Let’s get into the weeds of what Arcs is, what it does, and touch on why it’s dividing opinion so strongly, before telling you whether I think you’ll enjoy it or not. A word of warning: despite trying to stick to my 1000-1500 word self-imposed guidelines, this one will probably top 2000 words.

Blackout impossible

Normally I go into writing a review blind. I have a self-imposed media blackout so as not to be influenced by other outlets’ reviews. This time around that’s been impossible. Arcs has been everywhere for the last month or so, and thanks to people desperately trying to make themselves relevant or ride on the coattails of others’ success, it’s impossible not to know what a lot of people think about it. Regardless, I made sure to approach my plays of the game with an open mind.

You’ll hear Arcs described as a trick-taking space game, and that’s partially correct. The big diversion from trick-taking games, however, is that nobody wins a trick, and there are several different ways to ‘win’ each round (trick, for want of a better word). Each round begins with the player holding the initiative marker playing a card from their hand to the main board. Each card belongs to one of four suits and lets you perform multiple different actions. Low-value cards have more pips on them, with each pip giving you an action if you follow suit.

When it’s your turn to play a card, you can either play a card of the same suit with a higher value and claim all the pips as actions (Surpass), play a completely different suit and take a single action from it (Pivot), or play a card face-down to copy the lead card, but again only for one action (Copy).

I love the closed economy of the game. It’s another thing which keeps the player interaction at a constant high level. There are only five of each resource token, and in a game where three of the five scoring conditions want those tokens (as well as the icons on the cards you’ll collect), competition is fierce. Even when you’ve got them, the temptation to spend them during your prelude phase for additional actions is more tempting than snoozing your alarm on Monday morning.

I’m not going to explain how to play Arcs here, there are plenty of other places you can find that, like the rulebook on Leder’s resources page. Essentially you build cities to gain resources from, starports to make ships, then you move your ships about the board to control areas and engage in planetary pugilism to see who emerges victorious. The difficulty here though, and the key to everything that happens in Arcs, is being at the mercy of the hand you are dealt at the start of each chapter of the game. This is where a lot of people cry foul. For me though, this unpredictable ‘chaos’ (it’s really not that chaotic at all) is what makes Arcs sing like a magnificent space whale.

Tactics vs strategy

There are some core concepts to understand if you want to know if Arcs is for you and your group. Firstly, this is not a space 4X game. Not really. The likes of Twilight Imperium, Eclipse (review here), and Xia: Legends of a Drift System might resolve combat with dice rolls, but they’re strategy games. You set your stall out at the beginning of the game and work to a plan. If anything it’s closer to Voidfall (review here) in the way you play cards for actions. That’s where the similarities end, though.

Scoring points in Arcs is done when Ambitions are declared. There are five different scoring categories and the players choose which are scored in each chapter. Three of them are built on accumulating the most of specific resource types, while the other two rely on having the most trophies from combat, or prisoners claimed from the game’s Court cards. What this means to you, the player, is that going into the start of a chapter the way you score is a blank canvas. There’s no advantage to being a power-hungry warlord, smiting all in their way if all of the VPs are going to come from collecting resources.

Regardless of who declares an ambition, the scoring is open to all. This makes timing your declaration of ambition tricky and a lot of fun. The moment you declare, you paint a huge target on your back. Everyone knows what you’re after, and you’d better believe they’re going to try to stop you. You can always wait for the first ambition marker to go and place a later one, but they’re worth fewer VPs, so what do you do? Drawing a line in the sand and committing to a goal is an awesome moment that never gets old.

This is where the difference between strategy and tactics comes into play. Think of strategy as your long-term plan to get to your goal. Tactics are the smaller steps that’ll help you get there. The way Arcs is built means that any long-term strategy is all but pointless. It’s a game of break-neck adaption and canny tactical play. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about here, to try to wrap some context around my rambling words.

Picture the scene. You’ve locked down the planets producing fuel and materials. You’ve been taxing them like crazy to fill your player board with them. You’re all set to declare the Tycoon ambition this chapter (VPs for the player with the most fuel and resources), but fate has kicked you squarely in the balls and you don’t have a 2 or 7 in your hand. The very cards you need to declare that ambition are in other players’ hands, and they’re not going to be stupid enough to declare something you’ll win.

Great, the game’s ruined, right?

Wrong! This is where some people struggle to understand Arcs’ design. This is where you pivot like a sofa in a staircase. In this example, resources on your board can be spent for bonus Prelude actions on your turn, before your main action. You can spend that stockpile to build more starports and ships, use the fuel to catapult your newly bolstered fleet across the galaxy, then beat the snot out of some damaged ships in other systems and work towards the Warlord ambition.

This is a quick and simple example, for sure, but it’s wholly representative of the constant pivoting and adaptation that Arcs is propped up by. If you come to the game expecting Eclipse and try to plan in the same manner, this is where you’ll come unstuck. This is where I hear a lot of the complaints about Arcs. “I’ve been dealt these cards, I can’t do the thing I wanted to, boo hoo it’s not fair”. Mitigation and planning are your friends. If you really want to attack in the next chapter, make sure you secure and tax weapon planets so you can spend pips for combat. Copying a lead card, even for a single action, can be hugely powerful. Invest in court cards. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. Are you truly hamstrung? No, there are always options.

Training wheels not included

Arcs is from the brain of Cole Wehrle. I’ll happily admit up-front that I’m a big fan of Cole and his games. Oath (review here), Root (review here), Pax Pamir, John Company – all of these are games from his brain and imagination. If you’ve never played one of his games and were brought up on a diet of Euro games, it can be a jarring experience. The importance of player interaction is present in all of his games, and the way they can swing and change (all of the above do this) are hallmarks of his design. They’re not for everyone, and that’s fine, but understanding how his games work will largely dictate whether you’ll enjoy Arcs or not.

There are similarities in Wehrle games to those published by Splotter. Neither of them holds you by the hand as you walk through the nursery doors, and both give you enough rope to hang yourself with in the early game (note to self: don’t combine those metaphors again). This is another point which can be a real turn-off for lots of people. It’s a far cry from the modern Euro game that lets you push buttons and pull levers just to see what happens, knowing that you may well still be in contention at the end of the game. A prime example was my second game of Arcs. On the very first turn of the game, I declared an ambition for a particular resource, only to find out I’d misread the board and where I could build and tax, essentially handing the Chapter to my opponent.

If you don’t pay attention you can really scupper yourself. This isn’t fate kicking you in the balls. This is you curling up a fist and punching yourself squarely in the gonads.

Arcs is a game designed to be learned by repetition. To be played multiple times until you understand what makes it tick and how to play it properly. With this in mind, please listen to the designer when it comes to the asymmetric module you can add. I’ve seen and read multiple accounts from people where they’ve thrown in the asymmetric module of Leaders and Lore from the very first game. This is despite this is the back of the rulebook:

Cole’s games are tuned and balanced, but often hard to get to grips with. Throwing in asymmetry while you’re trying to learn the game is a bad move. There is no other game like Arcs, and the first games have a sharp, steep learning curve. If there were the equivalent of Root’s Walking Through Root playthrough book to explain how to use the asymmetry, it might be different, but it doesn’t. The last thing you want is for players to have a miserable experience because someone else’s leader and lore cards were stroked into activation through your inexperience as much as their clever play. Play the base game first, please.

Final thoughts

Is Arcs the best game ever? No. Not yet at least. Is it a chaotic, unbalanced mess? No, it’s not that either. Arcs is a superb game which comes with a few caveats to get the most from it. You’ve got to understand that the first couple of games will be rocky and unpredictable. You’ll mess up, but you’ll learn from it. Ideally, you’ll have a regular group who have the appetite to play it repeatedly, or access to other people who play it regularly. In this aspect, it’s just like Root and Pax Pamir.

I’ve seen the videos bemoaning the swingy scoring and contrived, ridiculous scenarios that could lead to a game-winning score in one turn. Ignore them. You’ll get some big-scoring rounds, but that’s because someone has played superbly, not because the stars happened to align in a particular way. Ambitions and resources are open information and easily readable, and killing the king is inherent in every part of the game. If someone looks like they’re racing away to a big chapter score, everyone else will do all they can to pull them back, because that’s the game. This is a game of extreme interaction, not a solitaire Euro game.

Just because Arcs is riding a huge wave of hype right now, and is surely going to end up in the BGG top 100 (it’s sitting at 509 at the time of writing), doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. Twilight Struggle and Mage Knight are both in the top 50, does that mean they’re games everyone will enjoy? Absolutely not. I want this review to act as much as a public service announcement as anything else.

Arcs is a Cole Wehrle game. It has Kyle Ferrin’s amazing artwork which makes it look cute, just like Root did, but in both cases, the game underneath the pretty wrapping can be unforgiving and difficult to get to grips with. If you like Cole’s games, I think you’ll absolutely love Arcs. If you’ve given his other games plenty of chances but still don’t enjoy them, then try Arcs, but be aware it might not do much for you. If, however, you found your way here and have no idea who Cole Wehrle is, or what the hell a Pax Pamir is, then this last bit is for you:

Arcs is brilliant. It will be noticeably different every time you play, and with the right group, you’ll have an awesome time. You have to be prepared to fight your friends every step of the way and get in each others’ faces, and you have to accept that the first couple of games might end up with a runaway leader while you all find your feet. Get past that though, and for the £45-50 you’ll spend you’ll end up with a game with enormous replayability, a very short setup and teardown time, and a box no bigger than Root’s. An amazing game that represents great value for money.

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

Arcs (2024)

Design: Cole Wehrle
Publisher: Leder Games
Art: Kyle Ferrin
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 120-180 mins

The post Arcs Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Schrödinger’s what?

Some of you might be aware of the classic thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat. It refers to the idea of quantum superposition, where something can be considered to be in two different states at the same time. In the experiment, a cat is sealed in a box with a vial of poison, a Geiger counter, and a radioactive substance. If the substance decays the Geiger counter reacts, breaks the vial, and the poor cat loses one of its nine lives. The thing is, you don’t know for sure whether it’s happened until you open the box. Until the moment of observation, it can be considered to be both alive and dead.

That’s all well and good, but what’s it got to do with this game? If you know traditional trick-taking games, you know there are usually four suits of cards, and in each trick, you usually try to follow the lead suit with a card of your own. In Cat in the Box, none of the cards have a suit. Instead, they can all be all of the suits at once. When you play a card, it’s at that point you decide what suit it is. At the start of each game, that’s as easy as saying “I’m playing this five as green”, where green could also be yellow or blue, and put that card next to the green side of your player board as a reminder. Everybody follows the led suit and plays cards of their own, and the highest card wins the trick.

So far, so easy, you might think, and you’d be right. However, there are a couple of pretty big spanners you can throw into the mix, but your choice of spanners and when you want to toss them in depends on your ability to predict the future.

Telling the future – what’s in your cards?

In each round, after you’ve been dealt your hand you have to make a prediction. How many tricks do you think you’ll win? You mark that number on your player board with one of your tokens, and it’ll typically be something between one and four. Let’s say you bid low and proclaim “I will win but one trick this round. My word is my bond”, because you’ve been dealt a hand of ones, twos, and threes. You win your solitary round but in a later round, the cards in your hand mean that to play one of them, you’ll win another. Not the worst result in the world, but it does put you out of the running for claiming a bonus at the end of the round.

At this point you might be wondering why you can’t just play another Yellow One, for instance. There’s a board in the middle of the table with all possible values for each colour visible at the start of each round. Once a value in a suit has been used, the person who claimed it places one of their tokens there, and it makes that card unplayable again in a future trick. e.g. if someone has already played a Yellow One, nobody else can. What a pain in the arse.

Remember before, when I said you decide what colour a card is? That’s true of the cards in your hand too. If you had a five in your hand for example, but following the led colour would win you a trick you don’t want to win, you can just say “I don’t have any yellow cards left”, and play a different colour. You discard the token of the colour you just said you don’t have any more from your player board, and you may not play it again for the rest of the round. Obviously that restricts what you can do for the rest of the round, but it might just save your bacon.

If you look at that picture of the board above you’ll notice that there’s a red suit too. Red in Cat in the Box is special. It’s the trump suit, which means if you play a card as red when everyone else has played a different colour, you will win the trick. The snag is that you can’t play red at the start of the round. You can only do that once someone (even you) has broken suit and declared they can’t play another colour. Once that happens, red is up for grabs and it makes for some seriously interesting gameplay, not to mention being a great way to grab tricks you’d otherwise have lost.

Causing a paradox

Knowing that each number in each colour can only be played once, you might realise that situations arise where there’s nothing possible for someone to play. Even if they break suit, they might only have threes and fours in their hand, but all the threes and fours are taken. What then? Then you cause a paradox, and the round ends immediately. Why is it a paradox? Because you can only play a card that’s already been played.

Causing a paradox is bad, mmmkay? You don’t want to do it. If you do then instead of gaining a point per trick you won, you lose a point per trick. This is especially bad if you predicted you’d win four and actually managed to! It adds a juicy, sharp, but really enjoyable bit of tension to the end of every round, like biting into a lemon, and I love it.

There’s another really cool little something extra in the scoring at the end of each round. As the round progresses and numbers get covered on the main board with player markers, groups of adjacent markers grow. If you exactly meet your prediction for tricks won, you also get a point per marker in your largest adjacent group.

There’s just so much to consider if you want to play well. Will your cards win you tricks? Can you create big groups of markers? How many tricks can you realistically win? It’s amazing how much depth is generated by such a simple concept. I wondered how Can in the Box could possibly live up to the hype, but it does.

Final thoughts

This is quite a long review for what is essentially a simple card game. A lot of that is because I’ve explained almost everything you need to be able to play the game, and as someone who prides himself on not just writing reviews that are rules regurgitations, it leaves me with mixed feelings. I think it’s justified on this occasion though. If I want you to understand what makes this game so intriguing and so much fun, you have to understand the nuances which differentiate Cat in the Box from its peers.

The decision to commit to a different colour and prevent yourself from being able to use that colour for the rest of the round is a big one, and that’s where this game shines. In big decisions which feel like small ones. How many tricks do you predict you’ll win? Which colours do you choose to abandon? Which one of your dealt cards do you choose to discard before the round starts? All are quick choices you’re forced to make in the moment, and choices you’ll make as many times as there are players in your game.

While I’m talking about the number of players, it’s worth mentioning that although you can play Cat in the Box with two players, it doesn’t really work as well as with any other count and requires special rules. Three, four and five players are all great, however, and I’ll happily play at any of those counts.

Forget the theme, it’s as thin as the shrinkwrap around the box, but Cat in the Box is right up there with Aurum (review here) for my favourite trick-taking game ever.

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.

Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition

Design: Muneyuki Yokouchi
Publisher: Bezier Games
Art: Osamu Inoue
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-40 mins

The post Cat In The Box: Deluxe Edition Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Alchemy

The story – like it matters – is that you and the other players are alchemists, and wouldn’t you just know it, you’ve discovered how to transmute base metals into gold. What a result! Between you, you’re trying to perfect the formula…

…skip-to-the-end, here’s a game.

The rules for Aurum are pretty simple, with a couple of little outliers to remember. You can lead a trick with any suit but gold. You must not play a card of any suit already in the trick. The highest value card wins the trick. Gold trumps all suits.

At the start of each round, you choose a card from your hand and play it face-up to make a bid. Your bid is how many tricks you expect to win. At any time you can play a gold card from your stash of gold cards to replace that bid with another, but that costs you a precious gold.

So far, so by-the-book, right? Gold cards are super-good. Not only do they trump all other suits (i.e. you can win a trick by playing a zero-value gold – nice), and not only do they let you swap your bid mid-game, but they’re also worth points at the end of a round. The kicker? The little thing which makes you want to play this game instead of another? The loser of a trick gets to claim a gold card from the market row matching the value of their losing card. Pretty devious, right?

The Miller Process

The Miller Process is used in gold refining to help it get as close as possible to 100% pure. I might sound smart knowing that, but in truth I looked it up just for a catchy heading for this section of the review. I wanted to emphasise how Aurum really feels like a distillation of the genre, a purified trick-taker. There have been so many variations on a theme that it feels almost fresh to prune the game back and to keep it feeling like a hundred-year-old traditional game.

It’s worth knowing that there are two versions of the game in the box. The three- and four-player games follow the same basic rules but differ slightly as the four-player is two teams of two playing as partners. Your bid is shared, so there’s some tactical play required to try to make sure you meet that bid. If you do manage to win exactly the same number of tricks as your bid, you get double that amount in points. Going over nets you your bid, but go under the bid and it’s a big fat goose egg for you – 0.

Balancing the number of tricks you’ve won against the number of gold cards you’ve got is the trick (pardon the pun). 0-value golds are worth nothing at the end of a round, but 7-8 cards are worth three points each. I’ve seen rounds comprehensively won when a player completely abandoned their bid and mopped up a stack of gold cards instead. There isn’t too much to keep track of in Aurum, but there’s plenty to keep your brain occupied.

Final thoughts

Aurum is my favourite card game at the moment. I love how simple the game is to play and to explain. It takes a couple of tricks for new players to understand why you want to lose some tricks, and more importantly, how to lose well. Anyone can lose, but losing and taking a 6-value gold at the same time? That’s the good stuff, right there. If you don’t like trick-taking games, there’s nothing here which is going to make you change your mind, but that’s one of its strengths. It’s unashamedly a trick-taking game with no gimmicks.

I’m a little bit in love with the artwork in Aurum. There isn’t much, of course, it’s a card game, but the illustrations are gorgeous. The hands depicted on each card have a different pose according to the suit’s element, and I really like the art nouveau meets tarot aesthetic used throughout. Making a card game look unique and not lose the instant legibility you need from it is a skill I really appreciate.

When Aurum releases in the near future here in the UK, you should be able to pick it up for £20 or less. Should you though, that’s the question. If you’re after a card game that’s a bit different to others in your collection, yes, it’s a great game. If you like trick-taking games especially, then it’s a must-buy as far as I’m concerned. The bidding, the winning-by-losing, and the quick, snappy games make it a total winner in my opinion.

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

Aurum (2023)

Design: Shreesh Bhat
Publisher: Pandasaurus Games
Art: Stevo Torres
Players: 3-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Aurum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Like, really excited.

Without delving too deeply into the historical roots, Brian Boru was the ruler of Ireland at around 1000AD. The game loosely follows the situation in Ireland at the time, with different clans vying for power, and those-who-would-be-rulers trying to unite the nation, fend off the Viking invasions, rebuild the religious buildings, and use arranged marriages to strengthen foreign bonds. How this happens in the game is with a mixture of trick-taking and area control, and it’s a blast.

Hello tarot

The first thing that struck me when I opened the box, was the tarot-size cards used in the game. Cards are so often a means to an end in games, but the added size – while being an impediment to small-handed shufflers – adds appropriate significance to their importance in the game. You see, every turn in the game is based around selecting a card in your hand (which you drafted during the drafting phase), and playing it in the current trick.

I’ve played plenty of trick-taking games in the past, and the concept is now mainstream thanks to games like The Crew, but the concept of combining it with area control is a new one to me. In a nutshell, the active player chooses a town on the map, and starts a trick in that town’s colour. The winner of the trick takes the action on the top of their played card, which is usually at least placing a marker of their colour on that town. The really interesting stuff happens in the cracks in-between, with the players who lost the trick.

Every card has two optional actions on the bottom, and players who lose the trick choose one to activate, in ascending numerical order. The order the actions are taken is really important, as some of the ways to score in the game are order-critical. Take the marriage track for example. You can move your token up the track, hoping to be the highest on it when the round ends, taking the hand of the bride-to-be. In contrast to a lot of games, places on the track cannot be shared. If you’re going to advance, you need enough steps to jump clear over the other would-be suitors. Playing earlier in turn order means it more difficult for those playing higher-ranked cards.

Trick or treat

Turn order often has a level of significance in a game, but I love just how important it is in Brian Boru. I also love the fact that the low-ranking cards in your hand don’t feel useless. Tricks feel a little different than in many games, as there’s no obligation to follow suit, or beat rank. Winning a trick is important, as it lets you claim the contested town, increasing your clan’s influence in that region, but losing a trick can be just as important. It’s a brilliant dichotomy which makes every turn feel significant.

It’s so rare that a game manages to keep every player rapt through every turn, but Brian Boru does just that. Nothing feels insignificant, and every other player’s turn is something you have to pay attention to, if you want to win. Winning a trick feels double-edged, like you’re missing out on something else, and the three areas you can influence are similar in this. If you’re the best at repelling Vikings, donating to the churches, or… getting married… you get big rewards at the end of the round, but your influence in each area gets reset, while everyone else keeps some.

Ultimately, it’s an area control game. The connections between towns on the map give you plenty to think about, because a common action is to spend five coins to expand into, and take control of, a connected town. Some of these connections cross region boundaries, some even traverse the sea, so careful placement of your discs is vital. It’s something that doesn’t really show its significance until the end of your first game, but you’ll get it soon enough.

Bumps in the road

It would be negligent of me to not talk about my biggest issue with the game, and that’s the rulebook. For the most part, the rulebook is fine. Turns are simple enough, the game’s concepts and mechanisms are easy to understand. The problems lie with the ambiguity in places, the things that aren’t fully explained. They don’t render the game bad, not by any means, but it can leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth for that first learning game.

My first game of Brian Boru was at AireCon, and we played a five-player game. At least three of us were very experienced gamers, and we couldn’t even start our first round, because the rules tell you to ‘play a card from your hand’ but don’t tell you whether that’s face-up or -down. In most games you’d assume face-up, but in a game where you don’t have to follow suit or rank, we couldn’t be sure. That’s just one example, but there were plenty of times we stopped to check the book, or the game’s BGG forums, for clarification. To save you the same hunting, there’s a great thread with collected corrections and clarifications here.

The biggest problem is for German players. In the intended game – the game in the English rulebook – each round consists of playing four of the cards in your hand, discarding the fifth. The German rulebook, and the player aids, all state that all five cards are played. That’s not a small error, that’s a different game. If you’re wondering why I mention the German game in my review, I have a good following of German friends on Twitter, and Germany accounts for my fourth-highest source of readers (vielen dank), so it’s worth saying.

Final thoughts

As I read this review back, I realise just how big a section I allocated for my grumbles. If a review was proportionally good vs bad paragraphs, you’d be forgiven for thinking I think Brian Boru is average, but it isn’t. Brian Boru is FANTASTIC. Yeah – bold, italicised, and underlined. It’s my favourite game of the year so far, and I can’t wait to play it again. My pre-middle-age grumbling is because when something is so good, anything that throws grit in the gears is exacerbated for me.

While you can play it with three players, I found it’s at its best with four or five. When I got back from AireCon, the first thing I did was find people to play a three-player game with, but it just lacked some of the bite and tension. It’s still good, very good in fact, it’s just not as good. There’s no such thing as a dead turn, and you can achieve something valuable with every card in your hand. Get four or five people around a table for an evening, and you’ll be talking about Brian Boru long after you’ve played it.

I love how engaged every player is, and how interactive the game is. Concentrating on your own plans will only get you so far, and it doesn’t take long to realise that. The rest of the game is in reading the players around the table, trying to work out their plans, what cards they might be holding, and what you can do to piss on their shamrocks. Peer Sylvester has done it again, and Osprey Games have another hit on their hands, I just hope a future printing revises the rulebook.

I get that this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, with the dry theme and area control, but I love it. It’s going to take something special to knock this off my top spot this year.

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

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

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland (2021)

Designer: Peer Sylvester
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Deirdre de Barra
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Brian Boru Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Trick-taking hit the headlines last year with the release of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine from Kosmos Games. It’s a fantastic co-op trick-taking card game, where players try to work together without communicating, to accomplish missions. That’s great, but what if you want something that isn’t completely co-operative? What if you like a bit of teamwork laced with competition, and enjoy nothing more than crushing your rivals underfoot? Well, a new Kickstarter, Tome: The Light Edition, from Reversal Games, might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Trick shot

Trick-taking is a mechanism that’s been around for longer than I have – which is quite a while. If your parents or grandparents played card games, there’s a good chance they know at least one variation of a trick-taking game. Bridge, Whist & Euchre are among the best-known games.

The principle is simple. A card is played, players try to follow the suit or colour, the highest card in that suit wins that round, or ‘trick’. Tome is the latest to join the ranks of games built on this simple principle. What makes it different though? Why would you enjoy it?

Bridging a gap

Tome is a game in the vein of that perennial favourite, Bridge. Players work in teams of two, with partners sat opposite one another around a table. It follows the tried-and-tested formula of a card being dealt to the middle, and players trying to telepathically communicate with their partner as to which cards they should or shouldn’t play.

Tome’s cards use suits and ranks like many other cards, but the big difference here are the powers imbued in each card. As long as you don’t break the chain of suits from the start of the trick (or Chapter as it’s known, in Tome’s parlance), most of the cards have a power, spell, or effect that’s applied. And let me tell you, these powers really mix things up. You might play a card that increases in value with subsequent cards being played, or one that lets you claim any of the played cards at the end of the chapter. There’s another one that removes the lead card altogether!

It adds a whole new layer to simple trick-taking. Weak cards can suddenly become really powerful, chapters can completely swing on the last card played. And you know what? It feels brilliant when it happens.

Fun on the cards

Tome: The Light Edition is awesome fun. We were able to pick it up really quickly, and after we’d played the first couple of hands, there was this collective whirring of cranial cogs as it all made sense. It’s got a really enjoyable take-that feeling, which never gets outright aggressive or nasty, but is enormously satisfying. Tricks swing suddenly, that four point lead you had is eroded to nothing over the space of five minutes, and I guarantee that at least once in every game you’ll be hanging onto a card, inwardly wringing your hands at a deliciously evil plan you’ve got in store with it.

If even just working as a partnership is too much like co-operation for you, there’s a great Survival mode in the rule book. Three or four players can duke it out, hoping to hang on to at least one of their two lives, to survive long enough to be crowned the winner.

Honestly, it would be really hard for me to come up with a reason for you not to back Tome: The Light Edition. For £11 ($15), it’s an absolute no-brainer. It’s enormous fun, extremely easy to pick-up, will work in combination with other Tome editions as and when they’re available, it’s fast, and it’ll fit in your pocket. The cards, even in the prototype copy I was given, are really nice stock with a great finish. The artwork is gorgeous and practical. It’s as if Magic: The Gathering had a baby with a Tarot deck.

You can back Tome: The Light edition on Kickstarter right now – click here to find out more.

Prototype copy kindly provided by Reversal Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Tome: The Light Edition (2021)

Designer: Anthony Thorp
Publisher: Reversal Games
Art: Lauren Yu
Players: 3-4
Playing time: 30 minutes

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