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.

Can I interest you in an acre of land on the moon?

As I mentioned before, corporate greed is at the heart of Shackleton Base. The game comes with seven different corps, all in their own little (pre-made!) boxes in the main box, but you only ever use three of them per game. “Holy Clangers!” you might think, “That’s a whole load of replayability”. This is where my initial fears wormed their way to the surface. You see, a lot of the corporation interaction is in the form of contract fulfilment. Collect some stuff, turn it in, get some points and other stuff. After teaching the game three times, each time using the recommended starting corps, I was worried that the differences between the corporations would only be skin-deep.

I needn’t have worried. While the other corporations may be variations on a theme in a way, they still mix the game up enough to make it feel substantively different. Evergreen Farms, for example, let you build new greenhouse tiles on the board. To Mars lets you build your domes and place astronauts on a secondary board with a view to kicking them on their way to the red planet. Skywatch introduces the threat of an asteroid at the end of the game that will wipe buildings out, lest the players work together to build defences. You get the idea. It’s not like learning a new game, but throwing them in in different combinations presents some really interesting choices to make, and keep the game feeling fresher than a hunk of ancient moon cheese.

Actually playing the game isn’t too difficult. Players draft a shuttle tile at the start of the round which gives them some starting resources, six astronauts to place (one per turn, six turns per each of the three eras, so 18 actions for the whole game), and sets player turn order. On your turn the astronauts either get placed around the hex map to harvest resources and cold, hard cash, on the command action area to carry out actions like building, claiming corporation cards, or researching, or get sent to the lunar gateway to trade for an astronaut to place on your player board.

The main board is where a lot of the attention is because it’s a big, shared building area with some really neat area control mechanisms, but the player boards are equally fascinating. As the various buildings come off your board and get built on the moon, the spaces they free up become places you can house astronauts. There are loads of places to choose from, all giving different benefits. Discounts on upkeep, bonus stuff during income, increased reputation, or more lovely VPs for the end of the game. It quickly dawns on you that it’s not just a case of choosing the first building of a type and going with that. Long-term planning can reap big rewards.

Ring-a-ring-o’-roses

The hexes where you build are a part of my favourite puzzle in Shackleton base. Each hex can have a building of one space, one of two spaces, and a three-spacer too. If you build early in one of those spaces it costs you less to build in the small ones, with smaller upkeep costs, and you get the benefits earlier. Building later is more expensive (bigger buildings need more resources) but can pay huge dividends at the end of each round.

When a round draws to a close, each of the astronauts placed around the edge of the crater to get resources and money during the round are dished out to the players. Each astronaut faces a row of hexes, and the total space occupied by each player in the row is calculated. The player with the most claims the little astronaut and finds a place to put him in their player board, which as I mentioned before can earn you some serious income and discounts. It’s such a fun puzzle, and I love the moments when someone builds somewhere you weren’t expecting, meaning that the astronauts you were planning on banking are heading to someone else instead. Maybe no one can hear you scream in space, but on the moon, they can certainly hear you mumbling “You absolute bastard” under your breath.

This is one example of the thing that Shackleton Base does really well. It has mechanisms at play which feel simple and inconsequential, but after even just a couple of plays in the bank you start to realise their significance. Building late can net you lots of astronauts, but does so at the cost of more expensive command actions – i.e. the action that actually does the building. The first players to take actions there do them for free, while people later in each row pay increasingly more to do so. It makes timing crucial, and a lot of fun.

It all goes towards making what I love in a modern Euro – a ton of indirect interaction. There’s no take-that in the game but oh-so many opportunities to screw someone over just by doing something that directly benefits you. The juiciest little morsel is the energy track on the board. Some buildings and actions require energy to be spent, but energy is a shared resource. Anyone can build it, and anyone can spend it. There’s nothing more annoying than watching your plans blow away like dust because someone spent the energy you were banking on. You can make more power if you have the right resource, and it’s a free action, but it’s still this gorgeous layer of niggle that just bubbles under the surface the whole time.

Get the band back together

While there’s a solo mode included in the box (which works well, for what it’s worth), Shackleton Base is a game I only want to play with three or four players. There’s a two-player mode which blocks some spaces and uses an overlay for the Command action area. It works, but the game just isn’t as interesting. It’s up to the players if they choose to build in the same area of the crater or spread out. Sure, maybe you and your significant other like a game that lets you play without much interaction, but this game is so much better when the players are bouncing off of one another.

When you play Shackleton Base with three or four players, there’s really no choice about whether you stay away from the other player’s buildings. You’re tripping over one another for space to build and there’s a real tussle over the astronauts at the end of a round. In a two-player game, it’s easy to have an unspoken agreement along the lines of “Well, you’ve got those guys tied up, I’ll go over here and I can guarantee I get these”. It’s still a decent game, but it’s missing a little je ne sais quoi, like getting a fish supper on a Friday night and not dousing it with salt and vinegar, or eating a burrito without the spicy sauce. It’s good, it’s just not as good as it could be.

Play with three or four players to get the full experience, it’s where it’s at its best.

Final thoughts

I have a love-hate relationship with Fabio Lopiano’s games. Actually, it’s more like a love-infuriation thing, because I love his games, I just always feel like they end a round too soon. He’s a big tease. When I first played Merv (review here) I actually played a round more than I should. It just felt right. Ragusa (review here) and Zapotec (review here) were the same. His recent partnerships with Nestore Mangone and Mandela F-G seem to be steering away from that brevity, and I’m here for it. Shackleton Base is more like Sankoré (review here) and Autobahn in that it feels like there’s enough time to bring your plans to fruition. This is obviously very personal, but that’s why you’re here – to get my opinion.

Shackleton Base rode a wave of hype out of 2024’s Spiel Essen, and it’s deserved. It’s a clever, interesting game that feels different to any other game I’ve played this year. I love the way the shared building space has so much to consider. Building somewhere opens up those resources to you. Choosing which corporations place tokens around them dictates which corporations you lean toward. And then there’s the really satisfying collection of the astronauts based on row dominance. I have a near-irrational enjoyment of this part, and it’s not even an action I take. It’s just a part of the round-end process. Getting that sudden influx of astronauts just before you pay for upkeep and gather your income is wonderful.

The production levels are really high. The little boxes for the game components come ready-made, show what’s inside them on the outside, and aid with setup and teardown. I referenced Skymines in the intro, which also includes boxes, but doesn’t meet any of those conditions, so it’s a welcome relief to see Sorry We Are French doing it so well. It might not be worth mentioning, but my copy didn’t come with sticky dots to seal the player boards shut, but having spoken to the UK distributor it sounds like it was missed in the first run. The screen-printed wooden pieces are great, the cards and iconography are really well done, and I’m impressed with the A4 card aids for each corporation. It’s great to be able to hand them around the table so players can answer their own questions.

I’ve played Shackleton base with nine different people now, and all of them have enjoyed it. The two-player game feels a little tepid to me compared to three or four, so maybe that’s worth bearing in mind, but overall this is a really good game. A clean, easy-to-grasp Euro game, with plenty of room to experiment with your approach, and a ton of variability with the seven included corps and asymmetric leader tiles. It’s also a game in which I can honestly say I don’t have to continuously refer to the rulebook to check, which is a sign of good design in my books. Shackleton Base is an easy recommendation for me to make.

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

Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon (2024)

Design: Fabio Lopiano, Nestore Mangone
Publisher: Sorry We Are French
Art: David Sitbon
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Shackleton Base Review appeared first on Punchboard.

From the ground up

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

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

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

Balance

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Ironwood (2024)

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

The post Ironwood Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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

Blackout impossible

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

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

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

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

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

Tactics vs strategy

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

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

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

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

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

Great, the game’s ruined, right?

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

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

Training wheels not included

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

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arcs (2024)

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

The post Arcs Review appeared first on Punchboard.

By using a combination of dice, cards, and resources in a way I’ve not encountered before, Ultimate Voyage feels fresh. It feels different and unfamiliar. The layers of strategy mixed with the unknown all go toward making a game that almost certainly has no counterpart in your collection, so if you’re looking for something different to bolster your shelves, this may well be it.

There’s a lot going on in the game, but I’ll do my best to summarise. Ultimate Voyage is set around the final voyage of Zheng He. He is regarded as the greatest admiral in Chinese history. The game sees you taking the role of one of a number of different characters joining He in his travels. You’ll explore, trade, build, engage in combat, and even diplomatic relations with nations from East Asia to Africa and the Middle East.

Action stations

The core of Ultimate Voyage revolves around the action card system. In a nod to games like Ark Nova, each of the cards above your player board is used for a different action. Sailing, Combat, Building, Trade etc. I mentioned Ark Nova because the position of each card dictates its power. The card on the left has a strength of one, the card on the right has five power. That’s where the similarities end though. Cards can gain power-ups adding +1 or +2 to their actions, and each round sees three deity dice rolled which players share. The dice’s values are applied to three dials on your player board, and by discarding one you can add its value to an action’s strength.

When you use a card you ‘tap’ it by turning it 90 degrees. In an unusual twist though, you can still use that card again in the same round, but a tapped card has a base strength of zero. Enough extras from spent resources and dials means that you can still get some value from it. I really like this idea. You can truly min-max and go for that double combat round to really put the cat among the pigeons.

It’s when the round ends that things take another twist. If you’re used to Ark Nova you know that when a card is used it slides to the left, bumping the others to the right. Ultimate Voyage messes with the status quo a bit. When the round ends and your unspent cards slide to the right, the cards you used slide to the left, but you choose their relative order. So if that Trade card you really wanted to use would be in the first slot by default, you can choose to move it up to the third instead. It’s a really interesting twist which means no more dead turns while you wait for the actions you want to use to increase in power.

The spirit of adventure

This is a game of exploration and adventure. Lots of games offer the feeling of exploration in differing ways. Flipping tiles to see what’s on the other side for example, like in Revive (review here). Exploration in Ultimate Voyage is different and truly random. When you first sail you ship into an unexplored region you roll one of the deity dice to determine its standing. You could get really lucky and find that you immediately have great relations with you – happy days! Or you might roll badly and find that the port is actively hostile. In theory, you could uncover hostile port after hostile port, meaning your next turns are built around trying to do something about them.

Some people won’t like this. They like to know there’s some determinism in proceedings. They like to know “If this port is hostile, it means none of the others will be, so they’re safe to explore”. Personally, I really like this system. It means the map feels different every time you play. Sometimes you’ll be charging through the seas with reckless abandon, other times it’s more like tip-toeing around in a stealth pedalo.

There are lots things you can choose to do while you’re at sea, too, which means the game can get pretty asymmetric, pretty quickly. Although you’re all navigating the same waters and still at the whim of the meteorological gods (each round has favourable winds in one direction, and you may encounter a storm), you might be doing very different things, especially if you choose to lean into your character’s speciality. The Merchant, for instance, begins the game with a boosted trade action. Getting into port and seeing what’s on offer to fill your hold with might be your focus, while the Commander with his +2 combat action is out looking for trouble.

Spoiled for choice

Ultimate Voyage feels more like a 4X game than your standard pick-up-and-deliver. There’s so much going on that you can approach each game differently to see how things work out for you. There’s a big porcelain tower at the starting area of Nanjing, but you don’t have to contribute towards building it at all if you don’t want to. You each have some little wooden buildings to deploy, but as well as building at the ports you visit, you can build on your player boards too to increase your income of troops and porcelain – the game’s two resource types.

You might excel at diplomacy and create tributaries in some of the ports you visit, but like a high-maintenance spouse, they need attention. If you don’t keep a ship in port at the end of a round your reputation with the city deteriorates. No problem, just build more ships. But now you’re building ships when you wanted to be trading and engaging in naval warfare. The game has a sandbox feel to it, letting you play in the seas to figure out your own path to victory. That might not be for everyone, some people like more structure to their games. It’s better to know that ahead of time, which is why I’m telling you now.

You can even create semi-alliances with the other players, offering support for their combat encounters in return for… well, I’ll leave the details up to you. The point is, that it’s very unusual for this style of game of throw-in semi-coop parts to what’s unfolding on the board, and I respect the heck out of the designer for trying something different.

The biggest downside to all this variability and different ways to approach the game is that it’s pretty tough to learn. Working out the strength of an action and how that can be applied to the various actions adds a mental overhead. I recommend approaching your first play as an exercise in pulling levers and pushing buttons and seeing what happens, because it won’t be immediately apparent how to build a strategy.

Final thoughts

Ultimate Voyage is a unique game. A contract-fulfilment, area control, pick-up hybrid which would feel like more like a 4X game if there was PvP combat. The card system is a really nice tweak to something that feels immediately familiar if you’re used to Ark Nova, but with much more scope to do unusual things.

It plays from one to four players, but for me this is a game which thrives with more people. It works with two, and it’s still enjoyable, but it’s better with three and four. I think that comes down to the way the map gets limited with two players. It has you block out half the map so that you can’t visit lots of places. I appreciate that it keeps the action in a smaller, more concentrated area, but it also means you never venture as far west as Africa and the Middle East, and you don’t quite get that same feeling of heading out on a grand voyage.

All of that said, what Leonard and his team have created as a debut game is very impressive. A big vision, and a really unusual setting and theme which feels exotic and fresh to me. I’ve played so many games set in and around European history that the introduction to Zheng He and his stories is very welcome. Take all I’ve said here with a small pinch of salt because it is still in a prototype form, and even in the short time I had the game here there were several amendments and changes made.

If the setting and the idea of a game that does something differently to most other games you’ve played appeals to you, keep an eye out for Ultimate Voyage when it on the preorder site.

Preview copy kindly provided by Little Monks. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Ultimate Voyage (2025)

Designer: Leonard To
Publisher: Little Monks
Art: Faangoi
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Ultimate Voyage Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

“The truest wisdom is a resolute determination”

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

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

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

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

I was wrong.

Get your house in order

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

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

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

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

A bridge too far?

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

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Voidfall (2023)

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

The post Voidfall Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Shush now students, pay attention

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

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

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

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

Bookkeeping

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

Scoring.

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa (2024)

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

The post Sankoré Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Share and share alike

In the game of Skymines players take on the roles of investors. Four competing businesses have the rights to mine resources from the moon (or asteroids on the reverse side of the board), and by investing in shares in these companies you can help dictate where they expand their reach and how well they do. You do this by playing cards from your deck which dictate which actions you can take each round, and there’s a really cool dichotomy that it throws up.

There are three different types of resources available, and when you play those cards to your available slots for the round you can use them to buy cards from the market. Those cards get more and more powerful as the game goes on, so it makes sense that you’d want to be the first in the queue at the card shop, because the cheapest stuff goes quickly. That’s a good way to play, and you’ll get to cherry-pick the best cards, but then your resource cards are spent.

In addition to the card actions, there are places on the game board where you can place workers. That’s right, we’ve got some good ol’ worker-placement going on. Some of those places on the board where you can plonk your workers reward you for being the person with the most of a particular colour of resource on your board, unspent. So you might have gotten to the card market after all the bargains had been snagged by those camping out overnight on the pavement, but now there are things available to you that nobody else can claim. The ebb and flow of playing or waiting on cards underpins so much of the game and adds a nice balance. You’re not totally screwed just because you’re the last in turn order, and waiting is often the better option.

All of the card play is really just a means to an end when all is said and done. What really matters is which corporation controls the areas on the main board, and how many shares each player owns in those corporations. It’s a power struggle which both informs and is informed by, the actions of the players.

Land grab

If your experience of share-dealing games revolves around trains (e.g. 18xx, Cube Rails), the concept of being part-owner in multiple companies is nothing new. In many of those games, most of the companies are born equal. That is to say, there’s not necessarily any intrinsic benefit of buying stock in one company instead of another. Skymines spices things up a bit by throwing interchangeable share tracks into the mix. There are some suggested layouts included in the rulebook, but you could have any of the tracks next to any of the companies, and each track grants different bonuses as you march your share marker along it.

The further along each track you inch, the more bonuses you unlock. Bonuses include reducing the cost of certain things, granting permanent additions for actions that spend resources, or even adding new worker spaces to visit for actions that might not have existed before. I really like the way the shares work in this game, and I love the fact that they’re not a neutral part of the gameplay. If there’s a track with a power that you particularly want to use, your choice to invest in the company it’s attached to will directly alter the way the game pans out, and how control of the map swings.

Map control is dictated by spending resources to add outposts from your chosen company’s pool out onto the board. They chain outward, always going adjacent to one another, and the number of lines between where you are and where you want to tell you how many points of energy it’ll cost you. Spaces on the map grant bonuses when they’re claimed, and you get some great opportunities to make short-term plans. Get the bonus for doing this thing here, use that bonus over in this other place. Things like that.

The other thing I really want to highlight is the clever card retrieval mechanism. Above your player board are slots where stacks of used cards end up. When you end a round you take one of those stacks into your hand, and all of the cards you’ve just played have to be split among the remaining stacks. It adds a really cool planning aspect to the game. For example, you might choose to deposit all of your energy cards into one pile over the course of a few rounds, then once you pick that stack up you’re ready for a round of covering the board in little yellow buildings (energy is used to expand each company’s outposts and area control). It lets you choose your strategy and gives equal credibility to playing for a little bit of everything or going full min-max.

Final thoughts

Skymines is a blast. I’ve taught it to my regular group and they all had a great time with it. It’s a strange game in as much as there’s quite a lot going on, but it never feels like it’s too much. Contending with the cards you’ve got in hand and building the stacks from your discarded cards would be enough to think about on its own, but it all just works. The crawl of each company’s outposts as they spread out like mould across the moon (it’s made of cheese, right?) gives you this instantly discernible overview of the state of play. This is helped no end by the genius of not making everything in space, black. Even on the side of the board where you hop from asteroid to asteroid using a new shuttles mechanism, space is white. It creates a much nicer table presence, showing off the non-primary colours nicely.

It’s a heavier game than I’d recommend for newbies to modern games, and I think the decision space would probably just leave them with a sour taste in their mouths. A good way to get the hang of the way things work is to take on the AI opponent, named Luna. It’s an easy-to-run automa opponent which you can add into 2- and 3-player games to add some more competition, which is definitely a good idea. You can play Skymines with two players, but it’s at its best with four. I’ve played two-player games where one of the companies didn’t place outposts, and nobody bought shares in it, and it just made competing for space on the moon less competitive, and less fun. The Luna rulebook that’s included is quite creepy too! It’s written as if the AI opponent is talking to you in the first person, explaining how it all works.

There are parts of the game I haven’t even touched on, such as the helium and research tracks, both of which also lean heavily on your decision-making. They, like so much else in the game, are just individual strands which, once weaved together, create a brilliant, coherent tapestry of a game. Gah, Skymines is just so much fun. I’m trying to write the end of this review, and I keep daydreaming back to recent games of it, and thinking how much I want to play it again, right now. Skymines slipped past a lot of peoples’ radar when it was released towards the end of last year, which is a travesty. Alexander Pfister creates some incredible games (such as my first-ever review here, Maracaibo), and along with fellow designer Viktor Kobilke, they’ve created one of the best games I’ve played. If you like something that’s really going to massage your brain, and you have a regular group of three or four people, do yourself a favour and get Skymines.

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.

Skymines (2022)

Design: Alexander Pfister, Viktor Kobilke
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
Art: Javier Inkgolem
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-150 mins

The post Skymines Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Putting the ‘fun’ into fundamental rights

Fort Circle Games might not have the biggest back catalogue in the world, but founder Kevin Bertram knows what makes a game fun. I had a blast with Shores of Tripoli (review here), and you can definitely sense that Fort Circle influence in Votes for Women. That’s not to say it’s the same game in an Emmeline Pankhurst outfit. There’s just a general feeling of familiarity, which is a good thing.

Votes for Women uses a multi-use card system, where each card can be played for its event or for one of a menu of standard options. Just like in Shores of Tripoli, or any of the COIN games (for instance, Fire in the Lake, which I reviewed recently), there are times when you can’t, or don’t want to take the event. It’s in those situations where a lot of Votes for Women’s tactical nuance lies. The effects of the standard actions seem relatively weak, but just like nibbling a little bit off that bar of chocolate you’ve got in the cupboard each time you walk past, it doesn’t take long until you’ve got no chocolate. Or total control of the US Midwest. Whatever.

The game is split into two main acts. The first sees the two sides – Suffragists (yay) and Opposition (boooo) – in a tug of war. The Suffragists want to get six columns into the Congressional Track, in order to get the Nineteenth Amendment proposed, while the Opposition want the opposite. If and when it gets proposed, the second half of the game starts, where the posturing and placing of cubes in the various States suddenly turns into a traditional area control game. If the Opposition gets a 13th state to reject the amendment, they win. Vice-versa for the Suffragists if they get a 36th state to ratify it.

The ‘ick’ factor

If this were any other game, even a war game mirroring conflicts and all manner of atrocities, I could focus the body of this review on the ins and outs of the game and how it plays. But with Votes for Women, there is so much theme involved that I’ve got to talk about it. In previous reviews, I’ve talked about how theme is woven into games, like threads in a tapestry. In Votes for Women it’s less ‘weaving threads’ and more like ‘pick up that tapestry and dunk it in a tank of permanent dye’. You can try to play it by abstracting everything into placing cubes, ticks and crosses, but it’s nigh on impossible. The entire game is built on the bedrock of the real events it emulates, and to remove that bedrock would leave you with a tottering, fragile game, just waiting to collapse.

I don’t often wear my heart on my sleeve here when it comes to political issues. Here, I’ve got to, just to explain some things. The concept of equal voting rights for women (and it’s ridiculous that I even have to write this, just a hundred years on) is a good thing. Opposition to it is a bad thing. If my stating that has you shaking your head, then just close this tab, open a new one, and Google something like “how to not be an asshole”. This is the reason that playing as the Opposition just doesn’t feel nice. It feels truly horrible to play some of the events in your deck. It leaves you in this really weird limbo place, because playing the game – as a game – is a lot of fun. But emulating some of the horrible things that happened in order to win just feels gross.

I’m not sure if this is the reason that a variety of two-player scenarios exist, but I’m glad they do. If two of you want to play, but neither of you wants to play as the Opposition, you can each take one of the two Suffragist colours (purple and yellow) and play against an AI opponent. The bot is called the Oppobot, and it can only be used to replace the Opposition player. To put it another way – there is no way to play solo as the Opposition against an automated Suffragist opponent, and you know what? I’m okay with that.

Bumps in the road

It’s only fair to point out a game’s faults, even if it’s doing a good thing. The first thing to understand is that the game is very US-centric. It’s all about the US suffrage movement, so you’re not necessarily going to be learning about Emily Davison getting killed after walking in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby. The same goes for other suffrage causes in other places in the world, which I have to admit I’m ignorant of. I’m sorry. It’s not necessarily a fault, per se, but I’ve personally spoken to two women who admitted they weren’t as interested in the game when they found out it only covered the movement in America.

The biggest problem, which I doubt is just for international players either, is that each of the states on the game board is represented by its two-letter acronym. Some states are easy – TX is for Texas, CA, is California, etc. – but some aren’t as obvious if you don’t know the geography. For example, in one of the first games I played, my opponent was referring to MO as Montana, understandably. It wasn’t until I was packing the game away that I realised (I’m a lifelong fan of American sports and I’m okay with the map) that MO is actually Missouri, not Montana, which is MT. They could just as easily have mistaken MN for Montana too, while it’s actually Minnesota. It’s not a game-killer, but when you consider the sheer amount of accompanying material in the box (prints of posters, hand-outs, newspaper clippings from the time), the choice to not include a list of states and their initials is a bit of an oversight, especially when the cards refer to them by name.

(addendum: Kevin from Fort Circle informs me that the state abbreviations will be included with the second printing)

Final thoughts

I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that Votes for Women is a very good game. That’s with my analytical hat on, and just taking the mechanisms of the game for what they are. It’s a clever, card-driven area control game, peppered with events, cards with lasting effects, and a really engaging two-act structure. The use of Early, Middle, and Late decks is really nice, and slowly adds spice to the game as it builds towards its finale. The components are functional and really nicely made. I love the green ticks and red crosses for the late game, showing which states have ratified or rejected. It creates a really dramatic, unique look on the table.

There’s a huge amount of work that’s been poured into the game, and it’s clearly been a labour of love for designer Tory Brown. More than once I found myself not concentrating on the game, reading the text on the cards instead. That same level of detail went into all the additional material that comes in the box, which I mentioned above. It was a great touch adding buttons into the game as tokens, which each side can spend to re-roll dice, bid on strategy cards, and a few other things. It’s a game which really shines with two players, but playing solo against the Oppobot is really fun too.

The biggest problem you might have at the time of writing is getting hold of the game. I’m based in the UK and was very lucky to have a copy sent to me by Fort Circle. At the time of writing it doesn’t look like anywhere in the UK is stocking the game, which is a real shame, although Second Chance Games have it available for pre-order. US and Canadian residents can order direct from the Fort Circle Games website. It’s a shame that distribution might hold the game back from the audience it deserves, and Votes for Women deserves an audience for what it does, and the way it does it. If, and when, you can buy it, I recommend it to fans of historical games and fans of card-driven area control games alike. Who said education has to be boring?

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

Votes For Women (2022)

Designer: Tory Brown
Publisher: Fort Circle Games
Art: Brigette Indelicato, Marc Rodrigue
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Votes For Women Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Getting back to basics

There’s a crazy amount of competition in the board game world. Getting noticed isn’t easy, and I’ve noticed two trends on Kickstarter which a lot of new games tend to belong to. First is the cheap & cheerful party/card game, and the second is the huge, over-produced game that needs a forklift truck to deliver to your door. Crown of Ash is different. There are no promises of hundreds of hours of campaign, no app-driven shenanigans, and no hyperbole about innovative new things you’ve never seen before. Crown of Ash is built on a few tried-and-tested concepts, and it delivers on all of them.

Each player has their own board, but from a gameplay point of view, they’re unnecessary. They’re just a place to store your stuff. All of the action takes place on the central board, which – like everything else in the game – is really nicely illustrated. The artists have gone with a nice mixture of dark, brooding greys with contrasts in strong secondary and pastel colours. Along with a few spots to place your workers, there are some small spaces for constructing buildings (which generate resources), but the lion’s share of the board is taken up with space for fighters. When you compare the four different worker place types to something like A Feast For Odin with its 60+, you can see the intention to keep things streamlined and simple.

Fighters in Crown of Ash aren’t minis or even meeples. They’re represented by cards. Fighters can be bought from the market at the top of the board, using the resources generated by the different buildings, and then used in a couple of different ways. A player who controls an area can slap fighters down in that area to act as defenders. Alternatively, fighters can be used to attack other players’ areas, or even the central citadel itself.

Put ’em up. Put ’em up!

All of the cut and thrust of Crown of Ash is baked into the combat. It’s the way control of each area and the central citadel is decided. It’s important to control areas because they are worth points at the end of each round. Combat is simple enough, and very quick to resolve, which is vital in keeping the pace and rhythm of the game bouncing along. Getting into a scrap over an area involves playing attackers from your hand, who will directly compete against any defenders already on the board. The fun – and really clever – bit comes next.

Each player has a small deck of combat cards, and during combat, both the attacker and defender play one in secret. Each carries a varying number to add to your oomph in the fight, but more interesting are the rewards. Each card boasts a different reward based on whether you win or lose the fight. In the spirit of giving players interesting decisions to make, you’ll find sometimes that you might benefit more if you throw the fight and take the goodies from the bottom of the card. I love it when games do this. I love it even more when you so extravagantly throw a fight that your opponent’s initial joy washes from their face within a second. That moment of recognition when they understand you have something else going on upstairs is priceless.

Crown of Ash asks you to pay attention to all fights though, not just those you partake in. Each combat card can only get played once, and then it gets added to the discard pile in the middle of your player board. Granted, in a four-player game, it’s tough to keep track of who’s played what, but even remembering who’s spent their high-value cards might just give you the edge a couple of turns down the line. Combat cards aren’t gone forever when discarded. If you spend them all you get them all back, and there’s also a Gloomhaven-esque Refresh action you can take at any time to get a full complement of combat cards back in your hand.

Final thoughts

I’ve been bumping into Card Noir at various conventions around the UK for the last year or so, and each time I’ve always had my head turned by the game. I was delighted when Richard (the designer) asked me if I wanted to preview the game, ahead of their crowdfunding campaign. It’s always good when a new designer and a new game have something which feels refined, and that’s the case here with Crown of Ash. It’s not the heaviest or the deepest game in the world, so those of you looking for intricate combat, twisting tech trees, and resource management might go wanting. It’s hard to pin down other games to compare it with. It’s got essence of Lords of Waterdeep mixed in with important area control like Brian Boru (review here) or Blood Rage – all while feeling like none of them.

Crown of Ash makes a fantastic game for players looking for something beyond those first steps into the hobby. There’s more meat on its bones than the traditional gateway games, and what happens is almost entirely due to the decisions you make. Sure, there’s an element of chance with the timing of when structures and fighters come off their respective decks, but when you take that out of the equation the only chance left is with one of the combat cards which uses a D6. All this streamlined, laser-focused design is pulled together with fabulous imagery. I really like the artistic style throughout the game, right from the bright pink front cover of the rulebook, to the undead brutes on the cards. Heck, there’s even dual-layer player boards in the box.

Crown of Ash then, not quite a full-blown beer & pretzels game of stomping all over a map, but a happy medium between that and a lightweight Euro. The solo mode works really nicely, and is very easy to run, but I think to get the most out of the game you really ought to be playing with three or four players. Richard and team have done a fantastic job of making their debut game stand out in terms of design and production, and I hope that is enough to make the game a crowdfunding success, as I’d love to see where they can go next.

The Kickstarter campaign launches on the 28th March 2023, and you can check it out here – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cardnoir/crown-of-ash

Preview copy supplied by Card Noir Games. All rules, artwork, and production are subject to change. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Crown of Ash (2023)

Designer: Richard Lawton
Publisher: Card Noir Games
Art: Vadim Mishin, Rafael Nobre
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Crown Of Ash Preview appeared first on Punchboard.