The family board game Kerala: The Way of the Elephant first came out in 2016, and I tried it for the first time at Gen Con 2017, jumping into a game of a few friends who needed a fourth player, but I hadn’t scored a copy until just last week. It’s a very light, fast-playing game with a decent amount of luck involved, but the way the turns go, every player is going to have to cope with the randomness in the same way, and ultimately the game plays out as a sort of competitive puzzling match where each player has to build out his/her set of tiles to maximize points and minimize penalties in the same way.

Each Kerala player gets two elephant tokens and a start tile, all in the same color, with five colors total in the game (the game plays two to five, but it’s best with at least three). On each turn, the start player draws one tile from the bag – 100 tiles if there are 5 players, slightly fewer for lower player counts – for each player, and then players select tiles from those drawn to add to their tableaus. You can only add a tile next to one of your two elephant tokens, and then move the token on to the new tile. Then the start player moves around the table, so over the course of the game you should pick first through last a roughly even number of times.

The catch in Kerala is in the scoring, of course. There are five colors of tiles, and you want to try to create one area for each color in your tableau – if you have two separate areas of green tiles, you will have to choose one to discard at game-end, losing two points for each tile you lose. (You can have two areas in your start color.) Most tiles have one to three elephant symbols on them, and you’ll score a point for each symbol on tiles you haven’t discarded in the end-game scoring. You also need to have at least one area of each of the five colors at game-end, or you lose five points for each color you don’t have.

There are three types of special tiles in the bag, and they can be extremely valuable or utterly useless, depending on when in the game they appear and what your board looks like. One allows you to relocate any tile you’ve already played to the table; otherwise a tile you’ve placed can’t be moved for the rest of the game. One allows you to jump either of your elephants to anywhere else on your tableau, which can be very useful if you’ve boxed one of your tokens into an inconvenient spot. And the third type has two colors on it, one covering most of the tile and one touching a single edge; you score five points at game-end if you match the edge color to the tile adjacent to it on that side.

Kerala allows you to stack tiles on top of each other rather than just adding to the edges of your tableau, which can help you connect areas or cover tiles that would lose you points, but can also cost you more points if you have to discard an entire stack – it’s two points per tile you discard, not just for the stack – and potentially traps your elephant somewhere that makes it hard to place more tiles. You can also pass twice per game, choosing not to take any available tiles; when you do so, you lay one of your two elephant tokens on its side. You do get one point at game-end for elephant tokens still standing, although it’s generally worth losing that bonus to pass on tiles that you can’t place without incurring the two-point penalty.

Rounds can easily take under a minute, and you can play a whole game of Kerala in about a half an hour, unless you have a player who hems and haws over every little choice (I know a few of these, but I’m not one). It’s listed for ages 8 and up and I see no reason an 8-year-old or even a child a bit younger couldn’t play this with a little advice from an adult – you’re matching colors and just lightly planning ahead, but there’s only so much strategy you can employ in a game that gives you no warning or way to predict what tiles might be available. Kerala is also a bit unusual in that the designer is a woman, Kirsten Hiese: Board game design is an extremely male-dominated field, and if you see a woman’s name in the credits, it’s usually either as co-designer or as the artist. My #1 game at Gen Con this year, Nyctophobia, was designed by a young woman, Catherine Stippell; Visitor at Blackwood Grove, another game I didn’t get to demo there, earned some positive chatter, and its lead designer is Mary Flanagan (also the lead on Monarch, a game with three listed designers, two of whom are women). But this is rare, and there’s no good reason for it, which to me is all the more reason to try to boost a game like Kerala, one that is fun and easy to bring out for the whole family to play, and that oh-by-the-way happens to be designed by a woman.

When reviewing anything – books, movies, TV shows, and, yes, board games – it’s often too easy to describe something by comparing it to another more familiar title, or to say it’s a combination of this title and that title. Come to think of it, that comes up quite often in baseball too – readers and especially TV/radio hosts often ask me “who does this prospect remind you of?” I generally don’t like to answer those questions, because I find those comparisons too facile and often not very revealing – you lose a lot of nuance, and the comparison becomes an anchor point for whoever is listening or reading. If I tell you such-and-such a pitcher reminds me a lot of Roy Halladay, you’re not going to think of anything but Roy Halladay – and any further elucidation comes in the form of a negative statement, like “he’s Roy Halladay but not X.”

So now I’m going to violate everything I just said earlier – Century Spice Road is really a lot like Splendor, in a good way. It has one significant twist in the mechanics that make it a great game for people who like Splendor (and really, if you don’t like Splendor, I’m not sure if we can be friends) but want something a little different. Splendor is a shade more elegant, and gets points for bringing this general mechanical framework to the table, but Century Spice Road is perfect if you’ve decided you want something similar to Splendor but not exactly the same.

Century Spice Road is the first part of a game trilogy from Emerson Matsuuchi (Reef, Volt), the second part of which, Century Eastern Wonders, was out at Gen Con last week, with part three due out in 2019. The first two games can apparently be combined into a single game called Sand & Sea, which I will try out when I get my copy of Eastern Wonders.

Spice Road’s theme is a familiar one in the tabletop world – I’ve lost count of how many games involve merchants trading spices – while the rules are quite brief and simple. Players will collect spice cubes in four colors (turmeric, safran, cardamom, and cinnamon), and try to trade them in for bonus cards that can be worth 8 to 19 points depending on the cube costs. Players collect those cubes by playing cards that allow them to just take two or three cubes form the supply, and, more frequently, by playing upgrade cards that allow them to trade in some combination of cubes for another combination of cubes that is more valuable. (It’s not a zero-sum game; you’re trading with the market, which apparently is full of merchants who suck at math.) The cubes’ values are ordered, with turmeric the least valuable and cinnamon the most. Those values are reflected on all of the upgrade cards and on the bonus cards, so cards that require more cinnamon and cardamom cubes will be worth more points.

On a turn, a player can play a card from his/her hand, take a card from the supply, claim a bonus card with the appropriate cubes, or ‘rest’ to pick back up all cards s/he has played to the table. The queue of cards to take works with the same mechanic as many other games, notably Small World, where the leftmost (top) card in the stack is free, and you pay one cube of any color for each card you skip over to take another one, placing each cube on the card you’ve skipped. Sometimes that’s still a great play – your cube can only hold ten cubes at the end of your turn – and sometimes it’s smart to take a card from the queue because of the cubes other players have left on it.

The leftmost card in the stack of bonus cards rewards the player who claims it with a gold coin, and the next card to its right is worth a silver coin, although both piles of coins are limited to twice the number of players in that game. Game-end scoring is simple: add up the points on your bonus cards, take three points for each gold coin and one for each silver, and add one point for each non-turmeric (yellow) spice cube left on your caravan. When one player obtains his/her fifth bonus card (4-5 players) or sixth (2-3 players), players finish that round and score. Games take 30-40 minutes, turns are short, and the rules are very quick for new players to learn. It really is Splendor-ish, but with a little more engine-building to it, where instead of acquiring cards that give you permanent jewel/cube values, you play upgrade cards to boost the cubes you have. It’s a great lightweight game that capitalizes on the familiarity of an earlier game without feeling too repetitive.