“I was wondering if you have any pirate memory games suitable for children between the ages of 4 and 8”

I’m of an age now. My short-term memory isn’t what it used to be, so the idea of a game that relies on memory to do well is something I’d usually run a mile from. Well, less run, more get in my car. Wilmot’s Warehouse does things differently though. For a start, it’s a cooperative game, so it’s not just my leaky brain I have to rely on. Secondly, it borrows from some techniques I’ve heard about before.

When I was younger I remember a guy (with delicious irony his name escapes me) who’d appear on various entertainment shows on the telly, who could remember shuffled packs of cards in perfect order. When asked how he did it, he used a technique whereby he imagined a walk he knew well, then he mentally walked that route in his mind, adding the cards as people he’d meet on the way. More recently you might have seen something similar in the TV show Sherlock, with the Mind Palace. Wilmot’s Warehouse builds on this idea of creating stories to help you remember where things are on the board.

“Why don’t I just look at the tile on the board if I want to know where something is?”, I hear you cry. Because, dear reader, when a tile is drawn and added to the board, it’s flipped face-down. You have one opportunity to come up with a meaningful description of what that tile is and where it is in relation to the other face-down tiles on the board. This is where your own little stories come to life.

Jackanory

Before you even start to craft a story, you’ve got to know what a tile represents. Take this one, for example. What do you think this is?

Is it half a boiled egg? The wheel of a scooter poking out from the mudguard? A really angry eye, presumably with conjunctivitis?

The answer is that it’s up to you. You (usually) collectively decide, then place it somewhere on the board that makes sense. Making sense is very loosely applied here, as you may well find your stories cross the line between creative and surreal at times. Let me give you an illustrated example from a game we played.

1. The first tile was a speech bubble, fairly self-explanatory.
2. Well, it would have been, but we decided this is a duck. So the speech bubble became a quack.
3. Clearly the duck was wearing lipstick, because ducks are famous for their love of cosmetics.
4. Oh, and it was sucking a lollipop. So the order is duck, lips(?), lollipop. Glad that all makes sense.
5. The duck appeared under a star, or at least it did at first because…
6. This is clearly the ‘ducks capacitor’ from its DeLorean (yes, I made the Quack to the Future joke), meaning the star was actually a bright flash.

Bear in mind this is just six tiles here. This sort of nonsense goes on until you have 35 tiles on the board. All face-down, all reliant on your collective story-telling power to remember where they are. Good luck.

Wait, there’s more

If all of this wasn’t enough, there are a couple more flies in the ointment. Each day in the game is represented by a stack of seven tiles to place, and on top of each of Tuesday to Friday’s piles there’s a Mandatory Idea card. These add some arbitrary rule to placing each tile in that stack. Some of them are easy enough (each tile must be related to something smelly), whereas others are harder. There’s one that means that only the person turning the tile and the person to their right can look at the tile, for example. Those players can describe it for the rest, but they never know what it actually looks like. Or maybe you’re restricted to using a single word to describe the tile. There are some really devious ideas among them.

These ideas play havoc with the game’s final round before the big reveal. Once every tile is down, each player is given a stack of cards and you start a timer. Players rifle through their cards trying to find the ones which match the tiles on the board, and they try to place them on top of the matching tile. Easier said than done, especially under pressure from the clock and not necessarily knowing what all of the tiles actually look like.

It’s unadulterated creative stupidity, and I love every second. You’ll utter sentences never before given breath to, and never to be repeated before the inevitable heat death of the universe. For instance, I have now said “No, that’s the blue horse’s b*ll*ck. It goes to the right of the chainsawed beaver’s coffin”. Have you? The true beauty of the game comes from spouting such nonsense and watching the other players nod along in agreement, like you just said something sage and profound, you idiots.

Final thoughts

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a bit of a revelation as far as memory games go. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it’s the new standard for memory games. Other games have leaned on the idea, including one of my favourite games, El Grandé, but even then the Castillo was calculable and only a small piece of the package. Throwing everyone in the same boat warehouse is the key to its success. By making it co-operative it removes the biggest problem inherent in any memory game – some people (me) have terrible memory. You can’t even quarterback this game, because there are simply too many things to remember, and so many hurdles thrown into your path by the Mandatory Idea cards. Everyone gets input and everyone feels equally responsible for your collective success or failure.

Games which build on a successful name or franchise always trigger my inner skeptic. I’ve been stung by far too many cash-ins over the years, from Ocean’s licensed games on the Spectrum 48K, through THQ’s disastrous games on the SNES, and with every soulless cash-grab since. Wilmot’s Warehouse doesn’t try to emulate its namesake, it just borrows a premise, an aesthetic, and a sense of humour, and runs with it. This is the way to do it, IP licensees.

The folks from Shut Up & Sit Down were involved in its development, but again, don’t let this raise quizzical eyebrows. They know their way around a light, fun game, and it shows. Even through to the QR codes in the rulebook next to your completion times. Scan one to see a familiar face giving you a job appraisal video, and have a little smile to yourself. I don’t see if leaving my collection now, it’s the perfect social glue for family gatherings and impromptu visits from friends, and it’ll have you laughing your socks off. A light, whimsical, superb example of how to turn an unpopular game mechanism on its head and turn it into a success.

Review copy kindly provided by CMYK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wilmot’s Warehouse (2024)

Design: Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg, David King
Publisher: CMYK
Art: Richard Hogg
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Wilmot’s Warehouse Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve played other deduction games before, this might all sound familiar. Dishing out clues to help the rest of the table figure out the identities – ringing any bells? That’s right folks, Mysterium. Rear Window shares a lot of design DNA with Mysterium, but there are some small, but very important differences between the two.

“Well, that’s fine, Stella. Now would you fix me a sandwich please?”

The biggest difference between those two games is the goal of the game. In Mysterium, it’s always a cooperative game. All of the players win or lose together, so it’s always in everybody’s best interests to give good clues. In Rear Window, it’s usually the same. In order to win the Director needs the Watchers to correctly identify the four people involved, and their individual traits. To give them clues, they assign cards from their hand to the various windows on the board, hoping that the Watchers feed off the clues on each card you want them to notice, instead of the ones they invariably notice instead…

Earlier in this review though, you might have noticed the word ‘murder’, and if you’ve seen the film you’ll know that murder plays a big part. In the game adaptation the Watchers hand the Director 12 trait tiles and a murder tile. The tiles are shuffled and four of them are assigned – in secret, behind a screen – to each of the four apartments. You might think a 1-in-13 chance is low when it comes to drawing the murder tile, but the maths is more like 4-in-13, or closer to 1-in-3, so it happens quite often.

If and when a murder tile comes into play, the game is no longer cooperative. It’s now competitive. If the Watchers guess at least seven of the eight pieces of information, and guess where the murder happened, they win. For the Director to win when someone’s been offed, they have to make sure the Watchers guess at least six pieces of information and have them not guess where the murder happened. It’s a fine tightrope to tread.

It all goes to make Rear Window so tricky to play at first because as a Watcher, you have no idea whether a murder has happened. You’re working in good faith, you wonderful person you, because that’s all you have to go on at first. Figuring out whether there’s been a murder is tricky. Are the Director’s clues intentionally misleading so you don’t guess somebody’s done a bit of murdering, or are they just a bit crap at giving clues? Tricky…

“A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.”

The other big departure from Mysterium is the art direction for the cards. Mysterium is like Dixit, in that the cards are often surreal, with colours and images which don’t normally belong together. In Rear Window, the cards all feature people and/or places from each apartment. You’ll see very specific people on the cards, matching the people you’re trying to guess. On the one hand, this is great. If you want to tell them Miss Torso is in apartment A, you can just put a card with her in that slot on the board. The difficulty comes when – as Director – you have a hand of cards which don’t feature the people you want to point to. What then?

This is where things get equally frustrating for the Director and the Watchers. You’ll play a card to a slot because you have to, so you’ll hope they guess other features on the card instead. Maybe the Director doesn’t want you to focus on the person, they’re more interested in the food in the background, trying to steer you toward guessing that person has the Gourmand trait. The Director can play a couple of cards each round face-down, which is great when you’re the Director and don’t want to give false clues, but it can also draw suspicion from the Watchers. “Is she playing that card face-down because maybe they’re the murderer, and she doesn’t want us to know?”.

It doesn’t take much to get suspicions roused, I can tell you that much.

Final thoughts

Let’s do the quick and easy bit first. If you like Mysterium, you’ll love Rear Window. The core gameplay is very much the same, but the addition of a semi-cooperative goal, and the never knowing which goal is in play until the end of the game, is awesome. I’ve played with some people who didn’t get on with it as well, but some of that I’m sure came down to the fact that on their very final action of the game, they felt like it was a toss-up between murder and one of three remaining traits. Repeated play is definitely rewarded, as is having a group who might enjoy this sort of game. It’s all about abstract communication, not strategy.

I really like the art direction in the game. It stays true to the feeling and style of the film, and it’s functional at the same time as being really nice. I don’t often make much of a fuss about the art in a game, but in the case of Rear Window the whole game revolves around the artwork, so it matters. We’ve seen a few film tie-ins over the last few years, but the majority of them feel more like a couple of smaller games bolted together. Top Gun with its mixture of a beach volleyball game combined with a dog-fighting one. Jaws with the Island side of the board before the big battle with the angry fish on the rear. Interestingly, both of those games also came from the design studio of Prospero Hall, but Rear Window feels more polished and more refined. It could have been made without the Rear Window name and theming and been just as good.

I’ve not mentioned a few of the other things in the box. For instance, the tiles that the Watchers can use to sneak looks at or replace face-down cards, or get the Director to add a pointer to a card to show which thing to focus on (or not, if you’re feeling particularly devious). There are additional trait tiles which let you add a second person to an apartment along with some kind of relationship between the occupants, just to really spice things up. Rear Window is a very, very good game, and as much as I hate it when Youtube channels make their “this game killed this other game” videos, I can’t see Mysterium getting much more play for me now. Rear Window is like Mysterium 1.5 and it’s great.

Review copy kindly provided by Funko Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rear Window (2022)

Design: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Funko Games
Art: uncredited
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Rear Window Review appeared first on Punchboard.

With its roots firmly in the MOBA and Tower Defence genres of video games, Cloudspire aims to replicate the feel of a game like League of Legends, but in a tabletop form. As much as I love video games, I love disconnecting from the screen after a long day at work, which is why this site exists in the first place. Chip Theory Games once again give us an Oscars goodie bag of a game, stuffing a huge box with beautiful neoprene mats, heavy poker chips, and some fantastic storage and setup pieces.

Putting a hex on you

Cloudspire is a game that’s intended to be a long-term part of your collection. A game that you’ll play dozens of times, not once or twice a year before you sell it on. The reason I bring this up so early in the review is because a) it’s expensive, and b) your first game is going to feel a little clunky. Getting used to the game’s phases, options, and the crazy number of Talents available to you (70+) is like learning to ride a bike. Awkward at first, but so smooth and easy once you’ve got it. For a game that’s rated at 4.3/5 on the BGG complexity scale, that’s high praise. Don’t be put off by the weight, thinking it means it’ll be too complicated to be fun.

The game is played on a map made of neoprene tiles. Chip Theory Games clearly have a love of neoprene, and I can understand why. Setting up the map for a game is one of the more satisfying things you can do with something this floppy. The hexes on the tiles represent landscape types, which affect different units’ movement. Movement follows an order of precedence, which means if you can move across water or mountains, you can move through forests and plains too. Using a tiered system of movement restrictions in this way removes one set of rules overhead, as you can quickly learn the precedence, and never have to refer to the rules to figure out where units can move.

The tiles themselves look a little desaturated. You can imagine that if they were made of cardboard instead, they’d be brighter, but in the same breath they’d show wear much sooner. Does that matter? Yes, absolutely. Cloudspire is a game that will have you moving heavy poker chips all over the map repeatedly, over the course of 25, 50, or 100+ plays. Despite being slightly drab, you can read everything you need from the landscape at a glance, which is what matters in a game like this.

Stacking the odds in your favour

If you’ve played Too Many Bones, you’ll be immediately familiar with the stacking mechanisms in Cloudspire. Once again, red chips are used to represent units’ health, but stacking is also used in a couple of other clever ways. When your units leave your fortress at the start of each of the four waves, you can stack hired minions together. The slowest goes on top, restricting the group’s range of movement, but those beneath it can use them as a meat shield. Once the top unit dies, the one beneath it grabs its full stack of health chips and carries on where its freshly-departed comrade fell.

The other use for stacks comes with Spires. Ah yes, spires. I haven’t talked about them yet, have I? The titular spires in Cloudspire are best compared to the towers in tower defence games. They’re built in-place and attack anything stupid enough to get too close, a bit like a lighthouse with a frickin’ laser beam. Whether they’re built on your fortress walls or out in the world, spires can be upgraded by stacking chips under them, improving their strength and range. As they take damage, spires shed upgrades from the bottom of their stacks, so even choosing which order to buy your upgrades is something you can strategise.

I’ve used quite a lot of words explaining how Cloudspire mechanically bridges the digital divide to end up on your table, so let’s have a look at the most important thing now – is it a good game?

New wave

I find that I’m a natural sceptic when it comes to a lot of things. Transitioning one type of entertainment to another (in this case video game to tabletop game) just strikes me as the sort of thing that could easily be a swing-and-a-miss. In Cloudspire’s case, it doesn’t miss. It’s a home run. Taking the battle arena formula and exposing the clockwork that drives the game’s locomotion, doesn’t ruin the experience. Instead, it allows you to play the game at a slower, more tactical pace. Four waves, which translates as four rounds of play, doesn’t sound like enough. It sounds like it’ll all be over before it gets going.

It isn’t. It’s the perfect length for the game.

There are some brilliant aspects which could easily have not made it to the final game, but did, and Cloudspire is that much richer for it. Take the Earthscape tiles for example. little groups of three hexes which you can buy and lay over the existing map, completely altering the paths, and therefore the flow of the game. The fortress uses dials for health and resources, but the spires and units use stacks of chips. Did they have to? No. But in doing so, there’s a fantastic sense of scale of the army headed your way when your opponents set-up their towering deployment stack for the coming wave.

Even with just the four factions in the base game, there’s an insane amount of replay value. The sheer number of talents available through upgrades and items, and the variety of ways to play are great. Imagine taking that empty plastic tray out of the bottom of your box of chocolates, and finding another layer underneath. That’s Cloudspire. Brute forcing your way straight across the map to knock on the door, is just as viable as exploring off the beaten track for new site to build spires. It’s a brilliant game.

Final thoughts

I love Cloudspire. I can see why it might not be appealing to some people at a first glance though. Euro gamers might not gel with the theme and idea of the game, while Ameri-style gamers might be dismayed at the lack of minis for such cool characters. Give it a chance though, and listen to the players. If you don’t believe me, go and have a look at other reviews too. Gameplay is king, after all, and the gameplay in Cloudspire is slicker than a buttered weasel.

The iconography throughout is clear and simple. You could argue that the numbers on the chips can be hard to read at a distance, but it’s not a deal-breaker. The reference sheets for each faction are great too. Chip Theory Games do a great job of structuring their games well, to break down what could be complex game systems, into digestible chunks. It is a deep, complex game, with tons of scope for strategy, but it isn’t a difficult game. That’s a very important distinction to make.

The straight-up 1v1 competitive game is so good that I’ve not even touched on the other modes of play. You can go have three or four players in a free-for-all battle, team up in pairs to fight, and on top of that there are books for solo and co-operative scenarios. Yes, Cloudspire is a huge box, and yes, Cloudspire is expensive (around £130 at the time of writing). Given how freely people throw sill money at Kickstarter campaigns, and taking into account the huge number of hours of entertainment you can get from this game, I can still highly recommend this game.

Too Many Bones might be the Chip Theory game which gets the most attention, but in my opinion Cloudspire is the better game.

Review copy kindly provided by Chip Theory Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Cloudspire is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Cloudspire (2019)

Designers: Josh J. Carlson, Adam Carlson, Josh Wielgus
Publisher: Chip Theory Games
Art: Jared Blando, Anthony LeTourneau
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-180 mins

The post Cloudspire Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Semi-cooperative is an interesting concept. When it’s done well, it’s genius. Battlestar Galactica (now re-imagined as Unfathomable) and Nemesis are brilliant examples. Despite knowing this, I tend to wear my ‘hmm, dubious’ face when I learn that a game is using it. Even though I haven’t played a truly bad example. Games with a hidden traitor lend themselves to the concept really well, but a deck-builder? Dominion with negotiation?

Dominion in spaaaaaaaace!

I’m going to cut to the chase here, and say that the way Moonrakers plays has a lot in common with the original and best* deck-builder, Dominion. Each reactor card gives you another two actions, thruster cards let you draw more cards from your deck… sound familiar? if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The difference comes with the additional cards you might have, like shields and damage. These don’t give you anything extra, but you need a certain combination of cards in order to fulfil contracts.

So what’s a contract? At the start of your turn, you choose a contract to attempt. Contracts award you with different bonuses, but the ones you’re most interested in are money and victory points (VPs). Some of the contracts need a lot of cards to be played in order to complete them, and it’s not the sort of thing you can do by yourself. This is where we talk about the co-operative part of the game.

Let’s say that I’ve got a really tough contract to fulfil. I can do some of it myself, but I can’t get the number of damage I need. I can open it up to the table, and ask if anyone wants to join the contract with me, if they’ve got damage to contribute, in return for some kind of reward. We get to decide the terms of the deal ourselves, so it might be that I suggest I take the VPs for the contract, while you take the money. Sounds good to you? Mutually beneficial? Good, good. Negotiation in action.

* Dominion is the best pure deck-builder, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Only those you trust can betray you

The aim of Moonrakers is to be the first to 10 Presitge (VPs). So while I might need you to help me complete a contract, you might decide that it’s in your best interests to let me fail. So you tell me “Sure Adam, I’ve got a handful of damage cards here, I’ll help you”. We start the contract, then you decide to reveal that in fact, you have none. You just wanted me to commit to a contract I couldn’t fulfil, in the hope I take damage from the hazard dice I had to roll, and didn’t have the shield cards to mitigate them.

If this reminds you of games like Cosmic Encounter, then you’re on the right track. Knowing who you can and cannot trust is a big deal, and even then you’ll sometimes get screwed over by someone you thought never, ever would. This can be a problem for some groups. If you have players who are sensitive, or others who find it very hard to leave what happens at the table, at the table. You might find need to house-rule it. Make deals binding, something like that. Otherwise, this probably isn’t the game for you.

Non-binding agreements happen to be something I really like in games. As much as I like the mechanical dryness of a decent, crunchy Euro game, sometimes you just want something which gets the table talking and interacting more. Moonrakers hits a nice 50/50 balance between the game developing on the table, and the meta taking place above the table.

Rocket engines

Directly comparing Moonrakers to the base game of Dominion does it a disservice, as there’s a lot more going on. As well as carefully constructing your deck of cards, there are hidden objectives for each player to chase, and a player board to consider. When it comes to the buy phase of your turn, as well as purchasing crew cards to add to your deck (which can be very powerful), you can also buy the small, square, ship part cards. You add the ship parts to your player board which give you ongoing or instant effects, and usually more of the basic cards into your deck.

This kind of limited engine-building is really clever. It doesn’t feel as important as the main part of the game, but in a game in which you’re trying to get to ten points, every little thing you can do to swing things in your favour is important. It could be that getting that third ship part manufactured by that one company is enough to complete an objective, earning you a final point, and with it, victory. It’s another of those really clever, very subtle things that Moonrakers does so well. Showing you most of how people are scoring, but not everything.

Final thoughts

Fans of deck-building haven’t had many truly great options recently. Aeon’s End and Thunderstone Quest do a good job, but there aren’t many more that spring to mind. That’s what makes me really glad that Moonrakers exists. It’s nice to have a new game that keeps the core mechanisms of classic deck-building intact, but adds enough new things to make it feel fresh. The engine-building and negotiation don’t feel forced, or disjointed. It all melds together nicely.

I found that playing the game with people you don’t normally have in your group, can make the first few rounds feel a little stilted. It’s hard to gauge what kind of deals to propose with people, and even harder to know how people will react to having an agreement torn out from under them. Tread with care for your first few rounds. Once you get into the swing of things, however, it’s really good fun seeing who is desperate enough to help you in a deal that’s massively unbalanced in your favour.

I don’t usually talk too much about component quality in my reviews, but the bits in the box with Moonrakers are fantastic. The metal coins, little plastic ships, and even the cardstock is gorgeous. The same goes for the artwork and graphic design, it’s excellent throughout. The base game feels like a Kickstarter deluxe versoin. There’s even a comic in the box, explaining the backstory to the game. At its best with three or four players, Moonrakers is a fantastic example of a classic deck-builder with a modern twist.

Review copy provided by IV Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Moonrakers (2020)

Designers: Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, Zac Dixon
Publisher: IV Games
Art: Lunar Saloon
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Moonrakers Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Monster, monster

Eric Hall’s famous catchphrase doesn’t really cover it when you look at the cast of Horrified. It reads like a Who’s Who of classic movie monsters, and it’s a nostalgic glance backwards into horror films that the game tries to capture. In the same way as many of Ravensburger’s themed games do, Horrified streamlines the formulas that many heavier boardgames use, to deliver a family-friendly box of tricks. Asynchronous player abilities, pick-up-and-deliver, action selection, spending action points – it’s all in there, but presented in a way that doesn’t feel as complex as the mechanisms might sound.

To put that into some kind of context, I was able to teach this game to my (then) eight-year-old son, who in turn taught it to my wife, who bounces hard off of games that come across as complicated. If you’re an experienced gamer, you might think that making games feel simpler would inherently shorten their potential lifetime, or speed up the time it takes you to tire of a game. To be honest, you’d be right to some extent with Horrified, too, but it does not go softly into that good night.

The beast must die

Co-operation is the order of the day in Horrified, and the players need to work together to take down whatever variety of abominations they’re up against. Monsters for each game can be picked at random, or by following recommendations from the rulebook. Each have their own specific way of moving, their own actions to try to take you down, and their own ways to be defeated. What this all adds up to is a game where people need to talk, and decide who’s best suited to do which thing.

It all leads to some interesting conversations you’ll never have had before. “Okay, you distract Bride of Frankenstein over there, I’m going to take this villager up here, then she can try to move the boat closer to the Creature from the Black Lagoon”. The actions you take are really easy, and the player aids help as visual reminders, but you shouldn’t need them once you get up-and-running. If you’re a fan of co-op games, this one falls somewhere between Forbidden Island and Pandemic in terms of complexity.

Horrified does a really good job of capturing the ‘us against them’ feeling you’d expect. You can tailor it to make it as easy or as difficult as you want, based on the number and choice of monsters you want to face. Each monster has a really different way it needs to be dealt with, and each player character is slightly different to the others, in the same way you’d expect from one of the Forbidden series. It means you can keep things fresh, and cater to all abilities.

Fake blood

In a game like Horrified, you’d hope for plenty of theme. You won’t be disappointed. The monster minis look great, especially if you have the skills (or know someone) to paint them up. The board is bright and colourful, a feat made all the more impressive when you consider it’s set at night. The designers have done a really good job of making it feel like each monster has its own personality. The Creature is evasive and slips along the river, Dracula uses his Transylvanian charm to lure a player to him. It’s nice, because it means each game feels interesting and different.

One of my favourite moments in the many games I played with my wife and son, was the point where I realised I no longer had to help him understand what the best moves would be for us to make. No, I wasn’t Quarterbacking, I was gently leading, there’s a difference, promise. I could see the cogs whirring in his head, and the strategising emerging. He started telling us what to do, taking a lead on the monster smashing, and it was a lovely moment.

Final thoughts

Horrified is a really decent co-op game. The theme is fun, the monster minis are great, and it’s relatively easy to teach and play. The design house behind it – Prospero Hall – continue to put out really clever and engaging games. It’s gotten to the point now where I can play a Prosper Hall game, and it feels like a Prospero Hall game. That’s a compliment, not a negative, as they have a knack of taking the mechanisms from much heavier games, and tailoring them for a different audience. A wider audience.

There’s a ton of replayability, and I think families especially will get a lot of enjoyment from it. When the game arrived and I set it up for the first time, we sat down and played it. My son wanted to set it up immediately after for another game with different monsters. After that game was over, we had another. I think we played it something like five times over one weekend, which is unheard of for us.

I usually like to highlight any problems or shortcomings in my reviews, but there’s really not much to pick Horrified up on. It’s a great game, and like other recent games in Ravensburger’s range (e.g. Back to the Future: Dice Through Time, Villainous, Jaws), it’s a really good stepping stone between the really light games most families have, and the heavier, hobby games, that people like me enjoy. Would I always pick it off the shelf if asked to choose a game? Probably not, I like things a little more dense, but in the same breath, I’ll never turn down a game of Horrified. It’s monster magic.

Review copy kindly provided by Ravensburger UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Horrified (2019)

Designers: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Ravensburger
Art: Prospero Hall
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Horrified Review appeared first on Punchboard.

You’re stranded in deep space, your only hope to get home is a distant interstellar rift. To get there you have negotiate solar storms, wormholes and black holes, and try to survive using the wits and skills of you and your three crewmates, hoping the ship’s shields hold up long enough. Daunting, yes? It’s not the plotline to some blockbuster action film however, but a fun card game you can play on the table with your family, and its name is Cosmic Voyage.

This is the first physical game from Savania Games, who have previously created video games. It’s a co-operative game in the same style as the Forbidden series, where you’ll need to work together to overcome the hazards thrown your way and make it safely home. By completing missions in deep space you’ll earn items and bonuses, and by cleverly using your characters’ special skills, you might just make it back in one piece.

Box clever

The game comes in a nice little box, and it’s just made up of a few decks of cards. It’s got a really small footprint once it’s set-up, which is perfect for this sort of game. It’s the sort of thing you should be able to play on a coffee table in the living room, or even on the floor, with everyone making a bit of space for their own cards. Production values, even on this prototype, are really good, and the iconography is really clear throughout.

Gameplay is really simple. You all grab a card from the display, and then roll two dice to see if you succeed at the task on the card. Once of the dice is a D8, the other a D6, and there’s a further D6 used for certain bonuses in the game. Succeed, and you’ll get something useful – hopefully moving the marker along the Advance track, and towards victory. Fail, however, and either you or the ship is likely to suffer damage. Carefully using your collected items and the special powers I mentioned before, are the key to doing well.

Light speed

Cosmic Voyage is a quick, lightweight game. As I mentioned above, it really reminds me of Matt Leacock’s Forbidden series of games. In fact, if you’d told me this is Forbidden Space and hidden the logos, I’d probably have believed you. That’s high praise indeed in my opinion, because Matt is the king of co-op games. The back of the box suggests it’s for 14 years and older, but I had no trouble teaching my eight-year-old son to play, and I’d encourage you to get younger family members playing if they seem keen.

Much of the game revolves around the discussions around the table, as the team decide how and when to use their abilities. For example, the Medical Officer can prevent any player from taking one point of damage during a game round. But what if you have two players knocking on death’s door? You can help one of them, and the other will become incapacitated if they take a hit, meaning they’re unable to help unless you fix them up. The question is, which one is more useful for the mission, and who can you do without for now?

If this were a heavier game aimed at adult gaming groups, I’d have worries that it’s ripe for Quarterbacking. It’s that kind of game where everyone’s tasks and abilities are laid out in the open, and it’d be easy for someone to take charge. When that’s an option in family games however, I’m actually all in favour of it. If it’s done correctly. You can gently try to sway your child’s attention to something you know is the obvious best move. I say ‘try’, because if your kid is anything like mine, they’re as stubborn as a mule and there’s nothing on Earth that can change their mind once they’ve made a decision.

Final thoughts

I really like Cosmic Voyage. I don’t know of many (any?) Indie video game developers who made the jump to make tabletop games so early in their history, but Savania Games have done just that, and they’ve done a really good job of it too. It’s not a heavy game by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a really engaging little puzzle for the 45 minutes or so it’ll take you to play. I really like this type of game, where it’s friendly and approachable for anyone and everyone, and it can easily help people see if co-operative games are the right games for them.

It could have been simpler, but I like the slightly thicker layer of complexity included. You’ve got multiple tracks to manage, and certain events like Solar Storms and Black Holes help solidify the idea of “we’re all in this together”. These events see players drop everything and try to clear the danger as fast as possible, and there’s a palpable moment of relief when you manage to clear one. It’s quite a feat for a little game. It was also a clever idea making the cards have two tasks each; one for the specialism of the matching character colour, one for everyone else.

You can play solo, taking on all four characters at once, and it’s a fun puzzle, but the game shines brightest when there are four of you playing. Watching peoples’ faces – young and old – when they succeed with an unlikely dice roll, is really satisfying. I’m over the moon with the quality of games coming out of small UK studios at the moment, and Cosmic Voyage is another to add to the list. Designer Andy Copsey might not have the same weight behind his name as the Matt Leacocks of this world, but I’d happily play this game as much as I would Forbidden Island, and I hope his Kickstarter campaign sees the success it deserves.

If you’ve got a young family, or want a lighter game to introduce your group to co-operative games, check it out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

A prototype copy of the game was provided to me by Savania Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Cosmic Voyage (2021)

Designer: Andy Copsey
Publisher: Savania Games
Art: Andy Copsey
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-45 minutes

The post Cosmic Voyage Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Earth Rising is a co-operative game which gives the players a straight-forward yet monumental task – save the planet in twenty years. No pressure then! Backed up with a frankly ridiculous amount of real-world science and study, players take on the roles of influential people in this fight, including Ecologists, Innovators and Activists, working together to try to find a way to sustain the world’s population, and make it a tenable place to live for future generations.

Role playing

The huge board represents the world, and the various sections represent sectors, such as Industry, Agriculture and Politics. In the centre, rows of meeples represent the world’s population living in poverty, while others in the coloured areas are clusters of population supported by various practices. They may not be good practices, but they support people all the same. On their turns players are drawing cards, carrying out actions like disbanding practices and introducing new ones (little cardboard discs), or reducing the number of strain tokens strewn around the planet.

Players also get special abilities, based on their chosen role. For example, the Ecologist can add green regeneration tokens to the board, which reduce the amount of strain added at the end of each turn. If players work together to best use these special abilities, the challenge becomes much easier – which I guess is an allegory for the real world. When enough strain is removed from a sector, you get to do the really satisfying thing of placing a big, new, coloured board wedge onto the main board, giving you more opportunity to support more meeples (and to look at less inky-black failure).

Getting things right is great, but there are a couple of things in there to stack the odds back against you. When you draw one of the cards, which are used for developing sustainable practices, there’s a chance of drawing a Status Quo Strikes card. Far from an attack by Francis Rossi, in another act of mirroring the challenges from the real world, these cards represent people trying to cling to the old ways, and they can really mess up your game in a hurry. Get things wrong too often and you face recessions and even ecological collapse. You don’t need to be an economist or scientist to realise these are bad things that you don’t want to happen.

Hard truths

The most important thing to understand about Earth Rising, is that although it’s a game, and you’re sitting down to have fun playing it, the themes and challenges you’ll face are real. The game is centred around the world – our world – and the ecosystems that support it. Players are trying to disband harmful existing practices, and replace them with sustainable alternatives, all the while cleaning up the mess the human race has made so far.

All of the scenarios, situations, practices and challenges faced in the game are based on their real-world counterparts. Every time I played the game it made me think about the problems and situations we’re facing as real things, and far more than I usually would. Given that that’s a part of this game’s mission, I’d say it does it very well.

SDR Games have had to tread a really fine tightrope in developing Earth Rising. It’s a game that wants to deliver a powerful message, while not forgetting that it’s a game. The idea of a game, after all, is to have fun. No-one wants to be invited around to games night and find they’re being lectured to, or told that the outlook is so bleak that they go home more stressed than when they left work earlier that day. The studio have managed to walk that balance pretty well in my opinion.

The characters are somewhere between illustrations and caricatures, but not to the point of being silly, or offensive. They’re refreshingly diverse characters too. Are they stereotypes? Maybe, but I think it’s more about creating a sense of character than anything else. The board and tokens are bright and colourful, and you’re placing meeples, which immediately feels familiar for games players. They’re referred to as ‘meeple’ all the way through the game too, which I think is a conscious design choice to try to keep that slight disconnect between game and real-life. Placing a meeple into the poverty section feels less soul-destroying than condemning another 150 million people to the same fate.

Are we having fun yet?

The reason you’re all reading this is because you want to know if the game is fun. It is a game, after all. Isn’t it? Thankfully yes, it is a game, and it’s a good one at that. I’ve played some games in years gone by which were meant to raise awareness over things like environmental issues, and by and large they’ve been pretty awful. Most use roll-and-move mechanics while trying to teach you the designer’s idea of right and wrong, and aren’t too far removed from the Georgian and Victorian era games which attempted to do the same with morality, like The Mansion of Happiness. Earth Rising doesn’t do this. It doesn’t batter you over the head with “you’re bad people and need to do better!“.

Everything in the game is thoroughly researched. More than any other game I’ve played I expect. The board and the base concepts of the gameplay revolve around the Doughnut Model created by economist Kate Raworth, and it works. As a game it works, and as a concept it works. You’re forced to make hard decisions in the game all the time. Removing strain tokens with your actions means you might not be removing an unsustainable practice, and removing an unsustainable practice sounds like a good thing, surely? Long-term, yes, but until you replace that practice with something sustainable, that portion of the population is no longer supported and gets placed in poverty, adding to your strain. Argh!

It’s clear that Earth Rising is a game, and it’s been made by game designers. Designers with a passion, yes, but game designers first and foremost. It feels not-too-dissimilar to something like Pandemic in that regard – players working together to complete a single, intangible goal. The mechanisms and game balance feel like they’ve had a lot of work go into them, and unless I’ve just not come across it yet, there doesn’t seem to be a single game-breaking strategy.

I noticed straight away that the game plays solo, and because I cover a lot of solo games here, I gave it a few plays on my own. It worked better than I expected, feeling like a proper puzzle to solve. I’d have to play it more to see if some characters are more powerful as they seem to be; the Activist and Ecologist especially I found it much easier to play as than the others. This is a game made for team play though, and I think that 4-6 is probably the sweet spot.

Final Thoughts

When the good people at SDR Games first approached me to look at Earth Rising, my initial reaction was to not want to. That’s me being honest. While I’m not blinkered to the plight of the human race and our planet, I’m very much someone who looks for escapism in his games. But how can I be a good parent if I ignore the world’s issues? How can I be a good reviewer of games, if I don’t review all kinds of games, and break myself out of that self-imposed comfort zone? I’m glad I did just that, because having Earth Rising for the last couple of months has been an eye-opener for me.

Firstly, it’s made me realise that a game that deals with hard, bleak, real-world issues can still be a good game in its own right. Earth Rising is a good game, it’s as simple as that. If you re-themed this to some alien world and changed the practises and people to be alien technologies and things, everyone would take it on its merits as a game, it would get good reviews. That’s where the tough sell comes for games like this I think – for small studios who’ve got a message to send, and to prove that they can make good games at the same time.

It’s not the most difficult game in the world for anyone like me, who’s spent a lot of time with heavy economic or co-op games. But it’s not a game necessarily aimed at people like me. It’s a medium-weight game, and I had fun playing Earth Rising. Honest-to-goodness fun, because it’s a good game. On top of that, I would find it very hard to name another game I’ve played that implements theme so well at its core. As I mentioned above, I think it works best with more than three players, because I think it’s at its best when players are talking to one another and trying to come up with solutions to the problems.

I could see Earth Rising doing really well in a school setting. Put a few copies of this in a room full of teenagers in a secondary school and I think it’d be the perfect example of that thing that videogames tried desperately to do in the 90s: ‘Edutainment‘. If you’ve got a group that regularly has more than four people around a table and loves co-op games, I’d recommend getting it too.

The Kickstarter launches on 26th April 2021, and I think it’s worth mentioning that as well as being a labour of love, post-fulfilment profits generated by the sale of the game will go towards charities and organisations tackling the different aspects of climate change and sustainability that are explored in the game.

Preview prototype kindly provided by Stop, Drop and Roll Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. No payment was made for the creation of this preview.

Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World (2021)

Designer: Laurie Blake
Publisher: Stop, Drop and Roll Games
Art: Rob Ingle
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 90 minutes

The post Earth Rising Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Forbidden Sky is the latest in the ‘Forbidden’ series from Gamewright. The series started with Forbidden Island, the game that comes in a tin that you could even buy in Waterstones. Then we had Forbidden Desert, which was more of the same. Forbidden Sky is the third in the series and makes the move to a big square box, and also shakes things up in some interesting new ways.

Cloud City

In Forbidden Sky, you and your fellow players are all working on the same team. Your flying machine (from the previous game) is landing at a secret platform in the clouds, and you can see a rocket poking through. That rocket would set you on the way in your continuing mission to finding the long-lost civilisation. But to find that rocket you’ll have to work your way through the clouds, building circuitry, avoiding lightning strikes, and trying not to get blown off the edge.

To do this each player assumes a role, each of which has a unique ability. You’ll be flipping tiles to add to the platform, building capacitors and lightning rods, and once you find the launch platform, actually completing an electrical circuit to power the rocket. The longer the game goes on, the worse the storm gets, and you’ll be lucky to finish your work and escape.

Forbidden v2.0

Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert were very similar to play, so thankfully Forbidden Sky introduces some nice changes. The electrical theme carries over into the game, where you’ll be working to build a working electrical circuit, and it’s really clever. You can add lightning rods and capacitors (plastic discs with metal on top) when you place certain tiles, and one of the actions available lets you add a wire. The wires are plastic, but with a piece of metal underneath. The launch platform has two separate metal tiles on top, the rocket stands on top, and the fins the rocket stands on have metal contacts in. What this all means is when the circuit is complete, with the rocket as the link in the middle, it has flashing lights and sound effects!

I think both mine and my son’s eyes went wide the first time we finished a mission and it started flashing. I’ve not played another game that does anything like this . Immediately after finishing our second game (in a row, no less), when I started to pack it away, my son stopped me. He wanted to take all the pieces and make his own circuits, and was so excited to see how it all works. It immediately turned from a game into a STEM kit. I know this is a game review, but I thought it was important enough to highlight this extra level of enjoyment and discovery that younger players can take from it.

We came for the games!

Okay, okay. Let’s get to the meat of the game. Matt Leacock is the designer, and it’s fair to say he knows his stuff when it comes to co-operative games. You might have heard of a small series of games he designed – Pandemic? Forbidden Sky is a co-op game of exploration, tile-laying and action management. Flip tiles and add them to the platform, add wires, use items, and help out your teammates. It gets more difficult as the game goes along, as a storm tracker slowly increases and demands you flip more cards. It adds a real sense of tension, as the game always builds up to an exciting finale. It’s not a difficult game if you play it at its easiest level, which is perfect when playing with kids. As you get more experienced though, you can easily make the game more difficult by starting the storm tracker at a higher level.

There’s a decent amount of replayability too. There are six characters in the box, each with their own ability to help the team succeed, and the tiles always come out in a random order, as do the storm cards and the items you can collect and use. If you’ve played either of the previous Forbidden titles, the game feels immediately familiar, but different enough to keep things interesting.

Rocketman

I challenge even the most ardently grown-up and mature among you to not go “Ooh, wow!” when you open the box and see the rocket in Forbidden Sky. Rocking that retro-futurism feeling, it looks like the rocket you would have drawn as a kid. You might look at it and think “It’s a gimmick, what’s the point?“, but there’s a really big point here. Make no mistake that this game is aimed at families, and adding what looks like (and is) a big, plastic toy front-and-centre is going to help you engage the younger members of your family. And the bigger kids too…

I speak from personal experience when I tell you that a really big step in getting children younger than ten to engage with board games, is to bridge that divide between toy and game. You and I might get excited by a big box of cardboard and wooden meeples, but younger children want something to play with. Something exciting, and fun. The rocket is exactly what bridges that gap. Literally and figuratively if you count making the electrical circuit.

Summary

I really like this game. It’s light enough that I could teach to anyone, and I think kids from eight-years-old and upwards would be able to play along and make their own decisions, if sometimes with a bit of steer from an adult. If you were playing it with a serious group of gamers, I think it would open itself up to quarterbacking. But it’s not really aimed at the hardcore audience, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

If you’re looking for a game to play with the family that you can learn in five minutes, and play from start to finish in about 45 minutes (allow 15 minutes per player as a guide), Forbidden Sky is a great choice. It’s fun, tense, encourages co-operation, has a cool theme, and everyone wants to make the rocket light up.

Designer: Matt Leacock
Publisher: Gamewright
Art: C. B. Canga
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45-60 minutes

Review copy kindly provided by Coiledspring Games. Words and opinions are my own.

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