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.

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.

You cool with Nazgûl?

One player is the Fellowship, trying to get The One Ring to Mount Doom to destroy it, while the other is Sauron, commanding his dark forces to stop them in their tracks. In practice the game wouldn’t feel like that at all, were it not for the funky little plastic ‘Quest of the ring’ track that comes in the box. Collecting blue cards with their ring emblems pushes Sam and Frodo along the track towards Mordor if you’re the Fellowship, or the Black Riders in hot pursuit if you’re Sauron.

The Quest of the ring track is one of three different ways to end the game immediately, which means you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel. The closest comparator is the military track in 7W:D, the biggest difference being that whenever the Fellowship advances, they drag the Nazgûl with them, meaning the gap only ever gets smaller. The green cards represent the different races in Middle-earth. Collect six of them, thematically getting their support, and the game ends immediately too. The third and final instant win condition is something entirely new and very different feeling for this series of games.

There and back again

Duel for Middle-earth has a little board representing the world. There are seven interlinked spaces representing everywhere from Rohan to Mordor, and some cards and actions allow you to add units to the board and move them from pillar to post. When opposing units come together, there’s a big ol’ scrap and each loses one at the same time until somebody has nothing left in the space, thereby losing control of it.

Another big difference is the absence of the titular Wonders from the previous games. Instead, we have Fortresses now. Building them is largely the same as in the previous game, but this time completing one lets you pop one of your little wooden fortress pieces on the matching map space, permanently giving you presence there. If either player manages to have a presence on all seven spaces on the map, they instantly win.

I really like the map. It adds a bit more spice to the game which I never realised was missing in 7W:D until I played this game. It’s not just the quasi-area control it adds, either. I like that fortresses are never removed, meaning there’s a good reason to devote your resources and coins towards building them early. It’s a real exercise in plate-spinning, trying to work towards dominating at least one of the three routes to victory while not neglecting something your opponent is working towards. Having three to keep an eye on is great, it’s really reminiscent of something you’d expect in a Reiner Knizia game, like Lost Cities. Not having an even split per player means there’s always a bit of a tussle over at least one of them, which is great.

“The wise speak only of what they know”

If you’ve played 7 Wonders Duel, most of the rest of the game will be immediately familiar to you. The game is split into three rounds, each seeing its cards arranged in patterns on the table. You either take a card and add it to your tableau, paying any due costs, or discard it for coins. Gone are resources on collected cards, instead we’re dealing with skills. Functionally it’s exactly the same thing though. If your played cards provide enough symbols to play a card, you can play it, making up any difference in coins.

You can still chain cards too. If a card from a previous round provides a symbol seen on a later card, you get to play it for free. It’s a really easy game to teach from this perspective. Any time you’re asked “Can I play this card?” you can answer with “Do you have those symbols visible on those cards in front of you?”, and the concept takes root very quickly.

In short, if you’ve played the previous 7 Wonders games then you’ll immediately understand the mechanisms that drive the game. Taking a turn feels the same. Growing your tableau feels the same. Planning for the future feels the same. The biggest diversion is what you do with the things your gameplay creates. It’s not a case of swinging the military in your favour. The Wonders are replaced with fortresses which don’t feel as important, even though they play an important role. There’s no competition between players between rounds based on military strength. It’s about keeping an eye on three different dials and making sure the needles don’t top out in the red unless you’re the one pushing it there.

Final thoughts

In my opinion, Duel for Middle-earth is the high point in the 7 Wonders line. I like some of the expansions for the original games, but those games are better once the expansions are included. In terms of a game, sans expansions, in a small box, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth is the best. I’m surprised to find myself writing that because when someone takes an existing game and forces it into a spandex fancy dress costume from a popular franchise, it’s an immediate turn-off for me. You can keep your Marvel and Cthulhu cash-ins, it does nothing for me. Yet here I am singing the praises of a game I love that’s wearing Tolkien’s fantasy garb.

The artwork and illustrations are gorgeous throughout, and the rulebook makes things very clear. It’s entirely possible for two non-gamers to buy this hobbity box and learn the game without watching a video. The drama of seeing what cards are revealed when you uncover them is just as exciting as it was in 7W:D, but the variations on a theme of the original game lift it and make it feel fresh and new. As well as the things I’ve mentioned above, there’s a nice little set-collection bonus built-in with the green cards, letting you collect shield tokens with different one-time bonuses.

The Quest of the Ring plastic track is extremely gimmicky, but you know what? I like it. It’s silly and fun and surprisingly dramatic. Sliding a piece of plastic with a horse drawn on it shouldn’t feel as dramatic as it does. It boils down to this. If you’ve never played the 7 Wonders games and want a quick, easy-to-learn, two-player game, get this. If you’ve already got 7 Wonders Duel and don’t know whether to get this too, it’s a little trickier, but I’d still say yes. It’s about 20 quid, it’s got a bit more going on, and obviously it’s Lord of the Rings. If you like LOTR, then yeah, get this. If you don’t then maaaaybe you could skip this, but it’s still the best of the bunch. This game, along with Watergate (review here) are my favourite small box two-player duelling games right now.

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

The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth (2024)

Design: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala
Publisher: Repos Production
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 2
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Every woman, every man, join the caravan…

One for The Housemartins fans there.

So you’ve got your starting board, a couple of workers, and you’ve thrown your handful of dice. What next? I guess the first thing to mention is that in Wayfarers the values of your dice don’t matter in the same way as in other games. Take Ping Yao: First Chinese Banks (review here) for example. In that game, you wanted low values. In Marco Polo II you might want high values. In Wayfarers the value only matters in the context of your caravan – the grid at the top of your player board. Each die face has a caravan column associated with it which will have one or more icons in it as the game goes on. Some of the actions you take demand that the dice you place in a spot have certain icons associated with them.

To get icons for your caravan you need to collect upgrade tiles through various in-game actions and then place them, tetris-style, into the grid on your board. It reminds me a bit of the tile-placement puzzle in Bonfire (review here), albeit less complicated. What’s especially nice about Wayfarers is the way Shem & Sam decided to make the Caravan layout different on each player board. They’re the same shape, but the bonuses you cover and gain when you place tiles are all different, which alleviates any early-game forced conflict between players, fighting over particular tiles. It’s a subtle, but welcome touch.

The little caravan area soon gets dwarfed by the rest of your city’s reaches, spreading east and west as you add card after card to your tableau. Lands go to the west, water cards to the right, while space cards can go above both. Then you’ve got townsfolk who can tuck under other cards to boost their features. Each has its own market around the main board, and each has its own costs and demands. It’s not just a case of buying any old thing that’s available, however. There are a lot of options available all of the time, and a lot of things to consider.

Layers.

Board games are like onions!

I love a game that gives me lots to think about at once, and Wayfarers is a fine example of just that. Just like Shrek, this game has layers. Finely woven layers that all need simultaneous consideration. Locations have tags that reward you with VPs for collecting sets of the same tag as well as simultaneously giving VPs for sets of different tags. Water cards have symbols on the left and right edges. As you expand eastwards if the two sides connect in the right way, you get rewards.

Space cards reward you with lots of ways to score end-of-game VPs, but they have to go above the other types of cards. You’ve got inspiration cards too, which, if fulfilled, double the rewards earned on the space cards they’re slotted behind.

The cards in the markets also line up with action spaces, each of which can earn you rewards. If you place a worker of a valid colour on a card, you get the action of the space for that card. Workers stay on the card they’re plonked on until someone buys that card, in which case they get the card and the worker(s). All of these things, and so many more, are the juicy niblets of corn adorning the cob of ‘roll some dice and place them to do stuff’.

I’ve painted the game with very broad brushstrokes here, and still haven’t touched on the heart of the game: the journal. The centre of the board – the journal – is a straightforward track with a couple of paths along it. Any time you take a journal action (often as a result of resting, which gets your dice back to use again) you can move to the next space if you meet the prerequisites for crossing the next line. Each space gives you more bonuses, more workers, more dice – just… more.

If at first, you don’t succeed…

Wayfarers of the South Tigris demands that you play it repeatedly. You can get a broad feel for how the game works in your first game or two, but it takes time and repetition to really get it. It’s very easy to just keep growing your tableau outwards, nudging your neighbour’s board further along the table, but it usually means you’re doing something inefficiently. You’ll end up with dice placement slots on your land cards that you never use. Granted, you can use the tags on those cards for other scoring opportunities, but you’ll always feel like there’s something better you could have done.

It means that you’ve got a game that’s deceptively heavy. Not complicated or complex, because learning and playing the game honestly isn’t that hard. The weight comes in the decision space. You can randomly do things, add cards, collect some stuff and make things happen, but you won’t do well. Wayfarers is another game from the Garphill stable with a player-driven end, which means you can’t just sit back and try to make things happen with a set number of rounds in mind. Your only cue for the end getting near is how close each player is to the last spaces on the Journal tracks, as that’s the trigger for final scoring.

Resting is the equivalent of a refresh / income phase, but you can take that action whenever you like, meaning players start to get out-of-sync really quickly. This effect is compounded by the way that the supply of worker meeples is a community pool. It’s possible, likely even, that one player ends up with a lot of workers while other players have none. Taking a turn means placing a dice or a meeple, so someone with a lot of meeples has a lot more choices before needing to take a rest.

If you’ve got the prerequisites for advancing to the next step of the journal though, maybe taking lots of rests and journal actions is a good thing, so you don’t want all of those workers anyway. Tricky, ain’t it?

Final thoughts

I’ve got a bit of a confession to make here. I backed Wayfarers of the South Tigris as a punter because I really like Garphill Games as a publisher and the games they make. When it arrived I punched it out, learned it, played it once, and then put it back on the shelf. It stayed there for months and months, and it shouldn’t have. My initial reaction after playing it for the first time was one of “Well, it’s okay, but nothing spectacular”. This was a mistake on my part. Some friends of mine were recently talking about it again which gave me the kick up the arse I needed to play it a bunch more and get this written.

You see, Wayfarers is good. Great even. I have a soft spot for their previous West Kingdom games (Architects (review here), Paladins (review here), and Viscounts (review here)), and I couldn’t see how they could hope to make something better. In all honesty, I’m not sure I’d call Wayfarers better as such. It’s just different. It’s a different take on worker placement and action selection, and the switch to using dice is very good. It’s an awesome game and one which just seems to get better with repeated play. I sit here writing this, and all my waxing lyrical just makes me want to turn around and put it on the table again.

It’s not a game for folks who don’t get on with heavier games, or those who want to feel like they’ve done something really clever after their first game. It’s a grower, not a shower, if you’ll pardon the expression. I also want to give a shout out to the outstanding solo mode. Playing Garphill’s games solo was one of the things that got me through lockdown, and Wayfarers just continues the lineage of easy-to-run, competitive AI partners. Having a low mental overhead is a must in a game like this, so having a bot which almost runs itself is a godsend.

The really crazy thing is that you can pick Wayfarers of the South Tigris up for less than £40! It’s a game with a ton of replay value and a great solo mode. There are many games of this weight and enjoyment you’ll pick up for this price. Highly recommended.

Wayfarers of the South Tigris (2022)

Design: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Publisher: Garphill Games
Art: The Mico
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Wayfarers of the South Tigris Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The tweak? Spoiler alert: Faraway’s scoring is done backwards.

Getting into the corners

Have you ever gone to make yourself a slice of toast, only to find that there’s no butter left in the tub? You end up desperately trying to get every last bit on your knife, resulting in a layer of butter a few microns thick on your toast. That transparent layer of butter you’ve got, that’s about as thick as the theme on the game of Faraway.

The rulebook tells you that you’re exploring the mysterious continent of Alula, venturing out on expeditions during the day and night to explore and catalogue the animals, plants, and minerals. You encounter denizens who’ll award you with fame (VPs) for completing their quests. Quests amount to “have these icons by the time you score this card“. Each expedition card has a number on it which represents the amount of time that expedition takes, and smaller numbers here mean you’re more likely to be able to play higher numbers on the following turn, resulting in finding Sanctuaries.

This all sounds very exciting, full of adventure and mystery, I know. The truth, however, is that none of this will mean anything to you once you start. The game is reduced to focusing on numbers, icons, and colours, and in all honesty, it’s not a bad thing. If anything, it turns into one of the game’s strengths, because the scoring, which I’ll come to shortly, is deceptively difficult to get your head around at first.

Re-e-e-wind

Let’s get into it then. Let’s get into the bit that every critic who gets their teeth into Faraway – me included – will laud as so clever and different. The scoring.

Over the eight rounds that the game lasts for, you add a single card to your row at a time. Once the eighth and final card is played, you turn them all over and then flip each card in turn, checking its criteria to see if you score any fame / VPs. The kicker is that the first card you flip is the last card you played, and the first card you played ends up being the final one you flip and score.

You can only count icons you have uncovered at the time when you score a card, so if that last card you played demands that you have three of the blue stone icons to your name, there’s a good chance that that card on its own won’t fulfil that requirement, so you won’t score any points. You might now have the dawning realisation in your brain that the early cards are the ones you should aim for the high VPs, the ones with the most demanding requirements. That first card you placed down can use all eight revealed location cards for icons.

The locations aren’t the only way to get points, icons, and card colours (which is another way to score points). Every time you play a card with a higher duration value than the previous one, you find a sanctuary which gives you a smaller bonus card to add to your area. Sanctuary cards add end-game scoring opportunities and icons which stay face-up to help towards your location card quests. If you’ve got Clue icons on display when you draw Sanctuary cards, you get to draw more cards to choose from. These little sanctuary cards can result in some beefy bonuses, so don’t neglect them.

It all sounds so simple, right? Play cards, and try to make sure that when you work back to the start you have all the things you need to score the cards. Take my word for it when I tell you it’s so much trickier than you think, and it’s brilliant for it.

Final thoughts

Faraway has a ton of hype and praise floating around at the moment. Ordinarily, I like to wait a month or two for hype to die off, but Hachette Boardgames UK sent me a copy of the game to play, and I’ve played it lots not only in-person, but also with the excellent BGA adaptation which you can go and play right now. Well, not right now, finish reading the review first, but afterwards go play. It’s one of those games that actually deserves the hype, and deserves its recent As d’Or win.

Every single card you play, every card you pick up at the end of each round, each Sanctuary card you pick from those on offer. Every decision is a Siren, calling you onto the rocks of indecision. You’ll get to the halfway point of the game and as you go to play your fifth card you’ll think “Maybe I can play this high-scoring card and manage to get the missing icons in the next few turns…”, at the expense of playing a card you definitely need for an earlier card. It’ll keep tempting right up until the end, and you’ll keep falling for it.

All of this decision and indecision, and temptation wrestling with tactics in your mind, plays out quickly. You can rattle through a game of Faraway in 20 minutes, giving you plenty of time to shuffle the decks and play again immediately after, during which you swear you won’t be tempted again. You will be tempted, and you’ll make the same mistakes again and again while your child / spouse / dog beats you for the umpteenth time.

Faraway will cost you about £20 when it releases by the looks of it, which is a bargain for a game which delivers a lot of fun. Not much interaction, apart from the race to claim cards from the market, but a lot of fun all the same. Bravo Johannes & Corentin.

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

Faraway (2023)

Design: Johannes Goupy & Corentin Lebrat
Publisher: Catch Up Games
Art: Maxime Morin
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 15-20 mins

The post Faraway Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Of elephants in rooms

If you’ve seen the artwork for this game and have been in the hobby for more than five minutes, you’ve probably had a “Hang on…” moment. Yes, the artwork looks like Kyle Ferrin’s work in games like Root (review here) and Oath (review here). No, it’s not AI-generated, and no, it’s not a blatant copy. I can see why people are going to get their underwear in a knot about it, but it’s a waste of time. It’s another game with colourful, pastel, critters and creatures. As much as I love Kyle’s artwork, he doesn’t have a copyright on any particular style. Let’s move past that and onto the things that really matter, like whether the game is actually good or not.

The short version is yes. It’s a good game.

At its heart, Explorers of Navoria is a tableau-building game. Players take turns placing wooden agent discs on one of five decks of cards of matching colours and add a corresponding card from the market to their tableau. Some cards have instant effects, like awarding the game’s resources or victory points, and some cards work cumulatively, awarding points at the end of each round, or the end of the game.

More than once I was reminded of playing Libertalia (review here), which is weird because the games play very differently. Agent discs are either drawn from a bag, like the tiles in Libertalia I guess, or played from the town center on the board. Once all the discs are played and cards claimed, players take the discs from the decks and return them to spaces in the town to claim rewards. This part is done in reverse player order, which is probably where the rest of the Libertalia feelings come from.

As a mechanism, the whole tableau-building thing is really well done. Everything is very easy to read at a glance, so it’s easy to get an idea of which cards each player might want. When you draw discs from the bag, you draw two, choose one, and place the other on the main board, which can be agonising. Giving up a disc that you know someone else wants is never fun, but it adds to the dynamic of the game.

Making tracks

Now it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the game has the word ‘Explorers’ in the title, but I haven’t mentioned anything very explore-y at all. The narrative of the game is that three new continents have emerged from the seas of Navoria, and it’s you folks, the players, who are setting out to explore them. Exploring is a very loose term, however, and it amounts to three tracks on the board. Some of the cards allow you to move your exploration markers along these tracks, and other card effects let you build little trading outposts along the way. Your progress along the tracks is reset at the end of each of the game’s three rounds, but only as far back as your furthest outpost.

There’s another feature which sees each card associated with one of four races who live in Navoria. Each race gets a reward tile at the start of the game, and the first player to amass five icons of a race gets to claim the top spot for that reward tile which typically nets end-of-game points based on the colours of cards in your tableau.

Final thoughts

Ultimately Explorers of Navoria is a set-collection and tableau-building game in the vein of a lighter Wingspan (review here) or Earth (review here). If you’re looking for a game which captures the feeling of exploration, you’re not really going to find it here. The exploring is all done in the theatre of the mind. The tracks could just as easily have been straight lines without the map artwork, and it would have made no difference to the game.

That said, it doesn’t really matter that the theme is spread thinly. The game itself is quick, clean, easy to learn, and offers plenty of replay value. The simple inclusion of the randomised race reward tiles dictates your strategy, and that on top of the variety of the cards in the five decks makes for a game with plenty of replay value. It’s at its best with three or four players, as the competition for cards and return sports in the town at the end of each round is at its fiercest.

It’s on the lighter side of mid-weight, so if you’re after something to really get your teeth stuck into it might not be for you, but it makes for an excellent gateway game into heavier things. I LOVE that it has a small table footprint, and that it’s so quick to setup and teardown. In a world of monstrous Kickstarters that swamp tables and need nearly as much time to organise as they do to play, Explorers of Navoria is a breath of fresh air. Yes, it’ll have people stamping their feet about the artistic direction, yes, people will complain that it’s copying the style that Leder Games are famous for now. None of that matters though. What matters is that it’s a great, welcoming game with a low barrier to entry.

I’m so pleased to see Dranda Games bringing a game from Asia to an audience of players who might otherwise never have a chance to play. You can get more details and pledge here when the Kickstarter launches on 8th January 2024.

Explorers Of Navoria (2024)

Design: Meng Chunlin
Publisher: Dranda Games, Qiling Board Game
Art: Meng Chunlin
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Explorers Of Navoria Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Check out my 4×4

Much of the game comes from the spatial puzzle in the middle of the table. There’s a 4×4 grid of 16 cards on offer, and on your turn, you have to take two orthogonally adjacent cards. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much the entire game. For the first half of the game, you’ll mostly take the cards that are resource side up, because you can only take a building card if you can pay for it. How do you pay for a building? With the resource cards in your hand, but also the permanent resources produced by the buildings you’ve claimed.

Every time a card is claimed, one replaces it, but the opposite way up. Claim two resources and two buildings fill the spaces – you get the idea. What results is that classic dilemma. Do you go all in on one or two types of resource production in your buildings, and top up with resource cards, or do you hedge your bets and try to do a little bit of everything? The beauty is that either approach can work, and the deciding factor is usually how efficiently you can carry your plans out.

The other thing which might tip you one way or the other is the inclusion of the little, round civic tokens. Some of the buildings on offer allow you to claim a token once built, and they’re the chief way to get extra points at the end of the game. You always play with a random selection of the tokens in the box, which might dictate which way you decide to go. It might pay you to invest in Community and Energy if there are tokens that reward having those types of production built.

Civic Fun-ding

The main problem I find with engine-builders is that they can become too much about the production chain, and the game can become very heads-down. Very insular. Point City manages to avoid this problem through a clever mix of traits. Firstly, the production chain you’re looking at is only one level deep. Each resource type can be used to pay for buildings of one kind or another. There are no steps which involve turning one resource into another resource, and then spending that intermediate resource on something else.

The biggest thing which brings the players together is the shared market in the middle of the table. At four players especially it adds a bit of drama and anticipation into the game. You might see the perfect 1-2 hit you can make on buildings in the market, knowing you can pay for both with your permanent resources. It’s agony waiting to see if someone else takes one before you get a chance to. Even with smaller player numbers, there’s still a bit of gamesmanship to be had, because it’s much easier to track who can produce what, and discern which buildings they might have their beady little eye on.

My favourite thing about Point City though, and the thing which makes it the game I’m most likely to use to introduce newcomers to this type of game, is the art direction. The bright, bold colours and crisp illustrations are really friendly. There’s no undue text to read, there’s no cyberpunk dystopia full of neon pinks and greys, nor fantasy tropes of magic and dragons. It’s just nice little buildings whose names you’ll immediately forget if you even read them at all. It helps make Point City a game with universal appeal, ideal for non-gaming family and friends.

Final thoughts

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a big fan of Point City. It was part of a duo of games released through Flatout Games along with Deep Dive, which I reviewed last week. I expected to like Deep Dive more, given my love of push-your-luck, but it turns out I prefer Point City.

There’s something about the bold colours and the immediacy of the game that really appeals to me. Turns are really quick, and the designers have done a great job of building in an inherent level of balance. It does something which I really appreciate in games designed for all ages and abilities. If you play badly or just don’t really understand what to do, you’ll still score points and still do reasonably well. If you know the game, however, and if you understand the interplay of the cards and civic tokens more, that’s where the skill ceiling starts to come into play, and it just means that the more skilled players can battle it out for top spot without scoring triple the points of the person in last place.

It boils down to making a game feel inclusive and welcoming, and it’s something I appreciate all the more when it’s done well. Point City is fun, easy to teach, and very rewarding. It’s earned a place in my bag for future conventions for short bits of downtime, like waiting for players to show up, or a half-hour break with a drink at the bar. I think the only people likely to be disappointed by the game are those expecting something with a bit more depth to it, like Res Arcana or It’s a Wonderful World. It’s another great game from the folks at Flatout Games, who are starting to make a habit of it.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Point City (2023)

Design: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Dylan Mangini
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Point City Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Race for the birdbox

“What game is it like?” – that’s the question I get asked most when introducing new players to a game. In the case of Earth, the best comparison I came up with was “Race For The Galaxy meets Wingspan”, and I think it holds some weight.

Each turn starts with the active player choosing one of the four actions available at the top of your player boards. These basic actions do things like add cards to your hand, add sprouts to your tableau cards (little green cubes), add growth (stacking wooden stems and those cute little mushroom-looking toppers), and add cards to your compost pile. Each action has an associated colour, which triggers cards with the same colour in players’ tableaus. That’s where we see similarities with a lot of other games, including the aforementioned Wingspan.

Earth is a game which doesn’t want any of the players to have any real downtime. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re the active player, and let’s say you choose to activate the orange action. Not only do you get to activate your orange actions, I get to do the same. Each of us has our cards on the table in a 4×4 grid layout, and we activate them left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so there’s a great opportunity to employ some strategy.

I might have a card which lets me add sprouts to cards and another that converts sprouts to growth. Maybe I’ve got a card which lets me take more cards into my hand, and another that lets me convert cards in my hand to compost. Knowing that the cards activate left-to-right, top-to-bottom, it makes sense to place cards that give me things before cards that let me do something with things. For experienced game players, this is all common sense, but to people taking tentative first steps into the hobby, the dawning of these realisations can be a real ‘Hallelujah’ moment. It’s so cool to see people suddenly ‘get’ how engine-building games work, and the smile that lights someone’s face when they realise they’ve done something clever is wonderful.

Better than a two-stroke diesel

When it comes to any engine-building game, the thing that really matters is how satisfying the game is to play. There are a load of potential pitfalls for a game like this, but the designer, Maxime, has done a great job of avoiding them.

Even if you do a really poor job of planning your horticultural wilderness, you still get the feeling of being able to do something, even if it isn’t particularly efficient. By the same notion, the way the game’s cyclical resources work means that it’s rare to find yourself with a huge excess of things you don’t want. Planting cards costs dirt, and like any of the other resources in the game, the dirt you gain tends not to be exponential. There’s a real feeling of one-for-one with many of the resource exchange actions, even if they don’t necessarily look that way at first.

It’s a far more forgiving game than others in this genre, especially compared to fine-tuned games like Race for the Galaxy. When it comes to scoring VPs at the end of the game, all of the various resources you’ve still got are just worth one point. Each dirt token, each sprout, each unfinished trunk growth, and every card in your compost pile – they all score a point each. For beginners, this is a great touch. It means they don’t feel like they’ve failed in some way, just because they’ve got a field of green sprouts and precious little growth.

The real difference in scoring comes from the bonuses offered by other cards on display. Ecosystem objectives earn you points, Fauna cards do the same. Interestingly, there’s a beginners’ mode suggested in the rulebook which uses the second side of the Fauna board, whereby it doesn’t matter when you complete a Fauna objective. You always get 10 VPs. In the full game the first player to claim one gets the most points, then the next player gets the next most, and so on. It’s just another example of the way the game is looking to guide people into the hobby with a gentle touch and to get people used to how to play it, rather than worrying about how well the other players are doing.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot to like about Earth. From its theme which I don’t think anyone could ever take offence at, through to the clever inclusion of a beginners’ game in the rulebook. For a very mechanical engine-building game, it manages to pack a lot of theme in. Plants are planted, watered to sprout, they grow, and then they die back to become compost. I mean, there’s a lot of Earth’s ecosystem that’s left out – namely animals – but when you’ve got everything from Wingspan (review here) to Ark Nova (review here) already covering that, why bother?

It’s going to become my default answer to the question “What’s a good game to get people into more serious board games?” from now on. The abject lack of player interaction becomes a major strength, because it lets the players mess around in this little eco-sandbox, to flick switches and see what happens. You’re not going to be attacked by other players, and you can’t attack them. You’re left alone to your own devices, and that’s what modern Euro games are at their core – multiplayer solitaire.

What elevates Earth above others, for me, is the fact that as well as being a great introductory game, there’s a ton of depth to it. The way that your tableau’s arrangement can be dynamic until you commit to the fourth card in a row or column, the way that cards in that tableau and trigger bonus scores so readily, and the sheer variety of strategy on offer. You want to come up with some kind of recycling machine that says ‘Screw everything else – compost, compost, compost’, go for it. It’s viable.

Earth is essentially a bix box of cards (over 350 of them) with a clever, easy-to-grasp game which will keep you coming back again and again to see what happens. While it is available to play over on BGA (click here to take a look), the interface there is designed to help people who already know the game. If you can play the physical game first, do so, or head over to watch Paul Grogan’s excellent instructional video on YouTube right here. Top stuff, highly recommended.

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

Earth (2023)

Design: Maxime Tardif
Publisher: Inside Up Games
Art: M81 Studio, Conor McGoey, Yulia Sozonik, Kenneth Spond
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Earth Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Tic-tac-toe

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

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

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

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

Easy come, easy go

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rauha (2023)

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

The post Rauha Review appeared first on Punchboard.

What a tangled web we weave

Over the course of a game, you’re going to make seven railway lines with twelve cards. No more, no less. The little cardboard frame gives you your starting points along the top and left sides, and with each turn, you choose a card from the market and add it to your display. They can go anywhere adjacent to an edge or an existing card, which gives you plenty of scope to plan as they criss-cross and snake their way around your tableau. The track cards have a terrain type (e.g. village, field, wetland) which comes into play when you score them, so I should probably talk about scoring, as it’s where all of the fun and interesting decisions stem from.

Every time you complete a track – i.e. have a complete track from a border to an edge – you first score the points as you move along the track. Take a little trip with me on the Punchboard Express.

Choo-choo – “Look, it’s a signal. We can count those and then refer to the scoring table to get some points” – chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff – “Aha, a tractor! Each of those scores me points for the number of different terrains I go through”.

You get the idea. Icons on the track earn you points, but only when you play them in the right places. There’s the potential for more points, however, as the track cards are double-sided, and on the reverse there are trips. If you buy trip cards from the trip market you can place one or two next to a track, and earn bonus points. For instance, you could have a trip card that lets you score two of the tractors on that line a second time each. Great news if you’ve got tractors on that line, not so great if you don’t.

You might have noticed that I talked about buying trip cards, and paying for things is an important part of the game. You need money, lest Village Rails’ conductor make his way down the train and kick you off for pretending to sleep instead of buying a ticket.

Tickets, please

Village Rails harkens back to the golden age of steam. As such, the numbers we’re talking about when it comes to cold, hard cash are small. You start with five pounds sterling, and trip cards cost just three of them. When you take a card from the market which isn’t at the end of the row, you place a pound on each card before the one you want. Money is tight though, and there are only two ways to gain any kind of income. You claim the coins on any card you take where someone before you bought their way along the market, but you’ll usually only see a quid or two this way. The main way is using Terminus cards.

Every time you complete a line you have to play a Terminus card at the same time, and each Terminus card has a table to show you how much money you made from the passengers on that trip. The money you earn is calculated in a similar way to scoring points on tracks, where you’re rewarded for things like the number of signals along it, or the number of fields it passes through. It’s a really clever system which means that longer tracks earn you more points, but if you don’t finish tracks you don’t have the money to buy more trips or choose better cards in the market.

What a pickle.

Final thoughts

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of Matthew Dunstan’s games. From the print and play games from Postmark Games through to The Guild of Merchant Explorers (which I reviewed here), which also featured the co-design talent of Brett Gilbert, just like Village Rails. He’s got an uncanny talent for taking the string of what should be an easy concept and teasing the individual threads out of it to pull you in different directions. Village Rails is no exception.

If you’re looking at it and thinking that it looks a bit like a Button Shy game, I’d agree with you. At a glance you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a title in their -opolis line of games, like Sprawlopolis. It shares some of the feelings of those games too, where the choice of not only where, but also which way around you place your card is really important. You’ll catch yourself focusing on making one mighty line of meandering countryside perfection at the expense of other lines which end up being a couple of miles around a corner through a field, but you won’t care. Your rail network, your little swathe of England’s green and pleasant land, is uniquely yours.

There’s very little interaction to speak of. You might take a card someone else wants, but it’s not a game where you’d ever do it because someone else wants it. In a game where you only get twelve turns and twelve cards in your tableau, using one of them just to spite an opponent would be a big waste. If you’re happy to just build your own little patch of the countryside while other people are doing the same though, Village Rails really is excellent. It comes in a dinky little box, has almost no setup time, and plays out in less than an hour with four players. For less than £20, it’s a very easy recommendation for me to make. There are even little scoring dials that look like train tickets!

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

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

Village Rails (2022)

Design: Matthew Dunstan, Brett J. Gilbert
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Joanna Rosa
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Village Rails Review appeared first on Punchboard.