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

Parks and Rec

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

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

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

Making tracks

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

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

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

Friendly and inviting

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

Tenpenny Parks (2022)

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

The post Tenpenny Parks Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Space invader

The first thing to understand is that Civolution is a sandbox game. A big, heavy sandbox. It’s a cliché in heavy Euro games to say there are a lot of paths to victory, but in the case of Civolution it’s warranted. The first time you sit down to play the game the thing that hits you first is just how big the player boards are. The ”consoles’ as the game calls them are huge. My first thought was one of “Uh-oh, Stefan’s gone for a gimmick here to make the game stand out”, but that fear was pretty quickly allayed. The left side of the board is mostly used to house resources, while the right is your menu of actions.

At this point you might think it would be better to have a shared action board in the same way A Feast For Odin does it, but there are some pretty good reasons why that would never work. You see, in Civolution you all start with the same actions available to you, but as the game goes on you can upgrade the actions by flipping or removing the action tiles from their sockets, meaning that my Migrate action, for example, might be more powerful than yours. Strategy in the game is so woven into the combinations of actions and resources that having your actions right there in front of you, so personal, makes playing and understanding the game easier.

The resource side of the console you could argue could be done smaller, but I’m glad they didn’t. Unusually for a modern Euro, there aren’t a heap of different wooden or cardboard resources. In fact there are none! Each player has a pile of octagonal wooden pieces which have a variety of different uses. The different resource types each have a space on your console, and you use your wooden markers to show what you have. For example, if you collect two wood, you put two markers in the ‘wood’ space on the board. It’s so easy, and important (for me at least) is how quick it makes setup and teardown. The resource spaces are in rows and columns too, which denote which type of region they come from, and how much they’re worth if you trade them.

On top of all of this, figuratively as well as literally, is the big, empty, unusual space above the board. This space is where you slot in cards you’ve been able to play, giving you yet more decisions to make, and a chance to build a powerful engine to drive your civilisation forward. Cards get slotted into rows and columns. The higher the row, the more points it’s worth at the end of the game, but the more expensive it is to place it. Placement is a trickier decision than you might think, because once you play a card of a certain colour into a slot, all subsequent cards of the same colour have to go in that same column. So despite the player boards being so large, they serve a genuine purpose.

In addition to the consoles you need to find space for two more boards and a jigsaw-style map, but with them being modular you can make it work with whatever table space you might have available.

Dicing with destiny

I used a lot of words to try and convey how big and imposing Civolution is, but I did it for a good reason. This game looks daunting and confusing, and that in itself is enough to put people off. Maybe not people like you and I, people who love a heavy game, but those who you’d like to welcome to the dark side who are heavy-curious. Once you get past that initial ‘Woah’ factor, playing the game is really not that bad. I mentioned Castles of Burgundy at the top of this review, and you can see some of its DNA in Civolution. Actions are driven by your personal stash of dice. If you don’t like the values on your dice you can use ‘ideas’ in the same way you could ‘workers’ in Castles to change the value one step. You place dice on spots matching their values, take the action, then remove them. Sound familiar? Each action requires two dice of different values, so while it’s true that someone could just roll lucky each round, the reality is that you need to allow for a bit of mitigation in your plans.

There’s a central pool of extra dice you can take from by using a certain action, and extra dice are a good thing, because it means you can take more actions before you’re forced to take a reset turn. Reset turns are what drive each round towards completion and although a necessity, often feel like a wasted turn. Everyone else is doing something, and you’re stuck rolling your dice instead. Even in this though, this simple cycle of dice rolling and using, there’s strategy. If someone grabs a load of dice early in the game you might think it gives them an insurmountable advantage long-term, but taking a minute to extrapolate what’s going on makes you realise it’s not necessarily the case. They took turns to claim those dice for a start, and while they might have lots of dice to spend, if the rest of the players are driving the round towards its end with frequent resets, they might not get the chance to use them all.

That’s just one small example of the layers upon layers of strategy bubbling under the surface of Civolution. All of these words so far and I’ve not even touched on the map in the middle of the table, which is what the whole game is built around. You send your tribes out in the world to collect resources and build farms and settlements. As they move from region to region they discover new resources and uncover new landmarks. So far, so 4X, but it introduces a really interesting layer of economics into the game which I think is under-appreciated.

You can only gather resources once they’ve been discovered by migrating tribes into new regions. This lets people Produce resources in them, then later Transport (two of the game’s actions) to move them to their boards to use. However, you can also use the Trade action to gain resources. If they’ve been discovered on the map those resources cost two Gold each. If they haven’t, you can still buy them, but they cost four gold, and gold is hard to come by. If nobody decides to explore the continent – which is a perfectly valid strategy – you need to make sure you’ve got a good economy, or you’re going to struggle to build and pay for cards later in the game.

It’s such a unique direction for a modern Euro to take. To have a game which can be so different every time you play it, and to have so much of the game’s meandering path from start to end dictated by the players’ actions.

Making tracks

Euro fans rejoice – Civolution has tracks. Six of them! Well, five with an extra, little track on another board, but hey, a track’s a track. The tracks grant you rewards and end-of-game points, but some are randomly chosen during the game setup to give some big points at the end of each of the four eras. You climb the tracks by playing cards that come with a cost, and then form a part of your own engine. It’s all very by-the-books from that point of view, and that’s good, because we like those things in a game. But for a game to stand out, it needs something different. Something interesting. A hook.

Civolution’s hook is the dice. The white dice are used to conduct actions – two dice per action, and the dice used have to match those on the action. As mentioned earlier, there are ways to mitigate for unlucky rolls, and in order to do well you need to allow yourself to take the occasional turn to bolster those mitigation options. Then you have the pink dice which are used for hunting and passing tests in the game, and those tests are usually ways to boost the effectiveness of upgraded actions. At first, you have one pink die and only pass if you roll a one, but as the game goes on you get the chance to get more dice, and by moving up the sixth (Agera) track, the number range you need to roll gets bigger. Hitting 1-3 on three dice is much more likely than a 1 on one die.

The dice form the bulk of the game’s player interaction too. There are only a few extra pink and white dice to claim (player count + 1), so what happens when they all get claimed? The action to take a die still exists on all players’ boards, so when you perform it when all the dice are claimed, you take a die from the player with the most of the colour you chose. Aside from dice thievery, the other direct interaction comes when you move tribes around the map. You can kick someone out of their spot and into ‘the wilderness’, at the expense of weakening your own tribe. It’s nice, there’s just enough bite there to keep things interesting without the game devolving into a game of spite and take-that!

Final thoughts

Trying to keep this review around 1500 words has proved really difficult, which is why it now tops 2000. I just want to talk and ramble about it so much. It rode a huge wave of hype after Essen, and I like to make a point of waiting for that initial hype to die down before I play and review a game, because it’s easy to get swept along, even subconsciously. Civolution was worth the wait. It sounds ridiculous to say, so I’m hesitant to even give life to the words, but this might just be Stefan’s magnum opus ahead of Castles of Burgundy as far as I’m concerned. And that’s coming from someone who’s bought three different versions of CoB over the years and has over 50 games logged on BGA on top of real-life plays.

The way that every game feels and unfolds differently is great. Yes, the actions on offer are the same each time, and the map is only randomised to a certain extent, but the way things play out differs every time. The example I gave above about nobody exploring is just one example. In a recent 4-player game we stuck to a third of the map and things were tight. I discovered stone – a resource that you need for quite a lot of early game things – in the fourth and final era, which brought a collective “Oh my god! Finally!” from the table. In another game one player found himself alone in a corner of the world with three tribes and no competition and ended up racking up a load of points by moving around the regions in a circle (one space in each region gives VPs for occupying it).

I want to make a special mention of the production in Civolution. The player boards are huge, but premium, and I love the way that it just uses the same octagonal pieces for everything in the game. It makes setup and teardown so easy, so quick and means that I don’t have to factor that time into the ‘have we got time to play this?’ decision at game night, and to me that’s a blessing. The huge raft of actions available will undoubtedly put some people off, and if you don’t already like heavy games, I don’t think this is the one that’ll change your mind, but the rest of you will love it. A glorious sandbox which feels like all the best bits of Stefan Feld’s designs rolled up into one beautiful game. A must-have in my opinion.

Civolution (2024)

Design: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Deep Print Games
Art: Dennis Lohausen
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Civolution 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.

If you’ve never played Echidna Shuffle, there are two things you need to know. Firstly, it has the cutest board game pieces in existence. Secondly, it’s incredibly interactive and very mean. Those of you who’ve played it know it’s essentially cutesy divorce fuel. Orbit has a similar feeling in the way that every player can move each of the planets on the board, and that every player needs to visit every planet to win. Simultaneously moving the planets you need towards you, while moving those your opponents need away from them. But you are all doing this at the same time.

Sounds like unmitigated chaos, right? Well, yes, but also no.

Staaaar Trekkin’ across the universe

The Orbit game board looks like one of those scanner screens in the background of an 80s sci-fi movie. Planets on dashed, geometric paths. A grid of triangles covers the entire thing. I’ve been playing with a prototype version of the game, but the first thing that struck me is that it’s not very pretty to look at. The cards are bright and easy to read, but the board is a bit bleh. The really weird thing is that after a few minutes, you don’t even notice, because the board is really functional. The aesthetic brevity (for want of a better word) is a strength instead of a weakness.

On your turn, you play a card from your hand which does two or three things. Firstly, it moves one or more planets along its orbital path. It’s as simple as moving the wooden planet to the next spot on the dashed line. Secondly, it has a number. This is the number of junctions along the network of little triangles you can move your spaceship. Thirdly, you might have an extra icon which lets you do something fun, like reverse the direction of a planet’s travel. Chaotic orbital mechanics ripping entire solar systems to pieces – no biggie.

In the style of so many of Dr Knizia’s games – oh, didn’t I mention, it’s a brand new Reiner Knizia design? – the game mechanisms take a back seat and let the game play itself. Your turn is simple. Play a card, move a couple of pieces around, draw a new card. Choosing which card you play, and what you do with that card is where the joy of the game lives. At first it’s a case of “Well, I really want that red planet, so I’ll move it and then move towards it”, but very quickly the true game pops its head around the door like an intrusive neighbour. So much of Orbit depends on keeping an eye on what the other players are doing, and in turn, trying to second-guess what their next move is likely to be.

Tech? We don’t need no stinking te… oh wait, actually, we do

It’s a space game, so it’s got to have tech, right? It’s the unwritten rule. Orbit has techs to go after, but if the five-course, leather-bound menu of tech options in a game like Eclipse (review here) is your frame of reference, the tech offerings in Orbit are more like a blackboard leaning against a jacket potato van. Cheese, beans, cheese and beans. There’s some point-to-point warping, a pretty cool cannon which lets you zap off as far as you want in one direction. You get a couple of these by visiting certain planets, but in addition to that there are space station tiles strewn about the board. When you visit one it’ll either be a permanent tech for your player board or a warp or cannon for all to use.

Despite tech and powerups being a relatively small part of the whole package, they often become the most decisive part of the game. In the early parts of the game, there’s a feeling of every person for themselves, spreading out and looking for close clusters of planets to ping around, like pinballs trapped in a set of bumpers. It quickly becomes a game of side-eyeing your neighbours and opponents when they get down to one or two planets left to go. I love the way alliances are gossamer thin and last as long as a bubble. One moment Alice and Bob are trying to move planets out of the way of Carol, and then Alice jumps on a planet and only needs one more. Now it’s Team Bob & Carol forever! Or for another turn, at least.

No matter how well you keep your eyes on the space race in front of you, good players will spot an opportunity to use something like a warp to make a crazy play that nobody saw coming. Especially when you factor in being able to gain energy cubes, which you can spend a cube at a time to boost the number of steps you can move. The number of times you get blindsided is equal parts infuriating and amazing. If you start to think you’ve got the measure of the game after repeated plays with the same group you can flip the board over to spice things up. The orbital paths for the planets are different and have branches along the way, and it just messes with the basics enough to keep you thinking.

Modular design

I found after a few plays that even with the other side of the board there weren’t too many variables in the game. I’m a heavy Euro nut. I love it when there are a hundred things to tinker with and see what happens. Luckily, there are some extra modules in the box to keep things interesting.

Yay, good times!

The quickest and easiest is the Prism. The rulebook recommends it with two players, and I have to agree. All it does is add an additional, stationary planet to the board to visit, but it’s extra meat to keep you gnawing at the bone a little longer. The module that’s the most interesting in my opinion is the four-player partnership mode. It’s a bit like playing Bridge, with partners sitting opposite one another. Except the game is nothing like Bridge, but you know, other than that. A couple of bonus tiles like you teleport around the board to get things done.

The copy I was sent also has the Nebula expansion included, which I believe may be an additional extra. As long as it doesn’t bump the price too much, I’d say it’s definitely worth getting. There’s a navigation tokens module which helps speed the game up, and another that adds ‘nebula’ tiles to the board which is pretty cool. The nebulas bump planets along their tracks faster, while simultaneously blocking player ships from crossing those points.

The best extra though, and by far the coolest, is the Hyper Accelerator Engine Module. It just sounds cool. With this module, once you upgrade your energy capacity to the max you just shove all those tokens off your board and replace them with a gigantic engine tile. The engine means that any card you play that would add energy cubes to your board instead lets you rocket across the board in a straight line, and then use that card’s movement. I really like this module, because it helps with what is my biggest issue with the game, and that’s speeding up the endgame.

Final thoughts

Reiner Knizia is a machine. He just doesn’t know when to stop. Now it’s true that in the past not every game has been a hit, but his recent record is pretty flipping good. This year’s Cascadero (which I reviewed here) is one of his designs and it’s one of my favourite games of the year. Orbit is one of those games where at first you’d be inclined to say “Wait, this is a Knizia game? Really?”. It doesn’t feel like it has any of his hallmark mathematic stitching under the surface. But as you play, you start to feel the familiar player-driven interaction, with the push and pull of players trying to step over one another to get to the top, while simultaneously reaching out for a hand up.

Dyed-in-the-wool Euro gamers might not have a great time with Orbit. So much of the game is out of your direct control, and a lot of what you do is reactive. You can adapt a big strategy to try to steer parts of the game in the way you want it to go, but you have to remember that everybody else is trying to do the same thing. Despite this, and as counterintuitive as it might sound, it’s not a game of random chaos. A good player with good, reactive planning, will normally do better than a bad player.

Even if you’re a Knizia fan, there’s a good chance you don’t have one of his games set in space (although MLEM: Space Agency came out this year, so maybe). If you enjoy his games like the recent remake of Quo Vadis – Zoo Vadis – then despite the vastly different settings and apparent mechanisms, I think you’ll have a good time with Orbit. The same goes for those of you who played and burned out on Echidna Shuffle. Don’t get me wrong, I love that game, but by the end of the game, it can get pretty painful. Orbit feels similar to me but with much more space between the echidnas planets.

Bitewing and Reiner Knizia are doing some really clever stuff at the moment, and Orbit is another fine example. I prefer it with three or four players, for sure, so if it sounds like your groups kinda thing, check it out.

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

Orbit (2024)

Design: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Bitewing Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Orbit Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

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

Lend a hand

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

I was wrong.

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

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

Elemental, my dear wossisface

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

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

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

First come, first served

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Mutagen (2025)

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

The post Mutagen Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

So colour me surprised when Mass Effect: The Board Game turned out to actually be pretty decent. It’s the board game equivalent of trying a vegan sausage roll for the first time. You might have very low expectations, but you know what – it’s not bad. Not bad at all. In fact it’s pretty damn nice, and if you’ve got a spare one going I’m still hungry.

Does this unit have a soul?

Let’s get a few things straight before we go on. If you’re expecting the campaign game to end all campaign games, the Mass Effect version of Gloomhaven which you and your friends are going to feast on for the next year of your lives, then you’re going to be disappointed. Instead, Modiphius, Calvin, Eric and BioWare have chosen to give us Mass Effect in microcosm.

What do I mean by that? Well, for a start each time you play through the campaign, you’ll play three to five missions. That’s it. Then it’s game over and time to reset. Here’s the first interesting thing though – that reset is as difficult as rubbing-out dry erase marker. There’s no legacy-style destruction of cards or permanent stickers on boards here. Instead, campaign activity and character progression is saved with a few wipeable pens.

Secondly, those of you who live and breathe the world of Mass Effect and the intergalactic stories carved from its bedrock aren’t necessarily going to find the RPG-like narrative you might have hoped for. That isn’t to say there’s no writing, or bad writing, because that’s not the case. There’s an entire narrative book included, and the writing in it is really good. It feels and sounds like Mass Effect, but it’s limited. Reading passages from the narrative book punctuates moments in the action, slapping flavour on like adding more sriracha as you work down through your meal.

Action is the keyword here though. Mass Effect: The Board Game is built around the run-and-gun cover shooter core of the digital games’ action sections, so it better do it well, and luckily it does. I mean, you’d hope so with Eric Lang at the helm, but nothing in life is certain. It uses the now-standard game book to set the landscape for each level, much like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and Artisans of Splendent Vale (review here) did before it. It’s a great way to do it. It takes up so little room, lets us have a ton of different levels, and dictates any special setup changes or rules adaptations. In Mass Effect, it also lets you keep track of each mission’s goals and how close you are to achieving them.

Hard to see big picture behind pile of corpses.

I’m delighted to say that actually playing Mass Effect: The Board Game is really easy. Why should I care though? I like complex games that suck on my brain like a parasite, right? True, but this game isn’t just aimed at me. At the low price the game’s being offered at (£40!!!) you can bet your backside that fans of the video game will pick this one up on a whim, even if they’ve never played a modern hobby game before, let alone read a review of it. A (relatively) small box game at an impulse purchase price, coupled with a smooth, easy game is exactly what needed to happen. Picture instant action instead of tear-soaked cardboard as your friends defect to Mario Kart while you enter the third hour of punching out Frosthaven tokens.

Playing the game is easy, fun, and tactical. Firstly, there are always four characters in the game, regardless of how many people are around your table. Four players take one each, two players take two each, three can take turns with the extra character – it doesn’t really matter. It means there’s no extra balancing needed, no additional rules exceptions saying things like ‘with x players add y + 2 tokens into the draw bag’, or nonsense like that. Again, beginner-friendly. It also means it’s actually a very satisfying solo experience. Sure, you control four characters, but if you’ve ever played an X-Com game, it’s not exactly beyond your ability.

The game is run by a bunch of dice. The first player rolls 12 of them, chooses three with matching symbols to carry out actions on their character’s sheet, and then passes the remaining dice to the left. Rinse and repeat. The last player only gets three dice to roll, but in the next round, they get first dibs on a fresh dozen dice – nice! Action is skirmish-style with line of sight for aiming, each aggressive action having a damage number and your targets having a defense value. Equal or exceed the defense and they die. Easy. Kills grant you XP which you can spend to unlock new actions and abilities on your character sheet, with some needing the one directly above unlocked first, so you still get that tech tree feel for customising your character.

For the most part the missions are fun and exciting. You’re constantly fighting and kinda role-playing your characters. Wrex likes to get up close and personal, using built rage to unleash more damage, while Garrus can do more damage from range. If you know the characters you know what to expect. You’re constantly attacking enemies, hacking turrets and doors, collecting loot, moving around to reach objectives, and reacting to the constant stream of replacement enemies that spawn in. It’s really good to see that the choice between Renegade and Paragon is present. The way you choose to approach a mission determines its outcome and gives different benefits down the line. Paragon victories give additional dice to the action dice pool, while Renegade success give you tokens which let you change a die to any result you like.

Throw it out the airlock.

Getting the licence to make a Mass Effect board game was always going to be part holy grail, part poisoned chalice for Modiphius. The reason we love video games is because they give us the opportunity to play things beyond the scope of traditional means. You couldn’t hope to replicate the scale, intricacy and emotion of a series like Mass Effect with a board game. When designers try, they’re invariably met with “This should have just been a video game”. The difficulty is in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which Eric and Calvin have managed, but not without concessions.

The biggest issue most fans might have is the fact that there’s only one story covered in the box. Granted, there are multiple paths through the story and plenty to explore, but it’ll always start with one of three missions and end with one of three. The missions can also feel quite samey in some respects. Objective tokens that you collect are abstract and have context based on the mission, but are often a case of ‘get to a hex and use a mission action to collect the token’. The waves of enemies become incessant, which is great for a run-and-gun, but some of the illusion is broken when one just appears behind you because a card told you it had to be there, not because it made sense tactically or in the context of the mission.

These two points alone might be enough to make you have second thoughts, and I would certainly understand if someone played the game and said “You know what, it’s just not for me”. The missions themselves can feel a little constricted too, with the space to move not being as big as you’re used to in the video games. But that’s where you have to remember, this isn’t a video game. These missions are pastiches of Mass Effect’s levels. They’re the essence of Mass Effect’s soap operas, not a facsimile recreated in cardboard. You’re not going to be getting Shephard to bump uglies with space guys and gals in the game, but there’s nothing to stop you smooshing your minis together and adding a little extra meta spice to proceedings.

Set your expectations ahead of time, and make sure the other players know what the haps are too.

Final thoughts

So Mass Effect: The Board Game isn’t a 1:1 recreation of any of the video games. It’s also not a sprawling TTRPG full of its relationships and intergalactic power struggles. What is it then? It’s a snapshot. It’s a moment in time. It’s a series of action sequences which you can relive like it’s Groundhog Day, approaching it differently each time. Take a different four of the five available characters on your voyage each time. Go Paragon or go Renegade, choose your path through the three missions, and decide whether you want to take on any of the optional loyalty missions for your characters.

I think it’s fair to say that Mass Effect: The Board Game isn’t a particularly difficult game. Sure, I had characters knocked down during my plays, but I never suffered a full squad wipe, nor did I feel like it was likely to happen. It makes you feel powerful, like you’re wading through waves of Cerberus and Reaper minions, but that you’re always likely to emerge victorious, and I like it. I like the idea of unlocking cool abilities and seeing how they combine with my teammates’, and knowing that I’ll probably get a chance to try it.

If you’re looking for a sprawling space opera skirmish campaign, I’m keen to point you towards Rogue Angels, a game which I previewed a while back which felt like Mass Effect in all but name to me. As a package though, Mass Effect: The Board Game is the beer-and-pretzels implementation of a cherished franchise which was doomed to never please everyone, but came out dripping with Mass Effect nostalgia and good feelings.

If you and your friends like nothing more than scrapping around in the Mass Effect Universe a few times a month, wiping the cards clean, then starting again while you catch up and knock back a few beverages, I think you’ll love it. On a personal note I am over the moon to have a campaign game that I can play and complete! I actively reject most campaign games here at Punchboard because I simply don’t have the time to invest in them, so I really hope other designers sit up and take note.

40 quid for a decent skirmish game with a really good rulebook, optional miniatures, and a beloved franchise handled with so much care is an absolute bargain. Bravo to all involved.

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

Mass Effect: The Board Game – Priority: Hagalaz

Design: Eric M. Lang, Calvin Wong Tze Loon 黃子倫
Publisher: Modiphius Entertainment
Art: David Benzal
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Mass Effect: The Board Game Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you listen closely you can hear the collective rolling of eyes of everyone under the age of 20 as they despair. Regardless, Spots is deserving of the attention and applause it’s garnered so far, and here’s why.

Push it real good

I love push your luck in games. I’m a sucker for it and my games frequently come undone when I convince myself I can beat the odds. If you’re not sure what I mean when I talk about push your luck, go and check out Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop on BGA. Spots tempts the gambler in all of us in a similar way.

Each player starts with a couple of cards in front of them, and each card has a dog with a number of places for you to add dice. The pips on the dice become the spots on the dogs, who presumably all have a bit of Dalmation in them somewhere back in their family trees. Taking a turn is a case of choosing one of the six tiles on the table and doing what it tells you to. Maybe you choose Walk which lets you roll two dice, then if you want to, you can roll another.

All of the dice you roll on each turn have to go somewhere. Preferably on a matching spot on one of your dogs, but if you don’t have a place for them to go, they get buried in your Yard – a little player board beside your cards. If the total of the dice in your yard ever tops 7, you bust, and all of the dice on your unscored dogs get taken off and returned to the supply, forcing you to start again.

You don’t have to take an action though. Instead, you can spend your turn scoring, where you remove the dice from any completed dog cards and flip them over, securing them, and drawing more cards from the draw pile to replace them. It makes sense to do this, after all, six completed dogs wins the game.

Or…

Fast and loose

Spots has a great mechanism which tempts you into going for just one more roll. Instead of taking a turn to score any completed dog cards, you can try taking a risk. If you manage to place dice that finish all of your dog cards at once, without busting, you automatically get to score them all. This game gets really tight towards the end, so not having to spend a turn to score cards gets really tempting. I speak from experience when I tell you that it often doesn’t work out the way you’d hoped.

The first time you play Spots you might feel like it’s very light, that there are very few decisions to make at any given time. Roll as many dice as I can, as safely as I can, and hope they match my dogs, right? Actually there’s more to it than that. I mentioned rolling safely just before, but what constitutes safe? Let’s say you’ve mostly filled your dogs, but you’ve already got a 5-pip buried in your yard. You’re worried about busting and you only want to roll 2s and 3s. Instead of taking an action to roll a bunch of dice, you might spot a dog on top of the deck with 4, 5, and 6 spaces on it. Taking a turn to claim that card (it’s on one of the action tiles) could make your upcoming turns a lot safer.

There are little red bone tokens in the game too. They’re called treats. You can discard a treat to re-roll all of the dice you just rolled, which can get you out of a tricky situation more times than you’d imagine. Likewise, taking a ‘dead turn’ to use one of the actions that gives you treats can benefit you down the line. Making a simple choice like taking these ‘unproductive’ turns adds an unexpected layer of fun to the game. Kids will just have a blast rolling dice and filling in dogs, but those of you who like a bit more in there games will really appreciate moments like these.

Final thoughts

Spots has already become a favourite here at home. It’s quick to learn, packs in tons of variety (there are loads of different action tiles you can mix and match), and it’s stupidly charming. The dogs on the cards (and at least one cow…) are gorgeous, and we spend plenty of time holding cards up saying “Oh look, this one is definitely Jeff”. Jeff’s my pug, by the way.

There’s a big enough decision space to keep players of all levels happy, but even non-gamers will get a kick out of it. It’s really easy to overthink what you’re doing and to find out a child or someone who never plays games has beaten you, and that’s one of Spots’ greatest strengths. It makes you feel clever, no matter what you choose to do, and it provides a much more level playing field for a table of mixed ages and abilities. You can helpfully point out where someone has a safe roll for example, where it’s impossible to bust.

Cute cards, a table full of dice that you’ll end up chucking by the handful, and a game that’s done and off the table in about half an hour. It’s the perfect time-killer, game to play while you’re waiting for a train, meeting someone new at a convention, or starting or closing out games nights. If you can’t stand luck in any form, you might not have a good time here, but if you like pushing your luck and taking a bit of a gamble, you’ll love it to bits, just like I do, frens.

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

Spots (2022)

Design: Alex Hague, Jon Perry, Justin Vickers
Publisher: CMYK
Art: John Bond
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Spots Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Suckers for worship

The idea behind the game puts you in the position of a worshipper of the great Cosmoctopus. Not much is known about the spacefaring creature, but as devotees, you are trying to bring him to your realm and to prove yourself the greatest, most devout worshipper.

So how does this all work as a game? It’s basically an engine-builder with a bit of point-to-point movement and resource management thrown in for good measure. There’s a 3×3 grid of tiles on the table and the plastic octopus head sits atop one of them. On your turn you’ve got to move the head to an adjacent tile and then collect whatever’s displayed on it. After you’ve done that you can play a card from your hand if you have the resources to pay for it.

Cards fall into one of four types, each with their own effects. Black cards – Scriptures – show a resource on them and give you that as a permanent discount for the rest of the game. Yellow cards – Relics – boost certain actions. It might give you an extra yellow resource every time you gain one for example, which might influence how you play for the rest of the game. Hallucinations are the red cards which give you a one-and-done bonus. Finally, there are Constellation (blue) cards, and these are the ones most of your focus will go on.

Once you’ve played a Constellation to your player area, any time in the future you gain the relevant resource you can add it to the card instead. Fill a card and you get to take a tentacle and add it to your own Summoning tile. Get eight tentacles and you complete the summoning of his most glorious octopusness and win the game.

Putting it all out there

I don’t normally go as in-depth with an explanation of the mechanisms and effects of a game as I have above, but it’s with good reason. If you’ve played any kind of engine-building game before, you know enough to be able to play Cosmoctopus now, which is a testament to how clean and simple the game design is. The designer, Henry Audubon, does this style of game so well. His previous hit, Parks (read my review here), is the perfect example of what I’m talking about.

What I really like in Cosmoctopus is the addition of the point-to-point movement of the octo head. Throwing in the spatial navigation element is great, it breaks your train of thought up enough to keep your brain whirring, without making things so complicated you forget what you were doing. It also gives the game an avenue to make things interesting and trickier once you’ve got the hang of it. Moving to adjacent tiles on a 3×3 grid is pretty easy, especially knowing you can spend resources to move extra spaces. When the layout looks like an S or an O, some tiles can end up quite a distance away.

Little touches like this in a game matter, especially when the game is aimed at new gamers, or fans of lighter games. People who probably don’t have collections of games in the hundreds, who buy a game expecting to play it more than once or twice a year (some of you out there are probably feeling seen right now). A smaller box, cheap price, and varied replayability really matter, and I applaud Paper Fort and Lucky Duck for delivering on it.

Keeping an eye on the time

I want to take a moment to call out something important, and that’s the length of the game. Be wary of how long the game takes. On page 12 of the rulebook it tells you how to play a shorter game by giving all players 3 tentacles to start the game with. If you’re playing it with younger or less-experienced players, I strongly recommend doing this.

Once you understand how to play Cosmoctopus properly you’ll find you have really fruitful turns. You’ll be gathering up handfuls of resources, playing a card every turn, and most importantly of all, fulfilling parts of multiple constellation cards at once. It’s a great feeling when you get your engine purring like that, but it doesn’t usually happen for most players’ first games. When it’s not firing on all cylinders, progress can be slow growing, and those tentacles can take a long time to emerge from the astral depths.

In my first game with my son, it took ages to get those first tentacles sprouting. Given that turns are pretty snappy, it meant that we had a huge number of turns each with the octopus pinging back and forth on the tiles like a pinball. I could see his interest waning, and I totally understood. If you want to bring new players into the hobby, you might only get one good chance so don’t spurn it because of misguided gamer pride telling you ‘play it properly or not at all’. Basically, get over yourself, play the short game, and make sure everyone has a good time.

Final thoughts

Confession time. When I first saw pictures of Cosmoctopus when the Kickstarter fulfilment started landing on doorsteps, it didn’t fill me with excitement. I committed the cardinal sin of judging a game by how light and thin I assumed it was. I was wrong to do so, because Cosmoctopus has a lot going on in terms of game design and in terms of how important a gateway game it could be for some people.

The simple turns combined with bright visuals and wonderfully tactile pieces are a winner. You can happily teach a table of four how to play in a few minutes and see the cogs turning after just a couple of turns. If your players get on with Cosmoctopus it opens a whole world of possibilities for next-step games. Terraforming Mars and Wingspan become distinctly doable, and from there – well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell some of you how deep and slippery that rabbit hole becomes.

There’s a really clever automa player you can introduce to the game to either play solo, or add to a multiplayer game to turn it into a co-op game instead. It’s really easy to run and opens up the potential to lead players by the hand in co-op games to really help them understand how strategy works.

Heavy gamers are unlikely to enjoy Cosmoctopus as anything more than an occasional filler game, but fans of lighter games, families dipping their toes in the waters of modern board games, and those of you who are part of a group that welcomes new members from time to time will take a lot from it. Just playing with the pieces is enough to bring a smile to your face, and the rulebook’s suggestion to turn the head to look at the next player is genius. I’ve got a lot of respect for Henry’s game design, and Cosmoctopus just deepens it. A clever, engaging, fun engine-builder that delivers on its goals, and then some.

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

Cosmoctopus (2023)

Design: Henry Audubon
Publisher: Paper Fort Games / Lucky Duck Games
Art: George Doutsiopoulos
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Cosmoctopus Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rondels in disguise

The first thing you’ll notice after you’ve punched out the million (that might be an exaggeration…) cardboard tulip tokens is the funky interlocking gear wheels. Each player has one, and both of the wheels have actions on them. On your turn you rotate the left wheel the required number of spaces (more on that later), which in turn rotates the right wheel. You pick one of the two actions – or sometimes both – now indicated on the board and do that thing.

Now, being the astute lover of rondels that I am, it didn’t escape my attention that what we’re dealing with here are actually two interlocking rondels. The difference between these and something like my beloved Hamburgum (read the review here) is that instead of moving a pawn around a rondel, we’re moving the rondel itself and letting a printed arrow take the place of the pawn. You might also notice that the spokes of the wheels are raised, leaving recessed segments between them. That’s because as the game goes on you’ll add action segments to the wheel to either boost or replace the pre-printed ones.

You might think it makes coming up with a strategy easy. Add complementary actions to opposite wheels, and every time they cycle around you end up with a supercharged turn. Not so, makker. The wheel on the left has six sections, while the one on the right only has five. Given that you’ll only get to rotate the bigger wheel four or five times at the most, those stars won’t align after their first meeting. It’s actually pretty tricky to figure out which two are going to meet a long way in advance, especially as you don’t know how many segments that wheel is going to turn when it comes to your turn.

Flooding the market

So what are you actually doing in the game with all of these actions? Your biggest priority is growing tulips. Ideally growing them in neat rows of matching colours, while making sure you don’t repeat the same colour in each column. In addition to getting points for complete rows and columns, you’ll also get VPs for tulips of certain colours if you manage to get their associated windmills out on the main board. This is where my ignorance of The Netherlands’ topology and history reared its head. It’s not a country famous for flour or bread, so why all the windmills?

If, like me, you didn’t already know, they needed those thousands of windmills to pump excess water from the lowlands. It’s a country that’s famously flat and close to sea level, which means flooding is, and always has been, a real concern. You can’t grow tulips in fields more akin to rice paddies. Before you take a turn you can optionally open the floodgates. The floodgate marker has three spaces, and the space it’s on dictates how far your action wheel turns. At the bottom it’s one segment, the middle is two, and the top is – you guessed it – three. Opening them costs money but rewards you with VPs and allows you to get the actions you want back in range more quickly.

It creates a really interesting tug-of-war between the players, especially when there are more than two players. One person might be desperately trying to get an action back in range, flooding the place with reckless abandon, while the others want to keep the gates closed so they can milk every action on the way around. The longer the gates are open, the more the flood marker moves along its track, and in a nice thematic callback, you can get rewards for using actions to lower it. Turns out all those windmills you’re building aren’t just to make an interesting skyline. Pump water out, get rewarded with money and/or VPs. Living the capitalist dream.

Networking opportunities

One of the things Windmill Valley does really nicely is the way it ties different game mechanisms together. Along with the rondelesque action selection, the bustling market area where you jostle for position and aim to get the most tulips or planting opportunities, there’s also the very pretty main section of the board. It represents adjoining fields of brightly coloured tulips, and at the junctions of each of the roads which separate the fields, there’s a space to build a windmill.

Each windmill that gets built has to be able to trace a path of previously built windmills back to the market in the middle of the board. They don’t have to be your own, but for every windmill that isn’t yours that your path traces, the owner gets a victory point, and they soon add up. As you venture further out from the market the building spaces get more expensive, but offer more rewards, as you take the actions and resources from the adjacent fields. This is all before we even take into account the helper cards which either slot into the top of your board to reward you with things like more powerful actions, or into the bottom to offer more end-of-game scoring opportunities.

Each little piece of the puzzle contributes towards a really tight, enjoyable game with a passive but ever-present level of player interaction. There’s no take-that. There’s no directly screwing someone over, but the consequences of one player’s choices for their own benefit can send out big ripples of annoyance to the others. I love it. I love it when something in a game throws grit in the gears of your plans and you’re forced to adapt, and never has that analogy been more apt.

There’s plenty of scope for mitigation, not least of which being the tool tokens which you can use to increase or decrease the number of steps your wheels move on your turn. Even if you don’t have any tools, you’re never forced to move further than you want to because you can just choose to close the gates for free at the beginning of your turn. In doing that, however, you open the gate – so to speak – for the following players to open it again and add more VPs to their tally.

Final thoughts

Windmill Valley is a really good game. Bang in the middle of medium-weight with enough going on to satisfy heavyweight nerds like me without causing brain burn in less-experienced players. The components are really nicely made and satisfying to play with, even if punching out 200 tiny tulips is a ballache. The rulebook is clear and concise, and the game itself is a doddle to teach. The player aids are great, and the appendix in the rulebook is ideal too. My biggest complaint about the stuff which comes in the box is the sheer size of it all. The board is huge and by the time you add a player board and a set of action wheels for each player, you’re not getting everyone around a 1m x 1m table.

I think Windmill Valley shines with three players. The level of competition around the windmill network is just right and the game doesn’t drag. It’s still very enjoyable with two and four, but I haven’t had the time to take the solo mode out for a spin. The passive interaction is great, and naturally I love the rondel nature of the action wheels. It reminds me of Parks (read my review here) actually in that respect. Racing to the next full rotation and progressing to the next calendar track section (equivalent to the end of the track in Parks) might get you the best rewards, but at what cost? How much will you regret skipping those actions?

My biggest worry for Windmill Valley is how well it finds its audience. I applaud Board&Dice for branching out and diversifying from the heavyweight browns of the T series of games, but I can’t help wondering who is going to choose a game about windmills and tulips. Hopefully, plenty of people do, because I think this is a great example of everything a modern Euro game should be. Clean design, clear rules, bright boards, and just the right amount of mental overhead. I don’t want it to slip between the cracks and get overlooked. After Arborea and Barcelona, Dani Garcia is doing some great things, and Windmill Valley is another fine example of what to expect from him.

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

Windmill Valley (2024)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Pedro Codeço, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Windmill Valley Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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

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

Action stations

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

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

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

The spirit of adventure

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

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

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

Spoiled for choice

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimate Voyage (2025)

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

The post Ultimate Voyage Preview appeared first on Punchboard.