If you’ve never played Echidna Shuffle, there are two things you need to know. Firstly, it has the cutest board game pieces in existence. Secondly, it’s incredibly interactive and very mean. Those of you who’ve played it know it’s essentially cutesy divorce fuel. Orbit has a similar feeling in the way that every player can move each of the planets on the board, and that every player needs to visit every planet to win. Simultaneously moving the planets you need towards you, while moving those your opponents need away from them. But you are all doing this at the same time.

Sounds like unmitigated chaos, right? Well, yes, but also no.

Staaaar Trekkin’ across the universe

The Orbit game board looks like one of those scanner screens in the background of an 80s sci-fi movie. Planets on dashed, geometric paths. A grid of triangles covers the entire thing. I’ve been playing with a prototype version of the game, but the first thing that struck me is that it’s not very pretty to look at. The cards are bright and easy to read, but the board is a bit bleh. The really weird thing is that after a few minutes, you don’t even notice, because the board is really functional. The aesthetic brevity (for want of a better word) is a strength instead of a weakness.

On your turn, you play a card from your hand which does two or three things. Firstly, it moves one or more planets along its orbital path. It’s as simple as moving the wooden planet to the next spot on the dashed line. Secondly, it has a number. This is the number of junctions along the network of little triangles you can move your spaceship. Thirdly, you might have an extra icon which lets you do something fun, like reverse the direction of a planet’s travel. Chaotic orbital mechanics ripping entire solar systems to pieces – no biggie.

In the style of so many of Dr Knizia’s games – oh, didn’t I mention, it’s a brand new Reiner Knizia design? – the game mechanisms take a back seat and let the game play itself. Your turn is simple. Play a card, move a couple of pieces around, draw a new card. Choosing which card you play, and what you do with that card is where the joy of the game lives. At first it’s a case of “Well, I really want that red planet, so I’ll move it and then move towards it”, but very quickly the true game pops its head around the door like an intrusive neighbour. So much of Orbit depends on keeping an eye on what the other players are doing, and in turn, trying to second-guess what their next move is likely to be.

Tech? We don’t need no stinking te… oh wait, actually, we do

It’s a space game, so it’s got to have tech, right? It’s the unwritten rule. Orbit has techs to go after, but if the five-course, leather-bound menu of tech options in a game like Eclipse (review here) is your frame of reference, the tech offerings in Orbit are more like a blackboard leaning against a jacket potato van. Cheese, beans, cheese and beans. There’s some point-to-point warping, a pretty cool cannon which lets you zap off as far as you want in one direction. You get a couple of these by visiting certain planets, but in addition to that there are space station tiles strewn about the board. When you visit one it’ll either be a permanent tech for your player board or a warp or cannon for all to use.

Despite tech and powerups being a relatively small part of the whole package, they often become the most decisive part of the game. In the early parts of the game, there’s a feeling of every person for themselves, spreading out and looking for close clusters of planets to ping around, like pinballs trapped in a set of bumpers. It quickly becomes a game of side-eyeing your neighbours and opponents when they get down to one or two planets left to go. I love the way alliances are gossamer thin and last as long as a bubble. One moment Alice and Bob are trying to move planets out of the way of Carol, and then Alice jumps on a planet and only needs one more. Now it’s Team Bob & Carol forever! Or for another turn, at least.

No matter how well you keep your eyes on the space race in front of you, good players will spot an opportunity to use something like a warp to make a crazy play that nobody saw coming. Especially when you factor in being able to gain energy cubes, which you can spend a cube at a time to boost the number of steps you can move. The number of times you get blindsided is equal parts infuriating and amazing. If you start to think you’ve got the measure of the game after repeated plays with the same group you can flip the board over to spice things up. The orbital paths for the planets are different and have branches along the way, and it just messes with the basics enough to keep you thinking.

Modular design

I found after a few plays that even with the other side of the board there weren’t too many variables in the game. I’m a heavy Euro nut. I love it when there are a hundred things to tinker with and see what happens. Luckily, there are some extra modules in the box to keep things interesting.

Yay, good times!

The quickest and easiest is the Prism. The rulebook recommends it with two players, and I have to agree. All it does is add an additional, stationary planet to the board to visit, but it’s extra meat to keep you gnawing at the bone a little longer. The module that’s the most interesting in my opinion is the four-player partnership mode. It’s a bit like playing Bridge, with partners sitting opposite one another. Except the game is nothing like Bridge, but you know, other than that. A couple of bonus tiles like you teleport around the board to get things done.

The copy I was sent also has the Nebula expansion included, which I believe may be an additional extra. As long as it doesn’t bump the price too much, I’d say it’s definitely worth getting. There’s a navigation tokens module which helps speed the game up, and another that adds ‘nebula’ tiles to the board which is pretty cool. The nebulas bump planets along their tracks faster, while simultaneously blocking player ships from crossing those points.

The best extra though, and by far the coolest, is the Hyper Accelerator Engine Module. It just sounds cool. With this module, once you upgrade your energy capacity to the max you just shove all those tokens off your board and replace them with a gigantic engine tile. The engine means that any card you play that would add energy cubes to your board instead lets you rocket across the board in a straight line, and then use that card’s movement. I really like this module, because it helps with what is my biggest issue with the game, and that’s speeding up the endgame.

Final thoughts

Reiner Knizia is a machine. He just doesn’t know when to stop. Now it’s true that in the past not every game has been a hit, but his recent record is pretty flipping good. This year’s Cascadero (which I reviewed here) is one of his designs and it’s one of my favourite games of the year. Orbit is one of those games where at first you’d be inclined to say “Wait, this is a Knizia game? Really?”. It doesn’t feel like it has any of his hallmark mathematic stitching under the surface. But as you play, you start to feel the familiar player-driven interaction, with the push and pull of players trying to step over one another to get to the top, while simultaneously reaching out for a hand up.

Dyed-in-the-wool Euro gamers might not have a great time with Orbit. So much of the game is out of your direct control, and a lot of what you do is reactive. You can adapt a big strategy to try to steer parts of the game in the way you want it to go, but you have to remember that everybody else is trying to do the same thing. Despite this, and as counterintuitive as it might sound, it’s not a game of random chaos. A good player with good, reactive planning, will normally do better than a bad player.

Even if you’re a Knizia fan, there’s a good chance you don’t have one of his games set in space (although MLEM: Space Agency came out this year, so maybe). If you enjoy his games like the recent remake of Quo Vadis – Zoo Vadis – then despite the vastly different settings and apparent mechanisms, I think you’ll have a good time with Orbit. The same goes for those of you who played and burned out on Echidna Shuffle. Don’t get me wrong, I love that game, but by the end of the game, it can get pretty painful. Orbit feels similar to me but with much more space between the echidnas planets.

Bitewing and Reiner Knizia are doing some really clever stuff at the moment, and Orbit is another fine example. I prefer it with three or four players, for sure, so if it sounds like your groups kinda thing, check it out.

Preview copy kindly provided by Bitewing Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Orbit (2024)

Design: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Bitewing Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Orbit Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Mutagen is a rare beast these days. A new Euro game competing in a market of ever-growing gimmickry, trying to make its mark. Don’t get me wrong, Mutagen has its own gimmick, but we’ll come back to that. It’s a game which feels like it could have been made ten or fifteen years ago, and if you take that to mean something negative, you couldn’t be more wrong. I miss the days when worker-placement games kept things simple and relied on solid core game design to tempt the box off your shelf and onto the table. Mutagen gives me that same feeling again, and I like it all the more for it.

Lend a hand

Let’s get the gimmick out of the way first. Each of the non-robot screen-printed wooden meeples (which have serious Explorers of Navoria vibes – read my preview for that one here) have hands which can have little plastic mutations added to them. Note that these come with the deluxe version of the game which is £45 as opposed to the £35, but I think it’s definitely worth the extra tenner, especially considering you get a couple of expansions thrown in too. They’re really cool to look at, and to be honest with you at first I thought there was precious little other than novelty value to them.

I was wrong.

In Mutagen you dispatch your workers to different spaces on the board. The actions at each are really simple, like gathering some elements from the display, claiming tree cards (think contract fulfilment) or bumping your tokens up a collection of tracks. Each action space also has a little table showing other, bonus actions you can take based on which worker you send (thug, spy, or engineer). On top of that, if your worker has a little mutation mitten you can spend your collected shards on performing a bonus action, based on the mutation cards you’ve assigned to it.

So why does it matter if they have a little plastic glove? It’s a great visual cue of not only having a mutation, but what kind. Think of the heavy games you’ve played before now and missed out on bonus actions you could have taken but didn’t, because you forgot that you’d applied some particular effect to the pieces on your player board. It’s easily done, especially when you’re working through a whole action checklist in your head to enact your plans. Mutagen’s mutation attachments serve a real purpose, and I like it. It’s just the sort of thing to help people playing medium-weight games (and Mutagen is firmly in the middle of medium-weight) who want to make the leap to heavier fare.

Elemental, my dear wossisface

Most of Mutagen revolves around the acquisition of elements. Installing them on your airship (player board) gives you ample opportunity to score big, but annoyingly you’ll want to keep some in your storage because you can spend those to bump the different tracks and complete tree cards. Tree cards reward turning in elements with shard fragments. Shard fragments can be spent to gain crew cards for end-of-game points and move your token around another progress track that loops, dishing out points and bonuses.

This is the game at the core of Mutagen. Balancing the elements you install against those you store to spend. Installing elements needs storage tiles to upgrade your airship, and there’s a fun spatial puzzle in here. Elemental tiles can only be installed on slots matching their type or colour, but matching types and colours may not be stored orthogonally adjacent.

‘Orthogonally adjacent’ – there’s a phrase you didn’t use often until you started playing board games, huh?

First come, first served

There’s a really nice idea that designer Alexandros has baked into the worker-placement and action-selection in Mutagen. There’s space enough for everyone to be able to take every action once, which is nice of him. It’s a far cry from the days of games like Caylus. However, if you visit an action space that other people already have workers at, they can take their workers’ mutation action again, but as a re-action this time, which costs a little more than a standard mutation action, but gives tantalising opportunities to take mini-turns out of sequence.

It’s these reaction turns that elevate Mutagen from A. N. Other’s Generic Game to something really intriguing. As the game goes on the reaction turns take on more importance. I really like this change of focus in a worker-placement game. It’s not about where you go because everyone can go everywhere in theory. It’s about when you choose an action, and understanding how your opponents benefit when you do.

It’s this indirect interaction which makes Mutagen most fun when played with three and four players. Two is fine, it’s still a fun game, but the chain reactions of reactions aren’t as interesting in the late game. And while I’m talking about the reactions, I have to once more acknowledge the practicality of the mutation gloves for the meeples. Even if you aren’t paying attention, the other players know who can take a reaction action and will remind them. Because of course you’d remind someone if they weren’t watching, right?

Final thoughts

Mutagen was peaks and troughs for me during my first play. I was so excited at the idea and the incredible art from The Mico (fans of the West Kingdom games know what I’m talking about, have a throwback to the third ever review here for Paladins), but my first few turns were tempered with a feeling of ‘well, this is okay I guess’. You might feel the same, but persevere and the real game quickly reveals itself, and it’s good.

Mutagen is the sort of game I would recommend for players who thrive on medium-weight games that don’t take an age to setup, learn, and play. You can get up and running really quickly and be finished inside an hour and a half. The most trouble you’re likely to run into is with some of the iconography. Not because it’s particularly bad, it’s just unusual at first. The other thing that caught me out more than once was the way that two of the elements look very similar, namely gas and liquid. Bear in mind that this is still a prototype copy of the game I’m playing here, and things will undoubtedly change between me writing this, and you playing the final product.

Kudos to Alexandros for his design, The Mico for lending his considerable artistic talents, and Dranda Games for taking a punt with this unusual, yet familiar game. It’s so refreshing to find a crowdfunded game which is neither tiny like a card game nor prophesising back problems trying to get your future delivery through the front door. Bear in mind that there are changes to come from what you see here to the final product, but even at this early stage there’s a lot of promise here for a game that a lot of people are going to have a good time with.

You can find out more and see how it plays by watching the excellent Gaming Rules! playthrough right here, and back Mutagen now over on its Kickstarter campaign page.

Preview copy kindly provided by Dranda Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Mutagen (2025)

Design: Alexandros Kapidakis
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: The Mico
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins.

The post Mutagen Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Sakana Stack is set in the famous Tsukiji fish market in Japan, hence the name Sakana, which translates as fish. The idea of the game is that each player is trying to sell their catch to prospective customers, but in order to attract them to your fish instead of your competitors’, you need to put out the best stack of seafood. How does this translate to a card game? Well, each card has a value and a suit. The suits are colours and represent different types of fish; pufferfish, eel, scallops etc.

On your turn you need to place a stack of cards down. Each of the cards has to have the same value. If there’s another stack on the table though, you need to obey a couple of rules. Firstly, you need to follow suit or number. Secondly, you need to equal or beat the value of the other stack. That’s the core of the game, and while there are a few other things to consider (like being able to use the Catch of the Day card on top of the draw pile), understanding those concepts is all you need to get started.

Play the player

It only takes a round or so of Sakana Stack to get it. Once you understand how it works mechanically, you can start to work on your tactics, and there’s a lot of scope for tactical play. Right from your first turn, you have a lot of choices to make. In a game where you want to get rid of all of your cards as quickly as you can, it can be tempting to slap down all four of those 7s you’ve got in your hand. However, you might want to do just enough to beat the current stack and play just a couple of them, ensuring you have some higher-value cards left to play later.

Slapping down a stack with a value of 28 though, that’s powerful. Remember, the other players need to follow suit or value and at least equal the stack value. If you can’t do that you have to take that Catch of the Day card from the top of the draw deck into your hand, and the owner of the stack(s) on the table takes the top card of that stack and flip it face-down as a scoring card. Points for each round are based on how many cards you manage to score.

Despite my mini-grumble at the top about a lack of theme, you can kinda see it here. You can picture people continuously trying to one-up each other’s stacks of fish, and when one finally concedes (i.e. you can’t follow with a high enough value), the winning player is selling part of their catch, scoring points in the process. I mean, a card game like this is never going to win awards for the strongest theme implementation, but it still does it well. Let’s be honest though, nobody is buying a small card game for the theme. They live and die on how much fun they are and how much replayability they pack in.

Sakana Stack manages to tick both those boxes.

Final thoughts

I first came across Sakana Stack at this year’s UKGE, where I fell in love with the artwork. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the folks behind the desk, so I was delighted when Mike from Huff No More got in touch to see if I wanted to cover the game. I only had two niggles when I started playing the game. Firstly, I found the rules explanation a little hard to understand from the sheet included in the box. Bear in mind that this is still a preview copy of the game, and it’s likely that things will change between now and the final release of the game. Once you understand it though, it’s a breeze.

The second niggle is more of a personal thing, and that’s that I like it when a small game caters for two players too. When Sakana Stack landed on my doormat it was advertised as 3-5 players, which isn’t the end of the world, but a niggle nonetheless. But this is where playing with previews of games sometimes throws unexpected things your way, and this time it was Mike sending me a message to let me know the two-player rules have been added to the game. Nice! They work really well too, but I still prefer the game with four or five people. I like the fact that it takes longer for your turn to come around, and harder to score your own stack as points, which happens if it comes back to you and you have a stack in front of you.

It looks like the campaign (which you can keep track of here) is going to launch at about £14 for the game, which is a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had more play out of this than I have some games that cost twice as much. Sakana Stack is quick, easy, gorgeous to look at, and a lot of fun. It’ll join the likes of Scout and Tokkuri Taking (review here) in my convention bag for some time to come. Great stuff.

Preview copy kindly provided by Huff No More. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Sakana Stack (2025)

Design: Mike Petchey
Publisher: Huff No More
Art: Joss Petchey
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Sakana Stack Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

By using a combination of dice, cards, and resources in a way I’ve not encountered before, Ultimate Voyage feels fresh. It feels different and unfamiliar. The layers of strategy mixed with the unknown all go toward making a game that almost certainly has no counterpart in your collection, so if you’re looking for something different to bolster your shelves, this may well be it.

There’s a lot going on in the game, but I’ll do my best to summarise. Ultimate Voyage is set around the final voyage of Zheng He. He is regarded as the greatest admiral in Chinese history. The game sees you taking the role of one of a number of different characters joining He in his travels. You’ll explore, trade, build, engage in combat, and even diplomatic relations with nations from East Asia to Africa and the Middle East.

Action stations

The core of Ultimate Voyage revolves around the action card system. In a nod to games like Ark Nova, each of the cards above your player board is used for a different action. Sailing, Combat, Building, Trade etc. I mentioned Ark Nova because the position of each card dictates its power. The card on the left has a strength of one, the card on the right has five power. That’s where the similarities end though. Cards can gain power-ups adding +1 or +2 to their actions, and each round sees three deity dice rolled which players share. The dice’s values are applied to three dials on your player board, and by discarding one you can add its value to an action’s strength.

When you use a card you ‘tap’ it by turning it 90 degrees. In an unusual twist though, you can still use that card again in the same round, but a tapped card has a base strength of zero. Enough extras from spent resources and dials means that you can still get some value from it. I really like this idea. You can truly min-max and go for that double combat round to really put the cat among the pigeons.

It’s when the round ends that things take another twist. If you’re used to Ark Nova you know that when a card is used it slides to the left, bumping the others to the right. Ultimate Voyage messes with the status quo a bit. When the round ends and your unspent cards slide to the right, the cards you used slide to the left, but you choose their relative order. So if that Trade card you really wanted to use would be in the first slot by default, you can choose to move it up to the third instead. It’s a really interesting twist which means no more dead turns while you wait for the actions you want to use to increase in power.

The spirit of adventure

This is a game of exploration and adventure. Lots of games offer the feeling of exploration in differing ways. Flipping tiles to see what’s on the other side for example, like in Revive (review here). Exploration in Ultimate Voyage is different and truly random. When you first sail you ship into an unexplored region you roll one of the deity dice to determine its standing. You could get really lucky and find that you immediately have great relations with you – happy days! Or you might roll badly and find that the port is actively hostile. In theory, you could uncover hostile port after hostile port, meaning your next turns are built around trying to do something about them.

Some people won’t like this. They like to know there’s some determinism in proceedings. They like to know “If this port is hostile, it means none of the others will be, so they’re safe to explore”. Personally, I really like this system. It means the map feels different every time you play. Sometimes you’ll be charging through the seas with reckless abandon, other times it’s more like tip-toeing around in a stealth pedalo.

There are lots things you can choose to do while you’re at sea, too, which means the game can get pretty asymmetric, pretty quickly. Although you’re all navigating the same waters and still at the whim of the meteorological gods (each round has favourable winds in one direction, and you may encounter a storm), you might be doing very different things, especially if you choose to lean into your character’s speciality. The Merchant, for instance, begins the game with a boosted trade action. Getting into port and seeing what’s on offer to fill your hold with might be your focus, while the Commander with his +2 combat action is out looking for trouble.

Spoiled for choice

Ultimate Voyage feels more like a 4X game than your standard pick-up-and-deliver. There’s so much going on that you can approach each game differently to see how things work out for you. There’s a big porcelain tower at the starting area of Nanjing, but you don’t have to contribute towards building it at all if you don’t want to. You each have some little wooden buildings to deploy, but as well as building at the ports you visit, you can build on your player boards too to increase your income of troops and porcelain – the game’s two resource types.

You might excel at diplomacy and create tributaries in some of the ports you visit, but like a high-maintenance spouse, they need attention. If you don’t keep a ship in port at the end of a round your reputation with the city deteriorates. No problem, just build more ships. But now you’re building ships when you wanted to be trading and engaging in naval warfare. The game has a sandbox feel to it, letting you play in the seas to figure out your own path to victory. That might not be for everyone, some people like more structure to their games. It’s better to know that ahead of time, which is why I’m telling you now.

You can even create semi-alliances with the other players, offering support for their combat encounters in return for… well, I’ll leave the details up to you. The point is, that it’s very unusual for this style of game of throw-in semi-coop parts to what’s unfolding on the board, and I respect the heck out of the designer for trying something different.

The biggest downside to all this variability and different ways to approach the game is that it’s pretty tough to learn. Working out the strength of an action and how that can be applied to the various actions adds a mental overhead. I recommend approaching your first play as an exercise in pulling levers and pushing buttons and seeing what happens, because it won’t be immediately apparent how to build a strategy.

Final thoughts

Ultimate Voyage is a unique game. A contract-fulfilment, area control, pick-up hybrid which would feel like more like a 4X game if there was PvP combat. The card system is a really nice tweak to something that feels immediately familiar if you’re used to Ark Nova, but with much more scope to do unusual things.

It plays from one to four players, but for me this is a game which thrives with more people. It works with two, and it’s still enjoyable, but it’s better with three and four. I think that comes down to the way the map gets limited with two players. It has you block out half the map so that you can’t visit lots of places. I appreciate that it keeps the action in a smaller, more concentrated area, but it also means you never venture as far west as Africa and the Middle East, and you don’t quite get that same feeling of heading out on a grand voyage.

All of that said, what Leonard and his team have created as a debut game is very impressive. A big vision, and a really unusual setting and theme which feels exotic and fresh to me. I’ve played so many games set in and around European history that the introduction to Zheng He and his stories is very welcome. Take all I’ve said here with a small pinch of salt because it is still in a prototype form, and even in the short time I had the game here there were several amendments and changes made.

If the setting and the idea of a game that does something differently to most other games you’ve played appeals to you, keep an eye out for Ultimate Voyage when it on the preorder site.

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

Ultimate Voyage (2025)

Designer: Leonard To
Publisher: Little Monks
Art: Faangoi
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Ultimate Voyage Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

“Instead of the cross, the Albatross around my neck was hung”

Thalassophopia – a fear of deep waters. Whether it’s down to a genetic disposition to not be dragged into the inky-black fathoms beneath, or because we saw Jaws when we were kids and now check the bath for sharks, plenty of us have an innate ‘nope’ reaction to deep water. Writers have always written about the real or imagined horrors in the water, from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Jules Vernes’ 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (you really should check out Nemo’s War), through to the likes of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories like the one I mentioned above, Dagon.

We can’t see what’s down there, so it’s easy to build a sense of unease and excitement about throwing a hook and line over the side of a boat and seeing what bites. Deep Regrets borrows this concept and throws a bucket of slimy chum into its churning waters. The idea is relatively simple. In each round of the game you either go out fishing on your little boat or stay at port to sell your catches and buy upgrades for your fishing business.

To perform actions you need to roll the wonderfully cute wooden D4 buoy dice and choose how to spend them. Moving into deeper water costs dice. Once you choose a shoal on the main board you flip the top card to see what “fish” is on offer and then try to land it by spending dice of its value. The rods and reels you can buy at port make your job easier with all sorts of cunning effects. The Rod of the Infinite for example lets you peek at the top three fish cards in a shoal deck and put them back in any order before you reveal one.

So far, so laissez-faire. Catch nice little fish and sell them at the market. It’s not just fish down there though, there are other things. Horrible things. Unspeakable things. Catching them will surely only lead to madness and compound your life’s regrets, and nobody wants that.

Or do they?

“I think I went mad then”

The things you catch in Deep Regrets fall into one of two categories: fair or foul. When you land a foul creature you draw regret cards, cards which represent the accumulated parts of a life lived badly. Regrets have different levels, ranging from “I lost my favourite sock”, right up to “Partook of human flesh”. The more regrets you collect, the greater your slip into madness. Don’t worry though, it’s not all bad.

The more regret cards you collect, the more your foul catches are worth when you return to port to do business. On the flip side of the coin, however, the value of your fair catches decreases. You see, you can make plenty of money by just landing and selling the nice, non-mutant fish that people actually want, where your lack of madness results in higher prices for fair catches. So why would you ever want to gain regrets and increase your madness?

This is one of my favourite parts of the game. In a nod to something more akin to an off-beat RPG, Judson nudges us towards madness. The higher your madness level, the more dice you can have at your disposal, which means deeper fishing and bigger fishes. It means more money, and more upgrades. It means you can mount those really valuable catches in your prized mounting slots above your board to multiply their worth at the end of the game. in fact if you can get your cube to the bottom of the madness track you even get a discount on upgrades. I guess the shopkeepers will do anything to get you out of their place of business as fast as they can, you weirdo.

Deep Regrets is a game of managing your madness rather than avoiding it. The only penalty you’re looking at for going completely hatstand is losing a mounted fish if you have the most regret at the end of the game.

Light in the darkness

This game is a lot of fun, let’s just get that out there right now. What it does brilliantly is to build the game around a lightweight rules framework. Nothing in Deep Regrets is complicated. Your actions are simple. It’s easy to teach. You’ll have new players up and running in a few minutes, and that’s perfect for the sort of person that’s likely to pick up a copy. Thanks to Judson’s amazing illustrations (check out the reviews I did for his previous game, Hideous Abomination), this is a game which is going to appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. Everything about the game screams approachable, which is precisely what it needs.

The rulebook is excellent. Clearly laid out with good examples and plenty of lore and flavour text. It’s not even called a rulebook, it’s “The Angler’s Guide to Fishing”, which I love. Deep Regrets has clearly been through a ton of playtesting and iteration, and it shows. At one point with my preview copy I wanted clarification over the wording on a card. I thought it was a bit ambiguous so me being me, I shot Judson an email asking for clarification. I had to retract the email a couple of minutes later when I turned to the back of the book and found the appendix detailing exactly what I’d asked.

Stuff like this matters. It’s not even the final product yet, and it’s already a long way ahead of most prototypes I’m given, and better than plenty of final, retail productions. If the final version follows suit you’re going to be getting a primo product for your pounds.

The solo and co-op mode is also great. You’re still trying to catch whatever’s out there, but this time you have a chart and your upgrades persist through multiple playthroughs. Trying to catch everything and to complete the list is something which appeals to the lockdown Animal Crossing perfectionist in me.

Final thoughts

Deep Regrets is a blast. I was one of those bombarded with Facebook advertising for it a little while back, and it worked. I love the games I mentioned in my opening salvo, especially Dredge, and this game really hooks into (forgive me) that same feeling. The same ‘cosy port town meets unimaginable horrors from the deep’ aesthetic that it delivers in spades.

I’ve lauded the artwork before, but it’s worth distinguishing that from the graphic design. The backs of the shoal cards for example, at first glance all look the same, but you’ll soon notice that the shadows in the water on each are different sizes, alluding to the size – and therefore the difficulty in catching – whatever’s on the other side. Little touches like this and the iconography throughout are just great.

Don’t expect a game with deep, complex layers of nuance. It’s a game of flip a card, catch the fish, decide what to do with it, but it excels at it. This is a game you could happily teach to your non-gamer friends and they’d have a great time with it. If your group’s idea of oceanic strategy perfection is Dominant Species: Marine, you might be left wanting with Deep Regrets. But it’s not a game aimed at hardcore Euro nerds like myself. It’s a game aimed at everyone, which hey, includes me.

Yes, there’s luck involved. You roll dice to do everything. You flip cards with no way of knowing what’s on the other side. But that’s the soul of the game. There are ways to mitigate the luck through upgrades and things you dredge up from the ocean floor, and that’s where the strategy comes in. It’s not deterministic, but it’s a lot of fun, and you’ll be done in an hour and a half, leaving behind some belly laughs and some interesting life stories if you choose to craft a narrative from your regret cards.

I’m hopelessly biased in this one I’m sure. I love the setting. I love the artwork. I love Judson’s work ethic and the amount of love poured into this game, and the fun I’ve gotten from it. Make of that what you will, but I’ve no hesitation in recommending Deep Regrets when it launches on Kickstarter on July 1st.

Preview copy kindly provided by Tettix Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. I also acknowledge that I’ve made jokes of ‘madness’ in this piece. As a supporter of mental health wellbeing, and someone who openly suffers with mental health problems, I hope this is taken in the manner in which it’s meant.

Deep Regrets (2024)

Design: Judson Cowan
Publisher: Tettix Games
Art: Judson Cowan
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Deep Regrets Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

My favourite pieces of classical music tend to either start or end strongly. With that in mind, this preview of Paverson Games latest title – Luthier – will start like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, starting with a headline. Luthier is a great game. A pipe organ cuts the silence. The blind bidding clack-clack-clack of the worker disc placement adds a rich, bright counterpoint to the by-the-books Euro format of collecting resources to fulfil goals. A toccata to its fugue, if you will. The result is a clean, competitive, engaging game. Heavier than medium-weight, without being too difficult to teach or pick up, but with a richness that rewards repeated play. Again, much like Bach’s piece. We all know how it starts, and the more you listen to it, the more you appreciate what comes after that familiar early exposition.

Booze and music – a festival?

I previewed Dave Beck’s previous game, Distilled, a long while ago. I really like that game, so I was excited to see an earlier prototype of Luthier back at the UK Games Expo in 2023 (show report here). It was little more than black squares on white paper at that time, but the mechanisms sounded really clever, and I loved the unusual theme. The promise of Vincent Dutrait’s artwork gave me confidence, and that confidence was rewarded when I saw the near-final prototype at this year’s UK Games Expo. Luthier is beautiful. Rich colours, gorgeous illustrations, and some pretty fantastic iconography.

The game places you in the role of a famous musical instrument-making family from the past. Your goal is to gather the materials you need, before crafting the finest musical instruments you can, fit for performances at the orchestra in the middle of the board. At the same time, art is imitating life through the patrons in the game. These are rich, powerful people who, if you can keep satisfied, will reward you with gifts. If you manage to fulfil all of their demands, their card ends up tucked behind your player board with ongoing bonuses for the rest of the game.

You might think you can just choose to ignore the patrons and concentrate on something else to build points, and while you technically can, you probably don’t want to. If you let a patron’s cube move all the way to the right as the rounds progress, they get tired of you and leave your family’s business, clobbering you with a loss of VPs (prestige points in Luthier’s parlance) in the process. This happened in reality. Patrons rewarded the arts for performances and productions, they invested in the families and their crafts.

In Luthier you have a game where your main goals and main source of points come from the various places these artisans touched with their craft. Patrons have a place on the board (the salon) where you can compete to add them to your family’s board. Instrument designs come from another contestable market. Performances are fought over in the same fashion, likewise repairs. All go towards your score, and all are involved in one of the main aims of the game, to claim First Chair for each instrument in the orchestra pit.

Harmony

Luthier is a strange one in some ways. As with many other Euro games, the theme strikes me as one that could have been replaced with something different relatively easily. We could be furniture makers making beautiful pieces and selling them. We could be painters creating masterpieces and vying for space in galleries. We could even be toymakers trying to be front-and-centre in Hamley’s window in London.

That said, however, the theme is integrated so well in Luthier that I don’t want a different one. I’ll admit I found a slight disconnect with the way the instruments just end up in First Chair, as do performance tokens. The performers themselves are never referenced or attributed, which felt odd at first, but then I realised I need to take a step back and understand that the entire game is viewed through the luthier’s lens. Their role starts and ends with the creation and repair of the instruments in their workshops. The instruments are used in the performances, but who uses them isn’t the focus of the game. Our main focus is to rough-out instruments before finishing them and creating things of beauty.

It all works so well together. The resources are limited to just three different types: animal products, wood, and metals. Removing the mental overhead needed to think about lots of different types of resources and manage any potential upgrade paths for them is an overlooked piece of game design in my opinion. At any moment in the game you can look at your player board, count the cubes in three colours, and know exactly what you can and cannot afford to do. This gives you the laser focus you need to concentrate on your strategy and your path to victory.

All of this is pulled together with the worker disc placement, which is my favourite part of the game. In turn order, each player places a disc at a time at the various spots on the board. Some of them are on your player boards, whereas the rest are shared spaces on the main board. All players can go to each space as many times as they like, but the interesting part is that each worker is a disc with a value printed on it, and they’re placed face-down in a stack. Each stack is resolved to determine turn order, with the highest value getting first pick of the cards at each respective market. In the event of a tie, which is common as all players start with a 1, 3, and 5 value chip each, it’s first-come, first-served.

It’s great. It adds drama three or four times to every round of the game in a way which is usually reserved for lighter, party-style games.

Final thoughts

If you haven’t guessed by now, I like Luthier a lot. It’s a looker for sure, and even with the early prototype, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was an Eagle-Gryphon game. It all feels premium. Vincent and Guillaume’s artwork is beautiful on the cards and the boards, and there’s nothing that feels out of place or confusing. It’s a game of threes, which pulls it all together nicely too. Three different resources, three types of instruments, and three types of performance. Maybe the future holds an expansion which adds to these, I don’t know, but as the game comes it feels like does enough without muddying the waters.

The hidden bidding worker placement doesn’t feel that important in your first game, which makes it easy to overlook its importance and its impact on the game. Once you make the connections though, it all hits you. The points from the public goals, each of which has different levels of completion (a bit like Ark Nova, a review of which you can read here), are dependent on completing certain types of patrons, or having instruments in different areas of the pit, or different numbers of rare instruments crafted, etc. When the cards you need to complete these goals appear in the market, the competition can be furious. Do you make a big statement and place your 5-chip in the Salon straight away to claim that patron? Or do you just slip your 1-chip there creating a false sense of competition, hoping the other players wage war for those cards while you quietly craft two instruments instead? How well do you think you can read the poker faces of your friends and family?

There’s more that I don’t have the time or space to tell you about in detail, for the sake of not turning this into a wall of text. The three tracks to move along for asymmetric boosts. The starting abilities and resources of each family being different. The dance you play in trying to keep your patrons satisfied while still competing on the main board, not only to keep them, but to keep their gifts coming. The only negative I really found during my time with the game was the ‘standard’ two-player game. It blocks some spots in the pit off and reduces the number of cards in the market to keep things competitive, but the drama and tension of the worker bidding doesn’t feel as juicy. The reason I put standard in quotes though is because you can add in the solo bot as a third player, which I recommend doing. There’s more to do in order to run the bot, but the competition is better. I much prefer playing at three and four players though. I love the metagame that takes place above the table between you and your friends.

There are still tweaks to come to the game between now and its release, but even in the state it’s in now, Luthier is a brilliant game. Music to my ears, like clapping along to the Radetzky March at the end of the New Year’s Day content from Vienna. Bravo!

Luthier launches on Kickstarter on July 16th 2024. You can sign up for updates or to back it here – Luthier Kickstarter page.

Luthier (2025)

Design: Dave Beck, Abe Burson
Publisher: Paverson Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Luthier Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Yes, it’s as adorable as it sounds, and it’s a lot of fun.

Moley moley moley

The concept is simple. Each player starts with a sheet of paper with a garden on it divided into a grid. All over that garden are stones, flowers, coins, mounds of dirt, and other bits and pieces. Your mole has a starting point at the middle of the garden and has to dig tunnels around underground to collect the things littered around it. The tunnels you dig all have a shape, and that shape is dictated by the card drawn from the top of the pile. Each shape has a name based on the shape it describes, and they’re well-observed and funny.

As with many games with Tetronimo-type shapes, you can flip and rotate the shape as you see fit, as long as it retains the same overall shape. The catch comes with how you place the next shape, and it’s probably the hardest concept to get across to new players. Each new shape can only share one edge with the existing tunnels. Sounds simple, right? In reality, it’s a little more complicated. It means your new square shape can’t place both blocks along a straight tunnel, because that’s two edges/faces. The same goes with trying to add a tunnel to a corner.

Take that First Aid shape in the image above. Tunnels can only ever join on the ends of the arms of the cross, which makes it a more difficult shape to fit than you might expect. It’s not really a ‘tetris’ game in the same way as something like Patchwork, Silver & Gold, or even A Feast For Odin is because for most of the game, you’ve got to leave spaces, rather than trying to fill them all. Once you understand that, it’s fine, there’s just a little learning curve for younger (and older) players.

Hip hip hooray, for Superworm!

Ot not, as it goes, as the worms in Molehill Meadows are all there to be eaten. Their sacrifice will not have been in vain, however, because eating worms allows you to charge up your various worm powers. Every worm eaten lets you tick off a box next to one of the powers, and once a power is full you can expend them for bonus effects. Things like drawing the next shape twice, allowing you to touch more than one face with the next tunnel, or even drawing your own, additional tunnels in a shape you choose.

Those of you looking for something a bit more challenging in your games will enjoy these powers, especially when it comes to combining them. Let’s take making connections as an example. If you can connect the pairs of flowers, ants, or streams across the map there’s a potential for big bonus points. It’s not always easy to do, but it becomes easier if you employ some cunning mole strategy. Invest your worms in the ‘draw the next tunnel twice’ and ‘dig an additional 6 square tunnel’ powers, and then use them both at once and bam! All of a sudden you’ve made a 12 square passage right across the map.

The strategy doesn’t end there. At the start of each game, a pair of goal cards are chosen at random which gives you something to aim for. Those yellow flowers on the sheet aren’t worth anything usually, but get a goal card which rewards them and all of a sudden you’re digging tunnels north-west to try to get them all. It’s another little thing which adds some longevity to the game and stops it from getting stale too quickly.

Final thoughts

Molehill Meadows is super cute and a lot of fun. If you like flip-and-write games, you’ll love it. It’s as simple as that. I own a ton of this style of game, so I knew I was likely to enjoy it, and I wasn’t wrong. If you’ve ever played and enjoyed Silver & Gold, Aquamarine, Pioneer Rails, Demeter, Patchwork Doodle, Cartographers, or The Guild of Merchant Explorers, you’re going to enjoy it. Another very cool fact is that the game is being produced in an eco-factory in Europe with no plastic being used. The cellophane equivalent used on the box and cards is bio-degradable. That’s a huge deal and a really good example how how it can be done if publishers are willing to spend the money.

Other than the ‘tunnels may only touch one face’ rule, the only thing I found which caused any kind of problem was with some of the more complicated shapes. Befuddled and Cloud in particular. They’re made of more than four squares, so the geometric awareness needed to rotate and/or mirror the shapes can be confusing for children (and some adults) to get their head around. This is a friendly, fun game though, so there’s no reason not to help one another out.

I’m delighted to see another new game from Unfringed, and also to see something in a completely different style to Zuuli. It’s just the kind of thing we need more of, and we’re very lucky to be getting it from not only Chris & co, but also the folks at Dranda Games, Postmark Games, and other indie studios. Long may it continue. At around £20 it’s very easy for me to recommend Molehill Meadows. Go back yourself a copy now on Gamefound.

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

Molehill Meadows (2024)

Design: Chris Priscott
Publisher: Unfringed
Art: Clemency Bunn
Players: 1-99
Playing time: 20 mins

The post Molehill Meadows Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

When it comes to duelling card games, we’re spoiled for choice. From the 27,000+ card behemoth of Magic: The Gathering to small, all-in-one games like Mindbug. There are a ton of different ways to fight the person opposite you, and it’s not going away anytime soon, as the Disney Lorcana juggernaut proves. Chroma Arcana joins the throng, aiming to separate you from the cash in your wallet. If you’re a designer bringing a new duelling card game to the market, there’s a very important question that I, as Joe Public, have for you.

“Why should I choose your game?”

To answer that question you need to give me some clear, concise reasons that make your game stand out from the crowd. So, why should I buy Chroma Arcana?

Why not both?

The biggest difference between the TCGs (Trading Card Games) like Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh and the all-in-ones like Mindbug is the variety of types, styles, or schools involved. Mindbug lets you slap cards pretty much straight into the battle, while those like Pokemon TCG see you adding cards to a staging area, trying to charge cards up, and balancing the cards in your deck which can fight for you against those that help charge their abilities.

Chroma Arcana brings that same feel of having different schools of magic, or Pokemon types. Each card belongs to a different colour deck. They might not be named as such, but the same feel persists. It might be the ‘red’ deck instead of ‘fire’, but it’s the same idea. Firey things live in the red deck, lifegiving stuff is in the green deck – you get the idea. The concept is great because it lets you build your own custom decks to fight with, but with each of you building from the same decks. There’s no advantage to be gained by buying a ton of booster packs and getting cards that the other person might not have.

At the same time, with the way the different colours’ abilities mesh, it feels like you’ve got an almost open-ended pallette of paints to mix to come up with something special. While I’m on the paint metaphor, and thinking about a mixture of colours, it’s worth noting that approximately 30% of the characters in the game are non-white, and the same proportion are LGBT+. Kudos for being aware enough to even think about doing this, let alone weaving it into the game. Representation matters.

It’s a bit like giving a kid a colouring book but just a few basic coloured pencils to work with. Just because you have some limitations imposed on you doesn’t mean you can’t still create something beautiful, and something more interesting than just having a single grey pencil. That’s the feeling I get from Chroma Arcana.

The small print

Chroma Arcana falls foul of my biggest pet peeve in any of these card duelling games, and that’s the printing on the cards. I’m not a moron, I get it. If you want to put words on cards, but leave room for important symbols and some very pretty artwork (the art in this game is gorgeous), the text has to be small. I just find it frustrating when I can’t read or discern everything I need to know about a card when it’s on the table. My eyesight’s pretty good, but I still have to pick them up to read it.

Those of you familiar with card games are probably rolling your eyes at this point, and I can understand that. It’s not like it’s as small as Pokemon TCG text! Once you’re past those first few learning games, the text becomes mostly irrelevant. As long as you can see the cost to activate something and the icons that tell you whether it’s a ward, a minion, etc., then you’ve got all the information you need. Those learning games are crucial though, as that’s the only time you’ve got to grab someone by the dopamine receptors and go “Look at the thing I made. Play it. It’s fun!”.

The iconography throughout is great, and I like the way the keywords for a card are in a black boxout in the middle of it. It does a great job of drawing your eyes where they need to be. Once you’ve played a few times, you’ll be able to rattle through your games with relative ease, and they move fast, except for when your opponent has a potion card to interrupt your turn. Grrr! Annoying, but a cool feature in these games. Nothing better than pushing a stick into the wheels of your rival’s bike and watching his plans flip over the handlebar.

Final thoughts

I was a little wary of Chroma Arcana before it arrived. I’ve played so many duelling card games now, that I already know what to expect for at least part of how the game will play out. Using colours for the decks is cool, if not unique. Achroma (review here) does something similar. Fun fact: when I was approached to cover this game, I thought it was Achroma at first. Don’t make the same mistake. They’re very different games, and I prefer Chroma Arcana.

Every game I’ve played of Chroma Arcana has felt tight and competitive. Even when I’ve had a go at constructing my own deck – something I’m terrible at – I found that I was able to make something that worked together without too much trouble, which I really appreciated.

The promo copy I was sent was restricted to a smaller number of colours and characters (Egos, in the game’s parlance) than you’ll get in the finished product, and there were a few rough edges that I’m sure will be planed smooth by the time it ends up in your sweaty little mitts. Some of the cards had different names from what was listed in the rulebook, which made deck construction tricky, and the instructions for building your decks for the first game don’t tell you how many cards you should end up with. You’re told to add cards to the deck, but not how many of each. The only reference to how many cards go in a deck (it’s 26, if you’re wondering) is in a boxout on page 15, five pages after it tells you what cards to use. Like I say though, bear in mind this is still a preview of a prototype, and these are the kinds of things that are subject to change.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you my favourite thing about the game! Every time you shuffle your discard pile to recycle it into your draw pile, you lose 1 HP. Sounds small, but I love it. It keeps the pace up, and it means discarding a handful of cards to charge spells comes at a long-term cost. The snappy pace, the beautiful cards, and the (apparent) balance in the cards meant that I really enjoyed my time with Chroma Arcana. It’s clearly a labour of love for the designer, Mo, and it really shows. If duelling card games are your bag, keep your eyes on the Kickstarter project page for when this launches on 27th February 2024.

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

Chroma Arcana (2024)

Design: Mo Shawwa
Publisher Roc Nest Games
Art: Ver Fadul, Nadine Jakubowski, Sandra Singh
Players: 2 (1-6 with expansion)
Playing time: 20-60 mins

The post Chroma Arcana Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Rock, paper, charging horse

Take the Throne has a couple of core concepts that the game is built on.

Firstly, each House (player) in the game has an identical hand of five cards. If you’ve read my reviews in the past, you’ll know that I don’t like to deep-dive too much into exactly how a game is played, but you’ll just have to indulge me here, because this bit is important, and underpins the whole game. As a house player, three of the five cards in your hand work in a rock, paper, scissors style.

Anyone playing an Attack card is in contention for the throne, and the current throne holder chooses which will take it from them. Unless, that is, someone plays their Infiltrate card, which takes precedence over an Attack card. The other option is to play a Charge card, which beats Attack and Infiltrate, but only if there’s only a single Charge card played. If more than one player charges, they cancel each other out. The other cards – Feint and Sabotage – just allow you to swap your played card for another at the cost of 1 VP, and force someone else to change their played card, respectively.

A quiet ten minutes on the throne

The second concept is the idea that one player always has the throne. Being in control of the throne is how you’ll net the 8 VPs you need to win the game. When you hold the throne, you get a unique hand of cards to play with: the Crown deck. The Crown cards are completely different to those in the House decks and offer ways to either carve out more VPs or mess about with the other players’ cards.

The Defend card, for instance, means that all Attack cards played get discarded. Pretty cool on its own, but when you realise that Infiltrate cards depend on Attack cards being in play, it’s a double whammy. you’ll only lose the throne now if one player plays a Charge. Alternatively, you might choose to Abdicate and gain another VP, which sounds crazy, but if the House players cancel one another out and nobody claims the throne, you keep it.

The way the asymmetry works is such a nice twist on a game like Love Letter, for example, which is a game I love. Having asymmetry for only one player is something that’s not done that often. The Beast is a game which is a good example of this. To have one player trying to stay afloat while the others clamber over one another, desperate to pop their water wings, is something which gives this game a different feel to others you might already own.

Final thoughts

I had a sneaky feeling I’d like Take the Throne before I’d even played it. The description ticked so many boxes for me. I was right, too. I do like Take the Throne. It’s a great game that will almost certainly be stuffed into my bag for conventions and to start or end game nights with my group. It only takes one game to learn what each of the cards does, and how they interact with one another.

My only real problem is with player count. Take the Throne plays from three to five players, but I don’t enjoy it as much with three. Having only two House players means that the fun of some of the card play is lost. The Attack card is always beaten by Infiltrate and Charge, and Infiltrate is dependent on Attack being played, so why play Attack? I mean, there’s a bit more meta to it than that, but that’s the sort of thing that people say in their first few three-player games. I much prefer the game with four or five players, where it really shines. Multiple Charge cards that cancel one another are more likely, and watching the Throne player agonise over which Attack player gets the crown is great fun.

Take the Throne is one of those games like Coup, Love Letter, The Resistance, Citadels, etc. A small box, a small deck of cards, with the game itself played above the table, driven by the interactions between the players. These games live and die on their “Oh I can’t believe you did that!” moments, and Take the Throne delivers them by the bucketload. You’ll find your own meta develops in your group, and it changes depending on who you play with, and I love that. A cracking little game from another independent UK designer and publisher, and one I’m very happy to recommend.

Take the Throne launches on Gamefound right here in the summer and at a likely price of less than 20 quid, it’s a no-brainer if you ask me.

Take The Throne (2024)

Design: Jon Lanon
Publisher: Deathtrap Games
Art: Joszef Kovacs
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 5-15 mins

The post Take The Throne Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Of elephants in rooms

If you’ve seen the artwork for this game and have been in the hobby for more than five minutes, you’ve probably had a “Hang on…” moment. Yes, the artwork looks like Kyle Ferrin’s work in games like Root (review here) and Oath (review here). No, it’s not AI-generated, and no, it’s not a blatant copy. I can see why people are going to get their underwear in a knot about it, but it’s a waste of time. It’s another game with colourful, pastel, critters and creatures. As much as I love Kyle’s artwork, he doesn’t have a copyright on any particular style. Let’s move past that and onto the things that really matter, like whether the game is actually good or not.

The short version is yes. It’s a good game.

At its heart, Explorers of Navoria is a tableau-building game. Players take turns placing wooden agent discs on one of five decks of cards of matching colours and add a corresponding card from the market to their tableau. Some cards have instant effects, like awarding the game’s resources or victory points, and some cards work cumulatively, awarding points at the end of each round, or the end of the game.

More than once I was reminded of playing Libertalia (review here), which is weird because the games play very differently. Agent discs are either drawn from a bag, like the tiles in Libertalia I guess, or played from the town center on the board. Once all the discs are played and cards claimed, players take the discs from the decks and return them to spaces in the town to claim rewards. This part is done in reverse player order, which is probably where the rest of the Libertalia feelings come from.

As a mechanism, the whole tableau-building thing is really well done. Everything is very easy to read at a glance, so it’s easy to get an idea of which cards each player might want. When you draw discs from the bag, you draw two, choose one, and place the other on the main board, which can be agonising. Giving up a disc that you know someone else wants is never fun, but it adds to the dynamic of the game.

Making tracks

Now it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the game has the word ‘Explorers’ in the title, but I haven’t mentioned anything very explore-y at all. The narrative of the game is that three new continents have emerged from the seas of Navoria, and it’s you folks, the players, who are setting out to explore them. Exploring is a very loose term, however, and it amounts to three tracks on the board. Some of the cards allow you to move your exploration markers along these tracks, and other card effects let you build little trading outposts along the way. Your progress along the tracks is reset at the end of each of the game’s three rounds, but only as far back as your furthest outpost.

There’s another feature which sees each card associated with one of four races who live in Navoria. Each race gets a reward tile at the start of the game, and the first player to amass five icons of a race gets to claim the top spot for that reward tile which typically nets end-of-game points based on the colours of cards in your tableau.

Final thoughts

Ultimately Explorers of Navoria is a set-collection and tableau-building game in the vein of a lighter Wingspan (review here) or Earth (review here). If you’re looking for a game which captures the feeling of exploration, you’re not really going to find it here. The exploring is all done in the theatre of the mind. The tracks could just as easily have been straight lines without the map artwork, and it would have made no difference to the game.

That said, it doesn’t really matter that the theme is spread thinly. The game itself is quick, clean, easy to learn, and offers plenty of replay value. The simple inclusion of the randomised race reward tiles dictates your strategy, and that on top of the variety of the cards in the five decks makes for a game with plenty of replay value. It’s at its best with three or four players, as the competition for cards and return sports in the town at the end of each round is at its fiercest.

It’s on the lighter side of mid-weight, so if you’re after something to really get your teeth stuck into it might not be for you, but it makes for an excellent gateway game into heavier things. I LOVE that it has a small table footprint, and that it’s so quick to setup and teardown. In a world of monstrous Kickstarters that swamp tables and need nearly as much time to organise as they do to play, Explorers of Navoria is a breath of fresh air. Yes, it’ll have people stamping their feet about the artistic direction, yes, people will complain that it’s copying the style that Leder Games are famous for now. None of that matters though. What matters is that it’s a great, welcoming game with a low barrier to entry.

I’m so pleased to see Dranda Games bringing a game from Asia to an audience of players who might otherwise never have a chance to play. You can get more details and pledge here when the Kickstarter launches on 8th January 2024.

Explorers Of Navoria (2024)

Design: Meng Chunlin
Publisher: Dranda Games, Qiling Board Game
Art: Meng Chunlin
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Explorers Of Navoria Preview appeared first on Punchboard.