→ November 19, 2024
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Runemasters.

Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense board game for up to four players, with a solo mode, that is really, really hard to beat. I’m pretty impressed by the design, even though I honestly have no idea what a winning strategy would be. (I only played this one solo, and no, I haven’t beaten it.)

In Runemasters, players are “guardians” trying to defend a tower against incoming hordes of monsters. The players win if at least one guardian is still alive and the tower is still standing when the monster deck reaches the Dawn card, which is randomly shuffled into the bottom three cards during setup. The monsters attack via four paths, each with its own color, and only one guardian can guard each pathway. Each monster has two to four spaces on it representing “weak points,” and once players have filled those via attacks, the monster is vanquished. Don’t worry, more are coming behind it. The game goes back and forth between player turns and monster attacks until either the players win or they all die.

On a turn, the active player rolls four dice and then uses each one for an action of their choice. Red, green, yellow, or blue symbols allow the player to move to the matching pathway, or to put an injury token on the matching weak point of a monster in the path they’re guarding. Purple symbols let the player move to any pathway, or to deal an injury to a purple weak point. When a player moves their guardian to an occupied pathway entrance, they swap places with that guardian, which is a good way to get another player out of trouble. The white symbol lets a player use their special ability, which can include healing any guardian of one hit point, moving a monster to another pathway, or putting a shield on any guardian to protect them from attacks for one round. Discarding two matching dice allows a player to place a blockade on their pathway for one round, as it’s destroyed by the next monster attack. A player may discard any die entirely to charge up their superpower, which is active when fully charged (level 4) and then may be recharged and used one more time before it is done for the entire game.

Players start the game with 4 health points and 4 mana points. The health points are the things you need to not die. Dying is very easy, as it turns out; livin’s the hard part. Mana is more useful, and easier to get, as it’s the reward for beating every monster type except dragons. You can spend one mana to reroll as many dice as you like one time. If a monster is at the nearest space in a pathway (space 1 – pathways have 5 spaces and new monsters spawn in space 3) and your mana is full, you can spend all 4 mana points to destroy the monster immediately.

After each player’s turn, all monsters move one space towards the tower, if able – only one monster can occupy a space. A monster in space 1 then attacks the guardian guarding that pathway, dealing 1 damage. If there’s no guardian, the damage hits the tower, which has 4 or 6 health points depending on the player count. To spare you a little math, I’ll spell this out: In a four-player game, monsters will attack four times between your actual turns. This is a very efficient way to kill a guardian, since you only have four health points, so if there’s a monster in space 1 and someone doesn’t move you out of the way, you’re dead before your turn will come back around again – and that’s even assuming you have 4 health points left, which, let’s face it, you don’t.

There are different monster types with some different attributes to contribute a little more chaos to the game. Archers can attack from any space as long as there isn’t a monster in front of them. Warriors can’t be killed by rerolled dice. Wizards can’t be killed by the four-mana trick. Dragons’ weak points don’t have colored icons on them; you kill a dragon with three matching dice, or with the four-mana trick, after which you get 1 mana and 1 health point. There’s also a small Event deck that combines some good and bad rules tweaks to each round, and that allows you to calibrate the difficulty a little bit.

Since I soloed this game and recently did the same with Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs, I couldn’t avoid a comparison, and this game is far superior. It’s so much less fiddly to learn or play, even with some issues in the rule book (possibly a translation issue, although I found at least two errors around icons that were reversed in the rules). It’s also harder to beat, which I suppose will ultimately have a ceiling, but I was happy to keep banging my head against the tower wall for a while. It’s not my favorite genre or theme, but if you like tower-defense games, or want a good small-box cooperative experience, Runemasters is pretty solid.

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→ November 15, 2024
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Inori.

Inori is the latest title from Space Cowboys, publishers of Splendor, Jaipur, and the underrated Botanik, along with last year’s Spellbook, a Phil Walker-Harding game that really missed the mark for me. Inori looks fantastic on the table – I saw it at Gen Con, and received a review copy from the publishers as well – but it was also disappointing in the actual play, in large part because of the worker-placement mechanic.

In Inori, players make offerings to spirits by placing their markers on the offering cards available in that round, starting with three in the first round and increasing by one in each round, while players also gain another worker in each round as the game progresses. Placing a token gives you some immediate reward, usually tokens of a certain color, and if all spaces on a card are filled at the end of a round, the card is scored, with points going to each player who placed workers on it. If it’s not filled, players receive no points and the card is flipped to its reverse side. There are also spaces on the big tree that can take workers, which the first player to use can then tag with a specific color for the remainder of the game. After four rounds, the game ends, with the player with the most points winning.

I’ll be up front: the mechanic where cards don’t score unless all spaces are filled sucks. It’s one of the worst mechanics I’ve seen in a game in a while, and I don’t say such things lightly. I love board games, period. A bad day at the tabletop is better than a day without the tabletop at all. I rarely say that something is outright bad, but I have played Inori many times and I think this mechanic is bad. As it works, you can place multiple meeples on the card to fill it to make sure it scores, but you only score once regardless of how many meeples you have on the card. That’s a design failure.

There is some randomness to the game as well, as some spaces allow the player to take a rune that gives you a random reward that can range from extra tokens to the power to move already-placed meeples on the board. The problem with that aspect of the game is that it is quite easy to get a rune that’s utterly useless. There’s just too wide of a variance between the high end of what a rune can be worth and the low (which is zero).

I’ll back up for a moment and get back to the rules. On each turn, you place a meeple on an open space on a card or on the big tree, and you take the reward shown on the space – usually one or two tokens of a specific color. Each round ends when all players have placed all of their meeples, after which all cards that are full, meaning there is at least one meeple on every space, are scored. Each player with one or more meeples on a filled card scores one point per token of the card’s color that they have in their supply – the number of meeples is immaterial. Then the card is removed and replaced with a card of a different color. If a card is unfilled, players with meeples on it receive no points, and the card is flipped.

The scoring at game-end revolves around the great tree – you score each level of the tree, where each level has a color that’s been assigned to it over the course of the game, and then points are awarded based on which players have the most tokens of each color. It is likely that at least one color will remain unassigned, and thus won’t have any value at game-end. Your final score will comprise the tree scoring from game end, the points from cards in each round, and any points you might have gained from placing meeples on cards during the game.

I played a half game at Gen Con at the demo table in the Asmodee booth and saw a ton of potential in Inori, but having played the full game, I was disappointed. It just doesn’t work – the card-scoring mechanism is all wrong, and it makes the game something of a random walk. I wanted to like Inori, given its publisher’s history and the way it looks on the table, but it’s a miss for me.

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→ October 22, 2024
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Dune: Imperium.

Dune: Imperium is one of the top-rated games of all time on Boardgamegeek, currently ranked 6th with an overall rating of 8.4 out of 10 despite having nearly 50,000 ratings, a really unusual degree of agreement on a site where, in my experience, people give in to some of their most pedantic tendencies. The game came out in 2020, in advance of the first Dune film from Denis Villeneuve, from the publisher Dire Wolf, who have also now put out a digital version of the game that is just as superb as the tabletop game itself. (It’s available on Steam, iOS, and Android.)

Dune: Imperium is a worker placement and hand management game with a dash of deckbuilding, and it has a ton in common with Clank!, which is also published by Dire Wolf and comes from the same designer, Paul Dennen. Where Dune: Imperium differs from Clank! is in its higher degree of player interaction; you don’t compete directly with opponents in combat, but you compete to send the most forces to the conflict in each round and are fighting for valuable spaces on the board. There are also asymmetrical player powers and some resource management involving spice and water, giving the game a strong mix of mechanics that blend into one outstanding whole.

In Dune: Imperium, you play as one of several leaders, such as Paul Atreides, and you will play two cards from your hand to place your two agents on the board, activating the spaces to gain resources or another reward, and then use your remaining cards to either buy new cards or to supplement your troops in the conflict in the Reveal phase. Each round has a unique conflict with its own rewards for the player who contributes the most, second-most, or third-most strength to fighting it, with strength coming from troops and cards.

The various spaces on the board allow you to gain water, spice, coins, or troops; to gain influence with one of four Houses, such as the Fremen and the Bene Gesserit, for rewards and victory points; and, in one-time use spaces, to gain a third agent (so you can place three per round, rather than two) and to gain a seat at the Council to boost your purchasing power by 2 in every round. Placing an agent requires playing a card with the correct symbol on its left side, after which you also gain the reward shown on the top row of the card’s lower half.

Once all players have placed their agents, you move to the Reveal phase, where players reveal their remaining cards and use the values on the bottom row for purchasing power or for more strength in the conflict. You might only buy eight to ten new cards over the course of the game, typically one per turn but occasionally two, with the powerful The Spice Must Flow cards worth one victory point apiece. You may also dedicate any attack strength on these cards to the current conflict. The game ends when any player has reached ten victory points, or when the ten-card conflict deck is empty.

As in many such games, like Clank! and the Lost Ruins of Arnak, the cards in your starter deck are not terribly useful, although there’s nothing as useless as the Stumble cards in Clank! are. Upgrading your deck as you play is important, but I would argue that how you use the cards in your hand each turn is at least as important as what you add to your deck, especially later in the game, since you might not even see a card you buy in the last round or two. You do want to build a deck that will maximize your turns – two and then three to play agents, and the remainder for the Reveal. There are a few cards that have the draw power, and there are a few opportunities to trash cards, and those are extremely powerful in a game with just ten rounds at most.

The digital implementation is outstanding – not a surprise, as Dire Wolf is probably the best digital board game publisher out there, and this is one of their own tabletop designs. There’s a great if long tutorial to introduce the game, and during the game it is always clear what moves you may or may not make, along with when you have no choice but to pass to the next phase. It frees you up to focus on the game itself, and, in my case, to trying to finish anywhere other than fourth. The app comes with three levels of AI difficulty, two AI modes, and challenges where some basic rules of the game are altered, just in case you manage to beat the AI on its basic mode. (I was so close to beating the first challenge mode in my first game, and lost 11-10 on the final move. I won the second time.) I actually owned a physical copy of Dune: Imperium, but sold it for charity away after playing the app – I have too many games as it is, and that one wasn’t getting to the table any time soon anyway, while the app is more than enough to scratch that itch.

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→ October 17, 2024
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Floriferous.

Floriferous is a delightful game from 2021, with some light set collection and public/private objectives, playing out over three quick rounds before the final scoring. There’s nothing new here, just some familiar mechanics put together really well for a fast, family-friendly sort of game.

In Floriferous, players are all at a flower show and will compete to create the most valuable collection of flowers after three days (rounds). They do this by selecting flower and ‘desire’ cards from a public tableau that has five columns and three to five rows, based on player count, with the last row always desire cards and all other rows flower cards. Two of the cards in the top row are always face-down, for reasons that will become clear in a second.

The start player places their token on any card in the first (left-most) column to claim it, replacing the card with their token, after which the other players do the same. Then the player whose token was in the topmost row out of all tokens goes first in the next turn, selecting a card in the second column, and so forth. After all players have taken a card from the fifth column, the day ends, and you check the three public objectives to see if anyone has met their criteria; their value decreases by the day from 5 points to 3 to 2. Day two works the same way, but goes from right to left, after which day three goes left to right and the game ends. (The rules offer a slightly more competitive mode, where you score public objectives as they’re achieved, with the player who does it first taking the 5-point space, blocking it for other players.)

Flowers come in five types and five colors, and may have one of the five insect types on them as well. Some cards in the flower deck are actually arrangement cards and give you points for getting the matching symbols within the cards you’ve collected. Desire cards come in three varieties: two points per specific bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 of the same bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 different bugs/flowers/colors. At the start of each day, you’ll place some tokens (called stones, but made of cardboard) on specific cards in the tableau, which are worth 1 point per 2 stones at game-end, with a 2-point bonus to whoever collects the most.

That’s the entire game, other than the included solo mode. The original Floriferous is in a smallish box, but there’s an even smaller one coming, a “pocket edition” you can pre-order here; it’s the same game, just in a tinier box. I’m a big fan regardless of the box size – it’s so simple, and works so well, that it’s a practically perfect little family game.

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→ October 16, 2024
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Circus Flohcati.

Circus Flohcati is a 1998 game from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, whose name you can’t mention without calling him a Prolific Designer; he’s published over 600 games, and has a number of all-time classics to his name, including Samurai, Tigris & Euphrates, Through the Desert, Battle Line, Lost Cities, Medici, Ra, High Society, and The Quest for El Dorado. I own seven of those, plus at least four more games by him, just at a glance at his BGG page. He’s good.

Circus Flohcati is actually one of his oldest games, but it’s out in a brand-new printing from 25th Century Games, which brought Ra back from purgatory, and uses art from the 2013 Korean edition. It’s a light push-your-luck game, listed for ages 6+, that is kind of perfect in its simplicity: there are just a handful of rules and the game works fine, with a high luck/randomness factor that should keep younger players in the game – as long as they grasp the main scoring mechanic.

The entire game is a massive deck of cards, 80 circus cards and 9 action cards. The circus cards come in ten colors, with cards numbered 0 through 7 in each. The action cards have three varieties, with three of each in the deck. The goal is to build the most valuable circus through collecting high cards in each color; through playing trios with three cards of the same numerical value; and possibly by causing the end of the game by collecting one card of each color in your hand.

On your turn, you may select one card from the face-up cards in the market, or, if you don’t want one, you may flip over cards from the top of the deck until you find one you like. If you flip a card with a color that’s already in the market, you discard that new card and your turn ends immediately. If you flip an action card, you take that action: take a random card from an opponent, choose an opponent to give you a card of their choice, or reveal cards from the deck until you get to a duplicate color and then choose any card from the market that you want.

If at any point you have three cards of the same value, you may play them to the table as a free action, forming a trio that is worth 10 points at game end. If you get all ten colors in your hand, you may call a “gala” and end the game, taking 10 points as your bonus. Once the game ends, each player scores the face value of the highest card they have in each color. Any lower-valued cards in those colors don’t score at all, so getting them out in trios if possible is the only way to get any points for them at all. You add those points to the trio points and the gala points and that’s the whole shebang. There’s no penalty for having lower-valued cards, or having too many cards – there’s nothing punitive in this game at all. You’re just drawing until you get high cards and/or trios.

One commenter on BGG gave this game a 7.5 out of 10 and said “It’s stupid and lucky but I love it!” and that’s pretty apt. I don’t know if I’d say it’s stupid, but it is simple. It plays very quickly, and it works with 2 to 5 players. BGG ratings are pretty heavily skewed towards longer, heavier, less luck-driven games, and this is kind of the anti-BGG game in that way: it’s super simple, quick, very random, and very fun. It reminds me a little of Splito, another small-box card game from 25th Century that was one of my favorite new games of 2023. I think I like Splito a little more, and it has the benefit of playing up to 8 people, but they’re in the same vein – you can bring these games to a family gathering where you have players of all ages and experience levels and you’ll have a good time.

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→ October 15, 2024
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Clash of Magic Schools.

Clash of Magic Schools is a brand-new version of the 2000 game Babel, with a fresh theme but as far as I can tell no real changes to the rules. It’s a two-player game co-designed by Uwe Rosenberg, back when he was only known for Bohnanza, before he became the king of heavy worker-placement games and more than a decade before he put out the two-player game Patchwork. It’s pretty clearly an early design, and it needed an update to more than just the theme and art to make it better.

In Clash of Magic Schools, players represent two different magic academies fighting some kind of tournament across five different ‘arenas,’ playing cards of students to their sides of those arenas and casting spells when they’re able to try to improve their standing and attack the other side. As you add cards to your side of an arena, you can pass trials in sequential order, from 1 through 6, once you have at least that many cards there, but only if the trial number you need is available. Although it looks like a capture-the-flag sort of game (Battle Line, Riftforce), there’s no control aspect here; the arenas exist just as places to attack your opponent.

On a turn, you can take as many actions as you want. You can move your token to any arena by discarding one card from your hand. You can play as many cards from your hand to your token’s current location (your side of that arena). You can pass a trial, as described above, taking the top trial card from your side OR from your opponent’s. You can summon students, moving exactly three cards from one arena to another. And you can cast a spell, for which you must have three student cards of the same color at one location. Spells allow you to trash cards from your opponent’s side, or steal a trial card, or pass a trial while skipping a level, and more. Play continues until all of the top trial cards on one player’s side totals 15 or more while their opponent’s total is 9 or less; if tied, you continue until one player reaches a total of 20, or one player drops down to 9 or less. If you exhaust the trial deck, the game ends regardless of scoring.

I have a soft spot for Babel because it’s the first Eurogame I ever owned. I was on vacation in Austria in 2003 and stumbled into a board game store, and I had never seen anything like it in my life. I was overwhelmed and wanted to buy all the things, but I barely speak enough German to order a coffee, and certainly didn’t have the vocabulary to ask an employee for advice – nor did I know what I’d ask even in English. So after some time, I ended up with Babel, as it was a two-player game and not too expensive, and it had a seal on it that I now know means it made the shortlist for the Spiel des Jahres award (won in its particular year by Carcassonne).

That said, I played Babel quite a few times with my ex-wife before our daughter was born, and after a while we both realized it’s just not that good of a game. The back-and-forth of it isn’t very fun; I’d compare it to trench warfare, where you make a few feet of progress one day only to have your enemy claw it back the next. It is easier to damage your opponent than to build up anything yourself, because passing trials requires a ton of luck – the right trial cards have to be visible when you’re ready for them. That is by far the aspect of Babel that most needed revising in a new version, and they didn’t touch it. You can have sabotage as a core mechanic – I think the base game of Riftforce does this really well – without making it the core mechanic. Five of the game’s six spells allow for some form of sabotage, and all that does is make the game a frustrating slog that takes twice as long as it should.

The artwork in the new game is fantastic – I love the art on the student cards, where each card color uses the same basic outline for a student, but each card itself has different hair, skin color, clothes, makeup, and so on. That said, this is about as blatant an attempt to draw on Harry Potter as those Russian books from the early aughts that barely bothered to disguise the main character. The spell names, the school symbols, the cover art, all of this makes it look like a Harry Potter-themed game that didn’t want to pay the royalties. (To be fair, I wouldn’t want to line that transphobe’s pockets, either.) I’m good with the update from ancient nomadic tribes to modern magic schools, but I did expect something more imaginative than this.

I still have my copy of Babel because it started my collection – it’s not the oldest game, and it isn’t valuable at all, but it was game #1 and I think my interest in the hobby truly started from there. I don’t see any need to keep my (review) copy of Clash of Magic Schools, though, as it’s the same game with a fresh coat of paint.

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→ October 9, 2024
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Applejack.

Applejack comes from Uwe Rosenberg, known for his heavy worker placement games and his light tile-laying games, although I think it’s been a few years since he had a real ‘hit’ – probably 2020’s tile-layer New York Zoo. Applejack came out in 2023 and it’s a perfectly fine game that suffers from an overwrought final scoring mechanic, so while I think it’s good enough to recommend, it’s not one I’ll come back to very often.

In Applejack, players will draft hexagonal tiles to fill out their meadow to attract the most bees and grow the most apples of seven different varieties. Each tile has up to four apples on it, possibly some flowers, and honey pots with numbers from 2 to 10 on at least one of the six edges. There’s a central board with a spiral track, and as the round-marker die moves, it will offer you your choices of the tiles in the bucket ahead of it and the bucket behind it (located around the outside of the board). You can place the tile anywhere on your personal board; if you line up an edge with a honey pot next to another edge with a honey pot, either on another tile or on the outer frame of your board, you get coins (honey) equal to the lower of those two values. That matters because you have to pay coins for the tile you draft, with the cost equal to the value of its honey pot(s). If you can’t pay, you must flip the tile over and place it face-down, with no apples, flowers, or honey pots showing.

The general goal is to place tiles to create chains of apple varieties; as the round marker moves, it will score the different varieties one or two at a time, giving each player coins equal to the number of tiles in the longest chain of that variety minus the current round number. Flowers score one coin apiece at the end of the first round, two apiece at the end of the second.

About halfway through round three, all players will have filled their boards and the game ends. You then score each apple variety again, subtracting three for the current round number, and double that number – effectively scoring them twice. Then there’s a bonus for the number of apple varieties you scored in that last harvest, starting with 4 coins for 4 varieties up to 35 points if you scored all 7. And flowers score again, but this time it’s back to just one coin per flower. Whoever has the most coins wins.

The actual game play, meaning the tile selection and placement, is good. I’d even argue that it’s all good until the final scoring, and then it gets annoying. It’s a lot of arithmetic, and it takes a while, but that also means that it’s hard to do the mental math during the game to fully anticipate how it’ll play out. Building the chains is fun, as is the challenge near the end of the game when you only have a couple of spaces left for tiles and have to choose which varieties’ chains to sacrifice and which to expand. I understand the philosophical decision to double the chains’ scoring at the end, because otherwise you’d end with players potentially gaining fewer points in the end game than they did in the second scoring, but it makes the process clunkier than it needs to be. Maybe Rosenberg tried it without subtracting the round number and it didn’t work; that seems like a more obvious way to score, at least. And I think the flowers are just kind of there – the points are nice but they’re so small in relation to the rest of the scoring that you’re not likely to pay much attention to them.

That’s a lot of words on what’s wrong with Applejack, but I’m being a little harsh – it’s really a solid game other than the scoring, and it’s possible that 1) the scoring won’t bug you like it did me or 2) you’ll just house-rule it and score it differently. I will say that among Rosenberg’s tile-laying games, though, this is below Patchwork, Sagani (also known as Nova Luna and Framework), and New York Zoo for me, so if you’re interested in this mechanic you might want to check those out first.

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→ October 7, 2024
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Seers Catalog.

Seers Catalog is yet another trick-taking game, this time a game where you’re trying to get rid of most of your cards, but not all of them. It has a lot in common with SCOUT until you get to the scoring, where it has a novel way of awarding points – or taking them away – that makes this game so fun and so very hard to play well.

A remake of a self-published game called Of What’s Left, Seers Catalog has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 13 in five suits, although you’ll cut that down based on player count so that each player will start with a hand of twelve of those cards plus one wild and two ‘artifact’ cards. Those artifact cards have various special powers but nearly all of them have values of 0 for scoring at the end of the round, so you want to use them rather than holding on to them. Some work in tandem with another card you play, such as changing its suit or adding or subtracting 1 (or ½!) to its value, while others you play on their own, like a card that automatically is the highest one on the table, or the Go First card that, as you might infer, means that player goes first (but doesn’t have to play that card immediately).

The player who starts a trick must play a ‘meld’ from their hand: a set of cards of the same value with different suits, a run of cards of the same suit with consecutive values, or a single card. All players may follow by playing the same type and size of meld – so if I play a run of 3-4-5, you must play a run of exactly three cards – but must have a higher card value than the last trick played, so in that example, you would have to play at least a 4-5-6. Players may pass; whoever wins the trick opens the next one. When any player has fewer than six cards in their hand, they go in the Bonus, flipping the indicator token in front of them. From that point on, they may not pass: if they have a legal play, they must make it.

A round ends when any player is out of cards. They will score zero points for the round, as will any players not yet in the Bonus. All other players in the Bonus score as follows: Take a number of points equal to the value of the lowest card in your hand, then subtract the number of cards in your hand. So if you have two cards remaining, a 6 and an 8, you would get 4 points (6 for the card minus 2 for your two cards in hand). Wild and artifact cards are (mostly) value 0, so if you have one, you get 0 points minus the number of cards in your hand.

It should be obvious that the goal is to end up with one high-value card at the end of a round, or at worst just a couple of high-value cards. Because you’re required to play once you’re in the bonus, however, that’s really hard to do. Later in the round, players are more likely to make smaller plays – a single card or a run/set of two – and it’s similarly likely that you’ll have a legal play. And if you have the misfortune to win a late trick like that, you may end up having to lead the next trick and end up playing your last card.

I haven’t mentioned the theme here, because beyond the wonderful title – which, I’ve discovered, you probably have to be at least 45 or so to get – the theme is irrelevant. There’s flavor text on the cards, but I never read them; I played this once without my glasses, so I couldn’t have read it if I’d wanted to, and it didn’t affect my ability to play the game at all. I can say that the game plays well with two players, which is unusual for a trick-taking game. It’s different, since it’s easier to guess what the other player might or might not have, but it still works really well. I prefer SCOUT, but if you love SCOUT and want something in a similar vein that’s offers a few new twists, you should put Seers Catalog on your order form.

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→ September 27, 2024
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Undergrove.

Elizabeth Hargrave has already cemented her place in board game history thanks to her design of Wingspan and her choice to devote much of her time and energy to promoting diverse voices in the space, notably women designers. She followed it up with The Fox Experiment, a completely different sort of game other than the two games’ shared basis in real science, and now is back with another science-themed game, Undergrove.

Hargrave’s name on any game box is going to get reactions, pro and con; the board gaming space has its share of incels and other misogynists who seem to rush to savage her games on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere, while I think she also has the benefit of being one of the few designers who even some casual gamers might know by name. I know I’m predisposed to like anything Hargrave does, certainly, because of her past designs and because I’ve had many positive interactions with her over the last five years.

So when it comes to her newest game, Undergrove, I have had a very hard time deciding what I really think of the design. There’s no question the game itself works well – it looks great, feels thoroughly playtested, isn’t too hard to learn, and seems balanced. If someone breaks it out, I’m going to be happy to play it. I’m just not sold that it’s fun enough for me to want to play it regularly.

Undergrove is built around the symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungi that live in the ground around them. Players have a collection of tokens to represent seedlings, trees, and roots, and will play them to the vertices on the shared board they’ll build, where the tiles are fungi that belong to the forest as a whole. You’re managing five basic resources in water, carbon, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, with the last four represented by their atomic symbols on the board, and will use the carbon cycle to continually trade up through those resources to allow you to take the game’s main actions – placing mushroom tiles, planting seedlings, growing roots, and soaking up carbon through those roots to grow your trees.

There are five primary actions in the game, one of which you can always take while the others tend to require you to have something first. There are also four major mushroom types, represented by tokens on each player board; when you take the first action, Activate, you pick a mushroom tile where you have at least one root, then flip the matching token to its used side, which means you can’t activate a mushroom of that type again until you do something to refresh the token. To Activate a mushroom, you pay the carbon cost shown on the tile, then pay whatever other resources are shown to activate its ability. These can include getting different resources in exchange, soaking carbon up into your trees (as in the Absorb action), or copying the ability of another mushroom. Some mushrooms can’t be activated but give you ongoing powers for the rest of the game once you have a single root on them. All mushrooms have victory points you get at game-end for each root you have on them, with a few mushrooms showing a variable victory point value that’s tied to how often it was activated.

The Absorb action lets you bring carbon from connected mushrooms into your seedlings, which is how they grow; once a seedling has taken in 3 carbon, it becomes a tree, and then can’t grow any more. A tree scores for all four of its roots at game end, whereas a seedling only scores for one root per carbon token. The Reproduce action lets you place a seedling and one root at any unoccupied vertex, and optionally to place a mushroom tile. The Partner action lets you place two roots from your supply from one or two of your seedlings/trees on to adjacent mushrooms; you may also choose to play a mushroom tile from your hand to the table. The fifth action, Photosynthesize, allows you to refresh all of your mushroom tokens, and to take two carbon cubes, plus optionally to trade nitrogen for carbon.

If all this sounds a bit … well, educational, it feels that way too. The problem I keep facing with Undergrove is that the actions feel pretty rote, and as a result, the game is lacking the joy of a really great design – never mind Wingspan, since that’s a totally different sort of game to me, but even to other resource management games where you’re gathering resources and trading them up either to build things or to get more of other resource types. I suspect that there was a tradeoff between lighter or freer gameplay and authenticity to the underlying science, which is something I’ve noticed in games explicitly designed to teach a science topic, like Cytosis and Cellulose (both very solid games, but a bit dry to play).

You can definitely get a little engine going in Undergrove, as the game rewards you for cycling through the various actions as efficiently as possible. There are some end-game objectives, and there’s a carbon track that you move up every time you absorb carbon through any means, giving you rewards while also serving as the game’s internal clock. Once any player reaches the top, they get to choose a bonus (probably the two point token) and the game enters its final round. That gives you more things to shoot for as you play so there’s something a bit more than just, well, breathe in (nitrogen), breathe out (carbon).

I’m afraid this game just missed the mark for me on some hard to define criterion. I think in the end I felt too constrained in my choices, though; the next turn’s action was always obvious, and often it was the only viable option. Maybe that was ultimately what made Undergrove fall a little short, despite the tight design, the balance, the fantastic artwork, and clever flourishes like the little boxes to hold your seedlings and roots and trees: I’d rather have more latitude in my actions, even if it means I might take some bad ones, than to have fewer options, or even just one.

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Águeda: City of Umbrellas.

Águeda: City of Umbrellas is a great-looking game with high-quality components. I just wish there was more game in here.

Águeda is a town in Portugal that hosts the Umbrella Sky Project, a permanent art installation that began as a temporary one in 2012 but that has expanded and become a major attraction for the city. Several pedestrian streets in Águeda have umbrellas of many colors sitting above them, forming artificial canopies that produce different visual effects depending on the time of day and the weather conditions.

The game Águeda has players collect umbrella tokens from the market and place them in three rows along their personal board, which represents one street. You also have a mural with six tiles on it, all of which begin the game face down; each tile has a different umbrella color on its back. And you have six tourist meeples, three of which are available to you at the start and three of which you can unlock by flipping the two mural tiles in their row.

On your turn, you take a complete row of umbrellas from the market, comprising one to three tokens. If you take a row of three tokens, you must pay one coin to the bank; if you take a row of just a single token, you receive one coin. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what happens if you take a row of two tokens.) You then put all umbrellas into a single row on your street, in any order you like. Each row has two spaces marked with paintbrushes, and if you place an umbrella on one, you then flip the mural tile with that color of umbrella on its back.

You then may place one or two available tourist meeples on the tourist space next to any row on your board as long as it does not already have any meeples on it. Each of these spaces has two colors on it. If you place two meeples, you get one point per umbrella of either color in that row. If you place one meeple, you must choose one color to score. If you can’t place a meeple, or simply wish to get your meeples back, you may rest instead, returning all placed meeples to their spaces on the top of your board, marked with little suitcases.

Play continues until one player fills all 21 umbrella spaces on their board, after which they get the bicycle token, which has no function other than to mark that someone finished the game, and all other players get one last turn. You then score for your mural, getting 2/4/6 points for flipping 4/5/6 tiles; and you score for the three shops, two of which vary in every game, while the third ostensibly is permanent since it’s printed on the board, although you could just choose a third shop from the deck to cover it. The permanent shop gives you ½ point for each umbrella on your street that matches any of the special wooden umbrella tokens randomly placed on the shop at the start of the game. In the beginner setup, you use two other specific shops, one of which gets two random wooden umbrellas and gives you a point for every column on your street with at least one of those colors, while the other gets one color and gives you 1 point for each umbrella of that color but only if you have an even number of them on your street.

I’m not the first person to compare this game to Azul, but I find it unavoidable, and it is not to Águeda’s benefit. Azul is tighter and has a high degree of player interaction, to the point of spitefulness if you choose to play it that way (I think that strategy has diminishing returns – a little spite goes a long way). You also have a lot to think about on almost every turn. My 7-year-old stepdaughter said the morning after we played Águeda that she thought “the turns got a little boring because you’re just doing the same thing over and over,” and she’s right. You don’t have that many choices, so your decisions on any one turn are limited, and there’s zero player interaction to spice things up.

The game does look amazing, and we all agreed (including my older stepdaughter as well) that the murals are the best part of the game – there are five unique ones and they’re all fun to reveal. It pops on the table, with solid plastic umbrella pieces that feel very sturdy and bright colors all over the place. It’s a pretty heavy box for a light game, with a promised play time of 20-40 minutes that I think leans closer to to 40. There just isn’t enough substance here; it feels like a game that could have been an hour in length with more spaces to fill and a better selection mechanic, maybe even some kind of drafting, or just a different format to the market. I just don’t see any way I’d pick this over the basic Azul game now that everyone in the house is old enough to handle it.

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