Space invader

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

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

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

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

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

Dicing with destiny

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

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

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

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

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

Making tracks

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

Civolution (2024)

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

The post Civolution Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Instead of the cross, the Albatross around my neck was hung”

Thalassophopia – a fear of deep waters. Whether it’s down to a genetic disposition to not be dragged into the inky-black fathoms beneath, or because we saw Jaws when we were kids and now check the bath for sharks, plenty of us have an innate ‘nope’ reaction to deep water. Writers have always written about the real or imagined horrors in the water, from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Jules Vernes’ 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (you really should check out Nemo’s War), through to the likes of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories like the one I mentioned above, Dagon.

We can’t see what’s down there, so it’s easy to build a sense of unease and excitement about throwing a hook and line over the side of a boat and seeing what bites. Deep Regrets borrows this concept and throws a bucket of slimy chum into its churning waters. The idea is relatively simple. In each round of the game you either go out fishing on your little boat or stay at port to sell your catches and buy upgrades for your fishing business.

To perform actions you need to roll the wonderfully cute wooden D4 buoy dice and choose how to spend them. Moving into deeper water costs dice. Once you choose a shoal on the main board you flip the top card to see what “fish” is on offer and then try to land it by spending dice of its value. The rods and reels you can buy at port make your job easier with all sorts of cunning effects. The Rod of the Infinite for example lets you peek at the top three fish cards in a shoal deck and put them back in any order before you reveal one.

So far, so laissez-faire. Catch nice little fish and sell them at the market. It’s not just fish down there though, there are other things. Horrible things. Unspeakable things. Catching them will surely only lead to madness and compound your life’s regrets, and nobody wants that.

Or do they?

“I think I went mad then”

The things you catch in Deep Regrets fall into one of two categories: fair or foul. When you land a foul creature you draw regret cards, cards which represent the accumulated parts of a life lived badly. Regrets have different levels, ranging from “I lost my favourite sock”, right up to “Partook of human flesh”. The more regrets you collect, the greater your slip into madness. Don’t worry though, it’s not all bad.

The more regret cards you collect, the more your foul catches are worth when you return to port to do business. On the flip side of the coin, however, the value of your fair catches decreases. You see, you can make plenty of money by just landing and selling the nice, non-mutant fish that people actually want, where your lack of madness results in higher prices for fair catches. So why would you ever want to gain regrets and increase your madness?

This is one of my favourite parts of the game. In a nod to something more akin to an off-beat RPG, Judson nudges us towards madness. The higher your madness level, the more dice you can have at your disposal, which means deeper fishing and bigger fishes. It means more money, and more upgrades. It means you can mount those really valuable catches in your prized mounting slots above your board to multiply their worth at the end of the game. in fact if you can get your cube to the bottom of the madness track you even get a discount on upgrades. I guess the shopkeepers will do anything to get you out of their place of business as fast as they can, you weirdo.

Deep Regrets is a game of managing your madness rather than avoiding it. The only penalty you’re looking at for going completely hatstand is losing a mounted fish if you have the most regret at the end of the game.

Light in the darkness

This game is a lot of fun, let’s just get that out there right now. What it does brilliantly is to build the game around a lightweight rules framework. Nothing in Deep Regrets is complicated. Your actions are simple. It’s easy to teach. You’ll have new players up and running in a few minutes, and that’s perfect for the sort of person that’s likely to pick up a copy. Thanks to Judson’s amazing illustrations (check out the reviews I did for his previous game, Hideous Abomination), this is a game which is going to appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. Everything about the game screams approachable, which is precisely what it needs.

The rulebook is excellent. Clearly laid out with good examples and plenty of lore and flavour text. It’s not even called a rulebook, it’s “The Angler’s Guide to Fishing”, which I love. Deep Regrets has clearly been through a ton of playtesting and iteration, and it shows. At one point with my preview copy I wanted clarification over the wording on a card. I thought it was a bit ambiguous so me being me, I shot Judson an email asking for clarification. I had to retract the email a couple of minutes later when I turned to the back of the book and found the appendix detailing exactly what I’d asked.

Stuff like this matters. It’s not even the final product yet, and it’s already a long way ahead of most prototypes I’m given, and better than plenty of final, retail productions. If the final version follows suit you’re going to be getting a primo product for your pounds.

The solo and co-op mode is also great. You’re still trying to catch whatever’s out there, but this time you have a chart and your upgrades persist through multiple playthroughs. Trying to catch everything and to complete the list is something which appeals to the lockdown Animal Crossing perfectionist in me.

Final thoughts

Deep Regrets is a blast. I was one of those bombarded with Facebook advertising for it a little while back, and it worked. I love the games I mentioned in my opening salvo, especially Dredge, and this game really hooks into (forgive me) that same feeling. The same ‘cosy port town meets unimaginable horrors from the deep’ aesthetic that it delivers in spades.

I’ve lauded the artwork before, but it’s worth distinguishing that from the graphic design. The backs of the shoal cards for example, at first glance all look the same, but you’ll soon notice that the shadows in the water on each are different sizes, alluding to the size – and therefore the difficulty in catching – whatever’s on the other side. Little touches like this and the iconography throughout are just great.

Don’t expect a game with deep, complex layers of nuance. It’s a game of flip a card, catch the fish, decide what to do with it, but it excels at it. This is a game you could happily teach to your non-gamer friends and they’d have a great time with it. If your group’s idea of oceanic strategy perfection is Dominant Species: Marine, you might be left wanting with Deep Regrets. But it’s not a game aimed at hardcore Euro nerds like myself. It’s a game aimed at everyone, which hey, includes me.

Yes, there’s luck involved. You roll dice to do everything. You flip cards with no way of knowing what’s on the other side. But that’s the soul of the game. There are ways to mitigate the luck through upgrades and things you dredge up from the ocean floor, and that’s where the strategy comes in. It’s not deterministic, but it’s a lot of fun, and you’ll be done in an hour and a half, leaving behind some belly laughs and some interesting life stories if you choose to craft a narrative from your regret cards.

I’m hopelessly biased in this one I’m sure. I love the setting. I love the artwork. I love Judson’s work ethic and the amount of love poured into this game, and the fun I’ve gotten from it. Make of that what you will, but I’ve no hesitation in recommending Deep Regrets when it launches on Kickstarter on July 1st.

Preview copy kindly provided by Tettix Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. I also acknowledge that I’ve made jokes of ‘madness’ in this piece. As a supporter of mental health wellbeing, and someone who openly suffers with mental health problems, I hope this is taken in the manner in which it’s meant.

Deep Regrets (2024)

Design: Judson Cowan
Publisher: Tettix Games
Art: Judson Cowan
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Deep Regrets Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Loaded dice

I’m not too proud to admit that as soon as I opened the box I wanted to play with the action dice. They’re black cubes with no faces on. Just open holes, promises of dice that could have been. It’s so sad. Luckily we’ve also got a bag full of dice faces! During the game, you get the chance to grab some of those faces and clip them to the blank sides, and it’s ridiculously satisfying. The publisher has also thrown in a couple of little tools to lever the faces off when you swap them out, which is another unnecessarily enjoyable process.

Why open a review with something as glib as this? Because the toy factor is one of the things guaranteed to get kids on board, and that’s important because Kapow! is absolutely aimed at kids as much as it is at adults. The removable faces are colour- and symbol-coordinated with the other (trait) dice in the game, and to play the game you need plenty of dice, and you need dice which are going to land on the correct faces for what you want to do.

Gameplay is pretty easy. Put your player screen up for secrecy and then roll all of your dice. Your player boards list a load of different actions, and each action shows which dice faces they need in order to be activated. You take the rolled dice and place them on the various action spots on your boards, before removing the screens and resolving the dice. This is the crux of the game and it’s reassuringly simple. Add up the values of your attacks and compare them to your opponent’s defence. If you clobber them with more than they defend with, they take the difference in lost hit points on their health dials.

As well as giving you attack and defence, as well as some other actions, some of the action spaces give you rewards, and these rewards usually come in the form of extra trait dice, action dice, or faces for action dice. Let’s say you’ve decided to go full Hulk on the person sitting opposite you. You know you want lots of the first and bicep symbols, so you stock up on those faces to adorn your action dice. BLAMMO! You’ve suddenly got a die with six red fists on it. It’s clobberin’ time! Yeah, I know, I’m mixing up The Thing and The Incredible Hulk, but you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Jean Grey

Kapow! is relatively simple, as you might have guessed by now. It doesn’t take long before you realise that the real game comes from trying to read the mind of your opponent. Are they going to attack hard this round? Should I stack up my defence to mitigate it, or just take my lumps and use my dice on the Power Up section of my board to gain more dice and faces? Seems like a good option, except that they might instead decide to assign dice to the After Power Up section, causing me damage for every die and face I gain this round… So maybe I should just attack instead?

You’ll find yourself caught in these decision loops constantly, and it really fuels the table talk. You start to get sneaky and devious, trying to bluff or double-bluff the other person. I even caught my son gesturing toward and looking at the area of the board where you can place dice to defend, only to find out he’d stacked everything on his attacks. The kid’s a supervillain in the making.

What I’ve talked about so far is the way you’ll play the game the first time, but once you’ve got the hang of it (in fact, from your first game onwards if you’ve experience with games) you can add asymmetric super hero and villain boards to your area. Each comes with their own abilities, starting health, and starting dice. and it breathes a welcome bit of life into a game which would otherwise get stale quite quickly. It’s not to say that Kapow! isn’t a fun game, because it is, but it’s lightweight and can get samey pretty quickly.

Superman from Wish.com

If you’re like me, and like your games with plenty of meat on their bones, you might find Kapow! a little lacking. Despite the player boards appearing to have tons of spaces to place dice, the reality is that the attack and defend columns are a little dull. It’s a cool concept, for sure. You assign dice to an attack, then you can add more dice to a Kicker (adds more damage), and finally assign some to a multiplier to really boost it. Defending works in the same way. The attacks all have suitably comic-bookish names like Biff, Zap, and Pow, but it doesn’t feel much like you’re using any superpowers, and surely the point of having superheroes is to be using cool powers?

The various character boards introduce some new powers as such, they’re just not very dramatic. Locking in abilities to use them in every round is pretty cool, for example, but it’s still maybe just having a ‘Pow’ every round for free, not like using laser eyes, invisibility, or something equally extravagant. I feel no small amount of hypocrisy writing this. I love beige, mechanical Euros where the theme can be nothing more than a gossamer-thin veneer, so why grumble about a lack of it here? In my opinion, a game about superhuman boys and girls knocking lumps out of each other should feel dramatic and explosive, and you should feel like you have some truly awesome powers. I just don’t get that from it.

I should caveat this review by mentioning that my experience of it has been with 1v1 battles only. There’s a 2v2 mode which allows for cooperation and teamwork, and you can add in the characters from the Volume 2 version of the game too. Just something to bear in mind if you’re looking to regularly play with four people.

Final thoughts

Kapow! is a mixed bag. On one hand, you’ve got this duelling game which is a load of fun. Gaining and customising your dice is super cool, and I love the plotting behind your screens before the big reveal. Planning and plotting to try for a monumental attack is extra satisfying when it comes off. It’s just tempered somewhat by the lack of ‘super’ stuff you can do. The characters aren’t licensed from any comic universe, and in a way that’s a good thing. Imagine a game where you were Spider-man but couldn’t do any web-slinging, or The Flash but had no way to move super fast.

I’ve got to give a special mention to the artwork and graphic design in Kapow! The illustrations are superb, and everything looks like it’s been lifted straight from a classic comic. The art combined with the bright, bold dice makes for a game which looks great on the table and is instantly appealing to everyone, non-gamers included. This level of appeal is a very important point and isn’t to be sniffed at. This is a fantastic game to bring families together around a table and introduce non-gamers to modern games. If you’re part of a game group and have games to introduce new members with, Kapow! would be a fantastic addition to the collection.

Ultimately Kapow! is a glorified Rock, Paper, Scissors with an element of bag- and engine-building. Stack your dice in one particular area and see whether your opponent countered it, met it head-on, or tried to reap some benefit as a result of your choices. Trying to do a little bit of everything each turn isn’t really viable if you want to win. As I mentioned before if you’re looking for something complex it’s not going to knock your socks off, but if your tastes lie with something lighter end of the board game buffet, Kapow! is a great option. If you’re looking for a game that does something similar with dice but with a bit more going on, check out Dice Throne. If you’re looking for generic superhero action with more emphasis on what the heroes are doing, you’d be hard-pressed to beat 2011’s Sentinels of the Multiverse. Kapow! fills a gap somewhere between the two, and is a great option to get kids and newbies into chucking dice.

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

KAPOW! Volume 1 (2023)

Design: Larry Bogucki, Robert Dougherty, Douglas Hettrick, Carl Van Ostrand
Publisher: Wise Wizard Games
Art: Randy Delven, Cody Jones, Kalissa Fitzgerald
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 20-45 mins

The post KAPOW! Volume 1 Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die historic on the Fury Road!

The basic premise of the game pits you as one of the four drivers available, piloting one of four vehicles. Your vehicle is a mat in the middle of the play area, which has nine card slots on it, arranged in a 3×3 grid. These are the places you can attach various items to either help keep you in one piece or add attacking prowess to your rolling deathwagon. You’ll need them, as the bulk of the game has marauders swarming around you on all four sides, aiming to destroy your car and claim what they can from the wreckage.

The swarming – oh the swarming – how I love the swarming cars. For each round during each chapter of the campaign, enemy cars come off the draw deck and surround your car’s mat. When a marauder attacks you, they deal damage if you can’t block it, and then circles around clockwise to the next side of your mat. If a little piece of your brain is now whispering “Sounds like something we can manipulate”, then it’s correct.

You see, which enemies activate and attack you is up to you. Most of the game is at the whim of dice rolls, and you’ll find yourself assigning dice for just about everything. Whether that’s your attacks, what you repair or add to your car, or which enemies activate and attack. If you choose a red 2-pip die, the enemies with a 2-pip die on them activate. So you can choose which cars move, and predict where they’re going to go.

So what?

I am your redeemer. It is by my hand you will rise from the ashes of this world.

Let’s say you’ve attached some really nasty guns to the front of your car. You’d like to fire them, but you want them to do the most damage possible to as many enemies as possible. Well, let’s activate those enemies behind us to being them up our left side, where another car already thunders along next to us – the driver leaning out of the window, giving us the bird. Every edge of every piece of metal down the side of the car is trimmed with barbed wire, like terrible lace.

On your turn – BAM! – you ram sideways into the marauders, dealing damage. More importantly, however, when you ram into enemies, you also move them to an adjacent section of your choosing. In this example, maybe we line them up in front, like bowling pins, ready to send tumbling into the dirt. It’s really satisfying to shepherd the enemies around, making them dance to your tune. It’s not only fun, but it’s also an essential skill to master as the game goes on, especially once you factor in the boss cards.

Each chapter has a big baddie to take on at the end, and they’re tough. Like, proper tough. When the first boss came out to play at the end of the first chapter, I had to check the rules twice because I thought I’d misread them. Not only did I need to deal a crazy amount of damage, but I also couldn’t damage them if any other cars were in the same section. What the Hell?! You’ll finish chapters with most of your car on fire, somehow balancing on one wheel, with nothing but the windscreen wipers working, and it’ll feel like a victory.

I’m scared, Fif. You know why? It’s that rat circus out there. I’m beginning to enjoy it.

It would be easy to think Wreckland Run is a racing game, based on its name and artwork. The idea of high-speed pursuit and car-nage is compelling, but that’s not what it’s about. You could pick up the game, shake off its theme and re-theme it with some kind of base defence game against zombies or aliens, and it would still be a great game. It’s a game of enemy manipulation and forward planning, with a good splash of dice-rolling thrown in for fun.

That’s not to say that the story is just gloss, because it isn’t. Wreckland Run has a full seven chapter campaign to work through, with a good story that builds up as you play. I’m not going to spoil any of it, but it’s full of tongue-in-cheek humour, punny car names, and surprising new things happening. It’s cool that the new enemies introduced in each chapter stay in the draw deck. It feels like you never truly outrun the people you smash in the earlier chapters. They’ll still track you down and take a swing at you from time to time.

I was honestly surprised at how much I got into the story because I find it really hard to buy into new worlds. The flavour text is well-written, and not halfway up its own backside, which really helps. There’s something about light-hearted fiction that takes itself too seriously which is a major turn-off for me. If you suffer with the same lack of buy-in that I do, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Wreckland run keeps you invested in what’s going on, and absolutely dying to know what’s waiting for you in the next envelope.

Final thoughts

A lot of people only know Scott from his Tiny Epic series of games, which is a shame, because he has designed a lot of other great games, including Heroes of Land, Sea, and Air, Warp’s Edge, and last year’s hit, Beer & Bread. My hope is that Wreckland Run joins that list of hits because it really is good. I don’t know how much playtesting and balancing the game went through, but it must have been a lot. I’ve not managed to steamroller any of the chapters yet, and it’s pretty common for me to have my flaming hunk of steel just crawl back to my garage for repair.

If you’d asked me before playing Wreckland Run, I wouldn’t have guessed that it would end up being my favourite post-apocalyptic car war game. The racing part isn’t there, but then, Mad Max was never about racing, it’s about survival, which is something I hadn’t really thought about before. Apocalypse Road from GMT Games does the racing and wrecking thing about as well as it could be done (read my review of Apocalypse Road here), so I’d probably swerve toward that if you yearn for tearing up tarmac and rivals.

Wreckland Run is a solo game, and while you could have someone else help you make decisions, it’s the kind of game to enjoy by yourself. It fits on a small table, plays out in about 45 minutes, and takes only a couple of minutes to setup and pack away. It’s a great ‘fill a dead hour’ game. I love how much variety Scott has managed to pack into the game. The cards coming out of each new envelope add new things to think about, and if you really rinse the game, the Fallout expansion is awesome. There are a couple of new vehicles for you, some new drivers to choose from, three more chapters, and some cool new mechanisms – including missiles. Missiles!

A fully-resettable campaign game for one player which is quick to play, fun, and doesn’t take up an acre of table space? Yes indeed, what a great game.

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

Wreckland Run (2022)

Designer: Scott Almes
Publisher: Renegade Games Studios
Art: Brett Parson, The Warden
Players: 1
Playing time: 30-45 mins.

The post Wreckland Run Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Either that, or you’re not as much of a geek as I am. Whatever the case, buckle up!

Tiley-tum?

Let’s clear up one thing right from the outset. Yes, this game has the word ’tile’ in its title. Yes, it has loads of tiles in the box. No, the word ’tile’ in the title has nothing to do with the tiles in the game. Tiletum is a town in west Belgium, and it’s this town which lends its name to the game.

As I mentioned before, you play as rich merchants, travelling around Europe doing stuff. You see, the merchants aren’t just sock weavers, cheese traders, or goat beauticians. Nope. You folks are jacks-of-all-trades. As you saunter your way around the continent you’ll do a spot of cathedral building here, fulfil contracts for wool and steel there, gain influence with noble families, steal their crests, build houses, home nobles – there’s a lot going on during the Renaissance.

As a player, this means you have a veritable Smörgåsbord of actions and ways to score yourself some of them delectable VPs. Min-maxing in one area or sampling a little bit of everything are both viable strategies in Tiletum. A lot of that viability is due to the sheer number of bonus tiles the game throws at you, tempting you hither and thither. Those bonus tiles are a large part of why I really like this game, but I’ll come back to that later. For now, let us dip our toes in the pond of action selection, for the water is warm and deep.

Teeley-tum?

The ludological skeleton that Tiletum attaches its musculature to, is dice selection. (Note to self – never use that particular metaphor again). At the start of every round, you draw some of the pastel-coloured dice from the included bag and place them around the action wheel on the board. They’re grouped by value, so you end up with different colour dice grouped beside the various actions. When you come to take a turn you take a die and plonk it onto your player board. Choosing which die to take is the first delightful headache Tiletum gives you.

The die you take has a colour and a value, right? So if you pick up a yellow five, you get five of the yellow resource, which is Gold. A pink three grants you three food, and so on, and so on. Taking a high-value die seems like a natural choice. More resources are always a good thing. Well, yes, and no.

The section of the action wheel you took the die from determines the actions you’ll be taking in your turn. The catch – because you knew one was coming – is that the strength of your action is the difference between the die’s value, and seven. Pick up a one-pip, you get six actions. Take a three, you get four actions. So while a high-value die might see you with more wool than you know what to do with, you’re not going to actually do much for the rest of that turn. Tricky, isn’t it?

Till-ettum!

I mentioned the bonus tiles before. The board is littered with them. There are bonuses available all over the map of Europe, which you can claim as part of your Merchant or Architect actions. There are bonuses next to each segment of the action wheel, often tempting you away from an action you were planning to take. There’s a bonus for being the highest on the King’s track at the end of each round. This is all before we even look at the bonuses you get for putting completed contracts on your player board, or adding crests to your board.

Personally, I really like this. It offers plenty of combo opportunities as you play. Sometimes you’ll take a die and immediately use the bonus tile from the wheel. Let’s say that bonus gives you enough food to add a new crest to the buildings on your board. You spend that food with one of your ‘anytime’ actions, and the space you cover lets you move your merchant on the map board. You’re setup to build a house, claim a tile from the new town, and move to another now, and this is all before you’ve taken the actions your die choice granted you.

If you’re reading all of that and think it sounds like AP-central, weeeellll, you’re kinda right. You definitely end up doing a lot of deliberation over which action to take next. For some people, that’s a turn-off. Those people like their turns fast and slick, like a finely-tuned otter. If that’s you, try the game before you buy, if you get the opportunity.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s glorious. The actions themselves are really simple, thanks to the iconography, and the great glossary in the rulebook. Even if you take a turn which is strictly speaking suboptimal, it never feels like it. It always feels like you’re doing something good, which is great if you’re secretly a bit rubbish at games, like me.

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed Tiletum the first time I played it. It’s easy to learn, and it really helps that most resources only have one use. Wool and steel are for contracts, nothing else. Stone only ever goes towards building cathedrals. It avoids those moments present in some games where new players suddenly stop and say “Well, I have a load of wood now, but no idea what I can do with it”. Every time I play the game I enjoy it more than the previous time, so I think it’s safe to say it’s staying in my collection for the foreseeable future.

The colours of the dice might be an issue if you’re colourblind. I was worried about the pastel colours on them, so I ran a photo through a simulator, and those of you with Protanopia or Deuteranopia might have real trouble telling apart the light-grey, dark-grey, and pink dice. On the whole though, the presentation and components are very nice. The rulebooks (there’s one just for solo mode) are well-written with good examples, and the iconography throughout is great.

The solo bot is a bit of a pain to learn, as its actions can be very non-standard, and have tables of preference, but once you get the hang of running it, it makes for a very good solo experience. Tiletum is one of those games that makes me happy just to play it. Yeah, at the end of the game I might get absolutely spanked by someone else, but I have so much fun playing around with the game’s systems that it just doesn’t matter.

If you enjoy those sandbox-y games that let you just play and experiment, you’re going to love Tiletum. It looks and feels like a classic Euro, but with no direct player interaction, and no meanness. It’s my favourite Board&Dice game since Teotihuacan, and that’s saying something. A hearty recommendation from me.

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

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Tiletum (2022)

Designers: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Giorgio De Michele, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Tiletum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Hit and miss

Cubitos makes heavy use of one of my favourite things in a board game: push-your-luck. I still don’t know why I like it so much, especially when I enjoy heavy Euro games which eschew luck in favour of planning. To move around the track in Cubitos, you throw handfuls of dice. Each die has a mixture of faces with something good on (a hit), and blanks (misses). Any hits you roll are moved to the Active Zone of your area, and then you choose whether to keep rolling with the remainder of your dice, or pass, and get ready to run.

So you and your friends are throwing handfuls of these little dice, banking the good stuff, and then deciding whether to keep going or not. If you roll no hits, you bust! It lends itself to simultaneous rolling, so there’s precious little downtime, but there’s one aspect of the way Cubitos handles it that I really like. There’s nothing in the rules to say you can’t just sit and watch other people rolling, and wait to see if they pass or bust. If you notice someone doing this, you can also stop and wait. In fact, the whole table can, and then it comes down to who has the most available dice, and they must roll first.

I love how it tickles that part of our brains that love to take a chance, to have a little gamble. Whether you find yourself praying to the dice gods, giving your dice a lucky blow, or telling fate that baby needs a new dice tray, I can’t get enough of watching my friends agonise over deciding on one more roll or not. If it sounds like The Quacks of Quedlinberg so far, you’re on the right track. In the same way Quacks has its rat tails catch-up mechanism, Cubitos has a Fan track to advance along, should you bust. It has some great bonuses along it, so it’s never too disheartening if Lady Luck swipes left on you.

Playing the markets

Cubitos also shows its ‘separated at birth’ similarities to Quacks when it comes to improving your pool. In every game, you’ll be buying from the same selection of brightly-coloured dice, but what each of them does is dependent on outside forces. If you’re familiar with Quacks, you’ll remember that each colour’s abilities were decided by which of the spellbooks you use. Cubitos does something similar and gives each of its eight dice stores a choice of seven different ability cards. I’m no Carol Vorderman, but even I know that that adds up to a buttload of different combinations. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

I wouldn’t recommend just drawing cards randomly, however, as you need to strike a balance between cheap and expensive dice, and some just don’t really work with others. It’s a bit like making a sandwich; sure, you could try jam, raw onions and tuna, but there’s no guaranteeing it’ll work. Stick to the recommended setups in the rulebook for your first few games, and enjoy tasty dice sarnies.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about Cubitos so far is that there don’t seem to be any obviously-dominant strategies. In Dominion, the Big Money tactic was famously overpowered for a long time, and it still works even now. Cubitos seems more balanced. The same is true of the different tracks that come in the box. They offer plenty of variety, and just like The Quest for El Dorado which I recently reviewed, you’ll find yourself torn between the shortest route, and the longer, bonus-filled outside lines. I love that no two games ever feel the same. It really does help the game feel fresh for a long time.

The flimsy cardboard elephant in the room

Cubitos comes with a really clever storage solution. Each of the different sets of dice has a storage box included, each of which doubles as a holder/marketplace during the game. Unfortunately, there are two big issues with boxes, both of which wind me up.

Firstly you have to fold and assemble the boxes yourself. This wouldn’t be such a bugbear for me, if it weren’t for the fact that they’ve got some irritating folds. Folds to make some sides recessed – for example. It means you can’t really just punch and sort the game as quickly as you’d want. I’m all for publishers including storage and organisation solutions in their games, even moreso when they forgo plastic in favour of card, so kudos to AEG for that. Just make them simpler, or pre-assembled. It’s really easy to not get straight, crisp folds on your boxes, and they end up looking a bit wonky.

The second gripe I have is using the boxes as the marketplaces, as suggested in the rulebook. It’s a great idea, but the boxes are so top-heavy when using the recesses as trays, that it all feels a bit flimsy. It can be unnecessarily awkward to take dice from the trays when they’re full, especially when you’ve got big, fat sausage fingers like mine.

It’s probably worth noting that I wouldn’t normally complain about a game’s components unless I was really upset about them, and my issue with the boxes doesn’t affect the gameplay at all. The issue is that Cubitos is such a physical, tangible game. Playing with the little dice, rolling them, clacking them together – it’s all a part of the experience. When you regularly have to interact with something which subconsciously detracts from that experience, however little, it’s the sort of thing I have to bring up.

Final thoughts

Look, I know I spend a whole section grumbling about the boxes. Unfortunately, as a dad in his mid-forties, it’s just something I have to do. I’m contractually obligated to be a bit grumpy. Don’t let that make you think Cubitos is anything other than mad fun, because that’s exactly what it is. I love pushing luck in games, I love bag/deck/pool building, and I love social racing games. Cubitos delivers in all three areas, in spades. It’s a brilliant game, and if you like The Quacks of Quedlinburg, you’ll like this too.

The little dice are unbearably cute and tactile. You might be wondering why I’ve mentioned their smaller size a few times in this review, and it’s because size matters – despite what you might have been told. In a game where you’re going to roll at least nine dice (nine!) at the start of your turn, if they were regular-sized dice, you’d need hands like Shaq to hold them all. Not to mention the table space you’d need with four of you all doing it at the same time.

You can play with anything from two to four players, but as with most other racing games, the more the merrier. If you asked me to play a two-player game, I would, but I’d be eyeing your collection to see what else we could play. With four though, I’d bite your hand off. It’s silly, colourful fun, full of groans and cheers, and just like he did with Space Base, John D Clair has come up with a winner. Ignore my curmudgeonly cardboard grumbles, and find out why it was so hard to get hold of for most of last year.

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

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

Cubitos (2021)

Designer: John D. Clair
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Jacqui Davis, Philip Glofcheskie, Ryan Iler
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Cubitos Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Ur-ban development

Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar, in Iraq.

I’m not about to pretend I knew that, it’s just what the combined might of Google and Wikipedia told me.

Tabannusi is set in the Late Bronze Age, as the city began to grow and flourish. As a master architect, you are tasked with building each of the city’s districts. Houses, gardens, the port, and even the famous Ziggurat are all there to be developed under your watchful eye, and the boats on the Euphrates River, which bisects the city, are the main source of resources.

In true T-game fashion, you’re going to accomplish these impressive feats of civil engineering through the use of dice. Lots and lots of dice. During the game, you claim dice from the barges in each district, and each die influences what you’ll do with it. The colour dictates which district you can build in, and the value tells you which district your Architect is heading to for the next round’s actions. It’s a clever, unusual system, which I really like. It breaks my brain with forward planning, but I like it.

I think there’s a certain type of person who likes a brain-crunching Euro game. Those people are masochists, and I count myself among them. That same type of person will love the mental gymnastics that Tabannusi has you performing. One of the things I particularly like is how little analysis-paralysis affects the game. All of your planning can be done while the other players take their turns, and you’ll normally find you’ve got a definite plan, which is different from the others. There are a lot of different ways to score VPs, which means there’s not much treading on toes by other players. The flip side of this is a low level of interactivity, but that’s to be expected in these games.

Spatial awareness

A trademark of the T-games is some form of spatial puzzle on the main board. In Tekhenu it’s pillars and statues, and in Teotihuacan it’s building the pyramid. In Tabannusi, we’re dealing with building projects, houses, and gardens, and it’s a much bigger feature of the game. There are bonuses just for covering squares with project tiles, restrictions about building adjacency, using garden tiles to improve others, and individual objectives – all of which can reward you with VPs.

Given that the spaces where all this land-grabbing takes place make up 60% of the board, you can understand when I tell you it’s an important feature. Despite what I said in the previous section about low interactivity between players, this passive interaction is actually pretty decent. It’s just not very in-your-face.

Once again we’ve got various tracks to climb too, giving bonuses along the way. It’s another example of a game where you’ll never do everything, so you’ve got to make your mind up early and stick with your plan. If like me, you have a tendency to get drawn away from your original strategy, to try a bit of everything, you probably won’t do too well.

Follow the leader

My favourite part of Tabannusi is each player’s use of the Architect and assistant meeples. It really gets you thinking ahead properly, and not just choosing randomly and hoping for the best. It’s also a unique way of telegraphing what your intentions are to the rest of the players. In most games, you might have an idea of what someone has in mind for their next move, but you never know. In Tabannusi, you know exactly where their next action will be, and it forces you to think about it.

This visual pre-planning, and the fact that the moving parts of the game’s systems aren’t too complicated, means that Tabannusi is the T-game I’d recommend to newcomers to the series. Tekhenu and Teotihuacan both have similarities but are denser. I’d rather teach Tabannusi, and I feel confident that a new player could pick the game up more easily.

The little mumbles and murmurs that happen during the game are brilliant. When someone moves their architect to an area you really weren’t expecting, eyebrows raise in surprise, and you’ll catch yourself saying “Hmm, interesting…”. Moments like that keep the game alive and add a little moisture to what would otherwise be an archetypal, dry Euro.

Final thoughts

If you enjoyed either Teotihuacan or Tekhenu, and were looking for another historical-themed game with similar DNA, you won’t be disappointed with Tabannusi. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Tawantinsuyu in this review, and that’s intentional. Despite belonging to the same family of games, Dávid Turczi’s game feels like a bit of an outlier in comparison to the other three. Even though the users of BGG disagree with me, I also believe that Tabannusi is the lightest of the series.

Tabannusi doesn’t really have the same presence on the table as its siblings. There’s no chunky pyramid, or towering plastic obelisk this time around. The little plastic houses are cute enough, but it’s not someone that’s going to excite anyone other than fans of Euros in this style. That said, I really like the graphic design and artwork. I just understand that it’s not for everyone.

The solo mode is solid enough, and a great option if you want to learn the game and feel what it’s like to have your options reduced by another player. I know we can play two-handed, but there’s an inherent bias in your actions, whether you admit it or not. Teotihuacan is still my favourite game in the series, but I won’t turn down a game of Tabannusi with you. It’s a good game, and one that can hold its own in its T-tastic family. It’s just not going to make anyone go “Wow, that was incredible!”

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

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

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur (2021)

Designers: David Spada, Daniele Tascini
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120 mins

The post Tabannusi: Builders of Ur Review appeared first on Punchboard.

It doesn’t take a genius to guess that a game called Las Vegas Royale might have something to do with the gambling center of the world. As a Euro game fan, I’m used to games that have a very thin theme, but the theme on Las Vegas Royale is thinner than a Downing Street party excuse.

Topical humour. Can’t wait to see how that one ages in a few years time.

Dice, dice, baby

The concept behind Las Vegas Royale is so simple, it’s amazing it wasn’t used years before the original Las Vegas game. Each player rolls their handful of dice, picks one of the face-up values, and puts all their dice matching that number onto the casino with the same number. The casinos, in this case, are cardboard tiles around the central dice tray that comes with the game. Each casino has two, randomly chosen, money cards next to them. The person with the most dice in a casino after all the dice are placed, wins the higher value card. Second place gets the lower value card.

Reading that back, it doesn’t sound that exciting. It sounds like Heckmeck with dice. The piece of utter genius that Rüdiger Dorn injected into this game’s lifeblood is what happens with ties. Tied numbers of dice count for nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. The dice just get removed. When that happens it can mean that someone who left a single die their gets the big money, while everyone else is left licking their wounded pride.

That all sounds pretty simple, right? Fun for a round or two, then it goes back on the shelf to gather dust. Wrong. Las Vegas Royale’s simplicity isn’t a weakness, it’s its greatest strength, and it’s why I love the game so much.

Do one thing, and do it well

My wife and son aren’t the biggest board game enthusiasts in the world. The chances of me getting them to even consider playing a heavy Euro or something like that, are non-existent. Although it means I don’t get to play as many games with them as I’d like to, they make for an excellent litmus test. I setup Las Vegas Royale one night, and despite the obligatory eye rolls, we played. Well, slap my ass and call me Susan if they didn’t love it! We immediately played it twice more, and again on the following nights too.

Rüdiger seems to be able to turn his hand to any style of game, at any weight, and he’s sorely under-appreciated. Las Vegas Royale is a perfect example of this. I’ve introduced the game to other, experienced gamers who had never played it, and they’ve loved it too. The mechanisms in the game are so simple to teach, and so easy to understand and interpret. The gameplay is almost entirely emergent, and it’s so fast to come to the surface.

The lack of real theme, and the abstraction of what you’re doing in the game, make it something that literally anyone can enjoy. If you get tired of the main game, there are some neat ways to keep it fresh, too. There are a set of expansion tiles included in the box, which you can add to the lower-value casinos to expand them with new actions, and Vegas-related minigames. In my experience, some of these are better than the others, but there’s nothing to stop you having house rules about which stay in the box.

Final thoughts

Las Vegas Royale deserves a place in everybody’s game collection. If you’ve got family or friends who don’t like “Those complicated games you always try to get us to play”, this is the perfect game to get them playing something different. On the other hand, even the most hardcore of hardcore wargamers need light relief sometimes. Las Vegas Royale delivers this in spades.

I think the biggest problem the game has is with the name and styling. The original Las Vegas had one of the bright and cheery Alea boxes of the time, but this new version is sleek, black and gold, and very different to look at. There’s no immediate connection to the previous game, if you’ve played and enjoyed it and would be keen on an updated version. The other difficulty it faces is the fact that Lords of Vegas exists. Okay, it’s very hard to get hold of, but when you mention ‘dice game’ and Las Vegas in the same sentence, Lords of Vegas is the one you’ll get pointed towards.

These things notwithstanding, Las Vegas Royale is an excellent game. Simple rules, addictive gameplay, and one of those rare games that gets better the more players you have. Playing with three is fun, but playing with five is absolutely brilliant. Lightweight, quick, easy, and pretty much guaranteed to get anybody playing.

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

Las Vegas Royale (2019)

Designer: Rüdiger Dorn
Publisher: Alea / Ravensburger
Art: Antje Stephan, Claus Stephan
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Las Vegas Royale Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The Gig is a new mixture of genres to me. When it comes to board games, regular readers know I love roll- or flip-and-writes (I refuse to call them verb-and-writes), and while I’ve tried lots of different kinds, I’ve never played one with a real-time element. That kind of lunacy goes hand-in-hand with the Jazz Fusion vibes the  game’s art gives off. Have Braincrack Games got Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute in their hands, or something more like Ross’ keyboard?

More cowbell

The idea of The Gig is novel. Each player is a musician in the same band, but it’s a jazz improv band, and they all want to be the centre of attention. Each player’s instrument board is different, and the aim of the game is to cross out polyomino shapes on it, in order to score the most points. The biggest score at the end, wins. You know the drill.

In most games, the shapes you draw or place would be dictated by a symbol on a card, á la Hadrian’s Wall, or a cardboard tile, like in The Isle of Cats. In The Gig, however, each song (round) is a blank sheet of music. All players roll their dice at once, then the craziness begins. After rolling, you can pick up any number of your dice and plonk them on the row of the song which matches their values. It’s first come, first serve, so you need to be fast.

When all the dice are used, and your friends have stopped cursing each other for claiming the one place they desperately needed, it’s time to get your Bob Ross on, and get drawing. The shapes formed by your dice are the shapes you can draw on your instrument board, following a simple set of rules. Fill in your board, claim the bonuses, and get out under that spotlight as often as possible.

Nice…

The Gig is another departure from the more serious Euro games we’ve seen from Braincrack. Ragusa, Venice, and Florence are all great games, but after the light-hearted Last Resort, I’m really pleased to see them trying something different again. Not only trying, but succeeding. Before I go any further, I want to give a special mention to the artwork through the game. The styling is very cool, and so thematic, I love it.

The first song or two that you play feel a bit chaotic, but once you get the feel of it, and the way the dice interact with your boards, it’s a chaos you can embrace. It’s the difference between listening to freeform jazz and wanting to plug your ears with cheese, and suddenly understanding it and snapping your fingers in nodding appreciation, daddio.

It’s worth noting that there is an alternative, turn-based way to play the game. It’s great for teaching new players the game, and also if you’re playing with anyone who feels too pressured trying to place dice on the song sheet. If you can though, the real-time mode is definitely the way to go, it’s frenzied and hilarious.

Polytempo

One of the things I really like about The Gig is the asymmetry. Each instrument’s board is laid out differently, and each has its own way to score bonuses. It’s a really nice way to do things, as it’s going to take you a long time to figure out how to do each of them well. There’s this wonderful feeling that’s like doing the Hokey Cokey as a kid (or Hokey Pokey as my Transatlantic friends might know it). You all descend on the song on the centre of the table, rushing in to try to claim the spots you want, especially as many of them carry bonuses when claimed.

After that comes the calm, as your focus turns towards your instrument board, and trying to work out the best way to use the shape you created. It means there’s tons of interaction between the players, but there’s never any meanness or spite in it. You’re so focused on what you want to achieve, on your board, that any clashes on the song sheet are the result of both wanting something, rather than trying to deny someone of something. It’s a small, yet important detail, which makes the game a fun experience for everyone around the table.

Final thoughts

I really like The Gig. When Lewis (one of the designers and heads of Braincrack Games) tweeted about a new game that was a real-time roll-and-write, my interest was immediately piqued. When you consider the fact that the game is in no way a reflection of playing music at all, it’s remarkable that it feels so thematic. A lot of that is owed to the presentation and artwork. It screams ‘jazz club cool’, and it’s gorgeous. The songbook pages are really clear and easy to read, and even the box lid looks like an aged LP.

It does a great job of simultaneously feeling like a party game and a clever roll-and-write, which is no mean feat. There’s a stupid amount of variety in the game too, not just because you’re at the mercy of the dice gods, but also through the sheer number of combinations of songs and instruments. There aren’t many games around at the moment that give that same feeling of being a ‘proper’ game – for want of a better word – rather than a filler, and do it in half an hour. But that’s exactly what The Gig does.

Dávid Turczi has once again got his mitts on a game to make a good solo variant. While the solo mode is decent enough, and a good way to practice, the multiplayer mode is how to get the most out of it. So much of the fun and laughter comes from the madcap scramble to roll and re-roll your dice, over and over again, willing them to land the way you want. The Gig isn’t going to melt your brain, and I’m sure the theme might not land with everyone, but grab some friends and some smooth tunes, and you’re going to have a great time.

The Gig launches soon on Kickstarter. Register here to be notified when.

The Gig (2022)

Designers: Jamie Gray, Dann May, Robb Smigielski, Lewis Shaw
Publisher: Braincrack Games
Art: Dann May, Robb Smigielski, Lewis Shaw
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post The Gig Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

It’s a game from the Euro stable of Board&Dice, so you’d expect it to carry on their fine pedigree. For the most part, it does. The design from the mind of Adam Kwapiński (best known for Nemesis, and the upcoming Frostpunk game) feels like a natural fit among the likes of Tawantinsuyu and Zapotec, despite the slightly fantastical setting. Tracks to climb, resources to hoard, and more dice to chuck than a fight in a Yahtzee factory.

Space cadet

If you’ve seen any images of Origins, it’s likely that the first things that caught your eye were the colourful plastic discs at the top of the board. These are in fact, motherships, in classic retro-futuristic style, rotating above our planet. During the game players take turns to place their workers (dice) at the sites of the motherships in order to have encounters. Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with less mashed potato.

The alien visitors impart wisdom on your tribes, allowing you to build buildings and farms, increase your military might, and take on more spiritual pursuits by advancing up the zodiac temple tracks. Naturally, each of these things are interwoven with threads of dependency, meaning the benefits you gain doing one thing, often allow you to do another, and so on.

Right now, you might be reading this wondering “How is this different to any other Euro worker-placement game?”. The answer is in the way Origins uses dice as workers. It shares some DNA with its stablemate, Teotihuacan, is as much as the values on the dice can increase with certain actions, becoming more powerful as they do. The motherships rotate in-place with each action taken there, and the workers visiting must at least match the value of the pips shown on the highlighted section of the ship.

And therein lies one of the biggest problems with the game.

Space invader

The motherships, whose positions determine which actions you can or cannot take on your turn, have dice pips embossed on their outer ring. The pips are really hard to see at a glance, even for eyes younger than mine. It’s such a basic flaw that I’ve seen plenty of people online take a Sharpie to them, to make them legible. The irony here is that if the motherships had just been printed on the board, and a normal dice placed on top to achieve the same function, there would have been no problem. The plastic ships are over-engineered and superfluous.

The same is true of the plastic ‘population bases’ used, which are effectively dice holders. As each is unlocked, they move from one spot on your board to another, just above it. They don’t actually do anything practical, and could easily be written out of the game, and left us with one less fiddly thing to do during the game.

I’m also slightly irked by the military track. The track runs around the outside of a colosseum printed on the board, but nothing actually happens in the colosseum. It’s just a big, grey oval, which stays empty for the whole game. In the setup I have to place piles of dice, resources, and cards around the outside of the board, and leave a great big gap vacant, and… grey. It’s something that bothered me with the design of Dune Imperium too. Designers – use the space on the board before asking us to swamp our tables with more stuff.

Stars in your eyes

The reason I’ve been so vocal about my gripes, above, is because I really like Origins: First Builders. It’s a really nicely-made, reasonably heavy Euro game. It’s right in my wheelhouse, and it is painfully close to being a great game. There are a few imbalance issues in my opinion, but I think rules tweaks in the recently-announced Ancient Wonders expansion could fix these. In each game I’ve played so far, the winner seems to race away and win by a healthy margin.

The randomisation of the zodiac track cards are a curse and a blessing. They can make each game feel very different to the previous one, which is great, but the game length can vary quite a bit. The end of the game is triggered by player actions, and some of those actions get boosted by some of the available zodiac cards.

These minor grumbles aside, it’s a slick game which gives you tons of choices, and plenty of routes to victory. There are great opportunities to plan the building tiles for good bonuses and scoring, and there are some really clever things you can do with your workers. Promoting them past a value of six means they turn into advisors, and can be plugged into your player board to further expand your abilities. They can also occupy a ‘seat of power’, which is a gap in the junction where four buildings meet. These give more scoring chances, if the arrangement matches cards, and can activate building powers again.

There’s a lot going on, and a lot to like about Origins.

Final thoughts

If it sounds like I’m torn on Origins: First Builders, it’s because I am. I love the dice as workers, I love the various tracks and resource management, and I love the clever tile-laying puzzle of the buildings. The motherships’ lack of legibility is an irritation, more than a show-stopper, but it seems unbelievable that it didn’t get caught in playtesting. The same goes for the way the value of each resource token is printed in the middle of the tile, on top of the image of what it represents. I defy anyone to not accidentally pick up wheat when they meant gold, and vice-versa.

The game advertises a solo mode by David Turczi on the box, which got me really excited. Be forewarned however, that the mode in the box is a practice mode – you against your own score type of thing. If you want an ‘active’ automa opponent (which plays a very good game, by the way), you need to download it and print its player board and instructions yourself. You can get it here. It was a bit of a disappointment to not have it included. It’s something Praga Caput Regni did too, and I really hope it stops happening soon.

If you can overlook the over-engineered plastic pieces, and my other little bugbears, you’ll find a rock-solid Euro, worthy of the Board&Dice logo. Complex, easy-to-learn, and tons of indirect interaction, just like a good Euro should be. I’m really looking forward to the expansion, to see what it throws into the mix. Anyone who doesn’t like player-driven ending of games should keep an eye on it too, as one of the modules determines the length of the game. I like what Board&Dice are doing at the moment, they’re a great publisher, and Origins: First Builders is a crunchy, satisfying game.

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

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

Origins: First Builders (2021)

Designer: Adam Kwapiński
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter, Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

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