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Curious about the ideal game for a five to eight-year-old? Well, here are three options worth considering that have proven to be adored by children in this age range. Dungeon Academy - Click title to find the cheapest price WBG Score: 8/10 Player Count: 1-6 Complexity rating: 4/10 Time to learn: 10 minutes Time to set up: 5 minutes Time to play: 15-30 minutes You’ll like this if you like: Racing against other players to do something. Published by: The Op Designed by: Julian Allain To read my full review of this game, head here. Dungeon Academy is a rol;-and-write game. This means the primary process of the game is rolling dome dice and then writing something down based on the dice rolls. In this game, the dce are rolled in a Boggle style box that forms them into a four-by-four grid which makes up a dungeon map the players need to traverse. Armed with player sheets, players journey through the dungeon, collecting potions and battling monsters. The game unfolds over four quick rounds, sparking a lively sense of competition as kids strive to conquer the maze with utmost efficiency. With games clocking in at just 10-15 minutes (though they feel even quicker with the four dynamic rounds), Dungeon Academy is perfect for those seeking a fast-paced adventure. The rules are a breeze to grasp and teach within a mere 10 minutes. With a variety of characters, each offering unique powers, and a distinct challenge driven by the roll of the dice, each game promises a fresh and engaging experience. Get ready to keep coming back to this delightful dungeon escapade! Marvel Splendor - Click title to find the cheapest price WBG Score: 8/10 Player Count: 2-4 Complexity rating: 3/10 Time to learn: 10 minutes Time to set up: 2 minutes Time to play: 15-30 minutes You’ll like this if you like: Building up your power in games Published by: Space Cowboys Designed by: Marc André Within this box, you'll discover cards featuring a vast array of current Marvel movie characters, instantly recognisable to your children. The inclusion of chunky, casino-style poker chips enhances the appeal, creating a wow factor when the box is opened. The game itself is a delightful experience. On your turn, you can opt to acquire three different chips, two identical ones, or use your accumulated chips to purchase a card, each clearly indicating its cost in the bottom left corner. Cards serve as currency to acquire other cards or points, propelling players in a race to reach the 16-point target. Games unfold swiftly, leaving a desire for more, as players strategise to either acquire inexpensive cards initially, building a robust engine to later claim pricier but higher-value cards or build up more steadily. However, those adopting a more strategic approach might find the game concluding before their engine is fully optimised. With its diverse cards and a dynamic, enjoyable gameplay style, children will likely be drawn back to this game repeatedly. This Marvel-themed version is the same as the popular board game Splendor, offering the same gameplay but with a more entertaining and engaging theme. Disney Dixit - Click title to find the cheapest price WBG Score: 8/10 Player Count: 3-6 Complexity rating: 3/10 Time to learn: 5 minutes Time to set up: 2 minutes Time to play: 30 minutes You’ll like this if you like: Thinking creativley. Published by: Libellud Designed by: Jean-Louis Roubira This game is a delightful choice for family bonding, especially if your loved ones are Disney enthusiasts and enjoy a touch of creativity. The concept is straightforward: each player selects one card from their hand of six or seven and provides a brief description, be it a single word or a phrase. Subsequently, all other players must choose a card from their own hands that best matches the given description. The selected cards are then shuffled and displayed, prompting players to try to guess the originally chosen card. Correct guesses earn points for both the guesser and the original card chooser, while selecting a different card awards a point to the person who chose it. The game provides joy and amusement, with interpretations and descriptions often leading to humorous moments. Typically lasting between 30 to 45 minutes, the game can be adjusted for shorter durations by reducing the points total. Alternatively, you can opt for a casual, non-competitive play, focusing on the creative enjoyment rather than scoring. Kids, in particular, will relish identifying their beloved characters and movies, immersing themselves in the charming and mysterious artwork. While the cards may become somewhat repetitive over time, each individual's unique interpretation ensures plenty of opportunities for creating lasting and enjoyable family memories. This is the Disney version of a very popular party game, Dixit that has many expansion and version currenlty available. Honourable mentions: Zombie Teenz Evolution WBG Score: 8.5/10 Player Count 2-4 Complexity rating: 3/10 Time to learn: 5 minutes Time to set up: 5 minutes Time to play: 10 minutes You’ll like this if you like: Fighting Zombies together. Published by: Le Scorpion Masqué Designed by: Annick Lobet To read my full review of this game, head here. Zombie Teenz Evolution is a legacy game, where you'll make permanent changes that transform the game into a unique experience for you and your family. Don't fret, though—it's incredibly easy to learn and play. One fantastic aspect of legacy games is their ability to introduce new rules gradually as you progress through different 'levels,' making it an ideal choice for younger children. Learning happens seamlessly during playtime. With its large, sturdy components, it's easy for little fingers to handle. The joy kids experience when opening a new envelope and discovering hidden treasures inside is truly delightful to witness. Each game session lasts between 5-10 minutes, and you'll be ready to dive into your first game within just 15 minutes. The rules and concepts are remarkably easy to grasp. This game offers substantial replay value, with numerous goals to achieve, envelopes with excitig new additions to the game to unlock, and compelling reasons to return for more playtime. The zombie theme leans towards cute and cartoony rather than scary, but it's worth mentioning if you prefer to steer clear of anything too monstrous.

Nucleum WBG Score: 9 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Brass: Birmingham, Tiletum, Barrage. Published by: Board&Dice Designed by: Simone Luciani, Dávid Turczi This is a review copy. See our review policy here Nucleum was one of the big hitters at the Essen Speil of 2023. There were long lines to get the game, and I saw a lot of people with a copy under thier arm. Anything with Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi's name on it will attract attention due to their extensive back catalogue of successes. Anachrony and Barrage being two noticable names in their collective CV's. I also think there is somehting incredible captivated about aterntive history. Nucleum is an Economic game set in the real-worl with one twist. Nuclear power was discoverd in the early 19th centurary. But this has been billed as a heavy game. It currently sits at over 4/5 on the weight scale on BGG. Thats a heavy game for sure. But how does it play? Let's get it to the table and see for our selves. How To Set Up Nucleum Place the main board in the center, matching the side of the board you use to the player count. Put Coal Import Wagon tiles in coal production areas, following player count rules. Set up Thaler tokens, Uranium cubes, and Achievement tokens into a general supply then put the victory point Flag token under the "70" spot on the VP Track. Seperate the base action tiles then shuffle the remaining 30 tiles. Add 10/15/25 based on 2/3/4 player count to the 20 base tiles. Shuffle this pile and split into three groups. Draw 5 for the market from one pile placing the others on the top of the side board and place the other two piles face-down next to this board. Return any unused tiles to the box. Next, set up Contract tiles based on type, give each player an Initial Contract, and create stacks for Initial, Silver, Gold, and the three types of Purple Contract, (they are marked on the back one, two or three) then place them into their allocated spaces based on the main board returing the rest to the box. Then shuffle the Milestone tiles, assign one face-up to each space on the Milestone track returnig the rest to the box, then place three Nucleum tokens on indicated spaces near the Milestone track. Then draw one card at random from the set up deck and place Power Plant standees, Urban Building tiles, Nucleum tokens, Turbine Rubble tiles, Urban Rubble tiles, and Mining Rubble tiles as indicated by the card. Now set up each players player board. Everyone must take components in your chosen color: Income markers, Urban Building tiles, Turbine tokens, Mine tiles, Worker meeples, Milestone markers, Victory Point marker, and Initial Contract. When packing up, put these all into one bag to make set up for your subsequent games a lot quicker. Next, place Income markers on the first spaces of income tracks. Put Urban Building tiles on matching level spaces face up. Position Turbine tokens on indicated spaces. Arrange Mine tiles on specified spaces. Distribute two Worker meeples to your supply and the rest to a reserve. Place three Milestone markers on indicated spaces, and keep three in reserve by the main board. Put Victory Point marker on the "0" space of the scoring track. Finally ,set up the initial Contract you received earlier on the bottommost Contract space. Now, each player chooses one of the four Experiments, taking the Experiment-specific components, and place Starting Action tiles and Turbine Effect tile accordingly. Note, that for Experiment B, this will include two Special Action tiles that you must place below the Experiment Board. You can get access to these later with a specific technology upgrade. Finally, set up the Endgame Condition markers on the main board and randomly select the first player and give them the First Player marker. Now, the game is ready to start, with the first player taking their turn. How To Play Nucleum On your turn, you will choose one of the following three actions: Play an Action tile on your player board and resolve its actions, then complete one Contract if you wish. Or, play any Action tile on the main board's empty railway space, placing a Worker then perform actions based on color matches. Or, peform a recharge action to gain income and retrieve all Action tiles from your player board. Players will take it in turns clockwise carrying out one of these three actions until two (or three in a two-player game) of the five endgame conditions are triggered. At which point final scoring takes place. Before we get into the actions lets look at the basics. Gaining Resources Thaler (money) and Achievement tokens come from and go to the common supply, while Workers come from and are used from your personal supply. You can spend one Worker to gain one Thaler, but not the other way around. If you need to gain a Worker and have none left in your reserve, you immediately gain one Thaler instead. This can all happen at any point as a free action. Uranium is typically obtained when constructing a Mine. When you acquire Uranium, you must either place it on one of your Mines or use it to gain one Worker. You can always spend one Uranium to gain one Worker, but the reverse is not allowed. When you build a mine you will gain one Uraniiuk for each mine currently built that you own. When you receive any income advancement (Thaler, Workers, Victory Points), shift the corresponding Income marker right by the specified number of spaces on your player board. If the Income marker is already on the last space of its income track, receive one VP for each advancement you couldn't gain. How The Board Works The main board displays cities with differnet colors (green, white, orange, purple, and Praha which is multi-coloured). Cities have urban sites, mining sites, turbine spaces, and power plants. Urban sites host buildings, mining sites have mines storing Uranium, and power plants can have Nucleum and Turbines. Some spaces are blocked based on player count or contain Neutral Buildings placed during setup. Red spaces indicate higher construction costs. Links connect cities through railway spaces when Action tiles are placed and turned into railways. Networks consist of connected cities with completed rail lines. A city is part of a network if it is adjacent to a railway or connected to a completed rail line with owned railways. At the tsrat of the game no one has a network so you can place your first building or tile anywhere you like. After that you must join up with part of your existing network when adding anything to the main board. Coal production areas, Ruhr and Silesia, represent off-map coal-rich region anyone can use. Long-distance rails connect these areas to specific cities for coal import at a cost of one, two, or three Thaler, although you can gain discoutns for this from your player board. Coal, Uranium, and electricity are transported between cities using completed rail lines owned by any player. Playing An Auction Tile The main action in the game is to play an Action tile. You will do this by putting it on the leftmost empty space at the top of your board. The placed Action tiles will stay in place until a Recharge action is taken. You can then carry out both actions on the tile in any order. The tiles show the fivemain actions which will be detailed below. You can skip actions if you wish; nothing is mandatory. When using a Special Directive tile (Starting Action tile with a black background), you can choose and perform any one of the five main actions with a one Thaler discount. This is a nice option becasue you can do anythig you like at a discount but you can only carry out one action instead of two with this tile. Before, between, or after actions, as a free action you can fulfill one Contract per turn. You can fulfill Contracts on your board or Purple Contracts on the side board. Purple Contracts don't get replaced as can be fulfilled pnce by all players. to fulfil a contract you simply must meet the requirements shown on the contract tile and you can then gain the benefits shown and flip the Contract face down. Freed Contract spots are available for new Contracts. Placing A Railway Tile The second main action in the game is to use an action tile to place a railway line. First, put an Action tile on an emplty link, using a Worker to mark ownership. Then, resolve any action(s) with a color match. Each end of the tiles have a colour. If you place the tile into a city or touching another tile and match the colour you can carry out the actions on this half of the tile. When you have carroied out the avtions of any matched colour, if the rail line is complete with tracks, flip the tiles over to the track side. If the track has two or more pieces in it all players hwo added track to this part of the line then scores a victory point bonus as shown on the bottom right of the board. This is differnet for each player count. When you place a tile like this, the tile doesn't have to be in your network; placing a Railway tile extends or creates a new network. If you don't have a Worker when you do this, you can spend a Uranium to get one. Special Directive tiles can't be placed as railways. To place a tile on a red railway space, pay two Thaler; otherwise, you can't place it there. If other players gain matched actions when yu place a tile this way, they resolve them after you finish. The tiles show symbols for the five main actions in the game. I will now go through these actions. understanding these will give you a basis for understanidng the main game. Main Actions: Urbanise This action lets you place Urban Buildings on the map. First you must choose an Urban Building tile from your player board. Then pay the cost shown to the left of its row (two Thaler for the first row, three Thaler for the second, etc.).then place the chosen tile onto an empty urban site within one of your networks on the main board. You must put the tile onto a matching site shown by the differnet building types. Some site shave two icons. If there are two options for your tile in one city and one has two icons and th eother has one you must put the Building in a single-type space in the chosen city. Some locations have a discount icon where you can reduce the total payment by one or two Thaler. Level-IV Buildings have two icons. There columns icons as well as being considered Government buildings. You want to place the buildings onto the main board in order energise them to gain benefits and achievements tokens n the game and to score points for them at the end of the game. Main Actions: Industrialise Use this action to place Mines and Turbines on the map. First, choose a Mine or Turbine from your player board. Then pay the cost on the left of its row (one Worker for the first row, 2 Workers for the second, etc.). Then put the Mine or Turbine onto a corresponding space within one of your networks on the main board. The Turbines provide an ongoing special ability to produce additional Uranium used during an energise action, more on that below. When you place a mine you will gain Uranium equal to the total Mines on the board, including the new one. Adding this to the new Mine or others you own if you prefer. When you build both the Turbine and Mine from a rown on your board you will gain an additional perminant reward, such as to reduce to the cost of coal. Main Actions: Develop This action allows you to buy one Action tile from the market by paying the specified Thaler amount as shown below it (zero to 2two). You can then if you wish pay an additional two Thaler plus the cost below the tile to purchase a second tile. After buying one or two tiles, shift the remaining tiles right to close gaps and refill from the draw pile. If the draw pile is empty, replenish it from the setup piles. Main Actions: Contract Carrying out ths action allows you to choose a Silver or Gold Contract from the main board and add it to any empty Contract space on the right side of your player board. You will then receive the corresponding reward shown on that Contract space. Some of the Action tiles for this action show the icon twice, if this is the case, you can get the reward twice. After taking a Contract, draw a new Contract of the same color (Silver or Gold) to refill the offer. If no more tiles of the required color are available, draw the other color. If neither color remains, leave the space empty. Drawing the last Contract from the last pile triggers an endgame condition. Purple Contracts cannot be taken with the Contract Action. Treat them as everyones to try ans fulfil, but the first player to claim them from the side board prevents others from fulfilling them. Some contracts will alllow you to unlock level one, two or three technologies. To do this, simply chose th eone you want from the specific level or above and slide it. Technologies will either offer a one time bonus or ongoing bonus. Main Actions: Energise This is the most complex part of the game buy runs relitivley simply once you have done it once. You will take this action to Energise previously placed Buildings to gain the benefit, experience and end game points shpwn on the building tile. To do this you must first choose a power plant (Riesa, Zittau, Glashütte, Grimma, or Plauen). You must then be able to transport coal and/or Uranium to this power plant using completed rail lines equal to the amount needed on the building you want to energise. For coal, you can import any amount you can afford based on the current cost. For Uranium, you can transport from your connected Mines to the power plant if the power plant has been upgraded to Nuclear, one for each Turbine (plus an additional amount for each extra Turbine) plus one for the plant itself. Pay must pay one Thaler to another player if using their Turbine. You will then receive Achievement tokens equal to the Building's requirement and any printed benefits and must then flip the building to show its energised side. Recharge If you find yourself in need of additional resources, have exhausted your action tiles, or simply sense it is the right moment, you have the option to take a recharge action on your turn. During the recharge, you'll receive Thaler, Workers, and Victory Points from your income tracks, determined by the current levels of both your income markers and the number of action tiles you've placed. Pay attention to the vertical lines running alongside the spaces for the action tiles, perforating the columns of the three income rows. When recharging, the benefits are derived from the line to the right of the rightmost action tile on your player board. Even if you've advanced your income tracks beyond this point, you won't accrue additional benefits beyond this specific point. Next, you will place a Milestone marker on the Milestone track based on yoru current amount of achievement stars. If the Uranium marker is still here from set up you can then place it into any of the power plants to gain the benefit shown there. If a Milestone space on the main board becomes empty by doing this, perform a King’s Day Scoring action meaning the player with the highest currenlty placeed Milestone marker scores six points and the player with the second highest scores two. Then discard all collected Achievement tokens and finally retrieve all tiles from the top of your player board redy to be used again. Endgame The endgame occurs when two (three in a two-player game) of the following five conditions are met. The Action tile draw piles are empty. Both the Silver and Gold Contract draw stacks are empty. All players have recharged at least three times (no Milestone markers on the Milestone spaces). At least one player has unlocked all eight Technologies. At least one player has reached 70 VP. At this point, ensure all players have had equal turns, ans if any player has remaining Achievement tokens, they can put a Milestone marker on the Milestone track during this stage, similar to the "Recharge" action. However, no additional effects or income are triggered, and the one-Milestone-per-player-per-tier limit still applies. Then final scoring takes place. Players will score points for what they achieved during the game plus points for each milestone condition they met based on the multiple shown on any placed Milestone makers on the milestone track. If you unlocked your ultimate goal technology you will now score this based on how well you did against this. This count be various things depenidng on which experient you chose at the begining of the game. Then score points for any left over resources, all energised buildings, and finally any income tracks you got to the final three spaces. Most points wins. Is It Fun? Nucleum Board Game Review When evaluating a game like this, two key considerations come to the forefront: 1) Is it good, and 2) Is it superior to similar games? This is important because individuals often lack the time or inclination to invest in multiple games of similar length and complexity. And fair enough. Nucleum frequently draws comparisons to Barrage and Brass, both due to mechanics and theme, with Barrage sharing the same designers. While they undeniably share similarities, is Nucleum a good game? Yes, it's excellent. Is it better than these counterparts? No. Brass stands out as a phenomenal game, potentially ranking among the best games ever made. However, Nucleum is noteworthy and deserving of your consideration. Nucleum boasts numerous positive aspects, but for a more balanced perspective, let's delve into its shortcomings, which primarily reside in three areas: the rulebook, the art, and the tension in a two-player game. Let's explore each of these issues in detail. Firstly, let's talk about the rulebook. While it's not inherently bad, it doesn't quite reach the level of user-friendliness expected for a game of this complexity. Learning the game from the rulebook was manageable, yet in the initial few plays, I found myself consulting it multiple times to clarify certain points. This is to be expected and the information was always there, but not always where I thought it should be. The layout is a bit awkward, and the order of explanations isn't as intuitive as one would hope. Some aspects, such as when certain things are scored, could be clearer. However, the excellent appendix at the end and a useful rundown of main icons on the back page are very useful, as the icons are not always immediately intuitive. On to my second point, the overall art doesn't particularly resonate with me. While the box art is impressive, the board's predominant green hue isn't to my liking. The iconography initially presents some confusion, taking until the third game before it fully clicked for me. Admittedly, such a learning curve is not uncommon for a game of this weight. But I did feel the art did not help the process. My third concern is a lot bigger. The lack of tension in a two-player game. It tends to feel like a multiplayer solitaire experience for a significant portion—about 80% of the game. Only in the final turns do considerations for the opponent become apparent, potentially leading to some areas you want to access being blocked moves based on their actions. In most two-player games, players often build near the top right or bottom left by the coal fields, keeping a respectful distance until necessary. In three or four-player games, a similar dynamic emerges, but it constitutes only about 30% of the game. Things become more engaging on this side of the board with more players a lot quicker. Four players is very enjoyable but perhaps a tad lengthy. Especially if you have a few new to the game. Therefore, three players seem to strike the right balance fo rme unless you plan with the same group over-and-over. Another minor concern involves the box. While it includes inserts, there are no instructions on how to assemble them. The packaging features a QR code, but it only leads to a website about the game, not assembly guidance. Despite this, I managed to assemble it adequately, and it stores neatly as you can see above. However, when I include the player boards and main board, an issue arises as you can see below. Does this bother you? It certainly bothers me. I understand that larger boxes are more expensive to produce and ship, but in this case, a larger box would be more fitting. Ok, onto the good bits. And oh my, there are a lot. But first, combos! This game has some amazing combo turns. Quickly into the game you will work out that to do well in this game you need to plan ahead. Turns can be quite simple on occasions, especially in the early phase. But later, thay can get very complicated with one thing triggering another. Understanding how to manipulate this to your favour is crucuial to not only doing well in the game, but to squeeze out all the joy it offers. Doing one thing, to then do another, to fulfil another thing, which gives you yet another benefit is a joyous thing. Nucleum brings this to the table in a big way. In Brass, there's a deliberate mid-game point that I appreciate, yet it does interrupt the game's momentum. In contrast, Nucleum steadily intensifies as players' turns grow more powerful, and points accumulate rapidly. There's no room for complacency; maintaining the momentum is crucial. Deciding when to recharge resembles the strategic pit stops in Formula One racing—opt for a full tank and one-stop technique for a slower pace or run half full, necessitating two stops but allowing for greater speed. You will feel like as this as you plan when to recharge in the game. It's a wonderful thing. I also love how you can only gain the icnome based on how many actions you took. So, if you have built up uour income, youc annot then siply just recharge over and over to gain all those points and resrouces. The game very cleverly fixes this. In Nucleum, achieving top status in all three Income tracks is not really unattainable, demanding focus on two that you feel willhelp you the most. Attempting all three might lead to falling behind the others as you become too much of a generalist, and not enough of a specialist. The Money and workers Income rows contribute less to in-game points than the victory point track but provide essential in-game resources. So, if you focus on these two tracks you may feel you are falling behind. And probably wont trigger the 70 point end game trigger if another player is moving along the points Income track. But fear not. You may well catch up more than you think if you have done well in the other areas. Balancing this aspect of the game's strategy is delicately nuanced, allowing each player to imprint their personality on each session maing each game feel unique. The setup in Nucleum also offers many variations with diverse board configurations, and scoring methods based on Milestone scorers and chosen Experiments. However, after several games, the two-player version may feel monotonous due to limited player interaction as optimal scoring strategies are identified and become more easilly deployed. Unless you are seeking a solo style experience, the two-player may lose appeal. In contrast, the game truly shines in three- and four-player mode and has yet not come close to looking like it will outstay its welcome. While Nucleum ranks high for its variety, it falls slightly short compared to games like Brass. Despite this, there's room in my collection for both. I appreciate deep euro games with complex strategy, and Nucleum aligns with this. I envision playing it frequently in the future and would welcome expansions to enhance the two-player experience and overall variety. Additional experiment boards and action tiles could introduce intriguing options and heightened tension. I look forward to much more fun with this box in the future, now if only I could actually close the lid!

Last Message WBG Score: 7/10 Player Count: 3-8 You’ll like this if you like: Micro Macro Crime City, Mysterium, Chronicles of Crime. Published by: IELLO Designed by: Lee Ju-Hwa, Giung Kim Remember those Where’s Wally/Waldo (delete as appropriate) books you used to read? If you have played, when trying Micro Macro for the first time, do you think how this is such a good idea for a game, why aren’t there more like it? Well, here you go! Last Message sets players as either detective, victim or criminal. Your choice! (Hence the minimum of three players required). You need at least one player for each role. But you can have multiple Detectives if you have more players. In the box is six very busy looking scenes. All from a very different looking landscape, and designed by a variety of very talented artists. Including Vincent Dutrait, artist for Robinson Crusoe and Lewis and Clark and Stéphane Escapa who was the artist on Slide Quest and Maki Stack amongst others. The criminal and victim will sit one side of a provided screen, the remaining players, all playing as the detectives will sit the other side. Once one of the incredibly hectic scenes has been chosen, the player playing as the victim will chose one of the many characters to represent themself and places a small magnifying glass token over the image on the picture on their side of the table. This lets the player acting as the criminal know who they have attacked. The victim will then have 30 seconds to send a message to the detectives, writing or drawing onto a three-by-three grid. They can draw, write messages, whatever they like really. There are some rules around repetition, but largely you can do what you like. “I am the large red man in the middle of the picture, sat on the building. I have black shoes and am next to another man wearing green.” Then draw a picture of that. Seems pretty easy right? The Criminal acts as timekeeper, screaming stop the second the last grain of sand drops. They can then enact their main power! The Criminal, in an attempt to get away with their devious crime, will then delete five of the nine sections of clues before handing it to the Detectives. This will often leave pretty much nothing to look at in round one. The Detectives will often have very little to go on and may feel at a loss as to however they will be able to determine who the Victim is. Their only job, and how they will win the game for them and the Victim. But fear not. There are four rounds, and in each round, the criminal has less opportunity to intercept the message. With only four grids being removed in round two, three in round three and two being taken away in round four. What I have found is that most games are won by the Detectives and the Victim in round three. The rules offer variations if it starts to get too easy this way. You can allow the Criminal to erase one extra space per round, which is a good idea for rounds three and four, but just makes round one and two largely redundant. You can say it has to be drawings only instead of text, which is a good idea for younger players anyway. Or finally, you can ask the Victim to pick a weapon instead of a character. A much smaller, and harder thing to find. But what I found is it is quite nice to win the game! It’s nice to have a game that is quick and relatively easy to win, but still gives you that endorphin rush when you spot the right character. I don’t see this as a negative. And as a largely co-operative experience, why not share that feeling of victory over and over? However, if you want to make it harder, and give the Victim more of a chance to win, the option is there and it works well this way too. Overall, the game feels unique. The idea has been seen before, but this mechanic of the Victim and Detective against the Criminal with the partial information that you can pass between players is new to me. And it feels fresh and entertaining. This game works well with families, or in a party situation, and is a perfect quick filler game before or after a heavier game. It is rules light and low pressure for a party game. The game is a great way to ease people into a game’s afternoon or evening. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys looking at the busy scenes of Micro Macro and trying to spot the hidden messages and is looking for another game offering a similar experience.

Raptor Island WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2-5 You’ll like this if you like: Exploding Kittens, Plotalot, Star Realms. Published by: Board Game Goose Designed by: Dan Hayball I first saw Raptor Island at UKGE 2021 and picked up a demo copy where I made the below video. I instantly fell in love with the theme, being a big fan of 90's Dinosaur based movies! And found the game to be, fast, fun, and very accessible. I then saw designer Dan Hayball again at UKGE 22 and managed to get my hands on one of the final production copies, which was very lucky as he sold out at the fair. In fact, he sold out his entire web stock too! As such, this review has been on hold for a while whilst Dan waited for a re-stock to come in, but I can happily confirm that via this link or by clicking on the name of the game in this review you can go buy a copy of this great little card game if you so desire. But do you so desire? Well, let's talk about the game and how it works so you can set your desire levels to the appropriate level. The above video will talk you through the set up and rules, but if you would rather read it, then here goes. There was a rule change since then around the set-up which I will explain below. Each player draws three cards from the main deck. If anyone draws a card with the trigger immediately sign, then they must discard these and redraw another card until they have three cards. This is the rule that changed since the video where I said you don't replace them and have a reduced hand count. Although I suppose this could be a hard mode variant?! Once this is done, any Trigger Immediately cards are shuffled back into the deck. The game then starts with the first player drawing one card. They can then play as many cards as they wish, or none, before handing over to the next player. Players are looking to collect two Dinosaur DNA cards in their hand, and two Fuel cards collectively, before playing an Escape the Island card to win the game. The Fuel cards are played into a separate pile on the table for all to see, and become a shared resource. You cannot win by holding two fuel cards in your hand, they must be played into the central space for all to see. So, this means that everyone can use them, and everyone knows what stage this part of the end game mechanic is at at all times. Although of course, some players may be storing some in their hand to stockpile these useful cards and hide their current status. If you ever draw a Raptor card you must immediately play this in front of you. You need to try to get rid of this Raptor as soon as possible using one of the various cards in the deck that dispose of these pesky critters! If you ever end a turn with a Raptor in front of you that was there at the start of your turn, you are eaten and must shuffle all your cards in hand back into the deck and effectively start again. But as this rule only kicks in at the end of the next turn, you generally will have at least one draw from the main deck to try and find a card to help with your plight. As well as the obvious set collection, the games main mechanic is take-that, and there are some really fun cards in the deck that allow you to mess with the other players. Take-that can be tough to take in games but I find always works when at least one of three things are in play. 1. The take-that isn't too bad and easy to recover from. 2. The Take-that happens all the time to all players so doesn't ever make anyone feel picked on. 3. The game is so short that you don't mind if the take-that makes you loose as you can just shuffle up and play again. Well, all three are very much in play here, so the take-that is just hilarious fun. Sure, some cards may make you loose, and in a two-player game you will obviously be targeted! But the games are so quick, it works great. My favourite cards are the Sabotage cards where you can take a much needed item from another players hand, who also has to reveal their entire hand to you when you target them with this card. very useful when the game is in its latter stages and you want to check on the progress of another player. I also love the Raptor eggs, which you place in front of another player, and then when the next Raptor is drawn by any player, it goes directly to the player with the eggs instead of to the person who draw the card. Reminds me of a certain someone, from a certain movie getting very wet in the forest. Other important cards in the deck at the Gallimimus and Safehouse Key cards. The Gallimimus card forces you to search the main deck for an Dino DNA card and add it to your hand. This not only gives you the chance to get one step closer to winning, but it also gives you an idea as to how many other Dino DNA cards are in there, and subsequently, how many are in the hands of the players at the table. Crucial information. Not that you wouldn't have been already trying to win as quickly as possible. But you can now perhaps play that Sabotage card you have been holding onto to check on another players status if there were not many DNA cards left in the deck. The Safehouse key is perhaps one of the most powerful cards in the deck. There are only two of them in the game, and when played, you can search the discard pile for any ITEM you want, but then you must shuffle the discard pile and any Raptor cards in play back into the main deck. The Safehouse Key itself will be left in the new discard pile to avoid it being used to often. This is the only way the discard pile will ever be shuffled back into the deck, so is a great card to play when things are looking bad for you, and you need more time, or more cards. Or indeed, a good card to play when are doing well and want to make the deck less dangerous for you, but reducing the chances of drawing a Raptor card. All this depends on how many Raptor cards are out already. The end game mechanic where all players are looking for two Dino DNA cards that they keep secret in their hand, and two Fuel cards which must be played into the shared Fuel reserve is such a simple one, but raises the tension in the game so much and makes playing Raptor Island so much more fun! Knowing when the Fuel cards are in play and anyone at any point is potentially one turn away from winning changes the dynamic so much. If you are ever falling behind on the search for Dino DNA, but there are two Fuel cards, the Triceratops card can be a very useful addition! When drawn, the Triceratops has to be played immediately and will charge at your resources and remove one fuel from the stockpile. Sometimes this can be a real pain for other players. But other times, it can swing the game a big way. Similarly, the Compsognathus card forces a player to discard a Dino DNA card if they have one. Great fun if they just played the Sabotage and stole a Dino DNA from someone else and then instantly lose it! The game is great fun. Each game lasts between five and fifteen minutes. As such, I have never played just one game of this. At the end of the first game I am always keen for more and regularly sit down to play five or so games back-to-back. It is such a funny card game. It never fails to bring laughter and joy to my gaming table. It scratches the itch of wanting to play a game with my family and is so accessible with the teach and set-up, you will be up and running with a game of Raptor Island within seconds. All this means it just gets to the table more often. I love more complex heavy games but feel the need for quick, lighter, fun family games like this to ensure I can game at all times and at all occasions. To play Raptor Island you simply take the cards out the box, give them a quick shuffle, decide who will be first player, and begin! What a joy! The back and forth of the take-that, the partial knowledge of what others have, and the fuel card stockpile, combined with the gorgeous and deeply engrossing dinosaur art all make this a firm favourite for us. We take it everywhere and regularly play before meals and when waiting for friends. The cards are a good stock, and its priced fairly at £15. I absolutely adore this little game. And did I mention the gorgeous card art...

CLICK HERE for the Kickstarter page Moonrakers came out in 2020 and is one of my favourite games. If you like negotiation games this could be the perfect game for you! If you like-deckbuilding too, then you should perhaps seriously consider this jumping right up to near the top of your wish-list. As a stand alone game I absolutely adore it. You can read more about my thoughts on the base game here. But the team at IV Studio have not rested on their laurels. Not content with one smash hit game and perhaps one expansion, Moonrakers is getting a Big Box version, three new standalone expansions, AND a whole new free experience via a Steam powered game to play the Moonrakers in an entirely new (and spoiler alert, stupidly awesome) way. You can find more about it here, or read on. These expansions will be on Kickstarter from July 19th and the digital download available from Friday 15th July. All copies of these expansions were provided for free for my unbiased opinion by IV Studio. Each expansion develops upon one of the main mechanics of the base game. Deckbuilding, negotiation, and strategy. Nomad Expansion Nomad is my favourite of the three regular expansions. It adds a new navigation board and makes the game feel quite different. It helps make finding suitable contracts a lot easier, and introduces global events which shake up the game for everyone! On your turn you will move to one of the five sectors. Each one offers different contracts that align with their factions speciality. You must be careful as you can only align with other players and form a partnership for contracts with other players that are currently adjacent to you on the board. Knowing what type of contracts will come up at each sector allows players to build their hand and ship accordingly. You can focus on certain areas and then ensure you get contracts that will reward that skill-set. Something that was somewhat more luck dependant in the base game. Nomad also introduces global events cards which change the rules of the game in some pretty interesting ways. Players can be forced to travel to certain sectors, or be allowed to draw extra cards, or even be forced to give cards from their hand to other players. Overload Expansion One of the core mechanics in Moonrakers is deckbuilding. Overload is all about expanding your options with this. In fact, it doubles your options in terms of the number of cards. There are new contract types, crew, ship parts, and supercharged cards to add to your deck that bring in increased powers. Some of the new crew cards use IOSpheres to give you powers that last beyond just one contract. The IOSpheres are used on some of the new Crew cards, and are placed on them when first used, and removed one by one, each time you activate the card. What this means is that the cards will stay out in front of you between contracts, so you can start the next one with some powers already in play. The other main change this brings are the new contracts and powered up cards. For example, you can buy Reactor cards now that give you three actions, or two actions and the ability draw a card. The combo powers are a real treat! The additions to the contracts are a lot of fun. There are head to heads contracts which if a player choses to do, all other players can then decide if they want to join in or not. The person who plays the most of the two types of cards shown will win the points, credits or cards shown on the card. There are also new Flex contracts which show a new star shaped symbol which acts as wild. You can complete these contracts using any card, but you will need to get to much higher numbers in order to be successful. Binding Ties Expansion Bing Ties is all about bringing new options to the negotiations at the table. There are 40 new cards that tie in with these new options. Binding Ties brings in more structure and strategy, encouraging more alliances at the start of the game and more power for each player who does help their fellow players at the end. The Binding Ties expansion brings in new player boards for each person around the table that introduces an entirely new concept. Faction reputation. Each time you complete a contract with another player you will gain reputation with them, move that p[layers coloured marker one space up your board. And reputation isn't just a nice thing to look at on a board. It can be used to buy new cards, crew, and even prestige points. It feels like this was the expansion that was made to make people who don't ever agree to help others play nice! At the start of the game, each player is given one of the new player mats and a coloured marker for each other person playing. As you successfully complete contracts with other players, you will move the appropriate marker along one space. You can then trade these reputation points for the ability to discard a contract or armoury card, to gain a credit one action or card, to draw one objective card, trash a card from your hand, gain prestige points, to block a hazard die, or the chance to subtract two from any one requirement. As I say, it feels like it was designed to encourage more interaction and partnerships in the contracts but I have noticed it perhaps goes too far. Where previously players may not want to help others in contracts as they will just help them get points and money, now players sometimes look to see where others who have offered to help them are on the reputation track, and decide against letting them partner with them as the know they are about to get a massive benefit. It's gone from others not wanting to help to players not wanted others help. But, mostly this is not the case, and the concept does work. It also speeds up the game, making more contracts successful and more rewards being made available. Luminor Expansion Now this is the big one! Luminor is a 1-5 player co-op PC or MAC based expansion that you load up alongside a vast majority of the base game components to play a digital hybrid mission based game. It's incredible. Everything just works so well. It's an incredibly slick operation that will take you through the core rules and mechanic changes with such ease it will make you question why more games don't do the same. But then, not many publisher put this much effort into the production of their games. Let's face it. IV Studio are a little different from the average. The plans are for this to be mobile enabled soon, but for now it's just on computers and laptops. It brings a cooperative nature to the game and as a download, is completely free! That's right, FREE! And you don't need any of the other expansion to play with this. Just the base game. Although it is compatible with them. In Luminor, players will move across a procedurally generated map, all powered by the games AI. This basically means it's a bit different each time you play! You will move through the map, planet to planet, completing different missions, similar to the contracts in the main game. You will purchase ship parts and hire crew just like the base game, but all along a narrative based arc that leads you to ultimately taking on an enemy general that you must defeat to collectively win the game. There are three end game bosses to take on currently, all quote tricky! But with more to come. You have to experience this to believe just how well it works. I was sceptical at first. I am not a huge fan of video games and play board games to get away from screens. but this is just such a flawless, engaging, unique and fun experience, I could not help but cast all my doubts aside and just have a good time. The AI in Luminor essentially just replaces the contract cards in the game, and therefore the competitive nature of the game. Sadly this does mean the negotiating part has gone. But the deck building is still there, and the negotiating is replaced with the narrative arc, sense of adventure, cooperative play, and some really cool new ways to play. Such as one contract where you need to beat another character in a shoot out. Who can cause most damage. But there is an element of choose-your-own-adventure here too. At the start of this contract you are asked if you want to play it straight or try and hustle them. If you hustle them, then you need to try and loose the first match playing three miss cards, this then ups the pot for a larger match up second time round. If you play it straight, you don't have this option. The game tracks all your upgrades and health and works just brilliantly. It really ramps up too. At the start. you will think it is a breeze, but the final few contracts do get very hard, and the amount of damage dice you will have to roll for the final battle is unbelievable at first! Overall These expansion's are amazing things. I love how the publisher has split the three core elements of the game, broken it down by the main mechanisms, and then focused on each one for the three physical expansions. And then Luminor... well, what can I say. I was blown away. It needs more plays, it's very early days, but my goodness was it cool! Everything just worked so well, and the introduction I played was just flawless in the way it guided you through it all. I loved Moonrakers already, but there is just so much content now, it is a hard game to ignore. More isn't always better. And I wouldn't say you need all of this, the base game alone is very good. But if you are a fan, and want to try the full experience then you are in for a treat. I would expect most people will buy one or two expansions, based either on the parts of the gam they like the most, or the part of the game they think needs the more development. But having all three, I don't see myself ever playing this game now without at least one expansion. Overload will 100% always be shuffled in. It is so simple, and doesn't add any more time, complication or complexity to the game. Binding Ties also I think will be used probably 9/10 games. Perhaps just when I am playing with someone completely new to the hobby. And Nomad I would expect would be included 7/10 times, again based on the players I am with and how much complexity they want. It's my favourite of the three, but does add the most in terms of rules. Go check out the Moonrakers instagram page here You can find out more about the kickstarter here. You can download the Luminor game on Itch.io right now, and then on Steam on July 23rd. And if you want to talk about it, join the Moonrakers community on Discord here.

Port Royal Big Box WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: TEN, Quacks of Quedlinburg, Lost Cities. Published by: Pegasus Spiele Designed by: Alexander Pfister Port Royal is one of my favorite push-your-luck cards games, but it has two small issues. First, the art is a little bland. Second, it has multiple expansions that are hard to store together. Well, fret not! There is now a big box version which fixes all these problems! If you like push-your-luck card games and are looking for a new game to add to your collection, then stop reading and get this game. If you are unsure, or have a spare five minutes and like playing spot the typo, then read on! I will cover the differences between this version and the previous ones first, then the actual game itself at the end! First up, lets talk about what's in the box. It's advertised as being BIG after all! Port Royal first came out in 2014*, and since then it has had three main expansions and some promo cards chucked in for fun. The promo was some rather nifty Gambler cards which were previously only available as a door prize at Stadt Land Spielt, then later packaged with Spielbox. This big box has them all! All in one tidy medium sized box, with some considerable art upgrades. *Port Royal was actually a reworking of Händler der Karibik which was also designed by Alexander Pfister as part of his entry into the Austrian Game Designers Competition. He won the top prize with this game and a year later published it in a slightly more polished version as Port Royal. Alexander worked with artist Klemens Franz for this version, and all subsequent versions and expansion. They look good. The cards are functional. But they are a little dowdy. For this big box version, Franz is out, and the Fantasmagoria Creative are in, whatever/whoever they/that is? I cannot find out much about them online, but what I do know is this. The big box reworking is their first foray into board games, and they seem to know what they are doing! Let's first look at the Box art and size. All the boxes for the original print runs are this size shown here, including the expansions. They are perfect for a small card game and stack nicely alone side games like Ganz Schon Clever and The Crew. The new box is bigger and fits everything in perfectly. The art is a little more realistic and evocative of exotic sea port towns too. The two new rule books for the big box version fit the size of the box, rather than being folded up to an inch of their lives and clearly illustrate all the games rules. There is a overview of everything with the basic rules on a double sided sheet. Then a full glossy rule book that covers everything perfectly. The rules to this game are not complicated but with all the expansions included, it is nice to know it has been laid out clearly! Inside the box, you can see how efficient both versions are with space. The big box version has separate compartments for each expansion. There is no labeling or initially obvious place for each one, but you will work it out based on the space required for each deck of cards. The cards themselves are a massive upgrade on the original. Here we can see one of the cards from the Port Royal: Just One More Contract... expanions on the top, with the new art version for the same card on the bottom. Art is always subjective, but think the new style is a lot more appealing. It comes across as more adult to me. More sophisticated and realistic, but also, just better! It seems like a significant upgrade to me. Like early sketches have been replaced by final finished professional artwork. Below you can see the comparison of artwork from the main game for the two main types of cards in the game. The removal of the border and new style is a significant improvement again in my opinion. These are all fairly functional cards. They do not need to give you much information, so the artwork is important. The new style makes me a lot happier! The colours, vibrancy and style are all a significant upgrade from my perspective. However, you can see in the comments below, it does cause issues for people who suffer for colour blindness or deficiency. Being able to see the symbols over the art is a problem for some, particularly the swords over the waves. Worth checking yourself using the two pictures below to find the right one for you. Away from the box, art, and card style, there is no difference here. This is just a collection of all that has been made so far. For the price, if you like the base game and don't have any expansions yet, this is the the clear choice. If you don't own anything yet, this again would be my recommendation. If you have all the original expansions, then it is obviously up to you based on the art and storage advantages. I myself gave away my original game and first expansion to the first person who found the Easter egg* hidden in this review as this big box has more then replaced them. This was the first time I tried the campaign expansion Port Royal: The Adventure Begins... The art for the character cards can be seen below. Again, there is full card art with no borders, realistic character art, and clear, bright, vibrant colours. Port Royal as a game is a simple game to learn as it is to teach; but it is so much fun! Depending on which version you are playing, this is a race game. The first player to reach a certain amount of points will win. Points are attained from buying cards with points on them, or completing missions by trading cards you have bought with mission cards you have found in the deck. On your turn, you will start turning cards over from the main deck. You can stop at any point and buy one character card if you can afford it, or take the money from a ship card. If you ever draw a ship card from a colour you have already drawn, you are bust. You can fight off ships if you have character cards in your possession with swords on, and a popular technique early in the game is to get as many characters with swords as possible. This is because if you ever have four ships of different colours, you buy or take two cards. If you have five colours, you can take three. And with the campaign expansion the Adventure begins, there is a sixth colour where you can then get four cards if you manage to get that far! So, being able to fight of same coloured ships and keep drawing is a hug advantage. Once you have taken the card or cards that you want, any cards that are left unclaimed will then be offered to the other players, one card per person. The other players have to pay you one coin as the active player for the privilege, plus whatever the card costs. It makes sense to push your luck beyond revealing just the cards you want to try and get some secondary plunder from the other players as they come to market on your turn. There are a few other nuances, but this is essentially the game. How far do you dare push-your-luck? Will you turn over just one more card to try and find the exact card you are looking for? Will you find my egg? *This competition has now closed. Congrats to the winner.

There are so many reasons why I love Board Games. But I wanted to focus on one point in this blog. That bit when a game makes sense. I play 100-150 new to me games each year. Exactly 162 so far this calendar year. That is a high amount I would wager compared to the national average. I am certain some people play a lot more. But I presume most would play a fair bit less. Anyway, let’s just all agree for the sake of this piece that it’s a lot. Because the point is, with all those new to me games, plus all the obvious repeat plays of those and other games that I have played before, my gaming itch is never scratched. I have never got to a point where I am not eagerly craving more games. It has led me to wonder if there is something wrong with me! And I have certainly bugged a few people by asking for one more game when everyone else is either ready to go to bed, already asleep or perhaps even gone home. So, I have had a long hard think about what it is about games that I crave the most. To see if I can isolate the core route of my obsession add more of that to my life in other ways. I have thought about what I enjoy most and really tried to narrow that down. I know I like playing new games over older ones. But what is it about playing new games that really gets me going. Well, after much thought I have come to the conclusion that the thing I love most about games is that moment in your first play when the matrix all comes together. You have read the rule book. Maybe watched a video or two. Explained it to your gathered friends or family. And taken a few turns and then your brains clicks. The rules make sense. The strategy starts to sink in. It’s that moment when you move from sort of getting it and knowing enough to take a turn to understanding the math or structure of the game to be able to take a good turn. It’s that moment when I go from partial confusion and sometimes blind panic to clarity. It is a wonderful feeling and I want to explore it a bit more here. Learning a new game can be tough, some rule books are terrible. Not every game has a video made for it. Some rules videos are long and complicated. It is not always an easy or enjoyable process. Rule books for games like Daybreak break the norm though. That is fantastic. Simple layout. Great examples. A nice pictorial introduction before you get into the meat of it. It is a fantastic way to learn a game. Some games use the play along app. Have you tried that? Dized is a very good one I have used a few times. They walk you through your fist few turns and teach you as you play without the need for any reading prior to starting to play. But it does make your first game very much a learning game. Which is fine. And sometimes unavoidable. But it does take some of the fun out of it. It walks you through the process in too much of a formulaic way for my liking, and essentially takes turns for you. It tells you what you can do from a rules perspective, rather than teaching you about your options and why you may choose to take one action over another. Or at the very least, creates a situation where you take turns and make decisions before you know the full game. I don’t like that. I also don’t like that feeling of uncertainty when you play a new game for the first time. Particularly if others around the table that you have taught are confused. If other players are having a bad time because of my poor rule teach, I feel terrible. It is a horrible feeling. It makes me feel guilty. I feel pressured to do something to make it better for everyone. But I am also confused as I don’t quite get the game yet and don’t fully know how to help them. It is one thing to learn and understand the rules. Even if I fully understand the rules, it is quite another thing to help people with the strategy and give them assistance when they show confusion as to what they should be doing. The strategy and structure of constructing a good turn is a very different thing to the rules. Particular in games like Root where every player is working to completely different strategies due to the asymmetric player powers used in that game. I can do that quite well now as I have played it so much, but learning Root takes at least ten games if you want to understand all the factions fully. But when this clicks for me, it feels euphoric. It is a wildly satisfying, beautifully clear, and wonderfully peaceful moment. I feel at one with the game. I can help others if they want me to, and I can construct well informed turns for myself without any confusion. It’s a great feeling and one that I have become utterly addicted too. It is why I want to keep playing new games. And why it seems, that no matter how many new games I play, the itch doesn’t go away. It’s not just that I want to play games. I want to experience that moment of clarity. And of course, that can only truly happen on game one. I need to keep playing new games. I have rather sadly come to realise that I would not be satisfied with finding ten games that I absolutely love; ten games I rate 10/10, that I play over and over. I would have fun with that. Of course I would. It sounds great. But I know deep down, as strange as it sounds, that I would prefer to play a load of new-to-me 7/10 games instead. Just so I can experience the endorphin rush when the game makes sense in my brain. That honestly makes me a little sad. I don’t like this about myself. But it’s the truth. Now that I have recognised this, and I am fully aware that it is unsustainable and a potentially unhealthy obsession, I am trying to work on it. There are several problems with this. I cannot always get hold of that many new games. I don’t have the storage space for any more. And the whole thing feels utterly wasteful and overly indulgent to my personal perspective of right and wrong. I understand this behaviour is not normal and very much something that needs to stop. My house is already overflowing with games. I give a lot away for free, but they often come in quicker than they go out and we are already over capacity. It is causing an unfair stress of my family about what we do with them. This was very much made apparent to me when we re-did the games room and I had to move 700 plus games out of this room. There were stacks of games everywhere. My children’s room. The landing. The living room. Everywhere! You can see some of this carnage in the video below. Where hilariously, you can also here my eight year old daughter on a voice modulator talking to our Cat! And this of course causes a problem. I want to keep playing new games. I would like to play more new games than I currently do. But I cannot keep playing new games at the current rate. Now of course, not every new game that I play is my own copy. A lot of new games that I play are at conventions, friends, or board game cafes. Around 50% this year were played in one of those three other ways. But this still means a couple of new games coming into the house every week. I recently had a big cull. Around 50 games were piled up in the lounge to give away. Most went pretty quickly via a local Facebook group. Perfect. No postage to worry about. I think I will need to do more of these. They will help keep the numbers in my house at a more controllable level. I think I need to try and get to more cafes and conventions. But these all cost money and I do much prefer to play in the comfort and peace of my own home. I find the noise levels in these places sometimes very stressful. And not ideal to my own personal requirements for the perfect environment to learn a new game. Great for a party game or game I know well. But less ideal for when I need to sit and quietly read a rule book. Or try to explain complicated rules to other multiple people. Ultimately, I don’t have a complete solution for it and part of the reason for writing this piece was to noodle it out in my brain a little more as I write it. But also see what others think. I would love to get your opinion on this topic. If you have the same issues. And what you have done about it. Does anyone else find that moment when new games make sense as deliciously addictive as I do? How can we satisfy a never-ending need for something that has a material, physical, and time based demand on our lives? I want to feel more fulfilled and satisfied in my life generally. Don’t we all. And I certainly don’t like the idea that my main hobby is hurting this rather than helping. No matter how much I play!

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NEON WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 2-6 You’ll like this if you like: Dice Throne, Unmatched, Funkoverse Strategy Game Published by: Hobby World Designed by: Ekaterina Gorn, Igor Sklyuev This is a free review copy. See our review policy here. I like card-based fighting games. I like cyber-punk, dystopian, fantasy themes. Helpfully, I also quite like board games. So, this seems like it should be a winner. Designers Ekaterina Gorn, Igor Sklyuev also made Master of Orion: The Board Game, which I have never played but it is a game that always interests me due to its theme and the fact it always seems to be available for such a reasonable price. Anyway, back to NEON. The cover alone intrigued me, and I was excited to try this one to see what new things it brings to the very busy card based fighting genre. Let's get it to the table and see how it plays How To Set Up NEON There are three game modes in NEON: Resurrection, Battle, or Squad. In Resurrection, the fighter with the most points is the victor. Battle is a last fighter standing situation. Squad is a team game where players work together to try and get the most points. The first thing you need to do is decide which game mode you want to play this time. When you have made your choice, shuffle the arena tiles and lay them out in a random order to form a circular arena. Next, assemble the drop ship and place it into the center of the arena. This will take a few minutes the first time, but then you can leave it fully formed. However, it won't fit in the box like this. Taking it apart is difficult as the cardboard connects very tightly, and I feel like I am damaging it each time I do this. A minor frustration for a component that is largely in the game for aesthetic purposes. It looks cool, but what am I supposed to do with it after each game? Moan over. Shuffle the numbered scoreboard tokens and place them in a face-up stack in the ship's central tower. They fit in very nicely and make up a little for the fact you cannot store the thing! The top token will let you know which sector to remove first during the first submerge phase. More on that later. Then shuffle the bot tokens and place one face down into each area. Then place the round tracker sheet next to the arena on the side that matches your current player count. Now shuffle the three equipment decks and place them next to the arena, and for the Resurrection and Squad mode, also shuffle and place the Enhancement deck. Each player now chooses a fighter and takes the cards, tokens, energy tracker clip, and miniature that comes with it. I store all these together in a separate baggy, so you can just give out the chosen bag to each player and it has all their bits. Some fighters have special tokens for unique weapons they alone have access to. I add these all to the bags as well. Take the matching player mat and choose the correct side to use based on the mode you are playing. For your first setup, take note of the top right on the mat, which will tell you if your chosen character should have a special token or not. Each player sets their energy tracker on this mat to three using the energy tracker clip and places their mini onto the drop ship. Each player shuffles their cards, draws three, and places the rest as a face-down draw pile. Finally, place the search tokens, dice, and HP tokens (HP not needed for Battle mode) next to the main arena, choose a leader, and give them the start token, and you are now ready to begin." How To Play NEON The game then runs through four phases in sequence and turn order until the end game condition is met. In Battle, this is simply when there is only one fighter remaining. For Resurrection and Squad, the game ends when the final round is over. All games can also end if all fighters are eliminated. Phase One - Choosing Cards The game starts with each player choosing two cards to use this round. The players will have drawn two cards to their hand during setup, draw a third card so you have three to choose from. The cards are split down the middle and offer two actions per card. You must choose three actions in total per round. To do this, you must use one card to cover half of another. You can do this however you like, rotating cards either way to pick the three actions you want from the six available on your three cards. The cards also have a number on the top which represents your initiative. The lower the number, the earlier you will take your action this round. When you have done this, place the two cards you want to use face down, with one card covering the other half. Place your third card down to be used in the next round. All players will then flip their cards simultaneously to reveal their chosen actions and initiative. Any ties in initiative are broken by the player with the leader token. Phase Two - Actions This is the main part of the game, where in initiative order, all players will now carry out the three actions shown on their cards for this round. The main actions are to move, search, fight or defend. But you can also gain energy or carry out the takeover action to claim the leader token, as well as your own character's unique special actions. Let's go through them all one by one. Defense - If any player plays a defense card, this is activated before any other player takes their turn, irrelevant to initiative. All players who played this action will add one forcefield from their player mat to their miniature on the main board. You can have a maximum of two of these at any one time. They will then also gain two energy. You can never have more than six energy. Attack - This is the main action you will be carrying out during the game. The first thing to do is choose a weapon and target. You can attack the bot tokens as well as other players if you choose to. They will reward you with extra ammunition as shown on the back of their tokens. Each player will have a basic attack shown on their player mat that allows them a limited range and attack strength, but once you have searched you will be able to add more powerful weapons that allow you to roll more attack dice and do damage from a further range. The area you attack from may affect your attack as well, potentially allowing you to spend energy to roll extra dice. Once your weapon and target are elected, roll the dice equal to your weapon's strength and the target's range. Certain powers on the weapon and your player mat will allow you to re-roll one time if you choose. The defending player may have some powers that could force you to re-roll or affect your attack too. This could happen before your roll or after. The defending player will then roll their defense dice. This could be affected by their forcefield, their location, or current gear. Once all modifiers and area effects have been taken into account, all attacks that have not been nullified are then enacted on the defending player who takes one damage for each attack they could not block. In Battle mode, this would mean removing one health token from the defending player's board for each hit. In battle, each token is worth one health point. For the other modes where some health tokens are worth two or three, you will remove one health point. If the target was a Bot and at least one damage was caused, the Bot token is removed from the board and added to the player's mat and can now be used as ammo. In resurrection or Squad mode, if a fighter loses their final health token, they become defeated. If their player mat is on the A-side, then they must flip this to the B-side and move their mini to the drop ship, essentially resetting back to their starting conditions. They can keep two gear cards of their opponent's choosing but can then draw two green, one orange, and one equipment card. If this happens when your player mat is on the B-side, then you are eliminated from the game. In Battle mode, you will already be on the B-side and are simply eliminated. Move - This allows you to move one space to either side of where your mini currently resides. On your first turn, you will be on the drop ship, and you can move from this to the main board for a free action. Note that each sector has its own unique power and this will apply to your fighter as soon as it moves into it. This could be to affect its attack or defense, ignore the damage from submersion (more on that soon) or for the train station, to cause you to immediately travel one more space if you move onto it. Search - Each area can be searched to find new weapons, gear, and ammo. Each area will have a symbol either representing a one, two, or number three sector area. When you search in a new area, you simply need to place a search token to show it has been searched. They can then take either three green, two orange, or one green and one purple equipment card based on which area they searched in. Later, if anyone searches in an area with a search token already present you must pay one energy for each search token currently present. All equipment must be immediately played onto your play mat. There are six different types shown by the icons on the botop left of the card. You can only have one card of each type. If you ever draw a card type that they already have, then you can either simply discard one of these cards or play it on top or underneath the other card with the same icon. This can then be used as ammo for the other card. For example, many weapons have a secondary action that can be activated if you have the right ammo card tucked underneath. The tucked card must be then discarded as this ammo has now been used, but the secondary power will often bring you very useful powers. Takeover - If you don't currently have the leader token, take this from the player who does and add it to your mat. This may affect this round's turn order if there was a tie involving the player who just claimed or lost this token. The player who played this then gains one energy. Gain Energy - Simply gain the shown energy on the card, either one or two. There is also a wild card which allows players to keep their option open and choose what to do on their turn, and either search, move, gain energy, or fight. Phase Three - End Game Check Once all players have played out their actions, then it's time to check the win condition for the mode you are playing. If this has not been met, then move onto the Submission phase. Phase Four - Submission Check the round track sheet and note if one or two areas are being affected this round. This will be shown by either one or two area token symbols being shown for your current round. The current face-up number in the middle of the drop ship will tell which area is being affected first. If you only have one area submerged this round then all players can plan for this as they know what was about to happen. But most rounds have two areas submerged, and this second one will be unknown to all players, so may catch you out. All areas that are submerged are removed from the game area, and all tokens on it and put back into the box. Any players who were on it are moved to an adjacent area and must suffer one damage. They can spend two energy to avoid this, and some areas will help you avoid the damage too. In this way, the area to fight in will reduce each round, and players will be forced into a smaller area. Play will then move onto the next round where these four phases are repeated until the end game condition is met Is It Fun? NEON Board Game Review A good fighting game needs to have clever card play. But a lot of great games already do that. To stand out and deserve a place on your shelf, it also needs to do something new. We have seen a slowly diminishing play area before, Blood Rage being a great example. Multi-use cards with a choice to be made about which part you use set in an Action Queue is also not uncommon in the board game world. Looking at you Gloomhaven. Unique asymmetric player powers and Dice manipulation are, of course, very popular with all genres, particularly in fighting games like this. Dice Throne being a recent example that also does both well. And I really enjoy the sense of exploration in the way you search and find cool new weapons and gear that can make huge differences to your subsequent turns, very much like Robinson Crusoe. But the thing that makes NEON stand out for me is the seamless combination of all these varying mechanisms integrated beautifully into the lavishly ubiquitous theme. The choice of whether this game is for you over similar games in its field will come down to theme. If you like the idea of characters from history battling it out against each other, look no further than  Unmatched. If you want to play with cartoonish minis go for the Funkoverse games. If you want a more dynamic map, with the cyberpunk theme, then maybe NEON is for you. Now, onto that clever card play I mentioned because, to me, it's so interesting. Each round, you will be picking three actions to carry out from the six available to you. Two actions on one card will be available next round, but one action will be taken out of the equation for the foreseeable future when you cover it with one of the other actions. This is a very interesting choice. You're not only thinking about what you want to do but what you are stopping yourself from doing. You must also consider what the other player(s) may be scheming. Like Colt Express, don't want to be firing into thin air. Some players will go for the kill early on, trying to inflict maximum damage to gain an early advantage. Another strategy is to play the long game, build up a powerful arsenal, avoid combat in the early rounds, and then pounce when you are fully tooled up. Trying to predict what other players may be thinking, particularly in a two-player game, is key. If another player moves away from you, out of range, while adding powerful weapons and defensive gear, while you blindly fire into thin air, you may find that in later rounds when it comes to combat, you may be severely outmatched. But of course, all of this comes down to the roll of some dice. You can stack the odds in your favor. Roll more dice. Give yourself re-rolls, and turn near misses into hits. But the fate of your attacks is still not fully in your control. If you do not enjoy games that introduce a chance element of luck like this, this may not be for you. But if you enjoy trying to manipulate the dice gods to look fondly upon you, and nudge the odds to be more in your favor, you may well have a lot of fun with this game. It looks stunning, each game feels unique, and the pace of the game suits my attention level just right! I have seen some comments on BGG questioning the speed turns come about. I can only assume this is in higher player counts with first-time players. Because for me, I find this electric. Choosing your cards can take a moment, but all players do this at the same time. Then carrying out your actions is an individual thing, but watching others do this is fun. So, perhaps this comes down to the crux of if this game is for you or not. If you like the idea of watching this battle unfold before your eyes, you could just fall hard for this game. When my family plays Colt Express, we take it in turns to reveal the cards we all played and then tell a dramatic story as each one is revealed one-by-one. We cheer and boo like a Pantomime. It is the most fun part of the game for us. Watching our choices play out before us in a hilarious series of failures and successes. If that sounds fun to you, then I would suggest checking this out.

Mezen WBG Score: 7 Player Count: 1-5 You’ll like this if you like: Candy Crush! Published by: Hobby World Designed by: Nikita Sorokin This is a review copy. See our review policy here Mezen is a new abstract strategy game from first-time designer Nikita Sorokin. It incorporates the traditional Mezen art style into a simple tile-laying abstract game that will draw you in with its mysterious beauty. After being around for a while but without European and US distribution, this has now been fixed thanks to the good people at Arcane Wonders and Hobby World. But how does it play? Let's get it to the table and find out. How To Set Up Mezen Place the main board into the centre of the table. Give each player a set of tiles in their chosen style. Each set should be the same barring the shape of the tiles. Along with the tiles, each player should take their score marker, placed onto the starting place on the main board, and their 50/100 score token. Each player will then arrange their 25 tiles into a randomly assigned five-by-five grid. All tiles are double-sided, either white or black. Be sure to set up the tiles on their white start but do so as randomly as you can. Mixing up the five different animals without looking or choosing is difficult, but I try to talk and look away as I do this. Next, take the deck of goal cards and choose 12 from it with a matching symbol on the bottom. Some cards have more than one symbol. That's fine. Just make sure all 12 you take have at least one matching symbol common to each card. Shuffle these 12 cards then deal ten out face down. Five above the board and five below. Place the other two back into the box. Then reveal the first two cards. Finally, each player takes five amulet tokens from the supply, placing the remaining tokens into a central area. In a solo game, take just two amulet tokens and place one more onto the goal cards for round four, six, eight, and ten. You will get these when you start those rounds. Give the starting player token to the last person to spend time in a forest. You are now ready to begin. How To Play Mezen The first player will now announce one of the five different animal symbols. They will do this by looking at their board and determining which animals cluster together orthogonally the most, or in a way that suits them the most. This decision will be based on the current round's goal and also the next round’s goal that they need to start planning for. The goal cards reward players with points based on the location of the tiles on their grid. Players will therefore, be looking to manipulate their grid each round to score as best they can. The goals vary from looking for specific tiles to be in certain locations, to certain tiles being surrounded by any tile other than the same ones. The light and dark side also matter, as do certain tiles being next to each other. The score for each goal is shown at the top of the card, and you will score this each time you meet that goal's requirements. So for example, for the third goal here on the top row, you will score two points for every fox that is surrounded by any card that is not a fox. As such, if you have a fox next to another fox now, you may want to move tiles so that one of those foxes relocates. This mechanic is executed in a manner more reminiscent of Candy Crush than traditional board games. Once the animal for this round has been declared, players can now move one group of this animal. A group consists of tiles that touch orthogonally, but you can connect two groups using your amulets if you wish. In this way, amulets can also be used to split groups. You do this by placing the amulet onto any tile of your choice, effectively changing that tile to another type and connecting or breaking a group according to your wishes. Above we see three birds in a group. They are taken out and placed next to the board leaving spaces where these tiles were. You must fill these spaces by sliding down the tiles that were above them. Now, fill the spaces now at the top with the tiles you removed, but now flipped to show their other side. When you flip a tile, it will display a different symbol. When you place the tile back into the grid, you will do so in an attempt to maximize your points for this round and the next. Looking at the two current face up goal cards, add your new tules into locations that will help you score as best you can for the next two rounds, but also potentilaly create new groups that will help you in these rounds. Once all players have done this, the current round's goal card is scored. Players will move their markers on the main board based on how many points they have achieved this round. If a player chooses not to score a round, they can do so, and take two amulets from the supply, adding them to their collection instead. The current goal card is then flipped to the blank side, and the next face-down round's goal card is revealed. You should always have two face-up round cards, except for the final round when you will have just the final round's card. After round five, you will score one additional point for all black tiles currently in your grid. After the final tenth round, you will do the same for all white tiles. You will also score one point for any unused amulet token and one point for any tile in any chosen group in your final grid. The player with the most points wins. In a solo game, you are scoring against a target as shown in the rule book. Is It Fun? Mezen Board Game Review I want to like this game more than I do. It looks stunning, and it's so easily taught and played. But there is just a little too much randomness in the game for me. When you choose which animal to group, you do so based on which other tiles you want to affect. However, you won't know which new tiles you will be given to do this because the reverse of each tile is random. There is no pattern. It's not like the reverse of a horse is always a fish. It could be anything. As such, there is a fair bit of luck in this game, which is not really welcome. It would have been so easy for every specific tile to have a common and consistent reverse side. Similar to the game  Shifting Stones where the reverse is consistent and also shown in the handy player aid. This way, you can plan for the round’s goals. In Mezen you must hope a little, and I don't quite understand this mechanical choice. That said, there is a real charm and beauty to this game, and it is very relaxing to play. With the strategy somewhat removed from it, the game becomes a lot less stressful. I feel less in control, but then also worried less about making good decisions. The way that you can slide multiple rows different amounts can leave me in a brain-melting situation. But never knowing for sure what new tiles I will have to replace them with helps relax my brain and encourages me to worry less. But there is some strategy. You get to decide which tiles to group, and being able to use the amulets to increase or reduce these groups is a crucial part of the game. Linking these three tiles like this in the above picture to affect the first three rows will make a huge difference to my grid once this is enacted. Deciding when to use your amulets and how best to do this is crucial to your success. However, there still will be moments, either due to the luck of the tile you just flipped or the next round's goal you revealed, where you may score a lot more points than you had otherwise hoped. This can be fun for you, but potentially frustrating for others. As such, I have found that I enjoy this game a lot more in solo. When I am not worrying about other players getting lucky and the injustice of it not happening to me! There is a question if this game is more style than substance. In terms of the art, I can see this. It is absolutely stunning. However, the components are just cardboard and potentially could have been better with nice acrylic tiles that were placed into a dual-layered board that holds them in place in the grid. That, along with consistent reverse sides, and I think there could have been a 9/10 abstract game here. Maybe that could be fixed for a later print run and a new version of the game? As it is, it is still good. Solid if not spectacular. But a game I can see myself bringing out on a lazy Sunday to relax too. A game I look forward to enjoying when I want my brain to switch off, and melt away into the Mezen art style, and dream wistfully of simpler times.

Daybreak WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Pandemic, Arkham Horror LCG (Mechanically speaking!). Published by: CMYK Designed by: Matt Leacock, Matteo Menapace This is a review copy. See our review policy here Originally billed as e-Mission, Daybreak is from the design team behind the cooperative board game mega-star, Pandemic. Although this time, Matt Leacock has turned his attention from a Pandemic destroying all of humanity to the impending global climate change crisis that will end human life as we know it. Matt, are you ok? We survived the Pandemic, so it was only a natural next step, right? Hopefully, we survive this! Although it would take some pretty major cultural and attitudinal changes, which thankfully the younger generation seems to embrace. Don't worry Matt, it will be okay! I hope. Goodness, what a mess. Anyway, back to the game. This has been billed as the next big co-op experience, with some phenomenal research and learning opportunities thrown in and I was very excited to get it to the table. But how does it play? Let's find out. How To Set Up Daybreak First, lay out the main board in the central playing area. Place the current round token with the clock side face up onto the first space on the round tracker. Then, place the six planetary effect tokens onto their starting locations on the board. Afterward, place the eight temperature bands along with the die for the Geoengineering and planetary effects onto the bulb of the thermometer on the bottom right of the board. Now, add the tree and ocean tokens based on your player count anywhere onto the map part of the board. Ideally, trees on land and oceans into the water, as this is the real world after all! But it's not essential. Then, place all the other tokens on the table nearby; the game comes with four handy (recycled) containers. One or two per player with a mixture of stuff works well for me. Don't worry about sorting this too much. Now, prepare the card decks by shuffling the global project cards, crisis cards, and local project cards and forming three separate face-down decks. There are also challenge cards, but these are not recommended for your first game as you get to grips with the rules and strategy. I would strongly advise playing two to three games before adding these in, if you want to win. Each player now chooses a world power to play as, taking the chosen reference card and board for this. All are available in a four-player game. With three players, you have access to Majority World, Europe, and the US. Two players choose between China and the US. And in solo, you can pick any you want based on the difficulty you want to play at. You can also vary the number of starting trees and oceans for all player counts to affect the difficulty. It's a good system. Finally, prepare the player boards for each person at the table. Each player takes their five starting local project cards with their chosen world power on. This is clearly shown on the back. These are placed face up above their player board into the five marked slots. Next, they add their energy demand token on the number shown on their reference card and add dirty energy, clean energy, and emissions tokens as shown on their reference card into their respective rows. Then, add resilience and community in crisis tokens to each player's matching areas as shown on your reference card. There are board extenders available if needed later in the game, but start with them in the box or to the side. They may not be needed, and certainly won't be useful during set-up. You are now ready to play. How To Play Daybreak The game is played over six rounds until either the single win or one of many lose condition's is met. You win if you can ever remove more carbon than you produce during the emissions phase. This is called drawdown. You will lose if either any player has 12 or more community in crisis tokens, the temperature rises to the top of the thermometer, or you run out of rounds. Players can play in any turn order they like, as the game moves through five different phases each round: the global stage, the local stage, the emissions stage, the crisis stage, and finally the growth stage. Let's look at them all one by one. The Global Stage The first thing you will do each round is draw crisis cards equal to the current global temperature. This starts with three but quickly ramps up. Place one face up to the right of the board, and place the others face down above this. Next, take the top two global project cards and choose one to keep and one to discard. The one you keep is placed on the top left of the board. This is now available for all players to make use of for the rest of the game or when you choose to replace it with another card in a later round. You can hold four of these maximum, and they are all very useful. Just pick the one that appeals most to you. This is hard to do in round one as you don't have much direction yet, but in later rounds, you will base this on your cards and current requirements. The Local Stage Now all players draw five local project cards. All players can now play in any turn order they wish, or even at the same time as others, but it does make sense to work together here and discuss your plans and actions with each other. It is a co-op game after all, and same cards and actions can help other players. The cards can be played in one of four ways. You will remember during setup you placed five cards above your player mat. This is your project area, and these five cards are active projects. Some give instant one use per round powers, others require certain things to make them possible. These are generally one of two things. Either for cards to be discarded, one of the four ways that cards can be used, or for certain symbols to be present on that card. Each card has a number of symbols on the top right. If you don't have the full quota of symbols, then you can tuck cards with the required symbols behind this, leaving the top part visible so that you can fulfill the requirements of the card. Some cards activate multiple times based on the number of symbols, so you may be able to use the card as is, but tucking more cards behind it will make the activation stronger. This is the second thing you can do with cards. The third thing you can do is place them over other cards to replace the project you are working on. The card you cover is then tucked behind the new card, bringing its own symbols to the party. The final thing you can do with the cards is tuck them under the crisis and global project cards. This will be shown on these cards when relevant, and tucking cards under them affects their powers, either positively or removing a negative. All players can use as many of their cards as they wish to tuck behind other projects, replace existing projects, or discard to activate other cards. You can activate as many projects as you have the resources for. This is the main part of the game that you control and is incredibly satisfying! Building up combos on certain projects and firing multiple actions at a time is wildly gratifying. The Emissions Stage On each player's board, they will have an energy requirement that they would have set during setup, based on their own country's reference card and specific demands. They will also have laid out a number of energy tokens, showing the clean and dirty energy that they create. Players must now check that they create more energy than they need. If they do, all is well. This can include both clean and dirty energy. It just has to be more than their requirements. If they have a deficit, though, they must then take community in crisis tokens to cover the difference. Players then add carbon tokens from the supply to the recent emission area on the top of the main board based on all dirty energy they have on their own player board, and for all emission tokens they have. During the local stage, players will hopefully reduce their dirty energy and emission tokens each round, as well as increasing their green energy to ensure they always meet their requirements, and slowly reduce their carbon footprint. But in round one, this will start badly for you. Once all players have added their carbon to the main board, one player will then move as many of these tokens as they can onto the tree and ocean tokens placed during set up. This represents the earth's natural defenses cleaning our carbon footprint for us. Later in the game, you can do things to increase the amount of carbon you can remove this way. If you have any spaces left over that could have taken more carbon, then you have reached drawdown. Congratulations! Flip the token on the round tracker to show this. Hopefully, you will now win the game! Just one final crisis round to get through. Any carbon on the thermometer from previous rounds can be removed and placed onto whichever leftover tree or ocean tile you have on the main board. But inevitably, and certainly in round one, you will have some carbon left over, and the game will go another round. The leftover carbon must be moved to the thermometer. Based on your player count, you will have access to two, three, or all four spaces for each row. When a row is full of carbon, remove all pieces and replace with one of the temperature bands you placed here during setup. If this ever fills up, the game is lost. Adding more bands could mean your current number of crisis cards increases from the level you had during the first phase. In which case, immediately add one more crisis card face down now to the row to the side of this. The Crisis Stage You now must roll the planetary effect die. The current number of temperature bands will dictate how many times you will need to roll the die. For each roll, move the shown planetary token on the board one space to the right. Each time the token moves over a scale symbol, you must resolve the effect for this particular area. Temperatures rise. More carbon is created. Trees are removed from the board. It's never good. Then, resolve the crisis cards, first with the face-up card, then the face-down ones. Each crisis card will have some way to negate the issues it creates. The crisis cards are bad and force you to lose cards or add community in crisis tokens to their player board. But if you have certain resilience tokens on your player board or have tucked specific cards under these crisis cards, you can reduce these negative effects. If you add enough crisis in community tokens you will notice your ability to draw five cards in the local stage is reduced. And eventually, if you fill this up, the game is lost. The Growth Stage If you have survived all this and the round tracker shows you reached drawdown, then you win! Well done, it's not easy. If you did not get there yet, simply move this down to the next round and go again. Every player increases their energy demand on the player mat to represent their country's growing energy demand. If you reach the final round and have not reached drawdown, this is the final way the game can defeat you. Is It Fun? Daybreak Board Game Review Before I begin, I must say, the rule book for this game is a thing of absolute beauty! The first 13 pages are simple descriptions of the main aspects of the game, how you play, what you need to do to win, and how you lose. It is a brilliant way to introduce the game. More publishers should take note. On to the game. Wow, I love this. The card play is so clever and gives you a real sense of control, precision, and satisfaction in what is otherwise a very chaotic, and sometimes overwhelming experience. It often feels like, in most games of Daybreak, you are way off victory, and that the situation will escalate way before you can take control. But I have won two-thirds of the games I have played, despite all of them feeling like an inevitable slide into loss each time. For me, this was genuinely by the rounds and therefore time running out. I managed to control the other lose conditions quite well, but it was always a matter of time that worried me. However, I have now won four times with two rounds to spare. I mention all this because it's tense, very tense. Even when you win, it will feel tense throughout. Even if you win with time to spare without any of the lose conditions being close, it will feel tense. If I have not made it clear enough yet, it is a tense game. Do not buy this game if you don't enjoy that. But, if you enjoy the tensions cooperative games like this can create and the challenge it creates to fight back, you may well just fall in love like I have. So, why have I given this an 8.5 if I am in love? Surely that deserves a 9 or higher? Well, it is close to that. The card play during the local stage alone deserves a ten. It's amazing. But I feel there are then four other rounds that are more admin and maintenance. You make some choices, but not many, and a lot feels out of your hands. This is fine; don't get me wrong. These phases fly by, and the local phase where you are 100% in control and doing awesome things is the bulk of the game. But this is why it gets an 8.5 instead of a higher score. Now I recognize that in a co-op game where it is players vs. the board you need these rounds. Where the game fights back. Otherwise, what are we all doing here? It just feels a little off balance in terms of what you do and what thw game does for a 9 plus game. But 8.5 is high for me. I don't go that high regularly, so this is all just context. Okay, have I justified that enough? Right, back to why this game is awesome. Other than the tension, beautifully constructed balance between wining and losing, and the brilliant interplay between cards, there is a wonderful sense of camaraderie created in this game. Sounds like a given for cooperatives, but I have found that not all co-ops do this in equal measure. But in Daybreak, it has been present for me in every game in a huge way, from turn one, no matter who I played with or the player count. The game feels hard and almost out-of-reach from the very first emissions phase when you realise the scale of what you all have to collectively achieve. This unites the players against the board in a way that makes the experience better. You feel connected and unified in your goals. You want to help others. You care about everyone's decisions. You celebrate your teams good turns. This is what makes cooperative games great for me. And Daybreak nails this. You may have noticed all the QR codes on the cards. Each of them links back to a webpage that explains how the card works for the game, but also gives you some interesting information on the cards real-world dynamics, consequences, and/or opportunities to help with the climate crisis. There is a huge leanring opportunitiy here. I would buy this game just to donate to a school. What an incredible resournce this is. I would recommend this game to anyone who played and enjoyed Pandemic but wanted that little bit more. Pandemic is a great game and has put board games on the map for so many new fans. It deserves huge respect. But Daybreak for me, and stand by, is a better game. I like the theme way more. I like the look and feel of the art and components way more. And the mechanics and strategy required to do well are so much more satisfying. Pandemic is a legendary game. Could Daybreak reach similar heights? Who knows. But it deserves to.

Die Of The Dead WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Ganz Schon Clever Published by: Radical 8 Games Designed by: James Allen, Mark Stockton-Pitt This is a review copy. See our review policy here Die of The Dead was a successful lockdown kickstarter that you can find out a little more about here when I sat down with the publisher near the end of the main game's crowdfunding campaign. Since then, two expansion have been released and the game has picked up a lot of traction. In this review we will look at the main game and the two expansions. So, let's get it to the table and see how it plays. How To Set Up Die Of The Dead For the main game, place the four caskets out in a row, left to right. Keep the lids on, but have the casket on the far left open. Underneath these, place the four casket boards in numerical order, and the four token boards. Place the tokens for each onto these boards. The token boards are double-sided, so make your choice as to which powers you want to have in the game. Next, assemble the Marigold steps. This takes five minutes for game one, but then is a simple process for any subsequent game. Each player now takes a player board and their matching colored dice. The player boards are double-sided, one showing a unique player power. Make your choice if you want to include these or not. Add the City of the Dead board to the main play area and then each player adds their three power souls (the dice with the skulls on) onto this board. Each player now rolls two souls (dice) to determine the starting player. The first player will add a soul into the first casket and one onto their player board. The second player adds a soul to casket one and two. Player three adds a soul to casket one and two and one onto their board. Player four adds a soul to casket one, two, and three. And player five adds a soul to casket one, two, and three and adds one to their board. You are now ready to play. Xolo Expansion Set up If you are adding in the Xolo expansion, there are a few modules you can bring in. Place the Xolo boards under the casket boards if you want to add this. The last player adds the Xolo meeple onto one of the boards, adding one Xolo token to it during setup. Place the other tokens to the side. There are also two new double-sided caskets for space three that you can swap in for variation, and new token dice that you can add to the City of the Dead, one per player Ofrenda Expansion Set Up Each player takes an Altar De Muertos board and places it in front of them. They then add one of their normal dice to the front of the steps, showing the single pip side. Any dice not used in lower than five-player counts are distributed evenly among the players. The unused power dice are added to the City of the Dead board. Players then add one die from their supply to each casket. This will be the scoring die. Note, the caskets are now seen as representing one of the four token symbols. One player now takes a start marker. How To Play Die Of The Dead Starting with the first player, players will take it in turn to take one action. This can be either one of the four actions as shown on the four casket boards. One part of this will benefit them, the other may benefit any player. The first casket is where you can add souls (dice) from your player board to this casket and the game. This can only be souls from your board, though, not your supply. Souls on your board are called prepared souls. Then, if there are at least two different colored dice in the casket, put the lid on and give it a shake. If any ones are rolled, then all caskets move one space to the right, with the casket in the final fourth spot coming back to spot one. The whole game is one big conveyor belt. The second casket is where you prepare souls. This means you can add two dice from your supply to your board. Now shake the casket again and see which player wins. This is the player who has the highest roll. In the event of a tie, it goes to the second-highest dice for the two winning players. Whomever this is can now prepare one soul. Any ones rolled move the caskets one space to the right again. The third casket is where you can remove souls. Shake the casket and remove any duplicates. The player who shook the casket then takes one token. The expansion variants for this offer the chance to add variation by removing all ones and twos, to remove half of a player's dice if you guess correctly who will win when you roll them, or to remove all dice from the winning player, although one of the dice is ascended. More on that soon. But with each of the variants, you now get two tokens. The fourth casket is where you ascend souls. This means adding them to the steps which is how you win the game. Shake the casket and ascend two of the winners' dice. You can then also move the caskets, gain a power soul, or ascend one more soul from this casket. Ascending means placing a die onto the lowest row that you have not placed a die onto yet on the Marigold steps. If there is a depicted bonus on this location on the steps, gain this right away. The bonus spaces will be to either gain a power soul, prepare a soul, or take one of the four available tokens. You can only have one die on each row, and the goal of the game is to get a die to the very top. The first player to do this wins. The tokens can be used whenever a player wants and offer the chance to swap locations of caskets before you roll, peek into a casket, adjust dice values, add prepared souls to caskets, and reshake the caskets. As soon as one player reaches the top of the steps with a soul, the game is over, and that player is declared the winner. You can play with all caskets open if you prefer, and there is a two-player variant where a dummy player adds two dice to a casket every third turn. Xolo Expansion Additional Rules When you choose a casket above the location of the Xolo dog, take the dog meeple and any tokens at this location. At the end of your turn, place the dog back into any location you chose along with one additional token taken from the supply. At any point in the game after a casket is shaken, any player can spend a Xolo token to take the action that relates to the shaken casket. The Xolo token used is placed onto the board you activated. The Xolo powers allow players to add dice from their supply or prepared souls to the caskets, change dice values by one, flip dice to the alternative side, prepare a soul, remove souls from the casket, ascend souls, or gain tokens. The new token dice are gained in the same way as the power souls, and when added to caskets, can gain players additional tokens. Ofrenda Expansion Additional Rules Players are now aiming to ascend as often as they can, rather than just be the first to do so. Players will now on their turn add any dice that are on top of the casket, more on that later, into the casket and give it a shake. They will now draft one die from this casket as their mandatory action. Drafting a die means taking one die from the open casket and either adding it to your player board or, preferably, your Altar De Muertos board. You must pay for this drafted die by placing a die on top of any of the other three caskets. The start player must pay with a power die from the City of the Dead. All other players then carry out an action of their choosing for this casket, either drafting a die for themselves, moving a die from their player board onto the Altar De Muertos board, taking a token, or if there are no dice or tokens, you may ascend one step, but you cannot take the ascend step bonus. After all players have chosen their action, the Altar De Muertos boards completed this round are scored. Scoring lets you ascend more souls up the steps. Altar De Muertos boards are completed when the fourth die is added to a row or column. Scores are tracked using the die placed by the steps, and the scoring die is moved up based on which row or column was completed, as shown on the Altar De Muertos board. Players can also discard three tokens to ascend one step or four tokens to ascend two steps. After scoring, if at least one section from any player was scored, move the caskets one space as per the usual rules. Dice on top move with the caskets. When one player has completed all four sections on their Altar De Muertos board, they ascend one additional step, and the game ends. Otherwise, pass the start marker clockwise and carry on for another round. The player that ascends the most steps is the winner. Solo Varient The Ofrenda expansion also offers a solo variant using the Altar De Muertos board. To do this, remove all power dice from the game, but still put three dice onto the City of the Dead, just use normal dice. During setup, add three different colored dice to each casket and remove the rest from the game. Use just one token of each type on each board. You will always be the start player but can now choose to move dice or take a token as your action. If you move dice, remove a die from the City of the Dead board. Tokens are removed from the game when used. The game ends when the City of the Dead is empty. The goal is to ascend 18 steps for a perfect score, although the rules suggest anything above 12 is good. Is It Fun? Die Of The Dead Before I get into the game itself, I want to touch on the effort the publisher put into honoring the theme and origins of this game. There have been some minor quibbles thrown, rather unfairly, at the game (check the comments section of the Dice Tower review for some), and I thought it only right the publisher had a chance to comment on this. "I completely understand people's concerns about cultural appropriation, which is why one of the first things we did was hire a cultural consultant and a Mexican artist to advise us on the game and tell us if they think any of it would be a cause to retheme. Instead, they both loved the theme, and the fact their culture had inspired a designer halfway around the world, and were eager to advise and guide us as we were designing. Finally, one of our playtesters is Mexican and was also a great help throughout and joined in on the original Kickstarter playthrough video. Ultimately, we did everything we could to ensure we weren't appropriating Mexican culture." Now, onto the game. First up, to address another complaint I have seen about the game, which suggests it cannot be packed away with the insert still in, and even then it is difficult. Above is the box all packed. It's fine. The perfect size, although it doesn't hold the expansion parts. Now, properly onto the game! Die of the Dead plays as well as it looks, and that's saying something! This is an awesome production, both in terms of how it looks and also the thought behind the entire process. As you read above, a lot of thought has gone into the look and feel of this game, with people who understand the significance and importance of the theme the game is based on being consulted and involved in the design to ensure this game is done in the right way. And it pays off. Both in terms of the theme, but also the stunning art design that pulls you straight into this beautiful world. The game plays incredibly fast and can be taught in minutes. The expansions are a simple add. The Ofrenda variant being a little more complex but still can be added with just a few additional minutes added to the teach, and from game one if you wish. The Altar de Muertos board is my favorite addition to the game, but it does feel like a completely different game, rather than a usual expansion. In a good way, this creates a completely different experience. Both the base game and the Ofrenda variant are fantastic games. Turns fly by, and you always feel involved. Players are shaking the casket to try to activate their own dice, but this won't always be the case. Of course, there can be some frustration here, but generally there is enough control in the game to manipulate the rolls, dice, or the casket you choose to ensure you get to do what you want most of the time. The trick is to remember what is in each casket. The rules don't say you can't touch or shake a casket before you choose it, unless I missed that, so we often do that, but all this tells you is that some dice are in there. Not which ones. The player who can keep track of where their dice are the best often wins at this game. The conveyor belt of dice is an interesting concept to play with. The first two caskets get your dice into the game, the third gives you a chance to manipulate what dice make it to the fourth casket. The final casket is where you move them to the steps and get your path to victory moving. In the Ofrenda variant, this is still your goal, but less of a race and more of a battle of efficiency. How many dice can you ascend during the course of the game. I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys playing with lots of dice and has to use them to make clever and interesting decisions. There is some luck involved but not as much as you would initially think. The game looks glorious, moves along at an incredibly fast pace, and offers some interesting choices as you play. I like the solo variant, but it feels a bit too much for me to play solo. Not in terms of the rule set, more the setup. Not that it is a lot, or complicated or time-consuming, more that for solo games, anything more than a paper and pen can be too much for me. But as a solo experience, it is excellent, and one I would recommend to fans of solitaire play. The two player works well too, but I found I was regulalry forgetting to carry out the dummy players actions, but didn't realy think it affected th egame that much. But it was an irritant. But it is still fun and feels like the three, four or five player experience. But three plus is where the game shines for me. More people, more dice, more choices, more competition. This is where I found I had most fun.