Among The Stars is a derivative and highly repetitive card drafting game about building space stations. Players pass “Location” cards around the table and add them to their personal tableaus by spending “Credits” and “Energy Cubes”, which scores them points and activates abilities (which usually score more points). There are variable player powers and shared objectives to vie over for points as well, but they’re mostly inconsequential. The vast majority of player scores comes from the location cards. The game is played over four essentially identical rounds, and the player with the highest score after that wins. This exceedingly brief summary is about as far as I’m going to go into the overall structure and rules of the game, aside from some particulars which I’ll be getting to in a moment, as the focus of this review will be comparing Among The Stars to its two most obvious tabletop relatives: Suburbia and 7 Wonders. Spoiler alert: they are both far superior games. The set-up rules for Among The Stars begin with an immediate red flag: “The game can be played in two modes: Aggressive and Non-Aggressive.” Is it so much to ask designers to design their games instead of leaving it the players? I’m all for optional variants and other methods of extending the longevity of a game that may otherwise exhaust itself after a few too many plays, but to place this choice front and center in your game’s set-up betrays a serious lack of confidence in the appeal of your game. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just a…
Saboteur is a poor game that doesn’t do the little it does very well. As a bluffing game, it is pathetically one-note. As a take that card game, it is lifeless and undramatic. As a route building game, it is simplistic to the point of mindlessness. I know the game has earned its fair share of devotees over the 15 years since its release (there are some very enthusiastic reviews on BGG as evidence of this), but this is a view I do not share in the slightest. It’s a fairly unique title, sure, but it’s also shallow, repetitive, and obnoxious. In fact, the game’s flawed nature is so openly admitted to — even by its fans — that perhaps there’s not much of a reason for me to be writing this review. Thing is, though I agree with all the commonly acknowledged problems that Saboteur has, I personally find it to have many, many more. Saboteur is a game about a group of dwarves mining for gold. Some of the players play as good little dwarves trying to get to the gold stash, while others play as the titular Saboteurs: evil, butthole dwarves eager to stop the gold from being found. The game is played over a series of three rounds. At the beginning of each the map of the mine is set up by placing the entrance card at one end of the table and three “Goal” cards face-down at the other, one of which is hiding the gold…
Ambitious doesn’t even begin to describe Vast: The Crystal Caverns, a five-player, highly asymmetric take on the well-worn “Knight vs. Dragon vs. Goblins vs. Thief vs. Sentient Cave” theme. The workmanship here is plain as day, as evidenced by an impressive slew of mechanics and ideas that connect through an enticing narrative core that keeps the action centralized and on track. It’s no wonder that upon release the game garnered acclaim for its unorthodox approach to the traditional dungeon crawl and for aggressively pushing the boundaries of asymmetric game design. It is quite unfortunate then that, despite its ambition and creativity, the experience of Vast: The Crystal Caverns amounts to little more than dealing with an unwieldy mess of overly specific rules and player interactions. Even more, Vast‘s problems run so far and deep that it calls into question whether asymmetry on this scale is even desirable in a tabletop game. Leder Games seems to think it is, as they have since doubled down on the concept with the highly praised 2018 title Root. But alas, that is another game for another review, and currently we must get back to the disappointment at hand that is Vast. Let’s start with something (relatively) positive for once: the art. Vast is colorfully illustrated in a charming comic-fantasy style that personally calls to memory the Spaceman Spiff strips from Calvin & Hobbes. Judging by the art alone, you might think the game is a simplified miniature tactics game such as Arcadia Quest. It isn’t. Not at all. So there’s a…
Leo Colivini’s Cartagena is a brief, to-the-point racing game, so this will be a brief, to-the-point review. I like this game. It’s simple, unique, and just tactical enough to be engaging. Its rules explanation is accomplished on a single page (though the recent 2017 edition comes with several options and variants we won’t be getting into), and its set up, though modular, is quick and painless. Cartagena is a game that is easy to teach, easy to play, but somehow (for me, at least) not easy to dismiss. Cartagena has only the slightest veneer of a theme. Each player controls a squad of pirates trying to be the first to escape to safety following a jailbreak from the titular prison (which the game overview humorously pretends is based on real events). Really though, this is almost purely an abstract. It is played on a linear board covered with vaguely pirate-y symbols such as lanterns and pistols. Players take turns playing cards with the same vaguely pirate-y symbols on them, allowing them to advance one of their pirates to the next matching symbol available on the board — not entirely unlike the ubiquitous children’s game Candy Land. If a player doesn’t want to play a card, they may instead choose to move any of their pirates backward to the first space with one or two other pirates on it, which allows them to draw one or two additional cards. These are the only two actions available to the players, though they are allowed up…
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is the very definition of a classic. That a simple storytelling game from 1981 holds up effortlessly amongst a deluge of modern narrative and thematic designs is all you need to know. It is a unique and fascinating game that when first released nearly 40 years ago was practically a genre unto itself. Taking the core design principles behind the Choose Your Own Adventure novels — which began publication a mere two years prior — to great new heights, it added a staggering depth of choice to their fiction formula. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective‘s challenging, won’t-solve-themselves mysteries, rock solid investigation mechanics, and wonderfully immersive production design have kept it on the shelves of thematic game lovers for a very long time — an accomplishment that impresses more and more with each passing year as ever increasing amounts of players are won over by its singular charm. Now, I typically don’t talk much about components in my reviews as I don’t feel they have a very strong correlation with the quality of a game, but I’d be remiss not to state that Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a visionary production. Case booklets filled to the brim with evocative text, newspapers that nail the look and feel of an old-timey publication, a detailed map and directory that allow you to call on hundreds of different suspects from all over London, etc. These are components that make you want to dive whole-heartedly into the game’s atmosphere, to really act out the role of a…