Hiking Vikings

The main board represents an unnamed land where your Viking longships have landed. This is where you take your actions, and taking an action is as simple as placing one of your Viking meeples on an unoccupied hex. The only placement rule is that you have to be adjacent to another Viking (anybody’s!) or one of the longboat spaces. The Vikings spread out across the lands like cracks in ice, gathering the resources from the hex they’re placed in. Gaining resources is the most stressful thing in the game, especially at the start.

“But Adam, you said it’s approachable and friendly. Why is it stressful?”

You got me there, but let me explain. When you take a resource tile you add it to your own board. Your village. Gravity in your village must be particularly strong though, because once you place a tile it’s there for good. You cannot move it. Where you choose to place things really matters though. Throughout the game, you can pick up longship tiles, and you also start with three special building tiles on your board too. To complete and to score these tiles they need to be adjacent to the things printed on them. For instance, you might choose a longship tile which needs to be adjacent to two trees and one sheep. Once it is, you flip the tile and benefit from the bonus, which is usually to give you bonus VPs at the end of the game for having particular tiles on your board.

You might be able to see where this going already now. Given that a hex has six adjacent sides and that you can take a longship tile each turn, there are opportunities for a single resource tile to adjacent to multiple longships or buildings. This is where the soul of Looot lives. The decisions around what you want to place, and where you want to place it. Your first game will consist of decisions like “I don’t know, I might as well just go here”, but it doesn’t take long to start seeing opportunities to chain together multiple bonus tiles and really start leaning into a strategy.

Village pillage

Once you get to grips with the game it might feel like there’s no reason to cross paths with the other players when it comes to adding Vikings to the main board. Sure, there are some opportunities to take a space just because you think someone else really wants that resource, but there are so many duplicate resources on the board that it doesn’t make much sense to do it. Where things get interesting is with the buildings.

Some of the spots on the main board feature one of three building types, with the available tiles in piles on them. Each type has its own criteria for taking one. Houses just need to have one of your pieces adjacent, whereas Watchtowers need to be linked by an unbroken line of your colour, resulting in you taking a watchtower tile from both ends of that line. Finally, you have castles which you can claim if you have a chain of four Vikings and one of them is adjacent to a castle. Claimed buildings do the same thing as other resources – they fulfil requirements on tiles you want to flip on your personal board. You can also get bonuses from longship tiles for them.

This chain formation and attempting to grab buildings before the stock of each is depleted is where all of the game’s interaction comes from, and it can be pretty cutthroat. Luckily, the designers saw fit to add a little mitigation in the form of three shields that each player gets. Once per game, you can flip each to use it, giving you bonuses like double rewards from a space, taking a second turn immediately, and most importantly, being able to to place your piece in the same hex as someone else. This lets you break the lines, if only once, and suddenly that game of Norsemen Tron cycles is broken.

I love the fact that the board is modular and double-sided. Each time you set it up the layout will be different which means no game-breaking strategy to try to memorise.

Final thoughts

I first saw Looot at this year’s UK Games Expo, and while I didn’t get a chance to play it, the tables were always full with a real mix of people, and everyone seemed to be having fun. These are the sort of games that stick in my mind from events and make me want to check them out, and I haven’t been disappointed by Looot. I really enjoy this game.

The mixture of route-building and tile-laying is smooth and easy to grasp, even if there’s that initial bump in the road that almost every player experiences at first – where the heck am I meant to put stuff? Strategy is very much created on the fly and is based on things like the board layout, which buildings you’ve been dealt, and which longships are on the board. These little hors d’ouevres of randomisation keep each playthrough feeling different, while still tasting like the familiar meal you know and love.

It’s a quick game offering a decent amount of strategy and a lot of fun. The scaling board size means it’s a game which feels very similar to play regardless of whether there are two, three, or four of you around the table, something it shares with another Gigamic game I reviewed, Akropolis. Like Akropplis, it’s a game which you’ll have played and packed away again inside an hour, which makes it perfect for conventions, starts of game nights with your local clubs, and most importantly perhaps, with your family.

If you’re not sure if it’s the game for you, you can even try it before you buy. It’s on Board Game Arena right now, although you’ll need someone with a premium account to at least set up a game for you.

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

Looot (2024)

Design: Charles Chevallier, Laurent Escoffier
Publisher: Gigamic
Art: Naïade
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30-40 mins

The post Looot Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition is big, brash, and over the top, and it’s exactly what the game always needed.

Theory of evolution

By way of a little background here, I’ve owned Castles of Burgundy in one form or another for the past 13 years. I bought the original game back in 2011 and had it in my collection for 11 years. I sold it on because I picked up the confusingly named ’20th Anniversary Edition’. The anniversary is related to the publisher, Alea’s birthday, not the game. I reviewed that game right here, and I loved it for the quality-of-life improvements it added, if not the garish colours.

So now I have the Special Edition too, and it’s a daunting thing. My little, beige, rectangular Alea box full of thin cardboard is all grown-up and now has a box the size of Frostpunk and La Granja Deluxe Master Set. Awww, they grow up so fast!

I get a little trepidation when I open these huge boxes at the prospect of just how much stuff I’ve got to take out, sort through, and then figure out how to get it all back in the box. I don’t like it. This special edition is different however, and I really like how Awaken Realms have done this one. The Vineyards expansion stuff sits in the bottom of the box, then you’ve got the plastic castles and player boards, with everything else in trays on top. If you, too, get the big box fear, you can relax.

By far my favourite improvements are the player boards and plastic hex holders. Each player get a dual-layer board to store their dice, crates, money and workers on, and in the middle, there’s a big open space. The space is where you put your chosen map. From memory, there’s something like 8,000 (actual number may be lower) maps to pick from. On top of the map you drop in a plastic frame which holds your tiles in place, and I love this. No more worrying about bumping the table or shirts demolishing your duchy as you reach across the table.

In the past, I’ve bought little opaque, cloth bags for drawing tiles from, and this new special edition includes them. Fantastic. Nobody enjoys flipping tons of tiles over just to set up every game. These things might all sound like non-essential luxuries, but the truth is they really add to the game. They smooth off the few rough corners left on the finely tooled game that The Castles of Burgundy is.

Expansion

If you were around when the original version of the game came out, you might remember the load of little expansion modules that were released. All of those are in the box, along with the solo challenge board, the co-op game and big, newer expansion called Vineyards. While the majority of the expansion modules just add one or two new tiles to the bags, Vineyards adds a whole new set of pieces to play with. As a long-time Castles player, I was really pleased to see this, and even happier to play with it and realise that it’s really well done.

I mentioned earlier that the box contains a load of plastic castles. There’s no denying that they look awesome, and it feels great to plug them into a hex space on your player board. It adds great table presence and makes the game look a lot more interesting than the old beige original, and in a world where there are thousands of games vying for our attention, this can be important. Personally, though, I prefer to play without them. They just obstruct my view of the other tiles on the board. I know there are addon tiles with 3D terrain etc., but in my opinion the standard tiles are best.

To clarify, the version of the game I’m reviewing is the retail version of The Castles Of Burgundy: Special Edition. This version comes with all the expansion content, plus the plastic castles and player pieces, but does not include extras like the acrylic tiles and 3D terrain.

Me, myself and I

The other big addition in the box which is going to please a lot of people is the new solo mode. There was a solo puzzle mode in the previous version of the game, and that puzzle is still in the Special Edition, but there’s a new one too! Châteauma (I love the name) comes from some well-regarded names including Nick Shaw and David Turczi, and it’s a simple-to-run bot which interacts with the game in the same way a human player would. Its actions aren’t the same as a normal player’s, but the effect they have on the shared board and Vineyard board (yes, it works with the expansion too) are the same as you’d expect with humans. In fact you can add the bot to a two-player game to add a third player, which is always a good thing in my opinion when you play Castles.

The bot has three difficulty levels too, which is great. It’s not a game with masses of interaction between players, so being able to practice your own play while you’re on your own is great. The addition of an automated opponent to play against is something Castles Of Burgundy has been crying out for in the years between its original release and the level of expectation gamers have now. Games without a good solo mode are in the minority now, and it’s another addition which helps keep the game relevant today.

Final thoughts

In closing I really need to address the huge, flashy elephant in the room. Is The Castles Of Burgundy: Special Edition worth the money? Yes, the money, I didn’t mention that yet, did I? This version of the game is just the wrong side of £130! That’s a lot of money. In a world where you could buy Voidfall (review here) for less, why would you spend this much money on a 13 year old game?

This special edition is for people who love Castles. People like me. I’ve played this game goodness knows how many times over the years. I’ve got over 40 plays logged on BGA. After all this time I still love playing the game, and I can’t see my enthusiasm drying up any time soon. If this sounds like you, why not spend the money on the most premium, satisfying version of the game you can? People will spend crazy money on Kickstarters full of plastic they’ve never played and have to wait years to receive, so why not?

If you’re not sure whether it’s the game for you, you can still buy the burgundy box version that I reviewed for less than £40 which is a great option. It’s pretty much the perfect mid-weight Euro which you can – and will – play again and again. If you have the money though, and if you love Castles of Burgundy, this Special Edition is fantastic. It’s absolutely the best way to play Stefan Feld’s classic game, and I’m very happy to hold my hands up and admit that I was wrong. Awaken Realms were right. This game deserves and benefits from the deluxe version.

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

The Castles Of Burgundy: Special Edition (2023)

Design: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Alea, Awaken Realms
Art: Jakub Dzikowski, Patryk Jędraszek
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Castles Of Burgundy: Special Edition Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Jumbled jalopy

Horseless Carriage is set back at the dawn of the automobile. Back when car designers were still deciding what needed to be on a car. Brakes, for instance, weren’t necessarily seen as a necessity. The main part of the game sees you laying out your factory floors in a tight, congested tile-placement problem. Each of your mainlines (the spots on the factory floor where the cars are assembled) needs to be connected to a station where a thing is added to it. Doors, brakes, engines, radiators – even the paint job – these can all be added to the cars you create if you can link them orthogonally to the correct side of a mainline. Each station can be connected to multiple mainlines too, if you manage to link to them.

The problem you’ll very quickly learn is that space on the factory floor is very limited. It can be really tricky to find the space you need. Space optimisation and planning is crucial. Not just important – crucial. Delbert Wilkins levels of crucial (ask your parents). The real kick in the teeth is knowing that once you’ve decided what goes where in the factory, you cannot move it. Not ever. Nor can you remove something to make space for something else. Once something’s bolted down it stays there. At the end of each planning phase you have to add another extension board to your factory, which just presents you with another set of tough choices while you decide which direction you want to expand into.

Each piece you add to a car is colour-coded, with each colour representing a selling feature, like reliability, safety etc. Different customers of the sales board demand different numbers of each feature, so to make the big bucks you need to make sure your cars deliver enough of those features. It’s not enough to just to make the cars, you also need to market and sell them too. How do you do this? You add dealerships and marketing departments. The fly in the ointment is that dealerships need to be adjacent to a mainline too, but dealerships are big and take up lots of space. Space that you want to use for stations to add things to your cars.

If you think games like Isle of Cats, A Feast For Odin, or even Barenpark are tricky tile-placement puzzles, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Horseless Carriage is a harsh, unforgiving mistress. Too harsh? Depends how much you like agonising over every single placement you make. The factories feel so small sometimes. It’s less ‘knife fight in a phone booth’ and more ‘just-in-time supply chain and logistics in a phone booth’.

Brain not fried yet? We can fix that.

The spatial planning of the factory could genuinely be a game on its own. It’s not far off from what’s happening in Fit To Print (review here) for the entire game. As you might expect though, this is Splotter, and they’ve got a few more tricks up their sleeve.

The biggest part of the shared main board is the Market Board which represents your potential customers and their demands. Some of the spaces are populated by a neutral deck, but each player gets to choose where new demand will spring from in each round of the game too. Customers’ x and y positions on the grid indicate their demand based on the the current spec axes for the round. In one round you might have people who just want a little reliability and safety, while in the next their might be people who insist on higher standards for the cars’ range and design. Your own factory’s production is measured by how many features matching these specs you can deliver, so there’s plenty of foresight required when you conduct research.

Oh yeah, research. Another part of the puzzle. You can add research depts to your boards to move your company’s marker up each of the spec tracks, increasing the variety of stations you can add to your factory, hopefully meeting market demand later in the game. There’s a shared track on the main board which represents two ends of a scale. If you’re on the left of it at the Engineering end you get first dibs when it comes to choosing from the limited stations on offer to make your cars. You also get to use technologies which players other than you have researched, which is pretty awesome. You could even spend your own research points on moving someone else’s markers, just because you know you’ll have access to it.

The other end of that track is for Sales. The further to the right you are on it, the sooner you get to sell your Wacky Races cars to the unsuspecting public. Demand is limited, so getting the first chance to sell to the people who want the most expensive cars can be really important. A double-edged blade and no mistake. Do you make the most of everyone else’s research and build your own awesome KITT car from Knight Rider, but risk only being able to sell them for buttons? Saving and spending the Gantt charts (again, produced in yet another station) your factory makes is the only way to influence your order in the track. It’s easy to overlook how important this is, but you’ll only make that mistake once.

Fiddlier than fixing a faulty fuse on a faithful Ford Focus

Horseless Carriage has a staggering number of pieces. 92 cards might not sound like a lot, but couple that with the nearly 500 wooden pieces, and then add the 629 cardboard pieces that you’ll have to punch from 19(!) sheets of punchboard, and you get an idea of what I’m talking about. Just setting the game up to play means making stacks and stacks of station tiles, and when you get further in the later reaches of the game the market board will be swimming with little wooden cars. In addition to this your factory boards start to spread and swamp your own bit of space at the table.

When your factories get really complex towards the end of the game you need to be so careful to not bump the table, or let your clothes brush across it as you reach across the board for something. It’s all too easy to act like your own personal Godzilla and lay waste to all your hard work, destroying your factory’s layout. The station tiles just sit atop thin, card factory boards. There’s nothing to keep them in place. I’ve honestly taken photos later in the game just so I can use them to rebuild the factories in case they get moved.

The same is true of the market board. All those little wooden cars wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the market windows. These are thin, really nicely made (by Splotter standards) plastic frames that you drop onto the market board to indicate where your customers will come from. They look great and do the job, but they’re difficult to manouevre and take back off the board without bumping and moving the cars, which are packed tight in the squares.

My final moan about all of this stuff is the spec boards. Each player has a wooden piece showing how far they’ve researched that thing, but with each new round one of these boards has to be moved away from the main board, and a replacement brought in. It’s too easy to bump one and send the pieces sliding, which again can be a real problem if you don’t know where everyone was on each board.

It’s all just an unnecessary distraction during a game which will already strain your mental aptitude to its limits.

Final thoughts

Horseless Carriage is a really tricky game for me to try to deliver a verdict on. I love a heavy, complicated game with interlocking gears and mechanisms, but at times this one almost feels like too much. The puzzle of filling the factory floor is really enjoyable, but tracing which thing connects to which other thing, making sure all the relevant tech markers are in the right place, and ascertaining what specs your finished cars have can be hard work. When you get it right, which takes time, it’s a deeply satisfying experience. When you get it wrong and realise you’ve stuffed up your chances of building anything decent until you get more factory boards in the following rounds, it can be really disheartening. That’s Splotter though, right? You know what you were getting into when you sat down to play.

The sheer amount of stuff in the box is just incredible. Good luck trying to get it all back in the box and have the lid shut flush. There are nowhere near enough baggies provided, which doesn’t help. I even ordered a set of trays to organise it from Cube4Me (who are excellent, by the way) and it’s still as ready to burst as my shirt buttons after Christmas dinner. If you want to play it before you buy, you can play an excellent version over on onlineboardgamers.com.

Horseless Carriage is a game which, with the right group of people, is an amazing experience. It’s heavy, it’s complex, there’s plenty of meta stuff happening with turn order and waiting to see who does what, and what’s left over, much like in Food Chain Magnate. Even after four plays I still don’t think I’ve scratched the surface of the strategy available in the game, but I can’t claim that as fact. It’s just the feeling I get from having seen how different each game has developed. The intro game where you all just build cars is a good way to learn, but it really comes to life when you add in the mainlines for trucks and sports cars too.

The part of the game which is the most fun is also the biggest deviation from the hard-fought, interactive nature of the game. Building your factory is cool, but it results in an intensely quiet period of the game where everyone has their head down, concentrating, and occasionally swearing under their breath. It’s not until everyone comes up for air and you see the results of all that planning and hard work that the interaction springs to life. Could that have been avoided? Probably not. It’s a game that takes the push and shove of FCM and throws in a geometric puzzle that’ll leave your brain in bits.

If you don’t enjoy heavy games, especially ones that’ll drag you over the coals the first couple of times you play, you won’t have a good time with Horseless Carriage. If you can invest the time and effort and have a group who dig that sort of thing too, you’ll be hard-pressed to find something better. A very clever game, an excellent game which asks its players to invest in it to truly appreciate it.

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.

Horseless Carriage (2023)

Design: Jeroen Doumen, Joris Wiersinga
Publisher: Splotter Spellen
Art: Jan Lipiński
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 180-240 mins

The post Horseless Carriage Review appeared first on Punchboard.

In Fit To Print you’ll be frantically choosing which articles, photographs, and adverts you want to publish in adorably-named papers such as The Chestnut Press or The Evening Hoot. This manifests as players grabbing facedown tiles from the middle of the table, taking them back to their equally adorable 3D desks, before flipping them to see whether the tile is an advert, photo, or article, and deciding whether they want to keep it. Those that don’t make the cut get returned to the pile faceup, ready for a rival to claim and print them.

Read all about it!

There are two main phases in the game – the Reporting phase and the Layout phase. The Reporting phase is the one I described above which is just a grab against the clock. If it sounds like Galaxy Trucker to you, then yeah, that’s a fair comparison. The big difference, however, is what happens when the time runs out. Just for reference, there’s no timer included. Just use a phone, clock, stopwatch – whatever. The time limits in the rulebook dictate the difficulty level.

Once the time runs out, you move into the Layout phase, and that’s where the comparison to Galaxy Trucker stops. In that game, you make the best spaceship out of the parts you’ve got. In Fit To Print you’ve each got a board that represents the front page of your woodland broadsheet, and just like in real life, you don’t want to leave blank space on the page. So the idea is to make sure that you pick up enough tiles to cover the page, but at the same time you don’t want to pick up more tiles than you can fit, as you’ll get penalised for taking tiles you don’t place.

On top of that, there are rules for placing tiles. You knew there’d be more rules, didn’t you? Adverts can’t be placed adjacent to adverts, photos next to photos, or articles of the same colour next to one another. Just arranging your tiles to follow those rules is quite a challenge, but wait, there’s more! Photos have scoring conditions based on what’s placed next to them. Articles have either happy faces or sad faces on them, denoting good and bad news respectively. If the level of good and bad news isn’t perfectly balanced, you get penalised again.

On top of that, as if we needed more to think about, are the centerpiece tiles that can score you more points based on the conditions printed on them. It all results in a two-dimensional tile-placement puzzle which adds layer after layer of other things to think about. You’ll finish your layout and be happy with finally managing to cover the board, then start moving things and looking for ways to increase your score, only to realise that you can’t remember what it looked like. Argh! It’s simultaneously hilarious and infuriating, and it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

The Sunday papers

It’s frustrating when you teach a game to people and then play it on the understanding that it’s “just a learning game“, meaning you basically write that game off. Fit To Print actually has three rounds, so even if you do terribly in one round, there’s more than enough chance to redeem yourself later. I love the way the Friday edition works on a grid of 7×14 squares, Saturday on a slightly bigger 8×16 grid, with Sunday expanding once again and going to 9×18. It doesn’t sound like it’s getting much bigger, and on the boards, it doesn’t even look like it’s getting much bigger, but that’s just an illusion. The three issues use 98, 128, and 162 squares to fill respectively.

Why the basic maths lesson? Or should I say ‘math’ lesson for my readers on the other side of the Atlantic? I bring it up because it becomes really tricky to figure out how many tiles you have compared to how many you need. It’s not like you can even just spread the tiles out to get a rough idea. Designer, Peter McPherson (you might remember that name from Tiny Towns and Wormholes, both of which I reviewed here and here respectively) saw that coming and added a rule which says every tile you take has to be piled up on your little 3D desk. Trying to estimate how much of your board a couple of stacks of tiles will cover is a game in itself.

If you’re still sitting there on your throne of nerddom, thinking this all sounds a bit easy, I’ve still got a couple more surprises in store for you. You could add in the character cards which give each player a unique power, and there’s another option to add Breaking News cards which throw random events into each day which introduce different restrictions and bonuses.

As you can probably tell at this point in the review, this isn’t just an entry-level tile placement game. I can say from experience despite having a ton of variety in the way you play, and despite the various rules and constraints you’re working around, it’s still a very family-friendly game. I speak from experience. I played it with my wife and son and immediately after playing, they asked to play again. Take it from me when I say that that’s high praise indeed. We didn’t even bother using the relaxed, family-friendly rules in the rulebook.

Final thoughts

My eyes lit up when I saw that Ian O’Toole was responsible for the art in the game. It’s fair to say that I’m a bit of a fanboy, but I also know that games with his touch on them tend to have great graphic design too, and Fit To Print is no exception. Being able to tell what a tile has on it at a glance is extremely important in a real-time game like this, and he nails it.

All this talk of real-time and the frenetic energy the game delivers might turn you off. You might have a disability which affects your fine motor skills, or vision problems which make it hard for you to tell at a glance which kind of tile is which. Maybe you just can’t stand real-time games because you don’t enjoy them. Almost all of my plays have been played using the real-time rules, but it’s important to note that there’s a turn-based variant included in the rulebook which alters the gameplay and makes it much more strategic.

The cherries on top of the Fit To Print cake are the solo mode, puzzle mode, and challenges. The solo mode works a lot like the multiplayer game, which makes it a great way to practice, and I really like the inclusion of the puzzles. Each puzzle has a strict setup of tiles available, with the knowledge that you can’t use them all. If you like to take your time to puzzle your way to the best score, you’ll love it.

Fit To Print blends puzzles and fast-paced gameplay into a tile-laying game that looks beautiful. It’s twee, it’s fast, it’ll hurt your brain, and you’ll have a lot of fun with it.

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

Fit To Print (2023)

Design: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Flatout Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Fit To Print 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.

“Barcelona! Such a beautiful horizon”

Are you feeling better now? Good. Barcelona is the latest Euro game from Board&Dice. It’s a mixture of tile-placement and action-selection, and while that sounds like a relatively easy mixture to cope with, there are a lot of things going on. The good news is that they’re a lot of really good, really interesting things. The question is – do you need or want another Euro with a lot of moving parts under the hood? Hopefully, I can help answer that question for you.

The Eixample

That’s not a typo. The Eixample is the name given to the extension designed for Barcelona in the 19th Century by the urban planner, Ildefons Cerdà. I won’t give a detailed history, but to set the scene for the game, the walls around Barcelona have come down and Ildefons has plans for the city: wide roads, green spaces, lots of natural light, and octagonal city blocks to name but a few.

You, the players, are the builders creating this new Barcelona. The main board depicts Barcelona and is divided into rows and columns, and at the end of each row and column there’s an action. To take your turn you pull a couple of citizen tiles from a bag and place them in a stack at the intersection of a row and column. From there, a whole bunch of things happen.

Firstly, you get to take the actions at either end of the row and column of your intersection. These actions range from the simple – take some cloth or coins, the game’s resources – to the more complex, like building streets or moving your tram. I call these actions more complex, but in truth their operation is really easy. Placing a street is as difficult as picking one of the tiles up off your player board and putting it on the main board. You don’t need to be a civil engineer to do that. The real game, however, the juice in this delicious Spanish Orange, comes from how you combine the knock-on effects of your actions.

C-c-c-combo maker!

Right off the bat, let me state that if you like games that have you planning combinations of one thing resulting in another, you’ll love what happens in Barcelona. There are few things as satisfying in all of board gaming as setting up the mental dominoes that represent your coming turn, and executing it to perfection with the simple act of tipping the first one over – or in this case, choosing your first action. There’s a strange phenomenon in Euro games where one player narrates all the things happening in a chain of actions – a combo.

“I take this action which gives me those things. I spend those things on placing this thing here, and get these bonuses for doing it. Taking that thing off my player board uncovered this bonus, which means I place another thing here, complete this chain, and get another bonus here…”

We all do it, and we’re all so proud of ourselves for figuring out our big brain moves, like a five-year-old who’s figured out how make their own bowl of cereal. The rest of the table might give you a polite “Nice one”, or more likely ignore you why they plan their own blockbuster turn. The point is, playing Barcelona is like spending two hours of people doing this. If that sounds like your jam, congratulations, you’re on the same team as me. I couldn’t give two hoots about what someone else does (unless it disrupts my plans), but I love the fact we all get to do it. It also means that more than once you’ll hear someone say “I had a plan but now I’ve forgotten it”, and that’s because this Spanish sandbox lays so many toys in front of you, that it’s easy to forget which one you started with when you built your own Sagrada Familia from sand.

Urban congestion

The way Barcelona’s turns play out means that your options get more and more limited as the game goes on. You must place a stack of citizen tiles on an intersection, but the intersection has to be empty to place them. The only way to remove citizens is to build buildings, which is obligatory if possible at the end of your turn. The puzzle it presents leads to much furrowing of brows in the last quarter of the game, where you try to complete the goals – be they shared or personal – with a limited set of choices laid before you.

If you’ve got AP-prone players around the table, this is where the game starts to wade through treacle. The butter-smooth chaining of actions from the early game gets bogged down while the players look for the least-worst options available. The end of the game is player-driven too, which might divide opinion. It’s possible to see when someone can end the game, so planning past that becomes difficult and forces you to decide whether to bank on one more turn to finish your plans, or make the best of what you’ve got because you’re sure someone’s going to end things. It’s the polar opposite of games like Uwe Rosenberg’s, games like Hallertau (review here) or Atiwa (review here) where you know for sure when the game ends, and then spend ages figuring out how to eke out every last VP.

I mention these things because there’s a whole heap of Euro games out there, all doing similar things but with their own twists. For experienced players, the decision of whether to pick up a game like Barcelona comes down not to the theme, but to other details like how prone to AP it is, whether the end of the game is prescribed, how much take-that is involved – smaller details like that. Barcelona, for the record, has very little player interaction, save for the usual “I can’t believe you took the spot I was going to have!”.

Final thoughts

I like Barcelona. I like it a lot. I like the way it takes what are now very familiar themes, like tile-laying and action selection, and adds its own little flourishes to them. You have this beautiful shared board that gets filled with a patchwork of streets of different colours, but rather than ending things with the laying of those streets and intersections, it adds another layer on the Z-axis and lets you move trams around. The trams move around on top of the streets, possibly getting you more actions, letting you transport people, and using your own streets for free movement. It’s just another nice touch that elevates Barcelona above other mid-heavy Euros.

As I mentioned above, it’s got a real sandbox feel to the game. You could play time and again and try a different approach, a different strategy, a different focus. In true Board&Dice fashion, the game comes with action tiles that let you randomise which actions are in which position, which is a bigger deal than you might think. Strategy in Barcelona is built on combining actions and buildings, so not knowing which actions will get paired and where makes a real difference, and I really appreciate it.

If you don’t enjoy thinking several actions deep ahead of your turn, you’re not going to enjoy Barcelona. If you don’t appreciate having to make plans B & C, lest someone block the spot you wanted, buggering your plans up, you’re going to have an especially bad time. For the rest of us though, Dani Garcia has put together a beautifully made game full of replay value. You’d be forgiven for thinking Ian O’Toole had his crayons all over this one, because it’s so colourful and bright for a city-building Euro, but no, it’s Aleksander Zawada we have to thank for the eye-candy this time.

If you like mid-heavy Euro games full of choice, combos, and attempted mind-reading, Barcelona is one of – if not the – game of the year so far for me. It’s fantastic.

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

Barcelona (2023)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Aleksander Zawada
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Barcelona Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Shifting sands

The world according to Oros is a small, water-covered globe. That globe is laid flat on the main game board, and underwater volcanoes are spewing land into the world, creating islands and bigger land masses. As a demigod, you’re powerful enough to move land, and you’ve got two methods to do it. You can either shift connected land tiles in one direction or move tiles into other tiles, combining them to make bigger pieces of land and even forcing volcanoes to form. When I talked about your first play maybe feeling awkward, it’s down to the way the moving tiles act when they move past the edges of the map.

When the tiles in the leftmost column move to the left, they come in again to the column on the right, and vice-versa. The same goes for tiles in the top and bottom rows moving up and down. If something disappears off one side, it reappears on the opposite side, just like in Asteroids. The really interesting thing is what happens when tiles in the leftmost column (for example) move up. They slide off the top and rotate clockwise into the top row, like turning a wheel. The easiest way to think about it is like a Rubik’s Cube. Getting your head around how these two work in tandem is a challenge for some people, me included, but it’s not the end of the world.

You can play the game and not totally get how all that movement works together, and have a great time, and even win. It’s an important point to take note of, because when you introduce the game to people for the first time it can make them feel like “I don’t really get this, so I’m not going to play well, and I’m just going to get demolished. This is no fun.” Expect a lot of questions for the first game or two, and a lot of referencing the rulebook for examples. In terms of difficult things though, that’s as far as it goes.

Action stations

To win the game you need to get the most wisdom. Wisdom comes through study, and in order to study your followers need places to study. You build those places through the build action on your player board, which is also where your other actions live. You move your followers from space to space to activate the actions, which adds a layer of strategy right from the get-go. If you want to take the Journey action, that action space needs to be vacant, so the follower that was there needs to go to another action space, thus blocking that space. It’s like constantly tripping over your own feet while trying to walk in a straight line.

Most of the strategy in Oros comes from timing. The land tiles grow as volcanoes erupt and tiles get smashed together until two size-4 tiles merge and become a mountain. Mountains are the only places you can build, and competition for those spaces is fierce. You can build up in three tiers, and the higher the tier you build, the more wisdom you get, and the higher up the ziggurat (scoring track) you go.

The cool thing is that the wisdom you earn is spent on moving little markers up the tracks on your action spaces which improves the power of each action. You’ll get situations where you think the little corner of the world you’re occupying is ready to be built on, then all of a sudden somebody else shifts that entire column halfway across the board, and it’s open season for monolith builders of all colours. It’s like setting up a delicious meal on a long table, getting everything just so, and then someone pulls the tablecloth and takes it all away. Yoink! It’s equal parts infuriating and amazing at the same time, and you can’t help but admire when someone pulls off a genius set of actions which completely ruin your plans, while simultaneously boosting themselves way up.

Final thoughts

Oros left me a little cold after my first play. I liked what it was trying to do, and I liked the mechanisms, but it left me a bit flat. The second play though, the third, and each play after that were great. When you understand what the game is doing, and what you need to do to win, it takes on this whole new light. The combination of the unique geometric puzzle and action selection is extremely satisfying.

I really appreciate the simplicity of the game design. Having a few meeples and markers per player and a few stacks of tiles is refreshingly clean in contrast to the current trend of more, more, more. Setup and teardown are quick and it actually takes longer to explain the game than to get it ready to play. The movement is a tricky thing to get the hang of, and I’m sure it might be the thing which turns some people off of the game after a first play. That would be a shame though.

I want to draw attention to the Automa system in Oros. To play the game you need at least three players, which sounds like a kick in the stomach for solo or two-players, but thankfully the designers have included a custom Automa deck per player colour. They’re not only just different colours, they also have different personalities and play styles. The good news is that running the Automa requires zero mental overhead. You don’t need to make any decisions for the AI players, just follow the simple instructions on the current card from top to bottom. It means playing solo is not only easy to do but really rewarding.

Oros is a unique game which deserves way more attention than it gets. If you’re one of those people who’s always looking for that undiscovered gem, or just want something different from anything you’ve played before, Oros is a fantastic choice.

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

Oros (2023)

Design: Brandt Brinkerhoff
Publisher: Lucky Duck Games, AESC Games
Art: Brandt Brinkerhoff
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Oros Review 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.

We are phorever people

Ynaros Fallin’ gameplay is concentrated around three main concepts. Controlling land tiles, moving around those tiles, and combat once you’re in range of a rival shaman who needs a good ol’ duffing-up. Most of this is determined by the shadow cards you hold in your hand, which act as a sort of two-colour currency. The yellow player wants to put down yellow tiles to move their yellow shaman and followers around on, and vice-versa for the blue player. Note that the coloured tiles are only used in the Standard rules game. It makes for a really clever way of controlling the landscape and flow of the game. You can move through an opponent’s colour tile, but it’s going to cost you more movement points. Is it really worth it? Is there a better option? You’ll catch yourself asking yourself questions like this constantly.

It’s probably a good point to touch on the different game modes now. The rulebook walks you through the setup and rules of play for what it refers to as the Novice game, where some of the mechanisms are different. You don’t need to place the tiles to walk on, for instance, which is one less thing to worry about. It’s a really cool thing to do because, despite the simplistic look of the pieces and actions, there’s actually quite a lot going on, on a tactical level. Getting used to moving, attacking, and gathering land tiles for your player boards is heavy going if you’re not used to the style of the game. Introducing new players to a game with a simplified version, before going for the full-fat version is a great way to lower the barrier to entry, or to simply enjoy it with people who don’t enjoy deeper games.

Combat follows a similar formula to movement, with players playing cards from their hands with varying power levels, depending on which colours they play. In fact, you even get bonuses to your attack when you put a card horizontally across the top of two vertically played cards, which results in this Stone Henge effect. It feels pretty apt in a game with Shamans flouncing about the place, collecting and using crystals.

Boss drum, in control again

Dodgeball was never really a thing for me when I was at school, but I knew about it from TV and films. The start of a game of Ynaros Fallin’ is like the start of a game of dodgeball, with the really juicy goodies near the centre line, and an implied sense of urgency to get out there and claim them ASAP. In fact, the layout of the board as a whole is really clever. The single hex that each Shaman steps out onto (the Hearth) fans out to cover the width of the land at the middle and then funnels back down towards the opposite hearth.

In most of the player-vs-player games I’ve played, there’s usually some kind of safe zone for each player to bring their units out onto the board. Not so in Ynaros Fallin’. Every hex is fair game when it comes to where you want to move. As a matter of fact, getting your dude to the opponent’s hearth lets you get a new follower into the game, for you to move about and do stuff with, or upgrade a follower into another Shaman! It’s quite an unusual feeling to push your own character so close to your opponent’s base, especially with it bottlenecking the way it does, and a lot of that comes from the concept of Control in the game.

Control’s a really interesting idea. If you can trace a straight line to the other player’s character, you can spend the magic crystals you collect to do various things, like activating some of the player powers they’ve collected for their side. I really like the Control mechanism, because it adds another layer to the board. Not a physical layer, but another layer of observation you’ve got to be aware of. It’s not enough to know where you are, and where you can move to, you have to be aware of the line of sight from you to your enemy.

Onward, ever ever on, Destination Eschaton

I’ve had the prototype of Ynaros Fallin’ with me for long enough to see two full rulebook revisions, which has been great. The people behind the game are still actively working on it, taking feedback and acting on it. It means the game I first played isn’t the same game I’m playing now, and probably not the same game you’ll play when it lands on your doorstep. The changes have all been for the better, creating a streamlined, easy-to-learn game, which is a lot of fun to play.

I’ve barely even touched on the Magic Land tiles you collect from the board, which attach to your player board and give you different one-time or ongoing bonuses. It’s another layer which doesn’t overcomplicate things but subtly alters your choices and strategy. Similarly, I haven’t talked about the clever way the dice work. Having a 6 on the top face of your die means you have six movement points, for instance, but when you’ve moved you just rotate that die down by one, so it becomes a 5. Charging that die value up costs cards and one of your two actions, but reaps long-term benefits. The card-driven play with two actions per turn reminds me of games like Brass: Birmingham, even though the they’re nothing alike.

The components, even in the prototype I’ve been playing with, are gorgeous. I’m used to double-layered player boards as an extravagance, but a dual-layer main board? Not since Polis have I had that pleasure, and I’ve gotta tell you, it feels really nice to play with. It’s small details like this that new games from new publishers need in order to stand out from the crowd in these days of crowdfunding campaigns. I will say that while Ynaros Fallin’ can be played by three or four players, with two players is where it’s best.

If you’re a fan of straight-up duelling games, keep an eye out for Ynaros Fallin’. The people behind it have put together a really clever, easy-to-learn, and highly engaging game which I’ve really enjoyed.

Prototype copy provided by Peekwik Dreams. Thoughts and opinions are my own. All components, artwork, and rules subject to change before fulfilment. Sorry about all the Shamen lyrics too, it got stuck in my head.

Ynaros Fallin’ (2023)

Designers: Luca Sanfilippo, Ugo Tomasello
Publisher: Peekwik Dreams
Art: Swan Keller, Ugo Tomasello
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Ynaros Fallin’ Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Shake, shake, shake senora, also shake your boo… irrational dislike of gimmick games.

If you’re going to Jump In The Line down at your local game store, you might spot Shake That City soon, a quick, puzzly game from designers Mads Fløe and Kåre Torndahl Kjær, and publisher AEG. If you’ve seen the cool kids showing Shake That City on Youtube or that there Tiktok, you’ll have seen the cube shaker in action. It’s a cardboard contraption, lashed together with elastic bands, which powers the game’s beating heart.

Yes, it’s a gimmick. No, it’s not entirely necessary. It’s a lot of fun though, and it turns out to be much more important than it first seems.

Town planning

Shake That City is a tile-laying puzzle game with really light rules. The (very tenuous) theme has you choosing a series of tiles to make your own little city on your 5×5 grid boards. “But Adam, how am I – a lowly civil engineer – meant to choose which buildings and infrastructure go into my city?”. Don’t worry, friend, that’s where the cube shaker comes in.

The cube shaker has an open slot on top of it where you can dump in all of the cubes. Then you give it a shake, hence the name of the game! There’s a clever series of holes in the layers in the box, and when you push the tab in on the front, a neat little 3×3 square of cubes drops out of the bottom of the box, onto the table. I’m not entirely sure how it works. I think it’s some kind of Scandinavian wizardry.

The cubes are the same colours as the various tiles in the game, and it’s up to you to choose one of the colours on display, take some matching tiles, and place them on your board. There’s a catch though – such is life. The tiles you place have to match the colour, the quantity, and the exact layout of the cubes on the table. There’s no mirroring, flipping, or rotating in this game. What you see is what you place. In the early game, it’s not a problem, but as the game progresses, sometimes the patterns on offer just won’t fit on your board, and things start to get tricky.

A rose by any other name

When you strip away all of Shake That City’s finery, it’s a game about making patterns of tiles that score well in combination. Think of games like Tigris & Euphrates, or Almadi (review here). Roads need to connect to the edge of the board to score, shops score best near the middle of the board, but need to connect to the edge by roads. Homes like to be on their own, but not next to factories, while factories like to be next to other factories and roads.

Shake That City could easily have been a roll-and-write, and it would have been great. There are a load of different ways to decide which buildings you’re adding: cards, dice, blind-draw cubes from a bag etc. The same goes for marking them on your board. The board could just as easily have been a pad of sheets to scribble on, or pages you print at home.

Ordinarily, these things might make me think that adding the whole cube shaker thing is a gimmick. Pointless over-engineering of a problem that doesn’t need solving. This time though, I’m inclined to be more lenient. I think the shaker box is a good thing, and for two big reasons.

My cube shake brings all the boys to the yard

I admit it: I really enjoy using the shaker. I like the noise it makes when the cubes bounce around inside, I like pushing the tab in, and I love the moment of anticipation as you pick the box up only to see OH MY GOD, IT’S DONE IT AGAIN, IT WORKS! It should get old after the first ten or fifteen times, but it doesn’t. The cardboard magic is always special. Admittedly, sometimes it drops two cubes instead of one in a space, or none at all, but 60% of the time, it works every time.

Secondly, it adds a toy factor to the game. That toy factor is massively important in getting non-gamers engaged, and that’s always a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I’m not one of those people who think games are for the Alpha Nerd gamers and nobody else. I want everyone to play games, and enjoy them. I’ve had first-hand experience of people walking past the game and having their attention grabbed by the sound of wooden cubes, rattling against the box’s cardboard innards. Those same people have gone on to really enjoy the game.

That might sound inconsequential, but it really isn’t. A big part of my personal mission in running this site, and writing these reviews is inclusion and making people realise this is a hobby for everyone.

Final thoughts

Shake That City probably should have a flip- or roll-and-write game. It would have worked well and I’d have really enjoyed it. As it happens, however, it’s a fully-fledged board game, and it’s a good one. The puzzle of trying to make the random patterns work together is really clever and reminds me of the end-game scoring of Almadi a lot.

There’s a clever touch which places bonus tiles in a random order around your board, offering big bonuses if you manage to complete the conditions in the relevant rows and columns. The random nature of these tiles and the cube-plopping machine mean each game genuinely feels different. If you do start to find the tasks a little boring, the player boards flip over to reveal a beachside space instead, with its own rules for scoring.

Shake That City is going to do really well with people who like this style of quick-and-easy games. It would make a great addition to the collection of someone who enjoys games like Cartogtaphers. The obvious comparison that I think some people would want to make is with Tiny Towns (review here), but while they share the idea of cubes and square grids to make towns, they feel very different. Shake That CIty is much more forgiving of a puzzle.

The Kickstarter campaign for Shake That City goes live on November 29th 2022, and apparently, the main pledge is only $29! Depending on the shipping and taxes in your part of the world, it sounds like an absolute bargain to me, and I readily recommend it to families and fans of lighter games, looking for something new.

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

If you enjoyed this review and would like to read more like this, consider supporting the site by joining my monthly membership at Kofi. It starts from £1 per month, offers member benefits, and lets me know you’re enjoying what I’m doing.

Shake That City (2023)

Designers: Mads Fløe, Kåre Torndahl Kjær
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Olga Kim
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Shake That City Review appeared first on Punchboard.