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

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

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

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

Jackanory

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, there’s more

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Wilmot’s Warehouse (2024)

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

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

Star wars

The overall premise of Eclipse is pretty simple. Explore the space around you, adding more tiles as you go, building the shared galaxy. If the new system has resources you can gather them as ongoing income. If it has aliens in it, you can fight them for glory and riches. If two players come into conflict, they can fight one another by rolling dice. Pretty much exactly what you might expect. How it does it all is really clever, really engaging, and a lot of fun for the most part.

You can take as many turns as you like in each round by moving a disc from your Influence Track to your action track. Why wouldn’t you take ten actions instead of three? Each action you take increases the amount you need to pay at the end of the round as upkeep, so you need to be careful you don’t go beyond your means. It’s a clever system that introduces a nice level of balance. Sure, you can go out to produce as much money as possible to take loads of actions, but without materials or science (the other two of the game’s three currencies), all of those actions might be worthless.

It’s a simple balance which is made lop-sided by the variety of different alien races available and leaning into their unique, asymmetric abilities and differences. The Planta for instance are interesting to play as their strategy relies on exploring more than the other races, controlling lots of systems, so you might well find the Planta’s player exploring backwards, away from the conflict.

One of my favourite things about the game is the fact that although each player has the same class of ships available to build. the components and technology are completely customisable. You want a finely balanced ship with computers, shields, guns, and engines? Great, go for it. You want to create a glass cannon ship which is essentially a load of cannons duct-taped together with an engine stapled to it? Fill your boots. It’s a cool system which makes the game more engaging, as you need to know what you’re getting yourself into when it comes to PvP combat.

You’re actively encouraged to spread your wings and explore, because exploring means more resources, and often grabbing an exploration tile at the same time. The tiles give you a minimum of 2VPs, but often have some great bonuses such as free ships for your fleet, or unique, powerful techs to employ. The spreading tendrils of your empires eventually intertwine, and that’s where the interaction begins. The interaction is what drives Eclipse and makes it as much fun as it is.

In space, everyone can hear you scream. And cheer. And groan.

It should go without saying that Eclipse is a very interactive game. Player interaction is baked into its very core. It’s not a case of if players are going to fight one another, it’s a case of when, and who will fight. There’s a potentially overlooked piece of the game’s production that reinforces the interaction, and that’s the tech tray. Each round a new batch of the universe’s hottest new tech becomes available and gets added to the tray, and the first turns of each round often turn into a bun-fight for who manages to get their sticky mitts on which new tech first. In practical terms, the tray gets handed around the table like a box of chocolates, and in two of the different groups I’ve played Eclipse with it’s been referred to as the chocolate box. It’s a communal activity that gets eyes up from the player boards and boring holes into the souls of the other players, using every ounce of psychic energy to defy them from choosing the tile you wa… oh, you bastard, you took the one I wanted.

Get used to that.

The techs that become available are drawn from a bag each round, which means sometimes you’ll not see new weapons appear for the first half of the game, for instance. Once they do, the competition for them is fierce, and the lucky person who gets their hand on a powerful new tech quickly becomes a force to be reckoned with. It’s a decent way for the game to evolve, but it can be almost painful to be the last person to pick once all the good stuff has gone. If you plan your game around destroying anything stupid enough to wander into your crosshairs and you’re left with the puny “does one damage on a 6 rolled on a D6” guns, it sucks. Plain and simple. Especially if you’re the player to the right of the first player in a 6-player game, as five players get to pick before you. This is fixed with a turn order variant which I would recommend always playing with, but the out-of-the-box experience is a pain in the backside.

One of the thickest, twangiest strings to the Eclipse bow is how different every game is. The techs come out in different order, the space tiles are always somewhere different than the last time you played, and the races around the table start out in different proximity to one another. You can try to play the same way again and again, but fate (and the tech tile bag) will simply kick you in the balls and laugh at you, delivering upgraded drives instead of the plasma cannons you had on your Christmas list.

It’s clear that a ton of development has gone into Eclipse. The interlocking systems are so finely tuned that it feels like a polished Euro game. I love a Euro with complex, interlocking systems. The biggest difference between Eclipse and a Euro though, is the sandpit nature of the game. It ought to be its biggest strength, but as often as not, it’s its biggest problem. With the loose reins that the players are on when running headlong into this sandpit, it’s easy to trip and find yourself trying to stand back up for the rest of the game.

We will rebuild! Or at least, we’ll try to.

If you’re doing well in Eclipse you feel powerful. It’s a really fun experience to just keep adding more and more guns to your unstoppable war machine and clash head-on with someone else doing the same thing. If, however, you stumble early, it can be a lonely, demoralising experience. My most recent experience (and the trigger for me writing this review) saw me fall victim to the dice. Not once. Not even twice. Three times in a row. Combat in Eclipse isn’t deterministic as it is in Voidfall. All you can do is give yourself the best chance you can when it comes to combat. Add more guns to your ships, giving you more dice to roll per ship, then send a bunch into combat. From there you hope the law of averages works out. Lady luck is fickle though, and when you lose fights you should have won on average, it’s so painful. Going in with 60/40 odds in your favour won’t cut it. You want to be going in with at least 85% likelihood of winning to be sure.

When your ships are destroyed, all you can do is rebuild. Rebuilding takes resources, and more often than not you need to wait until the next income turn to get the resources you need, not to mention the actions, which as we learned before, cost money. The money you get from income rounds. Every round you spend rebuilding is another round your rivals are making their armada bigger and stronger, and experienced players can start snowballing in power. I realise I probably sound like I’m moaning about nothing here. It’s a 4X game, right? You take a gamble, it might not pay off. You take your licks and start again. In other games, it doesn’t feel as downright punishing. There’s a sweetener in that you get to take something out of the VP tile bag just for taking part in a battle, which is a genuinely great thing when war is foisted upon you by another player, but it’s no real compensation for losing everything you had in one fell swoop.

To make it clear, we’re talking about finding yourself potentially two rounds wasted (of eight in total) just because the dice you thought you’d swung in your favour didn’t work out. Honestly, I’m not sure what could be done to change it – the dice, combat system, and tech upgrades are so integral to the system now.

The same is true of getting cornered, which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say in a game about exploring space. if your neighbours align their explored tiles in such a way that you can’t join yours to them, sometimes your only choice is to explore away from the middle, taking the lower-value zone 3 tiles, or to push towards the middle of the board, into a skirmish you know you can’t win. Woe betide you if someone notices your bottleneck and forces their way down it.

Regardless, for all my moaning, people like Eclipse. Correction – people LOVE Eclipse, and why shouldn’t they? It does everything it sets out to and more. Overall it’s a very, very good game. My problem is with the sharp edges left in the cosmic sandbox.

Final thoughts

This is an odd review for me to write. I think Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is a fantastic game that scales well from all counts from two to six. It sets out to do something specific and it does it. So why, at the top of the review did I say I’m not sure I ever want to play it again? Unless you’re very good at the game (and I am not), realising you don’t have a hope of winning with two more hours to play can feel soul-destroying. Eclipse needs a specific group to get the most from it. Friends who want to get together and enjoy an evening of games, snacks, drinks, and banter. You can end up in situations where one or more players are basically out of the game, or playing as a race which doesn’t quite work. If someone doesn’t know how to really lean on their race’s abilities, they’re screwed. make sure you do some hand-holding once you start playing with non-Terran races.

In the game I referenced above I had to rebuild my ships three separate times, and each time I did it I wasn’t advancing. I wasn’t challenging the other players. I was stuck in a narrow band of space I had no sideways escape from, my only option was to head to the middle of the map, straight into the arms of a waiting war machine. I enjoyed the evening, and I had fun with my friends, but two-and-a-half hours of not being able to compete or interact with anyone else isn’t much of a gaming experience for anyone. Honestly I suspect that some, if not most of that was down to the way I played. Choices I made, mistakes I made, but that’s my point. When you’re learning the game your bike can be very wobbly, while other players are off doing somersaults over ramps. Stabilisers are the way to go. What makes Eclipse sing is the group you play with. Ease them into their first few games, and you’ll have more players who love the experience. Steamroll them and I wouldn’t expect to see them at the next game.

Take it as a warning more than anything else. You’ll have amazing battles, you’ll be telling the stories of “Remember that game when all that stuff happened” for ages and be making great memories, but some people may have a thoroughly demoralising time. It may mean that more experienced players have to make sub-optimal plays just to keep the game flowing and keep everyone involved, or at least help them make good choices. Or not. Maybe you love a game where you get to trip someone over and then steal their lunch money. If you do, Eclipse is perfect.

Eclipse is an experience in a box. If you enjoy it, you’ll play it 20, 40, a hundred times and still love every minute, and it’ll be more than worth its £120+ price point. Just make sure it’s right for you and yours before you spend. If you want to get an idea of what it’s like before you spend, check out the excellent TTS scripted mod. It’s quick and easy to use, and I managed to get three online games played in addition to the two real-life plays. I still prefer Voidfall, but there’s no denying that Eclipse: Second Dawn for thee Galaxy is a fantastic game.

Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy (2020)

Design: Touko Tahkokallio
Publisher: Lautapelit.fi
Art: Noah Adelman, Jere Kasanen, Jukka Rajaniemi, Sampo Sikiö
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 60-200 mins

The post Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Corpse Revival 101

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

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

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

Light in the dark

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Cadaver (2023)

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

The post Cadaver Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I have no idea where the pool analogy came from, or why I took it so far. Let’s move on.

Crimson red

Card games in this style aren’t something new. Assemble a deck of cards that complement one another, and take turns playing cards in your play area which beat the cards in your opponent’s play area. It’s a tried and tested concept, and new games keep getting made in this style because it works. It works really nicely. Your deck becomes this crafted, personal thing, which you pit against someone else’s crafted, personal thing, to see which comes out on top. When you’re not playing, you can tinker with your various decks’ compositions, and in the case of Achroma, just enjoy the beautiful artwork. I’ve not seen another card game with the same style of illustration that Achroma employs, and I like it all the more for that fact.

I’m not the most experienced in this field of tabletop games, but I’ve played a bit of Netrunner, I’ve played the Pokémon TCG with my son, and I’ve watched plenty of Magic: The Gathering. Everything that even someone as inexperienced as me would expect to be in the game is there, albeit with different names. Your play area is your Canvas. Your deck is your Palette. Discarded cards go to your Dregs. Shards are the currency du jour, and in an interesting twist to some games, they’re both what you spend to play cards, and what you need to collect to win. Collect 30 shards and you win. Actually, it turns out that isn’t the only way to win. Collecting 30 shards is called a Chroma win, while reducing your opponents to zero shards – therefore knocking them out of the game – is called an Achrom win.

This concept of colour is everywhere in the game and plays an integral part in the setting and theme. Chroma is the magical (colourful) life force, which is fighting against Achrom (or, a lack of colour), a savage dark energy. It’s a really neat thing to weave this into the way the game is won or lost. Being able to win with either Chroma or Achrom is akin to a ‘good or bad’ win, yet it doesn’t feel bad. A win is a win, after all. No-one remembers how you won, just the fact that you did, right?

Yeah… about that.

Verdant Green

Achroma has obviously been built from the ground up with an accompanying app in mind. It’s an app which does a few things, but the most important for Achroma as a product, is the player profiles. When you first fire the app up, it’ll ask you to create an account, and show you where your friend code lives. If you play against another registered player, the apps are essentially synced, so the game knows who is playing against who, and it’ll update its database accordingly with the winner and loser. You can even place your phone, running the app, in your play area. It has a shard counter which is linked with your opponent’s, so if I steal one of your shards, your total automatically decreases while mine increases. That’s pretty cool.

As I alluded to above, the app also tracks how you win your games. There’s a slider which tracks your Chroma vs Achrom wins, which is a really nice touch. It strikes me that Achroma could easily have been a digital-only game, like Hearthstone, or an analogue-only one. Instead, it stands astride both, with a foot in each pond. Oh dear, I’m back with the pool analogies. Moving on!

Although my experience so far has been limited to the ‘The Curse of Curdle Hill’ starter pack, I’ve found the game really easy to learn, easy to play, and less fussy to do deck construction with. The construction rules for the base game type – Canvas – limit you on the rarity of the cards you use and how many copies of each you can use. Decks are also locked to a single one of the five Realms in the game, so there’s not the same mental strain of how best to combine more than one type, that you might get in Pokémon TCG for example. The app even tracks which cards you have in your collection through a code on the bottom of each card, which you can enter manually, or scan with your phone’s camera. If, that is, it works for you. Which brings me onto…

Inky black

For the most part, my reviews focus on the positives of a game. I try not to cover games I know I won’t like, for obvious reasons, and while I really like the actual game of Achroma, I’ve got a few issues with the app. And they’re quite big ones, in my opinion.

First up, when I opened my ‘The Curse of Curdle Hill’ pack, I contacted the publisher because the rules were missing. It turns out that no, the rules weren’t missing, you just don’t get a physical copy of them. I don’t mind games that use apps in some way. I’ve covered the Escape Tales series which all use one, Destinies (review here), which is entirely app-driven, and Dune Imperium (review here), which has a great solo app. But not even being able to learn how to play the game I’ve got in front of me, bothered me hugely. I appreciate that they describe the game as evolving, but at the very least include the base game rules.

So I downloaded the app. My son was off school ill recently, and while I was looking after him one night, I thought it was the perfect chance to learn to play. He’s sleeping beside me, I’ll open the app and read the rules, and teach myself how to play. Except there are no written rules in the app. I followed the guide thing that the app starts with into the tutorial, which shows you how to use the app, and then jumps into a how-to-play video, which is great. However, the video has no subtitles/closed-captions. So with the sound down (so as not to wake him), or if I was deaf, I still had no idea what to do.

Eventually, I found that if I started a game, then tapped on the diamond, and then chose Rules, it showed me the rules! Hoorah! Except that the rules page is just an in-app web browser pointed at the ‘How to play’ page on their website. Oh, and that in-app browser has no navigation buttons to drop back into the game you were playing – Grrr! My final grumble, you’ll be pleased to hear, is that the card scanner just doesn’t work. I’ve got access to two Android phones here running v9 and v12 of the OS, and on both the scanner won’t use the camera. It just shows a grey box. I’m pretty technically-minded, so I even tried manually adding camera permissions for the app (as it doesn’t ask for any), but it still doesn’t work. As a result, I’ve entered a total of one card, because there’s no way I’m manually typing in all 60 eleven-character codes. Maybe it’s better with iOS? I don’t know, but it shouldn’t matter which type I have.

Final thoughts

Achroma is a difficult game for me to review. I love supporting indie publishers here, especially when they’re from the UK, and Achroma is practically up the road from me, in Dorset. The game they’ve put together in Achroma is great, it really is. It’s a quick, easy-to-learn CCG-type game, and the polish on it, for a first title, is superb. The cards even have shiny UV-spot pieces on them. The artwork, illustration, and design principles are better than a lot of games I’ve played that have come from publishers and designers with a lot more time and money to throw at them.

I know I devoted a whole section to my grumbles about the app, and as much as I wish I didn’t have to write it, I owe it to myself and my readers, to be honest and transparent. I was sent a copy, for free, to review, but I have to treat it as if I’m a paying customer. You can shout “Get with the times, old man!” all you like, but the reality is I had a game which I couldn’t learn to play without a phone or computer next to me, no sign of even a player aid or reference card for when I’m in-game, and a card scanner which doesn’t work. If all of those things weren’t true, I’d have been over the moon with Achroma.

The upshot is this. If you don’t mind having your phone with you to play, and if you’re happy learning from a video or website, then CCG lovers are likely to absolutely love Achroma. The folk behind it have plans for more packs, more Kickstarter campaigns, and more and more content, which is what games like this live and die by. I think the game is very clever, very enjoyable, and gorgeous to look at. I’ll just always have that nagging thing, clawing at the back of my brain, asking what will happen when my phone is no longer supported, or if something were to happen to the studio. With a hard copy of the rules, everyone could play this forever. If the website and app disappeared tomorrow, the rules – and therefore the whole game – go with them. These are the times we live in, and I wish Realm Runner all the luck in the world with their game. They deserve it, Achroma is a fantastic game.

Preview copy provided by Realm Runner. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Achroma (2021)

Designer: unlisted
Publisher: Realm Runner Studios
Art: unlisted
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Achroma Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Let’s take a closer look.

Supporters’ club

I’ve made it a mission of mine to make sure I give as much exposure to UK-based indie designers and publishers. That said, I’ve got my standards, and I won’t review just any old thing. I was really pleased when Chris from Unlucky Archer approached me to take a look at his game, as it’s just the sort of thing which I know my family would have a blast with.

The idea is really simple. Draw a card, play a card, and aim to always have at least one card in your hand. The cards you play often require the roll of a dice afterwards to see what the outcome is. Say, for example, I play my Knight Club attack card at you. If I roll an even number you have to discard a card (good for me, bad for you), but an odd number lets you draw another card.

Play continues around the table in this manner until one person is left gloating, with a smug, smug grin on their face. If the game was only made up of the parts I’ve mentioned so far, it’d be fun for about five minutes, with all but the very smallest amount of player agency. Luckily, there’s more to this little box of cards, and plenty to keep you thinking.

Brief encounters

Included in the draw pile are a bunch of Beast Encounter cards. Draw one of these and you’re forced to play it immediately, and do battle with whatever monstrosity comes off the top of the Beast deck. Each of your cards has various different symbols and strengths, and to beat the beastie back into its box, you need to discard cards. If the cards’ values add up to what’s written on the Beast card, you are victorious, and get to draw some more cards.

Fantasy games really ought to have monsters in them, so I’m really pleased this little tangential mechanism was added. The same goes for the Blunder cards, which again, need to be played immediately. These live up to the Unlucky part of the game’s name, and you’ll end up stubbing your toe and falling into a hole, discarding a card along the way.

Each player draws a character card too, which usually gives you a one-time buff or ability to ignore something. It’s only a small addition, but there’s enough there to make you feel like there are some strategic choices to make. Each card has a few sentences of lore and light-hearted descriptive text too, which is a really nice touch. It would have been a complete game without them, but they just show how much care has been put into the game. It’s clearly a labour of love.

Final thoughts

I don’t know Amy or Chris, but having played their game a good few times now, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’re fantasy nerds who want to bring their love to families, with a good dose of humour. It’s a simple, lightweight game of chaos, and it does what it sets out to do really nicely.

If the idea of luck in your games is a turn-off, it’s probably not going to appeal to you. The vast majority of the cards make you roll one of the included dice, and as far as I’ve seen so far, it’s all a 50/50 chance. Some cards might look for you to roll high, or low. Some want odd or even. The differences are cosmetic though, and it often comes down to sheer luck.

Far from being a hindrance, the luck factor that Unlucky Adventurers has been daubed with is its greatest strength in my opinion. It means any player, of any age or ability, has a near-equal chance of winning. I should know, my nine-year-old is unbeaten in our house. It immediately made me think of games like Top Trumps, with the fast back-and-forth, and games that take the same length of time as it takes for your tea to be cooked.

Quick, mad-cap, card-flipping mayhem for the whole family. I’m so happy to see another UK independent designer taking their first steps into our hobby, and doing a great job at it. Check out the Kickstarter here, launching very soon!

Preview copy kindly provided by Unlucky Archer. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Unlucky Adventurers (2022)

Designer: Amy Niven, Chris Holden
Publisher: Unlucky Archer
Art: Amy Niven, Chris Holden
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Unlucky Adventurers Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Did I tell you about the porthole defoggers?

After the brain-chewing mathematic co-op efficiency of Rescuing Robin Hood, Guns or Treasure takes the difficulty down a notch or three. It’s a no-nonsense card game of pirate vs pirate vs pirate… you get the idea. In the first part of the game, each of you plays cards from your hand to create ships in front of you. A card can have treasure, guns, or a bomb on it. Pirates like to keep things close to their chest (pun not intended), so as you add cards to a ship, they’re played face-down.

It’s a really cute mechanism, as the backs of the cards have masts and sails on them. Each time you add a card to a ship, it’s splayed vertically, which makes it look like you’re creating long ships, covered in sails.

Or are you?

You see, there’s a lot of cunning to be employed when you construct your ships. You can either continue adding to a ship you’ve already started, creating a huge galleon, or you could choose to make a tiny little two-card ship, more akin to a pedalo. Why would you? Mind games, swabs. Mind games.

Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!

After your ships are christened with bottles of rum and pushed out of drydock, it’s time for some marauding. In turn, you and your fellow buccaneers choose one of your own ships, and one rival ship, to engage in maritime fisticuffs. Reveal the cards, count the guns, and the most heavily armed wins the treasure from both boats. After the first round of marauding, you can retreat a ship instead, pulling it out of the water and claiming any treasure that was on it.

The thing which elevates these battles to proper mind games, is the inclusion of bombs. If a fight reveals a bomb on either ship, both ships are blown to smithereens, and the treasure belongs to Davy Jones (i.e. it sinks). Without the bombs,. Guns or Treasure would have been okay, but a bit pedestrian. With the bombs though, it’s great. Double-, triple-, quadruple-bluffing are all commonplace.

Picture it: you’re about to engage in naval combat with your significant other. They have a really long ship, and two shorter ones. What’s so special about that long one? They’ve filled it with guns I bet, hoping I’d attack. Or maybe they just want me to think that, and in fact it’s full of treasure, and they’ll retreat it. No, no, no, it’s got a bomb, I know it. She’s still mad at me for not folding the washing. Think you can get one over on me eh? I’ll show you!

“Hah, I can read you like a book! I’m not falling for that. I attack that smaller boat instead, and… oh crap, it’s a bomb”

Final thoughts

As I said at the outset, Guns or Treasure is a quick, light card game. It’s also a lot of fun. If you enjoy the sort of mind games that games like Sheriff of Nottingham conjure up, you’ll get a kick out of this. There are some really nice touches included, such as the optional Captain cards. Leave them out, and you have a nicely balanced game to introduce younger players to. Once you add them in, they bring asymmetric abilities into the game to make things more interesting. This is the way the game should be played. The captains are a diverse bunch too, which is nice to see, but you’ll have to take my Thunderbeard card from my cold, dead hands.

There are some great variants included in the rules, including a clever drafting mechanism, and another which sees captured treasure pass from ship to ship, which is chaos. The cards are gorgeous, with lovely clear iconography. Honestly, I’m struggling to find anything negative to say about it. If you’re anything like me, and pack small games in your bags and pockets anytime you go anywhere – just in case – Guns or Treasure is perfect. It’ll stay in my bag with The Resistance, 6 Nimmt!, and Yogi.

I’m a big proponent of games that don’t cost a fortune, with things the way they are in the world at the moment. 20$ (30$ if you include the expansion, which I haven’t played) is a bargain for a game that packs as much fun in a little box as Guns or Treasure does. I have a special category for games which people with kids under-10 will resonate with: “Games that fit on a small table while you’re waiting for overpriced rubbish food to arrive at chain restaurants and be over by the time it arrives.” Guns or Treasure fits very nicely into this category. Check out the campaign now by clicking here. Another winner here, Bryce & co, well done.

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

Guns or Treasure (2022)

Designer: Bryce Brown
Publisher: Castillo Games
Art: Paul Vermeesch
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Guns or Treasure Preview 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.

My God, it’s full of stars

The first thing players of the original Gravwell will notice is the new artwork. One of my favourite board game artists, Kwanchai Moriya, was brought in to spruce things up, and it looks gorgeous. It keeps a similar aesthetic, but the cards which drive the gameplay look clearer, and I prefer the look of the game board.

If you’ve never played Gravwell before, it’s a cross between a race game and a tug of war. Each player chooses a card from their hand and plays it face-down. The cards are flipped, then resolved in alphabetical order (each represents an element). The majority of the cards pull you towards the nearest object – be that another ship, or a piece of space junk – while a few push you away.

This is where the game gets interesting. The card you played may have moved you towards the next ship, just a couple of spaces ahead, and slingshotted you off towards victory. However, if that next ship played a card with a symbol that gets resolved before yours, they might have moved away from you, leaving the nearest object as a piece of junk floating behind you. Gravity doesn’t care which way it pulls, so off you go backwards, careening through space, back towards the start. Imagine the frustration, and smug satisfaction in your opponents face.

Form an orderly queue

The guts of Gravwell: 2nd Edition are built around one of my favourite mechanisms – action queuing. You’ve probably experienced it in at least one game, from Gloomhaven and Dungeon Lords through to Colt Express and 6 Nimmt!. In an action queue, players play their cards face-down, then when they’re flipped, some value on them gives them an order to be resolved in. Trying to guess what the other players are going to do, and then choosing your own counter-move, is as frustrating as it is exciting.

There’s a small amount of magic that happens when everyone’s played their chosen cards. When the cards are flipped, everyone’s eyes scour them so fast it looks like people watching a table tennis match. I love the sounds of delight and despair when everyone figures out what’s going to happen next, it’s real tabletop chemistry.

At first glance it might look like it’s just a game of chance, but once you figure out how it all works, you soon realise that the game is about the people around the table. It’s pure mind games. From the second round onwards, the new hands of cards are chosen in a drafting system, and if you’ve got a good memory you’ll know four of the six cards that other players have. Trying to remember them definitely helps, but it’s hard to do, which I think lends to the fun of the game. That’s what Gravwell is – a fun game.

Vive la difference

There are a few key differences between the original version of Gravwell, and this second edition. First of all, each ship has four special ability cards. These get charged when certain things happen in the game – ending your movement next to a piece of space junk, for example – and give you one-off special actions and abilities. I like these, they add a small amount of asymmetry to the game, which makes things really interesting, and means you can make tactical plays as well as just racing.

The second and third main changes work together really nicely. The first is a new fuel card type, the multipoint repulsor. These cards push every other object on the board away from you, but they only come into play at higher player counts. Higher player counts is the other big change, as Gravwell: 2nd Edition now supports up to six players! If you’ve played with the chaos of four before, this takes it to a whole new level.

When you play with more than four, you can choose to start from the inside and work outwards, as is the norm, or flip things on their head and work from the outside, inwards. It’s not too different at first, but when you get to the third round or so, and ships start crossing paths, it’s galactic mayhem, and it’s hysterical. You’ll need reminders of who is going in which direction, but that’s okay. Playing Gravwell is meant to be a fun experience. It’s a light-hearted game which gets people talking and laughing, and it’s a great social lubricant (for want of a much better expression).

Final thoughts

Gravwell: 2nd Edition is really good fun. It’s much lighter than games I’d usually go for, but that’s one of its biggest strengths. I could take this to a family gathering, and teach everyone how to play in five minutes. It’s also a great game to start or end a regular games night with. It’s not too taxing, it plays out in about half an hour, and you can chat while playing. I recently took it to a local convention, and universally people enjoyed it.

It’s worth saying that it’s a far better game with three or more players. You can play with two, but it’s a really dilated experience. What makes the game fun is the chaos of ships and objects pulling each other hither and thither, and when there’s only two of you and a couple of pieces of junk, space feels too empty. One silly thing that I really enjoy is the way people count out their spaces when they move. Everyone – and I mean everyone – I’ve played with does that thing we all did with Monopoly or Snakes & Ladders, where you pick your piece up and tap out every step on the board. There’s no need to, because every fifth space has its number printed on it, but it’s a game that makes you feel like a kid again.

I’ve played enough times now for my cards to show the first signs of wear, which goes to show how much I enjoy it. It also shows that I really ought to sleeve the cards. Gravwell: 2nd Edition would make a brilliant addition to a fledgling collection of board games, and the super-cool minis and gorgeous board mean anyone and everyone can find something to enjoy. If you enjoy games like Jamaica, you’ll love Gravwell.

Review copy kindly provided by Renegade Game Studios. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Gravwell: 2nd Edition (2021)

Designer: Corey Young
Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
Art: Kwanchai Moriya
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Gravwell: 2nd Edition Review appeared first on Punchboard.