Art Robbery

3 Plays

I’m both amused and baffled by Reiner Knizia’s spicy new card game, Art Robbery.  Amused because its a delightful game of double-layered thievery—a group of art thieves are fighting over their spoils like two jealous toddlers snatching away whatever toy is in the other’s hand.  Baffled because Art Robbery successfully entertains me while sounding eerily similar to another game which I loathe—Cover Your Assets.

In both Art Robbery and Cover Your Assets, players each have a hand of cards that dictates what they’ll be able to claim or steal.  If I have a coveted 5 card (or gold card) in my hand, I can play that card to steal the 5 (or gold) sitting on display in your possession.  With Cover Your Assets, this mechanism feels like a brainless gotcha game of slap-happy take-that.  With Art Robbery, this mechanism reveals itself to be far more calculated, clever, and engaging.

Upon closer inspection, there are some subtle but critical differences between Art Robbery and Cover Your Assets that dictate why I enjoy the former and avoid the latter.  In Cover Your Assets, a player’s personal stash is always subject to robbery from start to finish.  While you can stack more sets on your stash to protect the sets that are buried deeper, I’ve seen plenty of times where somebody’s entire stash was wiped clean in only a few short rounds because opponents had the perfect card to steal whatever was currently on top.  Meanwhile with Art Robbery, the game is broken up into four rounds where your current goodies are locked in and off limits from thievery the moment the round ends.  Immediately, one game has an important sense of progress and permanence while the other carelessly embraces chaos and frivolous luck.

The next essential ingredient to Art Robbery’s success is the emphasis on timing.  Because each round has a clear ending enshrouded in the mystery of who will trigger it, players must decide when they will pull the trigger and claim or steal a token in hopes of it remaining in their possession until the round end.  If you sit on your best cards and wait too long to retrieve a token, then the round can suddenly end without you putting your hand to good use.  The good news is that your hand does carry over from one round to the next, which provides another layer of long-term planning and hand management.

The rules are simple: play a card to take the matching token from the center supply.  If there is no matching token in the center supply, take it from an opponent instead.  Once the center supply is empty, the round is over and each player locks in the tokens they’ve claimed that round.  As always, the game has a few brilliant Knizia twists including alibis.  Certain tokens (mostly the lower valued ones) have dots on them that each represent an alibi.  At the end of the game, the player(s) with the fewest alibis is immediately eliminated from victory, regardless of their point total.  On top of that, there are a few more unique cards that let you claim a guard dog to act as a buffer for your stash, take any token from the center supply, or claim a boss tile that only scores you points if you pair it with another high value tile.

While the first round of the first game made Art Robbery seem almost as shallow as Cover Your Assets, with tokens quickly bouncing from one owner to another like a pinball ricocheting between bumpers, over time the Knizian layers began to peel back and reveal subtle strategies beneath this chaos.  

For example, if I have multiple fours in my hand, then I can snatch a four early in the round knowing that I have another card ready to steal it back if needed.  If I sit on this five until there are only a couple tokens left in the supply, then the odds are that I’ll be able to steal and keep the five through the end of the round.  If the opponent to my left is sitting on a fat stack of points this round, then they are going to want to end the round quickly, so I better make my move before the round ends or steal from that player to dissuade them from ending the round too soon.  If one player is dominating everyone else by raking in the best point tokens, then it’s up to everyone else to keep the alibis away from them so that they get eliminated at the end of the game.

It’s not the deepest card game out there, but Art Robbery does hit the spot in terms of quick simplicity and clever thievery.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Twice As Clever

1 Play

I’m about to break the publisher’s code and share a secret with the world that has been eating away at me for far too long… the secret?  Game boxes are a lie.  A whole cornucopia of lies, in fact.  

Is the bean trading game for 2-7 players, Bonanza, really a worthwhile 2 player game?  Of course not.  Can Catacombs actually be won in only 60 minutes?  I doubt it.  Is Twice as Clever really TWO TIMES as clever as That’s Pretty Clever?  No, silly.  I suppose these examples and hundreds more make us publishers a bunch of pathological liars.  But at least our lies are pasted onto boxes of fun (usually).

In the case of Twice as Clever, perhaps a more accurate title would have been “Slightly More Clever, Probably” or “Roughly as Clever as the Last One.”  This standalone sequel doesn’t reinvent the roll & write wheel of combotastic bonuses, but it does approach That’s Pretty Clever’s design style with enough interesting twists to feel fresh and different from the original.  Twice as Clever manages to turn some original tracks on their head.  It also conjures some novel new tracks—ways to apply dice results while exploring the tension between immediate bonuses and end-game scoring.

One of the best aspects of the “Clever” roll & write series remains the tough decision of which dice to draft and which ones to serve up on a silver platter to your opponents.  If you’re a fan of That’s Pretty Clever, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take a stab at its younger sibling (note: Bitewing Games does not condone the stabbing of siblings).

Current Rating: 7/10

Orongo

2 Plays

I’m always keen to discover hidden gems in the hobby that have been forgotten or overlooked.  And if you’re wondering where the best place is to start digging for gold, you’d be hard pressed to find a better mine than Reiner Knizia’s ludography.

Orongo is one such “hidden gem” that many Knizia enthusiasts have mentioned, and its history explains a lot about why it ended up in this state.  When this Easter Island game was originally released at Spiel 2014 by Ravensburger, it sort of landed flat on its face due to production decisions.  Tiles blend in too much with the board (making them hard to find), the Moai statues are easily toppled like dominoes waiting to be nudged, the bingo chips give off an aura of… bingo chips, and the sea shells are supposed to rest on board spaces but often prefer to roll across the table.  Add all this together and players can quickly become annoyed with the experience and distracted from the design.

So it seems that the gameplay of Orongo certainly hasn’t gotten a fair shot at attention and acclaim.  Despite all these production missteps, our experience with the design was a pleasant surprise.  This one finds Knizia in his comfort zone with a crisp blend of auctioning and tile placement.  Each round, new tiles are added to the board, and players participate in a closed auction to determine how many of their markers they’ll get to add to the board and who will get to place them first.  The objective is to connect compatible tiles with each other and with coastal palm spaces.  Once you’ve made a proper connection using your markers, you’ll get to place a Moai statue on the board.  The first person to place all their Moai statues, plus the final ceremonial Moai, is the winner.

So Orongo is a race to erect your statues while wisely managing your shell economy.  In classic Knizian fashion, the tile placement mechanism is highly interactive and the auction is not without its twists.  The highest bidder always loses their bid to the reef space; they do get the privilege of placing three markers and doing it first, but it comes at a cost.  The second highest bidder gets to keep their bid and place two markers, so sometimes that can be the better deal.  Every other bidder also keeps their bid and places one marker, unless a player bids zero shells. Any time a player bids zero shells in a round, they don’t get to place any markers, but they do get to replenish their shell supply with whatever ended up in the reef from the highest bidder of this round (and possibly previous rounds).  The problem is that if multiple people bid zero, then they all have to split the spoils!

The beautiful thing about Orongo is that as new tiles come out onto the board and players invest in different opportunities, the challenge of the game becomes hyper-focused on opponent prediction.  If you can accurately predict what spaces your rivals want and how badly they want them, then you’ll be able to harness their behavior to your advantage.  Divining when to bid high, how high to bid, and when to bid zero are critical to success.  And then claiming the best spaces for yourself while blocking your opponents from essential areas will give you the best chance of victory.

Even if each play is riddled with a few pesky moments of toppling statues and rolling shells, the game is packed with Knizian tension that is bursting out of every minute of its lightning fast 40-minute playtime.  You won’t see these minor annoyances keep me from getting Orongo to the table for plenty more thrilling sessions.

Current Rating: 8/10

Bear Raid

2 Plays

Of the three games that publisher Board Game Tables launched in a bundle on Kickstarter last year, Bear Raid was the game that most caught my eye.  Of course it helped that they recruited artist Nick Nazzaro to do the stylish box cover and player screens which add vibrancy to an otherwise highly transactional experience.  Beyond that, I’ve enjoyed Ryan Courtney’s other designs (to the point of publishing his next puzzly pipey game, Trailblazers), and I had the impression that Bear Raid could be another game in the same vein as The Estates—a cutthroat romp of calculated savagery.

My first two plays of Bear Raid have confirmed that hunch and delighted me with the tactical possibilities.  Ryan has called this design his take on a “party game,” but this definitely isn’t your stereotypical game for parties.  This fills a more specific niche of being a thinky party-style game for hobbyist gamers and/or wistful investors.  There are still dramatic moments of luck featuring sighs of relief and groans of pain, but that is all intermingled with a heaping of careful computations.  While a cold-blooded tension lurks underneath, Bear Raid is delightfully coated in a playful personality of shared incentives and tongue-in-cheek flavor.  The companies are shamelessly titled things such as “GameStart” and “Nile” and “Banana” and “Edison,” while the forecast cards feature a wide range of events from Internet Memes to CEO Scandals.

Players are on the hunt for the most profitable ventures, and after a specific number of rounds you’ll cash in your stocks, pay back your shorts, and determine which player is wealthiest.  Shorting stocks is ironically the most confusing concept for newcomers yet simultaneously the most delicious mechanism to explore.  Essentially the way it works is you sell stocks you don’t technically own (based on the company’s current stock value) for instant cash with the promise of paying back those stocks based on their end-game value.  This incentivizes shorting players to gang up on those companies and, like a twisted puppet-master, guide them toward destructive bankruptcy.  If a company goes bankrupt, then you’ll be free of your shorted debts while invested players lose all their stock in that company.

Like the best tug-of-war games, Bear Raid makes friends of enemies and enemies of friends depending on how each player interacts with each company.  When the snaking turn order gets around to you, you’ll have four options for spending your turn wisely: buy stock in a single company, short stock in a single company, take dice from the available pool of a single company, or add up to three dice to the rumors card.

The dice, and how you can interact with them, are the keystone that holds this design together.  Each company has eight dice in its pool, yet those can either be sitting out influencing the stock change (based on their rolled value), hiding in the draw bag waiting to be pulled, or tucked away behind a player’s screen to be withheld or released as that player pleases.  After each action phase, plays can dump dice into the draw bag, but importantly, they can only hoard up to 5 dice behind their screen during this step.  Then 12 dice are rolled and added to the companies—any guaranteed dice on the rumor card plus the remaining of the 12 randomly drawn from the bag.  The sum of each company’s dice will move a tracking cube along a forecast card, and this usually results in a stock increase or decrease to the delight or dismay of each player.

While there are a few highs in Bear Raid of seeing your invested stock soar in value or your shorted stock plummet toward bankruptcy, more often you’ll feel like you’re taking an unending beating from both the dice and your opponents.  But just like The Estates, giving each other one smack down after another is kind of the whole point—it’s hilariously painful and mercilessly entertaining.  On top of that, Ryan Courtney fans will still get their AP-inducing fix as they try to navigate the best maneuvers through the varied forecast cards and dice manipulation opportunities. 

I wouldn’t call Bear Raid a game for everyone.  It’s pure stocks and shorts to its core with a hearty dose of nasty interaction in a tense tactical game that tends to go far longer than its forecasted 60 minutes.  You’ll also have to be constant and vigilant to help remind each other to adjust your stock/short trackers behind your screen where there is still the possibility of accidental (or intentional) errors.  Meanwhile, folks who can better track and remember the previous actions of their opponents will have a definite advantage at the table.  But despite its more niche appeal, I find myself well within the target audience for this game and loving every minute of it.

Current Rating: 8/10

Ghosts of Christmas

1 Play

We managed to play Ghosts of Christmas the day after Valentines Day, so that’s something.  Actually, the game does contain a heart suit which just so happens to be the trump suit of this trick-taker, so if you’re going to have a festive session of Ghosts of Christmas then Valentines isn’t the worst time to break it out.

Actually, I’d argue that there is never really a bad time to whip out Ghosts of Christmas, despite it being themed after A Christmas Carol.  The reason for that is because this card game offers a clever twist on trick taking by allowing players to play three tricks out of order—into the past, present, and future—before resolving them in order.  If I start a round by playing a candle suit into the future, then players must play a candle suit into the future if they have one, otherwise they can play any card suit, as is common in trick taking.  But they can also ignore the future for now and fill in the past and/or present first.

So the first time any player plays the first card in a time period, that sets the lead suit for everyone in that period.  What makes things interesting is that you can use other time period slots to drain your hand of a suit so you no longer have to play that suit into a time period that has already been set.  On top of that, the lead suit during the playing phase is often different from the scoring suit during the scoring phase—the ‘scoring suit’ being the suit that determines who wins the trick.

You see, whoever has Mr. Scrooge’s top hat will determine how tricks get scored during the scoring phase.  The past trick is resolved first, and the highest number of the scoring suit takes the trick.  The winner of that trick now claims the top hat, and whatever they played into the present becomes the scoring suit of that trick.  Likewise, the winner of the present sets the scoring suit of the future trick.  If you’re clever enough, you can manage to set yourself up for easy trick wins by playing different suits from your opponents and keeping control of the hat.

The catch is that the heart suit trumps all, including the scoring suit, so heart cards are always the best ones to have in your hand, right?  Not necessarily.  After players are dealt their hand of 12 cards each, and before playing 4 rounds of 3 tricks each (past, present, and future), players must wager how many tricks they’ll win with their hand, and if they want to score any points, they must hit that wager with exactness.

But being that precise across 12 wonky tricks is, you guessed it, tricky.  That’s why you’ll play as many hands as there are players, so you can certainly bust in one or more hands and not be totally out of it.  But that’s also why your wager comes in the form of taking purple or red door tokens.  Each purple door token you take represents a trick you must win in order to score anything this hand.  But you can also take an additional, single red door to give yourself a little more wiggle room.  Each trick you win earns you a wreath to place on an empty door, and you don’t have to cover the red door to score points for your wreaths.  But, the final stroke of brilliance to the game comes in the fact that taking a red door—whether you wreath it or not—will cut your wreath points in half.  Each wreath will only score you one point instead of two.

And so each hand goes: Deal 12 cards, make your wager at how many tricks you’ll win, and then claw your way to the precise amount of wreaths you need before slamming the breaks and dodging every trick victory after that.  And of course, do your best to sabotage your opponents by making them overshoot or undershoot their wagers.

There are plenty of trick taking games out there that offer a similar style of precise wagering on trick wins.  So Ghosts of Christmas mainly stands out with its past/present/future conceit.  Some will understandably worry that this concept is too complex for folks who aren’t trick-taking experts, but I disagree.  We successfully introduced the game to two non-gamers who only had a vague idea of trick taking.

I think the key to teaching Ghosts of Christmas is to first explain the rules of standard trick taking, then explain the twist in this design, then play a single practice round (deal three cards to each player) to demonstrate how things play out through the playing and scoring phases.  After that, we had no problem tossing them into the deep end with door bidding and all.  Our play of the game was competitive, too.

Ultimately, Ghosts of Christmas has earned itself a spot in our collection.  I like a solid trick taker, and while this one isn’t my absolute favorite of the bunch, it’s one that I could see us breaking out as a yearly Christmas tradition thanks to its cozy theme and clever twist.

Current Rating: 7/10

Factory Funner

3 Plays

After my first play of Factory Funner (the updated version just barely released by Board Game Tables dot com) It didn’t take me long to be reminded of Calico—the popular puzzly game of quilts and cats from the hotness of 2020.

Calico is one that remains a strong favorite for many gamers.  Yet it’s a box that I quickly passed on from my collection after only three plays—like a new pet owner who quickly regretted his decision after having to constantly feed a hungry mouth, clean a smelly litter box, and deal with a moody animal.  The main problem was that by my third play of Calico, I felt there was nothing new for me to discover or overcome.  I had found my optimal strategy for the game and there was nothing within the system (and certainly no form of player interaction) that would push me out of my comfort zone into interesting new experiences.

The interesting part about all of this is that Factory Funner is in many ways a similar style of game to Calico, yet it is one that I plan to keep around much longer.  In both games, players have a personal hex board where they’ll be puzzling out the optimal way to add tiles to its spaces.  Each turn consists of drafting a tile that will be added to an increasingly tighter player area.  What starts as hope and ease quickly turns to pain for current options and regret at past decisions.  Factory Funner even now includes a “No Speed Required Variant” where the drafting mechanism is structured the exact same way as Calico; but the standard, real-time drafting mechanism (and the rest of the game, really) is where Factory Funner diverges from Calico.

In each of the 8 rounds of Factory Funner, players start by revealing machine tiles equal to the number of players.  Every player will get one tile, but the options are first come, first serve.  The first player to snatch a machine that looks like the best fit for their own board will take 1 penalty point, and the last player to get stuck with the leftover tile will earn a bonus point and can choose to not even use the machine with no added penalty.  Everyone else must either fit their machine onto their board or lose two points for being too trigger-happy.

Once a machine is added to a board, it can never be adjusted or relocated.  But the thing that really puts the “funner” in Factory Funner comes from the ability to rearrange everything else on your board every single round, and the fact that this flexibility comes with a cost.  

Each machine will come with input and output requirements: put in two units of green on this side, two of yellow on this side, and output three red on that side… that kind of thing.  Each player starts with a supply reservoir of each color—a bottomless vat of vibrant goop that can be connected to the matching inputs of machines.  There are also 154 connector tiles of various shapes and bends that can be snaked across your board and even criss-crossed with each other.  Finally, there are output reservoirs that you’ll have to connect your machine outputs to if you can’t efficiently connect one or more machine’s output to one or more’s input.

But efficiency is the name of the game here.  While you’re welcome to remove connectors and reservoirs from your board for free, every time you add a piece to a space, you’ll lose yourself a point.  Placing a machine will grant you the amount of points that it displays on the tile, but that might be a bad machine for your board if it costs more new connector and reservoir tiles than it is worth.  Fortunately, it feels extra good to connect the matching colored inputs and outputs of different machines because doing so will grant you significant bonus points at the end of the game.

Fuse this tense spatial flexibility with real-time machine drafting and Factory Funner provides an engaging roller coaster of emotions from start to finish.  You’ll feel like a an evil genius when you snatch a valuable machine from the table before your opponents, and then you’ll feel like a complete fool when you realize that the colors on the machine are oriented in the opposite way from what your board needs.  Your heart will drop to the pit of your stomach as you can’t find a single possible way to fit your latest machine onto your board, but then the lightbulb moment comes where you finally crack the code and you are back to being a spatial genius as everything fits nicely onto your board and you scrape out another profitable turn.

It’s a blast of a puzzly 30 minute session, yet it’s also true that Factory Funner has barely any more player interaction to it than Calico.  So what’s my beef with Calico?  Am I just one of those icy-hearted people who has something against cozy quilts and cuddly cats?  Maybe it’s true.  I certainly don’t enjoy dandruff or constant sneezing.  And quilting was never my forte. But after giving it some thought, I think there’s a deeper reason why one game clicks for me while the other does not.

When it comes this hobby, my standard preference is for a high interaction experience where I can game the other folks at the table.  But, if I can’t play against my opponents, at least let me play against my ego.  Much like a wily fellow human with a mind of their own, my ego is a constantly morphing specimen that I must wrestle with.  This waltz between pride and sensibility, greed and reservation, glory and safety is one that becomes particularly potent in games of push-your-luck.  For those designs that bring it to the forefront, including Factory Funner, this internal struggle has proven to be a satisfying substitute to the void of longevity that multiplayer solitaire and low-interaction designs leave.

Current Rating: 7.5/10

Pickomino Deluxe / Heckmeck Deluxe

3 Plays

Pickomino/Heckmeck is among Knizia’s best selling games of all time (at least according to Board Game Geek stats), so it’s about time that a shameless Knizia fan like myself got around to trying it.  The nice thing about the “Deluxe” version is that it uses weighty components and includes the solid expansion.

Pickomino is exactly the type of light, push-your-luck, Knizia filler that I’ve been exploring lately with the likes of Excape (Rapido), L.A.M.A. Dice, Family Inc., and more.  After trying all these games within the span of a few months, it has become blatantly obvious that Reiner is a master of these simple, family-friendly luck-fests.  I’m typically the type of gamer who runs and hides from relatively mindless games such as Uno, Phase 10, Yahtzee, Cover Your Assets, and the like, so it should come as a huge compliment to Dr. Knizia’s designs that I am happy and proactive about getting these alternatives to the table.

Pickomino is simply another great example as to why his games have a magical appeal to them over similar competitors.  Here, you’ll be taking turns rolling 8 dice in an effort to claim a precious domino that contains game-winning worms.  With your dice, you’ll need to roll the domino’s number or higher to claim it from the central “grill,” or you can try to steal a domino from the top of another player’s stash by rolling the sum of its exact value.

The thing that makes Pickomino far more interesting than mindless dice rolling is that after each roll, you must choose a number (or the worms) to lock in.  Whatever you choose, all the dice that show your chosen number (or worms) can then no longer be re-rolled, and you cannot choose that value again when locking in your other dice in later rolls.  On top of that, rolling worms is essential because you need at least one die with a worm result in order to not bust, and the worms rolled are worth a whopping five points each toward your domino drafting options.

Whenever you choose to stop rolling, you’ll then claim a compatible domino based on your results.  But if you push-your-luck too far and roll results that only match dice that you’ve locked in, then your turn is over and you lose your top precious domino back to the central “grill.”  

So if you start your turn rolling two valuable worms, you’ll be tempted to keep them.  But if you lock in the two worm dice and then roll four more worms with your remaining six dice on your next roll, then you’ll quickly find yourself sliding down the path of regret toward an inevitable mid-life crisis.  Of course, that can also happen if you don’t keep the two worms and then never roll another worm for the rest of your turn.  While luck of the dice ultimately reigns supreme, your decisions still feel impactful as you anxiously determine which values to lock in, which dice to re-roll, and when to stop rolling.

The included expansion really hits the spot for me, because it gives you a strong incentive to keep multiple value-1 dice results (by rewarding you with a victory point known as a bratworm!), and it keeps rotating powers jumping between players and the low-value dominos.  Best of all, the game + expansion is still easy to teach to non-gamers (the main type of folks I would play this one with).

I believe where Pickomino suffers the most is in two ways:

1. It seems like higher player counts could be far too sluggish
2. There always seems to be one player who gets completely wrecked by Lady Luck

Fortunately, Pickomino is a relatively quick one with 2-4 players, so I don’t foresee any major obstacles to our enjoyment of the game as long as we stick to that short and sweet spot.

Current Rating: 7/10

Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest

2 Plays

To tell the truth, I did not expect to be buying another title from Stonemaier Games, especially so soon after having my fill of Scythe and Wingspan, growing weary of Tapestry, losing interest in Pendulum, and completely bouncing off of Red Rising.  There’s nothing necessarily wrong with these games, it simply felt like my tastes and their offerings were diverging further apart.  That is until the head of Stonemaier, Jamey, announced Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest—an updated design from one of my favorite creators, Paolo Mori—and he suddenly had my attention again.

But even then, I had actually tried the original Libertalia for the first time ever last year and thought it was ok at best.  My main gripes were that the design seemed to age poorly in terms of game length, graphic design, tiebreaker resolutions, strategic depth, and so on.  Lo and behold, Winds of Galecrest was revealed along with what appeared to be smart solutions to all of the problems I had with the original game.  So despite my primal instincts warning me to stay away, I couldn’t help but give Stonemaier Games and Libertalia another chance.  In the timeless words of Aragorn: “For Paolo.”  …or Frodo.  Why not both?

Anyway, I’ve been pleased to discover that Winds of Galecrest lives up to its promise in being an evolved and improved version of Libertalia.  Not only that, but it is perhaps the most un-Stonemaier-like game in their entire product lineup.  Against Stonemaier’s usual tropes and their stated tenets of game design, Winds of Galecrest is inorganically round/phase-based and highly interactive to the point of potential hostility.  Indeed, it appears that Jamey Stegmaier is willing to make exceptions to his carefully crafted brand when it involves a favored classic—and thank goodness for that!

Despite the many changes, tweaks, and additions that have occurred between Libertalia and Winds of Galecrest, it’s clear to me that Jamey and Paolo understood the strengths of this design and kept its spirit vibrant while breathing new life into its old bones.  Some folks are getting so hung up on the subjective art makeover from gritty Pirates of the Caribbean to colorful anthropomorphic sky pirates that they’re completely missing the objective improvements under the hood.  Fortunately, Jamey makes it blatantly easy for us to see the changes with a Publisher’s Note on the last page of the rulebook:

• Character card variety is increased by a whopping 33%.  
• Loot token abilities can be explored and modified to the group’s preferences for gentler effects, nastier effects, or a mix of the two.  
• The game length has been nicely shortened with each voyage ramping up in length and complexity.  
• Arbitrary tiebreaker numbers within player decks have been replaced with a deliciously dynamic reputation track.  
• A surprisingly solid 2-player mode has been introduced as well as a solo mode for those interested.
• The game board and graphic design are aesthetically basic yet fully functional and much clearer than the original production.  
• In other words, literally everything that has been changed about the gameplay itself feels like a huge step-up for me.

I prefer stylish and creative art styles over ones that feel like a blatant rip-off of a major IP (Pirates of the Caribbean), so I even prefer this new art style to the original.  Does that mean I think the Winds of Galecrest is the most beautifully illustrated game ever?  No.  But I dig its personality, it still feels like a pirate game, and I find it to be a swashbucklingly good time with me hearties.  Anyone that reflexively claims the original is the better game might want to put down their rose-tinted spyglass.

An important change to re-emphasize here is the Reputation track.  One worry I had coming into Libertalia 2.0 is that it would still feel overly chaotic and random at the expense of strategy, particularly at higher player counts.  In both editions of Libertalia, players are simultaneously selecting a card from their hand, revealing it, and then resolving the day phase abilities in one direction before resolving the dusk abilities and loot token drafting in the other direction.  My one experience with this system in the original game (at 4 players) felt a little too slap-stick random for my tastes, especially with the arbitrary tiebreaker numbers on cards resolving frequent ties.  With Winds of Galecrest, I can’t reiterate enough how the Reputation track is an absolute game changer.

Both ends of the Reputation spectrum have their benefits.  On the low end, you get to start each of the 3 voyages with more doubloons than your opponents (and doubloons convert to points!); you also get to trigger your day abilities first when tied with another player.  On the other end, ties go in your favor when determining who gets to draft a precious loot token first.  What makes this Reputation track really fun is how you can manipulate your position on it throughout the game with the effects of character cards and loot tokens.

Specific cards and abilities reward you for being at one end of the track or the other at precisely the right time.  This jockeying between rival Reputation tokens fills the gaping strategic void that I had found in old Libertalia.  In my second play of The Winds of Galecrest (this one at 4 players), I traveled the whole spectrum of Reputation thanks to intentional planning on my part and on the part of my opponents.  There were more than a few times where Reputation made all the difference in my ability to snatch the perfect loot token right out from under my opponents’ noses, and that made my experience all the more satisfying.

After my first two plays, I’m mightily impressed with what Paolo Mori and Stonemaier Games have managed to do with a 10-year-old design.  They took a game I was lukewarm about and turned it into one that I love.  Not only is The Winds of Galecrest one of the best reimplementations I’ve ever seen, but it might end up being one of my favorite releases of 2022.

Current Rating: 9/10

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Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite, including the upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post 1st Impressions of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, Bear Raid, Factory Funner, Ghosts of Christmas, Art Robbery, & More! appeared first on Bitewing Games.

With all the “Most Anticipated Games of 2022” lists I’ve seen over the past few weeks, it feels like Bitewing Games is a little late to the party. On the other hand, I’ve been surprised to see very little overlap between my list and the many others out there. So today it is my honor to shine a spotlight on many promising—and possibly overlooked—titles.

From quick, simple card games to sprawling legacy campaigns… from loud, hilarious party romps to tantalizing expansions, my most anticipated board games of 2022 list covers the entire spectrum of exciting upcoming releases. And these are just the ones we know about so far…

Caesar!: Seize Rome in 20 Minutes

Expected Release Date: Now

Well it appears that Caesar being on our 2021 Holiday Board Game Gift Guide was wishful thinking.  But now that this promising war game is finally starting to show up on shelves and doorsteps, it feels like second Christmas!  Don’t be surprised it this one ends up claiming the title of best 2-player game of the year.  Father Paolo Mori and the older sibling to Caesar (Blitzkrieg) are that good.

Why it’s Exciting: Tense, bitey tug-of-war games frequently hit the spot for me.  While this one isn’t as blatant of a tug of war as Blitzkrieg, it still appears to capture a similar essence.  It also gives me faint vibes of another classic tile laying game—Samurai.  Those two bangers are very good company to be in.

Ghosts of Christmas

Expected Release Date: February 2022

Thanks to clogged ports and delayed shipments, some of the games here are spillover from last year’s most anticipated board games list.  Ghosts of Christmas is the first in a trio of games that Board Game Tables launched on Kickstarter last year.  Sadly, this game may have just missed Christmas 2021, but I suppose it’s not a big deal because here you’ll be able to time travel as you play tricks in the past, present, and future.

Why it’s exciting: BGT has developed a new hobby of unearthing bizarre Japanese designs and bringing them to a wider, western audience.  Folks like me who love wonky card games should have this on their radar.

Bear Raid

Expected Release Date: February 2022

Game two from the BGT trio is none other than Ryan Courtney’s Bear Raid.  Fun fact: Ryan told me that he’s not a big fan of games where politics (wheeling and dealing, messing with others’ plans, persuading opponents in directions that help yourself and hurt others, etc.) can influence the outcome, and Bear Raid is in many respects this type of game, so he basically designed a game that he personally isn’t into.  How about that.  The important thing here is that Ryan’s playtesters love this stock investment romp… and it’s whimsically illustrated by Nick Nizzaro.  I was born ready for this one.  Yet for those who are hoping for a more warm and welcoming game from Ryan, we’ve got you covered (more on that later).

Why It’s exciting:  I love a good interactive game where you can bet on or invest in various options.  Whether it’s a horse, a camel, a battalion, or a company, the moment you feel personally invested in a thing’s success is the moment where the excitement begins.

Factory Funner

Expected Release Date: February 2022

I’ve never associated factories with the adjective “fun,” but this final game in the BGT trio is poised to change all that.  I recently shared my top 10 spatial puzzle games, and Factory Funner made that list thanks to questionable combination of gut-feeling and critical acclaim.

Why It’s exciting:  The crunchy spatial game play, the stylish art, the flexibility of tile arrangements, and the quick playtime all speak to me in this updated version from BGT.

Sound Box

Expected Release Date: March 2022

I’m not sure which is more surprising: the implication that Horrible Guild needed to take Sound Box to Kickstarter or the fact that it only raised 12k Euros.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent roughly that much just to market the game—what a depressing thought.  Of course, launching a party game during COVID may have had something to do with that… Regardless, I’ve got my money on this game being a hoot (literally—I’m a backer) and gaining a second wind once it hits tables.  The design team behind The King’s Dilemma and Railroad Ink have created a game where players must cooperate to listen to each other’s weird sounds in a quest to pick out the right topic cards.  Imagine Codenames where the clues are a chaotic jumble of simultaneous noises and you’re basically there.

Why it’s exciting: Also imagine your partner, sibling, parent, or friend trying their best but epicly failing to recreate the sound of a printer… or a golf tournament.  Need I say more?

Root: The Marauder Expansion

Expected Release Date: Q2 2022

Few things bring me as much joy as a new box of Root goodies.  Between the exciting faction variety, charismatic art by Kyle Ferrin, and colorful Leder Games production, Root and its several expansions never fail to capture my heart.  The Marauder Expansion is particularly notable in that it apparently offers an enhanced experience a lower player counts thanks to the new hirelings.

Why it’s exciting: “Some critters just want to watch the world burn.” Such a sentiment can be said about about the new faction Lord of the Hundreds—an unhinged rat who incites ‘torch-wielding mobs.’  Meanwhile, the Keepers of Iron are disciplined Badgers on the hunt for ancient relics.  What’s not to love here?

John Company: Second Edition

Expected Release Date: June 2022

Speaking of exciting new games from Root designer Cole Wehrle, John Company: Second Edition is hot on the heels of The Marauder Expansion’s scheduled release.  While this is only the second game to come from the brothers Wehrle and their company Wehrlegig, the first one (Pax Pamir: Second Edition) is one of my favorite games ever.  Thus, a meaty game of negotiation and politics from Cole is exactly the kind of thing that could easily become my favorite game of 2022 (and of all time).  It’s gonna be a good summer of gaming, my friends.

Why it’s exciting: If gorgeous, historical board game productions from a boundary-pushing game designer sound like your kind of thing, then Wehrlegig Games is a publisher you should follow.  They’ve already proven that their games are a labor of love, and John Company: Second Edition is set to please folks who enjoy deep, immersive, and dynamic political experiences.

Soda Smugglers

Expected Release Date: June 2022

I can’t believe we’ve had to stretch all the way to June to find a new Knizia game to be hyped about!  But worry not, because the second half of the year should more than satisfy Knizia fans.  These next three games are ones that I’ve already played a ton of, but that’s because we here at Bitewing Games are their publisher.  Personally, I’m excited to see our vision for Soda Smugglers achieve its final form—bottle cap tokens, hilarious bribing, and all.  For people who want a quick, clever bluffing game that is dead simple to teach, Soda Smugglers should be right up your alley.  You can even still preorder the standard or limited deluxe edition here and be one of the first to own it.

Why it’s exciting:  Harmless, simple, and fast bluffing games are perhaps some of the best gateway and/or filler games out there.  Nothing breaks the ice better than witnessing a seemingly gentle person attempt to cross the border with a couple suitcases jam-packed with illicit soda bottles.  And few things are as funny as watching the border guard fall for a bluff or a wily traveler shoot themself in the foot with a mistimed double-bluff.

Pumafiosi

Expected Release Date: June 2022

Along the same lines, Pumafiosi is another offering from Reiner Knizia and Bitewing Games.  This one features a unique style of trick-taking where the second-highest card wins the trick and slots their winning card into a push-your-luck style hierarchy.  To top it all off, it features zany Puma Mafia characters galore.

Why it’s exciting:  Similar to Ghosts of Christmas, here we have another wonky card game that slowly reveals layered strategies as you peel through the onion.  This is a small game with a big payoff in how it rewards multiple plays.  Plus the Pumafia art and lore spread across the entire collection is simply a joy to explore.

Hot Lead

Expected Release Date: June 2022

Finally, Hot Lead rounds out the Criminal Capers Collection with a new twist on auctioning from the master designer of auction games himself.  With the help of 19 illustrated investigators, you’ll be undercover collecting evidence on criminal organizations.  Just like the other two games, this one is quick, simple, and addicting.  Again, if you’re interested, you can preorder here.  This is currently the best and only way to support Bitewing Games as a publisher and content creator.  We love sharing and making games that bite (it’s in the name), and we appreciate the support!

Why it’s exciting: Those who appreciate auctioning games are likely fans of Knizia’s stone-cold classics including Ra, High Society, and Modern Art.  With Hot Lead, we were thrilled to discover that Reiner had funneled his mystical auction design powers into an even faster experience while giving the game its own distinct flavor.  Furthermore, you get the best of a push-your-luck experience where the glorious triumphs feel amazing and the stinging failures are as quick as ripping off a band-aid.  Either way, you’re always hungry for another go.

Beyond the Sun Expansion

Expected Release Date: Q2-Q3 2022

We don’t know much yet, but word on the street is that the upcoming expansion for Beyond the Sun provides more incentives to focus on the planet board (colonization and area control).  But to be honest, anything that gives me more reasons to revisit this excellent tech-tree bonanza of a Euro has my interest.

Why it’s exciting: Beyond the Sun is one of those types of games that feels like it has endless possibilities thanks to the uniquely unraveling tech tree.  Adding more possibilities to those ‘endless’ possibilities is a thrilling prospect that has me wondering what lies beyond Beyond the Sun.

Ahoy

Expected Release Date: Q3 2022

Ahoy is the next direct-to-retail game coming from Leder Games.  This one is described as an asymmetric pirate strategy game for 2-4 players that plays in roughly 1 hour.  Two players will play as oppositional governments (one insurgent, the other established) while the other two players act as smugglers who influence the topology and value of the map that is being contested over.  According to Leder Games, this one is already finished and heading to manufacturing.

Why it’s exciting: Folks who love the idea of Root but dread the baggage that game comes with it (meaty teach, steep cost of admission, etc.) can look forward to Ahoy being the more approachable design that scratches a similar itch.

Trailblazers

Expected Release Date: Q4 2022

Assuming we don’t hit any significant delays, it’s very possible that our next release after the Criminal Capers Collection reaches tables before the end of the year.  We recently unveiled the first details of Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney, and more juicy info will be trickling in over the coming weeks.  Those who enjoy spatial puzzles will find much to love here between the three solo modes, wide player count of 1-8, charming outdoor adventure theme, simple ruleset with a high skill ceiling, and handy travel case.  Be sure to subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter to follow the game all the way to the Q2 Kickstarter launch!

Why it’s exciting: Ever since my first play of the excellent Pipeline, I always thought it would be cool to see a game that really focuses in on and explores the possibilities of a pure spatial puzzle game based solely on Ryan Courtney’s windy pipe domino tiles.  Trailblazers is that game.  Trailblazers is to Pipeline as Patchwork is to A Feast for Odin.  Here you can simply concentrate on constructing ambitious, exciting routes within a charming theme and colorful presentation that will appeal to anyone.  

Horseless Carriage

Expected Release Date: Q4 2022

Publisher Splotter Spellen is known for many strategic classics including Food Chain Magnate, Bus, Indonesia, and The Great Zimbabwe. Fans of their designs have come to love the trademark Splotter traits of pure strategy, punishing decisions, brutal interactions, and deep gameplay. While details on Horseless Carriage are sparse, we do know that this is another economic game about creating and selling automobiles in the dawn of the industry.

Why it’s exciting: Horseless Carriage is the first entirely new game put out by Splotter since 2015’s Food Chain Magnate. With FCM being their highest ranked game and most recent game, that means Horseless Carriage has big shoes to fill. Whether it lives up to those high expectations or not, Splotter fans can finally celebrate the end of a 7-year new game publishing drought.

Sidereal Confluence: Bifurcation

Expected Release Date: 2022

I was recently delighted to discover that one of my favorite high-interaction games is getting an expansion this year.  Thanks to a cross-country move and COVID, it’s been trickier to get Sidereal Confluence to the table lately, especially where the game shines best with 5+ players who enjoy wheeling and dealing.  I’m hoping to dive deeper into this epic game of negotiation before this exciting expansion releases.

Why it’s exciting: Bifurcation is set to effectively double the variety of asymmetric species players can use during the game. It introduces a new variant to each of the 9 alien species in the game—meaning new mechanisms, new strategies, and new trading opportunities.

My City: Roll & Write

Expected Release Date: 2022

Last year, I interviewed Dr. Knizia about his plans for a follow-up to the phenomenal legacy game, My City.  He hinted that there would be a sequel, but it would explore new gameplay rather than retread the same ground.  It turns out, that sequel has been reveal as My City: Roll & Write.  From the box cover, we can gather that many of the core concepts have been carried over: the city sheet shows a very similar layout to the original game’s board including mountains, a river, rocks, and trees.  The art also shows similar polyomino shapes and three different building types.  

Yet this version can play a wider range of 1-6 players and features a smaller (and presumably cheaper) box of 12 episodes rather than 24. The major question is: How will the roll & write aspect of the game change things up?  Will we see new dice introduced across the four chapters?  I’m normally not one to get excited about a roll & write, but I’ll make an exception for the follow-up to My City.

Why it’s exciting:  Those who play Knizia dice games would largely agree that Knizia understands how to make the most of dice.  The man even wrote an entire book on dice games, for crying out loud!  So the introduction of dice to the My City system means that these 12 episodes will likely have all kinds of new tricks up their sleeves.

Crescent Moon

Expected Release Date: 2022

If a meaty expansion to Sidereal Confluence isn’t enough for you, then perhaps you’ll be able to satisfy your negotiation cravings with Osprey Games’ ambitious Crescent Moon.  This mammoth design apparently takes 2.5-3 hours to play and can only be played with 4-5 players.  You’ll take on the role of a wildly asymmetric character who has unique objectives, actions, and powers in an area control competition of alliances, rivalries, and negotiations.  Based on that description, fans of Cole Wehrle designs should take note.

Why it’s exciting: From a publisher standpoint, putting out a game with such a narrow target audience (groups of 4-5 players who enjoy meaty, asymmetric games) is a tricky proposition.  What this tells me is that publisher Osprey Games really believes in this project enough to take such a risk.  Combine that with the fact that they’ve been putting out some excellent games recently (Undaunted, Brian Boru, etc.) and suddenly this one has the potential to be something truly special.

Ra

Expected Released Date: 2022

Reiner Knizia fans won’t have to wait too much longer for one of his most popular classics to make a triumphant return.  We’ve finally seen a magnificent box cover from artist Ian O’Toole, and that’s only the tip of what’s bound to be an iceberg of stunning visuals and clean graphic design.  We also know that 25th Century Games is aiming to make this the best production of Ra ever.  So whether you own and love this fantastic push-your-luck auctioning design or not, the latest version of Ra should be on your radar.

Why it’s exciting:  A new version of Ra illustrated by Ian O’Toole is like the Spider-man: No Way Home of board game team-ups.  They’re bringing back a classic, critically acclaimed, beloved experience (Doc Oc, Green Goblin—Reiner Knizia’s Ra) and pairing it with something popular and exciting (Tom Holland’s Spider-man aka Ian O’Toole).

The Queen’s Dilemma

Expected Release Date: 2022?

If you’ve played the 2020 Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee, The King’s Dilemma, then you understand how much work went into this legacy game of tug-of-war politics.  Thus, it’s understandable why The Queen’s Dilemma has been announced but not given a release date.  The big change here is that the tug-of-war resource tracks from the King’s Dilemma are being replaced with a kingdom map where players control regions, gather resources, and develop their areas.  I can’t wait to see how this game of tense voting and impactful decisions is taken to the next level. 

Why its exciting: For folks who were underwhelmed by the mechanical side of The King’s Dilemma—dragging resource tokens up and down a track—The Queen’s Dilemma seems to be aiming for a more ambitious area control + Euro experience.  Beyond arguing and debating how the kingdom should be run, players will now get to see their decisions take effect on a map and feel even more invested in their slice of domain.

Fit to Print

Expected Release Date: 2023

While Fit to Print is not scheduled to release until 2023, it’s worth noting here because the game is coming to Kickstarter this year.  Beyond coming from the increasingly popular creators of Calico, Cascadia, and Tiny Towns, Fit to Print caught my eye with the whimsical artwork by Ian O’Toole.  One of my favorite movies of all time is Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox., and this game box gives me very fantastic vibes of the fox variety.  Mr. Fox himself even works for a newspaper, so the game’s theme is obviously a warm (and welcome) nod to that delightful stop-motion animation movie.  Players will be racing to arrange the best front page of their newspaper in this real-time spatial puzzle game.

Why its exciting:  For many gamers, Flatout Games have been on a hot streak of attractively approachable yet engaging publications, and Fit to Print is set to continue that streak.  Bringing in a design from the creator of Tiny Towns seems like a perfect match here, as Tiny Towns shares much in common with Calico and Cascadia.  If you love any of these games, then Fit to Print should certainly be on your watchlist.

Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition

Expected Release Date: 2023

Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition is another new reprint of a Knizia auctioning classic, and it’s likewise an upcoming 2022 Kickstarter that won’t hit tables until 2023.  But even 20 years on from its initial publication, it remains strongly ranked in the top 500 games of all time on BGG.  This new version will see the classic team up of Vincent Dutrait art with Reiner Knizia gameplay plus 3 entirely new expansions.

Why its exciting: I recently acquired an older copy of Amun-Re and it has proven to be a solid design that has been worth keeping around.  It’s a mark of a good Euro when I’d often rather play it over other Euros that are up to 20 years newer.  That said, Amun-Re has widely been regarded as a game that is good for primarily 4-5 players.  It sounds like publisher Alley Cat Games is aiming to improve the experience at lower counts with the help of an expansion, and that is certainly something to be excited about.

Arcs

Expected Release Date: 2023

While Cole Wehrle was designing his latest ambitious strategy game, Oath, he had many wildly intriguing design ideas that ultimately didn’t end up in Oath.  Arcs is the space-themed exploration of those leftover ideas set to come to Kickstarter in 2022.  It’s described as a short campaign game played over a few punchy episodes (or one long session of 3-5 hours) with branching narratives that can be enjoyed across many campaign sessions.  It’s also easier to teach than both Oath and Root.

Why it’s exciting: Arcs approaches the same question that was posed by 2021’s excellent Brian Boru: How do you combine trick taking with a strategy board game?  According to Cole, Arcs answers this question in a very different (and meaner) way from Brian Boru.  Any game that sounds like the love child of Oath and Brian Boru immediately has my attention.

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 upcoming Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

The post 22 Most Anticipated Board Games of 2022 appeared first on Bitewing Games.

Note: This written post features only my top 10 Spatial Puzzle games, but the podcast episode includes my picks plus 10 more picks from podcast guest, Ryan Flaherty. If you want twice the Spatial Puzzle gaming goodness via an audio discussion between friends, then check out our meaty episode!

Before one becomes a dentist, or even enters dental school, a prospective dental student in the US must take what is called the Dental Admissions Test.  This exam is an absolute beast of a hoop that one must successfully jump through if they wish keep their dental career dream alive.  Many folks (including myself) take off several weeks to spend 6-8 hours a day cramming biology, chemistry, mathematics, and more into our brains in preparation for the great spewing.  For a couple months or so, this pursuit essentially consumes your life as you cram, take practice exams, and cram some more as though you are trying to pour more knowledge fluid into an already overflowing brain bucket while patching up the leaky holes all over.

Oddly enough, there is one part of this exam that starts to feel like a game.  It is a section known as the Perceptual Ability Test, or PAT for short.  As the title describes, this section examines your ability to mentally visualize things such as 3D shapes, acute angles, and more.  The reason this feels like a game is that rather than solve problems or recall memorized information, you are challenged to rank angles, match keyholes, visualize folds, count cube surfaces, and more.  The reason for the PAT is because dentists are constantly using mirrors, x-rays, and models to visualize, shape, and diagnose teeth.  Thus, the PAT material is not so much something you can learn or memorize to be prepared.  Rather, it requires a spatially minded brain and a whole lot of practice to master the challenging types of questions you’ll encounter.  In a sort of sick and twisted way, this PAT practice becomes the “fun” part of your studying routine, and a great way to break up the monotony of the science subjects.  Over time, It’s quite satisfying to nail these questions with increasing competence.

Much like the PAT (but in a far more entertaining form), it is also very satisfying to take on spatial puzzles in tabletop games.  These puzzles usually take the form of cards and tiles which can be aligned, arranged, and overlapped in an open space of endless possibilities.  Typically, these games will punish you for poor spatial arrangements and reward you for clever planning.  While some games are pure spacial puzzling, others implement this mental challenge into a larger game packed with many more mechanisms.

We’ve had loads of fun exploring many games that include spatial puzzling in their repertoire.  Many titles in t  his genre have proven to be deliciously addicting and widely popular.  We’ve enjoyed them so much, that it is with great excitement that Bitewing Games here and now reveals our next published game to be… a meaty spatial puzzler.  That’s right!  We’ve been working hard these past several months to plan and prepare our next game for you.  You can find our grand reveal at the end of this post.  And in celebration of that reveal, today we’d like to share our Top 10 Spatial Puzzle games.  If you, like us, are a fan of many of these games and their puzzly goodness, then our next offering might just be up your alley.

But we’ll save the details for the end.  As for now, let’s talk about our favorite, highly recommended spatial puzzle games in no particular order…

Patchwork / New York Zoo

Might as well come clean right up front… there is definitely going to be some cheating involved on this Top 10 list.  It will actually consist of 13 games plus more honorable mentions at the end!  The reason for this dirty trick is simple: there are far more than 10 excellent spatial puzzle games out there.  Plus, some titles share so much in common that it’s too hard to mention one without mentioning the other.  Thus, with this first pick, we split the spotlight between Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork and New York Zoo.

Those of you who’ve seen my Battle of the Polyominoes article likely predicted that these games would end up here.  Polyominoes are to spatial puzzle games as dogs are to house pets.  They’re like a gamer’s best friend.  There is something about fitting various shapes together on a square grid that we gamers can’t get enough of.  This won’t be the only polyomino pick on this list—far from it—so let’s talk about what makes Patchwork and New York Zoo special.

Coming from the same designer, Patchwork and New York Zoo both feature an engaging rondel for tile drafting.  The former is all about an economy of spending and earning buttons while managing time to maximize positive points and cover up negative points to beat your single opponent.  The latter is instead an economy of breeding… that’s right… breeding animals in their exhibits at the zoo in a race to be the first to cover your board entirely before 1-4 opponents.  In both cases, you can enjoy pleasant themes mixed with compelling decisions from the polyomino connoisseur himself.  Which one is better is up for debate, but I say you can’t go wrong with either (or both).

Galaxy Trucker

While Patchwork and New York Zoo both contain elements of time economics or racing to the finish, neither of them are actual ‘real-time’ games where you are rushing your arrangements and burning your brain into overdrive.  But if that’s what you are looking for, Galaxy Trucker has you covered.  This wild, wacky game has been around for many years, but it recently received a new coat of paint with some minor tweaks to the formula.  Either version is dirt cheap and loads of fun, but you’ll need to have a group who can handle a bit of a rules dump up front.

While this one isn’t as family-friendly as it wants to be thanks to a few too many fiddly rules, it still has a major payoff for those who are fully invested.  The game consist of two acts: first, rush to reveal and arrange square tiles into a jumbled mess of a space ship that contains guns, thrusters, energy, shields, storage, and more.  The longer you take to arrange and nitpick your ship, the faster the best tiles will be claimed by other players because during this act you are scrambling to build your ships all at the same time and the tiles are first-come-first-serve.  The second act sees you laughing, cheering, and moaning as you send your ships on a risky voyage ripe with perilous dangers and delicious rewards.  Ship parts and sections get blasted and blown off, and all you can do is just hang on and hope you survive the journey.

Factory Funner

Speaking of rushing to grab tiles while cooking your brain, Factory Funner is also split into two phases: the first phase consists of brief real-time drafting, the second consists of crunchy spatial efficiency.  The cool thing here is that you are free to use connectors and other helpful tiles to your heart’s content, but each extra piece you use costs a dollar from your score.  As you have to add a new machine each round, you can also remove old pipes and tiles to establish new connections between the machine inputs and outputs.

The new version of this game (releasing within the next few months) comes to us from publisher BoardGameTables.com and features zesty new art, a non-real-time drafting variant for those who don’t like to be rushed, and the addition of a sixth player.

Pipeline / Curious Cargo

Since we’re on the subject of pipes, we might as well chat about the ultimate pipey games from designer Ryan Courtney: Pipeline and Curious Cargo.  Ryan burst into the board game industry with the critically acclaimed Pipeline, a slick economic brain burner about buying, refining, and selling oil.  While worker placement, loans, economics, engine building, and contract fulfillment are all major parts of this design, one of the standout features of this game is the pipe tiles where players must make long, winding connections of pipe of the same color to help refine their oil.  Purchasing and arranging these pipes is a compelling part of the challenge, and these different combinations of routes across dozens of domino tiles was something fresh and new in the spatial puzzle genre.

People loved it so much that the creators followed Pipeline up with another domino spatial puzzle game in Curious Cargo.  While many expected Curious Cargo to be a pure, simple distillation of the pipe element from Pipeline, in reality Ryan took this follow-up design as a challenge to cram as much complexity into a small box game as possible.  What resulted was a title that has perhaps been a little more polarizing in the industry.  This head-to-head shipping and receiving game contorts your brain with its even more difficult spatial challenges.  It demands much flexibility and adaptation from players as they draw tiles out the bag and must figure out how to best use those frequently less-than-ideal draws.  But I stand by my final statement in my review of this title: “Despite the emotional cuts, bruises, and occasional broken bones that this design doles out, I’ve found Curious Cargo to be one heck of a satisfying game.”

Azul

Let’s step away from the brain burning puzzles for a moment to talk about a few lighter options.  Azul mixes tile drafting with just a hint of spacial puzzling.  The sequence and location tiles added to your board is the core element of scoring, and it’s a challenge that comes into conflict with the dwindling drafting options of each round.  It’s just as important to be able to predict what tiles others will claim as it is to smartly plan your own moves.

Azul is one that ranks highly among our favorite 2-player games and 10 games everyone should try.  While there are now four versions of Azul out in the wild, I’m sticking with my guns and declaring that the original is the best.  At least that’s how things will remain until Azul: Queen’s Garden makes its way to the US for me to properly scrutinize it.

Carcassonne / Isle of Skye

If you’re looking to go even more classic and simple than Azul, then perhaps Carcassonne is the best candidate.  The procedure is dead simple: play the one tile in your hand anywhere into the growing arrangement of tiles and add a meeple on top of it if you’d like.  With the tiles, you’ll be accomplishing tasks as simple as growing, connecting, or enclosing fields, roads, or cities.  But the most important aspect is deciding when and where to add your meeples.  You see, these meeples are like investments in unfinished landscape features; the person with the most meeples in a feature when it becomes fully enclosed gets the big payout in points.  Things get extra spicy when opponents attempt to outcompete each other in the same region or when they try to sabotage the completion of a road or city.

Yet I can’t help but mention here another square tile game with an interesting twist.  In Isle of Skye, there is no shared, central region of growing tiles for players to add to like in Carcassonne.  Rather, you’ll be building up your own personal area as you’re pulled this way and that by the changing scoring criteria.  Each round, you’ll also be pulling 3 tiles out of the bag and deciding how to price them to either entice or deter your opponents.  Money is important here because you’ll desperately need it to be able to buy the best tile from a single opponent of your choice.  Plus, you’ll be using your own money to price your tiles, and if nobody bites, then you just bought them yourself for the price you set.

If you’re looking for a straightforward game that lets players dip their toes in the spatial puzzle waters by aligning and arranging matching features on square tiles, then you can’t go wrong with Carcassonne or Isle of Skye.

A Feast for Odin

For those of you who prefer your games sprawling and meaty, let’s now dive back into the deep end of spatial puzzle designs.  A Feast for Odin is a game that features a worker placement game board with over 60 possible spaces, hundreds of tiny polyomino tiles organized across several trays, and large player boards with supplemental island boards for you to arrange these many tiles over the course of a 2-3 hour playtime.  This is one big box game that will make you wish your table was at least… three times its size.

Yet, A Feast for Odin is one of the most satisfying Euros in existence thanks to Uwe Rosenberg’s steady design hand.  You’ll be hunting, raiding, farming, whaling, trading, and more to acquire viking goods that come in many shapes and sizes.  You’ll have to arrange these polyomino goods wisely in order to increase your income, surround and gain bonuses, and cover up negative points.  All the while, you’ll be feeding your vikings as they grow increasingly hungry throughout their many pursuits.  It’s a feast of game that is indeed worthy of Odin’s name.

Isle of Cats 

If you want to wrap your braintacles around one of the hottest polyomino games of the recent years, then Isle of Cats might just be what the doctor ordered.  You’ll be rescuing cats from the evil Lord Vesh by cramming them onto your boat board.  If that doesn’t already sound zesty enough for you, then consider that the other core mechanism of this game is card drafting similar to 7 Wonders or Sushi Go.

This game also has an easier, more family friendly mode for those who need it.  But either way, you’ll be playing a game that is currently ranked in the top 100 games on BGG and the BGG top 10 family games.  Need I say more?

Sprawlopolis

Those of you who are primarily solo or cooperative gamers, worry not, we haven’t forgotten about you!  Sprawlopolis is arguably the best wallet game that money can buy, and it is meant to be played solo or together.  It still blows my mind what the creators were able to pull off with only 18 cards:  The backs of these cards each have a unique scoring objective.  Your game will feature a random combination of 3 scoring objectives, and you’ll be using the remaining 15 card faces to arrange and layer a city of cards to try and achieve the scoring requirements.

You’ll lose points for each unique road, so it’s wise to try and connect them together to minimize damage.  Meanwhile, you’ll be trying to overlap and connect matching districts in all directions according to the tricky objectives of each individual play.  If the 3 objective cards are easy, then you’ll need a higher score to win.  This crunchy minimalist game comes highly acclaimed by many critics, and at such a low price you have no reason not to try it.

My City

Although this list was arranged in no particular order, we are going to end things off with my personal favorite spatial puzzle game.  While most of these games see players drafting or selecting tiles or cards to arrange in optimal orientations, My City makes its players fall victim to a bingo style draft.  A central deck with one card for each tile is shuffled at the start of the game.  Each round, the top card is revealed and players must decide where to place this building tile onto their city board.

One would surmise, as I once did, that such a system devoid of tile choice or player interaction would be aggressively dull.  Not so, dear reader.  Instead, this system creates an experience of suspense, risk, and anticipation as you plan and hope that the right tile will come out of the deck before you fill a suitable area in with something less ideal.  

A critical aspect of these rules is that you may spend a point to trash a tile rather than be forced to add it to your board.  And we haven’t even gotten to the real juicy part of the design:  My City is a legacy game where over the course of 24 sessions players will add stickers to their board, gain more tiles, encounter new challenges and objectives, and compete to be the ultimate city builder by tracking points earned during each play.  We’ve sung the praises of My City so much that our followers are undoubtedly now bleeding from all orifices and begging us to branch out to other games.  But alas, when one makes a Top 10 Spacial Puzzles list, one must listen to their heart and include the masterful My City among the champions.

Honorable Mentions

While there can only be thirteen games among the top 10 (our math is sound, don’t question it), the following are honorable mentions that we wish to list and celebrate so that we can minimize our chances of being flogged by spatial puzzle connoisseurs:

1. Blokus – classic, strategic goodness
2. Calico / Cascadia – hot new tile drafting and arranging games featuring animals
3. Arboretum – a tense cutthroat hand management game with a sprinkling of spatial arrangement
4. Railroad Ink – a solid roll & write of connecting highways and railroads
5. Barenpark – a favorite polyomino game for many… plus BEARS
6. On Tour – a roll & write about scheduling a tour by sequencing your route across the country
7. Sagrada – a popular game similar to Azul featuring gorgeous colorful token drafting (dice in this case) and arranging

A Bitewing Games Publication Reveal…

And here we have finally arrived… at the end of all things.  Or more accurately, at the end of all things yet published.  We are thrilled to finally unveil the next title that Bitewing Games will be publishing via a Kickstarter campaign in Q2 2022.  It is indeed a spatial puzzle game, but it is also a love letter to outdoor adventuring.  Introducing Trailblazers by designer Ryan Courtney:

Trailblazers are the gutsy folks who pave and brave the trails of the great outdoors.  Whether by hiking boots, cycling wheels, or river paddle, these tenacious travelers seek to feed their insatiable appetite for adventure.  With a scenic wilderness ever ahead and a freshly charted path upon the heels, one mustn’t forget to eventually find their way back to camp.  For there are always new environments to explore, further expeditions to undertake, and more trails to blaze.

In Trailblazers, players compete to earn the most points by building biking, hiking, and kayaking loops from their campsites of the matching trail type.  Each round, players are dealt eight trail cards where they’ll draft two cards, arrange those cards in their personal area, and pass their hand to the next player three times.  Cards must either be placed adjacent to or overlapping other cards.  While players can push their luck by aiming to construct long and elaborate trails, only closed loops that start and end at a matching campsite will score points.  Players also compete to fulfill “First To” and “End Game” goal cards.  After four rounds, the game ends and the player with the most points from closed loops and goal cards wins.

Compared to the travel edition for 1-4 players, the standard edition of Trailblazers features a second deck of trail & player cards so you can play with up to 8 players.  The box also contains two expansions (the Animals expansion and Adventurers expansion) that add another challenging layer of strategy and objectives to the experience.  

Trailblazers is the third spacial puzzle domino game by designer Ryan Courtney (the first two being Pipeline and Curious Cargo).  While they share a similar puzzly DNA that fans have come to know and love, Trailblazers differs by:

• Featuring simple, highly accessible rules in a 30 minute game for 1-8 players
• Boiling the gameplay down to pure spatial puzzling and card drafting with a dash of push-your-luck route building
• Using durable PVC cards that can easily be shuffled, dealt, drafted, and overlapped (found in the travel edition and deluxe edition)
• Including three challenging solo modes with a high skill-ceiling

Well there you have it!  We’re ecstatic to finally get that big news off our chest.  But we’re even more excited to launch this Kickstarter project next year!  For those of you who want to follow along or even try out the game early on Tabletop Simulator (once it is ready), simply subscribe to the Bitewing Games newsletter and join us for the ride!  In the meantime, keep on enjoying those spatial puzzlers!

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. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share experiences that, much like a bitewing x-ray, provide a unique perspective and refreshing interaction.

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