Any time I get my hands on a new Paolo Mori game I get excited, so I was thrilled when Osprey Games offered me a copy of Battalion: War of the Ancients to take a look at. It’s a game which masquerades as a wargame, has all the theme and trappings of a war game, but plays more like an asymmetric duelling card game. It sets out to do something very particular, and it does it brilliantly. Battalion is great fun, if not without a rough edge or two.

They say stay in your lane, boy

The first thing you’ll notice is there’s no board. A board game review site reviewing a game without a board?! The very idea… The lack of board is one of its biggest strengths, as the game is modular and only takes up as much space as you want it to. As long as you’ve got enough space to have three sectors (five in a four-player game), you’re good.

All you’ve got to worry about is a small player board, a few cards, some dice, and a whole lot of tiles. The tiles are a funny shape, they remind me of those tickets you used to get from the deli counter in a supermarket, but wider. Younger readers, ask your parents. Each tile represents something in your chosen empire’s army. A tile is known as a rank, and when you jigsaw them together – which, by the way, is way more satisfying a thing to do than it should be – they become a unit. Units fight against the opponent’s units, lining up in the aforementioned sectors.

If you’re at all familiar with MOBA games like DOTA or LoL, the concept of lanes won’t be alien to you. Using a two-player game of Battalion as an example, you have central, left and right lanes to deploy your units, and choosing which to deploy where is a huge part of the game. Not just because of the tactical nuance of the match-ups you want to make, but also because if you start a round uncontested in the central sector, you instantly win.

Instant win conditions – there’s something you don’t see in your games every day. Let me tell you, it really adds to the already spicy levels of nonsense going on in this game. Nonsense in the very best sense of the word too. How many other games in your collection let you utter phrases like “Okay, I’m sending in my elephants over here on the right”? See, wonderful nonsense in a world of beige farming and plastic zombies.

Bumping heads

Combat is pleasingly clean and easy in Battalion. No consulting of tables or calculating odds as per a more hardcore war game. Instead, you roll three D8 dice. 8s are guaranteed hits, then you assign any other dice to units to at least match the value printed on their tile for long- or close-range damage. You can grab extra dice to swing the odds in your favour by certain attributes of some ranks, discarding tactics cards, or managing to overlap (i.e. flank) an opposing enemy.

I love the combat system. A game like Battalion is aimed at drawing in more casual players, and if Paolo & Francesco had used something more convoluted it just wouldn’t have worked as well as it does. Being able to point at a tile and tell a new player “You need to roll at least that number to hit me” is a real boon. The trick comes in choosing which units you use, and when. You see, issuing orders – such as assaulting the enemy – comes at a cost. You have a stock of command tokens which you need to add to units to do stuff. If you don’t have enough, you can’t do the thing. When you’re in that situation you can Rally which brings them back to your board and flips Disorder command tokens back to their Order side.

Why would you have tokens on their Disorder side? Well, when you take hits you can offset some of the damage by flipping an available command token to the Disorder side and placing it on the damaged unit. This is where some of the most interesting decision-making comes in the game. Tokens are in short supply. If they’re marking Disorder on a unit, you can’t spend them to give orders. So what’s best – lose ranks in battle and save the tokens to make your own attacks, or save the rank from death at the expense of being able to do less? Battalion has you making these kinds of decisions constantly, which is great in a game which might only last half an hour.

The tactics cards I mentioned before are another great addition. You start each game with a slim deck of them and they offer all kinds of bonuses when you play them in battle. When you Rally though, you’re forced to draw another tactics card into your hand. This would be no big deal in most games, but in Battalion it’s the opposite. If you’re forced to draw a card and you don’t have any left, it’s another instant game-over situation. When you consider shorter setups only give you six cards to start with, you start to get a grasp of how vital they are.

Collateral damage

As much as I really enjoy Battalion, there are a couple of things which niggle me. First of all, are the Traits. Rank tiles have traits printed on them. Keywords which have different effects at different stages of the game. When I first played the game I was a little disheartened when I saw all the different verbs & adjectives printed on the right-hand side of the tiles. I remember learning Too Many Bones (review here) for the first time and just drowning in keywords. Having to refer back to the rulebook or a player aid every single time you want to plan a turn is horrible.

In fairness to Battalion, the traits aren’t as bad as the mental overhead of the keywords in Chip Theory’s games. There are only 14 different traits listed in the rulebook, but what annoys me about them is that very few of them are obvious just by reading the word. The number of times I found myself re-reading the descriptions for Discipline or Steadfast is ridiculous. I’m sure if you played it frequently it might not be quite as big an issue, but it still bothered me.

That all pales beside the issue I have with the command tokens though. They look cool, and they’re screen-printed on both sides. But for some reason though, and I really can’t fathom it, both sides look similar. Really similar. Look at the example below. Bear in mind that this is much more zoomed-in than your view over a table. The top token is on the Disorder side, while the one below is on the Order side. Picture this but with loads of tokens on loads of neighbouring ranks.

It makes it difficult – for me at least – to tell which command tokens I’ll get back when I Rally. Remember, when rallying you get tokens on the Order side back to spend, while those on the Disorder side get flipped instead. I just don’t understand why one side didn’t have a big cross on it, or even just left blank. It might sound like me being picky for the sake of it, but Battalion is almost entirely driven by the command tokens at your disposal, so an at-a-glance read of the game state is really important, and is unfortunately made more cumbersome because of the way they’re printed.

Final thoughts

Despite my pet peeve with the command token printing, I really like Battalion. I lead a busy life and have to squeeze a lot of different games into my free time, so I haven’t played this as much as someone who loves lighter war games might. I really like it though. The four ancient empires in the box (Roman Republic, Carthage, Han, Greco-Batrian) have some similarities in the units they let you command, but where they’re asymmetric the differences are stark and varied.

Playing casually to learn means you’ll probably turn to the preset scenarios in the rulebook which define the units, numbers of cards and tokens, and guide you gently into the system. Don’t get fooled into thinking this is the ‘lite’ way to play just because it’s using presets. Playing with them is fantastic. If you feel the need to mix things up, however, you can play mustered battles. This is more akin to drafting with pre-built decks in a card duelling game, and is great because you can agree between you the size and length of the game before you start.

I’m still not sure how the design for the command tokens ever got through playtesting, and while it’s not enough to make me not recommend the game, I can easily see people using Sharpies to mark one side to make it more obvious. Is Battalion for everyone? No, I don’t think so. Some people will bounce hard off the theme. While a lot of people are happy to play pretty much anything, ancient warring empires doesn’t do it for everyone, and this isn’t the game to change that. The same is true of hardcore wargames. Battalion won’t satisfy the hex-and-counter or 4X yearnings of those people. But for anyone looking for a quick, very clever, satisfying lane battler with tons of space for strategy and tactics, Battalion: War of the Ancients is superb.

You can buy Battalion: War of the Ancients right now from my retail partner Kienda. Click here. Remember to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

Battalion: War of the Ancients (2024)

Design: Paolo Mori, Francesco Sirocchi
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Roland Macdonald
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 20-60 mins

The post Battalion: War Of The Ancients Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Hiking Vikings

The main board represents an unnamed land where your Viking longships have landed. This is where you take your actions, and taking an action is as simple as placing one of your Viking meeples on an unoccupied hex. The only placement rule is that you have to be adjacent to another Viking (anybody’s!) or one of the longboat spaces. The Vikings spread out across the lands like cracks in ice, gathering the resources from the hex they’re placed in. Gaining resources is the most stressful thing in the game, especially at the start.

“But Adam, you said it’s approachable and friendly. Why is it stressful?”

You got me there, but let me explain. When you take a resource tile you add it to your own board. Your village. Gravity in your village must be particularly strong though, because once you place a tile it’s there for good. You cannot move it. Where you choose to place things really matters though. Throughout the game, you can pick up longship tiles, and you also start with three special building tiles on your board too. To complete and to score these tiles they need to be adjacent to the things printed on them. For instance, you might choose a longship tile which needs to be adjacent to two trees and one sheep. Once it is, you flip the tile and benefit from the bonus, which is usually to give you bonus VPs at the end of the game for having particular tiles on your board.

You might be able to see where this going already now. Given that a hex has six adjacent sides and that you can take a longship tile each turn, there are opportunities for a single resource tile to adjacent to multiple longships or buildings. This is where the soul of Looot lives. The decisions around what you want to place, and where you want to place it. Your first game will consist of decisions like “I don’t know, I might as well just go here”, but it doesn’t take long to start seeing opportunities to chain together multiple bonus tiles and really start leaning into a strategy.

Village pillage

Once you get to grips with the game it might feel like there’s no reason to cross paths with the other players when it comes to adding Vikings to the main board. Sure, there are some opportunities to take a space just because you think someone else really wants that resource, but there are so many duplicate resources on the board that it doesn’t make much sense to do it. Where things get interesting is with the buildings.

Some of the spots on the main board feature one of three building types, with the available tiles in piles on them. Each type has its own criteria for taking one. Houses just need to have one of your pieces adjacent, whereas Watchtowers need to be linked by an unbroken line of your colour, resulting in you taking a watchtower tile from both ends of that line. Finally, you have castles which you can claim if you have a chain of four Vikings and one of them is adjacent to a castle. Claimed buildings do the same thing as other resources – they fulfil requirements on tiles you want to flip on your personal board. You can also get bonuses from longship tiles for them.

This chain formation and attempting to grab buildings before the stock of each is depleted is where all of the game’s interaction comes from, and it can be pretty cutthroat. Luckily, the designers saw fit to add a little mitigation in the form of three shields that each player gets. Once per game, you can flip each to use it, giving you bonuses like double rewards from a space, taking a second turn immediately, and most importantly, being able to to place your piece in the same hex as someone else. This lets you break the lines, if only once, and suddenly that game of Norsemen Tron cycles is broken.

I love the fact that the board is modular and double-sided. Each time you set it up the layout will be different which means no game-breaking strategy to try to memorise.

Final thoughts

I first saw Looot at this year’s UK Games Expo, and while I didn’t get a chance to play it, the tables were always full with a real mix of people, and everyone seemed to be having fun. These are the sort of games that stick in my mind from events and make me want to check them out, and I haven’t been disappointed by Looot. I really enjoy this game.

The mixture of route-building and tile-laying is smooth and easy to grasp, even if there’s that initial bump in the road that almost every player experiences at first – where the heck am I meant to put stuff? Strategy is very much created on the fly and is based on things like the board layout, which buildings you’ve been dealt, and which longships are on the board. These little hors d’ouevres of randomisation keep each playthrough feeling different, while still tasting like the familiar meal you know and love.

It’s a quick game offering a decent amount of strategy and a lot of fun. The scaling board size means it’s a game which feels very similar to play regardless of whether there are two, three, or four of you around the table, something it shares with another Gigamic game I reviewed, Akropolis. Like Akropplis, it’s a game which you’ll have played and packed away again inside an hour, which makes it perfect for conventions, starts of game nights with your local clubs, and most importantly perhaps, with your family.

If you’re not sure if it’s the game for you, you can even try it before you buy. It’s on Board Game Arena right now, although you’ll need someone with a premium account to at least set up a game for you.

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

Looot (2024)

Design: Charles Chevallier, Laurent Escoffier
Publisher: Gigamic
Art: Naïade
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-40 mins

The post Looot Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Roll and move? Like Monopoly?? Burn, heretic!

Yeah, yeah, I know, enough punching down on Monopoly. It’s a fair concern to have though, especially as I’ve heard this game described as ‘Lords of Waterdeep crossed with Monopoly’. Those of you recoiling in horror at the thought of playing a game that’s anything like The Landlord’s Game don’t need to worry, because despite your actions being dependent on rolling a die, this game is nothing like it.

Mitigation

Some people can’t bear to play a game that uses dice to decide anything, especially when you’re talking about a single die. At least when you’re playing a game like Can’t Stop, the four dice you roll make heavy use of probability, turning it into a game of considered gambling instead of blind luck. Let’s compare that to River of Gold. In River of Gold you roll your single die to determine what actions might be available in your following turn. In the simplest terms, if you roll a 4, you can move one of your boats four spaces along the river. You could also use it to deliver your collected goods to a customer whose card has the same number on it, or build one of the available buildings in the zone of the river matching the colour and logo of that die’s face.

Your initial impression might be one of mild disinterest. A one-in-six chance of getting what you want? No thanks. That’s where the mitigation comes into play. For starters, you’ve got two boats on the river, not just one. If you play it clever and keep them a little way apart it makes the likelihood of any roll being good. The main way of swaying lady luck if she’s in a fickle mood is through the use of divine favour. Divine favour is just another resource you can collect and spend to change the die roll. Each you spend changes the value by one, and it wraps around from 6 to 1 and vice-versa.

Obviously it’s still a game that someone can get incredibly lucky at and never have to use any favour, while someone else sets the world record for rolling consecutive 1s, and there are some people who just can’t get on with games like that. Those people are better off sticking to games like Lords of Waterdeep with its worker-placement, perhaps. But there are some other things about River of Gold that really set it apart from its D&D-inspired stable mate.

Every space along the river has four buildings adjacent to it. When you dock in a space with your little boat you get the rewards from the pointy end of all of the building tiles that are adjacent. There’s no limit to how many boats can be in each space either, which really sets it apart from Lords. There’s no more choosing what the next-best option is because someone used the building you wanted to. Like Lords, again, the owner of each building gets a bonus when someone – even themselves – visits one of their buildings. One of the things I really like is that each building’s cost is determined by its location, not the building itself. There are some great locations which border multiple river spaces, but you’ll end up paying more than double the cost of somewhere that borders just one.

Boat race

It might not seem like it at first glance, but River of Gold has the feel of a race. There are randomised shared objectives which are first come, first served, and the end of the game is triggered by the last building tile being taken from the available stacks. You’ll find yourself planning to do several different things, but you’re increasingly aware that the end of the game is fast approaching. As with so many other Euro games you’ll never get it all done, so choosing what to chase and what to leave is tricky.

As if there wasn’t plenty enough to think about, each of the six regions of the river has its own progress track to wend your merry way up. There are decent points to be had for doing well on those tracks, as well as one-time bonuses along the way. So it makes sense to fulfil customer contracts that give you discounts on building in that region, right? Or maybe those that give you double points at the end of the game in particular regions. To fulfil those contracts you need resources though, so now you’re trying to work out how you’re going to get those resources and advance up those tracks at the same time, which generally means different building types. But for buildings you need money, money you can only really get by sailing, and…

…phew. The mental gymnastics aren’t venturing into Lacerda or Splotter levels here, but there’s enough to keep your brain on its toes. Not that brains have toes, but you get the idea. All of this is going on while the rest of the players are trying to do the same thing, and everyone is competing for the same communal goals, all the while watching the building piles shrink. Buildings get removed every time someone reaches the end of the river and loops around to the top of the board too.

It all makes for a game which is often done in an hour, and there aren’t too many games being released now that deliver the same amount of game and meaningful decisions in that length of time.

Final thoughts

River of Gold is my new gateway game. It’s that game that I’ll use to introduce new gamers to something a little heavier without getting confusing. Rolling dice is universal. Everyone knows how to do that, and giving new players something familiar is often the key in capturing their attention and making hobby games seem approachable. The remarkable thing is that despite making a game with mechanically simple mechanisms that plays out in an hour or so, there’s enough going on to make it engaging and interesting to nerds like me. I’ll happily play River of Gold with you. In fact, I’m taking it along to my local group tonight as we have a relatively new player and I know it’ll be a hit.

I have to mention the presentation too, for good and bad reasons. Let’s get the bad out of the way first. The insert looks fantastic, and if you look at the publisher’s pictures on BGG it’ll look like the game comfortably fits. The truth, however, is that it does not fit. I’ve read that there are some good 3D printable additional pieces which make it fit, but I’ve thrown it in the bin and bagged it all. On the good side though, holy cow is that board pretty. The river has inlaid gold which looks gorgeous. I’m used to seeing that sort of effect on cards, but never on main game boards. The wooden boats are different shapes for each player colour too. They’re small things that don’t affect the game you play, but pay testament to the level of care and production used in the game. Except for the insert.

Once you’re used to the game there are some asymmetric clan cards you can throw in that make things a little more interesting if you’re experienced gamers I’d throw them in right from the get-go. There’s really very little not to like about River of Gold, which is why I’d recommend it to anyone who regularly plays with a group who enjoy more than just hardcore games. The speed at which it plays out, combined with the number of choices available at any given time, and the ease of taking a turn, make for a cracking game that won’t swamp your table or make your bank account cry.

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.

River of Gold (2024)

Design: Keith Piggott
Publisher: Office Dog
Art: Francesca Baerald
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post River Of Gold Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Horsepower

I’m a big fan of cube rail games. Train games that usually involve laying track, creating routes, and often investing in the various companies on offer. I’ve covered Luzon Rails, Ride the Rails, and Mini Express here before, and I can honestly say I haven’t found one I didn’t like yet. Why mention trains in a game about putting little horse envoys on a board? It’s the network building, the point-to-point scoring, and the attempts to link towns of different and same colours. It all puts me in mind of a cube rail game, albeit with a more simple ruleset.

On your turn, you just have to place an envoy on any unoccupied hex on the board. That’s it. If the newly placed envoy is adjacent to one of your previously placed ones it forms a group, or extends a previously made group. If the newly placed envoy is part of a group, and next to a town hex that the group wasn’t touching before, you move your cube up the track of the same colour as the town. As those cubes march steadily northward up the tracks they trigger bonuses such as points, bumping another track, or placing another envoy.

You can see that it’s a pretty simple idea for a game, but it’s in the nuance where it comes alive. The little things. For instance, if you’re the first to visit a town you get a single move up that track. If someone is there before you though, you get two steps instead. If the town is one of the four that have a white herald figure on, that town earns a bonus step too, so by just getting your timing right you can have a three-point visit to a single town.

You can get extra points for connecting towns of the same colour too, and some bigger bonuses for being the first to connect three of a kind, or one of each of the five colours, so there’s some real competition there. If someone’s close to claiming those points, it’d be a real shame if someone placed their horsey in the way, blocking their route, right?

Making tracks

The tracks that you’re bumping your cubes up is the most fun part of the game for me. It’s the reward for clever placement and network-building on the other half of the board. The tracks are designed like ribbons, and you get the bonuses from every spot your cubes pass and stop at along the way, with the exception of the folds in the ribbons. If you manage to stop exactly in one of the folds you claim a seal token. If you place an envoy on a seal and then onto the board, it’s treated as a group. So you can take that single unit, place it somewhere on the map (remember, you can place it anywhere) and score it. Time that well and you can drop a single horsey for three track steps. How’d you like them apples?! Probably quite a lot, I guess. It’s a horse after all.

It’s moves like this that make Cascadero as much fun as it is. At first, the game seems simple and so straightforward, but the towns are in such close proximity that there are countless opportunities to make clever plays full of combos. You move up a track which gives another track a bump. That bump lets you place another envoy down, which in turn moves a cube into one of the folds which lets you move an already-placed horse to an adjacent space, which in turn triggers more shenanigans. Awesome stuff.

I’ve purposely waited this long to tell you the most interesting thing Cascadero foists upon you. It doesn’t matter if you have a huge score at the end of the game if you don’t hit the top of the track which matches your player colour. This artificial insistence on a single track completion is something you almost never see in other games, and I really like it. Throwing in a different target for each player means the game doesn’t become a mess of spite placement.

You can’t just try to cut across other players’ groups to deny them a link in their chain, because you won’t make it to the top of your track. This combined with the fact that there’s nothing to stop you from forming small groups all over the map, means that the cut and thrust of duelling for space on the map isn’t the be-all and end-all. It’s a really nice level of interaction that falls somewhere between a take that game and the multiplayer solitaire of a dry Euro.

Final thoughts

Cascadero is the sort of game which is an instant hit with me. Two to four players, a super slim box which fits in the gaps on any shelves, a couple of minutes to set up, and all done in under an hour. Ideal. Too few games fill that gap between a multi-hour big box game and a small card game, so it makes me really happy when one comes along that does it so well. The bonus actions start slowly but as the game moves on they build and build, and it almost feels like a race towards the end.

There’s another version of the game on the flip side of the board – Farmers – which replaces many of the towns with randomised tiles which give you bonuses if you build onto them. It’s fun and a clever take on the main game. Lots more bonuses to collect but fewer towns to try to advance your track. It’s a nice change, but for me, the base game is the most fun. Especially the variant which only uses two of the four heralds, but sees them getting moved every time they score for someone.

It’d be remiss of me to not mention the presentation too. I’m openly an Ian O’Toole fanboy, and Cascadero just cements my admiration of his work on games. Gorgeous muted colours, clean and deliberate iconography, and the characteristic graphic design which simultaneously shows the game off without getting in the way. Cascadero isn’t just a very good game, it might even be my favourite Knizia game. The only downside I can find is that with two players the competition isn’t as much fun. With three or four, however, it’s brilliant.

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.

Cascadero (2024)

Design: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Bitewing Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Cascadero Review appeared first on Punchboard.

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

Blackout impossible

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

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

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

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

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

Tactics vs strategy

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

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

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

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

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

Great, the game’s ruined, right?

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

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

Training wheels not included

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

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arcs (2024)

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

The post Arcs Review appeared first on Punchboard.

And yes, I really had Super Long Nose Goblin. It was okay.

Kanpai!

The story of the game is an unusual one. You’re dinosaurs drinking sake at a party, and the aim of the game is to collect the most empty tokkuri, which are the traditional sake jars. Now that you know that, you can basically ignore it. It’s cute, but the game is entirely abstract and it could have been literally any theme on the box.

That said, I bloody love dinosaurs, so I was already biased towards this one before I even bought it. And not just because Mark from their stand plied me with sake.

Each player has a hand of cards. On the back is a picture of a tokkuri with 10 rows on it. On your turn you either play a card face-down, adding another tokkuri to the party (it’s gonna get wild), or face-up to use the values printed on the card to drink sake from the tokkuri on the table. If you manage to empty a tokkuri exactly with your card, you collect it and it counts as a point for you (most of the time at least, I’ll come back to that). There are a couple of twists thrown in though, just to keep things interesting.

Firstly, you can only play a card you can completely satisfy. If your card shows 4 + 4 + 4 it means you need to take 4 from three different tokkuri. Not 4 from two of them and three for another to finish it. If there are fewer than three on the table, you can’t play it as you need to take from three. The other little bit of boozy fun which keeps you on your toes is that you can claim any of the tokkuri on the table, not just your own.

See, you like that, don’t you?

Making bank

Scoring is fun in Tokkuri taking, too. Each player starts with 10 in the bank. Counters, coins, gummy bears – it doesn’t matter what you count with, you have ten of them. When a round ends you get a point per collected tokkuri, and lose two points for every tokkuri with at least 3 sake left in them in front of you. The winner of the round is the player with the highest score, and all other players have to pay them the difference between their scores from their own bank.

Let’s say you and I are playing. I score 3, you score -4. You owe me 7 gummy bears, friend. Short arms and deep pockets won’t cut it here.

When one player’s bank is empty, the game ends and you tally the scores. It’s really as easy as that. I mentioned above that tokkuri are not always worth a point, and that’s because there are a few dummy cards in the game. You can only play them as tokkuri, but they’re worth nothing. It leads to some interesting mind games where you might almost drain that one, tempting someone else into finishing the jar.

It’s a really interactive game when you consider how small a box it comes in. We’re talking half the size of an Oink game. Now that’s small!

Final thoughts

This isn’t a big review because it doesn’t need to be. Tokkuri Taking is a quick, easy card game with a lot of cunning behind it. You get ideas for different strategies very quickly. Chris (designer of Zuuli) and I played a few games one evening at UKGE, and we quickly tried to invent the same strategy more than once. I’ve played it since with four players, and I think I enjoy it more with more players, but it’s still definitely worth playing at two.

It’s obviously not a big, or long game. It’s not like you’re going to go to your group and say “Okay guys, shall we play On Mars or Tokkuri Taking tonight?”, but it’s the perfect filler for the start or end of an evening. It’s also an ideal pub game because it’ll even fit into your skin-tight jeans’ pockets, fashionistas.

The little sticks to track sake levels are charming, and the artwork, although minimal, is still really cute. As and when print runs happen I highly recommend adding Tokkuri Taking to your teeny games collection. Cheap, cheerful, silly, and a lot of fun.

Tokkuri Taking / トックリテイキング (2024)

Design: Takashi Saito
Publisher: Bright Eye Games
Art: Rei Betsuyaku
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Tokkuri Taking Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak”

The game takes place around the time of the Irish potato famine. You play as young Irish prisoners, jailed for what was in many cases, trivial crimes, such as stealing food or milk to stay alive. The British warders are the bad guys of the piece, doing their best to detain you while you make your own bids for freedom. I’ll admit to being surprised that the theme was so prescribed. This could have been any fictional prison, from any period of time, but it isn’t. It’s a very specific time and place and is set in a very real prison on Spike Island. While I don’t think it does anything to turn it into a joke or to milk it for some kind of comedic value, the cutesy screen-printed meeples are maybe at odds with the setting.

During the game, you collect rectangular tiles, each with one or two spaces on them. As the game goes on you collectively create the prison you’re trying to escape as you add more and more tiles to the tabletop. The aim of the game is to get six squares away from the center of the prison, where you can lay outer forest tiles, and hopefully escape through too. You do this by collecting tools and contraband, trading contraband for more tools, and manipulating where the warders are at any given time. Keys let you move through locked doors, files through barred windows, and spoons through tunnels which act as teleporters around the map.

It seems like such a simple concept. Like the sort of game you might play with your Carcassonne-loving family. In truth though it’s a much tighter, thinky sort of game. It’s a game that demands careful planning and timing if you don’t want to end up shackled or in solitary confinement.

Get busy living, or get busy dying

In each of your turns, you get to add a tile to the prison, matching one of the spaces on the tile with an existing one, and making sure the doors and windows match up. After that, you get to use the tiles for other things. You can use them for their tools, shown on opposite corners of the tiles, to move from space to space. If you’re in the right spaces, you can also add tiles to your inventory as contraband, which you can later trade for tools to do something useful with. Being in the right spaces, however, is tricky. Each different piece of contraband can only be collected from a particular type of space, so you need to make sure you’re in that space and have the tiles in your hand that you want to stash for later. This is all while you’re trying to escape from prison.

You can also discard tiles with whistles on to move the warders from room to room, typically towards your opponents. If a warder ends up in a space with a prisoner, and that space isn’t the type expected by the warder (there’s a track to one side that shows where you need to be), you can end up shackled and thrown back in your bunk. It gives the game this desperate, almost panicked feeling which is something I don’t feel too often in games. In a game where end-of-game scoring awards you one VP for a piece of contraband in your possession, and two for a tool, the five VPs on offer for making it over the wall to freedom are huge.

Managing all of this is tricky. Planning where and what you’re going to build is one thing, but at the same time, you’re keeping track of how close to freedom the other players appear to be, as well as keeping an eye on the warders, making sure you’re in the right type of spaces to collect contraband, and having the right tools to move from tile to tile, and having the necessary tools in your inventory for the final escape. It’s not like it’s impossible, far from it, it’s just a step up from laying tiles in something like Kingdomino, for instance.

Final thoughts

After the size and scale of Mark’s previous game, Feudum, my first thought on hearing about Fled was one of “Is this his filler game before the next big one?”. The truth, however, is a game whose depth exceeds the small size of the box. I didn’t want to go with the age-old axiom of ‘It’s a big game in a small box’ (too late), but it is. By the time you get toward the end of the game, the labyrinthine jail you’ve created is equal parts impressive and challenging. Navigating it needs planning, thought, and consideration.

It might not be for you if you’re after the weight and experience of Feudum, or if you want something chock-full of Euro game mechanisms, because it’s neither of those things. Instead, it’s a solid, medium-weight tile layer with plenty to think about. I found the rules tricky to pick up at first, but once you understand the core concepts and placement rules, it’s a very smooth experience. I found the icons on the corners of the tiles hard to read at times, but it’s worth remembering that I played with a prototype copy of Fled. A very polished prototype, but a prototype all the same.

I want to give a special mention to the artwork while I’ve got your attention. Klemens Franz is an artist whose name slips by the radar for most people, but you’ve all seen it, and you’ve all enjoyed games with his brushstrokes on, from Agricola through to Grand Austria Hotel, his style is unique and really lends itself to the game.

I found I enjoyed Fled more each time I played it. Once the concepts become second nature and the mechanisms become transparent, it’s a crafty, enjoyable puzzle that plays quickly, doesn’t take up much space, and looks gorgeous. If Fled sounds like your sort of game you can check it out or get notified of its release on Kickstarter by clicking this link.

Preview copy kindly provided by Odd Bird Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Fled (2024)

Designer: Mark Swanson
Publisher: Odd Bird Games
Art: Klemens Franz
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-80 mins

The post Fled Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory might just be one of the best games I’ve ever played. That said, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to most people.

Ooh, the drama and clickbaityness of an opening paragraph like that. Get me, being all cool and edgy. The next 1500ish words will hopefully explain what I mean and by the end of it you’ll know whether it’s a game you should be considering or not.

Pure class

Hegemony is a game about leading your class in society to victory. You play in an unnamed country known as The Nation where things are turbulent. Between the Working Class, the Middle Class, the Capitalists and The State you try to get the nation back on its feet, but with things swung in your favour, so that you prevail at the expense of others. That’s right, it’s a heavy political game, one that’s positively dripping in theme and packed to the brim with substance.

It’s here where you’re likely to find your first sticking point. If you don’t have a group that enjoys heavy, intricately linked games, you won’t have a good time with Hegemony. Even if you do have a group that likes nothing more than the cerebral gymnastics that a good Lacerda game demands, if they avoid politics like the plague, Hegemony can be a hard sell. I speak from experience. I’ve been there.

“Hey guys, I’ve got this amazing game. It’s a game about politics and economics where you play as different classes in a society and try to swing tax, foreign trade and the Labour Market in your favour. Guys… Guys??”

Politics as the theme for a game sounds dry even to folks who like their games drier than a mouthful of cream crackers. This is despite many of us loving negotiation, income planning and trying to sway shared resources in our favour. And that’s what Hegemony boils down to at a mechanical level, but it’s hidden beneath a layer that many people have a strong aversion to.

This game is one of the few where I’ll break my own rule of thumb which says “Never try to force a game on someone if they don’t seem interested”, because when you actually play Hegemony you understand just how electric and dynamic the game truly is.

Not all are created equal

As I stated at the outset, each player chooses a different part of this fictional society to represent. The capitalists want to make money. They open companies to produce goods which can be sold to make money. Who works in those companies though? Well, that’d be the working class, who also want to make sure that they have access to basic essentials like education and healthcare. The middle class sits between the two, seeking employment for its own workers, but also being able to open its own companies where the working class might like to ply their trade.

Sitting above all of this is the faceless State. They want to make money too, and what better way to do it than offering those needs that the working class has. Provided, of course, that the other classes aren’t competing in the private market to offer their own alternatives. Maybe offering tax breaks, or making healthcare and education free might force the working class to love you more, but at what cost?

See, when I explain it like that, you can see where the game lives. It lives and breathes in that competition. In the cracks between the classes, in the balance of what you want against what others need, and how you can best profit from it. Suffice to say then that Hegemony is a highly asymmetric game. In the same way that games like Root (read my review here) and COIN games like All Bridges Burning (another review here) have player roles which all play differently, Hegemony takes this concept and runs with it. If you play a game as the working class for example, you can’t expect to play as the capitalists in the next game without learning how to play all over again. The game’s structure remains the same, but your goals, your motivations, and your actions will be completely different.

Thus, hegemony is a game in which you invest. Not just in terms of the money you pay to buy the game, but in the time you spend learning each of the roles, and in the overall structure of the game. Players’ first games are an undertaking, and you can expect to spend the best part of an hour at least explaining it to someone going in blind. If you want to play a four-player game, clear your calendar for the next 4-5 hours. You’ll need it, I promise. I highly recommend – nay, insist – that you watch the Gaming Rules! tutorial and playthrough. Context truly is king in learning how to play, so you’ll understand the game much better by watching a tutorial.

Fabric

It’s incredible just how well the theme of the game is woven into it. Honestly, it’s just ridiculous. Given that the designers are Post-Grads in Politics and Economics, it shouldn’t be surprising (there’s a book included which explains this much better than me) but it is. Hegemony truly is the epitome of making an educational game fun. You’re playing a game and enjoying it, but the actions you’re taking, the policies you’re proposing and voting on, and the outcomes, all mirror real life. It’s modern society in microcosm, and it’s mind-blowing to me that this game even came into being.

There are little nods to modern games everywhere, which lacquers on some shiny fun to the dry structure that supports it. Take voting for example. At various points in the game, players have opportunities to add cubes of their faction’s colour to the voting bag. At the end of a round (unless immediately triggered) players vote on proposed changes to policy. The more cubes you have in the bag, the higher the likelihood of your colour being drawn and you getting the chance to choose how the vote goes. Then we’ve got cardplay too, not something you might expect to be in a political game. These represent different things happening out in the world, unexpected events, the unseen sucker punches the world likes to throw at society. Each faction has its own deck of cards which can be played for those events and actions on them, or discarded for standard actions.

What I love about Hegemony is how quickly that the assumption of a dry, dour theme evaporates. Once you’re a round into the game, you’ll be roleplaying, whether you expect to or not. I’ve watched the working class player shaking their fist at the middle class player. I’ve smugly sat giggling to myself when playing as the state while the puppets around the table danced to my tune. I’ve played as the capitalists and raked in money hand over fist while the other three squabbled over other things. There’s plenty of kill-the-king gameplay when a player starts stretching the lead and the rest of the table decide among themselves to do something about it. You find yourself so invested in the game that you don’t realise the hours passing, which is a good thing, as there are lots of hours in a game.

Final thoughts

Writing this review makes me want to go ‘Grrrr’ and shake my fists. I love Hegemony. I think it’s a masterpiece of a game. I want to play it more. I want other people to play it. Despite all of that, I can’t recommend it to a good number of the people reading this review. There’s a checklist of things you need to be able to tick before you pull the trigger. The easiest way to know would be to play someone else’s copy, but otherwise, you need to ask yourself these questions:

Does your group love heavy games?
Does your group like politics, or have enough apathy about it that you could talk them around?
Do you have 4-5 hours spare to play?
Do you mind re-learning a lot of the game each time you change factions?

If you can answer yes to all of those questions, then yes. A hundred times yes. You should buy Hegemony. You’ll love it. Considering how much game there is, the cost of around £60 is well worth it. You’d pay twice that for a Vital Lacerda game, and you’re talking about a comparable level of production quality, complexity, and future life in the box. The player aids are amazing, the rulebook does an exceptional job of breaking a complex game and theme down into digestible pieces. You can play it with fewer than four players, but it needs bots to play in place of missing people. Personally I wouldn’t play it with fewer than three, where the State is controlled by the game, but four players is where the game truly shines.

What about the rest of you? Am I saying definitely don’t even think about Hegemony? No, I’m not. I’m saying do some research. Watch the tutorial (or at least some of it) and playthrough I linked to above, read the rulebook, and watch other tutorials. Talk to people who’ve played the game. Even if you think it might be a convention game that you drag with you three or four times a year when Real Life gives you the time you need to play bigger games, you might still decide it’s worth it. Hegemony is an outstanding game, one I’ll hang on to for a very long time, even though there might be big gaps between plays.

You can buy Hegemony right now from my retail partner, Kienda. Click here to shop and remember to sign-up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% discount on your first purchase over £60.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory (2023)

Design: Vangelis Bagiartakis, Varnavas Timotheou
Publisher: Hegemonic Project Games
Art: Jakub Skop
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 200-300 mins

The post Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you know either of those games then you know that’s some pretty high praise right there. Sea Salt & Paper is another of those games which feels like it’s a much older, tried & tested game, just being surfaced to a bigger audience for the first time. That’s the mark of a classic game in my opinion.

Frog base, bird base, mountains and valleys

The first thing that’ll strike you about Sea Salt & Paper is how gosh darn pretty it is. Each card represents something sea-related, from mermaids and swimmers to crabs and octopuses. Instead of plain illustrations or stock photos (or the inutterable awfulness of AI-generated images), the cards feature photos of origami models of each of the things. As someone who’s messed around with origami for the last 40 years, I love it.

These cards are gorgeous.

It means the game has a look unlike pretty much everything else out there, and I love it. One other thing of note is the designer’s choice to use something called ColorADD. If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, ColorADD is a colour alphabet, whereby colours are assigned symbols. Those symbols can be mixed to make the symbols for other colours, so if you combine the symbols for red and blue, you get the symbol for purple. It’s the first time I’ve come across ColorADD, and I sincerely hope it’s not the last. In a game where cards’ colours are really important, it means the game is accessible to colourblind people too.

Other than those very welcome breaks from the norm, everything else here is by the book. The game costs less than a round of drinks in Wetherspoons and comes in a cardboard box just big enough to house its 64 cards.

Gimme, gimme, gimme

Playing Sea Salt & Paper is super easy. On your turn, you either take a card from the top of either discard piles, or draw two from the top of the deck, keep one, and discard one. If you’ve got a pair of duo cards (cards which score for having pairs of them) you can play them in front of you for a bonus action, like drawing another card or stealing a card from an opponent. Other cards score points for collecting multiple copies of them, or give multipliers to other symbols on your cards. Nice and easy.

What keeps the game ticking and makes it more interesting than most other card games is the way each round ends. Once you get a total of seven points you can end the round. Note the italics there. Nobody’s forcing you to. The world won’t end if you don’t stop the game. Once you do decide to end the round you announce one of two things. And yes, I mean ‘announce’. It says so in the rules leaflet. No casual ‘saying’ things here, it’s announcing all the way.

So you get seven points, you rise from your seat, hold one hand aloft and announce either STOP or LAST CHANCE. If you say ‘stop’, the round ends and everyone scores the cards in their hands. It’s all very civil. ‘Last chance’, however, gets spicy. Each other player gets one last turn, but when the scores are totalled if the player who called ‘last chance’ is still the highest scoring, they score not only their cards but also the colour bonus, which is a point per card of the colour you have the most of. The losing players only get the colour bonus. Should the challenging player lose, they only get their colour bonus, while every other player scores their cards as normal.

I love having the rounds end this way. There’s no line in the sand which triggers the end as soon as it’s crossed. You can hang on for a turn or two, hoping to get some more collector cards maybe, so that when you do trigger it – BAM! – look at all those sweet, sweet points. Hooo mama. The gambling aspect might not seem that big a deal, but when scores are close to winning the whole game, an extra point or two might be all you need. It’s a really clever, really enjoyable little twist which makes the game feel unique.

Final thoughts

It’s very easy for me to recommend Sea Salt & Paper. It’s hard not to recommend a game that’ll cost you around £10 and take up next to no room on your shelves. But this isn’t just a lazy “Why not?” recommendation, this is a “You should get this game because it’s a very good game” recommendation. Sea Salt & Paper is excellent.

You might find the first round or two a little clunky with new users, but that soon evaporates. It’s an odd feeling to play a card game where you start with no cards in your hand and frequently have fewer than three. There comes a point after a game or two where you start to understand the frequency of cards and how likely they are to appear. I mean, the numbers of each card type are printed right there on the card, but knowing those numbers means nothing until you weave them into the context of the game.

Sea Salt & Paper is one of those games that you might break out with the family to fill half an hour, but find yourself still playing an hour later. You’ll take it to your games group as a filler for the start or the end of the evening, but end up playing it more than you expected. It’s quick, easy, very pretty, and has a level of immediacy and interaction which really puts the polish on the whole thing. It’s a fantastic little game, and you should own a copy.

I wasn’t provided with a copy of the game. I bought a copy and wrote about it because I love it.

Sea Salt & Paper (2023)

Design: Bruno Cathala, Théo Rivière
Publisher: Bombyx
Art: Lucien Derainne, Pierre-Yves Gallard
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Sea Salt & Paper Review appeared first on Punchboard.

When you read the words ‘dungeon crawler’ in the previous sentence, did you conjure an image in your head? Did you see brooding warriors in armour alongside scantily-clad women only wearing enough armour to protect their most intimate areas, flanked by wizards in robes? Did you envisage skeleton warriors, orcs, goblins, and magic? Was it dark, gloomy, and grimy? If you did, this might not strike you as a problem, because it’s probably what you’re looking for in a dungeon crawler.

What if you’re looking for something else? What if dull greys, greens, and browns aren’t your thing? What then? Up until now, your options have been very limited. As soon as you step outside of the generic, gritty fantasy theme you’re either looking at generic, gritty sci-fi or ‘family/kids’ games. Artisans of Splendent Vale redresses the balance by giving us a watercolour world full of diverse, non-stereotyped, pastel protagonists, breathing fresh life into tired tropes.

By the book?

Artisans of Splendent Vale takes a leaf out of the books (pun very much intended) of games like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion which use a book of maps to play on. I’ll touch on overworld exploration later, but once you visit a place where some kind of skirmish takes place, you’ll be instructed to turn to a particular page in the Action Scene Book and told where to put the different characters before getting down to some fisticuffs.

Skirmishes – Action Scenes in the game’s parlance – in Artisans are great fun. There’s an initiative track to keep track of who gets to act in what order, which is more intuitive for newcomers than something like Gloomhaven’s per-turn initiative setting. I had an initial worry that the action scenes might feel a little hollow, with so much attention being lavished on the narrative and world-building. I needn’t have worried, the action scenes are solid. What I really like is the way they’re not always just a straight-up fight. I’m not going to spoil things for you here, but let’s just say that at times you’ll be testing how fast you can get out of trouble, instead of getting elbow-deep in it.

The design choices for the skirmishes have been carefully thought out too. Gone are plastic minis, and in their place instead we’ve got screen-printed meeples with round edges. The screen-printing is friendly too, just giving the impression of clothes and characteristics. Why am I telling you this? Because the sort of person who might want to try a game like Artisans of Splendent Vale might also be the same sort of person who’s looking for a friendlier experience. The sort of person who wants to feel like they’re being led by the hand into something welcoming and fun, without having something sharp and pointy stuck between their ribs and left for dead.

Representation matters

During its Kickstarter campaign, a lot was made of the diversity represented in Artisans of Splendent Vale. It’s true, there’s a ton of diversity in the game, and it’s a good thing. It doesn’t take very long before you realise how embedded it is in the game. To begin the game each player chooses one of the four characters in the game and takes the corresponding (200+ page!) book, and what you’ll notice right away is that each book lists the character’s pronouns. If you choose Farah, you’re going to be referred to as ze/zir for the rest of the game. What’s the last game you played where that happened? This doesn’t just happen for pronouns. All four characters are QTPOC, which is another first for me in a board game.

Does all of this matter? Yes, absolutely, it matters. It’s not just about ticking boxes. It’s not just a case of saying “Look at us, we’re being so diverse, right?!”. I play games as a part of that huge demographic group of heterosexual, cis, white males. I don’t have to worry about what I see in games. I know I’m going to find something familiar in whatever I play. What about the huge number of people who don’t fall into that intersection of those Venn diagrams? What about people from marginalised communities? What’s going to make them feel comfortable and at home when they take their first steps into this hobby? Artisans of Splendent Vale might not cover everything, but it does a damn fine job of doing better than most.

The sad truth is that there are people out there who will actively avoid the game because of the diversity and representation. I’ve seen it in online groups. I’ve seen people who believe it’s some kind of agenda, and it’s ridiculous. If you’re really worried that a game with a good representation of diverse characters is in any way negative, I’d ask you to stop reading now and close your browser. We should celebrate the fact that games like this exist. In Artisans’ case, this celebration should be amplified, because it’s not just a token gesture of a game, it’s an excellent game in its own right.

Career path

Artisans of Splendent Vale is a campaign game. Your choices dictate where you go in the world, what you do when you get there, and how your character changes after the action scenes. I love that each of the characters has a different mechanism for tracking their advances. Harinya’s method for brewing potions is completely different from Javi’s artificing, where he fills in nodes around tracks. It reinforces how different each character is from one another.

These differences are apparent in each character’s book too. Most of the books’ contents are the same, but there are subtle differences in some parts. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there might be occasions when your group is exploring a room, and each of you is looking at a picture of it in your books. One character with a certain ability might be able to see something in their picture that the others cannot. If you see a number in something like that, you’re free to look up that location in the book and see what you find there. This is one of those bittersweet features of a game like this because it means that your experience could be very difficult from somebody else. Your chosen characters (if you’re playing with less than four characters) might not see things that other people did. That’s just something you have to live with in any campaign or legacy game – you won’t see and do everything in one playthrough.

Something about the game makes your character feel uniquely yours. I’m not sure whether it’s using pencils to add things to your to-do lists, or using the overworld map to decide between you what happens next, but I can tell you that the moment you apply your first scar sticker to your character, you’re going to feel a real investment in their fate.

Final thoughts

In an ideal world, I’d be able to write a review of Artisans of Splendent Vale and tell you why it’s so good. It’s a great campaign game with tons of dungeon-crawling skirmish action, character development, and fantastic writing throughout. Seriously, the story of Artisans is great, and it’s abundantly clear how much time and effort has been put into the world-building. The graphic design and illustrations throughout are beautiful. Truly beautiful. This isn’t an ideal world, however, so I have to pay attention to what this game does for inclusivity and diversity and applaud it for that. To have these things not just paid lip service to, but woven into the very fabric of such a story-rich game is special.

In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, I’ve got to tell you that I haven’t finished the game yet. I’m playing a two-player campaign and getting the time together with my player two to get through it all is tricky. What I can tell you, however, is that I desperately want to know what happens in the end. The story is so good, which is a good thing because there’s an awful lot of reading between fights. If you’re not a fan of the written word and look for your games to be action, action, action, this probably isn’t the one for you. If and when you do complete it, if you want to explore all of the ‘what might have been’ options you can buy a reset pack to play it all through again.

Artisans comes in a big box so make sure you have space on your shelves for it. Along with the rulebook and action scene book, you’ve got four full paperbacks along with the various meeples, pencils, and the gorgeous card box. The card box works like an old card index, and even the design and artwork on it evoke the sort of feeling the game is going for. If you’re looking for a big-box campaign but are tired of the same old themes being re-hashed, and if you have the money for it (it’s north of £100 at the time of writing), Artisans of Splendent Vale is going to give you and your friends an adventure you won’t soon forget.

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

Artisans of Splendent Vale (2022)

Design: Nikki Valens
Publisher: Renegade Games Studios
Art: MK Castaneda, Lil Chan, Cleonique Hilsaca, Lisa Pearce, Christina Pittre
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-90 mins per session

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