Drags to Riches is currently live on Kickstarter. You can check the campaign here. A demo copy was sent to me for a preview after I met the team behind this game at UKGE 2022. Drags 2 Riches is a deck-building game. Deck-building games are all about making what you start with better. A theme that translates well to what the world needs regarding certain attitudes! But, off politics and back to the game. Your goal is improve your personal deck of cards and win the game. It's been done many times, and perhaps most famously with the O.G. Dominion. BUT! I have not seen deck-building used in a game about Drag Queens before. In fact, I have not seen any game using any mechanic themed around Drag Queens. Come to think of it, I have not really seen many games at all that represent people from any part of the LGBTQIA2S+ community at all! Search for "Drag" on BGG, and you will just get a load of Dragons! As such, this game very much appealed to me. There are many things I love about the board game community. One of the things I love the most is the sense of inclusion it brings to all people. But we can only really say that when all people feel represented and included. As such, I think this game is very important. But is it any good? Well, I don't think that is as relevant as the question, it is important we support games like this? But for the sake of brevity, clarity, and as this is fundamentally a review website... yes, yes it's a lot of fun. How to Play In Drags 2 Riches, all players are looking to build up their collection of Hair, Heals, Make-Up, Outfit, and Accessories cards to become the most fierce Drag Queen around. All players begin the game with the same starting hand of level one attire and some money. On your turn, players will lay as many cards as they like using their cards for one of three things. Either as money to buy more cards from the shop. A special power as described on the card. Or as an addition to their wardrobe. You can lay one type of each card into your wardrobe to build up your characters overall score to compete for that rounds event. Each round, the top event will be revealed from the 15 event cards in the event deck. This will mainly be a chance for all players to compete for points ranging from three to twelve. On two occasions, a shopping spree will trigger, where all players get to draw two extra cards to increase there chance of a good upgrade from the shop, with no event being played that round. Meaning all players can use all card to shop with rather than build up their wardrobe. After everyone has had one turn, all players with then simultaneous vote with their thumbs after a count of three to show if they are competing for the event that round or not. Everyone who voting with a thumbs up must reveal all cards in their wardrobe. This will be between one and five cards depending on how full they have made it, and can only contain one card from each of the five categories. The player with the highest value wardrobe is deemed the winner that round and collects the event card. This will form their end game scoring. Everyone who had their thumbs up for this event must then discard their entire wardrobe, win or loose. And start building this up again in later rounds. This happens quicker than you first think, so it makes sense to compete for most events if you have at least a few cards down. Although of course this depends on how many cards other payers have down and your current strategy. Each round, you will draw five new cards. You will find most rounds you can buy at least one card so your hand will get better and better. As you start with only eight cards, the improvement in your hand will be seen quickly. This is a crucial part of what makes good deck-builders fun for me. I don't like being forced to wait multiple rounds before I get to see my new cards again. In Drags 2 Riches, you will benefit from your newly acquired cards generally by round two or three. This is very satisfying. I like the multiple use of cards too. Many cards can be used simply as money, or as an addition to your wardrobe to compete for the vents. But there are a lot of cards with some pretty cool powers too. Some incorporate the chance to negatively affect another players at the table using what this game describes as Shade. All cards with this affect have a sunglasses symbol on the bottom right to clearly identify it. When you play Shade cards these against other players, they can either take the affect such as being forced to give a card to you, or reveal their entire hand. Or, they can block it with any card with the hand symbol in the bottom right, or by playing the same Shade card to reverse the affect. You can also reverse a reverse, in a classic exchange of cards. "Nope!" "Nope!!" "NOPE!!!" There are also some very minor asymmetrical powers used in Drags 2 Riches which I love but think could be made more impactful. At the start of the game, each player choses a character to play as. Each one shows a different drag queen. They all have their own powers such as the ability to block a shade card, or being able to take the highest value card from the shop for free. All these affects are one time only bonuses. In a game with 15 rounds, I found this to be a little light in affect. I would have preferred either much more powerful abilities, or the chance to use them more often. When playing with my daughter Mya (six) she was disappointed that after choosing her character, she was not incentivised in trying to acquire the specific items her character was wearing. She liked the idea that she chose her character based on the outfit she liked best, and wanted to then try and buy each card that matched her characters clothes, hair and makeup. These cards are in the deck, so this could be done. You will recognise them as you play. But there is no incentive to do this, other than your own OCD or desire to dress your character in your preferred style. This feels like a very cool opportunity for a variant/expansion to me! (Feel free to call it the Mya variant if you include this Drags 2 Riches team!) This would add a bit of jeopardy as certain cards come out into the shop. Whereas currently, if someone buys a high value or powerful card from the shop you had your eye on, then it will just get replaced by another card and by the time it is your turn again, there is bound to be something good there to chose instead. This is fine, and makes the game "nicer" but I think this variant will increase the tension and satisfaction. Plus it adds some set-collection to the game. Perhaps the character cards could be double sided, and every time you get a card into your wardrobe that matches a part of your characters personal outfit then you can flip your character card and use your more powerful action? Or you can use your power one more time if making the cards double sided isn't possible at this late stage (they currently have some detail on the rule son the back). Anyway, back to the review. It is a very simple game to learn and teach. My family all really enjoyed it. I felt it last a few rounds too many, but again, that is easily fixed by removing a few random event cards from the start. I liked how the event deck is built in a way where it generally improves as the game goes on, but not in a linear way as the event cards do not simply progress in points as you play. You could go from a level two card worth eight points to a level three event worth five one from turn to the next. So, you don't always know if it is best to go for an event and potentially miss a more powerful card afterwards as your wardrobe is now empty. Or, to go for the event in front of you now as the next one may not be necessarily better. Some players may hold off the lower scoring events waiting for the highest scoring cards. Which can work as a strategy if you win lots of high scoring events. But you may find you can win more uncontested lower scoring cards, and win the game if lots of other players are holding off. So, with that said, it makes sense to have more events cards for this flow to happen. And perhaps the current number is the perfect amount to allow for this part of the game to have room to breathe. But it did feel three to four rounds too long to me. Seeing as each round was the same, there is no real variation round-to-round. And you build up your deck very quickly so you don't need that many rounds to build up your wardrobe before you can feel ready to compete for an event. The game did not necessarily do anything new with the deck-building mechanic. But it certainly brings a fresh look with the them to the board game world. And I applaud the designers of this game for clearly putting so much effort into working with people from within this community to make sure they are representing them in the right way. A positive way. And using the correct language. Something I have tried to do in my writing. If I have missed the mark here or anywhere else, please do correct me. Playing this game has being very helpful for me. It has given me a platform to discuss something new with my children. The game represents the drag community in such as positive and fun way. All of that seems to be more important to me that the core games mechanics. If you are interested in checking out the game or backing it, you can check the campaign here

Godtear WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 2 You’ll like this if you like: Unmatched, Funkoverse, Warhammer Underworlds Direchism Published by: Steamforged Games Ltd. Designed by: David Carl, Alex Hall, Steve Margetson Rule Book Godtear is a tactical arena battle skirmish game that pits two players against each other in a game of hidden depths. As first glance, this will feel like a rush up to your opponent and smash-em type game. But on closer inspection of the cards and character powers, you will realise this is a highly strategic game that offers players the chance to build to some very exciting and rewarding turns. Godtear was first released in 2019. There are two starter sets, The Borderlands or the one I have, Eternal Glade. You can find more out about these here. Both sets come with two champion sets and all that is needed to play a game of Godtear 1v1. By that, I mean one person controlling one group of fighters against another with just one set too. This game is always a two-player only game, but can be played with one to four sets of fighters each. But you will quickly learn that one Champion versus one another champion only scratches the surface of this game. The full experience comes with a 3v3 match up, which requires additional Champions being acquired. They can be bought for around $30/£20 per set so with four extra of these acquired, plus the base game, this will a significant investment in the three figures. But is it worth it? Set-Up Place the board on the table. The boards are double sided but this is just aesthetics. So, pick which ever suits you. Then chose a scenario to fight in. There are six scenarios in the rule book. They bring four main variations for each one. First, where you can place your warbands at the start of the game. Second, the additional hexes you add to the board where the Champions can place their banners during the game. Third, the starting position for each player's Warband tokens. And finally, the variable set-up seen at the end of each phase. Once you have chosen your scenario, place the hexes used in this set-up onto the board and the round token beside the midline on the battle ladder, one space closer to the first player. Each player must then choose their warbands, either one, two, three, or even four depending on what game length and complication you want. Players will choose who is first player and then one by one, add their war bands onto the board on the chosen scenarios starting hexes. Each player will gather their three cards for each of their war bands. One that represents their Champion. One for their Followers. And one that shows their Champions unique one-off power and factions extra scoring opportunity. The board itself is gorgeous, but the art is deformational rather than causing any affects sadly. I suppose there is enough going on already! How To Play To start each player will work through the Plotting phase. This is done in order, warband by warband, player by player, taking two actions each time. There are a few basic actions such to advance (move) claim (place your banner down on a hex) and recruit (add an additional follower to the board if one had been knocked out). And then the skill actions unique to each champion and follower. For example, in a game where each player has two sets of champions and followers, the first player would activate all of their followers and both champions within their Warband, before the second player would do the same for all of theirs. In the plot phase, you cannot hurt another player, but you can move your troops into position, and add status tokens to add positive affects to your fighters and negative affects to your oppositions. In this phase, Champions adjacent to the objective hexes that scenario can place one of their banners onto the board. This will let them move the turn token for that round one step closer to their warband token, and if the banner is still there at the end of the clash phase, a further four spaces. As players activate each unit, they flip the card of the unit they just used to show it has been expended and ready for the next phase. The cards have two sides, one for the plot phase and one for the clash phase. The actions on each side are specific to each phase they are used in. Then all players move to the clash phase where you can now attack opposition followers and champions, remove opponents' banners, add or remove status tokens, and try to win the round. Each time you remove an opposition follower by adding damage tokens to it beyond its current health, you can move the round token one space closer to your warband token. Plus, an extra space if you are playing as one of the Maelstrom champion classes. And of course, the other player has one less follower to use against you if you timed the order of the attack correctly. Attacking your opponents followers before they have activated in clash phase is a key part of the game. Setting this up in the Plot phase is crucial to doing well in the game. The clash phase works in turn like the plot phase, but with one player activating one group of followers or one champion each turn rather than all of their warband. This continues until both players have activated all of their followers and champions. Players will score additional points for each remaining banner, and then the player who has the round token closer to their own warband token will take this, flip it and score the points on the reverse. In round one and five, the token is worth one point. Round two and four has a two-point value. In round three the token is worth three points. The game is won as soon as one player has won at least five points. So, a minimum of three rounds must be played but you could play up to five. Fighting The dice rolling in this game is a key part of the fun. But as with any use of a dice in this way, there is a fair bit of luck in this game. But you can try and mitigate your luck by making sound choices. When one player attacks another, you will roll dice equal to that characters specific power you chose. For example, the Fireball attack for Blackjaw as seen below uses five dice. You need to roll hits equal to or higher to your targets dodge score. As such, it would be risky to attack another player with this skill if their dodge was higher than four. You could waste your turn with a failed attack. Each dice face has either one hit, two hits, or zero hits. If you roll high enough, you can then roll for damage In the case of Blackjaw's Fireball, you will roll four dice against your targets armour. So, again, you need to plan ahead and look at your intended targets stats for both dodge and armour before you choose who to attack, and what to attack with. You can also affect your luck by targeting enemies with negative status tiles, or by using Champions or Followers of your own with positive boons. You can increase the number of dice you roll to attack or damage and reduce your enemy's dodge and armour value. Strategy The cards and powers for each character is so different. It takes a few minutes each game to familiarise yourself with your skills. Each class has a different power, this is another actor to consider when building your team. The Shapers get an extra step on the battlefield ladder when they place their banner. The Guardians get the extra step if their banner is still in play at the end of the clash phase. The Slayers get their extra step from knowing out opposition Champions. And as we mentioned above an extra space for knocking our followers for the Maelstrom class. When a champion is knocked out, they are not out of the game. Rather they are moved two hexes by the player that knocked them out, and they must then use a rally action on their next turn to remove all wounds from their player board to start again. Generally, they will then need to move back into position. So, essentially you just miss a turn wasting two actions getting back into the mix. As you can only win or lose a round, as in, you cannot win high, or lose badly; this is a game of strategy over the multiple rounds. There is no difference to losing a round by one point or six. If you are in a position of weakness one round, use it to manipulate your positions and positive boons to come back stronger in the following round. There is no point trying to get a few points to reduce your loss. As each round has a different points reward, you need to pick and choose when you will do this, and which rounds you will really go for. Loosing round one is irrelevant if you then win round two and three and win the game. But winning two rounds in a row is tough. Taking out a Champion generally takes a few rounds to achieve. They have higher health and can usually take a few blows before they are knocked out. Apart from Mournblade who has only one health, but in turn, only rewards the other player with one movement of the round tracker rather than the usual four. Mourneblade is also my favourite Champion to fight with. I like the ability to move your followers with your champion and visa-versa. Mourneblade has this power. It means you can drastically change the look of the battlefield in one plot phase. You have two actions each turn but cannot do the same action twice. If you want to move twice, you need to use a skill power as well as a basic power. Each character has a Ultimate skill that only the Champion can use, and then, only once per game. Mourneblade's ultimate skill allows it to pick up and move three of its followers to any hex three spaces from where it is currently located. The followers for Mourneblade, the Knightshade's, have a special power of their own which stops any enemy model from being able to move when using the advance action when they are adjacent to it. It's a powerful way to quickly change the dynamic and control the board by moving your Knightshades into multiple positions which stop your enemies from being to move as freely. Learning how each champion set works, and more importantly how each one integrates with each other is a fascinating and rewarding experience. The rules suggest you start with a 1v1 set-up which I agree with. It can be a lot to take in on game one if you try to master more than one champion and group of cards in your first game. But after a few plays, it will become natural to you. The game flows so quickly turn by turn. And you will find the real joy in this game comes from working out the best strategy for which group of fighters you have chosen. 3v3 is a great fun way to play. 4v4 is epic if you have the numbers, but 2v2 is my favourite. The game is quick, around 30 minutes one you become familiar with the cards, but still offers a lot of fun, strategic decisions. Some fighters can move faster and further than others. Some warriors are all about brute force and high yielding attacks. Others benefit more from tactical movement and strategic placement of their banners. Helena as a champion does not have a separate banner like the other champions, and instead carries her banner with her at all times. So, you must manipulate the board so that your champion ends each round on an objective hex, but of course your opponent will know this is your goal and try to thwart you. There are certain classes that work better with others, but it also depends on what style of game you enjoy and what strategy you want to deploy. It makes each game feel quite varied as you work your way through the different classes, but of course, this does add to the cost of the game. So, to go back to the question I posed at the start, is this any good? Well, yes. It's excellent. Playing Godtear is so much fun. But you do need multiple champion and follower sets for the full experience. It's up to you if you want to invest in this. So, it is good, but is it worth it? That really is the important question. But what I can say is that with eight sets in the house already, I am very keen to get more! I will collect them all as soon as I can, as I think this game will get to the table a lot. So, for me the answer is yes. Yes, this is very much worth it.

IKI WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Great Western Trail, Concordia, Le Havre. Published by: UTSUROI, Fractal Juegos, Geronimo Games, Giant Roc, Hachette Board Games UK, Lucky Duck Games, Reflexshop, Sorry We Are French Designed by: Koota Yamada Rule Book Edo Craftsman Story came out in 2014 and was a dice-driven points collecting game about merchants in Edo (Tokyo) doing business with local shopkeepers. It was based on paintings and research from that era and the art looks stunning. Check it out here. Designer Koota Yamada then released IKI in 2015 to critical acclaim, based on the original Edo game. Sadly, not that many people played or bought the game after a limited release and minimal marketing. But like all good origin stories, it came back! In 2021, IKI got a reprint with new art, new publishers and distribution, and won a whole heap of awards! Some are torn on if the new art is better, but the game remains largely the same. But with significantly improved components and rule book. The new version game is a real stunner to look at and plays brilliantly too. Let's set it up. ... Sorry, I was distracted by the box art for a second. Stunning isn't it! Anyway, see that person in the middle there? That's you. (Or at least I assume it is) You are about to walk around (following the direction of the arrows of course, you're not a heathen!) the conveniently circular streets of Edo. Stopping off at various shops and visiting different merchants, trying to collect the most IKI. IKI is a concept used in the Edo period meaning the ideal way of living a civic life. Being a good person you know. Something we could perhaps do with more of now! Imagine if the world was run by IKI and not money? Anyway, all of this is done using a classic Euro style game but with some serious and unexpected twists. Set-Up I won't go into the full rules and set up here as it may take a little too long, and would be rather dull to read, full rules are linked in the intro and here if you can't be bothered to scroll up. But as mentioned, the rule book really is excellent. So, you wont have any trouble getting this to the table if you buy this. But let's cover the basics to give you a flavour for the game. The first decision you need to make is which way to lay the board down on your table. And I don't just mean regarding the player count. (One side works for a very tight two-player experience, the other is for three or four players). I mean the orientation. Check it out above and look at the orientation of the art at the top and bottom of the board. Which way would you do it? (Cue everyone flipping their phone and getting annoyed at the auto orientation correct feature on modern phones). Once this debate is over, lay out all the cards, mon (money), rice, wood, and other components. Give each player a player board and items in their chosen player colour and you are ready to go. The board looks initially confusing but lets talk through it quickly. In this orientation, the top half shows the year that you will play in Edo. One space for each month and one final space for New Years day. You then have two shopping areas called Nagayas. Below that is the street that you will be walking around with two more Nagayas below it. You will notice in front of each of the four Nagayas there are symbols showing you what you can trade or buy when you stop there. Below this on the left is the fire track showing you each players current ability to fight fires. On the right is the track showing how many spaces each player can move that turn. Then finally at the bottom is the score. Hopefully this all makes sense now. Playing IKI On a players turn you will place your Ikizama meeple onto the track on the bottom right of the board which will determine on how many spaces your Oyakata meeple will move this turn. You can see this represented in the left hand side of your player board in space A. You can move one, two, three, or four spaces, and there is also a space that allows you to choose to keep you options open to move either one to four, but your phase B turn will be weaker. In phase B, players will either take four mon or hire a new character from the available cards that season. But if you chose the one to four spot, you can just take one mon. The recruited card will have an associated cost which must be paid. The card is then placed into one of the available merchant spaces in one of the four Nagayas and that player adds a Kobun meeple of their colour to this character card to show it is thiers. They will then move their Oyakata meeple based on the location of their Ikizama meeple from phase A, and trade with the shop or merchant that is in their final resting space. If you ever trade with another players character they will level up their experience. Each character has two to four spaces to level up which increases the benefit you get at the end of the season, until they eventually retire. We will come to that later. Trading can entail gaining sandals which allow you to increase your movement by one space per tile, rice which are needed to feed your active characters in employment each season, or a variety of other options based on which characters are in play. You can also build buildings, acquire points, buy wood or Koban (not Kobun, gets confusing doesn't it!) needed to build buildings, buy fish, pipes or tabaco, which work as a points multiplier through the four season. Or finally, increase your fire fighting skills. At the end of each month, any characters not yet hired will have their cost reduced by one. Also in a two player game, one of the unused cards will be added to the board as a neutral character that can be used one by either player. After each third month is over the season ends and all fish, tobacco, pipes and character cards not yet acquired will be removed and replaced with new ones for that season. Players then score points for their workers based on what level they are at before finally paying one rice for all workers still active. Any shortfall in rice and you must lose one character. So far, so euro. But wait, there is more! At the end of the fifth, eighth, and eleventh month a fire will start. There are four tokens representing each of the four Nagayas. One must be drawn at random, and then a fire will start there. The fires increase in strength as the years progress, and moves from one part of the Nagaya to the next, killing off each character or building card there. Unless the player that owns the card has a fighting ability higher than the fires current strength. The fire then moves on losing strength as it goes, until it reaches the final space in the Nagayas were it stops. This is a brutal and unexpected part of the game you need to either plan for, and build up your fighting powers, or just accept that its part of the game and leave your fate to chance. There is only a one in four chance it will affect you if you focus your characters to one Nagayas that is, maybe you will get lucky. In the first few games, I did not like the fire. I lost a lot of characters before I had the chance to retire them, or get my fighting levels up, and it was just irritating. I don't like luck in strategy games. But as I played more, I realised you really could plan for the fire. I like to play it this way rather than leave it to chance. Some characters when you recruit them increase your fire fighting abilities. Some pipes when you buy them do the same. After a while you see these little fire fighting symbols everywhere and you want them! They don't help with short term points, but they certainly do give you long term gain, especially when it comes to increasing your chances of retiring characters. When a character receives enough experience it retires. Experience comes when players use your merchant as discussed, but also when your Oyakata pawn completes one lap of the shopping area. When you receive the final experience point needed to retire you can move that card from the board onto your own player board. They will still earn you a bonus at the end of each season, now higher. And also wont need feeding anymore. You can no longer trade with them of course, they are enjoying retirement. But you will also score points for them at the end of the game based on how many different colours of cards you manage to retire. There are five colours in total and the points grow exponentially the more you get. After the final month, players will then take their Oyakata pawn off the board and can then place it back onto any space for one final turn. It's new years day and it's a free move for all players. Often in games you are left wanting just one more go, but even if you had it, you could not quite make it to the space you need. IKI acknowledges this and gives you just what you want. Its a very satisfying way to end the game. Players then tot up their points from all their in-game points, characters retired, fish, tobacco, and pipes bought, and any buildings they may have built. You will also score for your left over resources and money. The buildings will earn you big points, but they are hard to build. I have not built more than two in any one game yet, and that was tough. There are only thirteen turns in any game remember, and to construct a building you first need to acquire the parts to do this, which can take two to three turns, and then land on the right space on the board to make the building itself. There are so many turns to do this in, and once every three months, you will want to at least get the fish as they are unique to each passing season, whilst of course not neglecting all the other ways to score. You cannot ever do it all. So, you must prioritise the way you wish to play that game. And this right here is why I love IKI. I love scarcity in games. When there is an abundance of options but only so much time or so many turns. It makes me happy to make tricky decisions like this. But this sort of game isn't for everyone. Check out what Sam, aka Miss Frenchtoast had to say about IKI. I was drawn in my the theme and art of IKI, but I didn’t find playing the game to be very exciting. There are some puzzle aspects that I really enjoyed, such as figuring out how many spaces to go and where to place your workers, but the turns felt chunky and didn’t flow well. Although I was excited about the theme and I enjoyed the tightness, I found it almost too difficult to balance feeding workers, fighting the fire, buying fish or pipes, and building. While that tightness is a positive in my book, I never felt like I had a clear direction. Perhaps this would be remedied with more plays. Overall, it was a fine game. The cards and board are beautiful, it has that challenging feeling of not quite being able to do it all, it’s just missing flow and excitement for me. So, if you like games like Le Havre where there is this tight balance between what you can do and what you want to do, then IKI could be for. If you don't, then you may be left frustrated such as Sam was above. For me though, I think it's fantastic, but needs a few plays as Sam says, to get your head round all the different ways to score, and give you a chance to understand how to prioritise what you want to focus on. It wasn't until game three that I started scoring well in this game. Normally, I couldn't care less about my score. But in IKI, you do want to do well. It's frustrating when you don't achieve your goals of the forth fish, or the final piece of wood for the high scoring building. It's not a game I need to win at, but it is a a game I want to score well at compared to my previous scores. So, I can see why some may not enjoy the first few games as you learn the strategy. When you play IKI, you do need to give if some considered attention. You cannot just rush it. But despite this, it is very quick. In a two, I have completed this game in under 40 minutes, and that was with my nine year old as my partner. It's only 13 turns each after all. And each turn is very quick, you can only ever do one thing. In a two, this game is a 9/10. In a three or four, it's still great, an 8 I would say, but I perhaps like the speed of the two player game more. You can see above the four player board is pretty much the same as the two player at the top of this page, just with an extra space in each Nagaya. In the two player game, the only major difference is you block off one of the five movement options used in phase A to keep that decision tight. This is changed each season. There is pretty much only one thing I don't like about this game, and that is the lack of insert. Why do some games do that? Cost I assume? But for a quality game like IKI, with a high end reprint like this, why not charge £5 more and give a nice insert to avoid this mess? I Know price points are important, but I cannot image many people are buying IKI that are not at least a semi-serious gamer, and £5 more with the knowledge there is a nice ordered insert would I expect not put that many people off. Maybe I am wrong, I suppose I could always just buy one myself! Although it is considerably more than £5! Check it out. Anyway, that is being picky. IKI is a fantastic game and comes highly recommended from WBG. I have played IKI many times now and have left it set up for more games this weekend! It is incredibly addictive in terms of wanting to beat your previous score, and master the intricacies of the various scoring options. I think it would suit many types of gamers, but obviously not those who find balancing the tightness frustrating as Sam quite rightly mentions. But anyone who does like this who is looking for a medium weight, quick to play euro with various ways to score, with a Japanese theme, this really may become one of your favourite games very quickly.

Funkoverse Strategy Game Review WBG Score: 7.5 Player Count: 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Unmatched, Heroclix, Disney Sorcerers Arena Published by: Funko Games Designed by: Prospero Hall I love Jurassic Park, especially that bit when the raptor goes to attack Alan Grant but then one of the golden girls clocks it with her hand bag. Then when Voldemort goes to fire a spell at her Marty McFly swoops in and saves her on his hoverboard only for Batman to knock out Bellatrix and escort her to Arkham. They don’t make them like that anymore! Funkorules. Set up depends on what set/s you have but in general pick a board that you’ll be using, pick a scenario and then the really fun bit, pick your characters! Then take all the special items, shuffle them up and deal out any number to the players and let them keep one for each character. Then take the physical components and give them to the characters. I’ll talk more about mixing the sets later on and just talk through the rules as if you're using a single set. On your turn pick one of your characters and perform up to two actions. You can move up to two squares, assist an adjacent knocked down ally by standing them up, interact with tokens on the board or perform a basic challenge to an opponent's character. When you challenge you roll two dice or more depending on if you're doing a basic challenge or using an ability. The defender rolls as many dice as their defence value and then you compare hits and blocks. If the challenger wins then the opponent is knocked down and the only action they can do on their next turn is stand up. If they’re already knocked down when they fail to defend a challenge then they are knocked out and the character is placed on the first space of the cool-down track. If none of these actions appeal to you then you can do a special action and perform an ability on your character's card or use an item. Each special ability has a type associated with it and when you use it you place a token of that type on the cool-down track in the indicated space. These tokens will move down a space on the track at the end of each round. This means that you need to use your abilities carefully because you may not have access to them for a few rounds. If you don’t have a token of that type then you can’t use the ability. Funkoverse, tis’ a silly game. If there’s one thing you need to know about Funkoverse it’s this. It is ridiculous! You are able to team up Jaws, who is equipped with a purse and a raptor who has a cheesecake and have them fight one of the golden girls holding a Batarang and the Kool aid man riding a hoverboard. Now if that sentence doesn’t bring a smile to your face, or you think it’s too silly then there’s a good chance that this game isn’t for you. That being said, read on because you never know. On the surface Funkoverse may seem like a gimmick, a way to sell more Funko pops and, maybe there is a little bit of that there, but underneath all the crazy combos and the highly recognisable characters is a solid, fun game with plenty of replayability. At its core Funkoverse is a light, simple skirmish game. They’ve taken a lot of elements from small skirmish games and boiled them down into their fairly simple base mechanics. Even the line of sight rules are easy to follow. If you’ve ever played any kind of combat game then you know how groan- inducing the words “line of sight” can be. In fact you can have this taught easily in about five minutes and be done within an hour give or take depending on the scenario you’ve chosen. If you want to see how simple this game is then try making up a team of just the basic characters you get in the sets that only have the basic rules! On second thoughts, don’t do that, it’d probably be rubbish. This only goes to prove how much fun those player powers and special abilities are though. Each one works thematically for the characters and because of that adds another layer, not only to the strategy, but to your character choices. There’s a ton of fun to be had by loudly announcing Expelliarmus! and, if successful, disarming an opponent and putting one of their items on their cool-down track, or shouting Great Scott and prematurely shifting items down your cool-down track All the abilities here have been thought about and not just slapped on just because they’ve managed to get hold of a particular IP. Marty has a “nobody calls me chicken ability”, Doc Brown has his 88mph move which lets him move four spaces in a straight line and the Raptor has a “Clever girl” ability that lets her ambush someone. It’s all been done with knowledge and passion for the characters they add to the game and gives every game some instant recognisability and in some cases a bit of nostalgia. Slam dunk the funk Now let’s talk about that cool down track. This takes the game and elevates it by giving it another level of strategy that doesn’t over complicate the game and still keeps it accessible for everyone. Without it this game would be one of those “let me just take the most powerful character and spam their best ability till I win” games, which would have been the table top equivalent of button mashing and we all know how annoying those people were to play Street Fighter against……..Marcus. Sorry, don’t know where that came from. Whenever you use an ability it goes on an indicated space on the cool-down track and generally the more powerful the weapon, the higher it goes on the track. Each round, anything on the cool-down track slides down one space. So the more powerful the ability, the longer it takes to get it back. Knowing when and how to effectively use those abilities for maximum effect is crucial. You may look as Voldermorts fiendfyre ability and think that range 2 and 6 attack is pretty darn powerful, and it is unless your luck with the dice is as shocking as mine, but that ability is not coming back you for four rounds! However, there are ways to manage that track and expedite your tokens journey or, even give you multiple of the same tokens to be able to use those abilities a bit more often and that's where your team building comes into play. All the power in the ‘verse Each character has their own role to play in a team, some are more of a powerhouse when it comes to attacking, some are support characters and some will help you shift your tokens down the cool down track or stand up fallen allies. I love the multiple ways you can choose to build your team and how it caters for different styles of gamers. If you want to pour over the characters, analysing what they each bring and put together a strong team based on whose abilities synchronise well together you can. On the other hand if you want to just throw together a team of your favourite characters or just a team based on how silly it is, then it’s just as satisfying and, arguably more fun. It’s a system that will satisfy those slightly more serious players or anyone who just wants to have Jaws fighting Hagrid for the giggles, I’m definitely more of the latter. There's a ton of Funky to go round. Something I love about these sets is that all the boxes (barring the single character sets) come with all the components that you need to play. So if you want to just buy a two character set to dip your toes in then you can absolutely do that. This is such a great idea as it makes the game that much easier to find your jumping on point. So many of these games require you to buy a base set which you may or may not be as interested in just to get the essentials. Here though you can find a set you like and go for that. As your collection grows you're going to have lots of different boards to play on and multiple different scenarios to use. It seems that the more sets they release the more inventive they’re getting with the scenarios. The Space Jam set has a basketball one and the Thanos single pack has an all against one infinity saga scenario. Whilst I wouldn’t change this system it does pose a bit of an issue as you get more sets. Asides from getting a load of fun coloured crystals (like having more eggs from wingspan) you are going to have a LOAD of all of the other tokens, like objective point markers and exhaust tokens that you will not use and have to find a new home for. Whilst we’re on the subject, storage is going to be a puzzle you’ll have to contend with the more sets you get….unless you plan on keeping all the sets in their relevant boxes that is. These are smaller than the usual Funko pops but I can see them needing some creative solutions for storage as your collection grows. Now I’m not saying that to put you off buying a load of stuff, far from it. I just want you to fully know the rabbit hole you’re probably going to end up down if you enjoy this game. One last thing whilst we’re on the negatives and it’s not necessarily a negative. You can get any set and have a great time with this game, but a lot of the fun of Funkoverse comes from mixing and matching. So unless you’re tied to just one IP, you're probably going to want to get at least another set to really see the games full potential. This is mostly because each team will comprise three characters and, with only one set your team will need either one or two of the basic character tokens and they are just that, basic, so you will really want another set to really flesh out your team. That's not something you need to do immediately of course and if you're having enough fun with just one set then great! Now if I was reviewing this game when it first came out then that may have been more of a negative, it may even have been cause to drop the score since the sets were so expensive. These days however you can find a lot more of the sets for cheaper and sometimes these can be around the same price as getting a new card pack for something like Marvel Champions. We’ve managed to get hold of three sets (two four packs and a two pack) and paid just over what a four pack originally cost. That’s not to say that’s going to be the case everywhere but it’s worth shopping around. If you’ve ever had the urge to take your Funko pops off the shelf or worse, out of the box!! and play with them then Funkoverse does a fantastic job on making that dream a reality. Sure it doesn’t yet have the extensive range of characters and IPs as their bigger counterparts but there’s still fun range out there. There’s nothing like stomping round the board with your favourite characters pulling off fun moves and uttering sentences like “Jaws is now going to hit you with Harley Quinns hammer” Funkoverse is great, silly light fun but you may want to watch out for that rabbit hole, it’s easy to fall down…..but it might just be worth it.

Downforce WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 2-6 You’ll like this if you like: Rallyman GT, Flamme Rouge,Formula D Published by: Iello, Coiledspring games Designed by: Wolfgang Kramer,Justin D. Jacobson, Rob Daviau This is your car, your pride and joy. You will do anything for this car and nothing and I mean nothing will stop you being a dedicated owner who will stop at nothing to get this car across the finish line first. Well that is until you see the red car storming into the lead and you decide to bet your life savings on that instead. Let’s auction off some rules. To set up, choose one side of the double sided board, place all six cars behind the finish line in a random order and give each player a scoresheet. Deal out the speed cards evenly to each player then place the car specific speed 8 cards and the power cards in separate face down decks next to each other. At the start of the game there’s going to be an auction phase. Reveal the top speed card and power. Players then need to bid to own this car and power combination. You bid by using the speed cards in your hand. Each card has any number of colours on it with a number in that colour. To bid on that colour car simply play a card with that colour on it. The player who has the highest number of that colour will win. The number they bid will be the amount they pay for that car which they will write on their score sheet. The auction will continue until all the cars have gone. There’s no real limit to how many cars you can have but every player must have at least one car. Once this phase is over any player that has multiple powers has to choose one to keep and discard the rest. Then start your engines as the race is about to begin. Shifting gears. On a players turn they have to play one of their speed cards. When played they have to move all the cars on the card the number of spaces indicated and in the order they’re listed. Cars can only move forward onto spaces that finish in front of the one they’re leaving but they can’t move through other cars. At some point cars will reach one of the three yellow betting lines on the track. Once the first of the cars cross one of them players must then bet on who they think will win the race by marking the car colour on their sheet. This will happen everytime a betting line is first crossed. As cars finish the race they are placed on the podium based on their position. Once either all the cars have finished or all cards have been played from players who are still on the track the race ends. Players will then score money based on correctly betting on the winning car and when you made that prediction The more times you get the right prediction, the more money you get. You’ll also receive money from the final position of your car(s). Then takeaway what you spent at the beginning auction to get your final score. I enjoy a good racing game and, sometimes even the bad ones. There’s a couple of issues I’ve had with the ones that I’ve played though. First is the amount of luck in them, regardless of how much they’ve tried to mitigate it and the runaway leader problem. Now I’m not saying that Downforce alleviates that altogether, but it does a darn good job of getting them either down to a minimum (luck) or making you use it to your advantage (runaway leader) First the luck factor. The only real luck in a 3-6 player game is the cards that you're dealt at the start of the game but you quickly start to decipher how you can best use these cards to your advantage. Do you have a lot of green movement in your hand? Then maybe the green car is the best to try and bid on, or you could try buying another car with a better power for cheap and then betting heavily on green. Just in case that sounds like a simple enough decision, let me introduce you to the power cards. These come out with each speed card and could well change what is a sure fire car choice and make things that little bit tougher. The other thing it may change is how many cars you try and get your hands on. Since at the end of the auction phase you get to pick one of the powers you have in your hand, it may be worth getting hold of a car just because the power card will work well for you. It’s such a quick and simple auction mechanic but it adds so much to how your game is going to play out. It’s a weird comparison but it really reminds me of the drafting mechanic in Blood Rage and how important that is to your game. If there’s one bet I’ll make in this review it’s that I’ll bet you never expected me to compare Downforce to Blood Rage did you? The other big decision you need to make is how many cars you try and get. More cars are great for choices of powers and chances to get a good finishing position, but how much you pay for those cars could well be your downfall. The two player game does suffer a bit more when it comes to the luck factor though. It’s still a fun game but in this version you split the deck and then draw seven cards to your hand then draw another at the end of your turn. So making any kind of solid plan at this player count is potentially pointless. Please gamble responsibly. So the other issue that can crop up with a lot of racing games is the runaway leader. Let’s face it there’s no fun watching other players get lucky and race ahead of you knowing that, aside from an act of the cardboards gods, you’re not going to be catching up anytime soon. As much as I don’t mind losing games it’s far better to lose when you’ve had a good crack at winning, rather than have it out of your hands entirely. Again downforce manages to shift gears and dodges around this beautifully. Yes, technically you can get runaway leaders but this is where the betting comes in and elevates this game from just another racer that only certain people might enjoy, into something for everyone. The betting means that, even though your cars may be stuck in a less than advantageous position, you can still use your opponents to your advantage. You can easily just bet on those seemingly obvious front runners and then use your cards to make sure they get over the line in a position that benefits you. Sure you’ll be giving that player a bit of a boost but as long as you can bet on them early enough and still get your cars over the line in a good position you still have a decent chance of winning. Mechanically this game is great, it’s a really clever design but it’s not complicated with it. Where Downforce shines though is in its interactivity. It’s not just about navigating the track and how you can get in front of the race, it’s how you can do all that AND screw up you friends or force them into putting you into a good position. Downforce isn't a take that game, yet, there is something soooo satisfying about moving opponents cars into single lanes behind other cars that you know they can’t easily get out of or, and I’m not saying I’ve ever done this, (ahem) playing a huge movement card and only being able to move them one space….and then making the screeching brakes sound. It’s a ton of fun and whilst it may trigger alarm bells in those that don’t like that kind of potential meanness in games, I think that the mechanics swoop in to save it. Also, as devastating as those moves may sound, I’ve seen cars in dead last weave around the track and end up in the top three. This leads me nicely onto the other reason why I love this game. It gives you so many great moments and tension throughout the game. You may have stormed into the lead on your last turn but now you have to anxiously wait and hope that you're still in a good enough position by the time your next turn drives around to play the card you want. Downforce is a game in which the race could go from a forgone conclusion on one turn and could have completely turned by the time your next one comes around. That kind of wild unpredictability may not be for some people but for me it’s something that’s tense, exciting and keeps things on a knife edge. I can’t tell you how many times there have been almost neck and neck tussles to the finish line. Honestly if I had nails I would’ve almost certainly bitten them off in some games. As of quite recently my highest rated racing game (by a long way) was Flamme Rouge at number eight and Downforce has just unceremoniously taken its spot. It’s quick, clever fun that has a much wider appeal as far as racing games go and yes, you will be making vroom vroom noises as you move your cars round the track!

Trek 12: Himalaya WBG Score: 8.5 Player Count: 1-50 You’ll like this if you like: Welcome To, Ganz Schon Clever, Cartographers. Published by: Lumberjacks Studio, Blackrock Games, Geronimo Games, Hachette Board Games UK Designed by: Bruno Cathala, Corentin Lebrat Rule Book Roll & Writes became all the rage a few years back, and now it seems we have a new game using this mechanic being launched every week. So, how do you wade your way through the bad ones, and find the good ones? Play them all of course! Don't have the time? Well, never fear, I play loads of new games every week and I can safely say that the 2020 release of Trek 12 stands out and should be worthy of your consideration if you are looking for a new game in this genre. Why? Well, read on, but give me a sec as a new roll-and-write just dropped through the letter box... There sure are a lot of games that use the blank and write mechanic. A term coined to described games that either use cards (flip-and-write) or dice (roll-and-write) to add some random factor into a paper and pencil based game. We also now have flick and writes and I'm sure a few more! But there are not many with a campaign mode; or one of my favourite things in board games, extra stuff to unlock and open as you progress through the game. You see this in legacy games like Pandemic Legacy or Zombie Kidz/Teenz but it hasn't become something that you see that often. I'm unsure why, as it is an awesome way to introduce new rules slowly into a more complex game, and brings real drama and excitement when you finally get to open a new envelope. In Trek 12 they are used to add more replayability and motivate you to keep playing the game over and over. And it works so well! But I am getting ahead of myself. Let's first talk about how this game plays. How to Play Trek 12 is built using the classic mechanics of a roll-and-write. One player will roll two dice, and then all players will use those dice somehow on their own personal player sheet. As such, this game scales to as many players as you like. It's marketed as 1-50 but as long as you have enough sheets, you could play with as many friends as you can gather. This will not affect the game at all including how long it takes to play, other than the post game chat and banter of course! Players must use the dice in one of five ways. At the top of the sheet you will see a grid with five rows showing five different symbols. The top one must be marked off if you use the lowest of the two numbers rolled on the two dice. The second one is if you use the highest of the two numbers. The third one is for when you use the difference between the two dice. You cannot go into negative numbers so you must subtract the lowest number from the highest. Then you have the combined value of both dice, and finally one dice multiplied by the other. You cannot go over 12 but this is one way along with the addition row where you get get numbers higher than 6. You cannot use each method more than four times. Once you have your number, you must then mark that into one of the circles on the mountain. You can draw the first one anywhere you like, but all subsequent numbers need to be adjacent to one other number you have already marked. You are looking to score from two main ways. Groups of sets of the same number and groups of runs of numbers running one up or one down from each other. Sets are called zones, a mapped zone you have plotted out for your climb. Runs are called fixed lines, a line you are climbing up to the top of the mountain. As such, once you place a number onto the sheet, the next number needs to the the same or one different in order to place it. If you ever cannot place a number you place mark a sad face onto a circle instead. These lose you three points at the end of the game. You will then score your groups by taking the number used in the group, for example a six, and then one additional point for every additional circle used in this group. So my two sixes above in the bottom left of the map score me seven points. The runs score the same, except you take the highest number then add one for all additional circles used. You will then score a bonus from your largest run and group, and subtract three points for any number you were unable to place. Campaign Mode The game comes with a simple Trek manual to teach you the basic game. You will be up and running within in a few minutes, playing one of the three starting mountains. There is also a brilliant solo mode using the Soloist Trek manual, which adds one small addition, Max, your competitor in solo mode; in an otherwise very simple but fun solitaire game. And finally, there is the meat of the game. The Alpinist Manuel, which introduces the campaign mode, and the way to unlock those juicy envelopes. The main difference with the Alpinist campaign mode is you are working your way through three different mountains in one game. In the box, you start with Dunai, Kagkot, and Dhaulagiri peaks. You will score each climb the same way, but your scores are not tallied. Instead for each route, the person with the highest score gets one star. There will also be a star for all players that achieve the minimum target score for that mountain, and a final star for anyone who beats your groups top score for that mountain. Whenever a new top score is achieved, that must be recorded in the hall of fame included on the back of the rule book, so you know what you are looking to beat in any future game using the same mountain. The player with the most stars after the three ascents wins. There are also Assist cards used in this mode. Whenever you create a new zone with zeros, ones, or two's, you can pick an assist card from the cards revealed at the start of each climb. These help you as you make your way up the next few mountains. The Compass allows you to write a result of a dice face in a non-adjacent circle. The Rope gives you the chance to create a fixed line between two non-adjacent circles. Using the Schnapps gives players the opportunity to re-roll the dice after other players have used them. And finally, the Tent lets you use either one of the five metrics for choosing your dice for a fifth time, when usually they are limited to four. If you achieve one of the six set targets you can open one of the envelopes. The targets are to create a zone of exactly five or seven spaces, a zone of three seven's or two eleven's, and a fixed line that is nine or thirteen circles long. Once any player has achieved either of these after any ascent you can open one envelope. I don't want to spoil the surprise as to what's inside these envelopes, so I will not show any pictures here. But suffice to say that there is a lot more "game" to be had in Trek 12 than first meets the eye. There is pretty much more of everything and then some! And just when you think that's all Trek 12 can offer, there is now a new Amazon version Trek 12: Amazonia (which I have not played yet) and Trek 12.1: A Travel Diary Through The Himalaya's which brings even more climbing fun to the table. Again, I don't want to spoil what is inside this box as most of it is locked away safely inside secret envelopes. But right out the box you will have access to Jampa, a new map, which introduces a new rule - New Circles. Circles that are already linked on the map and must be filled with numbers that create a fixed line between them. Once you create seven successful New Circles you can open the first envelope and see the wonders inside! The second and third envelope has some real treats in store for you too, and it doesn't end there. Virtually the story will continue. It's a wonderful expansion and one I would highly recommend getting with the base game. There is so much game in these two little boxes. You may well need more sheets soon or consider laminating some like I did. I burned my way through the maps so quickly! The game is incredibly addictive. Each game only takes between 5-10 minutes, depending on your familiarity with the rules. And you will want to beat your last score, or try to get the top score to get onto the Hall of Fame leader board. But the game isn't just addictive, it's also very fun. I get a lot of satisfaction from scoring well in this game, but also love the theme, and how playing Trek 12 transports me not to the mountains (sadly) but to a calmer, more meditative state. I love losing myself in the player sheet, working my way towards to the best result. There is something so grounding about rolling a nice wooden dice, and writing with a pencil on a piece of paper. This, I think, is one of the reason roll-and-writes as a mechanic is so popular. The reason Trek 12 deserves it's place amongst the elite is that it brings with it a simple brilliance in the way the game is played and scored, a real sense of adventure with the theme and envelopes, and an overall brilliant game experience from the ever evolving components and additional rules.

Horizon Zero Dawn WBG Score: 8 Player Count: 1-4 You’ll like this if you like: Dark Souls, Horizon Zero Dawn The Video Game, Kingdom Death: Monster Published by: Steamforged Games Ltd. Designed by: Sherwin Matthews Fans of the video games series will already familiar with this story. For those of you that haven't played that, let me quickly catch you up. It's the distant future. The world has gone to pot. Robot machines terrorise the land. Your job its to clear the area of these monsters, and get a job with the hunters guild. All caught up? Great, let's get to it. Before I start, I want to declare that Steamforged sent me these game for free for a free review. No money changed hands. The fact that I got the game for free does not in any way affect my opinion. There has been a lot of chat about this game online recently and I wont to cover four main points that have come up from this. Is there enough in the base game for a good experience? How easy is it to learn? Does the semi-cooperative game work? Is it any good? I will cover these in more depth but the short answers are, not really, no, very, and yes. Learning The Game Let's start with the rule book. It's a monster. Lots of pages. Lots of rules. Seemingly difficult. But two key points here. It reads really well, and once I read it, I found the game very easy to play. I am left somewhat baffled by the reaction to the rule book and rule set online for this game. It really isn't that difficult and the rule book is mainly pictures! Let me talk you through the basics. Basic Rules You are hunting monster robots. There will be a choice of three maps to hunt on. Pick one and discard the other two, then set up the boards accordingly. Another player will choose one event card from three options. On your turn, you will be able to take two actions which includes options of moving two spaces which could alert a near by enemy, moving one space which would sneak by anything, distracting a nearby enemy and making it move one space of your choosing, crafting to get three discarded cards back, or attacking. When you attack you can attack from range using a ranged weapon and ammo, or from close by using your melee weapon. When you attack, you roll the dice shown on the weapon and ammo card and deal the rolled damaged, minus the enemies armour if it was alert prior to the attack. Any attack will make it alert afterwards if not destroyed. Any successful attack rewards the hunter that strikes the final blow with salvage cards and glory points. Once all players have used both actions, the enemies have their turn. Non alert enemies will patrol through pre-set paths. If they move off the board they are lost and cannot be attacked. Any alert enemies will attack following their own attack cards, generally targeting the nearest hunter. You can roll to avoid damage using your armour. Any damage you take means you must discard one card. If you run out of cards, you faint. If your hunting party ever collectively faints more than half the number of players, you all lose. If you can defeat enough enemies for each missions points target, you can move on to the next map. That all seems relatively simple to me. And there really isn't that much more in the rules. Just some specifics about how attacks work, mainly line of sight etc. And what you do between fights, which is where the fun really begins! The idea of this game is that you will move through various hunting grounds, taking down the quarry in each, before resting at the camp fire. Here, you have the opportunity to upgrade your character both with your own personal skill tree and via acquiring new items from the merchant. There are three levels of map to hunt on. Completing each level means you can advance one skill. You have a choice to make not only on which skill you wish to acquire, but also which path to take as not all skills lead to the next. Moving up the skill tree will also increase your total deck size, and therefore your durability. Once you have made this decision and taken any appropriate cards into your deck, you will then be able to spend any salvage cards you acquired from fighting in the previous rounds to buy new items from the merchant. There are three levels based on what map you just hunted on. Choosing suitable items for your character is crucial as each of the four main hunters has their own speciality, focus and fighting style. This brings more than just variety of game play, but also avoids players fighting over the same items at the merchant stage. Adding the right cards into your hand to increase your chances in the later battles is important. This is a deck and character building game after all, and what you add to your deck each round will come back to help you in later fights. The variation of the four main characters, the skill trees you can choose from, and the cards you acquire from the merchant, all create a very exciting and enjoyable diverging experience. Each hunter feels unique, and exploring each ones own strengths and specific fighting styles was a lot of fun for me. I like how each character finishes a game with its own distinct characteristics based on your own choices through the game. Once you have fought your way through four different battlefields, the hunters call will sound and you will face up against the mighty Sawtooth. This foe has a more varied attack, with four behaviour cards instead of just one, and a much larger total hit point value. Taking Sawtooth down will end the game for all hunters. Each successful hunt will reward the hunter who made the final blow with glory points. At the end of each battle, the hunter with the most glory points will be rewarded with sun tokens. If the hunters make it through all battles then all players win. But the hunter with the most sun tokens at the very end wins the game overall. With all that said, I think I can now answer two of the four main questions. Is there enough in the base game for a good experience? Yes, there is. But the final battle does feel a little anti-climactic. You will find it relatively easy after all your upgrades. The Sawtooth is tough, but you will be tougher by this point. 2. How easy is it to learn? Pretty simple. There are 51 pages in the rule book, but the basic rules are simple, and the flow of play is easy enough to to grasp and very repetitive, so you will master it quickly. This leaves the final two questions, which need more thought. 3. Does the semi-cooperative game work? 4. Is it any good? Semi-cooperative games are quite rare. This I think, is because they are hard to make work. I am unsure why this game chose to be semi co-operative instead of being fully co-operative. Only rewarding glory points to the hunter who strikes the final kill creates a weird stand off. It is rare that any attack would destroy an enemy fully. Usually you are destroying a component or taking damage from the enemies total hit points. If you damage an enemy only to leave it vulnerable for a final killing blow by one of your fellow hunters, they will take all the glory. You get nothing. In a cooperative game, this is fine. But in a game where total glory points matters, this can lead to players not wanting to attack until they think they can strike the killing blow, or avoiding attacks entirely, waiting for the other hunters to soften up the quarry first. Or, more commonly, trying to strike the final blow, getting unlucky with the dice rolls, and leaving the enemy ripe for an easy kill for another player. So, in short, the cooperative game doesn't really work. Solo, its fine, and I played with my son who is nine and I was very happy for him to get the glory points, so that was also fine. But if you want to have a game where you are really going for the win, I can see this being frustrating and I would recommend the full cooperative version in the rule book instead. As such, I am left wondering why the semi-cooperative version was included like this? Which leads me to the final question. Is it any good? Well, yes. It is. It's very good in fact. But it has it's flaws as you have seen. But if you think you can overcome those, then you may well be onto something special here. The sense of adventure as you play your way through the various missions is high, and the feeling of satisfaction as you upgrade and advance your hunter and successfully take own each monster is strong. There is one other frustration I have not covered yet though and that is the randomness of the salvage cards. With any game using dice, there will always be some randomness, but you can accept that. It's dice. With the salvage cards, its a bit much. After defatting a beast, you must draw salvage cards, and most of the time, it gives you just that. Salvage. But sometimes you draw other cards which tell you that the enemy you just fought is still alive and must be put back onto the board, or that it is dead, but you don't get any glory for that particular kill. If it was fully cooperative, I think it would be ok, as the teams would take the wins and loses together. But in semi-coop mode, when you defeat a mighty beast only to be told that either it is not dead or you get zero glory for this, well, that's just annoying. There are some positive salvage cards too, but again, this just increases the randomness which is semi-cooperative mode, just doesn't work. And the whole game does all miss a punchline. One final big battle. And this is where the expansions come in. Check out this "mini"! Thunderjaw, meat the readers. Readers, say hello to Thunderjaw. Just look at it. Its massive! In the Thunderjaw expansion you get the chance to add this mighty foe to the end of your battle. Fight your way through the previous challenges as usual, and then face off against Thunderjaw on its own battle map, in one epic finale. Thunderjaw takes up four spaces and its size really does add to the spectacle. It has 50 hit points and four amazing components to take down, including two disc launchers. Which once destroyed, can be added to your own arsenal to continue the battle. Which is awesome! Taking Thunderjaws weapons for your own feels truly epic. It feels great fighting Thunderjaw. It brings a suitable conclusion to the battle. A proper way to end this game. Victory or defeat, this is the way the game should end. It's not just the size, but the difficulty and complexity of the AI. You feel like you earnt your victory after this. The Stormbird expansion does exactly the same thing with a second epic finale to add to the game. Or you could combine them all and have one huge battle, which we did, and I loved it The Stormbird offers a unique characteristic in that is flies. So, as you work your way through its behavioural cards, some will show it as airborne, and others as landed. Its attacks will vary based on each card and position. It feels very different and truly challenging. In fact, this was the only enemy that caused us to faint across five different games. Bringing me to the final point. Horizon Zero Dawn is too easy. Yes, you can very simply modify the game to be harder. But in he initial game you play you wont do this. You wont know if it is too easy for you or not, so will follow the rules. And you will win. Quite easily. And the lack of a real challenge will take away from the experience. In later games, you can add more enemies, or reduce your card count to modify this very simply. But that first experience will be forever tainted. If the game had difficulty settings so you could set your difficulty using the rule book from game one, and the game was fully cooperative, or at least the semi-coop mode gave rewards for all damage rather tan just kills (which is such a simple fix!) I think this game could be a 9. If the base game included more variety and a tougher boss, it could even be a 10 for me. But the requirement of the expansions which are not cheap, and the previous issues mean this scores an 8. Which is still very high. This is a good game. It wont be for everyone. But if you like miniature skirmish games and have got this far in the review then I would wager you may well agree with me and find this game very rewarded. Let's hunt!

Moonlight Castle WBG Score: 7/10 Player Count 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Dragons Breath, Honga, Valley of the Vikings. Published by: HABA Designed by: Marie Fort, Wilfried Fort Moonlight Castle looks amazing! There is a 3D castle stood around a moat, with brightly coloured flowers and shrubbery surrounding it. When I first set this up my children were instantly amazed! I then showed them the characters they could choose from and I was greeted with cries of "how cute!" and "I want this one! No, wait. That one!" So far, so good. And then, I introduced them to the sliding mechanic whereby you fill the castle with gems tiles, and then push them into play, one-by-one, using a sliding mechanism; and well... their tiny little minds were blown away! You can see below how the clear tool on the right is used to push forward a stack of tiles that are hidden inside the castle at set-up, to slide the jewels out into the castle pathway. In truth, this can be a little fiddley. It doesn't always quite work as it should due to the cardboard nature of the set up allowing for slight variations in the movement of the castle. But a few wriggles here, and jiggles there and you will be away. In terms of table presence for children's game, I have not seen many better. How To Play The game itself, like many Haba games in this range, is very simple. Your goal is to collect as many jewels as possible. You will do this by placing your character onto one of the various flower spaces and paying the cost of that space. One green pebble for a green space, one red pebble for a red etc. You will then draw as many pebbles as shown on that spaces from the blue circles, either zero, one, two, three, or four. And then if you are next to a path space, you can claim that jewel if you can pay the cost. Again, matching the colour pebbles to the coloured jewels. One pebble per jewel shown. This jewel then goes into your collection for end game points. One point per jewel. But before your turn is over, you must flip the jewel tile to reveal a potential bonus action. Either you will be asked to bring more jewels out from the castle or have another turn. There will be times when you don't have the right pebbles to take an effective turn, on these occasions you can go to the white flower spaces that don't cost anything, and give you extra pebbles to plan for later turns. The game ends when a certain marked jewel appears out of the castle. You can randomly shuffle this to to appear anywhere at set-up, or place into a specific position to determine the game length. But using all the jewels will only mean a 10-15 minute game, there is no real reason to shorten this game. At the end of the game, the player with the most jewels wins. In case of a tie, the player with the most remaining pebbles wins. The game itself is perhaps a little too simple, although of course this game is aimed at younger gamers. I just always feel younger gamers are talked down too. I have been playing Scythe with my son since he was six. Now, I understand not every child wants a complex game, nor does every adult for that matter. But I do think you could add variations to games like this to add extra levels of strategy. Variations The extra levels in this game add different places to place your character with four ritual fountains included in the game and one added to each game per player. But they are double sided and have various options depending on what type of game you want. Either they offer the chance to draw free pebbles at no cost of placing your character there. Or on the advanced side, they force players after drawing four pebbles to either select one colour to keep and discard all other colours, or to keep one of each colour drawn and discard any duplicates. This does not really make the game any more fun, just frustrating. Things that take away in games like this always confuse me. Life does that enough, why have it in games? The other variation is to remove the player screen. Usually, players would place any pebbles they have behind their player screen. This stops the other players from knowing how many pebbles they have and what colour they currently possess. Without the screens, players can play a little more tactically and block their opponents based on what positions they place their own characters. But again, this just makes the game less fun. It brings more take-that to the game, and makes it a little more vindictive. Due to the simplicity of the game and disappointing variants, I have only scored this a seven. That has been driven up by the table presence and wow factor for kids. I feel this game has focused on that more than the game mechanics itself. Now, this is a common issue for me with family games aimed at young children, so not a comment directly targeted at Haba or the designers of this game. But with a few changes, I think this game could easily be an 8 for younger gamers. A few more variations of what is on the back of the jewels would help. Some variations where some spaces on the board cost a lot more to place your character there but offer higher rewards. Perhaps some mission cards so add temporary effects during the game? Or, individual player powers that allow each character unique opportunities to try different things in the game. Moving forward, I would implore Haba and all designers of family games to think about things that add more fun to the game, rather than take away opportunities to do fun things in games. Moonlight Castle looks stunning and it plays fast and fun, but I feel it missed a trick to become a real modern day family favourite. Overall, I have enjoyed playing it and think it will come to the table many times as it just looks so appealing. And as it plays so fast, people wont be left too disappointed by the simple mechanics and unnecessary take-that.

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland WBG Score: 7.5 Player Count: 3-5 You’ll like this if you like: Inis, Blood Rage, The King is Dead Published by: Osprey Games Designed by: Peer Sylvester By Steve Godfrey Whenever I think of the title of this game I always end up singing it to the tune of Metal Guru by T-Rex. It’s got nothing to do with the game or the review but I figured that I’d share that particular ear worm with everyone else, enjoy the review! Rules of the High King Once the game is set up, deal each player a number of cards depending on player count. Then each player will draft two then pass them round, this will go on until all the cards have been drafted. Flip over the top card of the Viking deck and place that many Viking tokens out. Flip over the first marriage card then start the round. The player with the control ring places it on a town on the map. The colour of this town will be the trump suit for the next phase. The first player then plays a card from their hand matching that town's colour. In turn order, the other players will play a card from their hand of any colour. Players will then resolve their cards in number order from lowest to highest. The player who played the highest number card of the same colour as the trump suit (or a white wild card) will win the trick and they will perform the top action on the card on their turn. All the other players will have a choice to play one of the two bottom actions on their cards. The top actions on the cards mainly give that player control of the chosen town,and the town marker for the next turn. Sometimes this will also give you a bonus and sometimes will cost you coins. Bottom actions come in a combination of things. Money is a regular feature of the cards and is self explanatory. Axe symbols will let you take Viking tokens from the ones that were placed at the start of the round. Crosses let you place discs onto the church area and envelopes will move your disc up the marriage track. In any of these cases you can pay two coins to gain extra. Some cards will give you the option to pay five coins to place a disc on a town connected to one you already control. Rounds will continue until everyone has played all bar one of their cards. At the end of the round the marriage, viking and church areas will trigger in that order, I’ll get to these later on. Finally you will check for region control. Each region has a threshold and when that many towns have discs on them the player with control of the most will gain the token for that region. This will be worth points at the end of the game but these can be taken from you if other players gain more control in that region. Area control, Vikings and trick taking? All games are a mishmash of different mechanics and most of them just seem like natural bedfellows when described as part of a pitch or on the games BGG page. But area control and trick taking is one I’d never seen before, and even now, when I’ve played the game a few times it still sounds odd. But it works really well and regardless of how it sounds, it plays out in a really smooth and natural way and opens up a whole new way of strategizing in an area control game. You can teach an old dog to win tricks. In most trick taking games the aim is to win the trick and similarly here winning the trick is also something you want to be doing since this will help you spread across the different regions. Placing discs in connecting towns will only get you so far around the map since most connecting towns won’t venture out of a region and often won’t offer more than two towns connecting together. This means that winning tricks in different regions is vital for expansion and expansion is needed if you want to be involved in the race for those region control points. So winning tricks is great, but it’s not always the best strategy because ignoring those other areas of the board could be a costly mistake and that’s where those bottom actions become all important. Winning a trick may give you some benefits in those other areas but they’re not always great. If you want to make any real advancements then you need to use those bottom actions. I love how the game makes what would normally be considered a consolation prize, just as important and in some situations more important than winning the trick itself. The drafting phase acts to alleviate as much of the luck factor in the card draw as possible and add to the strategy Drafting two cards per player gives you a bit more control for the cards you want (aside from the one or two your left with after the draft) and serves to maybe cut down on how long that drafting phase will take. So far in all of our games the drafting has gone pretty quickly but that’s not to say that it’s going to be the case every time. The many areas of area control. At first glance you may wonder what Vikings, marriages and churches have to do with area control but thematically and more importantly historically you realise, not only how well they tie in, but also how much of an effect they can have on the board. The marriage track will net you either renown tokens, a chance to claim another town or precious, precious money. Trust me money is tight in this one, you won’t see players doing their best Scrooge Mcduck impression in Brian Boru. But most of all, the person higher on the track at the end of each round will give you a political marriage which gets you points and lets you claim a town in the named region before the region step resolves, potentially swaying it in your favour. The Viking tokens can get players renown tokens, points and also, probably more importantly tactically, is the player with the most tokens at the end of the round will let them place a Viking token on another player's controlled town essentially losing them control of it. The last is the church. Here the player with the most discs will put a monastery ring around one of their controlled towns which now makes it now count as two control in a region. Any player with 4 discs in there can also place a ring out in the same manor. All of this matters because of the region claim step. Once regions start to get claimed, what follows is a brilliant game of tug of war, not only on the map but in those other areas as players try to win advantages to snatch control of different regions away from their opponents. Another touch I love is that the “winner” of each area will remove their discs/tokens but all other players will retain all or some of theirs which acts as a nice little catch up mechanic and stops any one player becoming running away in any of those areas. The quadrilogy of quick control. If you’ve read my previous reviews of A War of Whispers and The Court of Miracles and even the King is Dead (another brilliant game from this games designer Peer Sylvester) you’ll know that I’ve had a bit of an obsession with quick area control games and I think Brian Boru sits pretty well in that camp. This is potentially going to be the longest of the four, the box says 60-90 minutes, but the main reason for that would be the drafting. Like most drafting games this would be all down to how long players take, the rest of the action turns are generally fairly snappy purely because of how simple they are. I could happily host a games night and fit all these games in and have a great night. One thing I did find a bit fiddly was the upkeep phases where you're resolving the Viking and the church areas. I’ve played this a few times and I still find myself reaching for the rulebook to clarify things. It’s slowly sinking in though. There are guides on the board to let you know how those phases work. Personally I find these are useful only once you’ve got a good idea of how these phases work in the first place. I’m prepared to admit though that this could be a “me” issue and it’s just not something that’s sunk in properly for some reason. In no way is it something that’s going to take away from the game and, let’s be honest, chances are one of the players is going to be hugging the rulebook for a quick reference anyway. I’ve only played Peer Sylvesters The King is Dead but my understanding is that this is one of, if not his biggest game. Just because it’s big though it doesn’t mean it’s complex. It's still a fairly straightforward area control game but still retains a lot of the strategy you’d expect from this style of game. If this is the sort of thing we can expect from his bigger games then consider me already in the queue for the next one.

Blast from the Past WBG Score: 7.5 Player Count: 1-6 You’ll like this if you like: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Unlock Series, Exit Series. Published by: Homescapehome Designed by: Alexander By Steve Godfrey At the time of writing this a certain show's fourth season is about to drop…or will have already dropped, depending on when this goes out. So what a great time to put out a review of a game which shares a strong theme with it. Was it planned like this or not? Who knows, Stranger Things have happened. We played this game using the physical paper version but there is a digital version available. I’ve not played any of the digital versions so I can’t comment on how they work. To set up, open the folder, scan the QR code which takes you to a form where you can enter your names and what time you start playing. Then just read the first page of story aaaaand that’s it. Seriously, just start looking though the pages and solving puzzles. Let’s turn this up to Eleven I’m going to be honest right out of the gate. Having access to everything all at once, having all of those sheets of paper in front of you, it’s overwhelming and it can be difficult to know where to start since you’re taking in so much information. All of a sudden though something will click. You’ll read a puzzle and say “ah, I know what to do!” and you’ll just fall into it. You’ll start to see where clues crop up for different puzzles and start piecing things together like a detective in every police procedural and before you know it you’ll start to find your flow and it’s a lot of fun! One of the things I like about the puzzles is that they’re all trying to lead you to a similar style of solution which in this case is the name of one of ten locations on the map. Because of that you instantly know when you're solving them, that you're on the right track. There’s sometimes nothing worse than doing a puzzle and not sure if you're looking for a number, an alphanumeric code or if you're trying to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen African or European swallow. Let’s Hopper into some puzzles. The main reason you come to these things is the puzzles right? and the puzzles here are a lot of fun. A lot of them are spread over multiple pages in the folder so you’ll find yourself rifling through the pages trying to find all the linking pieces of a puzzle. If you’ve ever seen those detective shows where people have filled half their living room with pages of evidence then you’ll have the general gist of how this looks on the table. This set is one of the lower difficulty levels and I’d say that’s probably about right. The puzzles are clever and there’s a bit of a mix. Some have that instant “I know how to solve this” which helps with the initial confidence boost, whilst others need a bit more looking over before that final eureka moment. There is one puzzle here which is probably a bit more labour intensive than I personally would have liked. I won’t spoil the puzzle, but it is one of those puzzles that involves a programming element and making a mistake may mean you have to reset certain elements. If you end up having to do that multiple times then I can see that being a frustration for some people, myself included. All that being said, it did keep us engaged throughout our two and a half hour playtime (if I didn’t have my much smarter partner in puzzle solving with me I then I probably would have taken longer) Neither of us felt the urge to call it a night and pick it up another day. We were both keen on seeing how it played out. So obviously this is a one and done. But how one and done is it, do you have to destroy stuff, could you possibly replay it and find different things? First question. Technically, you can draw on stuff and cut out a couple of things. However, the things you cut out are an aid and not a solution so they can easily get put back in the wallet for other players and don’t affect the puzzles. The things you can draw on, just use a pencil and they’re easily erased for someone else. Don’t try that with the digital version though! Pencil, or pen for that matter, is tough to rub off of a computer screen! er, so I’m told. As for the second question. No, this is a linear style of puzzle. One solution and one way of doing things which means that once you're done, you’re done. Not enough room for a Demogorgon. I played this with my eldest daughter and I think that this was probably the perfect player count. At a stretch you could probably go to a three but for me I tend to find that most of these puzzle games work best at the lower player counts. For this one I would say that’s particularly true, let me tell you why. Because different parts of the puzzles are split over several pages, whilst one person is doing one puzzle, the other players don’t have access to those pages (not unless you have everything spread out) so they’d need to find a separate puzzle to work on that doesn’t involve those pages. That’s not to say that that’s necessarily a bad thing. There's something fun about rifling through loads of papers looking for clues and putting things together. There’s also the joy of having your head in a puzzle and then the other player lets out a “YES!!!” Once they’ve solved what they’re working on. I do think that two heads are better than one for these types of games but too many heads could potentially get in the way. Obviously different groups work differently and if your group usually works well with these sorts of games then you’ll get a lot from it. Now we’ve tried this one, and experienced it's fun and strong take on the theme, we’re both interested in seeing what else they have to offer and to see how well they stack up when we’re not quite as invested in the theme as we were with this one. They’re definitely worth looking into if you’re in the market for an interesting puzzle game with some strong thematic ties.

Mandragora WBG Score: 7/10 Player Count 2-4 You’ll like this if you like: Tucano, Sushi Go, Point Salad Published by: Studio H Designed by: Bruno Cathala, Florian Sirieix Come with with me to a magical land where all the sorcery boutiques are selling off their magical items half price. It's Black Magic Friday and their are bargains to be had! The bad news... you are not the only one eyeing up some new Mandrakes. The good news... you can use your new magical items to cast spells on your rival shoppers to slow them down and become the most powerful sorcerer in the land. Or at least your table, for that game, amongst those that played. How to Set Up Lay out the ten shop tokens into a circle in any order. Note the three shops with a darker background and the one with the dimpled edge. Then lay one card face up by each shop, and face down for the three shops with the darker colour. Place the remaining cards into a face down stack in the middle of the shops. Next to the shop with the dimple, place the assistant standee. Then lay out the spell cards into their separate piles, numbered one to five. Place the Curse and Countdown marker nearby and you are ready to go. How to Play On each players turn you have the choice to do one of two things. You can either move the assistant one, two or three spaces clockwise, taking the cards in the space the assistant finishes in and then placing another card from the draw pile into each space the assistant passed through. Or use cards in your hand to cast a spell. This is done using one spell card and one to five ingredients cards. It is up to you how many ingredients you use, but they must all be the same colour and match the colour of the spell card. If you use one ingredient then you can take the top card from the number one spell pile. This will get you one point at the end of the game, plus the points on the spell card (which varies from zero to three). And of course the power of the spell itself. The powers allow you to get rid of bad cards, take extra turns, move the assistant an extra space if required when you are moving this, or get rid of cards at the end of the game. Getting rid of cards is important as each different colour of spell or ingredient card left in your hand at the end of the game will cause you to loose one point per colour. The person with the most curse cards at the end of the game will lose two points from their overall score. Using the spell cards to get rid of unwanted curse cards could be the difference between winning and loosing. However, this does introduce a bit of take-that into the game. A game that is largely targeted at children. Younger players tend to react poorly to this mechanic, so I am always left unsure why it is included in games that are marketed at kids. But you can always take these cards out I suppose. The art on the cards is bright and vibrant. It's nice how the art is not just repeated on each card too. There is a nice variety of the ingredients you can get. This does not affect the game at all, but adds a nice layer of polish to the game. The colours are all easily distinguishable too, with different icons in the top corner for anyone who has colour blindness. A simple but effective touch. The game plays very quickly. Turns take a matter of seconds. Moving on the assistant and taking the cards, or laying cards to claim a new spell. A total game can be played in under ten minutes quite easily. There are only 106 cards and once the deck is extinguished, the game has three final rounds before it ends. If players are regularly moving the assistant longer distances then you will find you will get through the deck a lot quicker than you think. This does mean it is hard to implement any meaningful strategy into this game though. But the main thing you will want to decide is if you plan to try and complete lots of little spells, or fewer more powerful spells. There are only a few level four spells and just the one level five spell. So, if you are building up for these, you need to move fast to avoid disappointment. But if you don't get the cards you need, there is not much you can do. However, the white Mandrake cards are wild, and can be used either as any ingredient, or any spell card. Overall. Mandragora is a fast, fun, family friendly game, that plays very quickly and offers some fun moments. My family has really enjoyed it and I can see this coming out a lot, not just because it is fun, but because it is so accessible. Teaching this game is a cinch. Setting up and playing it is so quick. But it still delivers a level of satisfaction seen from higher weight games. It is a lot of fun to cast spells in such a simple way. Collect colour sets, play those sets, get the power. There is a constant sense of satisfaction from completing lots of mini tasks. No real high, no massive build to a huge task being completed. But lots of little buzzes, and I think that is the perfect vibe to go for with a game like this.

Stay Cool WBG Score: 8/10 Player Count: 2-7 You’ll like this if you like: Blockbuster, Anomia, Escape: The Curse of the Temple. Published by: Le Scorpion Masqué Designed by: Julien Sentis From the very moment I heard about Stay Cool, I was intrigued. I wanted to experience this game to see how it made me feel. This is not a common reaction for me. Many games excite me and make me want to play it. Many trigger that certain part of our brain that won’t be satisfied until we peel away the wrapper and learn the game. But Stay Cool was different. I wanted to know how I would feel playing this. Would I enjoy this experience? Would I be good at this game? Could I stay cool? Stay Cool is a challenge of multitasking, answering basic trivia questions, some minor hand-eye dexterity, and ultimately, a test in how well you can stay cool! There are two different sets of questions. The first are on a small red card with five questions on. Each answer is three of four letters long. There are some questions that require an action over an answer such as touching your left knee with your right index finger for example. But most are simply three or four letter words. They are all fairly simple trivia based questions. The trick here being you cannot answer them out loud. You must answer them by spelling out the correct answer using the lettered dice. The two white dice have the vowels and the letter ‘Y.’ The other dice show the consonants. There will be the odd occasions where you won’t be able to find the letter you need as it only exits on a dice you may have already placed for another letter. In which case you will need to change the first dice around. But most of the time this is a fairly simple task of arranging the dice. However, the moment the person to your left asks you this first question that you must spell out, your time starts, and the person to your right will ask you another entirely different question. The second blue question card will have ten questions on, again, fairly simple trivia-based things. But now your brain is trying to spell out the answer to the question from the red card whilst it is also thinking of the correct answer on the blue. The clever thing with many of the questions, is that they are simple enough, but require some concentration. Such as counting the number of vowels in a long word or arranging a sentence into alphabetical order. They are all things you could easily do under normal circumstances. But add the time pressure and second simultaneous task and it becomes somewhat more of a challenge. In round one. You will continue answering questions from the two cards for two minutes. You will then multiple the number next to the question you last answered on the red card by the number by the last question correctly answered on the blue card. Each other player around the table will take a turn and then all players move onto round two. In round two, the same thing will happen, except now the person answering the questions will now be in charge of their own time. The two-minute time is counted by the turn of a 30 second sand timer three times. In round one this is done for you. In round two, you must say the word “timer” when you want to have the timer turned. If you loose focus and let the timer run out, then your turn that round is over. Adding this simple visual task into what is already a very difficult multi-tasking game, can be too much for some! So, feel free to leave this out for certain players if you like, but I found this to be a highly entertaining rule to bring in. I don’t tell people to expect this change at the start of the game. I like to surprise people with it when the time comes. Once every player has had a turn in round two saying “timer” at the appropriate time, in round three they must do the same, but this time, with the box lid blocking their view of the timer. This may sound very difficult. But having played a couple of rounds already, and watched other players do the same, you will have a good idea for what 30 second feels like at this stage. But of course, the challenge will feel difficult no matter how many times you have practiced when run at the same time as answering the two questions. The moment the player answering gets a question correct, either by spelling out the right answer with the dice, or simply saying it out loud for the blue card, the question master will ask the next question. You could run through three or four questions from one card whilst still thinking off the answer on the other. This is fine. The people asking the questions must work hard not to speak at the same time as each other And if you ever answer a question incorrectly, they must re-read the entire question. And that is the entire game. See who scores the most points over the three rounds, and they are the winner. So, is this fun? Did I enjoy it and did I stay cool? Well, I played this with several people across different ages, demographics, and backgrounds. I was very keen to see how different people reacted to this particular experience. Overall, I would say that most people I played this with were not sure. They didn’t like the pressure it put them under. They enjoyed the game if it was played in a light-hearted and jovial way. Perhaps even not scoring and just seeing how they reacted, and how it felt. But if it was taken too seriously with some players, they did not enjoy the pressure it put them under. However, as you can probably tell from my score at the very top of this review, I absolutely loved this. Now, don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t mean I was good at it. Far from it in fact. I often got very confused with simple things due to the time pressure and left right brain thinking required. One question that asked me to explain the two meanings of the word “Oversees” really through me. I simply could not think of a second meaning outside of someone who travels to other country over a sea. The amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex, which humans use to calm ourselves down during stressful situations was clearly not functioning here! (Yes, I googled that) and the fact that this word can also mean to take charge of a situation was lost to me. I got stuck on that question and it ruined that round for me, which did frustrate and in truth, embarrass me a little. As such, I want to make it clear that my high score in this review has nothing to do with the fact that I was good at this. This game isn’t just for people who would be good at this type of challenge. For me it is more about the enjoyment than the success! It is more to do with the fact that I loved playing it that I scored this as I did. I loved the experience. Even though I was not always able to stay cool, I enjoyed the challenge of trying. And I think this is the key part. Do not ask yourself if you want this game as you may be good at it, I would consider more this. Do you want this game as you would enjoy the experience of trying to be good at it? Regardless of your relative success, will you enjoy trying? Now, another huge factor is who you will play with. You ideally need at least two others to play with but it can work in a two, but not quite as smoothly. Are there at least two others in your gaming world who would enjoy this experience with you? As from what I have found, there is a real divide between those who I play with who will want to play this time and time again, and those who would be quite happy if they never saw this at the table one more time! The stress this game puts some people under is very real, and it is obviously not for everyone. But what I was able to do with some who didn’t enjoy game one or two, was encourage them to try again and view it as an experiment to see if they could improve. And most did. This improvement did then encourage them to try again as most humans enjoy seeing progression in their lives, be that work, home or board games! But I still saw stress etched in their face as they tried perhaps too hard to play the game. But for me, despite the fact I was clearly not able to stay cool, I loved the experience and would enjoy playing this for many years to come. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who think they would enjoy the challenge and had the right group to play with.