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.

Horsepower

I’m a big fan of cube rail games. Train games that usually involve laying track, creating routes, and often investing in the various companies on offer. I’ve covered Luzon Rails, Ride the Rails, and Mini Express here before, and I can honestly say I haven’t found one I didn’t like yet. Why mention trains in a game about putting little horse envoys on a board? It’s the network building, the point-to-point scoring, and the attempts to link towns of different and same colours. It all puts me in mind of a cube rail game, albeit with a more simple ruleset.

On your turn, you just have to place an envoy on any unoccupied hex on the board. That’s it. If the newly placed envoy is adjacent to one of your previously placed ones it forms a group, or extends a previously made group. If the newly placed envoy is part of a group, and next to a town hex that the group wasn’t touching before, you move your cube up the track of the same colour as the town. As those cubes march steadily northward up the tracks they trigger bonuses such as points, bumping another track, or placing another envoy.

You can see that it’s a pretty simple idea for a game, but it’s in the nuance where it comes alive. The little things. For instance, if you’re the first to visit a town you get a single move up that track. If someone is there before you though, you get two steps instead. If the town is one of the four that have a white herald figure on, that town earns a bonus step too, so by just getting your timing right you can have a three-point visit to a single town.

You can get extra points for connecting towns of the same colour too, and some bigger bonuses for being the first to connect three of a kind, or one of each of the five colours, so there’s some real competition there. If someone’s close to claiming those points, it’d be a real shame if someone placed their horsey in the way, blocking their route, right?

Making tracks

The tracks that you’re bumping your cubes up is the most fun part of the game for me. It’s the reward for clever placement and network-building on the other half of the board. The tracks are designed like ribbons, and you get the bonuses from every spot your cubes pass and stop at along the way, with the exception of the folds in the ribbons. If you manage to stop exactly in one of the folds you claim a seal token. If you place an envoy on a seal and then onto the board, it’s treated as a group. So you can take that single unit, place it somewhere on the map (remember, you can place it anywhere) and score it. Time that well and you can drop a single horsey for three track steps. How’d you like them apples?! Probably quite a lot, I guess. It’s a horse after all.

It’s moves like this that make Cascadero as much fun as it is. At first, the game seems simple and so straightforward, but the towns are in such close proximity that there are countless opportunities to make clever plays full of combos. You move up a track which gives another track a bump. That bump lets you place another envoy down, which in turn moves a cube into one of the folds which lets you move an already-placed horse to an adjacent space, which in turn triggers more shenanigans. Awesome stuff.

I’ve purposely waited this long to tell you the most interesting thing Cascadero foists upon you. It doesn’t matter if you have a huge score at the end of the game if you don’t hit the top of the track which matches your player colour. This artificial insistence on a single track completion is something you almost never see in other games, and I really like it. Throwing in a different target for each player means the game doesn’t become a mess of spite placement.

You can’t just try to cut across other players’ groups to deny them a link in their chain, because you won’t make it to the top of your track. This combined with the fact that there’s nothing to stop you from forming small groups all over the map, means that the cut and thrust of duelling for space on the map isn’t the be-all and end-all. It’s a really nice level of interaction that falls somewhere between a take that game and the multiplayer solitaire of a dry Euro.

Final thoughts

Cascadero is the sort of game which is an instant hit with me. Two to four players, a super slim box which fits in the gaps on any shelves, a couple of minutes to set up, and all done in under an hour. Ideal. Too few games fill that gap between a multi-hour big box game and a small card game, so it makes me really happy when one comes along that does it so well. The bonus actions start slowly but as the game moves on they build and build, and it almost feels like a race towards the end.

There’s another version of the game on the flip side of the board – Farmers – which replaces many of the towns with randomised tiles which give you bonuses if you build onto them. It’s fun and a clever take on the main game. Lots more bonuses to collect but fewer towns to try to advance your track. It’s a nice change, but for me, the base game is the most fun. Especially the variant which only uses two of the four heralds, but sees them getting moved every time they score for someone.

It’d be remiss of me to not mention the presentation too. I’m openly an Ian O’Toole fanboy, and Cascadero just cements my admiration of his work on games. Gorgeous muted colours, clean and deliberate iconography, and the characteristic graphic design which simultaneously shows the game off without getting in the way. Cascadero isn’t just a very good game, it might even be my favourite Knizia game. The only downside I can find is that with two players the competition isn’t as much fun. With three or four, however, it’s brilliant.

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.

Cascadero (2024)

Design: Reiner Knizia
Publisher: Bitewing Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60 mins

The post Cascadero Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rondels in disguise

The first thing you’ll notice after you’ve punched out the million (that might be an exaggeration…) cardboard tulip tokens is the funky interlocking gear wheels. Each player has one, and both of the wheels have actions on them. On your turn you rotate the left wheel the required number of spaces (more on that later), which in turn rotates the right wheel. You pick one of the two actions – or sometimes both – now indicated on the board and do that thing.

Now, being the astute lover of rondels that I am, it didn’t escape my attention that what we’re dealing with here are actually two interlocking rondels. The difference between these and something like my beloved Hamburgum (read the review here) is that instead of moving a pawn around a rondel, we’re moving the rondel itself and letting a printed arrow take the place of the pawn. You might also notice that the spokes of the wheels are raised, leaving recessed segments between them. That’s because as the game goes on you’ll add action segments to the wheel to either boost or replace the pre-printed ones.

You might think it makes coming up with a strategy easy. Add complementary actions to opposite wheels, and every time they cycle around you end up with a supercharged turn. Not so, makker. The wheel on the left has six sections, while the one on the right only has five. Given that you’ll only get to rotate the bigger wheel four or five times at the most, those stars won’t align after their first meeting. It’s actually pretty tricky to figure out which two are going to meet a long way in advance, especially as you don’t know how many segments that wheel is going to turn when it comes to your turn.

Flooding the market

So what are you actually doing in the game with all of these actions? Your biggest priority is growing tulips. Ideally growing them in neat rows of matching colours, while making sure you don’t repeat the same colour in each column. In addition to getting points for complete rows and columns, you’ll also get VPs for tulips of certain colours if you manage to get their associated windmills out on the main board. This is where my ignorance of The Netherlands’ topology and history reared its head. It’s not a country famous for flour or bread, so why all the windmills?

If, like me, you didn’t already know, they needed those thousands of windmills to pump excess water from the lowlands. It’s a country that’s famously flat and close to sea level, which means flooding is, and always has been, a real concern. You can’t grow tulips in fields more akin to rice paddies. Before you take a turn you can optionally open the floodgates. The floodgate marker has three spaces, and the space it’s on dictates how far your action wheel turns. At the bottom it’s one segment, the middle is two, and the top is – you guessed it – three. Opening them costs money but rewards you with VPs and allows you to get the actions you want back in range more quickly.

It creates a really interesting tug-of-war between the players, especially when there are more than two players. One person might be desperately trying to get an action back in range, flooding the place with reckless abandon, while the others want to keep the gates closed so they can milk every action on the way around. The longer the gates are open, the more the flood marker moves along its track, and in a nice thematic callback, you can get rewards for using actions to lower it. Turns out all those windmills you’re building aren’t just to make an interesting skyline. Pump water out, get rewarded with money and/or VPs. Living the capitalist dream.

Networking opportunities

One of the things Windmill Valley does really nicely is the way it ties different game mechanisms together. Along with the rondelesque action selection, the bustling market area where you jostle for position and aim to get the most tulips or planting opportunities, there’s also the very pretty main section of the board. It represents adjoining fields of brightly coloured tulips, and at the junctions of each of the roads which separate the fields, there’s a space to build a windmill.

Each windmill that gets built has to be able to trace a path of previously built windmills back to the market in the middle of the board. They don’t have to be your own, but for every windmill that isn’t yours that your path traces, the owner gets a victory point, and they soon add up. As you venture further out from the market the building spaces get more expensive, but offer more rewards, as you take the actions and resources from the adjacent fields. This is all before we even take into account the helper cards which either slot into the top of your board to reward you with things like more powerful actions, or into the bottom to offer more end-of-game scoring opportunities.

Each little piece of the puzzle contributes towards a really tight, enjoyable game with a passive but ever-present level of player interaction. There’s no take-that. There’s no directly screwing someone over, but the consequences of one player’s choices for their own benefit can send out big ripples of annoyance to the others. I love it. I love it when something in a game throws grit in the gears of your plans and you’re forced to adapt, and never has that analogy been more apt.

There’s plenty of scope for mitigation, not least of which being the tool tokens which you can use to increase or decrease the number of steps your wheels move on your turn. Even if you don’t have any tools, you’re never forced to move further than you want to because you can just choose to close the gates for free at the beginning of your turn. In doing that, however, you open the gate – so to speak – for the following players to open it again and add more VPs to their tally.

Final thoughts

Windmill Valley is a really good game. Bang in the middle of medium-weight with enough going on to satisfy heavyweight nerds like me without causing brain burn in less-experienced players. The components are really nicely made and satisfying to play with, even if punching out 200 tiny tulips is a ballache. The rulebook is clear and concise, and the game itself is a doddle to teach. The player aids are great, and the appendix in the rulebook is ideal too. My biggest complaint about the stuff which comes in the box is the sheer size of it all. The board is huge and by the time you add a player board and a set of action wheels for each player, you’re not getting everyone around a 1m x 1m table.

I think Windmill Valley shines with three players. The level of competition around the windmill network is just right and the game doesn’t drag. It’s still very enjoyable with two and four, but I haven’t had the time to take the solo mode out for a spin. The passive interaction is great, and naturally I love the rondel nature of the action wheels. It reminds me of Parks (read my review here) actually in that respect. Racing to the next full rotation and progressing to the next calendar track section (equivalent to the end of the track in Parks) might get you the best rewards, but at what cost? How much will you regret skipping those actions?

My biggest worry for Windmill Valley is how well it finds its audience. I applaud Board&Dice for branching out and diversifying from the heavyweight browns of the T series of games, but I can’t help wondering who is going to choose a game about windmills and tulips. Hopefully, plenty of people do, because I think this is a great example of everything a modern Euro game should be. Clean design, clear rules, bright boards, and just the right amount of mental overhead. I don’t want it to slip between the cracks and get overlooked. After Arborea and Barcelona, Dani Garcia is doing some great things, and Windmill Valley is another fine example of what to expect from him.

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

Windmill Valley (2024)

Design: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Pedro Codeço, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Windmill Valley Review appeared first on Punchboard.

While it’s still a valid comparison it’s important to know two important things before we go any further. Firstly there are still a lot of things in Nucleum which aren’t directly from either of the namechecked games. Secondly, and most importantly, this isn’t just a case of someone saying “What if we take these two things and smoosh them together. That’ll work, right?”. So often in entertainment what looks like a good idea on paper turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. So while Audioslave just sounded like Chris Cornell singing over Tom Morello’s guitar, and was in all ways lesser than Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine (musical taste of my youth dating me here), Nucleum is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Both are great sandwich fillings in their own right, but when you put them together – wow.

A night on the tiles

The concept of Nucleum is powering homes and businesses in an alternate universe 19th-century central Europe. Uranium has been discovered as a great way to heat water and power steam turbines, so it’s your job as budding industrialists to harness the power, supply the power, and make a buttload of money at the same time. A lot of this is done in the game by forming networks to get power from one place to another, be that coal or nuclear power. If you’ve played the Brass games you’ll immediately see the biggest similarity here. Instead of building canals and railways however, it’s only ever tracks you lay down, and Brass’ biggest seismic shock – the mid-game removal of network links – is gone.

The really clever thing in Nucleum is that the tiles you lay down on the board to make the connections between cities are the same tiles that you use to take actions. One side of the tile is the railway line and on the other, you’ve got two actions, one on either end of the tile. You very quickly realise that you’ve got tricky choices to make all of the time. If you play a tile for the two actions on it, you place it in the next available slot above your player board, making a line of tiles from left to right. Your income markers move left to right on tracks immediately below your played tiles. When you take an income action you get to take whatever your income tracks show, but only as far along as you have tiles. More tiles played equals more potential income, right?

At the same time though, those tiles you’re placing above your board to take actions and get income are the same tiles you need to flip to place on the board as railway links. Each end of the tile has a colour on it, and the cities have colours on them too. When you place a railway, if the colours at either end match you get to take those actions before flipping it to the railway side, which is a nice bonus, but then that tile is stuck on the board for the rest of the game. You can buy more tiles with the money you make from income actions, but in order to make the most money, you need those tiles to be above your board, not on the main board. With a nod to games like Concordia, you can get your tiles back to use again, but you waste a turn doing it.

Quite the puzzle, isn’t it?

A competitive market

What makes games like Brass or Simone’s Barrage or Lorenzo Il Magnifico so much fun is the level of competition inherent in them. Network-building is especially good for driving competition in board games because it forces players to compete for the same things. Ticket To Ride has us building railway lines. Barrage is about directing water downhill. Brass gets players making sure they can get fuel to their factories. Nucleum does the same thing and it keeps that same slight anxiety when you start building a multi-part railway. Some players are just waiting for someone to start one so that they can jump in and finish the links, depriving you of any placement bonuses while simultaneously upsetting potential plans you had for those bonuses.

I dislike referring to Brass so much in this review, but it’s a necessary evil. The biggest difference in the way these two games feel to play comes as a result of that mid-game reset in Brass. All of a sudden all of your previous network just disappears from the board, and it can leave ill-prepared players with no way to get coal to their buildings. Nucleum feels very different. It’s a case of build, build, build, all the way to the end of the game. Some people will love that, some will prefer Brass’ way of doing things. Different strokes for different folks. I love Brass, but I love Nucleum too. It’s similar, just different.

The market for extra action tiles is really interesting. Occasionally tiles will pop out into view which perfectly align with your strategy. The feeling of “Don’t you dare take that before I can” is super present, and I love it. On the flip side of this though is the fact that sometimes you just won’t get a chance to get the tiles you want. You desperately want to replace an action you’ve turned into a railway tile, or something comes out with coloured ends which perfectly match a final link for you, but someone else takes it. Them’s the breaks. Contingency is something you’ll quickly learn to build.

Another thing I particularly like is how important each player’s player board is in the game. In many games with a heavily contested main board, the player board acts as not much more than somewhere to store the stuff that belongs to you. In Nucleum it’s so much more. When you gain technologies during the game you can plug in the jigsaw-like pieces hanging off the edge of your board to gain immediate and/or ongoing benefits, as well as end-game scoring opportunities. Choosing which buildings and turbines to build affects what you get and when, as does claiming contracts and plugging them into the side of your board. Keeping your attention on your own board, the main board, and even your opponents’ boards to keep abreast of what they’re doing, is tricky, but compulsive.

This game is so good.

Final thoughts

This review was a long time coming, and with good reason. I loved my first play and was super excited for the rest of the year waiting for it to arrive. I’m not immune to the power of hype though, so as is usual for me, I waited for the hype to die down and to play the game enough times enough to cast a critical eye over it. I’m glad I did, because after the initial glee and hype I had a little lull where I thought maybe I was convincing myself I liked it more than I really did. Now, however, with time on my side, I can honestly say that Nucleum is an excellent game.

It suffers from the same things many of Board&Dice’s heavy Euro games do, but that’s got to be expected. It’s a tricky game to teach, and it takes at least a couple of plays to understand how to see your strategy through to the end of the game. If the person you’re teaching has played Brass then it helps, but otherwise just understand that you might need to do some hand-holding in those first games. Making sure someone understands whether they can get coal to those early buildings for example, can mean the difference between someone having a good time or leaving with a bitter taste in their mouth.

It’s a pretty fiddly game too, and the attempt at a game insert that comes in the box went straight in the bin. I highly recommend you leave the technology tiles locked into place when you pack it away. It’s nightmare-inducing how thin and potentially breakable the cardboard arms are without them. Other than that Nucleum really is special. The asymmetric player boards, the variable setup, the way every single game with have a different initial state means it’s not something you’re going to naturally intuit right away for a long time.

Nucleum is a polished, well-produced, heavy Euro game of the highest order. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I had another game that scratches that Brass itch”, then Nucleum is that game. Far from being detracting, or calling it derivative and a copycat because of the countless Brass comparisons that I and others have made, look upon this as the highest compliment I can bestow on it. When you’re constantly being namechecked in the same sentence as BGG’s number one game of all time, you’re doing something right. Bravo Simone & Dávid.

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

Nucleum (2023)

Design: Simone Luciani, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Board&Dice
Art: Andreas Resch, Piotr Sokołowski, Zbigniew Umgelter
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-150 mins

The post Nucleum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Literally, dam, because that’s what you’re building in Barrage – dams. Also conduits, powerhouses and elevations, but ‘Coooonduit!’ doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s a game of worker placement and network-building as you and your friends compete to generate electricity from the limited amount of water flowing downhill. As far as Euro games go, it can be pretty cutthroat and there’s a ton of interaction. It’s a confusing game, for sure, but an excellent one.

Come hell or high water

Barrage puts you in the role of CEOs of energy companies. Your goal is to produce hydroelectric power to fulfil contracts, which in turn score VPs. The board is gorgeous and represents a map, starting at the top in the mountains, moving down into the hills, before finishing up at the bottom in the plains. Four rivers start their journey way up in the headwaters in the mountains, collecting in basins as gravity pulls them ever-onward.

Being the corporate giants you are, and understanding the nation’s need for energy, it’s your job to harness the flow of water to generate electricity by redirecting water through conduits towards powerhouses. It all sounds simple enough, but there’s a problem. There’s a limited amount of water flowing downhill and all of you are competing for it. In order to get enough water through the turbines in your powerhouses you’ve got to build dams on the edges of the natural basins for the water to pool behind. That means if you build dams up in the mountains, you’re going stop – or certainly delay – the flow of water to lower basins.

So what happens to the players building dams, conduits, and powerhouses further down, when the water can’t get to them? That question is the blood pumping through the beating heart of Barrage. It introduces some of the tastiest interactions in any modern Euro game from the last five years. It’s a game of combining plans with opportunistic swoops to either benefit from someone else’s loose ends, or to just be a pain in the arse.

To run the energy generation action you need three things. You need water behind a dam, a conduit leading away from that dam, and a powerhouse at the other end of the conduit. It brings this timing puzzle with it. You can use anyone’s conduit to channel water to your powerhouse, but if you use one that’s not yours you have to pay the owner for the privilege, and they generate VPs at the same time. You could build the conduit first, but if someone else builds the dam on that space, you can never generate energy, because the water has to come from your own dam. Maybe you see someone with a really good setup near the bottom of the board, but you don’t like that. It’d be a shame if someone else built a tall dam directly above it, wouldn’t it…?

Keeping your head above water

Sticking with the water puns, it’s easy to see how Barrage is a deep game. On top of all of that posturing and planning for the buildings on the map, you’ve got a tight Euro game to manage which overarches everything. Resources are tight, and unusually in these games, reusable. This brings me to my favourite toy in all of board games for the last few years: the Construction Wheel.

Each player has their own wheel which is split into six sections. When you want to construct a building you first have to have the building’s tile available, i.e. it can’t already be on the construction wheel. You place that tile and the required concrete mixers or excavators (your resources) into the top-most section of the wheel, and then rotate the wheel 60 degrees so that the next section reaches the open slot at the top. Any building tiles or resources on that section which is now at the top come back to your supply, ready to use again. The fly in the ointment being that the resources and tile you just used are trapped until that wheel spins all the way around, so planning is key.

To play Barrage well you need to have your head on a swivel, so the saying goes. You need to keep track of what things are available in your supply, what’s happening on the map, how many engineers (workers) you have left, where you could generate power, and importantly, which tiles other players currently have trapped in their construction wheel. Balancing it all is tricky, especially during your first couple of plays because the water flow isn’t as simple as you might imagine. Understanding the difference between a dam and a powerhouse isn’t immediately obvious, nor is the fact that water simply flowing past your powerhouse doesn’t generate any energy, unless you play as the USA, in which case it can.

There’s a reason this game currently has a 4.10 weight on BGG at the time of writing, with 5.00 being the heaviest, most complex a game could be. None of the actions is particularly difficult or drawn-out to perform, but understanding the way the game’s many, many gears mesh together is hard. On top of all of the various ways the actions work together, there’s even more to consider. You’ve got different player boards with different bonuses, different executive officers that grant you unique powers, and variable setup for how much water flows from which headwaters, and when. After your introductory game, you can throw in advanced technology tiles for construction too. Barrage is a big, wet sandbox, designed for repeated play with a group of players keen to explore all the game has to offer.

Final thoughts

Barrage is a game that I wanted to play for a long, long time. The idea of the construction wheel had me hooked on its own, let alone the level of interaction sewn in. When it arrived on boardgamearena.com I got stuck in and enjoyed it so much that I knew I had to have a physical copy of the game. I’m glad I own it now because the production is absolutely gorgeous. The water basins on the board have UV spot marking which makes them shiny and smooth. The excavators and concrete mixers are tiny and ridiculously detailed when something basic would have sufficed. Each player board is dual-layered with places for everything to sit neatly, and that’s despite the fact that each player’s buildings are slightly different. A green powerhouse looks different to a pink one, which looks different to a white one etc. It’s a level of extravagance I really appreciate in a game that’s designed to be played a lot of times, and the sort of thing usually reserved for Eagle-Gryphon’s Vital Lacerda games, like On Mars (review here).

Let’s make no bones about it, there are a bunch of players out there who won’t enjoy Barrage. It’s a tricky game to learn, there’s a lot of stuff going on at any one time in the game, and it can be really mean. If you don’t like games where your plans get knocked into a cocked hat because some swine has built above you, diverting everything past you, you’re not going to have much fun. Most of the time the game isn’t so overtly combative, but it certainly can be, and it’s worth being aware of. This brings me to another relevant point – player scaling. The only difference between a two- and a four-player game is the number of shared action spaces available. The board layout doesn’t change. It means a two-player game has the unspoken option of players choosing to build far apart from one another. In a four-player game, forget it, you’ll be under each other’s feet from turn one.

If you want a heavy game that’s deep, thematic, and has plenty of variety and scope for strategy, Barrage is superb. It will break your brain, you’ll get annoyed with the other players around the table, and you’ll find yourself making use of every last resource and coin at your disposal. But you know what? You’ll have such a blast doing it that you just won’t care.

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.

Barrage (2019)

Design: Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani
Publisher: Cranio Creations
Art: Mauro Alocci, Antonio De Luca, Roman Roland Kuteynikov
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-180 mins

The post Barrage Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“Is Brass: Birmingham as good as people say it is?” The answer is yes. A resounding, soot-covered, sing-it-from-the-pits, yes.

Bold as brass

Brass: Birmingham isn’t the first game in the series, as the ‘Birmingham’ suffix implies. In fact, it’s not even the second. It’s the sort-of third. Martin Wallace designed the original game – Brass – which was critically acclaimed, but if we’re being honest, not much of a looker. Around 2016 Roxley Games teamed up with Martin to refresh the game with a new lick of paint and a brand new version. Brass became Brass: Lancashire, and Brass: Birmingham emerged at the same time. The Kickstarter went bonkers, and the original £48,000 target was left in the dust as they raised a cool million quid.

Lancashire is the same game as the original, albeit with some rough edges smoothed off, while Birmingham took the original formula and tweaked it with some new mechanisms and a randomised board setup, which helped it stand on its own two feet. The biggest change came in the art and graphic design, which got a complete overhaul and produced one of the most gorgeous boards in all of boardgaming.

The hallmark of Martin Wallace’s designs is the level of interaction between players. Whether it’s direct mano-a-mano conflict like in A Few Acres of Snow, the hidden role area control of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, or the auctions of Tinners’ Trail. The same interaction is woven into Brass’ tweed, but with a clever twist. There’s this wonderful feeling of simultaneous competition and co-dependence, as each player tries to carve out their own spot in the Black Country, while relying on the other players to extend the reach of their network for the all-important trading. It’s this networking which leads to the trickier concepts to wrap your head around in Brass: Birmingham.

Brassed-off

Brass: Birmingham only has two main resources to worry about: coal and iron. Despite only having these two, explaining how they work can be heavy going. Both are necessary to build the buildings you want on the board, but consuming them is tricky. Iron can be taken from anywhere on the board, as long as it comes from an Ironworks, before turning to the communal market. Simple. Coal, however, needs a transport connection to a coal source, whether that’s coal on someone’s coal pit tile on the board, or the market.

Brass: Birmingham places huge importance on connections and networks, which are related, but distinct. Your networks are linked tiles of your colour, while connections are any number of networks that intersect, regardless of whose they are. For some reason it feels as if the concept is harder to teach than it ought to be, and I’m not sure why, I just know that in every teach I’ve done so far, that’s the part I’ve had to repeat or clarify the most. Don’t be surprised if, in your first couple of games, people try to build something using coal, only to find that they can’t trace a connection back to the coal market.

I’ve placed emphasis on these foibles because it’s important to understand that when you get past that initial learning hurdle, Brass: Birmingham reveals itself like a drunk Premier League footballer. At its heart, it’s just a case of play a card, then choose whether to build something (cards have either locations or building types), make a transport connection to extend your network, develop an industry, or take a loan from the bank. There’s a bit more to it than that, but understanding those basic actions opens up this wonderful, Industrial Revolution-era playground, just waiting to be explored by you and your friends.

Getting down to brass tacks

Despite the simple actions Brass: Birmingham is as rich and deep as a bathful of balti. Each player has the same set of buildings on their player boards and the same options open to them at the start of the game. It means that although you never know which cards the other players are holding, there’s a good chance they’re eyeing up the same building spots as you. Getting early coal and iron can be a huge boon, as can opening those initial connections to the market spots around the edge of the board. I really like how the iron and coal cubes get placed on your tile when you build them, and it’s only by getting rid of them (used for building) that you get to flip the tile and score the points printed on it. In your first game it seems obvious; get the coal and iron buildings built, forcing others to use the resources on your buildings, so that you benefit from their actions. Points in the bag for doing nothing – nice.

Things aren’t always that simple though, and there’ll be times – especially in the late game – when all of your plans are left in tatters when another player uses the last pieces of iron you were relying on. Sure, you can buy it from the market, but do you have the money? Curse those smug, iron-taking knobheads! (inspired by real events). The dichotomy between wanting to demolish your opponents while depending on them is simply brilliant. It’s another game of not being able to do everything, and choosing which industries you want to focus on is a difficult choice, one made even more awkward when you realise you have a direct competitor sat opposite you.

One of my favourite features is the way the game is split into two eras. The canal era plays out for the first half of the game, and then there’s an interim scoring, and all of the first-era buildings and canal boat network links are removed from the board. It leaves players scrambling to rebuild industry and to forge new, more expensive, rail links between the towns and cities. Not only does it add a nuanced layer of strategy (upgraded buildings don’t get removed, giving somewhere to build from again), but it also acts as a kind of reset point, letting players suddenly strong-arm their way into areas of the map once the domain of someone else. It’s also a really good time to get a cup of tea.

Honestly, sitting here and typing up my notes, I keep daydreaming back to the last time I played, and I find myself wanting to play it again, right now. That’s how much I like this game.

Final thoughts

Despite the less-than-intuitive differences between the way the only two resources behave, and learning how networks and connections work, Brass: Birmingham is a work of art. From the most literal interpretation of art, with the gorgeous board which has a day and a night side (purely aesthetic), to the abstract notion of a game as art. If game design is an art, then Messrs. Wallace, Brown and Tolman have made something worthy of the Louvre.

The setting isn’t going to appeal to everyone. 18th-19th century industry in the Midlands isn’t exactly the most glamorous setting. This is a dyed-in-the-wool Euro though, which has thick. beige blood running under its oh-so-pretty skin. Theme and setting aren’t the things which sell a game like this to board game fans, and brass is no exception. I love how minimal the game is. In a world of over-produced Kickstarter nonsense, a game with very few wooden pieces – let alone plastic – is wonderful. Using cardboard tiles and boats taken from thin card player mats, with a few orange and black cubes on the board, is like taking a step back 10 or 15 years into the Euro game renaissance. So much so that the little wooden beer barrels feel like an extravagance. In a game where being able to read the board state at a glance is vital, the lack of 3D pieces is clearly a design consideration and it’s one I appreciate.

Brass: Birmingham also scales really nicely for different player counts. It borrows a principle from Martin’s previous games such as Tinners’ Trail, where parts of the board are only really used in three- or four-player games. It keeps things tight and focused in a two-player game, resulting in a game which works nicely at two. I’m having trouble finding fault to balance this review with, to be honest with you. It’s quite a heavy game in terms of strategy and planning, but the game’s ease of learning belies this, resulting in a game like an ogre onion. The more you play, the more layers you uncover, resulting in a game you’ll come back to time and time again.

Essentially, I think every Euro game fan should own Brass: Birmingham. It’s due another print run at the time of writing, and the BGG #1 news has pushed prices up to crazy highs. It’s a thinner box than most, with a small number of components, so don’t pay through the nose just to get on board the hype tram. Be patient, and you’ll have one of the best games ever made for a fraction of the price of many recent Kickstarters. I love this game, and will never turn down a game. It’s simply wonderful.

Brass: Birmingham (2018)

Designers: Martin Wallace, Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman
Publisher: Roxley Games
Art: Lina Cossette, David Forest, Damien Mammoliti
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Brass: Birmingham Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The setting for Maquis sees you taking control of a small group of maquisards, the French resistance fighters. From your safe house each day, you send your people out to various spots in the city, aiming to collect resources such as money, food, intelligence, and maybe the odd explosive or two. The idea is to take all of those things and complete missions for La Resistance. Just don’t go thinking you’re going to have it all your own way. The militia – Milice – are patrolling the streets, and they’re looking for you.

Cul de sac

The worker spots in the small map are connected by streets, and those streets are vitally important. At the end of each round, any of your pawns that can’t trace a route back to your safe house is arrested, and permanently lost from the game. When you consider the fact that there are only two routes back to your starting safe house, the importance of keeping a clear route home becomes apparent.

Turns alternate between you and the Milice, and their turns are run by flipping the top card of their patrol deck. Each card gives you three locations, and they try to place someone in priority order, from top to bottom. If there’s already a pawn in a location, they move to the next on the list, and try again. Now, there are only ten of these patrol cards, which isn’t too many to be memorised. As you get more games under your belt you start to realise which cards are left, and how far you think you can push your luck.

That’s not fair

Your early games of Maquis don’t feel fair. You’re torn between wanting to visit the distant spots on the map to get the best stuff, and placing closer to home to ensure a safe route home. I lost track of how many times I thought “I’m going to risk it this once…”, and sure enough, I get blocked, lose pawns, and effectively end my game right there and then. Frustration isn’t the word. The odds can feel monumentally stacked against you.

Patience and experimentation (or reading this review) reveal a little secret. Maquis isn’t a normal worker-placement game. It’s a network building game. The way to ensure you survive the early game is to build chains. Branch out from your base and make sure there’s a safe route home. A bit like when you see video of people building human chains to pull people out of rivers.

This style of game isn’t going to suit everyone, because it means you’ll often find your first few turns of each game being carbon copies of the first few turns of your last game. And the game before that. You don’t have to play the game like that, you can risk it, but more often than not you’ll find yourself losing and resetting to play again.

Building resistance

If you’ve made it this far into the review, you’re probably thinking this game sounds like hard slog. There’s no denying, it is a difficult game, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can do to swing things in your favour. There are empty building slots on the map that can be upgraded to add new areas to visit, including safe houses, so you don’t have to make the perilous trip back across the river. You can even buy guns which let you eliminate the Milice, at the expense of stronger Soldier enemies replacing them later.

Maquis is a game of biding your time. It does a great job of tempting you to take risks. You can place your troops into any space you like, and you always place before the enemy. Tempering that temptation is the key to the game, unless you feel really confident (or you’re up against it), and go for a Hail Mary play.

Those moments of desperation will happen at times, because at the same time as trying to complete your missions, there are morale and days tracks adding to the pressure. As each of these progresses, the Milice presence in the city becomes stronger, and you’ll end up placing more and more enemy pawns, making the game harder the longer it goes on.

No-one ever said being the resistance was going to be easy.

Final thoughts

I’ve made Maquis sound like a hard slog through an unforgiving game. It’s true – it is difficult, and it takes patience, but it’s worth it. The setting of wartime France looks great, and the map is tense and claustrophobic. When you make it back safely at the end of a day, it’s like a mini victory, and you’ll find yourself breathing a sigh of relief at your own safe return.

My biggest criticism is the early game. You’ll find yourself setting things up the same way for the first few rounds, and it can feel like a by-the-numbers preamble to the game itself. I mean, you could just go for broke and send someone right across the map, but it doesn’t matter how well you know the patrol deck, you cannot know the first few cards to come out. With no weapon at the start of the game, the only way you can ensure it’s not game over in the first few minutes is to safely build your route, a link at a time.

Maquis is a really clever game. The combination of network building and worker-placement is really nice, and it all comes wrapped up in a small box packed with quality components. There’s loads of variety in the missions, and plenty of options for making things trickier if you’re some kind of masochist. I love these games that are designed from the ground-up to be a solo experience, and Maquis is one of the very best.

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

Maquis: 2nd Edition (2021)

Designer: Jake Staines
Publisher: Side Room Games
Art: Ilya Baranovsky, Jake Staines
Players: 1
Playing time: 30 mins

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