Let’s get into the weeds of what Arcs is, what it does, and touch on why it’s dividing opinion so strongly, before telling you whether I think you’ll enjoy it or not. A word of warning: despite trying to stick to my 1000-1500 word self-imposed guidelines, this one will probably top 2000 words.

Blackout impossible

Normally I go into writing a review blind. I have a self-imposed media blackout so as not to be influenced by other outlets’ reviews. This time around that’s been impossible. Arcs has been everywhere for the last month or so, and thanks to people desperately trying to make themselves relevant or ride on the coattails of others’ success, it’s impossible not to know what a lot of people think about it. Regardless, I made sure to approach my plays of the game with an open mind.

You’ll hear Arcs described as a trick-taking space game, and that’s partially correct. The big diversion from trick-taking games, however, is that nobody wins a trick, and there are several different ways to ‘win’ each round (trick, for want of a better word). Each round begins with the player holding the initiative marker playing a card from their hand to the main board. Each card belongs to one of four suits and lets you perform multiple different actions. Low-value cards have more pips on them, with each pip giving you an action if you follow suit.

When it’s your turn to play a card, you can either play a card of the same suit with a higher value and claim all the pips as actions (Surpass), play a completely different suit and take a single action from it (Pivot), or play a card face-down to copy the lead card, but again only for one action (Copy).

I love the closed economy of the game. It’s another thing which keeps the player interaction at a constant high level. There are only five of each resource token, and in a game where three of the five scoring conditions want those tokens (as well as the icons on the cards you’ll collect), competition is fierce. Even when you’ve got them, the temptation to spend them during your prelude phase for additional actions is more tempting than snoozing your alarm on Monday morning.

I’m not going to explain how to play Arcs here, there are plenty of other places you can find that, like the rulebook on Leder’s resources page. Essentially you build cities to gain resources from, starports to make ships, then you move your ships about the board to control areas and engage in planetary pugilism to see who emerges victorious. The difficulty here though, and the key to everything that happens in Arcs, is being at the mercy of the hand you are dealt at the start of each chapter of the game. This is where a lot of people cry foul. For me though, this unpredictable ‘chaos’ (it’s really not that chaotic at all) is what makes Arcs sing like a magnificent space whale.

Tactics vs strategy

There are some core concepts to understand if you want to know if Arcs is for you and your group. Firstly, this is not a space 4X game. Not really. The likes of Twilight Imperium, Eclipse (review here), and Xia: Legends of a Drift System might resolve combat with dice rolls, but they’re strategy games. You set your stall out at the beginning of the game and work to a plan. If anything it’s closer to Voidfall (review here) in the way you play cards for actions. That’s where the similarities end, though.

Scoring points in Arcs is done when Ambitions are declared. There are five different scoring categories and the players choose which are scored in each chapter. Three of them are built on accumulating the most of specific resource types, while the other two rely on having the most trophies from combat, or prisoners claimed from the game’s Court cards. What this means to you, the player, is that going into the start of a chapter the way you score is a blank canvas. There’s no advantage to being a power-hungry warlord, smiting all in their way if all of the VPs are going to come from collecting resources.

Regardless of who declares an ambition, the scoring is open to all. This makes timing your declaration of ambition tricky and a lot of fun. The moment you declare, you paint a huge target on your back. Everyone knows what you’re after, and you’d better believe they’re going to try to stop you. You can always wait for the first ambition marker to go and place a later one, but they’re worth fewer VPs, so what do you do? Drawing a line in the sand and committing to a goal is an awesome moment that never gets old.

This is where the difference between strategy and tactics comes into play. Think of strategy as your long-term plan to get to your goal. Tactics are the smaller steps that’ll help you get there. The way Arcs is built means that any long-term strategy is all but pointless. It’s a game of break-neck adaption and canny tactical play. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about here, to try to wrap some context around my rambling words.

Picture the scene. You’ve locked down the planets producing fuel and materials. You’ve been taxing them like crazy to fill your player board with them. You’re all set to declare the Tycoon ambition this chapter (VPs for the player with the most fuel and resources), but fate has kicked you squarely in the balls and you don’t have a 2 or 7 in your hand. The very cards you need to declare that ambition are in other players’ hands, and they’re not going to be stupid enough to declare something you’ll win.

Great, the game’s ruined, right?

Wrong! This is where some people struggle to understand Arcs’ design. This is where you pivot like a sofa in a staircase. In this example, resources on your board can be spent for bonus Prelude actions on your turn, before your main action. You can spend that stockpile to build more starports and ships, use the fuel to catapult your newly bolstered fleet across the galaxy, then beat the snot out of some damaged ships in other systems and work towards the Warlord ambition.

This is a quick and simple example, for sure, but it’s wholly representative of the constant pivoting and adaptation that Arcs is propped up by. If you come to the game expecting Eclipse and try to plan in the same manner, this is where you’ll come unstuck. This is where I hear a lot of the complaints about Arcs. “I’ve been dealt these cards, I can’t do the thing I wanted to, boo hoo it’s not fair”. Mitigation and planning are your friends. If you really want to attack in the next chapter, make sure you secure and tax weapon planets so you can spend pips for combat. Copying a lead card, even for a single action, can be hugely powerful. Invest in court cards. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. Are you truly hamstrung? No, there are always options.

Training wheels not included

Arcs is from the brain of Cole Wehrle. I’ll happily admit up-front that I’m a big fan of Cole and his games. Oath (review here), Root (review here), Pax Pamir, John Company – all of these are games from his brain and imagination. If you’ve never played one of his games and were brought up on a diet of Euro games, it can be a jarring experience. The importance of player interaction is present in all of his games, and the way they can swing and change (all of the above do this) are hallmarks of his design. They’re not for everyone, and that’s fine, but understanding how his games work will largely dictate whether you’ll enjoy Arcs or not.

There are similarities in Wehrle games to those published by Splotter. Neither of them holds you by the hand as you walk through the nursery doors, and both give you enough rope to hang yourself with in the early game (note to self: don’t combine those metaphors again). This is another point which can be a real turn-off for lots of people. It’s a far cry from the modern Euro game that lets you push buttons and pull levers just to see what happens, knowing that you may well still be in contention at the end of the game. A prime example was my second game of Arcs. On the very first turn of the game, I declared an ambition for a particular resource, only to find out I’d misread the board and where I could build and tax, essentially handing the Chapter to my opponent.

If you don’t pay attention you can really scupper yourself. This isn’t fate kicking you in the balls. This is you curling up a fist and punching yourself squarely in the gonads.

Arcs is a game designed to be learned by repetition. To be played multiple times until you understand what makes it tick and how to play it properly. With this in mind, please listen to the designer when it comes to the asymmetric module you can add. I’ve seen and read multiple accounts from people where they’ve thrown in the asymmetric module of Leaders and Lore from the very first game. This is despite this is the back of the rulebook:

Cole’s games are tuned and balanced, but often hard to get to grips with. Throwing in asymmetry while you’re trying to learn the game is a bad move. There is no other game like Arcs, and the first games have a sharp, steep learning curve. If there were the equivalent of Root’s Walking Through Root playthrough book to explain how to use the asymmetry, it might be different, but it doesn’t. The last thing you want is for players to have a miserable experience because someone else’s leader and lore cards were stroked into activation through your inexperience as much as their clever play. Play the base game first, please.

Final thoughts

Is Arcs the best game ever? No. Not yet at least. Is it a chaotic, unbalanced mess? No, it’s not that either. Arcs is a superb game which comes with a few caveats to get the most from it. You’ve got to understand that the first couple of games will be rocky and unpredictable. You’ll mess up, but you’ll learn from it. Ideally, you’ll have a regular group who have the appetite to play it repeatedly, or access to other people who play it regularly. In this aspect, it’s just like Root and Pax Pamir.

I’ve seen the videos bemoaning the swingy scoring and contrived, ridiculous scenarios that could lead to a game-winning score in one turn. Ignore them. You’ll get some big-scoring rounds, but that’s because someone has played superbly, not because the stars happened to align in a particular way. Ambitions and resources are open information and easily readable, and killing the king is inherent in every part of the game. If someone looks like they’re racing away to a big chapter score, everyone else will do all they can to pull them back, because that’s the game. This is a game of extreme interaction, not a solitaire Euro game.

Just because Arcs is riding a huge wave of hype right now, and is surely going to end up in the BGG top 100 (it’s sitting at 509 at the time of writing), doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. Twilight Struggle and Mage Knight are both in the top 50, does that mean they’re games everyone will enjoy? Absolutely not. I want this review to act as much as a public service announcement as anything else.

Arcs is a Cole Wehrle game. It has Kyle Ferrin’s amazing artwork which makes it look cute, just like Root did, but in both cases, the game underneath the pretty wrapping can be unforgiving and difficult to get to grips with. If you like Cole’s games, I think you’ll absolutely love Arcs. If you’ve given his other games plenty of chances but still don’t enjoy them, then try Arcs, but be aware it might not do much for you. If, however, you found your way here and have no idea who Cole Wehrle is, or what the hell a Pax Pamir is, then this last bit is for you:

Arcs is brilliant. It will be noticeably different every time you play, and with the right group, you’ll have an awesome time. You have to be prepared to fight your friends every step of the way and get in each others’ faces, and you have to accept that the first couple of games might end up with a runaway leader while you all find your feet. Get past that though, and for the £45-50 you’ll spend you’ll end up with a game with enormous replayability, a very short setup and teardown time, and a box no bigger than Root’s. An amazing game that represents great value for money.

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

Arcs (2024)

Design: Cole Wehrle
Publisher: Leder Games
Art: Kyle Ferrin
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 120-180 mins

The post Arcs Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rondels in disguise

The first thing you’ll notice after you’ve punched out the million (that might be an exaggeration…) cardboard tulip tokens is the funky interlocking gear wheels. Each player has one, and both of the wheels have actions on them. On your turn you rotate the left wheel the required number of spaces (more on that later), which in turn rotates the right wheel. You pick one of the two actions – or sometimes both – now indicated on the board and do that thing.

Now, being the astute lover of rondels that I am, it didn’t escape my attention that what we’re dealing with here are actually two interlocking rondels. The difference between these and something like my beloved Hamburgum (read the review here) is that instead of moving a pawn around a rondel, we’re moving the rondel itself and letting a printed arrow take the place of the pawn. You might also notice that the spokes of the wheels are raised, leaving recessed segments between them. That’s because as the game goes on you’ll add action segments to the wheel to either boost or replace the pre-printed ones.

You might think it makes coming up with a strategy easy. Add complementary actions to opposite wheels, and every time they cycle around you end up with a supercharged turn. Not so, makker. The wheel on the left has six sections, while the one on the right only has five. Given that you’ll only get to rotate the bigger wheel four or five times at the most, those stars won’t align after their first meeting. It’s actually pretty tricky to figure out which two are going to meet a long way in advance, especially as you don’t know how many segments that wheel is going to turn when it comes to your turn.

Flooding the market

So what are you actually doing in the game with all of these actions? Your biggest priority is growing tulips. Ideally growing them in neat rows of matching colours, while making sure you don’t repeat the same colour in each column. In addition to getting points for complete rows and columns, you’ll also get VPs for tulips of certain colours if you manage to get their associated windmills out on the main board. This is where my ignorance of The Netherlands’ topology and history reared its head. It’s not a country famous for flour or bread, so why all the windmills?

If, like me, you didn’t already know, they needed those thousands of windmills to pump excess water from the lowlands. It’s a country that’s famously flat and close to sea level, which means flooding is, and always has been, a real concern. You can’t grow tulips in fields more akin to rice paddies. Before you take a turn you can optionally open the floodgates. The floodgate marker has three spaces, and the space it’s on dictates how far your action wheel turns. At the bottom it’s one segment, the middle is two, and the top is – you guessed it – three. Opening them costs money but rewards you with VPs and allows you to get the actions you want back in range more quickly.

It creates a really interesting tug-of-war between the players, especially when there are more than two players. One person might be desperately trying to get an action back in range, flooding the place with reckless abandon, while the others want to keep the gates closed so they can milk every action on the way around. The longer the gates are open, the more the flood marker moves along its track, and in a nice thematic callback, you can get rewards for using actions to lower it. Turns out all those windmills you’re building aren’t just to make an interesting skyline. Pump water out, get rewarded with money and/or VPs. Living the capitalist dream.

Networking opportunities

One of the things Windmill Valley does really nicely is the way it ties different game mechanisms together. Along with the rondelesque action selection, the bustling market area where you jostle for position and aim to get the most tulips or planting opportunities, there’s also the very pretty main section of the board. It represents adjoining fields of brightly coloured tulips, and at the junctions of each of the roads which separate the fields, there’s a space to build a windmill.

Each windmill that gets built has to be able to trace a path of previously built windmills back to the market in the middle of the board. They don’t have to be your own, but for every windmill that isn’t yours that your path traces, the owner gets a victory point, and they soon add up. As you venture further out from the market the building spaces get more expensive, but offer more rewards, as you take the actions and resources from the adjacent fields. This is all before we even take into account the helper cards which either slot into the top of your board to reward you with things like more powerful actions, or into the bottom to offer more end-of-game scoring opportunities.

Each little piece of the puzzle contributes towards a really tight, enjoyable game with a passive but ever-present level of player interaction. There’s no take-that. There’s no directly screwing someone over, but the consequences of one player’s choices for their own benefit can send out big ripples of annoyance to the others. I love it. I love it when something in a game throws grit in the gears of your plans and you’re forced to adapt, and never has that analogy been more apt.

There’s plenty of scope for mitigation, not least of which being the tool tokens which you can use to increase or decrease the number of steps your wheels move on your turn. Even if you don’t have any tools, you’re never forced to move further than you want to because you can just choose to close the gates for free at the beginning of your turn. In doing that, however, you open the gate – so to speak – for the following players to open it again and add more VPs to their tally.

Final thoughts

Windmill Valley is a really good game. Bang in the middle of medium-weight with enough going on to satisfy heavyweight nerds like me without causing brain burn in less-experienced players. The components are really nicely made and satisfying to play with, even if punching out 200 tiny tulips is a ballache. The rulebook is clear and concise, and the game itself is a doddle to teach. The player aids are great, and the appendix in the rulebook is ideal too. My biggest complaint about the stuff which comes in the box is the sheer size of it all. The board is huge and by the time you add a player board and a set of action wheels for each player, you’re not getting everyone around a 1m x 1m table.

I think Windmill Valley shines with three players. The level of competition around the windmill network is just right and the game doesn’t drag. It’s still very enjoyable with two and four, but I haven’t had the time to take the solo mode out for a spin. The passive interaction is great, and naturally I love the rondel nature of the action wheels. It reminds me of Parks (read my review here) actually in that respect. Racing to the next full rotation and progressing to the next calendar track section (equivalent to the end of the track in Parks) might get you the best rewards, but at what cost? How much will you regret skipping those actions?

My biggest worry for Windmill Valley is how well it finds its audience. I applaud Board&Dice for branching out and diversifying from the heavyweight browns of the T series of games, but I can’t help wondering who is going to choose a game about windmills and tulips. Hopefully, plenty of people do, because I think this is a great example of everything a modern Euro game should be. Clean design, clear rules, bright boards, and just the right amount of mental overhead. I don’t want it to slip between the cracks and get overlooked. After Arborea and Barcelona, Dani Garcia is doing some great things, and Windmill Valley is another fine example of what to expect from him.

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

Windmill Valley (2024)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Pedro Codeço, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Windmill Valley Review appeared first on Punchboard.

While it’s still a valid comparison it’s important to know two important things before we go any further. Firstly there are still a lot of things in Nucleum which aren’t directly from either of the namechecked games. Secondly, and most importantly, this isn’t just a case of someone saying “What if we take these two things and smoosh them together. That’ll work, right?”. So often in entertainment what looks like a good idea on paper turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. So while Audioslave just sounded like Chris Cornell singing over Tom Morello’s guitar, and was in all ways lesser than Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine (musical taste of my youth dating me here), Nucleum is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Both are great sandwich fillings in their own right, but when you put them together – wow.

A night on the tiles

The concept of Nucleum is powering homes and businesses in an alternate universe 19th-century central Europe. Uranium has been discovered as a great way to heat water and power steam turbines, so it’s your job as budding industrialists to harness the power, supply the power, and make a buttload of money at the same time. A lot of this is done in the game by forming networks to get power from one place to another, be that coal or nuclear power. If you’ve played the Brass games you’ll immediately see the biggest similarity here. Instead of building canals and railways however, it’s only ever tracks you lay down, and Brass’ biggest seismic shock – the mid-game removal of network links – is gone.

The really clever thing in Nucleum is that the tiles you lay down on the board to make the connections between cities are the same tiles that you use to take actions. One side of the tile is the railway line and on the other, you’ve got two actions, one on either end of the tile. You very quickly realise that you’ve got tricky choices to make all of the time. If you play a tile for the two actions on it, you place it in the next available slot above your player board, making a line of tiles from left to right. Your income markers move left to right on tracks immediately below your played tiles. When you take an income action you get to take whatever your income tracks show, but only as far along as you have tiles. More tiles played equals more potential income, right?

At the same time though, those tiles you’re placing above your board to take actions and get income are the same tiles you need to flip to place on the board as railway links. Each end of the tile has a colour on it, and the cities have colours on them too. When you place a railway, if the colours at either end match you get to take those actions before flipping it to the railway side, which is a nice bonus, but then that tile is stuck on the board for the rest of the game. You can buy more tiles with the money you make from income actions, but in order to make the most money, you need those tiles to be above your board, not on the main board. With a nod to games like Concordia, you can get your tiles back to use again, but you waste a turn doing it.

Quite the puzzle, isn’t it?

A competitive market

What makes games like Brass or Simone’s Barrage or Lorenzo Il Magnifico so much fun is the level of competition inherent in them. Network-building is especially good for driving competition in board games because it forces players to compete for the same things. Ticket To Ride has us building railway lines. Barrage is about directing water downhill. Brass gets players making sure they can get fuel to their factories. Nucleum does the same thing and it keeps that same slight anxiety when you start building a multi-part railway. Some players are just waiting for someone to start one so that they can jump in and finish the links, depriving you of any placement bonuses while simultaneously upsetting potential plans you had for those bonuses.

I dislike referring to Brass so much in this review, but it’s a necessary evil. The biggest difference in the way these two games feel to play comes as a result of that mid-game reset in Brass. All of a sudden all of your previous network just disappears from the board, and it can leave ill-prepared players with no way to get coal to their buildings. Nucleum feels very different. It’s a case of build, build, build, all the way to the end of the game. Some people will love that, some will prefer Brass’ way of doing things. Different strokes for different folks. I love Brass, but I love Nucleum too. It’s similar, just different.

The market for extra action tiles is really interesting. Occasionally tiles will pop out into view which perfectly align with your strategy. The feeling of “Don’t you dare take that before I can” is super present, and I love it. On the flip side of this though is the fact that sometimes you just won’t get a chance to get the tiles you want. You desperately want to replace an action you’ve turned into a railway tile, or something comes out with coloured ends which perfectly match a final link for you, but someone else takes it. Them’s the breaks. Contingency is something you’ll quickly learn to build.

Another thing I particularly like is how important each player’s player board is in the game. In many games with a heavily contested main board, the player board acts as not much more than somewhere to store the stuff that belongs to you. In Nucleum it’s so much more. When you gain technologies during the game you can plug in the jigsaw-like pieces hanging off the edge of your board to gain immediate and/or ongoing benefits, as well as end-game scoring opportunities. Choosing which buildings and turbines to build affects what you get and when, as does claiming contracts and plugging them into the side of your board. Keeping your attention on your own board, the main board, and even your opponents’ boards to keep abreast of what they’re doing, is tricky, but compulsive.

This game is so good.

Final thoughts

This review was a long time coming, and with good reason. I loved my first play and was super excited for the rest of the year waiting for it to arrive. I’m not immune to the power of hype though, so as is usual for me, I waited for the hype to die down and to play the game enough times enough to cast a critical eye over it. I’m glad I did, because after the initial glee and hype I had a little lull where I thought maybe I was convincing myself I liked it more than I really did. Now, however, with time on my side, I can honestly say that Nucleum is an excellent game.

It suffers from the same things many of Board&Dice’s heavy Euro games do, but that’s got to be expected. It’s a tricky game to teach, and it takes at least a couple of plays to understand how to see your strategy through to the end of the game. If the person you’re teaching has played Brass then it helps, but otherwise just understand that you might need to do some hand-holding in those first games. Making sure someone understands whether they can get coal to those early buildings for example, can mean the difference between someone having a good time or leaving with a bitter taste in their mouth.

It’s a pretty fiddly game too, and the attempt at a game insert that comes in the box went straight in the bin. I highly recommend you leave the technology tiles locked into place when you pack it away. It’s nightmare-inducing how thin and potentially breakable the cardboard arms are without them. Other than that Nucleum really is special. The asymmetric player boards, the variable setup, the way every single game with have a different initial state means it’s not something you’re going to naturally intuit right away for a long time.

Nucleum is a polished, well-produced, heavy Euro game of the highest order. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I had another game that scratches that Brass itch”, then Nucleum is that game. Far from being detracting, or calling it derivative and a copycat because of the countless Brass comparisons that I and others have made, look upon this as the highest compliment I can bestow on it. When you’re constantly being namechecked in the same sentence as BGG’s number one game of all time, you’re doing something right. Bravo Simone & Dávid.

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

Nucleum (2023)

Design: Simone Luciani, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Andreas Resch, Piotr Sokołowski, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-150 mins

The post Nucleum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Going on a Saga holiday

The core concept behind Call of Kilforth is a glorified pick-up-and-deliver style of game, but to reduce it to such a thing would be doing it a massive disservice. The world (i.e. a 5×5 grid of location cards) is randomised to start with and the heroes venture out from the center location: Rimeshore Port. From there, the world is your oyster. You can set out in any direction, doing whatever you want to. To help keep the player on some kind of leash, regardless of how loose it may be, each hero has a few different things to give them something to aim for. Each has a race, a class, and most importantly of all, a saga.

The sagas are the cleverest part of the design in my opinion. While you can assign a saga based on a character’s class (which the rules suggest you do on your first play), there’s nothing to stop you throwing caution to the wind and randomising all three things. It’s great because it means not only is the world’s layout different each time, changing where you need to go to collect goods and fulfill quests, but also the way you go about accomplishing things changes too. Your race and class might align to turn you into an intellectual glass cannon, as stupid and charismatic as a steroid-fuelled troll, but a force to be reckoned with when it comes to fisticuffs.

Sagas are essentially mini-books consisting of a few cards, and by collecting assets and rumours on their travels, the players can flip a page and continue their stories, working their way toward a final showdown against the boss of their saga. I say final, but in truth, it’s like fighting the boss before the boss. The Ganondorf before the Ganon, if you will. Completing a saga finale brings the game’s Ancient to the world (or Ancients, plural, in a co-op game), the big bad-ass whose defeat signals the end of the game. It’s a juicy bit of compressed narrative that keeps all the players invested in what’s going on, and while it might not rival the 100+ hour campaigns of bigger games, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Pick up and deliverance

So the story bit is there, the reason for you to want to do anything in the first place, but what’s it actually like to play? It’s a lot of fun as it happens, and immediately familiar if you’ve played some of the Forbidden (Island, Desert) games. The whole idea of spending some of your action points to move to a named or type of location card, to collect a thing or fulfill another thing, it’s comfortable. It’s putting on a favourite sweater and enjoying how it feels. The same goes for flipping a location to its bad side. It’s a nice comparison to use to draw more casual gamers into your new fantasy purchase. “Remember Forbidden Island? That game we played that comes in a tin? Yeah, it’s a bit like that”.

The thing most likely to throw a spanner in the proverbial works is the amount of keywords. They’re everywhere, and not always in one specific place. Luckily, the rulebook does a great job of explaining them, but on your first couple of plays, you’ll want it on hand to refer to. Speaking of the rulebook, while I found it a bit disjointed at times, I have to give them kudos for including a proper index at the back. When I play a game like this where I can pick up the paper copy, look at the back, and it tells me which page to look at, it makes me wonder why more games don’t do it. It’s much nicer than having to download a PDF copy and use ctrl+f to find the thing you’re looking for.

There’s a forced pace to the game, which might not appeal to everyone, but works in its favour for me. Each round of the game is played out over a day and a night phase, and each night forces one of the locations to flip to its Gloom side. Gloom’s bad, unless you particularly enjoy losing HP for ending a day somewhere gloomy, like Eeyore’s basement. Trust me, you don’t want this, especially when you consider that your number of actions for each day is tied to your HP. 4 HP means 4 action points, all of which area precious, especially when there are eight things you want to do each day.

Making the most of your available actions is undeniably the crux of doing well. You’ll be bouncing all over the map, carrying out quests, revealing places, and fighting bad guys, all while trying to collect the things you need to complete said quests before you even think about cracking on through your saga. You’ll collect stuff to help you along the way like items, titles, and spells, but it can still feel like a tall order.

Final thoughts

Right at the top of this review, I mentioned how I like the things Call of Kilforth does and the things it omits. I should put some context around that. As much as I want to think of myself as someone who wants to immerse myself in high fantasy campaigns that take hundreds of hours, the truth is that I’m not that person. The set-up and tear-down times alone can be bad enough before I even think about finding a group to take it all on with, and then wringing the necessary hours out of my already demanding schedule. Hallelujah then, for a game that gives me my fantasy questing fix in a couple of hours, then all goes back in a box that takes up a small space on my shelves. Not forcing me into a huge campaign means if I forget what happened the last time I played, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.

That said, there’s a fair amount of terminology to contend with when you first play. Make no mistake, this isn’t as light a crawl as something like Bag of Dungeon (review here). There’s still plenty here to get your teeth stuck into. The rulebook runs to 28 pages (and includes at least one Monkey Island quote, which instantly wins favour with me). Within a couple of plays though you’ll innately know what the game terms mean. For example, ‘Veiling’ a card is the equivalent of ‘tapping’, rotating it 90 degrees to indicate that it’s spent. Once you’re familiar with the basic game, there’s plenty in the box to keep things interesting. Outposts, Galleons, Plots, Ancient Abilities all get thrown into the mix to give you more to think about and to contend with. World of Darkness mode is especially challenging, starting the game with every location on its Gloom side, asking the players to spend gold to bring light to the world.

Co-op isn’t really my thing, so I can’t comment on that too much, but in terms of a competitive and solo game, Call of Kilforth is great. It gives you that fantasy hit without asking too much in return, and it does it with style. As I’ve come to expect from Hall Or Nothing’s games now, the artwork throughout is gorgeous, and the writing is rich with lore and character. Kilforth is clearly a very real place in the minds of Tristan and the people who play his games, so the fan service on offer along with the continued world-building is appreciated. Some might bemoan the lack of a board for their £50 investment, but with similarly-priced competitors like Jaws of the Lion asking you to play on a book, it’s really not a big deal.

Quick, thematic, no-fuss fantasy from a designer who really knows his world. I probably ought to try the other two Kilforth games now…

Review copy kindly provided by Hall or Nothing Productions. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Call of Kilforth (2023)

Design: Tristan Hall
Publisher: Hall or Nothing Productions
Art: The Creation Studio, Jose Del Nido, Mikhail Greuli, Wietze Fopma, Roman Hodek, Ania Kryczkowska, Carlos Villas
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45-180 mins

The post Call Of Kilforth Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“The truest wisdom is a resolute determination”

So said Bonaparte, who knew a thing or two about combat strategy. Combat is a great place to start as we dissect Voidfall, because it’s where you’ll see the biggest difference between it and its peers, like Twilight Imperium. Combat in 4X games often sees players chucking handfuls of dice across the table at one another, praying to the chance cube gods for a favourable outcome. Combat in Voidfall is deterministic. If deterministic isn’t a word in your day-to-day vocabulary, it soon will be.

When you’re talking about a game, deterministic combat means that you already know the outcome of the encounter before it begins. You know what the defenders can do, you know what you can do as the aggressor, and you know what the board state will be in the aftermath. It’s a really important thing to bring up early because it’s the part that will likely make or break Voidfall for a lot of people.

Lots of people enjoy rolling dice. Part of that epic game experience is picking a fight with someone you have no right to win, but clinging on to that small chance that Lady Luck has blown kisses your way. Voidfall is a stark contrast. There’s no trench run with a torpedo down an exhaust vent here. You go full Death Star or you go home. That unknown quantity, the seeds of randomness sown into the soil of the 4X landscape, just isn’t there. Hearing all of this might have made the game sound dull, and there’s a chance you want to close this tab right now. I should know, I was one of those people.

When I first heard how my epic space battles’ outcomes were already carved in stone before my thrusters sputtered into life, I wasn’t exactly enthused. It sounded boring.

I was wrong.

Get your house in order

Each player represents a grand house in the game. A sci-fi race of intergalactic beings bent on ruling the cosmos. Each house is asymmetric in play style, each with its own perks, abilities, and suggested ways to play. Even the player boards that track your progress along the different tech tracks are different from one another. The nuts-and-bolts mechanisms in Voidfall are resource management, area control, and action selection. Sounds pretty Euro-gamey, right? That’s because it is. It’s a heavy Euro in disguise, gorging itself on thematic vol-au-vents at the buffet of an Ameritrash members-only party.

You’ve got a board covered in dials that track your resource levels and production rates. Thank goodness it’s there too, because having to manage five more types of tokens during the game would have been the tipping point in terms of what’s manageable.

In the main action phase of each of the game’s three cycles, you’ll take turns playing cards from your hand. Each card has three actions on it, some of which have costs, and you can pick any two of these actions to perform. The cards and actions have themes and names that help tie things together. Even without knowing the game, you can hazard a guess at the sort of things you can do with the Development and Conquest cards. Production isn’t a standard phase of the game however, as you might expect from a game of this ilk. If you want to produce resources with the various guilds you have strewn around the galaxy, you need to use one of your actions on one of your turns, and if you’re producing, you ain’t fighting.

It all stokes the fires that in turn power the engines of a good Euro game. Tech tracks and advancements, taking and fulfilling agenda cards, spending resources to build guilds and defenses on tiles. All the while trying to manage the orange corruption markers that invade the main board and your player boards. Then you’ve got the technology market where you can buy cards which, once again, add a layer of asymmetry to proceedings. All of a sudden you’ve got shields to soak up damage during fights, or missiles that let you deal damage before you even invade a hex. There is so much to try to keep track of.

A bridge too far?

Amazing as it may seem, I still haven’t talked about loads of things in the game. Population dice, trade tokens, and skirmishes – oh my! If you don’t like heavy games with lots of decision-making, where you’re trying to make a hundred tiny gears turn in unison, you’re not going to have a good time with Voidfall. In all honesty, I’d be surprised if you got through setting up and playing the tutorial. It’s a 3-4 hour assault on your cognitive abilities.

Even when you revel in this level of complexity – which I do – it’s still a force to be reckoned with. You’ll have an idea of what you want to accomplish in your next turn, and likely have 10-15 minutes to plan how to do it. But the cards are temptresses. Sirens, beckoning your brain onto the rocks of indecision. As you place card on top of card, stacking an action queue for the ages, you’ll see something that makes you think “Ooh, actually I could do this, couldn’t I?”, and by the time you return from that cerebral rabbit hole you’ve got no idea what your original plan was. Of course, by the time it gets back to your turn the game state will have changed again, and you can almost guarantee that someone else has clamped your war machine’s wheels, but that’s just what Voidfall is like.

The time and space commitments are genuine concerns too. Setting up a game of Voidfall is an undertaking that can easily take 30-60 minutes, depending on the number of players and the scenario you’ve opted for. It will also swamp your table. I don’t care how big your table is, Voidfall will devour the lot and insist on a wafer-thin mint to finish.

Did I mention that it’s an absolute pain to teach? There are a ton of concepts that you need to understand if you want to play. You need to understand that your production level and yield are two different things. You need to know about approach and salvo damage and mitigation in combat, on top of initiative. You need to understand how to calculate end-of-cycle skirmish combat values, and how fleets can be broken and regrouped. And the icons. Oh, the icons.

In addition to the rulebook, compendium, and glossary included in the box (40, 86, and 52 pages respectively), there’s a four-page icon reference sheet detailing 214(!) different icons used in the game. Two hundred and fourteen! Voidfall is not a midweek game for after the kids have gone to bed.

Final thoughts

You’d think that after that last section, I wouldn’t be recommending Voidfall. It’s an expensive, intense, time-hungry investment. But by the maker, is it worth it! Voidfall is a truly incredible game. If you can find a game to be a part of, I urge you to try it. Before you do, go over and watch the excellent how-to-play video from Paul at Gaming Rules!. It might take two full games to properly absorb the rules and iconography, but you’ll have such a good time getting there that you won’t care.

If I didn’t know the game was from the minds of Nigel Buckle & Dávid Turczi, who don’t seem to be able to put a foot wrong lately, I’d have sworn this was a Vlaada Chvátil game. The hex-based map, deterministic combat, card play, resources, and meticulous planning involved all make it feel like it’s what you’d get if he took Mage Knight and set it in space. Voidfall could so easily have tripped over its own feet if it weren’t for yet more sterling work in the graphic design department, thanks to Ian O’Toole. The man is some kind of wizard, I’m sure of it.

I could easily write twice the number of words I already have to try to explain the game better. I haven’t touched on the three different play modes, for instance. You can play competitively, cooperatively, and solo. The solo game runs smoothly and without too much overhead, and while I’ll be honest and say I haven’t had a cooperative game yet, the competitive mode is outstanding. When you consider the different houses and abilities, the pages and pages of scenarios on offer, and the different ways to play it, I can hand-on-heart say that the high price of the game is justified by its content, not just the amount of stuff in the box.

Hype games come and hype games go. I have a personal guideline which means I steer clear of heavily-hyped games for the first few months after release, just to see if people are still talking about them when the latest shiny trinkets are thrown before them. People are still talking about Voidfall, and I believe people will still be talking about Voidfall in the coming years too. It’s nothing short of spectacular. I recently played a four-player game at a convention which took close to four hours to complete. When we finished there was a palpable deflation, and had we not all had other games to go and play, I think we’d have all happily reset the game and played again immediately. Voidfall is that good.

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.

Voidfall (2023)

Design: Nigel Buckle, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Mindclash Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Voidfall Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Barcelona! Such a beautiful horizon”

Are you feeling better now? Good. Barcelona is the latest Euro game from Board&Dice. It’s a mixture of tile-placement and action-selection, and while that sounds like a relatively easy mixture to cope with, there are a lot of things going on. The good news is that they’re a lot of really good, really interesting things. The question is – do you need or want another Euro with a lot of moving parts under the hood? Hopefully, I can help answer that question for you.

The Eixample

That’s not a typo. The Eixample is the name given to the extension designed for Barcelona in the 19th Century by the urban planner, Ildefons Cerdà. I won’t give a detailed history, but to set the scene for the game, the walls around Barcelona have come down and Ildefons has plans for the city: wide roads, green spaces, lots of natural light, and octagonal city blocks to name but a few.

You, the players, are the builders creating this new Barcelona. The main board depicts Barcelona and is divided into rows and columns, and at the end of each row and column there’s an action. To take your turn you pull a couple of citizen tiles from a bag and place them in a stack at the intersection of a row and column. From there, a whole bunch of things happen.

Firstly, you get to take the actions at either end of the row and column of your intersection. These actions range from the simple – take some cloth or coins, the game’s resources – to the more complex, like building streets or moving your tram. I call these actions more complex, but in truth their operation is really easy. Placing a street is as difficult as picking one of the tiles up off your player board and putting it on the main board. You don’t need to be a civil engineer to do that. The real game, however, the juice in this delicious Spanish Orange, comes from how you combine the knock-on effects of your actions.

C-c-c-combo maker!

Right off the bat, let me state that if you like games that have you planning combinations of one thing resulting in another, you’ll love what happens in Barcelona. There are few things as satisfying in all of board gaming as setting up the mental dominoes that represent your coming turn, and executing it to perfection with the simple act of tipping the first one over – or in this case, choosing your first action. There’s a strange phenomenon in Euro games where one player narrates all the things happening in a chain of actions – a combo.

“I take this action which gives me those things. I spend those things on placing this thing here, and get these bonuses for doing it. Taking that thing off my player board uncovered this bonus, which means I place another thing here, complete this chain, and get another bonus here…”

We all do it, and we’re all so proud of ourselves for figuring out our big brain moves, like a five-year-old who’s figured out how make their own bowl of cereal. The rest of the table might give you a polite “Nice one”, or more likely ignore you why they plan their own blockbuster turn. The point is, playing Barcelona is like spending two hours of people doing this. If that sounds like your jam, congratulations, you’re on the same team as me. I couldn’t give two hoots about what someone else does (unless it disrupts my plans), but I love the fact we all get to do it. It also means that more than once you’ll hear someone say “I had a plan but now I’ve forgotten it”, and that’s because this Spanish sandbox lays so many toys in front of you, that it’s easy to forget which one you started with when you built your own Sagrada Familia from sand.

Urban congestion

The way Barcelona’s turns play out means that your options get more and more limited as the game goes on. You must place a stack of citizen tiles on an intersection, but the intersection has to be empty to place them. The only way to remove citizens is to build buildings, which is obligatory if possible at the end of your turn. The puzzle it presents leads to much furrowing of brows in the last quarter of the game, where you try to complete the goals – be they shared or personal – with a limited set of choices laid before you.

If you’ve got AP-prone players around the table, this is where the game starts to wade through treacle. The butter-smooth chaining of actions from the early game gets bogged down while the players look for the least-worst options available. The end of the game is player-driven too, which might divide opinion. It’s possible to see when someone can end the game, so planning past that becomes difficult and forces you to decide whether to bank on one more turn to finish your plans, or make the best of what you’ve got because you’re sure someone’s going to end things. It’s the polar opposite of games like Uwe Rosenberg’s, games like Hallertau (review here) or Atiwa (review here) where you know for sure when the game ends, and then spend ages figuring out how to eke out every last VP.

I mention these things because there’s a whole heap of Euro games out there, all doing similar things but with their own twists. For experienced players, the decision of whether to pick up a game like Barcelona comes down not to the theme, but to other details like how prone to AP it is, whether the end of the game is prescribed, how much take-that is involved – smaller details like that. Barcelona, for the record, has very little player interaction, save for the usual “I can’t believe you took the spot I was going to have!”.

Final thoughts

I like Barcelona. I like it a lot. I like the way it takes what are now very familiar themes, like tile-laying and action selection, and adds its own little flourishes to them. You have this beautiful shared board that gets filled with a patchwork of streets of different colours, but rather than ending things with the laying of those streets and intersections, it adds another layer on the Z-axis and lets you move trams around. The trams move around on top of the streets, possibly getting you more actions, letting you transport people, and using your own streets for free movement. It’s just another nice touch that elevates Barcelona above other mid-heavy Euros.

As I mentioned above, it’s got a real sandbox feel to the game. You could play time and again and try a different approach, a different strategy, a different focus. In true Board&Dice fashion, the game comes with action tiles that let you randomise which actions are in which position, which is a bigger deal than you might think. Strategy in Barcelona is built on combining actions and buildings, so not knowing which actions will get paired and where makes a real difference, and I really appreciate it.

If you don’t enjoy thinking several actions deep ahead of your turn, you’re not going to enjoy Barcelona. If you don’t appreciate having to make plans B & C, lest someone block the spot you wanted, buggering your plans up, you’re going to have an especially bad time. For the rest of us though, Dani Garcia has put together a beautifully made game full of replay value. You’d be forgiven for thinking Ian O’Toole had his crayons all over this one, because it’s so colourful and bright for a city-building Euro, but no, it’s Aleksander Zawada we have to thank for the eye-candy this time.

If you like mid-heavy Euro games full of choice, combos, and attempted mind-reading, Barcelona is one of – if not the – game of the year so far for me. It’s fantastic.

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

Barcelona (2023)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Barcelona Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Shifting sands

The world according to Oros is a small, water-covered globe. That globe is laid flat on the main game board, and underwater volcanoes are spewing land into the world, creating islands and bigger land masses. As a demigod, you’re powerful enough to move land, and you’ve got two methods to do it. You can either shift connected land tiles in one direction or move tiles into other tiles, combining them to make bigger pieces of land and even forcing volcanoes to form. When I talked about your first play maybe feeling awkward, it’s down to the way the moving tiles act when they move past the edges of the map.

When the tiles in the leftmost column move to the left, they come in again to the column on the right, and vice-versa. The same goes for tiles in the top and bottom rows moving up and down. If something disappears off one side, it reappears on the opposite side, just like in Asteroids. The really interesting thing is what happens when tiles in the leftmost column (for example) move up. They slide off the top and rotate clockwise into the top row, like turning a wheel. The easiest way to think about it is like a Rubik’s Cube. Getting your head around how these two work in tandem is a challenge for some people, me included, but it’s not the end of the world.

You can play the game and not totally get how all that movement works together, and have a great time, and even win. It’s an important point to take note of, because when you introduce the game to people for the first time it can make them feel like “I don’t really get this, so I’m not going to play well, and I’m just going to get demolished. This is no fun.” Expect a lot of questions for the first game or two, and a lot of referencing the rulebook for examples. In terms of difficult things though, that’s as far as it goes.

Action stations

To win the game you need to get the most wisdom. Wisdom comes through study, and in order to study your followers need places to study. You build those places through the build action on your player board, which is also where your other actions live. You move your followers from space to space to activate the actions, which adds a layer of strategy right from the get-go. If you want to take the Journey action, that action space needs to be vacant, so the follower that was there needs to go to another action space, thus blocking that space. It’s like constantly tripping over your own feet while trying to walk in a straight line.

Most of the strategy in Oros comes from timing. The land tiles grow as volcanoes erupt and tiles get smashed together until two size-4 tiles merge and become a mountain. Mountains are the only places you can build, and competition for those spaces is fierce. You can build up in three tiers, and the higher the tier you build, the more wisdom you get, and the higher up the ziggurat (scoring track) you go.

The cool thing is that the wisdom you earn is spent on moving little markers up the tracks on your action spaces which improves the power of each action. You’ll get situations where you think the little corner of the world you’re occupying is ready to be built on, then all of a sudden somebody else shifts that entire column halfway across the board, and it’s open season for monolith builders of all colours. It’s like setting up a delicious meal on a long table, getting everything just so, and then someone pulls the tablecloth and takes it all away. Yoink! It’s equal parts infuriating and amazing at the same time, and you can’t help but admire when someone pulls off a genius set of actions which completely ruin your plans, while simultaneously boosting themselves way up.

Final thoughts

Oros left me a little cold after my first play. I liked what it was trying to do, and I liked the mechanisms, but it left me a bit flat. The second play though, the third, and each play after that were great. When you understand what the game is doing, and what you need to do to win, it takes on this whole new light. The combination of the unique geometric puzzle and action selection is extremely satisfying.

I really appreciate the simplicity of the game design. Having a few meeples and markers per player and a few stacks of tiles is refreshingly clean in contrast to the current trend of more, more, more. Setup and teardown are quick and it actually takes longer to explain the game than to get it ready to play. The movement is a tricky thing to get the hang of, and I’m sure it might be the thing which turns some people off of the game after a first play. That would be a shame though.

I want to draw attention to the Automa system in Oros. To play the game you need at least three players, which sounds like a kick in the stomach for solo or two-players, but thankfully the designers have included a custom Automa deck per player colour. They’re not only just different colours, they also have different personalities and play styles. The good news is that running the Automa requires zero mental overhead. You don’t need to make any decisions for the AI players, just follow the simple instructions on the current card from top to bottom. It means playing solo is not only easy to do but really rewarding.

Oros is a unique game which deserves way more attention than it gets. If you’re one of those people who’s always looking for that undiscovered gem, or just want something different from anything you’ve played before, Oros is a fantastic choice.

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

Oros (2023)

Design: Brandt Brinkerhoff
Publisher: Lucky Duck Games, AESC Games
Art: Brandt Brinkerhoff
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Oros Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see” – Edgar Degas

As the titular gallerists, the aim of the game is to make your mark in the art world. The quality of art is subjective though, so the way to win isn’t necessarily by having the best art, but by having the most money when the game ends. You do this by flitting between action spaces like a butterfly and choosing one of the two actions available at each of those four spaces. Rinse and repeat until someone triggers the end of the game. If you’re reading this and think I’m over-simplifying things to indoctrinate more people into the Cult of Lacerda, then you’re wrong.

Vital’s games have this false shroud of inaccessibility draped over them. People hear about the depth and complexity of his games and it makes them seem too heavy to play. It all adds to the mystique and leaves people thinking that being able to play one of his games symbolises some kind of zenith of being a board gamer. Put simply, that’s a lie. Lacerda games are involved and can be complex, but learning to play them is absolutely in most hobbyists’ wheelhouse. The Gallerist is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

The entire game is contained in eight available actions. Does that sound like some kind of impenetrable nightmare to you?

What makes The Gallerist’s design so clever and so enthralling are the options this octet of actions throws at you. Sticking with the artistic metaphors, it’s like being given eight different colours and a huge, blank canvas. There are a lot of ways to approach what you’re trying to create, but how you choose to use those colours to paint your picture is the key.

Essentially you’ll spend the game discovering artists, buying and displaying their artwork in your gallery, then promoting the artists before selling their work to make your name and your fortune. You’ve got some assistants to help you, but ultimately about getting the art, getting visitors in your gallery to appreciate the art, and hopefully having some of them take something home with them.

“There is no must in art because art is free” – Wassily Kandinsky

Not in The Gallerist, mate. Art is anything but free. It buys into that classic economic game concept of “buy low, sell high” in order to make the most money. The difficulty with this is that up to four of you are all trying to do the same thing at the same time. The board is meant to represent the artistic quarter of some nameless metropolis, where your four galleries surround a central plaza. Art-appreciating visitors of three different kinds enter the game at the plaza, and it’s your job to entice them toward your gallery and away from the galleries of your rivals. Think of it like a connoisseur version of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

It makes for a game which is more confrontational than most modern Euro games. Some games focus on doing the best you can on a shared board (e.g. On Mars – read my review here), while others have a small amount of battling for space on a shared board while concentrating on developing your own player board (e.g. Revive – review here). The Gallerist’s board is the sole battleground and it makes no bones about the fact that you’re fighting over the visitors. There’s a set number in the draw bag for each game, and once they’re on the board they never leave. Much of what you can accomplish in the game (increasing influence and generating money) depends on visitors being in your gallery, and by spending the various tickets you collect in-game, you can move visitors of matching colours one step towards your own gallery. Outside of each gallery is a lobby, and to get a visitor from the central plaza to your gallery requires two tickets. While they’re in the lobby, kicking their heels and checking their phones, they’re fair game and can be lured away. Spend some tickets and you can move them out of someone else’s lobby and towards your own!

This sort of mechanism in a game makes me happy. It reminds me of games like Troyes, where if I don’t have the thing I need, I can just take it from someone else and deny them at the same time. Once the visitors are in your gallery they’re safe from all this body-snatching, but the action you need to perform to win the game (i.e. selling art) requires you to kick someone out of your gallery and back to the plaza. Fresh meat, just waiting to be claimed again.

“Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art” – Albrecht Dürer

Right back at the top of this review, I asserted that The Gallerist is a great entry point into Vital’s big box games. Part of that comes from the limited number of options you have on any one turn (a maximum of six), but another important factor is the lack of fiddly things to manage. You have a player board, admittedly, just like in On Mars, but it does very little. It’s somewhere to put the contracts and art you collect, as well as housing your assistant meeples. Other than awarding some small bonuses at some point – that’s it. The only resources you ever need to keep track of are your money, your influence (a marker on a track on the board), and any tickets you currently have. Those tickets are what you spend to move visitors to your gallery.

By keeping things simple in this way, you’re free to focus your attention on planning what you want to do, not spending precious brain energy doing the mental gymnastics to see if you can do it. There’s still an interconnectedness of all things (to quote Dirk Gently), but it’s easier to see. You only have to scrape a little of the gouache away to see the sketching underneath and understand the relationships between the various dependencies.

It leaves new players with a sensation that becomes so important when they graduate to heavier games. After a first game there’s a palpable Yin feeling of “That wasn’t as hard as I imagined. It’s actually pretty easy to play!” coupled with the Yang of “Next time I’ll have to do this thing differently so that I can do those other things at the right time”. That latter feeling – the infuriating planning your brain is doing while you’re desperately trying to get some sleep before work the next day – that’s the hallmark of a good, heavy game, and it’s something Vital has got down to a tee. The game is so finely balanced that it can be really small differences which mean the difference between winning and losing, and that’s what I love.

Final thoughts

The Gallerist isn’t for everyone. It is a big, intimidating game and it costs a lot of money. It’s not necessarily the kind of game you’re going to play with kids, grandparents, or people new to the hobby. If you’ve gotten as far as finding my review and have an interest in the game in the first place, however, you probably don’t need me to tell you that. What is ostensibly a game about art could easily have the art stripped out and re-skinned with just about any other industry, and that’s okay. Art is the theme du jour, and the presentation all feeds into the theming. For example, it’s very cool to add bought artwork to your gallery board and to see how they all line up with the illustration printed on the board. Look everyone, look how pretty my gallery is.

I really like the interaction in the game. It’s bedded in everywhere, from the push-and-pull of the visitors, down to the way you can kick other players’ pieces out of the spot you want to take, but with the understanding that they’ll get to take an extra turn if they can afford it. It means you’re never completely blocked from doing the thing you want to do, and it transforms it from a game of “Can I do this?” to a game of “Is it really worth doing this?”. You get a genuine sense of investment in the nameless, faceless artists you discover too, which surprised me. When someone I discover gets their fame pushed all the way up to celebrity level, I can’t help feeling the smug self-satisfaction that comes along with “I remember when they were a nobody. They owe it all to me”.

There’s a small chance that you’ll be disappointed by the way the game turns out to be about rampant capitalism instead of art appreciation, but if you go into the game forewarned, this shouldn’t be an issue. The Gallerist, even eight years on from its original release, remains a must-play for me. I would say ‘must-have’ here, but being a Lacerda/Eagle-Gryphon game, there’s a big cost to consider. You’re still looking at the wrong side of £100 here in the UK to purchase a copy when it’s in print. It’s a huge, lush box full of beautiful components and Ian O’Toole’s exemplary art and graphic design, but it comes with a cost. It’s a cost I shouldered when I bought the game a couple of years ago, but it’s a game I can safely say won’t be leaving my collection any time soon. What a superb game, bravo Vital.

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.

The Gallerist (2015)

Design: Vital Lacerda
Publisher: Eagle-Gryphon Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post The Gallerist 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.

A double-bagger?

I’m actually going to start off by talking about the game’s only real negative aspect, and that’s how it looks. Call me superficial, call me shallow, call me what you will, but Beyond The Sun doesn’t have much in the way of table appeal. Yes, there’s a bit of a minimalism thing going on, but the main board is still as flat as a pancake. A sea of cardboard with a slew of cards on top of it. The exploration side-board, despite its name, isn’t somewhere to store your maps and compass alongside your fine china. No, it’s a board on the side (shock!) which has cards representing the planets you can colonise, and these look a bit more interesting at least.

As an aside, I’m really surprised the design and production team went with the verb ‘colonise’ in the game. Even if we’re talking about uninhabited planets, the negative connotations the word raises still spike something in my subconscious. Terraform would have been a much better term.

Once you get past that initial feeling of ‘oh, okay, is this it?’, things rapidly start climbing towards orbit. The little cubes that act as resource markers on your player boards, spaceships on the exploration board, and scientists on the main board, are so freaking cute you could just eat them! Don’t eat them though, they’re plastic. Eating plastic is bad, as I find myself telling my dog far too often. The plainness and resulting ‘OMG did they accidentally send the prototype files to the printer?‘ feeling soon dissipates, and leaves you with a fantastically easy-to-read board state at any given time. The choice to not go for stark primary colours for player pieces is also a major win. The orange especially looks delectable. You hear me? Delectable.

In other words, less is more.

Daddy or chips?

For the vast majority of the game you’ll be faced with two main choices: get your spaceships moving around the exploration board, or research new technologies. The two things tie together and have all manner of interdependencies, but it’s still really difficult to choose at times, and a lot of that comes down to the end-of-game trigger. At the start of the game, you lay out some achievement cards next to the board. As the name implies, these represent the things you’ll aim to achieve during the game. A couple of the cards are used in every game, but the others get drawn at random, keeping the game interesting long after your first couple of games. So for example, you might be aiming to be the first to colonise four planets, or you might have your sights set on being the first person to research a level 4 technology. Once four achievements have been claimed, no matter who by, the game ends, so you’d better get your skates on.

This is what I was referring to back at the top of the review. Even though Beyond The Sun is a Eurogame through and through, it piles on the tension like a good racing game. The achievements are worth decent points and are dangled just out of reach for most of the game. The game state is so easily read that nothing is hidden from anyone, so you can see just how close your rivals are to claiming an achievement. It forces you to make some pretty important decisions in the heat of the moment. Chase the player opposite you to pip them to the post for the achievement they’re blatantly after, or go for something else instead?

What makes the choices all the more delicious is the fact that you’re basically just looking at one of two places for the entire game. The exploration board and the tech board. No matter which you choose to work with your wandering eye is drawn to what the other players are doing on the other board.

Sure, that sort of thing happens in other games too, but it feels especially pronounced in Beyond Of Sun, and I love it. Tech advancements not only get you VPs at the end of the game and often grant one-time bonuses, but more importantly may give you new worker spots. Despite there being worker spots, I don’t think of it as a worker-placement game really, as you’ve only got one pawn to move around to take actions. It’s more like action selection instead. Either way, some of those higher-level worker spots have some powerful effects, and are often cheaper to use than those printed on the board.

Back in your box!

No, not the game. I don’t want the game back in the box. It’s great. “Back in your box” was a catchphrase my group developed while playing Beyond The Sun. Whether it’s a ship or a population marker (or scientist as I keep calling them), all of your cubic resources come from the little columns of crates on your player boards. Managing your resources is the key to doing well in the game, and after the end of each of your turns you choose whether to produce ore (from a central reserve) or create population from any relevant columns in your supply. If you need to remove ships from the board because you colonised a planet, or if you lose a population cube in order to make a new ship or conduct some research, they get rotated back to their crate side and return to your board again. Hence “back in your box”.

Despite being a glib little sentence, getting stuff back on your board becomes crucial. In a game with no turn limit, most games seem to finish at around 15 turns, and you’re only able to run your production once per turn. There’s nothing more painful than going to produce population, only to realise you’ve got to waste your production phase on doing a resource trade with a really bad return. I say there’s nothing more painful, but that’s an exaggeration. There are plenty of things more painful, obviously. I sat down too fast once and sat on myself. That can bring tears to your eyes, trust me, but I’m trying to make a point here. Plan ahead and avoid the pain of a wasted production phase.

Beyond The Sun is one of those games that does a tremendous job of offering you tempting new things to reach for, while simultaneously pulling you back and saying “Ah ah ah, not so fast, you can’t afford that”, like a predatory video game full of microtransactions. There’s no pay-to-win here, though. Clever planning is the only way to make your galactic dreams come true, and it results in a game that’s as engaging as it is fun.

Final thoughts

Dennis K Chan has done a bit of a Min & Elwen with Beyond The Sun. The Czech duo came out of nowhere to land Lost Ruins Of Arnak on us and create a debut hit, and Dennis has done the same. Arnak isn’t a bad comparison actually. While there’s almost no crossover in terms of theme or mechanisms, they’re both very good medium-weight Euro games, and both are games with a near-universal appeal and low barrier to entry.

It’s not the most visually striking game in the world, admittedly, but it’s a design decision which benefits the game, and ultimately that’s what matters (despite my grumbling earlier). The double-layer player boards with their slots for the various discs and cubes are really high quality, and I love the decision to add in a second set of player boards with asymmetric upgrade options. Between those, the wide variety of tech and achievement cards, and the upcoming expansion (Leaders of the New Dawn), Beyond The Sun will be hitting your table over and over.

On a personal level, I’m really glad to see Rio Grande Games breaking the mould and opting for a shallow, rectangular box. Some of my favourite games came in boxes like this (Concordia, Hamburgum, etc.), and it’s great to see a publisher say “Sod your kallax, we like this shape”. If you’re curious about the game and fancy trying it before you buy, you can play it right now on Board Game Arena if you’re a premium member (or know someone who is) by clicking here. My addiction to the game shows no signs of letting up. I’m currently in three asynchronous games on BGA, and I can’t wait to get my physical copy played again. Beyond the sun is a joy.

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.

Beyond The Sun (2020)

Design: Dennis K. Chan
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Art: Franz Vohwinkel
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Beyond The Sun Review appeared first on Punchboard.