No grout required

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a game about collecting tiles from a central board and putting them on your own board, in order to score points. I know, it sounds thrilling. Be still my beating heart. While that might not sound that exciting a premise, the way it’s wrapped up in its theme is great. You see, you’re junior naturalists on board Charles Darwin’s famous Beagle, and you’ve got to help Chuck study animals and write all about them.

The animals on offer are one of four types (mammals, birds, reptiles, invertebrates) and come from one of four parts of the world (The Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania). As luck would have it, your player boards have 16 spaces for animal tiles on. One for every type from every place. What were the chances of that? On your turn you claim a tile from the row or column of the 3×3 grid that the little wooden Beagle pawn is next to and put it in its space on your player board. For instance the Moose would go on the purple (America) space with the mammal icon. A place for everything and everything in its place.

You’ll be pleased to know that it’s not just a case of trying to pick up the 16 different tiles to fill your board. This isn’t Patchwork, and there’s some strategy involved. Complete a row or column and you write a publication (i.e. take a little book token worth 5 VPs) about that place or that class of animal. However, you can also collect a tile of a type you’ve already taken, and place the new one on top of the existing one. When you do this you can take an additional theory token, which earns you points at the end of the game if you fulfil the things it wants you to.

Survival of the fittest

What seems like a very by-the-numbers set-collecting game soon peels back its friendly facade to reveal a game with a lot of potential for interaction. There are a load of different theory tokens for end-of-game VPs with lots of different criteria, and lots of them have some crossover. One player might be trying to collect tiles for the bottom-right quadrant of their board, while another is collecting reptiles, and a third wants Oceania tiles. The Saltwater Crocodile on the main board satisfies all of those criteria, meaning all three players might want it, so competition can get pretty spicy.

The only way you can keep players away from tiles is to make sure the Beagle pawn is in a different row and column from the one your precious snap-snap is in. The Beagle moves a number of spaces around the 3×3 grid after you take a tile, and that number is the same as the number of spaces away from the beagle your chosen tile was. Take the one next to you, it’s one space, the middle is two spaces, and the furthest is three. So you can dictate where the next player has to take their tile from by deciding how far the Beagle moves. In the spirit of competition though, there’s some mitigation you can do.

Claiming a tile gets you a bonus at the same time. It might be something to aid end-game scoring, or it might be a guide token. Guide tokens are really cool. You can spend a guide to either move the Beagle one step in either direction or to replace the tiles you’re about to pick from and deal out three new ones in their place.

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a game which will have you cursing your fellow players. You’ll catch yourself muttering “I can’t believe you took my wombat!”, and no one will bat an eyelid. Such an utterance is totally normal. In a game where you only get 12 turns and each turn only takes a few seconds, every wombat matters.

And there’s, like, one wombat.

Final thoughts

In the Footsteps of Darwin surprised me. I was surprised at how fast and light the game is. Seriously, you’ll be finished inside half an hour, and it’s rare for me to play a game that’s so brief which I enjoy so much. And it’s not just me, even my family like it. My wife suggested we play it again straight after her first game, and that’s practically unheard of. It’s light enough that anyone can grasp the rules in a minute or so, but still fun enough to try to maximise your scoring when you know what you’re doing. For a game this quick, there’s a surprising amount of strategy mixed in, and I like it a lot.

I was also surprised at how thematic they’ve managed to make such a fun little game. Study all the species in an area of the world, or study lots of the same kind of animal from all around the world and you get to write a book. Makes sense, right? If you research an animal type in a part of the world that you’ve already researched, you develop a greater understanding of its potential evolution and get to take a new theory. Again, it makes sense. When you tie it all together with the appendix book that talks about Darwin’s voyages and describes in his words the animals he encountered, it’s a really neatly presented package.

I think the only way In the Footsteps of Darwin could disappoint you is if you go into the game expecting something that it’s not. It’s not heavy. It doesn’t take long. It doesn’t have tons of pieces. In other words, it’s not Darwin’s Journey, another excellent, but much heavier game based on the same theme. You set it up in a matter of minutes, play a game, and have it all back in the box 30 minutes later, and you have a blast while you play it. What’s not to love?

At the time of writing (June 2024) I’ve no idea what will win the SdJ, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this game does. If it does, it deserves to. It’s a cracking little game which blew my expectations out of the water.

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

In The Footsteps Of Darwin (2023)

Design: Grégory Grard, Matthieu Verdier
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: Maud Briand, David Sitbon
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post In The Footsteps Of Darwin Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Of elephants in rooms

If you’ve seen the artwork for this game and have been in the hobby for more than five minutes, you’ve probably had a “Hang on…” moment. Yes, the artwork looks like Kyle Ferrin’s work in games like Root (review here) and Oath (review here). No, it’s not AI-generated, and no, it’s not a blatant copy. I can see why people are going to get their underwear in a knot about it, but it’s a waste of time. It’s another game with colourful, pastel, critters and creatures. As much as I love Kyle’s artwork, he doesn’t have a copyright on any particular style. Let’s move past that and onto the things that really matter, like whether the game is actually good or not.

The short version is yes. It’s a good game.

At its heart, Explorers of Navoria is a tableau-building game. Players take turns placing wooden agent discs on one of five decks of cards of matching colours and add a corresponding card from the market to their tableau. Some cards have instant effects, like awarding the game’s resources or victory points, and some cards work cumulatively, awarding points at the end of each round, or the end of the game.

More than once I was reminded of playing Libertalia (review here), which is weird because the games play very differently. Agent discs are either drawn from a bag, like the tiles in Libertalia I guess, or played from the town center on the board. Once all the discs are played and cards claimed, players take the discs from the decks and return them to spaces in the town to claim rewards. This part is done in reverse player order, which is probably where the rest of the Libertalia feelings come from.

As a mechanism, the whole tableau-building thing is really well done. Everything is very easy to read at a glance, so it’s easy to get an idea of which cards each player might want. When you draw discs from the bag, you draw two, choose one, and place the other on the main board, which can be agonising. Giving up a disc that you know someone else wants is never fun, but it adds to the dynamic of the game.

Making tracks

Now it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the game has the word ‘Explorers’ in the title, but I haven’t mentioned anything very explore-y at all. The narrative of the game is that three new continents have emerged from the seas of Navoria, and it’s you folks, the players, who are setting out to explore them. Exploring is a very loose term, however, and it amounts to three tracks on the board. Some of the cards allow you to move your exploration markers along these tracks, and other card effects let you build little trading outposts along the way. Your progress along the tracks is reset at the end of each of the game’s three rounds, but only as far back as your furthest outpost.

There’s another feature which sees each card associated with one of four races who live in Navoria. Each race gets a reward tile at the start of the game, and the first player to amass five icons of a race gets to claim the top spot for that reward tile which typically nets end-of-game points based on the colours of cards in your tableau.

Final thoughts

Ultimately Explorers of Navoria is a set-collection and tableau-building game in the vein of a lighter Wingspan (review here) or Earth (review here). If you’re looking for a game which captures the feeling of exploration, you’re not really going to find it here. The exploring is all done in the theatre of the mind. The tracks could just as easily have been straight lines without the map artwork, and it would have made no difference to the game.

That said, it doesn’t really matter that the theme is spread thinly. The game itself is quick, clean, easy to learn, and offers plenty of replay value. The simple inclusion of the randomised race reward tiles dictates your strategy, and that on top of the variety of the cards in the five decks makes for a game with plenty of replay value. It’s at its best with three or four players, as the competition for cards and return sports in the town at the end of each round is at its fiercest.

It’s on the lighter side of mid-weight, so if you’re after something to really get your teeth stuck into it might not be for you, but it makes for an excellent gateway game into heavier things. I LOVE that it has a small table footprint, and that it’s so quick to setup and teardown. In a world of monstrous Kickstarters that swamp tables and need nearly as much time to organise as they do to play, Explorers of Navoria is a breath of fresh air. Yes, it’ll have people stamping their feet about the artistic direction, yes, people will complain that it’s copying the style that Leder Games are famous for now. None of that matters though. What matters is that it’s a great, welcoming game with a low barrier to entry.

I’m so pleased to see Dranda Games bringing a game from Asia to an audience of players who might otherwise never have a chance to play. You can get more details and pledge here when the Kickstarter launches on 8th January 2024.

Explorers Of Navoria (2024)

Design: Meng Chunlin
Publisher: Dranda Games, Qiling Board Game
Art: Meng Chunlin
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Explorers Of Navoria Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

If you know either of those games then you know that’s some pretty high praise right there. Sea Salt & Paper is another of those games which feels like it’s a much older, tried & tested game, just being surfaced to a bigger audience for the first time. That’s the mark of a classic game in my opinion.

Frog base, bird base, mountains and valleys

The first thing that’ll strike you about Sea Salt & Paper is how gosh darn pretty it is. Each card represents something sea-related, from mermaids and swimmers to crabs and octopuses. Instead of plain illustrations or stock photos (or the inutterable awfulness of AI-generated images), the cards feature photos of origami models of each of the things. As someone who’s messed around with origami for the last 40 years, I love it.

These cards are gorgeous.

It means the game has a look unlike pretty much everything else out there, and I love it. One other thing of note is the designer’s choice to use something called ColorADD. If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, ColorADD is a colour alphabet, whereby colours are assigned symbols. Those symbols can be mixed to make the symbols for other colours, so if you combine the symbols for red and blue, you get the symbol for purple. It’s the first time I’ve come across ColorADD, and I sincerely hope it’s not the last. In a game where cards’ colours are really important, it means the game is accessible to colourblind people too.

Other than those very welcome breaks from the norm, everything else here is by the book. The game costs less than a round of drinks in Wetherspoons and comes in a cardboard box just big enough to house its 64 cards.

Gimme, gimme, gimme

Playing Sea Salt & Paper is super easy. On your turn, you either take a card from the top of either discard piles, or draw two from the top of the deck, keep one, and discard one. If you’ve got a pair of duo cards (cards which score for having pairs of them) you can play them in front of you for a bonus action, like drawing another card or stealing a card from an opponent. Other cards score points for collecting multiple copies of them, or give multipliers to other symbols on your cards. Nice and easy.

What keeps the game ticking and makes it more interesting than most other card games is the way each round ends. Once you get a total of seven points you can end the round. Note the italics there. Nobody’s forcing you to. The world won’t end if you don’t stop the game. Once you do decide to end the round you announce one of two things. And yes, I mean ‘announce’. It says so in the rules leaflet. No casual ‘saying’ things here, it’s announcing all the way.

So you get seven points, you rise from your seat, hold one hand aloft and announce either STOP or LAST CHANCE. If you say ‘stop’, the round ends and everyone scores the cards in their hands. It’s all very civil. ‘Last chance’, however, gets spicy. Each other player gets one last turn, but when the scores are totalled if the player who called ‘last chance’ is still the highest scoring, they score not only their cards but also the colour bonus, which is a point per card of the colour you have the most of. The losing players only get the colour bonus. Should the challenging player lose, they only get their colour bonus, while every other player scores their cards as normal.

I love having the rounds end this way. There’s no line in the sand which triggers the end as soon as it’s crossed. You can hang on for a turn or two, hoping to get some more collector cards maybe, so that when you do trigger it – BAM! – look at all those sweet, sweet points. Hooo mama. The gambling aspect might not seem that big a deal, but when scores are close to winning the whole game, an extra point or two might be all you need. It’s a really clever, really enjoyable little twist which makes the game feel unique.

Final thoughts

It’s very easy for me to recommend Sea Salt & Paper. It’s hard not to recommend a game that’ll cost you around £10 and take up next to no room on your shelves. But this isn’t just a lazy “Why not?” recommendation, this is a “You should get this game because it’s a very good game” recommendation. Sea Salt & Paper is excellent.

You might find the first round or two a little clunky with new users, but that soon evaporates. It’s an odd feeling to play a card game where you start with no cards in your hand and frequently have fewer than three. There comes a point after a game or two where you start to understand the frequency of cards and how likely they are to appear. I mean, the numbers of each card type are printed right there on the card, but knowing those numbers means nothing until you weave them into the context of the game.

Sea Salt & Paper is one of those games that you might break out with the family to fill half an hour, but find yourself still playing an hour later. You’ll take it to your games group as a filler for the start or the end of the evening, but end up playing it more than you expected. It’s quick, easy, very pretty, and has a level of immediacy and interaction which really puts the polish on the whole thing. It’s a fantastic little game, and you should own a copy.

I wasn’t provided with a copy of the game. I bought a copy and wrote about it because I love it.

Sea Salt & Paper (2023)

Design: Bruno Cathala, Théo Rivière
Publisher: Bombyx
Art: Lucien Derainne, Pierre-Yves Gallard
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Sea Salt & Paper Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If that name – Phil Walker-Harding – seems familiar, but you can’t place it, let me throw some names at you. Sushi Go!, Barenpark, Silver & Gold, Llamaland, My Shelfie. All of these, and more, are creations from the mind of Mr Walker-Harding. If you’re familiar with any of those games you’ll know that they rely on set collection, and SpellBook is another game where you’re going to collect sets of things, but this time with a little more going on under the wizard’s robes.

Under the robes? Yeah, that was worse than the shotgun thing.

We are living in a materia world

The rulebook for the game tells us we’re wizards taking part in an Grand Rite, during which we’ll be gathering materia to fill our spell books with new spells, and to maybe even store some of that materia with our familiars, too. The materia spews forth from a magical vortex, with some of it even landing on an altar, just waiting to be claimed by one of you.

The reality isn’t quite as grand as the description would have you believe, but then that’s board games, right? The altar is a flat piece of cardboard, the materia are colourful plastic tokens, and the magical vortex is a drawstring bag. We’ve got imaginations though, so let’s use them.

This rite takes place over many days, and in each round, each player gets to take a turn consisting of morning, afternoon, and evening actions. At the start of the game those actions are really limited. You can draw materia from the bag or altar, store one of the materia on your familiar’s board, and maybe learn a new spell if you have enough of a certain colour of materia.

Each of the seven colours of materia relates to one of the seven spell cards with matching colours. Each spell card has slots for spell levels 3, 4, or 5. So to learn a level three red spell, you need three red materia. To learn a level five blue, spell, you need five blue materia. You get the idea. As well as a colour, each materia has a symbol on it, and should you find yourself short of a colour you need, you can discard three matching symbols on materia of any colour to act as wild.

Once you learn your first spell, things really start to get going. You might have a morning action now that lets you discard any materia with a triangle on it to draw four from the bag. That’s a lot better than the two that you’re normally allowed. Maybe you learn a daytime spell that lets you swap a materia from your board for one of the ones on the altar. Things start to snowball from there, and within 30 minutes someone will have learned a spell of all seven colours, triggering the end of the game.

Decisions, decisions

There’s a huge decision space in SpellBook which forces you to make tricky choices more often than you’d like to. Firstly there’s the question of which spells should you learn first. That’ll dictate which materia you try to collect, but immediately you have the problem of which level of spell you want. Jump at that level three, and you’ll never have the level five version.

Unless, of course, you’re playing with one of the spell cards (there are three sets of spell cards per player) which lets you upgrade spells at a later time. That sounds good, maybe go for that. But hold up, there’s that other spell which lets you treat a specific symbol as wild in the future, so you don’t need three spare materia to make a wild. Or that daytime spell which lets you store two materia on your familiar board instead of one, potentially doubling the points you get from it. So many things to consider.

The dilemma of the order you make the decisions is pretty unique to SpellBook, too. In many games it’s a case of hedging your bets and choosing which few things you want to concentrate on. You can’t do everything, right? Wrong. In SpellBook one of the ways to trigger the end of the game is to learn all seven spells, so you’re in an unusual position of knowing that you really are meant to try to do everything. Where your choices matter is in the order you choose to approach them, and how well you manage to make good synergies between your spells. Once that starts happening, the race is well and truly on.

Which is good, because the start of the game can be pretty slow. You’re at the mercy of dirty luck for the first few turns of the game. The starting two material you draw from the bag could be matching, with loads of other matches on the starting altar board too, meaning you have a new spell to use from your second turn onwards. For others, there might well be a couple more turns before they can get anything going. Once that engine warms up it purrs like a kitten. Before that, it’s more like an old moggy trying to hack up a hairball.

Final thoughts

SpellBook is an unashamed engine-builder with magical stickers stuck all over it. It’s not as blatant at it as Furnace, and it packs a bit more theme in than It’s A Wonderful World, but that’s not saying much. None of that really matters though, because SpellBook is fun, fun, fun. The setting and bright colours were certainly easier for me to sell to my family than Furnace, for example, which is a real plus in my opinion.

Everyone I’ve played with has remarked how nothing much seems to happen in the first round or two, and they’ve got a point. It reminds me of the likes of Terraforming Mars for that reason, which was precisely why the Prelude expansion got released for that game. Fortunately turns are a lot quicker in SpellBook though, so that drag doesn’t feel as bad.

I’m glad there’s some variety in the spell cards in the box. Having three sets to play with is great, and if you feel that even that has become predictable, you can mix and match and come up with all kinds of combinations of cards to work with. I want to bring attention to the plastic material tokens that come with the game. If only The Quacks of Quendlinburg (review here) had come with these, they’re absolutely perfect for it.

With so many games vying for your attention after Spiel Essen, some will got lost in the noise. SpellBook deserves to stand out from the crowd. It’s the perfect little engine builder that won’t cost you the Earth (my partner store, Kienda.co.uk has it for just over £30 at the time of writing) and has a theme which means you’ll be able to get just about anyone to play it with you. Top stuff!

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

SpellBook (2023)

Design: Phil Walker-Harding
Publisher: Space Cowboys
Art: Cyrille Bertin
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post SpellBook Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Apparently, the collective noun for penguins is a colony. So in Deep Dive, you control a small colony of penguins. Your goal is to dive into icy waters and return with some tasty submarine morsels. The deeper you go, the tastier (read: more points) the food is worth. However, lurking in the depths there are predators like seals and sharks, and they want nothing more than to p-p-p-p-pickup a penguin.

As if I wasn’t going to get that in there. UK people of a certain age – you’re welcome.

Where you from, you set-sy thing?

In a slight twist from the usual push-your-luck fare, Deep Dive adds set-collection to the mix. It’s not enough to just return with marine munchies. Instead, you want to collect sets of the different colours – pink, green and yellow. If you collect a set, you get the full points from each of the tiles at the end of the game. Any incomplete sets give you half points, rounded down, as if to insult you.

As with games like Can’t Stop, strategy is only a light touch in Deep Dive. Some of it is obvious, like for example prioritising pink tiles when you’ve got lots of yellow and green, but there are some other nice touches in there.

Picking up a rock tile, should you flip one over, can be super handy. In a Did You Know? moment, did you know that penguins eat rocks? A belly full of pebbles – or gastroliths as they’re known – helps a penguin dive deeper. Rocks in Deep Dive do the same thing. Use one at the start of your turn and instead of working your way down through the layers, like eating a big, wet trifle, you can choose to start anywhere. Very handy for trying to nab tiles from the bottom layers.

If you’re worried about penguins being eaten by the predators, then worry not. Your penguins don’t get munched – they’re merely cornered and trapped. Should all three of yours be trapped, you retrieve them all. Trapped Pingus actually act in your favour, because a layer with a trapped one in can just be skipped over. There are a lot of clever little touches in the game which mean that even potentially negative events have some kind of silver lining.

Final thoughts

Deep Dive is extremely cute, and a lot of fun. There’s no denying that it’s very light, and so for most of my readers, it’s a game which will go in your bag as filler material. Sat around a table in a pub, or at a cafe waiting for a train – it’s perfect for these kinds of situations. Will I still be playing it in a couple of years’ time? Time will tell.

It’s a good job that the different depths of water tiles also have a number of dots on the back to tell you which level they belong to because even with my decent eyesight, some of the darker tiles are really hard to tell apart. Other than that, I’ve no complaints about the components at all. The little penguin meeples are to die for.

It doesn’t quite have the same immediate draw that makes me want to play again, and again, like when a game of Can’t Stop ends, but I think some of that is down to the setup time. Don’t get me wrong, it only takes a few minutes, but you really do need to swap out the tiles each time and shuffle new ones into the game, otherwise, you very quickly learn how many predators are on which level, for example. Other than that, Deep Dive is great. Quick, fast, cute, and yours for less than twenty quid. Bargain.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Deep Dive (2023)

Design: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Dylan Mangini
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 15-10 mins

The post Deep Dive Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

As someone who went to Secondary school in the late ’80s/early ’90s, most of my schoolwork was held in ring binders. For some subjects we had those fancy lever-arch folders, but for the rest it was the ring binders that always looked like they were after your flesh when you closed them.

Why am I telling you all of this? Have I finally lost it? Nope, it’s just because Books of Time makes a big point of using those same vampiric ring mechanisms to create the titular books, so you’d better get used to the Clack!, because you’re going to hear it a lot.

Getting your books in order

Books of Time is a set collection game hidden between the pages of its engine-building books. There’s no denying it looks really different and visually arresting the first time you see it. The little books before each player, the lectern with the central chronicle, the pages all over the table – you won’t have seen another board game that looks like it. There are other ways the designer could have tried to accomplish the same thing, but the choice to go with the ring binders definitely helps it stand out in a sea of themeless Euro games.

Themeless? It seems like a weird thing to say, right? A game where you physically put together little books by adding pages between covers being themeless. The blurb in the rulebook says:

“Challenge up to three of your friends, or play solo, and tell your own story that will be written and remembered for ages to come!”

That’s a bit of a leap, to put it lightly. The pages on offer to add to your books have some really pretty illustrations representing different advances in science, trade and industry. They also have various symbols representing the actions and resources you’ll get for either adding the pages or activating them during the game. Oddly though, and almost certainly to make printing cheaper and easier for international markets, there’s no text on the pages. When you choose to place a page in one of your books you do it solely for the reasons of how it gels with the other pages in your books, and more often, because of the way the symbols work towards your sets.

Ultimately it means your books will mean nothing at the end of the game, nor will they make any sense. You’ll have pages with pictures of Marie Curie, a horse, Jazz music, and a scoop of cocoa beans, all nestling up next to a book showing a route around the Cape of Good Hope. Put bluntly, from a theme point of view, your books will mean nothing at the end of the game.

A real page-turner

Despite my negativity about how the theme of making books is handled, the game itself is really good fun. As is often the case with a Board&Dice game, there are a load of different things you’ll want to get done, and not enough turns to do them all. I don’t know if Board&Dice have some kind of requirement that games should have three tracks to progress up, but Books of Time follows the same format as others have in the past, including Teotihuacan (review here), Origins: First Builders (review here) and Tabannusi (review here), and gives you three to try to climb.

Climbing those tracks can give you some seriously good rewards, but movement up them costs resources, the same resources you need to spend to add pages to your books. I like the way the game only bothers you with two resource types: pens and paper, along with some folders which act as wild. It makes planning much easier than other games, and helps the game lean towards the middle of the difficulty spectrum.

As well as paying resources to climb tracks and add pages to your books, you can also choose to activate books, which is often the most satisfying thing to do. You get to claim the benefits on both pages on view, before flipping to the next page and queuing up the next delicious combo. Pages not only give you stuff for using them, but also add a third prong to the points trident. Each of your three books – red, green, and yellow – can net you some hefty points, but with conditions.

Green pages just need to be of different types, while red ones like you to have two or three of the same kind, with some extras for variety. The yellow book is the trickiest of all, where the game wants you to have placed pages in a certain order to score. Scoring of the books is dependent on discarding objective tiles along the way. You might want to go all-in on getting those yellow pages sorted, but if you discard the top two tiles and only leave yourself with the third, most difficult objective, you’re looking at either zero or 24 points.

None of these decisions are too contrived to make, but you need to make your mind up early and stick to your guns.

Final thoughts

As a straight-up mixture of engine-building and set collection, Books of Time is great. It hits smack bang in the middle of medium-weight as far as I’m concerned, and it’s great to see Board&Dice make this visually appealing commitment to something lighter than its usual Euro fare. The theme is non-existent, as I mentioned above, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a lot of fun to make your little books. It creates a personal bond between you and the thing you’re making which feels pretty unique, but personally, I could live without the flesh-threatening Clack! of the rings snapping shut.

I’ve played some games of it where I’ve managed to get everything right and go whizzing round the score track like a merry-go-round, and others where it hasn’t gone so well. I’m not sure if the difference between those games was skill, luck, or a combination of the two, but I’ve played more than one game of Books of Time where it’s become obvious from a long way out that I’m not going to achieve the objectives I’ve set for myself.

The components were my biggest worry. As a teenager who was permanently armed with a packet of hole reinforcement sticky hoops for his binders, I worried that the pages would show wear quickly. So far, so good. No tears, no growing holes, and no broken binders. I strongly recommend not adding those hole reinforcements by the way, because you’ll need to shuffle the pages lots, and I’m not sure that would go so well with stickers on every page.

The combination of the toy-like hook of the ring binders combined with the unique set-collection stuff makes for a fun game. Beneath the surface, there’s nothing going on here that you haven’t seen in countless other Euros through the years, but it’s all wrapped up in a nice, appealing package. If you want something that’s more about printing books, have a look at Portal Games’ Gutenberg (review here), and if you want something that does a better job of taking a trip through history with a game more tightly woven into the theme, try Trekking Through History (review here). Books of Time is a satisfying, enjoyable game with a great gimmick which might not knock your socks off, but you’ll still have a good time with it.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Books of Time (2023)

Design: Filip Głowacz
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-75 mins

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Corpse Revival 101

Cadaver is played with a big deck of mixed cards. Some cards are corpses which you can play in front of you, with the aim of collecting and playing the various resource cards needed to reanimate them. There are some ghouls in the deck which allow you to steal corpses and assistants from the other players. If it happens to you, it’s a pain in the arse, but luckily you have a couple of ways to counter ghouls.

Firstly you have coffin lid cards. These can be played on top of other cards which stops people from stealing them, but also means you need key cards to unlock and remove them. The crown jewel in the deck is the amulet card which can be discarded to counter a ghoul or played to act as two of any resource. That’s really all you need to understand to play the game.

On your turn, you play or discard up to two cards. If you complete a corpse, you discard the resources back to their relevant piles and turn the corpse sideways, adding to your completed pile for end-of-game scoring. After your turn, you draw back to five cards, either from the draw deck or from a resource pile, if you’ve found an assistant who can supply you with those things.

Light in the dark

You’ve probably gleaned all you need to know about the game now from that previous section. If it sounds super-light, that’s because it is. There’s very little strategic play in the game except for hanging on to amulets and ghouls for opportune moments. After that, a lot of the game is down to the luck of the draw. Whether that’s a pro or a con depends on your viewpoint.

If you’ve got older kids and want something quick and light you can play in a rainy tent when you’re camping, or a game which won’t test your brainpower, it’s ideal. Play cards, draw cards, play cards, draw cards – and repeat ad-nauseum. You can trade cards, but when someone is desperately trying to get a card for one reason or another, there’s very little impetus to help them out.

For my family and I, unfortunately, the luck element meant it fell flat a lot of the time. Let me give you an example. In our first game, my wife just could not draw a corpse card. Bad luck, for sure, but she went five consecutive turns without being about to play a corpse card and instead had to just keep discarding cards. All the while, my son and I are completing corpses willy-nilly. It made for a really frustrating game for her, which left a really sour taste in her mouth.

Final thoughts

It’s a bit trite to say, but Cadaver is what it is. It’s a quick, easy, set-collection game with a generous helping of take-that thrown in for good measure. Luck plays a huge part in the game which might be a problem for people who like don’t enjoy luck. I think the trade mechanism in the game is meant to counteract the luck, but as I mentioned above, unless you’re on the favourable end of a very lop-sided deal, there’s very little reason to help someone out.

The artwork and presentation throughout is great. Macabre and thematic without being gross or graphic. I especially like the way the iconography for resources is shown on the assistant cards. There’s a cute addition to the presentation where you’re meant to use the box to hold the draw pile, and the box is designed to look like an open grave.

Despite Cadaver not being a game I’d tell you to rush out and buy, I’d definitely recommend it for something like a Halloween party, or horror-themed event. Who knows, maybe your crowd will get more out of it than I did, but for us, it just fell a little flat.

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

Cadaver (2023)

Design: Kedric Winks
Publisher: Cheatwell Games
Art: Augustinas Raginskis
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Cadaver Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Taking the initiative

The core of Vaalbara is set-collection. In each of the game’s nine rounds, there are enough land cards on offer for each player to take one and add it to their ‘realm’. Realm is a grand way of saying ‘bit of table in front of you’. Different land types score in different ways, as described on your handy-dandy reference cards, so once you’ve chosen what lands you want to collect, it’s just a case of nabbing those ones from the market row. Everyone else is trying to do the same thing though, so how do you decide who gets first dibs?

Roll for initiative!

Except, there’s no dice, and there’s no rolling. Except for maybe rolling your eyes when someone takes something you want. Initiative in Vaalbara is printed in the top-left corner of the character cards. Ah yes, character cards, I’ve not really mentioned those yet. You’ve all got an identical deck of 12 characters, each with its own initiative number and ability. Shuffle them up, take five cards into your hand, and on each turn you all play one face-down, then do the dramatic reveal. The dramatic reveal isn’t really that dramatic. Instead, it’s more like a group of kids in a primary school trying to give the answer to a rudimentary maths question fastest. Eyes flit back and forth across the cards trying to see who gets to go in which order.

“But Adam, with only 12 cards, surely there are ties. How do you break ties?”. I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader. I really like this bit. Each of the decks of character cards has a different colour (and symbol, colourblind rejoice), and each of the cards in the lands deck has these symbols in a different order. So if you need to break a tie, you look at the top of the lands draw deck, and break ties based on the order of the symbols. I really like it, it’s pretty unique.

Quick & weak, slow & strong

So you’ve played your characters, flipped them over, and done the mental maths to see who goes when. Now you get to do that character’s thing. Each has a different ability, and as you might expect, the later in turn order you go, the more powerful the effect. The Hunter, for instance, goes first – huzzah! But playing them gives you no instant benefit. Instead, anyone else with The Hunter in their hand can reveal it to grab 1VP. Compare that to the Farmer, sitting on the other end of the scale with an initiative of 12. Playing The Farmer doubles the points you get for your land card in this round. Let’s say you’ve already got four Field cards, and snag a fifth. Fields give you 2VP for every field in your realm so that 10VPs is now double to 20. Twenty!! Twenty is lots.

Play early and get bobbins rewards from your character, but get to pick up first from the Lands market, grabbing that juicy mountain card. Play later for big points, but get left with the dregs. Or play somewhere in the middle, where you get some interesting effects to play with, such as being able to swap a card in this round’s row with one in the row behind it (you always see the next round’s Land cards). All of this planning could be for naught though, because you have no idea which cards are in the other players’ hands, let alone which one they’ve played. The only thing you know for sure is which cards have already been played, but good luck keeping track of that.

It’s in that moment, that point where you commit to your character, where the game comes to life and really shines. That breathless five seconds when the cards are revealed, you work out who goes when, and then figure out whether you might get that Land you really wanted. One of the things I really like is the way being neighbours with other players matters. Some Lands (meadows) give you a point per meadow card in your and your neighbours’ realms, whereas some character cards reward you based on whether you went before or after them. It’s a clever way of introducing interaction without the ‘Take that!’ that games like Citadels have.

Final thoughts

It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you whether I think a game is good or not. Quantifying that opinion is more difficult, so let me illustrate just how good a game this is. I took Vaalbara with me to the UK Games Expo this year (you can read my show report here) and taught it to some friends on the first evening. Later in the evening, they were then teaching it to another group, and the same thing happened the following evening. Just before I left on Saturday, in the pile of communal purchases my friends and I created, there were two more copies of Vaalbara.

It’s not the deepest game in the world, but nor is it long or difficult to teach. I’ve taught it to my wife and son, to friends, and to complete strangers, and everyone has had a good time with it. It plays nicely with all player counts from two to five, but I think it’s best at four and five, where the concept of neighbours really matters. With two or three, everyone is your neighbour, and it just shaves a little off the strategy elements that I prefer to be there.

My copy of Citadels still gets played today, 12 years after I bought it. It goes with me in my bag to all kinds of trips and occasions, because I know anyone can and will enjoy it. The same is now true of Vaalbara. I expect the box to get worn and knackered, and the game to get some wear and tear because it’s going to get played a lot. For less than £20, Vaalbara is a great option that deserves to be in your short and/or filler games collection.

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

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Vaalbara (2022)

Design: Olivier Cipière
Publisher: Studio H
Art: Félix Donadio, Alexandre Reynaud
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20 mins

The post Vaalbara Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Not all those who wander are lost

The premise of Trekking Through History is pretty out there. You’re tasked with going on a three-day tour of human history in a time machine. No biggy. To make things easier on the ol’ time machine, you’re trying to visit each year in chronological order, so you head back as far as you dare, and then step forward through history. If you ever need to go backwards, that ‘trek’ is over, and you have to start a new one. As you might have guessed, longer treks score more points, so ending treks isn’t ideal.

Choosing where – or more accurately, when – you go to is as easy as choosing a card from the central market and adding it to your splayed collection of cards. That on its own would be pretty dull, so instead the game offers you these cool plastic experience tokens for taking cards. Some come from the card you choose, and others from the slot you took it from in the market. The tokens fill in spaces on your Itinerary sheets, which get swapped out after each day (round) is complete. Fill in the correct spots on your itinerary sheets to get points and time crystals.

So now you’ve got headache of choosing not only a card which fits into your trek nicely, you also want to maximise the benefits from collecting and placing the experience tokens too. On top of that, each card you take also has a number of hours printed on it, and you’re forced to move your counter around the clock that many spaces. Bigger rewards generally mean better bonuses, but it’s always the player furthest back on the clock that takes the next turn, so it’s possible to take cards which keep you at the back, giving you consecutive turns.

Not as easy as it first seemed, eh?

Collect moments, not things

One of the things I really like about Trekking Through History is the amount of care and attention that’s been lavished on it. It would’ve been easy to make the cards have a cursory title and date, and not really get into the detail of the place/time you’re visiting each time. Instead, the back of each card has a proper explanation of the event you choose, giving some flavour and context to what would otherwise be a very abstract trip.

For example, the 500BCE card is titled Drink “hot chocolate” with the Mayans, and it gives some nice background to it. I now know that the Mayans didn’t drink their chocolate hot, it was served cold, but the addition of chilli peppers certainly made it taste hot! From travelling the Silk Road in the 13th-century with Marco Polo, right through to tearing down the berlin wall in 1989, many of the world’s important times and events are covered. I really appreciate it when a game’s designers take the time to add this level of colour and flavour.

The moments from the game aren’t the only ones I’ve been collecting. It’s been one of the few games that my whole family universally enjoys. My son doesn’t have the patience for games that drag on, and my wife doesn’t like it when games start ramping up the complexity. To have this game which plays out pretty quickly and is really easy to not only teach, but also understand, means we’ve been able to enjoy more time playing together, as a family. That’s worth a lot to me.

Hidden depth

I’ve made Trekking Through History sound like a light game, and it is, but that’s not to say there isn’t plenty in here for a hardened gamer to enjoy. Deciding how to fill your itinerary and weighing up turn order against the cards on offer is plenty to get your brain chewing over. The time crystals I mentioned earlier are a great tactical asset. When you take a card and move your stopwatch counter around the clock face, you can subtract one from the total movement for each crystal you spend, down to a minimum of 1. It makes for some really interesting combo opportunities.

It’s true that it’s another of those games where you’re at the mercy of the cards that come out of the deck and the order they come out, but it’s not as bad as it could be. Each day has its own deck, and a reference sheet which tells you which dates are available in each deck. This proved to be priceless during our games, because planning your trek out is really dependent on what’s possible. You don’t want to try to keep stringing out a trek in the hope of a later date, only to find there aren’t any in that particular deck.

Once you’ve played a couple of times, I recommend opening the little Time Warp packet inside the box and adding those tiles into the game. They just spice things up a bit with a random choice of additional rules or actions each day, and it’s enough to elevate the game from ‘by the numbers’ to something with a little more bite.

Final thoughts

When the folks at Underdog Games asked me to take a look at Trekking Through History, I was keen, but seeing the low Weight rating on BGG (1.8 at the time of writing) made me wonder if I’d get much out of it. I am very happily surprised. I taught myself how to play with a two-handed game, which is the way I usually learn, and after just ten minutes I knew that I really liked the game, and I knew that I wanted to get other people to play.

The whole game feels like the deluxe edition of a standard game, with the custom plastic tokens, stopwatches, and GameTrayz insert, which is a great feeling in a game that costs £36/$40. The artwork is great throughout, with bright, vivid colours, and the various tokens tracks all have unique symbols too, to make them colourblind-friendly.

If your group likes things on the lighter end of the board game complexity spectrum, or you have a family who enjoy playing together, I highly recommend Trekking Through History. If you’re only really interested in heavy games, or games with no degree of randomness in them, it’s not for you. For the rest of us, however, it’s a great addition to our collections, which happily sits alongside Ticket To Ride and The Quacks of Quendlinburg (review here) on my family games shelf.

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

Trekking Through History (2022)

Design: Charlie Bink
Publisher: Underdog Games
Art: Eric Hibbeler
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Trekking Through History Review appeared first on Punchboard.

As you may have guessed, Pugs in Mugs is neither serious nor tricky. It’s a nice, light set-collection game for two to five players, and it’s adorable. Pugs have extremely expressive faces, which would be cute enough on their own, but Pugs in Mugs takes that knowledge and asks you a question. It asks you “What if?”. What if you take that pug and added a pirate tricorn, or a monocle and top hat combo? What if you had a teeny pug scientist? What, dear reader, would a pugstronaut look like??

Pretty flipping adorable is the answer.

Take one, take that, take a bow

Pugs in Mugs is a set collection game in the classic style. You’re trying to collect pug-laden cards with matching colours – or patterns, colour-blind players rejoice – in order to trade three of the same in for a pug in a titular mug. Collect one of each of the five different mug cards, and you’re the winner. Yay, go you!

This would be easy, were it not for a liberal dollop of player interaction. As well as drawing cards on your turn, you can also play the various mischief cards you might end up with, which throw all manner of cats among the proverbial pigeons. A Dig card, for instance, lets you rummage through the discard pile like a pug in a flower bed, aiming to pull out a card you want. Maybe you play a Gimme card, which works more like Go Fish. Choose a player, sneer menacingly across the top of your cards, and demand that your rival gives you a certain card – if they have it, of course.

Even better still, and by far my favourite mechanism in the game, is the Steal a Mug action. Should you find yourself with a pug of every colour, you can discard them in an action of (and this is direct from the rules) “dazzling another player with such a varied display of adorableness that you are able to steal one of their mugs“. Yoink, indeed. The first player to get one of each mug, wins, and gets to laugh, point, gloat, and demand a cup of tea and biscuits. At least, that’s how I interpret it.

Final thoughts

I need to start this wrap-up with a confession. A rubbish confession too, as it looks like I’m trying to pass the buck. I should have written this review aaaaages ago. Laurie from SDR sent me a copy at least a year ago for me to cover, and I was delighted to get it. Moreso delighted, however, was my son, who was besotted with the game. We played it loads when it first arrived, every visitor and family member who entered the house was taught how to play, and he added the game to his own collection of games. So technically, it’s not my fault, I’m just old and forgetful, that’s all. You’ll buy that, right?

Pugs in Mugs is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a light, fun, accessible, family-friendly card game. It’s one of those games I like to fit in the rather niche category of “Games I can take to Pizza Express to keep the kids entertained while we wait for our food, without them turning feral”. It’s adorable, simple to teach, and offers plenty of fun for just about anyone. It’s a real cross-generational game, as it uses the same sort of mechanisms your parents and grandparents grew up playing. Just try not to be too much of a competitive dad, yeah? Not that anyone would be like that…

If your family loves games like Trash Pandas, Go Fish, or even good old Rummy, it’s safe to say you’ll really enjoy Pugs in Mugs too. We even spent half an hour playing a game of ‘choose your favourite pug card – no, not that one, that one’s my favourite, you have to choose another’. For the princely sum of £12, it’s a no-brainer. If I hadn’t been given a copy, I’d have bought one, and that’s about as clear a recommendation as I can give.

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

Pugs in Mugs (2020)

Designer: Laurie Blake, Stuart Lawrence
Publisher: Stop, Drop & Roll Studio
Art: Rob Ingle
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Pugs In Mugs Review appeared first on Punchboard.