→ November 19, 2024
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Runemasters.

Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense board game for up to four players, with a solo mode, that is really, really hard to beat. I’m pretty impressed by the design, even though I honestly have no idea what a winning strategy would be. (I only played this one solo, and no, I haven’t beaten it.)

In Runemasters, players are “guardians” trying to defend a tower against incoming hordes of monsters. The players win if at least one guardian is still alive and the tower is still standing when the monster deck reaches the Dawn card, which is randomly shuffled into the bottom three cards during setup. The monsters attack via four paths, each with its own color, and only one guardian can guard each pathway. Each monster has two to four spaces on it representing “weak points,” and once players have filled those via attacks, the monster is vanquished. Don’t worry, more are coming behind it. The game goes back and forth between player turns and monster attacks until either the players win or they all die.

On a turn, the active player rolls four dice and then uses each one for an action of their choice. Red, green, yellow, or blue symbols allow the player to move to the matching pathway, or to put an injury token on the matching weak point of a monster in the path they’re guarding. Purple symbols let the player move to any pathway, or to deal an injury to a purple weak point. When a player moves their guardian to an occupied pathway entrance, they swap places with that guardian, which is a good way to get another player out of trouble. The white symbol lets a player use their special ability, which can include healing any guardian of one hit point, moving a monster to another pathway, or putting a shield on any guardian to protect them from attacks for one round. Discarding two matching dice allows a player to place a blockade on their pathway for one round, as it’s destroyed by the next monster attack. A player may discard any die entirely to charge up their superpower, which is active when fully charged (level 4) and then may be recharged and used one more time before it is done for the entire game.

Players start the game with 4 health points and 4 mana points. The health points are the things you need to not die. Dying is very easy, as it turns out; livin’s the hard part. Mana is more useful, and easier to get, as it’s the reward for beating every monster type except dragons. You can spend one mana to reroll as many dice as you like one time. If a monster is at the nearest space in a pathway (space 1 – pathways have 5 spaces and new monsters spawn in space 3) and your mana is full, you can spend all 4 mana points to destroy the monster immediately.

After each player’s turn, all monsters move one space towards the tower, if able – only one monster can occupy a space. A monster in space 1 then attacks the guardian guarding that pathway, dealing 1 damage. If there’s no guardian, the damage hits the tower, which has 4 or 6 health points depending on the player count. To spare you a little math, I’ll spell this out: In a four-player game, monsters will attack four times between your actual turns. This is a very efficient way to kill a guardian, since you only have four health points, so if there’s a monster in space 1 and someone doesn’t move you out of the way, you’re dead before your turn will come back around again – and that’s even assuming you have 4 health points left, which, let’s face it, you don’t.

There are different monster types with some different attributes to contribute a little more chaos to the game. Archers can attack from any space as long as there isn’t a monster in front of them. Warriors can’t be killed by rerolled dice. Wizards can’t be killed by the four-mana trick. Dragons’ weak points don’t have colored icons on them; you kill a dragon with three matching dice, or with the four-mana trick, after which you get 1 mana and 1 health point. There’s also a small Event deck that combines some good and bad rules tweaks to each round, and that allows you to calibrate the difficulty a little bit.

Since I soloed this game and recently did the same with Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs, I couldn’t avoid a comparison, and this game is far superior. It’s so much less fiddly to learn or play, even with some issues in the rule book (possibly a translation issue, although I found at least two errors around icons that were reversed in the rules). It’s also harder to beat, which I suppose will ultimately have a ceiling, but I was happy to keep banging my head against the tower wall for a while. It’s not my favorite genre or theme, but if you like tower-defense games, or want a good small-box cooperative experience, Runemasters is pretty solid.

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→ September 17, 2024
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Dorf Romantik.

I’ve played the solitaire video game Dorf Romantik, and found it kind of mindless – yes, there is some scoring to consider, but you always have a ton of options, it’s pretty easy to hit the basic objectives, and the game goes on way too long. I don’t really get the appeal, but I’m also not a video gamer of any stripe.

The board game adaptation of Dorf Romantik won the Spiel des Jahres in 2023, and man does that baffle me. The game isn’t bad; it’s just boring, even with the various additional rules you unlock as you play the campaign and get a handful of new tiles and tokens. I’m baffled by its victory, or the claims that either the board or video game is some sort of gentle or relaxing activity. It is aggravating in its dullness, in that while playing I thought of all of the other things I could do.

The board game is sort of a cooperative game, but the rules are the same as in the solo mode and I have no idea how or why you would play this with others. You draw a new hexagonal tile on each turn and place it on the board, making sure it is adjacent to at least one tile already on the map along a side (not a vertex). Tile edges only have to match if there’s a river or a railroad on the edges; otherwise, you can place tiles anywhere you’d like. Some tiles have a flag icon indicating that you must draw and place a scoring tile on them, which will display a number and show the color of one of the terrain types (including the river and railroad). To win the flag and its victory points, you must then create a continuous region of that terrain type, including the tile with the flag on it. Some require an exact number of tiles, while others have a minimum number that you can exceed. (Once a flag is removed, you can of course go beyond the number.) You can’t place a tile with a flag on it in such a way that its flag requirement will already be satisfied, of course. You must have at least three active points tokens on the board at all times; if you finish one, you draw a new tile from a separate stack that will give you a new flag.

At game end, you add up the values of the flags you completed and then score your longest river and longest railroad. That’s the first game, at least, as the box comes with a soft campaign where you mark off circles on a separate sheet to track your progress and then get to open additional boxes that add new rules and tiles once you reach certain milestones. The new stuff adds a little complexity and some additional ways to score, along with some different tiles that do things like combine a river/railroad with a terrain so the latter isn’t split in two, but none of it fundamentally changes the game.

The video game is actually worse, although I know it’s been a massive hit, probably aided by its low price (I got it on sale on Steam for under $10). That game gets longer as you complete its objectives, adding tiles to the stack every time you finish a flag, so you actually have to play worse to get it to end sooner. I suppose in that sense the board game is an improvement, because the tile stack is finite and thus so is the playing time. The video game version also sets objectives based on the number of trees or houses in a contiguous set of tiles, which becomes just the number of tiles showing these things in the board game, another big upgrade because in the video version you’re really just taking the app’s word for it.

I don’t think this game needs to exist in the first place – it’s not so much that it’s bad, but there is nothing original here, and it seems like little more than a brand extension. It’s like solo Carcassonne, which isn’t a thing. Nobody gets in your way and if you don’t get the tile you need this time, you’ll get it soon, because nothing is scarce in the tiles, not even the railroads or rivers. It just … is. I need a whole lot more than that from a game.

(There is a two-player version called Dorf Romantik: The Duel that just came out this month. That might be a lot more interesting, as it has a module that involves some direct player interaction. Or maybe it’s just another cash grab.)

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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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→ October 1, 2020
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Atlantis Rising.

The second edition of the cooperative game Atlantis Rising came out last September from Elf Creek Games, bringing updated graphics and much-improved components while simplifying some of the mechanics. It’s flown a bit under the radar but is one of the better cooperative titles I’ve played, a step up in complexity from Pandemic but not as difficult to learn as Spirit Island.

In Atlantis Rising, one to seven players try to save Atlantis before the island floods by gathering resources to build eleven ‘components,’ each of which helps the players continue to advance towards the ultimate goal with one-time or ongoing benefits. Each player gets a specific role with a special ability and a set of meeples they can place around the island’s many spaces. The island board has six peninsulas on it, each containing six tiles on which players can place their meeples. Three of those allow you to gain resources – gold, crystals, and ore – by rolling a die, while the other three allow you to convert ore to steel, to pick up Library cards that give you extra benefits, or to recruit more meeples. You can also place up to two or three meeples (based on player count) on the components board to allow you to build them on that turn.

The order of operations here is a bit different than that in Pandemic and the many games that have borrowed its mechanics. In Atlantis Rising, players all place their meeples at the same time, coordinating their efforts, and then players draw one card apiece from the Misfortune Deck, which mostly comprises cards showing the name of one of the six peninsulas. When you draw one of those, you flip over the tile closest to the end of the peninsula that isn’t already on its flooded side. Those tiles furthest from the center either have the best rewards or require the lowest value on your die roll to gain a resource, so the island gets harder to use as it shrinks. If any peninsula has all six tiles flooded and you draw another card for it, you have to flip the middle tile and you lose the game. Some cards in the Misfortune deck are even worse, while others are Calm cards where nothing flips, so it’s possible your card draw won’t be entirely disastrous.

Only after you’ve drawn and resolved your Misfortune cards do you execute the actions for the meeples you’ve placed, assuming that they weren’t booted from the board when their tiles flooded. (You don’t lose the meeples forever, just for the round.) You roll dice to see if you get any of the three resources, convert ore to steel, roll for recruits (which requires two meeples to activate, as in the “love shack” of Stone Age), and draw Library cards. You can also build components if you have a meeple there and have acquired the two to four resources required. Once you’ve built the ten components, you can build the final piece, requiring eight resources, to win the game. At the end of each round, you flip a number of tiles equal to the value on the Wrath of the Gods round tracker, starting at 0 and going up to 3, where it remains for the rest of the game. The players choose which tiles to flip this time, so you have some discretion here, but you’ll probably get seven rounds in before you run out of tiles.

The Library card deck includes mostly single-use cards, but has about a dozen Artifact cards that you keep for the rest of the game, gaining benefits on every turn. There’s also a sort of internal currency in the game called mystic energy, which you can always gain for free by placing meeples on the center tile, and which you can use to increase the result of a die roll by one, or collect to spend four to place a barrier tile on a peninsula that you discard rather than flooding a tile, or to spend five to un-flood a tile. You need two mystic energy in addition to six other resources to build the final piece on the components board to win the game, but one of the components lets you get two mystic energy per meeple placed there, so if you get to that point acquiring more mystic energy is less of an obstacle.

The game is highly customizable by difficulty, with multiple suggested configurations of components to use in each game and the ability to make the Misfortune deck more punitive. With two or three players, you draw four Misfortune cards as a group; with just two players, you also get a Hologram meeple that takes on an additional role and may take one action like any other meeple. There’s also a solo mode that really works, letting you play one main role, one secondary role with the Hologram, and use a robot meeple to boost one or two of your own meeples by adding 2 to their die rolls. In solo mode, you get a free mystic energy token at the start of every round, and then draw four Misfortune cards in that phase.

What really works about Atlantis Rising, which I’ve read is a change from the first edition, is that the mechanics of the challenge are simple to understand and implement. The complexity is all on the players’ side – how best to deploy your meeples, which components to build, even which tiles to use on each round because of the risk that they’ll be flooded before you get to take your actions, which amounts to a lost turn for those meeples. It’s also quite solid as a solo game.

The game is out of stock in most places right now – it’s on amazon but for a gouging price – and Elf Creek has indicated there will be a new print run available in Q1 of next year. If you enjoy cooperative games, and want something a bit more difficult than Pandemic, I’d check it out.

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→ January 30, 2020
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That’s Pretty Clever!

In 2018, a fairly unknown designer named Wolfgang Warsch ended up with three of the six nominations for the annual board game awards known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (often translated as the ‘expert’ game of the year, or the connoisseur’s game of the year), winning the Kennerspiel for his fun press-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg. One of those other nominations was for the game known as That’s Pretty Clever! (Ganz Schön Clever), a roll-and-write game with a crazy scoresheet that lends itself to all kinds of real-time decision-making.

That’s Pretty Clever! gives you six dice, each a different color, that you’ll roll three times on every turn. You also have a scoresheet with five scoring areas, one for each die color except the white die, which is always wild. You roll all six dice and choose one to score, but then must set aside all dice with values lower than the one you chose, placing them (if you’d like) on the ‘silver platter’ in the game box. You roll all remaining dice, choose another one to score, set aside those with lower values, and then roll any dice still remaining and score one more. You’ll do this sequence four to six times, depending on the player count. When an opponent rolls, you’ll still get to choose one die to score. After that opponent has finished all three of their rolls, you can choose any die from the silver platter and score it. Multiple players can choose to score the same die in this stage. You can still score more dice than this, however, if you choose wisely when scoring dice you automatically get to score.

A solo game after four rounds.

The scoresheet has five sections and each scores completely differently. The yellow area has a 4×4 grid with four spaces already X’d out, and then two spaces each showing a number from 1 to 6. If you score the yellow die, you cross out a space with the number showing on the die. (You can always use the white die for the same purpose, since it’s wild, but I won’t repeat that in each section.) When you complete a row or the top left to lower right diagonal, you get a bonus: you can fill in another square in a different (specified) section, or you get a +1 bonus that allows you to choose to score an extra die at the end of someone’s turn – even your own, or you get a fox bonus, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you complete a column, you score 10 to 20 points at game-end.

The blue section also has a grid, but this one goes from 2 to 12, and you score it by combining the blue die’s value with the white die’s. Thus not every space is equally easy to cross out, and when you get a blue bonus in another section, you might want to mark the 2 or the 12 since they’re generally hard to get. You score points at game-end based on the number of spaces marked in the blue section, with the values increasing faster as the number of spaces increases.

The green, orange, and purple sections are all rows that you’ll fill out left to right. The green row requires dice values greater than or equal to what’s shown in the space, starting at 1, going up to 5, then restarting at 1. The orange row is the easiest to fill in – you just write the die’s value in a space, with no restrictions. Some spaces let you double the die’s value; the last space lets you triple it. The purple row is the trickiest, as you can only fill in a space with a number greater than the one in the space before it, unless the prior number is a 6, in which case you can start over. All three of these rows award bonuses for certain spaces, but the purple row gives you a bonus of some sort on every space starting with the third one, so I think it’s the most valuable section on the sheet. At game-end, you score the orange and purple by adding all the numbers you’ve written in the squares, and you score the green by looking at the number above the last square you’ve filled, with values increasing kind of like they do in the blue section.

There are also a few bonuses you get at the start of each round – a free re-roll of all dice, a +1 bonus, and at the start of the fourth round the choice to fill in one square anywhere on your sheet, either with an X (for yellow, blue, and green) or a value of 6 (for orange and purple). At game end, you add up all five of your section scores, and then you count how many fox bonuses you got, with a maximum of five. Find your lowest section score, and then multiply that by your number of foxes, and add that to the five section scores for your total. Over 200 is pretty good; I’ve cracked 300 once in pen-and-paper, while my high score in the app – which works well but assumes you know the game already – is around 285.

I’ve played this dozens of times between pen-and-paper and the app, and I find it incredibly addictive. Despite the simple mechanics, it doesn’t become repetitive because you are always making multifaceted decisions – choosing a die to score usually means relinquishing other dice for the remainder of that turn; choosing when to use those powerful +1 bonuses involves weighing the value of saving them for later, when maybe you can start a daisy-chain of bonuses that will let you fill in four or five boxes with one die. There’s a sequel game I haven’t tried called Twice as Clever! that’s apparently good but not quite as elegant as this original, which has already entered the rotation of games we bring on trips because it’s so simple, portable, and easy to teach.

You can also see my reviews of Warsch’s other games, The Mind, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and The Taverns of Tiefenthal, over at Paste.

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→ November 25, 2019
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Palm Island.

Palm Island is a solitaire game with one of the most clever gimmicks – I use that term with endearment – I’ve seen in a while: You hold the entire game in your hand, hence the name “Palm Island.” It manages to sneak in some resource management and ‘building’ concepts while forcing choices by setting up the cards so you can’t do everything you want to do. You’ll cycle through a small deck of cards eight times, trying to gain as many points as possible by using the cards with resources on them to upgrade the cards worth victory points.

The base game comprises a deck of 17 cards, one of which is just the round marker, while the others are double-sided and have different abilities depending on which side is pointing up. After shuffling the other 16, all in their starting orientation, you look at the top two cards and choose your actions. You can rotate some cards 90 degrees clockwise to make a resource (fish, wood, stone) available, often for free but sometimes at the cost of other resources. When you use a resource card to pay for something else, you rotate it back 90 degrees counterclockwise. You may also spend resources to turn some cards 180 degrees, unlocking more powerful abilities/more resources/more points, or to flip them over, unlocking even more of the same. The base deck has two housing cards that you can upgrade three times (turn 180, flip over, turn 180 again) to get to 6 victory points, and two temples that you can upgrade three times to get to 10 victory points, but I don’t think it’s possible to hit all four of those maximum figures with the original deck, and the order in which those cards appear affects your ideal strategy.

There are a handful (pun intended) of other restrictions on how you use these cards. You can only have four resource cards rotated to the right at any time; to rotate a fifth one you must discard one of the others by rotating it counterclockwise back into place. When you rotate a card 90 degrees to make its resource(s) available, you place it at the back of the deck; if that card returns to the top before you’ve used it, you lose that resource, rotating the card back 90 degrees counterclockwise and also placing it at the back of the deck. You can keep the top card in place and keep using or discarding (to the back) the second card, but once you reach the round marker card, you have to use or discard that top card as well – you can’t roll it over into the next round.

Palm Island card play

Some of the resource cards can be worth points if fully upgraded as well, although it can be at the cost of some of its resource powers – the Logger cards, which give you one wood at the start and two wood if upgraded twice, are worth five points if upgraded all three times but don’t give you any wood in that state. You have to upgrade at least some of the resource cards to be able to max out the housing or temple cards, the latter of which requires eleven total resources to go from its 2x state to its 3x state. This combination of features means you have to make a series of choices that will be determined by the order of the cards in the deck. The rules say you can look through the entire deck once before you start, but once you’ve started you can only look at the top three cards.

The game comes with Feat cards you can gain by hitting certain milestones in your games, starting with scoring 30 points, which I did in my first game and do almost every game now, up to some more difficult goals – it took me several plays and a bit of luck with card order to finally hit 40 points – or more specific ones, like upgrading all your Logger cards three times. Those Feat cards are nearly always useful, some more than others, but getting them at the wrong time can mess with your card sequencing.

There are two base decks in the game, so you can play competitively or cooperatively with someone else, although it’s a bit of a kludge for a game that was clearly designed with the solo player in mind. I’ve timed myself and none of my games has taken more than 13 minutes to play. For a novel solo experience it’s worth the price, maybe not as clever or challenging as my favorite solo game, Coffee Roaster, but cheaper and much more portable.

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→ November 10, 2019
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Proving Grounds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ August 20, 2019
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Coffee Roaster.

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

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

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

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

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

My 22-point Kona roast.

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

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

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→ August 22, 2017
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Friday boardgame and app.

The boardgame Friday is a bit of a unicorn, pun intended, as a truly solo boardgame – there isn’t even a coop mode shoehorned on to it as in some other one-player titles – in a field of games that really play best with three or more. Taking a Robinson Crusoe theme, the game forces you to build your deck in large part by destroying it, working to remove unfavorable cards (but at a cost) so that your deck is strong enough to survive the greater challenges you’ll face at the game’s end. The game is now also available as a fantastic app, one that handles the nuisance of accounting for points and is a perfect experience even on the small screen of a phone, available for iOS devicesand android.

All cards in the Friday deck have two functions, shown at the top of the card and the bottom. The top gives a point total you must match to obtain the card – like a challenge to defeat – by drawing cards from your deck and adding up the values from the bottom. The bottom parts of most cards also include special abilities, like regaining lost life points, destroying a card you’ve already played this turn, doubling the value of a card you’ve already played, or drawing two more cards from the deck. The totals on the top of the card come in three colors, representing three rounds; in each round, the number you have to match with your drawn cards to ‘defeat’ the challenge card increases by a lot, so if you haven’t dispensed with most of the negative-value and 0 cards in your deck by the time you reach the third round, you’re probably screwed. And if you survive that third round, then you have to defeat two pirate ships in the same fashion.

Each card you have to defeat also comes with a fixed number of cards you can draw to try to match its point total. Up to that number, every card you draw is free, but beyond that you must give up one of your “life points” to draw each additional card. The number of points you have at the game’s start varies by difficulty level, with the app giving options from 16 to 20. If you succeed in defeating the card, you get to take it into your deck. If you fail, you get a certain number of points to use in destroying cards you’ve played that turn – usually your negative-value cards first, then the zeroes. The basic deck has mostly cards with -1 values and I think one -2, but higher difficulty levels add cards (with fun titles like “very stupid”) with values of -3 or worse.

You can’t win without making frequent use of the special abilities on the cards in the deck, and learning how to use them and combine them is a big part of the game. The Vision card lets you see the next three in the deck and rearrange them however you’d like, so you can do that and follow with an Equipment card that lets you draw the next two – or one of the destroy cards if you want to ensure your next draw is a card you need to trash. Destroying cards is particularly powerful, but most destroy cards carry 0 point values for the direct approach to meeting a challenge, so you need to strike some balance in deciding which cards to acquire and when. There is a particularly powerful card that lets you use the point value of a challenge card from a lower round than the one you’re in (first-round value in the second, second-round value in the third), but that also carries a 0 value.

The app lacks sufficient undo functions if you tap the wrong thing, but otherwise is an excellent adaptation that takes the annoying accounting aspects of the physical game out of your hands – especially in terms of ensuring that, for example, you’ve used all your potential to destroy cards when you fail to defeat the challenge. I’ve also had some issues with resuming games if I switch out of the app for any reason, but it doesn’t seem to be a consistent problem and I’m not sure what triggers it. I’d still recommend it but would only try to play it when you’ll finish a game (10 minutes or less) in one shot.

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→ August 11, 2017
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Onirim.

Onirim is a solitaire card game app from Asmodee Digital, based on a solo or cooperative card game previously published by Z-Man (now part of Asmodee’s growing empire). It’s simple to learn and very quick to play, but calibrated to be reasonably challenging through several plays, especially with the Glyphs expansion. It’s available for free on iTunes and Android with in-app purchases of expansions for $0.99 apiece.

Onirim is played with a single deck of cards that, in the base game, contains cards of in four different colors with three shapes apiece on those colors (sun, moon, key), as well as eight door cards (two in each of the colors) and ten “nightmare” cards. Your goal is to unlock the eight doors before the deck runs out of cards, working with five cards in your hand at any given time. Every time you play or discard a card, you replenish your hand by drawing from the top of the deck.

You can unlock a door by playing three consecutive cards with the same color but different symbols – sun-moon-sun is fine, but sun-sun-moon is not – or by playing the correct color of key card from your hand when that color door appears from the deck. You can also choose to discard a key card to look at the next five cards in the deck, rearranging any four of them and restoring them to the top of the deck while trashing the remaining card. When the next card you draw to refill your hand is a nightmare card, however, the trouble begins, and you can dispense with it in one of four ways:

* You can discard all remaining cards in your hand.
* You can discard the next five cards from the top of the deck. Nightmare and door cards are ‘recycled’ rather than discarded, but color cards of any shape are gone from the game.
* You can discard a key from your hand.
* You can recycle a door card that you’ve already unlocked.

When you unlock a door, the remainder of the deck is reshuffled, so if you played a key and knew what was coming, well, now you odn’t.

The game is balanced enough that I could win comfortably more than half of the time, but rarely won by much (going by the number of cards remaining in the deck, which is one of the ways the app determines your score). Onirim requires sacrifices; it gives you enough ways to unlock doors that you can plan around the nightmares, but have to make tough choices, often discarding cards you were about to use because a nightmare appeared. There are more sun cards than moon cards, and more moon cards than key cards, so you’ll probably find yourself ditching sun cards to get something better in your hand, or playing a moon card just to ‘reset’ the board, since the last card you played in the preceding triple (to unlock a door) still factors into the rule that you can’t play two consecutive cards of the same shape.


So far I have only tried the Glyphs expansion, which adds a fourth shape, glyphs, to the deck, but also requires you to unlock twelve doors rather than eight. You can use a glyph as you might any other shape card, but you can also discard a glyph card to reveal the next five cards in the deck. If one of them is a door, you can unlock it immediately, regardless of color. All non-door cards then go to the bottom of the deck, which can be good (nightmares!) or bad (that moon card you were waiting for!). Unlike the rules for doors unlocked with keys or card triplets, the deck isn’t reshuffled after you open a door with a glyph. Playing a key card and then a glyph can be powerful if the key shows you a door in the next few cards, but doing so knocks out two cards that might otherwise have been useful in completing sets of three. The expansion makes the game a few minutes longer, but I think it’s better; there are more decisions to make and the challenge of completing that many doors is harder, while recycling an unlocked door becomes a much more reasonable choice than it is in the base game.

There aren’t many good solitaire boardgames out there, and only a few I know – Friday is another, and I’ll review that soon – so Onirim would be an easy recommendation even if it weren’t free for the base game. The screen layout is different on the iPhone vs iPad, but both work – the iPhone makes good use of the space and I preferred having the doors laid out along the topic so they were always in sight. The publisher really could get away with charging a buck or two for this given the amount of time I’ve already spent playing it.

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