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

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

Play the player

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

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

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

Sakana Stack manages to tick both those boxes.

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Sakana Stack (2025)

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

The post Sakana Stack Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

And yes, I really had Super Long Nose Goblin. It was okay.

Kanpai!

The story of the game is an unusual one. You’re dinosaurs drinking sake at a party, and the aim of the game is to collect the most empty tokkuri, which are the traditional sake jars. Now that you know that, you can basically ignore it. It’s cute, but the game is entirely abstract and it could have been literally any theme on the box.

That said, I bloody love dinosaurs, so I was already biased towards this one before I even bought it. And not just because Mark from their stand plied me with sake.

Each player has a hand of cards. On the back is a picture of a tokkuri with 10 rows on it. On your turn you either play a card face-down, adding another tokkuri to the party (it’s gonna get wild), or face-up to use the values printed on the card to drink sake from the tokkuri on the table. If you manage to empty a tokkuri exactly with your card, you collect it and it counts as a point for you (most of the time at least, I’ll come back to that). There are a couple of twists thrown in though, just to keep things interesting.

Firstly, you can only play a card you can completely satisfy. If your card shows 4 + 4 + 4 it means you need to take 4 from three different tokkuri. Not 4 from two of them and three for another to finish it. If there are fewer than three on the table, you can’t play it as you need to take from three. The other little bit of boozy fun which keeps you on your toes is that you can claim any of the tokkuri on the table, not just your own.

See, you like that, don’t you?

Making bank

Scoring is fun in Tokkuri taking, too. Each player starts with 10 in the bank. Counters, coins, gummy bears – it doesn’t matter what you count with, you have ten of them. When a round ends you get a point per collected tokkuri, and lose two points for every tokkuri with at least 3 sake left in them in front of you. The winner of the round is the player with the highest score, and all other players have to pay them the difference between their scores from their own bank.

Let’s say you and I are playing. I score 3, you score -4. You owe me 7 gummy bears, friend. Short arms and deep pockets won’t cut it here.

When one player’s bank is empty, the game ends and you tally the scores. It’s really as easy as that. I mentioned above that tokkuri are not always worth a point, and that’s because there are a few dummy cards in the game. You can only play them as tokkuri, but they’re worth nothing. It leads to some interesting mind games where you might almost drain that one, tempting someone else into finishing the jar.

It’s a really interactive game when you consider how small a box it comes in. We’re talking half the size of an Oink game. Now that’s small!

Final thoughts

This isn’t a big review because it doesn’t need to be. Tokkuri Taking is a quick, easy card game with a lot of cunning behind it. You get ideas for different strategies very quickly. Chris (designer of Zuuli) and I played a few games one evening at UKGE, and we quickly tried to invent the same strategy more than once. I’ve played it since with four players, and I think I enjoy it more with more players, but it’s still definitely worth playing at two.

It’s obviously not a big, or long game. It’s not like you’re going to go to your group and say “Okay guys, shall we play On Mars or Tokkuri Taking tonight?”, but it’s the perfect filler for the start or end of an evening. It’s also an ideal pub game because it’ll even fit into your skin-tight jeans’ pockets, fashionistas.

The little sticks to track sake levels are charming, and the artwork, although minimal, is still really cute. As and when print runs happen I highly recommend adding Tokkuri Taking to your teeny games collection. Cheap, cheerful, silly, and a lot of fun.

Tokkuri Taking / トックリテイキング (2024)

Design: Takashi Saito
Publisher: Bright Eye Games
Art: Rei Betsuyaku
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Tokkuri Taking Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Fox in a box

The game is the same size as a standard deck of cards, which is an instant win for me because portability is key to lighter and filler games doing well. Among the 54 cards there are food cards with carrots and values on, foxes (boo! hiss!), and some natty tracker cards, which means you don’t need tokens to track how many bunnies or how much food you have. Nice.

It’s one of those games which I can explain to you in a couple of minutes, so while I don’t do rulebook regurgitations here, I want to emphasise just how easy Feed & Breed is to learn. On your turn you draw a card from the Forage deck, which is seeded with fox and food cards. If you draw a food card, you instantly gain that much food. If you draw a fox, you lose a rabbit, plus one additional rabbit per 10 rabbits in your warren. From there you get the juicy bit which appeals to the gambler in me, the push-your-luck phase.

You can choose to keep drawing cards, but you don’t instantly get the food this time. You can keep turning cards for as long as you feel lucky. If you choose to stop, you add all the collected food to your tracker. If you draw a fox though, you lose bunnies again and all the food you’d drawn up to that point. Once you reach the end of the deck you do the feed and breed phase. Spend one food for every rabbit in your warren, then with any food left over spend it 1:1 to add rabbits. So for example if you had five food left over after you fed your bunnies, you add another five of the long-eared scamps to your warren.

That’s as difficult as the game gets, which makes it perfect as a lightweight family game, or a quick filler to start or end the evening.

Mental maths

The gamer in you who wants something more from a game than flipping a card and hoping for the best will be pleased to know there’s enough in Feed & Breed to keep your brain working. At the start of the game, you know how many fox cards are in the deck, and you’re never allowed to look through the discard pile to see how many of those foxes have come out already. For instance, if you’re in the first round of a two-player game, you know there are only three foxes. If you keep track of the fact that three have already come out, then you know you can go carrot-mad safely for the rest of the round.

As each player moves past each set of ten rabbits, however, you add another food and another fox card to the deck, and slowly the game gets a bit more awkward. It’s never difficult, but it’s a great test of memory and concentration for younger players. I really like the fact that it gradually gets trickier as the game goes on without ever getting hard. It also doesn’t drag on too long, which is another strength in a light game’s arsenal.

A game which fits in your pocket, tickles your brain, plays well with any age of player, and is done & dusted in 15 minutes? It’s a winner.

Final thoughts

There’s no denying that the market for small, light card games is heavily saturated. To make a dent in it you need to do something a bit different, and that’s what Feed & Breed does well. It doesn’t lean into the toilet humour themes which so many games do. You wouldn’t believe how many offers I see to look at some new ‘risqué’ games that I have no interest in. Instead, we’ve got colourful, beautifully illustrated cards which appeal to any age and player.

Feed & Breed is available from the print-on-demand store, The Game Crafter, and you can order a copy right here. I’ve spoken to Martyn, the designer, who tells me that there may be crowd sale later in the year which will drop the current $19.99 price, so keep your eyes open for that.

Feed & Breed is a cracking little game which you can happily play with the family and be done with in the time between ordering and getting your food when you’re out at the pub for tea. Push-your-luck distilled into a deck of cards with a cutesy theme you’ll love.

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

Feed & Breed (2024)

Design: Martyn Hedges
Publisher: Scattershot Games
Art: Aariel Cooper
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 15 mins

The post Feed & Breed Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The tweak? Spoiler alert: Faraway’s scoring is done backwards.

Getting into the corners

Have you ever gone to make yourself a slice of toast, only to find that there’s no butter left in the tub? You end up desperately trying to get every last bit on your knife, resulting in a layer of butter a few microns thick on your toast. That transparent layer of butter you’ve got, that’s about as thick as the theme on the game of Faraway.

The rulebook tells you that you’re exploring the mysterious continent of Alula, venturing out on expeditions during the day and night to explore and catalogue the animals, plants, and minerals. You encounter denizens who’ll award you with fame (VPs) for completing their quests. Quests amount to “have these icons by the time you score this card“. Each expedition card has a number on it which represents the amount of time that expedition takes, and smaller numbers here mean you’re more likely to be able to play higher numbers on the following turn, resulting in finding Sanctuaries.

This all sounds very exciting, full of adventure and mystery, I know. The truth, however, is that none of this will mean anything to you once you start. The game is reduced to focusing on numbers, icons, and colours, and in all honesty, it’s not a bad thing. If anything, it turns into one of the game’s strengths, because the scoring, which I’ll come to shortly, is deceptively difficult to get your head around at first.

Re-e-e-wind

Let’s get into it then. Let’s get into the bit that every critic who gets their teeth into Faraway – me included – will laud as so clever and different. The scoring.

Over the eight rounds that the game lasts for, you add a single card to your row at a time. Once the eighth and final card is played, you turn them all over and then flip each card in turn, checking its criteria to see if you score any fame / VPs. The kicker is that the first card you flip is the last card you played, and the first card you played ends up being the final one you flip and score.

You can only count icons you have uncovered at the time when you score a card, so if that last card you played demands that you have three of the blue stone icons to your name, there’s a good chance that that card on its own won’t fulfil that requirement, so you won’t score any points. You might now have the dawning realisation in your brain that the early cards are the ones you should aim for the high VPs, the ones with the most demanding requirements. That first card you placed down can use all eight revealed location cards for icons.

The locations aren’t the only way to get points, icons, and card colours (which is another way to score points). Every time you play a card with a higher duration value than the previous one, you find a sanctuary which gives you a smaller bonus card to add to your area. Sanctuary cards add end-game scoring opportunities and icons which stay face-up to help towards your location card quests. If you’ve got Clue icons on display when you draw Sanctuary cards, you get to draw more cards to choose from. These little sanctuary cards can result in some beefy bonuses, so don’t neglect them.

It all sounds so simple, right? Play cards, and try to make sure that when you work back to the start you have all the things you need to score the cards. Take my word for it when I tell you it’s so much trickier than you think, and it’s brilliant for it.

Final thoughts

Faraway has a ton of hype and praise floating around at the moment. Ordinarily, I like to wait a month or two for hype to die off, but Hachette Boardgames UK sent me a copy of the game to play, and I’ve played it lots not only in-person, but also with the excellent BGA adaptation which you can go and play right now. Well, not right now, finish reading the review first, but afterwards go play. It’s one of those games that actually deserves the hype, and deserves its recent As d’Or win.

Every single card you play, every card you pick up at the end of each round, each Sanctuary card you pick from those on offer. Every decision is a Siren, calling you onto the rocks of indecision. You’ll get to the halfway point of the game and as you go to play your fifth card you’ll think “Maybe I can play this high-scoring card and manage to get the missing icons in the next few turns…”, at the expense of playing a card you definitely need for an earlier card. It’ll keep tempting right up until the end, and you’ll keep falling for it.

All of this decision and indecision, and temptation wrestling with tactics in your mind, plays out quickly. You can rattle through a game of Faraway in 20 minutes, giving you plenty of time to shuffle the decks and play again immediately after, during which you swear you won’t be tempted again. You will be tempted, and you’ll make the same mistakes again and again while your child / spouse / dog beats you for the umpteenth time.

Faraway will cost you about £20 when it releases by the looks of it, which is a bargain for a game which delivers a lot of fun. Not much interaction, apart from the race to claim cards from the market, but a lot of fun all the same. Bravo Johannes & Corentin.

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

Faraway (2023)

Design: Johannes Goupy & Corentin Lebrat
Publisher: Catch Up Games
Art: Maxime Morin
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 15-20 mins

The post Faraway Review appeared first on Punchboard.

When it comes to duelling card games, we’re spoiled for choice. From the 27,000+ card behemoth of Magic: The Gathering to small, all-in-one games like Mindbug. There are a ton of different ways to fight the person opposite you, and it’s not going away anytime soon, as the Disney Lorcana juggernaut proves. Chroma Arcana joins the throng, aiming to separate you from the cash in your wallet. If you’re a designer bringing a new duelling card game to the market, there’s a very important question that I, as Joe Public, have for you.

“Why should I choose your game?”

To answer that question you need to give me some clear, concise reasons that make your game stand out from the crowd. So, why should I buy Chroma Arcana?

Why not both?

The biggest difference between the TCGs (Trading Card Games) like Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh and the all-in-ones like Mindbug is the variety of types, styles, or schools involved. Mindbug lets you slap cards pretty much straight into the battle, while those like Pokemon TCG see you adding cards to a staging area, trying to charge cards up, and balancing the cards in your deck which can fight for you against those that help charge their abilities.

Chroma Arcana brings that same feel of having different schools of magic, or Pokemon types. Each card belongs to a different colour deck. They might not be named as such, but the same feel persists. It might be the ‘red’ deck instead of ‘fire’, but it’s the same idea. Firey things live in the red deck, lifegiving stuff is in the green deck – you get the idea. The concept is great because it lets you build your own custom decks to fight with, but with each of you building from the same decks. There’s no advantage to be gained by buying a ton of booster packs and getting cards that the other person might not have.

At the same time, with the way the different colours’ abilities mesh, it feels like you’ve got an almost open-ended pallette of paints to mix to come up with something special. While I’m on the paint metaphor, and thinking about a mixture of colours, it’s worth noting that approximately 30% of the characters in the game are non-white, and the same proportion are LGBT+. Kudos for being aware enough to even think about doing this, let alone weaving it into the game. Representation matters.

It’s a bit like giving a kid a colouring book but just a few basic coloured pencils to work with. Just because you have some limitations imposed on you doesn’t mean you can’t still create something beautiful, and something more interesting than just having a single grey pencil. That’s the feeling I get from Chroma Arcana.

The small print

Chroma Arcana falls foul of my biggest pet peeve in any of these card duelling games, and that’s the printing on the cards. I’m not a moron, I get it. If you want to put words on cards, but leave room for important symbols and some very pretty artwork (the art in this game is gorgeous), the text has to be small. I just find it frustrating when I can’t read or discern everything I need to know about a card when it’s on the table. My eyesight’s pretty good, but I still have to pick them up to read it.

Those of you familiar with card games are probably rolling your eyes at this point, and I can understand that. It’s not like it’s as small as Pokemon TCG text! Once you’re past those first few learning games, the text becomes mostly irrelevant. As long as you can see the cost to activate something and the icons that tell you whether it’s a ward, a minion, etc., then you’ve got all the information you need. Those learning games are crucial though, as that’s the only time you’ve got to grab someone by the dopamine receptors and go “Look at the thing I made. Play it. It’s fun!”.

The iconography throughout is great, and I like the way the keywords for a card are in a black boxout in the middle of it. It does a great job of drawing your eyes where they need to be. Once you’ve played a few times, you’ll be able to rattle through your games with relative ease, and they move fast, except for when your opponent has a potion card to interrupt your turn. Grrr! Annoying, but a cool feature in these games. Nothing better than pushing a stick into the wheels of your rival’s bike and watching his plans flip over the handlebar.

Final thoughts

I was a little wary of Chroma Arcana before it arrived. I’ve played so many duelling card games now, that I already know what to expect for at least part of how the game will play out. Using colours for the decks is cool, if not unique. Achroma (review here) does something similar. Fun fact: when I was approached to cover this game, I thought it was Achroma at first. Don’t make the same mistake. They’re very different games, and I prefer Chroma Arcana.

Every game I’ve played of Chroma Arcana has felt tight and competitive. Even when I’ve had a go at constructing my own deck – something I’m terrible at – I found that I was able to make something that worked together without too much trouble, which I really appreciated.

The promo copy I was sent was restricted to a smaller number of colours and characters (Egos, in the game’s parlance) than you’ll get in the finished product, and there were a few rough edges that I’m sure will be planed smooth by the time it ends up in your sweaty little mitts. Some of the cards had different names from what was listed in the rulebook, which made deck construction tricky, and the instructions for building your decks for the first game don’t tell you how many cards you should end up with. You’re told to add cards to the deck, but not how many of each. The only reference to how many cards go in a deck (it’s 26, if you’re wondering) is in a boxout on page 15, five pages after it tells you what cards to use. Like I say though, bear in mind this is still a preview of a prototype, and these are the kinds of things that are subject to change.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you my favourite thing about the game! Every time you shuffle your discard pile to recycle it into your draw pile, you lose 1 HP. Sounds small, but I love it. It keeps the pace up, and it means discarding a handful of cards to charge spells comes at a long-term cost. The snappy pace, the beautiful cards, and the (apparent) balance in the cards meant that I really enjoyed my time with Chroma Arcana. It’s clearly a labour of love for the designer, Mo, and it really shows. If duelling card games are your bag, keep your eyes on the Kickstarter project page for when this launches on 27th February 2024.

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

Chroma Arcana (2024)

Design: Mo Shawwa
Publisher Roc Nest Games
Art: Ver Fadul, Nadine Jakubowski, Sandra Singh
Players: 2 (1-6 with expansion)
Playing time: 20-60 mins

The post Chroma Arcana Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Rock, paper, charging horse

Take the Throne has a couple of core concepts that the game is built on.

Firstly, each House (player) in the game has an identical hand of five cards. If you’ve read my reviews in the past, you’ll know that I don’t like to deep-dive too much into exactly how a game is played, but you’ll just have to indulge me here, because this bit is important, and underpins the whole game. As a house player, three of the five cards in your hand work in a rock, paper, scissors style.

Anyone playing an Attack card is in contention for the throne, and the current throne holder chooses which will take it from them. Unless, that is, someone plays their Infiltrate card, which takes precedence over an Attack card. The other option is to play a Charge card, which beats Attack and Infiltrate, but only if there’s only a single Charge card played. If more than one player charges, they cancel each other out. The other cards – Feint and Sabotage – just allow you to swap your played card for another at the cost of 1 VP, and force someone else to change their played card, respectively.

A quiet ten minutes on the throne

The second concept is the idea that one player always has the throne. Being in control of the throne is how you’ll net the 8 VPs you need to win the game. When you hold the throne, you get a unique hand of cards to play with: the Crown deck. The Crown cards are completely different to those in the House decks and offer ways to either carve out more VPs or mess about with the other players’ cards.

The Defend card, for instance, means that all Attack cards played get discarded. Pretty cool on its own, but when you realise that Infiltrate cards depend on Attack cards being in play, it’s a double whammy. you’ll only lose the throne now if one player plays a Charge. Alternatively, you might choose to Abdicate and gain another VP, which sounds crazy, but if the House players cancel one another out and nobody claims the throne, you keep it.

The way the asymmetry works is such a nice twist on a game like Love Letter, for example, which is a game I love. Having asymmetry for only one player is something that’s not done that often. The Beast is a game which is a good example of this. To have one player trying to stay afloat while the others clamber over one another, desperate to pop their water wings, is something which gives this game a different feel to others you might already own.

Final thoughts

I had a sneaky feeling I’d like Take the Throne before I’d even played it. The description ticked so many boxes for me. I was right, too. I do like Take the Throne. It’s a great game that will almost certainly be stuffed into my bag for conventions and to start or end game nights with my group. It only takes one game to learn what each of the cards does, and how they interact with one another.

My only real problem is with player count. Take the Throne plays from three to five players, but I don’t enjoy it as much with three. Having only two House players means that the fun of some of the card play is lost. The Attack card is always beaten by Infiltrate and Charge, and Infiltrate is dependent on Attack being played, so why play Attack? I mean, there’s a bit more meta to it than that, but that’s the sort of thing that people say in their first few three-player games. I much prefer the game with four or five players, where it really shines. Multiple Charge cards that cancel one another are more likely, and watching the Throne player agonise over which Attack player gets the crown is great fun.

Take the Throne is one of those games like Coup, Love Letter, The Resistance, Citadels, etc. A small box, a small deck of cards, with the game itself played above the table, driven by the interactions between the players. These games live and die on their “Oh I can’t believe you did that!” moments, and Take the Throne delivers them by the bucketload. You’ll find your own meta develops in your group, and it changes depending on who you play with, and I love that. A cracking little game from another independent UK designer and publisher, and one I’m very happy to recommend.

Take the Throne launches on Gamefound right here in the summer and at a likely price of less than 20 quid, it’s a no-brainer if you ask me.

Take The Throne (2024)

Design: Jon Lanon
Publisher: Deathtrap Games
Art: Joszef Kovacs
Players: 3-5
Playing time: 5-15 mins

The post Take The Throne Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

If you know either of those games then you know that’s some pretty high praise right there. Sea Salt & Paper is another of those games which feels like it’s a much older, tried & tested game, just being surfaced to a bigger audience for the first time. That’s the mark of a classic game in my opinion.

Frog base, bird base, mountains and valleys

The first thing that’ll strike you about Sea Salt & Paper is how gosh darn pretty it is. Each card represents something sea-related, from mermaids and swimmers to crabs and octopuses. Instead of plain illustrations or stock photos (or the inutterable awfulness of AI-generated images), the cards feature photos of origami models of each of the things. As someone who’s messed around with origami for the last 40 years, I love it.

These cards are gorgeous.

It means the game has a look unlike pretty much everything else out there, and I love it. One other thing of note is the designer’s choice to use something called ColorADD. If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, ColorADD is a colour alphabet, whereby colours are assigned symbols. Those symbols can be mixed to make the symbols for other colours, so if you combine the symbols for red and blue, you get the symbol for purple. It’s the first time I’ve come across ColorADD, and I sincerely hope it’s not the last. In a game where cards’ colours are really important, it means the game is accessible to colourblind people too.

Other than those very welcome breaks from the norm, everything else here is by the book. The game costs less than a round of drinks in Wetherspoons and comes in a cardboard box just big enough to house its 64 cards.

Gimme, gimme, gimme

Playing Sea Salt & Paper is super easy. On your turn, you either take a card from the top of either discard piles, or draw two from the top of the deck, keep one, and discard one. If you’ve got a pair of duo cards (cards which score for having pairs of them) you can play them in front of you for a bonus action, like drawing another card or stealing a card from an opponent. Other cards score points for collecting multiple copies of them, or give multipliers to other symbols on your cards. Nice and easy.

What keeps the game ticking and makes it more interesting than most other card games is the way each round ends. Once you get a total of seven points you can end the round. Note the italics there. Nobody’s forcing you to. The world won’t end if you don’t stop the game. Once you do decide to end the round you announce one of two things. And yes, I mean ‘announce’. It says so in the rules leaflet. No casual ‘saying’ things here, it’s announcing all the way.

So you get seven points, you rise from your seat, hold one hand aloft and announce either STOP or LAST CHANCE. If you say ‘stop’, the round ends and everyone scores the cards in their hands. It’s all very civil. ‘Last chance’, however, gets spicy. Each other player gets one last turn, but when the scores are totalled if the player who called ‘last chance’ is still the highest scoring, they score not only their cards but also the colour bonus, which is a point per card of the colour you have the most of. The losing players only get the colour bonus. Should the challenging player lose, they only get their colour bonus, while every other player scores their cards as normal.

I love having the rounds end this way. There’s no line in the sand which triggers the end as soon as it’s crossed. You can hang on for a turn or two, hoping to get some more collector cards maybe, so that when you do trigger it – BAM! – look at all those sweet, sweet points. Hooo mama. The gambling aspect might not seem that big a deal, but when scores are close to winning the whole game, an extra point or two might be all you need. It’s a really clever, really enjoyable little twist which makes the game feel unique.

Final thoughts

It’s very easy for me to recommend Sea Salt & Paper. It’s hard not to recommend a game that’ll cost you around £10 and take up next to no room on your shelves. But this isn’t just a lazy “Why not?” recommendation, this is a “You should get this game because it’s a very good game” recommendation. Sea Salt & Paper is excellent.

You might find the first round or two a little clunky with new users, but that soon evaporates. It’s an odd feeling to play a card game where you start with no cards in your hand and frequently have fewer than three. There comes a point after a game or two where you start to understand the frequency of cards and how likely they are to appear. I mean, the numbers of each card type are printed right there on the card, but knowing those numbers means nothing until you weave them into the context of the game.

Sea Salt & Paper is one of those games that you might break out with the family to fill half an hour, but find yourself still playing an hour later. You’ll take it to your games group as a filler for the start or the end of the evening, but end up playing it more than you expected. It’s quick, easy, very pretty, and has a level of immediacy and interaction which really puts the polish on the whole thing. It’s a fantastic little game, and you should own a copy.

I wasn’t provided with a copy of the game. I bought a copy and wrote about it because I love it.

Sea Salt & Paper (2023)

Design: Bruno Cathala, Théo Rivière
Publisher: Bombyx
Art: Lucien Derainne, Pierre-Yves Gallard
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Sea Salt & Paper Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Here comes a new challenger!

Playing Fatal Knockout is pretty easy. Each character in the game has their own deck of cards with unique actions, and their own standee that goes on the… well, I guess you’d call it a stage. I’ve played using a prototype copy of the game which uses a totally unique box. The box is actually three boxes: two thin boxes for all the cards and tokens, and a larger covering box to keep it all together. When you play the game, the bigger box flips on its side to double as a background, and one of the thin boxes acts as a stage for the fight. It’s a novel, thematic touch, which I like.

Turns consist of playing a card face-up, and maybe others face-down, before flipping them over and resolving them in numeric order of initiative. Yes, just like Gloomhaven. The cards also have a top and bottom action on them, again like Gloomhaven. Not that there’s anything wrong with using a system like that. On the contrary, in fact, giving players a familiar mechanism to play with can only help when it comes to people learning to play something new. The fact that you can see the first step in someone’s plan (the face-up card) is neat. Are they giving you a sign of what’s to come? Or a bluff? Or a double-bluff??

The actions on the cards do things like move you back and forth across the stage, attack, or add a shield (think of it like blocking in a video game). You use these actions to manipulate both your and your opponent’s positions on the stage, trying to set things up in a way which works best for your character. The Gunslinger likes to use his gun at range, while the grappler likes to get up close and personal, before tossing you around like a bin bag on bin day. All of the actions are super-easy to understand, thanks in no small part to the limited and distinct iconography in the game. It’s a real asset to Fatal Knockout to keep things simple in this way, because there’s nothing worse in a game that’s meant to trot along at pace, than having to stop and consult a rulebook every five minutes.

Duel 1: Let’s rock!

In the days since the Fatal Fury and Street Fighter franchises took off, beat-em-ups have evolved. Most modern fighters have a few characters that play quite ‘vanilla’ and basic, and others who have unique mechanisms. Fatal Knockout mirrors this evolution with characters with varying levels of complexity, and some which have their own something special to set them apart. I already mentioned the Gunslinger. He needs to use his unique bullet tokens to carry out certain actions. The same is true of the Guitarist who uses various different coloured note tokens to do similar things. I like this, it’s a nice touch and a nod to games like Guilty Gear and Smash Bros.

If you’re used to having various meters to build up during a fight, you’ll be happy to see that mechanism employed too. The cards you play on your turns have varying amounts of meter that they fill, and building meter grants you things like shields, and the ability to perform certain moves. Ultimately though, if you take too much damage, you die. I say ‘die’ just because the game is called Fatal Knockout, which sounds pretty final to me!

You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance

Fighting game tabletop fans might be champing at the bit right now, desperate to tell me that this isn’t the first time fighting games have been made analogue. Calm down folks, I know. There are loads of lesser-known fighting games, but a couple of bigger titles spring to mind. Street Masters came out a few years back, but it feels more like a brawler game, like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. The Exceed fighting system is the big one though, and it’s always going to be Fatal Knockout’s biggest competition. I learned Exceed back in 2019, and while it’s great and has some fantastic licences (Shovel Knight, Street Figher, BlazBlue to name a few), it’s trickier to do well at. A good Exceed player is always going to destroy a newbie.

Fatal Knockout feels easier to get to grips with, and even a new player can hope to leave a few bruises on an experienced player. This matters. Fatal Knockout isn’t a system in the same way that Exceed is, which means you can buy a box and have fun with it without worrying about picking up more and more expansion packs. More fighters might well come, I’d expect it if the game does well, but it’s not the same expectation as Exceed. The two games play fairly differently too, which is surprising given that they both employ cards for actions, and the idea of jockeying for position on a track. Fatal Knockout doesn’t lean on the same rock-paper-scissors central mechanism that Exceed does. It’s neither better nor worse, just different.

Final thoughts

I like Fatal Knockout. I was always going to like it, it’s a 2D fighting game, but I ended up liking it more on its own merits than for being a nostalgia-fest. I really like the Gloomhaven-style cardplay and the twists and turns it adds. The look on the other player’s face when you move before them, taking you out of range of some hideous throw they were about to, is glorious. I really like the fact that it’s so easy to teach and pick up, because this is a game which will visually and thematically appeal to video game fans. If you’ve got friends like some of the friends I have, you’re all-too-familiar with the eye-rolling that ensues when you start explaining the rules of a game. Fatal Knockout’s simple ruleset doesn’t do this, which is great.

The artwork is very stylistic, and possibly a little too simple? I’m not sure. I know it’s trying to replicate that 16-bit era, but I’d like to see some more detail in the fighters. There’s a lot of white everywhere. I think maybe I’m expecting either pixel art or the illustrations from game artwork, and this is somewhere in between. Remember though, I’m playing a prototype, so all artwork, components, and rules are subject to change.

All in all, Fatal Knockout is a great package, with a low barrier to entry. The quick and easy teach is great, and I love that the booklets give you an idea of how each character plays. Newbies can choose a fighter that’s easier to learn, and once you get the hang of it you can learn those with a bit more nuance to their move-set. The biggest difficulty it’s going to face is going up against Exceed and its licences with the big names in fighting games. But at the right price point, Fatal Knockout delivers an all-in-one, mano-a-mano slugfest, rich with fighting game theme.

Preview copy provided by Crab Studios. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Fatal Knockout (2023)

Designer: Niall Crabtree
Publisher: Crab Studios
Art: Fodsley
Players: 2
Playing time: 5-20 mins

The post Fatal Knockout Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

I have no idea where the pool analogy came from, or why I took it so far. Let’s move on.

Crimson red

Card games in this style aren’t something new. Assemble a deck of cards that complement one another, and take turns playing cards in your play area which beat the cards in your opponent’s play area. It’s a tried and tested concept, and new games keep getting made in this style because it works. It works really nicely. Your deck becomes this crafted, personal thing, which you pit against someone else’s crafted, personal thing, to see which comes out on top. When you’re not playing, you can tinker with your various decks’ compositions, and in the case of Achroma, just enjoy the beautiful artwork. I’ve not seen another card game with the same style of illustration that Achroma employs, and I like it all the more for that fact.

I’m not the most experienced in this field of tabletop games, but I’ve played a bit of Netrunner, I’ve played the Pokémon TCG with my son, and I’ve watched plenty of Magic: The Gathering. Everything that even someone as inexperienced as me would expect to be in the game is there, albeit with different names. Your play area is your Canvas. Your deck is your Palette. Discarded cards go to your Dregs. Shards are the currency du jour, and in an interesting twist to some games, they’re both what you spend to play cards, and what you need to collect to win. Collect 30 shards and you win. Actually, it turns out that isn’t the only way to win. Collecting 30 shards is called a Chroma win, while reducing your opponents to zero shards – therefore knocking them out of the game – is called an Achrom win.

This concept of colour is everywhere in the game and plays an integral part in the setting and theme. Chroma is the magical (colourful) life force, which is fighting against Achrom (or, a lack of colour), a savage dark energy. It’s a really neat thing to weave this into the way the game is won or lost. Being able to win with either Chroma or Achrom is akin to a ‘good or bad’ win, yet it doesn’t feel bad. A win is a win, after all. No-one remembers how you won, just the fact that you did, right?

Yeah… about that.

Verdant Green

Achroma has obviously been built from the ground up with an accompanying app in mind. It’s an app which does a few things, but the most important for Achroma as a product, is the player profiles. When you first fire the app up, it’ll ask you to create an account, and show you where your friend code lives. If you play against another registered player, the apps are essentially synced, so the game knows who is playing against who, and it’ll update its database accordingly with the winner and loser. You can even place your phone, running the app, in your play area. It has a shard counter which is linked with your opponent’s, so if I steal one of your shards, your total automatically decreases while mine increases. That’s pretty cool.

As I alluded to above, the app also tracks how you win your games. There’s a slider which tracks your Chroma vs Achrom wins, which is a really nice touch. It strikes me that Achroma could easily have been a digital-only game, like Hearthstone, or an analogue-only one. Instead, it stands astride both, with a foot in each pond. Oh dear, I’m back with the pool analogies. Moving on!

Although my experience so far has been limited to the ‘The Curse of Curdle Hill’ starter pack, I’ve found the game really easy to learn, easy to play, and less fussy to do deck construction with. The construction rules for the base game type – Canvas – limit you on the rarity of the cards you use and how many copies of each you can use. Decks are also locked to a single one of the five Realms in the game, so there’s not the same mental strain of how best to combine more than one type, that you might get in Pokémon TCG for example. The app even tracks which cards you have in your collection through a code on the bottom of each card, which you can enter manually, or scan with your phone’s camera. If, that is, it works for you. Which brings me onto…

Inky black

For the most part, my reviews focus on the positives of a game. I try not to cover games I know I won’t like, for obvious reasons, and while I really like the actual game of Achroma, I’ve got a few issues with the app. And they’re quite big ones, in my opinion.

First up, when I opened my ‘The Curse of Curdle Hill’ pack, I contacted the publisher because the rules were missing. It turns out that no, the rules weren’t missing, you just don’t get a physical copy of them. I don’t mind games that use apps in some way. I’ve covered the Escape Tales series which all use one, Destinies (review here), which is entirely app-driven, and Dune Imperium (review here), which has a great solo app. But not even being able to learn how to play the game I’ve got in front of me, bothered me hugely. I appreciate that they describe the game as evolving, but at the very least include the base game rules.

So I downloaded the app. My son was off school ill recently, and while I was looking after him one night, I thought it was the perfect chance to learn to play. He’s sleeping beside me, I’ll open the app and read the rules, and teach myself how to play. Except there are no written rules in the app. I followed the guide thing that the app starts with into the tutorial, which shows you how to use the app, and then jumps into a how-to-play video, which is great. However, the video has no subtitles/closed-captions. So with the sound down (so as not to wake him), or if I was deaf, I still had no idea what to do.

Eventually, I found that if I started a game, then tapped on the diamond, and then chose Rules, it showed me the rules! Hoorah! Except that the rules page is just an in-app web browser pointed at the ‘How to play’ page on their website. Oh, and that in-app browser has no navigation buttons to drop back into the game you were playing – Grrr! My final grumble, you’ll be pleased to hear, is that the card scanner just doesn’t work. I’ve got access to two Android phones here running v9 and v12 of the OS, and on both the scanner won’t use the camera. It just shows a grey box. I’m pretty technically-minded, so I even tried manually adding camera permissions for the app (as it doesn’t ask for any), but it still doesn’t work. As a result, I’ve entered a total of one card, because there’s no way I’m manually typing in all 60 eleven-character codes. Maybe it’s better with iOS? I don’t know, but it shouldn’t matter which type I have.

Final thoughts

Achroma is a difficult game for me to review. I love supporting indie publishers here, especially when they’re from the UK, and Achroma is practically up the road from me, in Dorset. The game they’ve put together in Achroma is great, it really is. It’s a quick, easy-to-learn CCG-type game, and the polish on it, for a first title, is superb. The cards even have shiny UV-spot pieces on them. The artwork, illustration, and design principles are better than a lot of games I’ve played that have come from publishers and designers with a lot more time and money to throw at them.

I know I devoted a whole section to my grumbles about the app, and as much as I wish I didn’t have to write it, I owe it to myself and my readers, to be honest and transparent. I was sent a copy, for free, to review, but I have to treat it as if I’m a paying customer. You can shout “Get with the times, old man!” all you like, but the reality is I had a game which I couldn’t learn to play without a phone or computer next to me, no sign of even a player aid or reference card for when I’m in-game, and a card scanner which doesn’t work. If all of those things weren’t true, I’d have been over the moon with Achroma.

The upshot is this. If you don’t mind having your phone with you to play, and if you’re happy learning from a video or website, then CCG lovers are likely to absolutely love Achroma. The folk behind it have plans for more packs, more Kickstarter campaigns, and more and more content, which is what games like this live and die by. I think the game is very clever, very enjoyable, and gorgeous to look at. I’ll just always have that nagging thing, clawing at the back of my brain, asking what will happen when my phone is no longer supported, or if something were to happen to the studio. With a hard copy of the rules, everyone could play this forever. If the website and app disappeared tomorrow, the rules – and therefore the whole game – go with them. These are the times we live in, and I wish Realm Runner all the luck in the world with their game. They deserve it, Achroma is a fantastic game.

Preview copy provided by Realm Runner. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Achroma (2021)

Designer: unlisted
Publisher: Realm Runner Studios
Art: unlisted
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Achroma Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Calling your bluff

Yup, bluffing. Bluffing is king in Castleshire, in the same way it is in Poker, or Skull. The aim of the game is to use your builder meeples to construct the towers of a castle. Each section of a castle is represented by a space for a card, ranging in value from one to twelve, as they move left-to-right, bottom-to-top. Each player has a hand of cards, again ranging from one to twelve.

On your turn, you’ll place a card on an empty space, whack a builder on it, and proclaim “I, Adam, have constructed section eleven of this mighty edifice. It will see the birth and death of a thousand kings and queens, see nations rise and fall, and through it all, endure. Though time may seek to reduce it to sand, it will stand strong, in perpetuity”.

Except I’m lying, see. I’ve played a three there. I’m a bit of a geezer, a medieval cowboy builder. So if you don’t mind, I’ll be taking my groats, disappointing your daughter, and buggering off to Burgundy, where I understand they’re building some castles.

It’s there – right there – in those moments of “Is he telling the truth, or full of crap?” that Castleshire springs to life.

How do you annoy Lady Gaga?

Poker face.

Dad jokes aside, a good poker face is vital if you’re one of those players who just loves to bluff constantly in games. One of the things I love in Castleshire, which it shares with poker, is that if nobody challenges you, you never have to reveal the cards you played. You might have played your 1 card in the 12 space and gone unchallenged, so when the castle’s cards are removed and a new castle starts, you could still have a priceless twelve in your hand, and nobody would know.

I can’t tell you just how satisfyingly devious that feeling is, and it’s one of the reasons that Castleshire is a game whose level of fun is disproportionately higher when you play it with friends. With no money on the line, it’s just a case of how well you know your mates, and laughing at the banter from around the table. The basic game is decent enough, but I can see how it could get stale with repeated plays. Lucky for us then, that expansion modules are in the box, ready to go.

Speaking of the box, I’ve got to draw attention to the production of Castleshire. The version I was sent has a cloth playmat, the meeples are really nice, and the player character books are excellent. The star of the show is the box, which is styled like a big book, and has a magnetic closing. It might only be a preview copy of the game, but it’s very impressive. The little fold-out guild books which double as player mats, with cutouts for your workers, are especially awesome.

Planning permission for an extension

The included expansions are great, and I highly recommend including them once your players are familiar with the base game. The Guild Books add variable player abilities, which mix things up nicely, and by the time you add in Ally cards, using the Rest Area, and the various obstacles, it elevates it from a light social game to a gamer’s game.

I feel icky just saying something like “gamer’s game”, so I hope you appreciate it.

The point I’m trying to make is that the modular changes keep enough life fizzing in the game to keep everyone interested, without over-complicating things. It’s important, too, because game prices are going up, and getting value for money matters. There are even elements which introduce luck to the game, which are a great choice. Good bluffers are often gamblers, and pushing your luck to the point you fail is a great leveller for the rest of the table.

By the time you throw in extras to enable up to six players, and kid-friendly variants to make things easier, it’s a complete box.

Final thoughts

I didn’t know what to expect when I first started talking to Sven from Cheap Sheep over a year ago. In my head, it was going to be a Euro. It turns out to be something very different, and it’s a really pleasant surprise. Bluffing games have near-universal appeal, and Castleshire is a fantastic example of how to do it well. The rules take a little explaining, but the design decision of a making base game and including modular expansions was a great idea. It means you can teach just about anyone, and add in other bits and pieces as you see fit.

I was sent a copy of the game which comes with the cloth playmat. The standard version uses cards for the scoretrack and castle layout, which is fine, but I think I’d prefer to be using the mat. The cards don’t move around as much, and it looks really nice on the table. That might sound superficial of me, but one of the key factors in getting non-gamers to play games with you is making the game look appealing.

The Kickstarter campaign is now over, but at the time of writing, you’ll still be able to late pledge here. With options at £24, £37, and £61 (the £37 level is the one which gives you the cloth playmat, I believe), it represents great value for money. In a world of big, expensive games that take an hour to setup, and a day to learn, Castleshire is the perfect antidote. You’ll laugh, you’ll have fun, and you’ll never trust your friends again. That’s what board games are all about.

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

Castleshire (2023)

Designer: Till Peters
Publisher: Cheap Sheep Games
Art: Rebekah Farr, Janette Ramos, Sam Rodger
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 30-45 mins

The post Castleshire Preview appeared first on Punchboard.