Que?

El Grande is an area control game. The board is a map of Spain which is split into nine regions. During each of the game’s three scoring phases, the player with the majority of pieces in each area scores points based on the scoring marker in the area. Nice and easy so far. Each player has a Court area in front of them with their available Caballeros (cubes in the original, meeples in the new print), and a shared Province area holds all the reserve Caballeros for all players.

On your turn, you play a power card. The cards are numbered 1-13, most of which have a number of meeples printed on them. The lower the card value, the more meeples. In each round there are five action cards on offer, four of which change every round, while the remaining card which lets you move the king is available in every round. The meeples on your power card determine how many you add to your court from the province, and the meeples printed on the action card you pick tell you how many you can play onto the map on your turn. What makes it so interesting is that no one can play the same value as a previously played card in that round, and that each card can only ever be played once.

90% of what makes El Grande so much fun is summed up in that paragraph above. You see, if you play a higher value power card, you get to pick first from the action cards for that round, at the expense of not adding many meeples to your court to actually play to the board. You can play low value cards to get lots of meeples, but you’re likely to be left with whatever action hasn’t already been claimed. The action cards have the ability to really mess things up, so having first choice is great, but at the same time you want to have the meeples to put down, so what do you do? High value card, low value, or somewhere in the middle and hope for the best?

You only have to make that decision nine times in the entire game, but it’s agonising every time, and it’s incredibly enjoyable. A big piece representing the king stands in one of the regions and it has a big influence. You can only place meeples in areas adjacent to the king, and you can’t affect the king’s area at all, so having him stood in a region you’re going to score big in is a huge benefit. This is especially true when you realise that the action cards let you do things like remove other players’ pieces from the board, move any meeples wherever you like, add scoring tiles to regions which either boost or degrade their scoring, or even score regions between scoring rounds.

Castillo

It’s impossible to ignore the cardboard castle – or castillo – standing in one corner of the board. It’s the cherry on top of this delicious cake of a game in my opinion. Whenever you place or move pieces, instead of adding them to the board you can toss them into the castillo, out of sight, but never out of mind. At the start of each scoring round the castillo’s doors open, the meeples within come tumbling out, and it’s scored like a little region of its own. But wait! All players now move those newly freed caballeros to regions of their choice, affecting the majorities just before they get scored.

The genius little twist added here sees players analyse and compute consequences at light speed, resulting in groans and cheers. Before you open the castillo, each player chooses one of the game’s regions in secret on a little dial. Do you dare choose that one region nobody is in, hoping nobody else does the same? Or do you add them to the highest-scoring region to try and pip the others to the post? What if they do the same?? Can you remember how many they put in it? Can you remember how many you put in it?

As the game progresses control swings like a pendulum. The player in the lead at any given time has a huge target on their back, and in my experience, the table turns into a gathering of Grima Wormtongues from Lord of the Rings. Everyone trying to influence the other players to hobble another player, but never for their own benefit of course. No, they’d never do that. They just want to help you, friend.

Ebb and flow, thinking on your feet

The biggest difference between El Grande and many area-control games is the level of strategy involved. Long-term planning in El Grande is difficult. It’s a game of tactics and pivoting in an instant. The action cards push the game along in an unpredictable manner, like pushing a shopping trolley over cobbles. You have an idea of where you want to get to, but there is so much that’s going to happen to you before you get there. Holding on to that 7-point Toledo is great until someone puts the 4-point scoring tile on it. Having a majority of one meeple in a region goes up in smoke because someone gets to the card which lets them move two of yours to another region.

Similarly, there are plenty of options to sneak points and creep around the scoring track. Players often concentrate on the 6- and 7-point regions, but cards come out of the deck which score the 5-point regions instantly. You’ll see chances to add a single meeple to multiple regions in one turn and claim uncontested second places there, mopping up another ten or more points that others didn’t notice. You really need your head a swivel and have to be able to react to what’s going on very quickly.

Some people won’t enjoy that at all. Strategists who are in it to play the long game can quickly find they aren’t having a good time. The wild swinging and the fact that other players can just force you to ditch loads of your meeples from the board or your court is like a poke in the eye to some folk. In my personal experience this is a small minority of players, but it’s something to bear in mind if you know your group well. I’m editing this existing review draft off the back of a weekend convention where I taught the game to eight new players, and only one of them didn’t have a great time. That’s pretty good going as far as I’m concerned.

Final thoughts

I’ve loved El Grande from the first time I played it. It’s a classic for a reason, and this reprint just makes it better in my opinion. The board art is prettier, and while some people might mourn the loss of the old score tile design with its pips, the numbers are more readable. Meeples instead of cubes is good, the Grande piece now looks like someone on horseback instead of a bigger cube, and the king is golden and has a crown. It’s a really nice edition with the kind of care and attention to detail it deserves.

The game itself is essentially the same as it’s always been. Choosing a card and playing it, before putting some little wooden dudes on a board isn’t too taxing, but the decision space in such a simple turn is huge. Aside from what I mentioned above and trying to decide between adding more meeples to your court and turn order, there’s the first player marker. The player who plays the lowest value card each round gets the first player marker for the next, which can be huge. Even when you don’t want to move the king, moving it just to stick it in the corner of the map and limit where the other players can place pieces. There are just so many little needles to stick into the other players.

The level of balance is great. Even in your first play of the game, you’ll get a sense of belief that you can compete with people who’ve played before. It’s a belief that’s justified. You really can compete. El Grande is a game about playing the other players around the table, not wrestling with rules and unknown edge cases. What you see is what you get, and if you can read the other person’s thoughts, you can get one over on them. El Grande is amazing. It’s still amazing, even after all this time. No other game has managed to topple it when it comes to doing what it does. It’s best played with four or five players, but if you regularly have that many people around a table, it’s a must. A masterpiece of a game which deserves a place in your collection.

You can buy El Grande from my retail partner, Kienda, right here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

El Grande (1995)

Design: Wolfgang Kamer, Richard Ulrich
Publisher: Hans Im Gluck
Art: Doris Matthäus, Stefan Sonnberger, Franz-Georg Stämmele
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post El Grande Review appeared first on Punchboard.

In Courtisans you play the role of an attendee at the Queen’s banquet. What’s on the menu? Hors d’oeuvres of influence & backstabbing, followed by a main course of skullduggery and shenanigans. Come, gorge yourself on the feast of fun this small box brings to your table too.

At its core, Courtisans is a very simple game. In the middle of the table is the cloth ‘board, which represents the Queen’s table. It’s separated into seven sections: one per noble family, and a middle section where spies go – more on this later. For every one of your turns you’ll find yourself holding three cards – each in a different suit, and all you have to do is play all three. One goes to the area in front of you, one goes to another player’s area (your choice), and the final one goes to the Queen’s table.

The last of these is the most interesting. If you play the card above the Queen’s table next to a particular family (each family has a colour/icon), you’re essentially voting to make that family esteemed. Play it below the table, and you’re trying to drag them down to be fallen from grace. At the end of the game, a family with more cards above than below is esteemed, more below than above is fallen from grace, and a tie means they’re neither. They’re the Switzerland of Courtisans – neutral.

Role-playing

If that all sounds interesting but bland, you’re right. Things would very quickly get deadlocked. Luckily there are lots of cards which have different roles in the game to spice things up. Nobles are worth two cards each, which can be huge. Assassins let you kill a card in the area in which you play it, regardless of whether it’s yours, the Queen’s table, or another player’s area, upsetting the balance of power. Guards, however, cannot be killed. Once they’re in place, they never move. Finally, you have the most interesting of the lot – Spies.

Spies are placed face-down, regardless of where you play it. If you play it to the Queen’s table, you play it to the centre, which isn’t assigned to any particular family. It’s played either above or below, so you know it’ll pull or push a family’s credibility, but you don’t know which family until the end of the game when the cards get revealed.

Scoring at the end of the game is easy. You count the cards around the Queen’s table and see which families are esteemed and which have fallen from grace. For every card you have matching the suits of esteemed families you gain a point, and for every fallen from grace family you lose a point. There’s one final twist of the knife where each player has two secret objectives, each of which is worth 3 VPs. What’s great about these are that they require players to do things like make sure certain families have fallen from grace, or to have more of a particular family than a neighbour, etc.

Quite a looker

The most obvious thing that sets Courtisans apart from many of its small-box peers is the quality of the production. The cards are long, tarot-size cards with beautiful inlaid gold on every one of them. The cardstock is thick and nice to handle (although those long cards are always awkward to shuffle). The little cloth board is a really cute touch, as it so easily could have been a plain old cardboard board instead. Yes, it’s a bit annoying that it never lies flat straight out of the box, but it’s so cute there on the table.

One of the best things about the game is its small footprint. Even though each player has their own tableau in front of them, you can stack and splay cards of each suit, just so there’s enough visible so that everyone knows how many of each card each other player has. I’ve played this on small tables in bars, on a desk, on a table in the corner of a shop, and the fact that I can makes it perfect for what it is. An interactive, clever game that only takes 15 minutes to play. It makes it the perfect ‘between games’ or ‘waiting for the food to arrive’ game.

Final thoughts

What can I say that I haven’t already? Courtisans has been a hit with every person I’ve introduced it to, which is coming close to 20 people now. It’s so easy to explain, and despite your turn being so simple – play three cards to three places – it’s surprisingly tactical. I was a little worried at first that the Assassin cards would alienate some people, because some folk hate take-that in a game, but so far it’s been a non-issue. I think it’s because it feels less personal and less invasive than in other games. You can’t be certain you haven’t helped someone out by killing a card from in front of them.

The small box means you can take it pretty much anywhere. It tucks into the small gaps in my backpacks which means it’s a convention and games night mainstay for me now. It’s always there, just in case, and because it’s so fast and so enjoyable, it invariably gets played a lot. If there’s a gap for a quick, interactive game in your collection, I heartily recommend Couritsans. It’s great.

You can buy Courtisans from my retail partner, Kienda, right here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

Courtisans (2024)

Design: Romaric Galonnier, Anthony Perone
Publisher: Catch Up Games
Art: Noëmie Chevalier
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Courtisans Review appeared first on Punchboard.

A lightweight game needs to do two things well to be a hit with new players and people who only enjoy these lighter games. They need to be fun, and they need to have a theme which appeals to a wide demographic. Tenpenny Parks nails it on both counts. Entry-level worker-placement combined with polyomino placement covers things mechanically, while the theme of building an amusement park isn’t likely to find too many detractors. It manages to do both things really well, resulting in a game I think I could teach to just about anybody and be confident that they’d have a good time.

Parks and Rec

The idea of the game is simple. Each player has their own board which represents the land they’re going to develop into a top-notch amusement park. They also each have three oversized wooden worker meeples. The main part of the game has the players take turns placing a worker at a time on the various spaces on the board. Anyone who’s been here before knows what to expect. There are four shared spaces which anyone can go to as many times as they like: the Bank (get $2), the Arborist (remove two trees), the Contractor (get little concession tiles for your park) and the Realtor (get expansion boards to make your park bigger).

The other spaces surround the biggest piece of eye candy – the gorgeous carousel in the middle of the board. Each of the six spaces around it relates to one of six decks of cards, each of which features attractions for your park. Those spaces are first-come, first-served, and can offer discounts as well as penalties to some of the prices. There can be real competition for these, which makes being the first player really important. More on that later. If you buy a card you get the associated polyomino tile to add to your park.

Building your park is similar to games like Patchwork, Barenpark and even heavier games like A Feast for Odin. You can build anywhere there isn’t a tree in the way, but it almost feels like a shame to hire the arborist and shift some trees, because they’re gorgeous little wooden pieces and I want more on my board, not fewer dammit! The biggest divergence from games like Barenpark and Isle of Cats is that no two tiles can have touching edges. No exceptions. Touching diagonal corners is fine, just keep all that orthogonal nonsense out of here. Once you realise how this works you suddenly understand the puzzle of trying to make things fit, and the importance of clearing trees and adding extra boards. It’s tricky.

Making tracks

There’s a cool mechanism added at the bottom of the main board in the form of three shared tracks. Building attractions and concession stands give you bumps along these tracks, each of which is evaluated once in each of the five rounds of the game. If you’re ahead on the Thrill track you can take a step back for a bonus worker for the following round. In a game with only 15 turns, every extra turn can be huge. The player furthest ahead on the Awe track can opt to lose a step to take the first player shovel, which not only lets you take the first turn, but also choose which way you want to like the carousel to point for the next round. Finally, the leader on the Joy track can also choose to lose a step and claim $3. It might not sound like much, but money is tight in Tenpenny Parks.

I love these tracks for the choices they make players make. As I mentioned at the outset, this is a light game, so forcing choices like these is a glimpse into what more complicated games offer. You don’t have to take the bonuses after all. You can opt not to and claim a VP and stay ahead on the track, which might prove valuable if you have a private goal card which wants you to be furthest ahead on a certain track for bonus points at the end of the game.

There’s another really interesting phase of each round. Each completed attraction (except the Souvenir shops, which boost income) gives players an option to spend their hard-earned cash on advertising, bringing in more VPs per round. It sounds like a no-brainer to do it, but sometimes you might have your eye on a really lucrative, but expensive attraction in the next round. No money means a trip to the banker, which means one less worker to use. Maybe not Lacerda-level brain melting, but certainly enough agency to get players invested in their park.

Friendly and inviting

I need to take a few lines to explain how impressed I am with the production of Tenpenny Parks for the most part. The carousel was a pain to put together for me, not least because some of the panels had delaminated, but because it’s a tight fit. However, once it’s done it feels incredibly solid, and it’s not coming apart anytime soon. Having a huge hole in the main board is unusual, but having the carousel slot in so nicely is great.

The big, chunky workers are a nice touch, as are the thick, sturdy tokens throughout. The whole thing is blocked out with bold, poster paint colours that lend to its newbie-friendly table presence. Nothing about the game is intimidating or overbearing. It looks, feels, and indeed is perfect for lightweight gamers.

The only downside from a development and production point of view is the choice of colours for two of the attraction types. Given the stark colours used throughout, it seems odd that the souvenirs and Old West attractions are yellow and yellowy-brown respectively. It’s not the end of the world, but it stuck in my brain each time I played it that I mistook the colours of the cards more than once, and that’s the sort of thing I’m duty-bound to moan about in a review. See what you think in the picture below. It might just be a ‘me’ problem.

Final thoughts

Tenpenny Parks makes me smile. My chosen board game world is one of muted beige and dry themes, so Tenpenny Parks stands out like a neon helter-skelter in the middle of it. I love it for that. The bright colours, streamlined gameplay, and open, friendly approach to the game are lovely. As a self-confessed heavy game nerd, I’m also appreciative of the fact that there’s still enough game in there to sink my teeth into while the rest of my family are content to make nice-looking parks, and enjoy the game for what it is – a fun time. Importantly, the game doesn’t take hours to play. Five rounds and you’re done, all within 90 minutes. There’s a lot to be said for that brevity in a modern game.

Despite my grumble about the colours above, Vincent Dutrait’s artwork again stands head-and-shoulders above many. I love the wooden pieces, they’re chunky, tactile and fun to use. There’s a bit of a disconnect between me buying a crazy rollercoaster and then putting a small cardboard tile on my park mat, but equally I’d be complaining about a big plastic mini obscuring my view if it was the other way around. I’m an ornery monkey at times.

There’s not enough here to satisfy you if your regular group usually contends with fare from Messrs Lacerda and Turczi, but if you’ve got a group you want to edge towards medium-weight games, or a family that rolls their eyes when you lovingly stroke your copy of Civolution (read my review of that here, right after you finish this one), Tenpenny Parks will be a hit. Polyomino placement is fun, worker placement is fun, the game is beautiful, and thematically it outperforms so many other games in the same space. A lightweight heavy-hitter.

Tenpenny Parks (2022)

Design: Nate Linhart
Publisher: Thunderworks Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45-75 mins

The post Tenpenny Parks Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Any time I get my hands on a new Paolo Mori game I get excited, so I was thrilled when Osprey Games offered me a copy of Battalion: War of the Ancients to take a look at. It’s a game which masquerades as a wargame, has all the theme and trappings of a war game, but plays more like an asymmetric duelling card game. It sets out to do something very particular, and it does it brilliantly. Battalion is great fun, if not without a rough edge or two.

They say stay in your lane, boy

The first thing you’ll notice is there’s no board. A board game review site reviewing a game without a board?! The very idea… The lack of board is one of its biggest strengths, as the game is modular and only takes up as much space as you want it to. As long as you’ve got enough space to have three sectors (five in a four-player game), you’re good.

All you’ve got to worry about is a small player board, a few cards, some dice, and a whole lot of tiles. The tiles are a funny shape, they remind me of those tickets you used to get from the deli counter in a supermarket, but wider. Younger readers, ask your parents. Each tile represents something in your chosen empire’s army. A tile is known as a rank, and when you jigsaw them together – which, by the way, is way more satisfying a thing to do than it should be – they become a unit. Units fight against the opponent’s units, lining up in the aforementioned sectors.

If you’re at all familiar with MOBA games like DOTA or LoL, the concept of lanes won’t be alien to you. Using a two-player game of Battalion as an example, you have central, left and right lanes to deploy your units, and choosing which to deploy where is a huge part of the game. Not just because of the tactical nuance of the match-ups you want to make, but also because if you start a round uncontested in the central sector, you instantly win.

Instant win conditions – there’s something you don’t see in your games every day. Let me tell you, it really adds to the already spicy levels of nonsense going on in this game. Nonsense in the very best sense of the word too. How many other games in your collection let you utter phrases like “Okay, I’m sending in my elephants over here on the right”? See, wonderful nonsense in a world of beige farming and plastic zombies.

Bumping heads

Combat is pleasingly clean and easy in Battalion. No consulting of tables or calculating odds as per a more hardcore war game. Instead, you roll three D8 dice. 8s are guaranteed hits, then you assign any other dice to units to at least match the value printed on their tile for long- or close-range damage. You can grab extra dice to swing the odds in your favour by certain attributes of some ranks, discarding tactics cards, or managing to overlap (i.e. flank) an opposing enemy.

I love the combat system. A game like Battalion is aimed at drawing in more casual players, and if Paolo & Francesco had used something more convoluted it just wouldn’t have worked as well as it does. Being able to point at a tile and tell a new player “You need to roll at least that number to hit me” is a real boon. The trick comes in choosing which units you use, and when. You see, issuing orders – such as assaulting the enemy – comes at a cost. You have a stock of command tokens which you need to add to units to do stuff. If you don’t have enough, you can’t do the thing. When you’re in that situation you can Rally which brings them back to your board and flips Disorder command tokens back to their Order side.

Why would you have tokens on their Disorder side? Well, when you take hits you can offset some of the damage by flipping an available command token to the Disorder side and placing it on the damaged unit. This is where some of the most interesting decision-making comes in the game. Tokens are in short supply. If they’re marking Disorder on a unit, you can’t spend them to give orders. So what’s best – lose ranks in battle and save the tokens to make your own attacks, or save the rank from death at the expense of being able to do less? Battalion has you making these kinds of decisions constantly, which is great in a game which might only last half an hour.

The tactics cards I mentioned before are another great addition. You start each game with a slim deck of them and they offer all kinds of bonuses when you play them in battle. When you Rally though, you’re forced to draw another tactics card into your hand. This would be no big deal in most games, but in Battalion it’s the opposite. If you’re forced to draw a card and you don’t have any left, it’s another instant game-over situation. When you consider shorter setups only give you six cards to start with, you start to get a grasp of how vital they are.

Collateral damage

As much as I really enjoy Battalion, there are a couple of things which niggle me. First of all, are the Traits. Rank tiles have traits printed on them. Keywords which have different effects at different stages of the game. When I first played the game I was a little disheartened when I saw all the different verbs & adjectives printed on the right-hand side of the tiles. I remember learning Too Many Bones (review here) for the first time and just drowning in keywords. Having to refer back to the rulebook or a player aid every single time you want to plan a turn is horrible.

In fairness to Battalion, the traits aren’t as bad as the mental overhead of the keywords in Chip Theory’s games. There are only 14 different traits listed in the rulebook, but what annoys me about them is that very few of them are obvious just by reading the word. The number of times I found myself re-reading the descriptions for Discipline or Steadfast is ridiculous. I’m sure if you played it frequently it might not be quite as big an issue, but it still bothered me.

That all pales beside the issue I have with the command tokens though. They look cool, and they’re screen-printed on both sides. But for some reason though, and I really can’t fathom it, both sides look similar. Really similar. Look at the example below. Bear in mind that this is much more zoomed-in than your view over a table. The top token is on the Disorder side, while the one below is on the Order side. Picture this but with loads of tokens on loads of neighbouring ranks.

It makes it difficult – for me at least – to tell which command tokens I’ll get back when I Rally. Remember, when rallying you get tokens on the Order side back to spend, while those on the Disorder side get flipped instead. I just don’t understand why one side didn’t have a big cross on it, or even just left blank. It might sound like me being picky for the sake of it, but Battalion is almost entirely driven by the command tokens at your disposal, so an at-a-glance read of the game state is really important, and is unfortunately made more cumbersome because of the way they’re printed.

Final thoughts

Despite my pet peeve with the command token printing, I really like Battalion. I lead a busy life and have to squeeze a lot of different games into my free time, so I haven’t played this as much as someone who loves lighter war games might. I really like it though. The four ancient empires in the box (Roman Republic, Carthage, Han, Greco-Batrian) have some similarities in the units they let you command, but where they’re asymmetric the differences are stark and varied.

Playing casually to learn means you’ll probably turn to the preset scenarios in the rulebook which define the units, numbers of cards and tokens, and guide you gently into the system. Don’t get fooled into thinking this is the ‘lite’ way to play just because it’s using presets. Playing with them is fantastic. If you feel the need to mix things up, however, you can play mustered battles. This is more akin to drafting with pre-built decks in a card duelling game, and is great because you can agree between you the size and length of the game before you start.

I’m still not sure how the design for the command tokens ever got through playtesting, and while it’s not enough to make me not recommend the game, I can easily see people using Sharpies to mark one side to make it more obvious. Is Battalion for everyone? No, I don’t think so. Some people will bounce hard off the theme. While a lot of people are happy to play pretty much anything, ancient warring empires doesn’t do it for everyone, and this isn’t the game to change that. The same is true of hardcore wargames. Battalion won’t satisfy the hex-and-counter or 4X yearnings of those people. But for anyone looking for a quick, very clever, satisfying lane battler with tons of space for strategy and tactics, Battalion: War of the Ancients is superb.

You can buy Battalion: War of the Ancients right now from my retail partner Kienda. Click here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

Battalion: War of the Ancients (2024)

Design: Paolo Mori, Francesco Sirocchi
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Roland Macdonald
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 20-60 mins

The post Battalion: War Of The Ancients Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Space invader

The first thing to understand is that Civolution is a sandbox game. A big, heavy sandbox. It’s a cliché in heavy Euro games to say there are a lot of paths to victory, but in the case of Civolution it’s warranted. The first time you sit down to play the game the thing that hits you first is just how big the player boards are. The ”consoles’ as the game calls them are huge. My first thought was one of “Uh-oh, Stefan’s gone for a gimmick here to make the game stand out”, but that fear was pretty quickly allayed. The left side of the board is mostly used to house resources, while the right is your menu of actions.

At this point you might think it would be better to have a shared action board in the same way A Feast For Odin does it, but there are some pretty good reasons why that would never work. You see, in Civolution you all start with the same actions available to you, but as the game goes on you can upgrade the actions by flipping or removing the action tiles from their sockets, meaning that my Migrate action, for example, might be more powerful than yours. Strategy in the game is so woven into the combinations of actions and resources that having your actions right there in front of you, so personal, makes playing and understanding the game easier.

The resource side of the console you could argue could be done smaller, but I’m glad they didn’t. Unusually for a modern Euro, there aren’t a heap of different wooden or cardboard resources. In fact there are none! Each player has a pile of octagonal wooden pieces which have a variety of different uses. The different resource types each have a space on your console, and you use your wooden markers to show what you have. For example, if you collect two wood, you put two markers in the ‘wood’ space on the board. It’s so easy, and important (for me at least) is how quick it makes setup and teardown. The resource spaces are in rows and columns too, which denote which type of region they come from, and how much they’re worth if you trade them.

On top of all of this, figuratively as well as literally, is the big, empty, unusual space above the board. This space is where you slot in cards you’ve been able to play, giving you yet more decisions to make, and a chance to build a powerful engine to drive your civilisation forward. Cards get slotted into rows and columns. The higher the row, the more points it’s worth at the end of the game, but the more expensive it is to place it. Placement is a trickier decision than you might think, because once you play a card of a certain colour into a slot, all subsequent cards of the same colour have to go in that same column. So despite the player boards being so large, they serve a genuine purpose.

In addition to the consoles you need to find space for two more boards and a jigsaw-style map, but with them being modular you can make it work with whatever table space you might have available.

Dicing with destiny

I used a lot of words to try and convey how big and imposing Civolution is, but I did it for a good reason. This game looks daunting and confusing, and that in itself is enough to put people off. Maybe not people like you and I, people who love a heavy game, but those who you’d like to welcome to the dark side who are heavy-curious. Once you get past that initial ‘Woah’ factor, playing the game is really not that bad. I mentioned Castles of Burgundy at the top of this review, and you can see some of its DNA in Civolution. Actions are driven by your personal stash of dice. If you don’t like the values on your dice you can use ‘ideas’ in the same way you could ‘workers’ in Castles to change the value one step. You place dice on spots matching their values, take the action, then remove them. Sound familiar? Each action requires two dice of different values, so while it’s true that someone could just roll lucky each round, the reality is that you need to allow for a bit of mitigation in your plans.

There’s a central pool of extra dice you can take from by using a certain action, and extra dice are a good thing, because it means you can take more actions before you’re forced to take a reset turn. Reset turns are what drive each round towards completion and although a necessity, often feel like a wasted turn. Everyone else is doing something, and you’re stuck rolling your dice instead. Even in this though, this simple cycle of dice rolling and using, there’s strategy. If someone grabs a load of dice early in the game you might think it gives them an insurmountable advantage long-term, but taking a minute to extrapolate what’s going on makes you realise it’s not necessarily the case. They took turns to claim those dice for a start, and while they might have lots of dice to spend, if the rest of the players are driving the round towards its end with frequent resets, they might not get the chance to use them all.

That’s just one small example of the layers upon layers of strategy bubbling under the surface of Civolution. All of these words so far and I’ve not even touched on the map in the middle of the table, which is what the whole game is built around. You send your tribes out in the world to collect resources and build farms and settlements. As they move from region to region they discover new resources and uncover new landmarks. So far, so 4X, but it introduces a really interesting layer of economics into the game which I think is under-appreciated.

You can only gather resources once they’ve been discovered by migrating tribes into new regions. This lets people Produce resources in them, then later Transport (two of the game’s actions) to move them to their boards to use. However, you can also use the Trade action to gain resources. If they’ve been discovered on the map those resources cost two Gold each. If they haven’t, you can still buy them, but they cost four gold, and gold is hard to come by. If nobody decides to explore the continent – which is a perfectly valid strategy – you need to make sure you’ve got a good economy, or you’re going to struggle to build and pay for cards later in the game.

It’s such a unique direction for a modern Euro to take. To have a game which can be so different every time you play it, and to have so much of the game’s meandering path from start to end dictated by the players’ actions.

Making tracks

Euro fans rejoice – Civolution has tracks. Six of them! Well, five with an extra, little track on another board, but hey, a track’s a track. The tracks grant you rewards and end-of-game points, but some are randomly chosen during the game setup to give some big points at the end of each of the four eras. You climb the tracks by playing cards that come with a cost, and then form a part of your own engine. It’s all very by-the-books from that point of view, and that’s good, because we like those things in a game. But for a game to stand out, it needs something different. Something interesting. A hook.

Civolution’s hook is the dice. The white dice are used to conduct actions – two dice per action, and the dice used have to match those on the action. As mentioned earlier, there are ways to mitigate for unlucky rolls, and in order to do well you need to allow yourself to take the occasional turn to bolster those mitigation options. Then you have the pink dice which are used for hunting and passing tests in the game, and those tests are usually ways to boost the effectiveness of upgraded actions. At first, you have one pink die and only pass if you roll a one, but as the game goes on you get the chance to get more dice, and by moving up the sixth (Agera) track, the number range you need to roll gets bigger. Hitting 1-3 on three dice is much more likely than a 1 on one die.

The dice form the bulk of the game’s player interaction too. There are only a few extra pink and white dice to claim (player count + 1), so what happens when they all get claimed? The action to take a die still exists on all players’ boards, so when you perform it when all the dice are claimed, you take a die from the player with the most of the colour you chose. Aside from dice thievery, the other direct interaction comes when you move tribes around the map. You can kick someone out of their spot and into ‘the wilderness’, at the expense of weakening your own tribe. It’s nice, there’s just enough bite there to keep things interesting without the game devolving into a game of spite and take-that!

Final thoughts

Trying to keep this review around 1500 words has proved really difficult, which is why it now tops 2000. I just want to talk and ramble about it so much. It rode a huge wave of hype after Essen, and I like to make a point of waiting for that initial hype to die down before I play and review a game, because it’s easy to get swept along, even subconsciously. Civolution was worth the wait. It sounds ridiculous to say, so I’m hesitant to even give life to the words, but this might just be Stefan’s magnum opus ahead of Castles of Burgundy as far as I’m concerned. And that’s coming from someone who’s bought three different versions of CoB over the years and has over 50 games logged on BGA on top of real-life plays.

The way that every game feels and unfolds differently is great. Yes, the actions on offer are the same each time, and the map is only randomised to a certain extent, but the way things play out differs every time. The example I gave above about nobody exploring is just one example. In a recent 4-player game we stuck to a third of the map and things were tight. I discovered stone – a resource that you need for quite a lot of early game things – in the fourth and final era, which brought a collective “Oh my god! Finally!” from the table. In another game one player found himself alone in a corner of the world with three tribes and no competition and ended up racking up a load of points by moving around the regions in a circle (one space in each region gives VPs for occupying it).

I want to make a special mention of the production in Civolution. The player boards are huge, but premium, and I love the way that it just uses the same octagonal pieces for everything in the game. It makes setup and teardown so easy, so quick and means that I don’t have to factor that time into the ‘have we got time to play this?’ decision at game night, and to me that’s a blessing. The huge raft of actions available will undoubtedly put some people off, and if you don’t already like heavy games, I don’t think this is the one that’ll change your mind, but the rest of you will love it. A glorious sandbox which feels like all the best bits of Stefan Feld’s designs rolled up into one beautiful game. A must-have in my opinion.

Civolution (2024)

Design: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Deep Print Games
Art: Dennis Lohausen
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Civolution Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I’m going to split this into three parts: Best light game, best medium-weight game, and best complex game, as I don’t think it’s fair to compare apples to oranges. There’s something for everyone, and I want to give my opinion which is the best of each bunch. I’m not including games that I previewed that aren’t available yet, and there may be games which are from late 2023, but I’m not being too fussy about release dates. This is about the games that I’ve reviewed this year.

Note that although this list is in no way sponsored or influenced by anything other than my own opinions, my retail partner kienda.co.uk happens to sell most of these games. If you haven’t already ordered through Kienda (who are great, for what it’s worth) make sure to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard to get 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

Without further ado…

Best Light Game 2024

Winner – Looot

Looot came out of nowhere for me and it was a real hit. The gameplay is really easy to explain and there’s so much emergent strategy once you get the hang of it. Just the right amount of player interaction on the main board with any real take-that, a clever puzzle on your own board to maximise scoring, and the challenge of trying to tie that all together to come up with a win.

French publishers are on fire at the moment, and Looot is just another example of that. Gigamic have a hit on their hands, and when you consider the fact you can pick this up for less than £20, it’s a genuine no-brainer to have in your collection as far as I’m concerned.

You can read my full review here – Looot Review – and pick up a copy from Kienda right here.

Honourable mentions

Faraway – It was a close-run thing for me as to whether Faraway or Looot won best light game, but I just prefer Looot, and strictly speaking Faraway came out in 2023. The unique mechanism of building your simple tableau backwards works brilliantly, and messes with your brain in a way that most light games have no right to. It’s clever, quick and fun. You can read my full review here, and pick up a copy from Kienda here.

Molehill Meadows – Designer Chris Priscott is in a real purple patch. Not content with getting Zuuli snapped-up by Oink Games to become Moving Wild, he also released my favourite new flip-and-write of the year. Molehill Meadows is charming, easy to explain, and has a lot of variety and ways to explore. If you like roll-and-writes as much as I do, you’ll really enjoy Molehill Meadows. Read my review here, and pick up a copy from Kienda here.

Best Medium-weight Game 2024

Winner – Cascadero

This was by far the hardest category for me to choose this year. There are so many great games around now that won’t melt your brain but give you plenty to think about, but in the end, Cascadero from Bitewing Games and the seemingly eternal Reiner Knizia won out.

Cascadero is very easy to explain, plays out in less than an hour, but delivers a plethora of choices to make with every plonking of a horse. There’s a perfect level of interaction, it gives me cube rail feels, and ultimately turns into some kind of race game by the end of it. It’s a gorgeous, wonderfully enjoyable game which I keep teaching to new people just to share the love.

You can read my full review here – Cascadero Review – and pick up a copy from Kienda right here.

Honourable mentions

River of Gold – Described by many, including me, as feeling ‘a bit like Lords of Waterdeep’, River of Gold is great. It’s a clever mix of roll-and-move (trust me, it works), tableau building, contract fulfilment, and shared building spaces. Another game that’s simple enough to introduce to relative newcomers to the hobby, but with enough depth to keep hardcore nerds enjoying themselves, and with a beautiful board with inlaid metallic gold. Read my review here and pick up a copy for yourself from Kienda here.

Ironwood – It’s on the heavier side of medium-weight, but very deserving of its spot here. Ironwood is a two-player asymmetric game mixing area control with multi-use cards, and it’s a lot of fun. Mindclash games have delivered a game which feels like you’re getting the deluxe edition when you buy the base game. Less than £50 and including fancy wooden and metal pieces with a custom insert is great value, but on top of that the game is excellent. Check out the full review here, and treat yourself to a copy from Kienda here.

Best Complex Game 2024

Winner – Shackleton Base

This was another category I agonised over. Heavy games are my favourites, and I was spoiled for choice, but in the end, Shackleton Base won. I love the competition over the shared building space on the main board, combined with competition for achievements in each of the corporations on offer with each play. The game is pretty easy to play once you get the hang of it, but there are so many options open to you. It’s not just a case of choosing what to do, but also when to do it.

The individual boxes for everything in the game seems like a pointless extravagance at first, but it genuinely helps with set-up and teardown. There’s huge scope for variety by combining the included corporations in different combinations, and I’ve just had a huge amount of fun with the game every time I’ve played it. Bravo Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone, and it’s yet another French publisher on the list!

You can read my full review here – Shackleton Base Review – and buy a copy of the game from Kienda here.

Honourable mentions

Arcs – Sacrilege to some, I know, but Arcs just missed out. It’s had a Marmite reception with most people either loving or hating the game., and I fell firmly into the former category. Cole Wehrle has some incredible designs to his name, and this is yet another. This isn’t the grand strategy 4X game you’re looking for, but it is the chaotic, ever-changing, space opera in a couple of hours nonsense you never knew you needed. If you like Cole’s other games like Root or Pax Pamir, I think you’ll get a kick out of Arcs. Read my full review here, and grab your own copy from Kienda here.

Sankoré – What’s the matter? Did you forget Sankoré came out in 2024? I’ll seem like a Fabio Lopiano fanboy including two of his games in my top three for the year, but Sankoré deserves it. It’s a vast, table-hogging game of yet more Ian O’Toole muted colours, but it’s excellent. Combining each of the mini-games on the main board (which is what they feel like) to score well requires some clever planning and often a lot of pivoting, but the end result is a satisfying, well-made heavy Euro, which you ought to try if you haven’t yet. Read my full review here and pick up a copy from Kienda here.

Summary

I’m fortunate enough to have played a lot of great games this year. Some old, some new, and it’s nice to be able to highlight the newer ones that really left their mark on me. Let me be clear by saying that on another day, any of the games in each category could have won it, and there is a whole heap of fantastic games that I just didn’t have the space to include.

What do you think? Do you agree with my choices, or have some others you’d put in their place? Am I on the money or a lunatic who has no idea what he’s doing? Let me know in the comments, or head over to find me on the various social channels and let me know.

Thank you for reading Punchboard this year and over any previous years. This is a hobby for me, but one that I love, so I’m going to keep going. Here’s to a game-filled, happy, healthy 2025 for you and your loved ones.

Adam.

The post Game of the Year 2024 appeared first on Punchboard.

Can I interest you in an acre of land on the moon?

As I mentioned before, corporate greed is at the heart of Shackleton Base. The game comes with seven different corps, all in their own little (pre-made!) boxes in the main box, but you only ever use three of them per game. “Holy Clangers!” you might think, “That’s a whole load of replayability”. This is where my initial fears wormed their way to the surface. You see, a lot of the corporation interaction is in the form of contract fulfilment. Collect some stuff, turn it in, get some points and other stuff. After teaching the game three times, each time using the recommended starting corps, I was worried that the differences between the corporations would only be skin-deep.

I needn’t have worried. While the other corporations may be variations on a theme in a way, they still mix the game up enough to make it feel substantively different. Evergreen Farms, for example, let you build new greenhouse tiles on the board. To Mars lets you build your domes and place astronauts on a secondary board with a view to kicking them on their way to the red planet. Skywatch introduces the threat of an asteroid at the end of the game that will wipe buildings out, lest the players work together to build defences. You get the idea. It’s not like learning a new game, but throwing them in in different combinations presents some really interesting choices to make, and keep the game feeling fresher than a hunk of ancient moon cheese.

Actually playing the game isn’t too difficult. Players draft a shuttle tile at the start of the round which gives them some starting resources, six astronauts to place (one per turn, six turns per each of the three eras, so 18 actions for the whole game), and sets player turn order. On your turn the astronauts either get placed around the hex map to harvest resources and cold, hard cash, on the command action area to carry out actions like building, claiming corporation cards, or researching, or get sent to the lunar gateway to trade for an astronaut to place on your player board.

The main board is where a lot of the attention is because it’s a big, shared building area with some really neat area control mechanisms, but the player boards are equally fascinating. As the various buildings come off your board and get built on the moon, the spaces they free up become places you can house astronauts. There are loads of places to choose from, all giving different benefits. Discounts on upkeep, bonus stuff during income, increased reputation, or more lovely VPs for the end of the game. It quickly dawns on you that it’s not just a case of choosing the first building of a type and going with that. Long-term planning can reap big rewards.

Ring-a-ring-o’-roses

The hexes where you build are a part of my favourite puzzle in Shackleton base. Each hex can have a building of one space, one of two spaces, and a three-spacer too. If you build early in one of those spaces it costs you less to build in the small ones, with smaller upkeep costs, and you get the benefits earlier. Building later is more expensive (bigger buildings need more resources) but can pay huge dividends at the end of each round.

When a round draws to a close, each of the astronauts placed around the edge of the crater to get resources and money during the round are dished out to the players. Each astronaut faces a row of hexes, and the total space occupied by each player in the row is calculated. The player with the most claims the little astronaut and finds a place to put him in their player board, which as I mentioned before can earn you some serious income and discounts. It’s such a fun puzzle, and I love the moments when someone builds somewhere you weren’t expecting, meaning that the astronauts you were planning on banking are heading to someone else instead. Maybe no one can hear you scream in space, but on the moon, they can certainly hear you mumbling “You absolute bastard” under your breath.

This is one example of the thing that Shackleton Base does really well. It has mechanisms at play which feel simple and inconsequential, but after even just a couple of plays in the bank you start to realise their significance. Building late can net you lots of astronauts, but does so at the cost of more expensive command actions – i.e. the action that actually does the building. The first players to take actions there do them for free, while people later in each row pay increasingly more to do so. It makes timing crucial, and a lot of fun.

It all goes towards making what I love in a modern Euro – a ton of indirect interaction. There’s no take-that in the game but oh-so many opportunities to screw someone over just by doing something that directly benefits you. The juiciest little morsel is the energy track on the board. Some buildings and actions require energy to be spent, but energy is a shared resource. Anyone can build it, and anyone can spend it. There’s nothing more annoying than watching your plans blow away like dust because someone spent the energy you were banking on. You can make more power if you have the right resource, and it’s a free action, but it’s still this gorgeous layer of niggle that just bubbles under the surface the whole time.

Get the band back together

While there’s a solo mode included in the box (which works well, for what it’s worth), Shackleton Base is a game I only want to play with three or four players. There’s a two-player mode which blocks some spaces and uses an overlay for the Command action area. It works, but the game just isn’t as interesting. It’s up to the players if they choose to build in the same area of the crater or spread out. Sure, maybe you and your significant other like a game that lets you play without much interaction, but this game is so much better when the players are bouncing off of one another.

When you play Shackleton Base with three or four players, there’s really no choice about whether you stay away from the other player’s buildings. You’re tripping over one another for space to build and there’s a real tussle over the astronauts at the end of a round. In a two-player game, it’s easy to have an unspoken agreement along the lines of “Well, you’ve got those guys tied up, I’ll go over here and I can guarantee I get these”. It’s still a decent game, but it’s missing a little je ne sais quoi, like getting a fish supper on a Friday night and not dousing it with salt and vinegar, or eating a burrito without the spicy sauce. It’s good, it’s just not as good as it could be.

Play with three or four players to get the full experience, it’s where it’s at its best.

Final thoughts

I have a love-hate relationship with Fabio Lopiano’s games. Actually, it’s more like a love-infuriation thing, because I love his games, I just always feel like they end a round too soon. He’s a big tease. When I first played Merv (review here) I actually played a round more than I should. It just felt right. Ragusa (review here) and Zapotec (review here) were the same. His recent partnerships with Nestore Mangone and Mandela F-G seem to be steering away from that brevity, and I’m here for it. Shackleton Base is more like Sankoré (review here) and Autobahn in that it feels like there’s enough time to bring your plans to fruition. This is obviously very personal, but that’s why you’re here – to get my opinion.

Shackleton Base rode a wave of hype out of 2024’s Spiel Essen, and it’s deserved. It’s a clever, interesting game that feels different to any other game I’ve played this year. I love the way the shared building space has so much to consider. Building somewhere opens up those resources to you. Choosing which corporations place tokens around them dictates which corporations you lean toward. And then there’s the really satisfying collection of the astronauts based on row dominance. I have a near-irrational enjoyment of this part, and it’s not even an action I take. It’s just a part of the round-end process. Getting that sudden influx of astronauts just before you pay for upkeep and gather your income is wonderful.

The production levels are really high. The little boxes for the game components come ready-made, show what’s inside them on the outside, and aid with setup and teardown. I referenced Skymines in the intro, which also includes boxes, but doesn’t meet any of those conditions, so it’s a welcome relief to see Sorry We Are French doing it so well. It might not be worth mentioning, but my copy didn’t come with sticky dots to seal the player boards shut, but having spoken to the UK distributor it sounds like it was missed in the first run. The screen-printed wooden pieces are great, the cards and iconography are really well done, and I’m impressed with the A4 card aids for each corporation. It’s great to be able to hand them around the table so players can answer their own questions.

I’ve played Shackleton base with nine different people now, and all of them have enjoyed it. The two-player game feels a little tepid to me compared to three or four, so maybe that’s worth bearing in mind, but overall this is a really good game. A clean, easy-to-grasp Euro game, with plenty of room to experiment with your approach, and a ton of variability with the seven included corps and asymmetric leader tiles. It’s also a game in which I can honestly say I don’t have to continuously refer to the rulebook to check, which is a sign of good design in my books. Shackleton Base is an easy recommendation for me to make.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon (2024)

Design: Fabio Lopiano, Nestore Mangone
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: David Sitbon
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Shackleton Base Review appeared first on Punchboard.

From the ground up

When I started writing that opening paragraph I had to choose which games I referenced several times. It struck me that many of the games that spring to mind when I think of two-player fare are spin-offs of existing games. 7 Wonders Duel. Splendor Duel. Cosmic Encounter Duel. Those that aren’t spin-offs are usually small board games or card games. Lost Cities, Battleline, Jaipur, Patchwork, Sky Team, etc. Ironwood bucks both trends by being both a two-player game from the get-go and delivering a full-size board game simultaneously.

Ultimately size doesn’t matter (apparently), but it’s a feeling which permeates the game everywhere. Ironwood is a premium two-player game. Wooden and metal playing pieces in the bog-standard (in fact, only) version of the game you can buy just reinforce that feeling. The setting of the game pits the forest-dwelling Woodwalkers against the industrial mining might of the Ironclad. Both are vying for control of the land of Ironwood and the crystals therein. It’s a pretty cool twist on the ordinary area control game because the two factions never share a space. The Woodwalkers can only stay in the forest spaces while the Ironclad are restricted to the rocks of the mountains, and never the twain shall meet. They just fight where the borders meet.

As is becoming more common in two-player games, the two sides are asymmetric. Each has its own deck of dual-use cards that drive the actions in the game. To paint the game with broad brush strokes, the Ironclad want to create forges in the mountains, harnessing the power of their great drill and building foundations, while the Woodwalkers use visions to locate ancient totems and to escort them back to the outskirts of the forest. It really works, too. Each side feels very different to play, even if the essence of the actions is the same. Movement is movement. Adding warbands is adding warbands. They feel fundamentally different to play as though, and that’s where a lot of Ironwood’s replay value comes from.

Balance

If you’ve played games with a decent level of asymmetry before, you know how important balance is, and how it can often feel missing in your first plays. Ironwood does the same. Woodwalkers – in my experience – felt like the faction who make the early progress, while the Ironclad take longer to build, but then have the potential to snowball later in the game. It’s a bit like Cats vs Birds in Root. The Woodwalkers have a consistent, rhythmic beat to their progress, while the Ironclad feel like spinning up a flywheel. That’s how playing Ironwood felt to me in my first games.

The important thing is the balance, and I’m happy to say that in my experience the game feels very well balanced. I’ve won and lost almost the same number of games as each faction, and while some of that will come down to the quality of the opponent, I feel like any inherent imbalances would have reared their ugly little heads by now. For sure, the Woodwalkers feel easier to do well with, and I’d advise giving them to new players while they learn the game, but with a game or two under your belt, you should have enough of an understanding to make a stand with either faction.

The feeling of a struggle is really well imparted by the game. The unknown locations of the totems mean that no two games will follow exactly the same flow. When combat happens, it uses a system I really enjoy. Each player can play a card from their hand, face-down. The cards are revealed, any bonuses from things like Golems are added, and the damage applied. If the opponent’s attack is higher than your defence, you lose units equal to the difference. However, and this is the fun bit, combat doesn’t end there. Once the punches have been thrown and bloodied noses wiped clean, a second value on the cards is checked – Dominance. As long as you still have a standing unit, you still have skin in the game. The side with the higher dominance can force any remaining losers to retreat, and they decide where to. Spicy!

Final thoughts

I’m really impressed with Ironwood. In every area it could make the effort to deliver something more than the minimum viable product, it does. The components are the sort you’d pay extra for in a deluxe game. The board isn’t tiny just because it’s for two players. It doesn’t feel like a multiplayer game re-imagined for two. The rulebook is, for the most part, excellent too. You can easily learn to play the game without the need for a video. I’m really pleased that Mindclash are offering this ‘Mindclash Play’ line of games, because it’s offering a hand to those who want to play their heavier games without diving in at the deep end.

The card-play in Ironwood is especially good. I love that the cards are used for their actions or their combat values. It forces you to make all kinds of judgment choices all of the time. One really clever part of the game’s design is to give each faction three core cards which are never lost. Even if you wager them in combat, they still return to your hand instead of the discard pile at the end of the round. Why does this matter? The game doesn’t give you enough rope to hang yourself with. You’ll never find yourself with a turn with no actions to take, because you’ll always be able to do the important things. A Splotter game this is not.

It’s worth mentioning that Ironwood comes with a fully-fledged solo bot to play against should you find yourself without an opponent. I tried it out for a game and found it a little fiddly, but far from impossible to run. There are a few flowchart-like actions to work out priority, but on the whole it seemed very smooth. This is a duelling game though, and at its best when you’re sat opposite someone trying to read their mind. It’s easy to learn, offers plenty of strategic and tactical choices, and throws in some clever cardplay and a nice twist on combat. For a touch over £40 when it releases here in retail, for a game that feels so premium, it’s crazy good value. If you have a regular player two, Ironwood is a fantastic game that tickles that part of my brain which Root does for four players. Highly recommended.

Review copy kindly provided by Mindclash Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Ironwood (2024)

Design: Maël Brunet, Julien Chaput
Publisher: Mindclash Games
Art: Villő Farkas, Qistina Khalidah
Players: 1-2
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Ironwood Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The games

The highlight of any convention for me is the people, but you’re probably not here for that. You want to know about the games, right? This year was a mix of new and old games for me, and here they are. Note that some of these will be getting full reviews in the not-too-distant future, so these synopses will be kinda short.

Castle Combo

The first game was a good recent one. Castle Combo is a cute, easy-to-explain tableau builder. Claim a total of 9 cards from the market in the middle of the table, each of which has a scoring condition. The aim is to get as many of those scoring conditions to depend on the other cards in your tableau. In an ideal world that’s 9 chances to score. It’s quick, the iconography is great, and there’s a surprisingly wide decision space for a game of nine limited turns. Good stuff.

Courtisans

Another quick and easy game we played at the bar, and one of my favourite small games this year. So much so that I played it multiple times over the weekend. There are six suits of cards in play. On your turn you play one to your own area, one to any other player, and one to the queen’s table in the middle. Essentially you’re trying to influence which suits are esteemed and which have fallen from grace, bumping the score for you and hindering your opponents. Quick with gorgeous cards, good times.

Lords of Vegas

The venerable Lords of Vegas is still relevant, moreso now than recently thanks to the crowdfunded reprint. I took it along and played it with three others, and we had an absolute blast. Laughing, groaning, cheering and absolute involvement from everyone. You get surprisingly attached to your little cardboard casinos, and there are few things in board games as satisfying as having a single die involved in rerolling a huge casino and winning ownership of it. A modern classic and no mistake.

Cascadero

I’ve already sung the praises of Cascadero. You can read my review right here. I love introducing new players to it because the concept of the game is so simple, but it offers so much choice in what becomes a cross between a network-builder and a race. More Knizia genius, but not the last of the weekend…

Shackleton Base

I have a full review of this coming soon, so I won’t dwell too long. I taught this to three new players and everyone had a great time. The shared map you build on combined with multi-use astronauts is great, and while it feels a lot like a traditional Euro game, the area control is so interestingly done, using intercepting lines and checking for dominance. It’s really, really good, and I’ll expand on why soon.

Flip 7

This was new to me, and I’d heard a lot of good things, so I actually bought this from Games Lore’s stand at the convention before I played it. I even fell foul of FOMO from time to time. It’s a really simple push-your-luck game. the deck has one 1-value card, two 2s, three 3s etc etc. Your turn is as simple as stick or twist, knowing that being dealt a second card matching one you already have means you bust. Get to 200 points and you win. That simple premise with some modifier and action cards makes for a really quick, enjoyable example of pure push-your-luck.

The Great Library

This one was a bit special. Vital Lacerda is one of my favourite designers (check out my reviews of The Gallerist and On Mars). Last year he brought a prototype of Speakeasy, and this year it was Great Library. Set around the fabled great library at Alexandria, it’s a heavy, cleverly-integrated euro game which uses time as a resource. Despite managing to dig myself into a hole, I had a great time with the game and can’t wait to see what the final game looks like with Ian O’Tooles artwork on it. Big thanks to the man himself for taking the time to teach us the game.

7 Empires

I love Mac Gerdts’ games, so seeing his name on the front of a PD Verlag box was very exciting. 7 Empires looks like Imperial, but is very definitely its own game. It’s another of those games where nobody directly controls any one empire directly (although they do at times), and you’re trying to influence what the map looks like when the game ends, and how much of a stake you have in each of them. Despite playing at two players we really enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to trying it with more people.

Arcs

You already know how much I like Arcs if you read my review. I got the chance to play with three experienced players for the first time, and we had a blast. It was the usual chaos which came down to all three ambitions being declared for trophies in the final act. Cue a lot of space fisticuffs and despite losing (handy hint: if you swoop in with a massive fleet, make sure you get to act first in the next round…), I had a great time and made some new friends. Good times.

Hegemony

Hoo boy, it’d been a long time since I played this, so I was glad to be given The State to play as. We had a new player so there was a long teach, which meant we met at 2pm and put the game away at 8pm. Five hours of game flew by though, and it was fantastic. It’s such a shame that the theme and explaining of the game can seem too dry to so many people that they’ll deny themselves the chance to play an extraordinary game.

Pixies

Pixies was a surprise to me. Another 3×3 card tableau builder in a tiny box. The scoring options are really interesting and it gives you turns where you have to choose between benefitting yourself and denying someone else what they want. It’s cute, it’s clever, and I’ll definitely be looking for a copy for my convention bag.

Cities

Cities is another game about making a 3×3 grid in front of yourself. This one is about creating a little bit of a city in front of yourself, choose the tiles which represent the buildings, parks, and water, then adding little plastic houses and other decorations to increase their scoring potential. It does the little things correctly, making you choose between which row you want to pick from first, knowing someone else is bound to jump on the think you want on a different row. I really like the way you pick up an extra end-of-game scoring card in every round too. My second-favourite surprise of the convention.

Rebirth

Finishing things up with the second Knizia game of the weekend, and my favourite new game – Rebirth. This one got its hooks into me instantly. Placing farms and buildings one at a time, trying to make long chains while messing with the other players’ chains. Majority control of castles offers more opportunities for scoring, building next to cathedrals gives you more personal scoring objectives, etc. And that’s just on the Scotland side of the board, let alone Ireland on the other side. It’s a winner and I’ll be picking up a copy as soon as I get the chance.

The people

As much as I love playing games for hours, days at a time, it’s the people that make a convention what it is, and GridCon is the perfect example of this. I’m fortunate in that I’ve been to the last four in a row, so when I head to Taunton in November it’s to catch up with old friends and to make new ones. Getting a hug from a friend from hundreds or even thousands of miles away who you haven’t seen for a year is special.

I caught up with people I play games with on BGA and talk to every day on Slack from the USA, Sweden, Greece, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, The Netherlands, Malta and more besides, as well as those closer to home. The sense of belonging to a community is something I think many people need in their lives, and I’m very fortunate to have that in spades.

I laughed, yawned, groaned and cheered with friends. I sat and ate breakfast in a post-slumber stupor with people I barely knew. I chilled at the bar with like-minded people who just wanted to be around people like them, and it was wonderful. It’s the perfect antidote to the way everyday life can grind you down without you even realising it’s happening.

I want to say thanks to lots of different people. To (and I’m going to forget names here, so forgive me) Chris, Bob, Mark L, Krissie, Brett, Tobias, Andy, Mike, Joe, Ian, Matt, Mak, Alex, Glenn, Mark B, Neil, Albert, Paul, Lee, David, Willem, Mark M, JP, Rob, Becky, Kerley, Adrian, Ayden, Scott, Elaine, Marton and the many others who chatted or played games with me over the weekend.

Thank you to Paul and Vicky for organising the event down to the nth degree every year, and to the team of volunteers who help the whole thing run as smooth as a crokinole board. To everyone who chipped into the raffle and helped raise nearly £7,000 for charity. To the hotel staff who were always helpful, happy and patient despite the onslaught of hungry and thirsty nerds.

If you’ve never been to a convention before, find yourself a smaller play-focused con like GridCon and experience first-hand what it is to be accepted and welcomed into this wonderful hobby.

Same time, next year everybody?

The post GridCon 5 (2024) Convention Report appeared first on Punchboard.

You cool with Nazgûl?

One player is the Fellowship, trying to get The One Ring to Mount Doom to destroy it, while the other is Sauron, commanding his dark forces to stop them in their tracks. In practice the game wouldn’t feel like that at all, were it not for the funky little plastic ‘Quest of the ring’ track that comes in the box. Collecting blue cards with their ring emblems pushes Sam and Frodo along the track towards Mordor if you’re the Fellowship, or the Black Riders in hot pursuit if you’re Sauron.

The Quest of the ring track is one of three different ways to end the game immediately, which means you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel. The closest comparator is the military track in 7W:D, the biggest difference being that whenever the Fellowship advances, they drag the Nazgûl with them, meaning the gap only ever gets smaller. The green cards represent the different races in Middle-earth. Collect six of them, thematically getting their support, and the game ends immediately too. The third and final instant win condition is something entirely new and very different feeling for this series of games.

There and back again

Duel for Middle-earth has a little board representing the world. There are seven interlinked spaces representing everywhere from Rohan to Mordor, and some cards and actions allow you to add units to the board and move them from pillar to post. When opposing units come together, there’s a big ol’ scrap and each loses one at the same time until somebody has nothing left in the space, thereby losing control of it.

Another big difference is the absence of the titular Wonders from the previous games. Instead, we have Fortresses now. Building them is largely the same as in the previous game, but this time completing one lets you pop one of your little wooden fortress pieces on the matching map space, permanently giving you presence there. If either player manages to have a presence on all seven spaces on the map, they instantly win.

I really like the map. It adds a bit more spice to the game which I never realised was missing in 7W:D until I played this game. It’s not just the quasi-area control it adds, either. I like that fortresses are never removed, meaning there’s a good reason to devote your resources and coins towards building them early. It’s a real exercise in plate-spinning, trying to work towards dominating at least one of the three routes to victory while not neglecting something your opponent is working towards. Having three to keep an eye on is great, it’s really reminiscent of something you’d expect in a Reiner Knizia game, like Lost Cities. Not having an even split per player means there’s always a bit of a tussle over at least one of them, which is great.

“The wise speak only of what they know”

If you’ve played 7 Wonders Duel, most of the rest of the game will be immediately familiar to you. The game is split into three rounds, each seeing its cards arranged in patterns on the table. You either take a card and add it to your tableau, paying any due costs, or discard it for coins. Gone are resources on collected cards, instead we’re dealing with skills. Functionally it’s exactly the same thing though. If your played cards provide enough symbols to play a card, you can play it, making up any difference in coins.

You can still chain cards too. If a card from a previous round provides a symbol seen on a later card, you get to play it for free. It’s a really easy game to teach from this perspective. Any time you’re asked “Can I play this card?” you can answer with “Do you have those symbols visible on those cards in front of you?”, and the concept takes root very quickly.

In short, if you’ve played the previous 7 Wonders games then you’ll immediately understand the mechanisms that drive the game. Taking a turn feels the same. Growing your tableau feels the same. Planning for the future feels the same. The biggest diversion is what you do with the things your gameplay creates. It’s not a case of swinging the military in your favour. The Wonders are replaced with fortresses which don’t feel as important, even though they play an important role. There’s no competition between players between rounds based on military strength. It’s about keeping an eye on three different dials and making sure the needles don’t top out in the red unless you’re the one pushing it there.

Final thoughts

In my opinion, Duel for Middle-earth is the high point in the 7 Wonders line. I like some of the expansions for the original games, but those games are better once the expansions are included. In terms of a game, sans expansions, in a small box, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth is the best. I’m surprised to find myself writing that because when someone takes an existing game and forces it into a spandex fancy dress costume from a popular franchise, it’s an immediate turn-off for me. You can keep your Marvel and Cthulhu cash-ins, it does nothing for me. Yet here I am singing the praises of a game I love that’s wearing Tolkien’s fantasy garb.

The artwork and illustrations are gorgeous throughout, and the rulebook makes things very clear. It’s entirely possible for two non-gamers to buy this hobbity box and learn the game without watching a video. The drama of seeing what cards are revealed when you uncover them is just as exciting as it was in 7W:D, but the variations on a theme of the original game lift it and make it feel fresh and new. As well as the things I’ve mentioned above, there’s a nice little set-collection bonus built-in with the green cards, letting you collect shield tokens with different one-time bonuses.

The Quest of the Ring plastic track is extremely gimmicky, but you know what? I like it. It’s silly and fun and surprisingly dramatic. Sliding a piece of plastic with a horse drawn on it shouldn’t feel as dramatic as it does. It boils down to this. If you’ve never played the 7 Wonders games and want a quick, easy-to-learn, two-player game, get this. If you’ve already got 7 Wonders Duel and don’t know whether to get this too, it’s a little trickier, but I’d still say yes. It’s about 20 quid, it’s got a bit more going on, and obviously it’s Lord of the Rings. If you like LOTR, then yeah, get this. If you don’t then maaaaybe you could skip this, but it’s still the best of the bunch. This game, along with Watergate (review here) are my favourite small box two-player duelling games right now.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth (2024)

Design: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala
Publisher: Repos Production
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 2
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth Review appeared first on Punchboard.