Innehållsförteckning för Issue 75 från Tabletop Gaming

NOW PLAYING… Ulaya Chronicles: Raptor Claw Island Welcome to an issue of big conflicts and games for big kids. We’ve got the 4X inspired Time of Empires – a real time empire building game where losing it all is just a matter of distraction. We also offer the more traditional 4X experience with Europa Universalis – a great take on the classic grand strategy theme. And we’re also raiding the attic for ‘Grail Games’ – those games you might have played as a kid but are probably stashed away somewhere next to the Christmas tree light you thought you’d lost. We explore some of the most coveted games, meet the collectors who want them and discover some eye-watering prices for something that was probably originally bought from Woolworths. If you…

When I was asked to write this column I was very quick to say yes because I love games and I work in the industry and so thought this would be an easy assignment. But then I sat down to write it – and I didn’t know what to type, there are just so many brilliant games out there. Do I choose one of the games that we sell at Joking Hazard? Or do I pick a chunky campaign game that I have sunk weeks of my life into like Gloomhaven? Or do I choose Lords of Waterdeep because I love worker placement games? Or do I go for a deck/engine building game like Century: Spice Road because I absolutely LOVE that game… hmm so this wasn’t going to be…

The humble ‘where’s Wally?’ has come to Dungeons & Dragons. The classic hunt for the stripey hatted chap has been replaced with a search for the monsters, creatures and various peoples of the worlds of the Forgotten Realms – and there’s a bit of an adventure to go on too. While naturally aimed at younger audiences, it’s a great companion to the A Young Adventurer’s Guides series of books by Jim Zub. That set of books looks to give younger readers a way into understanding the various worlds of D&D via the monsters that inhabit them. Not only that, these monsters all come with guides to their habitats, and how best to approach them. It’s a cute way of introducing youngsters into the hobby without overloading them with stats, rules…

With hundreds of titles up his sleeve, not to mention multiple awards, Reiner Knizia is something of a magician when it comes to designing successful board games. Considering his reputation, expectations are dizzyingly high when he drops a new release. So is San Francisco, his latest offering, as golden as we’d all anticipate? Visually, it gets off to a promising start. The retro cover by Roman Kucharski (following his excellent form on the likes of Draftosaurus) gives great box both outside and in, where even the component dividers are considered. However, it’s sort of Kucharski’s fault – thanks to his intricately sketched player boards – that the game seems weighty. It unfortunately isn’t. San Fran needs a makeover and players are the urban planners for the job. Everyone has a…

Bag of Chips is a simple hand-management and push-your-luck game that gathers two to five players around the table in a tense gamble for points. Each round begins with players receiving a hand of six objective cards, each detailing the colours (flavours?) or quantities of chips needed to score it. Following this, the round progresses in four steps of escalating tension. First, five chips will be drawn from the bag and everyone chooses two objectives to discard. Then four more chips are drawn and another objective is discarded. Three more chips are then added to the pool at which point players must place one card on the negative scoring side of their play area and two on the positive. Finally, two chips arrive one by one before scores are calculated…

Many games have taken a run at the – on the face of it, ideal – theme of football, and many have fallen to a career-ending double-footed tackle in the penalty box, their top flight dreams ended by lacklustre mechanics, drab presentation, or overly-simulationist fiddly implementation – and occasionally, all three. Eleven is a management game, where you attempt to guide your team to league success over six weeks. Every week you’ll resolve an issue facing the club, contract sponsors, refurbish your ground and facilities, hire staff and players, then at the weekend, you’ll play a match, using scouts’ reports to decide your tactics and which star players to include. Let me tip my hand early: Eleven is very much a game of two halves. Some things it does…

Sometimes you aren’t looking for an intense game. Sometimes it just been a really long day – or a busy week – and you find yourself hankering for something gentle. You like the idea of something to get your brain thinking-but-not-hurting, a challenge somewhere short of an actual puzzle. Perhaps it might have a little player interaction, enough to let you niggle your opponent, to toy with them, but also to let you focus on the pretty stuff in front of you. Does any of the above resonate? If so, Maui may well be the game you don’t have yet. It certainly doesn’t hurt that “the pretty stuff” in this case is arranging colourful towels on the sun-drenched beaches of Hawaii. Maui is a game of selecting towel tiles, and…

“Competitive Secret Mushroom Picking” is one of those themes I didn’t know I wanted in a game until I had it. Wonder Woods is one such game and by goodness if it doesn’t deliver a half-hour of hurriedly hoping your horticultural hoarding heralds happiness. The game is simple: each of the four different mushrooms has a set of four points cards, numbered 1, 3, 5 and 7. At the start of the game, each mushroom’s set is shuffled and one card placed face down near its matching board. The remaining cards are then shuffled together and distributed to the players, so everyone has some idea of how much each mushroom could be worth (for example, if you have the morel cards numbered 1 and 3 in hand, those mushrooms are…

First things first, this game is gorgeous. Evocative box cover? Check. Beautifully laid out rulebook with clear instructions and visual aids? Check. Fantastically illustrated game boards festooned with charming wooden wolf meeples and other tactile-pleasing pieces? Massive check with little decorative moons. But be warned, behind its beauty hides a devious little challenge. The Wolves revolves around players taking two actions each turn in the grand tradition of 4X games, to explore the map, expand control of regions by creating dens and lairs, achieved through exploiting other wolves into service via tactical howling. However, instead of exterminating your opponents, it’s more “expropriating” (no it doesn’t quite match the definition but hush) their wolves and dens through dominating barks. I’m not quite sure how one claims a den by screaming at…

Basing a game on a popular intellectual property is difficult, translating that property’s reflection or incitement of a cultural moment is even more challenging. But in a completely un-satirical leap of opportunism, Netflix sanctioned the production of a number of licensed board games to capitalise on – including Squid Game. With the show – and its stylishly violent critique of class inequality and rampant capitalism – coming out amidst a near universal haze of post-lockdown public cynicism, the question is, how much of this does it capture, and at the very least, is it any good? In Squid Game: Let the Games Begin, players will be guiding a team of faceless, numbered participant tokens through six of the show’s games in the hopes of reaching the contest’s end with at…

Give me a standard deck of playing cards and I’ll give you a hundred ways to play with them. Well, not me, but someone could. In the contemporary gaming scene, designers have picked up on this inherent blend of minimalism and flexibility, simultaneously expanding upon and moving away from the basic 52 card deck to create similarly compact but endlessly varied modern tabletop experiences. Some are overwhelmingly vast (Magic: The Gathering), others are wonderfully inventive (Oh My Goods), but the ones of most value to the hobby are those striking that perfect balance of simplicity and depth. Fantasy Realms is one of those games: staggeringly easy to teach with an emergent depth and cleverness that’s sure to beckon most who play it towards the gates of our curious hobby. Fitting…

I’m not much of a painter. I like to occasionally break out a set of quite beaten-up brushes and old and scavenged paint pots for a bit of relaxation though. Or when there’s a set of very cool minis in a box. I previously relied on a set of Turbo Dork by Exit 23 (for weird effects) and some Scale75 (for normal stuff) to get through whatever it was I wanted to paint. And these were fun and interesting paints to use. Even the handful of donated Games Workshop paints had their standout elements. But none of these individual makers feels anything like as good as Duncan Rhodes’ Two Thin Coats set. The set is notable, down to the name (Duncan’s Games Workshop period’s instructional catchphrase), for the idea that…

“Balancing a co-op game is, in many ways, more challenging than balancing a competitive game” Richard Garfield on balancing King of Monster Island, p20 “It became quite logical for us to play with time because history is about the flow of time” David Simiand and Pierre Voye on Time of Empires, p26 “Being perceived as the most powerful or dangerous realm will make you a natural target for your opponents’ plots” Eivind Vetlesen on Europa Universalis: The Price of Power, p48…

1 EVERYBODY WINS James Wallis wrote a chunk of this book’s draft in the pages of this very magazine. The All The Jahres section goes to make up much of this book that explores the most important awards in board games from the very start right up to today. With plenty of additional material, and great insight into those games that missed out on the top prize (rightly or wrongly) it’s an incredible trip through the history of our hobby. This is a big, chunky, book is a great way to get really connected to the hobby. Look out for the full review in the next issue of the magazine, and listen to the accompanying podcast here: anchor.fm/aconyte-books 2 KEEPERS TIPS Call of Cthulhu is a game that people love to…

Much like Burger King, solo gaming is about having it your way. With less calories, usually. And one of the closest gaming experiences to fast food for the solitaire gamer is the graphic novel adventure – part choose your own adventure, part comic book. The undisputed (non-burger based) kings of publishing the good stuff when it comes to graphic novel adventures is Van Ryder Games, who you may know for their massively popular Final Girl and Hostage Negotiator games. Much like those two titles they deal in a kind of up-market-pulp that you don’t necessarily see everywhere, and the graphic novel adventures are a perfect version of this. Each book in the series is different, but they follow the usual format of following a route through the adventure by spotting…

Geographically speaking, we’re merely popping next door from last month’s stop in Macedonia, to the steppe-filled and mountainous Republic of Bulgaria. Here, in the pockets of civilisation jutting out from the Balkans terrain, the tabletop hobby is growing at a pace on par with its European neighbours, and in the next few paragraphs we’ll be exploring the games, cafes, and designers demonstrating this best. With its proximity to Macedonia, and ultimately its historic trade routes, Bulgaria’s more distant tabletop history bears many similarities. Tapa, for example, is a backgammon style game still enjoyed by both countries, as well as Greece. But despite this historic scarcity, Bulgaria’s rich past nonetheless still seeps into latter day designs. One such example is Etnos from publisher Sly Foxes Games. This attractive tile-laying game takes…

MEGA CONSTRUX POKEMON JUMBO PIKACHU, MATTEL Yes, everyone’s favourite electric mouse is available as a MegaConstrux set, this one proudly claiming to be 32cm tall. This is, nearly, as tall as the original Pokémon Pokedex officially records (40cm). While this jumbo version of Pikachu is pretty cute, it does require a bit of brick-building nous to make this mouse. The instructions are decent, but you’ll have to be able to imagine some aspects of the model in your mind to get the pieces right, and the brick removal tool is not going to win you any gym badges. The model is posable however, so you can train your Pikachu into whatever position you prefer. The 8+ age range might be a bit ambitious at the bottom end, and it’s likely…

Take that Mayan Calendar! As well as surviving another foretold apocalyptic date, 2012 also saw Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, the ‘better than anyone expected’ London 2012 Olympics and the Box Office Busting team-up film that has now defined modern cinema, The Avengers (amusingly referred to as Avengers Assemble in the UK so it wouldn’t be confused with the 1960’s TV show, look that gem up when you can.) As the UK embraced superheroes and superathletes, we saw a healthy selection of industry-defining releases that would change the course of tabletop gaming. Join us as we look back at 2012! ANDROID: NETRUNNER It wasn’t that Netrunner was a new game; the asymmetric collectable card game designed by the legendary Richard Garfield first released in 1996. Nor was it the debut…

No other cooperative game manages to make removing cubes from the board as satisfying as Pandemic. A newcomer to the scene has to offer something extraordinary to escape Pandemic’s gigantic shadow, and The Spill definitely gives it a good try. The Spill’s most compelling success is the tight interweaving between the game’s theme and the mechanics. Players are a response team coming out to the ocean to a recent accidental oil rig spillage. They will have to contain the spill, while attempting to save the local sea wildlife. In The Spill, ‘the cubes on a map’ take the form of black dice (representing oil) that can populate the circular board of four sectors each divided into six lanes, corresponding to the six-sided dice values. Players will be rolling these dice…

How fast can you assemble a burger? Burger ASAP is a featherweight puzzle game in which players race to be the first to assemble burger orders. It has a colourful design reminiscent of the happy food in Sushi Go and it packs down into a burger box. Each round you’ll race to make a specified set of burgers from the seven ingredient cards in front of you. Every player has the same set of ingredients from which they must construct the burgers and every card must be used. Cards can overlap, hiding up to half of a card but no card can be fully concealed. There’s an element of memory to the game as you try to familiarise yourself with the sides of each of your cards and there is…

One-night, little children went to bed and the next morning they couldn’t be roused. An evil demon trapped their souls in his dream castle full of darkness and nightmares, chaining the children so they could not escape. Terrifying, right? Yet, add cutesy-like artwork and the whole concept is somehow darkly adorable? This is a mix that only Japanime games can successfully pull off. CHAINsomnia, under the covers of this strange but somehow compelling theme, is a dungeon crawler, where players take on the roles of the children and attempt to escape the demon’s castle while fighting bad dreams along the way. The castle is composed of tiles, drawn at random from a stack, which players reveal as the game progresses. However, the addition of each new tile also requires players…

Designer Steve Finn likes to keep it chill. With previous titles, he’s invited players to plant herbs (Herbaceous), arrange flowers (Floriferous), paint a landscape (Sunset Over Water) or arrange fancy knick-knacks (The Whatnot Cabinet). Finn’s latest game follows in the green-fingered (or should that be green-toed?) footsteps of Herbaceous, except this time it’s fruit and veg you’re growing rather than tasty weeds. In terms of mechanisms, however, this is quite a different kettle of broccoli. Rather than being a push-your-luck set-collecting card game, Delicious is a flip-and-write affair; a puzzley experience with a dash of artiness. Each round two cards are turned, one above the other, each card revealing an image of a vegetable, with a smaller visual prompt to add a random token (drawn from a bag) on either…

Kicking off Garphill Games latest series following the North Sea and West Kingdom trilogies is Wayfarers of the South Tigris, a worker and dice placement title of cartographic set-collection. But that sounds somewhat reductive; it turns out mapping the land, seas, and stars surrounding Baghdad is a touch more complex than that. Indeed, across it’s substantial (yet variable) game-length, players will be optimising their own dice-placement spots, navigating an unpredictable market of public workers, and building a personal panoramic tableau from no less than five different decks. So, as you might’ve guessed, Wayfarers leans toward the heavier end of Garphill’s spectrum, but does this weight lead to something that feels fun or new? The short answer is yes. Fans of the previous trilogies might find themselves in familiar territory…

In less than two years, MicroMacro: Crime City has gone from a one-off, Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year winner to a can’t-print-‘em-fast-enough trilogy – All In being the third instalment. It’s been hard to avoid, but for those who have missed the series it’s a look-and-find detective co-operative played out on a cutesy monochrome map. Putting it more plainly, it’s Where’s Wally set in the underworld. With quirkier characters. With clue cards. Yet with fewer stripy jumpers. The game probably best appeals to children, who are not only generally more observant than adults, but also have fewer back twinges and functioning eyesight (there is a lot of stooping over and squinting at the city map, unless you tack it to the wall). However, and here comes the…

Once every 25 years, someone decides skateboarding should be popular. Fevered children pester parents for a board but before you can say gnarly, 99 per cent of them have been resigned to the shed as we wait for the start of the next cycle. We’re still waiting. But that hasn’t stopped Pandasaurus bringing us Skate Summer, a suitably garish game of tricks, big air, and combos. Don’t get me wrong. I like an underused theme, and skateboarding is a compelling idea for a board game. The bright cartoon artwork fits, although some of the cardboard chits are too small and the board is horribly busy. While there are lots of bits in the box, £50 feels steep. So, do you get bang for your bucks or does Skate Summer crash…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s Renaissance Europe. You’re playing as a merchant, and there’s quite a bit of beige on the board. There are resources to collect such as wool, stone, and iron. And you can use them to get victory points in a variety of ways. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the latest in dicey, tiley, action selection euro games. But is Tiletum worth your tile-time? A game of Tiletum plays over four rounds during which each player selects and uses three dice, each gaining them both resources and actions. In addition, there are a number of tasks players can do at any time during a turn. Each round ends with a fair, where players who have a presence in the city holding it can…

Movie Mind is so much better than it sounds on paper. I can tell you that it’s a game of picking out the movie references from a Where’s Wally style scene card to answer questions and get points. Every question is a bit like ‘an animate movie that starts in London’ or ‘a movie that contains a big shark’ and each scene is full to the brim of references. One of the cards, featured on the box, contains a sort-of Ursula from The Little Mermaid fighting a big robot from Pacific Rim while Ponyo (from the film of the same name) runs on the heads of some fish. It’s pretty good, and you’ll get a chuckle out of each set up. But you might be asking – where’s the friction?…

I love a good fantasy game. From D&D in my teens, through Magic and PC games, through many years in online MMORPGs, it’s the genre I keep coming back to. But fantasy board games have a sketchy history, as every step away from rolelaying to board game seems to lose more from the storytelling than it recovers from clever mechanisms. Some games, such as Terra Mystica or Tales of Glory, leave the pretence of story at the door and revel in their abstract nature, bolting on the theme in the same way most modern board games do. No harm in that. While dungeon crawlers such as the D&D range and Gloomhaven have enough story that like-minded groups can tell an epic tale, as long as they’re willing to wade through…

NEW OPEN GAMING LICENCE FOR DUNGEONS & DRAGONS LEAK CAUSES BACKLASH A leaked version of the new Open Gaming Licence (OGL) for Dungeons & Dragons has been picked up by the gaming community, and many creators are not happy. The OGL is a framework in which Wizards of the Coast allows third-party companies to use the mechanics and rules of D&D to create their own tabletop products. The OGL in its original form has existed since 2000, but is claimed to be fully replaced by the 1.1 draft document, it is claimed. Wizards of the Coast has stated that the changes to the OGL reflect a change in the distribution of roleplaying games (now most commonly in PDF), and that the OGL was originally designed to allow the D&D community…

LOUP GAROU Werewolves are a great bit of folklore, especially in this format. Both the hunted and the hunter they’ve got a context switch that makes moving from one panel to the next feel risky depending on what form you might be taking. Loup Garou sees you take the role of unfortunate and reluctant hero who contracts the werewolf disease. Using a bit of dice rolling, levelling up, and some occult reading makes it one of the best fun books in the series. There’s even a spell and skills system tree to progress through. It’s pleasingly light to move through, and the skill tree gives you a sense of depth on future playthroughs. Come for the schlock and stay for the roleplaying elements. YOUR TOWN This is the weirdest one…

Q. Dear Ben, Looking in the mirror this morning I noticed how grey my hair had become. I remember the first grey hair I spotted. I grinned at the interloper. A silver flower, alone in a field of richest gold. I decided to let him live, not realising that, in a few short years, my head would look more like the high summer seed pod than the lion head of the spring dandelion. The fact is though, I’m fine with it. I have matured into verdant middle age and wear my years comfortably. So much pressure departs as your internal rings increase. I no longer feel the need to be cool. I don’t have to dredge up pretend delight at things I don’t really care for. Also a rapidly fleeing…

On first inspection through the spyglass, Ahoy is Root on-boats. It is, after all, an asymmetrical battle-driven title from Leder Games featuring fun, scrappy illustrations of anthropomorphic animals by Leder’s in-house artist Kyle Ferrin. But instead of cats, birds and mice fighting over a forest, players here take to the waves and ready their cannons in the form of pirate sea creatures. And that’s only where the differences start. Anyone who’s played Cole Wehrle’s Root will know it is far more complex and challenging than it looks. In contrast, Greg Loring-Albright’s Ahoy turns out to be a far simpler and more accessible game. It has already been lauded for being a great entry-level asymmetrical experience, and with good reason. When set up for four, two participants will be playing an area-controller…

It’s the 1920s and the next big gold rush in North America is delivering packages via planes. But this isn’t as easy as Postman Pat jumping in his van and tootling around Greendale to visit Mrs Goggins. No, you’ve got to fight for the most lucrative routes, while also making sure your planes are the most reliable. There isn’t even a black and white cat to cheer you up when things go awry. Air Mail is the latest network building game in the style of Ticket to Ride and Age of Steam, but here you’re taking to the skies as you traverse the USA (in a two to five player game) or Canada (in a two to three player game). The inclusion of different maps is a nice touch right…

Wordle, the online word-wrangling sensation. Originally just a standalone webpage containing the five-letter word puzzle by developer Josh Wardle, later purchased by the New York Times, it offered a kind of desynchronised game with everyone else on the internet. My first experience of Wordle was seeing the yellow and green boxes turning up on Twitter as people shared (boasted?) about their ability to guess a five-letter word. It was extremely of its moment, and created hundreds of copycat versions online (Heardle, Wordle for audio. Worldle, Wordle for countries. My favourite, Redactle, Wordle but for entire Wikipedia articles.) And now, we have the board game tie-in. For those completely unfamiliar, you have six guesses at the five-letter word of the day. This word is the same for everyone in the…

Marching Order is the kind of indie production I like. A little bit rough around the edges. Complete, but a little sprawling. One too many ideas. A box that is a bit like one of those cardboard fish and chip boxes you sometimes get at the seaside. Except black of course. What it lacks in finesse is made up for with enthusiasm. This is a monochrome dungeon delving adventure that shares a great deal with the extremely popular Darkest Dungeon video games. In both, players put together a team of rogues of different stripes (thief, sellsword, doctor, archer and so on), and head into a decaying space like a mansion. Go in, get loot, try and not die. Pretty standard. But both Marching Order and Darkest Dungeon model the idea…

Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork was somewhat of a sensation back in 2015, at a time where tabletop gaming was starting to push out of male-heavy geek culture and into “normal” people’s lives. It combined a (perhaps) traditionally feminine theme of quilting with an incredibly tight two-player competition. This made a perfect stepping stone for couples that might not have otherwise considered board gaming for them. Stack ‘n Stuff extends that wide invitation to children and young families. Together, you compete to load a delivery van with “Stack” tiles and earn coins. Go past a coin stop on the board and get more coins! Reach the house at the end of the road, and pay a penalty for empty spaces in your van. Clearly, this is Patchwork Light (in fact, it’s heavily…

It’s pretty brave to lead a rulebook by explaining the card system the game is introducing. That’s precisely what Precognition does, before you even get to the component list or story blurb. It suggests publisher Ludonaute will be supporting it with more titles. So, I guess we should also begin with the aforementioned ‘Dual Select System’. In Precognition, each player has a slightly asymmetric 24-card deck. It is split into three seasons of roughly equal numbers, each of which is shuffled individually to make a single phased draw deck. You draw the top two cards from your deck and put them face up in front of the player to your right. Then you draw two more cards for yourself, adding your two Choice cards (which you always keep) to your…

Before the miracles of modern medicine, diagnoses of illness and behavioural traits were guided by theories on humorism. Applying such theories to myself – whereby pains and personality traits can be determined through identification of imbalances in four bodily fluids – would likely turn up an excess of black bile and phlegm (nice), indicating a touch of melancholy and reservedness. Unfortunately, nowadays – unlike the hues of these particular fluids – things aren’t so black-and-white. But for a moment, lets step back to a time when humorism was in its heyday. Four Humours is an area-majority game of deduction and bluffing set in a pastel-painted, anglo-esque medieval kingdom. As doctors of the middle-ages, players will be competing for medical fame, travelling the kingdom and swaying the favour of citizens with…

In Wildstyle, you are part of a graffiti-spraying crew tagging city streets. The goal is to tag more than your rival crews. Although the exact location is unspecified, the city depicted on the district-based board looks distinctly NYC. Called “the map”, the board is pieced together by sections that match the number of players at the table. On each is a hive of hexagons with various symbols that represent places to tag – railways, parks and so on – each worth a different number of points. Suffice to say that scribbling on the police station carries the greatest reward. Tagging takes place via set collection. Snaffle three of the same icon and you can place one of your tokens on a corresponding hex. There are restrictions on how many cards…

Terra Mystica, on which Terra Nova is based, has been around for a decade. It received high praise on release and has continued to garner it ever since, regularly featuring in ‘best strategy games of all time’ lists. Its mechanisms spawned sci-fi spin-off Gaia Project, which now sits even higher on many of those lists. So, with such lofty heritage, what does Terra Nova hope to bring to the party? The simple answer is probably volume sales. The hobby is growing, but the family market is where real sales are found. I’m a fan of both Gaia Project and Terra Mystica, but both are heavy Eurogames. There are lots of moving parts to consider on every move, requiring high levels of strategic and tactical play throughout. Terra Nova offers a…

Star Trek: Missions is a reworking of Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee Fantasy Realms, a simple set collection game about gathering a hand of cards with as many scoring synergies as possible. ST:M isn’t a simple reskin of the original – it uses the same core mechanics, but the cards here are unique to the game. Actual play is so simple as to seem almost like an afterthought – you start off with a hand of seven cards. Each turn, you draw one, then discard one. Your only choice is whether to draw from the main (or ‘Galaxy’) deck, the Mission deck, or the discard area. As soon as there are eight Galaxy cards or twelve Mission cards in the discard area, the game is over. Cards from the main deck…