→ November 24, 2024
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Courtisans.

Courtisans is a very simple, cunning small-box game where players fight to shift the balance across six different ‘families’ (card colors) to determine which cards will be worth positive points at the end of the game and which ones will be worth negative points. The game plays well with three to five players, although in my experience it’s better when players are willing to be spiteful – this is the wrong game for your group if everyone is nice about it.

Courtisans comes with a little mat that shows the six families trying to curry favor with the queen, and players will play cards above and below the mat over the course of the game to increase or decrease their favor, as well as playing cards to the areas in front of them. On each player’s turn, they’ll get three cards to play: one to their own play area, one to the mat (above or below it), and one to another player’s area. The game continues until the deck is exhausted, which takes about a half an hour if everyone’s focused. (I’ve played this with my stepdaughters, and it took longer because they got a little bored between turns.) There are four special card types in the deck, but the vast majority have no function beyond their color. When the game ends, you look at the cards above and below each family on the mat; if there are more cards above, that family is in the good graces of the queen, and every card you have in front of you of that color is worth +1 point. If there are more cards below, the family has fallen from grace and each card you have of that color is worth -1 point. If there are as many cards above as below, the cards aren’t worth any points.

The four special card types do add some extra intrigue to the game, although the heart is still in that ‘take-that’ mechanic where you should be actively trying to screw with your opponents. Noble cards count as double (two cards), whether they’re above or below the mat or in a player’s area. Spy cards are played face-down, wherever they’re played, and are only revealed at game end; if they go to the mat, they’re played at the queen’s spot. No one can look at a played spy card until the game is over, not even the player who played it. Assassin cards let the player eliminate one card from that area – if you play an assassin card to the mat, you get to trash one card from there, and if you play it to any play area, even your own, you may trash a card from there, although this is optional. Assassin cards, like all special cards, do have a family/color, so they count towards the final scoring like any other card. Guard cards are the only cards immune to the assassin. There aren’t very many of these special cards, and none of them is so powerful that they throw off the balance of the game; if anything, they made me suspect there might be more cards coming in an expansion that might be more potent or otherwise upend the rules.

Each player also gets two random private objective cards at the start of the game that are worth 3 points each if they’re achieved, one of which is about your play area and one of which is about the central play area; that’s a small shift compared to the total point values in the game, so in my experience they’re nice to get but not enough to totally shift your strategy.

Ultimately the game works best if you’re trying to screw with each other, boosting a couple of families where you have a bunch of cards by playing above the mat while hurting players who have cards in other families by playing below the mat. That said, if a family goes too far into the negative, all players will avoid it for themselves and try to stick each other with cards from that family, and because you can’t hold cards from turn to turn, you can’t plan to flip a family from positive to negative (or vice versa) on your last turn – you just hope the cards go your way. That makes it a light strategy game with a big luck component, one you play more for the fun of messing with your opponents than for the pleasure of a well-executed plan.

Note: I’m shifting board game affiliate links to NobleKnight.com and away from you-know-who.

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→ October 17, 2024
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Floriferous.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ October 16, 2024
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Circus Flohcati.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 16, 2024
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Life in Reterra.

The earth has been devastated by some sort of apocalypse – take your pick, there are just so many options to choose from. Now it’s up to you to try to rebuild your part of the planet, with enough diversity in your terrains to help all species grow, attracting inhabitants and even constructing some basic buildings to get civilization back on track.

Such is the backdrop for Life in Reterra, a new family-level game from designers Eric M. Lang (best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and Ankh) and Ken Gruhl (Cahoots, Happy Salmon, and the underrated Mystic Market) that draws heavily from Kingdomino but offers a ton of replayability because you can change the scoring. It’s a strong filler game, definitely one to play with the kids, that can move very quickly because turns are so simple and most of the complexity within the game is in the scoring at the end.

Players in Life in Reterra – by the way, I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to realize what “Reterra” meant – will build a 4×4 tableau of square tiles, each of which is divided itself into a 2×2 square of one to four terrain types. Some squares have relic symbols on them, which are worth a single point each if still visible at game end. Some squares have gears, which you can cover immediately with an inhabitant meeple for another point at game end, or you can leave open to try to create a pattern of two to four connected gears that you can cover with a building.

The turns are extremely short: on your turn, you either take a tile from the market or use one of the three tiles you were dealt at the start of the game, placing it on your tableau. You place inhabitants on any gears, if you want, or a building if you have the right configuration of gears. That’s it. Go around the table 15 times and the game’s over. I can see why BGG lists a play time of 35 minutes for it – if everyone’s engaged, you can rip through this game really quickly, and usually you can figure out your turn a player or two before it gets to you.

The buildings are the heart of the game, and the best aspect of Life in Reterra is that they’re flexible: The game comes with three sets of building tiles, with five buildings per set, and each building has a double-sided card with slightly different scoring. There’s a recommended beginning building set, but you can mix and match as you see fit, so if my math is correct there are 7776 combinations just in this base game. Some may not necessarily work that well, so the rulebook recommends a few combinations to get you started. Most buildings give you a few base victory points, but they have additional powers that range from sticking a junk token on another player’s relic space (turning it from +1 points to -1 at game end) to giving you one extra inhabitant per turn until all buildings on that terrain area are full to giving you one point per square in your largest contiguous area of one terrain type.

The game-end scoring is where it gets tricky enough that you’ll need an older player to take over. Inhabitants, relics, and buildings score as described above, with the buildings scoring their base value plus a variable bonus for some building types. For every contiguous area of a single terrain type that covers at least 7 squares, you get three more points. There are also special “energy source” tiles that score 8 points each, but only if they’re completely surrounded by other tiles – that is, they have to be in the 2×2 square in the middle of your 4×4 tableau. Counting squares and then moving building pieces aside to ensure they’re counted correctly is where this requires a little experience in dealing with board game scoring mechanics.

If the game only came with one set of buildings/scoring cards, I think I’d get tired of it quickly, just as I got tired of Kingdomino quickly. (Then again, Queendomino added a bunch of new scoring mechanisms, and that game sucked.) I’m more intrigued because there are so many ways to mix up the cards and get a game that’s more or less competitive, or that rewards more or less diversity in terrains, and so on. It’s a strong family-level game, probably not something I’d break out for a game night group but a good one for kids who have reached the point where they can play ‘adult’ games. (My guess is this will be on the bubble for my best-of-2024 list – it’s turning out to be a very strong year for new board games.)

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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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→ January 23, 2024
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Nautilus Island.

Nautilus Island is a simple family-friendly game that first appeared at Gen Con this past August, combining set collection with a tiny bit of press-your-luck that’s great for younger gamers but that I found too simple for my own tastes.

In Nautilus Island, players will try to collect sets of treasure cards from the board, which represents a shipwreck and has stacks of cards aligned in rows, with some stacks face-up and others face-down. On your turn, you’ll move your Castaway meeple to the other side of the board, next to any row except the one you just left. Once there, you may either take the top card from every stack in that row, or play a number of cards from your hand, all of one color, equal to the number of stacks in your row (one to three). If there’s an active bonus token available for that card color, you can claim it. You then have the choice to ‘close’ your set, which precludes you from playing any more cards of that color for the rest of the game (although you may take them), at which point you take the most valuable Porthole token left for the number of cards in that set. For example, if you have four blue cards in your set, and you close it before anyone else has closed a four-card set, you’ll get the Porthole token worth 8 points. Those tokens decline in value as more players claim them. There are six different colors of cards, five of which you can collect in sets plus the yellow treasure cards that are just worth straight victory points. Once players have exhausted the stacks in any row of the board, the game ends, and players add up the points from their bonus tokens, Porthole tokens, and any treasure cards to determine the winner.

There isn’t that much strategy in Nautilus Island other than the turn order aspect of where you place your meeples. The number of stacks varies by player count, but the board always has at least one stack alone in a row at the front of the boat, and at least one row of three stacks at the back. After a round, when all players have placed their meeples on one side of the boat, the new turn order is determined by who’s closest to the front of the boat – so if you moved to the one-stack row at the very front, you had a less powerful move (take or play just one card), but you go first in the next round, which might line you up to get cards you really wanted. Beyond that, however, you’re just collecting cards, and eventually have to decide how much to push your luck around closing sets, because you only score for sets you’ve closed and for which you’ve claimed a Porthole token – once all tokens for a set size are claimed, future sets of that size are worthless.

The game was co-designed by Théo Rivière and Johannes Goupy, who also co-designed last year’s Rauha and have contributed to the designs of Sea Salt & Paper, Orichalcum (still on my Shelf of Shame), and Draftosaurus, so they’ve got some pretty strong designs under their belts. This feels a bit like a throwaway design, though; my seven-year-old nephew loves it, and that’s worth something, but I’ve played this with adults and we all thought it was too light. Your best option on each turn is pretty obvious, and when to close a set isn’t that hard a decision if you’re old enough to figure out how many cards of each color might still be left in the stacks. You can play a complete game inside of 20 minutes with two or three players – I haven’t played with four but I can’t imagine it would run longer than about 25 with that player count. I’d recommend this if you have younger kids who want to join the big people at the game table but are between games strictly for kids and those for older or more experienced players, but that’s a narrow window.

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→ September 16, 2022
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Power Failure.

Power Failure is a clever small-box game from Genius Games that rethemes a Taiwanese game called Power On!, taking some of the concepts of the great route-building game Power Grid while including a key message about climate change. Sometimes a game just hits you the right way; Power Failure has just so-so ratings on BGG, for example, and my daughter really didn’t care for it, but I think it’s both clever and fun. It’s great value at $17 or less, as on Amazon or Miniature Market.

Power Failure has two main conceits: You’re building an engine of power plants that you can fire once per turn, with each plant type requiring different fuel (in the form of cards); and building and firing plants usually involves adding carbon tokens to the shared tower in the middle of the table. When that tower falls, it ends the turn of the player who placed the last token on it, and everyone else has to discard a card from their hands, simulating the environmental cost of generating energy, especially through dirtier forms like coal and natural gas. At the end of your turn, you can “fire” all your plants of one type, and then use the total power you generated to claim a City card that represents the power demand of one city, which is the only way to gain victory points in the game.

Beyond the tower, this is a hand-management game – you get a hand of cards that include power plants, fuel cards for some of those plants, and special action cards. On every turn, you can take three total actions, which can include selecting a card from the common market, playing a card from your hand (building a plant or using a special action card), or firing up all of your plants of a single type. You can do the same action type twice, and in the first two or three rounds you’ll use all three actions to play or draw cards.

There are three main types of power plants in Power Failure, coal, natural gas, and nuclear; plus renewable energy plants that require no fuel and fire automatically on every turn. All power plant types require that you add one carbon token to the tower when you build them. Coal plants require one coal fuel card each to fire them, and you have to add three carbon tokens per plant when you do so. Natural gas plants require one natural gas card each, and you add two tokens per plant when you fire. Nuclear plants don’t add carbon tokens, but you need two separate cards for each plant you fire, one for fuel and one to represent the handling of the nuclear waste. Some renewable plants generate a variable amount of energy, from 0 to 2 units, based on the number showing on the top card on the deck, so you can’t build an entire energy strategy around them, but they can be enough to supplement your other energy sources to get you to a better city card.

Thus your goal is to build an engine of plants, likely concentrating on one type, that you can fuel and fire every other turn or so to try to fulfill a contract on a city card. The catch for coal and nuclear plants, which are cheaper to fire, is that they pollute. For every coal plant you fire, you must add three carbon tokens to the tower, and for every natural gas plant, you must add two. So you might build an engine with three coal plants, which would generate 18 power, enough to claim any contract in the game, but you have to add nine tokens to the tower, doing so one at a time. The tokens are hexagonal wooden pieces about a half-inch thick, and you can stack them flat or vertically, depending on how hard you want to make it for the next player. When the tower falls, your turn ends, you generate no power, and everyone discards a card, after which you reset the tower by starting out with three tokens and play resumes. There’s a little dexterity involved here, which does exclude certain people from playing, unfortunately. I do think the idea is clever because of the way it introduces variability into the mix – every form of power production pollutes at some level, but it’s hard to predict who will actually be the polluter to push the total over some threshold.

Games take 45-60 minutes, and I think it’s good for any age range that can handle the token placement part of the game. There’s some light text required, but it’s manageable for younger players. I also appreciate the color scheme, which is brighter and clearer than Power Grid’s fifty shades of grey. It’s a serious engine-builder at heart, though, with the dexterity element a small part of the game. You can play it mostly solo against other players, or you can play more competitively with a “take-that” strategy that swipes fuel cards your opponents might need. I think it’s a small gem of a game that deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten so far.

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→ September 1, 2021
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Summer Camp.

Summer Camp has flown under the radar among new games this year because it’s a Target exclusive release (at least for now) and comes from a publisher not known for tabletop strategy titles, Buffalo Games, a publisher of jigsaw puzzles and party games. Yet Summer Camp is from Phil Walker-Harding, the mind behind Cacao, Gizmos, Imhotep, Imhotep: The Duel, and Silver & Gold, and it’s a straight-up deckbuilder, one that – dare I say it – is actually fun for the whole family. It’s so light and breezy for a deckbuilding title that you can play with anyone in the house who reads fluently. Right now, it’s $24.99 on Target.com, although I found it for 10% off in store a few weeks ago.

Summer Camp does have a modular board of 9 tiles that you arrange randomly in a 3×3 grid at the start of each game, forming three paths across the board, left to right, that your campers will try to traverse as you play. Each path is tied to a specific activity – Cooking, Water Sports, Outdoors, Friendship, Arts & Crafts – and has merit badges for campers who get all the way to the end of the path before the game ends, with more points for those who get there first. Along the paths, certain spaces give you a one-time bonus, allowing you to move any camper one more spot, to draw one more card into your hand, or to gain one snack bar (+1 energy for purchasing cards).

The heart of the game is your deck, which you’ll build as the game progresses, trying to get more powerful cards to drown out the relatively weak ten cards with which you start the game: seven Lights Out card, which have no value other than their purchasing power of 1 energy; and one card for each of the three paths that allows you to move your camper forward one space. Other than the Lights Out cards, all cards have an action on them – move 2+ spaces, move any camper one space, draw another card, discard & draw, gain 2-4 energy for purchases on this turn, and so on.

On each turn, you draw a fresh hand of five cards from your deck, and at the end of your turn, you discard all cards to your discard pile, shuffling the latter when your deck runs out. All cards have a value of 1 energy if you don’t use them, so you will never have a turn where you can’t do anything – even drawing five Lights Out card lets you buy one or more cards with a total cost of 5. There are also three stacks of generic cards, not tied to any of the separate path decks, that are always available to purchase – S’mores, cost 2, worth +2 energy for purchases; Scavenger Hunt, cost 3, which lets you discard 1-3 cards and draw that many again; and Free Time, cost 4, which lets you move one camper on any track one space forward. That’s a huge part of what makes this game more friendly to younger players and casual gamers – you will never have a wasted turn. You can always buy something, and the cheapest cards to buy are still useful.

There is some light strategy involved in how you move the campers, balancing the points value of getting the merit badges first – when you get all your campers to the first bridge, one-third of the way across the board, you get the top badge in that pile, and there’s another pile worth more points when you get all your campers to the second bridge – against the value of getting to the end of a path first. You also may move certain campers to trigger those space bonuses, especially the one where you get to draw another card, which can keep your chain of moves moving or just get you more buying power. If there’s a best way to build a deck here, I haven’t caught on to it yet; there is no card anywhere in the game that lets you trash any cards (like the Chapel card in Dominion), and the fact that only two cards are available from each path deck at any given time makes it very hard for one player to monopolize a good card or build a deck full of a specific type of card. That serves to balance things out, and may frustrate experienced players who like deckbuilders that give you more control, but for a game that is clearly aimed at family play – right down to the theme – it makes perfect sense. It’s great for ages 8+ and the box’s suggested play time of 30-45 minutes is about right once everyone gets the deck concept.

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→ August 20, 2021
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Abandon All Artichokes.

Abandon All Artichokes is a game as silly as its title, taking one tiny sliver of strategy from deckbuilders and making an entire game out of it: Get rid of your artichoke cards so that you become the first player to draw a fresh hand of five cards without any artichokes in it. It’s quick, and fun, and easy to learn for any player old enough to read the text on the other vegetable cards.

Each player in Abandon All Artichokes starts with ten cards, all of which are artichokes, and which are the only artichoke cards that you’ll use in the game. The main deck in the game comprises cards of other vegetables, each of which has an action associated with it. There’s a garden row of five cards that you refill after each player’s turn. On your turn, you must take one card from the garden row into your hand. You may then play as many cards from your hand as you’d like, using the actions printed on them, and then end your turn by discarding everything that’s left, artichokes and other. Then you draw a fresh hand of five cards, shuffling your discard pile into your deck if necessary, and play continues.

The main power to get rid of artichokes is composting. Four vegetables let you directly compost an artichoke card:

  • A carrot lets you compost two artichokes in your hand, but you can’t take another action that turn, and you compost the carrot too.
  • A broccoli lets you compost one artichoke if you have at least three in your hand.
  • An onion lets you compost one artichoke, but you then give the onion to an opponent by putting it on their discard pile.
  • An eggplant lets you compost one artichoke, and then players exchange two cards from their hands (of their choice).

There’s also the potato, which lets you draw the top card from your deck and compost it if it’s an artichoke; and the beet, for which you and an opponent each reveal a random card from your hands, and compost them if they’re both artichokes, exchanging them if they’re not.

The other vegetables don’t involve composting at all. Corn must be played with one artichoke, and it lets you take any card from the garden row and put it on top of your deck (so it will be in your hand on your next turn). A leek lets you reveal the top card of an opponent’s deck, after which you can take it or put it on their discard pile. A pepper lets you take a card from your discard pile and put it on top of your deck, which is nice for getting a strong card right back into your hand.

The key to success in Abandon All Artichokes is speed – these games go quickly, often faster than the 20 minute time shown on the box. You don’t have to get rid of all of your artichokes to win, although that doesn’t hurt; you just have to draw a hand of five cards without any artichokes in it. That could also involve composting a bunch of artichokes and also adding as many cards as you can do your deck so your odds of drawing five straight cards without an artichoke go up, but I haven’t seen anyone win that way, playing live or online. I think the slim deck strategy is the better one, not too far off from the Chapel strategy in the original Dominion, but it’s possible that with more players or the right vegetables you could pull off a “fat” deck strategy and win.

The box says it’s for ages 10+, but I would say that if your kid can read at a third-grade level they can probably play this game. There isn’t a lot of deep strategy here that would be beyond an 8-year-old’s reach, and the 20-minute playing time (if that) is great for all ages. It’s only about $13 everywhere I can find it, including at amazon, and even better comes in a small artichoke-shaped box. The ceiling on a game like this isn’t super high, but I love it as a family filler game.

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→ February 9, 2021
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Gods Love Dinosaurs.

Gods Love Dinosaurs is the latest game from the designer of Magic Maze, a Spiel-nominated family game from 2017 that I still have yet to play or acquire (although I’d love to … so many games, so little time). Magic Maze is cooperative, while Gods Love Dinosaurs is competitive, but both games have simple rulesets and mechanics that make both setup and learning fairly quick processes. I’m not sure that GLD follows through on its promise, though – the game might actually be too simple, and I found it hard to get any sort of strategy or plan going as a result.

The premise of the game is that you’re trying to build out an ecosystem, placing one new tile each turn, that has six main species in it, three prey, two predators, and an apex predator in a dinosaur. The prey don’t do much except multiply; the predators in your ecosystem will move in prescribed ways and eat prey in their path, but they must eat something each turn or they’ll “go extinct” (die). Every few turns, the dinosaurs activate, eating everything in their path, predator or prey, but only when a dinosaur eats a predator do you get a bonus egg, which you can keep as a point at game-end or use to hatch another dinosaur to eat more predators and get you more points. The game ends when the tile supply is exhausted.

You draw those ecosystem tiles from a central board that has five columns, with one of each animal species (excluding dinosaurs) underneath each, and then a dinosaur meeple that will move left to right as columns are cleared. You place one tile into each column per player, but don’t refill those vacated spaces immediately. Most tiles show one animal species on them, and when you take that tile, you take a meeple (animeeple?) of that type. When a column is cleared, its associated animal is activated. For prey, that means reproduction: Each prey meeple you have spawns one more prey meeple (one assumes via parthenogenesis) into a neighboring hex as long as it’s of that species’ preferred terrain type. Predators move in a very specific pattern, with each species moving differently, and must eat at least one prey to survive, so placing your tiles and your prey becomes one of the most important decisions – I would argue the only important decision – you’ll make in the game.

The dinosaur activates if that meeple is under a column when it’s cleared, after which it slides to the right to the next column. Each dinosaur may move five hexes, in any pattern, and eats everything in its path, but it must end on a mountain hex – the one on which it started, or a different one. Each prey it eats is merely consumed, its existence a meaningless speck on the fabric of time, while each predator consumed yields an egg. If you have an empty mountain hex when dinosaurs activate, you may pay one egg and place a new dinosaur on that space.

That’s all there is to the game – the process repeats until you’ve run out of tiles, and then everyone adds up their eggs and dinosaurs, one point for each. There’s no player interaction, and in our experience it’s hard to get enough predators on the board to have many (if any) left after you have at least two dinosaurs and activate them. You can’t plan for the long or even medium term here; you just have to plan for the next dinosaur activation. That makes it sound like a kids’ game, and my daughter did like the game more than I did, but I don’t think you could play this with children under 10 or so because of some of the spatial reasoning involved in setting up the next feeding. I might be wrong about that age limit, as the box says ages 8+, but I think I’m also just not very fond of the game and may not be giving it enough credit. I’m still hoping to pick up Magic Maze in the near future, though.

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