→ July 16, 2019
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Kodama Duo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ June 24, 2019
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Lanterns Dice.

The 2015 game Lanterns has been one of my favorite titles to play on my iPad for since the app version came out in 2016, which in turn led me to trade for the physical game as well. It’s a quick-moving game that appears light but has more depth to the long-term strategy than it seems, especially because players all place tiles into the same space and have to plan for the potential for someone else to screw up your little plan.

Renegade Games is about to release Lanterns Dice: Lights in the Sky, a spinoff, roll-and-write game that incorporates similar themes to the original but gets rid of most of the directly competitive elements of the original, asking players to fill out spaces on their individual sheets to match set patterns and create contiguous areas for more scoring. That lack of interaction on the table itself makes this a very different experience than that of playing Lanterns, which makes this more of a competitive solo game – what you do almost barely affects anyone else’s game or score. That said, it’s still a solid roll-and-write game because of the variability in game setup and because of some new quirks on the sheets that can let you chain together certain moves.

Lanterns Dice comes with four six-sided dice, each side showing a distinct color, and gives each player a sheet with a 9×6 grid of “pools,” each of which contains two triangles of different colors. When it’s your turn to roll the dice, you roll them into the tray and shake it until the four dice sit in the center, and then you orient it so one die faces you. You get to fill in one triangle of that color on your sheet; every other player has a die facing them at the same time, and they fill in triangles of those colors. On your roll, you also get a free fill from a color specific to that round, shown on the right of your scoresheet.

The primary goal in Lanterns Dice is to fill in complete pools (both triangles) to match any of the four patterns that you’ve chosen for scoring in that particular game. The box comes with eight patterns, two of which cover three squares, four of which cover four squares, and two of which cover five squares; you pick which four to use, using one small, two medium, and one large. The point value for each pattern declines the more it’s used over the course of the game, so being the first to score a pattern has a modest baked-in bonus of an extra point or two. You will also score at game-end for the second-largest contiguous block of completed pools on your sheet, so you need to create two disconnected chains and try to keep them close in size to maximize these points. There’s a third way to score by surrounding pools with boat symbols on them, filling in the four orthogonally adjacent pools but leaving the boat’s pool untouched.

The interesting aspect of Lanterns Dice comes from two other symbols that appear on certain pools on your sheet. When you complete a pool with a square platform, you get to fill in one triangle on any adjacent pool. When you fill in either triangle on a pool with a circle on it, you get one “gift,” tracked at the bottom of the scoresheet, and you can redeem those for valuable prizes. You can spend one gift to reroll your four dice one time. Each game also has three bonus moves you can buy with one to three gifts, such as letting you fill in a second triangle of the same color you rolled, or letting you fill in one or both triangles on a separate pool somewhere on your sheet. These can be very powerful if you plan them out a little, because you can set yourself up to get a chain of free moves, especially later in the game.

Games take about a half an hour, and setup is really very quick – you just have to sort and choose the fireworks tiles showing the patterns you can match and score in that game. It’s a nice filler game, but I think it loses the facet of the original Lanterns that I liked most: the interaction among players on the main board, where you’re competing to place tiles in the most valuable places, and your placement can interfere with someone else’s plans. The dice game also isn’t as visually appealing as the base version, if that’s your thing. It’s a solid addition if you love the original or enjoy roll-and-writes, but I don’t think it’s going to be a regular play around my house.

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→ June 9, 2019
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Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra.

Azul was my #1 game of 2017 and remains a huge favorite in my house for so many reasons – simple mechanics, high interaction, appealing components, solid play for two players and for four, and the most important fact: it’s a lot of fun. The game was such a huge hit that the designer and Next Move games have released a spinoff game, Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra, that borrows about half of the mechanics of the original but asks players to achieve different goals, creating a slightly longer game but one I find just as entertaining.

The basics of Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra are identical to the original. Tiles in five colors are placed on platforms in the center of the table, four per platform, and on a turn, each player takes all of the tiles of one color from a platform. Remaining tiles go to the center, from which players may also take tiles. As the round progresses, players then have to weigh the potential of getting stuck with tiles they can’t place, which also carries a penalty – this time, one that increases as the game goes on, rather than resetting every round.

Here, players have unique boards of eight columns of five spaces in different combinations of those colors. The player places as many of the tiles they’ve taken in a single column, moving their personal glazier token to that column. Once a column is filled, the player places one of the tiles on his board below the columns, discards the rest, and scores: 1 to 4 points for that column, plus points for every column to the right of that one for which the player has scored at least once previously in the game, plus one point per tile matching the special tile color for that round.

When a player fills a column, they flip it to the other side, which contains a different pattern; once that side is filled, the column is removed entirely. The bottom board thus has two spaces under every column, and there are bonuses at game-end tied to how many of those spaces you fill and in where – two different sets of bonuses, depending on which side of the boards the players use. My preference is side A, which gives you bonuses of 3, 6, or 10 points per 2×2 square.

The original game is a good bit simpler and more streamlined than this game, which takes slightly longer to play, but also gives you more options than the first game did. In the first game, it was easier to get stuck with tiles you couldn’t place. Here, you have more spaces to fill and more options, plus a way to pass your turn by moving your glazier back to the first position (you can only places tiles under him or to his right), which factors into the calculus at the end of the round battle to avoid getting the shaft.

There’s an elegance to the original that’s missing in this game, but the play in this game is also more open-ended, so you will usually feel like you have more choices. I don’t know that this is really a distinct game from the original; it’s more like a new flavor of the same thing. Some folks like original recipe and some like extra crispy. If you loved the first Azul as I did, though, you’ll at least like this version. (You can also buy the original game here.)

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→ May 15, 2019
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Reef.

Emerson Matsuuchi has come on the gaming scene with a bang the last couple of years thanks to the trilogy of games under the Century banner, beginning with Century Spice Road, which is – and this is generally a compliment – a great game to try if you like Splendor. In between the release of Spice Road and the second Century game, Eastern Wonders, he also released a very light pattern-matching game called Reef, which is a fun trifle of a game that I think is a great game to play with younger kids or folks entirely new to gaming.

Reef’s setup and components are themselves quite simple. The game comes with coral pieces in four colors, and you use a fixed number depending on how many players are playing. Each player has a 4×4 board, and begins with one coral piece of each color, arranging the pieces as they wish on the four central spaces. There’s a deck of cards with two coral symbols on top and some sort of pattern on the bottom that you’ll try to match. You begin the game with two cards, dealt to you at random, and then there are three cards out on display.

On each turn, you may take a card from the center of the table, or play a card from your hand. If you play a card, you execute two steps: You take and place the two coral pieces shown on top, and then you can score if anything on your board matches the pattern shown on the bottom. You can stack coral pieces, but the only color on a stack that matters for matching purposes is the one on top – so you look at your board from the top down to determine if you’ve matched the pattern. Regular patterns can include anywhere from one to four spaces, and may require you to have one or more stacks of specific heights. For example, it might require you to have two stacks, diagonally adjacent to each other, of height two with purple coral on top. You can score a pattern multiple times, but each stack can only contribute to one pattern per turn. Although you could potentially score more for certain cards, across many plays we’ve found it’s extremely rare to score more than ten points for any of these cards. (I believe my daughter did so once, and that’s it so far.) There are a few special pattern cards that can score quite a bit more – they give you two points for each stack topped by color X adjacent to your tallest stack of color Y, which can get you up to 16 points (four orthogonally adjacent spaces, four diagonally adjacent spaces).

The cards are well-calibrated so that the colors shown on the top don’t contribute to the pattern on the bottom, which means few if any cards beyond the special pattern cards are objectively more valuable than the rest. There’s a bit of strategy involved in collecting cards that will allow you to build toward a pattern on a card you already have while also letting you score something for the patterns on the new cards, but you’re limited to the three shown on the table and those will often be less than helpful. (You can take the top card from the deck in a blind draw, but have to place one or more point tokens on the lowest-valued card on the market, which is probably a terrible move.) With a hand limit of four, you can’t do too much long-term planning, and you’ll regularly have to change your strategy because the cards don’t cooperate or an opponent took the card you wanted.

The game ends when the supply of any color of coral is exhausted or, less likely, the deck of cards is exhausted. At game-end, each player can then score every pattern on cards in their hand, but only once apiece, so saving cards to try to score more points has a bit of risk involved.

That’s all there is to Reef – if anything, it’s simpler than my very detailed explanation implies – and the game doesn’t vary in practice with the number of players. It plays in a half hour or so, with moves very short and your decisions quite limited in practice; you can put your two new coral pieces on any of the sixteen board spaces, but most of those will make no sense at any given time. The flip side is that the game itself is shallow, pun slightly intended; I don’t see any way to play this with a long-term strategy, so you’re just drifting along with the current, playing the best cards that become available to you. Even holding two or three high-value cards doesn’t make much sense because you can usually score those patterns no more than twice and you need to churn your cards to get the coral pieces you need.

Reef’s pattern-matching should work for pretty young kids – it’s color and number matching, and there is no text reading required whatsoever – with turns short enough to keep them occupied, and stacking the coral pieces is oddly satisfying. Each color has a unique shape as well in case any players are unable to distinguish certain colors. As a lightweight, filler game you can teach and play quickly, Reef works, but I don’t think it’s going to be in heavy rotation for us.

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→ February 19, 2019
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Kero.

Kero is a pure two-player game that is absolutely perfect if you like games with lots of dice-rolling – not the Monopoly sort, where you roll once and are stuck with it, but more like King of Tokyo and other games where you get to re-roll repeatedly until you get a result you like or you bust. There’s a lot of luck involved, and I’m not sure all of the elements here are strictly necessary, but there’s something very appealing in how Kero works the dice.

Kero’s theme is postapocalyptic, and each player has a truck full of kerosene that must be refilled from time to time. Players roll the dice to collect various resources and use them to collect cards worth points at game-end and that also give one-time or permanent benefits, and can place ‘recruits’ on the four territories on display to claim those for more game-end points. Your truck contains an hourglass with sand in it, and on your turn you flip it and may continue rolling your dice as long as you have sand (kerosene) left in your tank, or until your dice all show fire icons, after which those dice have ‘burned up’ and can’t be re-rolled. The other sides of the five basic white dice show various resources – metal, food, recruits, fuel, or bricks – and you may pay fuel to add any of the three bonus dice, which have bigger rewards on them.

When your fuel runs low, you can spend one jerrycan token to refuel – and your opponent gets to roll the dice. You flip your truck the other way, so the sand fills the visible portion of the truck’s tank, and your opponent rolls all eight dice, and rerolls every die until all eight show fire tokens, at which point the refueling stops and you set your truck on its wheels again. (If you get seven fire tokens, then you roll the eighth die a maximum of five times before you just give up.) So there’s randomness all over the game, but the designers – Prospero Hall, the same group behind the Villainous games – have mitigated that with the ability to re-roll, and additional tokens you can use to allow even further rerolls or that let you ignore fire symbols for a particular turn.

Once you’ve decided to stop rolling dice on your turn (assuming you didn’t run out of fuel, which would end your turn immediately), you can use the resources shown on your non-burned dice to buy things from the board. The most common choice will be to buy cards from the market, with cards granting you points at the end of the game and most cards giving you either a one-time bonus or a permanent (unique) bonus for the rest of the game. The permanent bonuses mostly appear in the first round of the game – there are three rounds, separated by ‘claim cards’ shuffled randomly into the main deck – and grant you powerful benefits like a specific resource in every turn for the rest of the game, or the ability to convert something into fuel. Each player also starts the game with two Tuarek tokens, which grant one-time abilities like the power to ignore fire icons on dice for a turn or to move explorers to different territories.

Those territories, of which there are twelve, appearing four at a time across the three rounds, are the other source of points for game-end, either flat bonuses or bonuses tied to the cards you’ve collected. Each player has seven explorer tokens they may place in each round, usually by combining a recruit icon and a metal icon from dice. When a claim card appears to end a round, players compare who has the most explorers on each territory; whoever has the most gets that card for the rest of the game, taking any immediate bonuses on it. (There’s a power you can gain that helps you win ties, which happen frequently.) This is one of the few clumsy mechanics in the game, because the rounds are short enough that territories often go to a player who placed a single explorer on them, and it’s nearly always more efficient to go claim an empty territory than to compete with your opponent for one where they’ve already placed a token.

Kero games run about a half-hour, as the game’s length is determined by how quickly you move through the card deck; any time a player finishes their turn with at least two fire icons showing on the dice, you also ‘burn’ the rightmost card in the market to keep things rolling (pun intended), so there’s no way to stall progress through the game. The mixture of controlled randomness through the dice and the light engine-building aspect of the cards with permanent benefits makes Kero better than a pure dice-rolling game, so there is some strategy involved, but it’s definitely a game of luck – perhaps one of making your own luck, but still one where the randomness of dice rolls has a lot to say about who wins. That makes it a good game to play with your kids, since the dice will help smooth out any gaps in your skill levels, and one I think we’ll keep on the shelves here, but not something I’d pick over my favorite two-player titles like Jaipur or 7 Wonders Duel.

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→ September 21, 2018
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Mesozooic.

Mesozooic seems to be flying a bit under the radar among new releases in 2018, coming in a small box from a new designer from a publisher (Z-Man, now part of Asmodee) that has many larger and higher-profile releases in the second half of 2018 … but it’s actually kind of great, a really fun, quick family-level game that has a strong mix of skill and luck, plus a timed aspect that generally leaves people laughing by the time each round is over. It’s available to preorder right now with a scheduled release date of September 30th, although it was on sale at Gen Con last month.

Players in Mesozooic try to build the most valuable dinosaur ‘zoos’ of cards that they can from hands of 11 cards that they’ll lay out randomly in a 4×3 grid and try to rearrange to maximize their point totals in the 45 seconds while the game’s little hourglass drains. Each round combines the 11-card deck from each player – they’re functionally identical but differ in artwork – with the 12 neutral cards used in every round; the complete deck is shuffled and each player is dealt 11 cards, with the remaining cards left out for the round. The game incorporates a common card drafting mechanic (think 7 Wonders), where each player chooses two cards from his/her hand and then passes the remainder to the left or right, until eventually each player is passed one final card that they keep to bring their hands back up to eleven.

At this point, each player then shuffles his/her hand and lays the cards out in a 4×3 grid, leaving the bottom right space blank. The players then have 45 seconds, measured by a little timer, to rearrange their zoos to try to align cards to maximize their points. If you remember those annoying little puzzles you had as a kid where there were tiles numbered 1 through 15 in a 4×4 grid, and you had to try to get them in order by shifting tiles around into the one empty space, then you understand the core mechanic in Mesozooic. (There are certain game states that you can’t achieve even if you had no time limit; in the classic 4×4 puzzle, for example, if the 1-13 tiles are in order, but the final two tiles are reversed so the final row reads 13-15-14, the puzzle can’t be solved.) The official rules say you can only use one hand to manipulate the cards, but we’ve dispensed with that rule as superfluous and frustrating – plus, when we’ve played with younger players, it puts them at a needless disadvantage. When the timer runs out, you take your unique Director card, which has a small truck icon on it, and put it in the empty slot in your zoo, wherever that ended up.

The basic game’s scoring is fairly simple, with four ways to earn points. If you can create enclosures across two adjacent cards – some are left-right, some are top-bottom – you score six points for each completed one. If you connect roads on adjacent cards, you earn four points per connection (not per card – that was a bit unclear in the rules). Every card with a truck on it that is adjacent to a giant blue dinosaur attraction earns you two points, and every topiary card (a large shrubbery trimmed into a dinosaur shape) is worth one point. The enclosures are generally the best path to victory, but every player is trying to grab those in the card draft, so you’ll end up having to balance out the cards you select with other ways to score. The draft is largely where the round’s winner is determined; the arrangement phase is the fun part, although obviously you can screw yourself over if you don’t get the cards in order before the time runs out. You play three rounds like this, and add up each player’s two highest scores to determine the winner.

Mesozooic cards

The core game also comes with a set of ‘advanced’ cards that offer different ways to score points that blunt the power of the enclosures to dominate scoring. With the advanced cards, you ditch the neutral cards, and then shuffle in a number of advanced cards (random or selected) based on the number of players. The advanced cards include ‘double enclosures,’ cards with enclosure halves in both directions, allowing you to potentially score 12 points off 3 cards (the double plus adjacent cards in both horizontal and vertical directions). T-Rex cards score 5 points if you get one into the two central spaces in your zoo. Gift Shop cards score four points if you get one into any of the four corners. Gate cards score 3 points if you get a top gate card on the top row or a bottom gate card on the bottom row. And then there are the VR Simulator cards, which can copy the feature of any adjacent card of your choice and score for that – a clever twist but also a harder one to manage when you’re moving fast to rearrange your zoo. Z-Man has already announced another expansion with three new card types, a rules twist that allows you to flip certain cards to change how they score, and variant rules that let you play with up to 12 players at once (I have no idea how this will work, to be honest).

Mesozooic plays two to six players; we’ve played with two to four and it works well with any number, with the obvious changes in the card-drafting phase that will be familiar to anyone who’s played a game that uses that mechanic (mostly that you know you’re more or less likely to see a card again in the phase). It’s fine for ages eight and up, and I see no reason players as young as six couldn’t play along if you granted them a little more time in the arranging phase. I bought this on a whim at Gen Con, since it was only $20 and the box was so small (space in my suitcase was at a premium by this point), but it’s hit our table many times already and I’ve brought it to many friends’ houses where there are kids, since the rules are quick to learn and the bright, goofy artwork is an instant hit with younger players. The luck factor is probably too high for hardcore gamers but I think it’s perfect for family game night.

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→ September 14, 2018
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Lost Cities Rivals.

Lost Cities is one of the original, classic “couples” games, a strictly two-player game that’s quick to learn, has enough luck involved to allow someone who hasn’t played many games to compete fairly with an experienced gamer, and that has plenty of interaction to keep the two players engaged. It’s from Reiner Knizia, whose games are all built on a math foundation but keep that stuff under the hood. It has since fallen behind several other two-player games (notably Jaipur) in my own rankings & my house, but I’ll always have a soft spot for it because it was one of the first two-player games I ever tried and liked.

Kosmos has now released a new version of the game, Lost Cities: Rivals, that allows up to four to play at once, simplifies the scoring, and mitigates the luck factor at least a little bit so that players can strategize a little more over the deck. It still works with two players, but the design here, giving players money to bid on cards, is clearly aimed at getting the whole family to the table at once. It’s a nice filler game, nothing too novel, but again very easy for anyone to pick up and certainly appropriate for younger players (the box says ages 10+, but I’d say this is fine for kids as young as 8), and priced appropriately at $14.95 list.

The basic premise of Lost Cities: Rivals is the same as the original – players try to build ‘expeditions’ of cards in five colors by acquiring cards numbered 2 through 10 and playing them in ascending order. That is, once you’ve played a red 4 card, you can’t play the red 2 or 3 any more. The Rivals deck has two copies of each card numbered 2 through 5, and just one copy of each card numbered 6 through 10. On a turn, a player may uncover the next card in the deck and place it on the table for all players to see, or may bid on all face-up cards on the table, starting an auction that proceeds around the table until all players pass.

The scoring in Rivals is much simpler than in the base game. The original had you start with -20 points in any expedition you started, so you’d have to make up the deficit by playing enough cards to that expedition, with each card worth the points of its numerical value. That’s all gone in Lost Cities: Rivals, as you start with zero points in each expedition, score one point for each card you play to any expedition, and get a straight eight-point bonus for any expedition where you play at least four numbered cards.

Rivals also carries forward the ‘wager’ cards for each expedition; you can play one, two, or three such cards to any expedition before you play any numbered cards to it, and those increase your bonuses for each card to 2, 3, or 4 points. (The eight-point bonus for playing four cards is unaffected.) Each player begins the game with two random wager cards, while the remaining ten are shuffled into the main deck.

Players begin the game with equal stashes of gold coins – there are 36 in total, and you distribute them evenly among all players – to use to bid on cards on display. The deck is split into four piles, and when each of the first three piles is exhausted, the ‘bank’ of coins paid to buy cards is split evenly again among all players, with any remainder left in the bank. The player who wins the auction takes all cards but may discard one from the game entirely, and may not take any other cards s/he can’t legally play to his/her own tableau. Thus you may still want to bid on cards even if you can’t play some of them – there is value in discarding a card that’s valuable to an opponent, and there’s no penalty involved in winning cards you can’t play because you just leave them on the table.

The game moves very quickly since turns are short and decisions aren’t really that complex – it gets tricker towards the end when you’re hoping for certain cards and might preserve your coins to try to nab something important – with a full game taking under 45 minutes in our plays. It’s also very compact, like the original, something you could easily take with you on the road in its box or just by bringing the deck and throwing the coins in a small bag. I don’t think this will be in regular rotation here, though; it’s certainly light and simple, but I think we want a little more fun or strategy from games we’ll play often. This felt a bit too familiar, and other than the few times we were all seriously bidding on a set of cards, there wasn’t enough to get us laughing or taunting each other to make me want to pull the game out again.

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→ August 27, 2018
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Kerala.

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.

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→ August 10, 2018
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Century Spice Road.

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.

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→ February 16, 2018
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Seikatsu.

Seikatsu was one of my honorable mentions on my list of the top ten games of 2017, maybe the best-looking game I played last year with gorgeous artwork and solid, heavy tokens. It’s listed as a game for 1 to 4 players, but really works best with 3 and fairly well with 2, not with the other counts.

Seikatsu calls itself “a game of perspective,” which is true for the final scoring, which accounts for the bulk of the points in the game. You score two ways in Seikatsu: once when you place a token on each turn, and then once for each row on the hexagonal board at the end of the game – but the rows you score depend on where you sit, so each player scores those rows (or columns, if you want to get all pedantic about it) differently. The result is a fast-moving game that asks you to balance two different scoring methods with every turn, but that keeps those turns short because your options are finite and it’s not that hard to figure out an optimal move.

The tokens in Seikatsu each show a bird and a ring of flowers, which correspond to the two scoring methods. You can place a token anywhere adjacent to another token or the neutral center space, and you score 1 point for that token plus another point for each adjacent token with the same bird image on it. In theory, you could score a maximum of 7 points, but in practice you’ll get 1 to 3 each turn and maybe luck into a 4 once every other game or so. There are four koi pond tokens that function as wild cards; you can place one and name any bird type to score it, after which the tile no longer scores as any bird type for tokens placed adjacent to it.

The flowers come into play at the end of the game. There are pagodas on three vertices of the board, each of which corresponds to one player’s perspective for scoring, splitting the board into seven columns unique to that player. In each column (or row … I’ll stop that now), the player identifies the flower type that appears on the most tokens, and scores points based on that number – 1 point for a single token, then 3, 6, 10, 15, and 21 points for the maximum possible number of six tokens with the same flower type. Koi pond tiles are wild again in this stage, and each player can assign whatever flower type s/he wants to those tiles.

Seikatsu is ideal with three players; with two, it’s a little easier to work the board independently until the last few moves, whereas with three you can’t plan ahead as easily. You only get two tokens in your hand each turn, so long-range planning is just not part of the game, but with two players you can set up your rows of flowers with less interference from other players. We’ve found that with two players, the scores are extremely close – we’ve tied once and never had a margin of victory over 5 points. That makes it a great game for a parent to play with a child, because it’s hard for the parent to run away with the game and thus doesn’t require playing ‘down’ to the younger player’s level. With four players, it’s “team” play, which I don’t think works very well; there’s a solitaire mode I haven’t tried. Seikatsu lists for $40, which I think reflects the high quality of the components but is a bit dear for this type of game; now that it’s been on the market for six months, though, I’m seeing it for under $30 (e.g., $28 on amazon) which is just right.

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