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

Parks and Rec

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

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

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

Making tracks

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

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

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

Friendly and inviting

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

Tenpenny Parks (2022)

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

The post Tenpenny Parks Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Mutagen is a rare beast these days. A new Euro game competing in a market of ever-growing gimmickry, trying to make its mark. Don’t get me wrong, Mutagen has its own gimmick, but we’ll come back to that. It’s a game which feels like it could have been made ten or fifteen years ago, and if you take that to mean something negative, you couldn’t be more wrong. I miss the days when worker-placement games kept things simple and relied on solid core game design to tempt the box off your shelf and onto the table. Mutagen gives me that same feeling again, and I like it all the more for it.

Lend a hand

Let’s get the gimmick out of the way first. Each of the non-robot screen-printed wooden meeples (which have serious Explorers of Navoria vibes – read my preview for that one here) have hands which can have little plastic mutations added to them. Note that these come with the deluxe version of the game which is £45 as opposed to the £35, but I think it’s definitely worth the extra tenner, especially considering you get a couple of expansions thrown in too. They’re really cool to look at, and to be honest with you at first I thought there was precious little other than novelty value to them.

I was wrong.

In Mutagen you dispatch your workers to different spaces on the board. The actions at each are really simple, like gathering some elements from the display, claiming tree cards (think contract fulfilment) or bumping your tokens up a collection of tracks. Each action space also has a little table showing other, bonus actions you can take based on which worker you send (thug, spy, or engineer). On top of that, if your worker has a little mutation mitten you can spend your collected shards on performing a bonus action, based on the mutation cards you’ve assigned to it.

So why does it matter if they have a little plastic glove? It’s a great visual cue of not only having a mutation, but what kind. Think of the heavy games you’ve played before now and missed out on bonus actions you could have taken but didn’t, because you forgot that you’d applied some particular effect to the pieces on your player board. It’s easily done, especially when you’re working through a whole action checklist in your head to enact your plans. Mutagen’s mutation attachments serve a real purpose, and I like it. It’s just the sort of thing to help people playing medium-weight games (and Mutagen is firmly in the middle of medium-weight) who want to make the leap to heavier fare.

Elemental, my dear wossisface

Most of Mutagen revolves around the acquisition of elements. Installing them on your airship (player board) gives you ample opportunity to score big, but annoyingly you’ll want to keep some in your storage because you can spend those to bump the different tracks and complete tree cards. Tree cards reward turning in elements with shard fragments. Shard fragments can be spent to gain crew cards for end-of-game points and move your token around another progress track that loops, dishing out points and bonuses.

This is the game at the core of Mutagen. Balancing the elements you install against those you store to spend. Installing elements needs storage tiles to upgrade your airship, and there’s a fun spatial puzzle in here. Elemental tiles can only be installed on slots matching their type or colour, but matching types and colours may not be stored orthogonally adjacent.

‘Orthogonally adjacent’ – there’s a phrase you didn’t use often until you started playing board games, huh?

First come, first served

There’s a really nice idea that designer Alexandros has baked into the worker-placement and action-selection in Mutagen. There’s space enough for everyone to be able to take every action once, which is nice of him. It’s a far cry from the days of games like Caylus. However, if you visit an action space that other people already have workers at, they can take their workers’ mutation action again, but as a re-action this time, which costs a little more than a standard mutation action, but gives tantalising opportunities to take mini-turns out of sequence.

It’s these reaction turns that elevate Mutagen from A. N. Other’s Generic Game to something really intriguing. As the game goes on the reaction turns take on more importance. I really like this change of focus in a worker-placement game. It’s not about where you go because everyone can go everywhere in theory. It’s about when you choose an action, and understanding how your opponents benefit when you do.

It’s this indirect interaction which makes Mutagen most fun when played with three and four players. Two is fine, it’s still a fun game, but the chain reactions of reactions aren’t as interesting in the late game. And while I’m talking about the reactions, I have to once more acknowledge the practicality of the mutation gloves for the meeples. Even if you aren’t paying attention, the other players know who can take a reaction action and will remind them. Because of course you’d remind someone if they weren’t watching, right?

Final thoughts

Mutagen was peaks and troughs for me during my first play. I was so excited at the idea and the incredible art from The Mico (fans of the West Kingdom games know what I’m talking about, have a throwback to the third ever review here for Paladins), but my first few turns were tempered with a feeling of ‘well, this is okay I guess’. You might feel the same, but persevere and the real game quickly reveals itself, and it’s good.

Mutagen is the sort of game I would recommend for players who thrive on medium-weight games that don’t take an age to setup, learn, and play. You can get up and running really quickly and be finished inside an hour and a half. The most trouble you’re likely to run into is with some of the iconography. Not because it’s particularly bad, it’s just unusual at first. The other thing that caught me out more than once was the way that two of the elements look very similar, namely gas and liquid. Bear in mind that this is still a prototype copy of the game I’m playing here, and things will undoubtedly change between me writing this, and you playing the final product.

Kudos to Alexandros for his design, The Mico for lending his considerable artistic talents, and Dranda Games for taking a punt with this unusual, yet familiar game. It’s so refreshing to find a crowdfunded game which is neither tiny like a card game nor prophesising back problems trying to get your future delivery through the front door. Bear in mind that there are changes to come from what you see here to the final product, but even at this early stage there’s a lot of promise here for a game that a lot of people are going to have a good time with.

You can find out more and see how it plays by watching the excellent Gaming Rules! playthrough right here, and back Mutagen now over on its Kickstarter campaign page.

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

Mutagen (2025)

Design: Alexandros Kapidakis
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: The Mico
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins.

The post Mutagen Preview 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.

Mrs Frisby not included

When I was growing up, one of my favourite books was Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. It was the story of a family of field mice who get taken in by a group of sophisticated, intelligent rats who have access to human-like technology. I’m not going to ruin the story here (go read the book, it’s excellent), suffice to say the theme and setting for Rats of Wistar immediately made me think of that story.

In this game you play as a rat who wants to be chosen as the leader of the colony. To do this you need to explore the nearby farm in search of cheese, while you simultaneously grow your burrow, recruit more rodents to your cause, and develop funky new rat technology and inventions to help you on your way.

As soon as I put this game on the table, complete with its moving wheel of action segments, it makes me smile. I love a dry Euro as much as the next person, but it’s so refreshing to play a heavier game which isn’t about building some ancient city, or a fantasy fight for the ages. The board and cards are bright and colourful, the artwork is cute, and the whole thing feels friendly and uplifting. This sort of stuff matters. There are times you want to play a game as a mood booster, and the family-friendly pallet and art style really play into that.

The game revolves around the aforementioned wheel. It’s split into six segments, with two of the six being next to one of the three areas of the board at any one time. You plonk one of your three your chief rat meeples on one of the action spaces on the segments, then collect the associated resources and perform the action there. Things instantly get interesting because the strength of your action is equal to the number of mousey meeples you’ve deployed to that section of the board. e.g. if you have three mice in the Forest area of the board, you’ll either be able to collect three wood, or potentially dig three rooms.

Taking your chances in the rat race

There’s lots going on on your player boards, but the main thing you do there is expand your burrow. You start the game with a few spaces to house more mice, and as the game goes on you need to both dig new holes and construct new beds for the new inhabitants. Building a bedroom adds another mouse for you to deploy in order to boost your action strengths.

While all this is going on you also have an explorer meeple at the door of the farm. By using explore actions you can open doors, move around the building, unveil new mission cards in some of the rooms, and even welcome native mice back to your fancy digs. This part of the game is where opinions (in my experience) tend to get polarised. Some people like the exploration and the unknown quantity that the mission cards add to the game. Some people hate it. Personally, I like it. I’d have liked an official variant which gave you the option, but it is what it is.

I get it though. The idea that you might spend most of your game working down towards the basement mission cards that are worth the most, only to find out when you flip the card that the scoring criteria on it don’t match what you’ve been doing so far. In the same breath, however, in a four-player game, you’ll see all except one of each type of mission card. The only unknown is which room each will be in, and which two of the ten included mission cards stay in the box. The same is true of the face-down guest mice throughout the house. You might flip one only to find it doesn’t really mesh with your ideas, and that you’d have been better off just adding a new bedroom instead.

The explore action is by far the most interesting in the game. I like moving around the house. I like seeing what appears where. I like the race to the cheese in the far corner of the basement, with its precious bounty of VPs. The rest of the game is there to fuel that exploration. To give you the things you need to complete the missions, because claiming a mission means moving a piece from your player board to the card, unlocking new one-time or ongoing bonuses as you go. It’s all neatly knitted together, like a warm jumper for a naked mole rat.

Player InteRATion

I know, I’m not proud of that heading either, but we’re stuck with it now. Player interaction is a signature of Luciani’s games, and I’m pleased to say that Rats of Wistar continues that pedigree. In some of his games it’s passive interaction, like the action space blocking of Marco Polo II or Lorenzo Il Magnifico, while in some it’s much closer to flipping someone the bird a few inches from their face, like in Barrage.

Wistar has a bit of both. The action space blocking is a very strong passive play. If there are no spaces left on the Explore segment when it comes around to your turn, you better have a solid Plan B. More direct, however, are the invention cards which directly mess with the other players. Let’s suppose the scenario I just described happens – you can’t explore and you’re left back at the start of the farmhouse while the others have been off opening doors (which grant you bonuses when you collect them) scampering around the farmhouse. BAM, I play my Spy Center card, pay two wood for the privilege, and everyone with more door tokens than me loses 2 VPs. That card is also worth 4 VPs to me at the end of the game, so there’s a 6 VP swing in one quick action. Take that, mother fluffers!

Again, there are some people out there who hate direct player interaction in a Euro game. Fear not, however, as the designer himself says you can just leave those cards out of the game without affecting it noticeably, a task which is made easier by those cards being marked with a flame. That flame is the flame of anger when you screw someone over, and I love it!

I’ve heard complaints that being the first player is too powerful a starting advantage, and I can understand why someone might think that. Conversely, however, I’ve played with people who thought that being the last player was too powerful because you get the first pick of the pairs of invention cards to start the game with. Getting an early card played which grants you an additional free action once per round is powerful too. To me, it feels balanced, but I’d defer to the results of Simone’s playtesting if it’s available anywhere.

Final thoughts

Rats of Wistar looks much lighter than it is. Your first game or two feel pleasant enough, but after that, you start to grok what’s going on, and then the game really starts to fire. The importance of the free anytime actions becomes clear, as does the importance of turn order. Turn order is influenced by visiting a worker spot which is less powerful than the others, but when you know which actions will rotate to which location for the next round, you can set yourself up for some really powerful turns. You need those powerful turns because there are only five rounds before the game ends. 15 turns, that’s all you get.

It’s one of those games where having an abundance of ‘stuff’ that you don’t have a specific need for often means you could be doing something more efficiently. Moving your workers around the wheel to boost actions to wring everything out of an action feels like the way to get the most done, but I’m far from an expert. I really like the way the scoring is so visible and tempting. As you dig new spaces or build new bedrooms, the value for each successive one is n+1 compared to the last one. The bed spaces go 1, 2, 4, 7, and so on, so you constantly feel yourself pulled in multiple directions at once. If you’re like me and easily distracted, you probably won’t win, because there are so many ways to try to earn points.

My favourite things about Rats of Wistar are time and space. That sounds more scientific than it is. The game is quick to set up, quick to teach, and quick to put away. These are traits I’m beginning to appreciate more and more with each new game I play. I dearly love Voidfall for example, but in the time it takes me to set that game up I can have Wistar set up and halfway played. It’s a relatively easy game to teach too, helped in no small part by the excellent, consistent iconography throughout. Space-wise it’s great too. It’s a smaller, Alea-sized box. It doesn’t swamp your table. It all just feels compact, without appearing crowded.

I’m a bit of a Simone Luciani fanboy, I’ll admit. I haven’t played a game of his yet that I didn’t really enjoy, and Rats of Wistar joins that list. Easy to learn, plenty of depth, optional take-that interaction, quick to play – what’s not to love? Well, the exploration and random positions of the missions, sure, and if that’s a big deal to you I’d suggest looking elsewhere. It doesn’t bother me, however, which is why I really like this one.

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.

Rats of Wistar (2023)

Design: Simone Luciani, Danilo Sabia
Publisher: Cranio Creations / Capstone Games
Art: Candida Corsi, Sara Valentino
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90 mins

The post Rats Of Wistar 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.

Chain reaction

Playing The White Castle is easy in principle. Grab a die from either end of one of the three bridges on the board. Place that die in a colour-matched worker space, and take that action. If the value of the die is below the value printed on the board you pay the difference. If the value is higher, take the difference in money from the bank.

It doesn’t sound difficult when you put it like that, and in all honesty, it isn’t. There are only a few areas on the board to place the dice, along with a few on your own player board. The kicker though, and the first thing you’ll hear from anyone who’s played it, is that you only get nine turns for the entire game.

That’s right, nine turns.

Three dice in the first round, three in the second, and three in the third and final round. If it sounds like that’s barely enough turns to get a strategy together, then you’re right, and your first couple of games have a real feeling of “What? That’s it? Oh…”.

There are plenty of people who will call the game right there. Played it, it ended too quickly, sell it on Facebook. And that’s fair. If you’ve got more games than you can play, there’s a perfectly valid argument to get rid of the things you’re not enjoying.

In the case of The White Castle, however, persistence reaps huge rewards. Once you get the hang of creating chained actions, things get spicy.

Nickel-and-Daimio?

Have you ever played a game and used one of your turns with the thought of “Let’s just get some stuff this turn”? Of course you have, we all have. Forget that when you play The White Castle. Go on, just dump it out of your brain. Tell yourself right now – there are NO dead turns in this game. If you’re not doing really productive stuff on every single one of your nine turns, you’re going to do badly.

I’ll give you an example. Taking a die from the left end of a bridge means you’re going to get a lower value. The lowest values go on the left end of a bridge, and the highest go to the right. Taking a die from the left often means you’re going to have to cough up a few coins to take an action, but those left dice also trigger your lantern actions. You might be wondering what lantern actions are. Good. At the bottom of your player board, there’s a space to add action cards you claim from the main board, and these cards stack. Every time you trigger the lantern, you do all of those lantern actions.

Nice, right?

Here’s where it gets tricky. To use lantern actions, you need some action cards. To get lantern cards you need to place courtier meeples into the castle. As they climb through the levels they take the cards and send them back to your board and your lantern area. So how do you get a courtier into the castle? You find a spot where you can place a die to take that action. Spend some mother-of-pearl and up they go.

The astute among you might have noticed I said ‘take that action’ in there, and that’s where the Eureka moment comes from. Or more accurately, the ‘eek!’ moment. Taking one action is 11% of your entire game. ELEVEN PERCENT! That’s a lot. Those first couple of plays will hammer home how much of an efficiency puzzle The White Castle is, and how dynamic it is. The dice in each round are random, as are the actions on the main board, the rewards available in different areas, and of course the biggest random factor of all – other people.

Final thoughts

I feel myself cringing when I start this summary because I need to use a trite, overused line. The White Castle packs a lot of game into a small box. Ugh, there, I said it. It’s true though, Devir and Llama Dice have proven that you don’t have to conform to the Kallax-hugging 30cm x 30cm boxes and fill them with stuff, just to provide a game experience that you’d want to headline a games night with. All credit to them with sticking to their guns when they can, because a small box with a language-agnostic board and cards, combined with packing all the different language rulebooks, means they can keep costs down. I try not to mention the cost of games here, because it varies around the world, and because I try to focus on the game for what it is, rather than providing some kind of cost-benefit analysis.

That said, you can pick up The White Castle for less than thirty quid at the time of writing. That’s a bit of a bargain in my eyes. It doesn’t swamp a table even with four players, and it plays out in less than 90 minutes with those same four players. It scales really well and works as well with two people as it does with four, which again, is something you can’t say about every game being released now. The solo game is clean and easy to run, and a great option when you don’t have somebody else at the table with you.

Most importantly though, The White Castle is fun. It’ll have you scratching your head and it might even leave you feeling frustrated for your first few plays, but it really is worth sticking with. Instead of building a sprawling, multi-armed machine in the way some games do now, you build this small, efficient machine which blinks out of existence as quickly as it comes into being. It’s not the game for you if you’re after a sandbox to play in, but if you want a tight, satisfying puzzle of a Euro, it’s a great choice.

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

The White Castle (2023)

Design: Isra C., Shei S.
Publisher: Devir
Art: Joan Guardiet
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post The White Castle 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.

Literally, dam, because that’s what you’re building in Barrage – dams. Also conduits, powerhouses and elevations, but ‘Coooonduit!’ doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s a game of worker placement and network-building as you and your friends compete to generate electricity from the limited amount of water flowing downhill. As far as Euro games go, it can be pretty cutthroat and there’s a ton of interaction. It’s a confusing game, for sure, but an excellent one.

Come hell or high water

Barrage puts you in the role of CEOs of energy companies. Your goal is to produce hydroelectric power to fulfil contracts, which in turn score VPs. The board is gorgeous and represents a map, starting at the top in the mountains, moving down into the hills, before finishing up at the bottom in the plains. Four rivers start their journey way up in the headwaters in the mountains, collecting in basins as gravity pulls them ever-onward.

Being the corporate giants you are, and understanding the nation’s need for energy, it’s your job to harness the flow of water to generate electricity by redirecting water through conduits towards powerhouses. It all sounds simple enough, but there’s a problem. There’s a limited amount of water flowing downhill and all of you are competing for it. In order to get enough water through the turbines in your powerhouses you’ve got to build dams on the edges of the natural basins for the water to pool behind. That means if you build dams up in the mountains, you’re going stop – or certainly delay – the flow of water to lower basins.

So what happens to the players building dams, conduits, and powerhouses further down, when the water can’t get to them? That question is the blood pumping through the beating heart of Barrage. It introduces some of the tastiest interactions in any modern Euro game from the last five years. It’s a game of combining plans with opportunistic swoops to either benefit from someone else’s loose ends, or to just be a pain in the arse.

To run the energy generation action you need three things. You need water behind a dam, a conduit leading away from that dam, and a powerhouse at the other end of the conduit. It brings this timing puzzle with it. You can use anyone’s conduit to channel water to your powerhouse, but if you use one that’s not yours you have to pay the owner for the privilege, and they generate VPs at the same time. You could build the conduit first, but if someone else builds the dam on that space, you can never generate energy, because the water has to come from your own dam. Maybe you see someone with a really good setup near the bottom of the board, but you don’t like that. It’d be a shame if someone else built a tall dam directly above it, wouldn’t it…?

Keeping your head above water

Sticking with the water puns, it’s easy to see how Barrage is a deep game. On top of all of that posturing and planning for the buildings on the map, you’ve got a tight Euro game to manage which overarches everything. Resources are tight, and unusually in these games, reusable. This brings me to my favourite toy in all of board games for the last few years: the Construction Wheel.

Each player has their own wheel which is split into six sections. When you want to construct a building you first have to have the building’s tile available, i.e. it can’t already be on the construction wheel. You place that tile and the required concrete mixers or excavators (your resources) into the top-most section of the wheel, and then rotate the wheel 60 degrees so that the next section reaches the open slot at the top. Any building tiles or resources on that section which is now at the top come back to your supply, ready to use again. The fly in the ointment being that the resources and tile you just used are trapped until that wheel spins all the way around, so planning is key.

To play Barrage well you need to have your head on a swivel, so the saying goes. You need to keep track of what things are available in your supply, what’s happening on the map, how many engineers (workers) you have left, where you could generate power, and importantly, which tiles other players currently have trapped in their construction wheel. Balancing it all is tricky, especially during your first couple of plays because the water flow isn’t as simple as you might imagine. Understanding the difference between a dam and a powerhouse isn’t immediately obvious, nor is the fact that water simply flowing past your powerhouse doesn’t generate any energy, unless you play as the USA, in which case it can.

There’s a reason this game currently has a 4.10 weight on BGG at the time of writing, with 5.00 being the heaviest, most complex a game could be. None of the actions is particularly difficult or drawn-out to perform, but understanding the way the game’s many, many gears mesh together is hard. On top of all of the various ways the actions work together, there’s even more to consider. You’ve got different player boards with different bonuses, different executive officers that grant you unique powers, and variable setup for how much water flows from which headwaters, and when. After your introductory game, you can throw in advanced technology tiles for construction too. Barrage is a big, wet sandbox, designed for repeated play with a group of players keen to explore all the game has to offer.

Final thoughts

Barrage is a game that I wanted to play for a long, long time. The idea of the construction wheel had me hooked on its own, let alone the level of interaction sewn in. When it arrived on boardgamearena.com I got stuck in and enjoyed it so much that I knew I had to have a physical copy of the game. I’m glad I own it now because the production is absolutely gorgeous. The water basins on the board have UV spot marking which makes them shiny and smooth. The excavators and concrete mixers are tiny and ridiculously detailed when something basic would have sufficed. Each player board is dual-layered with places for everything to sit neatly, and that’s despite the fact that each player’s buildings are slightly different. A green powerhouse looks different to a pink one, which looks different to a white one etc. It’s a level of extravagance I really appreciate in a game that’s designed to be played a lot of times, and the sort of thing usually reserved for Eagle-Gryphon’s Vital Lacerda games, like On Mars (review here).

Let’s make no bones about it, there are a bunch of players out there who won’t enjoy Barrage. It’s a tricky game to learn, there’s a lot of stuff going on at any one time in the game, and it can be really mean. If you don’t like games where your plans get knocked into a cocked hat because some swine has built above you, diverting everything past you, you’re not going to have much fun. Most of the time the game isn’t so overtly combative, but it certainly can be, and it’s worth being aware of. This brings me to another relevant point – player scaling. The only difference between a two- and a four-player game is the number of shared action spaces available. The board layout doesn’t change. It means a two-player game has the unspoken option of players choosing to build far apart from one another. In a four-player game, forget it, you’ll be under each other’s feet from turn one.

If you want a heavy game that’s deep, thematic, and has plenty of variety and scope for strategy, Barrage is superb. It will break your brain, you’ll get annoyed with the other players around the table, and you’ll find yourself making use of every last resource and coin at your disposal. But you know what? You’ll have such a blast doing it that you just won’t care.

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.

Barrage (2019)

Design: Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani
Publisher: Cranio Creations
Art: Mauro Alocci, Antonio De Luca, Roman Roland Kuteynikov
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-180 mins

The post Barrage Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Barcelona! Such a beautiful horizon”

Are you feeling better now? Good. Barcelona is the latest Euro game from Board&Dice. It’s a mixture of tile-placement and action-selection, and while that sounds like a relatively easy mixture to cope with, there are a lot of things going on. The good news is that they’re a lot of really good, really interesting things. The question is – do you need or want another Euro with a lot of moving parts under the hood? Hopefully, I can help answer that question for you.

The Eixample

That’s not a typo. The Eixample is the name given to the extension designed for Barcelona in the 19th Century by the urban planner, Ildefons Cerdà. I won’t give a detailed history, but to set the scene for the game, the walls around Barcelona have come down and Ildefons has plans for the city: wide roads, green spaces, lots of natural light, and octagonal city blocks to name but a few.

You, the players, are the builders creating this new Barcelona. The main board depicts Barcelona and is divided into rows and columns, and at the end of each row and column there’s an action. To take your turn you pull a couple of citizen tiles from a bag and place them in a stack at the intersection of a row and column. From there, a whole bunch of things happen.

Firstly, you get to take the actions at either end of the row and column of your intersection. These actions range from the simple – take some cloth or coins, the game’s resources – to the more complex, like building streets or moving your tram. I call these actions more complex, but in truth their operation is really easy. Placing a street is as difficult as picking one of the tiles up off your player board and putting it on the main board. You don’t need to be a civil engineer to do that. The real game, however, the juice in this delicious Spanish Orange, comes from how you combine the knock-on effects of your actions.

C-c-c-combo maker!

Right off the bat, let me state that if you like games that have you planning combinations of one thing resulting in another, you’ll love what happens in Barcelona. There are few things as satisfying in all of board gaming as setting up the mental dominoes that represent your coming turn, and executing it to perfection with the simple act of tipping the first one over – or in this case, choosing your first action. There’s a strange phenomenon in Euro games where one player narrates all the things happening in a chain of actions – a combo.

“I take this action which gives me those things. I spend those things on placing this thing here, and get these bonuses for doing it. Taking that thing off my player board uncovered this bonus, which means I place another thing here, complete this chain, and get another bonus here…”

We all do it, and we’re all so proud of ourselves for figuring out our big brain moves, like a five-year-old who’s figured out how make their own bowl of cereal. The rest of the table might give you a polite “Nice one”, or more likely ignore you why they plan their own blockbuster turn. The point is, playing Barcelona is like spending two hours of people doing this. If that sounds like your jam, congratulations, you’re on the same team as me. I couldn’t give two hoots about what someone else does (unless it disrupts my plans), but I love the fact we all get to do it. It also means that more than once you’ll hear someone say “I had a plan but now I’ve forgotten it”, and that’s because this Spanish sandbox lays so many toys in front of you, that it’s easy to forget which one you started with when you built your own Sagrada Familia from sand.

Urban congestion

The way Barcelona’s turns play out means that your options get more and more limited as the game goes on. You must place a stack of citizen tiles on an intersection, but the intersection has to be empty to place them. The only way to remove citizens is to build buildings, which is obligatory if possible at the end of your turn. The puzzle it presents leads to much furrowing of brows in the last quarter of the game, where you try to complete the goals – be they shared or personal – with a limited set of choices laid before you.

If you’ve got AP-prone players around the table, this is where the game starts to wade through treacle. The butter-smooth chaining of actions from the early game gets bogged down while the players look for the least-worst options available. The end of the game is player-driven too, which might divide opinion. It’s possible to see when someone can end the game, so planning past that becomes difficult and forces you to decide whether to bank on one more turn to finish your plans, or make the best of what you’ve got because you’re sure someone’s going to end things. It’s the polar opposite of games like Uwe Rosenberg’s, games like Hallertau (review here) or Atiwa (review here) where you know for sure when the game ends, and then spend ages figuring out how to eke out every last VP.

I mention these things because there’s a whole heap of Euro games out there, all doing similar things but with their own twists. For experienced players, the decision of whether to pick up a game like Barcelona comes down not to the theme, but to other details like how prone to AP it is, whether the end of the game is prescribed, how much take-that is involved – smaller details like that. Barcelona, for the record, has very little player interaction, save for the usual “I can’t believe you took the spot I was going to have!”.

Final thoughts

I like Barcelona. I like it a lot. I like the way it takes what are now very familiar themes, like tile-laying and action selection, and adds its own little flourishes to them. You have this beautiful shared board that gets filled with a patchwork of streets of different colours, but rather than ending things with the laying of those streets and intersections, it adds another layer on the Z-axis and lets you move trams around. The trams move around on top of the streets, possibly getting you more actions, letting you transport people, and using your own streets for free movement. It’s just another nice touch that elevates Barcelona above other mid-heavy Euros.

As I mentioned above, it’s got a real sandbox feel to the game. You could play time and again and try a different approach, a different strategy, a different focus. In true Board&Dice fashion, the game comes with action tiles that let you randomise which actions are in which position, which is a bigger deal than you might think. Strategy in Barcelona is built on combining actions and buildings, so not knowing which actions will get paired and where makes a real difference, and I really appreciate it.

If you don’t enjoy thinking several actions deep ahead of your turn, you’re not going to enjoy Barcelona. If you don’t appreciate having to make plans B & C, lest someone block the spot you wanted, buggering your plans up, you’re going to have an especially bad time. For the rest of us though, Dani Garcia has put together a beautifully made game full of replay value. You’d be forgiven for thinking Ian O’Toole had his crayons all over this one, because it’s so colourful and bright for a city-building Euro, but no, it’s Aleksander Zawada we have to thank for the eye-candy this time.

If you like mid-heavy Euro games full of choice, combos, and attempted mind-reading, Barcelona is one of – if not the – game of the year so far for me. It’s fantastic.

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

Barcelona (2023)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Barcelona 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.