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.

Suckers for worship

The idea behind the game puts you in the position of a worshipper of the great Cosmoctopus. Not much is known about the spacefaring creature, but as devotees, you are trying to bring him to your realm and to prove yourself the greatest, most devout worshipper.

So how does this all work as a game? It’s basically an engine-builder with a bit of point-to-point movement and resource management thrown in for good measure. There’s a 3×3 grid of tiles on the table and the plastic octopus head sits atop one of them. On your turn you’ve got to move the head to an adjacent tile and then collect whatever’s displayed on it. After you’ve done that you can play a card from your hand if you have the resources to pay for it.

Cards fall into one of four types, each with their own effects. Black cards – Scriptures – show a resource on them and give you that as a permanent discount for the rest of the game. Yellow cards – Relics – boost certain actions. It might give you an extra yellow resource every time you gain one for example, which might influence how you play for the rest of the game. Hallucinations are the red cards which give you a one-and-done bonus. Finally, there are Constellation (blue) cards, and these are the ones most of your focus will go on.

Once you’ve played a Constellation to your player area, any time in the future you gain the relevant resource you can add it to the card instead. Fill a card and you get to take a tentacle and add it to your own Summoning tile. Get eight tentacles and you complete the summoning of his most glorious octopusness and win the game.

Putting it all out there

I don’t normally go as in-depth with an explanation of the mechanisms and effects of a game as I have above, but it’s with good reason. If you’ve played any kind of engine-building game before, you know enough to be able to play Cosmoctopus now, which is a testament to how clean and simple the game design is. The designer, Henry Audubon, does this style of game so well. His previous hit, Parks (read my review here), is the perfect example of what I’m talking about.

What I really like in Cosmoctopus is the addition of the point-to-point movement of the octo head. Throwing in the spatial navigation element is great, it breaks your train of thought up enough to keep your brain whirring, without making things so complicated you forget what you were doing. It also gives the game an avenue to make things interesting and trickier once you’ve got the hang of it. Moving to adjacent tiles on a 3×3 grid is pretty easy, especially knowing you can spend resources to move extra spaces. When the layout looks like an S or an O, some tiles can end up quite a distance away.

Little touches like this in a game matter, especially when the game is aimed at new gamers, or fans of lighter games. People who probably don’t have collections of games in the hundreds, who buy a game expecting to play it more than once or twice a year (some of you out there are probably feeling seen right now). A smaller box, cheap price, and varied replayability really matter, and I applaud Paper Fort and Lucky Duck for delivering on it.

Keeping an eye on the time

I want to take a moment to call out something important, and that’s the length of the game. Be wary of how long the game takes. On page 12 of the rulebook it tells you how to play a shorter game by giving all players 3 tentacles to start the game with. If you’re playing it with younger or less-experienced players, I strongly recommend doing this.

Once you understand how to play Cosmoctopus properly you’ll find you have really fruitful turns. You’ll be gathering up handfuls of resources, playing a card every turn, and most importantly of all, fulfilling parts of multiple constellation cards at once. It’s a great feeling when you get your engine purring like that, but it doesn’t usually happen for most players’ first games. When it’s not firing on all cylinders, progress can be slow growing, and those tentacles can take a long time to emerge from the astral depths.

In my first game with my son, it took ages to get those first tentacles sprouting. Given that turns are pretty snappy, it meant that we had a huge number of turns each with the octopus pinging back and forth on the tiles like a pinball. I could see his interest waning, and I totally understood. If you want to bring new players into the hobby, you might only get one good chance so don’t spurn it because of misguided gamer pride telling you ‘play it properly or not at all’. Basically, get over yourself, play the short game, and make sure everyone has a good time.

Final thoughts

Confession time. When I first saw pictures of Cosmoctopus when the Kickstarter fulfilment started landing on doorsteps, it didn’t fill me with excitement. I committed the cardinal sin of judging a game by how light and thin I assumed it was. I was wrong to do so, because Cosmoctopus has a lot going on in terms of game design and in terms of how important a gateway game it could be for some people.

The simple turns combined with bright visuals and wonderfully tactile pieces are a winner. You can happily teach a table of four how to play in a few minutes and see the cogs turning after just a couple of turns. If your players get on with Cosmoctopus it opens a whole world of possibilities for next-step games. Terraforming Mars and Wingspan become distinctly doable, and from there – well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell some of you how deep and slippery that rabbit hole becomes.

There’s a really clever automa player you can introduce to the game to either play solo, or add to a multiplayer game to turn it into a co-op game instead. It’s really easy to run and opens up the potential to lead players by the hand in co-op games to really help them understand how strategy works.

Heavy gamers are unlikely to enjoy Cosmoctopus as anything more than an occasional filler game, but fans of lighter games, families dipping their toes in the waters of modern board games, and those of you who are part of a group that welcomes new members from time to time will take a lot from it. Just playing with the pieces is enough to bring a smile to your face, and the rulebook’s suggestion to turn the head to look at the next player is genius. I’ve got a lot of respect for Henry’s game design, and Cosmoctopus just deepens it. A clever, engaging, fun engine-builder that delivers on its goals, and then some.

Review copy kindly provided by Lucky Duck Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Cosmoctopus (2023)

Design: Henry Audubon
Publisher: Paper Fort Games / Lucky Duck Games
Art: George Doutsiopoulos
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Cosmoctopus Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rolling up a new one

Let’s have a show of hands. How many of you love the start of a new role-playing game? Whether it’s tabletop or digital, who really enjoys that session zero – the session where you all make your characters for the upcoming game? Maybe you spend a week crafting a new rogue for your group’s new D&D game. Maybe you find joy in spending six hours in the character editor for Fallout 4, trying to make him look exactly like Steve Buscemi. For me it’s clicking the Randomise button at the start of a new game of Rimworld and tweaking the crazy quarter-dozen of people it churns out, trying to get the mix just right.

Keith Matejka (if the name seems familiar, I interviewed him a while ago) latched on to this concept and created a whole game out of it, and while it sounds like something that maybe shouldn’t work for a board game, it does.

The idea of Roll Player is that each player is creating a character for some game that doesn’t exist. At least, that game didn’t exist at first. The Monsters & Minions expansion gave your heroes creatures to battle, and Roll Player Adventures is a full-on campaign which you can bring your Roll Player characters into. Regardless, the aim of the game is just to craft that character. Your player board gives you your race (elf, human, orc, etc.), and randomly drawn cards give you your class, alignment, and backstory. So you might end up with a street urchin, halfling warrior who you’re trying to steer towards lawful good.

So how do you do it? Well, in an RPG you’d expect to spend points in various attributes like Wisdom, Dexterity, Strength and so on, and you do the same here. While there’s nary a D20 in sight, there’s still plenty of dice to be rolled.

What is this – Lords of Vegas?

Most of the game revolves around drafting dice from the initiative cards in the middle of the table. There’s a juicy choice here right away. The lowest value dice go on the earlier cards sooner in initiative order, and initiative is what dictates who gets to pick first from the card market each round. You might see a card for sale which completes your set of armour, potentially netting you a bucketload of points, but in order to be sure to claim it first, you’ve got to take that 1-pip black die. What are you going to do with it?

I’ll tell you what you’ll do with it. The same thing you do with all the other dice you pick up during the game. You put them in the sockets on your board in one of the attribute rows. Sounds easy, but there’s a ton of stuff to consider with every die placement. First up, each row has a goal value dictated by your class card. So your strength row might net you 4VPs for getting 18 points in it, but that means getting three 6-pip dice in there.

You’ve also got your backstory card to consider. You can get rewards here if certain coloured dice are in specific positions on your board at the end of the game. On top of that there’s a reward of two gold every time you take a yellow die, or there might be bonuses for collecting dice of certain colours based on cards you’ve bought. It might sound like a 1-pip placed in the wrong place would completely scupper you, but no, Roll Player has another trick up its wizard’s sleeve. Each attribute row has an associated bonus action which can help manipulate the dice you’ve already placed, among other things. Don’t like that 1-pip? Place a die in the top row to let you flip any already-placed die to its opposite side. All of a sudden that 1 is now a 6. Or you can swap dice, or bump them up or down a number. There’s lots of scope to change what’s already been done.

I tell you though, there’s something innately satisfying about socketing dice into little square holes. It reminded me of Lords of Vegas with all the coloured dice getting slotted into the board. The games are nothing alike, but it made me smile regardless. It may sound superficial of me, but I don’t think I’d enjoy the game as much if I placed the dice on top of the board.

Market-ready

I’ve only really touched on the card market, but it needs to be talked about, because it’s a really important part of the game. During the game, you’ll buy weapons which give you ongoing abilities, and skills which can be used once per round, as long as you can move your alignment cube in the direction the card dictates (do good things, the cube moves up towards good etc.). There’s an element of set-collection too, as you try to adorn your character in a complete set of armour, which will earn you points. There are also trait cards which do various things, and many of them offer you alternative routes for scoring at the end of the game.

Once you understand the impact of the cards and the competition for them, it suddenly places much more emphasis on the initiative order you get from claiming dice. Not to mention the fact that instead of buying a card, you can discard a card from the market row to gain two gold. It’d be a real shame if I discarded that piece of armour you need to complete your set, right?

The tussle and agonising choices the card market brings are so good. I really like the way that some of the cards can flip the game on its head too. There’s a great skill card that lets you flip and then reassign the dice on the initiative cards whenever you want to. Let’s say for example that all the dice get rolled as sixes, so you claim one, then use the skill to flip the remaining dice all to ones. Devilishly delicious.

The only thing I don’t really like is the way the market deck has cards removed from it in two- and three-player games. I understand why it does it, because the more powerful cards are at the bottom of the deck and you need to cycle through far enough to see them, but it means that some of the discarded cards back in the game box might be armour pieces you need to complete a set. Sure, you’ll get competition to claim them in a four-player game, but at least you know they’re all in the deck.

It’s a pretty small grumble though in the scheme of things.

Final thoughts

Roll Player is a very clever, very enjoyable game. The theme being creating characters for a game is so well chosen that it does some special things that might not be obvious. Firstly, it gets the players really invested in their characters, and their player boards. You get to make something that’s uniquely yours. The real magic though is the way it adds in so much game without slamming down a barrier in front of less-experienced board gamers.

The dice placement and its associated bonus actions. The dice manipulation. The card market and turn order strategy. Set-collection. Basic engine-building. In the wrong setting and wrong game they can be dense, confusing concepts and mechanisms. Somehow though, Roll Player feels light. I can try to teach this to just about anyone and feel confident in them having a good time, even if they don’t fully appreciate everything that’s going on or every option that’s at their fingertips.

As I mentioned above, there’s something indescribable and nebulous about the simple action of putting a die in a hole of the same shape. The tangible feeling of doing it is rewarding, without it being a toy or a gimmick. It’s just a nice thing to do, and in Roll Player you get to do it 18 times. Glorious.

If you’re worried about there not being enough meat on the bone for more hardcore gamers, you needn’t. While it’s not the heaviest game in the world, the dice-placement puzzle will have you scratching your head, as will adjusting your strategy on-the-fly when new, enticing cards pop into the market. Roll Player might be a couple of years old now, but there’s nothing that’s done this style of game better since its release in 2016, so if you’re after something a bit different that won’t swamp your table or make your wallet cry, it’s a great choice. I really like this game.

Review copy kindly provided by Thunderworks Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Roll Player (2016)

Design: Keith Matejka
Publisher: Thunderworks Games
Art: JJ Ariosa, Vincent Dutrait, Luis Francisco
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Roll Player Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If that name – Phil Walker-Harding – seems familiar, but you can’t place it, let me throw some names at you. Sushi Go!, Barenpark, Silver & Gold, Llamaland, My Shelfie. All of these, and more, are creations from the mind of Mr Walker-Harding. If you’re familiar with any of those games you’ll know that they rely on set collection, and SpellBook is another game where you’re going to collect sets of things, but this time with a little more going on under the wizard’s robes.

Under the robes? Yeah, that was worse than the shotgun thing.

We are living in a materia world

The rulebook for the game tells us we’re wizards taking part in an Grand Rite, during which we’ll be gathering materia to fill our spell books with new spells, and to maybe even store some of that materia with our familiars, too. The materia spews forth from a magical vortex, with some of it even landing on an altar, just waiting to be claimed by one of you.

The reality isn’t quite as grand as the description would have you believe, but then that’s board games, right? The altar is a flat piece of cardboard, the materia are colourful plastic tokens, and the magical vortex is a drawstring bag. We’ve got imaginations though, so let’s use them.

This rite takes place over many days, and in each round, each player gets to take a turn consisting of morning, afternoon, and evening actions. At the start of the game those actions are really limited. You can draw materia from the bag or altar, store one of the materia on your familiar’s board, and maybe learn a new spell if you have enough of a certain colour of materia.

Each of the seven colours of materia relates to one of the seven spell cards with matching colours. Each spell card has slots for spell levels 3, 4, or 5. So to learn a level three red spell, you need three red materia. To learn a level five blue, spell, you need five blue materia. You get the idea. As well as a colour, each materia has a symbol on it, and should you find yourself short of a colour you need, you can discard three matching symbols on materia of any colour to act as wild.

Once you learn your first spell, things really start to get going. You might have a morning action now that lets you discard any materia with a triangle on it to draw four from the bag. That’s a lot better than the two that you’re normally allowed. Maybe you learn a daytime spell that lets you swap a materia from your board for one of the ones on the altar. Things start to snowball from there, and within 30 minutes someone will have learned a spell of all seven colours, triggering the end of the game.

Decisions, decisions

There’s a huge decision space in SpellBook which forces you to make tricky choices more often than you’d like to. Firstly there’s the question of which spells should you learn first. That’ll dictate which materia you try to collect, but immediately you have the problem of which level of spell you want. Jump at that level three, and you’ll never have the level five version.

Unless, of course, you’re playing with one of the spell cards (there are three sets of spell cards per player) which lets you upgrade spells at a later time. That sounds good, maybe go for that. But hold up, there’s that other spell which lets you treat a specific symbol as wild in the future, so you don’t need three spare materia to make a wild. Or that daytime spell which lets you store two materia on your familiar board instead of one, potentially doubling the points you get from it. So many things to consider.

The dilemma of the order you make the decisions is pretty unique to SpellBook, too. In many games it’s a case of hedging your bets and choosing which few things you want to concentrate on. You can’t do everything, right? Wrong. In SpellBook one of the ways to trigger the end of the game is to learn all seven spells, so you’re in an unusual position of knowing that you really are meant to try to do everything. Where your choices matter is in the order you choose to approach them, and how well you manage to make good synergies between your spells. Once that starts happening, the race is well and truly on.

Which is good, because the start of the game can be pretty slow. You’re at the mercy of dirty luck for the first few turns of the game. The starting two material you draw from the bag could be matching, with loads of other matches on the starting altar board too, meaning you have a new spell to use from your second turn onwards. For others, there might well be a couple more turns before they can get anything going. Once that engine warms up it purrs like a kitten. Before that, it’s more like an old moggy trying to hack up a hairball.

Final thoughts

SpellBook is an unashamed engine-builder with magical stickers stuck all over it. It’s not as blatant at it as Furnace, and it packs a bit more theme in than It’s A Wonderful World, but that’s not saying much. None of that really matters though, because SpellBook is fun, fun, fun. The setting and bright colours were certainly easier for me to sell to my family than Furnace, for example, which is a real plus in my opinion.

Everyone I’ve played with has remarked how nothing much seems to happen in the first round or two, and they’ve got a point. It reminds me of the likes of Terraforming Mars for that reason, which was precisely why the Prelude expansion got released for that game. Fortunately turns are a lot quicker in SpellBook though, so that drag doesn’t feel as bad.

I’m glad there’s some variety in the spell cards in the box. Having three sets to play with is great, and if you feel that even that has become predictable, you can mix and match and come up with all kinds of combinations of cards to work with. I want to bring attention to the plastic material tokens that come with the game. If only The Quacks of Quendlinburg (review here) had come with these, they’re absolutely perfect for it.

With so many games vying for your attention after Spiel Essen, some will got lost in the noise. SpellBook deserves to stand out from the crowd. It’s the perfect little engine builder that won’t cost you the Earth (my partner store, Kienda.co.uk has it for just over £30 at the time of writing) and has a theme which means you’ll be able to get just about anyone to play it with you. Top stuff!

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.

SpellBook (2023)

Design: Phil Walker-Harding
Publisher: Space Cowboys
Art: Cyrille Bertin
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post SpellBook Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Check out my 4×4

Much of the game comes from the spatial puzzle in the middle of the table. There’s a 4×4 grid of 16 cards on offer, and on your turn, you have to take two orthogonally adjacent cards. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much the entire game. For the first half of the game, you’ll mostly take the cards that are resource side up, because you can only take a building card if you can pay for it. How do you pay for a building? With the resource cards in your hand, but also the permanent resources produced by the buildings you’ve claimed.

Every time a card is claimed, one replaces it, but the opposite way up. Claim two resources and two buildings fill the spaces – you get the idea. What results is that classic dilemma. Do you go all in on one or two types of resource production in your buildings, and top up with resource cards, or do you hedge your bets and try to do a little bit of everything? The beauty is that either approach can work, and the deciding factor is usually how efficiently you can carry your plans out.

The other thing which might tip you one way or the other is the inclusion of the little, round civic tokens. Some of the buildings on offer allow you to claim a token once built, and they’re the chief way to get extra points at the end of the game. You always play with a random selection of the tokens in the box, which might dictate which way you decide to go. It might pay you to invest in Community and Energy if there are tokens that reward having those types of production built.

Civic Fun-ding

The main problem I find with engine-builders is that they can become too much about the production chain, and the game can become very heads-down. Very insular. Point City manages to avoid this problem through a clever mix of traits. Firstly, the production chain you’re looking at is only one level deep. Each resource type can be used to pay for buildings of one kind or another. There are no steps which involve turning one resource into another resource, and then spending that intermediate resource on something else.

The biggest thing which brings the players together is the shared market in the middle of the table. At four players especially it adds a bit of drama and anticipation into the game. You might see the perfect 1-2 hit you can make on buildings in the market, knowing you can pay for both with your permanent resources. It’s agony waiting to see if someone else takes one before you get a chance to. Even with smaller player numbers, there’s still a bit of gamesmanship to be had, because it’s much easier to track who can produce what, and discern which buildings they might have their beady little eye on.

My favourite thing about Point City though, and the thing which makes it the game I’m most likely to use to introduce newcomers to this type of game, is the art direction. The bright, bold colours and crisp illustrations are really friendly. There’s no undue text to read, there’s no cyberpunk dystopia full of neon pinks and greys, nor fantasy tropes of magic and dragons. It’s just nice little buildings whose names you’ll immediately forget if you even read them at all. It helps make Point City a game with universal appeal, ideal for non-gaming family and friends.

Final thoughts

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a big fan of Point City. It was part of a duo of games released through Flatout Games along with Deep Dive, which I reviewed last week. I expected to like Deep Dive more, given my love of push-your-luck, but it turns out I prefer Point City.

There’s something about the bold colours and the immediacy of the game that really appeals to me. Turns are really quick, and the designers have done a great job of building in an inherent level of balance. It does something which I really appreciate in games designed for all ages and abilities. If you play badly or just don’t really understand what to do, you’ll still score points and still do reasonably well. If you know the game, however, and if you understand the interplay of the cards and civic tokens more, that’s where the skill ceiling starts to come into play, and it just means that the more skilled players can battle it out for top spot without scoring triple the points of the person in last place.

It boils down to making a game feel inclusive and welcoming, and it’s something I appreciate all the more when it’s done well. Point City is fun, easy to teach, and very rewarding. It’s earned a place in my bag for future conventions for short bits of downtime, like waiting for players to show up, or a half-hour break with a drink at the bar. I think the only people likely to be disappointed by the game are those expecting something with a bit more depth to it, like Res Arcana or It’s a Wonderful World. It’s another great game from the folks at Flatout Games, who are starting to make a habit of it.

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

Point City (2023)

Design: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Dylan Mangini
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Point City Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Race for the birdbox

“What game is it like?” – that’s the question I get asked most when introducing new players to a game. In the case of Earth, the best comparison I came up with was “Race For The Galaxy meets Wingspan”, and I think it holds some weight.

Each turn starts with the active player choosing one of the four actions available at the top of your player boards. These basic actions do things like add cards to your hand, add sprouts to your tableau cards (little green cubes), add growth (stacking wooden stems and those cute little mushroom-looking toppers), and add cards to your compost pile. Each action has an associated colour, which triggers cards with the same colour in players’ tableaus. That’s where we see similarities with a lot of other games, including the aforementioned Wingspan.

Earth is a game which doesn’t want any of the players to have any real downtime. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re the active player, and let’s say you choose to activate the orange action. Not only do you get to activate your orange actions, I get to do the same. Each of us has our cards on the table in a 4×4 grid layout, and we activate them left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so there’s a great opportunity to employ some strategy.

I might have a card which lets me add sprouts to cards and another that converts sprouts to growth. Maybe I’ve got a card which lets me take more cards into my hand, and another that lets me convert cards in my hand to compost. Knowing that the cards activate left-to-right, top-to-bottom, it makes sense to place cards that give me things before cards that let me do something with things. For experienced game players, this is all common sense, but to people taking tentative first steps into the hobby, the dawning of these realisations can be a real ‘Hallelujah’ moment. It’s so cool to see people suddenly ‘get’ how engine-building games work, and the smile that lights someone’s face when they realise they’ve done something clever is wonderful.

Better than a two-stroke diesel

When it comes to any engine-building game, the thing that really matters is how satisfying the game is to play. There are a load of potential pitfalls for a game like this, but the designer, Maxime, has done a great job of avoiding them.

Even if you do a really poor job of planning your horticultural wilderness, you still get the feeling of being able to do something, even if it isn’t particularly efficient. By the same notion, the way the game’s cyclical resources work means that it’s rare to find yourself with a huge excess of things you don’t want. Planting cards costs dirt, and like any of the other resources in the game, the dirt you gain tends not to be exponential. There’s a real feeling of one-for-one with many of the resource exchange actions, even if they don’t necessarily look that way at first.

It’s a far more forgiving game than others in this genre, especially compared to fine-tuned games like Race for the Galaxy. When it comes to scoring VPs at the end of the game, all of the various resources you’ve still got are just worth one point. Each dirt token, each sprout, each unfinished trunk growth, and every card in your compost pile – they all score a point each. For beginners, this is a great touch. It means they don’t feel like they’ve failed in some way, just because they’ve got a field of green sprouts and precious little growth.

The real difference in scoring comes from the bonuses offered by other cards on display. Ecosystem objectives earn you points, Fauna cards do the same. Interestingly, there’s a beginners’ mode suggested in the rulebook which uses the second side of the Fauna board, whereby it doesn’t matter when you complete a Fauna objective. You always get 10 VPs. In the full game the first player to claim one gets the most points, then the next player gets the next most, and so on. It’s just another example of the way the game is looking to guide people into the hobby with a gentle touch and to get people used to how to play it, rather than worrying about how well the other players are doing.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot to like about Earth. From its theme which I don’t think anyone could ever take offence at, through to the clever inclusion of a beginners’ game in the rulebook. For a very mechanical engine-building game, it manages to pack a lot of theme in. Plants are planted, watered to sprout, they grow, and then they die back to become compost. I mean, there’s a lot of Earth’s ecosystem that’s left out – namely animals – but when you’ve got everything from Wingspan (review here) to Ark Nova (review here) already covering that, why bother?

It’s going to become my default answer to the question “What’s a good game to get people into more serious board games?” from now on. The abject lack of player interaction becomes a major strength, because it lets the players mess around in this little eco-sandbox, to flick switches and see what happens. You’re not going to be attacked by other players, and you can’t attack them. You’re left alone to your own devices, and that’s what modern Euro games are at their core – multiplayer solitaire.

What elevates Earth above others, for me, is the fact that as well as being a great introductory game, there’s a ton of depth to it. The way that your tableau’s arrangement can be dynamic until you commit to the fourth card in a row or column, the way that cards in that tableau and trigger bonus scores so readily, and the sheer variety of strategy on offer. You want to come up with some kind of recycling machine that says ‘Screw everything else – compost, compost, compost’, go for it. It’s viable.

Earth is essentially a bix box of cards (over 350 of them) with a clever, easy-to-grasp game which will keep you coming back again and again to see what happens. While it is available to play over on BGA (click here to take a look), the interface there is designed to help people who already know the game. If you can play the physical game first, do so, or head over to watch Paul Grogan’s excellent instructional video on YouTube right here. Top stuff, highly recommended.

Review copy kindly provided by Inside Up Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Earth (2023)

Design: Maxime Tardif
Publisher: Inside Up Games
Art: M81 Studio, Conor McGoey, Yulia Sozonik, Kenneth Spond
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Earth 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.

Loaded dice

I’m not too proud to admit that as soon as I opened the box I wanted to play with the action dice. They’re black cubes with no faces on. Just open holes, promises of dice that could have been. It’s so sad. Luckily we’ve also got a bag full of dice faces! During the game, you get the chance to grab some of those faces and clip them to the blank sides, and it’s ridiculously satisfying. The publisher has also thrown in a couple of little tools to lever the faces off when you swap them out, which is another unnecessarily enjoyable process.

Why open a review with something as glib as this? Because the toy factor is one of the things guaranteed to get kids on board, and that’s important because Kapow! is absolutely aimed at kids as much as it is at adults. The removable faces are colour- and symbol-coordinated with the other (trait) dice in the game, and to play the game you need plenty of dice, and you need dice which are going to land on the correct faces for what you want to do.

Gameplay is pretty easy. Put your player screen up for secrecy and then roll all of your dice. Your player boards list a load of different actions, and each action shows which dice faces they need in order to be activated. You take the rolled dice and place them on the various action spots on your boards, before removing the screens and resolving the dice. This is the crux of the game and it’s reassuringly simple. Add up the values of your attacks and compare them to your opponent’s defence. If you clobber them with more than they defend with, they take the difference in lost hit points on their health dials.

As well as giving you attack and defence, as well as some other actions, some of the action spaces give you rewards, and these rewards usually come in the form of extra trait dice, action dice, or faces for action dice. Let’s say you’ve decided to go full Hulk on the person sitting opposite you. You know you want lots of the first and bicep symbols, so you stock up on those faces to adorn your action dice. BLAMMO! You’ve suddenly got a die with six red fists on it. It’s clobberin’ time! Yeah, I know, I’m mixing up The Thing and The Incredible Hulk, but you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Jean Grey

Kapow! is relatively simple, as you might have guessed by now. It doesn’t take long before you realise that the real game comes from trying to read the mind of your opponent. Are they going to attack hard this round? Should I stack up my defence to mitigate it, or just take my lumps and use my dice on the Power Up section of my board to gain more dice and faces? Seems like a good option, except that they might instead decide to assign dice to the After Power Up section, causing me damage for every die and face I gain this round… So maybe I should just attack instead?

You’ll find yourself caught in these decision loops constantly, and it really fuels the table talk. You start to get sneaky and devious, trying to bluff or double-bluff the other person. I even caught my son gesturing toward and looking at the area of the board where you can place dice to defend, only to find out he’d stacked everything on his attacks. The kid’s a supervillain in the making.

What I’ve talked about so far is the way you’ll play the game the first time, but once you’ve got the hang of it (in fact, from your first game onwards if you’ve experience with games) you can add asymmetric super hero and villain boards to your area. Each comes with their own abilities, starting health, and starting dice. and it breathes a welcome bit of life into a game which would otherwise get stale quite quickly. It’s not to say that Kapow! isn’t a fun game, because it is, but it’s lightweight and can get samey pretty quickly.

Superman from Wish.com

If you’re like me, and like your games with plenty of meat on their bones, you might find Kapow! a little lacking. Despite the player boards appearing to have tons of spaces to place dice, the reality is that the attack and defend columns are a little dull. It’s a cool concept, for sure. You assign dice to an attack, then you can add more dice to a Kicker (adds more damage), and finally assign some to a multiplier to really boost it. Defending works in the same way. The attacks all have suitably comic-bookish names like Biff, Zap, and Pow, but it doesn’t feel much like you’re using any superpowers, and surely the point of having superheroes is to be using cool powers?

The various character boards introduce some new powers as such, they’re just not very dramatic. Locking in abilities to use them in every round is pretty cool, for example, but it’s still maybe just having a ‘Pow’ every round for free, not like using laser eyes, invisibility, or something equally extravagant. I feel no small amount of hypocrisy writing this. I love beige, mechanical Euros where the theme can be nothing more than a gossamer-thin veneer, so why grumble about a lack of it here? In my opinion, a game about superhuman boys and girls knocking lumps out of each other should feel dramatic and explosive, and you should feel like you have some truly awesome powers. I just don’t get that from it.

I should caveat this review by mentioning that my experience of it has been with 1v1 battles only. There’s a 2v2 mode which allows for cooperation and teamwork, and you can add in the characters from the Volume 2 version of the game too. Just something to bear in mind if you’re looking to regularly play with four people.

Final thoughts

Kapow! is a mixed bag. On one hand, you’ve got this duelling game which is a load of fun. Gaining and customising your dice is super cool, and I love the plotting behind your screens before the big reveal. Planning and plotting to try for a monumental attack is extra satisfying when it comes off. It’s just tempered somewhat by the lack of ‘super’ stuff you can do. The characters aren’t licensed from any comic universe, and in a way that’s a good thing. Imagine a game where you were Spider-man but couldn’t do any web-slinging, or The Flash but had no way to move super fast.

I’ve got to give a special mention to the artwork and graphic design in Kapow! The illustrations are superb, and everything looks like it’s been lifted straight from a classic comic. The art combined with the bright, bold dice makes for a game which looks great on the table and is instantly appealing to everyone, non-gamers included. This level of appeal is a very important point and isn’t to be sniffed at. This is a fantastic game to bring families together around a table and introduce non-gamers to modern games. If you’re part of a game group and have games to introduce new members with, Kapow! would be a fantastic addition to the collection.

Ultimately Kapow! is a glorified Rock, Paper, Scissors with an element of bag- and engine-building. Stack your dice in one particular area and see whether your opponent countered it, met it head-on, or tried to reap some benefit as a result of your choices. Trying to do a little bit of everything each turn isn’t really viable if you want to win. As I mentioned before if you’re looking for something complex it’s not going to knock your socks off, but if your tastes lie with something lighter end of the board game buffet, Kapow! is a great option. If you’re looking for a game that does something similar with dice but with a bit more going on, check out Dice Throne. If you’re looking for generic superhero action with more emphasis on what the heroes are doing, you’d be hard-pressed to beat 2011’s Sentinels of the Multiverse. Kapow! fills a gap somewhere between the two, and is a great option to get kids and newbies into chucking dice.

Review copy kindly provided by Wise Wizard Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

KAPOW! Volume 1 (2023)

Design: Larry Bogucki, Robert Dougherty, Douglas Hettrick, Carl Van Ostrand
Publisher: Wise Wizard Games
Art: Randy Delven, Cody Jones, Kalissa Fitzgerald
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 20-45 mins

The post KAPOW! Volume 1 Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I guess you could call it – engine-building!

Loco-motivate

I first time I saw Isle of Trains (I can’t be bothered to keep writing ‘All Aboard’ on the end. I’m very lazy) was at this year’s UK Games Expo, where I managed to confuse it with Osprey Games’ new title, Village Rails, because I’m special. The original Isle of Trains came out eight years ago, but I haven’t played it, so I won’t be making a comparison. The one thing I can tell you, based on a sneaky peek at the BGG page for the original, is that I prefer the newer, more realistic artwork on the trains.

The concept of Isle of Trains is simple: make the best darned train you can. Your train carries goods and peoples around the island, fulfilling contracts and delivering passengers. When I say your train goes around the island, it never actually moves anywhere, other than in your mind. You see, what you’re actually doing is creating a kind of tableau of trainy bits in front of you, adding tankers and freight cars and what have you, to carry the goods and fare-dodging miscreants.

The super-interesting thing that Isle of Trains does, is to make you want to build locomotives that are attractive to the other players too. Coveting thy neighbours caboose, if you like. If you load your goods onto an opponent’s train, you get a bonus – yay! At the same time, however, you’ve just helped them get closer to fulfilling a contract – boo! If this last paragraph has you rubbing your chin and thinking “Hmm, interesting, you have my attention”, then read on.

Even if it didn’t, read on anyway. It’s polite.

Choo-choose your track

As if I’d make it through the whole review without a choo-choose quip. Isle of Trains is deceptively simple. The iconography is clear (albeit quite small), and learning how to upgrade or extend your train only takes a quick explanation. What it does brilliantly, is to force you to make awkward decisions on every turn you take. Add more, new carriages, or upgrade the ones you already have? Jack of all trades, or become the oil baron of the island? Either is viable, but which will work for you?

You can play without loading things onto any train other than your own, but it doesn’t really work. The joy of the not-forced-but-strongly-suggested interactions between players is so much fun. It brings the game up out of the navel-gazing isolation of a heads-down Euro, and ensures that everyone around the table knows what their rivals are up to. There are only a handful of locations for contracts and passengers to be turned-in, so the competition in the game is turned up to 11 the whole time.

Thanks to the big deck of train cards, there’s a lot of variety in the way games pan out, and the same is true of contracts and passengers. The randomised (and thankfully, very quick) setup means it’s impossible to go into the game with a plan. The game setup and your initial hand of cards will start to mould a strategy from the pliable clay you call a brain. Even the cards that make-up the island itself are double-sided. The whole game is a fantastic example of game design done well.

Final thoughts

I fell in love with Isle of Trains: All Aboard as soon as I played a couple of turns at UKGE. It’s so simple to play, and to teach, that you’d expect it to be about as deep as a paddling pool. But it isn’t. You’re forced to make awkward choices constantly, and I love it. It’s a brilliant game.

I’m used to the concept of “using someone else’s thing for mutual benefit”. It’s been present in classics like Caylus and Lords of Waterdeep for a long time. In those games, however, there’s a level of abstraction in the benefits. You know you’re helping your rival in some small way, but it’s difficult to see how it figures in their plans. In Isle of Trains, you know exactly what you’re helping them with, but those bonuses are too good to ignore. They may as well be buffet cars offering me free sausage rolls – I just can’t help myself.

Three players is the sweet spot. I’ve played with two, which was fun, but the head-to-head duel means you can easily just aim to complete the contracts the other person is ignoring. Four is decent, but feels a little more chaotic. Three through – *chef’s kiss*. The Kickstarter campaign is live as you read this, and while the folks at Dranda Games haven’t asked me to, I’m going to strongly suggest you back it. How many Kickstarters can you back at £19? Not many, that’s for sure, and with the deluxe version just a few quid more, Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a steal.

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

Isle of Trains: All Aboard (2022)

Designers: Seth Jaffee, Dan Keltner
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: Denis Martynets
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Isle of Trains: All Aboard Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

When you get Cytress setup on the table, there’s no denying it makes for an impressive sight. The modular boards, plastic tubes, and garish neon hues all scream “Cyberpunk, yo“. The most impressive thing of all, however, is the 3D structure at the end of the table that represents the Stratos floating city. If you’ve ever played Everdell, you’ll know the sort of thing I’m talking about. Ultimately pointless, but fun to interact with, and in Cytress it actually has thematic ties, which goes some way towards warranting its inclusion in the game.

Totally tubular

If you’re wondering how flatpack cardboard table furniture could be thematic, you aren’t alone. I was wondering why it’s in the box too. Everdell’s tree is undeniably gorgeous on the table, but from a practicality point-of-view, it’s not great. The cards on the upper levels are unreadable, as they lie flat, and there’s absolutely no reason for tortoises to be in the tops of trees. Cytress’ floating utopia, however, is better. Firstly there’s nothing you need to read up on those eye-level horizontal planes. You just plonk cubes up there. Secondly, during the game you’ll physically put together little plastic tubes, which represent the tubes that are your route into the upper echelons.

The little tubes are built on a board of hexes that the players are fighting for control over. As you build them higher, you can reach the higher levels on the floating city. You literally build little towers that reach up in the air to place cubes on higher levels. That’s neat! Could they have done it without the cardboard building? Yes, absolutely, but it’s tied-together quite neatly here. I suspect I’d just end up playing with the levels as flat, separate boards anyway, but it’s definitely a game that’ll grab attention.

Does it deserve the attention? Yes, it does.

Lifepaths

Cytress is a worker-placement game, and it’s smack-bang in the middle of the medium-weight category. It’s no A Feast For Odin, with it’s thousand-and-one placement options, but in the same breath it’s a little heavier than something like Stone Age. What sets this apart from its ludological siblings is the clever Lifepath mechanism. Many of the actions you take from the four main areas of the board (or more accurately, boards, as these are modular) let you add cards to your player area’s Lifepaths, and each card added, adds more icons. Without going into too much detail, different paths award bonuses at different phases in each round.

Sometimes that’s more resources in the income phase, another path might give you resources when an opponent takes an action in an area you have influence in. It’s a brilliant system, because it gives you so much more to think about. The areas you choose to take actions in not only give you the benefits of those actions, they also go towards building benefits you’ll get from other actions.

Along the way you’ll be able to upgrade your skills for certain actions, and the little cards that represent them have two options. When you cover up one side with a tile to choose your skill, it completes the little portrait on the card, and adds another nice layer of customisation, making your build feel very personal.

Tubeway army

Most of the real crunchy interaction happens around the center board. The hexes there are locations you can build your tubes on. They’re colour-coded using the same four colours that pervade every other place and action in the game. You can build up from wherever you like, but the player cubes that occupy the surrounding spaces influence how many points you’ll score for each.

The little plastic tubes area really good fun to play with too! I defy anyone to not want to see how long a stick they can make.

The little area-control battle it throws in the mix is really nice, and it probably won’t hit home how important it is until after your first game. The way that Sean Lee – the designer – has integrated the mixture of tableau-building, worker-placement, and area control is really clever. None of them are difficult at all, in fact they’re all pretty simple implementations of each, but the way they’re balanced and interconnected makes for a really fun puzzle.

Final thoughts

For a prototype game, Cytress feels really polished. Cyberpunk’s been done to death, with Netrunner probably being the high point, but Cytress feels fresh. The colour scheme and artwork are striking, and uniform throughout the game. If you saw this on a table at a games night or convention, you’d stop and take notice. I’ll be sorry to see this one move on to the next content creator, I’ve had a lot of fun with it,

I think Cytress would be a brilliant game to introduce non-gamer friends to, especially if the traditional, dry Euro themes are off-putting to them. Cyberpunk is cool. Plastic towers are fun. The Stratos model looks impressive. Most important though, are the feelings Cytress conjures up. The game’s mechanisms are easy to learn, and while it never gets much deeper than a medium-weight level of complexity, it feels like you’re doing something much cleverer than you are.

That’s not a slant at the game, in fact it’s the opposite. Plenty of games swamp players with choices, and sometimes it can feel like it’s done for complexity’s sake. Cytress offers a futuristic, original twist to a Euro formula that would otherwise be applied to traditional industries in bygone, beige cities. If Cytress gets the exposure and hype that it deserves, it should do really well. If you’re a Euro-gamer at heart and want a futuristic theme for a change, check it out. You can sign up for an alert when the Kickstarter goes live, here.

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

Cytress (2022)

Designer: Sean Lee
Publisher: Tress Games
Art: Riotbones
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

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