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.

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

Booze and music – a festival?

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

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

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

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

Harmony

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

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Luthier (2025)

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

The post Luthier Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

While it’s still a valid comparison it’s important to know two important things before we go any further. Firstly there are still a lot of things in Nucleum which aren’t directly from either of the namechecked games. Secondly, and most importantly, this isn’t just a case of someone saying “What if we take these two things and smoosh them together. That’ll work, right?”. So often in entertainment what looks like a good idea on paper turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. So while Audioslave just sounded like Chris Cornell singing over Tom Morello’s guitar, and was in all ways lesser than Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine (musical taste of my youth dating me here), Nucleum is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Both are great sandwich fillings in their own right, but when you put them together – wow.

A night on the tiles

The concept of Nucleum is powering homes and businesses in an alternate universe 19th-century central Europe. Uranium has been discovered as a great way to heat water and power steam turbines, so it’s your job as budding industrialists to harness the power, supply the power, and make a buttload of money at the same time. A lot of this is done in the game by forming networks to get power from one place to another, be that coal or nuclear power. If you’ve played the Brass games you’ll immediately see the biggest similarity here. Instead of building canals and railways however, it’s only ever tracks you lay down, and Brass’ biggest seismic shock – the mid-game removal of network links – is gone.

The really clever thing in Nucleum is that the tiles you lay down on the board to make the connections between cities are the same tiles that you use to take actions. One side of the tile is the railway line and on the other, you’ve got two actions, one on either end of the tile. You very quickly realise that you’ve got tricky choices to make all of the time. If you play a tile for the two actions on it, you place it in the next available slot above your player board, making a line of tiles from left to right. Your income markers move left to right on tracks immediately below your played tiles. When you take an income action you get to take whatever your income tracks show, but only as far along as you have tiles. More tiles played equals more potential income, right?

At the same time though, those tiles you’re placing above your board to take actions and get income are the same tiles you need to flip to place on the board as railway links. Each end of the tile has a colour on it, and the cities have colours on them too. When you place a railway, if the colours at either end match you get to take those actions before flipping it to the railway side, which is a nice bonus, but then that tile is stuck on the board for the rest of the game. You can buy more tiles with the money you make from income actions, but in order to make the most money, you need those tiles to be above your board, not on the main board. With a nod to games like Concordia, you can get your tiles back to use again, but you waste a turn doing it.

Quite the puzzle, isn’t it?

A competitive market

What makes games like Brass or Simone’s Barrage or Lorenzo Il Magnifico so much fun is the level of competition inherent in them. Network-building is especially good for driving competition in board games because it forces players to compete for the same things. Ticket To Ride has us building railway lines. Barrage is about directing water downhill. Brass gets players making sure they can get fuel to their factories. Nucleum does the same thing and it keeps that same slight anxiety when you start building a multi-part railway. Some players are just waiting for someone to start one so that they can jump in and finish the links, depriving you of any placement bonuses while simultaneously upsetting potential plans you had for those bonuses.

I dislike referring to Brass so much in this review, but it’s a necessary evil. The biggest difference in the way these two games feel to play comes as a result of that mid-game reset in Brass. All of a sudden all of your previous network just disappears from the board, and it can leave ill-prepared players with no way to get coal to their buildings. Nucleum feels very different. It’s a case of build, build, build, all the way to the end of the game. Some people will love that, some will prefer Brass’ way of doing things. Different strokes for different folks. I love Brass, but I love Nucleum too. It’s similar, just different.

The market for extra action tiles is really interesting. Occasionally tiles will pop out into view which perfectly align with your strategy. The feeling of “Don’t you dare take that before I can” is super present, and I love it. On the flip side of this though is the fact that sometimes you just won’t get a chance to get the tiles you want. You desperately want to replace an action you’ve turned into a railway tile, or something comes out with coloured ends which perfectly match a final link for you, but someone else takes it. Them’s the breaks. Contingency is something you’ll quickly learn to build.

Another thing I particularly like is how important each player’s player board is in the game. In many games with a heavily contested main board, the player board acts as not much more than somewhere to store the stuff that belongs to you. In Nucleum it’s so much more. When you gain technologies during the game you can plug in the jigsaw-like pieces hanging off the edge of your board to gain immediate and/or ongoing benefits, as well as end-game scoring opportunities. Choosing which buildings and turbines to build affects what you get and when, as does claiming contracts and plugging them into the side of your board. Keeping your attention on your own board, the main board, and even your opponents’ boards to keep abreast of what they’re doing, is tricky, but compulsive.

This game is so good.

Final thoughts

This review was a long time coming, and with good reason. I loved my first play and was super excited for the rest of the year waiting for it to arrive. I’m not immune to the power of hype though, so as is usual for me, I waited for the hype to die down and to play the game enough times enough to cast a critical eye over it. I’m glad I did, because after the initial glee and hype I had a little lull where I thought maybe I was convincing myself I liked it more than I really did. Now, however, with time on my side, I can honestly say that Nucleum is an excellent game.

It suffers from the same things many of Board&Dice’s heavy Euro games do, but that’s got to be expected. It’s a tricky game to teach, and it takes at least a couple of plays to understand how to see your strategy through to the end of the game. If the person you’re teaching has played Brass then it helps, but otherwise just understand that you might need to do some hand-holding in those first games. Making sure someone understands whether they can get coal to those early buildings for example, can mean the difference between someone having a good time or leaving with a bitter taste in their mouth.

It’s a pretty fiddly game too, and the attempt at a game insert that comes in the box went straight in the bin. I highly recommend you leave the technology tiles locked into place when you pack it away. It’s nightmare-inducing how thin and potentially breakable the cardboard arms are without them. Other than that Nucleum really is special. The asymmetric player boards, the variable setup, the way every single game with have a different initial state means it’s not something you’re going to naturally intuit right away for a long time.

Nucleum is a polished, well-produced, heavy Euro game of the highest order. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I had another game that scratches that Brass itch”, then Nucleum is that game. Far from being detracting, or calling it derivative and a copycat because of the countless Brass comparisons that I and others have made, look upon this as the highest compliment I can bestow on it. When you’re constantly being namechecked in the same sentence as BGG’s number one game of all time, you’re doing something right. Bravo Simone & Dávid.

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

Nucleum (2023)

Design: Simone Luciani, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Andreas Resch, Piotr Sokołowski, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-150 mins

The post Nucleum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Star wars

The overall premise of Eclipse is pretty simple. Explore the space around you, adding more tiles as you go, building the shared galaxy. If the new system has resources you can gather them as ongoing income. If it has aliens in it, you can fight them for glory and riches. If two players come into conflict, they can fight one another by rolling dice. Pretty much exactly what you might expect. How it does it all is really clever, really engaging, and a lot of fun for the most part.

You can take as many turns as you like in each round by moving a disc from your Influence Track to your action track. Why wouldn’t you take ten actions instead of three? Each action you take increases the amount you need to pay at the end of the round as upkeep, so you need to be careful you don’t go beyond your means. It’s a clever system that introduces a nice level of balance. Sure, you can go out to produce as much money as possible to take loads of actions, but without materials or science (the other two of the game’s three currencies), all of those actions might be worthless.

It’s a simple balance which is made lop-sided by the variety of different alien races available and leaning into their unique, asymmetric abilities and differences. The Planta for instance are interesting to play as their strategy relies on exploring more than the other races, controlling lots of systems, so you might well find the Planta’s player exploring backwards, away from the conflict.

One of my favourite things about the game is the fact that although each player has the same class of ships available to build. the components and technology are completely customisable. You want a finely balanced ship with computers, shields, guns, and engines? Great, go for it. You want to create a glass cannon ship which is essentially a load of cannons duct-taped together with an engine stapled to it? Fill your boots. It’s a cool system which makes the game more engaging, as you need to know what you’re getting yourself into when it comes to PvP combat.

You’re actively encouraged to spread your wings and explore, because exploring means more resources, and often grabbing an exploration tile at the same time. The tiles give you a minimum of 2VPs, but often have some great bonuses such as free ships for your fleet, or unique, powerful techs to employ. The spreading tendrils of your empires eventually intertwine, and that’s where the interaction begins. The interaction is what drives Eclipse and makes it as much fun as it is.

In space, everyone can hear you scream. And cheer. And groan.

It should go without saying that Eclipse is a very interactive game. Player interaction is baked into its very core. It’s not a case of if players are going to fight one another, it’s a case of when, and who will fight. There’s a potentially overlooked piece of the game’s production that reinforces the interaction, and that’s the tech tray. Each round a new batch of the universe’s hottest new tech becomes available and gets added to the tray, and the first turns of each round often turn into a bun-fight for who manages to get their sticky mitts on which new tech first. In practical terms, the tray gets handed around the table like a box of chocolates, and in two of the different groups I’ve played Eclipse with it’s been referred to as the chocolate box. It’s a communal activity that gets eyes up from the player boards and boring holes into the souls of the other players, using every ounce of psychic energy to defy them from choosing the tile you wa… oh, you bastard, you took the one I wanted.

Get used to that.

The techs that become available are drawn from a bag each round, which means sometimes you’ll not see new weapons appear for the first half of the game, for instance. Once they do, the competition for them is fierce, and the lucky person who gets their hand on a powerful new tech quickly becomes a force to be reckoned with. It’s a decent way for the game to evolve, but it can be almost painful to be the last person to pick once all the good stuff has gone. If you plan your game around destroying anything stupid enough to wander into your crosshairs and you’re left with the puny “does one damage on a 6 rolled on a D6” guns, it sucks. Plain and simple. Especially if you’re the player to the right of the first player in a 6-player game, as five players get to pick before you. This is fixed with a turn order variant which I would recommend always playing with, but the out-of-the-box experience is a pain in the backside.

One of the thickest, twangiest strings to the Eclipse bow is how different every game is. The techs come out in different order, the space tiles are always somewhere different than the last time you played, and the races around the table start out in different proximity to one another. You can try to play the same way again and again, but fate (and the tech tile bag) will simply kick you in the balls and laugh at you, delivering upgraded drives instead of the plasma cannons you had on your Christmas list.

It’s clear that a ton of development has gone into Eclipse. The interlocking systems are so finely tuned that it feels like a polished Euro game. I love a Euro with complex, interlocking systems. The biggest difference between Eclipse and a Euro though, is the sandpit nature of the game. It ought to be its biggest strength, but as often as not, it’s its biggest problem. With the loose reins that the players are on when running headlong into this sandpit, it’s easy to trip and find yourself trying to stand back up for the rest of the game.

We will rebuild! Or at least, we’ll try to.

If you’re doing well in Eclipse you feel powerful. It’s a really fun experience to just keep adding more and more guns to your unstoppable war machine and clash head-on with someone else doing the same thing. If, however, you stumble early, it can be a lonely, demoralising experience. My most recent experience (and the trigger for me writing this review) saw me fall victim to the dice. Not once. Not even twice. Three times in a row. Combat in Eclipse isn’t deterministic as it is in Voidfall. All you can do is give yourself the best chance you can when it comes to combat. Add more guns to your ships, giving you more dice to roll per ship, then send a bunch into combat. From there you hope the law of averages works out. Lady luck is fickle though, and when you lose fights you should have won on average, it’s so painful. Going in with 60/40 odds in your favour won’t cut it. You want to be going in with at least 85% likelihood of winning to be sure.

When your ships are destroyed, all you can do is rebuild. Rebuilding takes resources, and more often than not you need to wait until the next income turn to get the resources you need, not to mention the actions, which as we learned before, cost money. The money you get from income rounds. Every round you spend rebuilding is another round your rivals are making their armada bigger and stronger, and experienced players can start snowballing in power. I realise I probably sound like I’m moaning about nothing here. It’s a 4X game, right? You take a gamble, it might not pay off. You take your licks and start again. In other games, it doesn’t feel as downright punishing. There’s a sweetener in that you get to take something out of the VP tile bag just for taking part in a battle, which is a genuinely great thing when war is foisted upon you by another player, but it’s no real compensation for losing everything you had in one fell swoop.

To make it clear, we’re talking about finding yourself potentially two rounds wasted (of eight in total) just because the dice you thought you’d swung in your favour didn’t work out. Honestly, I’m not sure what could be done to change it – the dice, combat system, and tech upgrades are so integral to the system now.

The same is true of getting cornered, which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say in a game about exploring space. if your neighbours align their explored tiles in such a way that you can’t join yours to them, sometimes your only choice is to explore away from the middle, taking the lower-value zone 3 tiles, or to push towards the middle of the board, into a skirmish you know you can’t win. Woe betide you if someone notices your bottleneck and forces their way down it.

Regardless, for all my moaning, people like Eclipse. Correction – people LOVE Eclipse, and why shouldn’t they? It does everything it sets out to and more. Overall it’s a very, very good game. My problem is with the sharp edges left in the cosmic sandbox.

Final thoughts

This is an odd review for me to write. I think Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is a fantastic game that scales well from all counts from two to six. It sets out to do something specific and it does it. So why, at the top of the review did I say I’m not sure I ever want to play it again? Unless you’re very good at the game (and I am not), realising you don’t have a hope of winning with two more hours to play can feel soul-destroying. Eclipse needs a specific group to get the most from it. Friends who want to get together and enjoy an evening of games, snacks, drinks, and banter. You can end up in situations where one or more players are basically out of the game, or playing as a race which doesn’t quite work. If someone doesn’t know how to really lean on their race’s abilities, they’re screwed. make sure you do some hand-holding once you start playing with non-Terran races.

In the game I referenced above I had to rebuild my ships three separate times, and each time I did it I wasn’t advancing. I wasn’t challenging the other players. I was stuck in a narrow band of space I had no sideways escape from, my only option was to head to the middle of the map, straight into the arms of a waiting war machine. I enjoyed the evening, and I had fun with my friends, but two-and-a-half hours of not being able to compete or interact with anyone else isn’t much of a gaming experience for anyone. Honestly I suspect that some, if not most of that was down to the way I played. Choices I made, mistakes I made, but that’s my point. When you’re learning the game your bike can be very wobbly, while other players are off doing somersaults over ramps. Stabilisers are the way to go. What makes Eclipse sing is the group you play with. Ease them into their first few games, and you’ll have more players who love the experience. Steamroll them and I wouldn’t expect to see them at the next game.

Take it as a warning more than anything else. You’ll have amazing battles, you’ll be telling the stories of “Remember that game when all that stuff happened” for ages and be making great memories, but some people may have a thoroughly demoralising time. It may mean that more experienced players have to make sub-optimal plays just to keep the game flowing and keep everyone involved, or at least help them make good choices. Or not. Maybe you love a game where you get to trip someone over and then steal their lunch money. If you do, Eclipse is perfect.

Eclipse is an experience in a box. If you enjoy it, you’ll play it 20, 40, a hundred times and still love every minute, and it’ll be more than worth its £120+ price point. Just make sure it’s right for you and yours before you spend. If you want to get an idea of what it’s like before you spend, check out the excellent TTS scripted mod. It’s quick and easy to use, and I managed to get three online games played in addition to the two real-life plays. I still prefer Voidfall, but there’s no denying that Eclipse: Second Dawn for thee Galaxy is a fantastic game.

Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy (2020)

Design: Touko Tahkokallio
Publisher: Lautapelit.fi
Art: Noah Adelman, Jere Kasanen, Jukka Rajaniemi, Sampo Sikiö
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 60-200 mins

The post Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Every woman, every man, join the caravan…

One for The Housemartins fans there.

So you’ve got your starting board, a couple of workers, and you’ve thrown your handful of dice. What next? I guess the first thing to mention is that in Wayfarers the values of your dice don’t matter in the same way as in other games. Take Ping Yao: First Chinese Banks (review here) for example. In that game, you wanted low values. In Marco Polo II you might want high values. In Wayfarers the value only matters in the context of your caravan – the grid at the top of your player board. Each die face has a caravan column associated with it which will have one or more icons in it as the game goes on. Some of the actions you take demand that the dice you place in a spot have certain icons associated with them.

To get icons for your caravan you need to collect upgrade tiles through various in-game actions and then place them, tetris-style, into the grid on your board. It reminds me a bit of the tile-placement puzzle in Bonfire (review here), albeit less complicated. What’s especially nice about Wayfarers is the way Shem & Sam decided to make the Caravan layout different on each player board. They’re the same shape, but the bonuses you cover and gain when you place tiles are all different, which alleviates any early-game forced conflict between players, fighting over particular tiles. It’s a subtle, but welcome touch.

The little caravan area soon gets dwarfed by the rest of your city’s reaches, spreading east and west as you add card after card to your tableau. Lands go to the west, water cards to the right, while space cards can go above both. Then you’ve got townsfolk who can tuck under other cards to boost their features. Each has its own market around the main board, and each has its own costs and demands. It’s not just a case of buying any old thing that’s available, however. There are a lot of options available all of the time, and a lot of things to consider.

Layers.

Board games are like onions!

I love a game that gives me lots to think about at once, and Wayfarers is a fine example of just that. Just like Shrek, this game has layers. Finely woven layers that all need simultaneous consideration. Locations have tags that reward you with VPs for collecting sets of the same tag as well as simultaneously giving VPs for sets of different tags. Water cards have symbols on the left and right edges. As you expand eastwards if the two sides connect in the right way, you get rewards.

Space cards reward you with lots of ways to score end-of-game VPs, but they have to go above the other types of cards. You’ve got inspiration cards too, which, if fulfilled, double the rewards earned on the space cards they’re slotted behind.

The cards in the markets also line up with action spaces, each of which can earn you rewards. If you place a worker of a valid colour on a card, you get the action of the space for that card. Workers stay on the card they’re plonked on until someone buys that card, in which case they get the card and the worker(s). All of these things, and so many more, are the juicy niblets of corn adorning the cob of ‘roll some dice and place them to do stuff’.

I’ve painted the game with very broad brushstrokes here, and still haven’t touched on the heart of the game: the journal. The centre of the board – the journal – is a straightforward track with a couple of paths along it. Any time you take a journal action (often as a result of resting, which gets your dice back to use again) you can move to the next space if you meet the prerequisites for crossing the next line. Each space gives you more bonuses, more workers, more dice – just… more.

If at first, you don’t succeed…

Wayfarers of the South Tigris demands that you play it repeatedly. You can get a broad feel for how the game works in your first game or two, but it takes time and repetition to really get it. It’s very easy to just keep growing your tableau outwards, nudging your neighbour’s board further along the table, but it usually means you’re doing something inefficiently. You’ll end up with dice placement slots on your land cards that you never use. Granted, you can use the tags on those cards for other scoring opportunities, but you’ll always feel like there’s something better you could have done.

It means that you’ve got a game that’s deceptively heavy. Not complicated or complex, because learning and playing the game honestly isn’t that hard. The weight comes in the decision space. You can randomly do things, add cards, collect some stuff and make things happen, but you won’t do well. Wayfarers is another game from the Garphill stable with a player-driven end, which means you can’t just sit back and try to make things happen with a set number of rounds in mind. Your only cue for the end getting near is how close each player is to the last spaces on the Journal tracks, as that’s the trigger for final scoring.

Resting is the equivalent of a refresh / income phase, but you can take that action whenever you like, meaning players start to get out-of-sync really quickly. This effect is compounded by the way that the supply of worker meeples is a community pool. It’s possible, likely even, that one player ends up with a lot of workers while other players have none. Taking a turn means placing a dice or a meeple, so someone with a lot of meeples has a lot more choices before needing to take a rest.

If you’ve got the prerequisites for advancing to the next step of the journal though, maybe taking lots of rests and journal actions is a good thing, so you don’t want all of those workers anyway. Tricky, ain’t it?

Final thoughts

I’ve got a bit of a confession to make here. I backed Wayfarers of the South Tigris as a punter because I really like Garphill Games as a publisher and the games they make. When it arrived I punched it out, learned it, played it once, and then put it back on the shelf. It stayed there for months and months, and it shouldn’t have. My initial reaction after playing it for the first time was one of “Well, it’s okay, but nothing spectacular”. This was a mistake on my part. Some friends of mine were recently talking about it again which gave me the kick up the arse I needed to play it a bunch more and get this written.

You see, Wayfarers is good. Great even. I have a soft spot for their previous West Kingdom games (Architects (review here), Paladins (review here), and Viscounts (review here)), and I couldn’t see how they could hope to make something better. In all honesty, I’m not sure I’d call Wayfarers better as such. It’s just different. It’s a different take on worker placement and action selection, and the switch to using dice is very good. It’s an awesome game and one which just seems to get better with repeated play. I sit here writing this, and all my waxing lyrical just makes me want to turn around and put it on the table again.

It’s not a game for folks who don’t get on with heavier games, or those who want to feel like they’ve done something really clever after their first game. It’s a grower, not a shower, if you’ll pardon the expression. I also want to give a shout out to the outstanding solo mode. Playing Garphill’s games solo was one of the things that got me through lockdown, and Wayfarers just continues the lineage of easy-to-run, competitive AI partners. Having a low mental overhead is a must in a game like this, so having a bot which almost runs itself is a godsend.

The really crazy thing is that you can pick Wayfarers of the South Tigris up for less than £40! It’s a game with a ton of replay value and a great solo mode. There are many games of this weight and enjoyment you’ll pick up for this price. Highly recommended.

Wayfarers of the South Tigris (2022)

Design: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Publisher: Garphill Games
Art: The Mico
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Wayfarers of the South Tigris Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“The truest wisdom is a resolute determination”

So said Bonaparte, who knew a thing or two about combat strategy. Combat is a great place to start as we dissect Voidfall, because it’s where you’ll see the biggest difference between it and its peers, like Twilight Imperium. Combat in 4X games often sees players chucking handfuls of dice across the table at one another, praying to the chance cube gods for a favourable outcome. Combat in Voidfall is deterministic. If deterministic isn’t a word in your day-to-day vocabulary, it soon will be.

When you’re talking about a game, deterministic combat means that you already know the outcome of the encounter before it begins. You know what the defenders can do, you know what you can do as the aggressor, and you know what the board state will be in the aftermath. It’s a really important thing to bring up early because it’s the part that will likely make or break Voidfall for a lot of people.

Lots of people enjoy rolling dice. Part of that epic game experience is picking a fight with someone you have no right to win, but clinging on to that small chance that Lady Luck has blown kisses your way. Voidfall is a stark contrast. There’s no trench run with a torpedo down an exhaust vent here. You go full Death Star or you go home. That unknown quantity, the seeds of randomness sown into the soil of the 4X landscape, just isn’t there. Hearing all of this might have made the game sound dull, and there’s a chance you want to close this tab right now. I should know, I was one of those people.

When I first heard how my epic space battles’ outcomes were already carved in stone before my thrusters sputtered into life, I wasn’t exactly enthused. It sounded boring.

I was wrong.

Get your house in order

Each player represents a grand house in the game. A sci-fi race of intergalactic beings bent on ruling the cosmos. Each house is asymmetric in play style, each with its own perks, abilities, and suggested ways to play. Even the player boards that track your progress along the different tech tracks are different from one another. The nuts-and-bolts mechanisms in Voidfall are resource management, area control, and action selection. Sounds pretty Euro-gamey, right? That’s because it is. It’s a heavy Euro in disguise, gorging itself on thematic vol-au-vents at the buffet of an Ameritrash members-only party.

You’ve got a board covered in dials that track your resource levels and production rates. Thank goodness it’s there too, because having to manage five more types of tokens during the game would have been the tipping point in terms of what’s manageable.

In the main action phase of each of the game’s three cycles, you’ll take turns playing cards from your hand. Each card has three actions on it, some of which have costs, and you can pick any two of these actions to perform. The cards and actions have themes and names that help tie things together. Even without knowing the game, you can hazard a guess at the sort of things you can do with the Development and Conquest cards. Production isn’t a standard phase of the game however, as you might expect from a game of this ilk. If you want to produce resources with the various guilds you have strewn around the galaxy, you need to use one of your actions on one of your turns, and if you’re producing, you ain’t fighting.

It all stokes the fires that in turn power the engines of a good Euro game. Tech tracks and advancements, taking and fulfilling agenda cards, spending resources to build guilds and defenses on tiles. All the while trying to manage the orange corruption markers that invade the main board and your player boards. Then you’ve got the technology market where you can buy cards which, once again, add a layer of asymmetry to proceedings. All of a sudden you’ve got shields to soak up damage during fights, or missiles that let you deal damage before you even invade a hex. There is so much to try to keep track of.

A bridge too far?

Amazing as it may seem, I still haven’t talked about loads of things in the game. Population dice, trade tokens, and skirmishes – oh my! If you don’t like heavy games with lots of decision-making, where you’re trying to make a hundred tiny gears turn in unison, you’re not going to have a good time with Voidfall. In all honesty, I’d be surprised if you got through setting up and playing the tutorial. It’s a 3-4 hour assault on your cognitive abilities.

Even when you revel in this level of complexity – which I do – it’s still a force to be reckoned with. You’ll have an idea of what you want to accomplish in your next turn, and likely have 10-15 minutes to plan how to do it. But the cards are temptresses. Sirens, beckoning your brain onto the rocks of indecision. As you place card on top of card, stacking an action queue for the ages, you’ll see something that makes you think “Ooh, actually I could do this, couldn’t I?”, and by the time you return from that cerebral rabbit hole you’ve got no idea what your original plan was. Of course, by the time it gets back to your turn the game state will have changed again, and you can almost guarantee that someone else has clamped your war machine’s wheels, but that’s just what Voidfall is like.

The time and space commitments are genuine concerns too. Setting up a game of Voidfall is an undertaking that can easily take 30-60 minutes, depending on the number of players and the scenario you’ve opted for. It will also swamp your table. I don’t care how big your table is, Voidfall will devour the lot and insist on a wafer-thin mint to finish.

Did I mention that it’s an absolute pain to teach? There are a ton of concepts that you need to understand if you want to play. You need to understand that your production level and yield are two different things. You need to know about approach and salvo damage and mitigation in combat, on top of initiative. You need to understand how to calculate end-of-cycle skirmish combat values, and how fleets can be broken and regrouped. And the icons. Oh, the icons.

In addition to the rulebook, compendium, and glossary included in the box (40, 86, and 52 pages respectively), there’s a four-page icon reference sheet detailing 214(!) different icons used in the game. Two hundred and fourteen! Voidfall is not a midweek game for after the kids have gone to bed.

Final thoughts

You’d think that after that last section, I wouldn’t be recommending Voidfall. It’s an expensive, intense, time-hungry investment. But by the maker, is it worth it! Voidfall is a truly incredible game. If you can find a game to be a part of, I urge you to try it. Before you do, go over and watch the excellent how-to-play video from Paul at Gaming Rules!. It might take two full games to properly absorb the rules and iconography, but you’ll have such a good time getting there that you won’t care.

If I didn’t know the game was from the minds of Nigel Buckle & Dávid Turczi, who don’t seem to be able to put a foot wrong lately, I’d have sworn this was a Vlaada Chvátil game. The hex-based map, deterministic combat, card play, resources, and meticulous planning involved all make it feel like it’s what you’d get if he took Mage Knight and set it in space. Voidfall could so easily have tripped over its own feet if it weren’t for yet more sterling work in the graphic design department, thanks to Ian O’Toole. The man is some kind of wizard, I’m sure of it.

I could easily write twice the number of words I already have to try to explain the game better. I haven’t touched on the three different play modes, for instance. You can play competitively, cooperatively, and solo. The solo game runs smoothly and without too much overhead, and while I’ll be honest and say I haven’t had a cooperative game yet, the competitive mode is outstanding. When you consider the different houses and abilities, the pages and pages of scenarios on offer, and the different ways to play it, I can hand-on-heart say that the high price of the game is justified by its content, not just the amount of stuff in the box.

Hype games come and hype games go. I have a personal guideline which means I steer clear of heavily-hyped games for the first few months after release, just to see if people are still talking about them when the latest shiny trinkets are thrown before them. People are still talking about Voidfall, and I believe people will still be talking about Voidfall in the coming years too. It’s nothing short of spectacular. I recently played a four-player game at a convention which took close to four hours to complete. When we finished there was a palpable deflation, and had we not all had other games to go and play, I think we’d have all happily reset the game and played again immediately. Voidfall is that good.

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.

Voidfall (2023)

Design: Nigel Buckle, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Mindclash Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Voidfall Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Shush now students, pay attention

Sankoré is set in West Africa in the 14th Century, and is based on its namesake university in Timbuktu. You’ve been tasked with spreading knowledge by the emperor, Mansa Musa, and during the game you’ll be teaching students, adding courses to your curriculum, and adding books to the shelves of the great library. All of this takes place on the four areas of the main board, each of which is related to the four main subject areas in the game: Astronomy, Mathematics, Theology, and Law.

Explaining how the game is played in detail is too much for a review. Sankoré is a heavy game that requires the same kind of planning and strategy that you’d normally find in a Vital Lacerda game like On Mars (review here). At the very highest level, there’s a dependency loop which you need to keep an eye on to make sure you have enough of the game’s three principal resources: salt, gold, and books. Actions on the theology area of the board will gain you books. Books can be spent in the mathematics area to gain gold. That gold is used in astronomy actions, which result in getting salt, which in turn can be spent to do the theology actions. Thus, the circle of life is complete.

The game design around the four different areas on the board is especially good. Each area has very different actions, with different costs and different dependencies, but there are some core concepts that permeate every teaching action. Prime among the concepts is the idea of knowledge, which makes a lot of sense in a game about learning and teaching, right? Each area has its own shared level of knowledge, which increases as pupils are recruited to players’ boards. As you put more buildings on the board your personal knowledge increases, and adding that to the shared knowledge dictates which level of each action you can take. It’s a cool concept which means that actions slowly build in power as the game progresses. If you choose to min-max in one area, you can dominate the most expensive spaces there.

The other important aspect of the design is the way the different areas are divided and contested. Each area is split into four sub-areas A-D, and each area has two separate mid-game assessment points which award books and prestige to the players building in each sub-area, based on the level of competition there. It’s a simple concept, but it needed to be because there is so much going on that you need to try to stay focused on. By keeping one system of scoring area control, an unnecessary layer of overhead has been avoided by not using unwarranted asymmetry.

Bookkeeping

Books are the most important thing in Sankoré. They’re also one of the most confusing things. As the game goes on you’ll gain books which go on your player board into their allocated spaces, while other actions make you ‘pay’ these books onto the shared library board. Putting walls around the Sankoré Madrasa with the mathematics action, for instance, or graduating students. There are three shelves to choose from when you add your book, and this simple act – putting a book on a shelf – leads on to the most complicated concept in the game.

Scoring.

You might notice that there’s no VP track on the game board, which is unusual nowadays. This is because no scoring is done until the end of the game. It didn’t even register with me until halfway through my first play, and my immediate thought was to one of the guys in my games group. He hates it when a game doesn’t have any visible way to keep track of scoring until the end of the game. While the rest of the world loves Great Western Trail, he won’t play it again for that very reason. If that’s a deal breaker for you, you might want to consider it before spending your cash.

Scoring is based on the amount of prestige you collect during the game. It’s everywhere, from little wooden stars you collect, to stars on graduate student tiles, and stars on your player boards when you build enough in one area. The value of each prestige isn’t fixed though, it’s based on the books in the library. Each shelf is appraised separately, with two points being awarded to the colour of the most numerous books, and one point for the colour in second place. If there’s a tie at the end of the game, it’s the colour which managed to get all its books in first that wins.

This all goes to add a really interesting dynamic which some people aren’t going to have a good time with. Not on their first play, anyway. I remember my first game, thinking “I’ve got loads of orange prestige, this is great”, before the hideous realisation that there were almost no orange books in the library, meaning they were worth nothing. That’s hard to stomach if you’re used to games that throw points at you as if they’re dollar bills and you’re the only stripper working the 11 am shift. It adds in this ever-changing, plasma-like layer to an otherwise rigid Euro experience. Your strategy can and will adapt as the game goes on, and a well-placed book in the final turn can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Maybe that’s not your thing, but I love it, like the parallel universe morning shift stripper I could be. My biggest gripe is that there’s nothing included in the box to help you with the final scoring. No track to tally your points, no little notepad to write your totals. In a game which makes you hang on until the very end to find out who won, it’s a janky experience to have to go and find some paper and a pen.

Final thoughts

Sankoré then. A game that honestly, not everyone is going to enjoy. The scoring is unusual. There are a ton of interconnected dependencies. It takes a while to set up. If you prefer your games on the heavier end of the spectrum though, this is a real treat. Ian O’Toole’s artwork and graphic design lift the whole thing and make it feel much friendlier and approachable than it might have been. The guy’s a wizard if you ask me. And for once, I play one of Fabio’s games which doesn’t make me feel like it ends one turn too soon. I love his games, but that feeling of “always leave them wanting” isn’t my favourite thing.

There’s so much I haven’t even touched on, from the skill tiles that boost your actions, to the spatial puzzle of which lessons go where on your board and where to place your students. I haven’t mentioned sending your camels across Africa for the Astronomy action, building outposts as you go, or the competition for position around the courtyard you build together. I haven’t talked about the objective cards to help give you some focus in the early game. As ever, my goal here is to give you a feeling of what the game is like to play, and what you’re likely to enjoy or dislike. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, you can read the rules here.

I want to give a special mention to the solo mode. I was worried running the AI bot was going to be an exercise in flowchart hell, but it’s not. It’s easy to learn and it runs smooth as silk, which is perfect in a game which is going to drain your cognitive ability like a Hobnob soaking up a cup of tea. There are four different bots of varying difficulty to compete against too, which is great. As a solo experience, it’s a fantastic way to practise and enjoy the game on your own.

Thematically it holds its own. The idea of accepting students, putting them through classes, spreading knowledge, and trying to gather prestige in your chosen academic area, is a solid one. It’s represented well in the game. The components are great, especially the game’s insert which does the job very nicely indeed. Setting up and playing the game feels like an Eagle-Gryphon experience, but without the associated price tag, and I love it for that. It’s only January, but I can already see Sankoré being in my top 5 games of 2024.

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

Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa (2024)

Design: Fabio Lopiano, Mandela Fernandez-Grandon
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 150-180 mins

The post Sankoré Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Workers of the world unite…”

The first thing I want to talk about is how well the theme is integrated into Factory 42. To set the scene: you and your dwarven workers are manufacturing goods in a government factory. Factory 42, no less. The main board has spaces for you to place your workers to try to fulfil government orders. Factories work on a production line basis and each worker space on the board is resolved in order, so by doing some careful planning, you can make sure the goods you need for manufacturing later in the round are requisitioned and delivered to your warehouses.

More accurately, you can try to make sure the goods are there.

Government being government, some of the things you want might get delayed by bureaucracy. This is represented by the imposing tower on the table. Inside the tower, there are cardboard layers with holes of different shapes and sizes. All of the available materials and goods for the round get dumped into The Tower of Bureaucracy, and as you’d expect, not all of it comes out. Some get tied up in red tape, some go out in the briefcases of management I expect. Whatever happens, it’s a decent analogy for the bureaucratic process. Players of the classic Wallenstein know what to expect.

Whatever the outcome, the goods you’re left with go into the common pool, which is shared by all players for the rest of the round. It’s a theme that’s carried throughout the game, this idea of a dwarven pseudo-communist society. Whatever’s available is available for all players equally. It just depends how quickly you get to the worker allocation space, and whether or not someone decides to take the optional Commissar spot, and that’s where shenanigans can really start to emerge.

“Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they have never sowed”

The Commissar spot at each action space works to boost or alter each of those spaces, but it’s not mandatory to have a worker placed there. Some are nice, like the Loading space which lets you add extra cubes to the little railcars that carry goods to the players’ boards. Some are less nice. The Trading spot, for instance, requires each player who wants to trade to pay a rosette token to the Commissar, if one is present. You need to pay somebody else just for the right to trade, and that Commissar might have been placed there after you chose to trade.

It’s not just the Commissar spots that can sway the game in this interactive way. Take the Shipping action as a perfect example. You can claim one of the first two railcars on the track which may or may not have lots of useful cubes on them, and then place them on a player board. Note that I said a player board, not necessarily your player board. If you want to scupper someone’s chances you can take that railcar with a paltry single lichen cube and clog up somebody else’s dock! When you take the Requisition action which lets you add cubes to the common pool you might already have stock of the items you need to fulfil this round’s government orders, so why not add a load of useless – but burnable – items to the pool which don’t help anyone else, but help you generate the steam necessary to make things.

The push and pull, and “Oooh you absolute git!” shouts from across the table are great, if interactivity in a euro is your thing, of course. It’s not for everyone, but for me it’s a good thing which takes me back to older, German-style Euros.

Unfortunately, being metaphorically kicked in the shins by the other players isn’t the only frustration you’re likely to face in the game.

“Nothing can have value without being an object of utility”

The quote above from Karl Marx hits particularly hard because of the lack of utility in a lot of different things in the game. There are a lot of examples where design decisions – or lack thereof – really hurt Factory 42. The first place it hit me was setting up for my first game. I was following the setup instructions in the rulebook thinking “I don’t really get some of this, I wish there was a setup picture”, only to find one on the following pages. It’s odd in the 2020s to not find an image on the same page as the instructions. I thought it was odd that there were no step numbers to reference on the setup picture, only to find that there are, they’re just almost invisible. See this image for an example of what I mean.

Update: After feeding this back to the publisher, a new version of the rulebook which makes this much clearer is already in the works and a PDF should soon be available on their website.

I have no idea how this kind of design decision gets past an editor. I wondered if it was maybe just a one-off printing problem, so I headed to the publisher’s website only to find that it’s still the same now, even on version 1.35 of the rulebook. I carried on reading through the rules for each of the different action spaces and saw in the description for the first action – Requisition – where a sentence explaining costs reads: “The cost is also shown on the location”. Great, except that having scoured for the costs on the location and thinking I was just being a bit stupid, it’s just not there. I’m guessing whatever it refers to is now superseded by a reference card, but that’s all it is – a guess.

Update: The above paragraph is being addressed in a new rulebook revision too. I’ve kept my original text in the review, as this is what I was sent to review.

Each of the eleven different resources is a different colour and one of three different sizes. The choice of sizes is actually really clever. There’s a small Spiking bag included that gets loaded with cubes during one particular action, and players can draw cubes blindly from the bag to add to the pool. The bag is too small to get more than a couple of fingers in, but it’s probably enough to tell the difference between a big and a small cube. It’s not a lock-in, but you’ve got a rough idea of what you’re pulling out. It’s a really clever way to utilise the different sizes. The problem comes when looking at the pile of cubes in the common pool and trying to discern what’s there. I’m not colour-blind but even I have trouble telling what colour some of them are at a glance. The reliance on symbols that aren’t on the cubes, and the fact that the resource board (with the symbols) has backgrounds that are slightly different colours to the cubes might make it impossible for colour-blind people to play.

It might sound like I’m nit-picking, but it’s important to understand that Factory 42 is a heavy game. Every little thing which makes an already complex game harder has its impact amplified by that weight. Just trying to work out whether you can do the things you want to if someone doesn’t sabotage you is tricky enough. Trying to make a mental note of how many of which cubes there are because you can’t tell what they are at a glance just makes things harder. Equally, each of the eleven different types has a symbol associated with it which might become intuitive later, but at first need constant reference to a reference card. Eleven is just too many things to have to pair a colour to a symbol, and a symbol to a part of a group of types.

Final thoughts

Factory 42 could be a good game. Maybe even a great game. But in the state it’s in now, there are just too many niggles for me to be able to say that outright. It’s like putting on a pair of walking boots to go for a difficult hike, only for someone to have thrown a handful of gravel into them before you even get going. The rulebook needs heavy editing to bring it up to standard, and there are so many little things you’ll find when you play which suggest it just needed more playtesting, or an experienced developer involved.

The Cyrillic-style backwards Rs, Es, and Ns in the headings in the rulebook. I get it. It looks very ‘Soviet’, but it doesn’t help. The typewriter-style smudged and incomplete typeface used on the tops of the cards is stylistic but difficult to read. When I go back and look at some of the things in the prototypes, like the bold colours of the cubes, it seems like some things have taken a step backwards in terms of function, in favour of form.

All of my grumbles are a real shame because I really enjoy playing the game. The semi-co-op, ‘greater good’ feeling of creating a shared pool of things to fulfil the shared contracts is cool, especially with the way the knives come out when it comes to sharing things. The bureaucracy tower does its job really well, the spiking bag too. I love the way the market prices change every round. The optional modules for inventions and Elven contracts spice things up. The flow of the action resolution and the pain of choosing when to place a worker, and where – it’s all really good. It’s just let down by the barriers to entry.

I understand that there have been plenty of small revisions since the original crowdfunding campaign, but even with those I would still absolutely love to see a v2.0 of Factory 42 with some redevelopment. There’s a great game in here, complex and chewy with a ton of interaction, but it needs a concerted effort to work around the various issues to make it worth it.

Review copy kindly provided by Dragon Dawn Productions. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Factory 42 (2021)

Design: Timo Multamäki
Publisher: Dragon Dawn Productions
Art: Lars Munck
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Factory 42 Review appeared first on Punchboard.

A double-bagger?

I’m actually going to start off by talking about the game’s only real negative aspect, and that’s how it looks. Call me superficial, call me shallow, call me what you will, but Beyond The Sun doesn’t have much in the way of table appeal. Yes, there’s a bit of a minimalism thing going on, but the main board is still as flat as a pancake. A sea of cardboard with a slew of cards on top of it. The exploration side-board, despite its name, isn’t somewhere to store your maps and compass alongside your fine china. No, it’s a board on the side (shock!) which has cards representing the planets you can colonise, and these look a bit more interesting at least.

As an aside, I’m really surprised the design and production team went with the verb ‘colonise’ in the game. Even if we’re talking about uninhabited planets, the negative connotations the word raises still spike something in my subconscious. Terraform would have been a much better term.

Once you get past that initial feeling of ‘oh, okay, is this it?’, things rapidly start climbing towards orbit. The little cubes that act as resource markers on your player boards, spaceships on the exploration board, and scientists on the main board, are so freaking cute you could just eat them! Don’t eat them though, they’re plastic. Eating plastic is bad, as I find myself telling my dog far too often. The plainness and resulting ‘OMG did they accidentally send the prototype files to the printer?‘ feeling soon dissipates, and leaves you with a fantastically easy-to-read board state at any given time. The choice to not go for stark primary colours for player pieces is also a major win. The orange especially looks delectable. You hear me? Delectable.

In other words, less is more.

Daddy or chips?

For the vast majority of the game you’ll be faced with two main choices: get your spaceships moving around the exploration board, or research new technologies. The two things tie together and have all manner of interdependencies, but it’s still really difficult to choose at times, and a lot of that comes down to the end-of-game trigger. At the start of the game, you lay out some achievement cards next to the board. As the name implies, these represent the things you’ll aim to achieve during the game. A couple of the cards are used in every game, but the others get drawn at random, keeping the game interesting long after your first couple of games. So for example, you might be aiming to be the first to colonise four planets, or you might have your sights set on being the first person to research a level 4 technology. Once four achievements have been claimed, no matter who by, the game ends, so you’d better get your skates on.

This is what I was referring to back at the top of the review. Even though Beyond The Sun is a Eurogame through and through, it piles on the tension like a good racing game. The achievements are worth decent points and are dangled just out of reach for most of the game. The game state is so easily read that nothing is hidden from anyone, so you can see just how close your rivals are to claiming an achievement. It forces you to make some pretty important decisions in the heat of the moment. Chase the player opposite you to pip them to the post for the achievement they’re blatantly after, or go for something else instead?

What makes the choices all the more delicious is the fact that you’re basically just looking at one of two places for the entire game. The exploration board and the tech board. No matter which you choose to work with your wandering eye is drawn to what the other players are doing on the other board.

Sure, that sort of thing happens in other games too, but it feels especially pronounced in Beyond Of Sun, and I love it. Tech advancements not only get you VPs at the end of the game and often grant one-time bonuses, but more importantly may give you new worker spots. Despite there being worker spots, I don’t think of it as a worker-placement game really, as you’ve only got one pawn to move around to take actions. It’s more like action selection instead. Either way, some of those higher-level worker spots have some powerful effects, and are often cheaper to use than those printed on the board.

Back in your box!

No, not the game. I don’t want the game back in the box. It’s great. “Back in your box” was a catchphrase my group developed while playing Beyond The Sun. Whether it’s a ship or a population marker (or scientist as I keep calling them), all of your cubic resources come from the little columns of crates on your player boards. Managing your resources is the key to doing well in the game, and after the end of each of your turns you choose whether to produce ore (from a central reserve) or create population from any relevant columns in your supply. If you need to remove ships from the board because you colonised a planet, or if you lose a population cube in order to make a new ship or conduct some research, they get rotated back to their crate side and return to your board again. Hence “back in your box”.

Despite being a glib little sentence, getting stuff back on your board becomes crucial. In a game with no turn limit, most games seem to finish at around 15 turns, and you’re only able to run your production once per turn. There’s nothing more painful than going to produce population, only to realise you’ve got to waste your production phase on doing a resource trade with a really bad return. I say there’s nothing more painful, but that’s an exaggeration. There are plenty of things more painful, obviously. I sat down too fast once and sat on myself. That can bring tears to your eyes, trust me, but I’m trying to make a point here. Plan ahead and avoid the pain of a wasted production phase.

Beyond The Sun is one of those games that does a tremendous job of offering you tempting new things to reach for, while simultaneously pulling you back and saying “Ah ah ah, not so fast, you can’t afford that”, like a predatory video game full of microtransactions. There’s no pay-to-win here, though. Clever planning is the only way to make your galactic dreams come true, and it results in a game that’s as engaging as it is fun.

Final thoughts

Dennis K Chan has done a bit of a Min & Elwen with Beyond The Sun. The Czech duo came out of nowhere to land Lost Ruins Of Arnak on us and create a debut hit, and Dennis has done the same. Arnak isn’t a bad comparison actually. While there’s almost no crossover in terms of theme or mechanisms, they’re both very good medium-weight Euro games, and both are games with a near-universal appeal and low barrier to entry.

It’s not the most visually striking game in the world, admittedly, but it’s a design decision which benefits the game, and ultimately that’s what matters (despite my grumbling earlier). The double-layer player boards with their slots for the various discs and cubes are really high quality, and I love the decision to add in a second set of player boards with asymmetric upgrade options. Between those, the wide variety of tech and achievement cards, and the upcoming expansion (Leaders of the New Dawn), Beyond The Sun will be hitting your table over and over.

On a personal level, I’m really glad to see Rio Grande Games breaking the mould and opting for a shallow, rectangular box. Some of my favourite games came in boxes like this (Concordia, Hamburgum, etc.), and it’s great to see a publisher say “Sod your kallax, we like this shape”. If you’re curious about the game and fancy trying it before you buy, you can play it right now on Board Game Arena if you’re a premium member (or know someone who is) by clicking here. My addiction to the game shows no signs of letting up. I’m currently in three asynchronous games on BGA, and I can’t wait to get my physical copy played again. Beyond the sun is a joy.

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.

Beyond The Sun (2020)

Design: Dennis K. Chan
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Art: Franz Vohwinkel
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Beyond The Sun Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Which begs the question – what do you do for the rest of the time?

Football manager

I’m part of a huge group of people who enjoy sport manager games on the computer. I’ve bought countless versions of Football Manager, and I shudder to think how many hours of my life were spent searching for wunderkinder from unknown leagues around the world. Eleven takes a similar approach to the Football Manager games, but with the key difference that there’s no choice to let the computer do all the boring stuff for you, like hire staff, find sponsors, and upgrade the stadium.

Before we go much further, I should probably let you know that Eleven is a Euro game, through and through. There’s no harking back to the granddaddy of football games – Subbuteo – even though I was a huge fan of the flicking football fun when I was around 14 years old. Seriously, I had a roll-up astroturf pitch, box mondial goals, and Adidas Tango balls. Yeah, that’s right, look impressed.

Eleven is an engine-builder at heart. Most of the time you’re trying to mould your staff into producing each of the four main currencies in the game: budget, fan base, operations, and fitness. As per the Euro standard, each of these has a level of income per round, and each can be boosted with the correct staff. What makes Eleven an outsider in comparison to most recent Euro games is the fact that you can’t really min-max your stats.

Stadium infrastructure grants you bonuses, but costs money. Players picked for game day need fitness. Fans fill the stadium and grant you more income. This all makes sense thematically, but it forges pretty rigid chains of dependence, in a similar way to the way On Mars (review here) does it. Each resource underpins another, and you need all of them. The differences between players come in how you fine-tune your engines and make the most of the staff you have.

Hardly Kane and Cristianot Ronaldo

As a devotee of the Winning Eleven / Pro Evo games from Konami, back when Fifa ruled the roost, I know first-hand that official team and player licences don’t always make the game. If you wanted Liverpool and Man City instead of Merseyside Red and Man Blue, you had to put in the time to edit the rosters. Eleven doesn’t even have a hint of a licence, but it doesn’t matter. For a start, the teams would be out of date immediately, and a board game isn’t easily patched over the internet.

You aren’t dealing with named players and famous teams in Eleven, but you don’t need to. In all honesty, it could very easily be re-skinned into almost any other team sport, and the only tweaks would come in the match section. During the matches, it’s a case of setting up your team and choosing a formation and tactics, which players going on the wings, up-front, in defence etc., and then flipping the opponent card to see how they’ve set up. There are clues on the back of the opponent’s card, letting you know where they are strong and weak, so it’s not like going into a fight with a blindfold on. If you have the higher stats in one place, you score, if they do, they score. It’s not difficult to work out.

Despite the very thin implementation of the matches, handling your squad is actually pretty cool. There are nameless youth stars you can recruit, waiting for the surprise of the player they can become with your investment. There are veteran players, who add to the team’s strength while they’re not quite ready to be put out to pasture. You have a full set of jersey numbers to assign to your players, but each player comes with their own chosen number too (the divas), so there’s often no point in hiring two number 10s for example, as only one can play. Combine all of this with the various tactic and formation cards on offer, and matchday feels more like an event, not an anti-climax at the end of the week.

The Hand of God

There’s one facet of Eleven which might drive a wedge between the football and Euro game fans.

Luck.

Eleven’s clean engine-building is tempered by several things that are completely out of your control. Right at the start of each round (Monday, in the game’s parlance), you draw a board meeting card and then roll a die. When you compare the result to your directors’ cards, it’ll tell you which of the three outcomes on the board meeting card came to pass. The board meeting card isn’t shared, however. Each player draws their own, and the outcomes can vary quite a lot. Some are positive, some not-so-positive.

A similar fate awaits you after each match when you make a Match Consequence roll. Win, lose or draw, you check the result of your roll on the results table, and see what lingering effects carry over into the next week. There’s no guarantee that a win will get you good consequences. You could win the match and roll a 1 and end up with a double serious injury to apply to your players, while someone else loses, rolls a 6, and takes two temporary strength boosts into the next week.

If you feel your blood boiling at the very idea of such ludological injustice, Eleven isn’t for you. Personally, I’m a big fan of these two mechanisms in particular. Sport is affected by all kinds of things outside of people’s control, and it feels great on a thematic level to have the same chaos sewn into the game’s finery. There’s no denying, it can feel desperately unfair at times, but “that’s football.”

Final thoughts

I’m so pleased that Eleven doesn’t try to recreate a game of football on my table. Other games have done it in the past, and continue to. UND1C1 and Counter Attack do a great job. Instead, it’s a Euro game where the football theme has been applied with a sopping-wet brush. The biggest criticism I have for Eleven is that out-of-the-box, you can’t do the one thing you might expect in a football game. You can’t have a match against the other players. It feels like a big ‘oof’ moment from Portal Games here. Instead, you each play against different teams in the same league to try to come out on top. There’s nothing to stop you lining your team up against your opponent, but it’s just too random to have any tactical merit.

There are a few mini-expansions which add to the game, and the International Cup in particular adds those player vs player rules. Some of the others are decent, too: the International Players and Solo Campaign expansions in particular add some nice things. I think Solo is where you’ll have the most fun with Eleven, to be honest. Two-player is good fun, but I think four would drag it out, and the disparity in luck could see one player wipe the floor with the others.

Despite these criticisms, Eleven is a great game, and certainly the best football (soccer) game I’ve played. The theme is so well applied to the game, and the engine-building is very clear and simple in practice. There’s plenty of depth and nuance as to how you apply the various effects, but the iconography throughout is excellent, so accomplishing what you want to is down to whether your tactics work, not because you didn’t understand what a certain card or effect did. The way that injuries and card suspensions work fits perfectly, and the game is a fantastic choice for someone who craves that Football Manager experience on a table, instead of a screen.

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

You can buy Eleven now, at Punchboard’s partner store, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for an account using this link – kienda.co.uk/punchboard – to snag 5% off your first £60+ order.

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Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (2022)

Designer: Thomas Jansen
Publisher: Portal Games
Art: Mateusz Kopacz, Hanna Kuik
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Eleven Review appeared first on Punchboard.