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.

Malum Hortus is a cooperative game where you play nymphs, lured to a beautiful garden to frolic, or do whatever it is when nymphs have a few hours to kill. Some weeding, maybe? Things turn sour at night though. What seemed like a nice garden full of sweet perfumes and bright colours turns out to be an evil place, and after dark the plants are out to get you. Your goal is to get all of the nymphs out of the garden and to get the trapped woodland critters out with you ideally.

I bet you’re wondering how that happens.

Tiptoe through the tulips

Malum Hortus is a card-driven game. Each of the nymphs starts in the middle of the board on one of four paths that lead to the edge of the board. Each player gets to play a card during each round, with each round representing a day. Cards do all sorts of things, from moving the naughty plants away from you, to adding more magic tokens to the shared magic pool.

It’s a co-op game, so yes, of course things like magic are shared. So too are things like the power to move nymphs along the path. You don’t have to move your own character, you can move the others too. Magic is used to do a couple of things, namely freeing critters if you share the same space on the board with them, and also using your nymph’s unique power. After you’ve all taken an action and flounced along the garden paths (in my mind, flouncing is the way nymphs move), night descends on the garden and the plants take their turns.

The plants on the paths are bad, bad plants. Frightfully naughty plants. Think ‘Little Shop of Horrors meets The Triffids’. Each plant has a dice rolled for its movement, and should it move past or land on the same space as you, you take some damage. Poor nymphs! By this point you’ve got the idea, I think. Move nymphs, gain magic, free critters, and avoid horticultural entanglements.

From tiny acorns

Malum Hortus is a lightweight game, and the theme of fairies in the garden really helps it lean into its strengths. It’s a game I think will work great for families with young children. The theme is so light and friendly that even when something bad happens to the players, it’s never vicious. Take dying, for example. It doesn’t happen. The rulebook (which is subject to change) says:

“If a player reaches 0 health, you do not die, Malum Hortus is crueller than that, you must endure.”

It sounds harsh, but what it means in practical terms is that you don’t need to tell a child their nymph died. It wasn’t torn to shreds by some thorny mutant plant. It goes back to the middle of the board and you collectively gain a corruption token. If someone hits 0 HP and you’ve got the token, you all lose. So it’s not a game of “I’m alright Jack, I don’t fancy your chances though”. You win or lose together.

There aren’t too many games being released which fall into the intersection of the ‘co-op’ and ‘lightweight’ Venn diagram. For that reason, Malum Hortus is a great stepping stone towards other, more complicated cooperative games like Pandemic or Gloomhaven, as it starts to get players to look at the bigger picture, and to understand that they need to work towards the greater good.

Final thoughts

I’m conscious of the fact that I’ve stressed that Malum Hortus is on the lighter end of the complexity scale, but I don’t want that to take away from the fact that it’s a good game. It’s just not the game you’re looking for if you’re after something heavy with layer upon layer of complexity. Instead, you’ll play cards, move characters along paths, and do your best to outrun the ever-dwindling Night deck, which acts as a combination of event cards and game timer.

Designer Nikita’s previous game, Canine Capers (preview here) showed that lightweight, family-friendly games are still as important as ever. Malum Hortus feels like an evolution of those design principles, keeping things simple and familiar (the plants use roll-and-move), while simultaneously introducing concepts which are commonplace to nerds like me (hand management and co-op planning).

I really hope the final game expands on the lore and setting of the game, because the descriptive text on the night cards is well-written and atmospheric, and it makes me want to know more about the garden and its inhabitants and prisoners.

The actions are really easy to understand, thanks to the game’s iconography. Hopefully in the full game (I was playing an early prototype) there’ll be some changes to the rune card artwork, because even as someone with reasonable eyesight, some of the runes aren’t very legible. But hey, that’s all a part of working with a prototype, and a good reason why you should always take a preview with a pinch of salt, because things can and will change.

We had fun with Malum Hortus, and I think your family will too, especially if you’re trying to introduce them to modern games.

If you’d like to know more, you can head over to the Malum Hortus Kickstarter page and sign-up to be notified when it goes live.

Malum Hortus (2024)

Design: Nikita Sullivan
Publisher: Atikin Games
Art: Nikita Sullivan
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Malum Hortus Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Bear with me, I can explain.

Evolution crawling from the sea

ACME is the second game in this series, following on from 2019’s Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea. It builds on the original with the same system, but some changes. In ACIS there are 10 civilisations, each with their own homeland, but those numbers jump to 17 civilisations and 22 different homelands in ACME.

Let that number sink in. 17 civilisations to choose from. How many games can you think of that come with anything even like that number of different factions, even with expansions? I’ll concede that there are small differences between the civilizations. Usually, it’s just a change or addition to a standard rule which fits with that civilisation, thematically, but combined with the location(s) of their homeland, it results in some really nice asymmetric play.

On top of the bigger numbers, the board itself is different. Land in ACIS is all of one type, whereas in ACME there are four different types, and the types are important. Having settlements in different terrain types adds to the number of ‘Discs for Growth’ you get as income at the start of a turn, and mountains can gain strongholds to bolster your defenses. Turns in ACME represent hundreds of years (500 in the first epoch, 100 in the fourth epoch) and the growth represents your people spreading out across the Middle East. Sometimes into untouched lands, sometimes butting heads against your neighbours, which is where the fun begins.

The other big change is with Wonders from the original game making way for Deities. Deities in this case shouldn’t give religious people much cause for concern as they don’t attempt to use any real ones, to the best of my knowledge. As the design notes in the rulebook state, during the epochs the game takes place in there were thousands of gods worshipped. ACME makes an attempt to distil them down to seven generic deities such as God of War, God of the Skies, God of the Dead, etc.

If you’re new to this series, once you ‘invest’ in a deity you can use its power on every turn, as long as its temple remains in play in your homeland. Some of these powers are really powerful, so choosing when to claim one, and which one you claim, can have a big impact. If you’re coming from ACIS, the biggest differences between Wonders and deities is that each person can only have a single deity, and they get to use it on every turn, not just when placing a disc on it.

Cardplay

There are no dice to worry about in Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East, but there’s a whole bunch of cards. Cards drive the majority of what happens in ACME, and they come in a variety of different flavours. Some get played during the aptly named Card Phase and do things like adding and removing discs to and from the board, changing the balance of the power. Some are investment cards, allowing you to add them to your play area with a few discs on. You get to trade those discs in at different times for different benefits. I particularly like the few Religion cards that turn up, which can only be used if you establish a deity first.

The juiciest cards of the bunch are the competition cards. During the competition phase of each turn each contested area gets resolved. If there are stacks of discs from different civs they duke it out, but each player can choose to play any number of competition cards face-down before they’re resolved. They grant you any number of benefits to help swing things in your favour, and balancing how many you use, and for which areas – that’s where the heart of the strategy lies. You’ve no way of knowing whether the cards someone has in hand are competition cards waiting to trip you up, or just cards they’re hanging onto. They might even be holding a Negate card, which as the name suggests, allows you to negate certain effects too. There’s no denying that combat can be a tense and cagey affair.

Luckily, interaction between players is encouraged. Not happy about the way a situation is developing along your western borders? Make a mutually beneficial deal with someone else. You’re meant to be representing great civilisations after all, so seeing this kind of back-and-forth is the game is great. It can be tempting to try to crush all before you early on, taking what feels like an unassailable position at the top of the pecking order, but it often doesn’t work out like that. It’s one thing to become dominant among the other civilisations, and a very different one to stay in that position. ‘Kill the king’ is alive and well in ACME, and I’m here for it.

Time flies when you’re having fun

ACME is an odd duck in some respects. There’s a maximum of four epochs to play, each with four turns. 16 turns doesn’t sound extraordinarily long, but those 16 turns could quite easily keep you playing for in excess of four hours, especially with the maximum quota of six players. It’s so much fun exploring the game’s systems though, and seeing how the shape of that part of the world changes as the years march on, that it really doesn’t feel like that long. Much in the same way as Sid Meier’s Civilization video games erased hours and hours of my life in the blink of an eye, time just zips along.

The game offers a fairly unique sandbox approach to games. There are a bunch of historically-inspired scenarios in the included Playbook if that’s your thing, but you’re encouraged to decide how you want to play. Don’t have four hours spare? Agree to play just the first two epochs. Only three of you are playing, and you want to keep things tight and aggressive? Add the border discs to carve a usable piece of the map out, leaving the rest forbidden. Maybe there are only two of you but you want to avoid the knife fight in a phone booth feel of just using a small part of the board. So pick a couple of civilisations each, or throw in a few Non-Player civs too. This open-ended feeling will feel like a joy to some and a real sticking point to others.

Some people like to have their game prescribed. The map is a certain size, x civilisations will play, and it will last y turns. There’s a lot to be said for that kind of structure being placed around a game. If that’s what you’re coming from, and that’s what you enjoy, then ACME can feel alienating. It’s the difference between being given a Lego kit and following the instructions to make a car and being given a box of Lego pieces and being told to come up with your own design. Some people love that, some don’t. Just be aware of that going into the game. As I mentioned above, there are preset scenarios, and there are guidelines on how to create your own, but ACME is a game that’s meant to be explored and played with, and you’ll get the most from it if you have a regular group who’ll enjoy that.

Final thoughts

Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East is a pretty unique game. The grand scale of nations rising and falling over the course of thousands of years is somehow contained within a game with a basic ruleset. Trust me, it won’t take long to learn how to play the game. It means that the rules do the most important of things with a game like this though – they just disappear. You don’t have to think too hard about what you can do, or how you do it. You just think about what you want to do. In fact, the only time you ever really need even the player aid, let alone the rulebook, is checking how many growth discs you’re awarded for what areas during the expansion phase.

The cards need a special mention. The artwork on each of them is gorgeous, without exception, and each has a quote from the King James version of the Bible’s Old Testament. The truly remarkable thing is that designer Mark McLaughlin has managed to find a quote for each of the game’s 103 fate cards which matches what the card describes. If you know the King James version, you know how expressive and poetic the text is, and you’ll find yourself quoting the text on the cards as you lay waste to your opponents.

The rest of the components are pretty standard GMT fare. Coloured cubes and discs, a nice board, and thin, card player boards and player aids. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. The coloured discs make it really easy to read the board state at a glance.

One other thing I really, really like about ACME, is the way it gives players who don’t get started well a chance to turn things around. If you find yourself eradicated from the map, or more than 5VPs behind everybody else, you can invoke the Gilgamesh rule. The Gilgamesh rule lets you start afresh with a new civilisation, a new set of discs, and a chance to take vengeance on those who wiped your predecessors from the face of the globe. It’s a really cool thing to do to fight needless player elimination, and I think it’s great.

If you like the idea of a sandbox civ game with a ton of ways to play, Ancient Civilisations of the Middle East is absolutely fantastic. Simple rules, easy cardplay, and enough strategy to keep everyone happy.

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

Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East (2023)

Design: Mark McLaughlin, Chris Vorder Bruegge, Fred Schacter
Publisher: GMT Games
Art: Mark Mahaffey
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 120-420 mins

The post Ancient Civilizations Of The Middle East Review appeared first on Punchboard.

There’s a part of me that wants to draw comparisons to Mass Effect all the way through this preview, but that would be both disingenuous and doing an injustice to Rogue Angels. The concept for the game is great. A sweeping intergalactic story plonks you – the heroes – smack bang in the middle of it. I’m not going to delve too far into the story because the whole point of the game is to discover that for yourself. On top of that, what happened to me in my plays might end up being completely different to yours.

You see, one of the big draws of the game, and one of the things which draw more comparisons with the aforementioned video game, is the way the story changes based on the decisions you make. You get the same thing right from the first scenario in Rogue Angels. It’s great to have a game where there isn’t a single win condition every time you play. You might get the option of escaping or killing all the bad guys, and the choice you make shapes the story. Choices shape the story directly and indirectly, which is the kind of thing which raises your investment in a game, and Rogue Angels does it really well.

Building a legacy

I really like the legacy folders that come in the game. These little folios not only give you somewhere to keep your character’s board and cards, but also track things like your relationships with other characters. Some decisions will move towards making you closer, and some will drive an irreconcilable wedge between them, and these things again play into the story, options, and choices later in the campaign.

I was playing with a prototype copy of the game which has to go to several reviewers, so my changes happened on a colour photocopy I made, but even doing things this way felt personal and gave me that level of connection with my character. Apparently, the stickers which customise your cards with new abilities are re-applicable – how cool is that? It seems that publishers might finally be listening to players and not forcing them to go for after-market options like the removable sticker sets you can get for Gloomhaven.

The last time I felt this level of connection to my character was with Aeon’s End: Legacy (review here), which is my favourite campaign/legacy game yet. Speaking of cards, I want to give a mention to the card system in the game. There are four slots at the bottom of your board, and each card has a value on it. To play a card you have to be able to place it in the matching numbered slot, which requires a little forethought. In a nod to video games, each ability has a cooldown, and this is represented by the cards being moved a step to the left each turn, until they come off the end of your board and back to your hand. I really like this, it’s both tactical and a nice tie back to the inspiration it draws from.

Bang for your buck

Once I got stuck into everything that came in the box, I was blown away at just how much there is to the game. Not in terms of hundreds of minis you might only see once, but in the size of the campaign and map books. There’s a crazy amount of world-building, story-writing, and attention to detail. Page after page after page of new places for the action to take place, an unfurling narrative, and the writing is excellent.

I’ve been spoiled when it comes to narrative in games. I spent a lot of time playing through The Baker Street Irregulars (review here) which had phenomenal writing throughout, so games have a lot to live to. Rogue Angels does a great job. Sci-fi and fantasy can so easily become derivative and boring, but I was completely invested in what was going on. Part of that comes from the game refusing to sugar-coat anything. I won’t give too much away here, but after the second or third mission, I had a really horrible choice to make. From then on it coloured the way I felt about one of the senior figures on my ship.

Choices like this get stuck in your head, and it becomes the difference between a good campaign and a mediocre one. When you play a game which revolves around the same type of action scenes, sometimes hundreds of times, the story is what keeps you coming back. You’ll know how to move, what your attacks can do, and how your characters best work together, but a good narrative keeps it interesting and means you want to see how it plays out, and what happens in the end.

Final thoughts

Generally speaking, campaign games aren’t my thing. If you’ve been visiting here for a while, you’ll know that. I just had to reach out and try Rogue Angels though, and I’m really glad I did. Firstly, it’s a pleasant change to play one which isn’t based on fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, it’s just been done to death, and it was great to delve into some campaign sci-fi for a while. My biggest problem with sci-fi and fantasy is buying into yet another universe, but I love the Rogue Angels setting. The writing is superb and very atmospheric.

I love how combat works. The card slot system is great, and it genuinely feels like the cooldown systems used in turn-based and action RPGs. I said at the top that I didn’t want to keep comparing it to Mass Effect, but it’s hard not to. The branching story, the character development, and the relationships between characters are handled so nicely. Saving your game is a breeze, and setup and teardown are both quick and easy too.

The biggest caveat I have is around the components and their quality. I’ve been playing with a proper homemade prototype. Card standees in repurposed stands, a map book made of bound printer paper, dice with stickers on – that kind of thing. Obviously, this doesn’t impact the quality of the game, which is sound, but I know how important those details can be to these games. The presentation can affect a person’s buy-in to a game and its universe. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter page and official game site to find out more about that as and when more is announced.

Overall, Rogue Angels is a fantastic sci-fi campaign that honestly lives up to its billing as Mass Effect in all but name. Brilliant stuff.

Preview copy provided by Sun Tzu Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rogue Angels: Legacy of the Burning Suns (2023)

Design: Emil Larsen
Publisher: Sun Tzu Games
Art: Dinulescu Alexandru, Linggar Bramanty, Przemek Kozlowski
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Rogue Angels Preview 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.