What in the X Files is going on?

The Scythe universe makes a decent effort of doing some world-building. Expeditions moves the setting to Siberia. A massive meteorite has crashed at Tunguska, waking up a load of ancient corruption which was apparently lying dormant. An expedition to investigate it has gone missing so it’s up to you, war heroes from Europa (from Scythe), to head into the frozen wastes to explore and to find fortune and glory.

It’s a pretty cool story, and in some ways it does a good job of sewing the theme into the game’s patchwork quilt. Most of the hex tiles which make up the landscape are face-down and unexplored when you start the game. Once you explore them you’ll find new resources and actions to take, and also churn up some of the aforementioned corruption. My biggest problem with the theme is trying to understand what this corruption actually is. It’s represented by colourful tiles with numbers on them, and by using a Vanquish action you can spend your accrued power and guile to remove them, but I’m still none the wiser as to what I’m actually doing there.

The rulebook tells me I’m “removing ancient evil”, but it’s never explained how, or what’s happening. For me to be complaining about this as a massive fan of beige, arid Euros might come across as hypocritical and stupid, but it matters here. The huge, gorgeous mech minis look so cool. They look like they’re ready to kick ass in a kind of coal-fired Pacific Rim tribute. But nothing happens. I move my green marker 4 steps down a track and remove a green wooden block with a 4 printed on it. It feels like a missed opportunity to add a thick, shiny layer of thematic gloss.

The goal of the game borrows heavily from Scythe. There are milestones on offer, called Glory in Expeditions. If you meet the criteria for one (e.g. solved four quests, collected seven corruption tokens) and take a Boast action, you can place a star on the Basecamp board. The first player to place four glory tokens triggers the end of the game. So you get the same feeling of a race, which I like. I like it when a game’s end is driven by the players, and it works well here.

Decking in the frozen North

Expeditions is a latecomer to the 2020 party of ‘deck-building + another mechanism’ which the likes of Lost Ruins of Arnak and Dune Imperium (review here) championed. During the game you add cards to your deck, which can in turn be played any time you take the appropriate action, and many cards have a boosted action available if you’re able to place a worker of the correct colour on the card.

Workers, along with cards, coins and other resources, find their way onto your board any time you use the Gather action. You gather whatever’s on the hex where your mech is, which is where you need to use your third available action – Move – which shockingly enough lets you move around the map. The action selection is fun, actually. The three actions are represented by squares on your player board, and on your turn you move your little cube from one square to another. The square you cover is blocked, so you get to take the two actions left uncovered. It adds a nice little element of planning. You can take a full refresh turn to get your played cards back into your hand, along with your workers, and you get to do all three actions next time, but it can feel like a wasted turn. If you plan well you can use rescue actions from tiles and cards to move a played card back into your hand, prolonging the time you’re actively doing things in the game.

In a game where you’re racing the other players to be the one to trigger the end, downtime turns can really hurt if you take them too often.

The deckbuilding is the most fun part of the game. Some of the games using these mixtures of mechanisms don’t really feel like true deck-building in the Dominion sense of the word. Even Arnak and Dune Imperium, excellent as they are, don’t let you cycle through your deck very often. Expeditions does it well, and you’ll end up playing some of your cards a lot of times, which is refreshing.

Grit in the gears

As much as I enjoy Expeditions – and let’s be clear here, I do like the game – there are some things which feel a bit disjointed to me. First on the list is the use of coins in the game. You punch out so many coins of different denominations when you first open the box (80 in total) that you assume they’re a big deal. They aren’t. You can play half an hour of the game and take a load of turns without even collecting a coin, and when you do, it’s often one coin at a time. Coins count towards your score at the end of the game, but that’s all you really do with them. What use is money in a game where you can’t spend money?

The other thing is the constant back and forth that happens at different times during the game. The setting of the game makes you feel like as a veteran of war with a huge repurposed mech at your disposal, you’d probably head into the frozen wastelands prepared. But you end up coming all the way back to where you start to grab another worker, or a card, or whatever it might be. It’s like you and the other mechs are all trampling back and forth all over the place like worker ants.

While I’m talking about the mechs, it’s also worth mentioning that there is no combat in Expeditions. If you though the awesome-looking mechs in Scythe were under-used, Expeditions will set a new, lower benchmark. There’s not even any area-control, other than the rule that no two mechs can share a tile. It all just begs the question – why are the mechs even in the game? I can’t help but feel like I should record a full game, then play it back at 10x speed and watch the mechs bimble around to the Benny Hill theme music.

Final thoughts

Expeditions is a good game. Maybe even a very good game. It has some issues, for sure, which I’ve mentioned above, but I’d still recommend it despite them. The biggest issue is probably the thing which made me the most interested in the game in the first place, and that’s piggybacking on the Scythe theme and name. It didn’t need to be, at all. I would not be remotely surprised to learn that the basic game and its mechanical component parts were designed with a different theme and setting in mind. Maybe even no theme. The whole pickup-and-deliver aspect of completing quests in the game (spend certain things in a certain space) could so easily be applied to any number of other, drier Euro themes.

It’s a big, impressive box with a great insert and those amazing mech minis, but they somehow feel redundant. They all have a slightly asymmetric boost to some actions, but they’re underused. They’re glorified shopping trolleys.

Griping aside, the game itself is great fun to play. I love the race feeling to the game, I love the simple suspense of flipping over a new tile to see what’s on the other side, and I love how simple the game feels to play. It’s obviously had plenty of development done on it, which is exactly what I come to expect from Jamey’s games now, and that professional touch is there on every aspect of the presentation. It’s also surprisingly quick to setup. play, and pack away, which is not what I come to expect of games that come in boxes this big. It’s also easy to teach, much moreso than Scythe.

Now that I write this and think about it, if I wanted to induct a new player to the world of Scythe, I would definitely start with Expeditions before moving on to Scythe. It’s a much smoother, friendlier introduction with a lower rules overhead. If you go into Expeditions expecting more Scythe, you might be disappointed, but if you love the world Scythe is set in, you’ll love to explore more of the lore and characters. I’d still love to see what it would have been if it was in a setting of its own though. A solid, if not outstanding, addition to the Stonemaier family of games.

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

Expeditions (2023)

Design: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jakub Rozalski
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Expeditions Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Going on a Saga holiday

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

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

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

Pick up and deliverance

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Call of Kilforth (2023)

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

The post Call Of Kilforth Review appeared first on Punchboard.

All aboard

It’s the future, right? Passenger space travel is a thing, and some bright spark has come up with a wormhole fabricator. The fabricator enables the captains of the spaceships to punch a hole in the fabric of space, and stitch the two ends together, allowing instantaneous travel between two points. It’s a pretty cool concept, and every time I face the drive from Cornwall to Harrogate for Airecon (which I wrote all about here), I wish it were real. As the captain of your own interstellar Uber your job is to take passengers (cards, in Wormholes’ case) to their destinations. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a handful of passengers who all want to go to the same planet, gaining you lots of points for one trip.

Wormholes are tunnels, and the thing about tunnels is that they have a hole at either end. So before you get all excited thinking “I’m going to take off and immediately warp to the edge of the known universe”, keep that enthusiasm in check. At any point in your turn, you can drop a wormhole token on the hex your spaceship is flying through. Wormhole tokens come in pairs, and as soon as you drop the second of a pair somewhere – punching a hole in the other end of the tunnel, if you will – the tokens are flipped and immediately active. From that point on, anyone landing on either end of the wormhole can warp to the other end for free!

Wormholes being a free trip is a big deal. On your turn you get three movements, and moving from one hex to another costs one of those movements. It means the first half of the game starts slowly as the players slowly spread out using movement points, searching for the right places to hitch either end of their interstellar ziplines. As the game progresses though, you soon start to realise that when wormholes butt up against one another, you can start to move really far with only a few movements.

Engage

Once the board starts to fill up with players’ wormhole tokens, you’re left with some painful – if not difficult – decisions to make. You might have a ship filled to the brim with passengers who want to go to the planet that looks like a fuzzy ball, but to get there quickly you’ll have to use other players’ wormholes. You can do that, and they can’t stop you doing it, but they’ll get VP chits by way of compensation for using their intergalactic highways. I had a really funny game of Wormholes with my wife and son, where my son deliberately ruined his chances of winning by refusing to use my wormholes. Rather than let me earn VPs, he went on a slow, spiteful crawl around the cosmos. So for those of you wondering “Can I just use my own network and avoid any interaction?” – no, you can’t. It’s baked-in, and it’s great.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the legibility of the wormhole tokens. In a game where being able to quickly trace routes across the board is key, some of them are really difficult to read at a glance. When a token goes on the board without a matching one, they start on a black side with a bright number, and things are good. When the wormhole is completed, the token is flipped and black is replaced with the player colour, and the number is a kind of silver colour. The silver is reflective and hard to read at a distance. The little arrow that points to the other token in a pair could do with being bigger too. Too many times I heard someone say “Where does this one go to?”, which shouldn’t be a question in a game dependent on that mechanism.

Gripes aside, Wormholes is a lot of fun. It plays out so quickly, which makes it perfect for a start or end game for a game night, and I’ve also found it really good for playing with non-gamers. I wondered if there’d be a min-max problem where cunning players were just taking on passengers who rely on their own routes, but the problem doesn’t exist. The end of the game is driven by players placing wormholes next to each planet, which also rewards bonus points, so it’s usually in your best interest to weave a wide web through the stars.

Final thoughts

I have two sets of shelves that I use to store games. The upstairs shelves hold my collection of Euro and wargames – the sort of games I’ll play with my regular group, or at a convention. The downstairs shelves are for family and party games – the games I know I can regularly get to the table with my family. Wormholes has earned a coveted spot on the downstairs shelves. If you were looking for a heavy space game to sit alongside Gaia Project, Eclipse, and Twilight Imperium, Wormholes isn’t it. This is a much lighter, more accessible game.

Regular gamers will enjoy the mixture of the initial planning of routes, and later trying to optimise their turns to milk every last point out of the game. Non-gamers might find the start a little slow-going on their first game, but just watch their eyes light up towards the end when they’re zipping all over the place. It’s a game which does a great job of making you feel like you’re enacting really clever plans, whereas it’s really just following the path of least resistance, but that’s a big part of hooking new gamers in. Make them feel like they did something clever.

I like the way the boards are double-sided and include different kinds of obstacles and features. It mixes things up enough to keep it interesting, without making it feel like a different game. AEG are undoubtedly one of the best at producing these light-mid weight games at the moment, and Wormholes happily sits alongside the likes of Cubitos (review), Whirling Witchcraft (review), and Peter McPherson’s other hit, Tiny Towns (review) as games which hide layers of strategy behind a newbie-friendly veneer. Speedy pick up and deliver action with a nice twist, I really like it.

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

Wormholes (2022)

Design: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Caring Wong
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Wormholes Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Interestingly, the two people who lent their names to SchilMil Games – Julia Schiller and Amanda Milne – are also the game’s designers. I think it’s fair to say that Manifest is a game which is aimed at the same kind of space as Ticket To Ride. It’s pretty, has tactile pieces, a nice insert, and a thin rulebook. The board isn’t plastered with icons and reminders, like the lid of a teenager’s laptop. Instead, it’s clean and clear and lets the Art Deco typeface and artwork take centre stage.

Boarding pass at the ready

I like how streamlined the gameplay is in Manifest. You’ve each got a hand of cards, and on your turn, you play them for either their movement value, their money, or the effects written on them. I always find myself reminded of Ticket To Ride when I play Manifest, even though they’re two mechanically different games. I think it’s because of the contract cards, which ask you to take something from one place to another, and the further apart the start and end are, the more points you score by completing them.

There’s a great touch to the way contracts are handled too. As well as your own privately-held, secret contracts, there are also public contracts on offer on the board. They’re up for grabs, and it’s first-come-first-served. It just adds a little something to that feeling that TTR gives you, where it feels like you’re racing to complete contracts, but only ever guessing what the other players are going for.

Manifest could have been a much simpler game, but instead gives each player two ships to control, and thus, two ships to worry about. Your movement and money are split between them and force you to make some tricky decisions at times. For example, movement on one card cannot be split between ships. Not being able to use the change left over from one card on a different ship means you might have to decide whether to risk waiting a turn, leaving that juicy four-point public contract just out of reach for now. How confident are you someone else won’t take it this turn?

Rough waters ahead

It’s not all smooth sailing – pun absolutely intended. There are plenty of spicy little touches to keep you on your toes. Pirates are a good example. Not a good example of life choices, just of bad things that can happen in Manifest. Some of the most convenient routes around the Caribbean, South China Sea, and Suez Canal are patrolled by pirates. If you choose to negotiate those stretches, you roll dice which can lead to pirates stealing cargo and passengers.

Much like anything else in the game, there are cards which negate hazardous pieces of game design, but it’s a case of having the correct card in your hand when you need it. Perfect planning, people. Perfect planning. Combat’s not just limited to pirates either, and player vs player naval fisticuffs are on the table too. It’s a nice layer of interactivity to prevent Manifest from being just a straightforward race to the finish line.

Some of the included optional modules keep things interesting too. Interesting in the same way that cutting the brake cable on your bike and going for a fast ride is interesting. Fun, but anything but a smooth ride home. Company advantage cards give players unique per-turn powers, and there’s a pirate ship variant which sees anyone losing cargo to piracy being able to act as the pirate the next time someone else risks it. It’s the Expert version of the game that I like best though.

Deck building deck-building. Like, deck on a boat. Geddit?

Once you’ve played the basic version once or twice, the deck-building ‘Expert’ version of the game is where it’s at. Like all good deck-builders, you start with a basic set of cards you’ll cycle through, and there’s a card market too. Some of the powers on offer on the market cards are really interesting, and anything which helps prevent a game from going stale quickly is a good thing in my book.

Cheaper basic card upgrades, being able to use the values of a card face-up in the market, and even whirlpools to move anybody’s ship around the map. The new cards give you more to think about, for sure, and there’s the added problem that money spent on cards isn’t being spent on cargo. There are only a couple of cards that let you draw extra cards into your hand, so don’t expect Dominion-esque combos that go on forever. The deck-building in Manifest has a much more subtle effect on the flow of the game.

I mean, the basic game is fine with newbies, or with family who don’t play games often, but if you know your Carcassonne from your Carrom, you really ought to be using the Expert rules when you play.

Final thoughts

Manifest is a really decent game. I hadn’t heard of it when I was given the chance to review it, but one look at the ’20s stylings had me hooked – shallow man that I am! Luckily, the game is good too. I’ve mentioned Ticket To Ride too many times already in this review, and I really don’t want anyone to directly compare the games, because they’re so different. It really does give me that same feeling of accessibility, ease of play, and family-friendly play that TTR does. It sits on my ‘Games I could play with the family at Christmas’ shelf.

If you can, I recommend playing it with at least three players. It’s fine with two, but you can spend most of the game on opposite sides of the planet, doing your own thing. More fun comes from the risk of bumping into others mid-ocean, and the race for the public contracts. The game states that it’s aimed at 13+ years of age, but honestly, my nearly-ten-year-old had no trouble picking up the idea of the basic game.

It’s not going to scratch your heavy euro itch, nor sate your appetite for the pirate stylings of something like Merchants & Marauders. What it is, is a solid pick-up-and-deliver game which often results in a madcap race to get the last few points needed to win, and it’s beautifully produced. It even caters to those of you who don’t like the Greenwich Meridian running through the centre of the map. Flip the board over and you’ve got the Pacific there instead, with the Americas on the right, and the rest of the world on the left. Small touches like that just add that Mr Sheen shine to the whole package.

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

Manifest (2014)

Designers: Julia Schiller, Amanda Milne
Publisher: SchilMil Games
Art: Amanda Milne, Franz Vohwinkel
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45-90 mins

The post Manifest Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Monster, monster

Eric Hall’s famous catchphrase doesn’t really cover it when you look at the cast of Horrified. It reads like a Who’s Who of classic movie monsters, and it’s a nostalgic glance backwards into horror films that the game tries to capture. In the same way as many of Ravensburger’s themed games do, Horrified streamlines the formulas that many heavier boardgames use, to deliver a family-friendly box of tricks. Asynchronous player abilities, pick-up-and-deliver, action selection, spending action points – it’s all in there, but presented in a way that doesn’t feel as complex as the mechanisms might sound.

To put that into some kind of context, I was able to teach this game to my (then) eight-year-old son, who in turn taught it to my wife, who bounces hard off of games that come across as complicated. If you’re an experienced gamer, you might think that making games feel simpler would inherently shorten their potential lifetime, or speed up the time it takes you to tire of a game. To be honest, you’d be right to some extent with Horrified, too, but it does not go softly into that good night.

The beast must die

Co-operation is the order of the day in Horrified, and the players need to work together to take down whatever variety of abominations they’re up against. Monsters for each game can be picked at random, or by following recommendations from the rulebook. Each have their own specific way of moving, their own actions to try to take you down, and their own ways to be defeated. What this all adds up to is a game where people need to talk, and decide who’s best suited to do which thing.

It all leads to some interesting conversations you’ll never have had before. “Okay, you distract Bride of Frankenstein over there, I’m going to take this villager up here, then she can try to move the boat closer to the Creature from the Black Lagoon”. The actions you take are really easy, and the player aids help as visual reminders, but you shouldn’t need them once you get up-and-running. If you’re a fan of co-op games, this one falls somewhere between Forbidden Island and Pandemic in terms of complexity.

Horrified does a really good job of capturing the ‘us against them’ feeling you’d expect. You can tailor it to make it as easy or as difficult as you want, based on the number and choice of monsters you want to face. Each monster has a really different way it needs to be dealt with, and each player character is slightly different to the others, in the same way you’d expect from one of the Forbidden series. It means you can keep things fresh, and cater to all abilities.

Fake blood

In a game like Horrified, you’d hope for plenty of theme. You won’t be disappointed. The monster minis look great, especially if you have the skills (or know someone) to paint them up. The board is bright and colourful, a feat made all the more impressive when you consider it’s set at night. The designers have done a really good job of making it feel like each monster has its own personality. The Creature is evasive and slips along the river, Dracula uses his Transylvanian charm to lure a player to him. It’s nice, because it means each game feels interesting and different.

One of my favourite moments in the many games I played with my wife and son, was the point where I realised I no longer had to help him understand what the best moves would be for us to make. No, I wasn’t Quarterbacking, I was gently leading, there’s a difference, promise. I could see the cogs whirring in his head, and the strategising emerging. He started telling us what to do, taking a lead on the monster smashing, and it was a lovely moment.

Final thoughts

Horrified is a really decent co-op game. The theme is fun, the monster minis are great, and it’s relatively easy to teach and play. The design house behind it – Prospero Hall – continue to put out really clever and engaging games. It’s gotten to the point now where I can play a Prosper Hall game, and it feels like a Prospero Hall game. That’s a compliment, not a negative, as they have a knack of taking the mechanisms from much heavier games, and tailoring them for a different audience. A wider audience.

There’s a ton of replayability, and I think families especially will get a lot of enjoyment from it. When the game arrived and I set it up for the first time, we sat down and played it. My son wanted to set it up immediately after for another game with different monsters. After that game was over, we had another. I think we played it something like five times over one weekend, which is unheard of for us.

I usually like to highlight any problems or shortcomings in my reviews, but there’s really not much to pick Horrified up on. It’s a great game, and like other recent games in Ravensburger’s range (e.g. Back to the Future: Dice Through Time, Villainous, Jaws), it’s a really good stepping stone between the really light games most families have, and the heavier, hobby games, that people like me enjoy. Would I always pick it off the shelf if asked to choose a game? Probably not, I like things a little more dense, but in the same breath, I’ll never turn down a game of Horrified. It’s monster magic.

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

Horrified (2019)

Designers: Prospero Hall
Publisher: Ravensburger
Art: Prospero Hall
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Horrified Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Venice is a gorgeous-looking mix of worker placement and pick-up and deliver mechanisms. Players move their gondolier between their two gondolas, navigating the famous canals, and leaving their apprentices in the various buildings and businesses of the 16th century setting. The trouble is, rival merchants are trying to do the same, increasing their influence in the city. While all this political and mercantile posturing is happening, players have to be careful not to raise too much suspicion, otherwise they might find themselves on the wrong end of the Venetian Inquisition.

Staying afloat

Venice is a really simple game to play, on a mechanical level at least. Move your little plastic gondola along, pay any costs for the distance travelled, resolve any passing of rivals, and pick up or deliver stuff. You can place your assistants in the buildings around the map, but there aren’t enough to place one in every building, so there are some tricky choices to make. The longer an assistant remains in a building, the more powerful and influential they become, and the greater the rewards for coming back. Make money, spend money, buy stuff, complete missions with the stuff – you know the score.

There are a set number of missions available, and when the last mission card is drawn the end of the game is triggered. The same thing happens when someone reaches a preset level on the Major Council track. When that happens, scores are tallied, and to the victor – the spoils. In a really interesting twist for a Euro game though, if a player ends the game with any amount of intrigue on their player board, and has the most among the players, they instantly get arrested and lose! I wasn’t prepared for this, it’s a really unusual thing for a game like this, so make sure all the players are aware of it before the first game starts. Playing a game for an hour then finding out it was all for nothing is a real kick in the teeth, and not something you want your friends and family to experience.

Actually, maybe that’s exactly what you want. Luckily, I’m not here to judge you.

Decisions, decisions

I really like Venice. It does something really clever, because it takes a medium weight game, and makes it feel much heavier. It feels like you have loads of decisions to make, but in reality, most of the time there are only a few valid ones. All of the missions are similar: collect a load of orange, purple and/or grey cubes (ceramics, cloth and silver respectively), go to the correct building, turn in the cubes to complete a mission card. There are only a few moves you can, or would want to make when you move your gondola, because only the first move is free. Every stop afterwards costs money.

What makes this feel deeper is the variance in setup. The locations of the buildings are changed every time you play, and there’s a deck of intrigue cards you can draw from to give you one-off bonuses. It means you can’t go into your next game thinking “I really ought to get my assistants in the church and library this time“, because they’ll probably be in completely different places.

Deep theme

I really like how well the theme has been baked into the gameplay. It’s not something I can always say about a Euro game, but it’s true with Venice. Let me give you a couple of examples.

If your gondola moves past another player’s, you have a choice – give them a scroll (like currency) as a bribe, or word gets around the canals that you’re up to something, and your intrigue level grow. Intrigue is a bad thing. So how do you get rid of intrigue? Easy, head to the library or church and get your assistants working there. After all, who’s not going to trust a man of the cloth or a librarian? At both locations, you can actively reduce your intrigue.

Alternatively, maybe you’ve planted someone in the mint. Sure, they can sneak you some money out when you visit them, but at the cost of suspicion, and raising the intrigue level again. It’s little details like this that make Venice feel like more than a game which has been built around some mechanisms, and then had a theme stickered over the top.

Man overboard

I think it’s only fair to mention the plastic gondolas that come with the game. Yes, they are incredibly cute, and many a grown man will have no choice but to make motorboat noises as they drive them around the board. Yes, it’s also very cool how they have the perfect space to carry up to five cubes in the front (the most you’re allowed to carry), and a little place for the gondolier to stand at the back. BUT, they also have a little plastic post and lantern on them. It looks really cool, but I find it nearly impossible to get the cubes and gondolier in and out of the boat because of it.

The number of times I’ve caught the post with my hand and accidentally tipped the boat over and spilled everything, or tried to move the gondolier and done the same, isn’t funny. It’s especially annoying when you’ll be moving the gondolier between your gondolas on nearly every turn. It got to the stage where I was just placing him next to the boat each time. I think the problem can be solved by just chopping the post off, which I’ll probably end up doing. Your mileage may vary of course, but I’ve got big hands (strangler’s hands I’ve been told) and it was annoying enough for me to write this.

Otherwise though, the component and art quality is top-notch, and I love what Braincrack do by putting little colour-coded cardboard boxes in the game. Each player can just lift theirs out and have everything they need in it.

One man and his Doge

Anyone who spotted Dávid Turczi‘s name at the top of this review will be pleased to know there’s a solo mode included. Along with Xavi Bordes, he’s added the Doge as an opponent. No… not that doge, meme fans. The Doge was the head of state for Venice back in the day.

It runs really smoothly, and in a change to a lot of automa opponents, you get to choose which card gets used on each turn, from a choice of two. In line with every Turczi solo opponent I’ve played against, there are options in the rule book to make the game easier or more difficult, should you want to do either. The Doge is a tough opponent, and it really reflects the feeling of a multiplayer game.

Venice – a summary

Venice is a great game. I don’t own many games where the distance you can move per turn is a factor. The closest I usually come to that is a rondel. I’ve played pick-up and deliver games in the past, but none felt as mature as Venice. The gondolas are annoying to handle (for me at least), but as I mentioned above, I think I can fix that with a sharp knife. The theme is really well implemented, and a lot of what’s happening makes sense and is logical. Mooring spots get really cramped when more than one boat is there, and there’s a feeling of claustrophobia and narrowness when you’re trying to make your way around the canals.

I think the sweet spot for Venice is three players. Anything more and it feels very busy, and it’s hard to tell from a glance what’s happening. I like the way two-player games are handled, where the game gives each player a smuggler deck and an extra gondola. The smugglers act as dummy players you control. I know some people really dislike dummy players, but these are more active and under your control, and without them the board would feel empty. That said, I’d try to introduce new players with a three-player game, so they lose the overhead of trying to run a smuggler as well as their own turn.

Intrigue

At first the insta-lose condition of having the most intrigue left at the end of the game was jarring for me, but it’s something I really enjoy now. Intrigue is like a bad commodity you can spend during the game, you just have to keep an eye on the board and make sure you clear it before the game ends. You get a two round countdown when the end is triggered, so it’s not quite as harsh as it sounds, and you get an opportunity to reduce it with left-over money and scrolls.

Venice is a smart, easy-to-learn Euro, with a nice level of player interactivity. Each time I play it, it feels fresh, and I love the feeling of a sprint finish with the end-game is triggered. If you’re a Euro game fan and there’s space in your collection for something a bit different, I really recommend giving it a try. There’s an official Tabletop Simulator mod here you can try right now!

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

Image credits

¹ Matt @ BoardgameShot
² Ross @ More Games Please

Venice (2021) – Braincrack Games

Designers: Andrei Novac, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Braincrack Games
Art: Bartlomiej Roczniak
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 70-100 minutes

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