Arpy gee?

7th Sea is apparently an established RPG system. I say apparently because it’s not one I’m familiar with. The description from the 7th Sea website says:

7th Sea is a tabletop roleplaying game of swashbuckling and intrigue, exploration and adventure, taking place on the continent of Théah, a land of magic and mystery.

https://www.chaosium.com/7th-sea/

So while I’ve got no context for the world and the lore of 7th Sea, I can still appreciate the characters and story in the game, and I’ve got to say it’s integrated pretty well into the game.

The game itself is along the lines of games like the Exit and Unlock series. When you open the box you’ll find some small punchboards, a deck of cards, and some sheets. The game is very clear in making sure that you don’t open or read or look at anything before you’re meant to, for thar be spoilers ahoy for the unwary sailor.

Puzzling times

The game itself is a series of puzzles. You’ll collect items (cards) along the way which you may need in later puzzles, so while the game doesn’t take up a huge amount of space, it’s worth making sure you can lay out everything so that it’s all visible. It’s your standard mix of observational, logical, geometric, and lateral thinking puzzles, and it’s at a really nice level. Not so easy as to be boring, while not so difficult that you’ll never finish it without a walkthrough.

I’ll do my best to keep things spoiler-free, but suffice to say there are some really cool things the game makes you do with the box and sheets which means you’ll have to work in all three dimensions to solve some puzzles. This ‘puzzle in a box’ corner of the game market is saturated at the moment, and making a game stand out for any particular reason is a challenge. Sidequest: 7th Sea does a really good job of keeping it fresh feeling by asking me to do things I’ve never had to do before in one of these games.

The main drawbacks I found are more to do with a combination of graphic design and my own personal lighting. The game has a dark feeling that pervades through the narrative and the printing on everything. It’s dark, spooky, and eerie, which means that some of the things you’ll be employing your keen powers of observation on can be pretty hard to pick out. If you wear glasses, you’ll need to be wearing them, and I’d also recommend playing with plenty of light. I tried it out as a cosy little game on the living room coffee table one evening and soon had to turn the main lights on.

Final thoughts

I love a good puzzle game, and Sidequest: 7th Sea is a good puzzle game. I don’t know how much more I’d have gotten out of it if I was familiar with the game’s lore before I started, but I feel certain there are nods to other characters and things from the 7th Sea universe which went right over my head. The puzzles are good fun, and you get that dopamine kick in the brain when one clicks and you figure out how to solve it.

There’s no save system, but like the Exit games, there doesn’t need to be one. It’ll take you a couple of hours to finish the game, and it’s a really enjoyable couple of hours. You could play it on your own (as I did), and I think you’ll definitely get value out of having at least one other pair of eyes looking over things. It makes a great couples game to break the monotony of another night in front of the TV. There’s no reason you’d ever play it through a second time because the story and puzzles are a straight shot, but unlike the Exit games nothing gets altered or destroyed. You can easily put everything back in order and give it to someone else to play.

The most jarring thing for me is the hardest to talk about without dropping some serious spoilers. The game’s finale has a great build-up and the overall flow of the game then suddenly breaks to draw out the conclusion. The puzzles here were much harder and more obscure than the rest of the game, but there are still hints, and you’ll be able to draw on the things you’ve already done, let’s leave it at that. Depending on how well you do in that finale, I can see that it might leave a slightly bitter taste in the mouth for some people.

That gripe aside, Sidequest: 7th Sea is a great option for escape room fans looking to get their next hit from somewhere other than Exit or Undo games. I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope they manage to keep up the franchise tie-ins in the future. I have the Nemesis version here too, which I’ll be covering soon. Great stuff, and for less than £15 in most places, an easy recommendation for me to make.

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

Sidequest: 7th Sea (2023)

Design: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Sidequest: 7th Sea Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve never played a mystery game, let me set the scene for you. The first impression can be quite daunting. There’s a box full of stuff. You take it all out, have a quick look, and then realise you have no idea what you’re meant to do with any of it. Luckily there’s a letter addressed to you, dear detective, one which sets the scene and gives you a hint of where to start.

From there, my job as a reviewer gets really difficult.

No spoilers

I can’t tell you too much about what happens in the game, because if I do, you’ll know what to expect, and where’s the fun in that? What I can tell you, however, is that the story running through The Morrison Game Factory is extremely good. The writing is excellent, the characters are captivating, and there’s a running theme that’s reminiscent of one of my favourite films from the 1980s.

No, I’m not going to tell you which film.

The puzzles are nicely paced. Nothing so abstract and outlandish that you’ll never be able to figure it out, while at the same time presenting a bit of a challenge. I was delighted when I thought I might be getting near the end of the story and then found I was only halfway through. There’s a mixture of logic, code-breaking, and just reading between the lines. Everything in the box plays a part at some point, and I love it when a game does what The Morrison Game Factory does, and makes me come back to some items more than once.

If you find any part of it heavy going, and can’t quite muster up the brainpower to find the solution to a puzzle – or even where to start one – there’s a great online hint system. The online system is more than just a glorified FAQ though, it plays an integral part of the story, so let me make it clear here that an internet connection is required to play. It’s not a case of “this is just an online game with the audacity to make me buy a box”. Instead, the website (it’s not an app) helps push the story along, and acts as a way to give you feedback, so you know your answers are right.

Or not, as the case may be.

Narrative glue

If you’ve ever played any mystery games, there’s one thing which sets the great ones apart from the ones that are just good. That one thing is the story. Without a good story, what you’re left with is a box of puzzles, and while that might be cool for some people, for the rest of us the story matters. It’s what pulls everything together and adds impetus to make it to the next puzzle, to find out what happens next.

The writing in The Morrison Game Factory is outstanding. I’ve not been this drawn into an ongoing mystery since The Baker Street Irregulars. It ought to be expected I guess, given the involvement of Lauren Bello who wrote for The Foundation and The Sandman TV series. It’s frustrating because I really want to talk to someone about the story. I want to tell you, the reader, all about it, but I can’t. I can’t ruin it for you. Let’s just say it really is well-written, and evocative. I don’t mind admitting I was close to tears at one point.

I really enjoyed Death At The Dive Bar (Hunt A Killer) and the scenarios I’ve played of The Detective Society, but the story on The Morrison Game Factory blew them away. Only Dave Neale’s writing in The Baker Street Irregulars comes close.

Forewarned is forearmed

I’ve just got a couple of potential problems to be aware of, one of which is a teeny bit spoliery, so if that bothers you, skip down to Final thoughts. Firstly, for those of you who don’t live in the US, there’s a spot where you’re required to call a US phone number. That might not be a problem for some, but for me I’d have had to enable international dialling on my mobile contract. Luckily, it’s not a dealbreaker. The same information from the call is also on the website that you’re given right near the start in both audio recording and transcription forms. Top marks for providing both.

Secondly, the online section of the game uses a website, not an app. As such, it’s cookie-dependent. If you’re planning on taking your time and playing it across multiple days, just be aware that the next time you visit the site, it may not have remembered your progress. Again, not a deal-breaker, just an annoyance, and one that might not even happen to you. I only mention it because I played the game through twice, once using my brain, once checking the hint system, and the second time through it forgot my progress when I had to continue the next day.

Final thoughts

It probably won’t come as a surprise at this point to learn that I loved my time with The Morrison Game Factory. It doesn’t do anything radically different to other games of this ilk, in terms of puzzles, locks, codes etc., but the way it does it is brilliant. The story is so good and you’ll find yourself invested in it, dying to know what happens at the end.

Tying the theme to a board game factory is another great touch. For those of you into board games who haven’t played a mystery game like this before, this is the one most likely to grab your attention. Playing with board game pieces to solve puzzles is really good fun.

The only downside to the game, like all of those in this genre, is that you’ll probably only play it once. There’s no branching story to get you coming back to explore again like in Children of Wyrmwood (review), so unless you have a terrible short-term memory, there’s no challenge in playing a second time through. It’s the kind of game you’ll want to talk to other people about though, so expect to lend it to friends and family so that you finally have someone to compare notes with.

Mystery mastery, I loved every minute. The Kickstarter campaign launches soon, you can find out more by clicking here.

Preview copy provided by PostCurious. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Morrison Game Factory (2024)

Design: Lauren Bello
Publisher: PostCurious
Art: Steve Thomas
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 240 mins

The post The Morrison Game Factory Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The 7 Ps

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

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

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

Yes, Chef!

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game (2023)

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

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

Heart of stone

The core of Hiroba is based on placing your pebbles on the board. I say, board, it’s actually a 3×3 grid of card tiles, which works in the game’s favour. Hiroba is a small, light game, aimed at being played just about anywhere. If you’re only playing with two players – on a train or bar for example – you only need five of the tiles anyway. In a small game, portability and flexibility are king and queen.

The pebbles are actually little wooden shapes, each with a number from one to nine. Because Sudoku, right? The cards each have a pond in one square, and two zen gardens which share the remaining eight squares. Taking your turn is as simple as choosing one of your pebbles and putting it on a square. The rules of Sudoku are mostly in play – no two equal numbers in the same row or column – but you have to place each pebble after your first, on the same row or column as one of your previous ones.

Is that… is that a little bit of strategy poking its head out there? You’re darn right it is.

And the strategy isn’t restricted to just trying to make legal placements. The highest total value of pebbles in each garden will win points at the end of the game, so you gotta pump those numbers up. Oh, and you’ve also got to keep those numbers down. If you end up with the lowest total around a koi pond, you take the 2x multiplier token from it, which can be put on a free square in a garden at the end of the game, to – you’ve guessed it – double its value.

Yin and yang

All things in moderation then. The duality of trying to score low and high at the same time is very thematic in a game which borrows heavily from Japanese imagery and ideas. What I especially love about Hiroba is how deceptive it is. It seems so simple, and in principle, it really is. The fun in the game increases with each play as the game proper emerges. There is so much more to think about than just obeying the placement rules and trying to outscore with your pebbles. Let me elaborate with a few examples.

Each pebble is double-sided. Both sides add up 10, so if you really can’t find somewhere to place that 2, flip it over and turn it into an 8. It means looking at your opponents’ remaining pebbles isn’t as simple a read as it initially seems. You also have stone tokens, in very short supply. after your turn, you can place a stone anywhere on the board. Stones serve no purpose other than to block spaces, but my goodness, they can be so powerful when used well.

One of the things Hiroba does so well is something a lot of great games do. It constantly makes you choose between improving your position and hampering your opponent. The 2x koi tokens I mentioned before can be so powerful if placed into a big garden you’re going to win. You might notice that someone else is dominating a garden and has a pile of koi tokens, ready to let the hammer drop, but if you drop a pebble into the remaining space in that garden, they have nowhere to place that token. “The greater good” is a concept that’ll be rattling around your skull the whole time you play.

Final thoughts

Hiroba is a fantastic game. I initially wrote ‘fantastic little game’ there, but I don’t like the between-the-lines implications. People use ‘little’ to describe games which they think won’t be in your rotation for long, or don’t have enough meat on their bones to warrant being considered a game without a size adjective. Hiroba is great fun. It’s extremely easy to learn, and has an obscene amount of replay value for a game that only takes 15 minutes to play.

It does a strange thing where it feels like a two-player game, but it’s a game that’s as enjoyable at any player count from two to four. I can’t even explain what I mean by that, it just has that duel feel about it. Hiroba is a game which accentuates an imbalance in skill levels, and there aren’t any setup or gameplay mitigations that you can make really. It means that someone who’s played it a lot is likely to wipe the floor with a newbie. I know that’s true of a lot of games, but Hiroba is a game where you can’t really place pebbles and hope to get lucky. If you’ve got a family or a significant other you’re going to spend the winter with though, it’s a game which will evolve with your own unique meta, as you start to read one another.

Hiroba will only set you back about £20, and honestly, it’s a bit of a no-brainer. It takes up hardly any space on your shelves, it’s quick and easy to teach and to play, and it’s a really pretty thing on the table. If you enjoy these quick, light, filler-style games, I highly recommend Hiroba. You can pick it up right now through our site partner, Kienda. You can sign up for an account and get 5% off your first £60 purchase by heading to kienda.co.uk/punchboard, and you can jump straight to the game here.

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

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.

Hiroba (2022)

Designers: Johan Benvenuto, Alexandre Droit, Bertrand Roux
Publisher: Funnyfox Games
Art: Alain Boyer
Players 2-4
Playing time: 15-20 mins

The post Hiroba Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Where’s the rest of it?

That was my first thought when the box landing through my letterbox. And yes, I mean letterbox. Cryptid: Urban Legends is a much, much smaller game than the original. One which happily fits in your pocket. If you’ve been interested in the game, and wanted to keep it all a surprise, there’s a couple of things you should know.

Firstly, yes, it’s a much smaller game. There’s no board at all, just cards and some marker tokens. Secondly, this puppy is two-player only. The original game was for three to five players (although there’s a decent official two-player variant too, Cryptid fans), so you can tell right from the get-go that this is a very different beast cryptid. The thing I want to touch on first, is that Urban Legends isn’t a deduction game.

*gasps of astonishment*

Cryptid: Urban Legends is an abstract, asymmetric puzzle game, and it’s a tricky one.

Finding Mothman

The cryptid (it’s definitely Mothman) is trying to escape the city. I’m not sure why, maybe it overstayed its welcome at the local Premier Inn or something. The scientist is trying to capture the cryptid by placing sensors around city blocks, and narrowing options down to only one space they could be hiding in. That might sound like deduction, but in reality, it’s more like forcing Checkmate in Chess. The sensors are just coloured cubes, and the game consists of trying to build patterns of cubes if you’re the cryptid, and destroying patterns if you’re the scientist.

In each turn you play a card from your hand which lets you move the cubes from one side of the city block, to the opposite side. There are three different ways to move them, which can result in a lot of different ways to shift the balance one way or the other. The city blocks are square cards laid-out in a two-row checkerboard pattern, and in each round the cubes shift from one side to the other, some cards get removed, others added, but it’s essentially just shifting them back and forth.

The one major plus point this gives the game is that it has a tiny footprint. You could play this on a train, in a pub, or maybe on the head of someone much shorter than you. It’s also a much shorter game than its forebear, which is good, because if you enjoy the game, you’re going to need to play it lots of times.

Box of illusions

Cryptid: Urban Legends is a bit of a mystery in its own right. When you open the little box and take out a few pieces and a small number of cards, it looks simple. The rulebook is tiny and friendly-looking too. But there’s something about learning the game that is almost indescribably difficult. Not that it’s so difficult you’ll never understand it, more that it’s very hard to pin down exactly what is so difficult. I mean, there are three actions you can take in the entire game – what’s so difficult about that?

The difficulty is something which can only be overcome through repeated play. Its trickiness is the result of needing to understand your own win condition, your opponent’s, and how best to manipulate the space in front of you to win. I read parts of the rulebook three or four times while playing my first game, just to try to hammer home what I needed to do.

If you come into Urban Legends expecting a two-player, abstract, tug-of-war, I think you’re going to love it. If you’re expecting clues, a process of elimination, and some real gosh-darned deduction, you’re going to be disappointed. One thing’s for sure though, and that this game is an attractive little creature. The cubes and discs are irresistibly tactile, and Kwanchai Moriya’s artwork is – as always – fantastic.

Final thoughts

Cryptid: Urban Legends’ biggest problem is its name. A lot of people are going to see the name in online stores, think “Oh boy, more Cryptid!”, and feel a sense of disappointment. That’s a result of the original game being so good, and this new upstart being so fundamentally different to its parent. While Urban Legends isn’t a deduction game, what it is, is a fantastic two-player duel, which really rewards time invested in it.

It’s one of those games that feels like playing a classic, you know? They’re not great comparisons, but it’s like playing Chess, or Hive. It’s mano a mano abstract strategy, with a pretty coat of paint. The more you play, the more you learn, and the more you play against the same person, the bigger the meta game becomes. When you start being able to second-guess your opponent, it transforms from “How the hell do I play this?”, to “What’s that sneaky bugger up to this time??”.

The asymmetry, and the changing, randomised city cards add a nice feeling of freshness into Urban Legends, which is something I think will be more appealing to modern games fans. If you enjoyed something like Mr Jack Pocket, I think you’ll really enjoy this. I wasn’t remotely confident in what I was doing until at least five games in, and by way of levelling any skill imbalances, the Cryptid definitely feels more difficult to win as.

In summary, Cryptid: Urban Legends is a very clever, very tricky, two-player abstract puzzle. It’s very cheap, it looks great, it has a tiny footprint, and there’s an astonishing amount of strategy available for a game with three possible actions. It’s an easy recommendation if you have a regular player-two living with you, just don’t expect it to feel like Cryptid.

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

Cryptid: Urban Legends (2022)

Designers: Ruth Veevers, Hal Duncan
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Kwanchai Moriya
Players: 2
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Cryptid: Urban Legends Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Mystery Machine

Scooby-Doo (as I’ll shorten it to now) is a part of the Coded Chronicles series from The Op, a series which boasts this and one other game – The Shining: Escape from the Overlook Hotel. If you’ve played any of the Exit or Unlock series of games then the guts of Scooby-Doo will be immediately familiar. As you play the game you’ll gather cards as you explore rooms in the mansion, and by combining them and your character standees – and a little brainpower – you solve puzzles and progress through the story. Essentially, it’s an escape room game, and I’m a massive fan of escape rooms and puzzles in general, so I was excited to get a dose of childhood nostalgia at the same time.

If you’ve ever played an Exit game, you know the story is very loosely applied. It might be set in a pyramid or abandoned building, but there’s nothing really to make it feel like it. Scooby-Doo does things very differently here, by including a book for each of the characters. Without wanting to spoil the game, at various points you play as different members of the team, and as far as I’m concerned it should be obligatory to read out everything in character. The books are great; they’re bright and colourful, and the writing feels true to the cartoons. There are plenty of chances to ham it up and be the Velma you always dreamed you could be.

Pesky kids

I’ve played a load of games where you need to solve puzzles, so I’ve started to get to the stage where I can see the setup for something and think “Ah, this is going to be one of those”. I was expecting Scooby-Doo to seem simple compared to the likes of the Exit games I’ve played, or the Escape Tales games that I reviewed last year. I was half-right, I guess. Early on in the game, things are pretty easy, but you’d expect that in a game clearly aimed at families. When you get into the latter half of the game, however, it starts to require a bit more thinking. It’s done really nicely, there’s no sudden vertical ramp in difficulty, just enough of a slope to give a rewarding sense of success.

A lot has been done to make this game feel like Scooby-Doo. The characters’ voices in the text, the aesthetics, and the general scoobiness is all there. The way each member of the gang has a different skill works really nicely too. Each has their own speciality, which they can at least attempt to interact with different items and locations. Velma can research things, Fred can use stuff, and Shaggy and Scooby (perhaps predictably) eat and smell things. It doesn’t really matter too much who can do what, it’s just another clever way to add some flavour and theme to an already decent game.

The game system is really clever. The mansion slowly gets unveiled, and along the way you’ll be opening envelopes with all manner of secret stuff in them. My son was so excited every time we got to open a new envelope, and it adds a bit of theatre to the experience, which is super fun for kids and grown-ups alike.

Scrappy-Doo

When we finished playing Scooby-Doo, I got a real sense of deflation. Not because the story and the game weren’t good – both are great – but because it was over. More importantly, it was over, and it was completely finished. There’s just the one story in the box, and when you’re done with it, you’re done. You can reset it and start over, nothing gets destroyed in the same way it does in the Exit games, but it’ll just be the same story, same items, and same solution. That’s not a big deal when you’re buying an Unlock game for about £25 with three adventures in, or an Exit for less than £15. This is a game that’ll set you back nearly £30. Cost isn’t something I mention often, but it needs mentioning here.

HOWEVER…

My son didn’t mind one bit that the game would be the same the next time through. In fact, he’s already played it through twice on his own since. It’s a trait that other kids seem to share, if the conversations I’ve had with other parents is anything to go by. In the same way that I’ve watched Tremors a ridiculous number of times, they seem content to play something they know back-to-front, ad nauseum. It baffles me, frankly, but it’s the reason the game is still in my collection and not on the shelf at my local games café.

Final thoughts

If you like Escape Room games, you’ll have a good time with Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion. If you fall in the middle of that Venn diagram where Escape Room and Scooby-Doo fans intersect, you’ll love it. It’s great fun, but it’s over pretty quickly. It’ll probably take you a couple of hours to go through in total, longer if you’re playing with kids and let them take the lead on things.

The puzzles are good, and none are so abstract that you’ll need spoilers to solve them – no rubber chickens with a pulley in the middle here. It’s a really fun experience, it’s just the cost that you have to take into consideration. For some reason, the fact that it comes in a bigger box than the alternatives I’ve mentioned above, makes it feel like it should give you more than it does. If you’ve got kids, it’s a really worthwhile purchase, because they enjoy the experience of playing, more than feeling frustrated that they already know the solution.

One of the things it does have going for it, is that the game can be fully reset, so you can sell it on, or give it to someone else to enjoy. I really enjoyed the game, my son loves it, and I’m looking forward to trying out further games built on the Coded Chronicles system. Scooby dooby doooooooo!

Review copy kindly provided TheOp. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion (2020)

Designers: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim
Publisher: TheOp
Art: Rob Lundy, Rick Hutchinson
Players: 1-99
Playing time: 120 mins

The post Scooby-Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion 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.

I love an Escape Room. I’ve done as many in-person rooms as I could before lockdown hit, and I’m a big fan of games that replicate the feeling, like the Exit series, and the Escape Tales games. I recently heard about a new escape room experience, an entirely web-based one called Webscapade, and was invited to come along and play.

In a team with my brother, sister-in-law, and our friend, we tested our wits and lateral thinking, playing through Season 0: Welcome to Argenia. The story is set in a fictional republic called Argenia, and big things are happening. The independence day celebrations have a dark spectre looming over them, and it’s up to you and your friends to figure out exactly what, and how you’re going to do something about it.

Just browsing?

The game is played in your web browser. You’ll need some other communication going on, so something like Zoom, Skype or Discord works well. The game is started with an email setting the scene, and the sleuthing starts from there. This is where the review gets tricky for me, because if I tell you how this all works, then I’m spoiling the experience for you. More importantly, I might be giving you an advantage which sees you overthrow my mighty Roscroggan Owls team, as the fastest on record so far.

Yeah, a little flex there maybe, but I’m very competitive.

Let’s just say that it uses your browser and tabs in a unique way, and one that really brought a smile to my face as I played it. The way it’s able to let you know when you’re done with a particular clue, is really clever. You’ll really need your wits about you to solve everything, and it’s certainly not easy. Some of the puzzles were pretty hard to grasp where to start, more than how to complete them.

Spit and polish

One of the most important things with an experience like this, is how polished it is. It really breaks the immersion when you can see the cracks, or run into problems. This can come from things being badly designed or tested, or from poor writing. I’m very happy to say that Webscapade suffers from none of these things. It’s extremely polished, from start to finish. The writing is great throughout, and I love the tongue-in-cheek humour. That same humour carries through the whole experience, and while it’s not a funny game, I defy anyone not to laugh when you complete it.

There’s a great hint system, which I obviously tested just to see how it works. For the review, you understand. We never got stuck, no sir, not once. A pre-warning, you’ll need at least one active Facebook account to play the game. I’m not going to explain why, but you do need it, and the way it’s used is really clever too. Those of you who think they can outsmart the developers and just view the page source for shortcuts are out of luck too – I tried. I enjoy kicking the tyres while I’m playing.

Final thoughts

Webscapade is great. We had a great time playing it, and the ability to either work on a particular puzzle together, or branch out and try to work on things together, is fantastic. The setting of this republic under threat is nicely implemented, and I love the way the fictional city you’re in feels real. The way the websites have been created to convey the imaginary places, feel very genuine.

I normally try to touch on any negative points during a review, just to make sure you get a feel for the real experience of playing the game. With Webscapade though, I’m honestly finding it very hard to find anything negative to talk about. The whole experience was great, from start to end. I will definitely be back for Season 1, when it launches.

If you’re a fan of escape rooms, puzzles, riddles, code-breaking – or if you just want to do something a bit different for an hour with your friends – you could do a lot worse than Webscapade. It’s $25 (£18) per team to play, works with any decent, modern browser. I had a great time with it, as did the rest of my team. It’s a solid, tricky escape room, and I highly recommend it. Have a look now, by clicking here.

Webscapade gave me a free ticket to play. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Special Offer – 25% discount – from now until August 31st you can use the code ‘punchboard’ to get 25% off your play of Webscapade: Season 0

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The Mazescape games, from publishers Devir and Kosmos Games, are a series of small box games. They’re designed to be played solo, and use a novel game system. Each level of the game is a piece of paper, folded up like a map. Your aim in each level is to navigate the ever-changing maze, visiting as many of the collectibles as possible, before finally heading to the impossible triangle at the end of the maze.

Stick to it

How you navigate the maze is what makes this game different to any I’ve played before. The map/maze starts folded up, and you press the end of the included stick on the starting point. From there, you just trace a path along any white path, following any tunnels or stairs, but never taking the stick off the paper.

This doesn’t get you very far before you hit a dead end, or the edge of the paper, so what then? When that happens you unfold or refold a part of the paper and retrace your steps onto a new part of the crazy maze. Mazescape’s maps will see you folding horizontally and vertically, inside and out, but never lifting your stick off the path. If you’ve ever played the mobile game Monument Valley, you’ll know how these paths works.

If you want to see how it works for yourself, there’s an online version you can play right now, by clicking here.

What a tangled web we weave

There’s really not much more to Mazescape Labyrinthos. Pick a map, get going, and see how quickly and thoroughly you can solve it. The mazes start fairly easy, but by the time you get to the seventh – and final – sheet, you’re in for a stiff challenge, especially if you want to tick off all the collectibles on the included checklists. If you don’t like mazes, this probably isn’t a game for you, but if you enjoy exercising your little grey cells, you’ll find these puzzles really engaging.

It’s not a massively deep, or long-lasting game, but it’s not competing for that space on your shelf. It’s the sort of thing you could take to the pub, or your parents’ house, and spend an hour exercising your brain. You’ll find yourself telling yourself little stories – “I need to get here, and to get there I need to go here first, but how do I get there?” – and trying to reverse-engineer the parts of the maze you want to get to. By the time you finish one of the more difficult mazes, you’ll feel mentally drained, but very pleased with yourself.

Mazescape Labyrinthos is a really unique little game. I’ve never played anything else even remotely like it, and when I did some detective work online, the closest thing I could find was Friedemann Friese’s Folders. Amazingly, the two games were developed concurrently on opposite sides of the world. Mazescape’s designers in Chile, however, created a much more involved, and polished game.

Final thoughts

I think there’s a wide range of people that Mazescape will appeal to, and that group of people includes gamers and non-gamers alike. It would make an excellent backpack game for a weekend’s camping, or a gift for someone who likes puzzles. I really like the fact that there’s no setup and tear-down time, and that I can easily play a maze or two inside half an hour. You’ll glimpse the end of the maze and things you need to find as you’re folding the pages back and forth, teasing you, compelling you to complete it.

The graphic design is great, and the concept and execution is very clever. The satisfaction you’ll take from finishing each maze is a great feeling. Just remember that these are quick-fix games, designed to be played casually and quickly, by yourself. If you’re looking for a game you’re going to get hours and hours of involved play from, get yourself something else from Devir’s catalogue, like the excellent The Red Cathedral.

If you want something a bit different however, something to fill a special niche, or if you’re looking for a gift for the gamer who (probably) has everything, Mazescape Labyrinthos is a great choice. Especially when you consider it’s only going to set you back just over £10. What a clever, unique little game. Top stuff.

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

Mazescape Labyrinthos (2021)

Designers: Pablo Céspedes, Víctor Hugo Cisternas
Publisher: Devir Games
Art: Ivana Gahona
Players: 1
Playing time: 5-90 mins

The post Mazescape Labyrinthos Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The biggest difference between Children of Wyrmwoods and its predecessors is the absence of a game board. There’s a map to unfold, once you’re told to (it’s written on it, so it’s not a spoiler to tell you), but your table will definitely be laid out differently to the previous games by the time you reach the epilogue.

Building character

Children of Wyrmwoods is trying to be an adventure game from the get-go, and this time around you get a character card. Your protagonist – Gilbert – has statistics, just like in a role-playing game. Certain items and cards you gain during the game will affect your stats, and the path you trample through the game’s forks and twists depend on your stats at times. It’s not an RPG, or something like Mage Knight. It is, after all, still an escape room game, but it’s a nice change to the formula.

Although the character stats are a nice addition, it’s a little bit loosely implemented. The way the items are given to you, and the amounts they boost or reduce your stats, there’s never really a moment where you just squeak in by one point. It’s there to give you the feeling of customising your character, but the branches you choose are usually quite black-and-white in terms of what you can do. I think some of this is down to me, and the way I like to peer behind the curtain to see the wizard, and examine how games works, so I think for the majority of players it’ll still feel pretty cool.

The other cool thing the game does for the first time in the series, is to let you combine items. Just like in the Adventure Game series from Kosmos, you can enter the card numbers of two things into the app and see if you make a new thing, just like in a point and click video game. It’s done well, and the combinations are all very logical. There’s no ‘rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle’ levels of abstract thinking, and it helps the game feel fresh after the previous two outings.

Back on track

In my previous review for Low Memory, I said that I was a bit disappointed after playing The Awakening before it. Things felt a bit disjointed, and there were a few design choices that didn’t gel with me. I’m extremely happy to say that Children of Wyrmwoods gets right back on track, and surpasses the original in just about every way. The puzzles are great, the story is really engaging, and your choices feel really meaningful, like you’ve just made a major fork in the story. While you had to make similar choices in the previous games, it never really felt like you were missing too much after your choices.

The theme and setting for the game are really nicely tied to the narrative and the puzzles, and although there’s still some disjoints in the way a solution is meant to fix the problem in front of you, it’s better than in the previous games. The third book in the box has the biggest change in the series so far. I won’t spoil the surprise for you, but I’ll tell you that the training wheels get taken off, and you’d better be switched-on to finish the game.

The balance in the puzzles’ difficulty feels much better than in Low Memory, where at times it veered off into being simply too difficult to be enjoyable. It’s challenging still, but you never really reach the stage where you’ve got a full notebook and calculator just to figure things out.

Final thoughts

Children of Wyrmwoods is the best escape room game I’ve played. It’s easily the best in the Escape Tales series. It feels like the first two games were more experimental, and that this third game is the one where they’ve perfected the formula. Don’t get me wrong, The Awakening and Low Memory are still good games, but with Wyrmwoods, Lockme have smoothed off the rough edges. They’ve found their feet and the game really shines as a result.

While the first two games gave you the option of replaying to make a few different choices, I was never really desperate to. With Children of Wyrmwoods however, I really do want to go back and play it again. There’s a point early in the game where you make a big choice, and I saw puzzles later in the game where the two paths converged again, which made me wonder what I’d missed out on. I ended up with items I never used because my journey took me down a different path, and I want to know what they’re for, dagnabbit!

According to the box, there are over 60 different endings! I’m not sure how different they are, but I had a hard choice from four at the end of my game, and those were after a difficult choice of three. The writing is better in this third game, but I’m not sure if that’s just because the translations overall are better. In short, Children of Wyrmwoods is a fantastic game, with a great story, and if you’re a fan of escape room games like Exit or Unlock, you really need to get this one. It’s fantastic, and you won’t go disappointed or frustrated. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods (2020)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 450 mins

The post Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods Review appeared first on Punchboard.