Worker bees

Waggle Dance is a straight-up worker placement game, and that makes sense, given how anecdotally busy most bees seem to be. The aim of the game is to make honey. Yeah, I know, that’s a shocker, right? Your initial hive grows, your bees (dice) multiply if you get some little bee eggs in, and you collect nectar. Lots and lots of nectar.

As the title of this section alluded to, Waggle Dance is a worker-placement game. Instead of a board, however, the worker spaces are on cards which are laid out on the table. It’s a pretty novel approach to worker-placement games, even now, let alone in 2014 when the game first debuted. For that reason alone, Waggle Dance is a game you can play on pretty much any table, which isn’t something you could say for the majority of worker-placement games. Try playing On Mars on a tiny coffee table and see what it’s like.

Each card has an associated action, and most of them have a slot per dice value. At the start of a round you roll your dice (your bees), and then it’s a case of comparing your results to the other players and trying to guess which spots are going to be hotly contested. It’s a game where the designer forces your arm up behind your back and says “no min-maxing for you, you need to do a bit of everything”. In theory, it’s a great idea, because it forces players to compete for spaces, and adapt their plans when things don’t go their way.

That theory doesn’t always hold up, unfortunately.

Two bee, or not two bee?

The biggest part of Waggle Dance is collecting nectar. Each of the six flowers on offer provides nectar pieces to the bees, and each flower’s nectar is a different colour (and a different shape, colour-blind friends take note). When it comes to converting that nectar into precious honey, it doesn’t matter what colour the nectar is, all that matters is that all four pieces match.

The problem comes when you play with two players. Nectar is awarded by area majority on each card, so if you have the most bees on flower 1, during the night (resolve) phase, you take two pieces of nectar. It doesn’t matter which nectar you take, so there’s no impetus to choose the same flower as your opponent. Granted, you put blocking dice from an unused player colour on some of them, but it doesn’t really have an impact on play, because it’s random.

With that loss of competition for flowers that you get with four players, the game feels quite sterile. When I played Waggle Dance with my wife, we realised after half the game that we were just doing our own thing, and it ultimately turned into a race to finish, and I found that it made the game lean more heavily on the luck of your dice rolls.

It could be that you really like a lack of interaction in games with your significant other. Maybe you hate the minor conflict of fighting for area majority in games like El Grandé. If so, you might love Waggle Dance for this very reason. Personally, I’d much rather play this with at least three, and preferably four players.

Hive mind

My grumbles aside, Waggle Dance is still the clever game it always was. It’s unusually thematic for a worker-placement game. Everything makes sense, which really helps when you want to teach a non-gamer how to play. If you want more bees, you need to hatch eggs. Not enough space to put everything? Add more cells to your hive. If you want to make that sweet, golden honey – go get some nectar. It certainly makes more immediate sense than something like Praga Caput Regni – a city-building game which used eggs as resources.

The Queen Bee deck doles out cards which give you pretty neat rule-breaking abilities, which add a nice bit of asymmetry, but without really making the game feel too lop-sided. What I particularly like about Waggle Dance is how welcoming it is. Without a big board full of distracting imagery, the worker spaces on cards keep things clear and obvious. It’s an easy game to both teach and learn, and a ten-year-old could easily pick it up. Things like that matter when you have a game with such pretty box art, full of bees and honey, and Bright Eye have done a great job in refreshing the artwork in this new version.

Final thoughts

As I mentioned above, I wouldn’t get Waggle Dance if I knew I was mostly going to play with a player count of two. With three or four though, for a game that’ll set you back around £30, I really like it. People used to complain that Waggle Dance took too long in later rounds when players have lots more bees to place, and a lot more going on in their hives. While that’s still true to some extent, we live in a different world now. We live in a world where games like Everdell have rounds that take exponentially longer as the game goes on. In other words, don’t worry about it, it’s not that bad.

If you’ve already got a copy of Waggle Dance, there’s no need to buy this new version. There are some tweaks, and there is a solo mode, but it doesn’t warrant owning the same game twice. Unless you really like bees, maybe? If you’ve never played it, however, then it’s a great, lightweight worker-placement game, with a deadly cute theme, and I recommend it to anyone looking to fill that lighter, space-is-an-issue, worker-placement gap.

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

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Waggle Dance (2022)

Designer: Mike Nudd
Publisher: Bright Eye Games
Art: Sabrina Miramon
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Waggle Dance Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Jungle is massive

The Quest for El Dorado drops you into the roles of expedition leaders. Each is trying to negotiate their way through the jungles, deserts, and lakes, searching for the golden treasure. That landscape is a collection of big, hex tiles, joined at the edges. There are several layouts shown in the rulebook, but there’s nothing to stop you from creating something which fits on your table better. Despite the hexes not being too big, by the time they’re linked, and the card market is on the table, it takes up quite a lot of space.

The best way to describe the game is a mixture of deck-building and racing. Some deck-builders can feel like a race. Dominion, for example, is basically a race to amass points before the last Province card is taken. The Quest for El Dorado, however, is a traditional race. Our intrepid explorers have to play cards that allow them to cut their way through the jungle, aiming to be the first to make it to the gold – and with it, glory. Something like that, anyway.

If we’re honest, the most satisfying bit of a deck-builder is crafting your deck. As in Moonrakers, Aeon’s End, and just about every other deck-building game ever, there’s a card market to visit. In an attempt to keep things thematic, your trips to card-Tesco in El Dorado result in you hiring more people to come on your trip. You might be hiring a Scout to lead your group, but in reality, all you need to know is that he’s a green card with a power of two. You might look at the card art and think about what each card represents, but that’s quickly replaced with a need to just glance at colour and value. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad thing necessarily, it’s just how deck-builders work.

Lean, mean, exploring machine

There are two distinct phases to most peoples’ introduction to deck-building. Phase one is when you buy all the cards, and revel in your glorious collection, like some kind of card magnate. Phase two is when you try to play with all the cards, and realise they don’t work together. It’s this natural turning point that leads inquisitive minds to think “What if I take cards out of my deck, so the cards I want come out more often…?”.

Trimming the fat. Separating the wheat from the chaff. Skimming off the cream. It doesn’t matter which analogy you choose, the result is the same. In El Dorado you’ll inevitably find some value in thinning your deck, and there’s a mechanism for doing exactly that. Visiting a base camp on the map lets you bin some of your cards permanently, but in typical Knizia fashion, it’s a calculated risk. Getting to a base camp means straying off the beaten path. In other words, your deck gets more useful, but it means you’ll often have to travel further.

Decisions, decisions.

The way Reiner has balanced The Quest for El Dorado is fantastic. I love the way you can plan your route long in advance, and then try to craft your deck along the way. If you’ve played the more-recent Cubitos, you’ll be familiar with the agony of choice you’re given, between the most direct route and the best bonuses. It’s a light game, in terms of complexity, but I’d still probably point newcomers towards Dominion first. Learning how to build a deck while planning a route can prove tricky for younger players. Any mistakes made during crafting your deck feel amplified by your lack of progress in the race.

Final thoughts

I’m a sucker for jungley, adventurey, Indiana-Jonesy themes in games. I loved Escape: The Curse of the Temple, and The Quest for El Dorado conjures up the same feelings for me. On a mechanical level it’s just about growing a stronger deck of cards to cope with more difficult movement requirements. As you’d expect from a Reiner Knizia game, the mathematics behind all of this feel very nicely balanced. As long as you follow the official map layouts or use the principles in the rulebook (or these awesome fan-made maps), you’ll be able to create some unique and varied jungles.

This is a real keeper of a game. It’s not one of those that sits on your shelves for months between plays (I’m sorry, On Mars. I still love you). You could easily play it several evenings in a week and not get tired of it, thanks to the variable setup. I keep harking back to Dominion, I know, but El Dorado offers the same simplicity in rules and mechanical overhead as its forebear. Once you know how to play it, each time it lands on the table it becomes a game of figuring out what you want to do, not how to play, and that’s what all good games should do.

If you’re all about the heavy, brain-burning games, The Quest for El Dorado probably isn’t for you. As a svelte, accessible mix of racing and deck-building though, it’s fantastic. Even though Knizia has created hundreds of games, there aren’t many that I’d consider must-haves. El Dorado, along with Tigris and Euphrates, is a game that I think everyone should have in their collection. Dominion is still on my shelf after 13 years, and I expect The Quest for El Dorado to still be there in another 13. It’s brilliant.

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

The Quest for El Dorado (2017)

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Ravensburger
Art: Vincent Dutrait, Franz Vohwinkel
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post The Quest for El Dorado Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Every so often a game comes along, and I think “That sounds like the name of a Black Metal concept album”, and this is one of them. Book of Skulls – Slayers of Eragoth wasn’t named this way accidentally, either. Andy, the brains behind this new, team vs team fantasy dungeon crawl, is clearly a metalhead, much like me. It probably won’t come as a surprise then, to learn that the final game comes with a full metal soundtrack too. Get ready to throw some horns.

Let me get the music thing out of the way first. You’re here to read about a board game, after all, not my reminiscing of the days when I went headbanging at metal concerts, back when I had hair to swing. So far we’ve only got the battle theme to listen to, but I think it strikes the tone perfectly. It sounds like what you’d get if you mashed-up Iron Maiden, Dragonforce, Rhapsody, and a few other favourites. Harmonic distorted guitars, machine gun double-bass drumming, just awesome. Have a listen for yourselves.

Raining Blood

Book of Skulls is an unapologetic, balls-to-the-wall dungeon crawler. My first impression when the prototype turned up at my house was “Ooh, is this like Talisman??”. I think it was the mixture of high fantasy and roll-and-move in the rules that did it, and for a first-time designer, I’d actually call it high praise. I directly asked Andy if he’d been inspired by Talisman, and he told me he’d never played it, so the genesis of something like this, now, is as surprising as it is refreshing.

There might be some of you now taking a sharp intake of breath and thinking “Yikes, roll-and-move…”, and I admit that it was my first worry too. However, having played through the game a few times now, I can honestly say it doesn’t influence the speed or perceived fairness of the game in any notable way. There is so much else going on in Book of Skulls, that the overworld map and movement (or navigation as the game calls it) around it is a smaller part of the game.

Where Book Of Skulls shines, and shines brightly, is in the encounters. And by encounters, I mean fights. Boys, girls, and everything in-between beating the snot out of each other, with big weapons and more magic than Paul Daniels’ underpants.

Angel of Death

The clever twist Book Of Skulls applies to the genre, is to make each team act as each others’ opponents. For every turn the Slayers take (the folks you’re controlling to try to win), the opposing team acts as the various Demons they’ll encounter. Each Slayer has a cool range of abilities, giving tons of variety and tactical depth. When they face-off against the nasties, the opposing team chooses how they want to spend their Demon Coins, in order to summon in a team of diabolical creatures for them to fight.

Battle is by-the-book for the most part, and there’s a really cool feature whereby each Slayer card has a Guardian card beneath it, with the top edge protruding. A special die is rolled before each combat, and if one of your Slayers’ Guardians still has its symbol on the top edge, you can cover it. Cover all six on a Guardian, and Bingo! Literally, bingo, it’s like playing bingo. You then get to control the Guardian, who’s a bit like a Slayer on steroids. You haven’t even seen my final form, and all that gubbins.

The overworld map is what ties the fights together into an adventure, and there are all manner of dungeons and other places of interest along the way. I like the way the map and your choice of direction matters, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Deciding how best to use your Slayers to emerge victorious from each encounter is great fun, and I take a perverse amount of pleasure from controlling the Demons. It’s immensely satisfying to shove a stick in the proverbial spokes of the other team’s bicycle.

Not that you get many bicycles in dungeons, you understand. It’s just a poorly chosen analogy by yours truly, but it made me smile, so it’s staying in.

Final thoughts

For a first attempt at a tabletop game of any kind, I’m very impressed with Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth. I’ve been in touch with Andy for weeks now, and it’s been fascinating watching the rate of development in the game. I’ve played before and after big mechanical changes were made, and with each iteration it’s feeling more and more like a finished game.

There are a few rough edges, sure, but that’s to be expected. I’m still not 100% sold on roll-and-move, but it doesn’t cramp the game’s style for a moment. The combat – which, let’s be honest, is the most important part of these games – feels great. It works even in this prototype, where I’m sliding paperclips to track rage levels. I’m so engaged in the process that it doesn’t break the immersion.

By the time you throw in an app to track your characters, a full soundtrack, and goodness-knows-what-else, this has all the hallmarks of being a sleeper hit. The modular board is great, and means you can shorter games if you don’t have the time for a full-length game, and I really like the fact that the boards are small. Dungeon crawlers especially are guilty of throwing more and more in the box, and the boxes get bigger and bigger (looking at you, Descent 2nd Edition). Book Of Skulls is in a smaller box, and fits on the sort of table a normal person might have.

This might be the first time you’ve heard of Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth, and the first time you’ve heard of CloudRunner Games, but it’s almost certainly not going to be the last. Keep an eye on this one folks. The Kickstarter campaign goes live on 31st May 2022, and you can sign up for updates here.

Prototype copy kindly provided by CloudRunner Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth (2022)

Designer: Andy Feehan
Publisher: CloudRunner Games
Art: Various (TBC)
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

What’s In The Box?

As is customary here, let’s start with taking a look inside the box. Spirit Island is packed with pieces; wooden pieces, plastic minis, cards, cardboard player boards, map boards, dividers, and some natty little lift-out plastic organisers.

The titular island is made up of a number of land boards – one per player. The land boards are an unusual undulating shape, and have a really clever design. While a solo player can play the game with one board, two players can perfectly mesh two boards together. As can three, or four! The clever design means that the boards always mesh perfectly. They’re also double-sided, one side more functional for starters, and the other, more realistic-looking side for advanced players.

The cards have really nice artwork, and the graphic design and iconography is great. Everything is really clear and easily discernible at a glance. There’s a small deck of half-sized cards which is what is what’s used to drive the invaders’ turns. The cards are all really good stock and feel like they’d happily endure a lot of play without needing to be sleeved.

New Meets Old

One of my favourite things with the overall design of Spirit Island is the mixture of plastic and wood for the playing pieces. Initially even the idea of this mixture was a real turn-off for me. I don’t really like plastic pieces at the best of times, but mixing them with wooden ones? It seemed like heresy, like mixing together Skittles and M&Ms and taking a big mouthful.

However, after playing for a while, I realised it’s actually very clever. The ‘new’ of the invaders is all plastic, angular and spiky, while the defending spirits and Dahan (the original islanders) use smooth, rounded wood. This contrast between old and new, or good and bad if you like, creates a really nice juxtaposition.

Throughout the box, everything feels like it’s really well-made and using strong materials, it’s a big thumbs-up from me.

How Does It Play?

The Concept

Spirit Island puts the players in the role of one or more spirits – ancient presences who have ruled the island for as long as anyone can remember. The New World is on its way though, with invading forces coming from Europe, looking to claim the island as their own building, driving out the indigenous population, and ravaging the land for its resources. The spirits have other ideas, and through a combination of controlling the island’s environments, wreaking their own havoc, and instilling fear into the invaders, hope to drive them away for good.

Play is card-driven, and as your spirit’s presence on the island grows, so does its power, and spending earned energy to play cards is how you’ll push and pull the invaders, subject them to fear, and try to destroy their towns and cities. To win you either exhaust the Fear deck, or destroy enough towns and/or cities according to the growing terror level, which increases as fear increases. If the invaders destroy all of your presence however, spread too much blight through the island, or complete their colonisation by exhausting the invader deck, they win.

Gameplay Basics

Each player chooses a spirit board which dictates how they’ll play the game. Some are better at defending, while some are great at building fear. The back of each spirit board explains who they are and how they should be played. It also tells you how difficult they are to use, which is good to know when you’re starting out, because this game is anything but easy. Each of the spirits also comes with its own starting deck of four cards, unique to itself.

The island board(s) are drawn at random, and although each are the same shape, the positions of the lands (wetland, mountains, jungle and sands) are different on each, as are the locations for the starting Dahan locals, blight, towns and cities.

Each of the player boards has circles which represent two tracks: one for the energy earned each turn, one for the number of cards that can be played in each turn. These circles begin the game nearly completely covered with presence markers, which are little wooden discs. At the start of a turn you can choose one of several actions, most of which allow you to place at least one of these discs on the island, representing your presence there. As you move these discs from your board to the map, you earn more energy or can play more cards, in a similar way to the way player boards work in games like Great Western Trail or Maracaibo.

Turn Structure

Each turn starts with the players choosing which set of actions they’re going to do for the Growth phase. Most involve placing at least one presence disc, then either taking some extra energy tokens, a new power card, or drawing back your discard pile into your hand. Then you claim the energy for that turn, and choose which power cards you’re going to play with your accrued energy. Power cards are either resolved immediately (fast), or at the end of the round (slow). Then we play any Fear cards queued up for the coming turn, and resolve their effects.

Next it’s the invaders’ turn. The invaders have their own board to track their fear, the level of terror, and the advancement track for their exploration. If there’s a card in the ravage space, any invaders in lands of that type are attacked, but If the spirits have managed to raise any defence at the start of the round they can negate that much damage. Combat is a little complicated to explain here, but if any Dahan in the land survive the attack, they fight back, and fear is gathered for any towns or cities that are destroyed. If two or more damage is done to the land, a (nasty, modern, plastic) blight token is added to the land.

Next, the invaders build, using the land card that’s in the Build slot of their track. Towns and cities are added to the map, again, by following certain rules we won’t go into here. Suffice to say, the more towns and cities on the island, the worse things are going to get for us. so we try to use powers to make sure there aren’t invaders on the lands to be built on.

Finally, the invaders explore. A new card gets turned from the top of the invader deck, and provided the land type on that card has a building on it, or is adjacent to one that does, or is next to the ocean, explorers are added to the map. Then the clever bit happens. All of the invader cards slide one space to the left. The ravage card for this turn is discarded, the build card will be the next turn’s ravage, and this turns explored lands will be the ones built on next turn. This knowledge of what’s going to happen in the following turn is the key to winning, by forward planning and choosing your powers carefully.

Finally, the slow powers played at the start of the turn are resolved. And now we’re ready for the next turn.

Power Plants

Because plants = nature, right? And nature’s good.

In Spirit Island, the power cards played each turn have multiple functions. Firstly, they perform the actions stated on the card. These are usually:

• Push – if the target land is within the specified range of your presence discs on the board, you can push invaders and/or Dahan of the specified type into neighbouring lands.
• Gather – with the same range and type stipulations from the Push action, invaders and/or Dahan can be pulled into the target land from any adjacent lands.
• Defend – this adds a number of defence points to offset the ravage damage for the forthcoming invader action.
• Damage – the amount of damage specified can be applied to one or more invaders in the chosen land.
• Fear – finally, you can add the number of fear tokens from the fear pool to the earned fear. If all the tokens are removed from the pool, a fear card is moved from its deck to the space to be resolved in the coming turn. If this action uncovers a new Terror Level card, that’s moved to its space on the invader board and reduces the requirements necessary to win the game.

Secondly, each card has a number of elemental symbols on it. If the total number of these elements played on your turn matches those printed on your spirit’s board, you can use additional special powers. These are easy to overlook, but can be stacked with your power cards to make some really powerful combinations.

Putting It All Together

I’ve summarised the main cycle of the game above, but in all honesty there’s a lot more to it than than it might sound like. Strategy is a huge part of Spirit Island, and learning how to play your cards, and which to play when, is a real art. The fact that you know exactly what the invaders are going to do on their turn sounds like it should make it simple, but it doesn’t . Things start off slowly, and mid-game can feel like you’re being swamped if you haven’t managed to get the upper hand. But the end of the game when the invaders are swarming in, that’s where things build to a crescendo and the game escalates to something special.

There’s something immensely satisfying when you’re able to play your cards perfectly, shifting invaders wherever you want them, smiting them from your island, and flipping fear card after fear card. But even when it feels like the world is crumbling all around you, there’s usually a way to claw your way out of the mire and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Upping The Ante

Let’s not beat around the bush here – Spirit Island is a tough game. It’s a difficult puzzle to solve, because of the combination of random island layouts, shuffled invader deck, shuffled power cards, and eight spirits to choose from in the base game. But if you do feel you’ve got the measure of the game, there are a lot of ways to spice the game up. Firstly, there are adversaries you can introduce. Each of three adversary boards represent either Brandenburg-Prussia, Sweden or England, and each has up to six levels of difficulty, which can be added cumulatively. These can add extra buildings, blight, make the invaders more difficult to defeat – just generally make your life much more difficult.

There are also scenarios that can be introduced, which also make things more difficult and change rules, setup and victory conditions. On top of all of that, the island boards can be flipped to the more realistic side, which changes the way the game plays slightly, and again, makes things more challenging.

What’s really, really good about all of this though is that these changes can be added in any combination you like. It might sound like a messy way to do things, lacking structure in what you’re doing and unable to compare scores with others, but thanks to a table in the back of the rule book, you can cross-reference your difficulty choices to get a value, which then becomes a modifier for calculating your final score.

Final Thoughts

I know the review is longer than I’d usually write, so I apologise if it’s felt like a wall of text so far. I wouldn’t normally go into so much depth, but I felt it was important for this game, because there’s a lot going on, and I felt I went into the game pretty blind, even after reading recommendations and seeing a couple of playthroughs. The game loop is actually pretty simple when it comes down to it, but the choices you make with literally every action of every turn, really matter.

I bought this game because it’s very highly recommended for solo mode, and because we’re currently living in a world of lockdowns and social distancing, the solo modes of games are important to me. As a single player, single spirit, single board game, it’s an excellent game which plays out in around an hour. But it’s perfectly reasonable to pick two spirits and a two-board island and play that solo too. Any more than that, and its possible, but it will frazzle your brain exponentially with every spirit you add.

As I mentioned earlier, it feels like it should be an easy game. At the start of the turn you can see where everything is on the island. You know what cards you’ve got, how much energy you’ll have. You know which lands will be ravaged and which will be built on. The only thing you don’t know is where explorers will be introduced after all of that happens. But it really isn’t. Every card feels like a knife-edge decision, like the entire balance of the game could swing on one wrong decision. As the game progresses, the tension rises as your powers increase, and as more and more invaders pile their way onto your island, it really feels like the final scenes of a good film or book playing out.

I’m really happy with the way difficulty is handled. Being able to choose between different adversaries and scenarios, and then choosing the level of added difficulty within, it feels subtle and personal. It took me a few plays to beat Brandenburg-Prussia on level 1, but when I did it felt great, and immediately made me want to try again, but throwing a few more things into the mix.

Theme And Schemes

Theme can be dry in a Eurogame, but in Spirit Island it’s alive and well. As I mentioned earlier in the review, the contrast between the wood and plastic is subtle, but really nice. Physically moving little buildings and people on and off the map reinforces the feeling of what’s happening through the cards.

The designer added some notes in the back of the rule book explaining the idea of the anti-imperialist theme and anti-euro style, and it’s a really nice touch. It shows where the ideas were born, and how it came to fruition. There’s even a section about each empire, and the alternate versions of history that bring us up to 1700 AD, and the setting for the game. The history of the islands, the story of the Dahan – everything is there in delicious flavour text and lore.

I’m properly in love with Spirit Island. It’s so tight, everything works together perfectly. The way that everything is modular, from the board down to the difficulty. It’s pretty much the perfect Eurogame, if you like difficult puzzles and area control that is. It might not tick all the boxes for everyone. With higher player counts the game can drag on a little, as everyone has to talk and plan, to coordinate their efforts to get the best result possible. But it’s a great co-operative experience which gets the whole table talking. I’m really failing to see any negatives with it. There’s an expansion which adds new mechanics, spirits, and powers, which I’ll definitely be picking up in the future.

Spirit Island is a fantastic game for solo players and small groups alike. Get it.

The post Spirit Island Review appeared first on Punchboard.