If you’re a regular reader then you may have noticed that we just dropped off the face of the Earth last year. I’m happy to say, rumors of our demise have been premature. Still, if you’re still here after all this time, I thought you might appreciate some explanation.

As many of you probably know, we do most of the work around here in two people, one of us doing the writing, the other maintaining the website and handling photography. We’re also not doing this as a job, we’re working full time and run the Meople’s Magazine as a hobby. Considering, daily boardgame news on social media, a weekly roundup, and a weekly review was always a harsh schedule. But it was fun, while we had the energy for it. It stopped being fun when, during 2019, our paying job turned into what we in the industry affectionately call “a shit show”. I don’t want to get into details, but let’s just say that having energy left in the evening was not a common occurrence.

Also, we’ve more and more run into what you might call an intrinsic problem of writing a game review every week: it got harder and harder to play games for fun. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoy learning new games and playing them to tell you about them. But the pressure to write a review every week – pressure that I put on myself, I should add – lead to situations where we wouldn’t replay games we enjoyed because I needed review material. When the people you commonly play with tell you they don’t want to learn a new strategy game because you’ll only play it a few times and then never again, then you know there’s a problem. When you find yourself saying it to yourself, then something has to change. Mostly as a result from this, I also wasn’t happy with my writing any more. All the reviews sounded the same to me, very formulaic, no creativity. Just meh.

And then, on top of all this, you may have heard there was a little pandemic going around. (Just to be clear, if you’re one of the various flavors of people denying the pandemic, or denying the need for widespread vaccination, then just go away and stay there. I’m not even kidding.) For us, that meant months of not meeting people, not playing new games, not doing anything to write about. The damn virus also didn’t help one bit with the feelings of burnout.

Together with everything else, we took that as the final straw to take a bit of a break.

A break, however, implies a resumption at some point, and I feel this point has come. I feel like writing about games again. Things will have to change some, though. We won’t be doing weekly reviews any more. Sometimes there will be one a week, sometimes there will be one a month. We want to play for fun, and then we want to tell you about the fun we had. No more play-to-write.

Also, the news will take a different form. I want to spread boardgame news, because following the newest games coming out is a lot of fun, but the long form news I was doing just weren’t sustainable. I don’t know exactly how the news will look in future.

Also, if you’re working for a boardgame publisher and had the smart idea of only spreading your news on Facebook, we’ll probably ignore you most of the time. You might not realize, but for someone trying to find news about your games, Facebook is a most hostile environment. The only way to find your news there is to go straight to your page, the news feed shows less than 10% of what you post and shuffles it up with a bunch high-grade toxic trash. If there were two or three of you I might go to your page and look once in a while. With hundreds of you seemingly not giving a flying cow patty if anyone sees your new games, as long as you get those tasty, tasty random likes… nope, not going to do it. Running your own website is cheap. So is a newsletter. If you actively want to hide your news on social media, it’s not my job to fix that for you.

Sorry, rant over.

And that’s basically it. I can’t tell you for sure when and how we’ll transition to being alive again, but I hope it’ll be soon.

It’s not only about having workers, it’s about having workers qualified to do the job, and about helping those not yet qualified to get there. That still seems to be a difficult concept for many modern management types, and that will make playing Darwin’s Journey against those guys a lot more entertaining. Worker qualification is a big deal in this new worker placement game by Simone Luciani and Nestore Mangone. As you recreate Darwin’s famous journey where he came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection, you send workers to explore the islands, collect specimen, handle your correspondence and so on, and for all those actions they need the right seals of qualification, to be acquired at the academy. This system will make your workers into real individuals, and the decision how to train each of them will have a lot of impact on your options later in the game. Bundling your qualifications in certain ways may mean that you can’t take two actions on the same round because they’d need the same worker, for example. And that’s only the first bit of complexity in Darwin’s Journey. You’ll also unlock new actions that all players can then use, but you’ll earn money for them. You’ll get bonuses for emptying stacks of stamps on your player boards. And more. Darwin’s Journey is going to be one of the more complex worker placement games out there.

Alley Cat Games

Tinner’s Trail, a game about developing tin and copper mines in 19th century Cornwall, is one of Martin Wallace’s most popular designs, and that’s out of a pretty impressive list of games. It’s so popular, some people might be skeptical when the new edition by Alley Cat Games says it’s improved. How do you improve a game like that? Well, let’s have a look. Expanding the player count from originally 3-4 to a much friendlier 1-5 is a great start. Two included expansions, one for mining arsenic and the other for sending your workers overseas, what’s not to like? Reduced randomness in the setup by replacing dice rolls with setup tiles should eliminate the occasional game that you could see from the start would be painful. The only thing we’ll really have to wait and see is the improved auction mechanism, but to me having dual-use cards that either give you information before the auction or a bonus after sounds pretty good. Also, this new edition looks significantly nicer than the one I know, so that’s another plus. I call this Kickstarter a great opportunity to get in on a returning classic.

Renegade Game Studios / Garphill Games

I’m German, so historically speaking I’ve had some bad experiences with building walls. There are historic walls that worked, though, and one of them is Hadrian’s Wall, stretching eighty miles across England, from coast to coast, to keep the bothersome Picts out of the Roman Empire. And it worked for quite a while, until the whole empire collapsed. The collapse is not the players’ problem in Bobby Hill’s Hadrian’s Wall, they’ll be busy building one of the wall’s milecastles. To do that they’ll fill in a pretty big sheet of activities in this flip-a-card-and-write game. They’ll build the fort, the wall, attract different types of citizenry, visit various buildings, defend against the Picts and score points on four different tracks. It may be the most complex sheet I’ve seen in a do-X-and-write game, and that translates directly into strategic options.

Pandasaurus Games

To walk the shadow road sounds sinister and mysterious. To build it, even more so. So at first glance it might be disappointing that Umbra Via, the first game by Connor Wake, is a tile placement and auction game, both not genres known for their mystery. Looking closer, though, disappointment quickly goes away because Umbra Via is anything but standard fare. Where other tile placement games reward you for building long roads, your goal in Umbra Via is to finish them quickly. When you buy a tile in an auction, the currency – flowers – bid on it stays on the tile as you place it on the board. When a road is completed, which can be achieved by blocking it off with a non-matching tile, the player with the most flowers on it receives the most soul flowers, and having those is how you win. Ideally, you want to bid high, make short roads and get those precious soul flowers. Shame that everyone else wants the same. It’s a rare thing, breaking new ground with tile placement game to build roads, but Umbra Via has some fun twists we haven’t seen before.

Czacha Games

In H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, it’s usually bad enough to have one sect of crazy cultists trying to summon their preferred worldender. Having a couple of those cults active at once? That might actually work out better for everyone when they get busy fighting each other. In Czacha Games’ Call of Madness, you’ll lead one of those cults, and you’ll be damned if you let anyone else end the world before you can. Okay, you’ll be damned either way, but you know what I mean. The interesting bit is how you fight the other cults, because showing up with all your cult, and some torches and pitchforks, that just lacks style. Seriously, who would do that. The accepted way is to summon your god’s minions to do your bidding, and ideally they’ll drive some of those investigators threatening the cults crazy so they’ll set opposing cults on fire. Call of Madness is an aggressive game with lots of negative interaction – but lets face it, literally watching an opposing cult burn to the ground is so satisfying.

Stronghold Games / FryxGames

This is going to be the shortest news item this week, because this is all the Kickstarter preview says:

Ares Expedition – The Terraforming Mars Card Game

A new, stand-alone, game inspired by Terraforming Mars featuring faster gameplay & over 200 beautifully illustrated cards!

Okay, that’s all I needed to hear to be excited, too.

Farside Games

The world of Orbis is trapped in a cycle of destruction and re-creation, brought about by a war against the archdemons. Now, in the world’s seventh incarnation, a group of heroes steps in to stop this cycle. That’s the story of mobile game Epic Seven, and now it’s going to be the story of coop boardgame Epic Seven Arise, currently crushing it on Kickstarter. It’s a dungeon crawler / monster brawler style game, and while the Kickstarter page puts more focus on the pretty minis than on game systems – an unfortunate tradition for this genre – what we do see of the game is promising. The idea I like the most is that relationships between player characters has a game impact, making powerful Dual Attacks cheaper the stronger the characters’ bond is. It’s mechanically interesting, and it fits in well with the game’s anime style. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of Epic Seven before this, mobile games are not really my jam, but Epic Seven Arise seems like a very solid representative of its genre.

Unexpected Games

The first game by Corey Konieczka (Rune Age, Gears of War, Discover: Lands Unknown,…) with his new studio Unexpected Games is an interesting mix. The Initiative takes code breaking and puzzle solving like you’d have in an escape room in a box, shuffles it up with a more traditional game of moving around a board to collect clues, and wraps all that in a story campaign told page by page in a comic book. It’s a fun mix, and it tells an exciting, slightly meta story. A group of teenagers discover a game at a yard sale that turns out to be somehow connected to their lives, and the story is told through you playing a game. My kind of thing. Now the only question is, do I get this game new from somewhere, or do I wait for it to show up at a yard sale somewhere to make the whole experience even more meta?

This week’s featured photo shows the Saline Royale, the royal saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, France. The photo was taken and kindly shared by Flickr user LaurPhil. Thanks a lot for sharing! (Arc et Senans, saline royale, LaurPhil, CC-BY, cropped and resized)

Renegade Game Studios will release The Snallygaster Situation, an asymmetric cooperative board game based on the popular role playing game Kids on Bikes. Like in Kids on Bikes, players in The Snallygaster Situation will be kids in a small town in the US faced with supernatural problems. In this case, one of their own has gone missing and the others need to find the missing kid before they can all together defeat the monster. The missing kid player plays cards to give clues to their whereabouts, referring to landmarks, street names, and the like. It’s not clear from the description if those cards will have text, pictures, or both to give the other players important information and make them move to the right place. Either way, the mode of communication seems similar to games like Mysterium. However, The Snallygaster Situation complicates things for the missing kid. The cards not only have clues for the other players, they also move the monster and the Feds around the board, and being caught by either of them is a bit of a setback. Sometimes you’ll have a great clue card to play, but as a side effect it will get someone caught. That’s an intriguing addition to this style of game.

Osprey Publishing

Since his Ragusa last year, Fabio Lopiano is another guy to keep an eye on for strategy games. It now looks very much like that was more than a one-off, because his new design Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road, looks just as deep and polished. Like in so many games before it, your goal in Merv is to amass wealth and power, and sitting on the Silk Road puts you in a great position for that. There’s a little more than just trade to take care of in Merv, though. You get involved in court intrigues, make donations to the grand mosque construction, and did I mention the Mongols might be coming? Contributing to the city walls is a drain on your resources, but not having the city protected will end badly for everyone. For bonus points, Merv‘s art is by Ian O’Toole (The Gallerist, Lisboa, …), so you can be sure it’ll look amazing, too.

Capstone Games

As you can probably guess, boardgames are one of my favorite things in the world, especially heavier games. As regular readers probably know as well, coffee is another one of my favorite things, especially single origin, fair trade coffee. A heavy game about fair trade coffee? Excuse me, I think I have to lie down for a bit, just until I stop hyperventilating. In Capstone Games’ Coffee Traders you’ll build coffee plantations in some of the world’s famous coffee regions, establish an international trade network, roast the sacred beans and distributes them to cafes everywhere. And while profit is obviously your goal, improving your coffee farmers’ lives by building hospitals, for example, is also part of the game. Those improvements, as far as I can tell without seeing the rulebook, don’t help you personally, but the region, including other players investing there as well. There’s also a mechanism to piggyback on other players’ actions to get more down without using your own actions. Coffee Traders is going to be strategic, interactive, and, between coffee and the fair trade movement, deals with things that are important to me. This game is me-bait.

Board & Dice

Here’s the second new Fabio Lopiano game we get to talk about in as many weeks. Publisher Board & Dice describes Zapotec as a medium heavy introduction game, but it’s nevertheless mechanically very interesting. Building the city of Monte Albán – the original name is apparently unknown – works with cards. The one card you play on your turn tells you three things: your turn order, the resources you produce, and where you may place buildings. Drafting new cards at the end of the round gets even more interesting, though, because the one card that stays behind decides the scoring bonus for the next round. You not only want to get the right card, you also want the right card to be left. Let’s hope those are not the same cards. You only do this for five rounds, so there really isn’t much time to build pyramids, make sacrifices, and optimize your resource production.

Ares Games

If there’s one thing post-apocalyptic fiction has taught as, it’s this: there are no circumstances so messed up that humans won’t try to – and often manage – survive in them. In Last Aurora we were all survivors in a nuclear winter wasteland, desperately trying with our convoy to reach the Aurora, the icebreaker looking for survivors. In the expansion Project Athena we’re the unfortunate survivors that didn’t make it in time. Do we give up, though? Well, obviously not, that would be a bad game. We try to catch up with the Aurora. There’s one problem. The way leads through a military controlled by Athena, the AI that nuked the world in the first place, and it’s still not a fan of humanity. And you thought being trapped in eternal winter was tough.

Giochix.it

The 11th century marked, among many other things, the rise of the Italian city states that shaped history for centuries to come. Venice, Genoa, Ragusa, and so on got rich on maritime trade while also emerging from medieval, monarchist forms of government. An exciting time that Città-Stato (city state) lets you be part of. Somewhat unusual for this kind of game, it does so without a map board, instead building your city and maritime empire in a more abstract way by improving your city on various tracks and adding cards with special abilities. You control your city state with six actions that you have to pay with cubes of the matching colors, more cubes the more actions you’ve already taken that round. The cubes come from your personal resource bag, so which actions you can reliably pick depends on how you build your bag. When you add cards to your city, you can either play them for the card effect, or you can “burn” them and add them to a stack of cards of the same color, unlocking more powerful effects the more cards are in that stack. War is also a part of the game, in the very abstract sense that when going to war, the player that pays more wins. Not going to war gives you the chance to consolidate your government at home. And through all this, all players have a secret government card that will decide how they score points at the end of the game. Città-Stato is more abstract than other games with its theme, but thanks to that you end up with a game that plays out in an hour and a bit without sacrificing strategic depth.

This week’s breathtaking featured photo was taken by Rod Waddingto in the Omo Valley, Ethiopia. I have no words to describe how beautiful that is. Thanks a lot for sharing, Rod! (Omo Valley, Rod Waddington, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)

Many dexterity games don’t have much going on besides the dexterity part. Many, but not all, if you’ll excuse the confusing negation there. What I mean to say is, Hibachi is a dexterity game that has more going on. As chefs around the hibachi grill in a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant, the players compete for ingredients to complete their dishes. Acquiring ingredients is the dexterity part, you get them by throwing your player chips on the ingredient bowls. But like I said, that’s not all. Landing your chips on a bowl doesn’t give you the ingredients you want yet, it gives you the right to buy them, at the price printed on one side of your chip. If you tossed it right, the other players won’t see it until it’s time to buy. Money is a scarce resource in Hibachi, so sometimes you want to throw a high number and sell – and sometimes you want to push another player’s chip out to mess with their plans. Then you need the right ingredients for recipes before your opponents can claim them, and think about the special actions also available on the board. If you can hit them, that is. It’s not a hugely complex game, but it’s a dexterity game with important tactical decisions, and that’s a happy combination.

Explor8

If you watched any heist movie, you know the most important thing for a successful heist: the right team of specialists. Building that team will be your most important job in The Specialists. You want them with the right skills. You want them with the right abilities. You want a diverse team with different strengths, but you also want specialists from the same field because then you can activate them all at once. That last part is important, because your biggest challenge in The Specialists is the action economy. Recruiting a specialist costs a die, activating a specialist costs a die, pulling off a heists costs a die plus some equipment that you first had to acquire by activating specialists. You only get one die per round unless you find ways to get more, for example through specialists that you have to activate, again using dice. You see a theme here, right? The Specialists is pretty straightforward to play, but building a team to deal with the very limited number of actions you can take will be a fun challenge, especially when everyone else is trying to recruit the specialists first.

Kosmos

Apparently Kosmos have announced a sequel to The Crew. The new game is called Die Crew: Mission Tiefsee (translated The Crew: Mission Deep Sea), so it has a new theme and so far unspecified new game mechanisms. I say apparently because they only post those things on their Instagram, and that’s just like yelling out the window for reaching an audience.

Game Brewer

Prepare to be mildly and entertainingly confused. The new Kickstarter by Game Brewer is called Rulebenders, and that name is a promise. The game’s rules are set by a number of rules panels where players invest their energy cubes, and the player with the majority may change that panel’s rule for the next round. That includes things like switching the currency used to pay for things between energy cubes, point chips, or hand cards, change the hand size, change how much energy and cards every player receives, even change the active theme. Theme? That’s the other confusing part of Rulebenders. From six themes like Fantasy, Pirates, and Sci-Fi you pick four per game from which you’ll be using cards, and the active theme is the one from which you can play cards – unless the current rules say you can play others, too. Confused yet? Yeah, me too. It won’t be easy to figure out a coherent strategy when everything keeps changing around you. When you manage, though, it’ll be very satisfying.

Joe Magic Games

Levitation! is a magical engine building game, not in the sense that you build a magical engine, but that it’s a magical game where you build an engine. And that’s magic as in stage magic and illusion. Drafting dice will let you acquire magic tricks, acquire ticket tokens, and use ticket tokens to perform in cities for rewards. The engine building is in the magic tricks. When you draft a dice, you may activate tricks with matching dice colors for all sorts of useful effects. The catch is, to activate your tricks you also need acclaim cubes, and you start the game with very few of them. To get more, you need to perform. So on the one hand you need tricks to have more options, on the other you need more acclaim cubes to activate more tricks per round. Then you also need dice of the right color and, at the same time, with the right value to take the action you need. And that’s why you need that engine working, because without it you’ll never get everything done.

Academy Games

Meaningfully using the third dimension is something that few boardgames have tried, and even fewer have really achieved the meaningful. Reality Shift might be one of those rare ones. It’s technically a simple racing game, but the track is made from magnetic cubes and your racer can go on all sides of them. That in itself is not such a big deal. Besides moving your racer, however, you can also modify the track, shift and turn cubes to create a way for you to reach the finish line. Even more fun, if you manage to crush an opponent’s racer between two cubes they have to restart from their last checkpoint. Ouch. The racing part is actually pretty simple, but rearranging the track on the fly in three dimensions, that promises to be fun.

This week’s featured photo shows a mosaic at Nea Paphos, Cyprus. The site of the Mycenean city is said to have some of the most beautiful mosaics in the world, and looking at this photo I can’t disagree. The photo was taken and shared by Flickr user einalem. Thanks a lot for sharing! (Mosaics in Paphos, einalem, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)

“But, your majesty,” the Master Mapmaker stammered, “surely you must understand. I don’t create the lands I draw on my maps. I merely put on parchment the landscapes that I find.”

“And what,” the Queen asked, her voice icier than any glacier he’d ever mapped, “stops you from mapping those rivers and lakes that I ask for. Do you go chasing waterfalls instead? Do we need a new master mapmaker?”

“Your majesty, I can draw all the rivers and lake you could ever want on the maps.” The Queen’s lips quirked upwards, and the Master Mapmaker wondered, not for the first time, if such hypotheticals might be a dangerous conversational gambit with an absolute ruler who had never had their wishes denied. “That doesn’t mean they’re really there,” he hastily added, embarrassed by the squeak his voice had turned into by the end of the sentence.

Welcome to Cartographers, a roll-and-write game – draw-and-draw game, to be entirely accurate – that puts you in the unenviable position of the master mapmaker above. Queen Gimnax has sent you to the northern lands to map them, and with authority untempered by knowledge, has given you clear instructions what she expects you to find.

The full name of the game is Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale, but you don’t need to know Roll Player to enjoy it. It’s set in the same fantasy universe, but that’s the only connection between the two games. There are plenty of other reasons to get to know Roll Player, but that’s for another post.

The map is not the territory – how to play Cartographers

Cartographers is a Bingo style roll-and-write game. Every round someone draws a card, then all players put what that card shows on their score pad.

Cards tell you two things about what you can put on your map: a type of landscape to draw – forest, village, farmland, or water – and the shape that landscape will take on your map. There are very few rules how you can draw that landscape. Basically, it can not cross the edge of your map grid, and it can not cover another space of landscape. Other than that, anything goes, you can even flip and turn it any way you like.

There’s an important question, though: what are you trying to achieve? That’s where Cartographers turns awesome, because your goals change from game to game and from season to season. Cartographers comes with four sets of four goal cards each. You draw one from each set and randomly assign them the letters A through D. Then you play four seasons. In Spring, you score goals A and B, in Summer B and C, in Fall C and D, and finally in Winter D and A. You know all the goals from the start, so you can plan for the later ones.

Goals are as diverse as “score lotsa points for having full rows or columns” to “score points for every space in your second-largest village” to “score points for farmland spaces adjacent to water and for water spaces adjacent to farmland”.

To spice things up a little more, there are some extras. The most obvious are the mountains on your score pad. Surrounding one of them with landscape spaces gives you a coin that is worth a point at the end of every season. Then there are Ruin cards in the deck of landscape cards. When you draw one of those, then you immediately draw another card, and that landscape has to cover one of the ruin spaces on the score pad.

And then… there are monsters. Until now, Cartographers was a typical multiplayer solitaire game. Monsters change that. When a monster card comes up, it tells you to pass your score pad to the left or to the right. That player then draws the monster shape in a most inconvenient spot, then returns it. At the end of a season, empty spaces adjacent to monsters spaces score minus one point each.

After four seasons, the game ends. There’s no special endgame scoring, just add up the four season scores for your total, highest number wins.

Wait, that’s all? Our Verdict

I admit, Cartographers fooled me. Usually, my impression of a game after reading the rules turns out pretty accurate after playing the game. I read the rules for Cartographers after it was nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres, and I though “that’s nice, doesn’t sound that special”. It took me about half a game to revise that opinion.

What I underestimated from reading the rules is how much of a dilemma the different goal cards put you in. It’s not only that you could put things in a way to score some points now or more points later, you’re always looking where you might build opportunities for later, or block them, and hoping that the landscapes you want will come up before the end of the season. Better than that, your priorities shift with every season. Goals come closer, goals rotate out of the game after you’ve scored them twice, the situation keeps changing. With all the different combinations of goal cards, every new game is different, too.

And then there’s the icing on the mountain range, the monsters. Passing your score pad to another player to get a monster four times at most doesn’t sound like a lot of interaction. It might even be fewer, if you don’t draw all monster cards. But believe me, it’s plenty. Those monsters have a huge impact.

What they don’t impact is the game time. Just like regular pieces, all players put monsters at once, so even this bit of interaction doesn’t change Cartographers‘ no downtime design.

And that’s Cartographers: you can play without downtime, you have a huge replayability, you have some interaction with a huge impact. The best bit, though, is that you learn it in minutes, yet it still deserves the label Kennerspiel because it’s choke-full of complex, impactful decisions.

My first impression – pre-first impression, really – of Cartographers was wrong, and I’ve rarely been so happy to be proven wrong.

As if saving the people of Atlantis wasn’t tricky enough already! Your goal in Atlantis Rising is to cooperatively build a cosmic gate to help the Atlanteans escape. Build a cosmic gate, that sounds tricky, right? Well, it’s about to get much trickier. Atlantis Rising: Monstrosities, an expansion to the second edition of Atlantis Rising, puts Harpies and the Medusa in your path. How are you going to deal with that, on top of your other problems? Fortunately, you’ll have some so-called monstrosities on your side as well, with allies like the Centaurs. They’ll help, but even so Atlantis Rising will be more tense than ever before.

Hexy Studio

Terraforming a planet is sort of a big project. If you want to start with something more manageable, then Terraforming Mars designer Jacob Fryxelius also designed Space Station, where you build just what it says on the box. Space Station is now coming back as Star Scrappers: Orbital by Hexy Games and international partners, including FryxGames for the Swedish edition. Star Scrappers: Orbital is a worker placement / engine building game with a strong spatial component: the engine you build is your space station, built from cards that only fit together in certain ways and may not overlap. You can activate your station’s modules with your workers for many different effects, including some to attack your opponents. While those latter ones exist, they are specifically options, you can play and win without those offensive skills. In the new implementation as Star Scrappers: Orbital, all this is set in the space western universe shared by other Star Scrappers games.

Redi Games

“Queen Victoria disappeared. Armed with a sword, two axes, throwing knives, and a pistol, she jumped out of the Buckingham’s Palace window, straight into the darkness of the night. The rumours say that the queen was bored and decided to conquer a new colony – Hell itself.” I don’t usually just quote the description from Kickstarter, but this one is simply too perfect not to quote. Players in Penny Dreadfun are dropped into this Victorian London where the queen has gone missing and hellhounds roam the streets at night. This is the world our cast of heroes has to explore and defend. Penny Dreadfun is essentially a deck-building game. Heroes start with mostly identical decks, plus two individual cards and a personal quest, and use their cards to move through London, fight monsters, and acquire new cards to get better at those other things. There’s a scenario-based campaign mode that sounds semi-cooperative – you work together to win, but also want the most victory points – a competitive open-world mode and a fully cooperative boss battle mode, all in a very imaginative setting and with beautiful illustrations. Oh, and on the Kickstarter you get an RPG in the same setting, which is pretty awesome in itself.

Indie Boards & Cards

At the first glance, Crack the Code sounds a little like new variant of code-breaking game Mastermind. The name, the colored marbles. I’m glad I took that second glance, because it has nothing at all to do with Mastermind. Crack the Code is a cooperative, limited communication game. All players have some of those marbles, and they have a goal card which colors of marbles they need in which arrangement. However, they can’t see their own marbles and have to rely on the other players to set their code right. To manipulate the marbles the players use instruction cards that let them do things like pick up one of their marbles and put them at either end of another player’s code sequence. The available instruction cards change every round, and not knowing which marbles you have to start with makes things extra tricky. We can’t tell yet how you’ll be able to communicate, or if at all, and we don’t know what the scenarios in the scenario book will do exactly – but that last bit sure sounds exciting. I’m getting a strong Hanabi vibe from Crack the Code, but mechanically it’s a very different game. Figuring out how to play effectively will be a fun, new challenge.

Red Raven Games

The latest Kickstarter by Red Raven Games is, untypical for Red Raven, a brawler. Players in Rift Knights split into two teams. The knights, guardians of an ancient monastery, must protect their elders while they close a portal to the underworld. The demons, a vanguard that already came through the portal, want to kill the elders and bust the portal all the way open. Up to six players pick from the eighteen characters, each with their own special ability, and go to battle. They control the action with cards that can be used in three different ways. Manage your hand carefully and you’ll be able to turn the game in your favor when it counts.

Renegade Game Studios

The adorable Tea Dragon Society returns in their second deck-building game. Autumn Harvest is designed to mix with the original The Tea Dragon Society Card Game, so it works the same as that game, too. You build your deck over four seasons and win by having the most points at the end. On your turn, you either draw a card from your deck, triggering its effect, or you buy a new card to improve your deck. That’s it. Autumn Harvest and The Tea Dragon Society Card Game are the lightest kind of deck-building game I can think of, and together with its adorable setting and art and its quick play time it fills that niche perfectly.

Wheelhouse Games

Do you ever feel like half the things you do in games involve building railway tracks?`Well, a game can still be interesting, and The Transcontinental sure looks promising in that regard. The goal is to build a railway all the way through the Canadian wilderness, from coast to coast. The players all work together on the same tracks, but this is anything but a cooperative game. Only the player contributing the most wins. The Trancontinental is a worker placement game, even if you place telegrams instead of workers, but with some very interesting details. After placing telegrams, actions are taken in a fixed order, following the train tracks, and then each space is activated again as the train returns. Each action space activates two adjacent tiles, and as the game progresses and the tracks advance you will unlock more actions to choose from. On top of that there’s a big element of resource management as you load resources that you need to develop action spaces and to advance the railhead ever westwards. The Transcontinental really makes building rails fun again.

Repos Production

7 Wonders Duel has a second expansion, and Agora is quite a whopper. It’ll let you get into politics with the new Senate board. New cards let you buy Senators and send them to one of the six senate chambers where majorities grant really nice bonuses. Controlling more than half of the senate chambers is also another way to immediate victory. Since not all in politics is done above the table, the second new kind of card are Conspiracies. Once you’ve used a card to prepare a Conspiracy you can use it on your next turn and unleash it’s powerful one-time effect. Agora is a fun, strategic expansion to 7 Wonders Duel, but it does add some complexity and an element that is partially outside the cards with the Senate and its majorities. For some of you, something else to pay attention to is probably just what you wanted to add to your 7 Wonders Duel games, but if you’re more of a purist then Agora might change the beautifully simple 7 Wonders Duel formula too much.

Artipia Games

Artipia Games’ The Pursuit of Happiness has remained popular ever since its first Kickstarter in 2015. With worker placement and resource management you take your in-game avatar from the cradle to the grave, taking jobs and hobbies along the way, pursuing projects and relationships, and try to be the happiest when you get to the end. Two big expansions and a number of smaller ones add all sorts of things that can add to your happiness or distract you from the things that make you truly happy. Now all of that is back on Kickstarter. The Pursuit of Happiness Big Box holds it all, in one big box with a handy inlay to keep things sorted, and if you don’t own The Pursuit of Happiness yet you can buy the Big Box filled. Also included is the new Nostalgia expansion, a box full of childhood memories that you’ll pursue throughout your life. I’m just happy that they didn’t make a Twenty-Twenty expansion that would basically be “all players miss a turn.”

Adam’s Apple Games

Bear with me for a moment. This one’s a bit weird, but I think it’s worth the time. In Four Humours you place tokens of yellow bile, blood, black bile, and phlegm (the four humours of medieval medicine) on location cards, and when the card gets resolved tokens of the winning humour go to that location on the map where they can fulfill objectives for their owners. However, the winning humour is not decided by simple majority but by a more intricate algorithm. Yellow bile wins as long as its alone. Blood wins if there’s two or more. Black bile wins if there are exactly two of them, but if there’s only one it can withdraw to an adjacent location. Only if none of those happen all the phlegms win. It sounds complicated, but it’s simple enough to figure out for each card while at the same time keeping the outcome impossible to guess until the tokens are revealed. Spots on the location cards can only take two of the four humours, but that still leaves you guessing if that token someone else just played is supporting or opposing yours. It’s a fun dilemma in a weird game with even weirder art, and it sounds wonderful.

Steamforged Games

There are many dungeon crawling games out there, but few as rich and with as many interlocking elements to guarantee replayability as Bardsung. The dungeons are generated randomly, not only in layout but also with environment effects and other random events you might encounter along the way. Some of those random events will even affect the entire story of your campaign with secret cards you shuffle into your campaign deck. Monsters you encounter inside the dungeon will be controlled by a simple “AI” using cards with prioritized behaviors, but they go beyond that, too. Monsters evolve, level up, change their behavior, they may even hold grudges against heroes, and combat events will change exactly what you’re facing, too. On the hero side, your heroes have different starting roles, but the classless system lets you develop all heroes in any way you choose. A cubic meter of high-detail minis are pretty much mandatory for this kind of game, so of course they are there, too. Looking past the components, though, this is the first dungeon crawler in a while that I’m itching to try.

This week’s featured photo shows Nesvizh Castle, one of Radziwill family’s residences in Belarus. The Radziwills are not well known in Western Europe, but the family was hugely influential in Eastern Europe from the 17th century forward. Nesvizh Castle was one of twenty-three palaces they owned. The photo was taken and kindly shared by Alexxx Malev. Thanks a lot for sharing, Alexxx! (Nesvizh Castle 2, Alexxx Malev, CC-BY-SA, cropped and resized)

Two new games, one Kickstarter, that’s new this week from Ion Game Design. One game is Bios: Mesofauna, a gateway game into the Bios series. Players control and species of Cambrian arthropods and evolve them into all kinds of insects and arachnids through a relatively simple yet deep mechanism of evolution and speciation. The game has three levels of difficulty, appropriately named Caterpillar, Cocoon, and Butterfly and will integrate with Bios: Megafauna. That’s amazing all the way through.

Game number two has nothing to do with the Bios games. In Galenus the players are doctors in ancient Rome and work to treat patients, advance their own medical knowledge and especially their fame. Galenus has an interesting new approach to worker placement: when they feel that the time is right players can end their own worker placement phase and start resolving their workers actions while everyone else keeps placing workers. Stop placing early and you’ll have fewer total workers in play this round, but your workers will get first pick at their locations. An interesting dilemma for sure.

Panic Roll

You love fighting boss monsters, but spending all your time in underground dungeon is bad for your vitamin D levels? Townsfolk Tussle, the first Kickstarter by Panic Roll, gives you waves of mooks plus their big boss to fight, but all in the bright sunshine of an old-fashioned animation town. IT has all the staples of a cooperative brawler with different characters and their special abilities, gear to collect, different Ruffians and Bosses to defeat, and the mandatory minis, only they are ca. 1930s animation style. Nice. Don’t worry about the style, by the way, at least as far as I can tell it doesn’t include any of the insensitive stereotypes that were common back then. Extra nice!

Rio Grande Games

Not all games need colorful illustrations and and colorful art. The first thing you notice about Blue Skies is that its board shows only a large number of small grids, representing airports. That’s it. It’s not hiding all the art on the cards, either, they are equally minimalist. Blue Skies makes you run an airline in the US in the 1970s, when airlines sprouted there like mushrooms. The game is laser-focused on simple mechanisms: to increase your airlines profits you build gates at the thirty airports, and each cube of demand at the gate brings money to your pockets each round. You build your gates to meet demand and try to do it better than your opponents. The only source of bonus points is from area majorities at the end of the game. A quick, strategic game for when you don’t want to bother learning many rules.

Talon Strike Studios

The Cold War, while fortunately over, is still a fertile setting for games. Latest in the list is Talon Strike Studios’s Shadow Network, a worker placement game for up to five spymasters with an intriguing new concept of player interaction. When you place one of your agents in a city, they pick up intelligence there to feed your ever-hungry agency. But in the world of spies, nothing is really secure and leaks are everywhere. As part of your turn you have to seed fresh intelligence in connected cities, and that might just be what your opponents have been waiting for. Also, where there are spies, black market dealings are never far. In Shadow Network‘s Black Market you can acquire contracts to sell your compiled intel for influence, hire handlers that convert your intelligence into different kinds of intelligence, and even spend that hard-won influence on a critical piece of intelligence that will then allow you to acquire even more influence- if your plan works out. Unlike other worker placement games you don’t have to learn the effects of dozens of different locations in Shadow Network. The fun here lies in the network effect of intelligence leaking around the globes and in using your resources well to acquire the most influence in the world of spies.

Fantasy Flight Games

For years, a variety of boardgames have scratched on the wall separating them from computer role playing games, with companion apps to control the monsters and branching narratives. Descent: Legends of the Dark breaks another brick out of that wall. The new game in the Descent universe has parallels with Descent: Journeys in the Dark, but publisher Fantasy Flight Games considers it a new game, not a new edition. And there is a big difference straight from the start: while the old Descent games were one-against-all games with an evil player, Legends of the Dark is fully cooperative with the app controlling the monsters. This app is probably the most extensive companion app to a boardgame yet. Besides monster tactics it handles exploration of the game world for each scenario, similar Mansions of Madness but more complex. The world of Descent: Legends of the Dark goes full 3D, with things like underlay tiles to show what is below the floor, staircases leading to different levels, and 3D objects like trees and bookshelves you can interact with in the app. Unlike Mansions of Madness, Legends of the Dark is not a collection of independent scenarios but features a full campaign where your decisions in one scenario impact how your heroes develop and potentially what happens further down the line. On the campaign level, the companion app handles your heroes development and includes other common downtime activities from RPGs like crafting your own weapons. Like I said, that app handles more of the game than any other companion app I’m aware of. That’s great for an immersive gaming experience. On another level, however, I wonder how much longer this type of game can justify having hundreds of dollars worth of physical components, when all they do is show where things are and all the interaction happens in the app. What about you? Is this a style of game you’ll keep an interest in, or should Fantasy Flight and others just go ahead and create multiplayer computer RPGs?

Lookout Games

With their latest expansion to one of their successful strategy games Lookout Games have discovered Kickstarter. Grand Austria Hotel is already a superb game. Running a hotel in Vienna with a dice-based action drafting mechanism, hiring the right staff with bonuses, serving the right guests for bonus actions, a very variable setup – you can see why the game is popular. But the image of classic Vienna just isn’t complete without one thing: the Waltz. That’s what Grand Austria Hotel – Let’s Waltz! will bring to the table. Where before you would bring your guests to their room, you can now take them to one of multiple different ballrooms, or maybe to a rehearsal room, and get all new bonuses, including champagne bottles as a new resources. That’s the main module of Let’s Waltz!, but four extra modules have already been unlocked as Kickstarter stretch goals, and a fifth is close to be unlocked or, by the time you’re reading this, already unlocked.

Fantasia Games

Is there a saying like “hard times make great games”? Because I think there should be. Endless Winter: Paleoamericans is a game about the ice age, and it sound terrific. It combines deck building with worker placement in a very interesting way. Your deck has Culture cards with benefits, and it has Tribe cards that you need to pay the labor costs of placing a worker. Placing a worker always gives you a series of actions and lets you, among other things, buy new cards, place camps and villages on the board, or build megaliths worth points and bonuses. Beyond the regular development of your tribe and culture, you have to keep an eye on the stars as well. Every few rounds there is an eclipse, and players who invested in their eclipse pile jump up in player order and receive benefits for tribe cards in their pile. Endless Winter takes two familiar mechanisms and weaves them together in an interesting new way into a tense, tight, and pretty game.

Post Scriptum

Japanese blacksmiths had to work extra hard to make katana, the Japanese longswords used by samurai. Part of that was the special folding technique required by the less pure Japanese iron, another part was that a katana was almost as much a work of art as it was a weapon. That’s what you’ll manufacture in Shogun no Katana by Post Scriptum, a sword that is also a work of art. That’s why you need lacquer, wood, and leather on top of steel, and all of that can be decorated to make the sword more valuable. Shogun no Katana is a worker placement game where you buy resources and send family members to the shogun’s palace to arrange favors for you, but the main work happens in your forge. Forging multiple katanas at once is a puzzle element, and doing well here is how you’ll win. Your forge is a grid where each space can hold a katana in the making. A worker in the forge can activate a whole row or column and add a material cube to all swords there. There’s a catch, though. Adding a cube always means moving that sword on the grid, and vice versa. If you can’t move a katana, you can’t work on that katana. You’ll have to find the right balance to work on many swords at once but not block your own progress. It’s true here even more than it is in other games: greed kills.

Tabula Games

For a long time the Weybits have lived together with the Great Guardians in Faeriell. They have built their civilization in balance with nature, and all was good. Then the Corruption came, and nature started changing. You probably already recognized your role in all this. As a band of adventurous Weybits you set out to find the source of the corruption and stop it in its tracks. Every player in Sons of Faeriell controls a small tribe of Weybits, and together they’ll have adventures and find out what’s going on. Well… mostly together, Sons of Faeriell is a semi-cooperative game. You all want to find and stop the corruption, but you want to win by yourself. However, if that seems unachievable one player can switch sides and work against the others to spread the Corruption. Their new victory condition then is to end the game with victory for the corruption before anyone else can win the game. The core of each players’ tribe are the three Weybit miniatures with their differently colored masks. The masks look great, and they clip onto the Weybit minis and give them special powers according to their color. And the masks and minis are only the start of how good Sons of Faeriell looks.

Queen Games

Stefan Feld went to visit the US, and of course he brought a game idea back with him. Kokopelli is a light game – by Feld standards – and inspired by culture and art of the indigenous people of the southwest United States. What you do is, you collect points by performing a variety of ceremonies. Each ceremony conveys an advantage to the player who’s village hosts it as soon as the first card is played. When the fourth matching card is added to a ceremony it scores points and the cards go away together with the ceremony’s ability. I said Kokopelli is a light game, but it’s not quite that simple. Each player’s play area extends to half of their neighbors’ villages, and while they don’t benefit from ceremonies in another village they can contribute cards to it. This means they get the points, the village owner loses a special ability, and the active player may now start that ceremony for themselves, because it can only exist once per play area. So, a lighter game, but getting the best use from the twelve ceremonies each game will take some thinking. And since there are sixteen ceremonies in the game – twenty-five in the Kickstarter edition – you’ll need to think anew every time.

Funtails

Social deduction games tend to have not so much of a table presence, just some cards,maybe some markers. But no more. Feed the Kraken is a social deduction game with an impact. Having a large board is already unusual for the genre, but a large ship mini and a kraken really stand out. Components aren’t everything, though. What is this game? Players in Feed the Kraken belong to one of three factions on a ship. The sailors want to take the ship into the safe harbor, the pirates want to take it into their secret cove, and the kraken cultists want to take it into their submarine master’s lair. Which way the ship goes is decided in a process between the Captain, his Lieutenant, and the Navigator where no one can really be blamed for what happens and going towards that bad place is just the best option that we had, honestly. The Lieutenant and the Navigator change after every round. The Captain stays in power until he’s overthrown in a mutiny. Meanwhile, the kraken cult leader recruits more people into his cult. Suspected cultists or pirates can be thrown overboard, but if you accidentally feed the cult leader to the kraken the cult’s prophecy comes true and they win immediately. There’s more going on in Feed the Kraken than in any other social deduction game I can think of, especially more uncertainty and more intrigue. The only problem now is getting together five or more people, considering the current unpleasantness, but I consider it an investment into a better next year.

Dire Wolf

Dune: Imperium is not the first game where you fight for control of the desert planet Arrakis, but I really like the way that battle is fought in this one. A classic worker placement mechanism lets you send your agents to raise armies or navigate the political intrigue surrounding the only planet with spice. You can’t just send your agents where you want, however, you need a card for that location. That’s where the deck-building part of Dune: Imperium kicks in, you can buy those cards. When you take turns playing cards – unlike other deck-builders where you play your whole hand at once – the other players may suspect which cards you have for this round, but they won’t know. How you develop your deck will dictate your strategy, but your enemies will never know what exactly what you can do right now. This partially hidden information will make Dune: Imperium a very tense game indeed.

This week’s featured photo was taken at Lake Ohrid, part of the world heritage site “Natural and Cultural Heritage of the Ohrid region” in Albania and North Macedonia. There are many beautiful cultural sites there, too, but this landscape was too stunning to pass. The photo was taken and kindly shared by Charlie Marchant. Thanks a lot, Charlie! (Lake Ohrid, Macedonia, Charlie Marchant, CC-BY, cropped and resized)

Another Essen fair has come and gone, and to say this year it was different would be an understatement of some considerable magnitude. Let me just put this ahead of everything else, canceling the physical event in Essen, Germany was the only responsible thing to do. I generally have a pretty healthy immune system, and I bring back some sort of respiratory infection back from Essen every year. In the year of Covid-19, a fair with as many people from all over the world as the SPIEL was guaranteed to become a superspreader event. They’d probably have to invent a new term and call it a hyperspreader event. Frankly, I just like all you guys making games and playing games too much to risk sending you home with the big C. Also, if the regular SPIEL had actually happened it might have been shut down on government orders at short notice, or at least have faced huge restrictions on the number of people they could have in the halls. That would have been frustrating for visitors who’d already traveled there and then couldn’t enter, and it would have been devastating especially for small publishers who’d have all the usual expenses, but only part or even none of the sales. So, kudos to everyone at Friedhelm Merz Verlag for making a clear decision early, and even bigger kudos for creating the digital alternative.

That’s what we really want to talk about. How did the SPIEL.digital go? Where to even start? The central offering at SPIEL.digital was solid. There were some hiccups on Thursday morning when pages wouldn’t load and people couldn’t log in, but all that was resolved after an hour or so and the rest of the extended weekend was rock-solid. I work in IT myself, so I feel qualified to say that for a launch with that number of users just chomping at the proverbial bit to get in, it was well done. I had minor usability gripes with the site – please don’t use infinite scrolling for a long list that people might want to look through item by item – but no major complains.

The SPIEL experience was entirely different, of course. Instead of our usual approach of grabbing a random person at a booth and asking them about their new games, many publishers had video trailers prepared for that purpose. That’s vastly more efficient, of course, but also very impersonal. The biggest general sad detail about the SPIEL.digital, lack of personal contact, but I don’t see how that could have been avoided.

To learn more about a game, and especially to try games, most publishers used Discord for communication and Tabletopia to play. Discord was always a solid platform, so the only issue there was that I ended up with a bakers’ dozen of new servers that I joined. Tabletopia had already been pretty solid the last time we used it extensively, but still I was pleasantly surprised by how stable it was now. No load issues at all, and the only misbehavior I noticed was that you had to reload the page very occasionally when things had gone out of sync between players. Until we get the Matrix, a digital gaming table will never be as fun as a real table and a real game, but Tabletopia is a very good replacement by now. Plus, no long setup and cleanup times. Yay! We played two games on BoardGameArena as well, which is also a joy to use, but Tabletopia was by far the most common platform at SPIEL.digital.

Having everything online presented some extra challenges, of course. Explaining a game on a virtual table with only a little hand cursor is trickier than sitting around a table and explaining a game. All the game explainers we met took those challenges in stride and made sure we knew how to play and could have fun. That’s where the one big advantage of doing everything online came in, too: there are no space or game limits. The usual SPIEL experience, especially at smaller booths, of fighting for a table and then waiting for someone to explain the game, their voice mostly gone by day three from shouting over the fair din, didn’t exist this year. If you had eleven people for a four player game, then everyone could join one Discord channel, the extra players could join the Tabletopia pages as spectators, and after the explanation they could just launch some extra tables and play as well. Even better, if you really loved a game and wanted to show it to a friend later, you didn’t have to wait for a table and then take it away from someone who didn’t know the game yet. You just launch your own table and play. Despite everything being online and impersonal, we even still managed to play some games with total strangers and met some great people along the way. So that was, in total, pretty awesome.

Obviously, when things are this different, not everything is for the better. One thing I really missed was looking at random games I’d never heard of before. We did a little of that, but at the physical SPIEL there would always be some games that the title didn’t sound all that interesting, the cover didn’t immediately catch our attention, but the game on the table was intriguing enough that we wanted to know more. That didn’t happen much this year, for lack of tables to look at. I also missed looking in on the far-away publishers from Korea, Japan, Brazil, etc. who were technically present, but mostly didn’t have any interactive options. Implementing a game on Tabletopia is an investment, so I perfectly understand why they didn’t do it, but I can still be sad about it.

The thing I had least expected about SPIEL.digital, however, was how tiring it was. As some of you know, the Meeple Cave is close enough to Essen that in a regular year we drive there in the morning and back again at night, four days in a row. It ends up being fourteen-hour days spent either driving or struggling through the massive throng of people plugging the halls in Essen. Yet, coming home from that we were all much fresher than we were after eight hours of playing from the comfort of our own desks. I’m not sure why, probably the depression from being cooped in for most of the year has something to do with it as well, but in the evening I was simply done. Consequently, we ended up seeing and trying fewer games than we usually would, and fewer games than we would have wanted to. That’s sad, but on the bright side we did have a chance to try those games that we did. For 2020, that’s a lot better than expected.

The bottom line is, SPIEL.digital was an experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’m grateful to all the people who made it possible. You guys rock! Still, if possible I would much rather go to the SPIEL 2021 in Essen, so let me get a little preachy here for a moment: while the Covid-19 situation is ongoing, please stay at home if you can, wear the mask if you can’t, and when it’s available, take the vaccine if you can. Above all, stay healthy. I hope to see you all face to face next year.

If you want to see more details of our Essen experience, especially the games we played, have a look at our Essen 2020 Facebook album! Also, the SPIEL.digital website is still online, and the new games that were made on Tabletopia are still there as well, so if you want to explore the new releases you still can.

Project L by Boardcubator is a fun mix of mechanisms. It’s a puzzle game with similarities to Ubungo where you’re trying to create a given shape using Tetris-like pieces. At the same time, it’s an engine building game. Every puzzle you solve rewards you not only points but also a new piece to build your solutions, allowing you to solve more complex tasks and more tasks in parallel. The original Kickstarter ran in 2018, but now there’s more. The new Kickstarter not only has a reprint of Project L with revised rules, it also includes the Finesse and Ghost Piece expansions. The first one gives you side quests, basically, the rewards from which you can later exchange for extra actions on your turn. The second has some new pieces, and new puzzles with their own, new rewards. Two fun, tactical additions to an already excellent game, and let’s not forget that all of it still looks amazing, too.

New Mill Industries

If you’re looking for a new asymmetric game for two players, have a look at The Science and Séance Society. It doesn’t get more asymmetric than that, the only thing the two players share is the goal. They are both members of the eponymous society, and they both want to banish a particularly bothersome piece of chaos back to the void whence it was summoned, only that one of them wants to use science, the other occultism. The science player rolls dice to activate their cards. Once a card has all three dice spaces filled its special ability becomes available to manipulate future dice and speed up progress. When all cards are active, science wins. Séance has a display of five cards they have to juggle into the right order and orientation. Each card has two special abilities to activate, but only the one currently pointing the right way is usable. The players can also spend dice or cards to put up an obstacle for the other player. Normally, just putting stones in the other players way is not my style of interaction. However, running out of dice or cards makes you lose the game, so you have a strong incentive not to spend them frivolously. Messing with your opponent is expensive enough to be a strategic choice, not a simple take-that, so it works for me. The Science and Séance Society comes together as a quick mix of luck and strategy both players will have fun with.

Greenbrier Games

It’s one of the classic tales, a group of young people somehow ends up in a sinister fairyland and must escape back home. That’s your fate in Lost Ones, the latest Kickstarter by Greenbrier Games. Lost Ones is a story exploration game. As you explore the world tile by tile, you have story encounters with different outcomes based on your decisions and your characters’ abilities. If one of you makes it to the Hollows Tree, all of you can go home. While the world you explore is not random, you won’t explore all of it in one game, and beyond escaping the fey lands there are different endings you can discover for your characters. It’s hard to say how often you can play and still discover new things, but according to designer Gordon Alford there are more than a dozen different story endings, so it’s safe to say Lost Ones will keep you busy for a good while and look very pretty while doing so.

Spielworxx / Stronghold Games

Cargo ports are some of the busiest places in the world, with not a moment of calm at any time. Even though the port of New Orleans is not quite among the world’s largest, it’s plenty busy. It’ll give you more than enough to do in Crescent City Cargo. All you really have to do is use your workers to get cargo from your warehouse onto your trucks and from there either on a ship, on a train, or into a shipping container. Where you deliver your cargo gives you different rewards, you’ll have to give your workers time to rest lest their morale drops too low, and your trucks are pretty small to start with. You can buy more and bigger trucks, but that’s only one upgrade path. Moving on the admin tracks makes your standard actions more powerful, while building offices gives you entirely new options. Technically, all you do in Crescent City Cargo is move commodities around the port, but there are more than enough different options to optimize your process to make it exciting.

Grey Fox Games / Cosmic Wombat Games

The US election is just around the corner, and since the outcome will inevitably affect the whole world, the topic is hard to avoid no matter where you live. Consequently, a bunch of games have cropped up making mostly unfunny fun of one side or the other, with a wide range of quality. Now, I have a strong opinion on the madhouse that is US politics, but I really don’t enjoy those games. I don’t even enjoy seeing them. What I do enjoy, and I enjoy the hell out of it, is Campaign Trail, a game that simulates a US election campaign but doesn’t go into specific issues or people at all, a tight and tense strategy game of resource management and multi-purpose action cards. It is also back on Kickstarter with a second edition and with the The Green Party expansion that puts a fourth party on the board and adds a couple of expansion modules. If I have to spend mental capacity on US elections, Campaign Trail is probably the only fun way to do so.

LudiCreations

Whimsical is the best word I can come up with for Mr. Cabbagehead’s Garden, a game inspired by the vegetable illustrations in a Victorian seed catalog. Mr. Cabbagehead, the hero of our story, only wants to have a nice, tidy garden that might wins his Gardening Club’s special awards. But every time Mr. Cabbagehead goes on holiday, one of his busybody neighbors will show up and rearrange the garden according to their own sense of aesthetics. At least you’ll have some idea who the neighbor to put their nose into your garden will be and plan accordingly. Mr. Carrotbody will take the highest-numbered vegetable adjacent to a carrot, Callahan o’Corncob will take whichever vegetable is the only one of its kind, and so forth. The default mode for Mr. Cabbagehead’s Garden is solo play, but rules to play in two players are included.

Lookout Spiele

Agricola, besides being a great expert game, has a clever approach to expansions. The game is big, but its expansions come as simple decks of cards that replace the base game’s cards. Soon we’ll see the fourth such expansion for the revised edition of Agricola: the Dulcinaria Deck or D-Deck. Now we just have to wait and see how sweet this expansion will be.

Speaking of expert games that expand with a simple set of cards, Nusfjord does the same thing. After the Plaice Deck, the Salmon Deck offers another set of advanced building cards of Nusfjord.

Of Uwe Rosenberg’s popular two-player games, Patchwork is probably the most popular with its relatively light rules and its time-based turn order that inspired a chain of other games. In time for this year’s SPIEL – next weekend – there will be not one but three new editions of Patchwork. They all stick with the original rules but change the looks. The Christmas-themed Patchwork Winter Edition is pretty cool, but I adore the idea of Patchwork Folklore. This series of games will present the classic Patchwork with patterns from the home countries of Lookout’s partner companies. The two we know about for now are the very pretty Patchwork Folklore Taiwan and Patchwork Folklore China, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if more games would join these two.

Somewhere between an escape room, a choose-your-own-adventure book, and a point-and-click adventure lies Cantaloop, a single player experience by Friedemann Findeisen and Lookout Games. In this interactive adventure book you take the role of small-time criminal Hook Carpenter, newly returned from exile and eager for payback against the man who betrayed him. It’s sort of adjacent to the escape-room-in-a-box genre, but not the same. Depending how popular this is, I could see it turning into a series.

Uwe Rosenberg creates great lighter games like Patchwork and Indian Summer, but what I really love are his heavy games. For me, and all other fans of this side of Uwe, there’ll be Hallertau this year. Hallertau has a claim to be the first region in Central Europe where hops was cultivated, as early as the 8th century, and is still the largest continuous hops growing region in the world. Why all that hops? It’s Germany, for beer, of course. In Hallertau, the game, you’ll build your personal hops empire using worker placement and a crop rotation mechanism. With those two things together, I guess timing will be of utmost importance.

Libellud

The people most qualified to solve a murder case often have some trouble communicating clearly who the killer is. No one listens to the victim’s ghost. Well, almost no one. The players in Mysterium did pretty well solving the case with just the victim’s vague visions to go on. Now we’ll get another chance to solve a crime by associating beautiful vision cards from the ghost player with suspects and murder weapons. Mysterium Park, as far as I can tell, doesn’t make any significant changes to the Mysterium formula, but it brings all new beautiful art in a fun fair setting. If there’s one thing spookier than a dusty old mansion, its a fun fair.

IV Studios

You think gods don’t have problems? That might be true in a monotheistic system, but throw more gods into the mix and things get complicated. Take Veiled Fate, for instance. You’re a god, and all you want is for your demigod child to ascend to the throne of the world, but if you give away which demigod is your progeny the other gods will make sure that never happens. You have to spread your favor almost evenly between all the demigods, only giving your offspring the tiniest bit of extra help. The basic idea of having to hide which game piece belongs to you has been around since Under Cover (also known as Heimlich & Co or Detectice & Co), but Veiled Fate builds a bigger game around the idea. Beyond moving the demigods, players also influence quest outcomes with cards and control the game with their divine powers. Other things are beyond even the gods’ control, and events from city and age cards will keep everyone scrambling to keep up. Basically, if you loved Under Cover but grew out of it, then you’ll love growing into Veiled Fate.

This week’s featured photo shows the view down the nave of Fountains Abbey Church in Studley Royal Park, United KIngdom. The photo was taken by Spencer Means. Thanks a lot for sharing, Spencer! (The nave looking east, Fountains Abbey Church, North Yorkshire, Spencer Means, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)

Another classic is about to make a return. Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers was one of the most beloved Carcassonne variants to date. The stone age game follows Carcassonne‘s success formula, but adds some minor complexities like bonus tiles and fishing huts. In time for this year’s online Essen fair, there’ll be a new edition of Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers with new art, some new tiles, and some minor rules tweaks.

Weird Giraffe Games

You probably think that wizards have it easy, don’t you? All your problems gone with the wave of a hand. You never even consider that they might have their own problems. Have you ever thought how hard life must be for a magic university student? If not, Studies in Sorcery gives you the chance. The card game by Weird Giraffe Games gives you four months to finish your magic thesis, and for reasons known to many a regular university student you neither have the materials nor the credits you need to graduate. So off you go to dig up – literally – the ingredients for your magic, drafting card stacks that hopefully have what you need. Successful projects at least give you some benefits beyond course credits. A reanimated skeleton is proof of your grasp of necromantic principles, but it’s also a pair of helping hands. Studies in Sorcery is a quick engine-building game where you always weigh the credits for a projects against the potential benefit for completing more projects. It’s not complicated, but very thematic and full of meaningful choices.

Green Feet Games

History time! I’d obviously known that US president Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and I’d been vaguely aware the killer was one John Wilkes Booth. One detail I had never encountered before was that a woman named Mary Surratt was convicted of conspiracy to assassinate the president and was sentenced to death in a trial that is controversial to this day. That’s the trial you can relive in Unforgiven: The Lincoln Assassination Trial, an intricate drafting game for two players. You draft cards from a pattern of overlapping cards where more become available as earlier ones are removed and some of the later cards are visible while others are face down. Mostly, you’ll draft those cards into your legal argument where they provide resources to buy more expensive cards as well as trial points that decide the winner when the game comes to its regular end. There are some ways to win early, however. By discarding a card instead of drafting it, you may sway a juror to your side of the argument. If you convince four jurors to your cause, the trial is immediately won. Similarly, moving the Reasonable Doubt marker all the way to your end of its track will decide the case in your favor. Adding another level to the proceedings are the trial dice, which you also draft by their own rules and that supply all the same things trial cards do, but only once. Unforgiven: The Lincoln Assassination Trial leaves no doubt, reasonable or otherwise, about its 7 Wonders: Duel heritage, but it applies the formula well and adds its own new twists, creating an equally enjoyable and slightly more complex game.

Thunderworks Games

First of all, this is the place for an apology. We wanted to have a review of Cartographers out two months ago, but it’s just sitting here, unfinished, a casualty of Covid-induced depression. Just assume, for the sake of this news item, that the review existed and we’d said Cartographers is an amazing game that we love, because that’s exactly what it will eventually say in more words. I’m very confident we’ll say the same about Cartographers Heroes, the stand-alone sequel on Kickstarter now. The basics are unchanged, you’ll still draw cards showing shapes of landscapes, all players will still draw those shapes on their personal map sheet, and they’ll still try to get the best result out of the highly variable scoring rules. Cartographers Heroes will have new map sheets and new scoring rules. That alone will give you an all new experience, different sets of scoring cards are enough to completely change the original game. That’s not all, though. Cartographers: Heroes also has new monsters, and where the original monsters just took up space and ate your points, these new guys are more active. Like the zombies that keep spreading if you don’t contain them. To counter these more active monsters, you now get heroes to destroy them. If you’re still hungry for more Cartographers – I completely understand if you are – the same Kickstarter offers three map packs, new map sheet pads with special maps that let you explore the underworld and magical islands. In total, that’s a lot more Cartographers. Just what we needed.

Formal Ferret Games

If you didn’t get Formal Ferret Games’s High Rise off Kickstarter, chances are you didn’t get it. It was available in shops after, but sold out quickly. Not to worry, here’s your chance to get in on the new edition, with all new plastic pieces to further upgrade the game. High Rise, if you don’t know the game, is related to Tokaido: the player furthest in the back takes the next turn, they may move as far as the want to reach an action space, but they then have to wait until all other players passed them once more. High Rise is more complex, though. To build the high rise buildings you first need to collect floor, take care that you don’t exceed your storage, and then construct buildings according to blueprints in the different districts of the city. Making things more tricky is corruption. It lets you power up your actions, but the player with the most corruption gets punished. That’s the rough outline. I hope it’s enough to give you an idea about High Rise, and an idea why I’m excited for my second chance to get it.

Glass Cannon Unplugged

Just two weeks ago we talked about cooperative game Frostpunk. Now the Kickstarter is live, so let me treat you to a quick re-run:

Some of you may know computer game Frostpunk, a steampunky city management survival game in which the world was devastated by ice storms and you’re the administrator of the last vestiges of civilization, huddled around a geothermal heating tower that is the only thing keeping everyone from freezing solid. That cheery scenario will soon come to your tabletop in an adaptation by Adam Kwapinski (Nemesis, Sigismundus Augustus, …) as the first Kickstarter by new publisher Glass Cannon Unplugged. A German version will be available from Frosted Games. The game is cooperative for up to four players, and it includes all the important aspects of the computer game. That means building your town in the ice is only the start of your problems. You’ll also have to keep your citizens as happy as the situation allows, and your decisions will have far-reaching consequences in that regard. Even without much detail information, I think it’s safe to say this will be a heavy game that you probably won’t win the first time you play. It will also have an impressive table presence, especially if that heating tower is a standard component. Even without it, though, Frostpunk will be a game that people stop to look at.

One update since then: the generator tower is not only a standard component, as a cube tower it has a purpose beyond looking impressive.

This week’s featured photo was taken by Mohamed Amine Abassi in the ruins of Dougga, Tunisia. Dougga was the capital of Numidia, later flourished under the Romans, but declined after the end of the Roman empire. Thanks for sharing this beautiful photo, Mohamed! (Dougga, Mohamed Amine Abassi, CC-BY, resized and cropped)