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.

What a tangled web we weave

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

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

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

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

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

Tickets, please

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

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

What a pickle.

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Village Rails (2022)

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

The post Village Rails Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Hex encounter

The world of Crescent Moon is some hex tiles laid-out on the tabletop. Each hex has a type, such as fertile, wilderness, and mountains. Some of the hexes have a river running through them, which act as an impassable barrier. Not ideal when you’re one of the factions trying to expand their domain. One tile has a crossing, which acts as a bottleneck and a hotly-contested pied-à-terre.

Using hexes in this way is clever, it allows for multiple layouts, and different layouts for differing player counts. I’ll come back to player count in a bit. It’s a design decision which means the game takes up less space on the table, and more variety without buying additional maps. The landscape types are very visible and obvious, which is something that can be harder to convey in a COIN game, for example.

The biggest initial confusion you’re likely to face is the colours of the units. For the most part, they’re really clear. The Warlord has black pieces, the Caliph is blue, etc. The Sultan, for reasons best known to himself, has green and pale yellow buildings. Not a problem on the face of it, but if you’re playing with five players, the Nomad is in the game, and they have yellow pieces. It’s a shame, as aside from that one visual disconnect of pale yellow and yellow belonging to different factions, it’s the most innately accessible war game I’ve played.

Toss a coin

Crescent Moon shares a lot of its biology with the COIN series of games from GMT Games. It might look different, but once you scrape away the friendly veneer and bright colours, what you’re left with could easily be re-imagined as a COIN game. The concepts of presence and influence in Crescent Moon naturally map to control and support in a game like Cuba Libre. Similarly, there are a series of ‘standard’ actions, which many factions share. Recruiting, moving, assaulting, building: learning how to do the basics for one faction means you can learn another, mechanically, pretty easily.

The biggest divergence Crescent moon has from both Root and a COIN game is the way scoring and goals are handled. Instead of a visible score track with obvious win conditions, Crescent Moon is played over a set number of rounds. Years, in the game’s parlance. Whether you choose to play the short or long version of the game, once the requisite number of rounds are played, scores are tallied and a winner declared. This works because the VP tokens (aptly crescent moon shapes) are stored face-down, and look the same from the back, regardless of their value.

I’m not a fan of this method of secret scoring, not in a wargame setting at least. What makes games like this so interesting are the interactions between the players. Despite everyone having their own aims and scoring methods, there’s usually a bit of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Some actions are mutually beneficial for different factions, and you get situations where players form temporary alliances to reel in a leader. You can’t do that in a game where you don’t know who’s winning for definite, and it makes alliances hit and miss at times.

Rock the kasbah

I mentioned player count before. The player count for Crescent Moon is its biggest problem. There’s a minimum of four players, and a maximum of five. What do you do if you only have two or three people in your group? You either give someone else an extra faction or two – which can unfairly weight the game in their favour – or you don’t play. There are some of you reading this now thinking “No problem, we always play with four”, and if that’s true for you, then great. For anyone else, it’s a real problem.

In Root, there are options to play with fewer factions, without overly disrupting the game. In Crescent Moon, the different factions are so inexorably linked, and dependent on one another, that it’s not an option. Those links are baked into the game, and so integral to the way the game pans out that each player has Year One objectives to aim for. If you complete them you get VPs that are only available in the first round, and in persuading players to go after them, it helps set up the game state to keep things running smoothly.

The other option for lower player counts would have been AI/Automa opponents, as GMT do with the likes of Gandhi. Granted, it introduces more cards into the game, and more flowcharty decisions to run the bots, but it at least means you can play with two people – or even on your own. I can’t see any obvious reason to not do this for Crescent Moon, other than the overhead of design and playtesting, and it’s a real shame. The game, despite my quibbles, is a really good one. Sadly it’s a game that many people will never buy, because they know they’ll seldom get to play it.

Final thoughts

I have a few issues with Crescent Moon, for sure, but it’s not a bad game. Quite the opposite, it’s actually a really good game, and I think it would be my recommendation for anyone curious about COIN games, but hesitant to dip their toe. The phase structure to each round and finite round limit make it a great option for Euro gamers looking at war games. The player aids are excellent, and I love the way they give advice for new players. It really helps in your first game.

The restrictive player count is where I have a real problem. There are so few games that lock your options to four or five players, and it stands out as a bit of an oddity. To give you an idea of how rare a beast it is, there are only four games in the BGG top 10,000 that restrict you to four or five – and that includes Crescent Moon. I wish they’d just made the extra effort to add AI players. Even if the best experience is with five players, you could still practice, and get some enjoyment out of your game between meet-ups.

If you’ve played Root to death and want something else with that same lop-sided, territorial tussle, Crescent Moon is great. The factions in my – admittedly limited – experience seem really well balanced, and the rules are very easy to follow. It’s also worth trying if you’re tempted by the COIN games but aren’t used to the GMT style of rulebook.

Crescent Moon then – a really clever, really good wargame-lite, with an unfortunate dependency on player count. If you’ve got a regular group of four or five, it’s a great choice. If not, just weigh up how often you’ll play against the cost of buying.

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

Crescent Moon is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Crescent Moon (2022)

Designer: Steven Mathers
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Navid Rahman
Players: 4-5
Playing time: 150-180 mins

The post Crescent Moon Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If you’ve never heard of the city of Merv, you’re not alone. I had no idea before I heard about this game. It was a rich, powerful city where East met West, and in the 12th and 13th centuries was one of the biggest cities in the world. It was a major trading hub until the early 13th century when the Mongols sacked the city, reportedly killing the entire population and refugees. Merv never recovered, and was permanently razed in the 18th century, and the rest is history.

Sounds like the perfect setting for a Euro game, right?

What’s In The Box?

Before we get inside the box, let’s just pay attention to the box itself. Wow, it’s a stunner, another beautiful piece of shelf-art from Ian O’Toole. When you open the box, things carry on in the same vein. The board is so colourful and vibrant, as are the cards. There are cards representing spices and contracts, and a whole heap of tiles which represent the buildings in the city, which players will be fighting for control of.

There are wooden pieces for each player, including some meeples, a load of little buildings, and some discs. You’ll be ignoring those though, once you start playing with the gorgeous camel meeples. The rule book is one of the big, square types, and does a really good job of giving examples of each of the actions. It’s worth noting that there are couple of errors in the printing, but only with reference to a couple of compass directions in the solo section.

As you’d expect now, with the artist’s pedigree, the graphic design and iconography throughout is clear, pretty and colourful.

How Does It Play?

Merv is a game of fighting for places in a queue around the city in the middle of the board. A grid of 5×5 has 24 buildings randomly assigned, with a camel market tile in the middle. Surrounding this central area are other areas, including a palace, the mosque track, a marketplace, and the caravans of the surrounding trading outpost. Each of these represents an action you can take on your turn.

Building Tension

The lifeblood of Merv is fighting for position however. On their turn, the first player in the queue of meeples can choose any column (or row if they’re on the sides) and claim that row or column. They then choose one of the building spaces in that row, and if they have one available, place one of their buildings there. They then own that space.

As well as having an action type, each building space has a colour, and the player first takes a cube of that colour, AND cubes of the colours of all the other buildings they own in that row or column. If you manage to claim all five in a row, that’s five resources per turn. You can immediately understand the importance of trying to get to the front of the queue then, to ensure that it’s you placing your buildings in line with, or perpendicular to, your others .

Any cubes you gain from that movement and building, you can now use along with any others in your possession, and spend them performing actions.

Action Stations

Once you’ve collected all those lovely resources, which come in orange, magenta, cyan. beige and white (wild) flavours, you can spend them on the various actions. The Caravansary part of the board lets you build outposts in neighbouring cities, and then spend your cubes on common or luxury goods. The different goods require different colour combinations of cubes. Maybe you’ll choose to trade in spices instead, where you can claim cards of matching types (e.g. ginger, juniper, pepper) if you have matching coloured cubes to spend.

There’s a library you can visit, and in there spending cubes of different colours lets you claim that many transcribed scrolls. Down one side of the board is the mosque track, and advancing along it requires different colours depending on which branch you choose to move along. As you move along it, you’ll unlock various bonuses.

There’s an action that lets you spend ever-increasing amounts of cubes to place a meeple in the palace. These courtiers score you points at the end of each year/round, based on the type of action space you place them in, and how much favour you’ve gained with the palace that year.

Finally, there’s a Walls action, which lets you build walls around the city square. This increases your influence, which is one of the tracks in the game, and protects neighbouring buildings when the Mongols invade at the end of the second and third years.

Wheels Within Wheels

If you know what I like from my reviews, you’ll know I love it when games have things that work together, and bonuses you can stack and combine. Merv does not disappoint. When you’re looking at the various actions available, you’d be forgiven for thinking “which should I go for?”, and the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. They will all gain you VPs, and also different bonuses.

Transcribing scrolls at the library for example. when you collect 2, 4, 6 and finally 8 of them, you can claim one of the breakthrough tiles at each level. They let you do things like have a one-cube discount for certain actions, or let you use one colour as another once per turn, so they can really boost your strategies.

Moving up the mosque track is another option, and with each step you move up, you’ll get additional bonuses, such as tiles you can overlay onto your claimed building sites, which generate an additional cube of a certain colour. Similar tiles can be grabbed by collecting pairs of particular spice cards, and these tiles grant you the white, wild cubes on your chose building instead of the usual colour.

All those goods from the caravansary, and the scrolls from the library, can be turned in to collect contracts, which give you VP bonuses or allow you to place soldiers. Oh, we didn’t talk about soldiers yet did we? Instead of using a building’s action on your turn, you can place a soldier meeple on a built building site to both increase your influence, and to protect it during the Mongol raids.

The Horse Designed By Committee

I mentioned the camels at the top of the review, and I also talked about how important the fight for the queue placement is. So I just want to mention how the two work together. At the end of each turn, the player whose meeple is furthest back along the current row or column, moves it to the queue on the next corner, taking the furthest-back space. Then the next player, then the next, etc. So the player the furthest forward, gets the advantage of going first again next turn.

Or do they?

During the game, various actions will give players camels. These can be spent during certain actions like trading and the caravans, but they can be saved and used to influence the turn order for the next turn. When the first player moves to the next queue, they can put a camel down in each of the spaces they want to skip, so if they have enough, they can put themselves at the front of the queue. The next player can do the same, adding to the camels on each spot, or just take their place and claim any camels there as their own.

This decision of when to spend camels to give you that first player advantage is critical, and makes the seemingly simple choice of ‘which row do I claim this turn?’ much harder.

After three trips around the board, which represents three years, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Final Thoughts

Merv is a great game, let’s just get that out of the way now. I really, really like the game. Fabio has put together some really well-connected mechanics and the decision-making involved is fantastic. After a couple of games, once I understood the interplay of difference actions and resources, I could really start trying to play with some form of strategy.

Merv For Dummies

One of the biggest complaints I see about the game – mostly from people who haven’t played it – is that they won’t play a game with a dummy player in. Some games have used a dummy, extra player to occupy space and make mechanics work with lower player counts. It’s usually a lazy way to not cope with making changes to the game with those lower player counts. In Merv if you play with one or two players, an additional character is added to the game, the High Courtier (HC).

At a glance, you’d be mistaken for thinking this is a dummy player, but it’s really not. Each turn, the first player chooses which row or column the HC claims, and the second player chooses which building plot they build on. Rather than just blocking though, this placement is very tactical. One thing I didn’t mention in the gameplay overview is that on your turn, instead of activating your own buildings, you can choose to activate another player’s, or the HC’s, and take their actions and cubes. Once you understand that, you can see how playing those extra buildings not only blocks other players, but can be a really useful resource for you.

Reactive Planning

The layout of the city tiles is randomised each time you play, and reading that initial state is the key to doing well, and I love that in a game. The same goes for the spice cards too, the deck is shuffled and the initial layout different each time. Even when you’ve got the initial read of things, and you start formulating a plan, you still need to be so reactive, especially in the first year. Players will get in your way, block your rows, take the things you had your eye on, and you’ve got to have a Plan B, and a Plan C, just in case.

This could lead to a really frustrating situation if it was left unchecked, as a good player could lock up really useful places and leave the others limited for options. However, turns are finite, and each player only gets 12 over the course of the game. Unless players spend some of those turns placing soldiers of building walls, they’re likely to lose some of those buildings during the Mongol raid at the end of the second year. Those spots are then fair game during the final year for the other players to claim and build on.

As well as the various actions and resources, there are also two main tracks that come into play. The influence track determines how many different types of spice you can trade for, and which value of contract you can fulfill, while the honour track is spent at the end of each year to score points for the courtiers you might have in the palace.

Putting It All Together

Some people have said there are dominant strategies and actions to take in Merv, but personally I’ve not witnessed it. I’ve won and lost games to players concentrating on different things. When I’ve made conscious efforts to just climb the mosque track, or just build outposts and dominate the caravansary, I’ve won and lost.

Merv just feels great to play. Even setting it up on the table, with all the bright colours and illustrations, puts a smile on your face. Turns are so simple, and there’s very little fuss in doing anything in the game. This combined with the clear iconography means that after just one learning play of the game, you can concentrate on your strategy. There’s no hidden information, so any strategies are yours to figure out, if you know your opponents well enough.

I have a love/hate relationship with games with a limited number of turns. You never have enough turns to do everything, and those 12 turns disappear quickly. To do well you have to set out your stall early and decide: am I going to be Jack of all trades and master of none, or am I Captain Library for the next hour.

Merv is a game that just feels satisfying. When you start the game there’s this empty city square, and by the end it’s covered in buildings, soldiers and upgrades, and walls and gates surround it. It’s not a town or civilization building game, but it gives that look and feel to all involved.

Solo Options

There’s a really well-made solo game in the box, and it’s with an automa opponent (yay!). Your foe in this mode is called the Corrupt Magistrate, and its actions are driven by a deck of cards. The way its deck is created is clever too, as it will concentrate on three of the main actions, and the palace, and you don’t know which it will be until you start playing. The rules for it placing buildings and taking actions are very clear and easy, and the two of you also drive the actions of the High Courtier, as per the two-player game.

As I mentioned above, in the current printing there are a couple of areas in the solo rules that don’t make sense. It refers to both the cities on the caravansary area, and the trails on the mosque area as if they were both rotated 90 degrees clockwise, but once you understand that, it’s all clear. It comes as a result of the solo rules going to print before the design of the board was finalised.

Recommended?

Absolutely. If you like your Euros with quite a lot of indirect player interaction (the blocking) and plenty of routes to victory, this is a fantastic option. The solo mode is very good, and hard to beat, which is a real boon during these times of lockdown, at the time of writing. It’s quick to learn, easy to understand, and it’s a beautiful thing to have on your shelf and table. Gamers and non-gamers alike can’t help to be drawn in by the colours, the walls around the city, and of course, my favourite, those wonderful little camels.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the UK, if you shop around you can buy Merv for less than £30. For that price, it’s hard to find a reason to not buy it.

The post Merv Review appeared first on Punchboard.