Apparently, the collective noun for penguins is a colony. So in Deep Dive, you control a small colony of penguins. Your goal is to dive into icy waters and return with some tasty submarine morsels. The deeper you go, the tastier (read: more points) the food is worth. However, lurking in the depths there are predators like seals and sharks, and they want nothing more than to p-p-p-p-pickup a penguin.

As if I wasn’t going to get that in there. UK people of a certain age – you’re welcome.

Where you from, you set-sy thing?

In a slight twist from the usual push-your-luck fare, Deep Dive adds set-collection to the mix. It’s not enough to just return with marine munchies. Instead, you want to collect sets of the different colours – pink, green and yellow. If you collect a set, you get the full points from each of the tiles at the end of the game. Any incomplete sets give you half points, rounded down, as if to insult you.

As with games like Can’t Stop, strategy is only a light touch in Deep Dive. Some of it is obvious, like for example prioritising pink tiles when you’ve got lots of yellow and green, but there are some other nice touches in there.

Picking up a rock tile, should you flip one over, can be super handy. In a Did You Know? moment, did you know that penguins eat rocks? A belly full of pebbles – or gastroliths as they’re known – helps a penguin dive deeper. Rocks in Deep Dive do the same thing. Use one at the start of your turn and instead of working your way down through the layers, like eating a big, wet trifle, you can choose to start anywhere. Very handy for trying to nab tiles from the bottom layers.

If you’re worried about penguins being eaten by the predators, then worry not. Your penguins don’t get munched – they’re merely cornered and trapped. Should all three of yours be trapped, you retrieve them all. Trapped Pingus actually act in your favour, because a layer with a trapped one in can just be skipped over. There are a lot of clever little touches in the game which mean that even potentially negative events have some kind of silver lining.

Final thoughts

Deep Dive is extremely cute, and a lot of fun. There’s no denying that it’s very light, and so for most of my readers, it’s a game which will go in your bag as filler material. Sat around a table in a pub, or at a cafe waiting for a train – it’s perfect for these kinds of situations. Will I still be playing it in a couple of years’ time? Time will tell.

It’s a good job that the different depths of water tiles also have a number of dots on the back to tell you which level they belong to because even with my decent eyesight, some of the darker tiles are really hard to tell apart. Other than that, I’ve no complaints about the components at all. The little penguin meeples are to die for.

It doesn’t quite have the same immediate draw that makes me want to play again, and again, like when a game of Can’t Stop ends, but I think some of that is down to the setup time. Don’t get me wrong, it only takes a few minutes, but you really do need to swap out the tiles each time and shuffle new ones into the game, otherwise, you very quickly learn how many predators are on which level, for example. Other than that, Deep Dive is great. Quick, fast, cute, and yours for less than twenty quid. Bargain.

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

Deep Dive (2023)

Design: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Dylan Mangini
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 15-10 mins

The post Deep Dive Review appeared first on Punchboard.

All aboard

It’s the future, right? Passenger space travel is a thing, and some bright spark has come up with a wormhole fabricator. The fabricator enables the captains of the spaceships to punch a hole in the fabric of space, and stitch the two ends together, allowing instantaneous travel between two points. It’s a pretty cool concept, and every time I face the drive from Cornwall to Harrogate for Airecon (which I wrote all about here), I wish it were real. As the captain of your own interstellar Uber your job is to take passengers (cards, in Wormholes’ case) to their destinations. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a handful of passengers who all want to go to the same planet, gaining you lots of points for one trip.

Wormholes are tunnels, and the thing about tunnels is that they have a hole at either end. So before you get all excited thinking “I’m going to take off and immediately warp to the edge of the known universe”, keep that enthusiasm in check. At any point in your turn, you can drop a wormhole token on the hex your spaceship is flying through. Wormhole tokens come in pairs, and as soon as you drop the second of a pair somewhere – punching a hole in the other end of the tunnel, if you will – the tokens are flipped and immediately active. From that point on, anyone landing on either end of the wormhole can warp to the other end for free!

Wormholes being a free trip is a big deal. On your turn you get three movements, and moving from one hex to another costs one of those movements. It means the first half of the game starts slowly as the players slowly spread out using movement points, searching for the right places to hitch either end of their interstellar ziplines. As the game progresses though, you soon start to realise that when wormholes butt up against one another, you can start to move really far with only a few movements.

Engage

Once the board starts to fill up with players’ wormhole tokens, you’re left with some painful – if not difficult – decisions to make. You might have a ship filled to the brim with passengers who want to go to the planet that looks like a fuzzy ball, but to get there quickly you’ll have to use other players’ wormholes. You can do that, and they can’t stop you doing it, but they’ll get VP chits by way of compensation for using their intergalactic highways. I had a really funny game of Wormholes with my wife and son, where my son deliberately ruined his chances of winning by refusing to use my wormholes. Rather than let me earn VPs, he went on a slow, spiteful crawl around the cosmos. So for those of you wondering “Can I just use my own network and avoid any interaction?” – no, you can’t. It’s baked-in, and it’s great.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the legibility of the wormhole tokens. In a game where being able to quickly trace routes across the board is key, some of them are really difficult to read at a glance. When a token goes on the board without a matching one, they start on a black side with a bright number, and things are good. When the wormhole is completed, the token is flipped and black is replaced with the player colour, and the number is a kind of silver colour. The silver is reflective and hard to read at a distance. The little arrow that points to the other token in a pair could do with being bigger too. Too many times I heard someone say “Where does this one go to?”, which shouldn’t be a question in a game dependent on that mechanism.

Gripes aside, Wormholes is a lot of fun. It plays out so quickly, which makes it perfect for a start or end game for a game night, and I’ve also found it really good for playing with non-gamers. I wondered if there’d be a min-max problem where cunning players were just taking on passengers who rely on their own routes, but the problem doesn’t exist. The end of the game is driven by players placing wormholes next to each planet, which also rewards bonus points, so it’s usually in your best interest to weave a wide web through the stars.

Final thoughts

I have two sets of shelves that I use to store games. The upstairs shelves hold my collection of Euro and wargames – the sort of games I’ll play with my regular group, or at a convention. The downstairs shelves are for family and party games – the games I know I can regularly get to the table with my family. Wormholes has earned a coveted spot on the downstairs shelves. If you were looking for a heavy space game to sit alongside Gaia Project, Eclipse, and Twilight Imperium, Wormholes isn’t it. This is a much lighter, more accessible game.

Regular gamers will enjoy the mixture of the initial planning of routes, and later trying to optimise their turns to milk every last point out of the game. Non-gamers might find the start a little slow-going on their first game, but just watch their eyes light up towards the end when they’re zipping all over the place. It’s a game which does a great job of making you feel like you’re enacting really clever plans, whereas it’s really just following the path of least resistance, but that’s a big part of hooking new gamers in. Make them feel like they did something clever.

I like the way the boards are double-sided and include different kinds of obstacles and features. It mixes things up enough to keep it interesting, without making it feel like a different game. AEG are undoubtedly one of the best at producing these light-mid weight games at the moment, and Wormholes happily sits alongside the likes of Cubitos (review), Whirling Witchcraft (review), and Peter McPherson’s other hit, Tiny Towns (review) as games which hide layers of strategy behind a newbie-friendly veneer. Speedy pick up and deliver action with a nice twist, I really like it.

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

Wormholes (2022)

Design: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Caring Wong
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Wormholes Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The what of what now?

I’ve played The Guild of Merchant Explorers a lot of times now, and I’m still no closer to knowing what such a guild is. It feels like someone has handed an AI writer a list of board game hot words and that’s what it came up with. Regardless, each of the players is a merchant-slash-explorer tasked with venturing forth and reestablishing contact with the various cities in the realm, opening trade routes, and discovering villages which may have sprung up since the last time someone went geocaching there.

In practice it’s a pretty simple game, like many of the best games are. In each turn a card is flipped over showing a terrain type, and each player places cubes on the board in hexes which match that terrain type. Every time you place a cube, it’s got to be adjacent to an existing cube, your capital, or a village you found in a previous round. If you completely cover a region of a terrain type, you get to place a little village on one of the hexes – huzzah!

Now, there might be some of you reading this thinking “reveal a terrain type, place cubes on hexes, make routes between cities – this is a Kingdom Builder rip-off!” It’s undeniable that there are plenty of similarities, and I made the comparison myself in social media posts when I was playing the game. However, there are a few big differences between the games, and these differences create an experience which feels different to Donald X. Vaccarino’s classic.

“You can go your own way”

Thank me for the Fleetwood Mac earworm later. The biggest difference between The Guild of Merchant Explorers and that other Kingdom game is that each player has their own map board. I say board, it’s a player sheet, just like those in The Castles of Burgundy (review here) and Ark Nova (review here). Everybody starts with the same map (of the four available in the box), and starts from the same space. Everybody reacts to the same terrain (explore) cards as they’re revealed, and places their cubes at the same time. It sounds like a recipe for several identical player sheets at the end of the game, but courses very quickly diverge.

During the game you get opportunities to draw Investigation cards, which act as more powerful versions of the explore cards. Each player ends up with three different investigation cards which get activated several times during the course of the game. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those pictures of spiders’ webs when they’ve been given psychoactive drugs, but the investigations have a similar effect on the players’ expeditions across the map.

Ultimately you’re trying to make lots of money. You’re a part of the guild of MERCHANT explorers, after all. Connecting two cities earns you dollarbucks, as does discovering villages and completing the shared end-of-game goals. There are ruins around the coasts to discover treasure in, discovery towers which can earn you big bonuses if you manage to reach them all, and there are some other interesting tweaks in some of the maps to keep things fresh.

Final thoughts

This isn’t the longest review I’ll ever write, but it doesn’t need to be. The Guild of Merchant Explorers is a lightweight game with a simple ruleset, which can be played in 30-45 minutes, tops. This isn’t a criticism, it’s the opposite. As much as I love heavy, complex games, I enjoy clever, lighter games just as much, and this is a great example of one. The solo mode is great too, and forces you to actively work towards the goal cards in a specific order.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the price. I make a point of not mentioning the price of a game unless it’s exceptionally high or low, and in my opinion, the ~£40 asking price for The Guild of Merchant Explorers is too high. For a light game which doesn’t even have player boards – just sheets – it feels like too much. Yes, the discovery tower models are cool, but if you take them out all you’re left with is basically a deck of small cards, a bag of wooden cubes, and a few punchboards of tokens. It didn’t need to be in a Kallax-size box, but competition for shelf presence is often king.

Grumble aside, there’s no denying that The Guild of Merchant Explorers is a great game. Matt and Brett keep turning out gold-standard game designs, and this is another one to add to their CV. If you’re looking for a flip-and-write that’s a little more meaty, I still rank Hadrian’s Wall (review here) as the best you can buy, but if you want something lighter, this is a fantastic choice. Nothing has really scratched that Kingdom Builder itch for me for years, and The Guild of Merchant Explorers does it with enough of a twist to make it feel fresh and interesting.

Review copy kindly provided by AEG. 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.

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The Guild of Merchant Explorers (2022)

Designers: Matthew Dunstan, Brett J Gilbert
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gerralt Landman
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post The Guild of Merchant Explorers Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Shake, shake, shake senora, also shake your boo… irrational dislike of gimmick games.

If you’re going to Jump In The Line down at your local game store, you might spot Shake That City soon, a quick, puzzly game from designers Mads Fløe and Kåre Torndahl Kjær, and publisher AEG. If you’ve seen the cool kids showing Shake That City on Youtube or that there Tiktok, you’ll have seen the cube shaker in action. It’s a cardboard contraption, lashed together with elastic bands, which powers the game’s beating heart.

Yes, it’s a gimmick. No, it’s not entirely necessary. It’s a lot of fun though, and it turns out to be much more important than it first seems.

Town planning

Shake That City is a tile-laying puzzle game with really light rules. The (very tenuous) theme has you choosing a series of tiles to make your own little city on your 5×5 grid boards. “But Adam, how am I – a lowly civil engineer – meant to choose which buildings and infrastructure go into my city?”. Don’t worry, friend, that’s where the cube shaker comes in.

The cube shaker has an open slot on top of it where you can dump in all of the cubes. Then you give it a shake, hence the name of the game! There’s a clever series of holes in the layers in the box, and when you push the tab in on the front, a neat little 3×3 square of cubes drops out of the bottom of the box, onto the table. I’m not entirely sure how it works. I think it’s some kind of Scandinavian wizardry.

The cubes are the same colours as the various tiles in the game, and it’s up to you to choose one of the colours on display, take some matching tiles, and place them on your board. There’s a catch though – such is life. The tiles you place have to match the colour, the quantity, and the exact layout of the cubes on the table. There’s no mirroring, flipping, or rotating in this game. What you see is what you place. In the early game, it’s not a problem, but as the game progresses, sometimes the patterns on offer just won’t fit on your board, and things start to get tricky.

A rose by any other name

When you strip away all of Shake That City’s finery, it’s a game about making patterns of tiles that score well in combination. Think of games like Tigris & Euphrates, or Almadi (review here). Roads need to connect to the edge of the board to score, shops score best near the middle of the board, but need to connect to the edge by roads. Homes like to be on their own, but not next to factories, while factories like to be next to other factories and roads.

Shake That City could easily have been a roll-and-write, and it would have been great. There are a load of different ways to decide which buildings you’re adding: cards, dice, blind-draw cubes from a bag etc. The same goes for marking them on your board. The board could just as easily have been a pad of sheets to scribble on, or pages you print at home.

Ordinarily, these things might make me think that adding the whole cube shaker thing is a gimmick. Pointless over-engineering of a problem that doesn’t need solving. This time though, I’m inclined to be more lenient. I think the shaker box is a good thing, and for two big reasons.

My cube shake brings all the boys to the yard

I admit it: I really enjoy using the shaker. I like the noise it makes when the cubes bounce around inside, I like pushing the tab in, and I love the moment of anticipation as you pick the box up only to see OH MY GOD, IT’S DONE IT AGAIN, IT WORKS! It should get old after the first ten or fifteen times, but it doesn’t. The cardboard magic is always special. Admittedly, sometimes it drops two cubes instead of one in a space, or none at all, but 60% of the time, it works every time.

Secondly, it adds a toy factor to the game. That toy factor is massively important in getting non-gamers engaged, and that’s always a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I’m not one of those people who think games are for the Alpha Nerd gamers and nobody else. I want everyone to play games, and enjoy them. I’ve had first-hand experience of people walking past the game and having their attention grabbed by the sound of wooden cubes, rattling against the box’s cardboard innards. Those same people have gone on to really enjoy the game.

That might sound inconsequential, but it really isn’t. A big part of my personal mission in running this site, and writing these reviews is inclusion and making people realise this is a hobby for everyone.

Final thoughts

Shake That City probably should have a flip- or roll-and-write game. It would have worked well and I’d have really enjoyed it. As it happens, however, it’s a fully-fledged board game, and it’s a good one. The puzzle of trying to make the random patterns work together is really clever and reminds me of the end-game scoring of Almadi a lot.

There’s a clever touch which places bonus tiles in a random order around your board, offering big bonuses if you manage to complete the conditions in the relevant rows and columns. The random nature of these tiles and the cube-plopping machine mean each game genuinely feels different. If you do start to find the tasks a little boring, the player boards flip over to reveal a beachside space instead, with its own rules for scoring.

Shake That City is going to do really well with people who like this style of quick-and-easy games. It would make a great addition to the collection of someone who enjoys games like Cartogtaphers. The obvious comparison that I think some people would want to make is with Tiny Towns (review here), but while they share the idea of cubes and square grids to make towns, they feel very different. Shake That CIty is much more forgiving of a puzzle.

The Kickstarter campaign for Shake That City goes live on November 29th 2022, and apparently, the main pledge is only $29! Depending on the shipping and taxes in your part of the world, it sounds like an absolute bargain to me, and I readily recommend it to families and fans of lighter games, looking for something new.

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

If you enjoyed this review and would like to read more like this, consider supporting the site by joining my monthly membership at Kofi. It starts from £1 per month, offers member benefits, and lets me know you’re enjoying what I’m doing.

Shake That City (2023)

Designers: Mads Fløe, Kåre Torndahl Kjær
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Olga Kim
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Shake That City Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Hit and miss

Cubitos makes heavy use of one of my favourite things in a board game: push-your-luck. I still don’t know why I like it so much, especially when I enjoy heavy Euro games which eschew luck in favour of planning. To move around the track in Cubitos, you throw handfuls of dice. Each die has a mixture of faces with something good on (a hit), and blanks (misses). Any hits you roll are moved to the Active Zone of your area, and then you choose whether to keep rolling with the remainder of your dice, or pass, and get ready to run.

So you and your friends are throwing handfuls of these little dice, banking the good stuff, and then deciding whether to keep going or not. If you roll no hits, you bust! It lends itself to simultaneous rolling, so there’s precious little downtime, but there’s one aspect of the way Cubitos handles it that I really like. There’s nothing in the rules to say you can’t just sit and watch other people rolling, and wait to see if they pass or bust. If you notice someone doing this, you can also stop and wait. In fact, the whole table can, and then it comes down to who has the most available dice, and they must roll first.

I love how it tickles that part of our brains that love to take a chance, to have a little gamble. Whether you find yourself praying to the dice gods, giving your dice a lucky blow, or telling fate that baby needs a new dice tray, I can’t get enough of watching my friends agonise over deciding on one more roll or not. If it sounds like The Quacks of Quedlinberg so far, you’re on the right track. In the same way Quacks has its rat tails catch-up mechanism, Cubitos has a Fan track to advance along, should you bust. It has some great bonuses along it, so it’s never too disheartening if Lady Luck swipes left on you.

Playing the markets

Cubitos also shows its ‘separated at birth’ similarities to Quacks when it comes to improving your pool. In every game, you’ll be buying from the same selection of brightly-coloured dice, but what each of them does is dependent on outside forces. If you’re familiar with Quacks, you’ll remember that each colour’s abilities were decided by which of the spellbooks you use. Cubitos does something similar and gives each of its eight dice stores a choice of seven different ability cards. I’m no Carol Vorderman, but even I know that that adds up to a buttload of different combinations. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

I wouldn’t recommend just drawing cards randomly, however, as you need to strike a balance between cheap and expensive dice, and some just don’t really work with others. It’s a bit like making a sandwich; sure, you could try jam, raw onions and tuna, but there’s no guaranteeing it’ll work. Stick to the recommended setups in the rulebook for your first few games, and enjoy tasty dice sarnies.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about Cubitos so far is that there don’t seem to be any obviously-dominant strategies. In Dominion, the Big Money tactic was famously overpowered for a long time, and it still works even now. Cubitos seems more balanced. The same is true of the different tracks that come in the box. They offer plenty of variety, and just like The Quest for El Dorado which I recently reviewed, you’ll find yourself torn between the shortest route, and the longer, bonus-filled outside lines. I love that no two games ever feel the same. It really does help the game feel fresh for a long time.

The flimsy cardboard elephant in the room

Cubitos comes with a really clever storage solution. Each of the different sets of dice has a storage box included, each of which doubles as a holder/marketplace during the game. Unfortunately, there are two big issues with boxes, both of which wind me up.

Firstly you have to fold and assemble the boxes yourself. This wouldn’t be such a bugbear for me, if it weren’t for the fact that they’ve got some irritating folds. Folds to make some sides recessed – for example. It means you can’t really just punch and sort the game as quickly as you’d want. I’m all for publishers including storage and organisation solutions in their games, even moreso when they forgo plastic in favour of card, so kudos to AEG for that. Just make them simpler, or pre-assembled. It’s really easy to not get straight, crisp folds on your boxes, and they end up looking a bit wonky.

The second gripe I have is using the boxes as the marketplaces, as suggested in the rulebook. It’s a great idea, but the boxes are so top-heavy when using the recesses as trays, that it all feels a bit flimsy. It can be unnecessarily awkward to take dice from the trays when they’re full, especially when you’ve got big, fat sausage fingers like mine.

It’s probably worth noting that I wouldn’t normally complain about a game’s components unless I was really upset about them, and my issue with the boxes doesn’t affect the gameplay at all. The issue is that Cubitos is such a physical, tangible game. Playing with the little dice, rolling them, clacking them together – it’s all a part of the experience. When you regularly have to interact with something which subconsciously detracts from that experience, however little, it’s the sort of thing I have to bring up.

Final thoughts

Look, I know I spend a whole section grumbling about the boxes. Unfortunately, as a dad in his mid-forties, it’s just something I have to do. I’m contractually obligated to be a bit grumpy. Don’t let that make you think Cubitos is anything other than mad fun, because that’s exactly what it is. I love pushing luck in games, I love bag/deck/pool building, and I love social racing games. Cubitos delivers in all three areas, in spades. It’s a brilliant game, and if you like The Quacks of Quedlinburg, you’ll like this too.

The little dice are unbearably cute and tactile. You might be wondering why I’ve mentioned their smaller size a few times in this review, and it’s because size matters – despite what you might have been told. In a game where you’re going to roll at least nine dice (nine!) at the start of your turn, if they were regular-sized dice, you’d need hands like Shaq to hold them all. Not to mention the table space you’d need with four of you all doing it at the same time.

You can play with anything from two to four players, but as with most other racing games, the more the merrier. If you asked me to play a two-player game, I would, but I’d be eyeing your collection to see what else we could play. With four though, I’d bite your hand off. It’s silly, colourful fun, full of groans and cheers, and just like he did with Space Base, John D Clair has come up with a winner. Ignore my curmudgeonly cardboard grumbles, and find out why it was so hard to get hold of for most of last year.

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

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

Cubitos (2021)

Designer: John D. Clair
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Jacqui Davis, Philip Glofcheskie, Ryan Iler
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Cubitos Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Go on then, one more

When it comes to card games, you’re spoilt for choice now. It doesn’t matter if you’re into trick-taking, take-that, set-collection, or even making buildings out of them – there’s something for everyone. Set-collection is one of my favourites, so I was excited to see what Alderac have done with TEN. Yeah, I know, the capitalisation makes it looks like I’m shouting (PARKS did the same thing), but I guess if I had a game published I’d get to choose how it’s written too.

TEN is a simple game at its core. Flip cards over one at a time, with the aim of collecting runs of consecutive numbers in each of the four coloured suits. Each time you flip a card you get the choice of stopping where you are, and claiming either the currency or number cards on show, or carrying on, and flipping another card. If you’re wondering why you wouldn’t just keep flipping cards, it’s because from the first card onward, there’s a running total. If that total ever goes over – you guessed it – ten, you bust.

This is all made more interesting by the currency cards I mentioned. Some of the cards have a number of pips on them, like dice. Currency cards reduce the running total by their value, so you can take the chance of flipping more cards if you can keep that total low enough. If the currency card total goes over ten though, you bust as well. Hmmm, this game is getting pretty tasty, right?

Making a bid

What raises TEN above other games of its ilk, is the inclusion of a market of cards. During the course of the game, various things will cause number cards to get added to the market. If you don’t bust on your turn, you can spend any of your collected currency tokens on buying a card of the same value from the market. Wildcards though, we haven’t touched on wildcards yet, and they add a really nice part to the game – auctions.

Wildcards might be any number of a coloured suit, a number in any colour, or even both at once. You don’t need me to tell you that these cards are really powerful, and so, players get to fight it out for them in an auction. When one is revealed in a turn, everything else stops, and the auction happens. It’s a simple auction, where each player in turn can bid only once, and has to beat the previous highest bid. Wildcards can change the course of a game quite easily, so the auctions can get really interesting.

One of the things I really like about TEN is that there’s no such thing as a bad turn. If you’re used to games like Can’t Stop, where pushing your luck too far can result in a dead turn with no reward, this is a refreshing change. It keeps the game really tense, with no runaway leader, or worse, someone who stands no chance of catching up. If the worst happens and you bust, you get a token worth three currency, which can be really powerful in future auctions.

Final thoughts

If it isn’t already obvious, I really like TEN. Set collection is awesome, push-your-luck is awesome, so what’s not to like? It plays nicely with all counts from two to five, but four or five is where I like it best, because the auctions take on some real bite. The game ticks along at a nice rate, and you can happily play three games in an hour. One thing I love about TEN is that all players are invested in every turn, not just their own. If someone chooses to take numbers, all other players get the currency left on the table. There’s palpable tension when someone’s sitting on a total of seven and choose to flip another card. Will they bust….?

The production values, especially considering it’s a card game, need to be talked about. TEN is gorgeous. The card quality is really good, the colours are vibrant, and there are so many nice touches throughout. The shiny UV spots on the cards not only look nice, but if you look closely you’ll notice there are a number of spots on each card that equal the value of it. The currency tokens are really tactile too, it’s fun just to play with them and clack them in your hands between turns.

Molly, Robert and Shawn from Flatout Games have put together a really polished game, one which I would – and have – play at home or a convention alike. The box is small enough to take to the pub, and when you consider you can pick it up for under £20, it’s the kind of game you could, and should, play anywhere. Tense, fast, and it’ll get the table talking, TEN is superb.

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

TEN (2021)

Designers: Molly Johnson, Shawn Stankewich, Robert Melvin
Art: Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post TEN Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Double double, toil and trouble

The setting for Whirling Witchcraft is a bright, friendly battle between witches. Each witch has their own spell cards which let them transmute ingredients into other ingredients. In each round you add a recipe card to your tableau from your hand, take the ingredients from your workbench, and add them to the various recipe cards. If the recipe shows a toad and a spider makes two mushrooms, that card produces the mushrooms and they sit on the card.

The ingredients you produce can either be used as the sources for other recipe cards, or added to your cardboard cauldron. The cauldrons may be unnecessary, but they’re really good fun, and lend to the table appeal of the game. The loaded cauldrons then get passed to the player to the right, while the unused recipe cards go to the player on your left. When you’re given a cauldron, you have to take the ingredient cubes from it and add them to your workbench. If there’s no room for some, they go back to the player that gave them to you and get added to their Witch’s Circle. The first player to get five cubes in their Witch’s Circle wins.

One of the things you’ll realise very quickly is that the person you’re passing recipe cards to is the same person handing you their cauldron. If you’ve got your brain engaged, you’ll be able to see what kind of ingredients they’re trying to use, and try to avoid giving them a card that’ll definitely land you in trouble further down the line. Yes, it might mean you have a sub-optimal turn, but that’s where a lot of the fun of the game comes from – whether to give yourself a boost to attack the player to your right, or to take one on the chin and ensure you don’t give the player to your left another broomstick to beat you with.

Fire burn and cauldron bubble

The first game Whirling Witchcraft reminded me of is It’s a Wonderful World. The process of passing cards, playing one, using cubes to generate other cubes – it was immediately familiar. It doesn’t take too many turns to realise there are some fundamental differences between the games. The most obvious is the once I mentioned above, the way you take and pass your generated cubes from and to your neighbours.

There are other things too which make this game stand alone. I love the way some of the recipe cards can be played either way up, so the cube generation can work in either direction, depending on which way you want to play. There are character cards that you can use which give each person slightly different special abilities, although the thing I like most about these cards is being able to play as a Frog Whisperer!

Whirling Witchcraft is a game which rewards repeated play. Once you get the hang of what you’re trying to do, and what you need to do to make that happen, the game opens up properly. That’s not to say it’s a difficult game to learn – it isn’t. I taught it to my wife and son who were both able to play very quickly. When you spend as much time eyeing up your neighbours as your own workbench and recipes, then the proper game reveals itself, with the interaction between the players.

Final thoughts

Erik Sundén has designed a really nice twist on the tableau-builder with Whirling Witchcraft. The ‘take that!’ aspect doesn’t feel as confrontational as it can in many games, which makes it feel well-suited for family play. There’s a ton of variety with the various different personality cards and recipes on offer, and it’s another game like Between Two Castles, where simply swapping seats with other players can affect the meta around the table.

The player boards are pretty basic, and a bit slippery. It’s a game dying for socketed boards, but a lot of the budget has gone into the little cauldrons. Yes, they’re gimmicky, but it makes the game so tactile and enjoyable. There’s something indescribably satisfying in handing your neighbour a cauldron full of cubes that you know they can’t take, knowing it’s going to score you points. As Kryten would say – “Ah, smug mode”.

If you prefer less interaction, and more focus on building an efficiency engine, have a look at It’s a Wonderful World or the recent sequel, It’s a Wonderful Kingdom. Otherwise, Whirling Witchcraft is a great game. Even as a grown man, I love handling the cauldrons. For me it sits it that same sort of space where games like The Quacks of Quedlinburg lives. It’s family-friendly, engaging, fun, and won’t bore hardcore players too quickly. Witchy fun for everyone.

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

Whirling Witchcraft (2021)

Designer: Erik A Sundén
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Luis Francisco, Weberson Santiago
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Whirling Witchcraft Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Tiny Towns Review

Tiny Towns is a damning indictment on urban sprawl, overcrowding, and an ever-expanding society’s need for quick, affordable housing! Actually, it’s not. It’s a really cute abstract puzzle about space optimisation, forward planning, and the most adorable little wooden buildings. These days you need a controversial strapline to pull people in though, so with that out of the way, let’s take a look at AEG and Peter McPherson’s 2019 puzzler.

Who lives on your block?

Tiny Towns revolves around the use of wooden blocks. Loads and loads of little wooden cubes of various colours. In the middle of the table there are some cards showing you the buildings you can construct during the game. Farms, cottages, theatres, inns – that sort of thing. Each building is made of a few cubes placed in the correct places on your 4×4 player board. It might be as simple as a well, which is a brown and a grey cube next to one another (wood and stone, respectively), or something more complicated, like a bakery. A bakery is two red blocks, with a blue block between, and a yellow block next to that, like a Tetris T-piece.

Nice and easy so far. Get some blocks, make nice patterns on the board. Here’s where things get interesting though. The shapes for each building can be rotated and flipped to your heart’s content, as long as the blocks’ relative positions to one another is correct. When you finish a shape, during your turn you can remove the cubes that have gone towards it and take one of the cute wooden buildings that represent it, and place it in any of the spaces the cubes were. So now that thing that was taking up four of your precious 16 squares only takes up one, and you can start working towards something else.

Merge in turn

If the idea of the game so far sounds familiar, but you’re not sure why, there’s a good chance you own a smartphone. If you’re not already playing one, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a thousand adverts for the recent craze of ‘merge games’. Drag three things together and pow!, you’ve got a new, slightly better thing. Repeat ad-nauseum. This idea is pretty close to the core concept for Tiny Towns, except there’s only ever one generation of merging.

At first, it seems like a pretty easy game. There’s plenty of space, and tons of options. Each of the building cards clearly shows how it’ll score at the end of the game, with relation to any of the other buildings on offer. For example, a cottage on its own scores nothing, but a farm on your board means that up to four cottages will score three points each. This is where things start to get tricky, however. For a start, you don’t always get to choose which resource cube you have to place next. Each player takes a turn naming a resource/colour, and all players have to place that same cube on their boards. Pretty annoying when you’re desperate for a wood cube but some joker keeps choosing stone. Better make sure you’ve got somewhere on your board it can still be useful, despite your best plans.

Then there’s the issue of space. At first it’s not an problem, but as the game progresses, each building permanently blocks a space. Not only do you have fewer squares available to place blocks, you also start blocking some possible shapes, because there just isn’t room for them. Very quickly you realise Tiny Towns is a game about optimisation. Optimisation of your space, and optimisation of your scoring opportunities.

Fun house

I’ve made the game seem very mechanical so far, so it’s time to tell you that Tiny Towns is fun, and to tell you why. Plotting what’s going to go where is so satisfying when it works out, and you end up with this miniature metropolis that banks you big points. But the real fun comes with the other players around the table. The cursing, the exasperated groans, and the “I cannot believe you chose brick!” cries of anguish. Your plans will almost never work out exactly the way you want it to, because some other git around the table is trying to do something else. Your player boards are visible to everyone, so it’s obvious to everyone (especially when someone takes it upon themselves to tell the table) when one player’s got a healthy lead.

I’ve played a four-player game where I was absolutely desperate for a brick to finish a high-scoring building near the end of the game, but the other players chose to pick anything except brick, just to force me to fill my board, thus ending my game. It doesn’t have to be played this way, with so much passive interaction, but if you’ve got a family or regular group playing, it can definitely happen. Far from being anger-inducing, it was really funny, because Tiny Towns isn’t a heavy, serious game. It’s a light, charming, quick game.

The biggest drawback Tiny Towns has is the one I just mentioned. When a player runs out of places to put blocks, it’s game over. Final scoring doesn’t happen until everyone has finished, and if you’re playing with newbies, it can mean they’ve got a little wait while the rest of the players construct their wooden wonders. It’s not a massive problem, unless you’re playing with lots of players. Out of the box it supports one to six players, but with enough cubes, printed player mats, or even pencils and paper, you could scale this game up to play with 50+ people.

Final thoughts

Tiny towns is a fantastic abstract puzzler. There are tons of different building types with different scoring conditions, which keep the game fresh and interesting. I love that it can play with pretty much any player count, if you don’t mind getting creative with making your own boards, or drawing on paper. There’s a solo mode included, where a deck of cards decide which colour cube you get next, which is a fun challenge and good practice for the main game.

If you don’t enjoy spatial puzzles, it’s probably not going to do much for you. Some people don’t enjoy them, and some people just don’t have a brain that works in that way, but then, not every game is going to appeal to everyone. A game usually takes comfortably under an hour, but scale that up for every extra player you have in the game.

If you like games like The Isle of Cats, Bärenpark, Patchwork, or even the aging Blokus, I think you’ll love Tiny Towns. It’s an interesting twist on the polyomino tile-placement genre, less than £35, and readily available. Plus, if you do find yourself getting tired with it, there are expansions to breathe new life into the game. For example, Tiny Towns: Villagers, which you can read about below.

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

Tiny Towns: Villagers Review

There are a couple of expansions available for Tiny Towns, both coming out the year after the main game, in 2020. I was sent a copy of Tiny Towns: Villagers to review, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sure what they could do with the formula so didn’t go into it with high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised.

As the title implies, the biggest new additions are the villagers. They’re a collection of cute animal meeples in the shapes of mice, squirrels, birds, and other little forest folk. Three of them get plonked into three corners of your board at the start of the game, and you’re given a second, teeny board to put in front of you too – a lodge. The lodge is just a holding board really, where villagers go when they’re removed from the board, but it also has a nice reminder of how buildings for villagers are formed.

Mousey housey

If you complete a building by placing the last block on the same space as a villager, they’re then actively working in whatever building it happens to be. At the start of the game, a couple of different villager abilities are chosen at random. When you have enough activated workers, you can choose to use these abilities, which vary from letting you build with fewer resources than you need, to replacing an entire building with a different kind.

If you’ve played the Tiny Towns base game, you’ll know that there’s already a lot to consider when you’re choosing what to build where, so you’ll understand the added layer of complexity the villagers add. For someone like me, that’s great. I love a game with a bit more meat on its bones, and Villagers is certainly meaty. It’s not even as simple as just making sure the buildings finish in a creature’s space, as you can purposely shunt them around the board until they’re in positions more in line with your plans.

In addition to the new meeples, there are also a decent number of new building cards thrown in too. You can happily play the base game and just add in the new buildings if you want to.

Final thoughts

When you look at what’s in the box, the ~£25 you’ll pay for Tiny Towns: Villagers can look a bit steep. It’s a handful of cards, six small boards, and 20 animal meeples. If your interest with Tiny Towns is “It’s okay, but I’m not crazy about it”, then I’d wait to catch it in a sale. If you love Tiny Towns however, Villagers is essential in my opinion. Especially if you love a bit more weight in your games. The added layer of strategy it throws in, with very little overhead, is very satisfying.

I wouldn’t recommend throwing anyone into their first or second game of Tiny Towns with Villagers included. There’s enough to get your head around already for those first few plays. The other place you might find a bit of hesitance is where you’ve successfully converted non-gaming parents, siblings, or friends to the original game. It might be a bridge too far if they’ve just about got to grips with the game.

For the rest of us though, if you don’t mind paying the £25, Villagers is a great expansion, adding a welcome layer of depth to an already-polished puzzle. Fans of Tiny Towns will really get a kick out of it, and let’s be honest – who doesn’t like playing with wooden squirrels?

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

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

Tiny Towns (2019)

Designer: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

Tiny Towns: Villagers (2020)

Designers: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Tiny Towns (+ Villagers Expansion) Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of push-your-luck in games. If it’s used well, it creates so much drama and interaction around the game table, and Sheepy TIme uses it really well. One of my favourite games of recent years is The Quacks of Quedlinburg, because it balances risk and reward so nicely. Sheepy Time does something similar, but in a different way, and I think I might even prefer it.

Getting forty winks

Gameplay in Sheepy Time is really simple, and very easy to teach and learn. On your turn you play one of the two cards in your hand, and do one (or sometimes both) of the actions on it. These actions almost always allow you to move a certain number of spaces around the board, or to place your Zzz tokens on one of the Dream Tiles, but more on that in a bit.

Every time you move enough spaces to jump the fence, you claim the five Winks (victory points) then make the decision whether to keep going and try for one more lap, or to call it a night, and cash out with the points you’ve accumulated that round. If you’re wondering what your incentive is to call it a night, there’s a nightmare piece moving around the board too.

There are a number of nightmare cards shuffled into the draw deck, and every time one is drawn you immediately carry out the actions, which typically move them a number of spaces around. If the nightmare jumps the fence before you call it a night, you lose your points for that round. Knowing when to call it quits and when to push your luck, is a tricky choice to make. And that’s where the magic of Sheepy Time comes from.

In it together

As much as I enjoy Quacks, there’s a small issue that detracts from the experience for me. It’s a very insular game: you build your bag, pull your ingredients, make your potion. The only time you have to all look at the same place and come together mentally, is when you do the round-end scoring. Sheepy Time does something really nice in having one central board for all the players, and it turns the experience into a really communal one.

There’s a common enemy in the nightmare, and you’re all playing on the same board, with the same dream tiles, and the forced end of the round is the same for everyone. You can all see the scoreboard and see how close someone is to winning, and that adds some brilliant drama and tension. Knowing that you need one more hop of the fence to win, and that everyone else has already called it a night. Knowing that the nightmare has already scared you (meaning landing in the same space as it once more ends your round), and is only one space away from jumping the fence – that kind of tension is amazing.

Too excited to sleep

We’ve played games of Sheepy Time where it’s come down to the wire, and the sheer drama of every card draw, and seeing whether a nightmare card comes off the top of the deck – it’s palpable. Each draw is greeted with gasps of agony and relief. For the strategists among you, that might sound like a nightmare (oops), but if you enjoy a game that’s about the people around the table and the shared experience, it’s amazing.

To keep the game fresh there are the aforementioned Dream Tiles. After each round these can be added to the spaces around the board. If you land on one and have a Zzz tile on it, you can use its ability, such as moving extra spaces, moving the other sheep, or even getting a few extra points. Clever placement of them can even let you combo bonuses one after the other, which feels great.

There are three different nightmare opponents in the box, who all behave differently, and add some freshness if things ever feel stale.

Final thoughts

When I first saw Sheepy Time, I wasn’t particularly enthused. I’m guilty of thinking it looked like a simple kid-friendly game. I’m so glad I was given the chance to play it, and to give myself a kick up the backside to make sure I don’t fall foul to preconceptions. Zoé Plane’s artwork is simultaneously cute and creepy, and I hope I see her art in future games. It fits the theme so well.

My comparisons to The Quacks of Quedlinburg are valid in my opinion, as they both do push-your-luck so nicely. Sheepy Time just does it in a different way. Instead of the personal investment in your own little bag of ingredients in Quacks, you’ve got this shared board, this arena, where everyone can see what’s going on at all times, and everyone knows what they’ve got to do in order to win.

Just because it didn’t arrive with the same fanfare as a lot of games have this year, doesn’t detract from the game you’ll get for your ~£30. If your family or group enjoy balancing risk and reward, it’s a great choice. Even when you lose, the stories you tell afterwards about that time someone pipped you on the last turn of the game, are the same stories that’ll see you playing the game again and again. Sheepy Time is a sleeper hit, and I don’t really have a baaaaad word to say about it.

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

Sheepy Time (2021)

Designer: Neil Kimball
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Zoé Plane
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Sheepy Time Review appeared first on Punchboard.