Reviews written by Gary Sax

This is an excellent game, an all time great. It's relatively short, plays using the great CDG wargame system and has wonderful themed events. It is a tight tense game as well, if slightly unbalanced. It also has a surprising thematic resonance and teachability that belies its complexity.

While I do have a couple critiques, they aren't particularly serious. It relies almost entirely on card knowledge. For such a highly thought of game I find it surprising how much it relies on many, many plays to reach its pinnacle. Playing between players of different experience is virtually impossible. I also think it misses out on a ton of tension by cycling the cards so little--there is very little "Do I play this now to get it out of the deck?" since you know you will see a card *maybe* 2 times and as low as 1 time.

Mare Nostrum did not work well for me, but I've never clicked with the core trading mechanism that defined the original civ genre. There are several thing that happened in my games that are supposedly easy to avoid (Egypt can't be traded gold, a player can choose to grind the game to a halt by limiting trading) but have happened to me and soured me on the game and its fragility.

Pandemic is a great game that I have largely run out of steam for, so my personal tilt on that rating is considerably lower. But the initial discovery and experience period is outstanding, and it remains a game that I would automatically feel comfortable recommending to people who only have experience with mass market games. I do think it is a game that is incredibly vulnerable to quarterbacking (raises hand), so that is worth being aware of going in.

Ancients is the definitive Command Colors system. The leadership system, combined with the support systems, actually makes you think a lot more about the positioning of your troops relative to each other. You are incentivized to form lines. There is more here than you initially think upon trying the game, but I think it ultimately ran out of gas for me after a lot of plays. Hard to fault it too much on that, even though I traded it away.

Don't buy the expansions, though, in my opinion they are completely superfluous and they are expensive.

A divisive game. This is a game that consistently bombed on the times I have introduced it locally. The asymmetry stands on its own but I think the game falls into some traps (e.g. overinvitation) with inexperienced players that make initial games boring. And boring initial games do not lead to subsequent plays, and how could you blame people?

It also is fragile to player count, as 3 player and even 4 player games can be too few players.

If I'm honest, I don't entirely get the hype. It's extremely light and quick, so it makes good filler.

Outstanding core action selection and unit recruitment mechanisms that solve a ton of the genre's extant problems. All of the mechanisms around it like questing can be a little opaque.

One of the, if not the, greatest filler games of all time. This is a good game to bring to a family gathering with inexperienced players as well. I have friends and relatives who have demanded to know where to get this game who do not regularly play tabletop games.