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…
Before El Grande, The Princes Of Florence, and Tikal — but after already snagging his first two Spiel des Jahres awards in the 80s — eminent game designer Wolfgang Kramer released a humble little card game called 6 nimmt!. Though it’s been released under many different titles over the years, such as Category 5 and Take 5, it’s likely still best known to the world under that original German title. It has been reworked/reimplemented/re-whatever-ed many times since its original publication date in 1994 (the most bizarre of which being The Walking Dead Card Game in 2013), due largely to its exceptionally clean and easily iterated upon system. In addition, while most light-weight card games from the mid-90s have long since faded into obscurity, 6 nimmt! has displayed impressive longevity with consistent print runs and sales. Today, despite its simplistic nature, 6 nimmt! remains one of Kramer’s best known designs and seems to have become something of a minor classic. That’s a laudable feat for any game, much less one with barely a handful of rules, so let’s take a closer look! 6 nimmt! is a simultaneous action selection card game lasting exactly ten rounds in which players attempt to add cards from their personal hands to one of four shared rows in the center of the table. Players start with ten cards, one for each round, and the cards are numbered 1 through 104 without duplicates. Distinct from this numeric value, cards also have point values (it’s golf rules, ladies and gentleman — points are bad). Each round, players…
At the time I am writing this, Gloomhaven is sitting comfortably in the number one spots for thematic, strategic, and overall rankings over on Board Game Geek, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future due to its insane, and (somewhat) understandable popularity. After all, Gloomhaven, by Isaac Childres, is the game that finally supplanted Cosmic Encounter as Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower’s favorite game of ALL-TIME after all these years, so it must be amazing, right? Well, at the risk of undermining whatever shreds of credibility you could’ve potentially afforded me before I even properly begin my first review, let me just say… it isn’t. Welcome to the first review in the Bozo’s Guide series — a series purely about analyzing and critiquing table top games. For this review, we’ll be taking a look at the second printing of the retail edition of this ultra-hyped colossus of a game. Gloomhaven is a cooperative dungeon crawler set in a rather generic fantasy universe featuring every popular board game mechanic that has surfaced over the last decade and a half: campaign play, legacy elements, deck-building, card drafting, simultaneous action selection/movement programming, storytelling, secret objectives, light role-playing, you name it. Before going any further, I’d like to posit that this alone explains a huge portion of the game’s popularity already. Even for the strategy purists and euro-gamers, the game’s elimination of dice from its combat system is extremely promising. Heck, on paper Gloomhaven appears to be the only game you’ll…