From the ground up

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

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

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

Balance

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Ironwood (2024)

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

The post Ironwood Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The 7 Ps

Some of you probably know a variation of the 7 Ps as I know them: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Planning is at the core of Crumbs, and you’ll probably lose if you don’t do it well.

The game is a small deck of cards and some wooden markers. The cards are double-sided: one side shows a sandwich ingredient, and the other has hungry customers’ orders. On your turn, you can pick up all the prepped ingredients of a single kind – bread, eggs, ham, etc. – and plonk them into your preparation area. It doesn’t take an efficiency expert to understand that it makes sense to be able to put the same ingredient in multiple sandwiches at the same time, especially once you understand that you only get five actions.

The good news is that once you complete an order you get a fresh set of five actions, and you get a free restock of one of the types of ingredients you’ve used. It doesn’t take long before the wheels start to come off the sandwich machine though, especially when you get orders with a lot of different ingredients. Ingredients are hard to come by, and although you can use an action to restock an ingredient, that’s 20% of your actions used. Yikes!

Yes, Chef!

Thanks to Crumbs’ small size and small deck of cards, it’s a concentration of an efficiency puzzle – a reduction if you will. It’s extremely easy to teach and to understand, and for your first couple of orders you’ll have a feeling of “This is easy!”. That feeling doesn’t last long though, especially if you’ve got some of the more difficult order cards in your queue.

If you’re the sort of person who likes a bit of randomness thrown into their games, some luck and a bit of “Let’s see what happens now”, Crumbs probably isn’t the game for you. If, however, you’re the type of person who loves a solvable puzzle, you’re going to love Crumbs. It’s like a Perfect Information game. The only unknown at the start of a game is the orders on your second order card. You can start the game, stare at the orders and ingredients, and plan ahead to complete everything you can see.

Unfortunately, this leads to what I consider to be the game’s weakest point. While you’re planning your mental to-do list, there are times when you’ll realise that what’s left to do is impossible with your remaining actions. Sure, it’s almost certainly because your planning was about as good as a tuna and marmalade sandwich, but it’s a really damp way to end a game. Like when someone puts something too wet in your sandwich and you think “You know what? I don’t want to finish this”. It is what it is I guess, I just don’t like the feeling of packing a game away knowing I didn’t actually finish it. It’s like the game’s disappointed in me.

Final thoughts

I’ve just been away for a few days with my family, and when I was packing I was looking through my games collection to decide what to take. Invariably it’s small box games. Crumbs epitomises everything that a good small box game should be. It’s small enough that you could happily play it on a fold-down plane table, it’s quick to setup and play, and it packs a really clever puzzle into its 18 cards. It’s important to reiterate just how small this game is. The cards, instructions, and ten wooden pieces fit inside a tuckbox that’s thinner than a standard deck of cards.

I’ve gone back and forth between preferring the solo and two-player co-op modes of play. The solo game is great, but the most prone to that problem I mentioned about that reminds me of Rell from Krull. You remember Krull? That early ’80s film? Rell was a cyclops whose people traded one eye to be able to see the future, but the only future they can see is their own death. That’s what I feel like when I’ve got four actions left and know that I can’t complete another sandwich. Melodramatic? Moi?

The co-op mode is really good fun. You’ve each got half the ingredients so you need to pass items back and forth to one another, and it introduces a ton of chatter and planning. What it comes down to is whether Crumbs: A Sandwich Filler Game is worth the £15 (£12 if you back the campaign) it costs, and the answer is a resounding Yes. The enigmatically named J. Antscherl has combined with Minerva Tabletop Games’ development and experience, and Rory Muldoon’s fantastic illustration-style artwork to make a fantastic debut game. You can back it from 8th August 2023 on Kickstarter by clicking right here.

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

Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game (2023)

Design: J. Antscherl
Publisher: Minerva Tabletop Games
Art: Rory Muldoon
Players: 1-2
Playing time: 10-20 mins

The post Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

The first thing to note about Task Force is that it’s an operational-level game. You might command more than one task force during each scenario, but make no mistake that it’s the organisation of your various ships and vehicles that matters. I love the way the game gives each player a board to represent their task forces. There are spaces to identify which vessels belong to which task forces, but the real fun comes from the way you choose which aircraft on each carrier are in which position. It’s not a case of “drop a load of Zeroes on this boat and they can all fly off and fight”. Planes returning from missions can’t just join the front of the queue and take off again, which is great. It forces you to not only be careful with your choices, but also reinforces just how precious your carriers are. When carriers are attacked you roll a die (as you do to resolve most events in the game) which tells you if your planes on the deck, ready to take off, get destroyed. You’ll also determine whether the flight deck gets damaged, which can be a royal pain in the ass when you find out planes can’t take off any more, or worse still, you can’t land the planes you put in the air.

Made in Japan

The first thing that might strike you when you play Task Force is the apparent lop-sided balance. Things seem heavily weighted in Japan’s favour in a lot of places. You’ll take your US F4F fighters up against a squadron of Japanese Zeroes and notice that your planes’ individual 3 strengths are weak compared to the Japanese 5s, and right off the bat you’re looking at the Japanese player using the +2 column of the air-to-air combat table when they roll the die. When you take part in Naval combat, the IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy) always gets a +1 DRM (dice roll modifier). Always. While it seems really unfair, it’s just meant to reflect the difference in the experience of the two battling Navies. It’s not a game-breaking difference, and the balance in redressed in other places, but it’s enough to make you think twice about just charging in and trying to brute force your way through their lines.

If you’re reading this as an experienced wargamer, I don’t think there’s anything I’ve said so far that would cause any furrowing of brows. If you’re new to the genre, however, some of this could seem daunting. DRMs, consulting tables for attack resolution, air-to-air vs ship-to-ship combat. I mention this because VUCA positions Task Force as a game which newbies can enjoy, and I can see how you might not be feeling that so far in this review. It’s an important aim because as a board gamer who is still finding his way into wargaming, I’ve encountered a definite barrier to understanding with some things, so there’s a chance you might be struggling too. If the game is a soft, delicious crème brûlée, the unfamiliar terms and concepts are the hard, caramelised layer on the top.

Tutorials are to wargames as spoons are to crème brûlée. They help break through that hard layer to get to the yumminess lying in wait beneath. VUCA have done the equivalent of loads of smaller, softer crème brûlées in the box, so as to ease you in gently, with a series of easy-to-follow tutorials. It’s tasty stuff.

The tutorials are not as granular as the multitude of mini-lessons that Atlantic Chase used for its tutorials, but it certainly doesn’t throw you in at the deep end either. Being thrown in at the deep end when you’re on a carrier in the middle of the Pacific is a bad thing! I think the very first tutorial might be my favourite in any game, ever. That’s a bold claim, right? The first scenario is the attack on Pearl Harbour and it uses its own special map. It doesn’t even have the hexes which the rest of the game relies on. Instead, it gives you a very visual, easily-understood example of how air-to-surface combat works, completely bypassing any movement rules, and it’s a great way to ease you into things. Taking a specific scenario which even those ignorant of WWII may have an understanding of, and using a special layout which is included in the box for just this one scenario, goes to show just how much VUCA care about increasing accessibility and lowering the barrier to entry.

Cat & mouse

Much of the early game is similar to the aforementioned Atlantic Chase (review here). It’s a game of just trying to figure out where the heck the enemy task forces are. Each player has a cache of fleet marker tokens made up of some designating their task forces, while the rest are dummies. They all begin the game face-down, and each player has twelve tokens on the board. I love how reconnaissance is handled in this game. It’s not as simple as “My plane’s flown over here and it can see a carrier fleet”. Recon is handled by taking a token from a cup or bag and having your opponent look at it in secret, before telling you what the result is. ‘No contact’ is self-explanatory. The scout didn’t see anything. If the result is Detected, your opponent has to be honest with you. A dummy marker is shown if that’s what it was, otherwise, they’ll tell you it’s a carrier TF or a fleet TF.

That seems simple enough, but you can’t be sure they were telling the truth until you attack.

Why? Because there’s a chance you drew a Misdirect token. If that happens Dummies are reported to you as No Contact, carriers are reported as fleets, and vice-versa. The only thing you know for certain is probability and the knowledge that the Detected tokens outnumber the Misdirect tokens 5:2. So they’re probably telling the truth, but what if they aren’t? What if it was foggy when your recon pilots looked down, and they reported the wrong thing back? How certain are you? It’s a brilliant system, and the tension it builds is palpable. You’ll never know for certain until you either send in an air raid or engage in a naval battle, and I love it. It’s not just a case of a mechanism thrown in for the same of spicing up the gameplay, it’s thematic too. We’re talking about small planes making observations over the Pacific in the 1940s. Mistakes happened, I’m sure.

Thematic touches are all over the game’s design, and while they’re the sort of things wargame veterans might take for granted, newcomers – who VUCA have clearly invited to the party with Task Force – will be pleasantly surprised. Little things like nighttime phases altering the way things work. Things can change under the cover of darkness. Fleets can re-arrange themselves, ships can move further, and all ships can engage in combat, regardless of their range designations. Recon missions are a no-go, and you can’t even start one in the last two turns of a day, as the light fades. I really love the way any recon chits you have under a fleet marker get removed and thrown back into the draw cup during the night. It emphasises this feeling of “stuff happens in the dark that you can’t see”.

Final thoughts

Task Force: Carrier Battles in the Pacific is my first game from VUCA Simulations, and if it’s any kind of a marker for what to expect, it won’t be my last. It has the highest production values of any cardboard-based wargame I’ve played. The four double-sided map boards are really well-made, but the shining crown sitting atop its head is that every counter has rounded corners. That means no counter-clipping for the nearly 600 counters and tokens. Can you imagine?? More of this please, publishers. The rulebook and scenario book are really well written, with thorough examples every step of the way. There are a few grammatical errors which I’m sure are a result of translation, things like this excerpt from the section about applying damage – “and if the result is in the range of 1-3, the aircrafts on the flight deck are striken and explode”. It doesn’t really affect the readability or the understanding though, so I’m not about to give it a striken just for that, just be aware that it might not be 100% grammatically correct.

There’s a wonderful feeling of duelling throughout, helped no end by setting the game up with the map in the middle of the table, with each player sitting opposite and their fleet boards in front of them. Trying to find the task forces among the dummies is great. It’s like Battleships, but fun, and I love the way you can obfuscate things during the night turns. Combat is really easy to work through and the excellent player aids give you everything you need when it does all kick off in (or above) the ocean. There’s a decent selection of scenarios, including solo tutorials to help you teach your friends, and ratings of how difficult each scenario is. I’d be happy replaying any of the scenarios due to the sandbox nature of the gameplay, but if you do tire of them there’s a guide at the end explaining how to create your own scenarios, not to mention alternate orders of battle (OOBs) for the supplied scenarios.

I’m a long way from having any kind of authoritative experience in operational-level wargames, but Task Force: Carrier Battles in the Pacific strikes me as being an excellent example of how to do it well. It’s easy to learn, the rules are clear, and the graphic design and presentation throughout are superb. Fleet boards could so easily have been a sheet of card with rudimentary boxes printed on them but instead, they’re bi-fold mounted boards covered in illustrations. It’s just another seemingly small detail which makes the whole package feel a bit more accessible for newcomers. You might think I’m making too big a deal of a small thing, but I’m not. Things like this make a big difference. Task Force is awesome, and if it sounds like your sort of game (and you’re not bored of fighting the Battle of Midway for the hundredth time), then go out and get it. What a fantastic production.

Review copy kindly provided by VUCA Simulations. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Task Force: Carrier Battles in the Pacific (2023)

Design: Ginichiro Suzuki
Publisher: VUCA Simulations
Art: Pablo Bazerque
Players: 1-2
Playing time: 45-90 mins

The post Task Force: Carrier Battles in the Pacific Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Is your brain frazzled yet? No matter, I’m going to plough on regardless.

Interceptions and intersections

So let’s say for argument’s sake that your opponent has a trajectory on the board: a line of pieces which his task force of ships is somewhere along. If you choose to extend your own trajectory and intersect with theirs, then you open up the possibility of using a Naval Search action. After you’ve done the maths associated with the action (there are handy tables printed on the board, as well as player aids) you may well find that you’ve punched a hole in that enemy trajectory. When this happens everything on one side of that hole gets taken off the board, and it’s the player who punched a hold in it who decides which.

To put that into context, let’s say my opponent has a trajectory from Ireland to the coast of North America. The moment I punch a hole in that line, I decide which half of the ocean they’re in. If I remove everything to the west of my own wooden stick, it means their task force has to exist somewhere along the eastern half that remains. I don’t know where exactly, but I’m closing in, and if they were trying to escape that convoy to an American port, I’ve just made their job a whole lot harder.

To the uninitiated, it might seem like a really random way to do naval seek and destroy, but the reality is something much cleverer. This might sound stupid, but oceans are really big, and in comparison, ships are very tiny. The trajectory mechanism is a fantastic way to represent the difficulties these sailors faced in finding one another in the first place, let alone shooting at them.

It’s such an interesting mechanism, and it’s really hard to convey just how thoughtful and strategic it makes the game. It’s like hidden movement, but instead of moving to a place, you’re digging tunnels so that in future turns you could pop up anywhere along it, like some kind of aquatic mole. So we’re dealing with quantum, submarine moles – got it? All of this kiss chase is no good without some fisticuffs once you finally meet up, right? Maybe we played kiss chase differently to you, I don’t know.

Note to self: find better analogies.

You sank my battleship

When battles happen, they’re carried out on the side of the board on a dinky little battle area. It makes sense; the battles really are the side dish compared to the main course of the chasing. Combat is relatively simple as your various vessels push in and out of range taking pot-shots across a dividing line. A bit like a tennis court, with heavy hitters dropping into the net to unleash volleys, before retreating to a safe distance to see what comes back at them.

Battles are really satisfying. There’s loads of room for cunning tactics. For instance, when ships use the manoeuvre ability to change their range, they can produce smoke. When the smoke marker goes on the board it affects both the ships shooting out through the smoke, and those firing in, giving a -1 modifier each way. Not that useful you might think, but there are plenty of times when just surviving is your goal, and sometimes smoke can help you do exactly that.

With those two pieces of gameplay acting as the foundations of the game, everything else just bolsters and adorns it, and adds extra little niceties which pull the whole thing together. The different leaders your task forces can have with their rule-breaking abilities, the crap-ton of scenarios in the accompanying books, the way weather affects the game, and the way certain actions allow your opponent to snatch initiative away from you and interrupt your plans. With the right people, and those people understanding the game, Atlantic Chase is a thing of beauty.

Having the right people and having them understand are just two of a handful of wrinkles in the smooth finish.

Troubled waters

Learning Atlantic Chase isn’t exactly smooth sailing (sorry…). It’s a daunting thing to open a box and find five books and a total of 200+ pages facing you. Some of that is scenarios, some is chapter-and-verse rules, and a chunk is reserved for the tutorial book. Normally I’d have a bit of a moan if I found a game to be too impenetrable with its rules and lack of tutorial. In contrast, Atlantic Chase veers in the other direction. It introduces concepts and parts of actions one tutorial at a time, which means by the time you’ve finished them you’ve setup, played, and put away the pieces for ten separate tutorials, covering 51 pages of that book. I think it’s great that a tutorial goes to this level of depth, but it’s a) very time-consuming, and b) indicative of the level of intricacy and nuance the game dives down to at times. But it’s there in the first place, and it works, and that’s worth a lot in my book. It’s an easier learn than something like Salerno ’43 (review here).

Atlantic Chase isn’t a game to play casually or to teach to someone who might only play once or twice. Learning the game is an investment, make no mistake. To get the most out of the game you need a regular partner to play games with, because it’s a two-player game. There are solo scenarios, and the solo does play a decent game, but it’s the mind games which make this game as much fun as it is, and that’s just not as much fun when it’s only your mind in the game. I can imagine having a wargame-loving friend who I meet up with regularly and having an absolute blast with Atlantic Chase, playing through scenario after scenario. If you go into it with a “dip in, dip out” mindset, you’re not going to get the most from it. I really enjoy playing Atlantic Chase and I’ve had great fun with the scenarios, but you need that wingman. You need that Goose to your Maverick. I’m sad and Gooseless.

I’ll admit right now that I haven’t tackled the campaign, just because I don’t have the time with another person to be able to do it, and that makes me sad. I’m also not keen on some of the random chance events in the game when they crop up. The first scenario for example, has you roll a dice if you manage to get the German cruise ship The Bremen to Murmansk before war breaks out. The scenario ends either way, but on a roll of 1 Russia captures it, and anything else sees it refuel and join the Kriegsmarine as intended. Rolling a 1 would be a damp squib of an ending for the Axis player. A similar thing happens to close some Axis ports in the campaign (hey, I can read it and dream, okay), which could see you get to a port and find out that someone’s rolled a die and it’s shut for the weekend, and you’re stuck there until it opens, like falling asleep in your car after going to B&Q at a retail park on Sunday afternoon.

Final thoughts

What a double-edged sword Atlantic Chase is. On one hand, you’ve got this incredibly tense game of hidden-movement cat and mouse, using what for me is a groundbreaking mechanism. It’s ridiculously good fun, and far more accessible than many hex-and-counter wargames. Yet on the other hand to really squeeze that juice from it, to get all the fun that comes in that cardboard box, you really need the right person on the other side of the table. You could argue that that’s true of any wargame, but the trajectory mechanism, brilliant though it is, takes at least a full game to really start to intuit.

The rule and scenario books are really well-written, and while it might put some people off, I’m a big fan of the conversational style used in them. It’s another little touch which makes the whole thing feel slightly friendlier and more welcoming to newbies. The counters are a decent size too, so when it comes to conducting battles, you don’t need tweezers. It’d be remiss of me not to mention the little wooden trajectory markers. Each country’s task forces use a specific colour of stick for the trajectories, and each colour has three different kinds of stick, for each of the three possible task forces. Each task force’s sticks are differentiated by one or two stripes printed on them, which would be great, but they’re only printed on one side! Flipping them around to see which belongs to which is a royal pain in the backside, and I’d dearly love to see this fixed in future printings (please!!!).

If you’re okay with all of that though. If you don’t mind the learn and the teach, if you have a regular player two, and if you’re smart enough to bag each set of sticks separately (…), Atlantic Chase is an amazing game. The hidden movement is so, so clever, so unique, and so much fun to apply. The choice of how long to make each trajectory is exquisitely painful. Too long and get broken quickly, too short and it takes twice as long to get anywhere. The chase when someone breaks the line and hightails it to safety is brilliant. They’re all things which precious few games manage to evoke in quite the same way. I’ve heard good things said about designer, Jeremy (Jerry) White, and if Atlantic Chase is anything to go by, they’re all correct. A stunning piece of game design, muzzled slightly by its dependencies.

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

Atlantic Chase (2021)

Design: Jeremy White
Publisher: GMT Games
Art: Jeremy White
Players: 1-2
Playing time: 30-120 mins

The post Atlantic Chase Review appeared first on Punchboard.

What’s In The Box?

There’s not much of a box to speak of, as you might expect with a game that’s designed to fit in one hand. There are a few different versions available, but the one I have comes with plastic cards, a magnetic clasp box, and a small faux-leather wallet with the Palm Island logo on.

There are two sets of the cards in the box, so you can play some of the two player games, which are mostly just direct competition for points. Along with these there are a few cards with rules and feats reminders, and a small instruction booklet.

The components are really nice. I love the magnetic box, and the little wallet could genuinely be used to take a copy in your pocket anywhere, anytime. The plastic cards in this version are divisive; some people love them, some hate them. I fall into the former group. I like knowing these will never wear out or get sweaty or dirty from being clasped in someone’s hand. The downside of the plastic is that it makes them pretty slippery. Great for shuffling and slotting cards into the deck, hard to keep hold of at times.

How Does It Play?

Palm island is essentially a resource management game, mixed with city-building, in a quite abstracted way. The premise is you’re put in charge of a budding island, and need to build it to be thriving.

To set up the game you set the round marker card to one side, and then shuffle the deck. There’s a mark in the corner of every card to help you orient it the right way. The round marker card goes at the back, then you take the assembled deck in your non-dominant hand, and you’re ready to go.

Each of the cards represents a building in your fledgling island community. The aim of the game is to score as many points as possible over eight rounds, and the way you do that is by upgrading the buildings. To upgrade a building, you need resources, so where do you get those resources? From the cards themselves.

Turn…

Each of the cards that can be used as resources have a number of symbols on the top of them, representing one or more of the different resources in the game: fish, logs or stone. To store a card’s resources you check the card to see if there’s a cost to bank it, pay the cost if so (more late on paying), and then turn the card 90 degrees clockwise (assuming you’re holding the deck in your left hand. You place that card – still rotated – at the back of the the deck, and the resources you’ve banked are now visible to the side. If you were to bank a second card, the same thing happens but the card is slid slightly to the right, so you can see all of your resources.

Any time a card is either discarded or upgraded, it gets put on the back of the deck, and so the resources slowly make their way forwards. If they ever reach the front of the deck, they’re discarded to the back, so you need to plan to spend them.

…Turn…

For each turn (see what I did there?) you look at the top card on the deck and decide what you want to do with it. You;ll either bank it as a resource, or upgrade it. Banking some resources when the cards have been upgraded might mean that you have to spend one to bank three for example. Usually these banked resources though are spent on upgrades.

…And Turn Again

Each card in Palm Island has four parts. The cards are double-sided, and each side has a top and bottom half. Shown on each card is the cost to upgrade it, and the action you carry out when you upgrade it. The action will either rotate it 180 degrees, so the top is now the bottom and vice-versa, or to flip it over. If it costs resources to do this, those resources are just rotated back upright wherever they are in the deck.

If you decide not to use the card on the top of the deck, you can look at the one beneath it and play that one instead, but if you don’t want to play either, the top one is discarded to the back of the deck. Once you’ve got through the whole deck, the round indicator card comes to the top. It has an arrow to show whether to rotate or flip it so that the next number shows, and it goes to the back of the deck. Once the eighth round is done, it’s game over. You add up the stars shown on your upgraded cards, and that’s your final score.

Getting certain scores or winning with certain conditions can unlock feats, which give you different ways to play future games. Not really a legacy game, but certainly enough to keep things fresh for a while and add a challenge,

Final Thoughts

Palm Island packs in way more game than it has any right to. It’s only a few cards, but really manages to capture that feeling that bigger games can, one of producing resources, growing your town, upgrading and keeping things balanced. It’s hard though, really pretty difficult to score well in. It takes a couple of rounds just to learn the order of the cards that are coming up, so you can start planning which resources you’re going to bank, and what you’re going to spend them on.

Initially it can feel like an unfortunately shuffled deck is going to ruin any chance of doing well, but with a few plays under your belt you start to realise that you can influence the order, and make things work for you. Don’t like that those two cards are right next to one another? Hold one, and play the one underneath, then do the same thing again, and now you’ve got a card gap between them. And it’s small moves like that, that can make all the difference.

It’s such a satisfying game, it makes me smile and feel cosy just to play. There are so few card and board games that you can curl up in a big chair and play, but this is one. And it doesn’t feel like a compromise to play it, it’s not a case of “I want to play in bed, I’ll compromise with something light and a bit rubbish“, you can play a thinky, clever game – anywhere. It even comes with little divider cards, so you can save your game at any point to continue later. You might wonder why you’d bother with that, a full game only takes 15 minutes. But remember that you can take this anywhere, so you may have started a game while waiting for the kids to come out of school, or waiting at the dentist before you get called in, so it’s a small but really welcome addition.

A Slippery Customer

The plastic cards are awkward at first to just keep hold of. There’s very little friction between them and they feel slippery together. It’s a double-edged blade though, as despite them being harder to hold than standard cards, they’re also really easy to shuffle, and really easy to slip them around when you’re spending resources or moving cards to the back of the deck. I have lost a game I was going to score well on however (no, really) when my deck essentially exploded when I sneezed, but that’s only once in dozens of plays.

The reason I’m highlighting it is just to make anyone aware of the potential problem if they’re thinking of picking up the plastic card version. If you’ve got small hands or any kind of problems with your hands or motor control, it could be a problem. For the rest of us though, it’s just a case of playing a few times until you get the feel for it.

In closing, given the fact this will barely take up any space in your collection, if you can find it for a reasonable price and have lots of small windows to play something, I think you should definitely pick up Palm Island. There are lots of versions around, so check which one you’re getting and what it’s made of. The feats, additional cards, and two-player modes – both competitive and co-operative – give the game a longer lifespan than you’d expect too. An exceptionally well-designed and implemented little game.

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