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.

From Russia with love

Or more accurately, from the Soviet Union as it was back then. In the 1950s a couple of scientists decided to start an experiment to see if they could successfully recreate the process of the domestication of dogs. They took a group of Silver Foxes and selected those with the ‘friendliest’ traits to breed over successive generations, to see if what had happened over thousands of years in the past, could happen again.

When I heard about the theme of The Fox Experiment, it sent a small shudder down my spine. I had initial worries about the ethics. Reading up on the subject though, it seems like my original concerns were unfounded. Not only were the foxes not subjected to cruelty (as far as anyone can tell), but the experiment formed part of a rebellion. The Soviet Union officially rejected the current understanding of genetics and instead promoted the work of Trofim Lysenko.

You came here for a game review, not a history lesson, I know, but bear with me. Lysenko’s work was based on pseudoscience, and the rejection of Mendelian genetics (he didn’t believe that genes existed!) lead to thousands of scientists who refused to abandon their views to become destitute, imprisoned, or even killed. The same Trofim Lysenko was later responsible for the practices in the Soviet Union which led to famines not only in his home nation but also in China where his practices were adopted. Read up on him, it’s enlightening to say the least.

So if you coming at this with a preconception of ‘crazy Russian scientists doing weird, inhumane experiments’, think again. The work of Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut (the aforementioned scientists) was important and put them at great personal risk. This game pays homage to the work they did, and it does it without throwing a history book at you.

A chip off the old block

Gameplay in The Fox Experiment seems more complicated than it is in reality. Each turn, you’ll each choose two foxes – a mummy and a daddy – to have a special cuddle which will result in a baby fox. Ask your parents. Each fox card has trait dice associated with them, which you collect and then roll in order to create your babies. The way the dice work is fun. Some faces have a whole symbol, some half a symbol, and some one-and-a-half. Once rolled, you line the dice up and place halves next to one another to create whole symbols.

Each symbol you create lets you take one of your dry-wipe markers – that’s right kids, this is part roll-and-write! – and colour in the dots and boxes on your next pup card. Perhaps the most adorable thing in the entire game is that each pup card has a space for you to give it a name! I’m not very creative when it comes to naming pups, so my games have had plenty of Steves, Fionas, and Ians. The pups you create go to the kennel (i.e. selection pool) for the next round of the game, hence carrying forward the most prominent genes for successive generations.

This game makes me feel unreasonably sad when my pups aren’t chosen in the following round. They just go to the discard pile. Poor little Susan fox. I have to think of the discard pile like it’s someone’s home, and they’ve just adopted a new, potentially dangerous pet.

“Look, papa, bitey Susan has crapped in your slippers again”

It’s a really clever way of baking the genetics of the subject matter into the genetics of the game. Selectively breeding foxes actually passes the chosen traits on to the next generation, which in turn gives more dice for each trait, increasing the chances of that trait getting stronger again in the following generation. It’s such a simple idea that it makes me wonder why a) it’s not been used more often, or b) why I’ve missed the games where it has been used.

Complex strands of DNA

The Fox Experiment is an easy game to teach, but there’s still plenty of game bubbling away under the surface for those who like their games with a little more bite. For instance, each player has a player board full of potential upgrades. Unlocking upgrades comes at the cost of spending trait tokens, which you get from filling in more dots on the pup cards, as well as certain actions during the game. These upgrades give you things like more friendly (read: wild) dice to roll each turn, or most interestingly to birth more pups each round. Pups make prizes!

It’s not a case of blindly picking traits and going with them, either. You each start with a study card too, which rewards you for managing to generate certain numbers of different traits each turn. Another unlockable on your player board grants you more study cards, offering more opportunities to score more points. Then there are the randomly selected patrons for each game which can reward you for accomplishing various things in the game, but only if (you guessed it) you unlock the ability on your player board.

Add to that science cards which offer you bonuses at specific points during the game, and the clever turn order selection which can give you some nice bonuses, but at the expense of having later picks at the kennel in the next round. There’s plenty here to keep your brain busy if fawning over the cute little foxes doesn’t do it for you. Don’t be put off just because appearances make it look lighter than it actually is.

Final thoughts

I only really have a couple of issues with The Fox Experiment, which is pretty high praise. Firstly is my odd emotional connection with the foxes I’ve bred and named, only to watch them immediately disappear into obscurity. I’m just too darn touchy-feely. The other problem for me is the artwork. The symbology is great, very easy to understand throughout, but the saturation and variety of colours in the game makes it hard to pick things out at a glance. It makes the table look really busy. I think that might be a ‘me’ problem rather than a design issue, but who knows?

Another thing to bear in mind is whether you intend to buy the game primarily for two players. When you play with any number fewer than three players, you need to run an AI opponent. All it really does is help to take cards out of the market and steal turn order spots, and it’s not difficult to do, but it is just another thing to do on top of playing your own game. With three and four players I think The Fox Experiment is at its best. You only have three actions to take in the first stage of the game (take a fox card twice and claim a turn order space), but agonising over which thing to leave on the table when you know others may want it is great.

The components are great, from the colourful custom dice down to the oh-so-cute fox meeples, and I really like the big tarot-size cards. I think using the dry-wipe pens and cards was a really clever move. The designers could easily have just stacked dice on the cards to go in the kennel display, but people love to draw on cards, and come up with names for their pups. It gets you personally involved with your foxes’ lineage. The Fox Experiment is a great middle-weight game with a decent amount of indirect interaction, a solid theme which is really well integrated, and quick, snappy gameplay.

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

The Fox Experiment (2023)

Design: Elizabeth Hargrave, Jeff Fraser
Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Art: Joe Shawcross
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post The Fox Experiment Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Tic-tac-toe

The land you’re tasked with rejuvenating takes the form of a board in front of each player with a 3×3 grid of spaces printed on it. Some of the spaces have icons printed on them, some are blank. Blank squares are boring, though. Booooring. They need little icons on them too. Luckily, between each player, there’s a tile, and on that tile, there’s a stack of square biome cards.

The rounds in Rauha tick along as alternating days and nights, and each side of the tile between neighbouring players has a day and a night side. If it’s a day round, turn to your right and draft a card from that pile. If it’s a night round, turn to your left and draft a card. The alternate drafting is really interesting and adds a nice little squeeze of tension, drizzled over the top of the game. More often than not there’ll be more than one card you want from a tile. Trying to second-guess your neighbour’s plans and the likelihood of them taking the card you want leads to some tense moments.

Cards for what though? Why do you want cards? When you choose the card you want on a turn, it’s time to add it to your board, and without getting into the nitty-gritty of it, you’re trying to make three-in-a-row. Get three matching icons vertically and/or horizontally and you get to take the associated Divine Entity tile. It’s the game saying “Nice one. You like that particular trait so much that its God is crashing on your sofa with you now”, which is a good thing. Divine Entities often grant the owner a bonus when they claim it, and again during each of the four scoring phases.

On the surface it seems like a pretty shallow game. Fun, but shallow all the same. Draft a card, play a card, get some stuff, maybe get a bonus. However, it only takes one full play to make you realise there’s a really nice layer of nuance which elevates Rauha from a very simple game to a clever, cunning one.

Easy come, easy go

The Divine Entities are the key to scoring well in Rauha. Initially, it seems tricky to figure out a way to use them to the biggest advantage, until you realise something important. You get a one-time bonus every time you claim one. Whether that’s from the central board where they’re hanging out at the start of the game, or beside another player’s board. This means it can be in your best interest for somebody else to claim an entity you’ve got because if you can claim it back, you get that one-time bonus again. Just make sure you’ve still got it when your avatar makes it to a corner of the board to trigger scoring.

I didn’t mention each player’s avatar (player marker), because they’re largely irrelevant. You all move them simultaneously from one notch to the next, around the sides of your player boards, to keep track of the rounds. The avatar’s position also indicates which row or column gets activated in each round, scoring you precious points and resources based on the cards in that very same row or column. It made me think back to Fabio Lopiano’s brilliant I-need-one-more-turn Merv (review here).

It might sound like a tall order, trying to manipulate your board’s state so you can repeatedly claim the same entity. It’s made entirely easier by the fact that you can play cards on top of other cards, thus breaking and making chains relatively easily. The other layer of fun in this ludological trifle is the spores, which I realise now sounds like a terrible layer to put in a trifle. Spores are these very tactile purple discs which can be added to some cards, and later flipped to re-activate the biomes (cards) during scoring rounds.

Final thoughts

Rauha does what it sets out to do in a quick and efficient way. Nothing about the game is cumbersome or bloated. While there are plenty of choices to be made with just about every card you draft, you’ll usually find yourself working towards a plan you have in mind, rather than just reacting to whatever’s happening. Speaking as someone who favours strategy over reaction, I really enjoy being able to play this way.

In a few of the games I’ve played, I’ve seen one player manage to get an unassailable lead a couple of times, but it comes from clever play rather than the planets aligning in some kind of cosmological lottery win. It’s not as wild as the score differences can be in something like Tapestry though. The constant yoinking of entities between players is really entertaining, and it’s a pleasant change to play a game with such a strong feeling of passive interaction. There’s no ‘take that!’, and no mechanisms to push a stick in the spokes of someone else’s bike. The groans and expletives generated by Rauha come about because someone takes the card you were hoping would be there next turn, or because someone pulls some Ocean’s Eleven level heisting and nabs a couple of entities with one card, just before a scoring round.

Not that that’s ever happened to me, you understand…

I’ve successfully introduced Rauha to people from seasoned gamers right through to my family, and all have had a good time with it. It’s a great game to start or end a games night with. There’s something there for everyone. The instant hit from making a row and getting some cool stuff for newbies, right through to nuanced long-term planning for the hardcore nerd in your life. It took me by surprise. There’s much more here than is immediately apparent. Check it out, I think you’ll like it.

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

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Rauha (2023)

Design: Johannes Goupy, Théo Rivière
Publisher: GRRRE Games
Art: O’lee
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Rauha Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Taking the initiative

The core of Vaalbara is set-collection. In each of the game’s nine rounds, there are enough land cards on offer for each player to take one and add it to their ‘realm’. Realm is a grand way of saying ‘bit of table in front of you’. Different land types score in different ways, as described on your handy-dandy reference cards, so once you’ve chosen what lands you want to collect, it’s just a case of nabbing those ones from the market row. Everyone else is trying to do the same thing though, so how do you decide who gets first dibs?

Roll for initiative!

Except, there’s no dice, and there’s no rolling. Except for maybe rolling your eyes when someone takes something you want. Initiative in Vaalbara is printed in the top-left corner of the character cards. Ah yes, character cards, I’ve not really mentioned those yet. You’ve all got an identical deck of 12 characters, each with its own initiative number and ability. Shuffle them up, take five cards into your hand, and on each turn you all play one face-down, then do the dramatic reveal. The dramatic reveal isn’t really that dramatic. Instead, it’s more like a group of kids in a primary school trying to give the answer to a rudimentary maths question fastest. Eyes flit back and forth across the cards trying to see who gets to go in which order.

“But Adam, with only 12 cards, surely there are ties. How do you break ties?”. I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader. I really like this bit. Each of the decks of character cards has a different colour (and symbol, colourblind rejoice), and each of the cards in the lands deck has these symbols in a different order. So if you need to break a tie, you look at the top of the lands draw deck, and break ties based on the order of the symbols. I really like it, it’s pretty unique.

Quick & weak, slow & strong

So you’ve played your characters, flipped them over, and done the mental maths to see who goes when. Now you get to do that character’s thing. Each has a different ability, and as you might expect, the later in turn order you go, the more powerful the effect. The Hunter, for instance, goes first – huzzah! But playing them gives you no instant benefit. Instead, anyone else with The Hunter in their hand can reveal it to grab 1VP. Compare that to the Farmer, sitting on the other end of the scale with an initiative of 12. Playing The Farmer doubles the points you get for your land card in this round. Let’s say you’ve already got four Field cards, and snag a fifth. Fields give you 2VP for every field in your realm so that 10VPs is now double to 20. Twenty!! Twenty is lots.

Play early and get bobbins rewards from your character, but get to pick up first from the Lands market, grabbing that juicy mountain card. Play later for big points, but get left with the dregs. Or play somewhere in the middle, where you get some interesting effects to play with, such as being able to swap a card in this round’s row with one in the row behind it (you always see the next round’s Land cards). All of this planning could be for naught though, because you have no idea which cards are in the other players’ hands, let alone which one they’ve played. The only thing you know for sure is which cards have already been played, but good luck keeping track of that.

It’s in that moment, that point where you commit to your character, where the game comes to life and really shines. That breathless five seconds when the cards are revealed, you work out who goes when, and then figure out whether you might get that Land you really wanted. One of the things I really like is the way being neighbours with other players matters. Some Lands (meadows) give you a point per meadow card in your and your neighbours’ realms, whereas some character cards reward you based on whether you went before or after them. It’s a clever way of introducing interaction without the ‘Take that!’ that games like Citadels have.

Final thoughts

It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you whether I think a game is good or not. Quantifying that opinion is more difficult, so let me illustrate just how good a game this is. I took Vaalbara with me to the UK Games Expo this year (you can read my show report here) and taught it to some friends on the first evening. Later in the evening, they were then teaching it to another group, and the same thing happened the following evening. Just before I left on Saturday, in the pile of communal purchases my friends and I created, there were two more copies of Vaalbara.

It’s not the deepest game in the world, but nor is it long or difficult to teach. I’ve taught it to my wife and son, to friends, and to complete strangers, and everyone has had a good time with it. It plays nicely with all player counts from two to five, but I think it’s best at four and five, where the concept of neighbours really matters. With two or three, everyone is your neighbour, and it just shaves a little off the strategy elements that I prefer to be there.

My copy of Citadels still gets played today, 12 years after I bought it. It goes with me in my bag to all kinds of trips and occasions, because I know anyone can and will enjoy it. The same is now true of Vaalbara. I expect the box to get worn and knackered, and the game to get some wear and tear because it’s going to get played a lot. For less than £20, Vaalbara is a great option that deserves to be in your short and/or filler games collection.

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

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Vaalbara (2022)

Design: Olivier Cipière
Publisher: Studio H
Art: Félix Donadio, Alexandre Reynaud
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20 mins

The post Vaalbara Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Quick and easy

On the surface, it’s easy to say Scout is a set collection game. The truth is that it’s more of a ‘carefully craft a set and then get rid of it’ game. Each player has a hand of cards, and each card has two different values: one at the top of the card, and one at the bottom. After you’re dealt your hand, you can choose which way up you want to hold it, but you – and this bit’s important now – may not change the order of the cards. The gods of the shuffle have decreed that you will receive these cards, and you will have them in this order. Fiddling with that order will result in a smiting.

Something like that anyway.

The only time your cards get new neighbours is when you ‘Show’, or when you ‘Scout’, each of which being the actions you can take. To Show, you take a set of cards from your hand (either cards of the same value, or a run of ascending or descending cards), and play them to the middle of the table. You only get to Show if your set is better than what’s already on the table at the time. The cards you beat get flipped over and added to your stash of points, you greedy little piggy.

Scouting entails choosing any card from those in the current Show, and adding it to your hand. You can choose to put it wherever you like in your hand, and whichever way up you like too. Powerful stuff in a game so prescriptive about what you can do. The penalty for this? The person whose card you take gets a point token from the supply.

You know how to play Scout now, you lucky devil. “But Adam, you go on about how you don’t like to do rules explanations, you hypocrite”. Yeah, yeah, I know. Forgive me this once, it’s a small card game. I need the word count.

Hidden depth

You’ll find all manner of hidden layers of depth once you’ve played a couple of games of Scout. You’ll start setting up combos in your hand so that you can play that rubbish set of three 2s, just so that the cards on either side clash together in their absence, setting up a run so formidable we dare not even imagine it. It’s a bit like Zuma in that respect.

You remember – Zuma? Oh go on, you do. That Popcap game from years back, where you’re some kind of rotating, magical frog, which spits coloured balls at balls on a track? Yeah, that one. That’s a bit like Scout, only different.

Player count is pretty important in Scout. You can play with anything from two to five players, but four or five is where it’s best. A round ends when the turn comes back around to the owner of the set in the middle of the table after nobody was able to beat it. In three players, that’s a short time, but with more players, there’s ample opportunity to plan and execute your shenanigans.

I really appreciate how easy it is to grasp not only how to play Scout, but to start picking up on the nuances of strategy. It’s a game which really rewards repeated play with the same people, in much the same way something like No Thanks does.

Final thoughts

There’s really not too much more to tell you about Scout. Often, I’m here trying to help champion smaller, less well-known games. For example, I was delighted when I was able to shine my little light on the likes of games like Zuuli and Cosmic Voyage, both of which did deservedly well. With Scout, I feel like I’m on the receiving end for a change.

I never played the version with the original artwork, published by One More Game! A game by a Japanese designer, printed by a Japanese publisher, is always going to find it hard to gain traction in the West. But with Oink Games picking up the baton and bringing it to a clamorous rest of the world, both you and I can pick up a copy without an esoteric knowledge of games and a bottomless wallet. In fact that’s exactly what I did, with my own pennies. I caught wind of the bubbling-under and grabbed a copy from Oink’s stand at the UK Games Expo last year.

There are very few reasons not to own a copy of Scout in all honesty. I haven’t met anyone who bounced off it hard yet, and for the price you’ve got a clever, entertaining game in a gorgeous little box. It’s the kind of game I’d take to the pub and not be too worried about having a clean table for. As testament to that, I took it to play with colleagues at the cafe of the university I work for. Yeah, the same tables those students were using… Scout is amazing, just go and get it.

Scout (2019)

Designer: Kei Kajino
Publisher: Oink Games
Art: Rie Komatsuzaki, Jun Sasaki, sinc
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Scout Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Green fingers

I’ll start off by explaining that the word ‘verdant’ means green, specifically the type of green when something is covered with plant life. Leaves, grass, rolling meadows – you know the sort of thing. Verdant is a game about filling a house with houseplants, so the name makes a lot of sense. Each player will make a tableau of fifteen cards in a 3×5 arrangement, where plant cards are placed in a checkboard pattern with room cards.

I have some houseplants which live in my games room. I like to keep some greenery around, it’s natural and relaxing. I know all too well though that certain plants like certain conditions. My monkey mask monster yearns for daylight and makes a beeline for it if it’s in too much shade. Conversely, my dracaena doesn’t care if it’s in the shade, he’s quite happy anywhere. Similarly, in Verdant you try to make sure each plant is adjacent to as many cards offering the type of light it likes as possible.

Getting the lighting right is made more difficult because there are a hundred other things you’re trying to match and best optimise with every placement. Okay, a hundred is an exaggeration, but it’s how it feels sometimes. Verdant does an amazing job of creating a tricky puzzle with a small number of variables. For example, there are five types of plants, and five types of rooms. Match a room’s colour with the type of adjacent plants, and you get more points for them. You can place objects like furniture or pets onto rooms, and again, get bonuses where the colours match. Easy so far, right?

Variety is the spice of life

Just when you think you’ve got the idea of Verdant, it likes to throw some curveballs at you. It’s true that loads of plants and rooms all of matching colours will earn you a lot of points. If you don’t dig matchy-matchy, the eclectic among you can score well too. You get bonus points for having one of every type of plant, and more points again for having one of every colour of room. Objects in rooms score more points when you don’t have duplicate types in your tableau. Vive la difference.

It’s a clever piece of game design. It means you aren’t penalised if someone is hoovering up all of the yellow cards, for example. You only need one of them if you collect every other colour too, and you’ll still score well. It’s interesting to note that Verdant is a game designed by a collaborative group. No fewer than five different people are credited as the designers for the game, and that’s a real rarity. I think that the combined ideas of each of the people have helped craft a balanced, nuanced game and that there’s strength in numbers here, rather than an excess of cooks around a pot of broth.

Careful pruning

Verdant’s concise approach to the game and its brevity are the reasons it shines. 15 cards aren’t many at all, and you’ll end up making some tough decisions in the last couple of rounds. That part of the game makes it feel like an Uwe Rosenberg game, where you’ll try to calculate the most points you can squeeze out of your last turns. Verdant is a game you can play in half an hour, which means you can let someone have a ‘learning game’, reset, and play again, all inside an hour.

It’s thirty minutes of tricky decisions. Getting the lighting right on plants adds the all-precious verdancy tokens, as do other actions like adding fertiliser or using tool tiles. The verdancy tokens are really cute, and I love how you get to complete a plant and add a fancy pot to the card. When you consider that Verdant is a card game where you lay cards in a rectangle, the amount of theme it manages to convey is pretty remarkable.

The chilled feeling the presentation conveys carries through into the solo game. It plays almost identically to the multiplayer game but uses a kind of conveyor belt mechanism to keep the card market fresh, and the high-scoring pots are removed as if another player was claiming them. Rather than just a one-off puzzle, Shawn has built a full solo campaign, complete with achievements. It’s the style of game which lends itself to being played in a spare hour, and the campaign is a nice touch to encourage you back and try for something different.

Final thoughts

Verdant continues Flatout Games’ fine pedigree. Both Calico and Cascadia were excellent puzzles, wrapped in a game, and Verdant does the same thing. At the start of every game there’ll be a little part of you thinking “this could be it. this could be the time I get the perfect layout”. Sod’s Law says it won’t be, but it plants that little seed of optimism every darn time.

It’s easier to narrow down the people Verdant isn’t for, rather than those it is. It’s such an easy game to learn, and the theme has near-universal appeal, so I think the only people who wouldn’t enjoy it are the same people who dislike tableau-building in any game. The rest of us will love the short-but-sweet brain burn of a game about growing some plants.

It’s great to see a collaboration of designers making such sweet music together. Board game design strikes me as something so personal that my first thought about a big collaboration was one of worry. I worried that the horse game designed by committee might end up being a camel. Verdant is not a camel. Verdant is beautiful game, thanks to the combined brains that made it work, and Beth Sobel, whose gorgeous artwork adorns the box and everything in it. Verdant is a light, fun, aesthetically pleasing game, and I love it.

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

Buy it now at Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your first order through kienda.co.uk/punchboard to potentially qualify for 5% off.

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Verdant (2022)

Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games, AEG
Art: Beth Sobel
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 30-45 minutes

The post Verdant Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Like, really excited.

Without delving too deeply into the historical roots, Brian Boru was the ruler of Ireland at around 1000AD. The game loosely follows the situation in Ireland at the time, with different clans vying for power, and those-who-would-be-rulers trying to unite the nation, fend off the Viking invasions, rebuild the religious buildings, and use arranged marriages to strengthen foreign bonds. How this happens in the game is with a mixture of trick-taking and area control, and it’s a blast.

Hello tarot

The first thing that struck me when I opened the box, was the tarot-size cards used in the game. Cards are so often a means to an end in games, but the added size – while being an impediment to small-handed shufflers – adds appropriate significance to their importance in the game. You see, every turn in the game is based around selecting a card in your hand (which you drafted during the drafting phase), and playing it in the current trick.

I’ve played plenty of trick-taking games in the past, and the concept is now mainstream thanks to games like The Crew, but the concept of combining it with area control is a new one to me. In a nutshell, the active player chooses a town on the map, and starts a trick in that town’s colour. The winner of the trick takes the action on the top of their played card, which is usually at least placing a marker of their colour on that town. The really interesting stuff happens in the cracks in-between, with the players who lost the trick.

Every card has two optional actions on the bottom, and players who lose the trick choose one to activate, in ascending numerical order. The order the actions are taken is really important, as some of the ways to score in the game are order-critical. Take the marriage track for example. You can move your token up the track, hoping to be the highest on it when the round ends, taking the hand of the bride-to-be. In contrast to a lot of games, places on the track cannot be shared. If you’re going to advance, you need enough steps to jump clear over the other would-be suitors. Playing earlier in turn order means it more difficult for those playing higher-ranked cards.

Trick or treat

Turn order often has a level of significance in a game, but I love just how important it is in Brian Boru. I also love the fact that the low-ranking cards in your hand don’t feel useless. Tricks feel a little different than in many games, as there’s no obligation to follow suit, or beat rank. Winning a trick is important, as it lets you claim the contested town, increasing your clan’s influence in that region, but losing a trick can be just as important. It’s a brilliant dichotomy which makes every turn feel significant.

It’s so rare that a game manages to keep every player rapt through every turn, but Brian Boru does just that. Nothing feels insignificant, and every other player’s turn is something you have to pay attention to, if you want to win. Winning a trick feels double-edged, like you’re missing out on something else, and the three areas you can influence are similar in this. If you’re the best at repelling Vikings, donating to the churches, or… getting married… you get big rewards at the end of the round, but your influence in each area gets reset, while everyone else keeps some.

Ultimately, it’s an area control game. The connections between towns on the map give you plenty to think about, because a common action is to spend five coins to expand into, and take control of, a connected town. Some of these connections cross region boundaries, some even traverse the sea, so careful placement of your discs is vital. It’s something that doesn’t really show its significance until the end of your first game, but you’ll get it soon enough.

Bumps in the road

It would be negligent of me to not talk about my biggest issue with the game, and that’s the rulebook. For the most part, the rulebook is fine. Turns are simple enough, the game’s concepts and mechanisms are easy to understand. The problems lie with the ambiguity in places, the things that aren’t fully explained. They don’t render the game bad, not by any means, but it can leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth for that first learning game.

My first game of Brian Boru was at AireCon, and we played a five-player game. At least three of us were very experienced gamers, and we couldn’t even start our first round, because the rules tell you to ‘play a card from your hand’ but don’t tell you whether that’s face-up or -down. In most games you’d assume face-up, but in a game where you don’t have to follow suit or rank, we couldn’t be sure. That’s just one example, but there were plenty of times we stopped to check the book, or the game’s BGG forums, for clarification. To save you the same hunting, there’s a great thread with collected corrections and clarifications here.

The biggest problem is for German players. In the intended game – the game in the English rulebook – each round consists of playing four of the cards in your hand, discarding the fifth. The German rulebook, and the player aids, all state that all five cards are played. That’s not a small error, that’s a different game. If you’re wondering why I mention the German game in my review, I have a good following of German friends on Twitter, and Germany accounts for my fourth-highest source of readers (vielen dank), so it’s worth saying.

Final thoughts

As I read this review back, I realise just how big a section I allocated for my grumbles. If a review was proportionally good vs bad paragraphs, you’d be forgiven for thinking I think Brian Boru is average, but it isn’t. Brian Boru is FANTASTIC. Yeah – bold, italicised, and underlined. It’s my favourite game of the year so far, and I can’t wait to play it again. My pre-middle-age grumbling is because when something is so good, anything that throws grit in the gears is exacerbated for me.

While you can play it with three players, I found it’s at its best with four or five. When I got back from AireCon, the first thing I did was find people to play a three-player game with, but it just lacked some of the bite and tension. It’s still good, very good in fact, it’s just not as good. There’s no such thing as a dead turn, and you can achieve something valuable with every card in your hand. Get four or five people around a table for an evening, and you’ll be talking about Brian Boru long after you’ve played it.

I love how engaged every player is, and how interactive the game is. Concentrating on your own plans will only get you so far, and it doesn’t take long to realise that. The rest of the game is in reading the players around the table, trying to work out their plans, what cards they might be holding, and what you can do to piss on their shamrocks. Peer Sylvester has done it again, and Osprey Games have another hit on their hands, I just hope a future printing revises the rulebook.

I get that this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, with the dry theme and area control, but I love it. It’s going to take something special to knock this off my top spot this year.

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

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

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland (2021)

Designer: Peer Sylvester
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Deirdre de Barra
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Brian Boru Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I’m going to kick-off this review by saying that Canopy is gorgeous. I know, I know, the art doesn’t matter if the game is great (looking at you here, Gaia Project), but the rainforest is meant to be beautiful, and full of colour. Artist Vincent Dutrait has done a fantastic job of recreating the hues and romanticised imagery of the rainforest I was hoping to see. It’s a game of gradual tableau-building, but with a fantastic mechanism that’s new to me, and really appeals to that part of my brain that likes to push its luck.

Sneaky peeks

Between the players there’s a row of cards representing new growth. It’s a forest after all, stuff grows. Cards from the current season’s deck get placed into slots numbered 1-3 of the new growth, and then comes the fun. On your turn, you pick up all of the cards in slot one, decide if they complement what you’re going for, then either claim them and stop, or put them back down, and add an unseen card to the pile. Then you move onto the next pile, and do the same. It means there’s this wonderful situation that’s constantly playing out, whereby you know exactly what the other player is going to pick up if you pass, plus an extra card. But what if that extra card I haven’t seen is amazing?!

This pick-or-pass mechanism is great, it adds a layer of tension, similar to getting to 16 in a hand of Blackjack having to decide whether to stick or twist. Fortune favours the brave… or does it? I really enjoy this method of drafting cards into my own little rainforest, the choice of what I include or exclude feels very personal. It means that whether I do well or not depends on how well I choose my cards, how much attention I’m paying to my opponent, and this little bit of chance from the unseen cards. I hate pure luck determining a game, and I don’t always like perfect information in games, as it can lead to a lot of AP. Canopy has the perfect blend.

The best laid plans

Most of the scoring opportunities in Canopy are constructed around future planning. Different plants have very different scoring mechanisms, and the creatures you bring to your jungle paradise don’t get scored until the third, and final, round. Your tableau of cards is there on the table, so the other player can see exactly what you’re trying to score with. This can lead to something I really like in games – being forced to take the least-worst option.

It tends to happen towards the end of a season, when both players have a good idea of what’s left on the table, waiting to be claimed. Take the beautiful Bromelia for example. Having two of them in front of you scores you 7 VPs. If you take a third, however, it’s now worth -3 instead, and your opponent knows it. The same applies with things like the fire cards. Having two of them is bad news for you, and you’ll lose two plants. Stoke that fire with a third card though, and you both lose one card instead.

Canopy is stuffed full of tricky decisions like this the whole way through. Nothing that can completely swing the game with a solitary card, but you need to build in plenty of mitigation for when your opponent forces you to pick up something you didn’t want. There’s this constant back and forth which is really engaging, and a lot of fun. Intermediate scoring after the first two rounds means you don’t get to the end of the game with no idea how well you did, in the way games like Concordia spring it on you.

Final thoughts

I’ve got a carefully curated collection of two-player games. The majority of the time I get to play a game, it’s with one other person, so I want the experience to be as much fun as possible. I’ve added Canopy to the collection, because it’s a great game which feels different to most of the others it now sits alongside (my favourite two-player games are here by the way).

For a two-player card game, it takes up quite a bit of space on the table, but that’s no bad thing, as it looks gorgeous. The rules are really simple to understand, the game moves fast, and it all (just about) fits in a really small box. If you enjoy it, I’d recommend sleeving the cards. There’s a lot of shuffling during setup, and the majority of the game revolves around picking some cards up off the table, looking at them, putting them back down, then repeating with the next pile. The cardstock is really good, but I can imagine it could start to wear after a while.

I normally like to add some caveats in my reviews, because not every game is for everyone, but I’m finding it hard to really come up with any for Canopy. It’s a game you’ll be able to pick up for a shade over £20, it’s got a ton of different cards, plays out in half an hour, and I’m honestly not sure who could find the theme offensive. Maybe if you got savaged by a tree frog as a child or something? Tim Eisner has put together a cracking little game in Canopy, that I have no hesitation in recommending.

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

Canopy (2021)

Designer: Tim Eisner
Publisher: Weird City Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 2
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Canopy Review appeared first on Punchboard.

When I was a kid, I loved the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books. The one I remember most is The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and I always had a mental image of what it looked like. I was stunned when I first saw the artwork created for the box of Last Resort, because it’s almost identical to the scene I’d imagined from the book.

As it happens, you’d probably expect a decent restaurant in the setting for this game. You play as entrepreneurs who have bought derelict space stations, and aim to turn them into the swankiest holiday resorts in the cosmos. This isn’t your Airbnb style holiday, think of it more like Space Vegas. (note to self – trademark ‘Space Vegas’, it sounds awesome). If you’ve enjoyed the tile-grabbing, ship-destroying mayhem of Galaxy Trucker, and wondered what the pilots do after retirement, I reckon it’s creating these resorts.

Castles of Betelgeuse

The first game Last Resort reminded me of is Castles of Burgundy. It’s something to do with the market of tiles in the middle of the table, and then buying the tiles and adding them to my own little board, and getting very attached to my little space station. The gameplay is pretty different however. The tiles you add to your board are rooms in your resort, and each can support a certain number of tourists. At the end of each round, once you’ve added a new room to your board, a busload (rocketload?) of tourists turn up in the middle of the table. Players take turns taking one, and adding it to one of their rooms.

Think of it like landing in some far-flung country for your summer holiday, then having reps from different places trying to get you to come and see their attraction. Except in Last Resort you won’t be taking the long way back, stopping at their cousin’s shop to sell you a new wallet.

Each tourist wants a particular type of vacation, and you can tell which type from their colour. If you want to house the red thrill-seekers, you need rooms which they’ll want to use, such as the VRcade. The blues just want to chill-out, so might prefer a Cyberspa. The thing is, you don’t know what type of tourists will arrive, as they’re drawn at random from a bag. Go all-in on one type of place, or try to have a little bit of everything? That’s the sort of choice you have to make from the outset.

Checking-out, sir?

One of the big things Last Resort has going for it is how little you have to maintain, and the relatively small number of decisions you need to make. You’ve only got four advert cards in your hand at the start of each year, and then get to play three of them. The cards decide which guests you’re going to boot-out and collect money from, and what type of tile you’re going to build. That level of relative simplicity is perfect for the game.

One of my favourite things is when the new arrivals land each round. You take big fistfuls of astronauts out of a bag and dump them on the middle board. Everyone takes turns to choose one and add it to their resort, and it goes round and round like that, but the competition for pieces is great fun. Sometimes you’ll choose to take a visitor just because it’s the last in that colour, and you know your neighbour wanted it. Mostly people call that indirect interaction, but I prefer to think of it as optimal passive-aggression. If you’re forced to take visitors you can’t accommodate, they get ejected into space and you lose position on one of the four influence tracks.

I felt oddly uneasy about shoving people out of the airlock when I don’t have room for them. For a game of silly retro-futuristic rockets and tongue-in-cheek humour, killing tourists felt out of place. I’d have liked to seen them ‘go back on the rocket’ or something. I think I’m getting soft in my old age.

Light speed

If you’ve played any of Braincrack’s ‘City’ trio of games (Ragusa and Venice reviewed here, Florence on the way), there’s likely to be two things that strike you about Last Resort. Firstly, it feels like a Braincrack game. There’s a Euro game here with some indirect interaction, a lot of competition for things, and a familiar round structure. The second thing you might notice is that it feels much lighter in complexity than the three games I just mentioned. This isn’t a cause for concern, it’s just different. It’s really nice to see the publisher going with a very different setting and take on something much more light-hearted. A lot of people only know them for the more serious, historical City games, but this one feels like a step back to the kind of game Dead and Breakfast was, before those.

Being a lighter game, it’s a much easier teach, and it’s a game that plays out pretty quickly too. Even with a full complement of four players, a game of Last Resort shouldn’t take more than an hour. It’s a small, but important detail, for non-gamers. It’s a great game to start or end a games night with. There’s a decent level of strategy in the game, but not too many decisions to make, which helps the game tick along at a good pace. The theme and the bright colours are an easy sell to younger players, and those friends whose eyes roll back into their head when you suggest playing ‘one of your games’.

Final thoughts

Last Resort is shaping up to be a really good game. The prototype copy I’ve been playing with has wooden meeples and cubes, which will be replaced with little astronauts and rockets respectively. These additions will really help the table presence, and again, encourage non-gamers to engage with it. I really appreciate how simple the teach and iconography are, and I love playing a game with this lighter level of strategy for a change.

My son enjoyed it, and even my non-gamer friends were willing to at least sit down and play it with me. Believe me when I tell you that that’s a big deal. As a whole, Last Resort is a very different kind of game when compared to the likes of Ragusa. It’s not as heavy, and the biggest obvious departure is the move away from a shared board to play on. Ragusa, Venice, and Florence all use a shared main board, where you spend the majority of the game putting more and more things onto it. This keeps the player interaction in those games high, which is great if that’s what you’re after, but not everybody is.

Last Resort is perfect for introducing people to the ideas of tile-placement and drafting. By playing with your own board, and only ever taking things from the middle of the table, the only real interaction is passive. It’s taking things that maybe someone else wanted. I’d prefer to play Venice if I was given the choice, but that’s because I love thinking lots of moves ahead, and I like second guessing what I’m going to be competing for. For fans of light-to-medium games, however, Last Resort is great. I love the theme, I love that it doesn’t take itself seriously, and I love the fact it doesn’t swamp a table. Snappy, engaging, cosmic fun for all – great stuff.

The Kickstarter campaign should go live in early 2022. You can find out more and back it here – bit.ly/lastresort-ks

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

Last Resort (2022)

Designer: Oliver Brooks
Publishers: Braincrack Games, Lucky Duck Games
Art: Andrew Forster, Dann May, Greg May
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Last Resort Review (Kickstarter preview) appeared first on Punchboard.

Drafting giraffes

Zuuli is a game of card-drafting and set-collection at its heart. You choose one of the cards in your hand to add to your park, then pass the rest to the next player and repeat, until all the cards are claimed. For your first couple of games you’ll probably be concentrating on taking what you want, but even that presents some tricky choices. More often than not you’ll be holding a couple of cards you really want, but you know you can only choose one. Then you’ve got a couple of minutes of nail-biting anxiety waiting for that hand of cards to make it back around to you to see if somebody took your precious card.

Once you get the hang of the game you’ll start looking to make the Big Brain plays. Not content with just concentrating on your own little park, you start looking at what everyone else has going on. Maybe you want to take that grizzly bear because he’s worth good points to you, but then you take a sneaky peek at your neighbours park and notice that the tree frog you’re holding would score really well for them. What to do, what to do…

If you’ve played anything with drafting and set-collection in the past, that description will sound really familiar, and probably pretty enticing. The formulae are tried and tested, but they endure for a reason. They work, and fit really nicely with one another.

Fierce and friendly

What separates Zuuli from other games of its ilk is the development phase. Claimed cards are placed face-down. Everyone flips them at the same time, and then attempts to build the best park from what they’ve got. Animals have to be matched to habitat types, and each enclosure has a certain maximum size it can sustain. Friendly animals play nicely together, but fierce ones can’t share with any other type, lest they turn their lodgers into lunch.

When you throw in the upgrades available which change rules among other things, there are a lot of different ways to build your park. Where it gets really interesting is in the second and third rounds. During the develop phase in those later rounds, you can rearrange your park to accommodate your new cards, which might mean your park looks very different at the end of the game, compared to how it started.

It’s a really nice mechanism, and I really like how the drafting phase is full of people eyeing each other up, seeing what’s in their park already, but once you get to the development, the atmosphere changes. Everyone’s eyes are down on their own park, trying to make a jigsaw out of pieces that don’t necessarily fit together. In my house we quickly developed what became known as the ‘Dad rule’, where we set a timer for a couple of minutes for the develop phase. Apparently I spend too long trying to optimise my zoo and everyone gets bored waiting. Well excuuuuuse me for being a perfectionist.

Splay play

The part that people find trickiest, in my experience, is visualising their wildlife park. Everything is a card of the same size: the habitats, the upgrades, the holding pens, and the animals themselves. The way the enclosures are depicted in the game is to place the enclosure on the bottom, and the upgrades and animals connected with it are placed on top, and then splayed, so you can see the edges and tops of the cards. That way you can see both the size of the enclosures and animals, and their points.

It might take you a couple of plays just to get that to feel natural. It’s not a problem for most, but for younger players (and older ones too…), you’ll need to explain how this works and why it’s done this way. My son asked me why the enclosures aren’t boards like ‘that other animal game’ (Zooloretto), but it was quite difficult to explain to him that the reason this game works so well and offers so much variety, is because everything looks the same from the back.

The artwork and graphic design is great. The animal illustrations are really pretty, and very cute, with bold, bright colours throughout. Numbers and icons are clear and clean, and the three different colours which designate which habitat types are really obvious, regardless of how much of the card is covered.

Final thoughts

Zuuli is a really nice card game. We’ve had lots of fun with it in my house, and no two games have been even remotely similar. There are so many combinations of cards that work, and those oh-so-clever upgrade cards really help keep things fresh, and offer new opportunities for cunning. The cards in my preview copy are those plastic-feeling, slippery yet durable ones. I don’t know what will be in the final version, but these worked really well. Small hands might have trouble holding a 9-card hand at the start of a two-player game though.

I’ve covered a few games here recently which feel like they could easily be much older games handed down through generations (Foul Play, for example), ones you just hadn’t seen before, and Zuuli is another of these. It’s very simple to learn and play, compact enough to take anywhere, and you’ll be finished in 15-20 minutes. Whether you’re a tactical player like me, who wants to optimise everything, or someone more like my son who proudly announces “I’m going to get all the frogs!”, you’ll have lots of fun.

Designer Chris Priscott has put together a really good game in Zuuli, and the hours and hours of playtesting poured into it are reflected in the polished and well-rounded game it’s become. You can back it on Kickstarter as soon as it launches on the 7th of September 2021 by following this link.

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

Zuuli (2021)

Designer: Chris Priscott
Publisher: Unfringed
Art: Chris Priscott
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15-20 mins

The post Zuuli Preview appeared first on Punchboard.