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

Lend a hand

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

I was wrong.

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

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

Elemental, my dear wossisface

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

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

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

First come, first served

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Mutagen (2025)

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

The post Mutagen Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Sakana Stack is set in the famous Tsukiji fish market in Japan, hence the name Sakana, which translates as fish. The idea of the game is that each player is trying to sell their catch to prospective customers, but in order to attract them to your fish instead of your competitors’, you need to put out the best stack of seafood. How does this translate to a card game? Well, each card has a value and a suit. The suits are colours and represent different types of fish; pufferfish, eel, scallops etc.

On your turn you need to place a stack of cards down. Each of the cards has to have the same value. If there’s another stack on the table though, you need to obey a couple of rules. Firstly, you need to follow suit or number. Secondly, you need to equal or beat the value of the other stack. That’s the core of the game, and while there are a few other things to consider (like being able to use the Catch of the Day card on top of the draw pile), understanding those concepts is all you need to get started.

Play the player

It only takes a round or so of Sakana Stack to get it. Once you understand how it works mechanically, you can start to work on your tactics, and there’s a lot of scope for tactical play. Right from your first turn, you have a lot of choices to make. In a game where you want to get rid of all of your cards as quickly as you can, it can be tempting to slap down all four of those 7s you’ve got in your hand. However, you might want to do just enough to beat the current stack and play just a couple of them, ensuring you have some higher-value cards left to play later.

Slapping down a stack with a value of 28 though, that’s powerful. Remember, the other players need to follow suit or value and at least equal the stack value. If you can’t do that you have to take that Catch of the Day card from the top of the draw deck into your hand, and the owner of the stack(s) on the table takes the top card of that stack and flip it face-down as a scoring card. Points for each round are based on how many cards you manage to score.

Despite my mini-grumble at the top about a lack of theme, you can kinda see it here. You can picture people continuously trying to one-up each other’s stacks of fish, and when one finally concedes (i.e. you can’t follow with a high enough value), the winning player is selling part of their catch, scoring points in the process. I mean, a card game like this is never going to win awards for the strongest theme implementation, but it still does it well. Let’s be honest though, nobody is buying a small card game for the theme. They live and die on how much fun they are and how much replayability they pack in.

Sakana Stack manages to tick both those boxes.

Final thoughts

I first came across Sakana Stack at this year’s UKGE, where I fell in love with the artwork. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the folks behind the desk, so I was delighted when Mike from Huff No More got in touch to see if I wanted to cover the game. I only had two niggles when I started playing the game. Firstly, I found the rules explanation a little hard to understand from the sheet included in the box. Bear in mind that this is still a preview copy of the game, and it’s likely that things will change between now and the final release of the game. Once you understand it though, it’s a breeze.

The second niggle is more of a personal thing, and that’s that I like it when a small game caters for two players too. When Sakana Stack landed on my doormat it was advertised as 3-5 players, which isn’t the end of the world, but a niggle nonetheless. But this is where playing with previews of games sometimes throws unexpected things your way, and this time it was Mike sending me a message to let me know the two-player rules have been added to the game. Nice! They work really well too, but I still prefer the game with four or five people. I like the fact that it takes longer for your turn to come around, and harder to score your own stack as points, which happens if it comes back to you and you have a stack in front of you.

It looks like the campaign (which you can keep track of here) is going to launch at about £14 for the game, which is a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had more play out of this than I have some games that cost twice as much. Sakana Stack is quick, easy, gorgeous to look at, and a lot of fun. It’ll join the likes of Scout and Tokkuri Taking (review here) in my convention bag for some time to come. Great stuff.

Preview copy kindly provided by Huff No More. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Sakana Stack (2025)

Design: Mike Petchey
Publisher: Huff No More
Art: Joss Petchey
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Sakana Stack Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

“Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak”

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

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

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

Get busy living, or get busy dying

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Fled (2024)

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

The post Fled Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Of elephants in rooms

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

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

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

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

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

Making tracks

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Explorers Of Navoria (2024)

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

The post Explorers Of Navoria Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Lucky for us then nobody is wearing the crown at the moment, as the previous king has apparently popped his clogs. Shuffled off this mortal coil. He is an ex-king. Each of you plays one of his heirs, hungry for power, climbing over one another to be the next monarch. In my head I’m picturing the Trial by Stone from The Dark Crystal, but with fewer Skeksis.

Land grab

The main board represents the regions of the kingdom. Having control of one or more regions at the end of an Autumn phase (rounds are broken into Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) grants you bonuses which help you get towards your ultimate goal, which is having 15 (20 in a two-player game) Influence Points, thereby claiming the crown.

The majority of what happens in the game is dictated by the cards the players use. A card has a strength value which is used during clash resolution (i.e. who wins control of a region), and typically a power or ability too. Already you might be able to see some similarities between this and other games. The first things that sprang to mind for me were thoughts like “Oh, so it’s a bit like Love Letter / Citadels / Vaalbara”, and those comparisons hold some weight, but there’s a lot more going on under the surface in The Old King’s Crown.

Turn order really matters. The first player has to commit to which Location they’re sending their Herald (the big wooden piece) as a statement of intent. It’s up to the other players to decide if they want to go toe-to-toe in the same location or try their luck elsewhere. It’s a small action, but it feels like there’s so much riding on it. Winning a region where your herald is can net you an influence point in addition to whatever the location gives you. If you contest a region where two or more heralds share a location, the winner gets to steal an influence point from the losers.

In a game where you might only need 15 points to win, a well-placed herald can result in a three-point swing, and that’s before you even take the location’s bonuses into consideration. So right away you’ve got these intriguing mind games. Is that herald there because they’ve got cards you’re never going to beat, or are they just full of bluster, hoping to scare you into contesting somewhere else instead?

Being last in turn order actually has a really good benefit, which is just another string to The Old King’s Crown’s bow. The last player chooses the order in which the three region’s clashes are resolved. It might not seem like that big of a deal, but some of the cards you play can have effects which bolster the strength of cards in adjacent regions. Those cards aren’t much use if the cards in those adjacent regions are revealed before your bolstering card, such is the power of choosing resolution order. There is no such thing as a dead action. Everything you do matters.

Follow your own path

Each of the factions in The Old King’s Crown has its own unique player board and despite sharing some common cards and abilities, is asymmetric. Not to the extent of something like Root (review here) or a COIN game like Cuba Libre (review here), but still with differences. Each has its own set of action tiles at the bottom of its boards, and each has its own site of power at the top of the main board, with new action cards to invest in as the game progresses.

It strikes a nice balance here. I know people who won’t play COIN games because understanding how each of four factions operates and wins is daunting. I find teaching those games difficult for precisely that reason. The Old King’s Crown dials those divergences down to a point where everybody has the same win conditions, and everybody knows how the clashes will be fought, but there are enough differences there to keep things interesting.

It’s funny because as a die-hard Euro game fan, wargames are where I’ll usually stray into confrontational, interactive games. This game feels and looks more like a Euro with its deck construction and player boards, yet it’s unashamedly in-your-face. The mind games are fantastic, and even in our first learning game my group found ourselves goading one another, daring rivals not to add their companies (wooden pieces that add to your strength in a region) to a region to ‘see what happens if you don’t’.

I haven’t even mentioned the Great Road kingdom cards yet, which you can claim and add to your player boards for new actions and abilities. You can claim them from the middle of the table, but if one of your opponents has one that you want, or one you simply want to deny them of because it’s such a pain in the ass to play against, you can outright steal it from them. This isn’t a game you can play head-down. You need to know what’s going on with everybody, all of the time.

No man is an island

It’d be remiss of me to not draw attention to the solo mode in The Old King’s Crown. I was dubious of how well it would work at first, knowing how cutthroat and confrontational the game is. Replicating that feeling in an AI deck of any kind is no small feat. However, with the help of solo specialist Ricky Royal, the solitaire mode is very good.

The opponent – dubbed Simulacrum – plays with a special deck and a ruleset that introduces very little overhead into the game. Regular readers will know there’s a dividing line for me, when running the artificial opponent for a game takes more time and brainpower than taking my own actions, and this one happily sits on the correct side of that fence.

Remarkably, the designers have managed to create a solo opponent which not only leaves you free to play in the same way as you would for the multiplayer game, but also seems to have its own personalities. It’s not like the cards are imbued with the souls of players, but it captures the idea of playing against someone who’s got their own intentions, not just randomly pulling cards and plonking things where fate decides. The Simulacrum’s cards have behavioural traits such as plotting and warmongering, and cards played in different phases combine (or not) in a way which feels natural.

Would I buy The Old King’s Crown just to play solo? For me, maybe not. The table talk and tension built by human beings is what makes the game truly outstanding for me. That said, the solo mode is excellent, and if you’d told me it had come from Morten and his Automa Factory, I’d have believed you in a heartbeat.

Final thoughts

I’m so pleased to see The Old King’s Crown get this far. I’ve been bumping into the guys from Eerie Idol games for years now, and the artwork has always caught my attention. The aesthetics and watercolour shades are absolutely gorgeous. We’re really spoiled here in the UK with indie studios at the moment, and the incredible design and art they’re bringing to games. I expect to hear lots of “This is their first game? Really??” once boxes start landing on tables.

Ultimately it’s a glorified bluffing game, but putting it in simple terms like that just highlights how much heavy lifting the word ‘glorified’ is doing. Strategising, adapting, and improvising all play a part. Customising your faction with the Great Road cards. Choosing if and when to invest in your site of power cards. Trying to remember if your rival across the table has already played that low-value card that assassinates your high-value one. Heck, some cards even let you claim other factions’ dead cards from the communal Lost pile and use them against their previous owners.

I had a hard time getting my head around some of the nuances and terms in the rulebook, but as with any preview I write, there’s a caveat that nothing is final, and things like the rulebook won’t be finalised for a while yet. While I don’t know exactly what Patrick and crew over at Leder Games did to help with development, knowing that a) they’ve been involved, and b) Pablo and the Eerie Idol team were sensible enough to involve them, is an indicator of the level of polish and quality you can expect.

With an easy-to-follow ruleset that leaves the majority of your brain free to plot and scheme, The Old King’s Crown is just wonderful. It’s the kind of game that you’d imagine would lead to some ‘kill the king’ when someone races ahead, and to some extent that’s true, but for every ally with a hand on your shoulder, you’d better believe they’re holding a stiletto tip at your ribs too. The Kickstarter goes live on October 24th 2023, and you can sign up to be notified of the launch right here. I suggest you do, I think this game is going to be deservingly huge.

Preview copy provided by Eerie Idol Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Old King’s Crown (2023)

Design: Pablo Clark
Publisher: Eerie Idol Games
Art: Pablo Clark
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post The Old King’s Crown Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

I didn’t either, but I do now because I read it on Wikipedia.

As well as basically keeping us all alive, diatoms are also extremely pretty. More than that, they’re beautiful. Diatoms have symmetry and come in all different shapes and patterns and during the 19th Century, some artists started creating mosaics from the microscopic wonders. This is a game about making your own patterns and mosaics from these curious creatures, and it’s as much fun as diatoms are gorgeous.

Hex appeal

Diatoms is a tile-laying game, pure and simple. There are two kinds of tiles to contend with. During your turn you’ll take one of the hexagonal tiles from one of the stacks, then add one of the tiles in your hand to the growing mosaic in the middle of the table. When you place a tile, the colours at the intersections of the tiles tell you which diatoms you get to claim from the little Petri dishes the game uses for storage (in the prototype copy I’m playing with at least).

Once you’ve got those unbelievably cute little diatom tiles in all their iridescent glory, you get to place them into your own mosaic board. There are a load of different scoring conditions based on what shapes and colours you place and where you put them, in the same way that classics like the Azul games do things. At the start of the game, there’s no wrong strategy to take here, it just depends on what you think you might be able to manage.

The kicker in Diatoms, the thing I really like, is the way that each of the spaces on the mosaic board can hold one of two different shapes. I can’t explain why, but I love this little detail so much. It’s almost the same feeling as doing those shape-sorting toys made for little children, but for adults instead. Because only an adult could cope with two shapes in one slot, right?

A head-scratcher

In principle it sounds like a really easy game, and in terms of taking your actions, and teaching others the game, it’s as easy as it sounds. Despite that level of ease, you’ll run into so many occasions where all you’ve got to do is place one or two little shapes, and there are only a few places they can go, but it’ll drive you batty trying to decide. This is down to the different scoring conditions I mentioned above. Agonising whether to try to get as many shapes of the same colour as possible, or to get a load of different shapes on a ring, or maybe going for symmetry, or a bit of everything… it’s so tricky to decide. Even more so when you add in the guest judge cards, which add even more ways to score points.

It gets easier with more plays, but it’ll still mess with your head, but in a nice way. It’s really hard to get annoyed when you’re playing with all of these pretty, pleasing pieces. They’re satisfyingly thick, and the finish on the (prototype) boards is really tactile too.

Planning is tricky, but not impossible, and I like the way that the multiple scoring objectives mean that you’re not totally screwed if someone starts gunning for the same things you wanted. It’s possible to branch into other scoring routes up until quite late in the game and still do well. That isn’t always the case in abstract strategy games, which is what Diatoms is.

Final thoughts

Diatoms found fame earlier in the year when the designer, Sabrina Culyba, won a Cardboard Edison award for it, and rightly so. The problem with many abstract games like this is because they’re exactly that – abstract. They make for fun games in their own right, but it’s extremely rare to find a cohesive link between the theme and the game. Diatoms manages precisely this, thanks in no small part to the game mimicking the way the real mosaics are made in the real world. Taking tiny, pretty things, and making a larger pretty thing with them.

There’s plenty of depth in the strategy, and in my experience so far it doesn’t seem to suffer from my usual bugbears in this sort of game. My plans aren’t totally ruined if someone claims the thing I had my eye on before I get a chance to (Azul), but I can still make those plans before the player directly before me makes a move (Mandala Stones).

It’s a game where I’m genuinely happy to sit back at the end of the game and just admire the thing I’ve made. It sits there, shimmering, and while it might not be complete or entirely symmetrical, it’s still something I made, and its inception was based on its aesthetics first and foremost, even if that was to comply with the scoring conditions. Art for art’s sake.

If this style of game is your thing, do yourself a favour and back Diatoms. It’s quick, fun, easy to learn and teach, and so, so pretty. Then google “diatom microscopic art” and enjoy your trip down that rabbit hole for a few hours. Diatoms – keeping us alive and providing inspiration for fun, who knew?

Diatoms is live on Kickstarter at the time of writing. You can check it out and back it right here.

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

Diatoms (2023)

Design: Sabrina Culyba
Publisher: Ludoliminal
Art: Sabrina Culyba
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Diatoms Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Malum Hortus is a cooperative game where you play nymphs, lured to a beautiful garden to frolic, or do whatever it is when nymphs have a few hours to kill. Some weeding, maybe? Things turn sour at night though. What seemed like a nice garden full of sweet perfumes and bright colours turns out to be an evil place, and after dark the plants are out to get you. Your goal is to get all of the nymphs out of the garden and to get the trapped woodland critters out with you ideally.

I bet you’re wondering how that happens.

Tiptoe through the tulips

Malum Hortus is a card-driven game. Each of the nymphs starts in the middle of the board on one of four paths that lead to the edge of the board. Each player gets to play a card during each round, with each round representing a day. Cards do all sorts of things, from moving the naughty plants away from you, to adding more magic tokens to the shared magic pool.

It’s a co-op game, so yes, of course things like magic are shared. So too are things like the power to move nymphs along the path. You don’t have to move your own character, you can move the others too. Magic is used to do a couple of things, namely freeing critters if you share the same space on the board with them, and also using your nymph’s unique power. After you’ve all taken an action and flounced along the garden paths (in my mind, flouncing is the way nymphs move), night descends on the garden and the plants take their turns.

The plants on the paths are bad, bad plants. Frightfully naughty plants. Think ‘Little Shop of Horrors meets The Triffids’. Each plant has a dice rolled for its movement, and should it move past or land on the same space as you, you take some damage. Poor nymphs! By this point you’ve got the idea, I think. Move nymphs, gain magic, free critters, and avoid horticultural entanglements.

From tiny acorns

Malum Hortus is a lightweight game, and the theme of fairies in the garden really helps it lean into its strengths. It’s a game I think will work great for families with young children. The theme is so light and friendly that even when something bad happens to the players, it’s never vicious. Take dying, for example. It doesn’t happen. The rulebook (which is subject to change) says:

“If a player reaches 0 health, you do not die, Malum Hortus is crueller than that, you must endure.”

It sounds harsh, but what it means in practical terms is that you don’t need to tell a child their nymph died. It wasn’t torn to shreds by some thorny mutant plant. It goes back to the middle of the board and you collectively gain a corruption token. If someone hits 0 HP and you’ve got the token, you all lose. So it’s not a game of “I’m alright Jack, I don’t fancy your chances though”. You win or lose together.

There aren’t too many games being released which fall into the intersection of the ‘co-op’ and ‘lightweight’ Venn diagram. For that reason, Malum Hortus is a great stepping stone towards other, more complicated cooperative games like Pandemic or Gloomhaven, as it starts to get players to look at the bigger picture, and to understand that they need to work towards the greater good.

Final thoughts

I’m conscious of the fact that I’ve stressed that Malum Hortus is on the lighter end of the complexity scale, but I don’t want that to take away from the fact that it’s a good game. It’s just not the game you’re looking for if you’re after something heavy with layer upon layer of complexity. Instead, you’ll play cards, move characters along paths, and do your best to outrun the ever-dwindling Night deck, which acts as a combination of event cards and game timer.

Designer Nikita’s previous game, Canine Capers (preview here) showed that lightweight, family-friendly games are still as important as ever. Malum Hortus feels like an evolution of those design principles, keeping things simple and familiar (the plants use roll-and-move), while simultaneously introducing concepts which are commonplace to nerds like me (hand management and co-op planning).

I really hope the final game expands on the lore and setting of the game, because the descriptive text on the night cards is well-written and atmospheric, and it makes me want to know more about the garden and its inhabitants and prisoners.

The actions are really easy to understand, thanks to the game’s iconography. Hopefully in the full game (I was playing an early prototype) there’ll be some changes to the rune card artwork, because even as someone with reasonable eyesight, some of the runes aren’t very legible. But hey, that’s all a part of working with a prototype, and a good reason why you should always take a preview with a pinch of salt, because things can and will change.

We had fun with Malum Hortus, and I think your family will too, especially if you’re trying to introduce them to modern games.

If you’d like to know more, you can head over to the Malum Hortus Kickstarter page and sign-up to be notified when it goes live.

Malum Hortus (2024)

Design: Nikita Sullivan
Publisher: Atikin Games
Art: Nikita Sullivan
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Malum Hortus Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

I’m not the biggest fan of most campaign games. They have a few things going on that don’t gel well with me, personally. Firstly, I find it hard to have the same group of people meeting regularly. I find the overhead of character customisation and tracking annoying. I don’t like the repetition of doing the same combat steps again, and again, and again. Mostly I don’t like how they are prohibitive to drop-in, drop-out play. I still enjoy campaign games, but those things are like grit in my shoe. Nothing that’s going to hurt, just an annoyance.

Midhalla makes some welcome changes to those things which go a long way towards alleviating my annoyances.

Keep your trap shut

My favourite thing that Midhalla adds is the element of tower defence. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a game style where enemies keep rolling in towards you, and you build defences to keep them at bay. One of my favourite games ever – Cloudspire (review here) – uses it. In one of the three phases of the game in Midhalla (more on those phases shortly) you get some preparation time between waves of bad guys. During this time you can buy and upgrade traps, positioning them in the dungeon to try to slow their encroachment towards your gate, which you’ve got to protect above all else.

Traps aren’t just single-use either, they’ll continue to work against the enemies until they destroy them, which is great, and really leans into the tower defence theme. As a group, you can decide during these preparation phases how you want to set up for the next assault, and it acts as a little breather. Breather is an apt term here too because Midhalla moves fast. Combat rounds are often over in 10 minutes and are really easy to run. I will give a quick overview of how the enemy turns play out because cumbersome enemy control drives me crazy in games.

First, you activate all of the enemies in the dungeon. There’s a specific order that is really easy to follow, but it’s a case of “Can the enemy attack the thing it targets (typically heroes or traps)? Yes? Okay, attack it. No? Okay, how about the gate, can it attack that? If it can, great, if not, just move onwards”. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have the basic enemy turns work like this. No complex way-finding. No charts of priorities. No list of exceptions. Just look at their card and do the thing.

Power up

My favourite thing in campaign games, whether they’re tabletop or digital, is when you unlock new powers and become more skilled in the art of ass-kickery. Midhalla doesn’t just tickle that little dopamine hit for me, it pulls the ripcord on a 2-stroke receptor stimulator. Each time you start a new part of the campaign, your characters are pretty basic. It’s not like Aeon’s End Legacy (review here) or Gloomhaven where you whip out your heavily modified character to take on the next chapter of the story. Your character sheets only have some pretty basic actions on them, which might sound rubbish, but they don’t stay that way for long.

The basic gameplay loop has three main phases: Exploration, Preparation, and Combat. During exploration, you’ll draw new tiles to add to the dungeon, each time reading the appropriate section of the campaign book to explain what you found. It’s a pretty cool system that gives you ideas about how you might want to explore and fortify. You might read a section that talks about noises from the west, so maybe you choose to keep exploring in that direction to find out what kind of a something makes those noises.

I touched on the preparation and combat phases earlier and won’t go into it more for now, because the fun stuff happens after those three phases when you come to the rewards step. The reward phase is when you get to prepare one of the ultimate abilities you might have used, do the same with items, remove status effects, and most importantly – for the control freaks like me – level your character up. Levelling up is as simple as drawing a couple of cards from the next skill tier up, choosing one, and putting it in a space on your character board. Instant power!

I love this way of doing things. It means you get more powerful as each chapter progresses, not like Gloomhaven where you’re thinning your deck out constantly, barely surviving an encounter with a sole ability left. Midhalla makes me feel powerful, and that’s a great feeling to get from a game like this. You’re going to need that power, too, because once you’ve levelled up you do it all again, and then again a third time. Exploring, placing traps and monsters, fortifying, fighting. The dungeon starts to sprawl, waves and waves of monsters begin to bear down on you, and the event cards you draw add a little bit of spice to the proceedings.

Interestingly, and brilliantly, the events are just about the only random things that happen during the game.

Determination

If you read and watch a lot of Midhalla previews I’m willing to bet five whole Pounds that you’ll hear a two-word phrase used a lot: ‘deterministic combat’. Sounds like a smartypants, big-brain thing to say, right? “I really like Midhalla because of the deterministic combat” – dinner party conversation gold right there.

What does it actually mean though?

When a game is deterministic it means that there are no random factors to the play. No dice rolling. No blind drawing of cards. No spinning a wheel of fortune and hoping for the best. In Midhalla this means that you know everything that’s going to happen in each cycle of play before it even happens. You know which enemies are in which locations. You know what they’ll attack, from how far, if they’ll move or not, and how much damage they’ll do. You know which traps will survive, where you can move, what you can do, and how much damage you can do.

Now, when it’s written like that, it doesn’t sound like much fun. It sounds like a giant spreadsheet that you can sit down and puzzle out with a pen and a piece of paper. And in fairness, you actually could. If you’re just that much fun that your idea of a good time is to run through every permutation possible to see what works, then you go for it. For the rest of us though, the reality is that you’re only really planning a few turns ahead at most. You know some baddies are miles away, so you don’t think about them until they’re getting close enough to cause you a headache.

It’s a really fresh take for a dungeon crawler. I realise there might be other examples out there, but to me, it’s something new and interesting. It makes me wonder why more of them aren’t done this way.

Final thoughts

Midhalla wasn’t a game I knew anything about when I first spoke to Eike, one of the designers. Coming into a game fresh like that is the way I always choose to do things when I can because I go into it having no expectations. If I had had any expectations, however, it’s fair to say that Midhalla would have blown them out of the water. Even playing with a prototype with thin card standees was an atmospheric, exciting experience.

I love that it has answers for so many of the things I don’t enjoy about campaigns. The rinse-and-repeat combat is broken up with preparation phases and setting up traps, and acquiring new skills mid-game. The feeling of getting more and more powerful in a short period of time is great, and the speed it plays out is so snappy, it keeps me invested more easily. Exploration is quick and adds flavour and atmosphere through the campaign book. Preparation is a proper team event, deciding on how best to defend your gate. Combat rattles through quickly and painlessly, and it’s all tied together with a player aid which honestly tells you everything you need to play the game, including all the status effects. Chip Theory Games would do well to see how to handle status effects without making it all but incomprehensible at times.

The combination of enthusiastic, colourful world-building and a story that looks like it’s going to deliver on the narrative front, and a smart, clean, efficient game design is an absolute winner. Maybe the Viking theme does nothing for you, but that’s personal taste. As far as whether you should take a punt on Midhalla – yes. The game is fun, it’s easy to learn. Your friends can drop in and out and take a character from a weakling to a hulking man-bear made of fists and axes without tainting someone else’s precious hero. The tower defence aspect is nicely done, and I love, love, love playing one of these games where luck doesn’t play a factor. Fyrnwest games have created something special, and for the money they’re asking for it, it seems like a bargain.

The Kickstarter campaign for Midhalla is running now and runs until September 13th 2023. Click here to jump across and take a look at it.

Prototype copy kindly provided by Fyrnwest Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Midhalla (2023)

Design: Eike J. Meyer, Michael Meyer
Publisher: Fyrnwest Games
Art: Phan Tuan Dat, Nicholas Koo, Nikoloz Baloo Kuparadze
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-180 mins

The post Midhalla Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

The 7 Ps

Some of you probably know a variation of the 7 Ps as I know them: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Planning is at the core of Crumbs, and you’ll probably lose if you don’t do it well.

The game is a small deck of cards and some wooden markers. The cards are double-sided: one side shows a sandwich ingredient, and the other has hungry customers’ orders. On your turn, you can pick up all the prepped ingredients of a single kind – bread, eggs, ham, etc. – and plonk them into your preparation area. It doesn’t take an efficiency expert to understand that it makes sense to be able to put the same ingredient in multiple sandwiches at the same time, especially once you understand that you only get five actions.

The good news is that once you complete an order you get a fresh set of five actions, and you get a free restock of one of the types of ingredients you’ve used. It doesn’t take long before the wheels start to come off the sandwich machine though, especially when you get orders with a lot of different ingredients. Ingredients are hard to come by, and although you can use an action to restock an ingredient, that’s 20% of your actions used. Yikes!

Yes, Chef!

Thanks to Crumbs’ small size and small deck of cards, it’s a concentration of an efficiency puzzle – a reduction if you will. It’s extremely easy to teach and to understand, and for your first couple of orders you’ll have a feeling of “This is easy!”. That feeling doesn’t last long though, especially if you’ve got some of the more difficult order cards in your queue.

If you’re the sort of person who likes a bit of randomness thrown into their games, some luck and a bit of “Let’s see what happens now”, Crumbs probably isn’t the game for you. If, however, you’re the type of person who loves a solvable puzzle, you’re going to love Crumbs. It’s like a Perfect Information game. The only unknown at the start of a game is the orders on your second order card. You can start the game, stare at the orders and ingredients, and plan ahead to complete everything you can see.

Unfortunately, this leads to what I consider to be the game’s weakest point. While you’re planning your mental to-do list, there are times when you’ll realise that what’s left to do is impossible with your remaining actions. Sure, it’s almost certainly because your planning was about as good as a tuna and marmalade sandwich, but it’s a really damp way to end a game. Like when someone puts something too wet in your sandwich and you think “You know what? I don’t want to finish this”. It is what it is I guess, I just don’t like the feeling of packing a game away knowing I didn’t actually finish it. It’s like the game’s disappointed in me.

Final thoughts

I’ve just been away for a few days with my family, and when I was packing I was looking through my games collection to decide what to take. Invariably it’s small box games. Crumbs epitomises everything that a good small box game should be. It’s small enough that you could happily play it on a fold-down plane table, it’s quick to setup and play, and it packs a really clever puzzle into its 18 cards. It’s important to reiterate just how small this game is. The cards, instructions, and ten wooden pieces fit inside a tuckbox that’s thinner than a standard deck of cards.

I’ve gone back and forth between preferring the solo and two-player co-op modes of play. The solo game is great, but the most prone to that problem I mentioned about that reminds me of Rell from Krull. You remember Krull? That early ’80s film? Rell was a cyclops whose people traded one eye to be able to see the future, but the only future they can see is their own death. That’s what I feel like when I’ve got four actions left and know that I can’t complete another sandwich. Melodramatic? Moi?

The co-op mode is really good fun. You’ve each got half the ingredients so you need to pass items back and forth to one another, and it introduces a ton of chatter and planning. What it comes down to is whether Crumbs: A Sandwich Filler Game is worth the £15 (£12 if you back the campaign) it costs, and the answer is a resounding Yes. The enigmatically named J. Antscherl has combined with Minerva Tabletop Games’ development and experience, and Rory Muldoon’s fantastic illustration-style artwork to make a fantastic debut game. You can back it from 8th August 2023 on Kickstarter by clicking right here.

Preview copy kindly provided by Minerva Tabletop Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game (2023)

Design: J. Antscherl
Publisher: Minerva Tabletop Games
Art: Rory Muldoon
Players: 1-2
Playing time: 10-20 mins

The post Crumbs: The Sandwich Filler Game Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Deep Impact

The first thing you’ll notice about the game is the collection of big, squishy dice. Asteroids? Diceteroids? Whatever, they’re squidgy, vibrant, and they look like they were made for giants with anger issues. They’re also incredibly tactile. I mean seriously, seriously good fun to play with. In the aforementioned burrito game, the titular burritos were also squishy, but not in a ‘toss up and down in your hand’, fiddly, juggley, kind of way, not like these asteroids. You’ll notice that the asteroids include all the standard dice types for a tabletop RPG. You’ve got a D6, D8, D10, D12, and a D20, which is really cool. Firm bouncy, and satisfying to play with, like so many of the best things in life. They might even be the gentle nudge you need to get your hardcore D&D friend to emerge from behind their GM screen and engage in some primal tomfoolery.

Playing the game is simple enough that the rules are printed on a three-fold sheet of paper. Everyone plays a card from their hand, face-down, and then they’re all revealed. Most show one of the dice on them, and there are a couple of special cards too. If yours is the only card showing a particular die – congratulations! – you just take it. If two or more of you play the same card, however, it’s battle stations. The players who matched scramble to grab that die and throw it at the other person. Imagine Cobra Paw, but you could throw the tile at the other people. If you hit the other person, you add the loser’s card to your score pile. If you miss, you can expect it to be picked up and returned with all the haste of a Happy Meal box full of turds.

When everybody has licked their wounds, and the losers take what’s left in the pool of unclaimed dice, you move on to the part where you score the majority of the points. The player with the die with the most sides throws it onto the table. Then the next biggest die, and so on. The trick here is to aim to knock the other dice to change their scores. There is nothing as satisfying as picking up your feeble D6, aiming at the D20 with an 18 or something ridiculous on it, and knocking it down to single figures. Even if you don’t win the round, there’s this delicious, spiteful part of your brain which is doused with dopamine when you prevent some smug git from winning. It’s a glorious feeling, and it abounds in Asteroid Dice.

Abounds, I tell you!

Final thoughts

This was never going to be a big review. It’s a game about chucking squidgy things at your mates. I’ve just posted reviews of Skymines (here) and Beyond The Sun (here) which are space games that take themselves seriously, but Asteroid Dice is a stupid, raucous blast. Throwing stuff at people is fun, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. I’ll fight them with squidgy dice from 3ft.

The best advice I can give you if you’re thinking about backing the game, or picking it up if you’re reading this post-Kickstarter, is to consider two things. Firstly, who will you play it with, and secondly, where will you play it? If your answer is ‘With the elderly and toddlers in a china & knife warehouse”, then it’s not for you. In all seriousness though, some people don’t like any kind of conflict at all, so be mindful of who’s around the table, and what space you have to play it in.

Asteroid Dice is silly and funny, and I can see it getting plenty of play in the garden and at barbecues over the summer. It’s a great game for non-gamers too if they’re willing to give it a go. While I wouldn’t necessarily endorse my own house rules for playing with my oldest mates of ‘loser takes a drink’ and ‘headshots only’, we certainly had a blast with it. It’s a game which won’t take up a lot of space and packs a lot of fun into a few cards and squodgy blocks. I’m looking forward to seeing what Camden Games come up with next.

The Kickstarter campaign starts on May 23rd 2023, and you can find it right here.

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

Asteroid Dice (2023)

Design: uncredited
Publisher: Camden Games
Art: uncredited
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Asteroid Dice Preview appeared first on Punchboard.