There are certain things a solo game can do if it wants to be something more than a niche form of Solitaire and Onirim does none of them. What’s weird about this is that it almost feels intentional, as if the central design goal of Onirim WAS to create a niche form of Solitaire. I suppose in that sense the game is somewhat ambitious. Without the reactive social force of other human minds to contend with much of the allure of tabletop gaming is lost, so to design within such disadvantageous boundaries is sure to bring up some difficult, yet interesting problems. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because interesting problems can yield very interesting solutions. For example, games like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, The 7th Continent, and Mage Knight Board Game all work quite well solo. And though these games have almost no mechanical similarities, each is a mentally stimulating and thematically expressive experience in its own way. A good multiplayer game’s tension and intrigue typically manifest as natural results of its system handling goal-oriented inputs from several minds in opposition. So how could a solo game possibly hope to accomplish something along the same lines? By driving the player as deep into their own mind as possible so they start having similar conflicts take place inside their own brain. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective has nearly impossible mysteries to solve. The 7th Continent has a truly massive island to explore. Mage Knight Board Game‘s turn-by-turn hand-management is unbelievably rich with options. Each of these approaches ensures a constant state of tension inside…
You’re relaxing at home, enjoying a rewatch of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal 1954 action film Seven Samurai, when a thought pops into your head: “Someone should adapt this into a co-operative version of Blackjack and also add furries.” Your heart sinks. You’re thinking those dangerous thoughts again, the ones your therapist warned you about. You entreat your brain to come back to reality as intense feelings of disassociation sweep over you once again. A few harrowing minutes pass. Gradually, you return from the abyss. You barely made it this time. You schedule another appointment with your therapist. Two weeks later, you are on Board Game Geek browsing through Antoine Bauza’s list of published games. You really like 7 Wonders, so you want to see what else he’s made. You are just about to ask yourself why this French dude is so obsessed with China and Japan when you see it: Samurai Spirit. It’s co-operative Blackjack. And it has furries. You cancel the appointment. Of all the games in the world that don’t need to exist, I think Samurai Spirit might not need to exist the most. Thematically, it’s pure dreck, an insipid knock off of a classic piece of cinema with the nauseating addition of furry transformations. Mechanically, it’s a crude co-op puzzler largely determined by the shuffle of the deck. The production is decent enough, but decent illustrations of furry samurai men are still illustrations of furry samurai men. If you’re in the mood for a laugh, check out the “Author’s Notes” section at the end…
In a sea of uninteresting co-op games, Castle Panic is particularly uninteresting. Releasing hot on the heels of 2008’s genre watershed Pandemic, it had a brief flash of popularity in the form of expansions, alternate versions, and spin-offs which has since tapered off. Revisiting the game now, it’s hard to believe it was ever en vogue. Castle Panic has none of Pandemic‘s thematic creativity, social puzzle solving, or clever narrative structure. It doesn’t even seem to try. Instead of learning from and iterating on successful tabletop designs, Castle Panic‘s primary artistic influence appears to be early 21st century web browser tower defense games. And, like many games of that ilk and era, Castle Panic feels amateurish, desultory, and unfinished. It has the elegance of a mid-stage prototype, the tactical depth of a “match 3” mobile game, and the social impact of a jigsaw puzzle. The first thing you’ll notice when you open up Castle Panic‘s box is how cheap the components are. Now, I am a far cry away from being a snob in this regard, but this is some of the worst chipboard stock I’ve seen in a published game. The tiles and standees feel like they’re made of pressed construction paper, giving off the impression that the game is a prototype that just so happens to be on store shelves. The cards are even worse, like unpressed construction paper. But these are trivialities compared to the game’s real problems — and the precise psychological ramifications of lackluster productions are impossible to define in pragmatic terms…
Coup is a good game for people that don’t play games. It has bluffing, hidden roles, variable player powers, a dash of deduction, a pinch of probability, and many more modern game design goodies in a very compact package. When it exploded back in 2012 with a chorus of claims that it is “a lot of game” for its size, that’s because in a way it was. It’s an impressively deft design that mixes myriad mechanics with ease. The problem is these eclectic elements don’t add up to much, and Coup greatly misses the mark in several key areas such as narrative, balance of risk/reward, and social impact. This is a last-man-standing player elimination game where the winner is often the player that played the most passively. This is a bluffing game without bids or bribes, a hidden information game without much information in the first place, and a filler that is — in direct contrast with the genre’s name — unfulfilling. What Coup wants to be is a game about political espionage and subterfuge. To start off, you shuffle the deck of 15 role cards (3 each of 5 different types) and deal 2 face-down to each player alongside an initial supply of 2 coins. Players then take turns performing 1 of 7 actions. 3 of these are general actions, while the other 4 are tied to specific role cards. The general actions are: 1) take 1 coin from the bank, 2) take 2 coins from the bank, and 3) pay 7…
The first game of Two Rooms And A Boom is exciting. The second is a lot like the first one, but less exciting. The third is a lot like the first two, but not exciting at all. That’s a precipitous decline in enjoyment for any game, much less one that’s 15 minutes long. The reason? Two Rooms And A Boom, despite its orchestrated cacophony, has but a single note to sing. Two Rooms And A Boom is a social deduction game played by separating a (hopefully large) group of players into two teams: Red and Blue. This is done by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing one secretly to each player. One member of each team will be special, as their card will inform them. The special Blue Team member is the “President.” The special Red Team member is the “Bomber.” The players are then split between two rooms using any arbitrary means, and the game begins. It is played over 5 rounds (round 1 is 5 minutes, round 2 is 4 minutes, round 3 is 3, etc.). At the beginning of the first round, one player in each room is nominated to be the room’s leader. At any point in a round the leader may abdicate to another player or be voted out and usurped. At the end of each round the current leaders both choose a player from their room to send to the other. The Red Team wants the “Bomber” and the “President” in the same room at the end…
Why Tsuro was one of the first modern board games I purchased, I have no idea. I remember it intrigued me, but I don’t recall why. It’s simplicity? It’s box art? It’s price? It’s a fairly unique game, so maybe that had something to do with it. After all, the purchase was made well before my realization that uniqueness in the tabletop space is frequently out of alignment with quality. Case in point: Tsuro itself. This is not a good game, not even close. About the nicest thing I can say about Tsuro is that it’s inoffensive. But oh wait, it’s a game designed by a white dude that draws aesthetic and thematic ties to ancient Chinese philosophy for marketing purposes. And oh no, in the introduction of the rulebook it even claims the game “represents the classic quest for enlightenment.” It’s 2019 yo, some woke somebodies out there must be outraged! Personally, however, there’s another passage in the rulebook I find far more offensive: the one that declares Tsuro a “masterful blend of strategy and chance.” Which, this being a board game review and not a Twitter rant, is the passage I’ll be addressing today. Let’s cut to the chase, Tsuro is so shallow you can practically exhaust the depths of its possibility space after only a brief explanation of its rules. So let’s do just that. Tsuro is a tile-laying game played on a large square grid. Players are dealt three tiles each, then place their pawns on their chosen starting point around the grid. On these tiles…
This will be a very short review because there’s not much to say about PitchCar. If it wasn’t widely considered a classic dexterity game I wouldn’t have bothered to even play it, much less write about it. It is much more of a toy than it is a game, and an incredibly boring toy at that. I genuinely find setting up the game more interesting than the game itself. Truth be told, PitchCar is probably the most uneventful dexterity game I’ve ever played. I say that without an ounce of hyperbole. PitchCar is a racing game you play by flicking wooden discs around a modular track. You can build said track with as many twists, turns, and straight-aways as you like. Once built, each player individually does a qualifying lap around the track to determine turn order. The fewer flicks you take to complete your lap, the better your position. This part is extremely boring at higher player counts for obvious reasons. Following the qualifying round is the real deal. Players take turns flicking their discs around the track, each aiming to be the first to complete three laps. This is only slightly less boring than the qualifiers. If I was attempting to review this game from the perspective of a child, I might be more enthusiastic about it. But I’m not, because why would I be? PitchCar is a seriously uninteresting dexterity game compared to all the others I’ve played. Rhino Hero and Jenga both have way more tension due to their balanced mixture…
Disclaimer: The author of the following review has been using a misprinted Machi Koro card as a bookmark for the last three years. He felt obliged to inform his readers of this and ensures them that this fact is a mere triviality and has in no way affected his opinion of the game because why the heck would it? Ah, Machi Koro. The game of great first impressions and eventual disdain. I say that of course because every single person I’ve introduced the game to (myself included) have all experienced this, shall we say, phenomenon in nearly exactly the same manner and at exactly the same pace. In fact, this opinion seems widespread enough amongst us crazy board game enthusiasts in general that I believe an official term should be minted for it, so let’s do just that. We can call it the “Machi Koro Appreciation Depreciation Effect”, or the MKADE for short. So what specifically is the MKADE? Based on my own analytical observations of several different players of all different backgrounds, I have chosen to define it as a three-stage process in the gradual transformation of one’s opinion on the game of Machi Koro. The stages are as follows: “I really enjoy this game and would like to play it again very soon.” “This is not as fun as I remember it being.” “I never want to play this game again.” For the sake of immediate relatability I have decided to name each stage after common utterances I’ve heard in post-game discussions…
Greenland is an interesting game to discuss. Did I say game? I meant simulation. As a game, it’s much less interesting. I know, I know, that’s just about the most common criticism you can toss at an Eklund design, but it’s a common criticism for a reason. In Greenland‘s particular case, it’s because the game was obviously created first and foremost as an abstract mechanical approximation of the historical events it depicts. But, as a tabletop gaming experience, it struggles to even function. Everything from the overarching game structure, to the flow of a round, to each individual player action is maximally obtuse and filled with all manners of exceptions, edge-cases, and randomizations. Thing is, contrary to most other games plagued by issues such as these, it is perfectly apparent that in Greenland this is intentional. A cursory glance at the ridiculous rulebook for the game betrays this immediately. The deliberateness behind each rule is obvious, but damn there are so many. Eklund, visionary that he is, has tried to include as many aspects and nuances of his chosen theme in the design as possible. In doing so, he has created a chaotic, claustrophobic mess of systems without a shred of attention paid to the game’s rhythm, decision space, or social interactions between players. Okay, maybe that’s not 100% true, but it’s certainly what it feels like. From a low resolution perspective, I can absolutely see the validity in implementing mechanics that are as representative of your theme as possible and making that your chief design…
Upon opening the story book and beginning to read aloud the two-page prologue, I immediately knew that there was something strange afoot with Mice And Mystics. It wasn’t that the writing was particularly bad or the setting and theme particularly trite — nothing so plainly damning as that. Very simply, it was just the length of the dang thing. By the end of my recitation my throat was sore and I didn’t feel like playing a game anymore. The pacing of the game had been thrown off before the first turn was even taken. And then it hit me: I still had to read the chapter introduction. Mice And Mystics envisions itself as a hybrid of sorts between children’s storybook and co-op dungeon crawl. Cool! Problem is, the game inherits the absolute worst of both worlds: a simplistic narrative that no well-adjusted adult could possibly care about and some mucky rules overhead guaranteed to stymie the vast majority of children that come in contact with it. It is clear that Mice And Mystics wants to be a bridge between young and old, to speak to kids of all ages, to bring families together and give them a grand adventure to experience. But instead, it is a game with no discernible audience and a heap-load of design flaws. In Mice And Mystics, players take the roles of a prince and his cohort who are magically transformed into mice as they plan a counterattack against the evil queen and her minions who have overtaken their castle. It is…