In Fit To Print you’ll be frantically choosing which articles, photographs, and adverts you want to publish in adorably-named papers such as The Chestnut Press or The Evening Hoot. This manifests as players grabbing facedown tiles from the middle of the table, taking them back to their equally adorable 3D desks, before flipping them to see whether the tile is an advert, photo, or article, and deciding whether they want to keep it. Those that don’t make the cut get returned to the pile faceup, ready for a rival to claim and print them.

Read all about it!

There are two main phases in the game – the Reporting phase and the Layout phase. The Reporting phase is the one I described above which is just a grab against the clock. If it sounds like Galaxy Trucker to you, then yeah, that’s a fair comparison. The big difference, however, is what happens when the time runs out. Just for reference, there’s no timer included. Just use a phone, clock, stopwatch – whatever. The time limits in the rulebook dictate the difficulty level.

Once the time runs out, you move into the Layout phase, and that’s where the comparison to Galaxy Trucker stops. In that game, you make the best spaceship out of the parts you’ve got. In Fit To Print you’ve each got a board that represents the front page of your woodland broadsheet, and just like in real life, you don’t want to leave blank space on the page. So the idea is to make sure that you pick up enough tiles to cover the page, but at the same time you don’t want to pick up more tiles than you can fit, as you’ll get penalised for taking tiles you don’t place.

On top of that, there are rules for placing tiles. You knew there’d be more rules, didn’t you? Adverts can’t be placed adjacent to adverts, photos next to photos, or articles of the same colour next to one another. Just arranging your tiles to follow those rules is quite a challenge, but wait, there’s more! Photos have scoring conditions based on what’s placed next to them. Articles have either happy faces or sad faces on them, denoting good and bad news respectively. If the level of good and bad news isn’t perfectly balanced, you get penalised again.

On top of that, as if we needed more to think about, are the centerpiece tiles that can score you more points based on the conditions printed on them. It all results in a two-dimensional tile-placement puzzle which adds layer after layer of other things to think about. You’ll finish your layout and be happy with finally managing to cover the board, then start moving things and looking for ways to increase your score, only to realise that you can’t remember what it looked like. Argh! It’s simultaneously hilarious and infuriating, and it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

The Sunday papers

It’s frustrating when you teach a game to people and then play it on the understanding that it’s “just a learning game“, meaning you basically write that game off. Fit To Print actually has three rounds, so even if you do terribly in one round, there’s more than enough chance to redeem yourself later. I love the way the Friday edition works on a grid of 7×14 squares, Saturday on a slightly bigger 8×16 grid, with Sunday expanding once again and going to 9×18. It doesn’t sound like it’s getting much bigger, and on the boards, it doesn’t even look like it’s getting much bigger, but that’s just an illusion. The three issues use 98, 128, and 162 squares to fill respectively.

Why the basic maths lesson? Or should I say ‘math’ lesson for my readers on the other side of the Atlantic? I bring it up because it becomes really tricky to figure out how many tiles you have compared to how many you need. It’s not like you can even just spread the tiles out to get a rough idea. Designer, Peter McPherson (you might remember that name from Tiny Towns and Wormholes, both of which I reviewed here and here respectively) saw that coming and added a rule which says every tile you take has to be piled up on your little 3D desk. Trying to estimate how much of your board a couple of stacks of tiles will cover is a game in itself.

If you’re still sitting there on your throne of nerddom, thinking this all sounds a bit easy, I’ve still got a couple more surprises in store for you. You could add in the character cards which give each player a unique power, and there’s another option to add Breaking News cards which throw random events into each day which introduce different restrictions and bonuses.

As you can probably tell at this point in the review, this isn’t just an entry-level tile placement game. I can say from experience despite having a ton of variety in the way you play, and despite the various rules and constraints you’re working around, it’s still a very family-friendly game. I speak from experience. I played it with my wife and son and immediately after playing, they asked to play again. Take it from me when I say that that’s high praise indeed. We didn’t even bother using the relaxed, family-friendly rules in the rulebook.

Final thoughts

My eyes lit up when I saw that Ian O’Toole was responsible for the art in the game. It’s fair to say that I’m a bit of a fanboy, but I also know that games with his touch on them tend to have great graphic design too, and Fit To Print is no exception. Being able to tell what a tile has on it at a glance is extremely important in a real-time game like this, and he nails it.

All this talk of real-time and the frenetic energy the game delivers might turn you off. You might have a disability which affects your fine motor skills, or vision problems which make it hard for you to tell at a glance which kind of tile is which. Maybe you just can’t stand real-time games because you don’t enjoy them. Almost all of my plays have been played using the real-time rules, but it’s important to note that there’s a turn-based variant included in the rulebook which alters the gameplay and makes it much more strategic.

The cherries on top of the Fit To Print cake are the solo mode, puzzle mode, and challenges. The solo mode works a lot like the multiplayer game, which makes it a great way to practice, and I really like the inclusion of the puzzles. Each puzzle has a strict setup of tiles available, with the knowledge that you can’t use them all. If you like to take your time to puzzle your way to the best score, you’ll love it.

Fit To Print blends puzzles and fast-paced gameplay into a tile-laying game that looks beautiful. It’s twee, it’s fast, it’ll hurt your brain, and you’ll have a lot of fun with it.

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

Fit To Print (2023)

Design: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Fit To Print Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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

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

Where you from, you set-sy thing?

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Deep Dive (2023)

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

The post Deep Dive Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Bear with me, I can explain.

Evolution crawling from the sea

ACME is the second game in this series, following on from 2019’s Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea. It builds on the original with the same system, but some changes. In ACIS there are 10 civilisations, each with their own homeland, but those numbers jump to 17 civilisations and 22 different homelands in ACME.

Let that number sink in. 17 civilisations to choose from. How many games can you think of that come with anything even like that number of different factions, even with expansions? I’ll concede that there are small differences between the civilizations. Usually, it’s just a change or addition to a standard rule which fits with that civilisation, thematically, but combined with the location(s) of their homeland, it results in some really nice asymmetric play.

On top of the bigger numbers, the board itself is different. Land in ACIS is all of one type, whereas in ACME there are four different types, and the types are important. Having settlements in different terrain types adds to the number of ‘Discs for Growth’ you get as income at the start of a turn, and mountains can gain strongholds to bolster your defenses. Turns in ACME represent hundreds of years (500 in the first epoch, 100 in the fourth epoch) and the growth represents your people spreading out across the Middle East. Sometimes into untouched lands, sometimes butting heads against your neighbours, which is where the fun begins.

The other big change is with Wonders from the original game making way for Deities. Deities in this case shouldn’t give religious people much cause for concern as they don’t attempt to use any real ones, to the best of my knowledge. As the design notes in the rulebook state, during the epochs the game takes place in there were thousands of gods worshipped. ACME makes an attempt to distil them down to seven generic deities such as God of War, God of the Skies, God of the Dead, etc.

If you’re new to this series, once you ‘invest’ in a deity you can use its power on every turn, as long as its temple remains in play in your homeland. Some of these powers are really powerful, so choosing when to claim one, and which one you claim, can have a big impact. If you’re coming from ACIS, the biggest differences between Wonders and deities is that each person can only have a single deity, and they get to use it on every turn, not just when placing a disc on it.

Cardplay

There are no dice to worry about in Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East, but there’s a whole bunch of cards. Cards drive the majority of what happens in ACME, and they come in a variety of different flavours. Some get played during the aptly named Card Phase and do things like adding and removing discs to and from the board, changing the balance of the power. Some are investment cards, allowing you to add them to your play area with a few discs on. You get to trade those discs in at different times for different benefits. I particularly like the few Religion cards that turn up, which can only be used if you establish a deity first.

The juiciest cards of the bunch are the competition cards. During the competition phase of each turn each contested area gets resolved. If there are stacks of discs from different civs they duke it out, but each player can choose to play any number of competition cards face-down before they’re resolved. They grant you any number of benefits to help swing things in your favour, and balancing how many you use, and for which areas – that’s where the heart of the strategy lies. You’ve no way of knowing whether the cards someone has in hand are competition cards waiting to trip you up, or just cards they’re hanging onto. They might even be holding a Negate card, which as the name suggests, allows you to negate certain effects too. There’s no denying that combat can be a tense and cagey affair.

Luckily, interaction between players is encouraged. Not happy about the way a situation is developing along your western borders? Make a mutually beneficial deal with someone else. You’re meant to be representing great civilisations after all, so seeing this kind of back-and-forth is the game is great. It can be tempting to try to crush all before you early on, taking what feels like an unassailable position at the top of the pecking order, but it often doesn’t work out like that. It’s one thing to become dominant among the other civilisations, and a very different one to stay in that position. ‘Kill the king’ is alive and well in ACME, and I’m here for it.

Time flies when you’re having fun

ACME is an odd duck in some respects. There’s a maximum of four epochs to play, each with four turns. 16 turns doesn’t sound extraordinarily long, but those 16 turns could quite easily keep you playing for in excess of four hours, especially with the maximum quota of six players. It’s so much fun exploring the game’s systems though, and seeing how the shape of that part of the world changes as the years march on, that it really doesn’t feel like that long. Much in the same way as Sid Meier’s Civilization video games erased hours and hours of my life in the blink of an eye, time just zips along.

The game offers a fairly unique sandbox approach to games. There are a bunch of historically-inspired scenarios in the included Playbook if that’s your thing, but you’re encouraged to decide how you want to play. Don’t have four hours spare? Agree to play just the first two epochs. Only three of you are playing, and you want to keep things tight and aggressive? Add the border discs to carve a usable piece of the map out, leaving the rest forbidden. Maybe there are only two of you but you want to avoid the knife fight in a phone booth feel of just using a small part of the board. So pick a couple of civilisations each, or throw in a few Non-Player civs too. This open-ended feeling will feel like a joy to some and a real sticking point to others.

Some people like to have their game prescribed. The map is a certain size, x civilisations will play, and it will last y turns. There’s a lot to be said for that kind of structure being placed around a game. If that’s what you’re coming from, and that’s what you enjoy, then ACME can feel alienating. It’s the difference between being given a Lego kit and following the instructions to make a car and being given a box of Lego pieces and being told to come up with your own design. Some people love that, some don’t. Just be aware of that going into the game. As I mentioned above, there are preset scenarios, and there are guidelines on how to create your own, but ACME is a game that’s meant to be explored and played with, and you’ll get the most from it if you have a regular group who’ll enjoy that.

Final thoughts

Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East is a pretty unique game. The grand scale of nations rising and falling over the course of thousands of years is somehow contained within a game with a basic ruleset. Trust me, it won’t take long to learn how to play the game. It means that the rules do the most important of things with a game like this though – they just disappear. You don’t have to think too hard about what you can do, or how you do it. You just think about what you want to do. In fact, the only time you ever really need even the player aid, let alone the rulebook, is checking how many growth discs you’re awarded for what areas during the expansion phase.

The cards need a special mention. The artwork on each of them is gorgeous, without exception, and each has a quote from the King James version of the Bible’s Old Testament. The truly remarkable thing is that designer Mark McLaughlin has managed to find a quote for each of the game’s 103 fate cards which matches what the card describes. If you know the King James version, you know how expressive and poetic the text is, and you’ll find yourself quoting the text on the cards as you lay waste to your opponents.

The rest of the components are pretty standard GMT fare. Coloured cubes and discs, a nice board, and thin, card player boards and player aids. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. The coloured discs make it really easy to read the board state at a glance.

One other thing I really, really like about ACME, is the way it gives players who don’t get started well a chance to turn things around. If you find yourself eradicated from the map, or more than 5VPs behind everybody else, you can invoke the Gilgamesh rule. The Gilgamesh rule lets you start afresh with a new civilisation, a new set of discs, and a chance to take vengeance on those who wiped your predecessors from the face of the globe. It’s a really cool thing to do to fight needless player elimination, and I think it’s great.

If you like the idea of a sandbox civ game with a ton of ways to play, Ancient Civilisations of the Middle East is absolutely fantastic. Simple rules, easy cardplay, and enough strategy to keep everyone happy.

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

Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East (2023)

Design: Mark McLaughlin, Chris Vorder Bruegge, Fred Schacter
Publisher: GMT Games
Art: Mark Mahaffey
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 120-420 mins

The post Ancient Civilizations Of The Middle East Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Race leader

There are surprisingly few pure racing board games. Many games use a race mechanism to decide a winner, but it’s abstracted from the theme of the game. Reiner Knizia’s The Quest for El Dorado (review here) is a great example. If you strip it down to the nuts and bolts of the game, it’s a card-driven hand management game, with the goal of being the first to the end. Heat takes the same approach, but puts it in the classic race environment of a road race. Other games do the same, such as Formula D, Rallyman, and the current de-facto recommended racing game, Flamme Rouge.

Heat dons the livery of classic 1960s-style racing cars. I don’t know which car the minis in the game and on the cards are based on, but they look like the Lotus 25 or Eagle Weslake to me*. Engines and wheels with a human strapped to them, and nary a spoiler in sight. Playing Heat is super simple – check which gear you’re in on your player board, play that many cards from your hand, add up the points on those cards, and move along the track that many spaces. I’m not over-simplifying things here, that genuinely is all you need to do to actually play the game. The trick (you knew there was a trick coming) is in which cards you choose to play, and which gear you’re in at any given time.

If you end your movement directly behind or beside another car, you slipstream past them and move in front. Let’s say you’re in a race and two cars are neck-and-neck, side-by-side on the track ahead. If you land directly behind them you’ll go whizzing by, like a moron in a Range Rover using the hard shoulder on the motorway. All while maybe only using two or three points of movement. It’s a pretty glorious feeling, I can tell you. The biggest consideration to make comes in the corners, where entering with too much speed can cause you all manner of grief, and cause you to spin out.

* I have no idea about racing cars from the ’60s. I Googled these to sound knowledgeable.

Cooling off

The game’s name – Heat – is more than clever wordplay to bring about the atmosphere of hot tarmac, or even the heats of a race series. Heat is a crucial component in the game. Certain actions in the game, such as shifting too many gears at a time, or going too fast through a corner, add Heat cards to your deck. Heat cards are useless, you don’t want them. All they do is clog up your deck. In addition to gumming up the works, if you try to do something that would add a Heat card to your deck and – alas – there are none, you spin off the track! You don’t want to spin out, take my word for it.

Heat is mitigated by driving in lower gears. Lower gears result in cooldown, where you can move heat cards out of your hand, and back into your engine, which is a gorgeous thematic touch. Other cards represent the stress of racing, and the chance of a lapse of concentration messing things up. Playing one means drawing a speed card from your deck and playing it immediately, not knowing how far it’s going to send you. It’s just another example of the theme which has been applied like so much motor oil to every moving part of Heat’s engine. It all goes towards giving a wonderful push-and-pull feeling to the game, which once again, just slathers on more theme like dirty, greasy frosting.

The simplistic nature of the gameplay is both its strength and its weakness at the same time. After a few games with the base rules and with the same players, you start to see the meta rise to the surface. If the players know one another well enough, they can predict who will do what when they come to a corner. It can get really cagey, and it’s fitting that the game gets compared to Flamme Rouge (which is about cycling), because those cagey races are like watching a road race, waiting to see who’s the first to try to break the field and move ahead of the pack alone.

If you do tire (no pun intended) of the base game, there’s a feast of extra modules to throw in. Weather and race conditions, and a Garage module are the ones you’ll get the most value from. The Garage module has a round of upgrade drafting before the race starts to give players slightly asymmetric decks and different abilities, which is really cool. Other than that there’s a full campaign-style Championship module, and the Legends module which adds AI-controlled cars to the mix. The AI is extremely simple to run and makes for a great solo experience. It’s also worth adding in a couple of drivers to two- or three-player races, because Heat is at its best with a full complement of racers.

Racing with a flat?

The cars in Heat don’t have spoilers, but in spite of this, there are a couple of things that can really spoil the experience. If you spin off the track it can be really difficult to catch up with the pack. There is a catch-up mechanism called Adrenaline that gives the last racer (or two in a 5+ player game) an extra movement each turn and increases your cooldown. Despite these, it can still be pretty difficult to catch up. When you’re up among the other cars it’s relatively easy to stay in touch, and you only need one or two slipstreams to stay at the front. If you get dropped, however, and end up with more than one corner between you and the others, it’s really difficult to catch the front runners, and it can be a pretty miserable experience. That extra speed given by Adrenaline is often offset by the slipstreaming happening in the pack.

I played a four-player game of Heat where someone spun out on a corner, and had to push so hard to catch up that they spun out again soon after. One player won, and I came in second. The player in third knew there was no way they could be caught, so both he and the player in fourth just stopped playing. It was a really anti-climactic ending which took the wind out of everyone’s sails. I’m sure that with another play with the same people, things will be better, but it’s fair to say that Heat is definitely a game that benefits from a little shepherding if you’re playing with a mix of new and experienced players.

The other main bit of grit in Heat’s gears is the rulebook. On the whole, it’s good, but there are some ambiguous or misleading bits in there. For instance, when you play a Stress card or take a boost, you turn over cards from your deck to find a speed card. However, it’s easy to miss the fact that the value 0 and 5 cards you start with don’t count as speed cards. only the 1-4 cards. In almost all ways these cards all look the same. There is a symbol on the cards to denote it is a speed card, but it’s far from obvious. These little obfuscations are causing enough confusion that there’s a complete unofficial FAQ over on BGG (link to FAQ) and the promise of an updated rulebook from the designers.

Final thoughts

I don’t have many racing games. Looking at my shelves, I see Cubitos (review here), Jamaica, Long Shot: The Dice Game (review here), and The Quest for El Dorado (review here). Heat is certainly the only car racing game I have, and it’s a game that’s going to stay in my collection for a long time. It’s such a simple concept, but so well executed. Sure, it has its snags, as I mentioned above, but what game doesn’t? I’m really pleased to see that there are four tracks included in the game on two double-sided boards. Days of Wonder haven’t skimped on anything in the production of Heat.

The little plastic cars are a little piece of genius in my opinion. They help Heat straddle the line between game and toy, and they also get players doing those things in games which you haven’t done since you were a kid. You’ll go ‘brrrrrmmmm’, make screeching noises as you turn your car into a corner, and pick up your car and tap it along each space, counting your movement. You never need to – the distance to each corner is printed on the board – but you’ll do it like you were playing Snakes and Ladders as a five-year-old.

I’m not sure I’d choose to buy Heat if I knew I’d only ever play with two or three players. You can throw in the Legends module for some AI rivals, but it’s at its best with five and six players. Racing games are personal. It’s about beating the other players around the table. Yes, it’s satisfying getting a great piece of movement done, but it pales next to leaving someone eating your dust as you take the chequered flag. I fully expect to see Heat being played all over the place at conventions for the next couple of years, when people get the chance to play it with a full grid. Deceptively easy to learn, tons of fun, and plenty of scope for expansions and more tracks in the future, Heat is here to stay, and it’s great.

Review copy kindly provided by my retail partner kienda.co.uk. Thoughts and opinions are my own. Register for an account by visiting kienda.co.uk/punchboard today for 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.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal (2022)

Designers: Asger Harding Granerud, Daniel Skjold Pedersen
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Heat: Pedal To The Metal Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The original Libertalia game from all the way back in 2012 was often recommended when people asked for ‘Pirate game’ recommendations. Rightly so, too, as not only is it as piratey as a middle-aged man in eyeliner, it’s a darn good game too. The biggest problem it has is with availability. That is to say, it’s out of print and hard to get hold of. Luckily, Jamey and his crew at Stonemaier games came along, picked up the rights from the original designer – Paolo Mori – and brought the game up-to-date with new artwork, cards, and some re-jigged mechanisms.

A day in the life of a pirate

Libertalia is a game about making as much booty (yes, I mean treasure) as you can in classic ‘Golden age of Piracy’ fashion. You do this by sending a pirate to the island each day, reaping the benefits of any powers they have, and then choosing which booty you bring back to your ship. Pirates, in this case, are cards. Each player has the same deck of 40 unique cards, and at the start of each of the three voyages (rounds), you all draw the same random selection from your deck. Each pirate has their own ability/power, and each has a number, which represents its priority on the island.

Once all the pirates are on the board, they’re arranged in ascending numerical order and activated left-to-right for the day phase. You might activate a card that lets you move up the reputation track, remove certain items from the booty space for this turn, or maybe even swap your card out for another. After that’s resolved, you go back along the cards in the opposite direction for the dusk phase, activating any cards with the dusk logo, and choosing tiles from the booty pile.

You know how to play Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest now. It’s not a tricky game, mechanically, which makes teaching it a breeze. Where the game comes alive, the gunpowder behind its cannonball if you like, is the interactions between the players, and the slowly diverging strategies.

All aboard!

Libertalia is like getting on a crowded train. There’s pushing and shoving, trying to be first in the line so that you can be the first to take your daytime action, especially if you have a card that affects the loot available. This is because even if you aren’t playing that loot-affecting card on this turn, you know that every other player drew the same cards as you at the start of the voyage, and could potentially play that card. This feeling of dread gets more diluted as the game goes on, as hands of cards may contain cards from players’ graveyards, or they may carry some from one voyage to the next, but in the first couple of rounds, it’s very apparent.

Then, before you know it, you arrive at the next station on your crowded train – or in Libertalia terms – the dusk phase. Playing a high-number card might mean you go last in the day phase, but hey, look, the train doors are opening, and you can get off first. These folks get the prime pick of the loot available, and when you consider that in most cases loot = money, that can be a big deal. After all, the player who collected the most plunder during the game, wins.

What I’m trying to get across here, despite my poor Tube analogy, is the constant indecision and mind-reading attempts you’ll go through. The tussle on the island part of the board is brilliant. There’s nothing more satisfying than revealing the cards only for someone to see you about to put a teaspoon in their microwave, and to hear the groan (and possible expletives) that head your way.

A corsair, in a sea full of frigates

One of my pet peeves with board games over the last ten years or so is the sheer size of them. By the time you’ve set up the main board, your player boards, the card markets, that expansion board, the novelty bus made out of pewter, and lord know what else, you need a fricking huge table most of the time. Libertalia takes a step back from this trend and packs a game which you can easily fit on your kitchen table.

The feeling of neatness and conciseness goes right through the game. It’s a streamlined, smooth experience, which means that you can be all done inside an hour, even with five or six players. It means it fills a gap which is present in a lot of players’ collections. A satisfying, clever, quick game, with its hold packed full of interaction.

If you’re somebody who played or owns the original Libertalia, the artwork and presentation might come as a bit of a shock. It’s a very different feel and style to its forebear, and while I think it’s an improvement, your mileage may vary. The new reputation track is a much better way to break ties than the old silver number in the original game, and I really like the individual score-tracking chests instead of the score track.

Final thoughts

Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is a great game. It’s one of the few games outside of the social deduction genre which gets better and more interesting with higher player numbers. It plays up to six, and six doesn’t feel like too many. Things get busy, sure, but in a game that thrives on the interactions it generates between the players, it’s a welcome thing, not a problem. If you’re after something more ship-focused, take a look at Merchants and Marauders, or Maracaibo (one of my earliest reviews here!)

The included solo mode plays really nicely, and in all honesty, I’d rather play solo than with two. That might sound like an odd thing to say, but I think two is the weakest player count for the game. Somewhere from four to six players is the sweet spot. I’ve not even touched on the ‘stormy’ side of the board, or the different loot tiles which keep the game fresh, and even more fiercely competitive.

Stonemaier Games have done it again, packing some really nice components into a game which you’ll spend less than £45 for. I’m so pleased that there’s a successful publisher out there now actively working to bring out-of-print licences back to life, and not just copying the original verbatim. Working with Paolo to improve the original was a great idea. Quick, stylish, pirate fun, which excels with a bigger player count. Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest comes highly recommended.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. 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.

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.

Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest (2022)

Designer: Paolo Mori
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Lamaro Smith
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Landscaping

When you first unfurl the neoprene playmat the game takes place on, you’d be forgiven for giving a groan. A groan of “Oh no, this is going to be really complicated, and take ages“. Despite the bright colours and sharp printing, there are things to look at all over the place, which gives it an air of something more complex than it actually is. Oath’s grand scale belies a game that is actually easier to play than you’d think.

Rather than replicate the asymmetry of a previous game like Root, Oath drops all of the players into one of two roles to start with. You’re either the Chancellor – the big character with a sign on their back saying ‘Insert knife here’, or an exile – the ones looking to partake in the stabby-stabby action. Roughly speaking, the Chancellor wants to remain the Oathkeeper (the person ruling the most sites) until the end of the game, and the exiles want to usurp them by ruling the most sites, thereby taking the little cardboard Oathkeeper away from the Chancellor.

I’ve grossly oversimplified the game there, but it gives you an impression of what the game is about, which isn’t obvious at first. Players pick from the standard actions available to them, which let them gather more of their chunky Warband meeples, draft and play cards, attack one another, or move their bigger pawn piece around. Actions cost supply points, and you gain supplies back at the end of your turn. The more warbands you have out in the world, away from your player board, the more you have to support them, so the amount of supply you get back is reduced.

It’s a wonderfully simple dynamic that underpins the game. Yes, you can get your little wooden army stomping all over the place, but it’ll cost you, and limit what you can do. As with all things in life, moderation is key. The croutons in Oath’s soup are the Vision cards. Cards which, if drawn, give the exiles new, unique win conditions. The visions change the way each game plays out, and often result in a bit of exile-on-exile fisticuffs, drawing focus away from the relieved Chancellor.

Dictatorship

In many modern Euro games, the players dictate their own paths. They choose what they want to do, and build their strategy around those choices. In contrast, Oath requires you to adapt. You might have a plan, but executing it is another matter. Your actions and reactions affect the game, and the world it exists in, in ways you don’t expect.

Oath is a game that is meant to be played by at least four people, and the same group should be playing every game of the campaign together. The way that unspoken – or blatantly spoken – alliances form and break is brilliant. The game board changes so much as cards and locations are played. It’s like huge swathes of paint being daubed on a canvas, changing what you’re looking at while you’re taking it all in.

The Chancellor acts as a huge target, and playing as it can feel like you’re playing as an AT-AT on Hoth, as Snowspeeders buzz around your legs, trying to bring you down. The Chancellor’s got a wonderful trick up their sleeve, however, whereby they can offer citizenship to an exile, bringing them onside, in exchange for a powerful relic. It’s like the AT-AT pulls one of the rebels to one side and whispers “Look, if you don’t wrap that string around my legs, I’ll buy you a pint“. So now the Chancellor has other people on their side – nice! More twists ensue however, because the citizens can snatch power – and victory – away from the very person who offered them a partnership. It’s just brilliant.

As I sit here now, typing these words and explaining what I love about the game, it makes me want to play it again. And I can do just that. I can simply reset my game to the same state as when I tore the shrinkwrap off of it, and start again with a new group. I just need to find a new group.

Any takers?

Known by the company you keep

Teaching Oath well, and with the right group, is what elevates it from a clever idea to a masterclass in how to make a legacy game. Just, y’know, without all the legacy bits.

There’s a nicely-written book in the box which teaches you how to play, with led examples. If you’ve played Root and used the walkthrough in that, you know the sort of thing. It’s a nice way to do things, and Oath’s is a better teaching aid than Root’s. Understanding the motivation and planning behind why you’re doing, what you’re doing, is the most important part.

Now, while you can learn ahead of time and then teach your group, I believe the better option is to gather the group who’ll be playing through the campaign, and do the teach-and-learn together. The decks are pre-constructed in such a way that every example in the book ensures the cards are where it expects them to be, and I for one don’t much fancy trying to reconstruct them.

The other advantage of learning together is in levelling the battlefield. If nobody has prior experience of the game, then nobody has an advantage during the first session, when you should all be finding your feet. I really want to emphasise the importance of regular group for Oath, because it’s the one factor that will make or break the game. Forming alliances between the Chancellor and Exiles between games is personal and intimate. It weaves the players themselves into the world they’ve made.

The tendrils spawned by your decisions in one game reach far into the following games, tugging at their roots, influencing how they grow.

Final thoughts

Trying to sum up Oath in ~1500 words is a very difficult job. There’s so much I want to tell you. So many small touches that make it special. Every card you draw can cause you headaches, trying to choose where to play it. Trying to keep an eye on what everyone else is doing, while guessing what they might have planned, is something I adore in a game when it’s done well. And Oath does it so well. For such a simple action set to choose from, and with only three roles available in the entire game, Oath has no right to tickle your brain in the way it does.

Kyle Ferrin’s artwork and design choices aren’t just cosmetic. They’re practical. They open the game up. This game could easily have been set in a barren, dystopian future, full of muted browns and greys, as a wargame. It would have worked. It would have been a good game. Instead, it’s a child’s pencil case full of colour and fun. The bright, chunky pieces make the game friendly and less intimidating. The bizarre setting, the way you’re just dropped into an alien world, even the Chancellor’s mask – so much of it has you wondering “What?”. There’s no lore to read. You make it all up. It all helps to elevate the game above a standard theme or setting, which in turn increases its potential cohort of players.

But look, I’m not about to tell you Oath is for everyone. It’s a very thinky game, on the heavier end of medium-weight, which might put you off. It’s a game which takes you by the collar, pushes one arm up behind your back, and demands you find a regular group of people, in order to enjoy it properly. If I didn’t have access to that regular group, I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it as much. Sharing the experience of continuously reshaping the world in which you’re playing is an intrinsic part of the game’s joy. If you’ve got three or four people in your pocket though, and if you want a game that’ll land on your table week after week after week, Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile is borderline essential.

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

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

If you enjoyed this review, please consider my Ko-fi membership. It’s cheap, and you’ll make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile (2021)

Designer: Cole Wehrle
Publisher: Leder Games
Art: Kyle Ferrin
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The plot and setting are almost identical to Devir’s La Vina, which I reviewed last year. Inherit a vineyard, do better than the other players, yadda yadda, you know the drill. The gameplay is vastly different, however. Viticulture is a classic example of my favourite genre of board game, worker-placement. In each round (or year, as it is in this game), you take turns placing workers in the available slots to improve your vineyard, plant and harvest grapes, and even give visitors a tour, earning some much-needed coin in the process.

The biggest difference between Viticulture and many other worker-placement games is how much effort the game goes to, to try to bake the theme into the mechanisms. Certain varieties of grape require certain improvements in the growing conditions. Ageing wine requires better cellars. If you want to play a visitor card, you’ve got to assign one of your workers to give them the tour, putting more strain on the remaining workforce. All of that is before we even take the changing seasons into account.

Last of the summer wine

In creating Viticulture, Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone have gone to great lengths to weave the theme into the game. Half of the worker spots on the board are available in the summer (i.e. the first half of each round), and the others can only be used in the winter. The part that makes this seasonal segregation really interesting is that each of your workers can only be used once per year. So, if you place a worker in the summer, you don’t get them back for the winter.

I can only assume they’re just too tired to work in the winter? I can relate.

It leads to some interesting decisions, and plenty of room to employ a little experimental strategy. The seemingly natural choice is to use half your staff in the summer and half in the winter, but there are times you might want to min-max and throw everyone into the winter, for example. It’s not often that a game asks you to make decisions like these, and it’s something I particularly enjoy about Viticulture. It’s something that sets the game apart from the other worker-placement games in my collection.

The visitor cards also tie into the seasonal settings, where each visitor can only be played in its respective season. Cardplay is really important in Viticulture, and learning how best to combine your visitors and vineyard is the key to scoring well.

In vino veritas

Stonemaier Games have a habit of managing to work in a decent level of player interaction in their games, which is certainly not the norm for Euro games. Viticulture is no different and does a great job of employing passive interaction. Space for the workers is limited, and more often than not you’ll find yourself competing to carry out the same actions as others. The competition is balanced, like a good merlot, with the wake-up track. Before the start of each year/round, players take turns choosing the player order. The earlier you wake up and get to work, the better your choice of spaces to work. Late risers are compensated with additional cards, money, or VPs.

All of these things result in Viticulture being another game that brings out laughter and annoyance in the players, which I love. If someone takes the last spot to get something that you really wanted, the level of annoyance is directly proportional to the level of joy the person doing the blocking experiences. It’s something that is present in a lot of Euro games, but Viticulture nurtures and grows the interaction to a level that elevates it above something like Lords of Waterdeep, but still never gets as far as the outright meanness possible in games like Troyes or Hansa Teutonica.

The thing I enjoy most about Viticulture is again, another Stonemaier hallmark. The end of the game is player-driven, not turn-limited. If you’re ever frustrated at games like Ragusa or Merv, where it seems to end one turn too soon, you’ll grow to love the Stonemaier approach. The game ends when someone hits 20 VPs, and the game is scored as you play, so everyone knows when their last turn or two is coming. I’m a big fan of this, which is just another reason why I enjoy Viticulture as much as I do.

Final thoughts

There’s a reason that at the time of writing, three Stonemaier games sit in the top 30 of BGG’s rankings. Viticulture, along with Scythe and Wingspan, define the level of expectation in modern Euro games. Not the wooden cubes and muted colours of the classic German games, but rich, thematic experiences. Viticulture takes what could have been a very by-the-books worker-placement game, and adds layers of interest and fun.

It’s worth mentioning that this Essential Edition takes a lot of what people liked from the original Tuscany expansion, and adds it to the original Viticulture game. The Mamas & Papas cards especially, which give each player a random combination of starting bonuses. It might sound like a small addition, but these guys and girls often define the way you want to start developing your vineyard.

Viticulture: Essential Edition is a great game. Fans of worker-placement will love it, and its medium-weight complexity means it’s a very accessible game too. The only reason I could think of for someone not to enjoy it is that they really hate the theme. Honestly, if you’re someone new to the hobby who wants to build a collection of essential (coincidental naming) modern games, Viticulture: Essential Edition demands a place.

If you’re looking for something lighter and more portable, take a look at La Vina, and if you want to dial the complexity right up, cast your eyes over Vital Lacerda’s Vinhos Deluxe. For the rest of us, the value for money is like picking a yellow-label bottle of wine at Tesco that’s been reduced to £10. Much better than expected for the money.

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

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

Viticulture: Essential Edition (2015)

Designers: Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jacqui Davis, David Montgomery, Beth Sobel
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Viticulture: Essential Edition Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Jamey Stegmaier conceived Rolling Realms during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to creating a game for any number of players, which can be played over video calls. Finding inspiration for the setting of a new game isn’t always easy, so Jamey leaned on the Stonemaier back-catalogue to come up with not one, but eleven settings.

Pick n mix

Rolling Realms is essentially a mixture of mini-games. The eleven mini-games are each based on one of Stonemaier’s existing games, so you’ll play something related to Scythe, Viticulture, Wingspan, Euphoria, Tapestry, and more. Each time you play, you’ll randomly choose nine of the eleven game cards. and play over three rounds, with three different cards in each round.

Roll dice, choose things to cross off, get resources and coins, and do stuff with them. The formula is tried and tested, and it works. Rolling Realms carries on in the same vein as something like Hadrian’s Wall or Cartographers, which means you get the same sweet little dopamine kick when combos start firing off, and a crossed box leads to another crossed box, and another, and another… When that feeling gets its hooks into you, it’s extremely satisfying.

As with pretty much every Jamey game, stars are the aim of the game. You get to cross stars off your cards for meeting certain conditions on them, and the skill of the game comes in combining the realms in play to maximise your scoring.

Breeding familiarity

Rolling Realms’ biggest draw is also potentially its biggest drawback too. If you’re familiar with Stonemaier’s games, playing this game is real fan service. It’s a lovely feeling when you’re playing on a realm based on a game you’ve played. I remember the first time I played the Scythe and Euphoria cards, I thought “ooh it’s just like those things in those games!”. It’s like getting a tub of Celebrations chocolates – little bites of things you love.

The problem comes when you don’t know the franchises. Between Two Castles means nothing to someone who doesn’t know the game. Viticulture is wine, sure, but there’s no context. It reminds me of trying to show my nine-year-old the cartoons I loved as a kid. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye saying “Sure dad, these are great…”.

I guess there’s an opportunity to make players familiar with Stonemaier games they’ve not played, but the mechanisms in Rolling Realms are so far removed from their source material that you couldn’t get a feeling for what the originating game is about. On the other hand, it’s a game begging for expansions and promos as more games join Jamey’s stable.

Balance enquiry

Rolling Realms is a perfectly good roll-and-write. The mini-games are god fun and offer up lots of different ways to approach each realm, and work out the best way to combine the ones in play. For a game whose genesis came from a want to create a quick game during lockdown, the balance is surprisingly good. With wildly different combinations of cards you can still expect similar scores whenever you play.

It’s a really easy game to teach, but the first few games can feel a bit stilted. It takes a turn or two to understand how each card works, but luckily the rulebook does a great job of explaining the mechanisms on each. I have no idea what’s going on with the dice, however. They’re gigantic, and a strange blue & green swirly pattern. On the one hand, it makes real sense for a game designed to be playable over a video call or game stream. Bigger = more visible. But the white pips on the different colours makes it hard to tell at first glance sometimes. It’s a small complaint, but it’s something that bothers me every time I open the box.

Final thoughts

Rolling Realms is a great game, and the smallest Stonemaier box I own. It sits in a funny space in my collection, somewhere between filler and main game. There’s a really nice solo version in the box, presented as mini-golf, where each hole is a challenge during play. As much fun as the solo mode is, the multiplayer is where the game comes to life.

It reminds me of playing Cartographers or Tiny Towns more than Ganz Schön Clever. Everyone starts in the same state, plays with the same cards, and uses the results on the same dice. I really like that in a game, there’s no bad luck to blame, it’s just your own choices which influence the outcome. It’s really interesting to see how different strategies play out when each round ends.

If you’re a roll-and-write fan and a fan of Stonemaier games, you really ought to get Rolling Realms. It’s cheaper at <£20 than a lot of the same sort of games which offer far less replayability. It’s still definitely worth buying if you just love this genre of game, just be prepared for the settings on the cards to leave you feeling a bit cold. A game with no theme is fine – Ganz for example – but when a game has a theme and you just don’t get it, it’s an odd experience.

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

Rolling Realms (2021)

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Miles Bensky, Marius Petrescu
Players: 1-6 (scalable to any number)
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Rolling Realms Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Tiny Towns Review

Tiny Towns is a damning indictment on urban sprawl, overcrowding, and an ever-expanding society’s need for quick, affordable housing! Actually, it’s not. It’s a really cute abstract puzzle about space optimisation, forward planning, and the most adorable little wooden buildings. These days you need a controversial strapline to pull people in though, so with that out of the way, let’s take a look at AEG and Peter McPherson’s 2019 puzzler.

Who lives on your block?

Tiny Towns revolves around the use of wooden blocks. Loads and loads of little wooden cubes of various colours. In the middle of the table there are some cards showing you the buildings you can construct during the game. Farms, cottages, theatres, inns – that sort of thing. Each building is made of a few cubes placed in the correct places on your 4×4 player board. It might be as simple as a well, which is a brown and a grey cube next to one another (wood and stone, respectively), or something more complicated, like a bakery. A bakery is two red blocks, with a blue block between, and a yellow block next to that, like a Tetris T-piece.

Nice and easy so far. Get some blocks, make nice patterns on the board. Here’s where things get interesting though. The shapes for each building can be rotated and flipped to your heart’s content, as long as the blocks’ relative positions to one another is correct. When you finish a shape, during your turn you can remove the cubes that have gone towards it and take one of the cute wooden buildings that represent it, and place it in any of the spaces the cubes were. So now that thing that was taking up four of your precious 16 squares only takes up one, and you can start working towards something else.

Merge in turn

If the idea of the game so far sounds familiar, but you’re not sure why, there’s a good chance you own a smartphone. If you’re not already playing one, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a thousand adverts for the recent craze of ‘merge games’. Drag three things together and pow!, you’ve got a new, slightly better thing. Repeat ad-nauseum. This idea is pretty close to the core concept for Tiny Towns, except there’s only ever one generation of merging.

At first, it seems like a pretty easy game. There’s plenty of space, and tons of options. Each of the building cards clearly shows how it’ll score at the end of the game, with relation to any of the other buildings on offer. For example, a cottage on its own scores nothing, but a farm on your board means that up to four cottages will score three points each. This is where things start to get tricky, however. For a start, you don’t always get to choose which resource cube you have to place next. Each player takes a turn naming a resource/colour, and all players have to place that same cube on their boards. Pretty annoying when you’re desperate for a wood cube but some joker keeps choosing stone. Better make sure you’ve got somewhere on your board it can still be useful, despite your best plans.

Then there’s the issue of space. At first it’s not an problem, but as the game progresses, each building permanently blocks a space. Not only do you have fewer squares available to place blocks, you also start blocking some possible shapes, because there just isn’t room for them. Very quickly you realise Tiny Towns is a game about optimisation. Optimisation of your space, and optimisation of your scoring opportunities.

Fun house

I’ve made the game seem very mechanical so far, so it’s time to tell you that Tiny Towns is fun, and to tell you why. Plotting what’s going to go where is so satisfying when it works out, and you end up with this miniature metropolis that banks you big points. But the real fun comes with the other players around the table. The cursing, the exasperated groans, and the “I cannot believe you chose brick!” cries of anguish. Your plans will almost never work out exactly the way you want it to, because some other git around the table is trying to do something else. Your player boards are visible to everyone, so it’s obvious to everyone (especially when someone takes it upon themselves to tell the table) when one player’s got a healthy lead.

I’ve played a four-player game where I was absolutely desperate for a brick to finish a high-scoring building near the end of the game, but the other players chose to pick anything except brick, just to force me to fill my board, thus ending my game. It doesn’t have to be played this way, with so much passive interaction, but if you’ve got a family or regular group playing, it can definitely happen. Far from being anger-inducing, it was really funny, because Tiny Towns isn’t a heavy, serious game. It’s a light, charming, quick game.

The biggest drawback Tiny Towns has is the one I just mentioned. When a player runs out of places to put blocks, it’s game over. Final scoring doesn’t happen until everyone has finished, and if you’re playing with newbies, it can mean they’ve got a little wait while the rest of the players construct their wooden wonders. It’s not a massive problem, unless you’re playing with lots of players. Out of the box it supports one to six players, but with enough cubes, printed player mats, or even pencils and paper, you could scale this game up to play with 50+ people.

Final thoughts

Tiny towns is a fantastic abstract puzzler. There are tons of different building types with different scoring conditions, which keep the game fresh and interesting. I love that it can play with pretty much any player count, if you don’t mind getting creative with making your own boards, or drawing on paper. There’s a solo mode included, where a deck of cards decide which colour cube you get next, which is a fun challenge and good practice for the main game.

If you don’t enjoy spatial puzzles, it’s probably not going to do much for you. Some people don’t enjoy them, and some people just don’t have a brain that works in that way, but then, not every game is going to appeal to everyone. A game usually takes comfortably under an hour, but scale that up for every extra player you have in the game.

If you like games like The Isle of Cats, Bärenpark, Patchwork, or even the aging Blokus, I think you’ll love Tiny Towns. It’s an interesting twist on the polyomino tile-placement genre, less than £35, and readily available. Plus, if you do find yourself getting tired with it, there are expansions to breathe new life into the game. For example, Tiny Towns: Villagers, which you can read about below.

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

Tiny Towns: Villagers Review

There are a couple of expansions available for Tiny Towns, both coming out the year after the main game, in 2020. I was sent a copy of Tiny Towns: Villagers to review, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sure what they could do with the formula so didn’t go into it with high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised.

As the title implies, the biggest new additions are the villagers. They’re a collection of cute animal meeples in the shapes of mice, squirrels, birds, and other little forest folk. Three of them get plonked into three corners of your board at the start of the game, and you’re given a second, teeny board to put in front of you too – a lodge. The lodge is just a holding board really, where villagers go when they’re removed from the board, but it also has a nice reminder of how buildings for villagers are formed.

Mousey housey

If you complete a building by placing the last block on the same space as a villager, they’re then actively working in whatever building it happens to be. At the start of the game, a couple of different villager abilities are chosen at random. When you have enough activated workers, you can choose to use these abilities, which vary from letting you build with fewer resources than you need, to replacing an entire building with a different kind.

If you’ve played the Tiny Towns base game, you’ll know that there’s already a lot to consider when you’re choosing what to build where, so you’ll understand the added layer of complexity the villagers add. For someone like me, that’s great. I love a game with a bit more meat on its bones, and Villagers is certainly meaty. It’s not even as simple as just making sure the buildings finish in a creature’s space, as you can purposely shunt them around the board until they’re in positions more in line with your plans.

In addition to the new meeples, there are also a decent number of new building cards thrown in too. You can happily play the base game and just add in the new buildings if you want to.

Final thoughts

When you look at what’s in the box, the ~£25 you’ll pay for Tiny Towns: Villagers can look a bit steep. It’s a handful of cards, six small boards, and 20 animal meeples. If your interest with Tiny Towns is “It’s okay, but I’m not crazy about it”, then I’d wait to catch it in a sale. If you love Tiny Towns however, Villagers is essential in my opinion. Especially if you love a bit more weight in your games. The added layer of strategy it throws in, with very little overhead, is very satisfying.

I wouldn’t recommend throwing anyone into their first or second game of Tiny Towns with Villagers included. There’s enough to get your head around already for those first few plays. The other place you might find a bit of hesitance is where you’ve successfully converted non-gaming parents, siblings, or friends to the original game. It might be a bridge too far if they’ve just about got to grips with the game.

For the rest of us though, if you don’t mind paying the £25, Villagers is a great expansion, adding a welcome layer of depth to an already-polished puzzle. Fans of Tiny Towns will really get a kick out of it, and let’s be honest – who doesn’t like playing with wooden squirrels?

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

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

Tiny Towns (2019)

Designer: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

Tiny Towns: Villagers (2020)

Designers: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Tiny Towns (+ Villagers Expansion) Review appeared first on Punchboard.

We’re heading back to Garphill Games’ West Kingdom, taking a look at the first game in the trilogy. I started the series with Paladins, then Viscounts, and now I’m looping back around to the game that started it all – Architects of the West Kingdom. In terms of complexity, Architects is the lightest of the three games, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t as interesting, or as much fun as its sequels.

Set roughly 50 years before Paladins, Architects of the West Kingdom puts you in the role of a royal architect. Wanting to keep your noble status, you set to work gathering resources and money, endeavouring to build the most impressive buildings and landmarks in the Kingdom. It’s not all plain sailing though, as the other architects (your rival players) are out to do the same. This leaves you with a choice: rise above such petty competition and remain virtuous, or resort to thievery and hit the black market like it’s the Next Boxing Day sale.

Work experience

Architects of the West Kingdom is a worker-placement game in the classic style. It’s not a game like The Lost Ruins of Arnak, where there is worker-placement, but you only have two workers. In Architects you start with 20 workers, and an absolute ton of places you can put them. My first impression was “Wow, this reminds me of Stone Age”, and I can tell you that in my books, that’s high praise. Stone Age was my first worker-placement game, and it’s a game I still love dearly, all these years later.

Taking your turn in Architects is really simple. Take a player from your board and place them on any available work spot. For every worker of your colour now in that spot, your reward grows. That might mean your third worker in the Quarry nets you three pieces of stone, instead of one if it was your first worker placed there. In the Workshop, which acts as a market to hire new apprentices, the more workers you have, the further along the market rows you can choose from.

It’s such a simple concept, but one which works really well. Your first few turns feel really uneventful, just taking the odd resource here and there. Pretty soon though, things start to snowball, and you can start to tell how the other players intend to set out their stall. While in Stone Age there is really only two ways to score, and everybody competes for them, in Architects of the West Kingdom there are a few different ways to chase those elusive VPs. It means you can choose to take a different path to your rivals, or directly compete with them, which gives it the same feeling that Paladins and Viscounts carry through the rest of the series.

Banged-up

When you first start playing, it feels great to have all these workers available right from the start. It doesn’t take long to realise, however, that unlike in other worker-placement games, you don’t pick your workers back up. Once you place them on the board, they stay there. I remember my first learning playthrough, and thinking to myself “Okay, so you have 20 turns, one per worker”, which didn’t feel like enough. It was about then that I started playing with the Town Centre placement spot.

The Town Centre allows you to choose a space on the board, and to capture all of one player’s workers on that spot, moving them to your player board. This is the rivalry between the architects in action. Thematically you believe someone’s up to no good, or getting too greedy, so you make the equivalent of a citizen’s arrest. After all, you’re nobles, you wouldn’t lie about something like that, right? On a later turn you can drop them off at the prison for one piece of silver each. Reward for performing your civic duty, indeed!

You can visit the Guardhouse on a later turn to free any prisoners of your colour, and release them back to your board to use again later, and it’s a brilliant mechanism. So few Euro games offer this level of direct player interaction and scuppering of plans, it’s a breath of fresh air. What makes it especially clever is the way it allows you to change tactics later in the game. Workers freed from one place can go on to work somewhere else later, and there’s direct impetus to capture other players’ workers, as you can make a lot of coin by doing it.

Going solo

Garphill Games know how to make an automa opponent, and Architects of the West Kingdom is no exception. The solo mode is simple to understand and quick to run. There’s no faffing about, and the two different opponents – Constantine and Helena – give you two different difficulty levels to play against. The bot feels fair and balanced, and they’ll push you to play your best game.

The other really nice thing you can do with the bot is introduce it into a two-player game. Architects is fun with two, but at its best with three and four players, so being able to play a three-player game when there’s only two of you around a table is a really nice touch.

Final thoughts

I really like games on the heavier end of the complexity scale, and because I’d played Paladins and Viscounts first, I was worried that Architects might feel a bit too light for me to really enjoy. I needn’t have worried. Architects is lighter than the other two games, but it’s still a solid medium-weight game. The trademark iconography that carries through to all of the games in the series is easy to interpret, and immediately familiar to anyone who’s played any of the other games. The Mico’s artwork can be polarising, but if you like his illustration style, you’ll love this too.

I felt real nostalgia and happiness when the game evoked memories of playing Stone Age, and I’m a really big fan of simple actions in worker-placement games. Put a meeple here, get the thing that’s printed on the board. No fuss, no obfuscation, just quick, easy turns. It’s for this reason that I think Architects of the West Kingdom will now be my go-to worker-placement introduction game. The player interaction that the capturing and releasing of other players’ workers brings to the game means it’s a fantastic game to try to tempt Euro-phobes with too. The complaint, which usually rings true with a lot of Euro games, is that they’re mostly multiplayer solitaire. No-one could accuse Architects of that.

If you enjoy pure worker-placement games, and you don’t already have Architects of the West Kingdom, you should get it, it’s as simple as that. It’s cheap these days, plays from one to five players, and is quick to pick up. Satisfyingly thinky without making it complicated, and it feels fun to come back to time and time again. It’s a cracking game, and it’s found a permanent home in my collection.

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

Architects of the West Kingdom (2018)

Designers: Shem Phillips, S J Macdonald
Publisher: Garphill Games, Renegade Game Studios
Art: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

Age of Artisans expansion

Age of Artisans is the first expansion for Architects of the West Kingdom. It throws in a few nice changes, but does it without making the game overly complicated, or drastically altering the way the game is played. There’s a new, socketed Guildhall board to place on top of the main board, along with a new card to cover a spot in the Black Market, with some new iconography. The expansion explains that we now have master craftsmen returning to the kingdom, and they can add adornments to buildings, or create tools to improve your apprentices’ abilities.

What that all means to you and I, is a new deck of dual-use cards, which can be bought and added to your buildings and apprentices to improve them. It’s a relatively simple change to the base game, but it adds some really interesting new choices. You can use the new cards to really min-max your strategy (i.e. go heavily for buildings and adorn them), or to off-set weaker areas. Along with the new cards, each player gets an additional Artisan meeple. This bigger, chunkier worker counts as two workers when you place them (powerful!), and it also reduces the loss of virtue you’d normally suffer for some of the less savoury actions on the board.

Table for six, sir?

The other really nice addition that Age of Artisans brings, is a new player colour – orange – and along with it, the ability to play up to six-player games. I haven’t had a chance to get six players around a table yet to try it (thanks Covid-19), but having played with four, I can see how six would be chaotic, and a lot of fun. There’s a couple of new player boards in the box too, which offer some new initial setups for players, and breathe a bit of life back into the game if you’ve played it to death already.

The excellent solo game from the base game also makes the transition to Age of Artisans really easily too. The AI player takes adornments with a really simple decision process, and games against it still feel really balanced and fair.

Final thoughts

Age of Artisans is a really nice expansion. It adds plenty of new depth without changing the base game too much. It’s very easy to learn the new actions and features, and if you don’t feel confident using them, you can still compete just using the base game actions. At a shade under £30, it’s quite an expensive expansion when you consider what’s in the box, but when you consider the fact that the Garphill games are usually very reasonable, I don’t think it’s too bad.

If you’ve not played Architects of the West Kingdom yet, play it a few times before getting this expansion, just to make sure it’s a good fit with your group. If you’ve played it and loved it, then Age of Artisans is a great choice. It’s adds plenty to increase the lifespan of the game, and the addition of a sixth player is great. There are so few euro games at all, let alone worker-placement games, that play up to six, so it’s a fantastic option if you have a bigger group.

Expansion kindly provided by Garphill Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Age of Artisans (2020)

Designer: Shem Phillips, S J Macdonald
Publisher: Garphill Games, Renegade Game Studios
Art: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Architects of the West Kingdom Review (+ Age of Artisans) appeared first on Punchboard.