→ November 10, 2019
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Proving Grounds.

Proving Grounds is a solitaire dice-based game with a peculiar mechanic around re-rolling, giving you sixty seconds to settle on your rolls and then matching them up to the six enemy cards your character is currently fighting. It’s a fun little distraction but ultimately I don’t think it puts enough strategy or power in your hands to mitigate the randomness of the dice rolls and the restrictions around rerolls.

There’s a complicated back story to Proving Grounds, which comes with a novelette that gets into it, but it’s immaterial to the play itself. Your character faces six enemies at a time and must try to defeat eight enemies – they get replaced when you kill one – before taking five ‘wounds’ from all of your enemies. Enemy cards have battle tracks up their right sides that spell out how many dice and in what combinations you need to roll to hit them, moving the battle marker up one spot on the track. If a battle marker on an enemy reaches the top spot, you have defeated that enemy and get to remove that card from the game, replacing it with the next card from the enemy deck.

You start the game with eight dice to roll, and in each round you get sixty seconds to roll and re-roll until you get a result you like or the timer runs out. (Renegade has an app that includes a timer and lets you track how many enemies you’ve defeated.) When you roll the dice, you group them into sets by value. You can re-roll any set of dice, but if you have a single die with a particular value, you can’t re-roll that unless you end up matching it by re-rolling some other set. You can keep re-rolling sets and regrouping the dice, but you roll complete sets at once and you can only roll one set at a time.

When you’ve finished rolling, you assign each die or set of dice to the card in that value’s slot around the board. For example, if you have three dice with the value of 1, those dice go to attack the enemy in slot #1. If you have enough dice to meet the criteria in the next spot up the battle track on that card – usually a minimum number of dice, occasionally an extra criterion to have at least one nonwhite die – you may move the marker up. If, however, you have only a single die with that value, you move the battle marker down one slot. When the battle marker reaches the bottom spot, you sustain a wound, moving the wound marker down on its track, then restoring the battle marker on that card to its start position. This feature informs your re-rolling strategy, as you will want to try to avoid creating singles for any enemies with battle markers one spot above the bottom.

Some enemies have other unique features on them. One card’s battle track works in reverse – singles move the battle marker up, sets move it down. Most of your dice are white, but there are green, purple, and yellow dice as well, and some cards count those as two dice apiece, both for purposes of determining whether to move the marker up or down (one die that counts as two thus also counts as a set) and for determining whether you have enough dice to move the marker up the battle track.

When you sustain a wound, you take one die and place it on the top spot on the exhaustion track, which has three spaces on it (although you can stack dice on any space). At the end of each round, you move dice on that track down one space, so after a die has spent three rounds on that track, it returns to your pool. The health track also has additional dice you gain after you’ve sustained three or four wounds, helping shift the odds a little in your favor.

The best part of Proving Grounds is the timed feature: the added pressure of the timer makes the decisions of whether to continue rolling and which sets to re-roll feel more fun, like a real-time quiz or puzzle, and creates the possibility that you’ll rethink certain decisions after the round ends. But the game is overly dependent on the luck of the dice, and once you have a single, it’s not that easy to get rid of it in the base game or some of the additional modules that come with it.

Those modules tend to increase the game’s complexity while shifting around some of the balance of the game. One gives you a dragon die that has five sides that are beneficial and one that requires you to reroll all of your sets. Another includes chariot cards that will ‘activate’ unless you place the required dice on them, raising the level of difficulty. The Inspiration module gives you a single card with a power you’ll keep for the entire game. They’re all tweaks to the base game that add complexity and change strategy, but I don’t think any does enough to mitigate the randomness at the game’s heart. As solitaire games go, it’s probably just good enough to recommend, but is behind other solo games I like more, such as Coffee Roaster, Friday, Onirim, or even Aerion.

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→ August 22, 2019
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Second Chance.

Uwe Rosenberg has two new games out in his seemingly unending series of polyomino-based (think Tetris) titles that started with Patchwork and continued with Cottage Garden. I reviewed Patchwork Doodle, the first of these two new flip-and-writes, last week; Second Chance is very similar, also a flip-and-write where you try to fill out a 9×9 grid by revealing cards with polyomino shapes and drawing those on your paper, but it is the far easier game to learn and play, but with a really clever twist when you get stuck that can cause massive frustration to other players (by design, I think).

The conceit is as above; everyone starts with a unique, 8-square pattern that they’ll fill out in the center of their papers, oriented however they’d like. The deck of polyomino shapes is shuffled and you draw and reveal two cards on every turn. Each player picks one of the two shapes and draws it on their paper, again anywhere and in any orientation they’d like. (You can rotate or flip the shapes in any way you need to.) The game comes with three reference cards that show all of the shapes in the deck, which are also displayed inside the box itself, so you can sort of plan ahead around certain shapes with the understanding that two shapes you need could both appear in the same turn.

The big twist comes when any player can’t place either of the two shapes shown, usually as you get close to the end of the deck. That player gets a “second chance,” and turns over the top card on the deck. If they can place the shape, they do so and continue playing. If not, they drop out; if they’re the first player to do so, they fill in any empty space on their grid with the number one. (If two players bust on the same turn, they both get the 1.) No other player can use that card, so it’s possible that a key shape you wanted will never be available to you because another player burned that card for their second chance.

A Second Chance turn.

Play continues until one player fills out their entire grid, in which case they win the game; the deck is exhausted; or all players bust. In the latter two cases, the player with the fewest empty squares on their grid wins, regardless of whether they dropped out or were still alive when the cards ran out. If there’s a tie, any players with that 1 on their grid win the tiebreaker. Otherwise it’s a shared victory.

As with Patchwork Doodle, the Second Chance box says it plays 1 to 6, but you’re really just limited by the number of start cards, which I believe is a dozen. We haven’t had anyone win by filling out their entire grid, but my daughter came within a single square of doing so (and she won, of course, even though she busted.) It’s very easy to teach people how to play the game – you don’t even have to explain the second chance part in full until you get there, unless people are counting cards, so to speak – and it’s a quick learning curve to climb too. As with Patchwork Doodle, you’re mostly playing solitaire, but the challenge of filling out the whole grid here is more enjoyable because of the number of cards and variety of shapes on them. It’s also quite portable and I prefer the subtler artwork. I think given the choice between the two flip-and-writes, I’d pick this one.

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→ August 20, 2019
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Coffee Roaster.

There are so very many board games – more than a thousand new ones hit the market every year, not including self-published titles or ones that don’t get published in English – yet there are few games designed with solo play in mind. More new games come with solitaire modes, typically asking you to beat some specific score, but truly solo games, ones designed from the start with the single player in mind. I’ve reviewed three in particular, Friday, the best I’ve played; Onirim; and Aerion.

One of the top-rated solitaire games on BoardGameGeek is a Japanese game known as Coffee Roaster, which has been out of print for a few years but which is coming back in a new edition this fall from Stronghold Games, now available for pre-order. I just obtained a copy of the original a few months ago, right before word of the new edition leaked, and it more than lives up to its reputation: It’s fun to play, suitably challenging, brings lots of replay value, and its theme is as well-integrated into its gameplay as any game I’ve seen.

Coffee Roaster asks you to do just that: You’re a roaster asked to roast three beans out of a selection of 22 possibilities, trying to maximize your score over the three roasts, but you have to do well enough with each roast to get to choose a more challenging (and lucrative) bean in the next round. It’s a brilliant press-your-luck game that gives you a slew of choices and multiple ways to try to max out your score, with every bean – tied to the physical characteristics of the real coffee beans the cards depict – offering a new starting point and different paths to scoring.

For any bean you roast in Coffee Roaster, you’ll start with some combination of tokens that you’ll place in the bag, usually unroasted beans (roast level 0, or green beans that have to be roasted once to get to 0), moisture tokens, flavor tokens depicting aroma or body or acidity, and probably some bad beans you have to work your way around as you roast. As the game progresses, you’ll pull an increasing number of beans from the bag in each round, roasting some, spending the flavor tokens to gain bonuses on the board or to manipulate the roasting process, and, at two steps, gaining smoke tokens that go in the bag and can screw up your final scoring. You decide when to stop roasting and ‘cup’ your coffee, drawing tokens to fill the ten spots on your cupping board – with three spots on the tray to hold beans you don’t want to score – and then add up the points on your tokens.

Each bean has an ideal total roast level that gets you the maximum number of points; you get fewer points if you’re too high or two low. You get points for drawing the key flavor components for that bean, up to ten points if you hit all four on an Expert level bean. You also get points for consistency, drawing at least three tokens with the same roast number on them. You can then lose points if you draw and place bad beans or smoke tokens in your cup, or if you don’t get any of the key flavor components, or if you fail to get ten tokens into the cup. As I type that, I realize it sounds a bit more complicated than it is, but the game has an inherent rhythm to it that makes it go very quickly once you’ve got the process down. You have a lot of potential options on every turn, but they depend almost completely on what tokens you draw from the bag on that turn – and earlier in any roasting process you won’t get to draw that many tokens, so your choices will be somewhat limited.

My 22-point Kona roast.

I have played a handful of times, with (of course) varying levels of success, but have found that getting the wild-card flavor token and the permanent 3-point token (which goes directly into your cup) are essential, while for some roasts you will want to get the extra tray, which lets you discard two extra tokens in the cupping process. There’s a Sweetness token – whoa oh oh, oh oh oh – that is required for some Expert roasts, but can otherwise serve as a wild token in the cupping process. Other bonus tokens let you redraw during the roasting process but the random aspect makes their value too variable. There’s one space on the left side of the board that lets you discard one flavor token to trash all smoke, bad bean, or burned bean (roasted past 4) tokens you have drawn in that round, a very powerful move that you can use just once per bean. It’s nearly always useful, but the question of when to use it becomes a key strategic decision among several across the game.

We don’t have the rules for the new version yet, just cover art, so I don’t know if the game itself is changing or if we’re just getting new images and, I would hope, an improved translation of the original Japanese rules, as the translation in the original edition omits key words or mistranslates others at a few places. It’s also a bit dear at a list price of $45, more than just about any solo game I know of, but I am hopeful that will come down after the initial release satisfies folks like me who’d been looking for the game for years. It is worthy of a bigger audience than it got the first time around, and while Friday is easier to recommend for its simplicity, I enjoyed this game even more.

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→ August 16, 2019
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Patchwork Doodle.

Patchwork is one of my favorite two-player games, and is probably the forerunner of all of the polyomino (Tetris shapes) games that have been flooding the market in the last year. Patchwork only plays two, and there’s very direct competition for the game pieces, each of which is unique, you use to fill out your 9×9 board, as well as specific rewards on a progress track that also serves as a sort of timer to restrict the length of the game. Designer Uwe Rosenberg has since created a line of polyomino games in the same vein as Patchwork, but that allow up to four players and run longer, including Cottage Garden and Indian Summer, while he experimented with mechanics like how players select their tiles; they’re good, but Patchwork is still the king.

This year saw Rosenberg bring out two new flip-and-write titles in this subgenre, Patchwork Doodle from Asmodee imprint Lookout games and Second Chance from Stronghold. I have both and have played Patchwork Doodle a bunch of times already; it does a solid job of bringing part of the Patchwork experience to more players (the box says “1 to 6+,” but the maximum is really ten players), but the game is also very streamlined and there’s zero player interaction, so it’s more of a brand extension than a sequel or a reimplementation.

This is a flip-and-write game, which means there’s a core deck of cards, and players will use those cards to write on their individual scoresheets. Each player here gets a sheet with a blank 9×9 grid, and gets one of ten unique start cards (which is why I say you can play with up to ten people), each of which shows a shape that will cover seven squares. You can fill in that shape anywhere on your board – I tend to do it somewhere in the middle, as placing it on an edge risks creating some hard-to-fill areas right out of the chute – before players take their first turn. The game itself comprises three rounds, and players will get to fill in eighteen more shapes across those rounds, scoring after each round, and possibly using any or all of their four special powers across the game.

The cards show more polyomino shapes, as you’d expect, although this time they’re not all unique. You start the game by flipping the top eight cads from the deck and creating a circle, placing the start token anywhere on that circle, and then having one player roll the die to move the token. The die lets you move the token 1, 2, or 3 spaces on to a card, which all players then get to fill in on their grids, after which the card is removed from the game. You do this six times in a round, after which you stop to score, saving the two unused cards to start the next round, when you’ll draw six fresh cards to bring the circle back to eight. In the last round, you’ll stop after the fifth card is used, and every player can choose one of the three remaining cards to fill in on their grid for their final move.

Patchwork Doodle components

Some example cards and player sheets

Players also have single-use powers they can bust out at their discretion over the course of the game. One lets you fill in a single square rather than using the card for that move. One lets you choose to use either card adjacent to the one with the token on it, whether one space ahead or one behind. One lets you make one straight-line cut to the polyomino shape on the card into exactly two shape, after which you fill in one of those shapes (but not both) on your grid. The last power just lets you reuse one of the three powers you’ve already used.

Scoring is a little confusing at first, although everyone I’ve played with got it after a round or two. When a round ends, you identify any completed rectangle on your grid, and then score one point for every space in the largest square inside that rectangle, plus one more point for every row outside the square. So if you had a 4×6 rectangle completed already, you would score 18 points: 16 for the 4×4 square, plus 2 for the additional rows that were in the rectangle but not the square. It’s just not intuitive, but the way the game plays out, it starts to make sense both for strategy and from a design perspective – the scoring absolutely affects where you choose to place your shapes.

After the last round, you score the largest square inside your chosen rectangle, then subtract one point for every space you didn’t fill in at all over the course of the game. You add up your three scores from the rounds, subtract that penalty, and that’s your final score. Games take 20-25 minutes, really depending on how quickly players choose which areas to fill.

There is zero player interaction here, which is true for most roll- or flip-and-write games, but you aren’t even competing in game-end scoring categories like in games like Welcome To; Patchwork Doodle is very much a solitaire game where you compete at the end of the game. Also, the box comes with six colored pencils that are kind of useless, so I recommend you gather your own before playing. It’s very portable – I just took it on vacation with my girlfriend, only to have her trounce me by filling in all but 5 squares on her grid – and easy to pick up once you grasp that square-in-rectangle scoring, but I would still suggest the original Patchwork if you’re going to play with two people.

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→ July 31, 2019
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Raiders of the North Sea.

The tabletop game Raiders of the North Sea was the first of Shem Phillips’ series of worker placement games that will reach its fifth title this fall with the release of Paladins of the West Kingdom, and earned a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination in 2017, two years after its initial appearance. (I didn’t review or rank it that year because it wasn’t actually a new title; release dates in the board game world are a nebulous thing, and I’m sure I’ve missed titles here and there because of it.) Each game in the series, which includes three North Sea games and now two West Kingdom titles, has some different quirk in how you place or use your meeples, part of how Phillips has managed to extend one theme over so many different titles.

Raiders of the North Sea now has a gorgeous app adaptation from Dire Wolf Digital, makers of the app versions of Lanterns and Lotus as well as the digital card game Eternal (soon coming to tabletop), although I think the initial release of the app could use some updates. If you haven’t played the physical game, or like me had very little experience with it, it’s a great introduction to the title, but I did find that after a handful of plays I was too good for the one AI level included in the app.

Raiders of the North Sea

The Raiders board has two parts – the village where you’ll place meeples to recruit warriors, collect food, and exchange plunder for more food or for points; and the various harbors, outposts, and fortresses you’ll raid over the course of the game for points and glory. The big difference between this and most worker placement games is that all meeples are shared, and you get two actions on your turn: one when you place the meeple you had to start the turn somewhere in the village, then a second when you remove a meeple from another location in the village. Each location has a unique action, and you thus get two different actions on every turn when you do stuff in the village. Once you have enough warriors, food, and sometimes gold to go raiding, you instead use one meeple to go attack a specific location on the top of the board, taking the plunder shown on that space, gaining a different meeple, and possibly getting points if your warriors’ total strength exceeds the lowest listed value on the space. (You always get the plunder, even if you’re not strong enough.) Most spaces you’ll raid include one or more black skulls, which means you’ll have to sacrifice one of your warriors, sending them to Valhalla, when you attack.

The new app looks fantastic, and the animations for the attacks are particularly fun. Dire Wolf has taken all of the game’s distinctive artwork, animating some portions of it and pulling some of the character images off the cards to show who’s in your crew (as opposed to the characters still in your hand). Their decision to depict the board isometrically was brilliant; the physical board is big and quite long north to south, and the app only shows you a portion at a time – the village fits into a single screen, and then you can scroll up to see all of the potential targets for attacks.

I did have a few small technical issues, including occasional crashes when first loading and difficulty moving the meeple from the lower right corner of the screen to place it if I had the map oriented in a way that there was a village location too close to the same spot. The app only comes with one AI level right now, and I found it too easy, mostly because it would do suboptimal things like attack some targets without sufficient strength to garner points. I also would love a one-touch way to jump between the top and bottom halves of the board, as scrolling is awkward, and the app doesn’t automatically reset you to the village after an opponent attacks.

The app also comes with a campaign mode that includes multiple rules variants, most of which are fun and require you to think a little differently, although I don’t think the campaign bears playing more than once. It’s similar to the campaign mode in Jaipur, but those variants were good enough to try multiple times, while here I always felt like the variations were cool but not as good as the base game.

Games take 10-20 minutes against the AI, depending on how quickly you try to move to the top; I’ve found the long play is best for beating the current AI options, because they don’t try to rack up the largest bonuses up top. I am assuming/hoping some of the minor bugs will disappear with updates, along with a stronger AI option, because the way this app plays and looks is outstanding.

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→ July 30, 2019
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Curios.

Curios, which will be released this week at Gen Con, is a fun trifle of a deduction game, playing two to five players in a very quick little game that asks you to bet on which of four ‘artifacts’ will prove most valuable based on the cards in y our hand and those you see. It’s a clever little idea that could probably have been built into a more significant game, but instead it’s a fast-playing filler.

The heart of Curios is a deck of sixteen cards in the four colors of the artifacts, showing the values 1, 3, 5, and 7 for each. Regardless of player count, the dealer sets up the game by dealing one random card from each color, face down, next to each artifact’s card, which will be the value of those artifacts when the game ends. Each player then gets some cards at random to start the game, the number depending on the player count, and will then place their tokens on each of the artifact cards to claim artifacts based on the values they deduce from the cards they hold and others revealed during the game. Once the supplies of two of the four artifacts are exhausted, the game ends; the four hidden values are revealed and players add up the values of the artifacts they’ve collected during the game.

Where the game goes a bit awry for me is in the way the players claim those artifacts. Each card has columns with one space, two, three, and four columns (two); to place your tokens on a card, you must fill the leftmost empty column. You start the game with five such tokens, so you run out of ways to bid on different artifacts very quickly in each round. When you fill a column on a card, you take one artifact of that color; when all players have placed all of their tokens (or can’t place any more), the player with the most tokens on each card gets a bonus artifact.

At the end of a round, each player may choose to reveal one of their hand cards and gain an extra token for the next round. The benefit of having an additional token probably justifies doing this, although by revealing a card you share useful information with other players; in a five-player game, you only get two cards apiece, so it may make more sense to hold one back there than in a two-player game, where you each get four cards. Regardless of player count, the way the columns work means you find it very hard to ‘bet’ on more than one artifact in a round, which means that you end up with a lot of luck involved in every game – maybe too much in a game of deduction, especially with five players. I think it’s ideal with three, and it works as well with two because you set up a neutral third deck of the remaining four cards and reveal one each round, and it’s pretty portable, so as a quick filler game for travel that can introduce novice players to deduction games, it’s fine, but I prefer deduction games that rely more on your mind and less on luck.

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→ July 19, 2019
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Exit: The Catacombs of Horror.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Exit games since I first tried & reviewed them a year and a half ago. The series, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017, comprises a series of single-play games that mimic the experience of an escape room, asking you (solo or in a team) to find a series of codes to solve the puzzle, generally destroying the game’s components as you go. They’re fun, appropriately difficult, usually playable inside of an hour, and come with a structured system of hints in case you get stuck. My daughter and I do these as a rainy-day activity, and I think we’ve played at least five so far, enjoying most of them.

The series steps up in difficulty with its newest title, Exit: The Catacombs of Horror, a longer title playable over two sessions, with puzzles that promise to be harder to solve … which is true, because this game was almost certainly not playtested, with puzzles that are far less straightforward than those in previous titles. The puzzle you have to solve to finish the game is a joke – even after reading the third hint card, which is supposed to explain the solution, I still have no idea what the designers expected players to do. There’s a huge failure of design here: You don’t make puzzles more difficult by making them too obscure to solve.

Exit’s puzzles come in all sorts of forms, but there are some common types, from deciphering codes in texts, finding hidden characters or images in printed materials, cutting and/or folding the materials to reveal patterns, or finding images that look like numbers. All of the game’s codes comprise three digits, so you know that will always be your goal; you use a decoder disk, entering the three digits under the symbol for the puzzle you’re solving, and you get a number for a card in the answer deck, which tells you if you’re wrong or refers you to the next clue. These puzzles generally range from very direct to a bit weird, often when the game wants you to see a number in an image or in something you’ve drawn; they take an especially liberal view when it comes to visual representations of numbers in sketches or lines.

The Catacombs of Horror, however, increases the difficulty by making things harder to see or to follow. One puzzle requires cutting images out of one of the cards, but the dashed lines that would tip you off that the designers want you to cut are almost impossible to see; my vision is fine, and I had a hard time spotting the lines, so I can’t imagine how hard it would be for older players or anyone requiring glasses. Another required finding blue dots on a large poster, except one of the blue dots was located on a teal flashlight, so the colors were nearly identical. There’s a puzzle that requires assembling a little cardboard box and threading a string through it, then looking through cutouts in the box’s sides and deciphering the number shown by the strings, once they’re pulled taut, which was a complete flop – yeah, I get why they said that looks like the number 2, but no average person is going to get that. It’s too inside-boardgaming for me, and I say that as someone who’s played most of the titles in the series.

Then there’s the final puzzle, which I won’t spoil because I can’t. I still don’t really get what the designers wanted me to do, even after a detailed reading of the last card – and my daughter, who loves these games but had lost interest before we finished this one, didn’t understand it either. It involves a lit candle, a ‘column’ with arrows that you place in a little plastic stand (which didn’t work – the column was way too flimsy and narrow for the stand), and then … a shadow? It’s the only time we’ve played an Exit game and given up. There’s no way they tested this final puzzle with regular game players, and I feel like the English translation of the last hint card (the third – each riddle has three hint cards, the first just a guide to start you, the third the solution) was inadequate.

I’m still interested in the series – there are four other new titles this year, and I see at least three previous titles we haven’t tried yet – but I can’t recommend The Catacombs of Horror unless they revise it, especially the final riddle. If you’d like to try the Exit games, I suggest The Abandoned Cabin, The Pharaoh’s Tomb, or The Secret Lab as a starting point – and feel free to ask me questions in the comments if you get a little stuck.

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→ July 16, 2019
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Kodama Duo.

Kodama: The Tree Spirits is one of my favorite family games, still one my daughter will ask to play years after we first got it, because it’s the rare game that’s appropriately competitive but also fun to play: The action you take on each turn, adding branch cards to grow your tree, is its own end, with a subjective component and the point-scoring aspect that forms the heart of the game. The base game has enough cards for anywhere from two to five players to play at one time, and in our experience plays as well with two as it does with higher player counts.

I was a bit surprised to see the designers had come out with a two-player version, Kodama Duo, but still gave it a whirl since the original is such a favorite for us. Duo does have a few rules tweaks that change the game for two players and make it a little harder, although I think the net result of the alterations is not positive – I prefer the original. However, the Duo box also includes enough additional cards for you to add a sixth player to the original game, which may be worth the cost by itself if you have enough kids around to get to six players.

I reviewed the original Kodama for Paste back in January 2017; click over there if you want a review of the base game’s details. The main difference in Duo comes to card selection. The game still has twelve turns in three seasons, but this time, you have to jump through a hoop before either of you gets a card to play. One player, the Chooser, draws the top three cards from the deck at the start of a turn. The other player, the Splitter, divides the three cards into two sets, one with two cards and the other with the remaining card. The Chooser then picks one of those two options, while the Splitter gets the other choice.

The player who ended up with two cards may only play one of the two to their tree, discarding the other card. The opposing player plays the one card they received, and then gets to take a Spirit token representing one of the game’s six features (where you get all your points in the game), using it to cover up any single feature already on their tree. You can only take a token if that feature was shown on the card your opponent discarded. At the start of the game, the six Spirit tokens are in the general supply, but they’ll eventually all end up on the two players’ trees, so when you select a token, you ‘ll take it from your opponent’s tree or relocate it on your own. (The rules are not well written around this, but the designers confirmed you can ‘take’ a token from your own tree and put it somewhere else.)

I think this rule is here because with just two players, there’s so much choice of cards in the base game that it might seem insufficiently challenging for two. Duo comes with exactly 36 cards, so you will draw them all over the course of a single game; thirty of them look like cards from the original, and there are also six single-feature cards, with exactly two instances of one of the game’s six features. But this isn’t an improvement over the original, and the idea of “splitting” three into two and one is … it felt silly, to be kind. I would have been much happier to just draw two cards each turn and alternate who picked first.

There are also different decree cards, which add a new wrinkle for four turns (one season), in Duo, and they don’t quite work the same way as in the base game, since most of them seem to rely on the spirit tokens or change how you split the cards (for example, one of the three cards is face-down to the Chooser until they choose). The decree cards are a big part of the appeal of the base game, so it was a shame that they worked so much worse here.

Duo does include additional cards and new decree cards that can only be played with the base game (marked 3-6 to distinguish them from the two-player decrees), which then allow you to expand the original to six players. Given the lack of added value in the pure two-player variant, I’d say get Duo if you want to play Kodama with six, but otherwise pass on it.

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→ July 2, 2019
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Claim.

Claim is a 2017 trick-taking game from designer Scott Almes, whose best-known titles are the Tiny Epic series (such as Tiny Epic Galaxies and Tiny Epic Zombies). Claim pits two players against each other in a two-phase game where the first phase allows players to battle to build their hands for the second phase, where the more traditional trick-taking mechanic kicks in, but is altered by the five factions (suits) in the game that have unique powers.

The Claim deck has 52 cards, and you’ll use half the deck in each phase. Each player starts the game with a hand of 13 cards, and in phase one, the top card in the deck is flipped over for the two players to try to win by playing the highest card. The Leader – the start player, or whoever won the last trick – plays first, and the second player usually has to follow suit; the higher card wins. In most cases, the cards used to bid are discarded, the winning player gets the face-up card from the deck, and the losing player gets the top card of the deck as a consolation prize – which, of course, can be better than the card the winning player got.

Phase one continues until the players have used their entire hands, by which point each player has a new deck of 13 cards to form their hands for phase two. Players then proceed to play another round of 13 tricks, this time with the winning player usually taking both cards. At the end of the game, players will count up how many cards they’ve won in each of the five factions; a majority of cards wins that faction, and with five factions you’ll usually have one player winning three or even four to win the game. Ties are broken by whoever has the higher-valued card in the faction.

The big catch is that the factions have different powers that can apply in phase one, phase two, or both. The base game comes with five factions – goblins, knights, dwarves, undead, and doppelgangers. A knight automatically trumps a goblin, regardless of numerical value, although you must still follow suit. You can play any doppelganger without following suit, and it becomes the suit of whatever your opponent played. (If you lead with a doppelganger, that is the suit for that trick.) In phase one, the player who wins the trick gets to keep any undead cards played by the two players and put them in their scoring pile for the end of the game. In phase two, the player who loses the trick gets to take any dwarf cards played in that trick – so, yes, you can lose the trick but still take both cards. (For example, I lead and play a Dwarf card with value 9, the maximum. You follow suit, playing a Dwarf 6. I win the trick … but you get both of the cards.) Only goblins have no special power.

The factions themselves are fun; each one asks you to think a little differently about how to approach it, and the hands you get in each round will require you to come up with different strategies. The one big negative in Claim is that the first round involves so much randomness – your starting hands are random, of course, but the player who loses each trick gets a random card from the top of the deck and can easily end up with the superior card. You could lose all of the tricks in phase one and still get a better hand in phase two. It’s not really a flaw, but a different kind of game, where you know you can play pretty well and still get beaten by the deck.

I picked this up at Origins, and since I bought the game, I got a bonus faction pack as well – ghosts, where you can choose instead to keep the ghost card you played rather than the card you’d normally get during Phase One. You can replace the dwarves, undead, or doppelgangers with ghosts in the original Claim game. There’s a separate, standalone game, Claim 2, with five new factions, and you can mix and match the factions from both games in certain combinations, so there’s fairly high replay value here if you get tired of the base game. It’s a solid filler, nicely portable (the whole game is the deck), quick to play, although I think there are better trick-taking games out there, like Fox in the Forest.

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→ June 28, 2019
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Century Eastern Wonders.

Emerson Matsuuchi’s Century Spice Road was a modest hit in 2017 that earned a lot of comparisons to Splendor, although it gave players more of an active role in trading the goods they were collecting before they cashed them in for points tokens. It’s the first game of what is now a completed trilogy with this summer’s release of Century A New World, three games that can be played alone or in any combination of two or even all three, each of which shares a core mechanic (you have four goods of increasing value, and will trade them up so you can collect certain combinations for points on objective cards) but approaches it in a unique way. Spice Road is a card game that focuses on hand management; A New World, which I’ll review for Paste next month, is a worker placement game a bit similar to Stone Age. The second game, Century Eastern Wonders, has players moving around a map, with a bit of pick up-and-delivery to it, but the heart of the game is route planning, as the board varies in each game and you will have to figure out the most efficient way(s) to get around the various tiles to get the cubes you need so you can score.

Once again, we have four goods, in the same four colors – yellow is the least valuable, brown the most valuable – and players try to collect sets of them and then go to one of the four port tiles at the corners of the modular board to trade in a specified combination of the goods for a points tile that is worth anywhere from 11 to 20 points. Each player has a boat to move around the board, moving at least one tile per turn. When you land on a tile, you can place a trading post on it, doing so for free if it’s empty and paying one cube for each opponent’s post already on the tile, after which you can use the trading function of that tile as often as you’d like, including more than once on this turn. (In a two-player game, you pay two cubes to build on a tile with your opponent’s post already on it.) All trades on the board are net-positive, so there are no bad tiles, but some are more useful than others, depending on what objectives are present at that time in the game. You can also move to a tile and choose to ‘harvest,’ taking two yellow cubes for free, rather than trading.

Eastern Wonders adds an additional layer on top of this mechanism, as you gain points and bonus abilities as you place trading posts. Your player card has 20 spaces on it that are covered by posts at the start of the game. Each tile has an icon representing one of the four trade goods, and when you build a post on a tile, you take a token from that row on your card. Once you’ve emptied a column on your card, you may take one of the game’s bonus tokens, which can confer valuable abilities – moving one extra space for free each turn, getting a free pink cube when you harvest, storing 13 cubes instead of 10 – or just give you points at game-end. The second post you place from each row is worth a point at game-end, the third and fourth two points, and the fifth post three points.

Moving around the board gets more difficult as the game progresses. If you move to a tile with an opponent’s boat, you have to pay them a cube, so doing this is generally not a great strategy. Building posts on tiles that already have two or more posts on them, or just one in a two-player game, is costly, and you’ll often find yourself less willing to pay that penalty as the game progresses because you’re trying to scrape enough cubes together to fulfill another contract. The game ends as soon as any player finishes their fourth objective, with players just completing that round, so usually you’ll end up with one player getting four objectives and their bonuses and everyone else ending with three; it’s possible to win with only three objectives, especially if they have higher bonuses, but it’s harder, so there’s a bit of a race to the finish. You can improve your chances by figuring out optimal paths around the board that work a bit like engines – a sequence of three or four tiles that quickly let you go from some low-value combination (usually including two yellows from a harvest move) to the higher-value set that fulfills an objective card, or at least gets you some brown and green cubes you can then trade down for whatever you need for objectives on the board at that point.

Of the three games in the trilogy, Eastern Wonders is the most complex (although it’s still on the lighter side) and takes the longest to play, and while I like it quite a bit, I also think it’s my least favorite of the trio. The Eastern Wonders box includes a separate set of rules and a few additional components that let you combine it with Spice Road for a single game called Sand to Sea, although a glance at the rules seemed to rob the games of the elegance that makes them both fun. Eastern Wonders plays two to four, as do the other games in the series, but in our experience can easily run an hour for even a three-person game with fairly quick turns, longer than the other two require, and I would say this is the least appropriate of the three for younger players because of the route-optimization aspect. For adults and older kids, though, I recommend it.

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