“Instead of the cross, the Albatross around my neck was hung”

Thalassophopia – a fear of deep waters. Whether it’s down to a genetic disposition to not be dragged into the inky-black fathoms beneath, or because we saw Jaws when we were kids and now check the bath for sharks, plenty of us have an innate ‘nope’ reaction to deep water. Writers have always written about the real or imagined horrors in the water, from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Jules Vernes’ 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (you really should check out Nemo’s War), through to the likes of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories like the one I mentioned above, Dagon.

We can’t see what’s down there, so it’s easy to build a sense of unease and excitement about throwing a hook and line over the side of a boat and seeing what bites. Deep Regrets borrows this concept and throws a bucket of slimy chum into its churning waters. The idea is relatively simple. In each round of the game you either go out fishing on your little boat or stay at port to sell your catches and buy upgrades for your fishing business.

To perform actions you need to roll the wonderfully cute wooden D4 buoy dice and choose how to spend them. Moving into deeper water costs dice. Once you choose a shoal on the main board you flip the top card to see what “fish” is on offer and then try to land it by spending dice of its value. The rods and reels you can buy at port make your job easier with all sorts of cunning effects. The Rod of the Infinite for example lets you peek at the top three fish cards in a shoal deck and put them back in any order before you reveal one.

So far, so laissez-faire. Catch nice little fish and sell them at the market. It’s not just fish down there though, there are other things. Horrible things. Unspeakable things. Catching them will surely only lead to madness and compound your life’s regrets, and nobody wants that.

Or do they?

“I think I went mad then”

The things you catch in Deep Regrets fall into one of two categories: fair or foul. When you land a foul creature you draw regret cards, cards which represent the accumulated parts of a life lived badly. Regrets have different levels, ranging from “I lost my favourite sock”, right up to “Partook of human flesh”. The more regrets you collect, the greater your slip into madness. Don’t worry though, it’s not all bad.

The more regret cards you collect, the more your foul catches are worth when you return to port to do business. On the flip side of the coin, however, the value of your fair catches decreases. You see, you can make plenty of money by just landing and selling the nice, non-mutant fish that people actually want, where your lack of madness results in higher prices for fair catches. So why would you ever want to gain regrets and increase your madness?

This is one of my favourite parts of the game. In a nod to something more akin to an off-beat RPG, Judson nudges us towards madness. The higher your madness level, the more dice you can have at your disposal, which means deeper fishing and bigger fishes. It means more money, and more upgrades. It means you can mount those really valuable catches in your prized mounting slots above your board to multiply their worth at the end of the game. in fact if you can get your cube to the bottom of the madness track you even get a discount on upgrades. I guess the shopkeepers will do anything to get you out of their place of business as fast as they can, you weirdo.

Deep Regrets is a game of managing your madness rather than avoiding it. The only penalty you’re looking at for going completely hatstand is losing a mounted fish if you have the most regret at the end of the game.

Light in the darkness

This game is a lot of fun, let’s just get that out there right now. What it does brilliantly is to build the game around a lightweight rules framework. Nothing in Deep Regrets is complicated. Your actions are simple. It’s easy to teach. You’ll have new players up and running in a few minutes, and that’s perfect for the sort of person that’s likely to pick up a copy. Thanks to Judson’s amazing illustrations (check out the reviews I did for his previous game, Hideous Abomination), this is a game which is going to appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. Everything about the game screams approachable, which is precisely what it needs.

The rulebook is excellent. Clearly laid out with good examples and plenty of lore and flavour text. It’s not even called a rulebook, it’s “The Angler’s Guide to Fishing”, which I love. Deep Regrets has clearly been through a ton of playtesting and iteration, and it shows. At one point with my preview copy I wanted clarification over the wording on a card. I thought it was a bit ambiguous so me being me, I shot Judson an email asking for clarification. I had to retract the email a couple of minutes later when I turned to the back of the book and found the appendix detailing exactly what I’d asked.

Stuff like this matters. It’s not even the final product yet, and it’s already a long way ahead of most prototypes I’m given, and better than plenty of final, retail productions. If the final version follows suit you’re going to be getting a primo product for your pounds.

The solo and co-op mode is also great. You’re still trying to catch whatever’s out there, but this time you have a chart and your upgrades persist through multiple playthroughs. Trying to catch everything and to complete the list is something which appeals to the lockdown Animal Crossing perfectionist in me.

Final thoughts

Deep Regrets is a blast. I was one of those bombarded with Facebook advertising for it a little while back, and it worked. I love the games I mentioned in my opening salvo, especially Dredge, and this game really hooks into (forgive me) that same feeling. The same ‘cosy port town meets unimaginable horrors from the deep’ aesthetic that it delivers in spades.

I’ve lauded the artwork before, but it’s worth distinguishing that from the graphic design. The backs of the shoal cards for example, at first glance all look the same, but you’ll soon notice that the shadows in the water on each are different sizes, alluding to the size – and therefore the difficulty in catching – whatever’s on the other side. Little touches like this and the iconography throughout are just great.

Don’t expect a game with deep, complex layers of nuance. It’s a game of flip a card, catch the fish, decide what to do with it, but it excels at it. This is a game you could happily teach to your non-gamer friends and they’d have a great time with it. If your group’s idea of oceanic strategy perfection is Dominant Species: Marine, you might be left wanting with Deep Regrets. But it’s not a game aimed at hardcore Euro nerds like myself. It’s a game aimed at everyone, which hey, includes me.

Yes, there’s luck involved. You roll dice to do everything. You flip cards with no way of knowing what’s on the other side. But that’s the soul of the game. There are ways to mitigate the luck through upgrades and things you dredge up from the ocean floor, and that’s where the strategy comes in. It’s not deterministic, but it’s a lot of fun, and you’ll be done in an hour and a half, leaving behind some belly laughs and some interesting life stories if you choose to craft a narrative from your regret cards.

I’m hopelessly biased in this one I’m sure. I love the setting. I love the artwork. I love Judson’s work ethic and the amount of love poured into this game, and the fun I’ve gotten from it. Make of that what you will, but I’ve no hesitation in recommending Deep Regrets when it launches on Kickstarter on July 1st.

Preview copy kindly provided by Tettix Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own. I also acknowledge that I’ve made jokes of ‘madness’ in this piece. As a supporter of mental health wellbeing, and someone who openly suffers with mental health problems, I hope this is taken in the manner in which it’s meant.

Deep Regrets (2024)

Design: Judson Cowan
Publisher: Tettix Games
Art: Judson Cowan
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Deep Regrets Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

What in the X Files is going on?

The Scythe universe makes a decent effort of doing some world-building. Expeditions moves the setting to Siberia. A massive meteorite has crashed at Tunguska, waking up a load of ancient corruption which was apparently lying dormant. An expedition to investigate it has gone missing so it’s up to you, war heroes from Europa (from Scythe), to head into the frozen wastes to explore and to find fortune and glory.

It’s a pretty cool story, and in some ways it does a good job of sewing the theme into the game’s patchwork quilt. Most of the hex tiles which make up the landscape are face-down and unexplored when you start the game. Once you explore them you’ll find new resources and actions to take, and also churn up some of the aforementioned corruption. My biggest problem with the theme is trying to understand what this corruption actually is. It’s represented by colourful tiles with numbers on them, and by using a Vanquish action you can spend your accrued power and guile to remove them, but I’m still none the wiser as to what I’m actually doing there.

The rulebook tells me I’m “removing ancient evil”, but it’s never explained how, or what’s happening. For me to be complaining about this as a massive fan of beige, arid Euros might come across as hypocritical and stupid, but it matters here. The huge, gorgeous mech minis look so cool. They look like they’re ready to kick ass in a kind of coal-fired Pacific Rim tribute. But nothing happens. I move my green marker 4 steps down a track and remove a green wooden block with a 4 printed on it. It feels like a missed opportunity to add a thick, shiny layer of thematic gloss.

The goal of the game borrows heavily from Scythe. There are milestones on offer, called Glory in Expeditions. If you meet the criteria for one (e.g. solved four quests, collected seven corruption tokens) and take a Boast action, you can place a star on the Basecamp board. The first player to place four glory tokens triggers the end of the game. So you get the same feeling of a race, which I like. I like it when a game’s end is driven by the players, and it works well here.

Decking in the frozen North

Expeditions is a latecomer to the 2020 party of ‘deck-building + another mechanism’ which the likes of Lost Ruins of Arnak and Dune Imperium (review here) championed. During the game you add cards to your deck, which can in turn be played any time you take the appropriate action, and many cards have a boosted action available if you’re able to place a worker of the correct colour on the card.

Workers, along with cards, coins and other resources, find their way onto your board any time you use the Gather action. You gather whatever’s on the hex where your mech is, which is where you need to use your third available action – Move – which shockingly enough lets you move around the map. The action selection is fun, actually. The three actions are represented by squares on your player board, and on your turn you move your little cube from one square to another. The square you cover is blocked, so you get to take the two actions left uncovered. It adds a nice little element of planning. You can take a full refresh turn to get your played cards back into your hand, along with your workers, and you get to do all three actions next time, but it can feel like a wasted turn. If you plan well you can use rescue actions from tiles and cards to move a played card back into your hand, prolonging the time you’re actively doing things in the game.

In a game where you’re racing the other players to be the one to trigger the end, downtime turns can really hurt if you take them too often.

The deckbuilding is the most fun part of the game. Some of the games using these mixtures of mechanisms don’t really feel like true deck-building in the Dominion sense of the word. Even Arnak and Dune Imperium, excellent as they are, don’t let you cycle through your deck very often. Expeditions does it well, and you’ll end up playing some of your cards a lot of times, which is refreshing.

Grit in the gears

As much as I enjoy Expeditions – and let’s be clear here, I do like the game – there are some things which feel a bit disjointed to me. First on the list is the use of coins in the game. You punch out so many coins of different denominations when you first open the box (80 in total) that you assume they’re a big deal. They aren’t. You can play half an hour of the game and take a load of turns without even collecting a coin, and when you do, it’s often one coin at a time. Coins count towards your score at the end of the game, but that’s all you really do with them. What use is money in a game where you can’t spend money?

The other thing is the constant back and forth that happens at different times during the game. The setting of the game makes you feel like as a veteran of war with a huge repurposed mech at your disposal, you’d probably head into the frozen wastelands prepared. But you end up coming all the way back to where you start to grab another worker, or a card, or whatever it might be. It’s like you and the other mechs are all trampling back and forth all over the place like worker ants.

While I’m talking about the mechs, it’s also worth mentioning that there is no combat in Expeditions. If you though the awesome-looking mechs in Scythe were under-used, Expeditions will set a new, lower benchmark. There’s not even any area-control, other than the rule that no two mechs can share a tile. It all just begs the question – why are the mechs even in the game? I can’t help but feel like I should record a full game, then play it back at 10x speed and watch the mechs bimble around to the Benny Hill theme music.

Final thoughts

Expeditions is a good game. Maybe even a very good game. It has some issues, for sure, which I’ve mentioned above, but I’d still recommend it despite them. The biggest issue is probably the thing which made me the most interested in the game in the first place, and that’s piggybacking on the Scythe theme and name. It didn’t need to be, at all. I would not be remotely surprised to learn that the basic game and its mechanical component parts were designed with a different theme and setting in mind. Maybe even no theme. The whole pickup-and-deliver aspect of completing quests in the game (spend certain things in a certain space) could so easily be applied to any number of other, drier Euro themes.

It’s a big, impressive box with a great insert and those amazing mech minis, but they somehow feel redundant. They all have a slightly asymmetric boost to some actions, but they’re underused. They’re glorified shopping trolleys.

Griping aside, the game itself is great fun to play. I love the race feeling to the game, I love the simple suspense of flipping over a new tile to see what’s on the other side, and I love how simple the game feels to play. It’s obviously had plenty of development done on it, which is exactly what I come to expect from Jamey’s games now, and that professional touch is there on every aspect of the presentation. It’s also surprisingly quick to setup. play, and pack away, which is not what I come to expect of games that come in boxes this big. It’s also easy to teach, much moreso than Scythe.

Now that I write this and think about it, if I wanted to induct a new player to the world of Scythe, I would definitely start with Expeditions before moving on to Scythe. It’s a much smoother, friendlier introduction with a lower rules overhead. If you go into Expeditions expecting more Scythe, you might be disappointed, but if you love the world Scythe is set in, you’ll love to explore more of the lore and characters. I’d still love to see what it would have been if it was in a setting of its own though. A solid, if not outstanding, addition to the Stonemaier family of games.

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

Expeditions (2023)

Design: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jakub Rozalski
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Expeditions Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Race for the birdbox

“What game is it like?” – that’s the question I get asked most when introducing new players to a game. In the case of Earth, the best comparison I came up with was “Race For The Galaxy meets Wingspan”, and I think it holds some weight.

Each turn starts with the active player choosing one of the four actions available at the top of your player boards. These basic actions do things like add cards to your hand, add sprouts to your tableau cards (little green cubes), add growth (stacking wooden stems and those cute little mushroom-looking toppers), and add cards to your compost pile. Each action has an associated colour, which triggers cards with the same colour in players’ tableaus. That’s where we see similarities with a lot of other games, including the aforementioned Wingspan.

Earth is a game which doesn’t want any of the players to have any real downtime. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re the active player, and let’s say you choose to activate the orange action. Not only do you get to activate your orange actions, I get to do the same. Each of us has our cards on the table in a 4×4 grid layout, and we activate them left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so there’s a great opportunity to employ some strategy.

I might have a card which lets me add sprouts to cards and another that converts sprouts to growth. Maybe I’ve got a card which lets me take more cards into my hand, and another that lets me convert cards in my hand to compost. Knowing that the cards activate left-to-right, top-to-bottom, it makes sense to place cards that give me things before cards that let me do something with things. For experienced game players, this is all common sense, but to people taking tentative first steps into the hobby, the dawning of these realisations can be a real ‘Hallelujah’ moment. It’s so cool to see people suddenly ‘get’ how engine-building games work, and the smile that lights someone’s face when they realise they’ve done something clever is wonderful.

Better than a two-stroke diesel

When it comes to any engine-building game, the thing that really matters is how satisfying the game is to play. There are a load of potential pitfalls for a game like this, but the designer, Maxime, has done a great job of avoiding them.

Even if you do a really poor job of planning your horticultural wilderness, you still get the feeling of being able to do something, even if it isn’t particularly efficient. By the same notion, the way the game’s cyclical resources work means that it’s rare to find yourself with a huge excess of things you don’t want. Planting cards costs dirt, and like any of the other resources in the game, the dirt you gain tends not to be exponential. There’s a real feeling of one-for-one with many of the resource exchange actions, even if they don’t necessarily look that way at first.

It’s a far more forgiving game than others in this genre, especially compared to fine-tuned games like Race for the Galaxy. When it comes to scoring VPs at the end of the game, all of the various resources you’ve still got are just worth one point. Each dirt token, each sprout, each unfinished trunk growth, and every card in your compost pile – they all score a point each. For beginners, this is a great touch. It means they don’t feel like they’ve failed in some way, just because they’ve got a field of green sprouts and precious little growth.

The real difference in scoring comes from the bonuses offered by other cards on display. Ecosystem objectives earn you points, Fauna cards do the same. Interestingly, there’s a beginners’ mode suggested in the rulebook which uses the second side of the Fauna board, whereby it doesn’t matter when you complete a Fauna objective. You always get 10 VPs. In the full game the first player to claim one gets the most points, then the next player gets the next most, and so on. It’s just another example of the way the game is looking to guide people into the hobby with a gentle touch and to get people used to how to play it, rather than worrying about how well the other players are doing.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot to like about Earth. From its theme which I don’t think anyone could ever take offence at, through to the clever inclusion of a beginners’ game in the rulebook. For a very mechanical engine-building game, it manages to pack a lot of theme in. Plants are planted, watered to sprout, they grow, and then they die back to become compost. I mean, there’s a lot of Earth’s ecosystem that’s left out – namely animals – but when you’ve got everything from Wingspan (review here) to Ark Nova (review here) already covering that, why bother?

It’s going to become my default answer to the question “What’s a good game to get people into more serious board games?” from now on. The abject lack of player interaction becomes a major strength, because it lets the players mess around in this little eco-sandbox, to flick switches and see what happens. You’re not going to be attacked by other players, and you can’t attack them. You’re left alone to your own devices, and that’s what modern Euro games are at their core – multiplayer solitaire.

What elevates Earth above others, for me, is the fact that as well as being a great introductory game, there’s a ton of depth to it. The way that your tableau’s arrangement can be dynamic until you commit to the fourth card in a row or column, the way that cards in that tableau and trigger bonus scores so readily, and the sheer variety of strategy on offer. You want to come up with some kind of recycling machine that says ‘Screw everything else – compost, compost, compost’, go for it. It’s viable.

Earth is essentially a bix box of cards (over 350 of them) with a clever, easy-to-grasp game which will keep you coming back again and again to see what happens. While it is available to play over on BGA (click here to take a look), the interface there is designed to help people who already know the game. If you can play the physical game first, do so, or head over to watch Paul Grogan’s excellent instructional video on YouTube right here. Top stuff, highly recommended.

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

Earth (2023)

Design: Maxime Tardif
Publisher: Inside Up Games
Art: M81 Studio, Conor McGoey, Yulia Sozonik, Kenneth Spond
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Earth Review appeared first on Punchboard.

All aboard

It’s the future, right? Passenger space travel is a thing, and some bright spark has come up with a wormhole fabricator. The fabricator enables the captains of the spaceships to punch a hole in the fabric of space, and stitch the two ends together, allowing instantaneous travel between two points. It’s a pretty cool concept, and every time I face the drive from Cornwall to Harrogate for Airecon (which I wrote all about here), I wish it were real. As the captain of your own interstellar Uber your job is to take passengers (cards, in Wormholes’ case) to their destinations. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a handful of passengers who all want to go to the same planet, gaining you lots of points for one trip.

Wormholes are tunnels, and the thing about tunnels is that they have a hole at either end. So before you get all excited thinking “I’m going to take off and immediately warp to the edge of the known universe”, keep that enthusiasm in check. At any point in your turn, you can drop a wormhole token on the hex your spaceship is flying through. Wormhole tokens come in pairs, and as soon as you drop the second of a pair somewhere – punching a hole in the other end of the tunnel, if you will – the tokens are flipped and immediately active. From that point on, anyone landing on either end of the wormhole can warp to the other end for free!

Wormholes being a free trip is a big deal. On your turn you get three movements, and moving from one hex to another costs one of those movements. It means the first half of the game starts slowly as the players slowly spread out using movement points, searching for the right places to hitch either end of their interstellar ziplines. As the game progresses though, you soon start to realise that when wormholes butt up against one another, you can start to move really far with only a few movements.

Engage

Once the board starts to fill up with players’ wormhole tokens, you’re left with some painful – if not difficult – decisions to make. You might have a ship filled to the brim with passengers who want to go to the planet that looks like a fuzzy ball, but to get there quickly you’ll have to use other players’ wormholes. You can do that, and they can’t stop you doing it, but they’ll get VP chits by way of compensation for using their intergalactic highways. I had a really funny game of Wormholes with my wife and son, where my son deliberately ruined his chances of winning by refusing to use my wormholes. Rather than let me earn VPs, he went on a slow, spiteful crawl around the cosmos. So for those of you wondering “Can I just use my own network and avoid any interaction?” – no, you can’t. It’s baked-in, and it’s great.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the legibility of the wormhole tokens. In a game where being able to quickly trace routes across the board is key, some of them are really difficult to read at a glance. When a token goes on the board without a matching one, they start on a black side with a bright number, and things are good. When the wormhole is completed, the token is flipped and black is replaced with the player colour, and the number is a kind of silver colour. The silver is reflective and hard to read at a distance. The little arrow that points to the other token in a pair could do with being bigger too. Too many times I heard someone say “Where does this one go to?”, which shouldn’t be a question in a game dependent on that mechanism.

Gripes aside, Wormholes is a lot of fun. It plays out so quickly, which makes it perfect for a start or end game for a game night, and I’ve also found it really good for playing with non-gamers. I wondered if there’d be a min-max problem where cunning players were just taking on passengers who rely on their own routes, but the problem doesn’t exist. The end of the game is driven by players placing wormholes next to each planet, which also rewards bonus points, so it’s usually in your best interest to weave a wide web through the stars.

Final thoughts

I have two sets of shelves that I use to store games. The upstairs shelves hold my collection of Euro and wargames – the sort of games I’ll play with my regular group, or at a convention. The downstairs shelves are for family and party games – the games I know I can regularly get to the table with my family. Wormholes has earned a coveted spot on the downstairs shelves. If you were looking for a heavy space game to sit alongside Gaia Project, Eclipse, and Twilight Imperium, Wormholes isn’t it. This is a much lighter, more accessible game.

Regular gamers will enjoy the mixture of the initial planning of routes, and later trying to optimise their turns to milk every last point out of the game. Non-gamers might find the start a little slow-going on their first game, but just watch their eyes light up towards the end when they’re zipping all over the place. It’s a game which does a great job of making you feel like you’re enacting really clever plans, whereas it’s really just following the path of least resistance, but that’s a big part of hooking new gamers in. Make them feel like they did something clever.

I like the way the boards are double-sided and include different kinds of obstacles and features. It mixes things up enough to keep it interesting, without making it feel like a different game. AEG are undoubtedly one of the best at producing these light-mid weight games at the moment, and Wormholes happily sits alongside the likes of Cubitos (review), Whirling Witchcraft (review), and Peter McPherson’s other hit, Tiny Towns (review) as games which hide layers of strategy behind a newbie-friendly veneer. Speedy pick up and deliver action with a nice twist, I really like it.

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

Wormholes (2022)

Design: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Caring Wong
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Wormholes Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Green fingers

I’ll start off by explaining that the word ‘verdant’ means green, specifically the type of green when something is covered with plant life. Leaves, grass, rolling meadows – you know the sort of thing. Verdant is a game about filling a house with houseplants, so the name makes a lot of sense. Each player will make a tableau of fifteen cards in a 3×5 arrangement, where plant cards are placed in a checkboard pattern with room cards.

I have some houseplants which live in my games room. I like to keep some greenery around, it’s natural and relaxing. I know all too well though that certain plants like certain conditions. My monkey mask monster yearns for daylight and makes a beeline for it if it’s in too much shade. Conversely, my dracaena doesn’t care if it’s in the shade, he’s quite happy anywhere. Similarly, in Verdant you try to make sure each plant is adjacent to as many cards offering the type of light it likes as possible.

Getting the lighting right is made more difficult because there are a hundred other things you’re trying to match and best optimise with every placement. Okay, a hundred is an exaggeration, but it’s how it feels sometimes. Verdant does an amazing job of creating a tricky puzzle with a small number of variables. For example, there are five types of plants, and five types of rooms. Match a room’s colour with the type of adjacent plants, and you get more points for them. You can place objects like furniture or pets onto rooms, and again, get bonuses where the colours match. Easy so far, right?

Variety is the spice of life

Just when you think you’ve got the idea of Verdant, it likes to throw some curveballs at you. It’s true that loads of plants and rooms all of matching colours will earn you a lot of points. If you don’t dig matchy-matchy, the eclectic among you can score well too. You get bonus points for having one of every type of plant, and more points again for having one of every colour of room. Objects in rooms score more points when you don’t have duplicate types in your tableau. Vive la difference.

It’s a clever piece of game design. It means you aren’t penalised if someone is hoovering up all of the yellow cards, for example. You only need one of them if you collect every other colour too, and you’ll still score well. It’s interesting to note that Verdant is a game designed by a collaborative group. No fewer than five different people are credited as the designers for the game, and that’s a real rarity. I think that the combined ideas of each of the people have helped craft a balanced, nuanced game and that there’s strength in numbers here, rather than an excess of cooks around a pot of broth.

Careful pruning

Verdant’s concise approach to the game and its brevity are the reasons it shines. 15 cards aren’t many at all, and you’ll end up making some tough decisions in the last couple of rounds. That part of the game makes it feel like an Uwe Rosenberg game, where you’ll try to calculate the most points you can squeeze out of your last turns. Verdant is a game you can play in half an hour, which means you can let someone have a ‘learning game’, reset, and play again, all inside an hour.

It’s thirty minutes of tricky decisions. Getting the lighting right on plants adds the all-precious verdancy tokens, as do other actions like adding fertiliser or using tool tiles. The verdancy tokens are really cute, and I love how you get to complete a plant and add a fancy pot to the card. When you consider that Verdant is a card game where you lay cards in a rectangle, the amount of theme it manages to convey is pretty remarkable.

The chilled feeling the presentation conveys carries through into the solo game. It plays almost identically to the multiplayer game but uses a kind of conveyor belt mechanism to keep the card market fresh, and the high-scoring pots are removed as if another player was claiming them. Rather than just a one-off puzzle, Shawn has built a full solo campaign, complete with achievements. It’s the style of game which lends itself to being played in a spare hour, and the campaign is a nice touch to encourage you back and try for something different.

Final thoughts

Verdant continues Flatout Games’ fine pedigree. Both Calico and Cascadia were excellent puzzles, wrapped in a game, and Verdant does the same thing. At the start of every game there’ll be a little part of you thinking “this could be it. this could be the time I get the perfect layout”. Sod’s Law says it won’t be, but it plants that little seed of optimism every darn time.

It’s easier to narrow down the people Verdant isn’t for, rather than those it is. It’s such an easy game to learn, and the theme has near-universal appeal, so I think the only people who wouldn’t enjoy it are the same people who dislike tableau-building in any game. The rest of us will love the short-but-sweet brain burn of a game about growing some plants.

It’s great to see a collaboration of designers making such sweet music together. Board game design strikes me as something so personal that my first thought about a big collaboration was one of worry. I worried that the horse game designed by committee might end up being a camel. Verdant is not a camel. Verdant is beautiful game, thanks to the combined brains that made it work, and Beth Sobel, whose gorgeous artwork adorns the box and everything in it. Verdant is a light, fun, aesthetically pleasing game, and I love it.

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

Buy it now at Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your first order through kienda.co.uk/punchboard to potentially qualify for 5% off.

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

Verdant (2022)

Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ, Shawn Stankewich
Publisher: Flatout Games, AEG
Art: Beth Sobel
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 30-45 minutes

The post Verdant Review appeared first on Punchboard.

So, how do you create a game about shares and investment, but keep it simple? The best way to do it is to keep the actions simple. If you make the gameplay simple, it leaves your brain free to churn away at a strategy, and that’s precisely what designer (and artist, the clever chap) Mark Gerrits has done with Mini Express. It’s essentially a cube rail game, similar to others I’ve covered here, like Luzon Rails and Ride the Rails.

First class

Your turn in Mini Express is limited to doing one of two things. The main thing you’ll be doing is adding tracks to the map, by taking some (incredibly cute!) wooden trains from the relevant company’s supply, and plopping them onto the hexes between two cities, extending their railway track. Once you’ve done that, you move that company’s track length marker along its track. Longer tracks are worth more points at the end of the game.

The other action is taking a share. It’s another simple action: you take a share certificate from the company’s supply, decrease your level of influence in that company by the number of trains in their supply, then add three more trains to that supply.

That’s it, that’s all you can do in Mini Express. Doesn’t sound too daunting now, does it? It also doesn’t sound that exciting, or interesting, when I break the game down like that. The truth, however, is that this game is very good, and very tense. All of the excitement in the game is generated by the four different colours used, and the interactions between tracks and companies.

Brain training

In Mini Express there are four goods types – cotton, timber, metal and leather (or maybe skins, they’re never actually named in the rules). They correlate to white, brown, grey and orange colours, which just so happen to be the same colours as the companies you’re investing in, and the tracks laid on the map. There’s a weird dichotomy whereby it feels like it should be really easy to understand how they all relate to one another, but in truth it feels oddly confusing in your first game or two.

The longer the track in a particular colour, the more points each share is potentially worth at the end of the game. Each time you connect a track to a new city, you take the token from the city, which in turn increases your level of influence with the companies whose colours are on the token. Are you still with me?

The person who ends up with the most influence in each company gets a number of victory points shown on the track length chart, multiplied by the number of shares you have in that company. If what you’re taking away from this garbled explanation, is that you want to have shares and influence in the companies with the longest tracks, you’re correct. It just feels much more difficult to explain that with the game set up in front of you, which is a weird feeling.

Buffet car

Once you get your head around what you’re trying to do in Mini Express, the game comes alive. Much like choosing a sandwich on the buffet car on a train, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into, but bad decisions can leave you feeling sick. You start out with concrete plans for the game ahead, which some git will shatter like a pneumatic drill, by claiming a connecting city you really wanted. You’ll find your loyalty to lines and colours changing as the game goes on, and it’s the player who most carefully treads these shifting sands who will do well.

Despite only having two actions to choose from, you’ll find yourself agonising over decisions nearly every turn. There’s this brilliant mechanism which means to take a share in a company, you have to give-up influence in that company, to the tune of the number of trains left in their supply. It means you don’t want to take shares if there are too many trains left, but in the same breath, if you lay track using all of the remaining trains in a colour, the next person is left to pickup a free share.

Mini Express has a ton of interactivity, but no real ‘take that!’ mechanism, which I really like. Some games suit direct attacks between players, but not train games. Making a malicious move just to deny someone is a possibility, but it’s highly unlikely, as it benefits nobody. I love that the end-of-game trigger is very visible, which leads to some very exciting last few turns, waiting to see who’s going to end the pursuit of railway riches.

Final thoughts

The more cube rail games I play, the more appreciation I have for the design nuances the designers use. Just like in Ride The Rails, Mini Express has simple, quick turns, and revolves around putting trains on hexes to make tracks. The two games feel very different, in spite of their genetic similarities. Mini Express has a lot more going on, and is a more difficult game to get to grips with. It’s a brilliant game.

The components are outstanding, but I do have a minor complaint about the screen-printed trains. The grey trains have white printing, while the white have grey printing. It can make them confusing when you’re trying to look at routes on the board. There’s a really simple solution though, just lay them face-down.

The solo mode plays a decent game, but it’s no substitute for three to five players. With more than two playing, there’s a terrific feeling of competition. There are some great variants for both the USA and Europe maps (the map board is double-sided!) which throw in some more things to think about, should you get tired of the standard game. Mini express is great. The way it combines simple actions with difficult decisions is utterly compulsive. If you like cube rail games, or are looking for an entry point to the sub-genre, look no further.

Review copy kindly provided by Moaideas Game Design. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The new expansion map packs and deluxe upgrades for Mini Express go live on Kickstarter in early July. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.

Mini Express (2021)

Designer: Mark Gerrits
Publisher: Moaiseas Game Design
Art: Pinting Pan, Shogun, Desnet Amane, Chiyami
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Mini Express Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Semi-cooperative is an interesting concept. When it’s done well, it’s genius. Battlestar Galactica (now re-imagined as Unfathomable) and Nemesis are brilliant examples. Despite knowing this, I tend to wear my ‘hmm, dubious’ face when I learn that a game is using it. Even though I haven’t played a truly bad example. Games with a hidden traitor lend themselves to the concept really well, but a deck-builder? Dominion with negotiation?

Dominion in spaaaaaaaace!

I’m going to cut to the chase here, and say that the way Moonrakers plays has a lot in common with the original and best* deck-builder, Dominion. Each reactor card gives you another two actions, thruster cards let you draw more cards from your deck… sound familiar? if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The difference comes with the additional cards you might have, like shields and damage. These don’t give you anything extra, but you need a certain combination of cards in order to fulfil contracts.

So what’s a contract? At the start of your turn, you choose a contract to attempt. Contracts award you with different bonuses, but the ones you’re most interested in are money and victory points (VPs). Some of the contracts need a lot of cards to be played in order to complete them, and it’s not the sort of thing you can do by yourself. This is where we talk about the co-operative part of the game.

Let’s say that I’ve got a really tough contract to fulfil. I can do some of it myself, but I can’t get the number of damage I need. I can open it up to the table, and ask if anyone wants to join the contract with me, if they’ve got damage to contribute, in return for some kind of reward. We get to decide the terms of the deal ourselves, so it might be that I suggest I take the VPs for the contract, while you take the money. Sounds good to you? Mutually beneficial? Good, good. Negotiation in action.

* Dominion is the best pure deck-builder, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Only those you trust can betray you

The aim of Moonrakers is to be the first to 10 Presitge (VPs). So while I might need you to help me complete a contract, you might decide that it’s in your best interests to let me fail. So you tell me “Sure Adam, I’ve got a handful of damage cards here, I’ll help you”. We start the contract, then you decide to reveal that in fact, you have none. You just wanted me to commit to a contract I couldn’t fulfil, in the hope I take damage from the hazard dice I had to roll, and didn’t have the shield cards to mitigate them.

If this reminds you of games like Cosmic Encounter, then you’re on the right track. Knowing who you can and cannot trust is a big deal, and even then you’ll sometimes get screwed over by someone you thought never, ever would. This can be a problem for some groups. If you have players who are sensitive, or others who find it very hard to leave what happens at the table, at the table. You might find need to house-rule it. Make deals binding, something like that. Otherwise, this probably isn’t the game for you.

Non-binding agreements happen to be something I really like in games. As much as I like the mechanical dryness of a decent, crunchy Euro game, sometimes you just want something which gets the table talking and interacting more. Moonrakers hits a nice 50/50 balance between the game developing on the table, and the meta taking place above the table.

Rocket engines

Directly comparing Moonrakers to the base game of Dominion does it a disservice, as there’s a lot more going on. As well as carefully constructing your deck of cards, there are hidden objectives for each player to chase, and a player board to consider. When it comes to the buy phase of your turn, as well as purchasing crew cards to add to your deck (which can be very powerful), you can also buy the small, square, ship part cards. You add the ship parts to your player board which give you ongoing or instant effects, and usually more of the basic cards into your deck.

This kind of limited engine-building is really clever. It doesn’t feel as important as the main part of the game, but in a game in which you’re trying to get to ten points, every little thing you can do to swing things in your favour is important. It could be that getting that third ship part manufactured by that one company is enough to complete an objective, earning you a final point, and with it, victory. It’s another of those really clever, very subtle things that Moonrakers does so well. Showing you most of how people are scoring, but not everything.

Final thoughts

Fans of deck-building haven’t had many truly great options recently. Aeon’s End and Thunderstone Quest do a good job, but there aren’t many more that spring to mind. That’s what makes me really glad that Moonrakers exists. It’s nice to have a new game that keeps the core mechanisms of classic deck-building intact, but adds enough new things to make it feel fresh. The engine-building and negotiation don’t feel forced, or disjointed. It all melds together nicely.

I found that playing the game with people you don’t normally have in your group, can make the first few rounds feel a little stilted. It’s hard to gauge what kind of deals to propose with people, and even harder to know how people will react to having an agreement torn out from under them. Tread with care for your first few rounds. Once you get into the swing of things, however, it’s really good fun seeing who is desperate enough to help you in a deal that’s massively unbalanced in your favour.

I don’t usually talk too much about component quality in my reviews, but the bits in the box with Moonrakers are fantastic. The metal coins, little plastic ships, and even the cardstock is gorgeous. The same goes for the artwork and graphic design, it’s excellent throughout. The base game feels like a Kickstarter deluxe versoin. There’s even a comic in the box, explaining the backstory to the game. At its best with three or four players, Moonrakers is a fantastic example of a classic deck-builder with a modern twist.

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

Moonrakers (2020)

Designers: Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, Zac Dixon
Publisher: IV Games
Art: Lunar Saloon
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Moonrakers Review appeared first on Punchboard.

There we go, I got the M word out of the way, and I can be done with it. There’s almost an unspoken obligation among board game critics that they have to mention that game when talking about this one, so let’s just leave it be now. Magnate is an unusual city-building game. In fact, it’s an unusual game of any type, because the climax to the game, the thing you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for, is a huge failure. You’re waiting for the property market to crash, and for peoples’ investments to be worth nothing.

Doesn’t sound like fun times? True, maybe it doesn’t, so let me explain why this game is great.

Money, money, money

Magnate is centred around several city blocks, made up from interchangeable boards. In each of these 3×3 grid blocks, plots of land come up for sale, and based on the current price of land, players can scoop them up, with a view to building on them in future rounds. Some spots have adjacency bonuses which make it more sensible to build residential buildings, for instance. You build buildings, attract the available tenants, and then…. SELL!

After all, you’re businessmen and businesswomen, doing important business things, running businesses and being all businessy. Business.

The person with the most money at the end of the game is the winner, and the land prices go up and up every round. Throw up a few buildings, fill them with tenants, and the land’s worth even more. Buy low, sell high, make tons of money and put it all in your included wallets, to keep things secret. Honestly, the wallets are one of my favourite things in the game. If you wanted to, you could try to remember how much money each person gains and spends, but it’s nearly impossible. What you end up with is this really funny situation where people are trying to secretly count their money while it’s still in their wallet, handing it over while trying to keep it secret like your granny giving you pocket money.

Bidding War

Even with five players, the city feels like it has plenty of room for everyone to build, and it initially made me feel like things might get as cutthroat as I’d hoped for. Games like this live and die on the interactions they create between the players, so getting all up in each other’s grill (greetings, fellow kids) is pretty important. Magnate creates this competition by serving up some scarcity in the supply and demand.

The number of plots up for sale, and the newly available tenants to lure into your concrete ziggurats, are limited. If you want to be the person who snaps up the sole industrial tenant this round, you had better make sure you’re first in turn order. Turn order is up for grabs each round, with an auction. Round and round the bidding goes until someone wins, and they get the cool little digger toy which denotes the first player.

The little digger is very cool.

All this gavel-banging is brilliant. Weighing up how much you want to be first, against how much you want to spend, is agonising sometimes. Other times you might make the decision to make sure you’re later in turn order, so that you can see what others build, which may result in better options for you. The way Magnate keeps you thinking and adjusting your plans on-the-fly is so good! There’s almost no downtime because there’s always something to be thinking about.

Crash and burn

I mentioned the market crash at the top of the review, and it’s so good that I want to draw some attention to it. As the game is played, the value of land increases, and risk cards are added to a stack. Once the Crash Track reaches zero, as the risk cards drive it down, the crash happens and the game ends. That stack of risk cards tells you how far back down the price track the marker moves, as you come to terms with the soul-crushing implications.

If you were able to sell your land when the property market was at its most-valuable, the most basic sale of all would have netted you over 2.5 Million. When the market crashes and the price plummets, you’re forced to sell-off whatever you have left. This can leave you selling for a basic price of 300K or less. Put that into context: if you had four plots to your name and sold them at 2.5M, you’d have banked 10 Million. If the crash plummeted to 300K, all of your planning and investing would see a paltry 1.2M in the coffers. Ouch.

The tension in those last few turns is palpable. Everyone just waiting to see who pulls the last brick in the Jenga tower of despair. Once it topples, win or lose, it’s like a weight being lifted off your shoulders. It’s just a brilliant piece of game design, it makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done countless times before.

Final thoughts

It’ll come as no surprise to learn that I like Magnate: The First City. I like it a lot. I don’t own any other games that concentrate on buying and selling land, and to be honest, I don’t think I need one now. It’s hard to see how anything is going to top this for a long time. I met James Naylor – the designer – at last year’s UK Games Expo, and it was clear from talking to him that Magnate has been a labour of love, into which he has poured years of effort and playtesting. It really shows, the game is brilliant.

Is it perfect? No, nothing is. The box is an absolute monster, thanks to the huge amount of plastic buildings included. If they’d been generic wooden buildings, the game could have been a lot smaller, and presumably cheaper too. It’s an expensive game, at £75, and while I tend not to mention cost too much here, it bears thinking about. If you’re not into high levels of interaction between players, it might not be for you.

If, however, you’re looking for a game that’s probably different to most others that you own, Magnate is a great option. The gameplay is superb, and how could I let the review get this far without mentioning the tutorial deck? The game boasts that you can learn to play the entire game without looking at the rulebook (save for the setup diagram), and you can be damn sure I tested it. True to his word, James’ tutorial deck is a work of art, and will get you up and playing very quickly.

Magnate is a brilliant game, and a brilliant debut from a designer who I’m going to keep a close eye on from now on. I think you should too – bravo James.

A review copy was kindly provided by Naylor Games. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

* images copyright Dr Meeple

Magnate: The First City (2021)

Designer: James Naylor
Publisher: Naylor Games
Art: Donal Hegarty, Cze Lee, James Naylor
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Magnate: The First City Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Unusually for a Euro game, there’s a pretty detailed backstory behind Pendulum. It’s a story of immortal kings, dragons, and a great iron clock. Whichever player exerts enough influence over the council will get crowned as the new timeless king, and usher in a new era. Exciting stuff, huh? All of this happens as the players literally have the sands of time, slipping away. Three sand timers govern the three distinct areas of the board, and actions can only take place when one of them is flipped next to your worker.

Tempus fugit

I had two big fears when going into Pendulum. Firstly, whether faster players would have an advantage over slower ones. Secondly, whether the real-time nature of the game, with simultaneous play and no turns, would turn it into a strangely unsociable experience.

Let’s start with the first worry – the relative speed of players. Euro games are about strategy, planning, taking your time and figuring out the next best move. My worry was that players who are prone to analysis-paralysis (AP) would be left thinking, while others took twice as many turns, if they could flip the timers fast enough. Having played Pendulum a few times now, I’m glad to be able to say that it’s really not a worry.

What I didn’t expect was how long each of the timers takes to trickle through. At 45, 120, and 180 seconds each, none of them is going to flipping back and forth like a slinky on an escalator. There’s plenty of time to plan and strategise, and that feeling is bolstered by the fact that you only start with two workers to place. Things get more frantic later in the game, when you get more workers, but there still isn’t the disparity I was worried about.

Coming up for air

So let’s touch on my second concern, the simultaneous turns. I say turns, I don’t actually mean turns, as there’s no turn structure as such. You can carry out as many actions as you can fit in the time before each Council phase is triggered. As a result, there’s this inherent, self-imposed pressure. You’re desperate to get as much done as you possibly can, to try to keep yourself on an even keel in comparison to the other players. It reminds me of swimming. You’ve got your head down, fully focused on what you need to do. It’s only the occasional break for a Council phase, or waiting for a timer to run out, when you’ll have the chance lift your head up, breathe, and to look at what the other players are up to.

I don’t really like this feeling. One of the things I really enjoy about a worker-placement game is seeing which strategies my opponents are trying, and seeing how – if at all – our plans might collide. In Pendulum, it’s very hard to play like this, and it can feel like you’re all playing your own game, just occasionally coming back together for the four Council phases, and seeing what happens at the end. It feels like playing in silos.

The only time it doesn’t really feel like this is in a two-player game, where you can instead seem to spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs, waiting for a timer to finish. Pendulum isn’t at its best with two though, I think three or four players is where the game does best. It supports up to five, but five people all trying to move the same things around the same shared board is just too crowded. The solo mode, added by the ever-dependable Automa Factory, is excellent, and I prefer it to two player.

Like clockwork

Here is a good place to mention the untimed mode that’s included in the box. Playing with the untimed mode pretty much nullifies that entire previous section of the review. The timers are still on the board, but only to dictate which areas can be activated, and have workers placed and removed. When all players have taken their actions, consulted the rulebook, made a cup of tea, and opened the custard creams, the timers get flipped. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until you reach the end of the included timer track, then do the Council phase.

I have mixed feelings about the untimed mode. On the one hand, I enjoy it more than the timed mode. It feels like a sophisticated Euro game with a nice action activation gimmick. On the other hand, however, I can’t help feeling like I’m not playing the game the way it was intended. I really like the innovation of adding the timers, and I love that someone has done something fresh with worker-placement, but I can’t help wishing the timers weren’t in there.

If there had to be a gimmick, a something special to make the game stand out, I wish they’d added a big pendulum. There’s meant to be a grand iron clock, so put half the action spaces on one side of the pendulum, half on the other. Then use the untimed mode for the whole game, with the pendulum shifted from side to side, between turns. Good, eh?

I’m wasted here…

Final thoughts

Pendulum is a good game. It’s not an amazing game, but it’s better than average. I love what Travis Jones has done with the design, and the clever thematic link between the setting and the sand timers. I just don’t enjoy the game as much when I use them. It’s a clever novelty, but it just misses the target for me. I don’t know who signed-off the sand timer design, but having tapered bases, instead of flared ones, was a crazy choice. They get knocked over far too easily, even with a bump to the table.

The presentation throughout is great, and the ten playable characters (well, five, each with two variants) all with their own unique stratagem cards and player mats, all feel slightly different to play with. It’s not a difficult game to learn and play, so anyone happy with medium-weight games will be well away with it. The fact that the rulebook contains a section dedicated to what to do when you forget to do something, just reinforces the feeling that the real-time doesn’t quite work.

All of my grumbling aside, there are going to be people reading this whose game nights thrive on chaos, who love a bit a frantic action on a table. For those people, I’d have no hesitation in recommending Pendulum. Solo gamers might see the Automa Factory name on the box and be tempted, but personally I’d go for Tapestry or Gaia Project instead if you want one of their titles. I really like the untimed game, it makes for a solid Euro game, but I can’t escape the feeling that I’m not playing the game I was meant to be playing.

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

Pendulum is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Pendulum (2020)

Designer: Travis Jones
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Robert Leask
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Pendulum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Rescuing Robin Hood is a card game. Over five rounds you try to rescue more powerful villagers to add to your crew (deck), and to do this you need to beat the guards that stand in your way. Battle in this game is done by the numbers – that is to say, you’re going to be flexing your big maths brain working things out. There are three traits that every character in the game has: wit, brawn, and stealth. In order to beat a guard, you choose one of the three traits from your current merry band, and then try to remove guards from in front of a villager. That’s where the fun, and the agony of choice, begins.

Feared by the bad

Standing between you and the villagers are a number of the sheriff’s men, but you only get to see the stats of the first guard in each line. The hand you’ve draw for the round determine the strength of each of your traits, and then you decide which you want to use. It’s not as simple as just choosing the strongest, however, as each of them has a different method to take them on.

Choosing brawn means flipping all of the guards in a row face-up, and hoping your brawn level is at least as high as their total, or you fail. Wits lets you push your luck, choosing whether to stop after each card, or risk flipping a further card, risking undoing all of your hard work. It’s a classic Blackjack-style bit of push-your-luck, which I really like. Finally, stealth lets you choose any number of cards – face-up or -down – and hope your total is high enough.

This all sounds very simple, I know, but in practise it’s agonisingly difficult to choose sometimes. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. Thanks to the rulebook, you know the average strength of each of the blue and red guard cards, so you can make a semi-informed decision, but unless every card you attack is face-up, there’s a certain amount of trusting in lady luck. It’s definitely a game to make sure you’re wearing your lucky pants for!

Loved by the good

Rescuing Robin Hood needs collective brainpower and decision making, and it makes for a fantastic co-op game. Before the first player makes a move, you get to chat things over and decide on the best approach. It’s a bit like planning a big heist, but less sexy. Between you, you’ll decide who should do what, where you can afford to take chances, and even use some bonus tokens to do things like reveal more guards, or move them around.

What follows next is great fun. One-by-one everyone takes their turn, and the tension and excitement is great. The three or four seconds of whispered mental arithmetic when totting-up brawn scores, or the tension of whether the wit check will succeed as you slowly turn that last… guard… card…

There’s lots of reactive planning when your plans inevitably tumble all around you, like acorns from Sherwood’s Mighty Oak, and in all honesty, that scramble is great fun. As a Euro gamer, I love it when my plans work just as I’d planned, but the co-operative damage limitation at play in Rescuing Robin Hood is great fun. There’s a real feeling of being all in it together, winning or losing as a team.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

Rescuing Robin Hood is more a game of deck-construction, rather than deck-building. Rescued villagers are available for players to draft into their decks at the end of each round, gradually increasing the potency of them. You never really cycle through the deck, and at the end of the second and fourth rounds you’re forced to whittle your deck down to eight, and then finally four cards. Card choice is really important. It’s also a tough game. Not difficult to play, the round structure is simple, but succeeding is hard!

In the fifth, and final, round, your team have to storm Nottingham Castle before you can even think about rescuing our favourite outlaw. If you make it as far as rescuing Robin, he joins your team for one last hurrah, trying to take down the Sheriff. Technically, you win as long as you rescue Robin, which is just as well, because accomplishing all three in one round is pretty flipping difficult.

If you’re looking for variety, there’s an advanced game to play, where you additionally draw challenge cards to complete as you play. And if you find yourself short of time, there’s an accelerated version too, to speed things up. My biggest complaint with the game are the boards and cubes used for tracking the values of your traits. They share something with Terraforming Mars, in that they’re wooden cubes on a card with a gloss finish. The slightest bump of the table, or brush with a sleeve, and they make a bid for freedom.

Final thoughts

When you open Rescuing Robin Hood and check out the gorgeous artwork, great rulebook, and custom insert, you’d be forgiven for thinking this comes from an established studio. For a debut game Castillo Games has done an incredible job, both in terms of production, and the game itself. Given how maths-dependent the game’s systems are, it’s clear that a lot of playtesting has happened to get the balance just right.

Fans of perfect information games probably won’t enjoy it too much, as there’s a lot of risk-taking and gambling involved. Rescuing Robin Hood is a proper social experience, and I can see it going down really well at games nights and conventions. The need to talk every step through, and the shared joy and misery when you win and lose, do a great job of binding the players together. If you lose, it’s no single person’s fault, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

The artwork and illustrations are fabulous throughout, and I love the punny names for some of the characters, like Anne Dittover and Hugh Jeego. If you’re planning on buying a game to play with two players mostly, just bear in mind that in my experience, two-player is a much more difficult exercise than with three or four people. Rescuing Robin Hood is a charming, easy-to-learn, co-operative card game, and I’m very impressed. I look forward to seeing what Bryce & Co have in store for us in the future.

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

Rescuing Robin Hood (2021)

Designer: Bryce Brown
Publisher: Castillo Games
Art: Paul Vermeesch
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Rescuing Robin Hood Review appeared first on Punchboard.