Que?

El Grande is an area control game. The board is a map of Spain which is split into nine regions. During each of the game’s three scoring phases, the player with the majority of pieces in each area scores points based on the scoring marker in the area. Nice and easy so far. Each player has a Court area in front of them with their available Caballeros (cubes in the original, meeples in the new print), and a shared Province area holds all the reserve Caballeros for all players.

On your turn, you play a power card. The cards are numbered 1-13, most of which have a number of meeples printed on them. The lower the card value, the more meeples. In each round there are five action cards on offer, four of which change every round, while the remaining card which lets you move the king is available in every round. The meeples on your power card determine how many you add to your court from the province, and the meeples printed on the action card you pick tell you how many you can play onto the map on your turn. What makes it so interesting is that no one can play the same value as a previously played card in that round, and that each card can only ever be played once.

90% of what makes El Grande so much fun is summed up in that paragraph above. You see, if you play a higher value power card, you get to pick first from the action cards for that round, at the expense of not adding many meeples to your court to actually play to the board. You can play low value cards to get lots of meeples, but you’re likely to be left with whatever action hasn’t already been claimed. The action cards have the ability to really mess things up, so having first choice is great, but at the same time you want to have the meeples to put down, so what do you do? High value card, low value, or somewhere in the middle and hope for the best?

You only have to make that decision nine times in the entire game, but it’s agonising every time, and it’s incredibly enjoyable. A big piece representing the king stands in one of the regions and it has a big influence. You can only place meeples in areas adjacent to the king, and you can’t affect the king’s area at all, so having him stood in a region you’re going to score big in is a huge benefit. This is especially true when you realise that the action cards let you do things like remove other players’ pieces from the board, move any meeples wherever you like, add scoring tiles to regions which either boost or degrade their scoring, or even score regions between scoring rounds.

Castillo

It’s impossible to ignore the cardboard castle – or castillo – standing in one corner of the board. It’s the cherry on top of this delicious cake of a game in my opinion. Whenever you place or move pieces, instead of adding them to the board you can toss them into the castillo, out of sight, but never out of mind. At the start of each scoring round the castillo’s doors open, the meeples within come tumbling out, and it’s scored like a little region of its own. But wait! All players now move those newly freed caballeros to regions of their choice, affecting the majorities just before they get scored.

The genius little twist added here sees players analyse and compute consequences at light speed, resulting in groans and cheers. Before you open the castillo, each player chooses one of the game’s regions in secret on a little dial. Do you dare choose that one region nobody is in, hoping nobody else does the same? Or do you add them to the highest-scoring region to try and pip the others to the post? What if they do the same?? Can you remember how many they put in it? Can you remember how many you put in it?

As the game progresses control swings like a pendulum. The player in the lead at any given time has a huge target on their back, and in my experience, the table turns into a gathering of Grima Wormtongues from Lord of the Rings. Everyone trying to influence the other players to hobble another player, but never for their own benefit of course. No, they’d never do that. They just want to help you, friend.

Ebb and flow, thinking on your feet

The biggest difference between El Grande and many area-control games is the level of strategy involved. Long-term planning in El Grande is difficult. It’s a game of tactics and pivoting in an instant. The action cards push the game along in an unpredictable manner, like pushing a shopping trolley over cobbles. You have an idea of where you want to get to, but there is so much that’s going to happen to you before you get there. Holding on to that 7-point Toledo is great until someone puts the 4-point scoring tile on it. Having a majority of one meeple in a region goes up in smoke because someone gets to the card which lets them move two of yours to another region.

Similarly, there are plenty of options to sneak points and creep around the scoring track. Players often concentrate on the 6- and 7-point regions, but cards come out of the deck which score the 5-point regions instantly. You’ll see chances to add a single meeple to multiple regions in one turn and claim uncontested second places there, mopping up another ten or more points that others didn’t notice. You really need your head a swivel and have to be able to react to what’s going on very quickly.

Some people won’t enjoy that at all. Strategists who are in it to play the long game can quickly find they aren’t having a good time. The wild swinging and the fact that other players can just force you to ditch loads of your meeples from the board or your court is like a poke in the eye to some folk. In my personal experience this is a small minority of players, but it’s something to bear in mind if you know your group well. I’m editing this existing review draft off the back of a weekend convention where I taught the game to eight new players, and only one of them didn’t have a great time. That’s pretty good going as far as I’m concerned.

Final thoughts

I’ve loved El Grande from the first time I played it. It’s a classic for a reason, and this reprint just makes it better in my opinion. The board art is prettier, and while some people might mourn the loss of the old score tile design with its pips, the numbers are more readable. Meeples instead of cubes is good, the Grande piece now looks like someone on horseback instead of a bigger cube, and the king is golden and has a crown. It’s a really nice edition with the kind of care and attention to detail it deserves.

The game itself is essentially the same as it’s always been. Choosing a card and playing it, before putting some little wooden dudes on a board isn’t too taxing, but the decision space in such a simple turn is huge. Aside from what I mentioned above and trying to decide between adding more meeples to your court and turn order, there’s the first player marker. The player who plays the lowest value card each round gets the first player marker for the next, which can be huge. Even when you don’t want to move the king, moving it just to stick it in the corner of the map and limit where the other players can place pieces. There are just so many little needles to stick into the other players.

The level of balance is great. Even in your first play of the game, you’ll get a sense of belief that you can compete with people who’ve played before. It’s a belief that’s justified. You really can compete. El Grande is a game about playing the other players around the table, not wrestling with rules and unknown edge cases. What you see is what you get, and if you can read the other person’s thoughts, you can get one over on them. El Grande is amazing. It’s still amazing, even after all this time. No other game has managed to topple it when it comes to doing what it does. It’s best played with four or five players, but if you regularly have that many people around a table, it’s a must. A masterpiece of a game which deserves a place in your collection.

You can buy El Grande from my retail partner, Kienda, right here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

El Grande (1995)

Design: Wolfgang Kamer, Richard Ulrich
Publisher: Hans Im Gluck
Art: Doris Matthäus, Stefan Sonnberger, Franz-Georg Stämmele
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post El Grande Review appeared first on Punchboard.

In Courtisans you play the role of an attendee at the Queen’s banquet. What’s on the menu? Hors d’oeuvres of influence & backstabbing, followed by a main course of skullduggery and shenanigans. Come, gorge yourself on the feast of fun this small box brings to your table too.

At its core, Courtisans is a very simple game. In the middle of the table is the cloth ‘board, which represents the Queen’s table. It’s separated into seven sections: one per noble family, and a middle section where spies go – more on this later. For every one of your turns you’ll find yourself holding three cards – each in a different suit, and all you have to do is play all three. One goes to the area in front of you, one goes to another player’s area (your choice), and the final one goes to the Queen’s table.

The last of these is the most interesting. If you play the card above the Queen’s table next to a particular family (each family has a colour/icon), you’re essentially voting to make that family esteemed. Play it below the table, and you’re trying to drag them down to be fallen from grace. At the end of the game, a family with more cards above than below is esteemed, more below than above is fallen from grace, and a tie means they’re neither. They’re the Switzerland of Courtisans – neutral.

Role-playing

If that all sounds interesting but bland, you’re right. Things would very quickly get deadlocked. Luckily there are lots of cards which have different roles in the game to spice things up. Nobles are worth two cards each, which can be huge. Assassins let you kill a card in the area in which you play it, regardless of whether it’s yours, the Queen’s table, or another player’s area, upsetting the balance of power. Guards, however, cannot be killed. Once they’re in place, they never move. Finally, you have the most interesting of the lot – Spies.

Spies are placed face-down, regardless of where you play it. If you play it to the Queen’s table, you play it to the centre, which isn’t assigned to any particular family. It’s played either above or below, so you know it’ll pull or push a family’s credibility, but you don’t know which family until the end of the game when the cards get revealed.

Scoring at the end of the game is easy. You count the cards around the Queen’s table and see which families are esteemed and which have fallen from grace. For every card you have matching the suits of esteemed families you gain a point, and for every fallen from grace family you lose a point. There’s one final twist of the knife where each player has two secret objectives, each of which is worth 3 VPs. What’s great about these are that they require players to do things like make sure certain families have fallen from grace, or to have more of a particular family than a neighbour, etc.

Quite a looker

The most obvious thing that sets Courtisans apart from many of its small-box peers is the quality of the production. The cards are long, tarot-size cards with beautiful inlaid gold on every one of them. The cardstock is thick and nice to handle (although those long cards are always awkward to shuffle). The little cloth board is a really cute touch, as it so easily could have been a plain old cardboard board instead. Yes, it’s a bit annoying that it never lies flat straight out of the box, but it’s so cute there on the table.

One of the best things about the game is its small footprint. Even though each player has their own tableau in front of them, you can stack and splay cards of each suit, just so there’s enough visible so that everyone knows how many of each card each other player has. I’ve played this on small tables in bars, on a desk, on a table in the corner of a shop, and the fact that I can makes it perfect for what it is. An interactive, clever game that only takes 15 minutes to play. It makes it the perfect ‘between games’ or ‘waiting for the food to arrive’ game.

Final thoughts

What can I say that I haven’t already? Courtisans has been a hit with every person I’ve introduced it to, which is coming close to 20 people now. It’s so easy to explain, and despite your turn being so simple – play three cards to three places – it’s surprisingly tactical. I was a little worried at first that the Assassin cards would alienate some people, because some folk hate take-that in a game, but so far it’s been a non-issue. I think it’s because it feels less personal and less invasive than in other games. You can’t be certain you haven’t helped someone out by killing a card from in front of them.

The small box means you can take it pretty much anywhere. It tucks into the small gaps in my backpacks which means it’s a convention and games night mainstay for me now. It’s always there, just in case, and because it’s so fast and so enjoyable, it invariably gets played a lot. If there’s a gap for a quick, interactive game in your collection, I heartily recommend Couritsans. It’s great.

You can buy Courtisans from my retail partner, Kienda, right here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

Courtisans (2024)

Design: Romaric Galonnier, Anthony Perone
Publisher: Catch Up Games
Art: Noëmie Chevalier
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Courtisans Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Sakana Stack is set in the famous Tsukiji fish market in Japan, hence the name Sakana, which translates as fish. The idea of the game is that each player is trying to sell their catch to prospective customers, but in order to attract them to your fish instead of your competitors’, you need to put out the best stack of seafood. How does this translate to a card game? Well, each card has a value and a suit. The suits are colours and represent different types of fish; pufferfish, eel, scallops etc.

On your turn you need to place a stack of cards down. Each of the cards has to have the same value. If there’s another stack on the table though, you need to obey a couple of rules. Firstly, you need to follow suit or number. Secondly, you need to equal or beat the value of the other stack. That’s the core of the game, and while there are a few other things to consider (like being able to use the Catch of the Day card on top of the draw pile), understanding those concepts is all you need to get started.

Play the player

It only takes a round or so of Sakana Stack to get it. Once you understand how it works mechanically, you can start to work on your tactics, and there’s a lot of scope for tactical play. Right from your first turn, you have a lot of choices to make. In a game where you want to get rid of all of your cards as quickly as you can, it can be tempting to slap down all four of those 7s you’ve got in your hand. However, you might want to do just enough to beat the current stack and play just a couple of them, ensuring you have some higher-value cards left to play later.

Slapping down a stack with a value of 28 though, that’s powerful. Remember, the other players need to follow suit or value and at least equal the stack value. If you can’t do that you have to take that Catch of the Day card from the top of the draw deck into your hand, and the owner of the stack(s) on the table takes the top card of that stack and flip it face-down as a scoring card. Points for each round are based on how many cards you manage to score.

Despite my mini-grumble at the top about a lack of theme, you can kinda see it here. You can picture people continuously trying to one-up each other’s stacks of fish, and when one finally concedes (i.e. you can’t follow with a high enough value), the winning player is selling part of their catch, scoring points in the process. I mean, a card game like this is never going to win awards for the strongest theme implementation, but it still does it well. Let’s be honest though, nobody is buying a small card game for the theme. They live and die on how much fun they are and how much replayability they pack in.

Sakana Stack manages to tick both those boxes.

Final thoughts

I first came across Sakana Stack at this year’s UKGE, where I fell in love with the artwork. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the folks behind the desk, so I was delighted when Mike from Huff No More got in touch to see if I wanted to cover the game. I only had two niggles when I started playing the game. Firstly, I found the rules explanation a little hard to understand from the sheet included in the box. Bear in mind that this is still a preview copy of the game, and it’s likely that things will change between now and the final release of the game. Once you understand it though, it’s a breeze.

The second niggle is more of a personal thing, and that’s that I like it when a small game caters for two players too. When Sakana Stack landed on my doormat it was advertised as 3-5 players, which isn’t the end of the world, but a niggle nonetheless. But this is where playing with previews of games sometimes throws unexpected things your way, and this time it was Mike sending me a message to let me know the two-player rules have been added to the game. Nice! They work really well too, but I still prefer the game with four or five people. I like the fact that it takes longer for your turn to come around, and harder to score your own stack as points, which happens if it comes back to you and you have a stack in front of you.

It looks like the campaign (which you can keep track of here) is going to launch at about £14 for the game, which is a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had more play out of this than I have some games that cost twice as much. Sakana Stack is quick, easy, gorgeous to look at, and a lot of fun. It’ll join the likes of Scout and Tokkuri Taking (review here) in my convention bag for some time to come. Great stuff.

Preview copy kindly provided by Huff No More. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Sakana Stack (2025)

Design: Mike Petchey
Publisher: Huff No More
Art: Joss Petchey
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Sakana Stack Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Schrödinger’s what?

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

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

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

Telling the future – what’s in your cards?

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

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

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

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

Causing a paradox

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition

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

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

No grout required

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a game about collecting tiles from a central board and putting them on your own board, in order to score points. I know, it sounds thrilling. Be still my beating heart. While that might not sound that exciting a premise, the way it’s wrapped up in its theme is great. You see, you’re junior naturalists on board Charles Darwin’s famous Beagle, and you’ve got to help Chuck study animals and write all about them.

The animals on offer are one of four types (mammals, birds, reptiles, invertebrates) and come from one of four parts of the world (The Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania). As luck would have it, your player boards have 16 spaces for animal tiles on. One for every type from every place. What were the chances of that? On your turn you claim a tile from the row or column of the 3×3 grid that the little wooden Beagle pawn is next to and put it in its space on your player board. For instance the Moose would go on the purple (America) space with the mammal icon. A place for everything and everything in its place.

You’ll be pleased to know that it’s not just a case of trying to pick up the 16 different tiles to fill your board. This isn’t Patchwork, and there’s some strategy involved. Complete a row or column and you write a publication (i.e. take a little book token worth 5 VPs) about that place or that class of animal. However, you can also collect a tile of a type you’ve already taken, and place the new one on top of the existing one. When you do this you can take an additional theory token, which earns you points at the end of the game if you fulfil the things it wants you to.

Survival of the fittest

What seems like a very by-the-numbers set-collecting game soon peels back its friendly facade to reveal a game with a lot of potential for interaction. There are a load of different theory tokens for end-of-game VPs with lots of different criteria, and lots of them have some crossover. One player might be trying to collect tiles for the bottom-right quadrant of their board, while another is collecting reptiles, and a third wants Oceania tiles. The Saltwater Crocodile on the main board satisfies all of those criteria, meaning all three players might want it, so competition can get pretty spicy.

The only way you can keep players away from tiles is to make sure the Beagle pawn is in a different row and column from the one your precious snap-snap is in. The Beagle moves a number of spaces around the 3×3 grid after you take a tile, and that number is the same as the number of spaces away from the beagle your chosen tile was. Take the one next to you, it’s one space, the middle is two spaces, and the furthest is three. So you can dictate where the next player has to take their tile from by deciding how far the Beagle moves. In the spirit of competition though, there’s some mitigation you can do.

Claiming a tile gets you a bonus at the same time. It might be something to aid end-game scoring, or it might be a guide token. Guide tokens are really cool. You can spend a guide to either move the Beagle one step in either direction or to replace the tiles you’re about to pick from and deal out three new ones in their place.

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a game which will have you cursing your fellow players. You’ll catch yourself muttering “I can’t believe you took my wombat!”, and no one will bat an eyelid. Such an utterance is totally normal. In a game where you only get 12 turns and each turn only takes a few seconds, every wombat matters.

And there’s, like, one wombat.

Final thoughts

In the Footsteps of Darwin surprised me. I was surprised at how fast and light the game is. Seriously, you’ll be finished inside half an hour, and it’s rare for me to play a game that’s so brief which I enjoy so much. And it’s not just me, even my family like it. My wife suggested we play it again straight after her first game, and that’s practically unheard of. It’s light enough that anyone can grasp the rules in a minute or so, but still fun enough to try to maximise your scoring when you know what you’re doing. For a game this quick, there’s a surprising amount of strategy mixed in, and I like it a lot.

I was also surprised at how thematic they’ve managed to make such a fun little game. Study all the species in an area of the world, or study lots of the same kind of animal from all around the world and you get to write a book. Makes sense, right? If you research an animal type in a part of the world that you’ve already researched, you develop a greater understanding of its potential evolution and get to take a new theory. Again, it makes sense. When you tie it all together with the appendix book that talks about Darwin’s voyages and describes in his words the animals he encountered, it’s a really neatly presented package.

I think the only way In the Footsteps of Darwin could disappoint you is if you go into the game expecting something that it’s not. It’s not heavy. It doesn’t take long. It doesn’t have tons of pieces. In other words, it’s not Darwin’s Journey, another excellent, but much heavier game based on the same theme. You set it up in a matter of minutes, play a game, and have it all back in the box 30 minutes later, and you have a blast while you play it. What’s not to love?

At the time of writing (June 2024) I’ve no idea what will win the SdJ, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this game does. If it does, it deserves to. It’s a cracking little game which blew my expectations out of the water.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

In The Footsteps Of Darwin (2023)

Design: Grégory Grard, Matthieu Verdier
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: Maud Briand, David Sitbon
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post In The Footsteps Of Darwin Review appeared first on Punchboard.

That’s right people, I’ve got my finger on the pulse and am giving you – the game-loving, hotness-buying board game players – exactly what you want. 16-year-old games that nobody talks about any more.

Writing that last sentence made me sad. People should talk about Hamburgum. People should talk about it because it was my first ‘proper’ Euro game, and they should talk about it just because I like it, because the world revolves around me and what I want. People should also talk about it because it’s a stone-cold classic example of how to use a rondel in your games. People should talk about the cutthroat church building and ever-shifting prices of sugar, beer and cloth in the game’s market.

They don’t though, thanks in no small part to another game of Mac’s called Concordia or something like that. I dunno, I never heard of it. Apparently, it’s popular though. But you’re here right now, a captive audience wondering why the hell I – someone who would like to get more eyes on his work – is devoting his precious spare time to reviewing this old game, instead of fuelling whatever hype machine is currently ploughing social media. Let’s get into it.

With bells on

Let’s start with the thing you’re most likely to stop and go slack-jawed at the first time you open the game. The components. None of your plastic minis here, nor the bog standard meeples we’ve all grown to love. No, instead we’ve got chonky, purple, wooden church pieces, teeny tiny little pieces of wood, little bricks made of actual clay, and the pièces de résistance, the little metal bells, replete with working clangers.

That’s right. Tiny little bells that jingle when you shake them. Stick that up your 2ft tall plastic Cthulhu.

When you start the game you each have some little cardboard citizen tokens and some ships, along with some starting goods and materials. Most importantly you have an octagonal piece on the rondel, and it’s this rondel, and your choices upon it, which fuels the entire game. If you’re not familiar with a rondel, it’s a (usually) circular wheel split into segments, with each segment representing one of the game’s actions. Your turn is as simple as picking up your marker and choosing whether you want to move one, two, or three spaces around the rondel, and then taking the action you land on.

It sounds so simple put like that, but the rondel is a cruel mistress, and she’ll make you question your decisions, your mind, your very sanity with every choice you make. Do you go whizzing around, taking great strides in an attempt to get back to an action you have your mind set on, or do you take baby steps, partaking of every action along the way. It’s agonisingly glorious, and once you get a taste of it you’ll likely understand why it’s my favourite mechanism in a game.

A racing Euro game? Really?

Yes. In many ways, Hamburgum is a race. The aim of the game is to get the mighty churches built, but in order to do that you need materials. How do you afford materials? You trade goods. How do you get goods to trade? You build buildings which make the goods (e.g. breweries make beer). How do you make the trades? You build boats in the docks. Everything is dependent on something else in the chain, which results in a game which is very difficult to min-max. You really need to do a bit of everything and to make sure that when you do those things, you do them as efficiently as possible. You need to do them quickly, too, as the end of the game comes when the sixth church is built.

The landscape of the game changes constantly, and there’s a lot more interaction in Hamburgum than you might be used to. You might be stockpiling sugar ready for a big payday on your next trade action, only for the players next in turn to build sugar refiners, with each new building increasing supply and reducing the price.

Being the first person to donate to a church and place one of your discs on its site nets you the big-scoring donation token, with each subsequent donation giving the donating player a choice of the tokens left. But it’s only the player topping off a church, and spending those adorable little bells in the process, who gets the big points for completing the church. It means that Hamburgum is a game where you need to keep an eye on everybody all at once. Who can finish that church you’re working on? Have they noticed they can finish it off and snatch it from your grasp? How far away on the rondel are they from the all-important church action?

Alongside all of this is a network-building mechanism to really keep things exciting. When you build new buildings you place your citizen tokens on the board, but only adjacent to either an already-placed citizen or next to a church you’ve made a donation to. It not only affects your own expansion plans, but by paying close attention to others’ networks, you can get a good idea of what their plans are limited to and can try to put a stick in the spokes of their industrial bicycles.

Stripped-back

The thing which keeps me coming back to Hamburgum year after year is because of how simple it keeps things. I remember all those years ago when I first played it, having had no experience of ‘modern’ board games, I thought there was a lot going on. A lot of stuff, a lot of cardboard. Looking back now, and comparing it to more recent games, I can see just how streamlined the game is. For a start, you don’t have a player board. You just manage a little pile of money, cubes, tiles and resources.

There aren’t a ton of cards to spawn events, choose actions, add factions, or any of that jazz. There are zero cards. There aren’t even any dice. Everything that happens in the game is driven by the rondel, by a few wooden towers processing around the wheel of actions. I’d started writing here about how things are made better by removing a load of stuff, but the reality is that Hamburgum came out before all of the ‘more, more, more’ that we get in boxes now. Would Mac Gerdts still do the same things if he were making the game now? I have no idea.

What it means to you, the player, is that if you can find yourself a copy of Hamburgum (and you can, some stores have stock) you’re going to get a game that’s easy to learn, easy to teach, and most importantly, is fun.

Final thoughts

If you’ve gotten this far in the review and still don’t know what I think about Hamburgum you either scan-read it or have no short-term memory. I love Hamburgum. Some of that fondness is sure to come from nostalgia and a reminder of my first tentative steps into the hobby, but even when I try to become a robot version of myself and remove my own feelings from things, it’s still a great game.

It’s not heavy in terms of complexity, not by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn’t make it simple. There are a load of things all happening at the same time. Not momentous events crashing down into the game state every other turn, just small changes to the ecosystem, to the webs of networks being spun by the players, and the eternal Benny Hill chase around the rondel. Like a shark, forever swimming forward, so goes your fate upon the rondel.

Look, if you’re an old hat when it comes to board games and you never picked this up, it’s well worth getting hold of. It can hold its own against the El Grandés and Le Havres of this world, plus it’s another one of those PD Verlag games in a long, flat box, so Concordia won’t feel so odd poking out of its shelf alone. If you’ve only picked up the hobby in the last few years and enjoyed the choices that games like PARKS (review here) and Trekking Through History (review here) gave you, you’re going to like it too. Both of those games use a rondel of sorts, and you’ll soon find yourself enamoured by the bells and beautiful box art too.

Hamburgum is a bonafide classic. Keep an eye out for it at the next bring and buy you find yourself at.

Hamburgum (2007)

Design: Mac Gerdts
Publisher: PD Verlag
Art: Matthias Catrein
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 75-90 mins

The post Hamburgum 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.

Tic-tac-toe

The land you’re tasked with rejuvenating takes the form of a board in front of each player with a 3×3 grid of spaces printed on it. Some of the spaces have icons printed on them, some are blank. Blank squares are boring, though. Booooring. They need little icons on them too. Luckily, between each player, there’s a tile, and on that tile, there’s a stack of square biome cards.

The rounds in Rauha tick along as alternating days and nights, and each side of the tile between neighbouring players has a day and a night side. If it’s a day round, turn to your right and draft a card from that pile. If it’s a night round, turn to your left and draft a card. The alternate drafting is really interesting and adds a nice little squeeze of tension, drizzled over the top of the game. More often than not there’ll be more than one card you want from a tile. Trying to second-guess your neighbour’s plans and the likelihood of them taking the card you want leads to some tense moments.

Cards for what though? Why do you want cards? When you choose the card you want on a turn, it’s time to add it to your board, and without getting into the nitty-gritty of it, you’re trying to make three-in-a-row. Get three matching icons vertically and/or horizontally and you get to take the associated Divine Entity tile. It’s the game saying “Nice one. You like that particular trait so much that its God is crashing on your sofa with you now”, which is a good thing. Divine Entities often grant the owner a bonus when they claim it, and again during each of the four scoring phases.

On the surface it seems like a pretty shallow game. Fun, but shallow all the same. Draft a card, play a card, get some stuff, maybe get a bonus. However, it only takes one full play to make you realise there’s a really nice layer of nuance which elevates Rauha from a very simple game to a clever, cunning one.

Easy come, easy go

The Divine Entities are the key to scoring well in Rauha. Initially, it seems tricky to figure out a way to use them to the biggest advantage, until you realise something important. You get a one-time bonus every time you claim one. Whether that’s from the central board where they’re hanging out at the start of the game, or beside another player’s board. This means it can be in your best interest for somebody else to claim an entity you’ve got because if you can claim it back, you get that one-time bonus again. Just make sure you’ve still got it when your avatar makes it to a corner of the board to trigger scoring.

I didn’t mention each player’s avatar (player marker), because they’re largely irrelevant. You all move them simultaneously from one notch to the next, around the sides of your player boards, to keep track of the rounds. The avatar’s position also indicates which row or column gets activated in each round, scoring you precious points and resources based on the cards in that very same row or column. It made me think back to Fabio Lopiano’s brilliant I-need-one-more-turn Merv (review here).

It might sound like a tall order, trying to manipulate your board’s state so you can repeatedly claim the same entity. It’s made entirely easier by the fact that you can play cards on top of other cards, thus breaking and making chains relatively easily. The other layer of fun in this ludological trifle is the spores, which I realise now sounds like a terrible layer to put in a trifle. Spores are these very tactile purple discs which can be added to some cards, and later flipped to re-activate the biomes (cards) during scoring rounds.

Final thoughts

Rauha does what it sets out to do in a quick and efficient way. Nothing about the game is cumbersome or bloated. While there are plenty of choices to be made with just about every card you draft, you’ll usually find yourself working towards a plan you have in mind, rather than just reacting to whatever’s happening. Speaking as someone who favours strategy over reaction, I really enjoy being able to play this way.

In a few of the games I’ve played, I’ve seen one player manage to get an unassailable lead a couple of times, but it comes from clever play rather than the planets aligning in some kind of cosmological lottery win. It’s not as wild as the score differences can be in something like Tapestry though. The constant yoinking of entities between players is really entertaining, and it’s a pleasant change to play a game with such a strong feeling of passive interaction. There’s no ‘take that!’, and no mechanisms to push a stick in the spokes of someone else’s bike. The groans and expletives generated by Rauha come about because someone takes the card you were hoping would be there next turn, or because someone pulls some Ocean’s Eleven level heisting and nabs a couple of entities with one card, just before a scoring round.

Not that that’s ever happened to me, you understand…

I’ve successfully introduced Rauha to people from seasoned gamers right through to my family, and all have had a good time with it. It’s a great game to start or end a games night with. There’s something there for everyone. The instant hit from making a row and getting some cool stuff for newbies, right through to nuanced long-term planning for the hardcore nerd in your life. It took me by surprise. There’s much more here than is immediately apparent. Check it out, I think you’ll like it.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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.

Rauha (2023)

Design: Johannes Goupy, Théo Rivière
Publisher: GRRRE Games
Art: O’lee
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Rauha Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Hideous Abomination is back with a disgusting refresh for 2023. I looked at the original a while ago, and this new 2nd edition takes everything that made it fun and adds to it. There are some great quality-of-life improvements, such as drawing more cards and forcing a small hand limit to create three discard piles. A new Dig action lets players take a discard pile and search through it to find body parts in it, and this is great because it creates more churn, and means you’ll see more parts cards more often. There’s a full list of the changes and improvements right here.

The way bolts and stealing work is changed and feels a lot cleaner, and there’s a new side of the die which sees more of the Award cards churned out, and they’re not secret. This is great because now your monster with five heads, one hand, and eleven feet might be worth more points at the end of the game. Speaking of the die, the physical die itself is new and looks like a vertebra! I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

When the new campaign goes live in the summer, it’ll be your chance to get the best version of Hideous Abomination. For families looking for something quick and easy to play and have a really good laugh with, Hideous Abomination is great. Don’t believe me? Just ask my ten-year-old son, who was extremely annoyed to find out that I had to send my preview copy on to the next reviewer. For less than 20 quid, backing it is an easy recommendation for me.

Original Review

Ever fancied yourself as a bit of a Doctor Frankenstein? Did you spend your childhood drawing weird and wonderful creatures and monsters? If so, I think Hideous Abomination might be the game for you. It’s a lightweight card game in a cool, cube-shaped box from Tettix Games. Gameplay is simple, but with plenty of scope for strategy, with a bit of take-that fun thrown in the mix.

Making monsters is cool. That’s not just my opinion, that’s a fact (probably). I’m sure many of you played that game when you were kids, where you draw a part of a creature and fold the paper down, then pass it to your neighbour for them to add a part on, and so on. Afterwards, you unfold the paper and roll around in hysterics at the bonkers beasts you’ve made. In writing this review I found out something I never knew before, that that game is called ‘Exquisite Corpse‘, and now you know it too. Well, Hideous Abomination is like a deluxe version of that game, but with proper rules, scoring and no artistic skill needed.

The game is really easy to learn. You start with a torso card – pick the one you think is cutest or most disgusting, whatever floats your board – and then roll a die. That die will let you do things like take a body part card from the market on the table and add it to your monster, steal a part from someone else’s monster, or maybe even bolt parts onto your monster so no-one else can take them. You just have to follow the rule that says that loose ends (connecting edges) have to meet, and you can’t leave an unfinished arm/leg/tentacle/what-the-heck-is-that-bit-coming-out-of-its-neck?.

Monster mash

While you’re picking what parts to add to your own abomination, you can check the award cards in play. These show you which body parts will score at the end of the game. For example, the cards might show that you want as many teeth, horns, and legs on your creature as possible at the end, as those are what give you bonuses. That means competition for those parts is really high, and you’ll find yourself praying for bolts sometimes to secure those really good bits you’ve stitched onto your creation.

As well as these scoring cards though, you’re also competing to finish your monster first, and to have lots of body parts in the same colour, as these things score too. It’s daft, hysterical fun the whole way through, and if you’re playing with kids, the chances are a lot of the time they completely ignore the scoring cards. And that’s okay, it’s meant to be fun.

Judson Cowan is the man behind the monsters, and he hand-drew every single one of the 190(!) body parts. This game was never a quick “make a monster game to make some cash” affair, it was a personal project with a lot of care and attention to detail lavished at every step. The cards themselves are hard-wearing and feel nice to shuffle and play with. We’ve played it inside, outside on a picnic table, on the carpet with the dog, and just about anywhere else you can think of, and the cards still look brand new.

I have fun playing it whenever it’s brought out, which is often. The random scoring tiles mean there’s plenty of scope for someone who considers themselves a hobby gamer to enjoy strategy and planning, the die adds a nice random touch, and there’s a 33% chance of being able to bolt-on a good bit every time you roll. That’s important, as it means you’re as likely to secure parts as you are to steal them. There are simpler variants included on the rules sheet, and it’s a game ripe for house rules. If you have young children who’d get upset at you stealing their parts (and that’s really tempting at times, my inner Competitive Dad is strong), treat the stealing rule as a re-roll, or an extra choice from the market – something like that.

Final thoughts

Hideous Abomination is what it is – a quick, funny, easy-to-play game. The illustrations on the cards are fantastic, and full of character. Disgusting enough to be monsters, but not graphic, so kids can happily play this too. It plays a lot like Castles of Caladale, a tile-placement game from Renegade Game Studios which flew under the radar for a lot of people. But instead of building castles without bits ending in empty space, it’s creepy creatures instead.

Hideous Abomination is an absolute hit with my eight-year-old son. Ever since our first play, I’ve not had the game on my shelves for a second. If we’re not playing the game, he’s making elaborate monsters on the table. There are some blank body-part tiles in the game, and those were pilfered and drawn on in the first day. Any time he sees family members, the game goes with him and they get taught, whether they like it or not. I’ve no idea how many games he’s clocked-up now with various people (and pets), but it’s safe to say it’s his favourite game in my collection.

It’s a great game, and one of those that truly transcends age and generational boundaries. Anyone can play it, and everyone will enjoy it. If you’ve got a family and want to take a step up from those very basic games, and want something with a lot of character from someone who really deserves the recognition, I have no hesitation in recommending Hideous Abomination. It’s monstrously good fun, and you’ll be supporting another indie studio.

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

Hideous Abomination (2020)

Designer: Judson Cowan
Publisher: Tettix Games
Art: Judson Cowan
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15-30 minutes

The post Hideous Abomination 2nd Edition Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Taking the initiative

The core of Vaalbara is set-collection. In each of the game’s nine rounds, there are enough land cards on offer for each player to take one and add it to their ‘realm’. Realm is a grand way of saying ‘bit of table in front of you’. Different land types score in different ways, as described on your handy-dandy reference cards, so once you’ve chosen what lands you want to collect, it’s just a case of nabbing those ones from the market row. Everyone else is trying to do the same thing though, so how do you decide who gets first dibs?

Roll for initiative!

Except, there’s no dice, and there’s no rolling. Except for maybe rolling your eyes when someone takes something you want. Initiative in Vaalbara is printed in the top-left corner of the character cards. Ah yes, character cards, I’ve not really mentioned those yet. You’ve all got an identical deck of 12 characters, each with its own initiative number and ability. Shuffle them up, take five cards into your hand, and on each turn you all play one face-down, then do the dramatic reveal. The dramatic reveal isn’t really that dramatic. Instead, it’s more like a group of kids in a primary school trying to give the answer to a rudimentary maths question fastest. Eyes flit back and forth across the cards trying to see who gets to go in which order.

“But Adam, with only 12 cards, surely there are ties. How do you break ties?”. I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader. I really like this bit. Each of the decks of character cards has a different colour (and symbol, colourblind rejoice), and each of the cards in the lands deck has these symbols in a different order. So if you need to break a tie, you look at the top of the lands draw deck, and break ties based on the order of the symbols. I really like it, it’s pretty unique.

Quick & weak, slow & strong

So you’ve played your characters, flipped them over, and done the mental maths to see who goes when. Now you get to do that character’s thing. Each has a different ability, and as you might expect, the later in turn order you go, the more powerful the effect. The Hunter, for instance, goes first – huzzah! But playing them gives you no instant benefit. Instead, anyone else with The Hunter in their hand can reveal it to grab 1VP. Compare that to the Farmer, sitting on the other end of the scale with an initiative of 12. Playing The Farmer doubles the points you get for your land card in this round. Let’s say you’ve already got four Field cards, and snag a fifth. Fields give you 2VP for every field in your realm so that 10VPs is now double to 20. Twenty!! Twenty is lots.

Play early and get bobbins rewards from your character, but get to pick up first from the Lands market, grabbing that juicy mountain card. Play later for big points, but get left with the dregs. Or play somewhere in the middle, where you get some interesting effects to play with, such as being able to swap a card in this round’s row with one in the row behind it (you always see the next round’s Land cards). All of this planning could be for naught though, because you have no idea which cards are in the other players’ hands, let alone which one they’ve played. The only thing you know for sure is which cards have already been played, but good luck keeping track of that.

It’s in that moment, that point where you commit to your character, where the game comes to life and really shines. That breathless five seconds when the cards are revealed, you work out who goes when, and then figure out whether you might get that Land you really wanted. One of the things I really like is the way being neighbours with other players matters. Some Lands (meadows) give you a point per meadow card in your and your neighbours’ realms, whereas some character cards reward you based on whether you went before or after them. It’s a clever way of introducing interaction without the ‘Take that!’ that games like Citadels have.

Final thoughts

It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you whether I think a game is good or not. Quantifying that opinion is more difficult, so let me illustrate just how good a game this is. I took Vaalbara with me to the UK Games Expo this year (you can read my show report here) and taught it to some friends on the first evening. Later in the evening, they were then teaching it to another group, and the same thing happened the following evening. Just before I left on Saturday, in the pile of communal purchases my friends and I created, there were two more copies of Vaalbara.

It’s not the deepest game in the world, but nor is it long or difficult to teach. I’ve taught it to my wife and son, to friends, and to complete strangers, and everyone has had a good time with it. It plays nicely with all player counts from two to five, but I think it’s best at four and five, where the concept of neighbours really matters. With two or three, everyone is your neighbour, and it just shaves a little off the strategy elements that I prefer to be there.

My copy of Citadels still gets played today, 12 years after I bought it. It goes with me in my bag to all kinds of trips and occasions, because I know anyone can and will enjoy it. The same is now true of Vaalbara. I expect the box to get worn and knackered, and the game to get some wear and tear because it’s going to get played a lot. For less than £20, Vaalbara is a great option that deserves to be in your short and/or filler games collection.

Review copy kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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.

Vaalbara (2022)

Design: Olivier Cipière
Publisher: Studio H
Art: Félix Donadio, Alexandre Reynaud
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20 mins

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