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Boardgame-Reviews

  • Theseus and the Art of Negative Choices

    Theseus: The Dark Orbit makes being trapped and making horrible choices a blast.


    Reiner Knizia, in his recent interview with Michael Barnes and Steve Weeks, said that he seeks to make games that give you only positive choices. His games, he posited, featured only a number of options that you really want to do. He contrasted that with games where you have to choose between bad options, suggesting that they aren't much fun.

    Well, Theseus: The Dark Orbit is that type of negative choice game. I think it's a great counterpoint to that interview: Dr. Knizia's statement is about his preference in game design, not a universal rule that positive choice games are always better or more fun. The Theseus engine revolves around a simple Mancala movement system along with card effects that escalate how dangerous individual rooms or pawns are. But the entire game is predicated around locking your opponent down, forcing her into bad choices. Go into this room and get torched by an ambush from a prepared position. Move that pawn and you'll end up in a room with two land mines. Move that third pawn and end up in a space where it can be shot at the next turn by a bunch of aliens who fill up the room. Or, if you're skillful, wriggle out by setting up a situation where your pawns can move to a safe zone and breath a huge sigh of relief.  

    Theseus makes your own movement the most powerless, stressful part of the game, which is a bold choice. Most games make the player's pawns their avatar, or at least the proactive stage of the player's plan. Instead, the empowerment in the game revolves around your card play taken at the end of the turn. Those cards alter rooms and, ideally, force your opponent's moves into a few dangerous deterministic channels. Your own units don't really get more powerful, beyond a single upgrade. The offensive part of the game is all about setting the perfect trap and giving your opponent only terrible choices. And it is glorious fun.

  • This Has All Happened Before... - Battlestar Galactica Review

    The best games touch something inside of us. They aren’t just a series of clever mechanisms that make us stroke our patchy beards in appreciation. They strike a much deeper chord. They reach down inside of us and grab our attention in a way that is hard to explain. They aren’t just stimulation for us mentally. We form an emotional attachment with the game,  like a favorite novel or movie. Battlestar Galactica did just that for me in the winter of 2009, just a few months after its initial release. I probably played the game close to 30 times in about 3 months. I could not escape it. Two years and two expansions later, I don’t play the game as much as I used to, but its excellence is branded on my head, and dare I say it, my heart. 

  • This Land is Your Land - Terra Mystica Review

    More than any game I’ve written about recently, Terra Mystica is hard to review. I find myself torn between actual enjoyment and the reviewer’s tendency to point out little things that are not to my taste. I don’t really like games like this as a rule. There’s only so much brain-burning for its own sake that I can handle before the game isn’t worth the effort anymore. But in a small way Terra Mystica has taken up residence in my head. After each session, we’ve had a fascinating conversation on strategy and what could be done differently, how the winner won and how the loser got buried. The design and strategy is compelling enough to overcome my own biases and leave me with an overall positive impression, though perhaps one of admiration rather than true enjoyment.

  • This Neighborhood's Going to Hell - Claustrophobia Review

    claustophobiaClaustrophobia is a board game that takes place in the world of Helldorado, which is a miniatures game where humanity decides to invade Hell in a land grab that is epic in its shortsightedness. You know you're in trouble when you need land so bad, you decide to move to Hell. Sure, you can get property really cheap, but you know it's going to be in a horrible school district, and odds are, taxes are way steeper than they have any right to be. And if you think it's bad for your home value when someone builds a parking lot next door, how much worse would it be if you're located next to a portal to Satan's Pawn Shop?

  • Those Pesky Dungeon Crawls...

    tphCover

    Going into Those Pesky Humans, I had high hopes, dungeon crawling is easily one of my favorite pastimes at the game table and the idea of being focused more on the perspective of the dungeon denizens, while not wholly original, promised a unique take on things. That it supposedly played quick and had good looking art was just icing on the jewel encrusted cake. However, what I ended up with was a lot of missed opportunity and middling game design wrapped in an attractive yet generic package. The bottom line is that there are a number of superior games that hit every mark this one tries for and in a world with so many options, there is no reason to settle for just alright.

  • Thoughts on Marvel Heroes

    It's Clobberin' Time!

    Superheroes have been the recipient of various board game and roleplaying game efforts over the years--some good, many awful, most of them completely forgettable.

  • Through the Ages Review

    If you're over 22, Civilization board games get caught in a nasty version of Catch-22. Give in to the epic sweep of history that such a game demands, and it'll take 22 hours to play on a huge global map. Cut it back, and you lose that sense of grandeur that separates Civ games from common or garden "dudes on a map" games. It's a conundrum that's rumbled along ever since Francis Tresham's original Civilization. And it took a genius like Vlaada Chvatil to solve it. The answer, it turns out, is to take away that map.

  • Throw Me The Idol! - Escape: The Curse of the Temple Review

    Escape is not a perfect game, but it has one thing that is a good sign: I always want to play it again. It’s like an enormous tin of cookies that you keep eating until you realize that half the tin is gone and you actually feel a little sick. I went to a game day a couple of weeks ago, and taught the game to a friend or two. We played, no joke, about seven times right then and there. There’s no such thing as only one game of Escape. It only exists in the plural.

  • Thunder and Lightning Review

    The biggest shock I got from Thunder and Lightning was seeing Richard Borg's name on the cover. He's become so synonymous with the Commands and Colours series that it seemed bizarre to remember he had, on occasion, designed other games. One of them was a 2-player card game called Hera and Zeus which has now been reskinned, rethemed and retitled as Thunder and Lightning.

    I never played the original, but cosmetically it looks like an impressive upgrade. Aside from the box art, which appears to show a tiny Thor being menaced by a muster of gargantuan ravens, the production is fantastic. It includes two shiny embossed wooden pieces, one for Thor and one for Loki, which appear to have no needful game function but do look rather lovely. 

    Switching to martial Norse mythology also seems to suit the fairly abstract mechanics a little better too. Players play cards with numeric strength values face down into into three columns. The cards at the head of those columns can challenge their opposite number, higher strength winning. If it sounds a little like Stratego, fear not: there are plenty of other cards with special effects to mix things up a bit.

    Ravens, for example, let you scout out face down cards by challenging them directly from your hand. Odin, Hel and Longships allow you to root around in your discard pile to regain cards of various sorts. Valkyries and Baldir can put in an appearance to rearrange card columns on one side of the board or the other. Shield Walls beat anything except for archers, but can't initiate challenges. The decks for each player are almost entirely identical, but big enough to ensure you're not playing like against like the whole time.

    Key to the whole edifice is that you get one action - play, pick up or challenge - on your turn for each card column you have. Depriving your opponent of a column  is thus an easy way to gain the upper hand. The need to get that column back adds a bluff element to the game whereby you can deliberately play understrength cards in the hope your enemy won't second guess you.

    You might think that all that face down play, and all those special effects lurking in the deck would make this quite a chaotic game. And you'd be right. Initial draw and placement is a complete crapshoot and it's entirely possible to start with a bad hand or make a bad blind initial play and for it to dictate the entire game. At up to 40 minutes to finish, that's not a small ask, although poor starts do tend to lead to shorter games.

    On the flipside, managing the chaos is where much of the fun is. There's a surprising number of ways to get creative in terms of getting past enemy cards which nothing in your column can beat. Some effects allow you to win ties or increase the strength of your troops so long as that card stays on top of your discard. So the game then becomes one of trying to keep it there as long as possible. My personal favourite is the Nightmare, a lurking horror that nukes the entire column for both players if it's revealed. 

    The game is full of these sorts of unexpected gotcha moments, little twists and turns that keep you interested. The unexpected Nightmare that blows away all your best troops. The quiet face-down card in the first row that you take for rubbish but which turns out to be a Shield Wall.  The empty column that's suddenly solved when you pull Fenris off the top of your deck. There's always something to keep playing for.

    Although I've enjoyed Thunder and Lightning, I do have one gripe with it: it's not Battle Line. The two games have a surprisingly similar feel of building up troops to overcome an opposing buildup on the other side, with special effects cards to spice things up. For me, Battle Line is the superior game in almost every respect. It's more exciting, faster playing and demands greater skill. I'd pick it over Thunder and Lightning every time except one, which is family play.

    My ten year old hated Battle Line. She understood the rules but couldn't grasp how to play effectively and rapidly gave up. But she took to Thunder and Lightning like a Viking to Valhalla, confidently slapping down cards and bluffing me with great skill and greater glee. The added luck and the more approachable theme helped a lot too. This is very much a game I can see having wide appeal for anyone who doesn't mind a bit of direct conflict.

    So Thunder and Lightning earns a spot on my shelf, even if it has an obvious and superior competitor. While I might want to swap it for a game of greater skill and tension, I'd never swap the consternation on my daughters Battle Line face with the sheer delight she took in this game. It's going to be a staple for a while to come.

     

  • Thunderstone - Review

    thunderstoneI have a theory. I'll walk you through it, and then you can tell me I'm an idiot, and I can tell you that you're retarded.

    Dominion is one of the most influential games of the last ten years. Whether or not you like it, it's tough not to see that a whole new kind of game has been invented. The game has drawn a huge audience, and people from all over the gaming spectrum have been drawn to it like skeeters to a bug zapper. That kind of success draws more than just fans, too - it draws people who would like to tap into the money well of gamers who have found some new shiny thing.

  • Thunderstone Advanced Review

    thunderstoneAdvancedIt's time for another Thunderstone review, and that means it's time for another review from my dad.

    If I had it to do over again, I’d . . .

    In those poignant moments of life we occasionally hear folks say they wish they could have a chance to do it again, but differently. Like after a divorce, or when knowing life is coming to an end due to cancer. (Serious opening, but bear with me). Most all of us wish we could go back and, knowing what we know now, take another swing at it.

    Well, AEG has had that rare opportunity to go back and do it again, but this time better. Thunderstone Advance is all the old Thunderstone but the little tweaks that we found irritating have, by and large, been cleaned up and improved, so that the end product is, in my opinion, better than the older experience. I’ll elaborate.

    When you open the box you immediately come upon the new game board. For those of you who have played Dragonspire, you know the board that came with that game. A genuine piece of … well, I really didn’t like it. It had spaces for the dungeon deck and cards in the three ranks and for any Guardian that managed to slip out of the dungeon, but the board was WAY too big for what it accomplished, so it was a great waste of table space. When I first pulled the board out of Thunderstone Advance I thought, “Oh, no, not another crappy board.” And maybe this was where my opinion of Advance began to have hope, because when you open up the board you find something altogether new and VERY helpful for game play. Not only does it have spaces for the dungeon, but also for all the village cards and sundry cards. AND, not only that but it leads you through set-up so that you don’t end up with all weapons or spells or villagers, but helps spread the cards around. Now, fellow gamers, THAT’S an IMPROVEMENT! And, I might venture, a stroke of genius. Oh, don’t let me miss mention of the fact that the new board is double sided. One side shows the dungeon/village, the other side for playing the wilderness. (Can you guess what expansions will come along?)

    The rulebook to TA is a delight for the veteran gamer to read. Some of the older Thunderstone rulebooks looked as though they were rushed past the editors so several stupid mistakes went to the printer. Ah, to be allowed to go back and do it again, but better. I didn’t read the new rule book as if I was the editor, but in my reading of the new rules I didn’t find nary a one misspelling or stupid error. Good job, AEG!! But not only did they send the rules to the editor, but they spent the time to do a crack-up job on describing play and on illustration. This is a beautiful book, and laid out in such a way that a new gamer to Thunderstone will pick it up immediately. You’ve set the bar very high this time, AEG – now to live up to it in future expansions.

     

    A few years back when Matt and I first played Thunderstone, after the game we talked about the need for another action – to be able to improve your hand to enter the dungeon, instead of just tossing those cards aside and grabbing another. What a surprise, while reading the new rulebook, to come across the new addition of the action “Prepare”. I was dancing around the room and feeling absolutely validated. (OK, so maybe not dancing per se, but at least gesticulating there in my chair.) That alone made me love TA, but the entire package deserves positive mention.

    A new addition to the game is “Familiars.” Kind of weird, and I’m at a loss to understand the rationale for including them, but they’re a cool touch. Early in the game you get to take a familiar – kind of like a side-kick animal or mythical creature that decides to follow you like a dog – and at certain moments they might just throw a helpful trick your way. I like ‘em. Wish I had one in my non-gaming life, but then I already have two dogs – not that they ever do more than bark when someone comes to the door.

    New diseases, as well as curses, militia has been replaced by “Regulars” and they’re much more reliable (and stronger) though sad to see Richard Gere go, some really great new cards, starting decks now have their own divider cards so you can keep a player’s set ready to go, and, well, you get the idea – I’m very happy with the new game.

    If you’re a veteran Thunderstone gamer, you’ll definitely want to pick up this “went back and did it again” version. If you’re new to the game, skip the earlier ones (though I enjoyed them as well – um, maybe not all the expansions) and start here.

    Pros:

    • Exceptional rule book – clear, beautiful, with great new ideas.
    • Awesome artwork.
    • Really cool new gameboard that’s actually helpful in play.

    Cons:

    • Richard Gere is no longer in the game.
    • You’ll have to find space for all the boxes that you won’t need when the expansions come out.

    Matt Drake is a regular contributer to Fortress: Ameritrash and the author of theDrake's Flames blog, where you can read more of his crassly opinionated reviews.

  • Thunderstone Quest Review

    Your table isn't ready for this sprawl.

  • Thunderstone: Dragonspire - Card Game Expansion Review

    I'm handing over tonight's review to my favorite (read: only) guest reviewer - my dad. He likes Thunderstone, and I don't, so I sent him Dragonspire and he reviewed it for me. Saves me playing the game (which, as I mentioned, I don't like) and gets me out of writing a review. It's like a one-night vacation. So while I kick back and go to bed early, you can enjoy this in-depth look at the newest Thunderstone expansion. Give it up for my old man! And don't forget to tip your waitress.

     

  • Ticket to Ride: New York Review

    The Big Apple gets little.

  • Ticket to Ride: United Kingdom & Pennsylvania Review

    I've nurtured a long, slow hatred of American cultural imperialism. As a developer, having to spend every working day spelling "colour" wrongly in your code will do that to a man. So, petty as it is, wherever possible, I'll pick a British version of a thing over an American one. And if a British one doesn't exist, I'll seethe quietly while I wait for one.

    So it feels like about time that there's a local version of Ticket to Ride for me. With it being such a great family game, my kids know the routes between Seattle to Atlanta and Essen to Sevastopol better then their own home town. Now they can learn the way around their own country too, with the help of some little plastic trains from either original set.

    Or perhaps they can't. It turns out that this is one of the least family-friendly iterations of the game yet released. Its gimmick is the addition of technology cards, which you buy using locomotive cards as currency. To support this the box has a whole new card deck with extra locos. Plus a new rule that allows you to cash in any four ordinary cards instead of a locomotive. So that's more rules and a whole slew of new technologies to memorise. No hurdle for hobbyists, but it's a steep slope for regular family folk.

    At the start of the game you can only build poxy 2-space routes in England. If you want to build longer routes, build ferries, build in Ireland, Scotland or Wales you'll need the appropriate technology to do so. Plus there are more esoteric options, like tech that gives you extra points or lets you cash in less cards for a route.

    With all these new options on the table, it looks like a recipe for some new strategies. In reality, however, they function more as limiters. Everyone needs to be able to build longer routes to succeed. It's hard to imagine doing well without building ferries or outside of England, too. So buying these is a given. As for the other stuff, well, let's just say I've never seen a technology heavy strategy win.

    Conversely, there's a massive ten-space, 40 point route on the board and I've never seen anyone claim that and lose. It looks like a bit of a game breaker, although people who've grabbed it do tend to fail a few tickets.

    In summary, it seems to add extra rules and extra luck of the draw for no particular extra gain. I've no problem with the latter, as Ticket to Ride is inherently a luck-heavy game. The former is less forgivable, though. So unless you have a particular geographical bee in your bonnet like me, there's no real reason to favour the UK map over the vanilla one.

    But wait. What's this? Tucked away on the corner of the cover like an embarrassing elderly relative, there's a little logo that says "Pennsylvania". If you rummage in the box there's a few more cards with funny pictures on. If you flip the board over, there's another map, another bit of god-damn America.

    The new mechanics for this map are a lot more easily digestible. Each time you claim a route, you can grab a stock certificate from one of several rail companies associated with it. At the end of the game, players total up their stocks in each company and get bonus points depending on how many they got. Simple.

    Yet what looks like an afterthought turns out to be the better of the two maps. Those stock certificates are mean. They're kept face down which means you have to try and keep a running tally of what other people are collecting. Unless you're a human calculator that rapidly becomes impossible. So every selection becomes a cauldron of paranoia, as you wonder whether the card you're picking is worthless, or a game winner.

    Plus, each company operates on a small sub-area of the map. To maximise your points you want to spread widely. So that's another thing to plan alongside making your tickets and gunning for the longest route. With plenty of blocking opportunities too, the game becomes gloriously brutal. And with both tickets and stock points waiting until the game end, there's uncertainty right up until the last minute.

    So the UK map is only for real Ticket to Ride enthusiasts. But Pennsylvania may be the best variant of the original game I've played. It's almost a shame they made you pay for them both in the same box. Much as I hate to admit it, America wins again. 

  • Tikal II - EuroCrap Board Game Review

    Once upon a time, in a land not unlike our own, there lived a prince. He was kind of a wiener, and he had silly ears and cheated on his hot-ass wife with a woman who had buck teeth and a horsy laugh. So we're not going to tell a story about him, because this prince was a douche and his story would be lame.

  • Time of Crisis: The Roman Empire in Turmoil - A Five Second Board Game Review

    If you wish for peace, prepare for turmoil.

  • Tiniest Epics, vol. 2: Right now in a galaxy near you

    Rolling the dice on the way to the stars.

  • Tiny Epic Kingdoms - Farming In A Land Of Oxymorons

    A critical look at Gamelyn Games' Tiny Epic Kingdoms.  Can a 4X fantasy game really thrive in a 30 minute playtime and pint-sized package?

  • Tiny Towns Board Game Review

    Tiny Towns may look idyllic on the surface but underneath it's a perplexing puzzle.