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.

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.

How do you annoy Lady Gaga?

Pioneer Rails is another flip-and-write which offers you loads of things to do, knowing full well that you can’t possibly do all of them. Your railways start out in one of the four quarters of the map, with each associated with a suit from a standard deck of cards. When you pick one of the three cards on offer, the suit of that card lets you extend that railway by three lines. Different hexes give different benefits if they have a feature, and each has a number. The number tells you how many edges of the hex you need to draw around, so while a mine only takes one edge to get you some gold, banking that gold at a… well, a bank. A bank that needs four edges of a bank surrounded. Plotting routes to get all the stuff you want is tricky, because temptation lies along the edge of every hex.

I mentioned poker hands earlier, and that’s one of my favourite parts of Pioneer Rails. The cards on offer each round represent the 10 – Ace range of standard playing cards. When you choose a card for its suit, to grow your rail networks, you also write the card’s value in the little row of boxes at the bottom of the sheet. The goal of these boxes is to create poker hands, which are worth points during each of the interim scoring phases. It’s a really interesting twist to most flip-and-writes, and it makes the choice of which card to take each round extra tricky. It’s also a really thematic touch, which brings to mind a hundred different westerns with grizzled cowboys playing poker in saloons.

If at first you don’t succeed

I don’t get as much time to play games as I’d like. While a lot of that is down to having a family and a full-time job, I also have the self-imposed pressure of having a backlog of games to write about. Sometimes that means that no sooner have I finished playing a game, than I’m packing it up, unboxing another and learning that one. Pioneer Rails scuppered that workstream by having an abundance of that ‘one more game’ pull. I find myself going back to try another strategy or another combination of things. It’s got the same draw for me as the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at a Premier Inn. High praise indeed!

By far the trickiest concept to grasp in the game is the way Cattle Ranches work. You score them by isolating them in such a way that you can trace a contiguous line of hexes to another ranch, with rails, mountains and rivers acting as barriers. It sounds really easy when you see it written like that, but there’s an odd mental disconnect when it comes to working it out. I think it’s partially to do with the fact that your focus during the game is on drawing lines between the hexes to accomplish everything, but to score the ranches you’re looking at the hexes, rather than the gaps. It’s not a major issue, and it’s one that may be a non-issue by the time it goes to print. This is just to let you know, if you do struggle with it, you’re not alone, and after a single play, you’ll have it.

Final thoughts

The hardest thing when it comes to reviewing verb-and-write games is conveying what makes them so much fun. I could span this review out to 2,000 words explaining every last action and intricacy, but that would be doing it a disservice. A game so quick and easy to both learn and play deserves a review of equal brevity and function. The feeling of ownership that every little line you draw bestows on your sheet is fantastic. The little rail networks are yours and yours alone, and despite a very small set of variables in terms of which actions you take on your turn, every player’s sheet will end up very different to the others.

If you’ve played any of the Postmark Games catalogue in the past, especially Voyages, you’ll immediately recognise Matt’s hand in the design of Pioneer Rails. It doesn’t feel like a rip-off at all, just a feeling a familiarity which goes in its favour, as Voyages is awesome. The artwork and presentation throughout is great, thanks to Inkgolem’s brushstrokes. The sheets are bright and colourful, and the playing cards are especially gorgeous. I believe there’s going to be a bonus in the Kickstarter campaign to get a full set of playing cards in the same style, and I’d be inclined to make sure I have them. That’s not Dranda asking me to push them, I just think they’re beautiful.

Pioneer Rails will have a pledge for the two different map sheets, and mini-expansions, for £24. For this price, for a game as much fun as Pioneer Rails is, I think you’d have to try hard to think of a reason to not back it. It’s fun, fast, and easy to learn. Admittedly the train part of it feels very abstracted – you only ever draw lines – but it doesn’t matter. Grab a pack of strong felt-tip pens, tip your stetson, and get your Old West railway on. Great stuff, flip-and-write fans rejoice, you’re going to love it! The Kickstarter campaign begins on the 17th April 2023.

Preview copy kindly provided by Dranda Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. All rules, artwork and components subject to change.

Pioneer Rails (2023)

Designers: Jeffrey D. Allers, Matthew Dunstan
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: Javier Inkgolem
Players: 1-100
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Pioneer Rails Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

I guess you could call it – engine-building!

Loco-motivate

I first time I saw Isle of Trains (I can’t be bothered to keep writing ‘All Aboard’ on the end. I’m very lazy) was at this year’s UK Games Expo, where I managed to confuse it with Osprey Games’ new title, Village Rails, because I’m special. The original Isle of Trains came out eight years ago, but I haven’t played it, so I won’t be making a comparison. The one thing I can tell you, based on a sneaky peek at the BGG page for the original, is that I prefer the newer, more realistic artwork on the trains.

The concept of Isle of Trains is simple: make the best darned train you can. Your train carries goods and peoples around the island, fulfilling contracts and delivering passengers. When I say your train goes around the island, it never actually moves anywhere, other than in your mind. You see, what you’re actually doing is creating a kind of tableau of trainy bits in front of you, adding tankers and freight cars and what have you, to carry the goods and fare-dodging miscreants.

The super-interesting thing that Isle of Trains does, is to make you want to build locomotives that are attractive to the other players too. Coveting thy neighbours caboose, if you like. If you load your goods onto an opponent’s train, you get a bonus – yay! At the same time, however, you’ve just helped them get closer to fulfilling a contract – boo! If this last paragraph has you rubbing your chin and thinking “Hmm, interesting, you have my attention”, then read on.

Even if it didn’t, read on anyway. It’s polite.

Choo-choose your track

As if I’d make it through the whole review without a choo-choose quip. Isle of Trains is deceptively simple. The iconography is clear (albeit quite small), and learning how to upgrade or extend your train only takes a quick explanation. What it does brilliantly, is to force you to make awkward decisions on every turn you take. Add more, new carriages, or upgrade the ones you already have? Jack of all trades, or become the oil baron of the island? Either is viable, but which will work for you?

You can play without loading things onto any train other than your own, but it doesn’t really work. The joy of the not-forced-but-strongly-suggested interactions between players is so much fun. It brings the game up out of the navel-gazing isolation of a heads-down Euro, and ensures that everyone around the table knows what their rivals are up to. There are only a handful of locations for contracts and passengers to be turned-in, so the competition in the game is turned up to 11 the whole time.

Thanks to the big deck of train cards, there’s a lot of variety in the way games pan out, and the same is true of contracts and passengers. The randomised (and thankfully, very quick) setup means it’s impossible to go into the game with a plan. The game setup and your initial hand of cards will start to mould a strategy from the pliable clay you call a brain. Even the cards that make-up the island itself are double-sided. The whole game is a fantastic example of game design done well.

Final thoughts

I fell in love with Isle of Trains: All Aboard as soon as I played a couple of turns at UKGE. It’s so simple to play, and to teach, that you’d expect it to be about as deep as a paddling pool. But it isn’t. You’re forced to make awkward choices constantly, and I love it. It’s a brilliant game.

I’m used to the concept of “using someone else’s thing for mutual benefit”. It’s been present in classics like Caylus and Lords of Waterdeep for a long time. In those games, however, there’s a level of abstraction in the benefits. You know you’re helping your rival in some small way, but it’s difficult to see how it figures in their plans. In Isle of Trains, you know exactly what you’re helping them with, but those bonuses are too good to ignore. They may as well be buffet cars offering me free sausage rolls – I just can’t help myself.

Three players is the sweet spot. I’ve played with two, which was fun, but the head-to-head duel means you can easily just aim to complete the contracts the other person is ignoring. Four is decent, but feels a little more chaotic. Three through – *chef’s kiss*. The Kickstarter campaign is live as you read this, and while the folks at Dranda Games haven’t asked me to, I’m going to strongly suggest you back it. How many Kickstarters can you back at £19? Not many, that’s for sure, and with the deluxe version just a few quid more, Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a steal.

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

Isle of Trains: All Aboard (2022)

Designers: Seth Jaffee, Dan Keltner
Publisher: Dranda Games
Art: Denis Martynets
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Isle of Trains: All Aboard Preview appeared first on Punchboard.