Innehållsförteckning för Issue 88 från Tabletop Gaming

Welcome back, adventurers! I’ve got a question for you – how do you track the games you play, if you do? Do you rate and review them? Do you keep record of all the games in your collection so one doesn’t wallow away all lonely at the back of a shelf? There’s a good chance if you’ve answered yes to these, that you may well be using Board Game Geek to do it. The website is a real heart of board gaming and will be the heart of this month’s magazine too, with a special focus on the 100 highest rated games. So grab a pen, and get ticking off the games you’ve played – and discover all the ones that would sit beautifully on your To Be Played pile.…

The Board Game Geek rating system is as clear as it dare be. You can give your played games a rating between one to ten, with helpful descriptions like “1 - Defies description of a game. You won’t catch me dead playing this. Clearly broken.”, “5 - Average game, slightly boring, take it or leave it” and “​10 Outstanding. Always want to play and expect this will never change”. So far so good. Once a game has received over 30 user ratings, it is eligible for Ranking, creating an average Geek Rating, that is then weighted against volume to provide the Board Game Geek rank – eg, a game that has a single rating of 10 does not exceed a game with 20,000 ratings of 9. There are more algorithmic…

Board Game Geek is the go to place for many board gamers, and that makes its ratings incredibly important. However, when there are thousands of games being ranked, sometimes there are a few surprises to be had in terms of popularity. Just for fun, we’ve got a few below, and we’re asking what you think – which one of these is higher on the Board Game Geek ranking, and for an extra point, how close can you get to its overall rank? SCORE CARDS AT THE READY… Carcassone Vs Catan Exploding Kittens Vs Cards Against Humanity Warhammer 40,000 (Tenth Edition) Vs Pokemon Trading Card Game Sea Salt & Paper Vs Sushi Go! Monopoly Vs Cluedo (Clue) Betrayal at House on the Hill Vs Codenames CARCASSONNE VS CATAN Carcassone is 215…

Open world games seek to give you narrative freedom in your approach to a story or your objectives, and Sleeping Gods is one of many trying to give this experience. Instead of a linear route of progression, open worlds tend to give you an explorable map with fixed locations you can visit in any order in an attempt to find the things that will give you resources, points or the next thing on your own set of objectives. Sleeping Gods comes with a pair of books, one of which is an atlas of seas, islands and towns with numbered locations. The other is a giant storybook with numbered entries which tell the story of what happens when you visit those locations. You can, theoretically, set sail for any numbered location…

When you look at the Board Game Geek Top 100 you’ll know any list like this is going to cause conversation and potential dispute. A common response to any list is either “A game I like isn’t in it, so it must be flawed” or “my favourite game is in the list, I feel seen.” Ideally, a top 100 list can stand as a set of recommendations to anyone looking for something new. The curators of BGG have undertaken a (arguably thankless) task to create a statistical breakdown of the various ratings and reviews left by the public into some kind of order representing the best gaming has to offer. The algorithm has to allow for various less helpful ratings left on the site, too, from those who haven’t played…

The Brass series has become somewhat of a phenomenon in the board gaming world. Originally released in 2007, it was well-regarded at the time, but made relatively little impact. However, a re-release of the original Brass (now Brass: Lancashire) with new art, and a new title (Brass: Birmingham) smashed crowdfunding records. Since then, both games have spent significant time on Board Game Geek’s Top 100 list, and at the time of preparing this issue, Brass: Birmingham is number one; potentially making it the most popular game in the entire world! I asked Martin Wallace, creator of the series, about what has made Brass: Birmingham so successful. “I have absolutely no idea, not a clue! If you had told me, back when I was designing it, that the rather dull game…

ENGINE BUILDING Definition: A game mechanic where what you play in one turn increases your available actions in future turns. Remember those times when you notice something you’ve never seen before and then see it everywhere for the next few weeks, like it’s haunting you? Prepare to be haunted by engine building, one of the dullest sounding, but fundamentally brilliant mechanics of board games. A telling sign that your game includes engine building is that it starts off slow. Before you’ve built your engine, you’re just milling around. You have a limited array of actions. Turns can be over quickly. Not much is going on. You’re not too interested in victory points just yet. You’ll sacrifice these, and resources, to invest in the future. You may choose to use cards…

ASMODEE Asmodee are the biggest distributors of board games in the UK, so their presence at UK Toy Fair was no surprise. It was easily one of the largest stands, containing a number of different brands. Coiledspring Games (who are merged with Asmodee) also had a presence next to the main stand and were showing off new games like Spin Some for Dimsum (stay tuned for our review next issue). Exploding Kittens were showing off a surprising number of new games, including the likes of CATchables, a collectable toy tossing game, That Escalated Quickly, a game of putting absurd things in the right order, and more. Pokemon had their current range on display, and you couldn’t miss the Pikachu wandering round the halls either. Speaking of guests, Ash and Anthony…

Designer: Reiner Knizia | Publisher: Pegasus Spiele Up, up and away! Time to gather your friends and compete to put on the best hot air balloon show that you can. Havalandi is the new game by esteemed designer Reiner Knizia in which 2-4 players place balloon tokens, lining them up to try and launch them the most efficiently. At the start of each turn of the game, a six-sided dice is rolled, and a beautiful three-dimensional hot air balloon token is moved around the board, after which, it is used to determine where that player may place their token. There are two main ways players are looking to set up to score, each of which conflicts with the other, in a tantalising way. Grouping balloons in large clusters yields increasingly…

Designer: Gamelyn Games | Publisher: Scott Almes The Mayor’s son, Donny Mureti, was murdered in his penthouse last night. The Mayor wants this case closed before the press sink their teeth into it. You have 48 hours to solve the case, find the murderer, and deal with all the other issues this corrupt city has to offer. That’s the job in Tiny Epic Crimes, the latest offering in the Tiny Epic series that sees you take on the role of detectives trying to figure out which of the 16 suspects is guilty. It’s a bit like Cluedo, especially with the identity of the Murderer being hidden in a special card sleeve but that’s where the similarities end. As mentioned above, you have 48 hours to solve the case and each…

Designer: Andre Santos, Orlando Sa | Publisher: Arcane Wonders If the process of real-world city planning mirrored the ways in which games do so, I’d seriously consider a change of career. Could Suburbia’s hexes supplant stale greyscale urban design software? What about the polyominoes of My City or the colourful cubes of Tiny Towns? Why shouldn’t the cities of the future germinate from plans laid down in the form of custom acrylic tokens? And, if they can, will the designers of Neotopia be remunerated for their concept? Probably not. As pretty as Neotopia and its scores of circular, screen-printed acrylic tokens is, at the end of the game players are left with something more closely resembling the individual pixels seen when pressing your nose to the television than a functional…

Designer: Zack Mader, Jason Viddal | Publisher: Restoration Games The newest release in the Unmatched line is formidable. Focused on historical Japan, this set includes two warriors that are fierce and intriguing options. It functions as a fully standalone two-player head-to-head experience and contains the expected high quality established in this brand. Most significantly, Sun’s Origin highlights the possibility of future design methodology, and how we may anticipate the growth of this game. Both warriors here are interesting. Oda Nobunaga was the head of the Oda clan and a notable daimyo for unifying Japan in the 16th century. He overthrew the Ashikaga shogunate and ended a long period of feudal wars. In Unmatched, his leadership provides the basis for his innate ability of boosting cards played by allied fighters.…

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Designer: Shem Phillips and S J Macdonald | Publisher: Garphill Games If playing this game has taught me one thing, it’s that translation is difficult, but it does pay well! In Scholars, 1-4 players will be gathering resources and journeying far and wide to employ the services of academics to translate ancient scrolls into Arabic, making them worth victory points. The core of this game is bag-building and resource management, primarily through rolling dice and playing cards to take actions on the central board. On a turn, a player will choose a handful of dice they have rolled and place them onto a card onto their personal player board, allowing them to take an action, the strength and value of that action is tied to the value and the colour…

Designer: Tom Jolly | Publisher: Steve Jackson Games This review is written with two specific groups of people in mind: first are the selection of innocent individuals who have never played or encountered Wiz War before; second are the many who have played (and possibly loved) an older edition. Let us begin with the newbies; our trainee Wiz-ees… Wiz War is a zany take-that game of magical mayhem. Players are wizards, running around a maze and firing ridiculous spells at each other with an aim to incapacitate rivals and steal their treasure. The game was first released in 1983, and has had a number of editions since then - this is officially the 9th! In reality, there have been three main versions; several early Jolly Games/Chessex versions; the much-loved and…

Designer: Nigel Buckle and David Turczi | Publisher: Osprey Games On the face of it, Imperium: Horizons is a crunchy hybrid of deck and tableau building. Player conflict is low and your focus is on efficiently running your engine to churn out the most victory points. What makes the game special though, is how evocative its 14 playable civilisation decks are in telling their unique stories. Imperium: Horizons arrives as the third and largest box in the Imperium series. Fully cross-compatible it includes updated cards for the previous two games. As deckbuilders go, few rival the Imperium series for complexity. It packs a ton of information, tags and symbols onto each card. Their meanings will seem esoteric until they are contextualised in play where parsing the card design language becomes…

Designer: Matt Henderson, Tam Henderson | Publisher: Loke Battle Maps Do you find planning your own Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition combats overwhelming but want more creativity than premade modules give you? Maybe you just love 5e dungeon crawlers? Veiled Dungeon is a toolbox including a premade module, a combat builder with lots of unique monsters, beautifully illustrated battle maps and custom stat block cards. This gives great versatility, as you can use it within an existing campaign or as a self contained mini series, with as much or as little prep as you like. I was surprised by how little I saw about the module in their information about the toolkit, because the story was my favourite part. I kept the world vague so the players could link to…

WHAT IS IT? Board Game Geek (BGG) is a website that “aims to be the definitive source for board game and card game content”, a goal it has arguably achieved. It’s essentially a database of board games, whereby an entry is created for new games, that shares core information about it. Users can note the games they own or want to own, can rate the games they’ve played, and can engage with the wider community about them. Because it’s so widely used, it has information on an incredible amount of board games – over 400,000 entries exist in the system itself – it’s the go to place to find out what you may need to know about almost any game. So what information is available? A normal entry will include…

100 THE 7TH CONTINENT Cooperative adventure and exploration game The 7th Continent raised more than a million Euros on Kickstarter in 2017. A seemingly remarkable number until you note the follow up expansion campaign in 2020, in which you could bundle the expansion with the base game, went on to top seven million dollars from more than 40,000 backers. HAVE YOU PLAYED? 99 KEYFLOWER UK designer Richard Breese started his game publisher company, R&D Games, in 1989. It was the seventh game in his Key series of board games, which now bears more than 10 titles and many more expansions. His sister, Julia Breese, is responsible for the series’ whimsical and distinctive artwork while Richard himself added the graphics. HAVE YOU PLAYED? 98 TRICKERION: LEGENDS OF ILLUSION Houdini. Derren Brown. Penn…

Lisboa, a title inspired by the stunning titular city, maintains its status as one of the most popular board games out there, despite its complexity. In fact, you’ll find many people have been daunted by the huge array of rules and moving components Lisboa has to offer. The game asks players to reconstruct the city of Lisbon, but it certainly wasn’t built in a day. From navigating different time periods, to constructing key infrastructure and balancing the economics of the region, Lisboa requires players to keep their eye on an ever-evolving landscape of tasks to manage. It might therefore stand out as a game that requires a great deal of time and energy to fully grasp, but Lisboa offers something that other titles of this nature don’t quite manage. Realism…

What really are the best games of our hobby? Is it those that make it to number one on the Board Game Geek rankings, or is it the ones we’re most excited about? Perhaps it’s those that win awards, but the likes of the Spiel Des Jahres cater to German language games, selected by judges, and only has three categories… So in 2006, Board Game Geek entered the chat, with their Golden Geek Awards, with open nomination and voting rounds. We’ve covered already that Board Game Geek does far more than just data entry, but their awards are a true stamp of approval for recipients. But what are the Golden Geeks, and why are they run as they are? And, given the huge community of gamers on Board Game Geek,…

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is an utterly unique concept because it combines multiple genres in ways players might not have expected. Collectable card games are on the rise and roleplaying titles continue to immerse gamers in worlds that they can control. But it’s rare to see these elements combined together, with horror and mystery components thrown in. Yet, that’s exactly what Arkham Horror: The Card Game does, and it simply does it so well. The title takes some of the best mechanics and concepts from each individual genre and brings them together to create an experience that has genuine longevity. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is based on Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, a Lovecraftian roleplaying game with horror and supernatural elements baked into its core. Set in the titular…

While anything but a perfect metric for board game quality, the Board Game Geek Top 100 is the closest we have to an admittedly fluid tabletop Hall of Fame. But how have our tastes changed over the last decade? Using the Wayback Machine website, I’m comparing the August 2013 list to the present, and offering you some opinions on the differences. For background, I got into the hobby about 15 years ago, so was five years into it in 2013. I’ve played roughly 70 percent of the games on the two lists with a pretty even spread across the two (taking into account reprints and versions). So, what has changed and what can we make of it? USER NUMBERS HAVE BOOMED It’s no secret board games have been booming in…

BACK TO THE FUTURE The Pokémon Company International this month announced the newest expansion of the Pokémon Trading card game: Scarlet & Violet - Temporal Forces. Set for release on March 22nd it will be the second main set in a row featuring the Paradox Pokémon from the Pokémon Scarlet & Violet video games and the set which finally brings every Paradox Pokémon into the card game. This includes brand new Pokémon like Iron Crown and Raging Bolt who debuted through downloadable content in the videogames and have been known for only a few weeks, an unusually quick turnaround from video game to TCG. Temporal Forces will also see the return of Ace Spec cards that are so powerful they are limited to one copy total in your deck. It…

WARHAMMER 40,000: WRATH AND GLORY: AELDARI: INHERITANCE OF EMBERS If you’ve ever wanted to step into the soft shoes of Warhammer 40k’s very own space elves, this sourcebook provides everything you might need to run Aeldari-focused adventures in Wrath and Glory. This guide offers new archetypes, equipment, and NPCs for both players and Gamemasters, as well as a whole heaping of tragic lore. Cubicle 7 Entertainment | £37 ACROSS THE EIGHT DIRECTIONS An expansive sourcebook for Exalted 3rd Edition, Across the Eight Directions explores the diverse cultures and civilizations spanning the world of Creation. The guide details history, culture, government, and religion across the setting’s various regions, introducing new settings and expanding familiar ones, with intriguing characters and mysteries for players to explore. Onyx Path Publishing | £25 SHADOWRUN RPG:…

Designer: Saashi & Daryl Chow | Publisher: Saashi & Saashi I always feel I’m on safe ground when I open up a Saashi-designed game. It will have a nice everyday theme, charming artwork, and a clever take on some familiar mechanisms. I was a little nervous when I saw the size of the box Come Sail Away! comes in but I needn’t have worried. This is very much a Saashi & Saashi game, it just takes up a little more table space than they usually do. One area where their games vary is the amount of interaction they have. Most tend to be quite solitaire, relying on the fun of the puzzle to draw the player in, and so it is with Come Sail Away!. If you’re looking for lots…

Designer: Jason Mowery, Chase Williams | Publisher: The Op Games The Perfect Wave is a laid back game about catching waves, set in a sunset snapshot of the seventies. The first thing that will strike you is the game’s presentation. Designer Patrick Spaziante has clearly targeted a specific vibe here—and I’d say he’s absolutely achieved what he set out to do. It is faded glory throughout, with a real care and attention taken to period-appropriate typography, and the use of rough recycled paper with printed fold lines makes the rulebook seem like a discarded 70s surfing flyer. There’s even something about the matte card stock that adds to a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feel of sunglasses and sunshine. As you lay cards down, the progressively larger numbers are…

Designer: Takeo Yamada | Publisher: Sylex Merchants in the Mediterranean during the Renaissance is the poster child for overdone themes. But publishers have shown that if you do it with swagger, you can still make it sing. Amalfi: Renaissance is the latest to prove there’s life in this old seadog yet. The original Amalfi had a small Japanese release in 2020. It was picked up by Sylex for a larger worldwide release, giving it time to make some rule and component upgrades, hence the slight title change. Amalfi: Renaissance is a beautiful thing. The cover art is gorgeous and everything fits nicely into the box without the need for a complex insert. The wooden ships and lighthouses have painted detail, all the boards are indented, and the art is lovely.…

Designer: Jacob Fryxelius, Daniel Fryxelius | Publisher: Stronghold Games Terraforming Mars was a huge hit when it arrived back in 2016, so when its follow up, the slightly pared down and more card focused Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, landed in 2021 there was an understandable amount of buzz, hype, and anticipation. On the whole, Ares Expedition performed well, holding a respectable ranking on Board Game Geek - albeit one lagging behind its predecessor’s positioning as one of the top ten games ever. So, considering this context, why did Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game’s announcement arrive with more of a box-fart than a bang? Are we fickle? Fatigued? Or, perhaps, just particularly inclined towards the cult of the new? Judging from their recent success, it wouldn’t be too controversial to assume…

Designer: Matthew Dunstan, Jeffrey D. Allers | Publisher: Dranda Games Poker and the Old West, an iconic pairing. Throw in an excellent flip-and-write railway building game and you’ve got Pioneer Rails. Train-based roll-and-writes are nothing new, but this game adds the tense thrill of a hand of poker as a much-needed twist on the formula. In Pioneer Rails, 2-4 (usually) players are trying to lay the railway tracks that littered the old west. You’ll connect towns, deposit gold into banks and even help the ranchers out by making it hard for the cows to flee too far. Each turn the dealer reveals three cards from a deck of poker cards, four suits numbered 10 through Ace, and chooses one to keep for themselves. The other players can then pick from…

Designer: Viktor Ahrens | Publisher: Xploding 10 games Zombies are always obnoxious but rarely does killing one lead to an agonising party death at the hands of a black knight in a sealed room just a few steps away from freedom. Welcome to Dungeons of Doria, a co-op crawler where any monster death may trigger a trap, because traps pepper the loot deck. And what a deck! Over 500 unique items and inventive traps. How about a cloth moth or a teleportation strip trap? Getting started is really simple using the quick start guide and choosing from eight preset characters. You only have to keep track of health, initiative and psi points (mana); there is nothing like the bookkeeping load of League of Dungeoneers (albeit with no over-world adventuring either).…

GAME SETUP “I am a servant of the Secret Flame, wielder of the fire of White Magic. You cannot pass! Your feeble green flickers will not avail you, burner of Anündûn. Not you, predator of the Purple lands! You cannot pass!” Dr White, the legendary warlock of the White Kingdom, appeared to be having another one of his ‘episodes’. Lady Green and The Purple Mystic looked at each other, and smiled, revealing wicked visages, with too many teeth. It was time to take some treasure! We set up our three player game of Wiz War with a standard configuration - three sectors in a line. Thanks to magic doorways which allow instantaneous travel between opposite sides of the map, it meant that every sector adjoined every other one; a perfectly…

Designer: Florian Sirieix | Publisher: Catch Up Games As a child of the seventies, the original Planet of the Apes movie had a huge effect on me growing up. The big final reveal blew my mind and I’ve had a fondness for the franchise ever since. So when I saw a clearly Apes-inspired tabletop game was on the way I was all in. As is always the case with Vincent Dutrait’s artwork, the game gives a fantastic first impression. I was a little surprised at the large box size, having played the game online and presumed it would be smaller. The quality of components is excellent throughout but I do wonder if a less flamboyant production, and resulting smaller price tag, may have given the game more traction. After Us…

Designer: Hankerin Ferinale | Publisher: Runehammer Some RPG books are more like a conversation about the hobby than a game in themselves. This is one such book. Presented as a collection of lessons learned from homebrewing games scribbled on index cards, it approaches the subject of roleplaying with a somewhat confusing mix of ‘this is a great starting point’ and ‘you know what it’s like, right?’ Beyond the sharpie-scribbled cover there’s a cute D20 system with ‘effort’ added on top, this is just a way of measuring effectiveness as a dice type. For example, guns are always a D8, magic a D10. For the former that’s your damage and for the latter that could mean the effectiveness of a healing spell or a fireball. There’s a, possibly innovative, unified system…

If you’ll pardon a little uncoolness for a moment, I’m afraid I’m about to reveal the hidden depths of my nerdiness. There’s no real way around it, because I need to talk to you about… URLs. A few years ago, whilst browsing Board Game Geek for some game lost to my ailing memory, I noticed that there was a certain structure to links on the site. All of them use this format: boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/123/name-of-game. Note the numerals there, giving each entry a unique identifying code? “Interesting!”, my little brain called out, “Change it to ‘1’ and find out which game was first on the website!”. Dear reader? I’m afraid this entire article has been spawned from that nerdly diversion. Join me, as we explore the first ten games ever listed on…

We Brits know how the rest of the world envisages us (when being mostly kind). It’s all how-do-you-do, tea in fine china, the butler at beck and call. Dramas might involve fainting, we all know the Queen (presumably with time this assumption will shift to the new monarch), and little fingers are firmly out when drinking a hot beverage - though be cautioned against googling the reasons behind this, lest you’ll firmly be tucking it back in (you’re intrigued now aren’t you?). Downton Abbey did little to help us in this regard, nor did royal dramatisations like The Crown. The fact is, as much as I might roll my eyes at the romanticised ideal of that such as Bridgerton in a time where society was otherwise bleak (to put it…

EVERDELL The place where it all begins, the original Everdell came out in 2018 and introduced us to not just some of the most adorable shaped meeples we’ve seen, but also a gorgeous Evertree, that literally stands above the board. Holding items as the seasons pass, you could play it without it - but why would you? Best for: If you just want to play a great worker placement, tableau building game, with cute visuals that somehow make this style of game all the more appealing to the not-usually-agamer crowd, Everdell is all you need. EVERDELL: PEARLBROOK Pearlbrook sees you taking to the rivers, gathering pearls with tiny little frog ambassadors. The pearls are gorgeous, but it arguably doesn’t add anything out of the ordinary – bar a cleverly created…

Wingspan exploded onto the scene in 2019 in a kerfuffle of feathers, putting designer Elizabeth Hargraves firmly on the map, and seeing many of us making the same comment about the little egg pieces looking alluringly close to Mini Eggs. There was something charming about it – with its little bird tower dice roller and quaint bird images – that captured our imagination. Whilst we were arguing over what constitutes a body part in the name (if you know, you know), such is the popularity of this game that other talented players began creating their own cards for the game. Stonemaier Games (publishers of Wingspan) took the enthusiasm one setp further by creating a Fan Art Pack for Wingspan. “I really like the different styles, there’s so many illustrations –…

As this set comes closer and closer it’s becoming very evident that Ravensburger are having some fun with this set and introducing a bunch of cards that open up lines of play that just weren’t possible in the first two expansions. With the new set on the horizon looking to make even more changes, it’s the best time to have a look at some of these unique cards coming. DALMATIAN PUPPY – TAIL WAGGER One of the really cool things about Dalmation Puppy – Tail Wagger is that there are multiple different artworks. Why? Why not? There’s no gameplay reason to have five different artworks for the same card but having multiple different puppies to choose from when playing this card is sure to appease fans of 101 Dalmatians and…

On the YouTube gaming channel “The Dragon’s Tomb’ (a channel dedicated to lampooning the hobby in the most deadpan manner possible), Jeff Kornberg takes a trip to Portugal, claiming it to be the ‘biggest board game country in the world’. He visits Lisboa, ‘the city that inspired Vital Lacerda’s On Mars’, whilst also housing the Tower of Belem - a fortification notable for being the ‘oldest dice tower in the world’. Jokes aside though, the video nonetheless inspired me to investigate Portugal’s place in the tabletop hobby. In the 15th century one might find people crowding the streets during a game of Malha. Much like the traditional horseshoe tossing games of other countries, Malha is likely of Roman descent, with the game’s components being an entertaining byproduct of the shoeing…

Designer: Karsten Harwig | Publisher: Repos Production Cards on the table (that I’ll later trade you for the perfect spot on the board), it’s been years since I played Chinatown. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a somewhat cutthroat trading game, surprisingly easy to explain, fun to play, and promising a comfortable number of arguments around the table. Perfect for any gathering needing a healthy dose of family balancing, and if you’ve ever wondered which of your siblings is your favourite. So far, so irrelevant you’d think – except this brightly coloured, theme park themed Waterfall Park is a reimplementation of Chinatown. Now you’re wondering which you should play… Let’s approach Waterfall Park as a new game for now. Waterfall Park sees you trying to build the very best…

Designer: Ed Naujokas | Publisher: Big Potato Games Picture the scene. You’ve headed round the cousins-in-law’s for New Years Eve. They’ve heard you do something about board games, and suggest you bring some games for the evening. You don’t want to scare them off by bringing too many choices, but equally, you don’t know how competitive they are, whether they like thinky games or loud ones, if they’ll absorb instructions or confuse them – and you’ve got one chance to get them hooked. What do you do? Well, I don’t know about you, but I brought three Big Potato games, Waterfall Parks, and an escape room style game. Guess which one was the favourite? (This wouldn’t be a story in the review for it if it wasn’t-) Block Party. Big…

Designer: Jason Hager, Darren Reckner | Publisher: Restoration Games That’s right—it’s another box with “Unmatched” written on it! You’re missing out if you’ve not played this gem of a series by Restoration Games yet, but surely even die-hard Unmatched-ers have had enough by now? The important difference is that Unmatched: Tales to Amaze is the first cooperative and solo friendly release in the series. Instead of a Super Smash Bros style battle royale, players must now work together against the game. Players choose characters to play as—with four new heroes included in the box—including Nikola Tesla, Annie Christmas, The Golden Bat and Dr. Jill Trent, Science Sleuth. Together, they must defeat one of two villains; Moth Man or the Martian Invader, alongside an array of potential minions. Gameplay is initially…

Designer: Isra C, Shei S | Publisher: Devir Games Nine turns? What do you mean we only get nine turns? The White Castle is a big game in a modestly sized box. In The White Castle players take on the role of 18th century Japanese clan leaders, currying favour with the emperor and set your families up in positions of power within his court. The game plays out over nine turns, each turn players will select one die from either end of a three-dimensional bridge and place it on the board. Using dice to activate spaces, players take actions based on the colour used, while trying to make it more expensive for other players to take that same action. The central mechanic of the game is moving your worker meeples…

Designer: Zé Mendes | Publisher: Arcane Wonders A polyomino (think Tetris shapes) is a fantastic game component. One shape carries within itself so many gameplay decisions. Is this the right shape? Will it fit? Will it make future shape placement more complicated? Can I place given the rules of the game? How can it help me win? If you succeed in these decisions, you walk away having built a both visually pleasing and brain stimulating landscape of tiles. Even if you had compromised in some areas - maybe none of the available shapes were quite right - you can clearly see areas for improvement, which encourages repeat plays. This geometric puzzle makes polyomino a perfect component for city-building games. You can easily apply theme, rules and restrictions but still retain…

Designer: Adam Kwapinski | Publisher: Awaken Realms Thor. Loki. Ragnarok. Names you’ve almost certainly heard of. Norse mythology is ripe for the picking for games and movies. Awaken Realms and designer Adam Kwapinski moved the focus of their mythologic pillaging from Lords of Hellas’ Greek setting to the frozen tundra of Scandinavia, for the area control fisticuffs of Lords of Ragnarok. If you’ve played the former you’ve got a good idea of what to expect in Ragnarok, albeit with a few tweaks to keep things fresh. You each play as one of five heroes, each controlling their armies, trying to take control of the various regions and lands on the map. You’re not the only ones taking a stroll in the north though, there are monsters too. The good news…

Designer: Wolfgang Kramer, Richard Ulricha | Publisher: Hans im Glück When it first came out in 1995, Wolfgang Kramer’s and Richard Ulrich’s El Grande set in medieval Spain, popularised a revolutionary gameplay approach to the area control genre: area majority. You no longer needed to fight till the last soldier, meeple or a figurine, as having the most tokens in the area gained the advantages equal to a complete annihilation of the opponent. With area majority, the gameplay focused less on the ruthless combat but more on strategic placements on the map, and this became so popular that most area control games favour area majority over complete elimination. Since then, the board game landscape has developed significantly, and area control games have not stopped evolving either. Area control games, for…

Designer: Tomas Härenstam & Chris Lites | Publisher: Free League Picture a world where the Cold War didn’t die out; in fact it got much hotter instead. Nuclear devastation takes out civilisation as we know it; World War III rages, and you and your fellow players are eking out your life round the ragged edges that used to be society. Twilight: 2000 was originally released in 1984, and has been refurbished and re-released several times since then. Coming from a rich heritage of wargaming systems and designers, it had a reputation for being somewhat simulationist - much in line with WWII games of the time - with a sandbox style that matched mechanics to tie fiction to specific rulings. Here’s a single sentence from the first edition; “Anderson has been…

Designer: CM Lowry | Publisher: Beyond Cataclysm Lucky for None introduces a no-prep rule-set with a twist; “Whatever you do, everything will get worse.” The Zine boasts a beautifully designed monochromatic colour palette and stylised art, and I felt very drawn to its comedy horror concept and macabre setting. It did keep getting worse, but just not in the way I’d hoped. To begin, the Game Master or a player rolls on the village problem table using the unique D13 (13 sided dice) provided. We got “church fire”. The players rolled for their character’s job before being plunged into the town of Grimhaven, complete with an illustrated map. I liked the immediate connection to the world; the shopkeeper launched the shop’s grand opening, and the Doctor had the clinic key…