Designer and self-publisher, Ben Downton (aka Prometheus Game Labs) has created a teeny-tiny little game which promises to give the same experience as a proper big-boy game. The board is tiny, the chits are tiny, and the money’s so small it puts Nusfjord to shame. There’s a good reason for this though. With the international shipping crisis what it is, and costs rising, it means you can get this through your door, internationally, at very little cost.

The question is – do you want Micro Dojo dropping through your letterbox?

Every day I’m shuffling

Not cards in this instance, the shuffling here refers to the way you move around the board. There are four characters/meeples on the 3×3 grid, and on a turn you move one, and carry out the action on the space it moves to. You might get some resources, build a building, or carry out an action or two. Sounds simple enough, but where the game gets its bite is in the fact that you cannot move a meeple that either you or your opponent moved on your last turns.

As well as picking from your restricted options, there’s a really clever bit of forward planning going on. When you move someone to a new space, you open up a space for the other player, and some of the spaces are much better than others. The centre square is the one everyone wants, because it grants you two (two!) actions, whereas the corner squares do things like give you one food, or one coin. Rubbish!

It feels tight and congested on the board, and the clever rules for moving previously-moved pieces works so well. It’s possible to force your opponent into really sub-optimal turns, which then free up something you really want, just to really twist the blade. It’s really nice to play another game that’s designed solely for two players. There’s a solo mode in the box envelope, which is good, but this is a game that is best played mano-a-mano.

Small margins

VPs are tight in Micro Dojo. Getting seven VPs triggers the end of the game, and there’s no hidden information. The randomly-chosen objectives start off worth one VP each, and end up worth three as you work through them. Scoring an objective is a standard action, and they’re clever point-in-time things. You might win one for having the most food and money when it’s triggered, or having spend the most money on buildings. You both know which objective is next, and you both know which of you would win it, so it’s a case of jockeying for an action space to claim it.

The random objectives, and random buildings that go along with them, mean that every game feels different. It’s the epitome of passive interaction. You can’t directly do something to another player, but indirectly you’re blocking spaces, hoarding resources you know will win you the next objective. It’s got that nice edge to it, in the same way something like Targi does, but in a much smaller, and quicker, package.

I get the impression that if you played this too often against the same person, you could get into a state of being able to practically mind-read the other person, which could sap some of the fun out of it. There’s only so many ways to move on a 3×3 board which doesn’t change, so it’s only really the buildings on offer and the objectives which change. Hmm, if only there was some way to change that… Oh wait, there is!

Loyalty & Deceit Expansion

Loyalty & Deceit takes the base game of Micro Dojo and improves it in every way. As the name implies, there are two additional paths open to you now. One clan, the blue, offers lots more chances to earn points and convert one thing into another, whereas the red clan moves the game into the realms of direct interaction. You can do things with the red buildings like force the other person to lose VPs, or steal resources. The concept might be more Chinese than Japanese, but the two clans have a very yin-yang feel to them.

One of the new actions allows you to increase your loyalty with either clan, shifting your marker up one side of the new overly frame for the main board. Each side has actions and building abilities available if you climb high enough in them, but in a game that doesn’t last too long, you need to decide where your loyalties lie early in the game.

The other big change is the introduction of tiles to overlay on the main board, which means the layout can change every time you play. This is great news, as it really alleviated my main worry about the game getting stale. There’s even a set of cards included with suggested setups, each leading to a different feeling for the game. Flip the frame over, and there’s a longer version of the game which goes up to nine VPs.

Final thoughts

Micro Dojo delivers what it says it does. It’s a proper (for want of a better word) game, in a very small package. I love it when games are designed for just two players, as there’s nothing else for the designer to factor in. No compromises or changes for more or fewer players, just something refined for a duel. It’s light enough to teach to just about anyone, and after a single game most people will be on an even footing. It proves, once again, that a limited choice of options doesn’t equal a lack of room for strategy.

While the base game is fun, and very enjoyable, the way to play it really is with Loyalty & Deceit added. There’s just a bit more to think about, more things to do, and I really enjoy the abilities which affect the other player. Two-player games should have a little bite to them, and bite is precisely what the expansion adds. The ability to change which tiles are on the board really opened the game up for me too, it’s done a lot to keep the game fresh.

Is it going to replace your board games? No. Is it going to impress anyone who sees it on a table at a convention? Probably not. But to have an option that packs this much game into something you can stick in your jacket pocket and take to the pub, or train, or just about anywhere – is fantastic. As I write this, you can get the base game, expansion, fancy triple-layer boards, eight wooden meeples, and some collector boxes to keep it all in, for £20 + shipping. It’s an absolute bargain for what it is, and the Kickstarter campaign is running right now.

Review copy kindly provided by Prometheus Game Labs. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Micro Dojo (2021)

Designer: Ben Downton
Publisher: Prometheus Game Labs
Art: Ben Downton
Players: 2
Playing time: 20 mins

The post Micro Dojo and Loyalty & Deceit Expansion Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly, and Mariposas is a game that recreates the incredible journey that millions of Monarch butterflies make every year. Starting in Mexico in the Spring, generation after generation of the beautiful creatures make the 3,000 mile migration to North America, and back again in the Autumn. It’s one of those bonkers feats of nature that happens constantly, while most of the world is oblivious to it. Mariposas puts you in the place of a family of butterflies, aiming to make that same arduous trip, and to bring the most of your offspring back to warmer climes before winter.

Ready, set, go!

Mariposas combines movement and set-collection to drive the gameplay. Each player starts out with a first generation butterfly, and on each turn plays a card from their hand of two that lets them move one or more butterflies, one or more hexes across the map. When you land on a flower, you collect a matching token. If you land on a hex that neighbours a milkweed icon, you can spend your flower tokens to spawn a new generation butterfly marker, giving you more of the little flappers to move on your turns.

Spread across the map, at various city locations, there are waystation markers. These start face-down, so the first to visit is in for a surprise when it’s flipped. Most waystations let you take a life cycle card. There are four different cards (egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult), and sets of each in three different colours. If you manage to collect all four cards of a single colour, you get a bonus – nice!

Each season (round) is one turn longer than the previous, and at the end of each season there’s a randomly chosen interim scoring card. The scoring categories are really diverse, rewarding you for things like being above, below, or to one side of a particular city, or having butterflies around a city, or on certain coloured hexes. Points are really tight in Mariposas, so trying to accomplish these while sticking to your own personal Master Plan is important, but potentially tricky.

The difficult second album

Success can be a double-edged sword. Wingspan continues to be a smash hit around the world for Elizabeth, so all eyes were on her for her next big game. She brought us Tussie Mussie too, but it was a smaller release in a smaller box. It was always going to be a tall order to replicate the universal appeal and success of Wingspan, and I’m really glad Mariposas took her design in a very different direction. I imagine it would have been easy to lean on the mechanisms used in Wingspan, and offer variations on a theme. Engine- or tableau-building with hundreds of cards – that sort of thing. Instead, Mariposas uses completely different systems.

There’s a proper board, with hexes(!), and the core of the game is based on moving around that board. Cards are involved, but they could just as easily have been a movement dice, with the card icons on different sides. So while I’m really pleased to see more strings to her bow, anyone coming straight from Wingspan expecting a game with a similar feel might be surprised. It’s not an unpleasant surprise by any means, but it’s something to be aware of, especially with the ‘new gamer’ appeal Wingspan has.

The truth is, Mariposas is a good game. A really good game in fact. Empire Strikes Back following A New Hope good? Maybe not quite that good, but it’s no The Matrix Reloaded, that’s for sure.

Schmetterling

Excuse the heading, but I just love the German word for butterfly. Mariposas can feel pretty chaotic the first time you play it. Despite all starting from the same place, players paths diverge quickly, and before you know it there are little wooden butterflies all over the map. There’s zero player interaction, but I think the game would have felt wrong with any included. The way this sprawl happens on the board feels really butterflyish (that’s definitely a word). If you’ve ever sat outside and watched a butterfly flit around all over the place, and wondered how on earth it knows where its going – that’s how Mariposas feels to look at.

There’s a really nice thematic feel to the game’s conclusion. Throughout the Spring and Summer rounds, butterflies are all over the map, doing butterfly things. During the final Fall/Autumn round, there are big points available if you can get your butterflies back to the starting space in Mexico. It’s a lovely thing to watch the butterflies – now three generations removed from the same ones that set out on their journeys – all swooping down the board and converging on Michoacán, ahead of winter.

Final thoughts

My first game of Mariposas felt like unfettered chaos. I had no direction, no idea what I wanted to do, and the game felt very random. After you finish that initial learning game, and start to get a grip on what you’re trying to do, a really nice game emerges from the chaotic chrysalis. The season goal cards can have a huge influence on how you play the game, as the scoring requirements can steer you to very specific areas on the board.

There’s also plenty of choice though, as you don’t have to chase those seasonal objectives. If you want to, you can try to collect all the sets of life cycle cards instead. That leads to a really reactive game, especially when the token for a card you particularly want gets flipped on the opposite side of the board to your lepidopteran machinations. However you decide to play, the main thing to know is that you’ll have fun.

Mariposas is another game with appeal to people who might not ordinarily engage with board games. The turns are really easy – play a card, move a butterfly, maybe make another butterfly – but there’s a good depth of strategy there too. If you’re looking for interaction, you’ll want to look elsewhere. Mariposas is the epitome of multiplayer solitaire. There’s not even claiming of highest bonuses for the first to complete something. For families and more casual players though, this is a massive pro, not a con. It’s a beautiful game with high quality components, simple rules, and it plays out pretty quickly. I really like it, and I think you will too.

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

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

Mariposas (2020)

Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Indi Maverick, Matt Paquette
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45-75 mins

The post Mariposas Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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Does the idea of gnomes, islands, guardians and bonfires get you excited? No? How about shells, fruit, roots and portals? Getting somewhere yet? Hmmm. Okay, how about a lavish new Stefan Feld game, full of mechanisms, strategy and gorgeous artwork? Ahhh, now I’ve got your attention! Let’s have a look at Bonfire, his big new game for 2020.

Stefan Feld is an important name for fans of Euro games. He’s the designer we have to thank for some of the most important games to have been produced in the last fifteen years. Trajan, Macao, Bruges, and a little game you might have heard of called The Castles of Burgundy. He’s been a busy boy in 2020, announcing a re-theming of several of his classics for the City Collection, a new ‘Castles of’ game, this time in Tuscany, and the one which really piqued my interest, and the one you’re here to read about – Bonfire.

Bonfire’s backstory isn’t the usual Feld fare. It tells of a world were bonfires brought light to a world of perpetual darkness, created and maintained by the guardians. When the inhabitants exploited them however, the guardians retreated, and the world was once again plunged into inky darkness. Now you, and a group of gnomes aim to bright light back by completing tasks to prove your worth to the guardians, and convince them to return from their islands to re-light the bonfires.

What’s In The Box

The more cynical among us would think back to the likes of The Castles of Burgundy or Notre Dame, and think of beige. There wasn’t much in the way of colour in his older games, and the components and boards could be pretty thin, not much to write home about. Bonfire, however, is a different story.

The first thing to notice is the board. It’s covered in rich, detailed artwork, and the back-side of it has a huge version of the illustration of the guardian from the box cover. Instead of cubes for player pieces, there are little gnome meeples, and the resources are custom-cut, brightly painted pieces of wood. Each player has their own player board, and there are a ton of different tokens and tiles in the box; action, fate, task, offering and path tiles. There are wooden guardians and boats, three decks of cards, loads of little portal tiles, and even a 3D bonfire you have to build from three pieces of cardboard.

Considering it’s a smaller box, like the old Alea ones used for the likes of Castles of Burgundy or Macao, there’s a huge amount of stuff in it. The production values are a far cry from those Alea games. Everything feels like it’s going to last a long time. The iconography is really clear throughout, and the rule book is really nicely written. It’s a good thing too, as you’ll need to refer to it quite a lot for the first few games, because there’s a handy appendix at the back telling you exactly what the specialist and elder cards do.

How Does It Play?

Bonfire is a meaty, thinky game, so let’s break it down and explain what’s going on.

The Basics

Players collect and use action tiles, to perform the various actions available. To get action tiles, they take fate tiles from their own area, and place them onto their player boards. In a similar way to the way the games Patchwork and A Feast For Odin work, the fate tiles have to fit onto the players’ boards. You get one action tile for each symbol, but if the fate tile you place has a matching action adjacent, you get two action tiles. Later, if a third matching one touches, you get three.

Spending your action tokens is where the rest of the game is played, but there are a lot of choices available at any one time. You might choose to sail to an island, to trade some of your resources to take a task. The task goes on your player board, and later if you manage to fulfill that task (which ranges from easy to difficult), you can flip it to light a bonfire.

You can rotate the great bonfire and claim two of the three rewards available at each slot. This is often one of the portal tokens, to add to your player board (every type is a different shape, jigsaw-style), and then either a resource or an action tile. Maybe instead you choose to claim one of the cards available: specialists and elders. Specialists usually grant you ongoing bonuses for performing certain actions, and elders are in limited supply, but give you a one-time VP bonus for having numbers of various ‘things’ in your possession.

What Else Can I Do?

I’m glad you asked. You can choose to claim a path tile. Path tiles are added clockwise around your player board, and give the guardians somewhere to move when you choose to trigger a procession. Speaking of which, when you’ve recovered one more guardians from an island, you can trigger a procession. This sees them advance along your path tiles, and either granting bonus resources for the space they stop on, or, if there’s a portal between their path and the board, they can stand next to one of your bonfires, for end game VPs.

Those are the basics, and I’ve really boiled them down to the most basic descriptions of each, because there are so many variations on each action, and so many choices to make along the way. Here’s an example of what I mean,

When rotating the great bonfire to claim a portal tile, portals have to be added counter-clockwise to your player board. Each space on your board will only fit one particular portal, which are distributed around the great bonfire at random. So when it comes to rotating the bonfire, you can spend a single purple tile to rotate it one space, two for two spaces, or three for any number. If you don’t have enough purple action tiles, you can spend two of any other kind to compensate for one you’re missing. Or you could recruit a specialist card which allows you to more move spaces per tile, or maybe the specialist who lets you add the portals in any order, depending on which are available. Of course, having those purple tiles depends on how you laid the fate tiles on your board in the first place, as I mentioned above.

How Is The End Of The Game Triggered?

Around your player board, you have seven ‘novice’ gnome meeples in your colour. When you complete a retrieved task – say for example collecting four guardians – you can use an action to trigger lighting a bonfire. This flips the task tile, giving you end-game VPs, and also lets you place one of your gnomes on one of the High Council spaces on the main board. These spaces grant you a one-time bonus of your choosing, dependent on where you place them.

The other way to fill the high council spaces is completing one of the communal common tasks, e.g. having five guardians. When these are fulfilled, the player completing it can take the associated neutral novice and add them to the High Council. Once enough spaces in the High Council are filled, which varies depending on the player count, a countdown begins. The five countdown tiles are passed from player to player as they take their turns, meaning each player has just five turns to squeeze as many points as they can from the game.

At the end of the game, points are scored for lit bonfires, having guardians next to bonfires, having bonfires matching the colour of the path next to it, having portals, and a few other bits. Each of these though is only worth a small number of points, so the game is a real puzzle of maximising benefits and planning ahead. The person with the most points, wins.

Having Trouble Deciding What Kind Of Game This Is?

Me too! It seems to be a mix of set collection, tile placement, and movement with the ships and islands at the top of the board. It’s undoubtedly a Euro, but it really seems to be genre-less, and it makes for a really interesting change to my usual go-to of worker placement or tableau building. I think because it seems to be its own thing, it has the potential to appeal to a lot of different players.

Final Thoughts

Trying to explain how Bonfire works and plays is almost as tricky as playing the game itself. In both instances, it’s not a problem of actions being difficult – they’re actually very easy. You collect some action tiles, you spend them to do those actions. Not brain-bending stuff. But how you use those actions, that’s where the crunch comes.

The Agony Of Choice

If you like working out a plan, this is absolutely the game for you. Indecision is your worst enemy in Bonfire. You need to work backwards, taking an early look at the board, the tasks available, the starting specialists and path tiles, and then try to guess how many of action type you might need.

From there, you can start to look at your fate tiles, and decide how you might want to place them in order to get enough of each action, and even the order you take them. Your fate tiles are laid out in a stack, randomly ordered, and when you claim one you can only choose the top or bottom one.

Even when you’ve formulated your plan, now you need to start looking at the other players’ boards too. If you decide you want to get guardians next to bonfires, you’re going to need portals. These are all around the great bonfire, and the order you need to collect them varies from player to player – the player boards aren’t identical. But the portals are placed counter-clockwise, starting at the last space and working back, whereas the path tiles that the guardians will advance along, to get to your portals, and then the bonfires, are laid in the opposite order! Argh!

But this agony, this brain-melting series of choices, is where this game really shines.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

With so many choices available to you, and so many ways to keep the VPs trickling in, and with the random game board setup for each game, I can guarantee that no two games of Bonfire will ever go the same way. If you try to tell yourself before the game is even setup that ‘this time I’m going to grab as many specialists as I can, and complete those tricky, valuable yellow tasks‘, you’ll likely fail. Understanding how each part of the game connects to, and weaves into the next is important if you want to do well.

It’s a beautiful kaleidoscope of options, and immediately feels very Feld-like to anyone who spent a lot of time playing Castles of Burgundy. Your primary focus is on your own board, your own laying of tiles and collection of resources, but with a shared main source of ‘stuff’, and a necessity to keep one eye on what the others are doing.

If you have a group who suffer with AP (analysis paralysis), and overthinking everything, Bonfire can take a long time to play, and you might even consider setting a house rule time limit per turn. On the whole though, things balance out, as you can be doing your own nefarious scheming while others are playing their turns. It’s also a really heavy game in my opinion, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to get anyone new to the hobby to start here. It’d be enough to put them off for life, and we don’t want that.

Table For One, Sir?

There’s a really well implemented solo mode in the box. Players are pitted against an automa player named Tom (as in auTOMa…), and if you ever play solo games, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s really quick and easy to do the upkeep for. He doesn’t use action tiles, move his ship around, or any of that stuff. Tom has a small deck of cards which describe an action, so you flip the next, and do what it tells you to e.g. take the highest value task from an island with a fruit resource on it, or rotate the great bonfire to the next spot with the next portal he needs, and take it.

Tom is a tough opponent, and the key to beating him is not letting him cycle through his full deck the maximum of four times it’s possible. How you do that, I’ll let you figure out for yourselves.

Should I Buy Bonfire?

In a word, yes. But with a couple of caveats.

If you’re here, reading this, or checking out Bonfire at all, it’s unlikely you stumbled across it while you were looking at Monopoly on Amazon, so I’m going to assume you like a Euro or a Feld game. If that’s the case, and if you like games on the heavier side, I think you’ll love Bonfire. The interplay of actions, the sheer variety of choices available in how to play, the ‘market’ of the great bonfire – it’s standard Euro fare, but implemented really well.

You’ll also really enjoy that crunch when the end of the game is triggered, and you know you only have five turns left. From there you’re performing mental gymnastics to eke out every last point you can. If you really suffer from AP, or you really don’t like that sort of thing, then this probably isn’t the game for you. If, however, that sort of thing really gets you itching to get the shrinkwrap off a new game, then this is a classic example of all the good things from a Stefan Feld game, and I’m sure will be mentioned in years to come in the same breath as Castles of Burgundy and Macao.

The post Bonfire Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Knowing it’s by renowned Austrian designer Alexander Pfister is a big plus. He’s more famous for his cow-centric smash Great Western trail, and you can really see the similarities between the two games. Racing laps around the board, choosing how many spaces to move, deciding when to use cards for currency, and when to save them.

What’s In The Box?

Maracaibo is a table hog. Even on a 3ft x 3ft table, expect to be pushed for space, but I think it’s justified. The board is really pretty, full of Caribbean islands and blue seas, jungle to explore, tracks for doubloons and VPs, space for story cards, quests, combat tokens, and a large track showing your influence over the competing nations.

Each player gets a ton of wooden pieces; a ship, ship crew, an explorer, cubes to track progress, and a seemingly endless supply of little wooden discs which act as both goods when you trade, and ship upgrades.

There are a lot of cards. A standard deck of ‘A’ cards are in use every game, with around half the deck of ‘B’ cards, along with any relevant story cards, and admiral cards (personal objectives which will influence how you play), to name a few.

The board and all card tokens are high quality, as are the wooden pieces. The player boards are thinner, but that’s to be expected if you’ve played anything from Castles of Burgundy to Terraforming Mars.

How Does It Play?

On every turn players move their ships 1-7 spaces around the board. Stopping at a city space lets you trade goods, which means you discard one of the cards in your hand with a matching symbol, and move a disc from your player board to the main board. There are lots of extra actions and rewards on your own player board, each covered with two discs, so clearing them by trading means you can do more each turn. Alternatively, you might stop at a village space, which lets you build cards from your hand, granting you permanent and end-of-game bonuses, or discard your hand in exchange for money. Or you may have upgraded your player board or bought cards which give you some new village actions.

You might want to move only one or two spaces per turn to maximise what you can do, but here’s the rub. If you move more spaces each turn, firstly you can get more than one village action per turn, but secondly whoever reaches the last spot on the lap – the finish line – triggers the end of round for everyone. The penalty for coming up with complicated plans is that you might never see them through to fruition.

There’s a lot going on at any one time in Maracaibo. You can pay for your cards in-hand can to add them to your tableau, but also used as goods to trade with to upgrade your ship, and they can also be used as items to claim quests. Maybe you want to increase your combat rank in order to fight with France, England or Spain to fight with them and increase your influence, aiming for VPs at the end. Maybe you concentrate on moving your explorer through the jungle and picking up bonuses that way. There’s a lot of variety in the way you approach the game.

Final Thoughts

Maracaibo comes with a story/legacy mode which is brilliantly implemented. It adds new cards to buy, and using tiles overlaid on the board to add new locations, hazards and quests. It completely changes how you approach your games, and can be instantly reset to its vanilla state for a fresh game. The solo mode works with an automa opponent called Jean, who plays with a deck to randomly choose what they do each turn. Even this deck can be customised to make the game easier or more difficult. It’s a strong challenge and a great solo option.

It’s a brilliant game of balancing your own plans and those you think the other players might be doing. You can build engines which give you great bonuses, but if someone guesses what you’re up to, they can race around and trigger a round end and reset all the ships back to the start and deny you the chance to finish them. I classify Maracaibo’s difficulty as medium-heavy weight, so not one to introduce new players to Euros, but once you understand the rules you’ll almost never need to look at the instructions again. It’s beautifully intuitive and all the information you need is right there on the table in front of you.

Maracaibo may not the cheapest game in the world, but it’s well worth the investment if you enjoy a chunky Euro and want a good solo game.

The post Maracaibo Review appeared first on Punchboard.