Reviews written by Gary Sax
This is a bit of a messy design but it has more variety and variability than Pandemic which I appreciate. It is poorly designed in a lot of areas that end up being serious, however, in particular with respect to losing to generals. If you lose to a general that is not the first one (perhaps due to dice), you have almost certainly lost the game but the game will go on for a long time afterwards.
Like it, don't love it. Very difficult. It is an impressive package---it actually meets that elusive "Could carry it around anywhere and play it in 30 spare minutes" criteria. The way it highlights a single twist of a special marine on your team and boils your decisions down into a compact 3 card decision matrix is divine.
Civ was an unthematic dud for me. The combat system is odd and, most importantly, you are absolutely slotted into your winning strategy on turn 1 by the civ you draw. Fail at the winning condition and you know you have lost. I would play Clash of Civilizations every time over this version.
I primarily played the game on an app but it simply did not work for me. I don't demand tremendous theme from dice games but locking in symbols did not communicate... really anything about what I was doing.
I think Virgin Queen is a game that solves many of the core problems of Here I Stand (e.g. straightjacketed diplomacy, clear best strategies for some players). It is disappointing that, in the process, it way overchromes the mix. In particular, I do not enjoy the espionage and assassination portion of the game, it is far too punishing for such a long game.
Great wargame with some groundbreaking mechanisms---the foreign assistance mechanic is a great, thematic, catch-up mechanism and the game plays out in quite a mobile, chaotic fashion. I'm not sure that the split players within alliances completely works out.
The mission pack, generally, feels like they took all the content for a real large expansion and stuffed it into a print on demand expansion once it was clear the game wasn't selling. The pack manages to stuff most of the rest of the content from GoW 1-3 into several low cost packs by coming up with creative ways to not add minis and proxy existing assets in the game. If you like GoW, these are well, well worth tracking down.
As my introduction to the hobby, this game has an outsized role in my gaming history. It's a fun little game, introducing in the lightest possible way some of the stuff that will define later, heavier fare. Hidden information, high stakes die rolling, asymmetric player powers, some light strategy.
I have not played this much but my first thoughts are that it is interesting but inessential. In some ways, vaguely fanservice-ey.
A very literal take on the pc civ genre that manages to capture most of its elements in a single evening design. There are so many creative elements to this game.