Innehållsförteckning för Issue 61 från Tabletop Gaming

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 MASTER WORD Think fast, write faster Designer: Gérald Cattiaux Publisher: Scorpion Masqué 15m 3-6 12+ £18 You’ve played some variation of ‘What am I?’, ‘Yes or No’ or ‘Animal, Vegetable or Mineral’ in your life, to potentially mixed success or appreciation. What makes these parlour trivia games great is how pliable they can be, that with the right rule changes or additions they can take on a whole new life. Master Word is Twenty Questions meets Mastermind on a shot clock. One player takes the role of The Guide, who knows exactly what you’re guessing, whilst everyone knows the category (so “Golf” would be under the category “Sport.”) For each of the up to six ninety-second rounds, players work together to come up with short…

TRANQUILLITY Designer: James Emmerson Publisher: Board Games Hub 15-20m 1-5 8+ £15 Bobbing along in the ocean looking for the perfect island paradise to retire to seems like it should be a fairly gentle premise for a gaming session. The name of the game, Tranquillity, suggests much of the same. As does the perfectly cubed box with an extremely chill boat on it. However, what comes in the box is actually a game of fraught choices played out silently. Players split the deck of square cards more or less evenly and play them into a square grid. You can play a card anywhere within the grid as long as it had a number higher than it to the right (wrapping to the next row above on the left) and a…

CLOUD CITY The sky is the limit Designer: Phil Walker-Harding Publisher: Blue Orange 30m 2-4 10+ £25 S tar Wars fans please take note: this game has nothing to do with gas-giant mining, devastating paternity claims or deals that just keep getting worse. Instead, it concerns a city with its head in Earthly clouds, whose founders have for some reason tasked two-to-four competing architects with designing a metropolis so vertiginous, its walkways scrape the stratosphere. As these architects, players must not only puncture the clouds with towering buildings of three different heights, but also connect those buildings with walkways, scoring more points the further they stretch across the fluffy expanse below. As building projects go, it’s almost as bonkers as the floating-platform construction of last year’s Megacity Oceania, though that at…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 DEVIL MAY CRY: THE BLOODY PALACE Jackpot! Designer: James M. Hewitt Publisher: Steamforged Games 60-90m 2-4 14+ £95 A game from the publisher Steamforged Games tends to have a few elements in common. Firstly, of course, are the minis in all their intricate detail. Secondly, the game is likely to be based on a well-known IP, probably a video game, where the fans of this franchise can rejoice in references and little nods to their beloved digital game being represented in a physical format. The game’s core gameplay is the combat with minions, mini-bosses and the big-bad scary boss, where their attacks are determined by AI decks specific to an enemy of each type. The combat itself is likely rely on dice rolls mixed with…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 THOSE DARK PLACES Death and Despair Between the Stars Designer: Jonathan Hicks Publisher: Osprey Games 121 15+ £20 Plenty of games manage to conjure up feelings of horror at the tabletop, but Those Dark Places is among the first to assail its players with the impassionate chill of raw despair. With just a handful of rules and a whole heap of atmosphere, it conjures up a sci-fi world where a malfunctioning purifier can inspire more dread than any alien, and where the crushing weight of isolation is deadlier than any laser beam. Coming from the mind of designer Jonathan Hicks, the game is a ruleslight, anxiety-heavy experience that revels in the horrors inherent to (moderately) realistic space travel. Rather than intrepid heroes and daring explorers,…

GRIND HOUSE Social distancing from your own limbs Designer: Jon Cohn Publisher: Everything Epic Games 20-30m 2-6 15+ £50 Grind house as a film aesthetic had its corpse jolted to life around 2007, when the Rodriguez-Tarantino double feature of Planet Terror and Deathproof were released in cinemas and played out at their full length, back to back. This was an attempt to recreate the classic murder-and-gorefests of the 70s from films like cult favourite, Basket Case. Generally it’s a bit silly, people tend to get arms and legs lobbed off left right and centre, and continue to hobble around on stumps as if, indeed, it was just a scratch. And this narrative dice game outing from Everything Epic Games does a great service to the scrungy spirit of these films.…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 KITARA A kingdom like no other Designer: Eric B. Vogel Publisher: IELLO 40m 2-4 10+ £25 Board games are the product of an undoubtably creative industry. That said, the prevalence of stale or rehashed themes still form the butt of many an inside joke. Dungeon crawls are still dungeons and many Eurogames are still beige – and on the whole, that’s fine. But a few genres have shed their thematic ruts, revealing fertile ground for the imaginations of talented designers. Kitara, Eric Vogel’s latest addition to the pantheon of area control games, demonstrates this exceptionally. Players will be thrust into the African lands surrounding the Great Lakes, as the leaders of one of four warring tribes looking to reunify this once grand kingdom. Despite the…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 THE COURT OF MIRACLES Hiding in plain sight Designer: Vincent Brugeas, Guilhem Gautrand Publisher: Lucky Duck Games 40m 2-5 10+ £34 The Court of Miracles immerses players into the 16th Century Paris, where they join the dark underbelly of the city as part of one the underground guilds. Players will aim to control various territories throughout Paris, and will scheme, plot and trick to exert their influence. The game uses a mixture of area control, worker placement and even bluffing mechanics, but in a very streamlined and easily-digestible way that makes it easy to learn and play. Players will place pawns of their guild around the neighbourhoods of Paris to earn various rewards, like coins, plot cards or move the Penniless King on his track.…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 DARING DUSTBUNNIES Play Smart or Eat Dust Designer: Andy Hopwood Publisher: Hopwood Games 30m 2-5 10+ £30 To say that Daring Dustbunnies surprised me would be an understatement. Clearly I didn’t read enough fairytales when younger, because I definitely judged this before playing it. I understand that the artwork is designed to match the scrappy, anarchic mood of the gameplay, with great lengths taken to design a variety of wild, rambunctious rabbits in a microworld of what lies beneath the sofa, but I feel like it captures the sense of chaotic mess a little too well. Thank heavens that playing it is an exploding firework of frantic fun. Players each play cards to dictate the fate of six different dustballs, with everyone dealt a colour…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 VISCOUNTS OF THE WEST KINGDOM If we may be Franks for a moment… Designer: Shem Phillips, S.J. Macdonald Publisher: Renegade Game Studios 60-90m 1-4 12+ £55 The final instalment in Shem Phillips and S.J. Macdonald’s Eurotastic West Kingdom trilogy (following 2018’s Architects and 2019’s Paladins) picks up with the late-10th century decline of the once glorious Carolingian dynasty. This was the era of Louis V, known as Louis the Do-Nothing – so called because he pretty much left everything for his Frankish nobles to sort out. Which is where you come in. Buildings must be constructed, manuscripts must be written, debts must be settled, townsfolk must be won over, and deeds must be secured for new land. It’s not easy being a viscount. This is…

ORE: THE MINING GAME Lead? Copper? Gold? Take your pick… Designer: Joe McClintock, Jason Lyle Steingisser Publisher: Quick Simple Fun Games 60-90m 2-5 12+ £50 It gives us no end of punny pleasure to announce that Ore: The Mining Game is a worker-placement title that comes with a little added depth. Set at the turn of the 20th century in the mineral-rich Appalachians, it casts its players as mining company bosses competing to meet the demand for coal and metals as cities like New York and Chicago embark on ambitious building projects that reach for the skies. You’ll need to direct your meepleshaped workforce to fulfil contracts, obtain building permits, and recruit new help as you start delving beneath the ground in search of lead, coal, iron, copper and gold.…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 WELCOME TO NEW LAS VEGAS What happens in Vegas, lives on a scoresheet forever more Designer: Alexis Allard, Benoit Turpin Publisher: Blue Cocker 35m 1+ 10+ £30 Before the time of Elvis impersonators and Cher tribute acts, before the huge fountains and dazzling hotels, came a requirement to actually build the thing, and that’s where Welcome To New Las Vegas comes in. The game is a new standalone sequel to the Welcome To… game made popular just a few years ago, only you’re trading an attempt to create suburban bliss for a shot at the tourism and gambling industry, as an architect in a project to build a New Las Vegas. And, much like its predecessor, it’s got a lot to offer. Welcome to New…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 BEEZ Let it Beez Designer: Dan Halstad Publisher: Next Move Games 30-45m 2-4 8+ £39 Beez is the perfect antidote to everything that’s gloomy, sad or stressful. From the moment you place its bright yellow box covered in flowers onto the table, to when you pick up your chunky-shiny bee with delicate see-through wings and all throughout the gameplay, it is incredibly hard not to smile and feel the warmth rising from inside. This is not a game of high strategy, but something to enjoy with the whole family, whether someone has played hundreds of board games or none at all until this very moment. It will be little surprise that in Beez players are indeed bees, doing what they do best: fly from flower…

WARHAMMER FANTASY RPG: MIDDENHEIM – CITY OF THE WHITE WOLF Chilling out in the Old World Designer: Various Publisher: Cubicle 7 157 13+ £50 One of the biggest draws of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is the chance to explore its impossibly detailed, wildly violent setting, and though it’s more of a primer than a campaign guide this latest sourcebook gives players a chance to explore one of the Old World’s coolest cities – both figuratively, and quite literally. Like so much of the Warhammer cannon, Middenheim is a setting that steals liberally both from real history and fantasy fiction. Loosely Scandinavian in feel, it’s a mountainous city of cold winters and long beards, where dirt-flecked criminals prowl frozen streets and the knights wear wolf-pelts around their necks. In fiction, it’s an…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 RAPA NUI How to get ahead in statue building Designer: Fabrice Besson & Guillaume Montiage Publisher: Matagot 45m 2-4 10+ £43 In Rapa Nui players compete to erect giant statues, moai, collect resources and transform those resources into offerings, which earn you points. Each turn you’ve got a handful of villagers to work with. Want to build a moai? Great. Also, you might want some hair ready to pull out. First you’ll need someone to quarry to sculpt your moai – the more villagers you send, the bigger the statue, and the more resources you’ll get when you put it up. There are limited spaces and a limited supply of statues, so you’ll want to get in early and claim those hulking po-faced whoppers before…

AEON’S END: OUTCASTS This isn’t the end Designer: Sydney Engelstein, Nick Little, Kevin Riley Publisher: Indie Boards & Cards 60m 1-4 14+ £60 Those who read the Have You Played from the last issue will be familiar with the don’t-shufflethe-deck deckbuilder that is Aeon’s End. While the original holds a lot of good qualities, one of its weaknesses is that you can see everything you’re going to be fighting from the get go. In a sense, you were always going to be spoiling yourself from the very first unboxing, and a sense of progression and narrative relies on you pretending to forget what is coming next That has been fixed for some time in the Aeon’s End series with the introduction of legacy elements (read as: ‘sticking things in envelopes’),…

BLOODBORNE: THE BOARD GAME Welcome home, good hunter Designer: Eric M. Lang & Michael Shinall Publisher: CMON 45-75m 1-4 14+ £99 For the fans of Souls video game series, the experience of their beloved game transformation into the physical format of board games has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. The anticipation of the Dark Souls: The Board Game was sky high and it came crashing down. The following smaller card games based on both Dark Souls and Bloodborne have been fine, good even, but they could never compete with the expectations of a miniatures heavy big box game. The announcement of the Bloodborne: The Board Game dared fans to dream once again, and all signs were hopeful, including it being delivered by a different publisher to Dark Souls:…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 PALEO Early man gets the worm Designer: Peter Rustemeyer Publisher: Z-Man Games 45-60m 2-4 10+ £60 It can’t have been easy being a cavedwelling early human. Between ravenous beasts, scarcity of food and the total lack of Netflix, life must have been a constant struggle. Co-op card game Paleo aims to transport you and your friends back to these murky days of prehistory, casting you as a tribe of hunter-gatherers battling against the odds to survive in a hostile world. And while at its core it’s simple and straightforward, what really stands out is the way it demands coordination and cohesion, with a firm focus on group discussion and collective decisions. The game revolves around a set of cards, each representing a different event in…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 THIS WAR WITHOUT AN ENEMY Going (crowned) head to (round) head Designer: Scott H. Moore Publisher: Nuts! Publishing 60-240m 2-4 12+ £62 We have to start this review with a small disclaimer that this was our first block wargame. These games bring the joy of wargaming to your tabletop with the element of hidden information. This is handled by the fact that the information on your blocks faces you and your opponent can only see the blank, coloured, side of the block. They know where you are, but not what is in any particular location. This War Without An Enemy is a fairly tightly historically themed block wargame. It’s played over the years 1642-1646 and see the royalists and the parliamentarians clashing across England. The…

BOB ROSS: THE ART OF CHILL Designer: Prospero Hall Publisher: Big G Creative 30m 2-4 12+ £27 You may have rolled your eyes as soon as you heard Bob Ross: The Art of Chill Game. It is easy to jump to a conclusion that this is an easy cash grab based on the name recognition of painter and television host Bob Ross. The game where you try to earn the most Chill points by painting Fluffy Clouds and Happy Little Trees using titanium white and van dyke brown paints is giggle-worthy if you watched the show and outright ridiculous if you don’t know much about Boss Ross. Yet while all these are all true, Bob Ross: The Art of Chill Game is really, unironically good. During the course of the…

TINY EPIC GALAXIES BLASTOFF! Designer: Scott Almes Publisher: Ganelyn Games 30-45m 2-4 9+ £24 Tiny Epic Galaxies Blast Off is a streamlined revision of Tiny Epic Galaxies and while it makes most things clearer it sadly drops the secret mission cards from the original. The Tiny Epic series of games has built itself around a set of respectable core principles: easy entry, short playtime, high replayability, high strategy, and a small footprint. All of which are definitely on show here as within 10 minutes of opening we had a game setup, understood the rules, and were already making meaningful strategic decisions all on a tiny camping table. The main goal of the game is to earn 21 points by colonising planet cards. To do that, and anything else in the…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 X-MEN: MUTANT INSURRECTION Something to get your claws into Designer: Richard Launius & Brandon Perdue Publisher: Fantasy Flight 1-2hr 1-6 12+ £55 The X-Men have deserved a proper outing for a long time. One that fully represents what the message of the comics, cartoons and films has been reaching for – something that covers the range from teenage dramas and general do-gooding through to fighting reality threatening forces of evil. Mutant Insurrection might just be able to pull it off, if you’re willing to put in a bit of teamwork that is. Players pick a X-Men standee, possibly of a favourite, possibly of a slightly obscure character from the mutant lore, and their associated character and assist cards. These are what give you your dice…

878 VIKINGS: INVASIONS OF ENGLAND Thegns, Danes, and Shire Gains Designer: Beau Beckett, Dave Kimmel, Jeph Stahl Publisher: Academy Games 1-2hrs 2-4 12+ £75 Sometimes a board game finds you just at the right time, and the new edition of 878 Vikings: Invasions of England could not have come at a more perfect moment. We seem to be living through a Viking revival and the era of the Viking invasion into England, in particular. The Vikings TV show covers the story of Ragnar Lodbrock and his sons as they try to conquer England, and recently released video game Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla picks up the later part of this story and re-tells the conflicts of ‘danes’ and English with added assassins. Even if you are unfamiliar with these particular franchises, there…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 PATHFINDER: LOST OMENS ANCESTRY GUIDE All Shapes and Sizes Designer: Various Publisher: Paizo 139 11+ £32 One of the greatest lures of Pathfinder has always been the chance to build whatever kind of weird and wonderful fantasy hero you can imagine, and while it may not be the deepest book in the world the Lost Omens Ancestry Guide is a grin-inducing cavalcade of background options that can truly make an adventuring party stand out in a crowd. The latest sourcebook for the game’s second edition, the Ancestry Guide is a product made with the simple goal of stuffing as many ancestries – Pathfinder’s term for a character’s species and cultural origin – into the game as possible. The result is a kaleidoscope of creatures that…

ERA: MEDIEVAL AGE Roll your own city Designer: Matt Leacock Publisher: Eggert Spiele 60m 1-4 10+ £40 Era: Medieval Age is a civilisation game writ small, where you construct a settlement, constructing townhouses, churches, farms and hospitals while feeding your people and defending yourself from disasters and marauding opponents. You achieve this by rolling dice and collecting the resources shown. You can reroll a limited number of times, but each time a die shows a skull, that die ‘locks’ in place. The more skulls you roll, the graver the disaster that befalls you – or, occasionally, your opponents. Era has an impressive table presence. Even before you start, players are going to be picking up little ramparts and buildings and slotting them into the pegboard. Indeed, the first thing you…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 CANTALOOP: BREAKING INTO PRISON The only thing missing from this mystery is Scooby Snacks Designer: Friedemann Findeisen, Grzegorz Kobiela Publisher: Lookout Games 5-8hrs 1-4 16+ £18 Imagine being handed a game that you’re told is based on a point and click computer game. If your immediate response is scepticism, you’ll know how I felt. Adding in terms like ‘open world’ and it looking more like a folder than a boxed game, and it raised an eyebrow. How would it encompass the nostalgic puzzle solving aspects, with just a few cards and hand outs? Surprisingly, it does so incredibly effectively. The game starts with a tutorial (just like any good point and click would) to show you the mechanics that lay the foundations for the rest…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 STEAMPUNK RALLY FUSION Ready, steady, fuse! Designer: Orin Bishop Publisher: Roxley 45-60m 2-8 14+ £55 A race across unexplored Martian terrain or the trap-filled Machu Picchu can only be made more exciting if you are a famous inventor assembling your vehicular contraption on the go, switching your machine parts to make it faster, sturdier and more efficient. In Steampunk Rally Fusion crossing the finish line first not only proves you are the fastest, but also that you have assembled the most efficient invention. If you played Steampunk Rally, which came out in 2015, then you will find that Fusion is a very similar game with a couple of fun additions and variations. You are still a famous inventor based on a real historical persona, like…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 THE RED CATHEDRAL Ivan the really good actually Designer: Sheila Santos & Israel Candrero Publisher: Devir 30-120m 1-4 10+ £28 The Red Cathedral is an exercise in restraint in a way that’s almost worth giving a name to, something like… Eurogame minimalism. Or maybe it’s just a reaction to the current dryness of the genre. Either way, it’s a game that has cut away from all the excesses of the last five or even ten years of Eurogames and become small sharp and elegant. In The Red Cathedral you are an architect attempting to build the beautiful cathedrals of Moscow. It offers a variable set up where players construct a series of building blueprints in the shape of four towers of the cathedral. Some of…

MEADOW A beautiful game, naturally Designer: Klemes Kalicki and Karolina Kijak Publisher: Rebel Studio 60-90m 1-4 10+ £42 Meadow is a tableau building game of habitat creation and careful planning of sustainability from designer Klemes Kalicki and nature artist Karolina Kijak. It feels like a game that might not have existed without games like Wingspan becoming as well regarded as they have. This certainly seems true on the sheer amount of art in the game, all lovingly created by Kijak. And while Wingspan might have the bird market cornered, and games like Oceans and Evolution have their own variety, Meadow feels somewhat unique in its attempt to present the rural world where people and nature meet somewhat happily. It’s a game of idyllic settings that not only says suggests that…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 CANDLEKEEP MYSTERIES Stacks of Short Adventures Designer: Various Publisher: Wizards of the Coast 224 11+ £42 Over the years that Dungeons & Dragons’ fifth edition has been filling the gaming tables of the world, we’ve been well-supplied with stonking great campaigns that can merrily eat up years and years of roleplaying. However, not every adventure needs to be quite so epic in scale. Sometimes, all you want something that’s going to keep you going through an evening of gaming and nothing more. Enter Candlekeep Mysteries. Within its pages you can find 17 different adventures spanning the first 16 levels of the game (for reasons that doubtless made sense at the time, we get a double-bill at level four). In theory each and every single one…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 ROYAL VISIT A right royal tug of war Designer: Reiner Knizia Publisher: IELLO 20m 2 8+ £18 Royal Visit is a regal reimagining of Reiner Knizia’s 2006 two player tug-of-war game Times Square. Displacing the action from the bars of Midtown Manhattan to a vaguely medieval and undeniably pretty duo of duchies, the game tasks players with enticing the king and his court across the valley to their chateau, securing both social and sovereign approval. The petty pair of bickering neighbours are represented by the rivalling figures of a wizard and a jester. Players will be using cards to advance these characters, plus the king along the central board, winning the game immediately upon his arrival. The board here is, in fact, a fantastically illustrated…

FALLOUT: THE ROLEPLAYING GAME Welcome home Designer: Nathan Dowdell & Sam Webb Publisher: Modiphius 436 12+ £38 War. War never changes, as the iconic line that starts every Fallout game goes. But, ironically, change is the very thing that Modiphius’ latest stab at a Fallout RPG does, and for the better. For long term Fallout fans, the announcement of Wasteland Warfare was a dream come true. An official RPG in perhaps the most iconic postapocalyptic setting in pop culture had fans salivating. Unfortunately Wasteland Warfare was intrinsically tied to the proprietary dice and miniatures of the same-named wargame and we, the theatre-of-themind story gamers, were scared off. But, with the continuing success of their 2D20 system and adaptations of Star Trek, Dune, Dishonored, and John Carter, Modiphius thankfully took another…

JUICY FRUITS A great addition to your five a day Designer: Christian Stohr Publisher: PSC Games 20-50m 1-4 8+ £29 For a relatively new studio, Deep Print Games are making quite a splash in the industry. Following on from last year’s fantastic Kiesling and Kramer title Renature, the studio – comprised of former employees from Eggertspiele and Plan B Games – have now released Juicy Fruits and secured the talents of Christian Stohr in the process, a designer whose name just so happens to grace the cover of 2020 Spiel des Jahres winner Pictures. In Juicy Fruits players will be farming fruit on their own island paradise. By supplying ships and investing in new businesses, players will gather the points needed to win the game. Whilst looking like a familiarly…

IMPERIUM: CLASSICS Build Rome in two hours Designer: Nigel Buckle & Dávid Turczi Publisher: Osprey Games 90-120m 1-4 14+ £30 Why do historic strategy games have to be so ruddy long to play? I understand that there’s lots to cover, but the all too common doldrums between turns and the sheer volume of stuff to learn gets tedious, fast. Fortunately, Imperium manages to successfully solve half of this problem. Imperium (available as Classics or Legends, each featuring eight different civilizations and are fully compatible) reinvents the empire strategy genre through a deck building engine so well machined it could run a jump jet. Each civilization has its own unique deck of starting cards, advancements and developments, with a shared common market of cards accessible to all players. Whilst each civilization…

BARON VOODOO Are You Ready? Designer: Yann Dentil Publisher: Lucky Duck Games 40-60m 2-4 10+ £34 Imagine, for just a moment, you’re Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of death, and there’s a party you want to go to but you’re a tad too busy with collecting souls to be able to go, when other Loas (voodoo gods) offer to take your place for the evening. Perfect! Set them the challenge to guide the most souls into the kingdom, and the Loa gains your seat for a year. Now you can get to that party and take some well-earned annual leave…That’s the premise of Baron Voodoo. To translate that into game mechanics, you’re going to be collecting dice in colour formations to try to gain the most points. You’re going to…

CALICO Designer: Kevin Russ Publisher: Flatout Games 30-45m 1-4 14+ £40 The theme of a game plays a large part in our enjoyment of it, it’s the presentation, the narrative that draws us in. Sometimes the theme can be a hard sell, like building industry in Birmingham. Other times designers can go such a cheating route that it almost feels exploitative. Calico is one of those games. The goal is to build the nicest quilt for a bunch of cats of which pictures and bios are included at the back of the rulebook. The calming colours, attractive patterns, cute buttons, and adorable cats come together to create something so easy to enjoy that you’d have to go out of your way to dislike it. Mechanically, it’s all about matching hexagonal…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 PATHFINDER BEGINNER BOX Designers: Various Publisher: Paizo 174 11+ £45 It says a lot about Pathfinder that its pared-down, rules-light beginners’ box probably has more complexity and content than a lot of full RPG releases. It probably says even more that, as a tool for getting new players on board with the game’s actionpacked fantasy adventures, it’s a roaring success. The boxed set is built to give a gaming group everything they need to get a game going, ranging from a set of fancy dice – colour-coded to give you a chance of distinguishing the d8 from the d10 – through to pregenerated characters. Where many other kits pride themselves on being about as minimalist as they can be, the Pathfinder team have gleefully leant…

SCHOTTEN TOTTEN 2 Designer: Reiner Knizia Publisher: Iello 20m 2 8+ £13 The 1999 card game Schotten Totten is a fantastically tight and elegant battle of wits that drops players into the role of chieftains of warring Scottish clans. It sees competitors lay down cards representing their warriors at nine boundary stones marking the border between their territories, aiming to build stronger card combinations than their opponent. The result is a bit like playing nine simultaneous hands of poker, although thankfully it’s easier to get your head around than it sounds. Now designer Reiner Knizia has produced a sequel. Schotten Totten 2 keeps the original’s clever card play. But this time it casts one player as an attacker laying siege to their opponent’s castle while the defenders fight to repel…

VEILWRAITH It’s all there, in black and white Designer: Tristan Hall Publisher: Hall or Nothing Productions 30m 1 14+ £35 The universe has ended. After the battle to defeat the evil Overlord is lost, reality itself has shattered. The Veil between life and afterlife is in tatters, with lost souls flitting around a realm built from fragments of memory. It’s all a bit bleak, a mood reflected in this solitaire card game’s monochrome style, with every Tarotsized card rendered in striking black and white. But don’t let that put you off. What Veilwraith lacks in cheery disposition it more than makes up for with compelling, almost addictive gameplay. Having mindfully built in oneplayer modes to all his games so far, from Gloom of Kilforth to 1565: St. Elmo’s Pay, designer…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 KINGDOM RUSH: RIFT IN TIME Out of time? More like overrun Designer: Helana Hope, Sen-Foong Lim, Jessey Wright Publisher: Lucky Duck Games 45-90m 1-4 10+ £53 SOLOREVIEW Games based on smartphone games, or indeed, any highattention-demanding digital games (looking at MOBAs like League of Legends, or MMPORGs like World of Warcraft) are usually unboxed with a certain amount of trepidation. This isn’t necessarily inherent snobbishness, but that these games contain such a high amount of social engineering in them to keep you hooked, that it’s hard to think about what’s going to be retained when the game goes cardboard. Will there be microtransactions? An advert with the close button obscured? Kingdom Rush, based on the app of the same name, is a really good punt…

CAPTIVE Designer: Emmanuel Manuro Publisher: Blue Orange 30-130m 1 280 10+ £13 Captive has been around in a few forms, in a number of languages for a little while now. You may remember it from an Indie Shelf column a few months ago when it was published in the US by Van Ryder Games. Now we’ve got a nice Blue Orange English edition in print once again. Your daughter has been kidnapped and you and a couple of colleagues are on the hunt for the culprits. You’ve been led to a mysterious estate on the outskirts of town, and it’s down to you to find your daughter and get her to safety. You’ll do this by choosing your own path through a graphic novel – moving from one room to…

COATL Three fun-filled bags of feathered snakes please Designer: Pascale Brassard & Etienne Dubois-Roy Publisher: Synapses Games 30-60m 1-4 10+ £30 I think most would agree that everyone needs a bit more colour in their lives at the moment. Last year’s ever-present blanket of dreary uncertainty followed by the long, dark winter nights has left many yearning for brighter times. Amidst this, our wonderful hobby became the ideal tonic, innately equipped to cater to a much needed sense of togetherness and vibrant escapism. But, could Coatl have perfected this tonic? Coatl is an abstract, pattern building set collection game veiled in a loosely thematic, but beautiful, Aztec setting. Players will partake in a tournament to become the new Aztec High Priest, competing to carve the most impressive feathered snake sculptures.…

PIEPMATZ Designer: Ben Pinchback & Matt Riddle Publisher: Lookout Games 20-40m 2-4 12+ £14 With a delicate flutter, Piepmatz, a set-collecting bird game, lands on the gaming table as a surprise in both looks and gameplay. At first glance understated, its antique-like art style reveals more detail the longer you look. While the cards maintain the faded grey look throughout, it is the songbirds that really stand out. Piepmatz may not have the naturalistic level of detail of Wingspan, in drawings or information, but every card clearly holds a reference to the little songbird depicted on it. Gameplay equally unfolds to reveal layers of detail unexpected for such a little game. There is the conventional part of the game: where players try to collect as many birds as possible of…

WRECK RAIDERS Dive in Designer: TIm W.K. Brown & Josh Cappel Publisher: Kids Table Board Games 45m 1-5 10+ £43 Under the Sea! Under the Sea! Gather some treasure, build fish tanks for leisure, what fun it can be! If reading that didn’t make you smile, you’re probably not the one for this game and that’s fine. Wreck Raiders finds that elusive sweet spot between accessible family title and engaging head scratcher, as one to five players lead a team of divers to explore various wrecks for sunken treasure and seashells, using them to create exhibits and aquariums respectively. Each turn a player chooses a die from the reef board, then places one of their divers on the corresponding position of any wreck site or the beach. At wrecks players…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 HALLERTAU Not baa-d Designer: Uwe Rosenburg Publisher: Lookout Games 50-140m 1-4 14+ £73 One look at the box for Hallertau will be enough to send some gamers running in terror. From its bone-dry agricultural theme to the “EXPERT LEVEL” warning on its front cover, it’s clear about what it is: a Eurogame for Eurogame players Try a few rounds, though, and you’ll find that while it comes with tough decisions, multi-turn planning and an array of strategies to explore, it’s surprisingly intuitive. The game sees you and your friends become farmers (of course) raising sheep, planting crops and improving your land to extract the maximum possible reward from your fields. To pull it off you’ll dispatch workers to undertake a variety of tasks on a…

BLUE SKIES Up in the air Designer: Joseph Huber Publisher: Rio Grande Games 45m 2-5 14+ £37 ‘Dignified’ is how one player around my table described Joseph Huber’s latest Eurogame, Blue Skies, and I’ve been struggling to think of a better word to describe what the game embodies. It’s set in the world of the North American airlines of the 1970’s, the box entices us in with a wink towards the bellbottoms and luxury of air travel – but inside the box we’re greeted with the stark reality of modern flight. We’ve got a very plain score tracker in black and white, a washed out map of the US with unadorned boxes representing gates and airports to place our passengers – the abstract resource cubes we know and love –…

IWARI Totem economy Designer:Michael Schacht Publisher: ThunderGryph Games, GateOnGames, Tcg Factory 45m 2-5 14+ £53 Iwari oozes an ethereal quality. At the start of the game, the land is barren. You can almost feel the frost blowing across the tundra and creaking trees echoing in the empty forest. Each player manages a tribe of early settlers trying to claim land and establish connections across different terrains. You start with nothing but during the game you must build your presence to demonstrate your power. You start each turn with three cards in hand. Each card indicates one of the five terrain types. A pile of tents and eight totem sections are at your disposal. On each turn, you must play one or more cards from your hand to place tents and/or…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 BATTLECON: DEVASTATION OF INDINES A punch above the rest Designer: D. Brad Talton, Jr. Publisher: Level 99 Games 45m 1-5 10+ £60 Fighting games are a bit of a showoff genre. They always want to entice with more characters to fight, fancier abilities to try, new decks to hunt or even shiny cards to collect. Get really into Netrunner, UFS style deck or Pokémon, and you are likely to find yourself among a small mountain of cards, having invested quite a bit of money, knowing intricate details of combos and attack moves and speaking a language your non-fighting friends stopped understanding some months ago. BattleCON: Devastation of Indies comes to all this splendour, drops one big box on a gaming table, and kindly asks other…

MAUSRITTER Designer: Isaac Williams Publisher: Games Omnivorous 48 12+ £28 It’s a hard life being a mouse adventurer. Not only are you very small and the world is very big, many toothed, and extremely dangerous, but you’ve only got so many inventory slots. Welcome to the be-whiskered world of Maustritter, originally published by Losing Games, now available in an excellent if limited boxed edition from Games Omnivorous. It’s a roleplaying game with something of the OSR about it, things can get tough quickly, and there’s a definite focus on thinking fast rather than hoping your optimised stats will see you through. Using a clever system of inventory tokens that fit on to character sheets, introducing the core concepts to new players is fast. Want to track durability? Don’t worry, there’s…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 ALIENS: ANOTHER GLORIOUS DAY IN THE CORPS & EXPANSIONS Not to study. Not to bring back. But to wipe them out. Designer: Andrew Haught Publisher: Gale Force 9 120m 1-6 14+ £50 The genius of James Cameron’s Aliens manifests itself in numerous ways. Such as being a sequel that not only equals (or arguably supersedes) the original movie, but also builds on its world while shifting it into a different genre, in this case the war movie. Or the fact that it sets up a group of core characters that you like and care about (well, except Burke), but who all feel as potentially expendable as each other (well, except Newt). It even, somehow, manages to maintain the primeval scariness of its titular creatures, while…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 CINDR Roll to seduce the dragon Designer: Harold Mikolaitis & Benjamin Walker Publisher: Smirk & Laughter Games 30m 1-5 14+ £30 Matched.com, Plenty of Fish, and of course: Tinder, these dating apps focus on trying to put together two compatible humans and sending them off into the world on dates with varying degrees of success. Of course, if you watched The Hobbit and debated the best way to catch the eye of Smaug, your dating app options are pretty limited. Enter: Cindr, a ‘cantrip app’ that you can cast to get playing the dragon dating game. Cindr is a push your luck dice game that shares a lot of design inspiration from its rhyming partner, except the images are (arguably) more magical and fantastical than…

NOMIDS Designer: Andrew Looney Publisher: Looney Labs 2-10m 2-10 6+ £15 Following the massive Kickstarter success of 2016’s Pyramid Arcade compilation, Looney Labs have released a quartet of both complimentary and stand-alone additions to their Looney Pyramid catalogue. Nomids acts as an entry point to what Andy Looney describes as his ‘gaming system’ - à la a deck of cards - which utilises his unique playing pieces as key components for over 500 games. Included in the small, retro-inspired box, courtesy of graphic designer Eileen Tjan, are ten sets of uniquely coloured pyramid ‘trios’ and a single die. Accompanying them is a brief introduction to the system and its history, alongside rules for Nomids and a further three games, including Treehouse, a classic from the earlier days of Looney Pyramids.…

WICKED ONES Good to be bad Designer: Ben Nielson Publisher: Bandit Camp 359 11+ 40 Do you ever sit down and wonder what life is like for the folks on the other side of the dungeon door? Have you ever thought it would be fun to flip the traditional RPG script and play as the beasts in the darkness, and to trap the heroes as they try to force their way into your bloodspattered lair? If so, welcome to the world of Wicked Ones. Based on the Forged in the Dark (FitD) system used in games like Blades in the Dark and Scum & Villainy, Wicked Ones uses a simple set of core rules and character options to spin surprisingly deep tales of greed and of evil that revels in…

CENTURY: GOLEM EDITION – AN ENDLESS WORLD Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi Publisher: Plan B Games 30-45m 2-4 8+ £39 Although they are known to be incredibly approachable and newcomer-friendly, dipping into the Century series can be confusing for the uninitiated. Which ones are part of the same series? Which one is just a variant of the game you already own? Which games can you mix and play together? However, this series has one important trick up its sleeve that makes diving right in absolutely worth it: any Century game can stand confidently on its own legs, getting others in the series and mixing them together is just a bonus. This too applies to Century: Golem Edition – An Endless World. A reimaging of the third game in the series Century: A…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 HOLI Holi Moley Designer: Julio E Nazario Publisher: Floodgate Games 20m 2-4 13+ £40 The great festival of colours, Holi sees celebration of the arrival of Spring through colour, a beautiful Hindu festival full of fun and powdered paint. Though my personal experience of flinging paint only gets as far as an ill advised university paint party, all the fun of flinging paint at someone else and getting to see the result has here been translated beautifully into a multilayer area control game (without the student debt). Everything about this game is delightful to the senses. Instead of a standard flat lay board, you’ll construct an impressive three tiered game area. Instead of a standard meeple, you’ve got great animal meeples, and brightly coloured paint…

SYMBAROUM STARTER SET: TREASURE HUNTS IN DAVOKAR Dense, Dark and Deep as the Forest Designer:Mattias Johnsson Haake & Mattias Lilja Publisher: Free League 123+ 15+ £32 Where most RPG starter kits focus on light, breezy inand-out adventuring, that kind of shallow heroism isn’t quite Symbaroum’s style. Instead, offers up a sliver of its dark, dangerous fantasy treasure hunts in a box set that is a little denser and long-lasting than many of its peers. If you have never encountered the core game before, Symbaroum is a shadowy riff on classic dungeoncrawling, monster-stabbing heroics from the ever-talented designers at Free League. However, while it certainly bears a passing resemblance to old-school Dungeons & Dragons (not to mention its countless modern imitators) the game has been given a few dramatic twists. The…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 AGE OF SIGMAR: SOULBOUND CHAMPIONS OF ORDER We Could be Heroes Designer: Various Publisher: Cubicle 7 132 11+ £30 The first major expansion for an RPG can often signpost the designers’ hopes for its longterm future. Assuming this holds true for Soulbound’s high-powered fantasy heroics, Champions of Order points towards a game that’s less concerned about shaking up the status quo and more about giving the players more of what they want, both in and out of battle. The book itself is a relatively slim affair, coming it at a modest 150 or so pages. However, within that space the designers over at Cubicle 7 have rammed in an impressive amount of fresh player-facing content. Perhaps the most headlinegrabbing of this is the ten or…

DUCKS IN TOW It’s a quacker Designer: Stephanie Kwok Publisher: First Fish Games 30-60m 1-4 10+ £40 Like any hobby, gaming has its trends. Every so often a particular theme captures the playing public’s imagination and game shop shelves are inundated with new releases about Mars, Vikings or whatever the latest craze may be. Most recently it seems that naturethemed games might be getting their turn in the spotlight, thanks in large part to the success of Elizabeth Hargrave’s birdwatching smash hit Wingspan. Ducks in Tow is the latest of the bunch. It sees players wandering around a duck sanctuary feeding a variety of feathered friends, and it combines a handful of simple mechanisms with gorgeous physical production in an engaging, accessible and utterly charming blend. The game sees you…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 DWELLINGS OF ELDERVALE LEGENDARY EDITION You’ll be in your element Designer: Luke Laurie Publisher: Breaking Games 60-150m 1-5 14+ £170 Take everything you have on your fantasy wish list and throw it into a pot, mix it with some great board game mechanics, sprinkle some fairy dust, stir carefully and then pour it straight onto the tabletop – and you get Dwellings of Eldervale. This is a truly exuberant concoction of worker placement, area control, tile laying and combat mechanics, mixed in with components that range from simple pawns to lush miniatures with sound effect bases. It feels like there are too many things, that are all too different and that couldn’t possibly come together in coherent gameplay, but they do. More than simply coherent,…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 DETECTIVE: CITY OF ANGELS Off the record, on the tabletop, and very hush-hush. Designer: Evan Derrick Publisher: Van Ryder Games 30-150m 1-5 14+ £90 With Detective: City of Angels, designer Evan Derrick wears his influences proudly on his grubby trench coat sleeve. Set in 1940s Los Angeles, a map of which is glowingly depicted on the game’s huge central board, it casts players as hard-bitten, rule-bending gumshoes who are out to solve crimes by pretty much any means necessary. So it’s no surprise while playing to taste the cynical tang of classic noir cinema like The Big Sleep, or feel the brutal, nihilistic force of James Ellroy’s novels, including LA Confidential, whose movie adaptation provides a particularly pleasing Easter egg on one of the components…

ANANSI Designer: Cyril Blondel, Jim Dratwa Publisher: Heidelbar Games 30m 3-5 10+ £12 Much like any spider, Anansi faces no problems standing out on the tabletop. From its foil printed box and cards to its bold artwork, this game of a story-weaving arachnid effortlessly lures players into its enticing web. Anansi is a trick taking game - an ancient and beloved traditional genre within card games that has been adapted and transformed countless times over the years. Here, the particular twist is a spin on the popular ‘exact prediction’ form of trick taking, whereby players declare the amount of tricks they hope to take and are rewarded or penalised appropriately. In Anansi’s particular case these predictions pop up during play, with players choosing to instead lay down a card for…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 EXIT: THE GAME: SACRED TEMPLE Yes, it really is a puzzle Designer: Inka & Markus Brand Publisher: Kosmos 2-3hrs 1-4 10+ £22 It’s difficult to write about a game like this – the newest entries in the series of Exit Games by the Brands – not least because there’s two kinds of puzzle here, and we’re not sure about how to review a jigsaw. It’s the classic Exit Game formula, explore a place, spot a puzzle to overcome in the shape of a coloured lock, and try and work out what the code is from the scene and materials that you have been provided. Enter this in the decoder matrix and you’ll find out if you can open the next envelope. A straightforward approach to…

SURVIVE: ESCAPE FROM ATLANTIS! 30 years in the sinking Designer: Julian Courtland-Smith Publisher: Stronghold Games 45m 2-4 8+ £36 It’s the early 20th century – a time of exploration, adventure and increased understanding of continental drift. Geologists no longer need huge landmasses to act as hypothetical bridges between continents, so it’s time for Atlantis to sink beneath the waves. But uh oh – you’re still on it, khaki archaeology trousers bulging with plundered relics. To the boats! In Survive: Escape from Atlantis each player is responsible for ten – yes, ten – little adventurers all trying to flee the sinking isle. Just like in real life, their worth is not determined by their colour, but by the number printed on their bottom. Each has a hidden value, ranging from one…

JURASSIC PARTS We dig it Designer: Kevin Lanzing Publisher: 25th Century 45m 2-5 10+ £25 I enjoy heavy, table hogging games as much as the next tabletop fanatic, but there’s something special about short games. Being able to unpack, teach, play and tidy in less than an hour immediately interests me, especially when the game has an evocative theme and looks amazing. Jurassic Parts comfortably hits every one of these targets. As well as being a great name, Jurassic Parts is an area control game for 2-5 players. Each player is a palaeontologist armed to the teeth with chisels, which you’ll use to slice up “The Slab,” the communal dig site made up of hexagonal fossil tiles. Each turn you get three sharpened chisels to help carve out your own…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 DUNE: ADVENTURES IN THE IMPERIUM He who controls the dice Designer: Various Publisher: Modiphius 330 15+ £45 This is hard to say without it sounding like thinly veiled criticism, but the most impressive thing about Modiphius’ attempt to adapt the convoluted world of Dune to the tabletop is that it somehow manages to capture the feel of the setting and still work. More or less. In most contexts, this would be a rather low bar to hurdle. Playing along with the themes of the setting is pretty much the minimum level of achievement you expect from most licensed works, after all. However, as several film studios have found out over the last 50-something years, Dune is not most settings. If you haven’t encountered the mountain…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 PRAGA CAPUT REGNI Bohemian Rhapsody Designer: Vladimír Suchý Publisher: Delicious Games 30-120m 1-4 12+ £75 In 14th Century Prague, things are looking up. The new king has decided that his first task in power is to rebuild the city. Players are citizens trying to earn the favour of their king, whose star is clearly rising, by participating in development projects and accumulating wealth. There’s a lot happening in the game (as there was in Charles IV’s Prague). Construction is underway on a new town, cathedral, university, bridge and fortifications and the six main actions – manage mines, manage quarries, upgrade an action, construct a wall, construct a building, construct the King’s road – allow players to advance in these different areas, ultimately gaining them points.…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 LOST RUINS OF ARNAK It’ll be in the last place you look Designer: Mí Elwen Publisher: Czech Games Edition 30-120m 1-4 12+ £58 Mash-ups aren’t, as the name suggests, always going to be neat. When a game takes a bit of deck building and integrates worker placement mechanics, you might think there’s trouble ahead. That is not the case here. Instead, we have one of the best games of the year appearing just as 2020 is drawing to a close. Join us for a bit of jungle exploration in Lost Ruins of Arnak. The game uses worker placement as its core mechanic, and then splits out nearly all of the resource generation and actions into the small deck of cards which players will be drawing…

SCHOOL OF SORCERY Designer: Steve Finn Publisher: Dr. Finn’s Games 40m 2 14+ £25 Looking at School of Sorcery’s box art, it is easy to picture yourself in the magic library of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as the two wizards ready their wands to conjure some mysterious, but powerful spell. Yet, the game has nothing to do with the Harry Potter franchise, and, despite naming components after magical crystals and teleporting portals, it has very few links to its magical theme at all. Yet what it lacks in theme, it makes up with gameplay. This is a two player card drafting game, where players use dice and push-yourluck elements to gain the cards they want. Throughout the game, players assign crystals to claim cards (each with its own…

SKORA Designer: Rory Muldoon & Rose Atkinson| Publisher: Inside The Box 20m 2-4 £13 Fishing rights, they’re not just for Brexit. They’re also the main feature of this beautiful little box of vaguely Nordic looking cards and boats from Inside The Box. Players set out a three-pronged pier in the middle of the table. Each of these areas are a different fishing location for the players boats. On a player’s turn, they place a card in a pier and follow the instructions – usually shipping out some boats, but occasionally switching around a card from one pier to another. The player with the majority in a fishing area gets first dibs of the cards in their scoring round – which is a simple meshing of points on the cards, plus…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 TASHA’S CAULDRON OF EVERYTHING A whole lotta’ class Designer: Various Publisher: Wizards of the Coast 192 11+ £42 Over the six years since it was first published, Dungeons & Dragons’ Fifth Edition has managed to pitch its extensive range of sourcebooks in a way that makes them feel exciting without actually being necessary to enjoy the game. They were stuffed with new worlds to explore and clever themes to play with, but you never felt like you were missing out on much if you just stuck to the core trio of rulebooks. With Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, this approach seems to have been reversed. Thanks to its heaping of new rules, character options and GM tips, the book is quite possibly the closest thing we’re…

DIGIMON: THE CARD GAME Champions of the cardboard world? Designer: Variuos Publisher: Bandai 20m 2 12+ £4 The chrono clash system is an intriguing one for a card game. In the way that Keyforge suggests that no one should be building a deck, this system suggests no one should be tied to a mana or power pool – or at least, not one that isn’t connected directly into the sense of competition. While there have been other outings for this system, we’ve been waiting for a champion to come along, an IP which could truly support the system and build a gaming community around it. That champion turns out to be Digimon: The Card Game. Using the smart memory gauge system where a player’s turn is only over when they’ve…

ABANDON ALL ARTICHOKES Designer: Emma Larkins Publisher: Coiledspring Games 20m 2-4 10+ £13 Abandon All Artichokes seems like a reasonable mantra for the vegetable shy, but in the case of the game it’s not a flavour preference, but a pruning necessity, as a crop of artichokes has taken over your beloved vegetable patch. Housed in an aesthetically pleasing artichoke shaped tin, this card game will see you abandoning vegetables more enthusiastically than a child with brussel sprouts at Christmas. This is no garden variety game however, as you’re going to be trying to draw a hand without any artichokes in it at all in order to win. To do that, you’ll use the special powers of other vegetables to try to abandon those pesky artichokes at every opportunity. For example,…

SUPERFIGHT Designer: Jack Dire Publisher: Skybound Tabletop 30m 3-10 8+ £30 Superfight is a simple party game, whose rules pleasingly fit on a tiny scrap of paper and require no real effort to understand. You pick from your hand of cards an object, and an action to go to battle with. For example, I’d pick pet rock, that can walk through solid objects. Then a random additional card is drawn, so now my pet rock also has a moustache that can stretch and move at will. My opponent, a dragon, able to summon cats to do its bidding, but is also drunk, will now argue against my physics defying rock with a handlebar moustache as to who would win in a fight, with the audience deciding the victor It’s a…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 MEEPLE LAND Life is a meeple rollercoaster Designer: Cyrille Allard, Frédéric Guérard Publisher: Blue Orange 60m 2-4 10+ £40 32 The I think I can say, without a doubt, that everyone has wanted their own theme park at one point in their lives. It could be a childhood fantasy, an actual career goal, or just a recurring dream that always makes you late for work. The desire is so prevalent that games have been trying to sate it for decades. From the ancient Theme Park World video game to Funfair, Trool Park, Imagineers, or Roller Coaster, designers have been trying their darndest to bring that joy to you. And while the Board Game Geek ratings for theme park games rise and fall like a rollercoaster,…

NEVADA CITY Lay the foundations of the unforgiving west Designer: Alan D Ernstein Publisher: Rio Grande Games 90-120m 2-4 14+ £50 There’s plenty of games drawing on the oft romanticised elements of America’s Old West: gunfights, train robberies, ranching, it’s all been done. But what of the whole experience? 2018 saw Western Legends released to great acclaim, offering an adventure-filled sandbox experience – but for the more euroinclined audience, options are slim. Thankfully, Rio Grande have stepped in to fill those spurred boots in the form of Nevada City, a sprawling worker placement game chronicling the early years of this frontier town. Whilst the framework is familiar; place a worker – gain resources, Nevada City exudes its setting through a dynamic sense of interconnectedness between its actions. Points will largely…

THE LOOP Wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey Designer:Maxime Rambourg & Theo Riviere Publisher: Catch Up Games 45-75m 1-4 12+ £40 Prepare yourself, agent, as the nefarious Dr Foo is trying to become master of the universe, using a time machine he built himself to loop from era to era, creating duplicates of himself in his evil super plan. Of course, your role as an agent alongside your fellow players will be to stop him from doing so, in a collaborative game that succeeds in layering a number of game mechanics. Starting at the very beginning, the artwork for this game is one you want to look at. It’s got a clear style, and subsequent voice, that shouts “FUN” from the top of its cardboard lungs, and that resonates from the box, to the pieces,…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 TALES OF EVIL There’s something strange in this neighbourhood… Designer: Antonio Ferrara Publisher: Escape Studios 60m 1-6 13+ £60 Antonio Ferrara has a knack for mashing together themes and mechanics. Last Friday was an ode to the slasher genre with hidden movement and deduction in what was a particularly brutal version of hide and seek. Here, in Tales of Evil, we have something aimed a little younger – think Stranger Things and Scooby Doo, rather than Friday The 13th. Players pick up the role of young people, and in one case their kid sister, roaming through spooky scenarios attempting to not only get out unspooked and alive, but also to carry out investigations and missions within the ghost-ridden modular houses they explore. The game sets…

THE BATMAN WHO LAUGHS: RISING Unholy smokes batman! Designer: Patrick Marino & Andrew Wolf Publisher: The Op 60m 1-4 15+ £50 What to do with a tie-in game? Often we can feel game designers pushing against the restrictions of a movie, comic or cartoon world with some disappointment. If only, we sometimes think, the designer could do what they want. Well, here’s what happens when they can. The Batman Who Laughs: Rising is a DC multiverse villain from another universe where the Dark Knights – all various Batman-plus-bad-guy combinations – are attempting to destroy Gotham City. Don’t worry though, the real Dark Knight, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl are assembling teams to fight back against this reality-ending nemesis. The system remains very similar to the other Rising games,…

HYPERTELLURIANS Designer: Frank Reding Publisher: Mottokrosh Machinations 156 12+ £22 Despite its name, fantasy roleplaying can be a bit predictable, cultists, old gods, pointy eared people with a superior affect. Orcs. It’s one of the reasons we like it, but when you’re offered a smattering of starting characters who are unusually undead, altered and alien, or strangely beastly you’re usually going to start listening. Hypertellurians is a light-ish RPG rulebook that packs a cosmically aligned punch. A great deal of the book is given over to character archetypes with loads of weird and wonderful powers. All of this leads to a player-focused roleplaying experience, where the story is really driven by what players are, as much as what they’re doing or where they’re headed. ‘Wonder’ is the name of the…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 POLIS The sound of the polis Designer: Fran Diaz Publisher: Devir 60-120m 2 14+ £50 Journey back to the 5th century BCE: a time of mighty warriors, wealthy traders and cunning rulers scheming to expand their empires. The ancient Greek world is split between two rival city states: refined Athens and warlike Sparta, both vying for economic, cultural and military supremacy. It sounds like the premise for a swords-and-sandals cinematic epic, but Polis, a reworking of the 2012 game Polis: Fight for the Hegemony, is a thoughtful and absorbing twoplayer game that casts you and your opponent at the rulers of two great powers, only one of which can seize control of the Hellenic realms. In theory, it’s a wargame. It certainly looks like one,…

INKLING Splot of Fun Designer: John Keyworth Publisher: Osprey Games 30m 3-6 14+ £16 There’s an art to making arty games. Finding the right to way to reward creative talents with arbitrary points can make or break a good word or drawing game. In word games, this often means that creating longer words with given letters is key. But what happens when instead, we’re given words and have to get creative with letters? Welcome to Inkling. Over three rounds, players use a slowly growing hand of letters to spell out words from their dealt secret list of six. Each list will have three simple words, two slightly longer and one behemoth, worth one, two and three points respectively. If a player to your left or right guesses a word, you…

COYOTE Designer: Spartaco Albertarelli Publisher: HeidelBAR Games 20m 3-6 10+ £15 Coyote is a bluffing game, where you’re a trickster. The premise of the game follows a coyote who nearly drowned, losing his belongings and becoming jealous and bitter of the other animals, where he subsequently challenges them to a bluffing game to try to win their possessions for himself. In it, no one can tell the truth, because no one knows quite what the truth is, and in fact It’s the second in a series of card games, following Spicy, and preceding Anansi. It’s a quick game to learn and play. Every player has a card on their card stand, but it faces away from you, meaning you can see everyone else’s but yours. These cards have numbers on…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 GINKGOPOLIS Tree-based urban design with lots going on biloba surface Designer: Xavier Georges Publisher: Pearl Games 45m 1-5 10+ £48 Ginkgopolis is set in a future where humans have exhausted Earth’s resources and must now build cities in harmony with nature, inspired by the Ginkgo Biloba tree. That’s what we’re told, anyway – the theme of this game bears almost no relation to how it’s played and, to be honest, tends to only confuse people during the rules explanation. ‘We’re building… tree cities?’ ‘Well, cities inspired by trees.’ What the game boils down to is area control with a pinch of engine building and a dash of drafting. Each turn you’re going to pick a card from your hand, perform one of two possible actions…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 THE PARTY RPG: RISE OF BURDEN BLUGGERBUCKLE Designer: Ben Paul Publisher: The Party RPG Publishing 95+ 15+ £19 I first got into roleplaying with a cobbled together idea of what it was from television, web comics, and some older friends and I revelled in the ridiculous sandbox we created. It was immature and crude and downright silly but that was what we loved about it. Then, like most but not all players, we grew out of that phase and sought after intricate plots and well acted characters. Then, like a blast from the past, The Party RPG: The Rise of Burden Bluggerbuckle landed on my doorstep. The plot is simple: Burden Bluggerbuckle, an orc in a floral apron, hears the tragic news that his boyfriend,…

FINAL FANTASY TRADING CARD GAME: SHADOWBRINGERS STARTER SET Exarch-ly what you want to be playing Designer: Square Enix Publisher: Square Enix 20m 2 13+ £22 It’s hard not to be at least a little aware of the Final Fantasy franchise, whether you’ve played on of the many games or not. Seemingly everywhere, this favourite in the world of video gaming consists of fifteen main games, without considering spin offs and expansions in everything from games to books to TV. Whilst summarising it reduces it to a vast over generalisation, the key points are that it’s a popular Japanese game of good vs evil, mixing in fantasy and science with RPG elements, gorgeous recognisable artwork, and rich narratives. It’s perhaps unsurprising then that it made its way to a trading card…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 STATION MASTER Toot toot on the tabletop Designer: Chris Baylis Publisher: Calliope Games 30-50m 2-6 8+ £24 Every year, the board game industry is gifted with a wealth of new or revisited games about trains - some big, some small. Last year saw the release of several grand 18xx style games - including 18Chesapeake and 18 MS: The Railroads Come To Mississippi from All-Aboard Games - alongside the more modest offerings of Colt Super Express and Switch and Signal. This year has already given us the promise of two revisited classics in the form of Ultimate Railroads and Ticket to Ride: Europe - 15th Anniversary, as well as a couple of cute new additions to the Railroad Ink catalogue. But with such a crowded abundance…

TAWANTINSUYU: THE INCAN EMPIRE The sum of its parts? Designer: David Turczi Publisher: Boards & Dice 60-120m 1-4 10+ £53 Tawantinsuyu was the name given to the Inca empire by its inhabitants. Literally translated as “four parts together” it was a sprawling civilisation stretching along the western edge of South America until it was brutally crushed by European colonisers. Its sheer scale is difficult to comprehend, which makes it appropriate that Tawantinsuyu: The Inca Empire is a big, complex, clunking beast of a game. It’s hard not to feel intimidated the first time you set it up. It comes with the standard heavy-Euro collection of chips, tiles, pawns and tokens as well as a 28-page rulebook. Then there’s the board itself–a space-hogging thing covered in strange symbols that seems like…

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COSMIC FROG One giant leap for frogkind Designer: Jim Felli Publisher: Devious Weasel Games 45-90m 2-6 13+ £75 Straight out of the gate, I’ll put it like this – Cosmic Frog is the game your friends think they’re going to play when they see Rising Sun for the first time. Clearly Rising Sun should be about big monsters wrestling one another rather than diplomatic elegance. Monster WWE is exactly what Cosmic Frog feels like in the best possible way. Players set up a neoprene mat displaying the hexes of ‘The Shard’, an outer dimension track, and a generalised ‘Aether’ area of space. Player then set out hex tiles across the map, with highlands (double thickness cardboard) atop lowlands, and barrens beneath all. Once this is set up, everyone takes a…

FUNFAIR Putting More Fun in Unfair Designer: Joel Finch Publisher: Good Games Publishing 30-60m 2-4 14+ £40 In 2017’s Unfair, players built the best amusement parks the city has ever seen. Their park could have everything an up-and-coming themepark entrepreneur would ever want - rollercoasters, merry-go-rounds, cinemas, and even pirate-themed restaurants – but there was just one little wrinkle: the competition. They, incidentally, were also trying to build the best amusement park in the city and were not afraid to play a little dirty to earn that title. The choice of whether to play fair or, dare we say it, unfair was left up to the players. The event cards in the game had two options, one which would be beneficial to all playing, while the other would allow you…

TAPEWORM Designer: Edmund McMillen Publisher: Studio71 13-30m 2-4 8+ £15 Edmund McMillen’s roguelike video game about childhood trauma The Binding of Isaac has been pulling at our heartstrings and making us mildly disgusted for over a decade now. In Tapeworm, McMillen brings his unique artistic style to the tabletop. If you took dominoes, replaced tiles with cards and dots with derpy, but somehow still cute tapeworms while adding a couple of UNO-like mechanisms – you get Tapeworm. Players are trying to empty their hand by playing down cards to match tapeworms of one of four colours. However, beyond simply being different colours, each tapeworm has its own personality: red is angry, pink is lovable. It is easy to tell them apart by their facial expressions and unique body patterns, making…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 DETECTIVE CHARLIE Elementary, my dear reader Designer: Theo Riviere Publisher: Loki 25m 1-5 7+ £20 It’s no secret that I’m a fan of detective games. Having clearly missed my early calling to be the next Sherlock Holmes, I settle (if gleeful joy can be described as settling) for tabletop games themed on mystery and intrigue. I don my imaginary deer stalker and pick up my imaginary pipe, and I’m on my way. These games – and that’s anything from the Detective Series, to Cantaloop, to Mysterium, to Escape, to Chronicles of Crime (you get the idea) – though fun, are rarely light, and not ones I can share with younger family members. Admittedly, that’s often a plus, but Enter Detective Charlie. A game that encapsulates…

THRIVE DIY Chess Designer:Martin Grider Publisher: Adam’s Apple Games 20-30m 2 8+ £25 Yes, I was a Chess kid. I went to Chess club, competed in national Chess tournaments, somewhere in my house is a binder of completed Chess homework (I’m not kidding). And I rarely play Chess anymore. The game’s biggest problem is how it rewards repeated play over strategic thinking. Someone who’s played a hundred games will almost always beat someone who’s played significantly less. As such, you’re constantly looking for players of similar experience in order to get rewarding games, because playing against someone significantly more or less experienced is less fun. Thrive kicks that barrier to play in the gut, delivering something I’d long forgotten: the joy of learning a game through play. Thrive is a…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 REEF SECOND EDITION Stack ‘em deep Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi Publisher: Next Move Games 30-40m 2-4 8+ £36 Once again we return to the bottom of the sea to play a game of aligning and stacking little plastic pieces (which sound great when clacked together) to make patterns. This second edition arrives with a newly illustrated board and certain colour changes to the game that are designed to improve its readability amongst less well-sighted players. A welcome addition to any board game, and one that will become standard before second editions at some point in the future, we hope. While many of us are fine with deep blues, coral pastels and general glowing undersea shapes, there are some who find it much as a nuisance to…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 MAGLEV METRO Expand and deliver Designer: Ted Alspach Publisher: Bezier Games 60-90m 1-4 14+ £70 Technology is progressing and the city needs a brand-new transport network. It’s your job to establish an infrastructure that’s worthy of this futuristic city. Behold… magnetic levitation rail. In Maglev Metro, you construct a line of your own colour in order to build and connect stations in different parts of the city. Your hex track tiles are perspex – so multiple players can build on the same spot and all the lines can still be seen, which is aesthetically very pleasing. Two types of passenger must be transported across the network – robots (which are gold, silver and bronze) and commuters (pink, lilac, coral and purple). Using your train, you…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 CRYO It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere… Designer: Tom Jolly & Luke Laurie Publisher: Z-Man Games 60-90m 2-4 14+ £60 Honestly, who’d go into space? From Alien to The Expanse, it just seems the kind of place where everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Take Tom Jolly and Luke Laurie’s Cryo. There you are, pootling happily along in your interstellar colony ship, when some git messes it all up and you crash into a freezing rock, reduced to desperately ordering drones to move your fellow, cryo-podensconced survivors down into lifesustaining caverns, before the sun sets and everyone freezes to death Thematically, it doesn’t get much grimmer. This isn’t even a cooperative struggle, as you might expect. Instead, it’s every faction for…

THE BEST GAMES OF 2021 MAGICAL KITTIES SAVE THE DAY! A paw-some family RPG Designer: Justin Alexander, Matthew J. Hanson, Michelle Nephew Publisher: Atlas Games 2-6 68 6+ £25 You are cute. You are cunning. You are fierce. You are magical kitties who can save the day! That’s how this RPG in a box begins, and also how it has continued – such a cute mantra has now invaded daily life and has been repeated regularly since starting to play this game. Gone away are the range of dice, the requirement to roll for an extensive number of options, and lengthy character sheets, instead, here stands Magical Kitties Save The Day, with six D6, and requirements to roll only for actions that fall under cute, cunning, or fierce. The premise…