Arpy gee?

7th Sea is apparently an established RPG system. I say apparently because it’s not one I’m familiar with. The description from the 7th Sea website says:

7th Sea is a tabletop roleplaying game of swashbuckling and intrigue, exploration and adventure, taking place on the continent of Théah, a land of magic and mystery.

https://www.chaosium.com/7th-sea/

So while I’ve got no context for the world and the lore of 7th Sea, I can still appreciate the characters and story in the game, and I’ve got to say it’s integrated pretty well into the game.

The game itself is along the lines of games like the Exit and Unlock series. When you open the box you’ll find some small punchboards, a deck of cards, and some sheets. The game is very clear in making sure that you don’t open or read or look at anything before you’re meant to, for thar be spoilers ahoy for the unwary sailor.

Puzzling times

The game itself is a series of puzzles. You’ll collect items (cards) along the way which you may need in later puzzles, so while the game doesn’t take up a huge amount of space, it’s worth making sure you can lay out everything so that it’s all visible. It’s your standard mix of observational, logical, geometric, and lateral thinking puzzles, and it’s at a really nice level. Not so easy as to be boring, while not so difficult that you’ll never finish it without a walkthrough.

I’ll do my best to keep things spoiler-free, but suffice to say there are some really cool things the game makes you do with the box and sheets which means you’ll have to work in all three dimensions to solve some puzzles. This ‘puzzle in a box’ corner of the game market is saturated at the moment, and making a game stand out for any particular reason is a challenge. Sidequest: 7th Sea does a really good job of keeping it fresh feeling by asking me to do things I’ve never had to do before in one of these games.

The main drawbacks I found are more to do with a combination of graphic design and my own personal lighting. The game has a dark feeling that pervades through the narrative and the printing on everything. It’s dark, spooky, and eerie, which means that some of the things you’ll be employing your keen powers of observation on can be pretty hard to pick out. If you wear glasses, you’ll need to be wearing them, and I’d also recommend playing with plenty of light. I tried it out as a cosy little game on the living room coffee table one evening and soon had to turn the main lights on.

Final thoughts

I love a good puzzle game, and Sidequest: 7th Sea is a good puzzle game. I don’t know how much more I’d have gotten out of it if I was familiar with the game’s lore before I started, but I feel certain there are nods to other characters and things from the 7th Sea universe which went right over my head. The puzzles are good fun, and you get that dopamine kick in the brain when one clicks and you figure out how to solve it.

There’s no save system, but like the Exit games, there doesn’t need to be one. It’ll take you a couple of hours to finish the game, and it’s a really enjoyable couple of hours. You could play it on your own (as I did), and I think you’ll definitely get value out of having at least one other pair of eyes looking over things. It makes a great couples game to break the monotony of another night in front of the TV. There’s no reason you’d ever play it through a second time because the story and puzzles are a straight shot, but unlike the Exit games nothing gets altered or destroyed. You can easily put everything back in order and give it to someone else to play.

The most jarring thing for me is the hardest to talk about without dropping some serious spoilers. The game’s finale has a great build-up and the overall flow of the game then suddenly breaks to draw out the conclusion. The puzzles here were much harder and more obscure than the rest of the game, but there are still hints, and you’ll be able to draw on the things you’ve already done, let’s leave it at that. Depending on how well you do in that finale, I can see that it might leave a slightly bitter taste in the mouth for some people.

That gripe aside, Sidequest: 7th Sea is a great option for escape room fans looking to get their next hit from somewhere other than Exit or Undo games. I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope they manage to keep up the franchise tie-ins in the future. I have the Nemesis version here too, which I’ll be covering soon. Great stuff, and for less than £15 in most places, an easy recommendation for me to make.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Sidequest: 7th Sea (2023)

Design: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Sidequest: 7th Sea Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

As someone who went to Secondary school in the late ’80s/early ’90s, most of my schoolwork was held in ring binders. For some subjects we had those fancy lever-arch folders, but for the rest it was the ring binders that always looked like they were after your flesh when you closed them.

Why am I telling you all of this? Have I finally lost it? Nope, it’s just because Books of Time makes a big point of using those same vampiric ring mechanisms to create the titular books, so you’d better get used to the Clack!, because you’re going to hear it a lot.

Getting your books in order

Books of Time is a set collection game hidden between the pages of its engine-building books. There’s no denying it looks really different and visually arresting the first time you see it. The little books before each player, the lectern with the central chronicle, the pages all over the table – you won’t have seen another board game that looks like it. There are other ways the designer could have tried to accomplish the same thing, but the choice to go with the ring binders definitely helps it stand out in a sea of themeless Euro games.

Themeless? It seems like a weird thing to say, right? A game where you physically put together little books by adding pages between covers being themeless. The blurb in the rulebook says:

“Challenge up to three of your friends, or play solo, and tell your own story that will be written and remembered for ages to come!”

That’s a bit of a leap, to put it lightly. The pages on offer to add to your books have some really pretty illustrations representing different advances in science, trade and industry. They also have various symbols representing the actions and resources you’ll get for either adding the pages or activating them during the game. Oddly though, and almost certainly to make printing cheaper and easier for international markets, there’s no text on the pages. When you choose to place a page in one of your books you do it solely for the reasons of how it gels with the other pages in your books, and more often, because of the way the symbols work towards your sets.

Ultimately it means your books will mean nothing at the end of the game, nor will they make any sense. You’ll have pages with pictures of Marie Curie, a horse, Jazz music, and a scoop of cocoa beans, all nestling up next to a book showing a route around the Cape of Good Hope. Put bluntly, from a theme point of view, your books will mean nothing at the end of the game.

A real page-turner

Despite my negativity about how the theme of making books is handled, the game itself is really good fun. As is often the case with a Board&Dice game, there are a load of different things you’ll want to get done, and not enough turns to do them all. I don’t know if Board&Dice have some kind of requirement that games should have three tracks to progress up, but Books of Time follows the same format as others have in the past, including Teotihuacan (review here), Origins: First Builders (review here) and Tabannusi (review here), and gives you three to try to climb.

Climbing those tracks can give you some seriously good rewards, but movement up them costs resources, the same resources you need to spend to add pages to your books. I like the way the game only bothers you with two resource types: pens and paper, along with some folders which act as wild. It makes planning much easier than other games, and helps the game lean towards the middle of the difficulty spectrum.

As well as paying resources to climb tracks and add pages to your books, you can also choose to activate books, which is often the most satisfying thing to do. You get to claim the benefits on both pages on view, before flipping to the next page and queuing up the next delicious combo. Pages not only give you stuff for using them, but also add a third prong to the points trident. Each of your three books – red, green, and yellow – can net you some hefty points, but with conditions.

Green pages just need to be of different types, while red ones like you to have two or three of the same kind, with some extras for variety. The yellow book is the trickiest of all, where the game wants you to have placed pages in a certain order to score. Scoring of the books is dependent on discarding objective tiles along the way. You might want to go all-in on getting those yellow pages sorted, but if you discard the top two tiles and only leave yourself with the third, most difficult objective, you’re looking at either zero or 24 points.

None of these decisions are too contrived to make, but you need to make your mind up early and stick to your guns.

Final thoughts

As a straight-up mixture of engine-building and set collection, Books of Time is great. It hits smack bang in the middle of medium-weight as far as I’m concerned, and it’s great to see Board&Dice make this visually appealing commitment to something lighter than its usual Euro fare. The theme is non-existent, as I mentioned above, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a lot of fun to make your little books. It creates a personal bond between you and the thing you’re making which feels pretty unique, but personally, I could live without the flesh-threatening Clack! of the rings snapping shut.

I’ve played some games of it where I’ve managed to get everything right and go whizzing round the score track like a merry-go-round, and others where it hasn’t gone so well. I’m not sure if the difference between those games was skill, luck, or a combination of the two, but I’ve played more than one game of Books of Time where it’s become obvious from a long way out that I’m not going to achieve the objectives I’ve set for myself.

The components were my biggest worry. As a teenager who was permanently armed with a packet of hole reinforcement sticky hoops for his binders, I worried that the pages would show wear quickly. So far, so good. No tears, no growing holes, and no broken binders. I strongly recommend not adding those hole reinforcements by the way, because you’ll need to shuffle the pages lots, and I’m not sure that would go so well with stickers on every page.

The combination of the toy-like hook of the ring binders combined with the unique set-collection stuff makes for a fun game. Beneath the surface, there’s nothing going on here that you haven’t seen in countless other Euros through the years, but it’s all wrapped up in a nice, appealing package. If you want something that’s more about printing books, have a look at Portal Games’ Gutenberg (review here), and if you want something that does a better job of taking a trip through history with a game more tightly woven into the theme, try Trekking Through History (review here). Books of Time is a satisfying, enjoyable game with a great gimmick which might not knock your socks off, but you’ll still have a good time with it.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Books of Time (2023)

Design: Filip Głowacz
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-75 mins

The post Books Of Time Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Barcelona! Such a beautiful horizon”

Are you feeling better now? Good. Barcelona is the latest Euro game from Board&Dice. It’s a mixture of tile-placement and action-selection, and while that sounds like a relatively easy mixture to cope with, there are a lot of things going on. The good news is that they’re a lot of really good, really interesting things. The question is – do you need or want another Euro with a lot of moving parts under the hood? Hopefully, I can help answer that question for you.

The Eixample

That’s not a typo. The Eixample is the name given to the extension designed for Barcelona in the 19th Century by the urban planner, Ildefons Cerdà. I won’t give a detailed history, but to set the scene for the game, the walls around Barcelona have come down and Ildefons has plans for the city: wide roads, green spaces, lots of natural light, and octagonal city blocks to name but a few.

You, the players, are the builders creating this new Barcelona. The main board depicts Barcelona and is divided into rows and columns, and at the end of each row and column there’s an action. To take your turn you pull a couple of citizen tiles from a bag and place them in a stack at the intersection of a row and column. From there, a whole bunch of things happen.

Firstly, you get to take the actions at either end of the row and column of your intersection. These actions range from the simple – take some cloth or coins, the game’s resources – to the more complex, like building streets or moving your tram. I call these actions more complex, but in truth their operation is really easy. Placing a street is as difficult as picking one of the tiles up off your player board and putting it on the main board. You don’t need to be a civil engineer to do that. The real game, however, the juice in this delicious Spanish Orange, comes from how you combine the knock-on effects of your actions.

C-c-c-combo maker!

Right off the bat, let me state that if you like games that have you planning combinations of one thing resulting in another, you’ll love what happens in Barcelona. There are few things as satisfying in all of board gaming as setting up the mental dominoes that represent your coming turn, and executing it to perfection with the simple act of tipping the first one over – or in this case, choosing your first action. There’s a strange phenomenon in Euro games where one player narrates all the things happening in a chain of actions – a combo.

“I take this action which gives me those things. I spend those things on placing this thing here, and get these bonuses for doing it. Taking that thing off my player board uncovered this bonus, which means I place another thing here, complete this chain, and get another bonus here…”

We all do it, and we’re all so proud of ourselves for figuring out our big brain moves, like a five-year-old who’s figured out how make their own bowl of cereal. The rest of the table might give you a polite “Nice one”, or more likely ignore you why they plan their own blockbuster turn. The point is, playing Barcelona is like spending two hours of people doing this. If that sounds like your jam, congratulations, you’re on the same team as me. I couldn’t give two hoots about what someone else does (unless it disrupts my plans), but I love the fact we all get to do it. It also means that more than once you’ll hear someone say “I had a plan but now I’ve forgotten it”, and that’s because this Spanish sandbox lays so many toys in front of you, that it’s easy to forget which one you started with when you built your own Sagrada Familia from sand.

Urban congestion

The way Barcelona’s turns play out means that your options get more and more limited as the game goes on. You must place a stack of citizen tiles on an intersection, but the intersection has to be empty to place them. The only way to remove citizens is to build buildings, which is obligatory if possible at the end of your turn. The puzzle it presents leads to much furrowing of brows in the last quarter of the game, where you try to complete the goals – be they shared or personal – with a limited set of choices laid before you.

If you’ve got AP-prone players around the table, this is where the game starts to wade through treacle. The butter-smooth chaining of actions from the early game gets bogged down while the players look for the least-worst options available. The end of the game is player-driven too, which might divide opinion. It’s possible to see when someone can end the game, so planning past that becomes difficult and forces you to decide whether to bank on one more turn to finish your plans, or make the best of what you’ve got because you’re sure someone’s going to end things. It’s the polar opposite of games like Uwe Rosenberg’s, games like Hallertau (review here) or Atiwa (review here) where you know for sure when the game ends, and then spend ages figuring out how to eke out every last VP.

I mention these things because there’s a whole heap of Euro games out there, all doing similar things but with their own twists. For experienced players, the decision of whether to pick up a game like Barcelona comes down not to the theme, but to other details like how prone to AP it is, whether the end of the game is prescribed, how much take-that is involved – smaller details like that. Barcelona, for the record, has very little player interaction, save for the usual “I can’t believe you took the spot I was going to have!”.

Final thoughts

I like Barcelona. I like it a lot. I like the way it takes what are now very familiar themes, like tile-laying and action selection, and adds its own little flourishes to them. You have this beautiful shared board that gets filled with a patchwork of streets of different colours, but rather than ending things with the laying of those streets and intersections, it adds another layer on the Z-axis and lets you move trams around. The trams move around on top of the streets, possibly getting you more actions, letting you transport people, and using your own streets for free movement. It’s just another nice touch that elevates Barcelona above other mid-heavy Euros.

As I mentioned above, it’s got a real sandbox feel to the game. You could play time and again and try a different approach, a different strategy, a different focus. In true Board&Dice fashion, the game comes with action tiles that let you randomise which actions are in which position, which is a bigger deal than you might think. Strategy in Barcelona is built on combining actions and buildings, so not knowing which actions will get paired and where makes a real difference, and I really appreciate it.

If you don’t enjoy thinking several actions deep ahead of your turn, you’re not going to enjoy Barcelona. If you don’t appreciate having to make plans B & C, lest someone block the spot you wanted, buggering your plans up, you’re going to have an especially bad time. For the rest of us though, Dani Garcia has put together a beautifully made game full of replay value. You’d be forgiven for thinking Ian O’Toole had his crayons all over this one, because it’s so colourful and bright for a city-building Euro, but no, it’s Aleksander Zawada we have to thank for the eye-candy this time.

If you like mid-heavy Euro games full of choice, combos, and attempted mind-reading, Barcelona is one of – if not the – game of the year so far for me. It’s fantastic.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Barcelona (2023)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Barcelona Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’re not familiar with the Terracotta Army, it’s really worth reading up on. It doesn’t get as much attention as monuments like the Egyptian pyramids, but the scale of the army and the rest of the mausoleum is ridiculous. We’re talking about ~10,000 statues of various types and sizes, which are just part of a 100 km² structure built by nearly three-quarters of a million people!

Blimey.

Not a rondel

Now, the first time I heard about Terracotta Army, someone told me it had a mega-rondel on it. “It’s three rondels in one, Adam”. It’s no secret that I LOVE a rondel, so I was really excited to finally play it. I’ve got one message for those people who told me that – you’re all fibbers. What this faux rondel actually is, is three rings with various actions on each one. The rings move position from time to time, but when you place a worker you get the three actions in line with the segment of the wheels you chose.

It turns out that this is a really neat mechanism. There’s a certain amount of planning you can do because you know how far each wheel steps at the end of each round, but there are a lot of unknowns thrown into the mix. For instance, only one player can claim each segment of the wheel in each round, and you just know someone’s going to go for the one you had your beady little eye on. Is that a game-breaking problem? No, because you can hire artisans who let you re-use segments that have already been claimed.

So it’s actually a really clever action-selection mechanism in truth, and I love how much variety and chaos it brings to the game. But a rondel it is not. You don’t step around the wheel, you don’t choose how many steps you make, or anything like that. And a rondel doesn’t even have to be wheel-shaped. Look at games like PARKS. It’s a straight path, but that thing is a rondel by any other name. The problem – if that’s what you want to call it – is people see an action wheel and assume it’s a rondel. It’s not, it’s just a circle.

Neopolitan

So now you’re thinking it’s an action-selection type game, and you’re correct. Well, you’re partially correct. You see, on the bottom of the board there’s a Masters section, and if you get some tokens in there, you activate new possible actions, as well as end-of-round cleanup bonuses. So it’s got some engine-building in there too. But then you cast your eyes over to that imposing box full of upside-down statue minis, and realise you haven’t even thought about those yet, and the third flavour of ice cream in the box.

The box with the minis acts as a cool storage solution for them which prevents them from getting damaged in the box. It’s a little odd that they’re all the wrong way up. It’s like some kind of bat party where you can only get in if you’re hanging from your feet. Once you’ve collected enough clay, you can start building statues and placing them in the mausoleum section of the board, and that’s where things start to get complicated.

Each of the different colours of statue triggers a different ability when you sculpt them, and when you add it to the board you sit it in one of the coloured bases supplied, to denote that you own it. Keeping an eye on the statues’ colours isn’t enough, you need to observe the bases too, and it’s something which takes a little getting used to at first, possibly less so if you cut your teeth on games like Tigris and Euphrates.

All of this is before you even look at the specialist statues, which score bonus points dependent on where certain statues are in relation to them. This whole area puzzle then throws in the concepts of presence and domination for scoring, and on top of that, moving the inspectors along the rows and columns to indicate which statues are to be scored in that round. Let’s not forget that the end of game scoring is different, too.

Phew.

Meshing gears

The whole package comes across like somebody really wanted to create a game in the style of Vital Lacerda (he of On Mars fame, review here). I love a complex game, but only when it’s done well, and Terracotta Army very nearly does it well. It just feels like there’s a little bit too much going on at times.

If you start your planning with the goal of making statues and work it backwards to see how you can make that happen, the dominoes that have to fall to make it happen are in a long twisty line, and it’s easy for someone to steal a domino along the way, forcing you to stand them in a different direction.

Figurative dominoes that is, the domino mechanism never made it into the game.

There are some of you reading this now thinking “There is a lot going on, this game sounds amazing!”, and if that sounds like you, then I think you’ll love it. If you’re more middle-of-the-road though, there’s maybe a bit too much going on, and I can see people not wanting to give it a second or third play, because of how broken their brains felt after the first game.

Final thoughts

The biggest problem Terracotta Army has, in my opinion, is that it’s hitting store shelves at the same time as its stablemate, Tiletum. If you read my review of Tiletum, you’ll know that I love that game. Board&Dice games have traditionally been on that mid-heavy end of the complexity spectrum, so Terracotta Army fits in nicely there. My problem comes in recommending this game over Tiletum, if you only have the budget for one or the other.

It’s not to say it’s a bad game, because it isn’t. Terracotta Army is a good game, t’s a thinky, grindy, crunchy game. If those adjectives cause a stirring in your loins, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. What you probably won’t enjoy, is punching out the tiny squares in the middle of the cardboard coins. Publishers, please take note: We like the historical ties, but punching those out is a task reserved for someone you don’t like.

I can’t escape the feeling that the area control part of the game – placing and manipulating the statues – would have made a great, clever game in its own right. A spatial strategy game. Give me that game.

All of that said, if you’re a solo gamer looking at Terracotta Army, and you like games that feel like elaborate puzzles, I think it’s a great option (although you need to download the solo rules, here). I prefer playing it solo to multiplayer in fact, because I can take my time over it, and think my plans through. It’s mental gymnastics like these that introduce not-insignificant AP in multiplayer games. I like Terracotta Army, I really do, it just occupies a very specific spot on your shelves. The same sort of spot that games like Underwater Cities occupy, with their far-reaching planning, difficult decisions, and sometimes-lengthy games.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. 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.

Terracotta Army (2022)

Designers: Przemysław Fornal, Adam Kwapiński
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zuzanna Kołakowska, Jan Lipiński, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 2-4 (solo with rules download)
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Terracotta Army Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Either that, or you’re not as much of a geek as I am. Whatever the case, buckle up!

Tiley-tum?

Let’s clear up one thing right from the outset. Yes, this game has the word ’tile’ in its title. Yes, it has loads of tiles in the box. No, the word ’tile’ in the title has nothing to do with the tiles in the game. Tiletum is a town in west Belgium, and it’s this town which lends its name to the game.

As I mentioned before, you play as rich merchants, travelling around Europe doing stuff. You see, the merchants aren’t just sock weavers, cheese traders, or goat beauticians. Nope. You folks are jacks-of-all-trades. As you saunter your way around the continent you’ll do a spot of cathedral building here, fulfil contracts for wool and steel there, gain influence with noble families, steal their crests, build houses, home nobles – there’s a lot going on during the Renaissance.

As a player, this means you have a veritable Smörgåsbord of actions and ways to score yourself some of them delectable VPs. Min-maxing in one area or sampling a little bit of everything are both viable strategies in Tiletum. A lot of that viability is due to the sheer number of bonus tiles the game throws at you, tempting you hither and thither. Those bonus tiles are a large part of why I really like this game, but I’ll come back to that later. For now, let us dip our toes in the pond of action selection, for the water is warm and deep.

Teeley-tum?

The ludological skeleton that Tiletum attaches its musculature to, is dice selection. (Note to self – never use that particular metaphor again). At the start of every round, you draw some of the pastel-coloured dice from the included bag and place them around the action wheel on the board. They’re grouped by value, so you end up with different colour dice grouped beside the various actions. When you come to take a turn you take a die and plonk it onto your player board. Choosing which die to take is the first delightful headache Tiletum gives you.

The die you take has a colour and a value, right? So if you pick up a yellow five, you get five of the yellow resource, which is Gold. A pink three grants you three food, and so on, and so on. Taking a high-value die seems like a natural choice. More resources are always a good thing. Well, yes, and no.

The section of the action wheel you took the die from determines the actions you’ll be taking in your turn. The catch – because you knew one was coming – is that the strength of your action is the difference between the die’s value, and seven. Pick up a one-pip, you get six actions. Take a three, you get four actions. So while a high-value die might see you with more wool than you know what to do with, you’re not going to actually do much for the rest of that turn. Tricky, isn’t it?

Till-ettum!

I mentioned the bonus tiles before. The board is littered with them. There are bonuses available all over the map of Europe, which you can claim as part of your Merchant or Architect actions. There are bonuses next to each segment of the action wheel, often tempting you away from an action you were planning to take. There’s a bonus for being the highest on the King’s track at the end of each round. This is all before we even look at the bonuses you get for putting completed contracts on your player board, or adding crests to your board.

Personally, I really like this. It offers plenty of combo opportunities as you play. Sometimes you’ll take a die and immediately use the bonus tile from the wheel. Let’s say that bonus gives you enough food to add a new crest to the buildings on your board. You spend that food with one of your ‘anytime’ actions, and the space you cover lets you move your merchant on the map board. You’re setup to build a house, claim a tile from the new town, and move to another now, and this is all before you’ve taken the actions your die choice granted you.

If you’re reading all of that and think it sounds like AP-central, weeeellll, you’re kinda right. You definitely end up doing a lot of deliberation over which action to take next. For some people, that’s a turn-off. Those people like their turns fast and slick, like a finely-tuned otter. If that’s you, try the game before you buy, if you get the opportunity.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s glorious. The actions themselves are really simple, thanks to the iconography, and the great glossary in the rulebook. Even if you take a turn which is strictly speaking suboptimal, it never feels like it. It always feels like you’re doing something good, which is great if you’re secretly a bit rubbish at games, like me.

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed Tiletum the first time I played it. It’s easy to learn, and it really helps that most resources only have one use. Wool and steel are for contracts, nothing else. Stone only ever goes towards building cathedrals. It avoids those moments present in some games where new players suddenly stop and say “Well, I have a load of wood now, but no idea what I can do with it”. Every time I play the game I enjoy it more than the previous time, so I think it’s safe to say it’s staying in my collection for the foreseeable future.

The colours of the dice might be an issue if you’re colourblind. I was worried about the pastel colours on them, so I ran a photo through a simulator, and those of you with Protanopia or Deuteranopia might have real trouble telling apart the light-grey, dark-grey, and pink dice. On the whole though, the presentation and components are very nice. The rulebooks (there’s one just for solo mode) are well-written with good examples, and the iconography throughout is great.

The solo bot is a bit of a pain to learn, as its actions can be very non-standard, and have tables of preference, but once you get the hang of running it, it makes for a very good solo experience. Tiletum is one of those games that makes me happy just to play it. Yeah, at the end of the game I might get absolutely spanked by someone else, but I have so much fun playing around with the game’s systems that it just doesn’t matter.

If you enjoy those sandbox-y games that let you just play and experiment, you’re going to love Tiletum. It looks and feels like a classic Euro, but with no direct player interaction, and no meanness. It’s my favourite Board&Dice game since Teotihuacan, and that’s saying something. A hearty recommendation from me.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. 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.

Tiletum (2022)

Designers: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Giorgio De Michele, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Tiletum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Ur-ban development

Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar, in Iraq.

I’m not about to pretend I knew that, it’s just what the combined might of Google and Wikipedia told me.

Tabannusi is set in the Late Bronze Age, as the city began to grow and flourish. As a master architect, you are tasked with building each of the city’s districts. Houses, gardens, the port, and even the famous Ziggurat are all there to be developed under your watchful eye, and the boats on the Euphrates River, which bisects the city, are the main source of resources.

In true T-game fashion, you’re going to accomplish these impressive feats of civil engineering through the use of dice. Lots and lots of dice. During the game, you claim dice from the barges in each district, and each die influences what you’ll do with it. The colour dictates which district you can build in, and the value tells you which district your Architect is heading to for the next round’s actions. It’s a clever, unusual system, which I really like. It breaks my brain with forward planning, but I like it.

I think there’s a certain type of person who likes a brain-crunching Euro game. Those people are masochists, and I count myself among them. That same type of person will love the mental gymnastics that Tabannusi has you performing. One of the things I particularly like is how little analysis-paralysis affects the game. All of your planning can be done while the other players take their turns, and you’ll normally find you’ve got a definite plan, which is different from the others. There are a lot of different ways to score VPs, which means there’s not much treading on toes by other players. The flip side of this is a low level of interactivity, but that’s to be expected in these games.

Spatial awareness

A trademark of the T-games is some form of spatial puzzle on the main board. In Tekhenu it’s pillars and statues, and in Teotihuacan it’s building the pyramid. In Tabannusi, we’re dealing with building projects, houses, and gardens, and it’s a much bigger feature of the game. There are bonuses just for covering squares with project tiles, restrictions about building adjacency, using garden tiles to improve others, and individual objectives – all of which can reward you with VPs.

Given that the spaces where all this land-grabbing takes place make up 60% of the board, you can understand when I tell you it’s an important feature. Despite what I said in the previous section about low interactivity between players, this passive interaction is actually pretty decent. It’s just not very in-your-face.

Once again we’ve got various tracks to climb too, giving bonuses along the way. It’s another example of a game where you’ll never do everything, so you’ve got to make your mind up early and stick with your plan. If like me, you have a tendency to get drawn away from your original strategy, to try a bit of everything, you probably won’t do too well.

Follow the leader

My favourite part of Tabannusi is each player’s use of the Architect and assistant meeples. It really gets you thinking ahead properly, and not just choosing randomly and hoping for the best. It’s also a unique way of telegraphing what your intentions are to the rest of the players. In most games, you might have an idea of what someone has in mind for their next move, but you never know. In Tabannusi, you know exactly where their next action will be, and it forces you to think about it.

This visual pre-planning, and the fact that the moving parts of the game’s systems aren’t too complicated, means that Tabannusi is the T-game I’d recommend to newcomers to the series. Tekhenu and Teotihuacan both have similarities but are denser. I’d rather teach Tabannusi, and I feel confident that a new player could pick the game up more easily.

The little mumbles and murmurs that happen during the game are brilliant. When someone moves their architect to an area you really weren’t expecting, eyebrows raise in surprise, and you’ll catch yourself saying “Hmm, interesting…”. Moments like that keep the game alive and add a little moisture to what would otherwise be an archetypal, dry Euro.

Final thoughts

If you enjoyed either Teotihuacan or Tekhenu, and were looking for another historical-themed game with similar DNA, you won’t be disappointed with Tabannusi. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Tawantinsuyu in this review, and that’s intentional. Despite belonging to the same family of games, Dávid Turczi’s game feels like a bit of an outlier in comparison to the other three. Even though the users of BGG disagree with me, I also believe that Tabannusi is the lightest of the series.

Tabannusi doesn’t really have the same presence on the table as its siblings. There’s no chunky pyramid, or towering plastic obelisk this time around. The little plastic houses are cute enough, but it’s not someone that’s going to excite anyone other than fans of Euros in this style. That said, I really like the graphic design and artwork. I just understand that it’s not for everyone.

The solo mode is solid enough, and a great option if you want to learn the game and feel what it’s like to have your options reduced by another player. I know we can play two-handed, but there’s an inherent bias in your actions, whether you admit it or not. Teotihuacan is still my favourite game in the series, but I won’t turn down a game of Tabannusi with you. It’s a good game, and one that can hold its own in its T-tastic family. It’s just not going to make anyone go “Wow, that was incredible!”

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur (2021)

Designers: David Spada, Daniele Tascini
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120 mins

The post Tabannusi: Builders of Ur Review appeared first on Punchboard.

It’s a game from the Euro stable of Board&Dice, so you’d expect it to carry on their fine pedigree. For the most part, it does. The design from the mind of Adam Kwapiński (best known for Nemesis, and the upcoming Frostpunk game) feels like a natural fit among the likes of Tawantinsuyu and Zapotec, despite the slightly fantastical setting. Tracks to climb, resources to hoard, and more dice to chuck than a fight in a Yahtzee factory.

Space cadet

If you’ve seen any images of Origins, it’s likely that the first things that caught your eye were the colourful plastic discs at the top of the board. These are in fact, motherships, in classic retro-futuristic style, rotating above our planet. During the game players take turns to place their workers (dice) at the sites of the motherships in order to have encounters. Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with less mashed potato.

The alien visitors impart wisdom on your tribes, allowing you to build buildings and farms, increase your military might, and take on more spiritual pursuits by advancing up the zodiac temple tracks. Naturally, each of these things are interwoven with threads of dependency, meaning the benefits you gain doing one thing, often allow you to do another, and so on.

Right now, you might be reading this wondering “How is this different to any other Euro worker-placement game?”. The answer is in the way Origins uses dice as workers. It shares some DNA with its stablemate, Teotihuacan, is as much as the values on the dice can increase with certain actions, becoming more powerful as they do. The motherships rotate in-place with each action taken there, and the workers visiting must at least match the value of the pips shown on the highlighted section of the ship.

And therein lies one of the biggest problems with the game.

Space invader

The motherships, whose positions determine which actions you can or cannot take on your turn, have dice pips embossed on their outer ring. The pips are really hard to see at a glance, even for eyes younger than mine. It’s such a basic flaw that I’ve seen plenty of people online take a Sharpie to them, to make them legible. The irony here is that if the motherships had just been printed on the board, and a normal dice placed on top to achieve the same function, there would have been no problem. The plastic ships are over-engineered and superfluous.

The same is true of the plastic ‘population bases’ used, which are effectively dice holders. As each is unlocked, they move from one spot on your board to another, just above it. They don’t actually do anything practical, and could easily be written out of the game, and left us with one less fiddly thing to do during the game.

I’m also slightly irked by the military track. The track runs around the outside of a colosseum printed on the board, but nothing actually happens in the colosseum. It’s just a big, grey oval, which stays empty for the whole game. In the setup I have to place piles of dice, resources, and cards around the outside of the board, and leave a great big gap vacant, and… grey. It’s something that bothered me with the design of Dune Imperium too. Designers – use the space on the board before asking us to swamp our tables with more stuff.

Stars in your eyes

The reason I’ve been so vocal about my gripes, above, is because I really like Origins: First Builders. It’s a really nicely-made, reasonably heavy Euro game. It’s right in my wheelhouse, and it is painfully close to being a great game. There are a few imbalance issues in my opinion, but I think rules tweaks in the recently-announced Ancient Wonders expansion could fix these. In each game I’ve played so far, the winner seems to race away and win by a healthy margin.

The randomisation of the zodiac track cards are a curse and a blessing. They can make each game feel very different to the previous one, which is great, but the game length can vary quite a bit. The end of the game is triggered by player actions, and some of those actions get boosted by some of the available zodiac cards.

These minor grumbles aside, it’s a slick game which gives you tons of choices, and plenty of routes to victory. There are great opportunities to plan the building tiles for good bonuses and scoring, and there are some really clever things you can do with your workers. Promoting them past a value of six means they turn into advisors, and can be plugged into your player board to further expand your abilities. They can also occupy a ‘seat of power’, which is a gap in the junction where four buildings meet. These give more scoring chances, if the arrangement matches cards, and can activate building powers again.

There’s a lot going on, and a lot to like about Origins.

Final thoughts

If it sounds like I’m torn on Origins: First Builders, it’s because I am. I love the dice as workers, I love the various tracks and resource management, and I love the clever tile-laying puzzle of the buildings. The motherships’ lack of legibility is an irritation, more than a show-stopper, but it seems unbelievable that it didn’t get caught in playtesting. The same goes for the way the value of each resource token is printed in the middle of the tile, on top of the image of what it represents. I defy anyone to not accidentally pick up wheat when they meant gold, and vice-versa.

The game advertises a solo mode by David Turczi on the box, which got me really excited. Be forewarned however, that the mode in the box is a practice mode – you against your own score type of thing. If you want an ‘active’ automa opponent (which plays a very good game, by the way), you need to download it and print its player board and instructions yourself. You can get it here. It was a bit of a disappointment to not have it included. It’s something Praga Caput Regni did too, and I really hope it stops happening soon.

If you can overlook the over-engineered plastic pieces, and my other little bugbears, you’ll find a rock-solid Euro, worthy of the Board&Dice logo. Complex, easy-to-learn, and tons of indirect interaction, just like a good Euro should be. I’m really looking forward to the expansion, to see what it throws into the mix. Anyone who doesn’t like player-driven ending of games should keep an eye on it too, as one of the modules determines the length of the game. I like what Board&Dice are doing at the moment, they’re a great publisher, and Origins: First Builders is a crunchy, satisfying game.

Review copy kindly provided by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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

Origins: First Builders (2021)

Designer: Adam Kwapiński
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Origins: First Builders Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The biggest difference between Children of Wyrmwoods and its predecessors is the absence of a game board. There’s a map to unfold, once you’re told to (it’s written on it, so it’s not a spoiler to tell you), but your table will definitely be laid out differently to the previous games by the time you reach the epilogue.

Building character

Children of Wyrmwoods is trying to be an adventure game from the get-go, and this time around you get a character card. Your protagonist – Gilbert – has statistics, just like in a role-playing game. Certain items and cards you gain during the game will affect your stats, and the path you trample through the game’s forks and twists depend on your stats at times. It’s not an RPG, or something like Mage Knight. It is, after all, still an escape room game, but it’s a nice change to the formula.

Although the character stats are a nice addition, it’s a little bit loosely implemented. The way the items are given to you, and the amounts they boost or reduce your stats, there’s never really a moment where you just squeak in by one point. It’s there to give you the feeling of customising your character, but the branches you choose are usually quite black-and-white in terms of what you can do. I think some of this is down to me, and the way I like to peer behind the curtain to see the wizard, and examine how games works, so I think for the majority of players it’ll still feel pretty cool.

The other cool thing the game does for the first time in the series, is to let you combine items. Just like in the Adventure Game series from Kosmos, you can enter the card numbers of two things into the app and see if you make a new thing, just like in a point and click video game. It’s done well, and the combinations are all very logical. There’s no ‘rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle’ levels of abstract thinking, and it helps the game feel fresh after the previous two outings.

Back on track

In my previous review for Low Memory, I said that I was a bit disappointed after playing The Awakening before it. Things felt a bit disjointed, and there were a few design choices that didn’t gel with me. I’m extremely happy to say that Children of Wyrmwoods gets right back on track, and surpasses the original in just about every way. The puzzles are great, the story is really engaging, and your choices feel really meaningful, like you’ve just made a major fork in the story. While you had to make similar choices in the previous games, it never really felt like you were missing too much after your choices.

The theme and setting for the game are really nicely tied to the narrative and the puzzles, and although there’s still some disjoints in the way a solution is meant to fix the problem in front of you, it’s better than in the previous games. The third book in the box has the biggest change in the series so far. I won’t spoil the surprise for you, but I’ll tell you that the training wheels get taken off, and you’d better be switched-on to finish the game.

The balance in the puzzles’ difficulty feels much better than in Low Memory, where at times it veered off into being simply too difficult to be enjoyable. It’s challenging still, but you never really reach the stage where you’ve got a full notebook and calculator just to figure things out.

Final thoughts

Children of Wyrmwoods is the best escape room game I’ve played. It’s easily the best in the Escape Tales series. It feels like the first two games were more experimental, and that this third game is the one where they’ve perfected the formula. Don’t get me wrong, The Awakening and Low Memory are still good games, but with Wyrmwoods, Lockme have smoothed off the rough edges. They’ve found their feet and the game really shines as a result.

While the first two games gave you the option of replaying to make a few different choices, I was never really desperate to. With Children of Wyrmwoods however, I really do want to go back and play it again. There’s a point early in the game where you make a big choice, and I saw puzzles later in the game where the two paths converged again, which made me wonder what I’d missed out on. I ended up with items I never used because my journey took me down a different path, and I want to know what they’re for, dagnabbit!

According to the box, there are over 60 different endings! I’m not sure how different they are, but I had a hard choice from four at the end of my game, and those were after a difficult choice of three. The writing is better in this third game, but I’m not sure if that’s just because the translations overall are better. In short, Children of Wyrmwoods is a fantastic game, with a great story, and if you’re a fan of escape room games like Exit or Unlock, you really need to get this one. It’s fantastic, and you won’t go disappointed or frustrated. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods (2020)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 450 mins

The post Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If this is the first Escape Tales review you’ve read here, I suggest jumping back to read my review of The Awakening first. The mechanisms and the way the game works in Low Memory is nearly identical. The biggest change is the way the story is split into three interwoven stories, each with its own book. It’s a nice change of direction, as it gives you a natural point to stop, save, and have something fresh to come back to the next time you play.

Once again, the game is drive by the same website-pretending-to-be-an-app, and it works well on all the devices I tried it with.

Techno, techno, techno

While the first game was set in a slightly paranormal space, with magical incantations and portals, Low Memory has gone for the archetypal Future setting. You can tell, because the art is full of screens and sweeping curves, and the puzzle numbers in the app are meant to look like hexadecimal values, and have a bitmap-style font. It’s a nice change of direction, and it got me excited to see where they might go with it.

Unfortunately, the theme feels a bit pasted-on for most of the game. Things do get a bit more interesting in the third book, which ties the first two together, but up until that point you honestly could have put the puzzles in any setting and not have noticed it was meant to be futuristic. You might be reading this and thinking I sound a bit down on the game already, and in all honesty, you’re probably right. I had high hopes when I tore the shrinkwrap off the box, because I really enjoyed The Awakening.

The good…

Low Memory does a few things really nicely. Moving from location to location feels better implemented than in The Awakening, which felt more like ping-ponging back and forth in the same rooms for most of it. I like the fact there are areas that you don’t get paragraph numbers for until you’ve managed to gain access to that part of the map card.

I also like the story, which is really nicely done. My trouble with a lot of games, especially escape-style games, is that I like to bounce from puzzle to puzzle, solving them as fast as I can. I’m pretty competitive in most things, and I think that’s just more of the same. You shouldn’t try to speedrun your games like I do sometimes. If you can absorb the flavour text and story in Low Memory, you’ll find yourself absorbed in a really interesting adventure. The connections between the first two books grow, the further in you get, and it’s cool the way the second book loops back over events you’ve already been a part of.

…and the not-so-good

Unfortunately, there were few bits of the game I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as the first one. I won’t reveal anything here that’ll spoil the game for you, but I’ll touch on a couple of things. The most annoying thing that happened to me was spending ages working on a puzzle, only for the game to tell me “You shouldn’t have wasted your time doing that, nothing productive happened”. It was like the makers were smirking at me going “OMG can you believe he fell for it!? What a moron”. Luckily I’ve not experienced that same thing since, as it was a big turn-off for me.

Some of the puzzles defied logic a bit. I mean, I know that’s always going to be a bit of lateral thinking and tangential puzzles in an escape room, but there were times when it was a bit too far. One of the puzzles involved a dart board, with darts in certain scores and even using the double and triple ring. I had to take a hint from the app for this one, and it gleefully told me “It’s nothing to do with actual darts or darts scoring”, which frustrated me. Maybe I was just feeling rubbed-up the wrong way after the time-waster puzzle, I don’t know.

Some of the puzzles were hard for the sake of being hard. I love a puzzle, I love logic problems, mystery, thinking laterally. But there were some in here that felt like they were intentionally convoluted. You should be able to play these games with a piece of paper and a pencil, but there were times that felt insufficient. Later in the game there’s a big puzzle, which I did enjoy, but only because I know how a logic grid works, and how to make one. Without that knowledge, I think I’d have been tearing my hair out.

Final thoughts

If you’ve read this far, you’d be forgiven for thinking I didn’t like Low Memory. I can see why, but I want to make the point that it’s not a bad game. Far from it, it’s a good game, with fiendish puzzles, that puzzle fans will love. I’m coming at it from a holistic point of view though, and with an eye on how it fits in with the setting of the game, how the story progresses, and how the puzzles tie-in with that story.

If I’d played this game before I played The Awakening, I’m not sure I’d have been as down on some of the puzzles as I have been. I think playing them in this order spoiled me a bit, because The Awakening was just a bit more cohesive. Some of the puzzles in Low Memory felt like they were maybe ideas that were first thought of when making The Awakening, but got left on the cutting room floor.

It’s a very long game, and that’s neither a positive nor a negative, it just depends if you want a short or long game. The box reckons each of the three stories will take you around three hours, and that’s not far from the truth. If you’re after a brain-melter of an escape room game, Low Memory is a good game. Not a great game, but certainly not a bad one. If you’re fresh to the series, or are coming from the Exit or Unlock series, I’d probably go for The Awakening first, but this is definitely worth picking up at some point to get your puzzle fix.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: Low Memory (2019)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 3 x 180 mins

The post Escape Tales: Low Memory Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I suppose the first thing I should tell you is that The Awakening is an app-driven game, as the use of technology in games can be pretty divisive. I like the way that Board & Dice and Lockme (the developers) have done it in these games. Instead of an app you need to download from an app store, the game is driven by a mobile-friendly website, masquerading as an app. The reason this is so good is because it means you can use it on anything with a web browser – be that your phone, laptop, or whatever technology you prefer.

Staying spoiler-free

The difficulty when reviewing games like this, is that I can’t really show you much of the game, or tell you too much about the story, as I’ll be spoiling it for you. So I’ll do my best not to reveal anything you couldn’t find out from the box or the website. The backstory for The Awakening puts you in the role of Sam, a man whose daughter is trapped in a coma and deteriorating. You meet a stranger who gives you a book containing a ritual called ‘The Awakening’, but gives you fair warning that your sanity will be tested. That’s where your adventure begins.

Gameplay in The Awakening revolves around cards. Cards for locations, cards for maps, and cards for the objects and puzzles you’ll find while exploring those locations. Each puzzle has a symbol associated with it, and a look at the app tells you how many cards with a matching symbol are necessary to solve it. If you get stuck, there are multiple hints available, before it finally concedes to your apparent stupidity and just tells you the answer. Sometimes you’ll have choices to make which will dramatically affect the direction your story takes and the puzzles you’ll face, and that’s where the replayability comes from – being able to play again and make different choices.

Riddle me this

The puzzles in The Awakening are pretty good, and you’ll need to use a good mix of logic, wordplay, mathematics and lateral thinking needed to solve them. There’s a bit of a disconnect in quite a few of them, because you’ll enter the code in the app, but when you find the location in the book to see what happens, it might say something like “You say the answer and the thing happens”. That’s just because in the story you might not be physically moving or rearranging things, and I guess you need to suspend some disbelief to play.

I’m still torn on whether I think it’s clever, or frustrating that some of the locations you choose to explore have no puzzle associated. Exploring a location means you spend an action token to do it, and when you run out of action tokens you need to draw a card from the Doom pile. That’s not as bad as it might sound, and it’s by design, but the first couple of times you do it, you feel like you’ve failed somehow. It’s actually a pretty clever mechanism, as it’s impossible to complete the game without drawing Doom cards, and it helps drive the narrative that your character is getting deeper and deeper into this situation he’s put himself in.

Final thoughts

There’s not much more I can say about the game without ruining the story, and the twists and turns it takes. The puzzles feel a little shoe-horned in at times, but that’s the nature of games of this ilk. The Exit games do the same thing. The way the story progresses is really good, and when other aspects of Sam’s life come back to haunt him during the game, you’re left with some really difficult choices to make. I found myself drawn into the story far more than I expected to, and I felt myself invested in Sam’s and his daughter’s outcome.

The puzzles are, in the vast majority of cases, good. There were a few which felt very difficult to solve, and even when I used the app to get the answer eventually, I was still none-the-wiser as to why that was the answer. A quick trip to the BGG forums for the game cleared things up for me, but given the number of people struggling on the same things, it might just be a design flaw rather than my broken brain. I think that’s the biggest flaw in The Awakening, the fact that the app will give you the answer if you get really stuck, but it doesn’t explain why. I’d like to see that in future games.

If you like these escape room style games, I think you’ll really enjoy The Awakening. It does things I haven’t seen in other games of this type, and the branching paths, choices, and the ability to replay it really help to justify its £25 price tag. When you consider you’re getting somewhere between three to six hours of game for that, it’s good value. Nothing is destroyed during the game, so you can let a friend play it, or sell it on afterwards. You can also save your game at any point, which is essential in a game this long.

If you like escape rooms and puzzles, and especially if you like the Exit or Unlock games, I’ve no hesitation in recommending Escape Tales: The Awakening.

A review copy of the game was kindly provided to me by Board&Dice. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Escape Tales: The Awakening (2018)

Designers: Jakub Caban, Matt Dembek, Bartosz Idzikowski
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Jakub Fajtanowski, Magdalena Klepacz, Paweł Niziołek
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 180-300 minutes

The post Escape Tales: The Awakening Review appeared first on Punchboard.