Shush now students, pay attention

Sankoré is set in West Africa in the 14th Century, and is based on its namesake university in Timbuktu. You’ve been tasked with spreading knowledge by the emperor, Mansa Musa, and during the game you’ll be teaching students, adding courses to your curriculum, and adding books to the shelves of the great library. All of this takes place on the four areas of the main board, each of which is related to the four main subject areas in the game: Astronomy, Mathematics, Theology, and Law.

Explaining how the game is played in detail is too much for a review. Sankoré is a heavy game that requires the same kind of planning and strategy that you’d normally find in a Vital Lacerda game like On Mars (review here). At the very highest level, there’s a dependency loop which you need to keep an eye on to make sure you have enough of the game’s three principal resources: salt, gold, and books. Actions on the theology area of the board will gain you books. Books can be spent in the mathematics area to gain gold. That gold is used in astronomy actions, which result in getting salt, which in turn can be spent to do the theology actions. Thus, the circle of life is complete.

The game design around the four different areas on the board is especially good. Each area has very different actions, with different costs and different dependencies, but there are some core concepts that permeate every teaching action. Prime among the concepts is the idea of knowledge, which makes a lot of sense in a game about learning and teaching, right? Each area has its own shared level of knowledge, which increases as pupils are recruited to players’ boards. As you put more buildings on the board your personal knowledge increases, and adding that to the shared knowledge dictates which level of each action you can take. It’s a cool concept which means that actions slowly build in power as the game progresses. If you choose to min-max in one area, you can dominate the most expensive spaces there.

The other important aspect of the design is the way the different areas are divided and contested. Each area is split into four sub-areas A-D, and each area has two separate mid-game assessment points which award books and prestige to the players building in each sub-area, based on the level of competition there. It’s a simple concept, but it needed to be because there is so much going on that you need to try to stay focused on. By keeping one system of scoring area control, an unnecessary layer of overhead has been avoided by not using unwarranted asymmetry.

Bookkeeping

Books are the most important thing in Sankoré. They’re also one of the most confusing things. As the game goes on you’ll gain books which go on your player board into their allocated spaces, while other actions make you ‘pay’ these books onto the shared library board. Putting walls around the Sankoré Madrasa with the mathematics action, for instance, or graduating students. There are three shelves to choose from when you add your book, and this simple act – putting a book on a shelf – leads on to the most complicated concept in the game.

Scoring.

You might notice that there’s no VP track on the game board, which is unusual nowadays. This is because no scoring is done until the end of the game. It didn’t even register with me until halfway through my first play, and my immediate thought was to one of the guys in my games group. He hates it when a game doesn’t have any visible way to keep track of scoring until the end of the game. While the rest of the world loves Great Western Trail, he won’t play it again for that very reason. If that’s a deal breaker for you, you might want to consider it before spending your cash.

Scoring is based on the amount of prestige you collect during the game. It’s everywhere, from little wooden stars you collect, to stars on graduate student tiles, and stars on your player boards when you build enough in one area. The value of each prestige isn’t fixed though, it’s based on the books in the library. Each shelf is appraised separately, with two points being awarded to the colour of the most numerous books, and one point for the colour in second place. If there’s a tie at the end of the game, it’s the colour which managed to get all its books in first that wins.

This all goes to add a really interesting dynamic which some people aren’t going to have a good time with. Not on their first play, anyway. I remember my first game, thinking “I’ve got loads of orange prestige, this is great”, before the hideous realisation that there were almost no orange books in the library, meaning they were worth nothing. That’s hard to stomach if you’re used to games that throw points at you as if they’re dollar bills and you’re the only stripper working the 11 am shift. It adds in this ever-changing, plasma-like layer to an otherwise rigid Euro experience. Your strategy can and will adapt as the game goes on, and a well-placed book in the final turn can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Maybe that’s not your thing, but I love it, like the parallel universe morning shift stripper I could be. My biggest gripe is that there’s nothing included in the box to help you with the final scoring. No track to tally your points, no little notepad to write your totals. In a game which makes you hang on until the very end to find out who won, it’s a janky experience to have to go and find some paper and a pen.

Final thoughts

Sankoré then. A game that honestly, not everyone is going to enjoy. The scoring is unusual. There are a ton of interconnected dependencies. It takes a while to set up. If you prefer your games on the heavier end of the spectrum though, this is a real treat. Ian O’Toole’s artwork and graphic design lift the whole thing and make it feel much friendlier and approachable than it might have been. The guy’s a wizard if you ask me. And for once, I play one of Fabio’s games which doesn’t make me feel like it ends one turn too soon. I love his games, but that feeling of “always leave them wanting” isn’t my favourite thing.

There’s so much I haven’t even touched on, from the skill tiles that boost your actions, to the spatial puzzle of which lessons go where on your board and where to place your students. I haven’t mentioned sending your camels across Africa for the Astronomy action, building outposts as you go, or the competition for position around the courtyard you build together. I haven’t talked about the objective cards to help give you some focus in the early game. As ever, my goal here is to give you a feeling of what the game is like to play, and what you’re likely to enjoy or dislike. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, you can read the rules here.

I want to give a special mention to the solo mode. I was worried running the AI bot was going to be an exercise in flowchart hell, but it’s not. It’s easy to learn and it runs smooth as silk, which is perfect in a game which is going to drain your cognitive ability like a Hobnob soaking up a cup of tea. There are four different bots of varying difficulty to compete against too, which is great. As a solo experience, it’s a fantastic way to practise and enjoy the game on your own.

Thematically it holds its own. The idea of accepting students, putting them through classes, spreading knowledge, and trying to gather prestige in your chosen academic area, is a solid one. It’s represented well in the game. The components are great, especially the game’s insert which does the job very nicely indeed. Setting up and playing the game feels like an Eagle-Gryphon experience, but without the associated price tag, and I love it for that. It’s only January, but I can already see Sankoré being in my top 5 games of 2024.

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

Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa (2024)

Design: Fabio Lopiano, Mandela Fernandez-Grandon
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 150-180 mins

The post Sankoré Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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

Read all about it!

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

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

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

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

The Sunday papers

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Fit To Print (2023)

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

The post Fit To Print Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The designer is listed as a Harry Wu, and if it’s not a name you recognise, that’s because it’s a pseudonym belonging to John Bohrer. John is a famous train game designer, who even has some of the 18xx games with his name on. Accompanying the streamlined design is more beautiful artwork and graphic design from one of my favourites, Ian O’Toole. This small box game packs in a huge board, a load of little white passenger meeples, and a freight car’s worth of tiny, coloured trains. It’s cuteness overload and the pieces are impossible not to play with.

Making tracks

The rules for playing Ride The Rails are so simple that they fit onto a double-sided sheet of A4 paper. At the start of your turn you choose which train company (colour) you want to take a share in, and add it to your player board. Then players take turns adding trains to the hex map, only placing trains in colours they hold shares in. The trains represent tracks, or routes. The aim is to connect the various cities dotted all over the continental US map on the board. In every city there’s a passenger, and at the end of each round each player chooses a passenger, follows the routes around the map, and removes them. Easy so far.

You get money for each city the passenger visits, and the shareholders also get money if their colour routes are used. The more shares you hold in a company, the bigger the pay-out you get from your dividends. This leads to some really interesting decisions that you need to make. Is it really worth moving that passenger all the way to the other side of the map, if your competitors are going to rake in big bucks because you used their routes?

You really need your wits about you, because you’re working with a limited number of trains of each colour. If you’re the only person laying that colour track, that’s not so much of a problem, but if others are using the same colour, you need to think about whether it’s worth striking out toward a new city, if it’s unlikely there’ll be enough trains to finish the route. A new colour becomes available in each round, which makes this a game of balancing strategy, while reacting to the other players’ choices.

Tickets please

The way the map develops in Ride The Rails is really satisfying. The first couple of colours available can only start in the Eastern-most cities, and as the game advances, the routes start to snake West, like ivy growing along a wall. Each round can see some really big swings in VPs, which keeps the game alive and interesting from the first turn to the last. One particularly clever route can move things in your favour, and investing in shares in the company the leader is using, can force them to make some really tricky choices.

In the first couple of rounds your choices are really limited as to what you can do, and where you’re going to build. When you combine that with the knowledge that some companies only become available for the last two or three rounds, it feels like a straight-forward game. When you reach the late-game stages though, Ride The Rails just springs to life and gets so competitive, so tight, and so interesting. Your passenger choices become a double-edged blade, because there’s no way your choice won’t benefit at least one other player at the same time as you. The trick comes in figuring out how to maximise your own profits, but not at the expense of boosting someone way ahead of yourself.

Full steam ahead

The brilliance of Ride The Rails comes from its speed and simplicity. You can play a five player game in an hour, which is not something you can say about the majority of the 18xx games. In fairness, it’s not a great comparison, because in truth this is nothing like 1830, for example. The only real similarities are in the fact it’s a train game, and there’s investment in companies, but that’s where it ends. It’s a great way to get that Train Game hit in a short time, with rules that you could teach to anyone. A turn is simple: choose a colour to invest in, lay seven or eight trains on the board, move a passenger.

Like many good games, simple actions don’t always mean easy choices. There’s this brilliant cat & mouse feel when two players are both laying trains of the same colours, taking turns. Trying to second guess what they have planned, and where they might link up with other colours is half the fun. Then you have the fun of deciding whether you want to back that horse and invest in their colours, or scupper them by using up their trains in a different direction. It’s a game with no real direct interaction, but an absolute ton of passive interactions.

Final thoughts

I’ll be the first to admit, I have a really limited exposure to train games. It’s just Ticket To Ride in all its various guises mostly. When the package arrived from Capstone, I shared some pictures of the game and mentioned that I’d seen it referred to as ’18xx-lite’. Hoo boy, what a mistake. It turns out that 18xx fans are very invested in their games, and don’t take kindly to bad comparisons. Having taught myself 1830 since, and realising how true this complaint was, made me appreciate just how different the games are. This gave me added motivation to make sure that I a) learned the (numerous) differences, and b) did this game justice in its own right.

I really like Ride The Rails. John Bohrer is a divisive designer for some people, but make no mistake, he knows his way around a train game. It’s so easy to learn, and so fast to play, the only word to describe it is ‘elegant’. It’s a refreshing change to play a meaty, thinky game, but for it to be so simple in its execution. I can take this game to a game night knowing that I could teach a table of people how to play in a few minutes, play an entire game with a group of happy people, and still have time for another big game. That’s worth a lot to me.

Ride The Rails has sparked a newfound interest for me, with Cube Rails games firmly on my radar. I can’t wait to get my hands on the other Iron Rail games – Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge. The pastel colours and sleek design go towards making a really beautiful game, and turns what could have been beige hexes and wooden cubes, into something absolutely gorgeous to play with. It’s a great game with three players, but at its best with four or five, so that’s a consideration to make before buying. But for £30, this is an easy recommendation for me to make. Ride the Rails is a great game.

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

Ride The Rails (2020)

Designer: Harry Wu
Publisher: Capstone Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Ride The Rails Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve never heard of the city of Merv, you’re not alone. I had no idea before I heard about this game. It was a rich, powerful city where East met West, and in the 12th and 13th centuries was one of the biggest cities in the world. It was a major trading hub until the early 13th century when the Mongols sacked the city, reportedly killing the entire population and refugees. Merv never recovered, and was permanently razed in the 18th century, and the rest is history.

Sounds like the perfect setting for a Euro game, right?

What’s In The Box?

Before we get inside the box, let’s just pay attention to the box itself. Wow, it’s a stunner, another beautiful piece of shelf-art from Ian O’Toole. When you open the box, things carry on in the same vein. The board is so colourful and vibrant, as are the cards. There are cards representing spices and contracts, and a whole heap of tiles which represent the buildings in the city, which players will be fighting for control of.

There are wooden pieces for each player, including some meeples, a load of little buildings, and some discs. You’ll be ignoring those though, once you start playing with the gorgeous camel meeples. The rule book is one of the big, square types, and does a really good job of giving examples of each of the actions. It’s worth noting that there are couple of errors in the printing, but only with reference to a couple of compass directions in the solo section.

As you’d expect now, with the artist’s pedigree, the graphic design and iconography throughout is clear, pretty and colourful.

How Does It Play?

Merv is a game of fighting for places in a queue around the city in the middle of the board. A grid of 5×5 has 24 buildings randomly assigned, with a camel market tile in the middle. Surrounding this central area are other areas, including a palace, the mosque track, a marketplace, and the caravans of the surrounding trading outpost. Each of these represents an action you can take on your turn.

Building Tension

The lifeblood of Merv is fighting for position however. On their turn, the first player in the queue of meeples can choose any column (or row if they’re on the sides) and claim that row or column. They then choose one of the building spaces in that row, and if they have one available, place one of their buildings there. They then own that space.

As well as having an action type, each building space has a colour, and the player first takes a cube of that colour, AND cubes of the colours of all the other buildings they own in that row or column. If you manage to claim all five in a row, that’s five resources per turn. You can immediately understand the importance of trying to get to the front of the queue then, to ensure that it’s you placing your buildings in line with, or perpendicular to, your others .

Any cubes you gain from that movement and building, you can now use along with any others in your possession, and spend them performing actions.

Action Stations

Once you’ve collected all those lovely resources, which come in orange, magenta, cyan. beige and white (wild) flavours, you can spend them on the various actions. The Caravansary part of the board lets you build outposts in neighbouring cities, and then spend your cubes on common or luxury goods. The different goods require different colour combinations of cubes. Maybe you’ll choose to trade in spices instead, where you can claim cards of matching types (e.g. ginger, juniper, pepper) if you have matching coloured cubes to spend.

There’s a library you can visit, and in there spending cubes of different colours lets you claim that many transcribed scrolls. Down one side of the board is the mosque track, and advancing along it requires different colours depending on which branch you choose to move along. As you move along it, you’ll unlock various bonuses.

There’s an action that lets you spend ever-increasing amounts of cubes to place a meeple in the palace. These courtiers score you points at the end of each year/round, based on the type of action space you place them in, and how much favour you’ve gained with the palace that year.

Finally, there’s a Walls action, which lets you build walls around the city square. This increases your influence, which is one of the tracks in the game, and protects neighbouring buildings when the Mongols invade at the end of the second and third years.

Wheels Within Wheels

If you know what I like from my reviews, you’ll know I love it when games have things that work together, and bonuses you can stack and combine. Merv does not disappoint. When you’re looking at the various actions available, you’d be forgiven for thinking “which should I go for?”, and the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. They will all gain you VPs, and also different bonuses.

Transcribing scrolls at the library for example. when you collect 2, 4, 6 and finally 8 of them, you can claim one of the breakthrough tiles at each level. They let you do things like have a one-cube discount for certain actions, or let you use one colour as another once per turn, so they can really boost your strategies.

Moving up the mosque track is another option, and with each step you move up, you’ll get additional bonuses, such as tiles you can overlay onto your claimed building sites, which generate an additional cube of a certain colour. Similar tiles can be grabbed by collecting pairs of particular spice cards, and these tiles grant you the white, wild cubes on your chose building instead of the usual colour.

All those goods from the caravansary, and the scrolls from the library, can be turned in to collect contracts, which give you VP bonuses or allow you to place soldiers. Oh, we didn’t talk about soldiers yet did we? Instead of using a building’s action on your turn, you can place a soldier meeple on a built building site to both increase your influence, and to protect it during the Mongol raids.

The Horse Designed By Committee

I mentioned the camels at the top of the review, and I also talked about how important the fight for the queue placement is. So I just want to mention how the two work together. At the end of each turn, the player whose meeple is furthest back along the current row or column, moves it to the queue on the next corner, taking the furthest-back space. Then the next player, then the next, etc. So the player the furthest forward, gets the advantage of going first again next turn.

Or do they?

During the game, various actions will give players camels. These can be spent during certain actions like trading and the caravans, but they can be saved and used to influence the turn order for the next turn. When the first player moves to the next queue, they can put a camel down in each of the spaces they want to skip, so if they have enough, they can put themselves at the front of the queue. The next player can do the same, adding to the camels on each spot, or just take their place and claim any camels there as their own.

This decision of when to spend camels to give you that first player advantage is critical, and makes the seemingly simple choice of ‘which row do I claim this turn?’ much harder.

After three trips around the board, which represents three years, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Final Thoughts

Merv is a great game, let’s just get that out of the way now. I really, really like the game. Fabio has put together some really well-connected mechanics and the decision-making involved is fantastic. After a couple of games, once I understood the interplay of difference actions and resources, I could really start trying to play with some form of strategy.

Merv For Dummies

One of the biggest complaints I see about the game – mostly from people who haven’t played it – is that they won’t play a game with a dummy player in. Some games have used a dummy, extra player to occupy space and make mechanics work with lower player counts. It’s usually a lazy way to not cope with making changes to the game with those lower player counts. In Merv if you play with one or two players, an additional character is added to the game, the High Courtier (HC).

At a glance, you’d be mistaken for thinking this is a dummy player, but it’s really not. Each turn, the first player chooses which row or column the HC claims, and the second player chooses which building plot they build on. Rather than just blocking though, this placement is very tactical. One thing I didn’t mention in the gameplay overview is that on your turn, instead of activating your own buildings, you can choose to activate another player’s, or the HC’s, and take their actions and cubes. Once you understand that, you can see how playing those extra buildings not only blocks other players, but can be a really useful resource for you.

Reactive Planning

The layout of the city tiles is randomised each time you play, and reading that initial state is the key to doing well, and I love that in a game. The same goes for the spice cards too, the deck is shuffled and the initial layout different each time. Even when you’ve got the initial read of things, and you start formulating a plan, you still need to be so reactive, especially in the first year. Players will get in your way, block your rows, take the things you had your eye on, and you’ve got to have a Plan B, and a Plan C, just in case.

This could lead to a really frustrating situation if it was left unchecked, as a good player could lock up really useful places and leave the others limited for options. However, turns are finite, and each player only gets 12 over the course of the game. Unless players spend some of those turns placing soldiers of building walls, they’re likely to lose some of those buildings during the Mongol raid at the end of the second year. Those spots are then fair game during the final year for the other players to claim and build on.

As well as the various actions and resources, there are also two main tracks that come into play. The influence track determines how many different types of spice you can trade for, and which value of contract you can fulfill, while the honour track is spent at the end of each year to score points for the courtiers you might have in the palace.

Putting It All Together

Some people have said there are dominant strategies and actions to take in Merv, but personally I’ve not witnessed it. I’ve won and lost games to players concentrating on different things. When I’ve made conscious efforts to just climb the mosque track, or just build outposts and dominate the caravansary, I’ve won and lost.

Merv just feels great to play. Even setting it up on the table, with all the bright colours and illustrations, puts a smile on your face. Turns are so simple, and there’s very little fuss in doing anything in the game. This combined with the clear iconography means that after just one learning play of the game, you can concentrate on your strategy. There’s no hidden information, so any strategies are yours to figure out, if you know your opponents well enough.

I have a love/hate relationship with games with a limited number of turns. You never have enough turns to do everything, and those 12 turns disappear quickly. To do well you have to set out your stall early and decide: am I going to be Jack of all trades and master of none, or am I Captain Library for the next hour.

Merv is a game that just feels satisfying. When you start the game there’s this empty city square, and by the end it’s covered in buildings, soldiers and upgrades, and walls and gates surround it. It’s not a town or civilization building game, but it gives that look and feel to all involved.

Solo Options

There’s a really well-made solo game in the box, and it’s with an automa opponent (yay!). Your foe in this mode is called the Corrupt Magistrate, and its actions are driven by a deck of cards. The way its deck is created is clever too, as it will concentrate on three of the main actions, and the palace, and you don’t know which it will be until you start playing. The rules for it placing buildings and taking actions are very clear and easy, and the two of you also drive the actions of the High Courtier, as per the two-player game.

As I mentioned above, in the current printing there are a couple of areas in the solo rules that don’t make sense. It refers to both the cities on the caravansary area, and the trails on the mosque area as if they were both rotated 90 degrees clockwise, but once you understand that, it’s all clear. It comes as a result of the solo rules going to print before the design of the board was finalised.

Recommended?

Absolutely. If you like your Euros with quite a lot of indirect player interaction (the blocking) and plenty of routes to victory, this is a fantastic option. The solo mode is very good, and hard to beat, which is a real boon during these times of lockdown, at the time of writing. It’s quick to learn, easy to understand, and it’s a beautiful thing to have on your shelf and table. Gamers and non-gamers alike can’t help to be drawn in by the colours, the walls around the city, and of course, my favourite, those wonderful little camels.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the UK, if you shop around you can buy Merv for less than £30. For that price, it’s hard to find a reason to not buy it.

The post Merv Review appeared first on Punchboard.