→ September 2, 2024
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Faraway.

Faraway is a very quick game with very few rules, but it’s a real brain-twister in the way that you score your eight Region cards – after eight rounds, you turn all those cards face-down, then reveal and score them one by one in reverse order. Because most cards score based on what else is face up at the time they’re scored, the cards you played last are usually worth the least, and the ones you play first may not be worth anything if you don’t get and play the right cards later.

Faraway comes from designer Johannes Goupy, who has burst on the scene with a flurry of new games in the last two years, including the lovely small-box game Pixies (due out in September in the U.S.), Rauha, Orichalcum, the brand-new heavy game From the Moon, and others; of his games, the only one I haven’t cared for was Nautilus Island, which seemed a bit underbaked, which is definitely not the case with his other titles. His forte seems to be coming up with simple games that pack a lot of strategy into them for their size and weight, at least based on the small sample so far.

In Faraway, all players work from a deck of numbered Region cards, 1 through 68, each of which has at least one of these three elements: fixed or variable point scoring, element symbols, and/or required elements. The point-scoring may be unconditional, but for the most part they only score if you have the required elements on cards that are already face-up when the card is revealed. There are three elements in the game – animal, mineral, and plant – and cards may require two or more of these symbols, the same ones or any combination. Many cards also show one or two symbols in the upper right that are then available to fulfill requirements for cards that appear later. Some Region cards are also “night” cards, with their card number surrounded by a white circle, which can also factor into scoring for some cards. Some Region cards show a map symbol next to the card number, which I’ll get to in a moment.

You start the game with three Region cards, and you will play one of them face-down. All players reveal their played Region cards at the same time. The player with the lowest played Region card gets first draft from the market, which has one more card than the player count and is visible before you choose what to play in the current round, so you can factor that into your decision of what to play. This process continues for eight rounds, although in the final round you skip the market phase.

You play your cards left to right in a line in front of you, and the order matters in two ways. The first is that if you play a card with a higher number than the one you played right before it, you get one or more Sanctuary cards. These can either offer additional points, provide additional elements, add another night symbol, or even have a different card color to qualify for certain Region cards that score based on the colors of cards you have. If you have any cards in your row with map symbols, when you get Sanctuary cards, you get one extra one for every map symbol you have showing, and then you choose one Sanctuary card to keep.

When the eighth round is complete, players all turn all eight of their Region cards face down, but keep their Sanctuary cards face up. You then begin scoring by turning over your rightmost (last played) Region card, scoring it if possible; then you move to the left and turn over the next card, scoring that if possible, and so on. That last played/first scored card will only meet its requirements if you have those elements showing on Sanctuary cards. When you get to your first played/last scored card, however, all eight of your Region cards will be face up, and you will have everything available. That means that one fairly basic strategy is to play a high-point card with a lot of required elements in the first or second round, and then playing the rest of your cards to try to fill those requirements. I won a two-player game on BGA against a much higher-rated opponent where I only scored three of my Region cards, including zero of the last four I played. Those cards were worth 24, 13, and 12 (3*4) points, and I tacked on 17 more from Sanctuary cards to dance to victory.

There is a good bit of luck involved here in the card draws, and you can end up behind the eight-ball if you’re getting cards that don’t fit your plans but are also high-numbered enough to keep you from drafting first in subsequent rounds. I think that’s just baked into the game; you have to cope with some randomness and just plan around it as best you can.

There is a whole lore behind the game’s theme and artwork that didn’t do a whole lot for me, other than that I appreciated the bold color choices on the cards (with patterns on a horizontal line in each color’s design to allow color-blind players to distinguish them). I didn’t expect to like it because of the silly art, but it’s more of an abstract game with a theme that’s sort of pasted on. I’ve learned not to judge a board game by its cover, at least, and the art here doesn’t get in the way of the game at all. Pandasaurus has brought this one over to the U.S., along with Goupy’s game Pixies; another great small-box game, Knarr; and another in my review queue, Courtisans. Faraway is my favorite of the batch so far.

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→ August 28, 2024
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Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs.

I’m not a Gloomhaven guy, for a variety of reasons, but foremost among them is that I just don’t care for modern role-playing games. I did play a little pen-and-paper D&D in the 1980s, and got into several CRPGs, including the Bard’s Tale, before going all out on the Baldur’s Gate series. Those experiences cemented a style of RPG in my brain that’s hard to dislodge; if a modern RPG isn’t built on the same framework, it feels counterintuitive and slow to me.

Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs gives me that same feeling, although I do respect the cleverness of the design and the way it packs a lot of game into a tiny box. Based on a fan expansion for the massive, $120, 20-pound Gloomhaven tabletop RPG, Buttons & Bugs is a strictly solo endeavor that has 20 scenarios to play through where your character gains levels, skills, and items … but the combat system at the heart of the game is so clunky that it drove me kind of nuts. (It’s between printings, but you can pre-order the second printing here, with shipping expected in September.)

In Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, your intrepid hero has been debiggified (my word, not theirs) to a miniature size and must fight through a series of adventures to get back to some kind of final boss that will reverse the curse and make you full-sized again. The battles will increase in difficulty, and your character will gain some new skill cards, better items, and a very modest number of hit points as the game progresses.

The combat system revolves around cards, and I don’t care what Gloomhaven fans say – this is the clunkiest combat system I’ve ever seen. You start out with four cards in your hand, with two actions on each side. You’ll pick a top action from one card and a bottom action from another on each turn. If those are the A sides of the cards, you’ll pick them back up and flip them to the B sides, which have different actions. Once you’ve used all of the B sides, you have to rest to pick them back up, but you will lose one card from your hand each time you do this. If you ever have just one card left in your hand, you lose the scenario. (You also lose if you run out of hit points.) Top actions usually involve attacks; bottom actions usually involve movement. That means if you’re hemmed in by a monster and just want to attack with both your actions, well, tough luck – you’re going to waste some of your turn with movement points you can’t use. I played several scenarios as the thief, and there’s a lot of movement on the thief’s initial action cards that is close to useless on the early maps because there’s no place to run, literally.

There’s also a single die with three values on it that works as a sort of attack modifier for you and determines the monsters’ initiative and exact actions (skewing towards more movement or more offense) on each turn. It’s fine for the monsters, as it mixes things up a little bit, but for you it’s just a nuisance – it adds a tiny bit of randomness in most cases, adding or subtracting one from your attack value, except very rarely it can either double your attack or void it entirely. Remembering to use it and then move the peg down the board to track the current modifiers was more trouble than it was worth.

I think the design here also presupposes some familiarity with Gloomhaven’s combat system, icons, and terminology. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what one symbol meant, since it’s not explained on the one reference card with the game itself, so I had to read the online rules (accessible with a QR code) and then go re-read them to find the symbol, which was just off to the right of my phone’s screen. It’s a dark element, and while it appears on one of the thief’s starter cards, there’s no explanation anywhere in the box of what elements are, and I don’t think you can even use that bonus action (+2 to your attack if you have consumed a dark element) with that initial card set.

I absolutely love the idea of this game – a solitaire dungeon-crawl with a solid story that’s a little bit funny and that has some great components to keep the game truly compact, like the hit point dials you use for yourself and for your adversaries. A whole campaign in a box the size of a new set of business cards is awesome. If the game had a more user-friendly combat and item system, I probably would have played it all the way through. It’s just too fiddly for me, and that may be just a function of my own experiences playing RPGs with other ways of handling combat.

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→ August 10, 2024
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Age of Wonders: Planetfall.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall is a 4X video game from Paradox Interactive that came out in 2019 and, from my reading, had all of the trappings of that genre, from resource management to economic and military development to a tech tree. Hobby World published a board game adaptation from a first-time designer that borrows the art from the video game but has nothing more to do with it, slapping the IP on a bad Splendor clone that might be more fun to play if it didn’t try so hard to get the sci-fi art and theme involved in game play.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall has seven decks of cards representing the seven planets players will “explore” over the course of the game, with cards in each successive deck increasing in cost and value. Cards can require you spend either strength or energy, and they may have a minimum experience level before you’re allowed to purchase it. For each round, you shuffle one planet deck and deal either all of the cards (4-5 players) or all but three cards (2-3 players) to the center of the table in three rows, next to the operations board that shows levels I, II, and III; each card shows three levels of costs and they become slightly less expensive at higher levels.

Players will go twice per round, moving their ship to a card or a space on the operations board, resolving those, then repeating the cycle before all remaining cards are removed from the game to make room for the next planet. The turn order depends on what cards players chose in the last turn; you resolve cards left to right, starting with level I, and then move each player counter to the topmost empty spot on the ops board to show turn order for the next round. You can choose any card on any level as long as you have the resources and/or experience required to buy it; every deck has several “power-up” cards that just give you energy and maybe a victory point or two, and you can also choose one of the three spots on the operations board to get 5-7 free resources or victory points or experience, so you can’t end up without a legal play.

Each player has an individual player board with four tracks, three in the middle and a victory point track around the outside. Strength and energy are expendable resources; you spend them to gain cards, and each has a maximum you can get at one point. Experience and victory points never go down, with experience maxing out at 10 while VPs have no limit. You have to gain experience as the game progresses or you won’t be able to acquire valuable cards from later planets.

Most points in the game come from the VPs you get as you go from cards, but each game also begins with three goals (public objectives) players can shoot for, some of which are competitive (points for having the most of something) while some are open to everyone (e.g., one point for every strength you still have left at game end). A few cards also provide game-end bonuses, although those only appear in the last 2-3 decks so you can’t plan ahead too much for those.

It’s a light engine-builder along the lines of Splendor but with the sliding resource scales seen in dozens of other games, such as The White Castle and Kh­ora. The art and card names are kind of a distraction here, and I didn’t feel the theme at all – the rulebook even talks about combat against a neutral opponent but that just means you can buy some cards with strength instead of energy. Instead, it’s Splendor in Space, except that game already exists in Space Explorers, which I think does a better job of grafting Splendor’s engine-building framework on to a space theme, and gets a little better with some of the expansions. I haven’t played the actual video game here, but from reading about it I don’t see where the connection is – this seems like an IP extension to cash in, without a lot of meat to the game behind it.

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→ June 12, 2024
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Big Top & Couture.

Big Top and Couture are both light auction games that have been rethemed from their Japanese originals by the publisher Allplay, which specializes in small-box games and has imported a number of great titles from Japan in this way (including last year’s two-player game Sail). Both Big Top and Couture offer something clever in the way they approach the auction, with Big Top the better gaming experience while Couture might be easier for less experienced players to grasp.

Big Top pits 3 or 4 players against each other in a fight to build the best circus by hiring performers from the deck. Each player starts the game with one hand card, $22, and a Ringmaster card on the table in front of them. On your turn, you become the auctioneer, drawing a card and then choosing to put that or your hand card down for auction, making the first bid yourself. Players bid until everyone but one has passed, at which point the winning player pays either the auctioneer or the bank (if they were the auctioneer).

When you win a card, you then have to ‘complete’ it to be able to score it at the end of the game and activate any powers. Cards have anywhere from two to nine circles on them showing numerical values from 1 through 12. When you place a bid on a card on the table, if you bid any number shown in an uncovered space on one of your cards, you take a coin from your supply and cover up that space. Thus bidding is nearly always valuable, even if you don’t win the card or even want the card on the table. If anyone’s bid matches an open circle on the card up for auction, you take a coin from the bank (if available) and cover that circle as well. Once you’ve covered all of the circles on a card in front of you, you move it to your completed attractions pile, regain all of the coins that were on it, and activate any powers on it, which can include placing one or two coins on any uncovered circles on your cards, taking the top card from the deck and completing it for free, and more.

The game continues until you reach the end-of-game card, which you shuffle into the bottom four cards of the deck. Any player who did not complete a Star attraction, of which there are about eight in the deck, is eliminated immediately. You then add up all victory points shown on attraction cards, plus all variable bonuses on clown cards, and then award points for stars (10 to the player with the most, 7 to second place, 3 to third, with tied players sharing the lower number). The game takes about 45 minutes because of the size of the deck and the fact that auctions can go around a few times, but downtime between turns is limited.

I love the bidding system here, which, to be fair, is the only unique thing about Big Top. You’re almost always working on something, and it rewards you for always having a couple of cards in play – there is no benefit to underbidding just to hoard cash. (You get one point for $5 left at game end, which is a pittance in a game where scores run 60-75 points.) And the three main ways to score seem pretty balanced – high-point attractions, stars, and clown cards. If you get a clown card early in the game, you can tweak your strategy a little to try to maximize its value, but it won’t fundamentally change how you play. I played this with my stepdaughters, aged 7 and 11, and they both got the concept and scored well, with the 11-year-old winning.

—

Couture, which plays from 3 to 6 people, is set in the world of high fashion and also involves bidding on a deck of cards, but here the bids come from your bid cards rather than money, and you’re bidding on slates of cards, nine in each round, three per column, representing New York, Paris, and Tokyo. Players start the game with the same four bidding cards each, valued at 1, 1, 2, and 3. They divide those cards across the three sites, hiding their bids in their hands, and all players reveal their bids at the same time. You may choose not to bid on any one site, but in that case you won’t get any cards from there at all.

Once the bids are out, you resolve the three sites left to right, starting with New York. The highest bidder gets to take one card of their choice, followed by the second-highest, and then the third-highest takes the last card. If only two players bid, the first player takes the last card; if only one player bid, they take all three. You must take a card – you can’t pass, even if the card is a Flop, which can hurt you at game end.

The deck includes two main types of cards, bidding cards and outfits. The bidding cards you can gain can have higher bid values, up to 4 points, but may be worth negative victory points at game end. Some bidding cards are worth 2 points unless there’s a matching symbol in the column you’re bidding on, in which case they’re worth 4. Some bidding cards have values of 0 or even -1, which lets you sneak in as the low bidder, and they are the only way to expand your hand limit of four bidding cards, even if you later replace them with higher-valued ones.

The outfit cards offer a variety of ways to score, mostly around set collection. You can get points for finishing pairs of matching streetwear cards, worth more points if you’re the first to finish. You gain points for getting cards of five different ready-to-wear brands, up to 8 if you get the whole set. Editorial cards are worth a straight two points each, but beware of Flops, as there’s a penalty for whoever has the most at the end of the game.

Couture’s bidding system is a little easier to play than Big Top’s because it’s simultaneous and you bid just once per round, with seven rounds in the whole game, but my youngest didn’t entirely get the concept of splitting her bids across the three sites along with the need to use all her bid cards every turn. We all loved the theme and the art, though, and they both said they’d play this again. I think Big Top executes the auction mechanic in a cleverer way, but it takes twice as long to complete, and Couture is certainly better to look at. Both come in small boxes and retail for under $20 on Allplay’s site (Couture, Big Top).

The kids were both asking for more auction games; I just got a copy of QE, and I’ve played some of Knizia’s auction games (Ra, Medici) but don’t own them any more. Let me know your favorite auction games in the comments.

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→ June 11, 2024
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Spellbook.

Phil Walker-Harding has designed some of my all-time favorite games, including Cacao, Silver & Gold, Super Mega Lucky Box, Imhotep: The Duel, Sushi Go!, Gizmos, and more. He’s been on something of a cold streak lately, unfortunately, with a number of games that felt unfinished or insufficiently tested, and it continues with his most recent big release, Spellbook, a game with a decent concept that ends way too quickly.

Players in Spellbook get a set of seven cards, each of which shows three ‘spells’ on it (with rare exceptions) that players can cast to gain additional powers throughout the game. On your turn, you may collect spell tokens in the seven colors, and if you collect at least three of a color, you can cast the associated spell, gaining either an immediate bonus or a new action for the rest of the game, plus victory points, but losing the ability to cast the other spells on that card. You may also store a token on your player board on every turn, with spells that allow you to store two or more if you cast them, which awards you the most points and also triggers the end of the game when someone fills all 14 spaces on their board.

In each turn, you get up to three actions, tied to morning, midday, and evening, with all spells fitting into one of those three times of day. In the morning, the base action is to take one visible token from the market or two random ones from the bag. In midday, the base action is to store one token on your board. In the evening, the base action is to cast one spell. As the game progresses, you’ll have better actions available from spells you’ve cast, such as allowing you to swap some of your tokens with those in the market, or allowing you to discard one token with a specific symbol to draw 4 from the bag, so the game speeds up. And that’s the problem: Spellbook ends before you can get anything interesting going at all.

If a player just muddled along and stored a token on every turn, they wouldn’t win, but the game would end after 14 turns, which might be a reasonable number – but the game should never last that long because of the actions available that let you store multiple tokens at a time. The game ends either when someone fills their board, which is the only way we’ve ever had this game end, or when someone casts a spell of all seven colors. I’m pretty confident that the cast-and-store strategy is the dominant one, both because it offers more points and because it ends the game more quickly, but that consistently left us with the sense that we’d barely played the game. Some spells aren’t that useful anyway, but you might cast only three of them before the game ends, and that just isn’t very fun to play. It wants to be an engine-builder, but that would require more turns, and there’s too much randomness involved in getting the tokens you need for spells (with one way to create a ‘wild’ token that’s too difficult to change the calculus). I have a hypothesis that larger publishers in board gaming are pushing to get more titles out rather than fewer, better-quality ones, and this feels like it supports my belief – at best, it just wasn’t tested enough, because there is no way people played this a bunch without saying the game ended too soon.

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→ May 31, 2024
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Donut Shop.

Donut Shop is a light-ish new game from 25th Century Games and Jeffrey D. Allers, designer of New York Slice and Heartland/Gunkimono, blending some set collection and tile-laying mechanics into a game with a short rule set but too long and amorphous a playing experience. It definitely looked more promising before it came out of the box.

In Donut Shop, players add 2×2 tiles to a common tableau to try to create patterns they can score by covering them with donut boxes that range in size from 4 to 12 donuts. There are five flavors, each of which can have sprinkles or some other decoration on them, as well as ‘wild’ spaces that show a little pile of five donut holes. On your turn, you must place the one tile in your hand fully adjacent to another tile on the tableau – at least one edge must fully line up with the edge of a single tile already on the table – and then choose one donut flavor to score. You get 10 cents for each donut of that flavor on your tile, plus 10 more cents for each matching donut orthogonally adjacent to the tile AND each matching donut adjacent to those.

At this point, you can end your turn, or you can take a donut box from the supply to cover part of the tableau as long as you have the correct cards to do so. The cards represent customer orders, and you must have one card for every flavor of donut you’re covering with the box – one card can cover as many donuts of one flavor as you need, although you may choose to play additional cards for more rewards. You get a fixed value for the box, plus an additional 10 cents if any of your cards show a sprinkles bonus on the bottom and you covered a donut matching that flavor that also has sprinkles. There are also coffee bonuses independent of donut flavors; if you trade in two coffee cards with one box, you get 15 cents, and if you trade in three you get 25 cents.

At the end of your turn, you must take a new donut tile and a new order card. You can do this in any order, as long as the first item you take is face-up, so the second is face-down. You may only have one tile at a time, but there is no limit on order cards. The game continues until the players either exhaust the donut tile supply or the order card supply.

There are two major issues with Donut Shop that ended up souring me on the game. The bigger one is its length: It takes way too long to get to the end of the game, by which point the very simple mechanics become rote and uninteresting. This game needs to be about half as long as it is, given the short rules and the overall theme, and when I played it with my seven-year-old and when my 11-year-old played with two friends, we all agreed it needed to end sooner – the second group didn’t even play till the conclusion.

I also don’t like how hard it is to set up any moves even a turn in advance. If you try to build towards a larger box, nothing can stop your opponent from just grabbing the space once they have the cards, and that’s really easy to do later in the game when both players will likely have a decent supply of order cards on hand at all times. In addition, while the supply of donut boxes is limited, but in a two-player game there are too many smaller boxes, so you have a very strong incentive to fill small orders early until those boxes start to run short, which feels very paint-by-numbers rather than strategic. It doesn’t penalize long-term planning, but it fails to reward it.

There might be a better game in here somewhere, even a smaller-box game, maybe if you weren’t all building the same tableau or were competing more directly for tiles and cards – if I could see you needed a tile and might take that first, that would be a different game but increase the interaction without it being as simple as “I’m covering the donuts you were going to cover next turn.” I also don’t think the 20-40 minute listed playing time is accurate – we had a two-player game run at least 45 minutes because it just takes too long to get through the supply, so perhaps an earlier end condition would help. I love tile-laying games but this one doesn’t hit any of the reasons I enjoy them.

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→ May 29, 2024
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Seven Games.

The title of Oliver Roeder’s book Seven Games: A Human History is a misnomer in two ways: It’s not really a book about games, and it’s far more a history of computers than of humans. It is, instead, a history of attempts to use what is now unfortunately referred to as “AI” to tackle the myriad problems posed by seven popular board and card games from human history, from chess to bridge. Each of these games presents the programmers with specific, novel issues, and while machine-learning techniques have succeeded in solving some games (like checkers), others have and may forever prove inscrutable (like bridge).

Roeder is a journalist for the Financial Times and clearly a gamer, and someone who loves the games for what they are beyond their competitive aspect (although it becomes clear he is a fierce competitor as well). He writes as an experienced player of all seven games in the book, even though he must have varying skill levels in each – I’d be shocked if he were much of a checkers player, because who on earth in the year of our lord 2024 is a great checkers player? His experience with the games helps infuse a book that could be a rather dry and grim affair with more than a touch of life, especially as he enters tournaments or otherwise competes against experts in games like poker, Scrabble, and backgammon.

What Roeder is really getting at here, however, is the symbiotic relationship between games and machine learning, which is what everyone now calls AI. (AI is itself a misnomer, and there are many philosophers who argue that there can be no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, without culture.) Games are perfect fodder for training AI modules because they tend to present short sets of rules and clear goals, thus giving the code and its coder targets for whatever optimization algorithm(s) they choose. In the case of checkers, this proved simple once the computing power was available; checkers is considered “weakly solved,” with a draw inevitable if both players play perfectly. (Connect 4 is strongly solved; the first player can always win with perfect play.) In the case of bridge, on the other hand, the game may never be solved, both because of its computational complexity and because of the substantial human element involved in its play.

In one of those later chapters, Roeder mentions P=NP in a footnote, which put an entirely different spin on the book for me. P=NP is one of the six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems* in mathematics, also called the P versus NP problem, which asks if a problem’s correct solution can be verified in polynomial time, does that also mean that the problem can be solved in polynomial time? The answer would have enormous ramifications for computational theory, and could indeed impact human life in substantial ways, but the odds seem to be that P does not equal NP – that the time required to solve these problems is orders of magnitude higher than the time required to verify their solutions. (For more on this subject, I recommend Lance Fortnow’s book The Golden Ticket, which I reviewed here in 2015.)

*A seventh, the Poincaré Conjecture, is the only one that has been solved to date.

You can see a thread through the seven chapters where the machine-learning techniques adjust and improve as the games become more complex. From there, it isn’t hard to see this as a narrow retelling of the ongoing history of machine learning itself. The early efforts to solve games like checkers employed brute-force methods – examining all possible outcomes and valuing them to guide optimal choices. More complex games that present larger decision trees and more possible outcomes would require more processing power and time than we have, often more time than remains in the expected life of the universe (and certainly more than remains in the expected life of our suicidal species), and thus required new approaches. Some of the attacks on games later in the book allow the algorithm to prune the tree itself and avoid less-promising branches to reduce processing time and power, thus leading to a less complete but more efficient search method.

Roeder does acknowledge in brief that these endeavors also have a hidden cost in energy. His anecdotes include Deep Blue versus Kasparov and similar matches in poker and go, some of which gained wide press coverage for their results … but not for the energy consumed by the computers that competed in these contests. We’re overdue for a reckoning on the actual costs of ChatGPT and OpenAI and their myriad brethren in silicon, because as far as I can tell, they’re just the new crypto when it comes to accelerating climate change. That’s nice that you can get a machine to write your English 102 final paper for you or lay off a bunch of actual humans to let AI do some things, but I’d like to see you pay the full cost of the electricity you’re using to do it.

I’ve focused primarily on one aspect of Seven Games because that’s what resonated with me, but I may have undersold the book a little in the process. It’s a fun read in many ways because Roeder tells good stories for just about all seven of the games in the book – I might have done without the checkers chapter, because that’s just a terrible game, but it is an important rung in the ladder he’s constructing – and puts himself in the action in several of them, notably in poker tournaments in Vegas. There’s also a warning within the book about the power of so-called AI, and I think inherent in that is a call for caution, although Roeder doesn’t make this explicit. It seemed a very timely read even though I picked it up on a friend’s recommendation because it’s about games. Games, as it turns out, explain quite a bit of life. We wouldn’t be human without them.

Next up: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, a book by Daniel Everett, a former evangelical Christian missionary who became an atheist and turned to linguistics after his time trying to convert the Amazonian Pirahã tribe. He appeared at length in last year’s outstanding documentary The Mission.

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→ April 25, 2024
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Trio.

If the card game Trio were brand-new, I’d call it the game of the year. It is out in a brand-new English edition, though, and I can’t recommend it any more highly. It’s right up there with Scout, Love Letter, Coup, and Super Mega Lucky Box as smaller games you can play any time with any mix of people, kids included, or throw in a bag or suitcase for when you travel. I just played it with my niece (nearly 12) and nephew (8) the other day, and after six plays, when I had to leave for a game, they roped my parents into playing several more times.

Trio was originally published in Japan as nana (??), one of the Japanese words for 7, and both names ultimately make sense given how you win the game. The full deck contains 36 cards numbered 1 through 12, three of each, with the actual cards used varying by player count – for four or five players, you use the whole deck, but you’ll remove the 12s for three players, for example. All cards in the game are either dealt to players or placed face-down on the table.

You win Trio by doing one of three things: collecting three sets of cards of the same numbers; collecting two sets of cards where the sum or difference is 7 (so, 11s and 4s, or 2s and 5s); or collecting the set of three 7s. The catch is how you reveal cards – you can only ask another player to reveal their lowest card or their highest card, or do the same for yourself, or reveal one card from the table. You take two such actions, and if the two revealed cards match, you may take a third as well. If not, all cards return to their players’ hands or to the table, face-down. If you complete a set, you take those cards and your turn ends. The game continues until one player achieves one of the three winning conditions.

Thus Trio is a game of memory: you need to pay attention every turn to what’s revealed, and also to what’s not revealed. If a player shows their lowest card is a 4, they’re also telling you that they don’t have any 1s, 2s, or 3s, thus limiting where those cards can be. Other players may reveal the cards you need to complete a set over several turns, so if you can remember where those cards are, you can ‘steal’ a set without doing the work. I’ve been dealt all three of a number, which I was only able to play once it was the lowest rank in my hand. (That is, if my hand was 2-3-4-4-4-10-12, I couldn’t play the 4s until I’d either lost the 2 and 3 or the 10 and 12.) If you’ve got an eidetic memory, well, Trio might be a little too easy for you.

You can play a whole game inside of ten minutes, probably more like five once you’re rolling, and it plays well with anywhere from three to five people. Two players can play, but it’s not as fun for strategic reasons – you only have to remember your opponent’s high/low cards and the table cards – and social ones. And the box is tiny, so it is highly portable. I’m all in on this one – I played it a few times in person at Gen Con, a few times online, and then a whole slew of times this week. It’s fun, like board games are supposed to be.

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→ April 24, 2024
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Furnace: Interbellum.

Furnace remains one of my favorite engine-building games – if anything, I’ve come to like it more and more the more I’ve played it. The rules are short, and I think very straightforward, especially if you’ve played any sort of engine-builders before (like Gizmos), while you can play the game in an hour even with four people, and in a half hour or even a little less with two people if they know the game already. It even has a useful ‘dummy’ player called the Agent to use in two-player games that at least creates a little competition for token placements. The expansion Furnace: Interbellum came out in 2022, and it is a mixed bag of added features I really like along with some extra complexity that I think the game doesn’t need. (You can get it on Amazon but it’s cheaper on specialty sites like Boardtopia.)

Interbellum does have enough good stuff to justify getting it, and although it doesn’t strictly contain modules, you can definitely pick and choose what to include. There’s really one piece here I didn’t care for, and you can very easily omit it from your games – the business school cards and manager tiles. Furnace’s main market for acquiring cards has a row of 6-8 Company cards, depending on your player count, on which players will place their bidding tokens in the auction round. You can add two or three business-school cards to the end of that market, and in each round, you place a manager tile on each of those cards. Players may place bidding tokens on those as well; if they win the auction, they get the manager token, and if they lose, they get compensation as usual, although with the b-school cards they get to choose among two options. You keep the manager token for just one round, adding it to any Company or starter card in your production line to do things like repeat the card’s actions or take a conversion action for free. It’s a lot of extra cognitive work to incorporate these into the game – you lose the simplicity of bid on cards, add cards to your production line, gather resources, and fire up the engine – but it doesn’t make the game more enjoyable.

Interbellum adds a variable bidding token that I also didn’t find that useful, and if you don’t use the added b-school cards you probably can’t use this token anyway. The token can be worth any value you’d like, but you must pay the value in coal – if you want to bid 6, for example, you have to pay 6 coal tokens when placing the bid. (The game’s standard tokens are valued 1 through 4.) It’s good to have a use for extra coal, as it’s pretty easy to end up with more coal than you can ever use, but this overcomplicates the elegant auction aspect of the game.

Now for the good stuff, starting with the addition of tokens for a fifth player – which, to be clear, I haven’t tried, but I’m on board with it in principle. The game also adds new Capitalist cards, the starting powers given to players to make it slightly asymmetrical, including one that replaces the most powerful Capitalist card from the base game, which gives its owner an extra value-2 bidding token. The new version of this card requires that the player place that token during a regular bidding turn, rather than giving them an extra fifth bidding turn after everyone else has gone. It also adds some new starter cards and a whole extra deck of 24 new Company cards, with instructions on how to integrate them with the base game’s deck (you remove 24 cards from it based on the background images). These cards bring a slew of new conversion and sale possibilities for turning your resources into other resources or into coins, which are the game’s victory points, along with immediate powers marked by a lightning symbol that occur either on purchase or on upgrade. This is good complexity – it works within the confines of the original game, making it more involved but not more difficult.

The expansion also adds a solo mode that gives the Agent coins over the course of the game, allowing it to win cards if it has the highest bid token or take compensation if it has a lower one. There are multiple Agent personalities, such as the Coal Baron, that change how it places its bid tokens and how it receives coins. I completely get it for the solo mode, but found it didn’t work well enough to be competitive in the two-player mode, and unlike the instructions for everything in the original game, the instructions on the Agent cards are quite confusing – and I can see from the discussion forums on BoardGameGeek that I’m not the only one who thought this.

I don’t buy or even trade for many expansions, because I have too many games anyway and there are very few games I play often enough to justify getting them. Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Wingspan are obvious exceptions, but if it doesn’t enhance the original I’m probably not interested. Furnace: Interbellum does do that, and you could probably get it all in the original box if you ditch the insert, especially all of the new cards. You’re also paying for some stuff that, in my opinion, makes a great game a little too complicated for its own good.

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→ February 26, 2024
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Stardew Valley.

My daughter loves the video game Stardew Valley, even though, according to her, there’s no actual end or final goal; you just keep playing to accomplish tasks and get more gold or other rewards, without a destination. I find that idea maddening. Whether a game is competitive or cooperative, there has to be a way to win. Otherwise, it’s not a game – it’s work.

The tabletop version of Stardew Valley does have a way to win, although it’s pretty hard to pull off. It’s a cooperative game for up to 4 players, with a solo mode, where you play through four seasons, planting and harvesting crops, rearing animals, fishing, exploring the mine, and making friends with villagers, all to try to achieve four objective cards and renovate the six rooms in the community center by making the appropriate donations. You get 16 turns apiece, and just two brief actions per turn, so you have to be ruthlessly efficient, contrary to the laid-back approach of the video game version. If you achieve all ten goals before you reach the end of winter, you win; otherwise, you lose.


Each season has four cards within it, telling you what to do on the board before players take their turns, and then a cleanup card at the end of the season that reminds you to change out that season’s forage tokens for the next one’s and to choose an additional professional skill card for their chosen profession (farmer, fisherman, forager, miner). At the start of the players’ turn, they may sell goods from their inventory for gold or swap them with each other, and then each player places their pawn on any location on the board, either taking two actions at that spot, or taking one action and moving to an adjacent location to take a second action. The benefit of the latter choice is that the player may take a face-down foraging token from the board, which gives some reward – basic goods like stone or wood, foraged plants that can be gifted or sold, or fancier items like artifacts or minerals that can be sold or donated to the museum for hearts.

The main ways to gain resources and money are growing crops, animal husbandry, mining, and fishing. Planting crops requires buying seeds at the town center, watering them (or praying for rain), and then harvesting them automatically when they have been watered enough times to match the water symbol on the tile. Rearing animals requires building a barn or coop first, and then moving to the farm to collect eggs, milk, wool, or feathers. Any player can fish by going to the river, lake, or ocean, then rolling three dice and assigning them to any of the five fishing tokens in the display, taking the fish that the dice match. The mine has 12 levels, and each has its own map and monster; you roll two dice and gain the reward (or penalty) shown at the intersection of their two values on the map card’s 3×3 grid, which can include the power to move down another level. Lower levels have better rewards, and one of the potential end-game objectives is to reach level 12.

You also need goods to gift to villagers you befriend, another action you take in the town. You draw the top card from the villager deck and give them any gift, as long as it’s not identified on the right side of the card as something they hate. If it’s an item they love, you get two hearts; if not, you get one. If you give them a gift in their birthday season, you get an extra heart. Hearts have many functions in Stardew Valley, but the most important one is to reveal the required donations for the community center’s six rooms.

Each player starts the game with one of the four professions and a basic tool which can be upgraded multiple times with copper ore. After each season, every player takes two Profession Upgrade cards and chooses one to keep, replacing one of the two they already have if necessary. These make your actions more powerful and/or allow you to re-roll or redo some unfavorable actions, commensurate with leveling up in a role-playing game.

There are way too many components in Stardew Valley, and it could have been a much simpler box if they weren’t trying so hard to replicate the video game. It’s cute that there are new crops for each season (except winter), but that’s hardly necessary, nor are all of the types of ore and geodes. You can upgrade crops and animal products to “quality” versions, which are worth all of 1 extra gold coin when you sell them, hardly worth the effort. There are twelve card decks, and that’s counting the four profession upgrade card decks as one. There are two bags of tiles, one of a billion kinds of fish (and trash), one of artifacts and minerals. I count 286 separate tiles, plus the various gold and heart tokens. It’s design overkill, and nearly all of these could have been condensed or simplified.

The fact that the bundles are hidden at the start of the game is just a nuisance, as some of them have to be completed before autumn or the pieces you need will no longer be available – there’s a way to swap them out, but that’s an extra step for no good reason, and the rulebook doesn’t actually tell you that these requirements are time-sensitive. The game is hard enough to complete as it is, but if you don’t reveal those cards early – and you wouldn’t know this unless you read the separate strategy tips insert or read some online suggetsions – you can end up unable to complete the game. There’s also some forced resource scarcity here that isn’t easy to overcome, particularly stone, which you need to go down further in the mine, and there’s no way to buy or trade for it.

The game’s box suggests it will take 45 minutes per player, which was true for us, and I imagine would make the game unbearable for four players (that’s three hours, if you don’t want to do the math). It does feel like a game that will go faster the more you play it, once you have some sense of what actions are more useful given the goals for the game and your chosen profession(s). I do like Stardew Valley for what it is, although if they’d streamlined all the components and some of the rules – maybe making one fishing site, cutting down some of the event cards and item types, and using far fewer goods – I might have loved it.

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