Hidden movement is the most under-used mechanic in all of board gaming. You can count the quality titles that use it on the fingers of one hand. Fury of Dracula, Letters from Whitechapel, Scotland Yard, Nuns on the Run and that's about your lot.

Specter Ops still doesn't take us on to the second hand. But it expands the genre with a style and energy that has to be played to be appreciated.

When I started Drake's Flames, Rio Grande used to send me a lot of games. Then they stopped, mostly because I was rather disparaging of one of their games. Then, several years later, I asked them for a particular game and they sent me three other games instead. This was my chance to make good, to get back in with one of the biggest game companies in the world so I could get free games from them again!

They are here. With their ships, their towns, and their people. They have invaded our land, killed our people, taken what they think is theirs by right. They think their way is the only way. We are the guardians of this land. We will show them they are wrong.

The island strikes back.

When I cracked the shrink on Splendor (what happened to the missing ‘u’?), I got a nasty surprise. I really thought that so many people had taken the piss out of the overuse of the “Renaissance merchants impressing nobility” theme in games that it had rightly been killed, had its head cut off and its mouth stuffed with garlic-infused meeples that it was gone forever. Yet it it was again, in my hands, in 2014.

But review copies are review copies, so with a heavy heart I began to dig into the box. A deck of cards with some lovely, if rather generic, artwork depicting various scenese of Renaissance life. Some delightfully hefty gem tokens in various colours. A punchboard of nobles and a page of rules. So it was easy to learn, and it looked nice.

Perhaps it wasn’t going to be quite so awful after all.

It was ludicrously easy to learn. Each turn you either grab some gems, spend some of your collected gems on buying a card, or reserve a card to buy later, keeping out of the greedy mitts of your opponents. Each card requires you to pay with a different combination of gem colours but itself contributes a gem to all future purchases. Some are also worth victory points, and you can also get these by “impressing” (oh, God!) one of the nobles with your gem collection. First one to fifteen points wins.

Nowadays I try not to do such an obvious and tiresome thing as a whole-rules paragraph near the beginning of the game but I really couldn’t help it here. It’s just too simple. A child could play this. My children did play it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After reading it, it sounded way too simplistic to even be interesting. My lack of enthusiasm must have shown to the people I cajoled and begged to play it with me: all refused. But eventually, I got my long-suffering family to agree to help me out.

And then I learned a variation on the old saw that one should never judge a book by its cover: one should never judge a game by its rules.

What Splendor actually feels like is a peculiar variation on Ticket to Ride. It’s got the same desperate vibe of trying to collect sets in order to steal goodies from under the nose of your eager opponents, the same teeth-grinding frustration when someone else does it to you.

But all the rough and ready edges of that design have been gently smoothed away, a set of mechanics moulded and shaped by the passing of the years. In place of randomly collecting colours toward your sets, you choose what you want. Instead of pot luck when it comes to grabbing routes you can “reserve” the ones you really want, at the cost of a turn’s play. Rather than the iron consequences of stolen routes forever closed to you, there’s the hope of a new card that might, just about, fill the same gap if you can get to it first.

The sum effect is one of replacing randomness with choice. How you feel about that depends on how you feel about that great cosmic balance in game design, whether you favour excitement over strategy, thrills over plans.

But Splendor does something that Ticket to Ride does not. Slowly, as you begin to collect cards, it becomes apparent that this is actually a super-simple economic engine game. Your primary purpose early in the game is to buy cards that help you buy bigger cards, on and on up the tree until you can get the fat victory point cards and win the game.

That this ends up happening with incredible speed is another of the game’s surprising pleasures. You only need fifteen to win, and some of the big cards are worth five or more. It’s quite possible for a game that’s been ticking along at a quiet pace to suddenly break into desperate tension as everyone makes a break for victory at the same time, with the win often going in unexpected directions.

Splendor isn’t everything. The theme is comically pointless, and while the stripped down mechanics pack in an impressive amount of variety there’s unlikely to be enough there to sustain real long-term interest. I’m not even sure it’s everything it thinks it is: while moderately strategic, a lot can hinge on what cards come out and turn order.

But Splendour undoubtedly is a quality addition to that small but vital genre of catch-all medium-light hobby games that seem to offer a little bit to please pretty much anyone, like light glittering on the surface of a gemstone. Enough simplicity for anyone to learn, enough strategy to exercise the strategists, enough randomness to satisfy the gamblers, enough interaction to engage the warriors.

It's that time of the year for ghosts and goblins...and what better way to celebrate than to get your friends all together and unleash nasty Hexes on them?

House of Spirits(Designed by Mark Thomas, published by Lock 'n Load Publishing)has arrived just in time for the holidays--a spooky, competitive romp through a haunted mansion where players try and solve the mystery of the titular House of Spirits. 

Last in my Halloween-themed reviews this month is the latest Asmodee offering, Gosu (short for "Goblin Supremacy.")  Designed by Kim Sato, it's a damned cool little card-based battling game of building up big goblin armies, then blowing them up real good.

The hills are alive with the sound of varmints.

It's called Spy Club but with the picture of sleuthing kids on the box, I keep calling it Spy Kids. My own kids admonish me every time I misname it. And I misname it a lot: it's obviously a family co-operative game, so we're sitting down to play it as a family. 

Can Star Trek Fleet Captains possibly be as good or bad as you have heard?

Star Wars is back! It's back in a big way. That means, for the foreseeable future, we're gonna be getting TONS of licensed Star Wars products. One of the first boardgames in the initial wave of licensed goodness was the curiously named, Star Wars Risk. Not exactly what people were expecting. Prior to its release, savvy internet folk determined that this was actually a refined version of the grail game, Star War's Queen's Gambit. Right then everybody should have perked up and taken note. Well, some of you are still not paying attention. Let me fix that for you.

It is Christmas day, 1980, and I am six years old. I go tearing through the house, rich with the smells of festive cooking, past beaming adults, trailing behind me a full stocking, to sit on my Gran's bed and open my presents. Tearing feverishly at the brightly coloured paper, I hope against hope that my hearts desire is nestled inside. And it is: Luke, Han and Leia come tumbling out onto the duvet in all their plastic glory and I am filled with the glee that only a child on Christmas morning can know.

In years since I have lost interest in Star Wars. Long before the prequels, without fanfare or particular reason I simply started to find Tolkien and Star Trek more interesting. As an adult, I left behind my childish things. Even the nostalgia worn thin: when I sat and watched A New Hope with my daughter recently, I consumed it like any other fun family action film. But when I opened a box and found the detailed, hand painted X-Wing miniatures inside for one moment, one brief flicker in time, I was back on that bed again, surrounded by the garish confetti of Christmas paper, trying to still my beating heart.

For some of you, that will be a siren call. If it is, you should stop reading, now, and go to buy this game. Those that remain will probably want to know a bit about the mechanics. It uses a points based system to allow each side to select a variety of starfighters and upgrades for them, and pilots picked from a roster of children’s dreams to fly them. Biggs Darklighter and Luke Skywalker in the base game. Wedge Antilles and Darth Vader amongst the expansions.

Each craft has a unique maneuver dial allowing the player to secretly pick a movement path, and once everyone has chosen these are revealed and the ships moved. Each fighter gets to pick an action from a roster individual to the type and then those in range and firing arc can attack. You roll attack dice and defence dice based on the ships stat line then compare hit results against evade results to see how much damage is inflicted. There’s a deck of damage cards, and critical hits provide unique disabling effects. Accumulate too much damage and a ship is destroyed. Last man standing wins.

It’s a simple, streamlined game and makes for a smooth, fast play experience that feels the way it should, filled with tension as you try and predict where enemy ships might go and excitement as the dice spill over the table. The individual movement, action choice and statistics for each craft are spot on from the nimble but fragile TIE fighter to the bloated gun platform that is the Y-Wing, wallowing in the vacuum. Planning your own movement and trying to anticipate the enemy provides a tactical base into which action choices insert a solid extra peg. Dice and cards make a heavy contribution toward success. There seems a good balance of these two elements in determining a winner, the game rewarding both skill and luck.

But for gamers used to all the decision making happening as the game plays out, X-Wing may provide a surprise. Like most points-based squad building games there’s a significant amount of strategic pleasures to be gained from looking at ship, pilot and upgrade combinations and building the most effective force you can with your points allowance. But again, like most points-based squad building games that means there are so many possible combinations that they can’t all be balanced, and there’s a risk of one-sided games and petty squabbling over one faction being “better” than another. Ignore it. There’s strategy here, but what the game is really about is playing the Star Wars theme in the background, and pushing primal buttons in the collective geek brain.

The base game comes with one X-Wing and two TIE fighters, each with four pilots and a small collection of upgrades. It’s not enough. With only three craft there’s no synergy, no outflanking, little interest in squad building. To try and wring maximum value from just three ships the game provides scenarios to build on the basic dogfight. One heavily favours the rebels, another the imperials, but they do offer variety and they do work with custom-picked forces and they illustrate how much mileage there is for fans to do their own thing with the game. The box also has some tactics-free quick play rules which are of no interest to hobbyists but are simple enough to parents play the game with young children, and three ships will suffice for that.

Ideally though, you need more. Doubling-down on base game sets is the best value option but also the least interesting. Far better to pick from the expansion miniatures. The Y-Wing is my personal favourite as it feels qualitatively different to everything else available right now, with its ship-disabling turret weapon and ability to suck up punishment. Two expansions, one for each faction, is enough. More is better if you can afford it. Just be aware that it’s the sort of expandable game that can rapidly become a money pit. There are more and bigger ships coming in the near future, including the Millenium Falcon. You know you’ll want one. Budget for it in advance.

You’ll want one because when the ships are on the table and the dice are flying alongside them, you can’t help but get sucked into the slipstream. The painted figures look fantastic as they close to combat range, jockeying for position. The endless variety gained from open movement, squad combinations and different scenarios ensures a vast mine of narrative potential, each game, each thrilling ride inscribing its own little legends on the collective consciousness of your group.  The only barrier keeping you anchored in tedious reality is the lack of a star field background to play on. Make one.

X-Wing seems to be the realisation of something that I thought would never exist, but have often wished for: a miniatures game tailored for the board game hobbyist. You get all the value of customised army building and the joys of open, distance-based maneuver and combat on a tabletop, unconstrained by the confines of the board. You have none of the grind of assembling or painting figures, and clever design tweaks ensure measurement dispute over things like positioning and firing arcs are minimal. But if you’re prone to arguing about rules trivia, you’re playing it wrong. It’s a game about tension, excitement and reliving your childhood dreams. It's an expensive game about priceless things. Play it. 

It takes about a New York minute between seeing a copy of the X-Wing base game and wondering what a Star Destroyer model might look like at that scale. In that minuscule time frame, Star Wars: Armada became an inevitability.

The base set of Armada looked to have the makings of an outstanding game. But it was kind of hard to tell for sure. With just three ships and a handful of fighter squadrons to divide between two sides, all you could do was sense the potential rather than experience it for yourself.

All through the colossal space battle at the end of Rogue One, I found it hard to concentrate. Seeing all those huge ships, the swarms of fighters, the epic scale, my brain kept turning back to Star Wars: Armada. That was especially true for the moment the Hammerhead Corvette came on the screen. I knew there was a new model for it coming for the game. And once the scene played out, I knew I had to have it.

The kitchen is bright and white. On the breakfast bar is a colossal faux-lego rollercoaster, a testament to a late-night drunken Kickstarter visit. Glancing down to the nearby dining table, I see a scattered mess of cards, dice and Star Wars art.

My face falls. "Oh no," I say. "You didn't".

"It's an experiment," my host replies. "Was just curious about the system. I'm not going to buy any boosters."

The first edition of Warhammer 40k was perhaps the worst thing Games Workshop even made. Although it was stuffed full of interesting tidbits, they unwisely chose to just copy their fantasy battle system into the 41st millennium. Where, as a result, a crossbow had the exact same stat line as a bolt gun, planting a high-explosive round smack into the middle of your suspension of disbelief. Porting fantasy straight to sci-fi is rarely a good idea.

I am too tired to go and learn a bunch of complicated miniatures rules. But a chance togame is a chance to game, so it looks like I'm going to have to go and learn Star Wars: Legion either way.