The 7 Ps

Some of you probably know a variation of the 7 Ps as I know them: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Planning is at the core of Crumbs, and you’ll probably lose if you don’t do it well.

The game is a small deck of cards and some wooden markers. The cards are double-sided: one side shows a sandwich ingredient, and the other has hungry customers’ orders. On your turn, you can pick up all the prepped ingredients of a single kind – bread, eggs, ham, etc. – and plonk them into your preparation area. It doesn’t take an efficiency expert to understand that it makes sense to be able to put the same ingredient in multiple sandwiches at the same time, especially once you understand that you only get five actions.

The good news is that once you complete an order you get a fresh set of five actions, and you get a free restock of one of the types of ingredients you’ve used. It doesn’t take long before the wheels start to come off the sandwich machine though, especially when you get orders with a lot of different ingredients. Ingredients are hard to come by, and although you can use an action to restock an ingredient, that’s 20% of your actions used. Yikes!

Yes, Chef!

Thanks to Crumbs’ small size and small deck of cards, it’s a concentration of an efficiency puzzle – a reduction if you will. It’s extremely easy to teach and to understand, and for your first couple of orders you’ll have a feeling of “This is easy!”. That feeling doesn’t last long though, especially if you’ve got some of the more difficult order cards in your queue.

If you’re the sort of person who likes a bit of randomness thrown into their games, some luck and a bit of “Let’s see what happens now”, Crumbs probably isn’t the game for you. If, however, you’re the type of person who loves a solvable puzzle, you’re going to love Crumbs. It’s like a Perfect Information game. The only unknown at the start of a game is the orders on your second order card. You can start the game, stare at the orders and ingredients, and plan ahead to complete everything you can see.

Unfortunately, this leads to what I consider to be the game’s weakest point. While you’re planning your mental to-do list, there are times when you’ll realise that what’s left to do is impossible with your remaining actions. Sure, it’s almost certainly because your planning was about as good as a tuna and marmalade sandwich, but it’s a really damp way to end a game. Like when someone puts something too wet in your sandwich and you think “You know what? I don’t want to finish this”. It is what it is I guess, I just don’t like the feeling of packing a game away knowing I didn’t actually finish it. It’s like the game’s disappointed in me.

Final thoughts

I’ve just been away for a few days with my family, and when I was packing I was looking through my games collection to decide what to take. Invariably it’s small box games. Crumbs epitomises everything that a good small box game should be. It’s small enough that you could happily play it on a fold-down plane table, it’s quick to setup and play, and it packs a really clever puzzle into its 18 cards. It’s important to reiterate just how small this game is. The cards, instructions, and ten wooden pieces fit inside a tuckbox that’s thinner than a standard deck of cards.

I’ve gone back and forth between preferring the solo and two-player co-op modes of play. The solo game is great, but the most prone to that problem I mentioned about that reminds me of Rell from Krull. You remember Krull? That early ’80s film? Rell was a cyclops whose people traded one eye to be able to see the future, but the only future they can see is their own death. That’s what I feel like when I’ve got four actions left and know that I can’t complete another sandwich. Melodramatic? Moi?

The co-op mode is really good fun. You’ve each got half the ingredients so you need to pass items back and forth to one another, and it introduces a ton of chatter and planning. What it comes down to is whether Crumbs: A Sandwich Filler Game is worth the £15 (£12 if you back the campaign) it costs, and the answer is a resounding Yes. The enigmatically named J. Antscherl has combined with Minerva Tabletop Games’ development and experience, and Rory Muldoon’s fantastic illustration-style artwork to make a fantastic debut game. You can back it from 8th August 2023 on Kickstarter by clicking right here.

Preview copy kindly provided by Minerva Tabletop Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game (2023)

Design: J. Antscherl
Publisher: Minerva Tabletop Games
Art: Rory Muldoon
Players: 1-2
Playing time: 10-20 mins

The post Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Which begs the question – what do you do for the rest of the time?

Football manager

I’m part of a huge group of people who enjoy sport manager games on the computer. I’ve bought countless versions of Football Manager, and I shudder to think how many hours of my life were spent searching for wunderkinder from unknown leagues around the world. Eleven takes a similar approach to the Football Manager games, but with the key difference that there’s no choice to let the computer do all the boring stuff for you, like hire staff, find sponsors, and upgrade the stadium.

Before we go much further, I should probably let you know that Eleven is a Euro game, through and through. There’s no harking back to the granddaddy of football games – Subbuteo – even though I was a huge fan of the flicking football fun when I was around 14 years old. Seriously, I had a roll-up astroturf pitch, box mondial goals, and Adidas Tango balls. Yeah, that’s right, look impressed.

Eleven is an engine-builder at heart. Most of the time you’re trying to mould your staff into producing each of the four main currencies in the game: budget, fan base, operations, and fitness. As per the Euro standard, each of these has a level of income per round, and each can be boosted with the correct staff. What makes Eleven an outsider in comparison to most recent Euro games is the fact that you can’t really min-max your stats.

Stadium infrastructure grants you bonuses, but costs money. Players picked for game day need fitness. Fans fill the stadium and grant you more income. This all makes sense thematically, but it forges pretty rigid chains of dependence, in a similar way to the way On Mars (review here) does it. Each resource underpins another, and you need all of them. The differences between players come in how you fine-tune your engines and make the most of the staff you have.

Hardly Kane and Cristianot Ronaldo

As a devotee of the Winning Eleven / Pro Evo games from Konami, back when Fifa ruled the roost, I know first-hand that official team and player licences don’t always make the game. If you wanted Liverpool and Man City instead of Merseyside Red and Man Blue, you had to put in the time to edit the rosters. Eleven doesn’t even have a hint of a licence, but it doesn’t matter. For a start, the teams would be out of date immediately, and a board game isn’t easily patched over the internet.

You aren’t dealing with named players and famous teams in Eleven, but you don’t need to. In all honesty, it could very easily be re-skinned into almost any other team sport, and the only tweaks would come in the match section. During the matches, it’s a case of setting up your team and choosing a formation and tactics, which players going on the wings, up-front, in defence etc., and then flipping the opponent card to see how they’ve set up. There are clues on the back of the opponent’s card, letting you know where they are strong and weak, so it’s not like going into a fight with a blindfold on. If you have the higher stats in one place, you score, if they do, they score. It’s not difficult to work out.

Despite the very thin implementation of the matches, handling your squad is actually pretty cool. There are nameless youth stars you can recruit, waiting for the surprise of the player they can become with your investment. There are veteran players, who add to the team’s strength while they’re not quite ready to be put out to pasture. You have a full set of jersey numbers to assign to your players, but each player comes with their own chosen number too (the divas), so there’s often no point in hiring two number 10s for example, as only one can play. Combine all of this with the various tactic and formation cards on offer, and matchday feels more like an event, not an anti-climax at the end of the week.

The Hand of God

There’s one facet of Eleven which might drive a wedge between the football and Euro game fans.

Luck.

Eleven’s clean engine-building is tempered by several things that are completely out of your control. Right at the start of each round (Monday, in the game’s parlance), you draw a board meeting card and then roll a die. When you compare the result to your directors’ cards, it’ll tell you which of the three outcomes on the board meeting card came to pass. The board meeting card isn’t shared, however. Each player draws their own, and the outcomes can vary quite a lot. Some are positive, some not-so-positive.

A similar fate awaits you after each match when you make a Match Consequence roll. Win, lose or draw, you check the result of your roll on the results table, and see what lingering effects carry over into the next week. There’s no guarantee that a win will get you good consequences. You could win the match and roll a 1 and end up with a double serious injury to apply to your players, while someone else loses, rolls a 6, and takes two temporary strength boosts into the next week.

If you feel your blood boiling at the very idea of such ludological injustice, Eleven isn’t for you. Personally, I’m a big fan of these two mechanisms in particular. Sport is affected by all kinds of things outside of people’s control, and it feels great on a thematic level to have the same chaos sewn into the game’s finery. There’s no denying, it can feel desperately unfair at times, but “that’s football.”

Final thoughts

I’m so pleased that Eleven doesn’t try to recreate a game of football on my table. Other games have done it in the past, and continue to. UND1C1 and Counter Attack do a great job. Instead, it’s a Euro game where the football theme has been applied with a sopping-wet brush. The biggest criticism I have for Eleven is that out-of-the-box, you can’t do the one thing you might expect in a football game. You can’t have a match against the other players. It feels like a big ‘oof’ moment from Portal Games here. Instead, you each play against different teams in the same league to try to come out on top. There’s nothing to stop you lining your team up against your opponent, but it’s just too random to have any tactical merit.

There are a few mini-expansions which add to the game, and the International Cup in particular adds those player vs player rules. Some of the others are decent, too: the International Players and Solo Campaign expansions in particular add some nice things. I think Solo is where you’ll have the most fun with Eleven, to be honest. Two-player is good fun, but I think four would drag it out, and the disparity in luck could see one player wipe the floor with the others.

Despite these criticisms, Eleven is a great game, and certainly the best football (soccer) game I’ve played. The theme is so well applied to the game, and the engine-building is very clear and simple in practice. There’s plenty of depth and nuance as to how you apply the various effects, but the iconography throughout is excellent, so accomplishing what you want to is down to whether your tactics work, not because you didn’t understand what a certain card or effect did. The way that injuries and card suspensions work fits perfectly, and the game is a fantastic choice for someone who craves that Football Manager experience on a table, instead of a screen.

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

You can buy Eleven now, at Punchboard’s partner store, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for an account using this link – kienda.co.uk/punchboard – to snag 5% off your first £60+ order.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to read more like this, consider supporting the site by joining my monthly membership at Kofi. It starts from £1 per month, offers member benefits, and lets me know you’re enjoying what I’m doing.

Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (2022)

Designer: Thomas Jansen
Publisher: Portal Games
Art: Mateusz Kopacz, Hanna Kuik
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Eleven Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Not too many games put you in charge of your own cult. Fewer still task you with collecting the souls of the host city’s inhabitants by killing them all. On the face of it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Amulet of Thrayax is a dark, dystopian, Hellscape of a game. How do you make a game like that fun? How do you turn the murder of tons of peasants and nobles into a good time?

I’ll tell you how. You put your tongue firmly in your cheek, cover the whole thing in cartoon silliness, and revel in the sheer absurdity of the gorgeous comic fantasy world that designer Tom Truman and artist Vincent Vyce have created.

Getting around town

There’s something about a round board or city map that I find inexplicably enticing. From A War of Whispers, to Discworld’s best-known city of Ankh Morpork, the circular shape just draws me in. Setting up Amulet of Thrayax, then, was particularly exciting. The city of Bleakpyre is divided into six districts, each connected to the others via the Dead Centre, the hub at the center. Throughout the districts are a number of peasants and nobles. The game’s lore states that the cult which harvests the most of the inhabitants’ souls during this period of Thraymania, gains control of the Amulet of Thrayax.

The cult which controls the Amulet is granted unnatural good fortune, apparently, although the rulebook doesn’t state what. I imagine it’s stuff like winning bets on chance games, dropped toast always landing butter-side-up, farts that smell like fresh coffee – things like that. So – kill all the people, stop the other cults doing the same, then welcome to Amulet Town – population: you. Sounds pretty good to me.

“How does one go about harvesting souls?”, you might wonder. The answer, fellow cultist, is cards. Lots and lots of cards. Each player has a deck of counter cards, and a deck of murder cards. That’s right, murder cards. Subtlety not a strong point in this game. Every card you play alters the state of the game board in some way, and deciding what play to make, and when, is the key to winning. Most actions will either harvest some souls, moving them to the altar on your player board, shift people into other districts, or changing the state of their protection.

A game of zones

The introductory text in the rulebook describes Thraymania as a crazy time of lawlessness, and that feeling really comes through in the gameplay. In each round the amulet in the middle of the board rotates to the next district, and each card played in that district gets an additional action. Despite your best efforts to milk this for all its worth, your rivals have other ideas. Some of the cards prevent the amulet rotating, and others even reverse the direction.

It’s not the game for you if your idea of a good time is painstakingly analysing each move, aiming for perfection. There’s too much chaos. That chaos is in the very DNA of Amulet of Thrayax, and it’s the game’s greatest strength. It’s frustrating, yet hilarious, and for every turn where you find yourself cursing someone else for their actions, you’ll find the rest of the table laughing. You can play with strategy, and good players can come out on top, but it’s far from a certainty.

One of my favourite things is the first player auction that happens each round. Instead of the first player token just rotating each round, there’s a straight-up auction for it. The currency used in the auction is (somewhat terrifyingly) the very souls you’re reaping. These auctions are agonising, but agonising in a good way. Being the first to play can give you a huge advantage, but at the expense of the very things you’re trying to collect. Of course, you could always bump the auction price up on your bid, just to force the others to spend more, but you wouldn’t do that, right?

Right?

Final thoughts

Okay, I’m annoyed here. As I was writing this preview, I was trying to think of the perfect, snappy little one-liner to describe it. I was so excited when I thought of it – “Discworld meets The Purge” – only to find out that someone else said almost the same thing! Curse you, like-minded person! It’s the perfect description though, the mixture of comic fantasy and extreme violence is awesome. The killing is very much implied while you’re playing, however, which fits with the cartoon aesthetic. All you’re doing is collecting little round and square tokens, so it’s a game I wouldn’t have a problem playing with my nearly-ten-year-old son.

I love how much interaction there is between the players. Some of it is passive, such as stopping the amulet from rotating in the next round, but some of it is much more direct. For example, some cards allow you to place your infiltrator tokens on the other cults’ markers, which let you steal two peasants from the owners altar, and place them on your own. Yoink! The preview copy I played with had the standard rules, but the version of the game you’ll have promises to have lots of things to add in to your games, including asymmetric cult powers.

Playing with two players is a much more tactical game, and has a different feel to what I think is the best way to play, with four or five. At four players there’s enough chaos to make things fun, but still feel like you’re retaining some element of control. Amulet of Thrayax is an absolute riot, proper ‘beer and pretzels’ fun, as my American friends would say. It’s very easy to learn, and from what I hear, the revised iconography on the final version will tidy up my biggest grumble, which was about the legibility of some of the symbols on the cards.

I can see this game doing very, very well in its Kickstarter Campaign when it launches on May 31st, and it deserves to. It’s another fine example of independent British game designers making their mark. Trolls ‘n’ Rerolls have a hit on their hands with Amulet of Thrayax, I’m certain of it.

Amulet of Thrayax (2023)

Designer: Tom Truman
Publisher: Trolls ‘n’ Rerolls
Art: Vincent Vyce
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 30-90 mins

The post Amulet of Thrayax Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Marvel Villainous is an asymmetric strategy game, where players assume the roles of one of five big bad guys from the Marvel universe – Ultron, Hela, Taskmaster, Killmonger, and the one even your dad has heard of, Thanos. Through card management and action selection, they’ll be trying to achieve very different win conditions, and declare themselves the biggest, and baddest of the lot.

Snobbery? Me?

Okay, I’ll admit it. When I first saw the buzz around the original Villainous game, I felt my inner snob talking to me. “A mass-market Disney game? Don’t even think about it, we like beige, complicated games with questionable box art“. I was curious because a lot of people were playing it, and the minis and artwork looked great, I just wasn’t sure there’d be enough game there to keep me interested.

Time passed though, I did some reading, and when the chance came to get Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power (to give it its full name, which nobody uses), I decided to come at it with an open mind. The theme is great, and fans of the comics and films will really appreciate the actions of each and every one of the hero and ally cards. When you’ve got a franchise as big an powerful as Marvel in your hands, you want to make the most of the lore and characters given to you, and Ravensburger really have.

Master of your domain

Each player has their own board, which represents their villain’s domain, and a deck of cards which is unique to them. On your turn you move your (gorgeous) villain pawn to a different space on the domain, and then carry out as many of the available actions on that space as you want. Those actions are usually choices such as take some power tokens (the game’s currency), play a card, or vanquish one of the heroes that one of the other players has put on your board. You draw back up to the hand size limit, and it’s the next player’s turn. The action selection is actually a sneaky way to introduce rondels to your group. It might not look like one, but it’s a four-space rondel with a three-space movement range. Board game smarts, right there.

The game is a balancing act in a couple of different ways. Your focus is always going to center around your domain, as that’s where you play your cards to build towards your win condition. Allies, items and effects all get played from your hand, usually at the cost of some of your power tokens. At the same time though, you need to keep an eye on what your nefarious neighbours are up to. Everyone knows everyone else’s win condition, because they each have a reference card. So when you’re dishing out heroes from the fate deck – which then sit in other players’ domains, blocking actions and adding negative effects – make sure you’re hindering the person you think is doing the best. That’s not as easy as it sounds though, because if you’re playing cards to scupper someone else, you’re not working towards winning.

Variety is the spice of life

I really like how different each villain is. One game you’re playing as Taskmaster, who needs to use his items to power-up four of his allies to a strength of five. Then the next game you’re Ultron, and he’s got his own set of special tiles which go on his play area. As you advance through the game, these tiles get flipped, give you a new perk, and show the next challenge on the road to victory. It’s variety like this which stops the game getting stale. If you’re bored of chasing the infinity stones as Thanos, go take on Black Panther as Killmonger instead.

The way the fate deck works is really clever too. Firstly, it changes every game. The standard deck of fate cards gets shuffled with the specific fate cards of the villains in the current game, and it means you’re going to see very different cards and heroes rearing their do-gooding heads each time you play. There’s also the option of removing the Event cards from the fate deck, which makes for an easier, faster game. That kind of flexibility in difficulty is a great touch, because this game is probably going to be out of some people’s comfort zone. If you want your friends to come back for a second game, lowering the difficulty is a great way to make the game more approachable, and ultimately more fun.

There are so many ways the five villains can be combined with four players, you’re never going to play the same game twice. That’s a lot of replay value for a game that you can pick up for around £30. It’s a game that’s begging for an expansion, so here’s hoping Ravensburger give it the same treatment they did with the Disney version.

Final Thoughts

I’m pleasantly surprised by Marvel Villainous. More than surprised, I’m actually really impressed. I was worried it would be very light in terms of strategy and choice, but it really isn’t. There’s plenty of scope to play with a strategy from the start of the game once you know the characters, but it really needs a first play before everyone gets what’s going on. I really like the asymmetry, and although I’ve not played with every combination at lots of different player counts, the balance seems to be very good.

As a big Euro game fan, player interaction isn’t something I deal with often. 99% of the time in a Euro, interaction is indirect, but In Marvel Villainous you’re actively targeting the other players, sometimes even coming up with agreements to join up and take on someone close to winning. Just don’t expect those alliances to last very long! I really enjoy the interaction, it makes a real change for me, just remember the golden rule that everyone is friends again after the game.

I want to give the rule book a mention too. This game could have been pretty tricky to explain, and very easy to explain badly, but the rule book is excellent. The terminology is consistent, the examples are great, and the important card types are colour-coded throughout, so you can easily learn the game without a video.

Who is Marvel Villainous for?

If you are either new to the hobby board game scene, or hoping to use this as a gateway game to bring in some family or friends, I recommend using the Omnipotent game mode, so that all of the Event cards are removed. They’re great once you know the game, and add in some conditions that affect one or all of the players and give you another thing to work towards, sometimes forcing you to work together.

I think this is a great game for families with children at least ten-years-old. My eight-year-old son gets the idea, but finds the strategic planning tricky. Games can last for quite a while too, so it’s not great for people with short attention spans. I also think it’s at its best with more than two players. A lot of the enjoyment comes from the back and forth and ‘how could you?!‘s, so the more of you sharing banter, the better. There isn’t a set number of rounds, it’s just a race to meet your victory condition first. One player wins, the others don’t, and that’s an ending befitting a game where the goal is to become the ultimate villain in the universe.

If you’re a fan of all things Marvel, it’s a fantastic game which really captures the feel and aesthetic. With two, it’s pretty good, with three or four players though, Marvel Villainous shines like an infinity gauntlet loaded with stones.

Designer: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Ravensburger
Art: n/a
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60-90 minutes

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

The post Marvel Villainous Review appeared first on Punchboard.