Developing a new civilization has to be one hell of a tricky day job. I mean, my day job is to make catalogs, and that can sometimes be tough, but taking a civilization from stone weapons to the Great Pyramids just seems like it would really be a bitch. Between famine and pestilence and sex scandal in the White Palace, being in charge of an emerging civilization must have been harder than a job as Christian Bale's anger management coach.

For a member of the “gaming press” I’m not particularly good at keeping up with all of the buzz that comes out of the Spiel in Essen. It’s one of the biggest gaming events of the year, but most of what gets released is totally outside of my knowledge. I’m not sure if Steam Park was some hotly anticipated game or a dark horse that no one knew about before. But I do think that it might turn some heads and become something that people talk about now that it’s out. It’s an unexpectedly fun game, one that leavens its family leanings with some good old fashioned silliness without sacrificing decision-making. As such it will satisfy a broad range of people. And at the risk of making it sound trite, it’s a pretty cute game too.

It’s not uncommon for a game to be  rejiggered into a slightly different form, which sounds like a bad thing. But it can often lead to a game that is much-improved, or at least excellent in its own way. In the past few years, games like Small World, Imperial 2030, and 1989 have taken systems established by old games and made them into something fresh. They may be recognizable, but they have much to recommend them on their own. It was with this optimism that I approached Carl Chudyk’s Uchronia. 

The best and most important game of 2018.

My Pirate Attack! review copy arrived and, upon opening the package, I dumped the base game out of the envelope and then the “expansions” came pouring out. One, three, five, six expansions! Holy cow, this game must be a smash hit to warrant six expansions. Then I start opening the expansions: 50 more cards, 100 more cards, 50 additional cards, 100 cards and a couple of dice. Oddly, they all fit perfectly into the base game because space has be made for them. Hmmm, that is some Kickstarter “stretch goals” type of shenanigans. Going by the MSRP on Whatthefungames.com that means the “Full” version of Pirate Attack! With all the “expansions” costs....$140.00. *looks at Gloomhaven's MSRP of $140.00 * Hmmm. This is going to be rough.

Like other high schoolers, I often would sleep over at my friends' houses. And by sleeping over, I mean that we played Risk and videogames all night long. Our brain-rotter of choice was Tekken 3. On one occasion we played for probably five hours straight, making the loser of each match step out to face the winner. It was a cruel affair, but it was the first time that I remember attaining oneness with a video game. You've been there, right? You play a game so much that you do everything in the game without thinking. It tended to happen mostly with old school platformers like Mega Man, but it also happened with fighting games when you played against other players. I was never better at Tekken 3 than I was that night. I took out all comers with Jin Kazama, and I could not be stopped. Then I made the mistake of sleeping and my powers left me as I slumbered. Never again did I attain oneness with Tekken.

Runebound clocks up another half a dozen expansions in the form of the wave 3 expansion deck releases. But is the game running out of steam or is this release as fresh as ever?

Fantasy wargames have a sad history of being far too much wargame and not enough fantasy, tired repetitions of stacking limits and zones of control but with dragons in place of Panzers. Adventure board games, in a similar vein, have always struggled with the inherent problems of making a genre that celebrates individual achievement and massive power differentials into an interactive, strategic form. Runewars seems like Fantasy Flight's attempt to solve both these problems at one stroke.

RUNEWARS is, as many of us know by now, a pretty great game. I like it a lot, and after owning it for about a month I still want to play it week in and week out, which is a good sign. I think it's got legs, and I think over time its stature will grow with expansions.

But you know that feeling when you watch a movie and come to the realization that it was edited for length just so theater owners could squeeze out more showings per day? That's how RUNEWARS winds up feeling to me.

Jim Felli returns with his best and weirdest game yet.

Conquere the furious river with swift swimming strokes! mind control bears and bald eagles! Get your fish laid! Wait, what? Come in friend and let me explain...

Saltlands – Sail Through the Desert! is a recently published boardgame from Antler Games for 1 to 6 players and set in a Mad Max-style future.

All it's missing is a license.

A few years back, Eagle Games was at the top of its game. It had some of the biggest, greatest, most beautiful games you could buy. Bootleggers, Age of Mythology, Attack! - these were huge games, and they were awesome. Back then, Eagle Games was a mighty juggernaut of gaming awesomeness, and every new release was practically guaranteed to be huge and pretty and expensive and fun (except Blood Feud in New York - that game was in my collection for exactly as long as it took to trade it for something else).

Could this be the end of this generation's Catan?

Hardcore FPS Tactical Combat Meets Finger Flickin' Fun.

Your soldier’s cover has been largely destroyed by those last shots.  She stands up, alone, and needs to make her two shots count or they will be her last.  The player assesses the situation and…  rolls 11 dice to find out if that happened or not.

The seasons began again. We had to build our rice paddies, fill them with water, plough them with our buffalos, plant our rice and wait for it to grow. We had to be clever about how we divided the land to make the best use of the most fertile soil. We also had to have enough help to get the harvest in, but overall, we had to be patient and wait for the end of the Seasons of Rice by Button Shy.

Everything Epic’s maiden release, Secret of the Lost Tombs, is a hybrid of the dungeoncrawl and narrative-oriented adventure genres, a combination that isn’t as common as you might think given how overpopulated both types of games are these days. It features a setting in which it totally makes sense that Teddy Roosevelt would lead an expedition into a subterranean Masonic lodge to decipher a code left by Ben Franklin that can be used to awaken and control a giant monster that helped the Colonies to win the Revolutionary War- one that is spoiling for a rematch with the giant monster that fought on Britain’s side. Oh, and you might meet Dracula and Blackbeard along the way. In a Mongolian tomb.