Those of you who don’t like reading too much will be pleased to know this is going to be a short review, but one which carries as much opinion as ever.

Flower power

Lacuna comes in a cardboard tube. A bit like a big tube of Pringles, but with far fewer calories. I mean, probably, I’ve not studied the nutritional values of wooden flowers, of which there are loads. Flowers are in groups of colours (with different shapes and patterns too, colour-blind players) and at the start of the game they’re sprinkled from the tube on the included cloth. The aim is to spread them across the whole area, and it’s an action not akin to shaking salt on an icy driveway, or fish and chips. It’s an innately enjoyable thing to do, and while it feels like it’s prone to flowers bouncing off the table, never to be seen again, the publishers thankfully saw fit to include some spares. Hurrah!

The game from there is dead easy. Take one of your metal pawns (which feel weighty and gloriously tactile) and put it somewhere between two matching flowers. The only rule is there can’t be anything else along that imaginary line, be it another flower or another player piece. You then pick up the two flowers you intersected and add them to your pile of claimed flowers.

Play continues over the next few minutes until both players have placed all of their pawns. Then we get to the fun bit. The meaty bit. The bit which really makes Lacuna sing and makes you want to say “Okay, okay, I get it now, let’s set it up again and play another.”

Proximal approximations

After all the pawns are out on the cloth playfield and the initial flowers are in neat little stacks beside each player (or a jumbled mess – which type are you?) you both work your way through all the remaining flowers on the table and decide who has one of their pieces closest to it. That person claims the flower and adds it to their collection. As you might guess, sometimes it’s a very close-run thing, which is why there’s a ruler included in the tube. Despite the measuring device being given to you, you’ll still have the occasional disagreement, but that’s okay.

Once every flower has been considered and claimed, the winner is the person who has the majority of the flowers in each colour is considered to have won that colour. The person who wins the most colours wins the game. That’s all there is to the game. Place six pawns each, pick up the flowers and see who won.

Despite the simple gameplay there’s a wonderful, nuanced level of depth to Lacuna. Not to the levels of something like Chess or Go, but enough to make you come back time and again. There’s a surprising amount of strategy involved. Take the act of placing a pawn for example. It can go anywhere along the imaginary line between two flowers to claim them, so you might put your pawn right at the very end, knowing that it sets you up nicely to claim a cluster of nearby flowers at the end of the game, for being the closest.

Wouldn’t you just know it though, your opponent does everything in their power to claim that little posie you had your eye on, so by the end of the game you’re left with a scant single daisy, instead of the bouquet you had your heart set on. You’ll also start noticing what colours the other player has claimed. Once they claim four of one (there are six flowers per colour) type, there’s no point in claiming that colour any more, because you can never win it. Set your sights elsewhere instead and see if you can make it work for you. Simple concepts you can explain to anyone, but ones which feel clever when you employ them.

Final thoughts

Like I said at the outset, this was never going to be a long review. It’s a quick, easy, wonderfully accessible game suitable for just about anyone. What Lacuna does so well is to build on its novelty factors to transform it from just another two-player abstract game, to something that you’ll return to again and again. There are so many clever design concepts used to make sure that’s the case.

The cylindrical ‘box’ means it’s never going to get lost in a sea of rectangles on your shelf. The cloth playmat can just be scrunched-up and stuffed back inside afterwards. Sprinkling the flowers from the tube to perform game setup is enjoyable. The metal pawns are hefty and fun just to hold. All these little things combine to make a game whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If it was the same game but used cardboard chits on a board, it would still have been enjoyable, but nowhere near as joyful to play, and that’s an unusual idea for me to wrap my head around.

Lacuna is a hit with my family and with anyone I’ve ever introduced to it. Will it be the main course of your games night? Probably not. Will it be the quick filler you return to again and again, or the post-Christmas dinner fuel for family interaction on the dining table? Absolutely. Lacuna is a joyful, simple, beautiful game which I’d argue deserves a spot in anybody’s collection for the £20 it’ll cost you.

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

Lacuna (2023)

Design: Mark Gerrits
Publisher: CMYK
Art: Nick Liefhebber
Players: 2
Playing time: 10 mins

The post Lacuna Review appeared first on Punchboard.

I’m a big fan of a publisher taking an established game and making a smaller, portable version of it. Being able to take games like that on holiday, on the train, or even just to the pub for an hour is a real boon. Qawale Mini manages to do just that. It’s the same game you might already know and love, but smaller.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of negative points to consider when you’re deciding whether it should join you backpacking around Europe, or down at the Dog and Duck for a swift jar or two on a Tuesday night.

Stone me! That’s easy

Qawale takes all of two minutes to explain to someone. On your turn you take one of your stones (or wooden pebbles as they are in reality) and put it on top of any other stack on the board, even if it’s just a stack of one. Then you pick that stack up, move around the board orthogonally, dropping a stone from the bottom of the stack onto each space as you go. Possibly filling blank spaces, possibly covering other stones. If you make four in a row of your colour, you win. Go you! Ring your mum and tell her the good news.

Each space on the board is actually a little raised bump with a flat top. It not only makes the game more interesting to look at, but serves a practical purpose too. Because each stack is raised off the board, it makes it easier to get your fingertips under the bottom stone to pick the stack up. It’s a clever bit of the game’s development which I admire.

The board itself is only 4×4, and it means that games don’t last long. You’ve only got 8 stones each, so there’s a maximum of 16 turns in a game, but in reality, you’ll normally finish with a winner before that happens. It reminds me of games like Kamisado, which I previously reviewed. Play the game, win or lose, and setup again a few minutes later. Games like that are great. They never outstay their welcome and give you the chance to try to adapt your strategy again straight away. Qawale is fast, easy, and a lot of fun.

But…

There are a couple of sticking points which, while not enough for me to not recommend the game to you, are things you need to consider. First of all you’ve got the smaller size to contend with. The wooden stones are smaller and lighter than their full-size counterparts which makes them far easier to knock over. They’ve got a lovely sheen on them, but it reduces the friction to a point where the slightest nudge can knock a stack over. If that falling stack knocks over another, forget about it. There’s no way you’ll remember exactly what was where, and in what order. Comparing Qawale Mini to its big brother is like having a stack of Mini Cheddars next to a stack of Rich Tea biscuits. Which is more stable?

This might be a non-issue for you. I’ve got great big strangler’s hands, however, which turns playing Qawale Mini into a mixture of abstract and dexterity all in the same game. The diminutive size of everything also means the whole game is more susceptible to being ruined if someone bumps into your table, or plonks a bowl of chips down next to your pints. It’s not the end of the world, it only takes a few seconds to set up again, but it can be very frustrating.

The other issue I’ve come across is the colours in the game. One player has the light stones, which are nearly white, and the other has the dark stones, which are a dark teak colour. There’s a third set of stones on the board, the neutral ones, which populate the board to get the game going and to later act as blockers, and all-around nuisance pieces. These neutral pieces are a sort of tan colour, and if you’re playing in dim or warm-white lighting they become almost impossible to tell distinguish from the light pieces. Again, it comes down to setting. Qawale Mini is a game to play anywhere, but on the sofa with the lights dim in the evening, or on my son’s bed before he goes to sleep in my case, or a dark pub, and you’ll end up taking a black sharpie to one colour to make marks to make the game playable.

Less than ideal.

Final thoughts

There’s no need for a long review here. Qawale Mini is a quick, easy, two-player abstract strategy game with a ton of scope for tactics. Despite my moans above, I really, really like the game. My whole family really likes it. It’s how we ended up in situations like playing it in bed, which is where both problems happened together.

If you’re looking for a fast, fun two-player abstract game which you’ll normally play on your normal table, go for the normal version of Qawale. It’s really enjoyable and you won’t suffer from the same problems I mentioned above. But if you really want that cute little box and board you can take anyway, Qawale Mini is a great choice. Just make sure you’ll play it somewhere well-lit and somewhere stable.

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

Qawale Mini (2023)

Design: Romain Froger, Didier Lenain-Bragard
Publisher: Gigamic
Art: Uncredited
Players: 2
Playing time: 10 mins

The post Qawale Mini Review 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.

Each player starts with the same starting tile of hexes and then takes turns choosing a tile made of three adjacent hexes from the display, before adding them to their city. The new tiles either go adjacent to the existing ones or if you’re feeling fruity, you can put them on top of the existing ones. As long as nothing overhangs and the new one sits on at least two different tiles, you can plonk stuff wherever you like. You just have to bear a couple of things in mind when you do that.

Kill your darlings

When you cover a hex with a tile to build higher, the thing you cover is no longer visible, and therefore no longer worth any points. The things you put on that higher level, however, are now worth two points a piece, or three for a higher level, etc. Sometimes covering hexes is a good thing. If you cover a white hex, which is a quarry, it gives you a white cube (stone) which you can spend when you claim tiles from the market. In time-honoured tradition, the first tile in the market is free, and as you move down the line, they become more expensive.

As soon as you come to build on top of the bottom layer you’ll start to understand the delicious agony of the decisions you have to make. At some point you won’t be able to just cover quarries, you’ll start to cover the yellow, purple, green, or other colour hexes too. The different colours are meant to be different kinds of buildings, like temples and gardens, but it’s so abstracted as to be meaningless. All you need to know is red hexes score if they’re on the outside of your city, yellow if they don’t touch another yellow, yada, yada, yada.

Tiles don’t just automatically score points though. No, that would be far too easy. Instead, you need to also add plazas to your city. Plazas are coloured hexes with a number of stars in them, which multiply scoring tiles of the same colour by the number of stars on them. Are you still with me? I hope so. It’s not really that difficult to understand once you start, but by crikey does it make you make difficult choices.

Spatial awareness

Akropolis would be tricky enough if was just a case of planning your own city because there are a buttload of decisions to make with every single tile choice and every single tile placement. After you’ve got the hang of playing, you’ll find yourself surveying the other players’ cities almost as much as your own. There are only so many of each plaza and each building, so if you find yourself too far invested in red for instance, only to find another player is doing the same thing, the competition for those tiles is huge.

It’s somewhere in the midst of all that the Akropolis elevates itself from what could have been a run-of-the-mill tile-laying abstract game to something a bit special. Trying to make sure you’re generating enough stones for the next round so you’ve got your pick of the tiles, while not covering up your precious scoring hexes. Figuring out how to lay the foundations for future elevated buildings while not letting your opponents rack up the points. Choosing which colours you’re going to concentrate on at an early stage in the hope of getting a serious score while never knowing what the next stack of tiles brings. It sounds like a random mess, and a lack of being able to plan usually turns me off of an abstract game, but in Akropolis it just works.

Final thoughts

Akropolis surprised me with just how much I enjoyed it. I saw it demonstrated at various conventions over the last year or so, and while I saw everyone enjoying it, I didn’t really get it. You may not too, not to look at. Playing it makes you realise just how clever the design is, and how much fun it can be to agonise over every tiny thing. Your city is uniquely personal, and you’ll come up with new and inventive ways to try to maximise your score each time you play.

Even though what you make never really feels like a city, you’ll find yourself getting attached to your own little towns. I love going around the table for final scoring and seeing the different shapes and styles of building the other players have gone for. I have to give a special mention to the tiles themselves, the stars of the show, because they feel so lovely and tactile. They look like thick cardboard, but they feel so much nicer. Almost clunky, or clacky, or whatever the right adjective is. They’re satisfyingly hefty and won’t make a chaotic bid for freedom if someone bumps the table gently.

If you tire of the base game (something I haven’t done yet, despite playing it lots in real life and on BGA), there are some neat variants in the back of the rulebook that spice up the scoring conditions. Not enough to feel confusing, but interesting enough to make you plan and place things differently. It plays nicely enough at two, but I think three or four is the sweet spot. It adds more tiles to the market and stones to pay for expensive tiles are harder to come by than in the two-player version. It’s short and quick, so it might not be the show-stopper game you invite everyone to games night to play, but it’s great at the start or the end of a night to fill half an hour with a decent workout for your noggin.

Akropolis is a great game. It’s very easy to understand why it sells out very quickly. When it’s in stock, you can pick it up from my retail partner, Kienda.co.uk, for around £20, which is a steal for a game this good.

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

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

Akropolis (2022)

Design: Jules Messaud
Publisher: Gigamic
Art: Pauline Detraz
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Akropolis Review appeared first on Punchboard.

For reference, I played the recently-released Korean edition of Kamisado, which might be different to the version you’ve seen or played.

I remember when I got into modern board games 15 years ago, one of the first games I picked up was Hive. It was a revelation to me because I hadn’t played a ‘new’ abstract game, and my experience was limited to games like Draughts, Chess, and Chinese Checkers – all of the standard games people of my age grew up playing. I didn’t realise that people still made new abstract games. From there it led to those games with their names all in capitals: GIPF, DVONN, YINSH. All of them are great games, but they were difficult to relate to non-gamers in the sense of not being able to say “It’s a bit like…”.

Chess? Draughts? Kinda, but not quite

When you look at the Kamisado board it’s obvious that colour plays a big part in the game. It’s not just for the sake of looking pretty. The colours of the squares and the colours of the playing pieces are intrinsically linked. To explain why I need to tell you how the game works, and being able to explain how to play so easily is the game’s greatest strength – its low barrier to entry.

Each of your pieces can move forwards in a straight line, or on a 45-degree diagonal. They can move as far as you like, as long as they don’t move through another piece. Whatever colour square you land on dictates which piece your opponent has to move. For instance, if my piece lands on a red square, you have to move your red piece. If either player gets one of their pieces to their opponent’s side of the board, they win.

That’s it, that’s the whole game of Kamisado explained. It’s that simplicity which makes it so good though. I taught my son how to play it in a couple of minutes, we played a full game in less than five minutes, and then we played again. And again. And again. You get the idea. It’s so immediately engaging and so addictive. It’s a genius piece of game design on the part of Peter Burley. It feels like Draughts on Speed meets the French Military Game (Hare and Hounds if you’ve played Nintendo’s 51 Worldwide Games). It’s a game of simultaneously trying to hold your line while breaking your opponent’s. I love watching Rugby, and it reminds me of that.

Lasting appeal

There’s plenty to keep Kamisado from gathering dust on your shelves. The most obvious thing is the full game, whereby a tile that wins a round gets flipped to a side with a ring around it. These are Sumo pieces, which can only move five spaces, but can shunt pieces directly in front of them. Get three Sumos, you win, or get one Sumo to the other side, you also win.

There’s something about playing the game which just feels good. Each time you move it feels really powerful to be able to slide right the way across the board in one move. This feeling of power is tempered somewhat by the inevitable “Oh no, I can’t go backwards now!” realisation that comes afterwards, but it’s a lot of fun regardless. There’s another nice touch in the box in the form of numbered tiles, which, when drawn, give you alternate setups in the rulebook. It’s only a small thing, but it keeps the game fresh, which is important in a game which can be played 15+ times in an hour.

Final thoughts

Kamisado is a fantastic game. It’s a game I could buy as a gift for anyone, and know they could get have a lot of fun with it. In a hobby as niche as tabletop games can be, this level of universal appeal is pretty unique. I’ve always seen the little castle-shaped pieces in the older versions of Kamisado, but I’ve got to say that I think I prefer the bakelite tiles that come with the Korean version. The inlaid icons are clean and colourful, and they have that same wonderful ‘clack’ as the pieces in games like Hive, Mahjong or Bananagrams.

The icons on the board and pieces mean that it’s a game which works with any type of colour blindness too, which is great. Anything which keeps our hobby accessible is a good thing. The rulebook seems unnecessarily long when you open the box. In reality, you only need about 10% of the book to learn how to play though, the rest is set up scenarios and details of how to play in competitive situations.

Put simply, Kamisado is my favourite abstract game. The presentation, ease of learning, depth of strategy, and table presence all add up to a wonderful game. If you can get it (which you can in the UK from Burley Games direct), you should get the Korean version. The artwork and presentation are beautiful, and there’s something about the flat, squat tiles which is almost unbearably tactile. What a wonderful game, and one I have no hesitation in recommending.

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

Kamisado (2008)

Designer: Peter Burley
Publisher: Burley Games
Art: Peter Dennis, Steve Tolley
Players: 2
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Kamisado Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Where’s the rest of it?

That was my first thought when the box landing through my letterbox. And yes, I mean letterbox. Cryptid: Urban Legends is a much, much smaller game than the original. One which happily fits in your pocket. If you’ve been interested in the game, and wanted to keep it all a surprise, there’s a couple of things you should know.

Firstly, yes, it’s a much smaller game. There’s no board at all, just cards and some marker tokens. Secondly, this puppy is two-player only. The original game was for three to five players (although there’s a decent official two-player variant too, Cryptid fans), so you can tell right from the get-go that this is a very different beast cryptid. The thing I want to touch on first, is that Urban Legends isn’t a deduction game.

*gasps of astonishment*

Cryptid: Urban Legends is an abstract, asymmetric puzzle game, and it’s a tricky one.

Finding Mothman

The cryptid (it’s definitely Mothman) is trying to escape the city. I’m not sure why, maybe it overstayed its welcome at the local Premier Inn or something. The scientist is trying to capture the cryptid by placing sensors around city blocks, and narrowing options down to only one space they could be hiding in. That might sound like deduction, but in reality, it’s more like forcing Checkmate in Chess. The sensors are just coloured cubes, and the game consists of trying to build patterns of cubes if you’re the cryptid, and destroying patterns if you’re the scientist.

In each turn you play a card from your hand which lets you move the cubes from one side of the city block, to the opposite side. There are three different ways to move them, which can result in a lot of different ways to shift the balance one way or the other. The city blocks are square cards laid-out in a two-row checkerboard pattern, and in each round the cubes shift from one side to the other, some cards get removed, others added, but it’s essentially just shifting them back and forth.

The one major plus point this gives the game is that it has a tiny footprint. You could play this on a train, in a pub, or maybe on the head of someone much shorter than you. It’s also a much shorter game than its forebear, which is good, because if you enjoy the game, you’re going to need to play it lots of times.

Box of illusions

Cryptid: Urban Legends is a bit of a mystery in its own right. When you open the little box and take out a few pieces and a small number of cards, it looks simple. The rulebook is tiny and friendly-looking too. But there’s something about learning the game that is almost indescribably difficult. Not that it’s so difficult you’ll never understand it, more that it’s very hard to pin down exactly what is so difficult. I mean, there are three actions you can take in the entire game – what’s so difficult about that?

The difficulty is something which can only be overcome through repeated play. Its trickiness is the result of needing to understand your own win condition, your opponent’s, and how best to manipulate the space in front of you to win. I read parts of the rulebook three or four times while playing my first game, just to try to hammer home what I needed to do.

If you come into Urban Legends expecting a two-player, abstract, tug-of-war, I think you’re going to love it. If you’re expecting clues, a process of elimination, and some real gosh-darned deduction, you’re going to be disappointed. One thing’s for sure though, and that this game is an attractive little creature. The cubes and discs are irresistibly tactile, and Kwanchai Moriya’s artwork is – as always – fantastic.

Final thoughts

Cryptid: Urban Legends’ biggest problem is its name. A lot of people are going to see the name in online stores, think “Oh boy, more Cryptid!”, and feel a sense of disappointment. That’s a result of the original game being so good, and this new upstart being so fundamentally different to its parent. While Urban Legends isn’t a deduction game, what it is, is a fantastic two-player duel, which really rewards time invested in it.

It’s one of those games that feels like playing a classic, you know? They’re not great comparisons, but it’s like playing Chess, or Hive. It’s mano a mano abstract strategy, with a pretty coat of paint. The more you play, the more you learn, and the more you play against the same person, the bigger the meta game becomes. When you start being able to second-guess your opponent, it transforms from “How the hell do I play this?”, to “What’s that sneaky bugger up to this time??”.

The asymmetry, and the changing, randomised city cards add a nice feeling of freshness into Urban Legends, which is something I think will be more appealing to modern games fans. If you enjoyed something like Mr Jack Pocket, I think you’ll really enjoy this. I wasn’t remotely confident in what I was doing until at least five games in, and by way of levelling any skill imbalances, the Cryptid definitely feels more difficult to win as.

In summary, Cryptid: Urban Legends is a very clever, very tricky, two-player abstract puzzle. It’s very cheap, it looks great, it has a tiny footprint, and there’s an astonishing amount of strategy available for a game with three possible actions. It’s an easy recommendation if you have a regular player-two living with you, just don’t expect it to feel like Cryptid.

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

Cryptid: Urban Legends (2022)

Designers: Ruth Veevers, Hal Duncan
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Kwanchai Moriya
Players: 2
Playing time: 20-30 mins

The post Cryptid: Urban Legends Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The premise of this abstract game is simple. You play the roles of deckchair attendants aboard the infamous ship, and your goal is to appease the First Class passengers who want prime deck space for their deckchairs. I think their priorities are in need of re-alignment however, as they’re so close to the iceberg that a chunk of it has landed on the deck, and is ready to wreak havoc in your aim to be the best collapsible seating apparatus operatives.

One step forwards…

Two to four players take turns performing actions. You can move one of your deckchairs one space, or drop your attendant meeple on one of your chairs or an empty space, to stick it in place. Alternatively you can give the ice block a kick in any direction, sending it careening into chairs.

Being at sea means the boat’s going to rock a bit, and you’ve got cards showing you which direction the boat’s going to lean in the current, and next rounds. Once you’ve all taken your turns, everything that can move, does, in the direction shown on the card. If you’ve managed to keep your chairs in the marked spaces, you get points, and the most points at the end of the game wins.

…two steps back

Deckchairs on the Titanic is really cutthroat. In the first couple of rounds it’s every man and woman for themselves, trying to claim the most points they can. When someone emerges as a leader though, there’s a notable shift in behaviour around the table. People start plotting against the leader, doing anything in their power to stop them ending on the all-powerful center space, worth a whopping four points. The ice block can shunt whole rows of chairs, so knowing when and where to use it can prove really powerful.

Maybe you join in this game of kill the king, or maybe you see what the others are doing and spot an opportunity to sneak some points on the sly. In what feels like a really lighthearted game (despite the setting), it gets really competitive. There’s no hidden information at any point – you all know where the chairs are, how many actions each person has, and which way the chairs are going to slide at the end of the round, so you need to use some serious cunning to plan ahead to score well.

Final thoughts

Deckchairs on the Titanic is a great game. Anyone can learn it in a few minutes, and you can bet that after the first game at least one person will say “Riiiiight, I get it now, let’s play again”. Each game only lasts around 15 or 30 minutes, depending on whether you choose the short or long version, so you can easily do a ‘best out of three’ competition in a couple of hours.

It’s pretty good with two players, but with three or four is where is really shines. Trying to keep track of what everyone else is up to is more tricky, and the table chatter gets really interesting. Especially when someone does something you hadn’t noticed. The number of times I’ve said ‘Oooh you…’, even with people I’ve only just met. It’s a terrific ice-breaker, and if you’ve got a particularly experienced player, you can gang up against them.

The artwork is great, capturing that art deco feel, and the components are really lovely. I love the deckchair pieces, it’s such tactile game. It’s currently live on Kickstarter at the time of writing, and you can pick up a copy for £25, which is a really fair price. It’s a gorgeous, quick, fun abstract game, and I really like it.

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

Deckchairs on the Titanic (2021)

Designer: Tom Holness
Publisher: Silver Birch Games
Art: Miles Hesketh
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 15-30 mins

The post Deckchairs on the Titanic Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The basics of Mandala Stones are pretty simple. The stones are stacked in random towers on the main board, and four ‘artist’ pieces get stood between them. Every stone has one of two mandala patterns on top, and each of the artist pieces has a mandala on top which matches one or the other. If you choose to pick up stones on your turn, you move the artist piece, then take each adjacent top stone which matches its mandala partner, as long as it’s not adjacent to another artist.

The strategy comes with what you do with those stones once you pick them up, and interestingly, how you pick them up.

Pick-up artist

When you pick the stones from the top of the stacks, you choose a valid stone to start from, from the four around the artist piece you moved. That stone is the bottom of the stack you create in your hand, and you move clockwise around the remaining stacks, adding the top stone from each valid stack to the top of the stack in your hand. This all sounds pretty intuitive, but the reality of physically doing this feels really awkward.

If you were to make some towers of poker chips, and wanted to make a little stack with some of the chips from on top of them, there’s a very natural way of doing it. Like some kind of human claw machine, you pick up the first one in your fingers, then move to the next tower and pick the top chip up beneath the first in your hand. It’s a very natural way of doing it, and the first chip you chose becomes the top of the stack. This is the opposite way you make the stack in Mandala Stones, and it feels wrong, for want of a better word. I can’t believe it got through play-testing without someone picking up on it.

It’s not game-breaking, and there are ways around it. You can just pick them up anti-clockwise and end up with the same result, just make sure everyone is doing the same thing. It’s just worth bringing up because it can feel jarring in a first play.

Score board

When you’ve got a pile of stones in your grubby mitt, you’ve got to place it on an empty space on your player board. Once your board has a pretty display of plastic stones, you can choose to score instead of picking up more, and this is where the game gets really interesting. If you choose to score a colour, you take the top stone of each stack that matches that colour. The points you get however, depend on the height of the stack you take them from. One spot on your board rewards a stone resting on it’s own on the board with the most points, while another rewards the third one up, and so on. There’s another that rewards points for the number of differently-sized stacks on your board.

It’s a really interesting way of doing things, because it means at times you’re actively trying to pick up just one or two stones from the main board. It’s a strange game in terms of interactions too, as there’s almost no point in trying to take stones you think someone else wants, as there’s very little chance they’re the ones you want. Mandala stones is a very reactive game, it’s almost impossible to play with a long-term strategy. So much so, that there’s almost no point in looking at the main board until the turn immediately before your own.

Granted, you can see the colours of the stones underneath the top-most ones, but you don’t know which mandala pattern will be on it until it’s revealed, and therefore don’t know how many stones you’ll be picking up until that point either. This isn’t a game for someone who likes to work on a grand plan. The skill comes in looking at the stones under the ones you plan to score, and trying to find scoring opportunities with the stones remaining on your board, and it’s a real head-scratcher of a puzzle.

Final thoughts

Abstract games are a mixed bag for me. Some of them I’ve kept in my collection for a very long time (Hive), and some seem to battle for the same space on my shelves. I’ve had Azul: Summer Pavilion for ages, and I really enjoy it, but I found myself choosing to play it over Sagrada, so sold that one on. Mandala Stones occupies the same sort of place for me, and it’s left me with a really tricky choice. Do I keep this or Azul? Or both?

Reading the review above, you might think I don’t like Mandala Stones much, but you’d be wrong. Mandala Stones is a clever, fun, and really unique game. I’ve not played anything quite like it. What I wanted to convey is that it’s not a game for grand strategy, and it’s a game that’s very difficult to do any future planning for, because your options are always dictated by the person directly before you. If you like those reactive games though, and thinking on your feet, you’ll really like it.

It really captures that same feel of a game like Azul, the way you’ve got an idea of what you want to do, but are never sure you’ll be able to do it, and it’s how you adapt to the game in front of you that determines if you win or not. It’s a gloriously tactile game, and the stones feel so nice to play with. Colour-blind players may have difficulties telling some of the colours apart, so I’d definitely take that into consideration, as there’s nothing else to tell them apart, unlike the Azul games.

If you like lighter games or abstract games, I think you’ll have great fun with Mandala Stones, and I think it would be an excellent game to get non-gamers to the table with. If I had to choose between this and Azul, I’d be really torn, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if someone asked me to play either. Mandala Stones is a really decent abstract.

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

Mandala Stones (2021)

Designer: Filip Głowacz
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Mandala Stones Review appeared first on Punchboard.