Reviews written by Legomancer

This was my Game of the Year in 2011. If you like fantasy as a theme, you are set in the board game world. You can elf as many dungeons with your wizarding stick as your heart desires. But if you like science fiction, then obviously what you want is a fourteen-hour long grindfest of sprawling space empires all trying to be the first to research Calculus so they can build terraforming stations or whatever. What I’m saying is, space games tend to only come in one flavor. Ascending Empires changes this, bringing the space conquest field into a fun, fast, and more appealing format. Yes, it has a flicky element, but unlike previous games with this element (such as Catacombs, which is now in the trade pile), this isn’t the only feature of the game. There’s a lot more going on, but not so much that you need to set aside an entire afternoon and your plans to ever know the touch of a woman to experience. The only, only, bad point is a huge one — the production values on the game boards are lousy, and this was almost enough for me to knock it out of the top spot, but I’ve had so much fun playing the game as is that I can’t really complain too much.

Unless its expansion makes some changes, this is the game I will want to be playing when I’m playing Eminent Domain. This is the deck-building space game to go for. (To be fair, though, there isn’t much interaction short of “I need to grab that before you do” and it goes on WAAAAY long with 5 players.) This one feels like I’m conquering planets and building up a space empire. As with Thunderstone, it’s a deckbuilder in which I do more than just shuffle cards around and get more cards. I’m curious as to how it plays with 2, and I’m also curious about the expansion. (I have heard that, like Eminent Domain, this too can get repetitive after only a few plays.)

I've never played the actual Blood Bowl game. I have no interest whatsoever in football, even (and especially) if it includes elves. Dan, my opponent, is exactly the same. Yet we both had a really good time playing this. I was the Eye Gougers and he was the Wood Elves. It's fast and fun, and wildly chaotic. You can and will get screwed by luck (I certainly did). But who cares? It's a grand time. It reminded me a lot of Campaign Manager 2008, which I liked but had a few things going against it. One, it abstracted its theme a little too much, unlike this one which abstracts it just enough, I think. Two, CM2008 made me think about Sarah Palin, which this game does not. Three, BBTM allows for more than two players, and I'm kind of curious to see how that works