Reiner Knizia). Throughout these iterations, the objective has stayed same: your hand consists of number pieces that can be a few possible colors, and you need to empty your hand first by playing out matching colored pieces adjacent to each other (in numerical order).

Shell We introduces a bit more flair to this concept by turning your pieces into shells with printed numbers on them. On your turn you can either play up to two tiles onto their exact spaces on the board or draw two tiles and add them to your rack. The main restriction here is that you can only play tiles adjacent to other tiles, so you have to try and seed and push the board in your favor. Fortunately, players start the game by choosing one tile to seed the board with, and you can earn bonus actions later to put out stranded tiles and start a new growing chain. It’s a simple exercise of playing the right tiles at the right time while milking the bonus actions.

The other major new feature of Shell We comes in the form of bottle actions. Each session, you’ll set up the game with a unique bottle action along each row. Whenever a player puts out two consecutive tiles in the same row (10-11 or 2-1, for example), then they immediately get the bonus action. This is where you’ll find the most flavor in Shell We. One bonus lets you pass a tile to the player in the lead, another forces all your opponents to draw a tile, another gives you a bonus turn, and there are several more. In our four player game, it was amusing to see players popping off the bottle bonuses and nailing each other with negative effects. It certainly invited some light banter than I missed having in my 2-player game of it.

Despite having 100 years to refine the idea, Shell We doesn’t leave much of an impression. The gameplay is about as memorable as a sandcastle built on the wet fringes of the shore. One moment you’re playing it, putting out shells in the only spots they can go, and the next moment it is completely washed from your memory. There is almost nothing to uncover here in terms of strategies or decisions. In that regard, it certainly makes for a pleasant enough game to play with young kids or with your great aunt who simply wants something to do with her hands while she chats the evening away. At least it doesn’t come in an offensively large box.

Prognosis: Poor

Hot Streak

6 Plays (4-8 Players)

Does the world really need another racing and betting game when we already have the excellent Winner’s Circle, the popular Camel Up, and the recent hit Ready Set Bet? Perhaps not. So does the world need the latest challenger in this genre, Hot Streak? I submit to you, dear reader, a resounding YES.

Hot Streak takes all the wacky chaos, thrilling drama, and sinister humor from those other games and cranks things up to eleven. The racers have more personality than ever before — with uncanny eyes peeking through their mascot uniforms. The card effects are crafted to allow for unexpected twists, thrilling comebacks, and shocking defeats. The player decisions are kept to a brisk pace and sharp simplicity where the game gets out of its own way and lets players invest their attention in the race.

When the gun is fired and the racers are off, nobody has to worry about their next turn or fret over a future decision. The game is out of your hands … Lady Luck is at the wheel. Hurley the Hot Dog storms ahead of the pack. Gobbler the Bear is hot on his heels. Mum the Queen is already turned around and headed in the wrong direction. And Dangle the Fish has fallen flat on its face. You went all-in on Dangle, that blasted creature. 

I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. One mascot takes a commanding lead only to turn around and trample a straggler as if it was a personal vendetta. Another character makes an unlikely comeback, barreling to the front of the pack only to tumble right in front of the finish line. A known loser changes their stars and wins against all odds in the final race. This is a game of laughs, groans, and cheers.

Hot Streak doesn’t care so much about putting the smartest player at the table on a victory point pedestal. It’s more about the shared experience of being degenerate gamblers in a contest of chaos. Sure, you’ll get the chance to place your bets and seed the deck before each race, but whether you win it big or gamble away your life’s savings, it’ll be a heck of a good time. With enough people (particularly 5-8 players, in my opinion), this might just be one of the best experiences that party games can provide.

Prognosis: Excellent

Now Available

If you’d like to support Bitewing Games then be sure to check out our new releases! Our Cosmic Silos Trilogy — SILOS, EGO, and ORBIT — is now available and shipping worldwide. These three Knizia sci-fi games span very different experiences… from dramatic area control to epic push-your-luck auctions to wacky racing. Thanks for helping us make and share great games!

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Hot Streak, Leviathan Wilds, Critter Kitchen, Positano, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Agent Avenue

8 Plays (2, 3, 4 Players)

Any time I try a pure bluffing game, it faces the unfair hurdle of being compared to Skull and my standout memories of playing Skull with friends. Over the years I’ve sampled other acclaimed titles including Cockroach Poker, Spicy, and more… yet none of them hold a candle to Skull and its perfect bidding/bluffing hilarity. But finally, I think I’ve found a worthy contender in Agent Avenue.

Like Skull, Agent Avenue is a dead-simple, fast-playing game. While it is primarily presented as a 2-player game, it actually includes partnership rules for 3-4 players that also work incredibly well. The premise is that one neighborhood spy is trying to catch the other on a simple circular track. You’ll each be collecting cards that cause your figure to advance forward or move backward, and whoever catches their opponent first wins.

On your turn, you’ll select one card from your hand to play face-up and one card to play face-down. Then, your opponent decides which of these cards to claim into their collection, you’ll take the other one, and you’ll both move your pawns as the cards indicate. There are a handful of different card types in the deck, but they are easy to learn and track (even for beginners).

The shared trait among all of these card types is that their movement value will change between the first one you collect, the second one you collect, and any additional cards you collect beyond the third. Your first Enforcer will advance you 1 space. Your second Enforcer will advance you 2 spaces. Your third (and any more beyond that) will advance you 3 spaces. So it’s obviously great to keep earning Enforcers, but those are one of the more vanilla cards in the deck.

The Double Agent moves you backward 1 space each time you earn it, except for the second card which advances you forward a whopping 6 spaces! It’s great to earn two of these cards and then dodge them the rest of the game.

Speaking of dodging cards, the Daredevil will help you move forward a total of 5 spaces with the first two cards, but playing a third Daredevil means instant defeat! On the flip side, the Codebreaker gives you an instant victory if you collect three of them. There are other cards that escalate up (or down) in movement that you’ll want to seek out or avoid. There are also a couple single cards sprinkled into the deck the straight up move you forward or backward 4 spaces, so you’ll always be wondering when those rare cards might come out of the deck.

This perfect mix of card types, and the way in which you offer a face-up and face-down option to your opponent, makes for a brilliantly engaging contest of mind games.

“You’ve already collected one Codebreaker, so obviously you are going to want this face-up Codebreaker I’ve presented to you, but if you take it then I get this face-down Double Agent which will advance me SIX SPACES (that is nearly half of the circular track).”

“Hold on, why you are presenting to me a face-up Saboteur which is obviously bad (it would move me backward)? Does this mean that the face-down card is even worse? Obviously I should take the Saboteur, unless that is exactly what you want me to think!!!” 

You’ll quickly feel like Vizzini from the Princess Bride — overthinking the mind games as you try to figure out which glass of wine contains the poison.

With three or four players, the change is simple but effective. Each player in a partnership has their own hand of cards — one of them plays a card face up and then the other plays a card face down. The other team discusses which one to take. At any player count, the game is lightning quick and completely gripping. When one spy suddenly catches the other, you’ll be eager to run it back again. 

While the standard game is basically perfect, it also includes an advance mode where you flip the board to a track that features four special spaces. These spaces (if landed on) grant special card abilities from the face-up display. Suddenly it’s not so bad to move backward one or more spaces if it gains you a special card.

Where many other bluffing games have failed to clear the bar, I think the key difference with Agent Avenue is that it allows for much more flexibility and creativity with your decisions. You’ll feel genuinely clever when your schemes unfold as planned, or you’ll all explode with laughter when they blow up in your face. Overall, Agent Avenue is easily one of the best surprises and best hidden gems of 2024. I had to order my copy directly from publisher Nerdlab Games to acquire it, but it was worth every penny.

Prognosis: Excellent

Altay: Dawn of Civilization

2 Plays (3 Players)

Picture this with me:  Imagine a game of area control on a shared map. Players each start out in their own corner of the land with an asymmetric faction. Over time, they slowly spread out — closer to each other and closer to the center — as they build a growing engine that generates increasingly more resources and points. They’ll stake their claims on different territories, and they might even clash from time to time, but the game mostly incentivizes them to build a robust engine and seek points through non-interactive means. If a player thinks they are in the lead, then they are further incentivized to rush the end-game before others can catch up.

Did I just describe Altay, or did I describe Scythe? The answer is yes.

To be fair, these are not at all the same game. One look at their components will make that obvious. But they absolutely feel quite similar in the itch they are trying to scratch. Both games feature smooth and generally fast turns. Generate some resources, spend them on upgrades and infrastructure, bolster your regions against nearby foes but mostly chart your own path through the individual engine building. While Scythe does this in the form of upgrading your personal action selection board, Altay does it through classic deck building and tech development.

The main source of variety you’ll encounter in your plays of Altay will be dictated by what cards enter your hand each turn and what technologies are currently available to develop. Perhaps you’ll increase your hand size or resource flexibility. Maybe you’ll gain the ability to thin your deck or simply cycle through it faster. Players are strongly incentivized to spend whatever resources they have, because only a few rare cards let you store any goods beyond your current turn.

Combat is just as clean as the rest of the game. Simply play one or more combat cards to attack an adjacent region and add the strength on your cards to the strength of your attacking territory (the number of settlements you have built there). The defender can likewise combine their territory strength with any combat cards they have. The winner claims a single settlement from the loser (worth a whopping 1 point, which is a lot in this game).

The main ways you’ll get points are through developing technologies, acquiring unique and expensive card types first, and spreading out across the map into as many regions as possible. But none of these really push players to interact with each other that much. Sure you can tussle over a territory or two, but the risk of failing an attack is often worse than the benefit of pursuing another strategy.

I suppose a player could opt for an extra-aggressive strategy of bullying everyone else around. You can certainly weaken your opponents’ engines by shrinking their control of the map. Or you can theoretically win the game outright by eliminating a player from the map and triggering the end game that way (instead of by building out your last settlement). But that seems like it would merely spoil the engine building part of the game, which is where Altay’s heart truly lies.

No doubt, Altay will find a fanbase who enjoys that Scythe-esque flavor of Cold War, engine building area control. But I got rid of my copy of Scythe, and I plan to do the same with Altay. This style of game just doesn’t excite me as much as it used to. For a game that combines deck building with area control, I strongly prefer another release from 2024 — Galactic Renaissance, which focuses more on the dynamic, tactical pivoting and cares less about the solitaire engine building.

Prognosis: Fair

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game

13 Plays (3 Players)

One of my favorite card games of the past decade is undoubtedly The Crew (both the Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea, although the latter kind of replaced the former). That seems to be the case for many folks, as this has also become one of the most popular card games of this century. It’s hard to dislike such a smooth, tense, and addicting cooperative trick taker as The Crew. But if you’ve always wished that The Crew had a better narrative arc, then you are in luck.

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game takes the core concept of The Crew and applies it beautifully to first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Each of its 18 chapters progresses through the major events of the novel while introducing new characters, challenges, and objectives along the way. The components are vibrantly illustrated with a stained glass art style that fits the classic nature of this story. Even the compact box is carefully sectioned off with a thoughtful insert and bookmarks to help save your mission progress as you journey beyond the Shire.

The core gameplay doesn’t stray too far from your classic trick taker. There are four and a half suits with only a single card (the One Ring) serving as a trump card. Players must follow suit unless they cannot, and only then may they play off suit and even throw down the ring suit (thus unlocking the ability for anyone to lead with a ring card). Frodo has a consistent obligation to win a certain number of ring cards (bring them in and bind them, I suppose), while all other characters have their own unique mission and sometimes a unique setup.

After seeing the first two thirds of the campaign, it really seems like the characters are the beating heart of this trick taker. You’ll constantly be meeting new personalities that bring their own thematic flavor to the card play. Pippin the Fool must win the fewest tricks. Gildor the High Elf must play a forest suit card in the final trick. Farmer Maggot the Brave stands up to the threat of the Black Riders and must win cards matching their rank.

It’s exciting to successfully complete one chapter and discover what surprises await you in the next. Although the initial chapters are not particularly difficult for experienced gamers (we only lost once during the first twelve chapters), we still found ourselves drawn in to the world. 

I do wish that the game felt more challenging at this point. Maybe it’s because everybody that I’ve played with has had plenty of experience with trick takers. More likely, it’s because we haven’t played with four players (which would give us smaller hands and one extra character challenge to overcome). I’m sure that playing the “long game” would be more difficult as well (where you have to play each chapter at least two or three times to complete all the character objectives rather than once to complete only the mandatory ones). But I haven’t had the patience to stick with a chapter for more than one victory.

It’s rare for a trick taker to earn seven or even three plays in a row at my table, and we easily could have gone further each night. Hopefully the difficulty will ramp in the third act as the gameplay surprises get weirder. At least it appears that The Fellowship of the Ring isn’t afraid to shake things up dramatically. One early chapter removes an entire suit from the deck and turns it into a neutral player of sorts that competes for each trick. We appreciated the variety that was often subtly inspired by story beats.

Combine these intriguing gameplay twists with a classic tale and you end up with a rock solid card game. True, it’s not as novel or innovative or challenging as The Crew was, but The Fellowship of the Ring is still satisfying somehow. Despite my lack of a consistent group (which hasn’t been a problem for the first 12 chapters), I’m eager to see this one through to the end.

Prognosis: Good

Nova Era

1 Play (3 Players)

Nova Era is one of a trio of $35 games releasing from CMON in 2025. This particular title boasts of being a full-blown civilization game that plays in roughly 60-90 minutes. While that sounds like a great value for only $35, I unfortunately found my experience with the game to be more agitating than anything else. 

To start off, it took us nearly half the game to figure out how many rounds we were supposed to be playing each age. The setup image tells you to place the round tracker in the wrong spot. The setup description is too vague to correct this mistake. So we ended up playing four rounds (instead of three) in the first age. After that felt a little bit off, we finally found the correct answer by digging deeper into the rulebook to see where the fine print clarified “three rounds per era.” 

I wish that was my only grievance. But seeing how we recently celebrated a Festivus for the Rest of Us, it still feels like the season to air any grievances… One particular issue I found with Nova Era is that it wants to be a three and four player game, but in so doing it gives the third and fourth player a subpar seat. Due to the unavoidable nature of mass and the geometry of tables, either these players have to somehow read roughly 30 small font cards upside down, or they have to sit on the sides, crane their necks the entire game, and still not be able to read the cards on the opposite end of the table. We’re talking about fitting 6 or 7 columns of cards plus a rectangular board onto the table (to say nothing of the personal player tableaus of cards and boards). With so many unique text-filled cards sprawling across the table, Nova Era is seemingly best for 2-players.

That sounds like too many cards to take in each era, but luckily the game only lets you acquire the cards at the bottom of each column… usually. We encountered a couple cards that let you take any card in the display. It’s a powerful ability, so that’s neat, but it means that your opponents will be waiting for you while you read through 20 or more cards and then decide which one to claim. Suddenly that card’s ability doesn’t feel so great anymore.

The fiddliness continues with the concept of Obsolescence. As you enter the second and third era, you’ll be acquiring technology cards that make other older cards with specific names obsolete. That’s great when you make your own cards obsolete (because you’ll score a point for each one, and points aren’t easy to come by). But it’s a pain to deal with when it forces every player to comb over 10 or 15 of their cards in their tableau (several of which are facedown and tucked partway under other cards) and several cards in their hand to see if they need to trash a specific card that is now obsolete. It’s such an awkward and derailing step to the flow of the game that happens far too frequently. It baffles me that nobody at CMON thought to put the names of the cards on their backs as well, as this would make checking for obsolescence a whole lot easer (and there is no hidden information in the game anyway).

Another frustrating problem we found with Nova Era is that it doesn’t bother to make player turns a smooth experience. The rulebook doesn’t clarify anything about the dozens upon dozens of unique card abilities that are frequently vague enough to interpret in multiple ways. Players are not given any aid or reminder about the seven possible actions they can take on their turn (or their unique costs and side-effects). There are two player aid cards to share among the four players, but these only cover the steps of each round and the meaning of the card icons. Better than nothing, I suppose.

There are some neat moments to the game… between all these headaches. My favorite aspect is how the dice are drawn from the bag, rolled, and split into groups of three across different dice tiles. Players then take turns claiming a bundle of dice, and if the total value is too high then their civilization’s unrest will increase. But you want the high dice because they will make it easier to afford the tech cards. Whatever trio of dice is not claimed will then increase the disaster tracks for the colors that match the dice. So there are some fun decisions to be made between making greedy grabs for the high dice, inching closer to crippling civil war on your unrest track, denying other players certain colors, and leaving certain dice out in the cold to cause a catastrophe.

I also dig the focused nature of the scoring. At the end of each era, you’ll get one point for each unique color of tech you have and one point for each color of tech that you have majority in. There are also a few tech cards and many personality cards that provide more objectives for minor scoring. It’s a tight race on the score track, which feels refreshing compared to many modern Eurogames that see players racing deep into triple digits.

At the end of the game, my friend made an observation that wasn’t meant to be a criticism, but it felt like an accidental dagger to Nova Era’s heart: “It’s like 7 Wonders with more steps.” And you know what? It really was. Sure, Nova Era has far more unique cards and card abilities, but at what cost? It all ended up being far more messy and cumbersome in practice than you would ever get out of 7 Wonders. On top of the grating physicality, there’s a whole lot of take-that going on in this game (which to be fair, is quite thematic for a civilization game). Players are constantly causing each other’s tech cards to be damaged (flipped face down), and some rounds you’ll feel like you are wasting all your dice just to repair them. I love an interactive game, but this typically isn’t the type of interaction I’m looking for.

Between a tiresome gameplay experience and an unclear rulebook that left far too many questions unanswered, I can’t say I’m eager to revisit the Era of Novas.

Prognosis: Poor

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

1 Play (3 Players)

I had the chance to try SETI recently, and I’m glad I did! This piping hot 2024 release has gotten a lot of attention due to the impressive blending of interesting mechanisms into a huge gaming stew. It was definitely an enjoyable experience, but it’s not one I’m keen to revisit anytime soon.

Like most of these hot and heavy modern Eurogames, SETI takes a couple solid hours of preparation just to get into your first game. The rulebook kinda throws you in the deep end and doesn’t try to define much of what it’s talking about, so hopefully you’ve had some good practice swimming in other gaming pools… otherwise you’ll probably just drown. If you’re reading for full understanding, then it’ll be a much slower read than what you are used to. SETI’s rulebook makes a lot of assumptions… What are the boundaries of a sector? Which spaces are comet spaces? What is the name of each of these icons? Ehh, you’ll figure it out. Or maybe you’ll resort to watching the 25 minute rules explanation video just to be sure.

I can’t fault SETI much for being such a strenuous learning experience. It is trying to accomplish a crap ton of stuff, after all. You’ll be managing your tight budget of resources and small hand of multi-use cards to navigate the eight action options and three-pronged primary objective. The goal is to find traces of alien life and eventually discover two alien races. Once discovered, these randomly selected aliens will introduce exciting new objectives and opportunities during the second act of the game.

Players will spend their turns launching probes into the spinning solar system, navigating to various planets, converting their probes into orbiters or landers, scanning nearby stars for information majority and data tokens, and analyzing data to make thrilling discoveries. The options are overwhelming initially, but you eventually get into a good groove thanks to the essential and thorough player aids. Kudos to whoever made those excellent player aids, those made it significantly easier to teach and play the game.

SETI reminds me a lot of titles like Ark Nova and Terraforming Mars, where the huge deck of cards are the star feature of the gameplay. A game like this will live or die by how good its deck is, and SETI offers plenty of flexibility, variety, and excitement within its huge deck. Honestly, I had nothing to complain about when I was playing the game. It was when I wasn’t playing the game that my problems with SETI arose.

I don’t love spending hours learning, prepping, and teaching a new game. And I’ll always prefer that a game be shorter than the four hours we spent with it during our initial play. But it kind of feels like a dealbreaker for players to be waiting 10 or 20 minutes at a time for a round to end after they have already passed. The problem with SETI is that when a player passes out of one of its five rounds, they have nothing to do but shoot the breeze until everyone else has stopped stretching their resources as far as possible. That’s not a big deal if somebody is waiting a couple extra minutes for their next turn. In the case of SETI, each player probably spent an average time of 30 or 40 minutes total just waiting around after they passed earlier than others. There are times where one player might spend all of their resources quickly on a few big actions, but if their opponents are on the opposite end of the action spectrum (taking frugal actions that grant even more resources), then it can end up being a loooong wait for that sorry soul who passed early.

SETI is also the type of game that encourages serious analysis paralysis. Each card has four possible uses, many of the eight possible actions are relatively expensive, resources are tight, objectives are many, and careful calculation is a must. If steam isn’t regularly coming out of your ears, then you should probably go see a doctor.

If nothing about what I said above is a dealbreaker for you, then you’re probably gonna love SETI. It’s a hulking mammoth of a modern Eurogame with a lot of satisfying decisions and interesting turns to be had. But proceed with caution — SETI does not necessarily value your time. If that much game time is too precious for you to place at the altar of SETI, then you are better off searching elsewhere for life.

Prognosis: Fair

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.

The post 1st Impressions of The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, SETI, Altay, Nova Era, and Agent Avenue appeared first on Bitewing Games.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Rebirth, Ethnos 2nd Edition, Fairy Ring, Lure, Intarsia, and Moonrollers. appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Courtisans

4 Plays (4-5 Players)

If Biblios and Botswana (aka Wildlife Safari) had a baby, a very evil baby, it would be Courtisans. It turns out that evil babies are fun.

Courtisans uses the basic player turn premise of Biblios — look at three different cards and put them in three different places. It then combines that idea with the shared investments and value manipulation of Botswana. Yet it also takes the passive aggressive rudeness of those two games and cranks up the savagery to eleven.

On your turn, you’ll look at your hand of cards and decide which one to keep, which one to give to another player, and which one to add to the banquet table. The banquet table functions as a way of determining whether each suit will be esteemed (worth positive points) or fallen from grace (worth negative points). This value is determined by simple majority — which side of the table has more cards of that color? If more cards of that suit are above the table, then it becomes a positive suit during end-game scoring, and you want lots of cards of that color in front of you (each card being worth positive 1 point). But if you or your opponents are working to sabotage a color, then you don’t want that color in front of you at the end of the game, otherwise it will put a dent in your score.

Most cards have no special ability, yet the fact that you can play them to a few different locations grants plenty of flexbility. Do you keep the card and hope it scores you a positive point? Do you nail another player with it if it looks to be worth a negative point? Do you manipulate the end-game value of that suit?  Do you award it to another player so they become invested in helping that suit be esteemed? 

These interesting decisions contain even more wrinkles thanks to the special ability cards. Each suit has several of them. The noble is worth two cards instead of one. The spy is played face down and only revealed at the end of the game. The assassin kills another card in the area it was played to. The guard is unkillable. These special roles introduce even more spice to a game that was already quite spicy. Players also each receive two secret objectives at the start of the game. These objectives push you to help or sabotage a specific suit or feed your neighbor a certain suit so they end up with more than you. For each objective you fulfill, you’ll get a bonus 3 points. 

As a quick 20-30 minute game, Courtisans delivers with funny and cutthroat moments. Competitive groups will have to decide carefully which players to target so that nobody runs away with an easy victory. And there will be plenty of opportunities to nail each other either out of petty revenge or cunning calculation. I’m always happy to find a new card game like this that is a hit with the entire group and begs repeat plays. 

Prognosis: Good

Ark Nova: Marine Worlds

1 Play (2 Players)

Ark Nova: Marine Worlds is exactly the kind of expansion that most fans want from the game — more deck mitigation, more card market flow, more animals, more card abilities, more strategic wrinkles, and fancy upgraded player pieces. Unfortunately for me, this expansion also represents the killing blow of my love of Ark Nova. Mind you, it’s not really the expansion’s fault that I stopped enjoying Ark Nova, at least not directly.

Ark Nova sadly followed the same doomed path that many past games of my collection have gone: 

1. Acquire new game and enjoy it over several plays.
2. Stop playing game for roughly a year while gaming tastes and preferences gradually morph over time
3. With the release and acquisition of a new expansion, finally have the motivation to revisit the game
4. Discover that I no longer enjoy the game as much as I used to
5. Sell the game and expansion

Many other titles have followed a similar trajectory including Dice Throne, Railroad Ink, Fort, Dice Forge, Downforce, Nidavellir, QE, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and Welcome To. Notably, most the expansions for these games were quite good (except for the painful Dice Throne Adventures and Welcome To: Outbreak). But the problem is that I unknowingly lost my love for a game and didn’t realize it until the expansion motivated me to revisit it.

In the case of our latest play of Ark Nova, I found myself impatient with the entire system. Rather than enjoying the huge zoo-themed sandbox, I felt the experience was too long, too convoluted, and too cluttered with effects and abilities. So while I believe that the expansion is good for the game, I feel that the game is no longer good for me.

But the expansion does feature exciting new opportunities for those who enjoy Ark Nova. At the start of the game, players draft powerful upgraded action cards (replacing 2 of the 5 with juiced up versions). These unique cards add another layer of starting asymmetry on top of the unique maps, and they feel great to utilize. My cards let me sell worthless sponsorship cards for money and mark animal cards on the display for bonuses. My opponent was able to pull off wacky exploits of her own with her cards.

The other most exciting feature is obviously the marine animals and the aquarium tiles that accompany them. Beside the additional variety they bring, these expansion cards introduce two new features:

1. A coral symbol found on many of the aquatic animal cards shows a bonus, and when played the coral symbol triggers all of the coral symbols in your tableau. This allows players to create a growing engine of bonuses if they lean hard into aquatic animals.
2. A wave symbol on many of the expansion cards causes the market row to flow more frequently by flushing the oldest card in the display.

You can tell that the design team aimed to address some of the biggest complaints of the core game. A faster flowing market means that players can more easily find specific cards they are looking for. There is even a new university tile that lets you dig through the deck for a specific animal type that you desire. 

Other components in this expansion add up to a well-rounded offering overall: more bonus tiles, more objective cards, more sponsorship cards, more variety for a game that was already packed to the gills with variety. I expect that most fans will find more to love about Ark Nova within its expansion. Sadly, I find myself no longer a fan due to the exhausting demands of the game — I simply find more fun out of playing multiple faster and more focused games in the same amount of time. But I still consider this a well-made expansion.

Prognosis: Fair

Klink 

3 Plays (3-4 Players)

Review copy provided by publisher

Klink is the kind of silly dumb filler game I’m happy to stumble across and bust out before or after a main event game. The fact that it comes in a small package and sells for dirt cheap at retail means it knows its purpose well. When Rebel Studio (publisher of MLEM, my favorite release of 2023) offered to send me a review copy of their new title, Klink, I was happy to take it for a test spin.

In Klink, 3-5 players are aiming to score the least points by the time the game ends (after a player reaches 77 points over multiple rounds of play). Each round, one player starts by grabbing two cards from the facedown deck, peeking at one of those cards, and then deciding whether to keep both or pass them along to another player. If kept, the cards are flipped and their values revealed. If passed along, the next player follows the same steps — peek at one card and decide whether to keep them or pass them along. You can only pass the cards to a player that hasn’t peeked at one of them, so if the cards get passed to all players then the last player is forced to keep them. The silver lining for this possibly unlucky player is that they start the next turn by grabbing two more cards from the deck and beginning the cycle anew.

Each card displays a number ranging between -5 and 20. Notably, there are no cards valued in the teens, and all of the cards (except the 20) have duplicates in the deck. Duplicates are very desirable in Klink, because just like Bitewing Game’s own Gussy Gorillas, a pair of numbers will cancel out (these get flipped face down but remain in front of the player). Pairs are almost always great, because usually you are erasing points (which are bad in this game). Furthermore, a run of 3 numbers is also desirable because earning this run allows you to utilize one of the face-up ability cards. These powerful cards let you do things like dump your bad card on another player, trade cards with another player, flip one or two of your cards face down, end the round immediately, and more.

So keeping positive value cards isn’t always a bad thing thanks to pairs and runs of three. And the final wrinkle that really makes Klink sing is end of round bonus points. A round ends when one or more players have 10 or more cards in front of them (face down or face up). Then players add up the face-up values in front of them for their round score, but the player with the most card gets rewarded with 10 negative points and the player with the least cards (but at least one card) gets penalized with 10 positive points. Any player with zero cards in front of them simply scores 0 points (which is hard to accomplish unless the group is exclusively targeting others in a round).

Klink offers players the tantalizing (but risky) decision of gunning for 10 cards to end the round and shed 10 points off their score. But that can easily backfire if they don’t get enough pairs to cancel out some of their higher cards. Having only a few cards is great for the end of round scoring… unless you have the least cards and get nailed with the bonus 10 point penalty.

The clever scoring system combined with the dramatic peeking, passing, keeping, and revealing makes for exactly the kind of filler game that hits the sweet spot for most groups with plenty of laughs and groans. Klink is a very swingy game with a whole lot of luck at its core, but it gets away with such antics by being surprising, exciting, and quick. A bit of electric energy is usually all I want from a filler game anyway.

Prognosis: Good

Heat: Heavy Rain Expansion

2 Plays (5-6 Players)

Heat lives up to its name by remaining one of the hottest board games on the market. And while it didn’t necessarily need an expansion yet to stay relevant, we’ve got our first one in the form of the Heavy Rain expansion. 

Heavy Rain comes with a set of components for a 7th player (the orange race car), a very welcome addition for any group that has that exact count on a game night. But the star of this expansion is found in the two new racetracks and additional car parts cards.

One of the race tracks features the titular “heavy rain…” sort of. It’s more about the aftereffects of heavy rain, namely puddles. These flooded spaces found in front of the corners of the Japan track make it harder for players to slow down. If you shift down a gear when you are on a flooded space then it costs you an extra heat. This forces players to either slow down earlier (to avoid the added heat penalty) or swallow the cost and possibly regret giving up that heat later. It’s not a huge game changer by any means, but it does introduce some welcome variety to the tracks.

Speaking of variety, both tracks introduce another new feature: chicanes. Chicanes are basically a double corner with the same speed limit and the same modifier (if you apply a road condition there). This makes it much harder for players to blast through a turn if it is a chicane because you are paying the heat penalty twice. So usually these become major bottlenecks that force all players to down shift significantly. Once again, it’s a feature that doesn’t feel drastically different from the usual Heat experience, but it does introduce a few new wrinkles to the decision making.

Finally the upgrade cards present a new ability called “super cool.” As a publisher, you know you’ve made a good board game when you can call a symbol the “super cool” symbol. This ability lets the player look through their discard pile and remove Heat cards from it (which go back on your Engine spot). That’s a huge advantage because Heat is a highly valuable resource that normally takes much more time and effort to get back after it has been spent — and that keeps it from clogging your hand as well! Good stuff.

All in all, Heat: Heavy Rain is neither an essential expansion nor a major “game changer.” It’s simply more variety for a solid game that was already filled to the brim with variety. It’s good new content, mind you, but certainly most sensible for groups who already get a lot of plays out of the base game.

Prognosis: Good

Expressions

5 Plays (3-4 Players)

Expressions is a quick cooperative card game of limited communication and clever deduction that reminds me in a lot of ways of The Crew. 

The deck is made up of 5 suits each numbered 1-10. Most of these cards are dealt out to the players, and the objective is to guess as many cards in each other’s hands as possible. On your turn, you can either guess a card in another player’s hand, or give a clue about your own hand. 

If you give a clue, then you’ll end up playing a card in front of you that gives information about the rest of the cards in your hand. That certainly makes it easier for players to figure out your hand and other players’ hands, but it comes at a cost. Each card played in front of you will end up on the “agony” side of the score pile (i.e., negative points). On top of that, the game has a countdown timer where cards that weren’t dealt out continuously get added to the agony side until the deck runs out and the game is over.

When you’re brave or confident enough to guess a card, it’ll either result in a big reward or a big penalty. A correct guess lets the guesser and guessee each discard a card to the “harmony” (positive point) side — and one of those cards is obviously the guessed card. An incorrect guess forces the real holder of the card to place it in agony (along with a bonus card from the guesser). Even just a handful of wrong guesses can cost you the entire game, because you need to have more harmony cards than agony cards in order to win.

The key to success in Expressions is giving out the best clues that allow for the most efficient guessing. Each card lets you play it in 4 orientations allowing for 4 possible clues. It can communicate to your teammates the following:

• This was the highest card in my hand of this suit
• This was the lowest card in my hand of this suit
• This was the last card in my hand of this suit
• I have more cards of this value in my hand

Those who are familiar with The Crew, another cooperative card game with limited communication, will notice that 3 of the 4 clues in Expressions are ripped straight from The Crew. Still, there are some key differences in how these games play out.

In Expressions, a clue stays displayed in front of you until it no longer applies. For example, if my red 8 was the highest card in my hand, it will stay in front of me as a clue until I run out of reds in my hand, at which point I finally discard the red 8. This kind of up-to-date information is obviously very useful to the rest of the table as they try to work out who is holding which exact cards.

Furthermore, the very act of guessing exact cards out of each other’s hands feels quite different and precise compared to The Crew’s more opaque information and flexible conditions.

To its credit, Expressions has always been enjoyable for the entire table every time we’ve played it. The only problem is that it exists in the same universe as The Crew, and it doesn’t fare well in terms of depth and longevity. While you can make Expressions more difficult for experienced players simply be cranking the round timer down, it still ends up feeling like the same challenge every time. Meanwhile, The Crew (both Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea) offer comparatively infinite challenges that present a much higher skill ceiling. 

The only thing that Expressions has it its favor is that it is slightly more approachable and easier to grasp compared to the starting missions of The Crew. But I’d rather walk newcomers through a couple quick intro rounds of The Crew before jumping into wackier scenarios than settle for another samey play of Expressions.

In the end, Expressions is a solid experience because it borrows many great ideas from The Crew. But if you’re going to throw your hat into the same ring, you better bring something significantly different or better, otherwise what’s the point?

Prognosis: Fair

Things in Rings

8 Plays (3-5 Players)

Things in Rings is one of the latest small box releases from our friends over at Allplay, and it is also one of their most unique. 

Players are racing to rid their hands of five colorful thing cards, charmingly illustrated by Snow Conrad with an obvious nod to Dr. Seuss artwork. These things must be placed into the proper area — either inside or outside of a Ven-Diagram of 3 rings. Each ring has a secret rule known only by the “Knower” — one rule relates to the word, another to the attribute, and another to the context. So the secret rules could be something like “Exactly 5 letters. Flammable. Only owned by wealthy people.” And players must deduce these rules by observing where the things end up over time.

If a player places a thing in the correct spot, they get to place another card. If they place it in the wrong spot, then the Knower repositions it to the correct place and the player must draw another thing card and end their turn. Simple as that.

Initially, you’ll work off of object association. If a sword goes into the blue ring, then surely an arrow goes there as well, right? WRONG. Usually. As you see more items get added to the rings, you’ll begin to recognize patterns. These are much easier to spot if you’ve played the game a few times, which gives a better grasp of what the possibilities are for the ring rules.

This is the type of game that usually breaks the brain of any newcomer on their first play. They’ll cautiously add a card to a ring only to get immediately corrected, and then watch in bewilderment as an opponent cracks the code and starts throwing down a stream of things in the correct places. That’s not a big deal because each game tends to last about 10 minutes. With a little more experience, they’ll have a better grasp of how to figure out the rules.

I’ve observed that some players simply don’t have the patience to get to that point. They’ll play the game once or twice and ask to move on to a different game. Either it never clicked for them and they felt lost the entire time, or they simply didn’t care for the challenge.

As for me, I’ve had a hoot with Things and Rings. As the Knower, it can be challenging to determine whether some things fit a rule or not. Sometimes you are making judgement calls based on the illustration of the card itself, or based on the average version of a given object. As long as you are consistent with your judgements, that should be enough to help players figure out the rules.

As a regular player, you’ll feel like a genius when you figure out the rule of one or more rings. You’ll even encounter a bit of emotional whiplash when you think you’ve solved a rule only for a unique object to enter the table and shatter your assumptions. It’s always funny when the table reacts to a newly positioned thing with shock and disbelief. I spent half of one game assuming that a context rule was “Can be used as a weapon” only to later find out that the real rule was “Useful.” 😆 What does that say about my psyche? Best not to let it trouble me too much and just laugh it off. Hey, my theory was bulletproof right up until mittens entered the ring.

Another highlight of the game comes after it is over, when one player has placed their final card (thereby winning the round) and the entire group tries to figure out what exactly the rules were before the Knower reveals them.

The game offers a huge deck of thing cards and a wide array of rule cards — each ranked with a difficulty of 1-3 stars. I don’t see this one running out of steam, even with a regular group. There is also a cooperative mode if you prefer to crown more than one player.

As far as deduction games go, there are very few that are as colorful, social, charming, quick, and addicting as Things in Rings. Furthermore, it forces you to think outside the box and recognize patterns in new and unusual ways. Recognizing those patterns and solving the ring rules is a constant delight for me. With the right group, Things in Rings is a triumph.

Prognosis: Good

Arcs

4 Plays (2-3 Players)

Review copy provided by publisher

I’ve been on an interesting journey with Cole Wehrle’s designs over the past few years. After finally talking myself into trying Root in 2020 and loving it, I immediately dove in Pax Pamir: Second Edition a month later. Both of these titles proved to become some of my favorite board games to play over the ensuing months and years, and that continued with the release of Oath and John Company: Second Edition. 

The reason Wehrle designs hit the spot for me is that they are such refreshingly unique and highly interactive experiences that stand out in today’s modern gaming landscape. They don’t shy away from situations of king making, dramatic swings of fortune, or brutal interactions. Cole is less concerned about keeping things fair or perfectly balanced and more concerned about allowing for memorable moments, brilliant comebacks, and dynamic politics.

The only problem with the Wehrle Way is that these games are all tough to get into and tough to get to the table. They don’t just demand a long rules explanation, but they also require a dedicated group of regular/repeat players. These games usually start out opaque and unwieldy and take multiple plays to fully grasp and appreciate. As much as Leder Games and Wehrlegig Games try to easily onboard newcomers, there is just no avoiding the fact that these boxes are optimized for deeper exploration rather than light sampling. For most publishers, this kind of product would be a tough sell. Unsustainable, even. Fortunately, when you’re the best in the business, a niche product such as these can attain more mainstream success. Yet that means you are all the more likely to end up with some curious gamers who wander in to this niche genre and completely bounce off their first play.

As I’ve relocated for work and changed my gaming groups in more recent years, I’ve sadly found it harder and harder to get Wehrle designs to the table. I just don’t have the consistent group of Wehrle-loving gamers like I used to. And thus games like Oath, which I last listed as my Number 1 Board Game of All Time, has only seen 1 play at my table in nearly 2 years. Root and John Company have likewise been better at collecting dust than anything else. Why expend so much energy teaching these games to my current gaming circles if I know that most of them won’t be dedicated or interested enough to make it a regular experience? I’ve come to accept that these games are currently in a hibernation phase until the right group reemerges someday.

Much of what I described above holds true for Arcs. It is still a Cole Wehrle game, after all. Yet for the first time in a long while, I finally have a glimmer of hope at enjoying the Wehrle Way more frequently moving forward. Unlike the other favorite titles mentioned above, Arcs manages to be more easily teachable and approachable than the rest. It also shakes out to be a shorter game on average. Mind you, it is still plenty difficult to grasp the strategies as a newcomer. It’ll take time and patience to really get good at. But by separating the heavy campaign from the core competition, the team at Leder Games has managed to remove more barriers to entry than ever before (at least for a Wehrle design). It’s enough to make me feel eager rather than exhausted at the prospect of teaching the game to newcomers. But then the next question becomes, “Is this a game worth teaching?” My answer is, “Absolutely.”

Arcs is aptly described as a “fast-playing space opera.” Meaning it successfully provides a lot of the meaty sci-fi goodness of titles like Twilight Imperium, Eclipse, or other huge 4X games in a more condensed experience. Sure, it may technically be missing an X or two from its gameplay, but it still manages to feel epic and dynamic nonetheless. It gives players a fascinating blend of tools and objectives, allowing them to pursue a variety of unique strategies. Perhaps you’ll work to expand your faction, build up your economy, and stockpile valuable resources that can grant both huge benefits and major points. Maybe you’ll amass a fleet of ships and use it to bully others around — collecting their corpses as trophies and raiding their settlements for loot. Or maybe you’ll seek to influence the court with your agents and secure for yourself a powerful tableau of card abilities while taking rivals captive along the way.

To categorize Arcs as just an “area control” game or a “tableau builder” would be a disservice to its depth and scope. It’s possible for any single play to be heavily one and very lightly another, and that can be different for each player within the same session. But one core thread that is inescapable, regardless of how the meta takes shape, is that of hand management and trick taking. The gears of this space opera are spun and greased by the cards that are dealt to and played from your hand in each Chapter of the game. Each Chapter is made up of multiple rounds, each of which are essentially a trick where one player leads with a suit and all others must copy, surpass, or pivot to another suit. 

By participating in this trick, you’ll dictate both who leads the next trick and what actions you’ll take on your turn. When you lead or surpass in a trick (play a higher number of the lead suit), you get to use your card to its fullest, meaning all of the action pips displayed on the card are yours to fully use. If instead you are copying the lead suit or pivoting to another suit which provides different actions, you only get one morsel of an action to spend on your turn. That can feel like a huge difference when some of the cards display a whopping four action pips.

When other players are taking two or three or four times as many actions as you, you’ll feel an immediate urgency to seize control of the initiative (i.e. win the trick) as quickly as possible. But when you have the initiative, you’ll be tempted to lead with a weaker card because the lower values display more action pips. Arcs is ripe with tough trade-offs such as this, and thus it makes every single turn feel extremely important. 

Another tough decision comes in the form of when to declare an ambition. Declaring an ambition is how you determine the scoring objective of a chapter, and this can only be done three times per chapter. With five possible ambitions available to be declared, and the possibility of declaring the same ambition more than once, it is very possible that the area in which you are strongest simply won’t score out in a given Chapter. Only the player with the initiative can declare an ambition, and thus Arcs doubles down on the importance of gaining initiative. But declaring an ambition (I.e. tilting the scoring objectives in your favor) opens yourself up to a world of pain. You’re likely to lose initiative right away because your played card gets reduced to a zero. You’ve also put a target on your back where players will expend the rest of their hand striving to undermine and outcompete you. 

Under such circumstances, it is safer to declare an ambition late in the Chapter when players have much less time to counteract you. The only problem is that the ambition scoring decreases in value after the first and second time they are declared in a Chapter… it’s hard to score big if you aren’t willing to take risks. Arcs rarely makes things convenient, and nowhere is this more true than with the hand you are dealt.

One major feature that players must come to terms with is this: Arcs is a game of adaptation and pivoting. If you set out with a rigid strategy and hope to be dealt the perfect cards to fit that strategy, you will likely come away frustrated… much like a ruler is frustrated by the limitations of their power and influence. You have to learn how to make the most of the opportunities of each hand.

Fortunately, Arcs provides plenty of flexibility in how you use your hand, but that isn’t immediately apparent to newcomers. If you’re dealt a diverse hand of high-value cards, that is probably easiest to grasp — simply gain and maintain control of initiative, taking whatever actions you please when you please. If you’re dealt a hand of low cards, then you’ll need to seize the initiative one or more times — burning an extra card now to set yourself up for a big next turn. If you find your hand lacking in one or more key suits, then you’ll have to let another player take the lead so you can copy their suit, and you’ll have to make the most of each single action turn. Furthermore, it helps to store up on resources (either through taxing or raiding) which grant bonus actions when spent.

If your hand of cards isn’t already enough to keep you on your toes, then the court of Guild and Vox cards will certainly round things out. These powerful cards can trigger massive events or grant valuable abilities to help you outcompete your rivals. In our plays, they’ve proven to be hotly contested both in initially acquiring them and thereafter fighting over them.

Speaking of fighting, Arcs has one of the most satisfying combat systems I’ve ever seen in a game. Not only is it robust, but it’s also elegant. The attacker will simply choose as many dice as they have ships to fight with, and then the drama ensues. By providing three different types of dice to choose from, each with their own strengths and drawbacks, Arcs provides many delightful surprises with the results. With a quick selection of dice and a single cast upon the table, combat is over in the blink of an eye yet consistently delivers excitement. And thankfully, Arcs is a game that invites and entices you to constantly be at each other’s throats, even from round one.

Perhaps this comes as no surprise, but Arcs is easily one of my favorite releases of this year, or even of recent years. After four plays, and also thanks to the included Leaders and Lore module (which introduces a bit of asymmetry upon setup), I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game. There is undoubtedly plenty more depth to uncover and surprising new situations to enjoy. And that is all to say nothing of the Blighted Reach Expansion which layers a replayable 3-act campaign on top of this system (I hope to try it soon). Thanks to its relatively lower barriers to entry, Arcs looks to become my go-to Wehrle game for the foreseeable future, and I’m very happy about that.

Prognosis: Excellent

Coming in October

Bitewing Games is launching a “Secret Epic Big Box Knizia Game” in October on Kickstarter. It may very well go down as the biggest Knizia game we ever launch, by a long shot (no, it is not Tigris & Euphrates). More details to come… In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to the Bitewing Games Newsletter so you don’t miss out on the grand reveal.

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Arcs, Things in Rings, Courtisans, Ark Nova: Marine Worlds, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Iki

2 Plays (3 Players)

Iki appears to be one of those strange late bloomers that came out in 2021 but didn’t really cause waves until this past year. I had never heard of it until very recently, and then suddenly everyone had Iki fever. I’m the kind of gamer who is normally inoculated against these modern trendy Eurogames, but curiosity got the best of me and I trusted the buzz enough to pick up a copy.

I do generally enjoy these types of games when I get to try them. If they are well designed and engaging then it’s hard not to get invested in the challenge. In truth, my main reluctance stems from the time and energy required to learn and teach such designs. My mind grows weary of all the rules and rulebooks that I have piled upon it in recent years. “Are we really doing this again?!” My brain laments any time I bathe it in a recycled stew of medium-weight mechanisms. It’s much less resistant to a new game when I know the title is truly refreshing, unique, innovative, or elegant. The modern Eurogame, being one of the most heavily trodden and increasingly complexified genres in the hobby, is one that rarely looks fresh on the outside.

But power through Iki’s rulebook, I did. Everything seemed in order, as expected. You have your action rondel in the middle, allowing for track advancement and resource exchange. You have your tableau card market off to the side, granting income and further action options. And you have your mix of lucrative tokens and cards where players can collect sets or gain private scoring opportunities. Everything is in order, indeed.

But somehow Iki manages to provide an experience that is more than the sum of its familiar parts. It’s the kind of comfort food Eurogaming that every new title dreams to achieve. Iki’s secret sauce is hard to put my finger on. Perhaps the key ingredient is found in the charming theme of progressing through the seasons, establishing shops and artisans, interacting with these welcoming vendors, watching them retire with grace or suffer a perilous fiery fate. Or maybe the real MVP is the layers of tension, incentives, and considerations as players vie for precise rondel movement and critical action turn order. Or could it be that a tight economy, impactful interactions, and meaningful variety are the simple but solid answers to this surprisingly satisfying conundrum? I suppose Iki’s magic comes from all of the above.

Prognosis: Good

Palmyra (Buy Low Sell HIgh)

1 Play (4 Players)

Group SNE, reliable as ever with their production and box size, just put out a new Japanese edition of Palmyra (aka Buy Low Sell High) — a nearly 30 year old design from Reiner Knizia. Of course, there isn’t an English word to be found in the rulebook, but when has that stopped me?

Palmyra is a simple and pure stock investment and manipulation game that feels familiar in a lot of ways. That doesn’t stop it from feeling satisfying when a big investment pays off. On their turn, players are allowed to buy or sell up one of each of the three goods types. Or they can double down by buying or selling two goods of one type. Then they’ll play a card to the board to influence the end of year value of an industry.

Like Knizia’s Classic Art or Modern Art, the values of the various industries will gradually take shape as players thrust their paws into the market. One good promises to skyrocket in value, another holds steady, another looks to drop. Meanwhile, the purchases and sales (demand and supply) influence the immediate value of the next transaction. It’s a clean and clever stock manipulation game marred only by the excessive math required with every transaction. Each player’s scoring disc (i.e., their money) launches up and down the track like an economic yo-yo.

The deck of cards is just varied enough to be interesting yet still trackable. Some cards cause the end of year values of goods to surge or shrink. Other cards, contracts, will payout bonuses to the players who currently own the corresponding goods. One card of each suit will instantly tax all the players who are hoarding those colored goods; this card lays bare the twisted satisfaction that presumably comes from being an IRS employee. And finally, one card of each color serves as a “mirage,” erasing the future effects of a previous card that was played.

It’s classic Knizia, shared incentives and all. I found myself quite amused by it. Yet I couldn’t help but wish that somehow all that arithmetic could be stripped away. Give me something a bit more pure, less demanding on the score track, more timeless and approachable, and I’ll be happy as a clam. I came away day-dreaming of such a game that could hit that sweet spot… That’s when I remembered that it already exists. Botswana (aka Wildlife Safari) is that exact game, and Reiner had designed it two years prior to Palmyra.

Prognosis: Fair

Harmonies

1 Play (4 Players)

Harmonies is yet another low interaction take and make game that rides on the coattails of nearly indistinguishable predecessors including Cascadia, Reef, Calico, and Azul: Queen’s Garden. That outta be enough to scare off some of you and pique the interest of others. It’s a very popular genre as of late, so I suspect a lot of folks will love it anyway.

In Harmonies, you’ll grab a trio of tokens from the display of options and decide how to arrange and stack them on your personal player grid. Brown tokens are wood — making the trunk of a tree or foundation of a building. Fields like to come in pairs or larger, otherwise what’s the point? Mountains likewise get lonely if they are left on their own. Rivers want to stretch far. Buildings are only valuable if they are surrounded by variety. Perhaps “Harmoneedy” would have been a more fitting title.

Speaking of needy, the various colors of discs and their unique scoring conditions aren’t the only demands placed on players. Layered on top of this foundation is the deck of animal cards. These cards display highly specific arrangements of tokens and stacks, and players can earn more points by replicating these arrangements one or more times. Like the drafting board of tokens, players can draft 1 card from the display to start working on it as a personal objective. You can only hold 4 incomplete cards at once, so the pressure is on to claim the right cards and clear them quickly to make room for more scoring potential. 

It’s a fine game with a pretty production that squarely targets the latest trend in board gaming. There are enough priorities to chew on that you’ll have to pick and choose which ones to really pursue. And it certainly helps to pick up the card types that other players are ignoring — that means less token competition on the drafting board. Aside from that, you’ll spend your time pretending that your fellow competitors aren’t even there… save for when they occasionally steal your desired items from the middle, or when they fall prey to analysis paralysis and slow the pace down as they decide what to take and how to place it. Our group of players quickly began to skip to the next turn the moment a player took their stuff — there was no point in waiting for somebody to arrange their newly acquired tokens and put out their animal cubes. In other words, there was no point in really caring what other players were up to.

All of this culminates in a grand finale of tallying up the 12 different ways that each player scored points on their private board. And by reasons known only to them, one player ends up with the highest number.

I’m not sure what makes Harmonies stand out in this increasingly crowded genre. Perhaps it is merely trying to be the flavor of the week… look pretty, snag an award nomination, rake in a bunch of easy sales, and then fade into oblivion. For those who love this type of game, I’m happy for you. I get it, it’s like catnip. My catnip is the inverse of this game — simple tile placement on a shared board with entangled interactions and incentives. I could play 100 different games in that genre and not grow tired of it.

We all have our own favorite flavors in this hobby. Harmonies isn’t the type I crave.

Prognosis: Poor

A Message from the Stars

3 Plays (2 & 3 Players)

The long awaited day is here! We’ve made contact with alien life and it is finally time to build our relationship via the power of… algebra… and the English alphabet.

Joking aside, those who don’t find the joy in math codes, alphabetical deduction, and word clue conjuring would be wise to steer clear of this sci-fi themed logic game. As cool as it sounds to communicate with extraterrestrials, there are certain gamers who will find nothing fun within this kind of experience. Might I suggest Cosmic Encounter, instead?

But for those of us nerds who are into such puzzly challenges, A Message from the Stars can certainly hit the spot. In this cooperative or team-based game, the objectives are twofold: Deduce the six letters sitting behind the alien’s screen, and deduce the six keywords on each species’ message card. Both of these obstacles are met via the sharing of clues and codes. The alien hands the humans a written clue with a numeric value. The word hints at their message and the letters and number hint at their secret alphabet cards. The humans record any logic they can pull from these hints and then respond with a written clue of their own which comes back with a numeric value from the alien.

The puzzle is solid, but as mentioned your enjoyment mileage may vary. This kind of game is either going to be intellectually stimulating or emotionally empty. I’d wager that if you love Turing Machine (another popular deduction game) then you’ll be right at home here. I for one much prefer A Message from the Stars because it is immensely more interactive. Even at a quiet and contemplative 2-players, you feel invested in each other’s efforts and success. There is also a team-based mode for 4 or more players that I haven’t tried, but I suppose it would be a good time given the proper niche group of players with similar tastes.

A lot of your brain power (whether you are alien or human) is spent trying to cram certain letters into your word clue. You’ll wrack your brain for the perfect word that connects to the topic and includes letters that you either wish to eliminate or highlight within the deduction process. The word will then get converted into a numerical value which scrambles the meaning of each letter. It’ll take several solid words with a diverse and careful array of letters before the humans can really connect the dots with the cryptic values they’ve been given.

At the end of it all, when the players make their final guesses as to the alien’s letters and each side’s words, you’ll be left with a score out of 12 points. There’s no real pass or fail (unless you are playing against another team). You tally up your correct guesses and call it a day. It’s certainly satisfying to nail the correct letters and words. And if that’s too easy for your group, then you can cut down the number of clues, as the rulebook suggests.

A Message From the Stars fulfills its promise as a satisfying deduction puzzle for those who are into these kinds of challenges. It won’t change anyone’s mind about the genre, but it does hit the sweet spot.

Prognosis: Good

Pax Penning

1 Play (4 Players)

Fellow dentist from overseas, Matilda Simonsson, has crafted another fascinating satchel game along the lines of Turncoats but now with even more meat on the bone.

Pax Penning follows in the prestigious line of Pax games by offering a dynamic shared incentives experience with a tight economy and shaky alliances. Yet, to its credit, it also lands itself as perhaps the least complicated Pax game ever conceived. The abstract, elegant production alludes to this simplified system. Yet there is still plenty to give newcomers a headache between the branching victory conditions and a sometimes frustratingly vague rulebook.

Like most games in this genre, I had to read the rulebook through multiple times and watch a lengthy playthrough video just to understand what players are supposed to be doing and why. That’s due in part to the lack of clarifications and examples in the rules, but also due to the opaque and slippery nature of the gameplay.

At its core, players must decide whether to support the king and his feeble economic attempts or to go it alone and try to come out on top. As a loyalist to the throne, you’ll work to increase the king’s reputation while flaunting your loyalty to the community. If he does succeed in his political goals, then the most loyal player will win. If he fails, then the player who is highest in the hierarchy comes out on top. 

But victory is not as simple as pushing your token or the king’s token to the top of the hierarchy track. The most devious and delightful rule in this entire game comes in the form of glass stones that sit in the economic space of the board and hide behind each player’s screen. These stones represent various things including favors, gifts, marriages, and debts that each house gains or possesses. 

The stone’s effect is most prominent at the conclusion of the game: the winning player reveals the hidden stones behind their screen, and whoever has the most stones there steals the victory… but then they reveal the stones behind their screen and might give up their stolen victory to another thief… and on and on it goes until a house that has its affairs in order has been reached or until an infinite loop of stolen victories is uncovered. In the latter case, a coalition is formed and it is possible for all players within that coalition to win the game in a joint victory.

Thanks to the possibility of coalitions, joint victories, and economic dependency, players have plenty of reasons to help each other out. Players will gradually get their runestones out onto the board, and any time a pawn passes over one the owner gets to insert a stone from behind their screen back into the economy. It’s always good to keep your economy flowing, either to purge opponent stones out of your supply or to seed your own stones behind rival screens. As the game unfolds, you’ll have to wager which player is best positioned for victory and then work hard to establish majority influence in their house. It’s possible to form an alliance, either spoken or unspoken, by feeding each other your stones. But certain actions such as the bishop allow a player to secretly transplant a handful of stones from their screen to another player’s screen. So betrayals are just as possible as coalitions.

Like squinting through a fog, it takes time to gain a sense or vision for good strategies and meaningful decisions. The first step toward success is getting all of those branching victory conditions and tiebreakers straight. But that’s a bit like untangling the heads of a Hydra… many players aren’t likely to thrive in their first play. If Pax Penning were 30 or 45 minutes, then that wouldn’t be a big deal. But despite its relative simplicity, this one runs closer to two hours. 

For a Pax game, two hours is pretty standard. But for a Pax game that is abstract, streamlined, and lacking a large variety of cards, two hours can start to feel repetitive. Each turn you are only taking two of five possible actions, and they all serve the core purpose of gaining and redistributing stones as you jostle for hierarchy power. With actions this simple that are taken across three increasingly longer eras, it almost feels like the arc of the game takes place in slow motion. They aren’t necessarily short turns, either. First you beg your neighbors for stones (favors) to gain more dice to roll. Then you roll the dice and hope for pairs. Then you decide how to use those pair bonuses. Then you decide which two dice to use on which actions and execute those actions. Then you perform cleanup. 

There are some satisfying decisions to be had with your turns, but it gradually feels more watered down as the game overstays its welcome. It’s certainly possible for the game to end much sooner (if enough people support or advance the king), and the ending is likely to be thrilling regardless as players reveal the majorities behind their screens, but I’d much prefer a consistently compact length for this type of game.

Prognosis: Fair

Knarr 

3 Plays (2 & 3 Players)

Knarr isn’t normally my type of game. You know the kind: Splendor-like engine building and point gathering in a low interaction competition. There are so many games of this crop that have sprung up over the past 15 years that for me they all start to blur together. It’s so common that the running joke in the industry is calling the latest flavor a “Splendor Killer.” Knarr should be no exception to this long line of dead horse beatings… but it kind of is.

Knarr is a game of recruiting Vikings to your clan and sending them on voyages. In other words, it’s a game of adding cards to your tableau, triggering bonuses, and spending those cards for points and more bonuses. It’s that last part that puts Knarr a step above its great ancestor. Rather than simply watching your purchasing power and point stream go up at a plodding rate, you get to decide whether to keep firing the old engine or send it off to sea. And that decision isn’t as binary as I make it out to be… it is more of a spectrum.

You always start your turn by gaining points according to your reputation. The higher you push your reputation, the faster you’ll reach the finish line. First player to 40 points wins. But reputation is merely one of a handful of strategies for racing to the top. Any time you play a card to your tableau, you activate all the cards of that color for gaining bonuses. Those bonuses increase your score, up your reputation, or gain you resources. Instead of playing a card, you can spend some Vikings from your tableau to gain a more powerful land card. These can offer big points, handy resources, and increase your income whenever you spend bracelet tokens (a bonus option on every turn).

None of this sounds all that revolutionary or interesting. But the enjoyment of Knarr comes in pursuing a specific engine strategy (out of a few engaging options) and running it for a quick 20 or 30 minute sprint. While it can be a little too easy at times to forget to score your reputation points at the start of your turn, the rest of the game is as clean as a whistle. Knarr takes the sleepy engine building of Splendor and crams it into a smaller package with more dynamic decisions. In both form and function it packs a big punch as a snappy filler.

Prognosis: Good

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Harmonies, Iki, Knarr, Pax Penning, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Through the Desert: Bazaar Expansion

2 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

After 26 years of existing as one of the greatest strategy games of all time, Through the Desert finally gets its first official expansion (unless we’re counting the river side of the game board which was added to later editions). The Bazaar Expansion introduces four modules that you can mix and match however you please (although I don’t recommend playing with all four — that just feels like too many condiments for one game).

Rival Nomads introduces two public goal cards (out of ten possible options) that players compete over for end-game bonus points. In our particular play, these cards granted bonus points to the player who connected to the most oases and to the player who had the most camels along the river. Notably, the oases and river already grant points by connecting to or crossing over them, respectively, so Rival Nomads merely made these two features the obvious/dominant strategy for better or worse. While other players went heavily after enclosing border spaces (and I did very little to stop them), I set up my own caravans all near the river and between oases. By focusing heavily on the objective cards, I was able to earn both of them and end up with a much bigger final score, even when compared to players who had enclosed a ton of spaces. I don’t mind this module for mixing up the incentives, but I ultimately prefer Through the Desert without it because it keeps the various strategies more balanced against one another.

The Djinns module is nothing but sixteen more cards that add some wacky unpredictability and swingy luck to the experience. Every time a player earns oasis points, at the end of their turn they reveal a new Djinn card that forces a new rule upon the entire table until it is replaced by the next Djinn card. These forced rules include things like: “Must place at least 1 red camel” or “Cannot place green camels” or “Place 3 camels” or “Place only 1 camel” or “Cannot place camels on watering hole tokens” or “Cannot place camels on border spaces.” It’s an amusing way to force more adaptation onto the experience… until it isn’t. I enjoyed when the group couldn’t place purple camels out so I took advantage by sneaking my own non-purple caravan around an enemy’s purple caravan that could do nothing but watch me invade their territory. But I mostly felt bad when my friends were barred from finishing their large enclosures during the final turns because we couldn’t use red camels at all. Ultimately, the swingy luck did as it tends to do and randomly favored one player far above the rest (in this case, it was the most experienced player who didn’t need the extra help). After seeing how that first session played out, I’m not inclined to use the Djinns module ever again.

So the cards are definitely the weakest part of the Bazaar expansion, at least for my tastes. But the good news is that the other two modules more than compensate for the Rival Nomad’s and Djinn’s shortcomings. Perhaps the simplest module of this pack is the Special Watering Holes. These tiles replaces some of the basic 1, 2, 3-point tiles with more interesting bonuses: an extra camel or a trade good. An extra camel tile can be spent immediately or during a later turn to put out, you guessed it, an extra camel beyond the standard 2-per-turn. It’s a really nice way of granting players a few big turns during the game where they can lunge to reach a bonus or close off an area. The trade good tiles offer a spicy bit of push-your-luck where the first tile is worth nothing, but a pair of tiles is worth 10 points. This is the type of module that I’m happy to welcome into the fold for basically any plays of Through the Desert.

Last but not least, the titular Bazaar module introduces one additional strategy to consider as you race to claim water holes, reach oases, enclose areas, and build the longest caravans of each color. To put it simply, Bazaar wants you to connect stuff. Along the outer border of this new version of Through the Desert, you’ll spot a new feature on the maps: villages. Villages want to link up with the bazaars in the middle of the map, but they’ll need your caravans to do it. By linking a village to a bazaar, you’ll get to claim the top tile of that bazaar that starts at a whopping 15 points but then reduces to 10, then 5, then 0. You can even claim multiple tiles from the same bazaar by using different caravan connections or by linking one bazaar to multiple villages. This module is a really great way of mixing up the formula and adding urgency to the incentives with racing and blocking. I’m a big fan of that Bazaar module.

Ultimately, one can’t deny that this new expansion to Through the Desert is completely inessential. That’s not a knock against the expansion… the base game is just that good. One could play vanilla Through the Desert a hundred times and not grow tired of it. There is a reason this game has lasted for decades. And it doesn’t help the expansion’s case any that these new cards and tiles don’t fit in the already crowded base game box (unless you are ok with box lift). That said, for only $19, the Bazaar expansion offers some interesting and worthwhile concepts if you do want to mix the game up a bit. My deck of cards may never see the light of day again, but I’m happy to keep the tiles in on rotation.

Prognosis: Good

Innovation

2 Plays (2 Players)

My exploration of 2-player gaming continues with the revered card game, Innovation, by classic Carl Chudyk. I’ve never played a Chudyk design before, despite his reputation, so it was good to finally give one a try. And while I enjoyed my first play of Innovation, I didn’t expect to be revisiting it any time soon (my main 2-player gaming partner hated it), but fortunately I got a second crack at it with another gaming friend.

Innovation is a game that cares about one thing and one thing only: multi-use cards within a civilization setting. While the gameplay itself is rather streamlined, the uses of these cards stray into the wacky and wild thanks to their unique text abilities. On your turn, you choose two actions from four possible options: draw a card, play a card to your tableau, activate a tableau card’s ability, or claim an achievement card. The game smartly caters to two possible strategies: race to claim a specific number of achievements to win outright, or build up a huge point stash for when the built-in timer runs out.

The star feature of the game is the text abilities, and they fundamentally include another key twist. When the active player triggers a text ability, all other players get to use that ability if they have at least as many of that icon displayed in their tableau as the active player. If the text ability is an attack against others, then other players can nullify this attack if they have at least as many icons of that type in their tableau. So one major influencer of the game is that of icon majorities. You want the majority in as many icons as possible so you can leech off of opponent abilities and defend yourself against opponent attacks. It’s great that each card has multiple reasons why you might wish to play it to your tableau — the unique ability it offers and the displayed icons it provides.

When adding a card to your tableau, it covers the last played card of that color. So you can build 5 stacks of cards with the top ability of each stack being available to you. But another twist here comes in the form of splaying your stacks. Certainly abilities will let you splay your color stacks to expose more icons from older cards.

Innovation provides a tremendous arc of gameplay by starting out in the Stone Age with weak actions and opportunities but quickly ramping up into much more powerful abilities and combos. I can see how Chudyk earned his fans by getting so much use out of deck of cards with a simple system. But all of this gameplay variety and evolution comes at cost, and that cost is tons and tons of card text.

This game may very well be the best of its class for having a streamlined ruleset with massive and chaotic potential, but it is not for everyone. Innovation is less about outwitting your opponent within an open information playing field and more about wacky opportunism. The challenge is to scan your hand, scan your tableau, scan your opponent’s tableau, and then uncover the best possible decision in the moment. It’s about figuring out the best card to play or the best ability to trigger right now, and then doing it. There’s no point in establishing a major long term strategy when a single opponent ability can wipe out your hand or your score pile or your tableau. Yet it is still possible to execute a good plan across multiple turns — just don’t grow too attached to that plan in case you need to pivot. The only thing they can’t touch is your achievement pile.

That means you get plenty of moments of surprise attacks, last-minute scrambles, and tactical lunges. It’s a game that keeps you on your toes from start to finish — the more nimble player will win. But it’s only enjoyable if you are willing to let the craziness sweep you away. It’s only worthwhile if you find endless wordy abilities to be exciting rather than exhausting.  Innovation is sadly not a good fit for my main Player 2, but I enjoyed it nonetheless (and even more on the second play). Even after only two plays, what starts out overwhelming and taxing quickly becomes more familiar and exciting. I can already sense how this one will continue to reward repeat plays.

Despite my partner’s distaste for the game, Innovation is unique and refreshing enough that I’ll happily go out of my way to show it to others who are interested. Just like the achievement rules themselves, nothing can take away from Innovation’s achievements as a robust and thrilling card game.

Prognosis: Excellent

Apiary

1 Play (3 Players)

I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Apiary. Not that I thought it would be a bad game… I just didn’t expect it would be a game for me.

The feature that sent my sirens blaring was the abundance of text and icons across the game board and its components. The problem with splaying out a lot of text heavy tiles and cards across a game board is that anybody sitting on the upside-down end of the table will end up with a headache while everyone comes away with neck and back pain from all of the squinting and reading required of them.

It probably helped that us three players sat on the left and right sides of the board, as close as we could to the items on display. Even so, there were times where I had to stand up and hunch over just to read the tiles on the opposite end of the board. Perhaps this all sounds like an old man shaking his fist at the clouds. I not old, though. I’m just spoiled by too many other games that don’t ask me to crane over them and scan a bunch of text across my table.

At any rate, games with these demands can still be enjoyable to play — as long as you have the energy and the juice is worth the squeeze. In the case of Apiary, I’m happy to have enjoyed the session. The key benefit that this abundance of text brought was seemingly a ton of variety found in the gameplay and opportunities.

A market of planets, cards, and tiles provide a wealth of strategic avenues for players to explore. My starting board and faction set me off to become the resource guy — earning resources for days to then convert them into valuable honey. I doubled down on this strategy by acquiring more options to gain easy resources and by upgrading my honey converter. Based on the many other abilities I saw (those left in the box as well as those that came and went on the game board), it seems that my strategy in a future game would end up feeling very different, which is great.

The core loop of Apiary is found in the use of worker bees that gradually improve in their effectiveness over time until they are ready to hibernate. While there are several worker placement regions you can send your bee off to, you are never blocked from a space. Rather, Apiary has its players bumping each other back home (and leveling up the bumpee in the process). Eventually you’ll max out at a value 4 bee, which becomes a super-powered action when used, before it goes into hibernation (reseting to a 1 and granting you a bonus).

There is a welcome bit of interaction found in how players bump each other out of spaces (effectively saving them the trouble of spending a turn to call back their bees) or how they race to claim certain bonuses first. Kwanchai Moriya’s artwork is great as usual, and the fancy worker bees are fun to handle. The graphic design does its job well to get out of the way and get you playing the game.

Aside from the few little twists mentioned above, Apiary doesn’t stray far from the standard modern Eurogame formula. At the end of the day, it’s another worker placement game that sees players collecting and storing resources, converting those resources into other resources, upgrading their personal tableau/engine, claiming expensive point-scoring items, and refreshing workers as needed. Rather than try to revolutionize or upend the genre, it merely tries to refine it. Fortunately, it does a pretty decent job at that. I enjoyed the general flow and focus, and it didn’t overstay its welcome. Maybe we should let these space bees take over the galaxy, after all. 

Prognosis: Good

Wonder Bowling

2 Plays (5 and 6 players)

One of the more recent Funbrick titles from Japanese publisher Itten is Wonder Bowling – a game with tiny bowling pins to set up on top of the box and a mallet to knock them over. 

The premise is very simple: you get up to two attempts to strike the box (not the pins) and knock over one or more pins. Easy, right? The problem is that if you knock over all of the pins (or no pins at all), then you bust. When you bust, you take a penalty by adding another objective tile to your supply, which puts you further away from winning the game.

Objective tiles want you to either knock down a specific number of pins (so that the number of remaining standing pins matches your tile number) or knock down all the pins but the last one (a strike). So there will be times where you want to knock down a ton of pins and times where you only want to knock down one or a few. First person to complete their objectives or last person standing wins. Players will quickly find themselves eliminated if they bust after all the extra objective tiles have been claimed. Total elimination seems to be the most common outcome for this game… either that or our play groups are a bunch of clumsy bowlers.

The strategies that players use to strike the box are amusing to watch. Some strike from above like a hammer and try to trampoline the pins off. Others swing it from the side like a wrecking ball that pushes the box laterally. Others give it a gentle tap in hopes of knocking just one pin over. No matter how you do it, the key to success is in how hard you swing… and while that sounds easy enough to control, in practice I’ve seen a few players struggle. 

Some people seem to only have two power settings when it comes to their bowling technique: (1) hulk smash and (2) imperceptible graze. It hilarious for everyone else to watch them fail miserably, but these players themselves didn’t seem to get any fun out of it. On top of that, the game does require a fair amount of upkeep as players have to reassemble all the pins after each strike or bust (when all the pins are knocked over). There can be some amusement to see how a player sets up the pins for the next person (anywhere on the box goes, as long as the pins don’t touch), but it usually feels more like a chore than anything.

I get a kick out of this game, but so far it feels more like a fleeting novelty than a game that demands to be revisited. It doesn’t quite call to me and hit the spot like other Funbrick games (Viking SeeSaw and Ninja Master) have.

Prognosis: Fair

Skyrise

3 Plays (3 and 4 Players)

I feel a personal fondness for projects like Skyrise. Much of that is due to its similarities to our own Crown Jewel Selection of games (Zoo Vadis, Cat Blues: The Big Gig, and more). The concept of such a project is this: find an old hidden gem game, dust it off, preserve its strengths, address its weaknesses, help the design reach its full potential, and reintroduce it to a modern hobbyist audience.

What I didn’t realize (until just barely) is how hard Roxley went on the redevelopment of this game from the original Metropolys (2008) to the newly released Skyrise. They didn’t just spruce up the game with a new production, a new title, and a few gameplay tweaks. They basically gutted everything except for the core hook of the game. 

Some of the most noteworthy changes include:

• The game is now split into two distinct rounds called “Eras”
• The first Era ends like Metropolys did when one player places their last building, but the second Era ends differently (after all players have put out their last building)
• There are now a couple of variable public objectives for players compete over (these cards were private objectives in Metropolys)
• The buildings are all now unique numbers or bidding powers ranging from 1 to 114ish (in the original game players had the same set of 1-13ish)
• Players are now restricted in where they can start an auction (either on the small central island or next to an existing building)
• Wonders have been introduced that are trump bids and come with a chosen unique ability each game
• The board is now modular — allowing the map to have a unique layout each time
• The tokens earned from the spaces (called “neighborhoods”) are more dynamic than they used to be (originally they merely granted a few positive or negative points)

That’s a lot of changes to digest, especially if you are not familiar with either game. And although I haven’t played Metropolys, it appears that Skyrise is aiming to increase variety, reduce analysis paralysis, provide a more interesting arc, improve the esthetics, and preserve some of that spice. As far as I can tell, publisher Roxley Games largely succeeded. Our plays of Skyrise have been great.

At its heart, Skyrise takes the auction concept of Ra (bidding with specific value tokens in front of you) and snakes it out across a large city map. Players take turns upping the bid by placing a higher valued building adjacent to the latest bid on an empty space of the board. The winner (after all other players pass) flips their building upside down — officially erecting it on that neighborhood and claiming the token from that space. The other players pull their lost bid building back. The winner then begins the next auction snake. On and on you go until all buildings are out on the map.

Initially, it seems like these bidding snakes are aimless and drawn out. One player bids a 1, another their 5, another their 12, another their 13, another their 18… the players just meander around the wide open city without much purpose or sense. But very quickly things begin to take shape. One player stakes their claim on an island with their tallest building. Another player seems to be gunning for the green neighborhoods more than any others. Another picks up a lettered patron disc and peeks at its value… do they keep going for that value or start avoiding it? You pick up a couple of yellow tokens, and suddenly those yellow neighborhoods are much more valuable for you to claim. The players’ building supplies dwindle… who will trigger the end of Era 1?

The public objectives score out and players see how well they are faring against the competition. The leader gets a target on their back. Era 2 begins. But you don’t just receive a restock of buildings in the second half… you also equip yourself with a powerful wonder and wonder card. Players simultaneously select and reveal a wonder card from their hand to gain an advantage or a scoring opportunity for whenever they play out their wonder. You can’t start an auction with a wonder, but you can finish it.

As the game marches on, you’ll quickly discover that where you lead the auction snake is just as important as what you bid. Sometimes the bids can lead the snake into a corner where a player can automatically win the auction because there is no open neighborhood next to their bid. Other times a player can create isolated neighborhoods by winning an auction — and then they can start the next auction on this “island” with a low building and win it uncontested. 

Another challenge is presented in how quickly you blow your most powerful buildings… or all of your buildings for that matter. If you are the first person to put out all of your buildings, you get a juicy 10-point bonus. But you also watch in agony for the rest of the game as your opponents pick up valuable spaces for easier and cheaper. If you wait too long to spend your best buildings, then you might run out of neighborhoods and tokens that worth claiming. I’ve made both mistakes — they were delightfully painful.

Despite coming in a big box, the game is rather approachable to teach and play. Although the implications of your actions might not be fully realized until after you have made enough tactical mistakes. There’s more layers to this one than one can spot at first, but they are a joy to uncover.

The deluxe “Collector’s Edition” is a luxury that is both lavish and frustrating. Lavish in the massively unique assortment of building miniatures that decorate the table. Frustrating in the way the 3D boards don’t quite fit together perfectly, particularly for the OCD hobbyists among us. Alas, my publisher curiosity got the best of me and I opted for this upgraded version. It’s perfectly playable, if a bit cumbersome at times. As an alternative, the standard “Essentials Edition”, with chunky wood buildings and simple flat boards, seems like a very nice option that I would happily recommend.

The nature of having a large open auctioning board with many considerations to stew over also lends itself to analysis paralysis from those who are most susceptible. Should I let my neighbor win this auction? If not, then where should I outbid them, and how high? The game demands deliberate decision making from its participants, as carelessness can suddenly let a an opponent scoop up a horrifying amount of points when they chain a powerful combo of buildings. Consequently, all of my plays have exceeded 90 minutes thus far which can feel a tad long when you are doing the exact same thing every round.

Fortunately, Skyrise provides a nice arc as the value of neighborhoods and islands takes shape over time. Initially, your bids feel aimless and interchangeable. Later, your bids feel tense and cutthroat. Your focus will narrow down to a handful of spaces that you desperately want to claim. The difficulty lies in guiding the auction snake toward that prized location and bidding high enough to scare off the competition.

On the other hand, the climax is watered down a bit by the overstuffed point salad scoring. Where the mid-game scoring is nothing but 3 objective cards, the end-game scoring has players tallying up about 10 different things. It gives off a “quantity over quality” kind of aftertaste that may not sit well with everyone.

Ultimately, my takeaway is that Skyrise is refreshing, attractive, challenging, approachable, and interactive in ways that so few modern releases are. It may drag on a hair longer than I prefer, especially when players take too long to decide how to bid, and the final scoring feels bloated, but overall the juice is worth the squeeze. This is a reimagined experience that, much like Roxley’s best work, demands to be enjoyed.

Prognosis: Good

London (Second Edition)

1 Play (4 Players)

Engine-building games, and more specifically tableau-building games, are a dime a dozen these days thanks to the popularity of Wingspan and its ilk. But London has been around much longer than Wingspan… long enough that London’s second edition came out two years before Wingspan’s release.

As is common in a Martin Wallace design (same designer as Brass: Birmingham), money is tight, the setting is bleak, and players must tread carefully to avoid the crushing threats of debt and poverty.

The interesting twist of this tableau builder is that you can make your row of cards as big as you wish, but a longer row accrues you more poverty tokens (which translate to negative points at the end of the game). So you’ll have to find that sweet spot of making your engine big enough to get the job done, but not so big that it bleeds you of precious points. Fortunately, you are allowed to play on top of existing cards in your row — upgrading or adapting your engine without increasing your poverty income. 

The three main objectives of the game are generating money, spending money on boroughs (points and other bonuses), and reducing poverty. There is also a satisfying cycle of building your hand of cards, playing them out to update your tableau, and then running your engine of city cards — a cycle that you execute many times throughout the game.

Poverty itself is a fairly interactive dynamic because it only matters relative to your opponents. At the end of the game, the player with the least poverty discards all of it, and the other players discard an equal number of tokens. So if you have a similar quantity to the player with the least, it is not a big deal. If you have significantly more than the player with the least, you are in trouble.

The hand management also introduces a nice feature where in order to play a card to the tableau, you must also discard a matching color card from your hand to the open market where other players can pick it up. Instead of simply playing everything that enters your hand as quickly as possible, you need to be more methodical about which cards you play and which cards you spend.

Overall, London feels like a fresh breath of hard, smokey industrial air in a genre that has been overrun by games that are more soft and bloated. It presents a core loop that is tight, engaging, focused, and a bit more interactive than your usual engine builder fare. And the production from Osprey Games is as solid as ever.

Prognosis: Good

Great Plains

3 Plays (2 Players)

With the Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert duo being 2 for 2 on 2-player bangers (that’s a lot of 2s), it was only inevitable that I would also try Great Plains. Between this one, Mandala, and Patterns, I’m beginning to see… well, a pattern. The pattern is this: elegant 2-player Euro-abstract strategy games that plays in under 30 minutes and really hit the spot

Great Plains is an area control game where you are racing to take over the light green patches of grass called meadows. The larger the meadow, the more points it is worth. You’ll be spreading out from your starting caves by placing a piece next to one of your caves or next to your pieces that are already out. Like the extending tentacles of two tussling octopi, you’ll quickly spread out across the map in only 20 minutes. 

Much like Through the Desert, there is an urgency to do everything, but this urgency is chained by the painful restriction of only doing one thing per turn. This strategery is given further texture because all of the other lowland spaces (between scoring regions) grant you a bonus ability token in the form of an animal. The horse lets you skip a space (even it is occupied) to drop into a normally out-of-reach hex. The bird lets you extend over an impassible mountain to the other side. And the bear is most spicy of all — it pushes an opposing figure out of the space (usually to its death).

These three simple animal abilities, stored up and spent at the most opportune moments, are what take Great Plains up an entire notch. Decisions are so much juicier when you have to carefully manage these resources and watch for how your rival might use them against you. They really open up the playing space for tactical maneuvers that feel devilish and brilliant.

For a game as clean as this, one might worry about the staying power after too many plays. The thing is, the map is made up of 7 unique tiles that can be flipped and rotated into a million different combinations. Some maps have players fighting over a bunch of small territories. Other maps will feature one or two huge meadow gauntlets where an irresistible amount of points are concentrated. And so much of what you do will be dictated by the telegraphed intentions of your opponent. I don’t ever see this game running out of steam.

I still remember the first time I ever played Through the Desert. It was a 2-player game, and I felt like the experience was too open and loose at that player count. Great Plains, with its narrower corridors and nuanced abilities, has cemented itself as the 2-player go-to when I want to scratch that itch. Considering the fact that Through the Desert is one of my favorite games of all time, that is high praise indeed.

Prognosis: Excellent

Launching on Kickstarter in Late June

Bitewing Games is kicking off our Mythos Collection — 2-player games of strategy and mythology — with two epic new releases from the legendary Reiner Knizia.

Informative posts and publishing projects like these are only made possible through the support of our Kickstarter backers. Iliad and Ichor will launch on Kickstarter in late June — be sure to follow the Kickstarter page so you don’t miss out!

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Skyrise, Innovation, Apiary, Through the Desert Expansion, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Galactic Renaissance

5 Plays (2, 3, and 4 Players)

A review copy was provided by the publisher

It has now been over a year since my four plays of a preview copy of Galactic Renaissance… over a year since the crowdfunding campaign for the game ended. And now the finished game is finally fulfilling to backers. A lot can happen in a year. 

I’ve backed a couple campaigns in the past where I was excited about the new offering and then a year or more passes, my tastes in board gaming change, and by the time the reward actually arrives I realize that this type of game is no longer a good fit for me. Fortunately, in the case of Galactic Renaissance, I find myself loving the experience just as much as I did a year ago. In fact, it is even better.

The rulebook and icons are now polished up, the production is gorgeous, and the gameplay is as good as ever. After our first play with this final version, I’m pleased to find no issues with this complex production aside from some dismissible grammatical errors on a few cards. I’ve seen Matagot get a lot of flak for other recent big box productions, but they seem to have made some improvements with their processes in response because Galactic Renaissance gives me no reasons to complain.

Because the gameplay is 99% the same as it was a year ago, I don’t have much more to add beyond what I shared in my full preview of the game. The only thing left to add is that this is a game that I still thoroughly enjoy. I want to revisit it more and explore it further. There is just perhaps one minor problem…

The issue is that I find myself with a huge advantage over any other players I try to onboard. Strong maneuvers aren’t readily perceivable to newcomers — while they are finding their footing in the systems, I’m running laps around them like the Energizer Bunny. And unlike Inis, Galactic Renaissance makes it harder for underdog rivals to gang up on the leader. Conflict is slower to trigger and less punishing against the oppressed, so players can generally only deal scuffs and scratches rather than decimating dents.

In our last play (3 players), the scores were something like 13, 11, and 7, and I managed to go from 11 to 30+ points in a single turn to suddenly slam the door on a deafening victory. Perhaps a more experienced player would have recognized my lucrative setup and tried to weaken me before my point explosion turn… Let me tell you, it was a supremely satisfying turn. But I would love even more to see a cunning rival cut my legs out from underneath me right before I sprint to the finish line. I believe this kind of experience is possible in Galactic Renaissance. I suppose I just need to train up my friends enough to let them become that threat. 

This is definitely the type of game that plays best with a group of fairly evenly matched opponents. It’s best to put in front of the same consistent group rather than a new batch of victims. But the fact that I want to go to the trouble to find or nurture such a group for this game is a very good sign indeed.

Prognosis: Good

Clash of the Gladiators

1 Play (5 Players)

While he knows his way around a fistful of dice, Reiner Knizia isn’t the type to make Ameritrash games (games where bombastic luck and theme are front and center). That’s why Clash of the Gladiators — a game that is packed with lucky dice chucking, thematic abilities, and endless battles — is such a standout design in Knizia’s ludography.

Here players assemble multiple teams of gladiators and toss them into a pit together (with a few wild beasts sprinkled in for good measure). At the start of the game, you’ll take turns recruiting unique types of gladiators to your teams that will bestow specialized benefits in the ensuing battles. The spearman grant initiative, the swordsmen gift more dice, the net-throwers neutralize opponent abilities, the shield-carriers block minor hits, and the prong bearers allow one reroll.

This initial gladiator drafting is where the bulk of your decisions take place. As you watch the spaces fill around your groups, you’ll try to exploit the weaknesses that peek out from neighboring teams. If everyone around you has ignored initiative, then your team would have a huge leg up on many rivals with even a single spearman. If an enemy is preparing a team that hits hard and fast, then you can undermine them with a couple effective net casters.

Once the teams are all formed and the board is seeded, players take turns attacking a neighbor with one of their own teams. Both attacker and defender will each get to roll dice, and casualties turn to points as players collect enemy casualties in their holding pens. Each defeated gladiator is worth a point, and each conquered animal is worth two points. Avoiding elimination is helpful too, because your surviving gladiators also each grant a point. Not that you can do much to aid your survival…

From the moment the first dice are cast until the end of the game, when one faction remains battered but alive, the core driver of the experience is Lady Luck. Yes, you can decide which neighbor you attack, but this decision merely boils down to which neighbor is weakest. Yes, you can decide which of your gladiators takes a hit and how your team falls apart, but it too often just makes the use of that team increasingly less exciting. Yes, you do get to pivot to playing as animals (and still claiming casualties) on your turn once your humans are completely eliminated, but this only makes the battles themselves more one dimensional.

All this game boils down to is ramming your units into other players’ units and hoping the dice roll in your favor. The problem is that so many games in the twenty years since have improved upon this formula, especially the ramming part in the case of Thunder Road: Vendetta.

In Thunder Road, the conflicts are more exciting, chaotic, hilarious, and tense. In Gladiators, the only exciting outcome is hit or miss… and a miss happens far too often (it’s 50% of the dice faces). Thunder Road also does a better job embracing wacky variety — granted, too much of that is siphoned off into the expansions. But even so, Gladiators doesn’t have much to stand on these days.

For a game that has more team customization, more interesting battles, and far less downtime, Challengers is a clear winner. Both games see players winding up their unique strategies before watching them clash in a big old luck fest. But Challengers does a far better job making you feel personal ownership and pride over your unique blend of characters. The teams of Gladiator look like different flavors of vanilla in comparison — would you like French vanilla or vanilla bean?

Although we had a few good laughs and loud gasps at the dice results, the same can be said of any dice chucker. Clash of the Gladiators might have been an amusing activity for its time, but it feels stuck in 2002 while the genre has evolved into bigger and better things.

Prognosis: Poor

Sol: Last Days of a Star

1 Play (4 Players)

A review copy was provided by the publisher

Most of us probably remember that one day in elementary school science class when our teacher informed us that the sun would eventually die and wipe out all life in our solar system. If you are like me, then you likely went home with a shadow looming over your very existence as you worried about the end of civilization. Such happy memories.

Sol is that game that fast forwards to that disastrous event far in the future and asks the question: What if we had the technology to get some of us out of the solar system before the sun explodes? Players act as competing factions who harness this technology to harvest the sun’s energy for their selfish salvation.

In Sol, you’ll deploy sundivers, maneuver them around the sun’s orbit (and even within its layers), and convert them into useful structures such as gates (passageways for sunders to delve deeper into the sun), energy nodes (resource generators), sundiver foundries (for making more sundivers), and transmit towers (point generators).

On your turn, you merely select one of three possible actions:  move (deploy and maneuver sundivers), convert (build one gate or station out of your sundivers), or activate (activate one type of station everywhere that you have a sundiver). Thanks to some handy player aids and a relatively streamlined ruleset, this isn’t a super complicated system to get into. But just like the many layers of the sun and its atmosphere, it takes time to dig deep into its strategies. 

Much of the complexity of this design comes from the planning of your actions. You’ll deploy a few sundivers, arranging them in a specific pattern to qualify for a conversion (turning them into a gate or station), and then actually execute that conversion. By the time you are ready to start utilizing your shiny new structure, you’ll unfortunately find your mothership on the opposite end of the sun where it is too far away to deploy more sundivers. 

Like the hands of a clock, players finish their turn by advancing their mothership one space in orbit around the sun — maintaining their equal distance from each other. You have to make the most of your current location in the atmosphere because you won’t be there long. Fortunately, you are allowed to utilize the gates and stations of your opponents, although you’ll be a bit more reluctant to do it because they benefit as well.

This unique combination of puzzly action planning and shared structure use makes for a refreshing experience in a lot of ways. On top of that, you’ll work your way through the instability deck — a deck of cards that provides one-time use abilities and serves as the countdown timer for the game. Thirteen of the cards in the deck are solar flairs, and when the last one emerges the game ends immediately. Due to the random shuffle, nobody knows whether the game will last half the deck or the entire deck or somewhere in-between. One can’t know how many days they have in the sun, they merely have to make the most of each day given them.

You’ll know when the end of the game is possibly very close, especially when the draw pile is small, but otherwise you have to decide whether to commit to a short-term strategy or long-term strategy and hope it pays off. This makes for a thrilling climax when the first half the game is about setting up an engine of replenishing fuel and sundivers and the second half sees players pivoting to point mongering. 

After our first play, we all came away with the sense that further experience will lead to more skilled play. Many of the initial turns were met with the expression, “Oh no, I made a mistake,” or, “Well that was a bad decision,” as we realized that our plans hadn’t accounted for all the necessities. It takes time to wrap your brain around the implications of your actions. Fortunately, the design welcomes repeat plays and mastery by also granting many possible instability powers — rule-breaking abilities that feel oh so good to execute. In a single play, you’ll only use a fraction of the effects that come in the box. 

Instability effects aren’t the only form of variety that one can find in Sol: Last Days of a Star. The rulebook also provides a shorter game variant, a longer game variant, solo scenarios, a cooperative mode, simpler effect cards, complex effect cards, aggressive take-that effect cards, and a trigger event variant. It’s enough options that you’ll almost have the overwhelmed feeling of looking at a Cheesecake Factory menu. A bit more editorial trimming would have been a welcome improvement, at least for the person learning, teaching, and hosting the game (myself). But as a publisher, I can appreciate that pressure to cram enough content into a crowdfunded game. It’s a tough balance to walk that line between perceived value and a focused gameplay experience. Yet on the player’s end, few things are as frustrating as learning a game with an identity crisis.

I imagine that most groups settle into their preferred version of Sol after only two or three plays. So that’s not a dealbreaker. For my table, I’m just not sure how often it will get repeat plays. The design is just obtuse and demanding enough to gently repel me — like the relentless rays of the sun driving me to the comfortable shadows of games that are easier for the entire group to handle. And there are elements of mostly positive player interaction here, but it still feels like a rigid brain burning optimization puzzle more than a flexible interactive contest. I don’t often crave this type of gaming experience… not like I used to.

Regardless, I can say that we all enjoyed our first play of Sol. It’s engaging, challenging, and refreshing. It lingers in your mind after you pack it up and shelve it. Much like that gloomy science class revelation I encountered long ago, Sol is a potent experience that sticks with you.

Prognosis: Good

Die Patin & Löwenherz

1 Play (4 Players); 2 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

Recently I had the chance to play a couple different German old-school style area control games that surprisingly have quite a bit in common. Despite the fact that I happened to play them only a few months apart, they were actually released about 25 years apart. 

Löwenherz is designed by Klaus Teuber and was originally conceived as part of a trilogy of games that also includes the one and only Catan. One can spot the DNA of Catan in this design… The critical initial setup which can make or break your game; the desperate negotiations over prizes; the long playtime. But Löwenherz mitigates any luck much better thanks to the auctions and negotiations that take place.

The area where Löwenherz really shines is in the round-by-round action drafting. Each round a new card is revealed that displays 3 different actions which can vary in strength. These actions include things like building walls onto the board (you want to enclose your castles in larger regions to score more points), extending your existing kingdoms further (even taking over enemy territory), putting out more knights to strengthen your kingdom against rivals, gaining money, or gaining a power card.

When a new action card is revealed, players take turns staking their claim on action A, B, or C of the card. If multiple players select then same action, then they are forced into a negotiation. If the negotiating players can’t come to an agreement on who gets the action and who gets paid a bribe to back out, or if more than 2 players choose the same action, then the conflict proceeds to a duel (or in other words a blind bid). 

Money is power in the world of Löwenherz. You can almost always talk an opponent down from a duel and guarantee yourself the action if you bribe them enough. And you can never have enough money when push comes to shove and you must duel your way to a coveted action.

This cycle of selecting actions, avoiding conflicts, bribing opponents to back out, and sometimes dueling to the bitter end is what makes Löwenherz such a joy to play. Even all these years later, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s a testament to Teuber as a game designer that he was creating systems that still feel refreshing today. Yet that doesn’t mean that Löwenherz has necessarily aged well. Like many games from its time, the general pacing is a bit slow, the overall game length is long, the initial setup can be overly punishing to inexperienced players, and often the writing is on the wall too soon as losing players spend the last hour flailing. It’s like a tall lumbering brontosaurus that means well but can accidentally step on (and flatten) its small companions at times.

Die Patin reminds me of Löwenherz in a lot of ways. This brand new 2023 release from German publisher Zoch also features shifting walls and borders on a central area control board. It likewise proceeds slowly through many turns of gradual map changes. It too has no qualms crushing a player or two under the weight of its mechanical brutality. But the manner in which players select actions is completely different from its distant ancestor.

Die Patin gives you 4 figures to use during each of its 5 rounds. These figures each represent an action that you will select and a space in which you will temporarily bolster (with the presence of the figure). You can either choose a space within your territory (a way to strengthen your forces or collect resources) or a space adjacent to your territory (this usually leads to a territory expansion action). The best part of this is that 1 of these figures is your boss lady — a special figure whose super powered action you secretly select at the start of the round.

The core focus of Die Patin is to compete for one of five possible scoring objectives, and you always have to claim a new one across each of the five rounds. So if I score for having the largest territory in round 1, I no longer care about this objective for the rest of the game (aside from the fact that I don’t want my opponents to easily earn it in later rounds). Then I’ll have to move on to occupying the most manholes with the rat cubes, or having the most rats on a single manhole, or setting up the most back rooms on the board, or having the most loot on hand. If I quality for multiple objectives at the end of a round, I can still only claim one. If two players tie for being the best at a particular objective, then neither of them can claim it that round. This becomes even more brutal as the rounds march on, because the points you score are equal to the current round number.

Much like the action selection shenanigans of Löwenherz, I’m a huge fan of the objective jockeying in Die Patin. Both of these games feature a refreshing element that keeps me engaged as I explore them. But both games also suffer by spreading out their fun across too many cycles of actions and rounds, at least for my tastes. 

It was also interesting to compare this experience to another old-school area control game, El Grande, which we played the morning after our session of Die Patin. While El Grande is arguably just as long and cyclical, it manages to justify its playtime with a dynamic variety of action cards — more surprises, more highs and lows, more flexibility to pivot and make a comeback. Simply more bang for your buck.

Although I enjoy both Löwenherz and Die Patin, I can’t muster the enthusiasm to revisit them over other options on my shelf. Both games call back to the golden years of board gaming where player interaction reigned supreme, yet they also carry some of the baggage of those old-school designs that more modern creations have learned from.

Prognosis: Fair

Botanik

2 Plays (2 Players)

As we prepare to launch our own line of 2-player games, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the genre lately. From what I’ve gathered, there are only really 2 big publishers that have established and are continuing a formal 2-player line of games. One of them is Lookout Games who put out one of my favorite releases last year — Patterns. This line of games includes many other legendary titles such as Mandala, Patchwork, and Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small. The other living 2-player line is from Space Cowboys who just released the excellent Marabunta that I covered recently. Space Cowboys’ hits include Jaipur and Splendor Duel, among others. Then of course you have more publishers who informally put out 2-player games (Capstone with Watergate, Match of the Century, Curious Cargo, etc.; Osprey with Undaunted, General Orders, etc.) and 2-player lines that seem to be discontinued aside from reprints (KOSMOS 2-player line, GIPF project, etc.).

The 2-player-only genre is certainly an interesting topic for me. It could be considered a niche audience since you are limiting your demographic to only groups of exactly 2 people who play games together. The moment you have 1 more or 1 less person, the game is out. On the other hand, the 2-player-only genre might be the largest niche in board gaming. It’s certainly easier to gather and coordinate the schedules of 2 players than it is to gather 4 or 5. If the success of Sky Team, Undaunted, Lost Cities, Patchwork, Chess, Go, Magic, and 7 Wonders Duel is anything to go by, then this “niche” within board games actually has a huge audience.

Despite my years-long appreciation of this genre, I hadn’t heard of Space Cowboy’s 2021 release, Botanik, until very recently. This 2-player abstract tile placement game features a very smart drafting system that fuels the entire play session. Three tiles are flipped face up at a time, and you and your opponent take turns selecting one and adding it to the central display board. You can either add a tile to the middle row (between both players) or your own row — but a tile placed in your row has to match the central tile of that column either in type or color. The moment that matching link is broken (when a new center tile covers the old center tile) is the moment you claim the tile in your row and add it to your growing tile network.

It’s possible for you to grant your opponent a tile as well when you break their link on the display board, but ideally you avoid doing them any favors or you do it at the most inconvenient time for their network. I learned the hard way that it’s hard to compete with your rival when they are simply claiming more tiles than you. It’s easy to claim victory by sheer strength of numbers because the network building itself isn’t all that hard.

All you are doing is connecting pipes to each other or blank sides to each other across your network of tiles. You’ll get points for grouping three or more of a tile color together, and you’ll get points for any flowers on your tiles. If a tile’s pipeline doesn’t connect back to your starting source tile through pipes, then that tile will be discarded at the end of the game before final scoring. It’s the world easiest spatial puzzle made a little bit trickier by your opponent trying to keep useful tiles away from you or force you to add them to your network before you are ready.

That back and forth of adding tiles to the central board, linking and unlinking with shared features, and growing your network makes for a nice steady tempo of gameplay. There’s something elegant here about going back and forth and back and forth in a 2-player game without the interruptions of round structure or bookkeeping. For two players who just want something smooth, quick, and bitey, Botanik is hard to beat. And there are even some nice surprising moments when the next three revealed tiles are precisely the colors or types that create some tough options or evoke feelings of regret for past decisions.

Yet even with its buttery smooth rhythm, I don’t feel compelled to come back to Botanik after our two plays. I mostly wish that the interesting drafting concept was attached to a more engaging challenge than a simple spatial puzzle. It feels like two games bolted together, with one of those games razzle dazzling me and the other putting me to sleep. Much like the auction systems of Nidavellir and Furnace, I hope to see the novel mechanical twist used again in a more interesting design.

Prognosis: Fair

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West

12 Plays (4 Players)

We finally wrapped up the entire campaign of Ticket to Ride Legacy — a game that managed to land high on my Top 15 Games of 2023 list, despite us only being 60% of the way through it at the time. But I’m pleased to report that this title is still worthy of such a ranking after having made it to our final destination.

As I noted previously, Ticket to Ride is a game that I haven’t played in many years. Perhaps it was more risky for us to acquire and commit to a massive version of the design in Legends of the West, but I had heard enough good things to feel confident that we would enjoy it.

Aside from starting you with a mere fragment of the United States (an incomplete map connected by large jigsaw tiles), the most obvious change from classic Ticket to Ride is found in how one scores points and wins the game. In vanilla TtR, you earn immediate points for claiming a route between two cities with more points for larger routes. Ideally you scoop up a lot of cards of the same color and spend big on huge routes to rake in a load of points as you work to complete tickets in your hand. These in-game points are entirely done away with in the Legacy game. 

In Legends of the West, players are still aiming to complete tickets (connect two distant cities with their train pieces) for big end-game points. But the point track itself has been replaced by money tokens. And there are new ways to earn money (points) during the game. You’ll want to build on your own color tracks as much as possible because you earn a bonus $2 every time you claim such routes. I love the fact that a certain route can have more value to one player compared to other players. In a game where there are many options to connect point A to point B, this added texture is a welcome change. 

But this change is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Ticket to Ride Legacy. As you progress through the sessions, you’ll regularly add a new large tile to the map that comes with new cities, routes, tickets, and special rules. The design has clever and even delightful ways of keeping the game from getting too bloated — like the rising and setting of the sun, new features will be introduced, paraded, and dismissed over the course of one or multiple games. 

While you and your opponents compete to win the current session with the usual methods — ticket fulfillment, route claiming, train card drafting — you’ll have plenty of side projects to distract you from the main objective. These side goals will often tinker with the incentives and pacing of your decisions. They constantly push you outside of your strategic comfort zone. You’ll also feel that with the evolving deck of event cards which will pop off a new event every time a triggering card emerges from the train deck. These events are often tied to the new board tile and features — they help give a sense of progression in the overall story of the campaign.

Perhaps my favorite part of this experience was facing down a new challenge at the start of each session and formulating a strategy. As I look at my starting hand of tickets and decide which ones to keep, how do I weave this route plan into the current events and opportunities that we are facing? Sure, a few of my ticket cards are encouraging me to build across the northern states (the shortest route from point A to point B), but due to current events there are some golden opportunities in the south that I don’t want to miss out on. Do I risk taking a longer detour through the south, do I ignore those events and focus on my best tickets, or do I select different tickets entirely?

By the time you reach the second half of the campaign, you’ll feel pulled in a million directions as multiple events are happening across the country at once. Again, these features often reach a conclusion at some point and are never seen again, so it isn’t entirely cumulative. But we found it quite engaging to ride this meta-arc of starting quick and simple on a tiny map, expanding into a wide horizon of mechanisms on a growing map, and contracting somewhat back into a more focused system in the concluding sessions on a large completed map.

The common Legacy elements are here in full force with customized permanence happening across the map, within the decks, and among the competition. Although the story here certainly takes a back seat to the gameplay experience. While this is a far cry from the approachable gateway game that is Ticket to Ride, the design and publishing team have done a great job making this system feel quite streamlined compared to more unwieldy Legacy games. I would feel comfortable introducing this to more casual gamers, assuming that I as a seasoned gamer am guiding the experience. And assuming that they are up for the commitment of playing a few times per month so nobody completely forgets what is going on.

I’ve never been the type to get heavily invested in the story or narrative of a board game. Rather, I find my thrills in the engaging gameplay and challenging competition. But I’ll also quickly become grumpy if a game overstays its welcome or doesn’t provide enough juice for the squeeze. That’s why I’ve preferred Ticket to Ride Legacy and My City over other legacy-adjacent experiences like Gloomhaven or Mechs vs Minions or Pandemic Legacy which sacrifice some of that clean, focused play in service of stronger themes or narratives or surprises. For me, board gaming is first and foremost about play. Ticket to Ride Legacy understands this principle well — it took us on an epic, thrilling journey of play that satisfied the entire table.

Prognosis: Excellent

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Prognosis: Excellent

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Ticket to Ride Legacy, Galactic Renaissance, Sol: Last Days of a Star, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Penguin Party

5 or more Plays (3 & 5 Players)

I’ve been playing Penguin Party on occasion for several months now with my family. It’s simple enough that my young daughters (3 and 5) can play just fine, and they absolutely enjoy it. All you do is play a card to the bottom of a pyramid or on top of two cards in the pyramid. Each card is nothing more than a single color — one of five possible options. The base of the pyramid can only contain 8 cards total, and you may only stack a card on top of two other cards if at least one of those supporting cards matches in color. The goal is to get rid of your hand — take penalty points for each card you can’t get rid of, discard two penalty points if you empty your hand. That’s the entirety of Penguin Party.

Playing with my girls, I had a hunch that this was quite a good little filler game. But I decided to reserve my judgment until I could put this tiny box in front of some grown-up gamers. I finally had that chance recently at Dice Tower West with a whopping group of five players. The result was interesting to observe…

In round one, the brash simplicity of the game made several of us question whether the game could hold our attention for five whole rounds (one round for each player). You really expect me to sit here for five cycles just building a pyramid of card colors? But we pressed forward into round two and the Knizia magic began to settle in. Players began to peel back and discover the implications of their decisions… positioning purple next to green in the base means that they’ll be competing with each other. Stacking a blue on top of a pink and a blue means that pink has been cut off from the party entirely… but other players have more pinks still in their hand than I do, maybe this isn’t so bad.

By round three, the hooks of the game had set in and the mental shift of the group was palpable. We were playing the same game, yet card positioning was more deliberate, more cutthroat, more desperate, more dramatic. What once felt like a mindless children’s game became a vicious bloodbath of penguins and colors. We were bonded together across a five-round journey of shared incentives and shared suffering.

Penguin Party is certainly not the most deep or dynamic card game from Reiner Knizia. Yet it impressively boils down the essence of card play to something transcendently simple and satisfying. It doesn’t possess any traits that compel me to love it, but I enjoy and appreciate its bold elegance.

Prognosis: Good

Genial Spezial

1 Play (3 Players)

2009’s Genial Spezial by Reiner Knizia is indeed a special design — not just because it is an interesting spinoff of the Ingenious series, but also because it is the precursor to Cascadero.

The object of the game is to connect to special spaces by placing groups of your own tiles onto a hexagonal grid. The first player to connect to a special space scores some amount of points, but then that space will score even more points for anyone who later connects to it with a separate group. You can also earn bonuses for linking matching spaces to each other with a group of tiles.

This description above could be used to describe both Genial Spezial and Cascadero. And although the former never really quite took off in the market, one must credit the Good Doctor for not abandoning the core compelling concept… instead reviving it for a more ambitious design.

While the core idea of these tile placement games is surprisingly similar, they end up providing very different experiences. Cascadero is all about timing your placements well to trigger cascading combos across multiple tracks. Genial Spezial is much more simple by merely have the Ingenious-style score board and objective of scoring your lowest color at the end of the game. There is plenty of blocking to be had here as players work to cut each other off from making tower connections while maximizing their own scores across the four colors. There are also some nice wild point bonuses from either covering the dark spaces between towers or by linking two or more tall towers.

Genial Spezial is yet another entry from Dr. Knizia that joins the bittersweet collection of wonderfully solid yet tragically overlooked abstract strategy games. That’s the tough thing about abstract games, I suppose. There are so many in existence… so many that present nothing more than a generic mix of shapes and colors and tiles and tokens. They all kinda blur together, and only a lucky few burst out of that ocean of noise. Yet it is still a pleasant surprise to come across a design such as this.

I may not need Genial Spezial in my collection (I already have Ingenious, Axio, Tigris & Euphrates, and Cascadero which expand upon its core ideas), but I’ll happily revisit it if given the chance.

Prognosis: Fair

Tatari

5 Plays (3 & 4 Players)

When I first saw Tatari, I figured it was simply a reskin of Zombie Mania — a Knizia dice chucker that I covered over a year ago. It made sense that Zombie Mania is the English version and Tatari is the Japanese version. Tatari is even linked to the former as a “reimplementation” on Board Game Geek.

And if you only glance quickly at the photos and description, they do look awfully similar. But even one play proved to me that Tatari was far more than a reskin. Yes you are still trying to purge yourself of figures (in this case, creepy dolls) by pushing your luck and chucking dice, and it’s possible to stick other players with your own figures, and the winner will be the player who starts their turn with zero figures. But while Zombie Mania was a nightmarish game that overstayed its welcome, Tatari was a delightful experience with nightmarish dolls that had our group playing it three times in one night. That’s a huge difference for two games that sound awfully alike.

For my money, everything that Tatari changes from its older sibling is an improvement on the formula. And I mean everything. Rather than having player turns often fizzle out into a zombie bust where nothing happens, a doll bust sees the offending player collect all of the dolls off of one board (whichever board has the most) which opens the door wide for their opponents to make an easy doll drop off. Rather than having the zombies get passed around between opponents in an endless take-that bash-a-thon, the dolls dwindle much faster as they enter the box shrine either through good rolls or by bouncing off a player who is at the maximum 10 doll limit. Rather than having one central pit stop where the group simply dumps their zombies, players must aim for an exact board by rolling a 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11+ and then roll more dolls than what that board contains — this is perhaps the most interesting part of the game.

Essentially, you need to roll a 7 or higher in order to not bust. This is done by rolling 1s, 2s, 3s, or 4s with the 6 available dice. Each time you roll, you must select a new value to lock in (setting aside all of the dice of that value). You can also bust by rolling only values that you have already set aside. Rolling an 11+ is always a good (and safe) thing. This is where you have reached the box shrine, and dolls never come back out of there, so any doll amount you roll simply gets permanently removed from your supply. But most often, you’ll be rolling a 7-10, and this is where things get… dicey.

Whatever exact number you land on in the 7-10 range, you better have brought some doll rolls with you. The 5th and 6th faces of the dice are replaced by single and double doll symbols. Whatever doll total you have rolled will become the new equilibrium of that board — where you will dispose of your own dolls with a good roll or reclaim some (or all) of the dolls there with a bad roll. Sometimes these boards will get 4 or 5 dolls placed onto them, which means that you want to avoid these boards at all costs. But if you get too greedy, you might simply bust and take all of those dolls anyway.

Brilliantly, the only way you can give other players your dolls is by rolling 1s and actually dropping off one or more dolls on a central board. So 1s are great for sticking it to the doll-purging leader, but they are awful at getting you to the threshold board of 7 or higher.

From our first few plays, Tatari showed a delightful arc of starting simple and low-risk. Players start with the maximum 10 dolls, so any more that you earn in a bust simply get dumped into the box and you’re left with merely a wasted turn. With a few good turns, tension starts to ramp up as players avoid crowded boards and whittle away at their doll supplies. Do you stop rolling and accept a couple dolls back into your supply simply because you couldn’t avoid the most crowded board, or do you toss the remaining dice one more time and risk taking all of the dolls on a bust? Maybe it’s not as big of a deal to risk it on your turn if you’ve slid back to 10 dolls in your supply, but a bust still means that you clear off a board entirely and make it that much easier for an opponent to add yet more dolls there.

The ebb and flow of Tatari is what makes it so much more addicting for me. Well that, and the fact that it doesn’t overstay its welcome (probably because it is much harder to pawn dolls onto your opponents). And it helps that these dolls are genuinely creepy, adding to the aura of the game as players try to purge them from their supply. Most importantly, the push-your-luck moments are much spicier here. Where many aging humans prefer to turn down the spice, it seems that Dr. Knizia still loves to turn it up.

Prognosis: Excellent

City of the Living

2 Plays (2 & 4 Players)

Review copy provided by the publisher

I’m beginning to see a pattern with these Knizia co-designs — Witchstone (co-designed by Martino Chiachierra) and now City of the Living (co-designed by Sebastian Bleasdale). It turns out that they feel less… Knizian. Shocking, I know.

For some folks, that may very well be a good thing. But for somebody who prefers Knizia’s style of game above all others, that is very likely a bad thing. How far does it stray from the way of the good doctor? Let us explore…

City of the Living is a game of managing your income tracks while improving your tableau of tiles. Players are managing their post-apocalyptic towns, scavenging for resources and supplies, fortifying their defenses, and trying to keep the zombies out. This dramatic retheme from Prosperity (the international balancing of pollution and advancement) at least maintains a base level of coherency, despite the pivot to an overused setting. Just don’t look too closely at or think too hard about the various tiles.

A discovered water purifier decreases the cooperation of your townsfolk… because they fight over it, perhaps? It also makes your town more secure from zombies, presumably because you don’t have to go out and search for clean water. Fair enough. Wooden walls strengthen your security, but brick walls weaken it? Zombies don’t function like the Big Bad Wolf, obviously. A few gas-powered lamps can wipe out three whole zombies… because zombies don’t like portable light? Let’s just say that it’s better to stick to the overhead concept of balancing zombie defenses against human cooperation against coolness factor (like building and using ballistas, just for style points).

This theme of balance and trade-offs is woven throughout the gameplay. How long do you build up your engine before pivoting to points? Do you prioritize fuel income or zombie containment? Are you ok with taking a hit on this track so you can leap up this other track? Do you take the time to improve your scavenging infrastructure or blow all your fuel to snatch up a prized item before an opponent? 

Players are limited to two actions per turn, and like any Knizia worth its salt, you always wish you had more actions on your turn. A tile is revealed from the pile and added to the market as it triggers a type of income event for everyone. Each “year” or round sees all the events triggered once, so it helps to time your income boosts before the next event of that type rather than after. Gradually, your tracks will get healthier and healthier. But one particular track must never be too neglected — the zombie track — otherwise you’ll be blocked from scoring points until you clear out enough zombies. What’s the point of living if you are overwhelmed by the undead?

The thing that feels odd about this semi-Knizia design is that all of the action happens on your personal boards. Aside from a minor end-game track competition, and the drafting of tiles from the central market, there isn’t a wink of interaction to be found in City of the Living. It’s an engine builder more akin to modern Eurogames where action efficiency and track management hog all the attention. At least there are some tough decisions to be had in the tile purchasing.

The game offers two possible player board options to build your town of tiles, with the back side being slightly less flexible and more punishing. If I can’t have my opponents beating up on me, then I suppose I’ll settle for this back side. It is unfortunate, though, that this side of the player board has the wrong setup iconography for the tracks. We encountered a few other annoyances in the production — bumps in the user-friendly features — but I suppose one can’t complain too much in such post-apocalyptic settings.

The other odd thing about this design is that there is no scaling according player count. At two players you have an over-abundance of tiles at your disposal — arguably too many options that fit your needs. At four players you have the exact same number of tiles where certain types quickly vanish from the market and leave players starving for just a morsel of fuel or security or cooperation.

For me, the real hangup with City of the Living is that I still feel like the city bookkeeper rather than literally any other more thrilling zombie-era occupation. Tractor driver? Sign me up. Daylight scavenger? Heck yes. Border security? My pleasure. Rival town infiltration? I’m in. Please, just anything but a spreadsheet of symbols and tracks.

In terms of Knizia designs, this one doesn’t hit the spot like I was hoping it would. I respect the game for trying something different, even if it’s not quite what I was looking for. And I respect co-designer Sebastian Bleasdale who has made significant contributions to many a favorite Knizia game (as a primary playtester), including some of our own publications. 

It’s neat to see Trick or Treat Studios bring this design back to life 10 years after its original publication. The new theme will likely have a broader general appeal, and the engine-building, income-balancing gameplay will undoubtedly find some new fans. As for me, I simply prefer it when the humans at my table are the biggest threat rather than the oscillating tracks on my personal player board.

Prognosis: Fair

Keltis + Neue Wege, Neue Ziele (New Ways, New Goals)

1 Play (4 Players)

After playing and sharing my thoughts on Lost Cities: The Board Game, I culled the game from my collection and thought that would be the end of it. It was an amusing family-weight board game that ultimately didn’t call to me like other Lost Cities titles or family-weight games in my collection. Little did I know that I would get reeled back into trying this design due to a foreign expansion.

Reiner Knizia has had several board games nominated for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (game of the year in Germany) but the title that actually won it was Keltis — a more abstract and loose version of Lost Cities: The Board Game. So naturally, Dr. Knizia followed that success up with an expansion called Neue Wege, Neue Ziele (New Ways, New Goals) which utilizes a new board with intertwined multicolored tracks.

The big draw of this expansion is that long-term planning is rewarded as players can move any of their pawns up any tracks and in any directions as they pivot from one color to the next. Your card play restrictions are fundamentally the same, although notably Keltis is looser because you can play each color in ascending OR descending order.

It’s hard to say whether the looser card play restrictions or the more flexible board were the main culprit (certainly both were contributors), but our play of this expansion board using the Keltis rules just felt too open and flexible to be all that interesting. Players basically never discarded a card (like you often do in Lost Cities) just to make room for another card — it was too easy to put too many cards to good use. So this experience was less about managing your hand with surgical precision and more about simply playing the best option currently available. Cards were played, pawns were advanced, and one player edged out the others by earning a few more points through collected tokens.

Between this and Lost Cities: The Board Game, I find the latter to be much more interesting. Keltis feels so stale without any theme at all, and it really loses its excitement by letting players play colors in either direction and jump across different color tracks on the expansion board. In terms of mechanisms and decisions, everything here just feels like a watered down version of better Knizia designs.

Prognosis: Poor

Keltis: Fun & Go (Der Weg der Steine Mitbringspiel)

1 Play (2 Players)

After Keltis and its expansion fell flat for me, I wasn’t expecting much from Keltis: Fun & Go. But one shouldn’t count out the good doctor’s ability to iterate. 

My friend introduced this title to me by pulling out a small fabric pouch and dumping a pile of tokens onto the table — this was his custom packaging, but it did a nice job setting the expectations for the compact Fun & Go. All you are doing on your turn is flipping a token and deciding whether to add it to your tableau or leave it face-up in the middle of the table.

The same Keltis gameplay is here — build runs of colors that either ascend or descend — but having it distilled down to its simplest push-your-luck form and still be compelling proved that the core concept is solid. If you start a color by keeping a 4 or 5 (something in the middle of the range of 1-9), then you are cutting yourself off from half the the values of that color (because you can only go either up or down from there). Then again, you only need three tokens of that color to enter positive scoring territory, so maybe you do it to start stealing those numbers away from your opponent. The challenge is in getting beyond the initial negative point territory of your first and second tokens.

You’ll also be tempted to take bigger leaps in your number sequencing when a particular token offers points or a gem or a bonus turn. These bonuses add a nice bit of spice and surprise to the token reveals.

At 2-players, you use the same amount of tokens as 3 or 4 player games, so there is certainly less tension to starting down a new color. I can see how it would be much more tricky to acquire at least 3 tokens of a color when the token supply is drying up faster and more than 1 opponent is competing for the same color.

With a playtime of 15 minutes and a container that fits in the palm of your hand, I can see how this one would be a worthwhile addition to the collection. But Knizia has already done so many other great games that scratch this push-your-luck itch of “reveal and decide whether to keep” (see Medici: The Card Game and Circus Flohcati). So Keltis Mitbringspiel is not one I’m dying to acquire.

Prognosis: Fair

Genesis

3 Plays (4 Players)

Reiner Knizia & tile placement games are like the milk & cookies of board games — they pair together beautifully. And I’m the Cookie Monster — I can consume an alarmingly unhealthy amount and still want more.

And while Genesis isn’t my favorite cookie, not even close, it’s still a mighty respectable one.  It’s probably most comparable to a Subway cookie — its chocolate chips are satisfyingly melty, but it’s not going to win any awards. 

It does feature something I’ve never seen Reiner do elsewhere — you start your turn rolling two dice, and those dice results restrict your tile placement options. Players each have their own pile of tiles made up of four terrain types: wetlands, mountains, forest, and savannas.  

With the setting being Pangea from millions of years ago, the goal here is to establish yourself as the dominant lifeforms in each area. Areas aren’t really a thing until players start placing matching terrain tiles together and building them out across the board. You’ll be trying to build up your herds by placing your tiles (designated by your animal type) next to each other, and if a matching tile is separated by another life-form or terrain type then it is not part of the herd.

Players want to have the largest herd (or second largest) in each area in order to score points at the end of the game, and the largest area of each terrain type will score double or triple points. While it’s true that the dice dictate your options, it always feels like there is a smart play to be made. Plus, you can always just ignore the dice and place out any one tile instead, but that means you must sacrifice your second tile placement.

With the help of volcano and tar spaces (spaces where nobody can place a tile), it can be highly advantageous to surround and block opponents from growing their herds. This is especially critical for areas that look like they’ll earn double or triple points. It can also be wise to abandon a hotly contested area and start your own smaller region of the same color. If nobody else joins your smaller area, then you can score both first and second place points. It’s also common to have two regions of a matching terrain type compete for the bonus of double or triple points — this provides another incentive to keep feeding your tiles to an area even after you have a commanding majority lead there.

The dice rolling offers an element of unpredictably as well — four of the six sides have one terrain type, and the other two sides are wilds.  It’s very possible to go multiple turns without rolling a specific color.  With multiple locations demanding your attention, it’s common for one worrisome area to stay dormant and untouched while another spirals out of your control — all depending on what your opponents roll. Sneakily, the dice also keep the game running at a quick clip. This is particularly noticeable when a player rolls two wilds and proceeds to nosedive into the depths of analysis paralysis as their brain flips through all possible scenarios. They’re a gift and a curse, those double wilds.

It’s a clever little game that, despite the dice rolling, feels very abstract and strategic. Admittedly, the combination of randomized turn restrictions with abstract tile positioning is initially jarring. During my early turns of the game, I didn’t find this combination particularly thrilling either. But somewhere in Act 2 of Genesis, the brilliance of its system begins to emerge. As regions begin to crash into one another and the landscape takes shape, as competing herds struggle to be the dominant species and the empty spaces dwindle, Genesis really starts to heat up. Like a warm, gooey cookie after a freshly toasted sandwich, it really hits the spot.

As a big box Knizia tile layer, Genesis is certainly a bit of a misfit when lined up alongside its more radiant siblings. No wonder this one has quickly faded into obscurity. But as an approachable, abstract filler for 3-4 players, Genesis is shockingly good. Keep the milk coming, I’m hungry for more of this cookie!

Prognosis: Good

Reif für die Insel

3 Plays (5 and 6 Players)

Reif für die Insel, or in English, Welcome to the Island… the island of many bananas. But not so many bananas that the monkeys won’t fight over them and the parrots won’t swoop in and steal them. Probably because some bananas are more ripe than others, and some are straight rotten.

In his latest auction game, Reiner Knizia mixes a whole bunch of tried and true ingredients into a satisfying new stew. The bidding itself feels like a mixture of High Society (spending away your dwindling hand of card values) and Amun-Re (raising the bid at a spot to bump out another player’s bid). The randomized options of bananas each round — each player ends up with a banana, and sometimes they come with parrots or bandits — feels like Hot Lead’s randomized row of evidence and back alley cards that players fight over. The mix of two possible auction types (clockwise bidding or simultaneous reveal) feels like the nice variety you get from Modern Art and Beowulf: The Legend. Sometimes you’re all bidding high to avoid a penalty (the rotten banana or thieving parrot) before somebody bites the bullet and takes it for free like High Society’s bad cards. Some of the bananas have a bit of push-your-luck (only a complete pair of them earns you any points, but they are big points) like plenty of other Knizia set collection games.

In other words, there’s not necessarily one particular feature to make Reif für die Insel really stand out from the pack. BUT, everything here is blended together into a very satisfying concoction. I suppose the ripening bananas (how long they stay on your mat, clogging up spaces before they score out) is the main unique feature, and it really helps to make the decisions the right amount of opaque. 

You’ll play through three rounds, and only the ripest bananas (brown ones) will score out and clear your board in the first round. You’ll have to wait until rounds two and three to score and clear your yellow and green bananas. But those bananas are worth more points, so do you gun for those delayed ones instead? If your player board is already full of bananas and there are still a few auctions left in the round (because other players haven’t filled their board yet), you might find yourself discarding bananas that you won in previous auctions (unlesss they are a bad bananas which never leave you).

There’s a tight balancing act across the three rounds. When do you spend your valuable monkey cards, if at all? Any monkey cards that you don’t spend during the game will be added to your final score (equal to their value!). Players only have 9 cards in their hand to use throughout the game which usually consists of about 12 or so rounds. The only way you can stretch your hand out is by judiciously deciding when to use your zero card in an auction (which always comes back to your hand).

It’s hilarious to see some players blow their hand of cards early and be stuck bidding nothing but their zero for the final batch of auctions. And it’s impressive to see when players manage to hold back several big cards (their 6, 7, 10, etc.) to score massive bonus points on top of their respectable banana stash.

True, Reif für die Insel may not have the novel twist of recent auction hits like Nidavellir or Furnace to evoke the reverent ooos and ahhs of the industry. But what it lacks in standout novelty, it easily makes up for by being tighter, cleaner, and far more thrilling. This is one that I’ll happily bring back to the table over and over again, especially at higher counts (4-6 players).

Prognosis: Good

King’s Road

1 Play (4 Players)

Only a couple years ago, I was under the impression that Reiner Knizia hadn’t really designed an area majority game.  Of course some of his designs like Genesis, Samurai, and Babylonia possess hints of area majority, but I was thinking more along the lines of El Grande or Inis.  I’ve since learned that my impression was wrong, as Municipium, Tower of Babel, Into the Blue, and King’s Road are very much area majority games from the good doctor.  And perhaps there are more that I have yet to discover.  The truth is simply that none of these have achieved the same level of fame as Knizia’s evergreens. 

King’s Road is definitely on the simple filler end of the spectrum.  It’s certainly more strategic than the Yahtzee style Into the Blue, yet it still manages to play out quick and breezy.

As a large king pawn travels around the board from one location to the next, players are committing influence markers to the locations of their choice.  Each player is given an identical deck of 11 cards — these cards represent the 8 locations plus 3 special cards.  Each round, players select 3 cards from their hand and simultaneously reveal them.  Essentially, you’re simultaneously committing 3 influence markers onto locations of the board with the cards you reveal.

These locations have a definite El Grande vibe in that they award varying levels of points to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.  The scoring for a location triggers once the King has reached it, and he reliably moves ever onward in an unending clockwise march.  As the King approaches higher valued locations, players predictably commit more of their pieces there in an effort to claim the highest reward.

The nuance mainly comes from the 3 special cards as well as some subtle scoring strategies.  One special card acts like a duplicate of another card you play in a round, allowing you to commit 2 influence to a single location in a single round.  The other two special cards are one-time-use: 1) the witch lets you see what everyone else has played before deciding your three cards and 2) the dragon triggers premature scoring of the next location.  These are all mildly interesting special cards that makes one wish that Reiner had explored this concept further.  Stronger cards or more variety could have gone a long way to spice up the cyclical nature of the game.

What do I mean by cyclical? Well, the King’s movement is predetermined, the players’ hands are identical, and the special cards are mild and minimalistic.  King’s Road has opted for an extremely safe, vanilla experience within a crowded genre of wild, flavorful area majority games.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game, especially for one so quick (30 minutes).  The clean, slim nature of the design allows for some nice mind games as you to try to eek out more points than your opponents.  Despite its bare-bones design, it feels like there is still wiggle room for multiple strategies to succeed.  

Unfortunately, the minimalistic nature of King’s Road means that it struggles to stand out in my collection, let alone its genre.  As an old-school Euro, this one certainly hasn’t aged as well as El Grande.  As an approachable gateway game, it’s not as thrilling as Ethnos.  As a filler, it’s not quite as punchy as Rumble Nation.  As a Knizia design, it doesn’t reach the satisfying dynamics of Municipium.  In a vacuum, I’d happily play this one more.  In my collection, it’s easily overshadowed by a dozen other games.

Prognosis: Fair

Money

3 Plays (4-5 Players)

Reiner Knizia has been interviewed probably more times than any tabletop game designer ever. That’s largely thanks to the fact that he’s been around longer than most working designers, and he’s the most prolific in terms of total game output. He could interviewed about a different game in his ludography every week and it would take 14 years to get through all of his games. But in reality, that’s a lie, because he would make another 350 games in those 14 years. There’s simply no keeping up with this man.

I bring up his interviews because I quite enjoy listening to them. For as successful, brilliant, and revered as he is, I’m always struck by how thoughtful and humble his answers are. One question he’s been asked before is this: “What is your favorite board game component?” Or something similar: “If you could only keep 1 game, what would it be?”

His answer? A deck of cards. Reiner loves a simple deck of cards for how versatile cards can be. And he wouldn’t use them to play established or existing games. He would use them to create new games. The practice of inventing games that bring enjoyment to people is his sole drive and focus. His hunger to innovate and iterate and entertain is insatiable.

All of this is proven by his extensive ludography. Looking at his card games alone, heck even just the ones I’ve played, I can tally up 30 unique card games that are plain solid, at the very least. These 30 card games are good enough that I would happily play them at any game session. Several of them are so stinking phenomenal that they rank among the greatest card games ever made… Perhaps those precious pearls, those select masterpieces, are the only Knizia card games I truly need. But because these 30 games are so easy to teach, quick to play, and simple to store on the shelf, they all live on in my collection. 

Money is one of these unassuming titles that promises to please when on the table and placate when on the shelf. It’s a pure deck of cards tailored for 3-5 players, and it only asks for 15-20 minutes of your time. The deck consists of up to 7 different currencies, with values of 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. There are also a handful of 10-value Chinese coins that add a little bonus to your bank. After dealing out 6 cards to each player, you’ll then proceed through a series of quick rounds where players simultaneously reveal a bid of one or more cards from their hands.

In the central market there are two sets consisting of four cards each. After players reveal their bids, the highest bidder can exchange their entire bid with one of the central market sets or with another player’s bid. Then the next highest bidder does the same, and so on until everyone has made an exchange (or withheld their bid).

The goal is to assemble a hand that contains as many cards of as few currencies as possible. Having all seven currencies in you hand would be a disaster, because each currency starts out with a 100 point deficit until you manage to cross 200 points in that currency. Surprisingly (for a Knizia), you cannot score below zero in a currency. So a value of 90 USD is zero points, while a value of 160 Euros is 60 points. But if you manage to cross that golden 200 threshold, then you don’t subtract 100 points from that currency at all. Additionally, if you manage to get any trios of 20s or 30s of the same currency, then you’ll score 100 bonus points for each one. And those 10-value Chinese coins are just a plain good 10-points each.

What this all leads to is a rapid-fire chaotic currency exchange where cards leave one hand to enter the market only to be snatched up again and traded away once more until they find the right home. Your hand starts out with a small but diverse array of currencies, and then it gradually grows in size while shrinking in variety. Eventually you’ll be forced to decide which precious sets to part with so that you can use those currencies to bid on others that show more promise.

Sometimes you’ll hunger for a juicy market set on display and overbid with your hand, only to find that nobody else cared about the available options and they all decided to bid low and get a cheap/easy gain… suddenly you regret adding that extra 50 to your bid. Other times you’ll try to thread the needle with a risky, low offer only to find that an opponent bid slightly higher to get first dibs on your desired stash. But all is not lost, because odds are that they’ll eventually relinquish your favored currency back out into the market with a future bid. Like many auction games, it’s all about reading the room and bidding with surgical precision.

When played fast, loose, and from the hip, Money feels like a stone-cold classic. Perhaps it’s not the most unique or innovative or dramatic card game in Knizia’s catalogue, but it’s a mighty fine one. And I have it on good authority that it is getting a new English edition soon, so that’s a plus.

Prognosis: Good

Launching on Kickstarter on April 9

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.

The post 1st Impressions of 10 Knizia Games — City of the Living, Money, Keltis, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Strike

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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.

The post 1st Impressions of World Wonders, Marabunta, Couture, Chomp, Strike, and more! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Sail

4 Plays (2 Players)

Publisher Allplay managed to put out a whopping 10 small box games in 2023. Nearly as impressive as that is the fact that I managed to play all of them. Within this mega mini lineup of visually dazzling boxes, one of them rises above as my favorite of the bunch — Sail. Where half of these games can loosely be called trick takers, Sail is easily the most unique as a 2-player cooperative trick taker of sailing a boat across treacherous seas.

Your hands are made up of three possible suits, a range of numbers, and a handful of action icons. The combination of your played icons is what usually triggers an action (sailing forward, firing at the kraken, etc.), but you are restricted to must-follow rules and shrinking hand options.

Like most great trick takers, your success will hinge upon management of your own hand and tracking/prediction of your fellow player’s hand. And like most great cooperative games, there are plenty of ways to lose. But the challenge boils down to reaching the finish line while defending against the kraken before time runs up.

Sail is easily one that is best played with the same partner over multiple sessions where you can grow in your experience while taking on more challenging maps. There’s a noticeable learning curve to the game as you grow accustomed to the action options and figure out how to best captain them. 

Even learning the cadence and balance of who should win a trick is necessary for success. If the wins are too lopsided, then the round will end prematurely with wasted potential still remaining in your hands. Indeed, Sail offers plenty of depth beneath its rippling surface. But the vivid colors and illustrations from Weberson Santiago go a long way to welcome you in to this challenging adventure.

Prognosis: Good

Patterns: A Mandala Game

5 Plays (2 Players)

Mandala was (and still is) a surprise hit at our table when it first released in 2019. This abstract 2-player card game with only a big square deck of six card colors and a cloth board proved to be shockingly deep and richly rewarding across repeat plays. 

I still don’t understand what kind of voodoo magic Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert used to conjure such a brilliant design out of so few components. But luckily for me, I don’t have to understand how it got to my table. I merely have to enjoy and embrace it.

As bafflingly impressive as Mandala is, I’m even more surprised and impressed to see that Trevor and Brett have captured lighting in a bottle yet again with 2023’s Patterns (a sibling design to Mandala). They’ve swapped the mechanisms out with something entirely new… Instead of drawing cards, bidding with your hand, and drafting rewards from the two fluctuating card markets, you are now swapping and flipping tiles as you establish and expand your tile color groups. Yet even with an entirely different system, this game still feels like “A Mandala Game” both in general vibe and in quality of gameplay. How in the world did they pull that off?!?

I’m not upset. I’m merely impressed and, frankly, intimidated. It’s the kind of intimidation you would feel if Jet Li threatened you with nothing but a paper clip. His weapon of choice may look simple and harmless, but somehow he can wield it to bring you a world of pain.

Within minutes of digging in to a first play of Patterns, one can sense that there are deeper layers of strategy just waiting to be unearthed. How can you block or even trap your opponent? How can they do the same to you? Which color tile should you swap into your supply to set yourself up for an even bigger play? The decisions of this game are mesmerizing, satisfying, and smooth in ways that so few abstracts capture. 

In playing Patterns, I am also reminded of another top-tier abstract strategy game — Through the Desert. Both games see players spreading out their color groups across a grid of spaces. Players can never let their matching color groups touch, as they must remain distinct groups. But this restriction allows players to block each other intentionally. All the while, you’ll constantly feel yourself pressured to accomplish multiple things at once but painfully restricted in your action limitations each turn.

In a year where 2-player gaming was one of the most hotly contested genres (in terms of quantity and quality), Patterns plants itself as one of the very best.

Prognosis: Excellent

Undaunted: Battle of Britain

1 Play (2 Players)

After dropping a bombshell of a legacy/campaign game in 2022 (Undaunted: Stalingrad, which was my favorite game of the year), the Undaunted team has wisely begun to branch out from the core system with arial combat in 2023 (Undaunted: Battle of Britain) and sci-fi battles in 2024 (Undaunted 2200: Callisto). Better to differentiate the next games than to try and one-up the epic undertaking that was Stalingrad.

So I finally got around to trying Battle of Britain, taking a break from our ongoing (and drawn out) campaign of Stalingrad, to see what Undaunted in the skies is all about. Not surprisingly, the core deck building system of Undaunted works well here, despite the many changes to rules and game flow. 

Here you are mostly controlling airplanes with your cards, and every plane card played must be used to move (these aren’t helicopters, after all) and possibly do one other action (such as attack or maneuver). Your planes will fly and shoot in a straight line, so lining the enemy up with your sights is key to success. Getting behind the enemy gives you an even greater advantage (an extra die to roll for the attack).

This fundamental change brings a few key tradeoffs. The fact that you are forced to move the plane every time you play its card means that you must constantly be thinking about where your nose is pointed and where you want to end up several movements from now. Yet the fact that you have to line up with your target perfectly means that you’ll spend more turns maneuvering and looping back around and less turns in the thick of the action.

For some folks, that simulation of arial combat will be a joy… enhanced in no small part by the solid core deck building decisions and initiative jostling found in the Undaunted series. For other folks, that might make Battle of Britain feel more tedious when other Undaunted games aren’t nearly as persnickety about movement and aiming. The rules are also a tad more fiddly for newcomers in the sense that you must move before you can change direction (at least with your bread and butter planes) and you can only change direction by one degree per movement.

After playing the first scenario, one thing I immediately miss is the tradeoffs you constantly face with your basic units. In other Undaunted games, you are frequently agonizing over whether to move or control or attack with your riflemen and whether to scout or conceal or recon or attack with your scouts. Likewise, there’s usually a competing core strategy of rushing for the objective before your units are easily wiped out or building up a stronger deck before pushing forward and hoping you are not too late.

In scenario 1 of Battle of Britain, this tension of decisions is dampened because you are always moving and only ever deciding whether to attack or maneuver. The only objective is to shoot each other’s planes down, so the overall strategy feels one-dimensional. To be fair, I presume the campaign immediately becomes more interesting in scenario 2 and beyond with more nuanced objectives like bombing naval ships or retreating across the map. But even so, I do miss having multiple options for how to utilize my basic units.

Overall, it appears that Undaunted: Battle of Britain is yet another good game which offers some key differences thanks to the new theater of operations. It’s one that I wouldn’t mind playing again, especially to dig deeper into the scenarios. But the reality at my table is that I would much rather go back to Stalingrad and enjoy further plays of that all the way until 2200: Callisto releases. With a growing wealth of Undaunted options at my disposal, and because of my preferences, I just don’t see myself revisiting Battle of Britain any time soon. But for those who are interested in arial combat, I think you are in for a treat.

Prognosis: Fair

Pies, Lunar, Mori, & Bacon

1 Play Each (4 Players)

Within the span of a couple weeks I’ve had the chance to venture through the entirety of Allplay’s latest releases: the four small-box trick takers — Pies, Lunar, Mori, & Bacon.Since I’ve only been able to play them once each, my impressions should absolutely be taken with a grain of salt. But when card games like these have you play through multiple hands, it’s still a good chance to explore a lot of what they have to offer. And I can’t exactly sense a high skill ceiling or hidden depths for any of these titles, except for perhaps Lunar. But let’s do a quick sprint through these four games, shall we?

Lunar is the first of these games that I got to the table. And straight away this title sets the visual tone for the entire collection by displaying gorgeous box and card art. Publisher Allplay is never one to shy away from a killer presentation. 

This particular game is really intended to be a 4-player experience (even if that box also says 2). The neat thing about Lunar is that you play in partnerships as if you and your partner are each playing half of a card — one of you plays the value and the other plays the suit. By combining your cards together, you put up a fight against the rival team who also plays a suit and a value. Just like in most trick taking games, the suit is must-follow and the highest value (or trump suit) wins the trick.

For Lunar, I enjoy the twist that this one offers of combining your team’s cards into one whole while navigating the tight scoring. Either your team wants to win very few tricks (0-3), or you want to win most but not too many tricks (7 or 8 of the 12 tricks in a round). Each time you win a trick, you’ll push your team marker up the track and into or out of scoring range. There are also a few cards in the deck that tempt you to win the trick regardless of your position on the track, simply because they grant bonus points if you claim them.

Lunar is one that will for sure stick around in my collection, although I’m not sure how often it’ll get played. I own way too many games that are best at 4-players, and many of them (both large and small) call to me far more than Lunar. Perhaps the biggest thing holding Lunar back for me is that I find it hard to know how to play well and communicate strategy to my opponent — it mostly felt like we were hoping we were on the same page for the bulk of each round. But I imagine that some further experience would improve our synergy.

Prognosis: Good

Mori was the next one we broke out a few nights later. It boasts some of my favorite Beth Sobel art ever with the combination of vivid skulls and lush flowers. Sadly, that presentation is undermined a bit by the small and difficult-to-see numbers which forced us to state the value of our cards as we played them to the table. But that didn’t hinder our gameplay experience in any way.

This one aims to be the weirdest trick taker of this Kickstarter bundle by cramming several unique features into the rules. The trump suit works via a rock-paper-scissors format where winter beats fall, fall beats summer, summer beats spring, and spring beats winter. Players must follow suit, but there are plenty of loopholes that Mori pokes in that traditional rule. Whenever you feel like it, you can simply play an X card (which never wins a trick) or a die instead (which can sometimes win a trick if your die is the only trump suit played). 

There are so many exceptions here, that the game can get a bit tangled up in its own vines. You don’t want to win the most X’s because you’ll lose a point per X, but you do want the second most X’s because you’ll gain a point per X. You do have to follow lead suit except if you decide to play an X or die. You can’t win with a X card unless you lead with an X and everyone else plays X’s. You do want to win tricks because the leaves on cards are each worth a point, except you don’t want to win tricks because the skulls on cards are each worth a negative point. The cards you win are kept face down, except your X’s should remain visible to all players (this rule is omitted from the rulebook but reinforced by the deluxe tokens).

You eventually get the hang of Mori after enough tricks. And that fiddlyness doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the general incentives of the game. The only viable strategy that I could figure out for this one was to try and avoid playing your best scoring cards (because your unplayed cards get added to your score anyway), and you should only try to win a trick after seeing what most everyone else has played.

The nicest part about winning a trick in Mori is that you get to claim a die from the center supply into your hand that you can use later. But even then, we mostly found that we would rather just lose tricks. 

The problem with leading with a high value card in Mori is that your opponents have so many ways out of following suit (playing an X card or die instead of feeding you their last valuable card of that suit). And when they are out of the led card suit, then they will gleefully feed you a negative point card of another suit. So having high cards in your hand (which themselves are negative point cards) feels more like a curse than a blessing.

Flipping that convention on its head (where high cards are typically good) is fine for Mori to do. But I didn’t really stumble across a satisfying way to manage my hand. There’s no chance to really make your move and execute a brilliant play, at least not that I can spot. For us it was mainly just a lot of hoping that you got to play last in the trick and that the cards up for grabs were a net positive points that you could claim. This was how the one player in our group managed to crush us with his end game score, he simply had the most chances to pounce on a good point pool.

It’s painful to admit that my favorite looking game of this bunch is also my least favorite one to play. Still, it’s a relatively quick card game that ambitiously tries to do a lot of unconventional things in this over-trodden genre, so I still had a decent time with it.

Prognosis: Fair

Bacon is perhaps the most surprising offering here because I knew it was the most basic and conventional experience in this line. But after trying so many trick takers that abandon their core values in a desperate need for attention, some classic comfort food card play really hit the spot. 

This one isn’t exactly a trick taker of one player leading with a suit and watching the other players follow or break from suit. Rather, Bacon is a ladder-climbing game where one player leads with a “combo” (a specific type of set or run of cards) and the other players must follow with a similar but slightly better combo —  alternatively they can blow it away with a “special” (basically a super combo).

Players have a menu of options (their player aid) sitting in front of them which very clearly lays out what you are allowed to play (combos like “a run of 3,” “a run of 4,” “a run of 5,” “a set of 3,” and so on). Veterans of popular ladder-climbing games like Tichu will probably see this streamlined experience as a downgrade. But for anyone who is in the mood for a casual card game with some interesting decisions, Bacon hits the spot.

You’ll still have plenty of wiggle room to adapt and strategize thanks to the two bacon (wild) cards that are dealt out to each player for each hand. And at even player counts (4 and 6) you’ll be paired into teams where you and your partner(s) want to go out first in order to score maximum points. 

The other nice wrinkle to the gameplay is that each time you win a trick (by forcing all other players to consecutively pass), then you get to decide which player on your team leads the next trick. This is a huge advantage if one of you has a beautiful run in your hand and you desperately don’t want somebody else to lead with an ill-fitting set.

I should have known that Bacon would be reliably solid, just like its namesake. Although I do worry how it will fare against the likes of Scout.

Prognosis: Good

Pies was the last card game to make it to the table (despite my undying love for the dessert). This one features no suits, but rather three decks of cards that range from 1-25. Each round you deal out one of these decks, and then players venture through a series of tricks deciding whether to play low or high with their dwindling supply of numbers. 

The weird thing about this trick taker is that your relative value against each other determines the drafting order, where you then take turns claiming a card that was just played into this trick. Only, the cards don’t re-enter your hand. Rather, they stay on display in your face-up tableau where you hope nobody steals them away before you can form them into fruit mixes and score points.

Drafting order is the commanding focus of Pies, especially when the special actions are up for grabs. Some cards display a unique feature like a recipe (which you’ll use to concoct fruit mixtures from your tableau and score points) or a steal (swiping a tableau card from another player) or a dog (a loyal companion that protects your tableau from thievery) or three pies (tokens which increase the drafting value of your played card by 3.14 each). 

Much like Mori, there is a major advantage here for the last player to throw down a card in a trick (so you can see what is up for grabs and what card is best spent on drafting order). The problem is that if your right hand neighbor keeps winning the tricks, then they’ll keep leading the tricks and you’ll constantly be hosed by turn order. Much of the competition hinges on you playing the right card at the right time, so luck of the deal combined with luck of the turn order has the risk of leaving some players feeling salty.

It’s not all bad being the lowest card of the trick, because you earn a bonus plum card along with whatever garbage was left out in the middle by your opponents. But that just means the being second-to-last is usually the true worst position because the best cards have all been taken and you get no compensation for it. Yet not even that can measure up to the pain that comes from having your tableau picked clean by opponents with thieving abilities. It’s a strange dichotomy to play a rather pleasant-looking game of fruit collecting and pie assembling that is packed with pits of take-that.

These features don’t bother me much. And the gameplay is surprisingly fast and breezy — the fastest of this entire collection. But I find that Pies suffers the most in how it reminds me of similar yet spicier games. The protective loyal dog and take-that stealing is also found in Art Robbery, yet that game does a better job of setting expectations and embracing the chaos of thievery. The hand management and bidding for drafting is also found in For Sale and Hot Lead, yet those games feature more excitement and drama. 

I didn’t dislike the recipe churned out by Pies, but I suppose I’m still searching for that key ingredient that makes it stand out in my collection.

Prognosis: Fair

Ironically, the strongest trick taker that Allplay released this year wasn’t even among this big Kickstarter bundle. It was actually Sail. But I at least enjoyed sampling these four latest card games.

Witchcraft!

2 Plays (1 Player)

The talented team behind 2022’s brilliant solo game, Resist!, is back with a follow-up featuring the same style of deck deconstruction and mission survival. Instead of acting as resistance fighters in the post Spanish Civil War era, you are controlling a helpful coven of witches seeking to defend the village and prove their innocence.

Witchcraft has enough similarities to Resist that if you’ve played one then you’ll feel right at home with the other. In fact, you could simply read my original thoughts on Resist and that would pretty closely mimic my feelings on Witchcraft.  That said, it isn’t simply a reskin either.

While Witchcraft features a comparable gameplay experience, it introduces a wealth of changes under the hood. Your main cards (witches) are now part of families which combo well off of each other if they happen to be in your hand at the same time. 

The most important decisions you make in the game might just be the initial draft when you separate the entire deck into coven cards (your draw pile) and recruit cards (a pile that you can occasionally recruit new witches from) — splitting them up two cards at a time. If you craft a deck that doesn’t synergize well, then you can quickly see your chance of success plummet as you begin to take on various challenges. That was the case in my first play of the game where I arrogantly skipped the suggested beginner setup and dove straight into the card drafting setup. Fortunately, my pitiful defeat came with a reward of lessons learned which set me up for a much more successful second play. 

The other notable change to Witchcraft is found in the victory objective. In Resist, the object of the game is simply to reach specific point thresholds — the higher you go, the more resounding your victory. With Witchcraft, the objective has been pivoted to a more thrilling and dramatic win/loss scenario where you are trying to sway the 3 jurors to your side through enough good deeds. The problem is that you don’t always know exactly how stubborn these jurors are — how far up the track do you need to push their conviction cube to sway them to your side?

From the randomized combination of jurors there springs an entire tree of setup variability. The extra mission cards and events that are shuffled into your session are linked to a specific juror, meaning you’ll be able to enjoy a huge variety of plays thanks to these endless combinations. The box also comes with a full campaign of 9 scenarios — these offer their own added challenges and objectives to the mix if you really want to change things up from the standard mode.

While I probably give Witchcraft a slight edge over Resist due to its gameplay changes in how a victory is achieved, I’d ultimately say that you can’t go wrong either way. Pick whichever one strikes your fancy and start there. Then, if you find yourself hungry for even more gaming goodness within this system, check out the other. They are both really solid.

Prognosis: Good

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.

The post 1st Impressions of Sail, Witchcraft, Undaunted: Battle of Britain, Patterns, Bacon, Lunar, Mori, and Pies! appeared first on Bitewing Games.