Most Non-Triumphant – Bill & Ted’s Riff In Time

I made the mistake of looking up when the first Bill & Ted film came out and now I feel really old. How in glob’s name did they manage to get a sequel made in 2020?! Yeah, it’s been 29 years. Keanu Reeves is heading towards 60. Nostalgia bucks are big bucks I guess. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about movies, we’re here to talk about related board games. *sigh*

Bill & Ted’s Riff In Time from Warcradle Studios is very much like the 2020 movie, Face The Music. It’s alright. Didn’t hurt anyone. It passed the time. It was nice to look at the art and go “oh yeah, it’s them” (and then “this game has a minis expansion, doesn’t it”, to which the answer is yes, of course it does). All the artwork is of the painted minis, but without the expansion, you’ll be pushing cardboard figures in plastic stands (with the exception of the player minis) around. It’s designed for 1-4 players and takes around 80 laborious minutes (not that time should really matter when you have a time machine, right?).

The basic plot is that there’s all these rifts opening in time. This has caused personages of historical significance to wind up at places and times they really don’t belong. It’s up to Bill, Ted, Elizabeth, and Joanna to jump into their time booths (for the sake of the game they have one each, I guess they’re just giving them out like free samples these days. Hey future people, where’s my damn time booth? I’m British, so I guess it’s a phone box with a missing door that’s been smashed to crap and smells like stale piss and hepatitis. Plus, it’s probably stuck at a lorry park/lake in Kent, we’ll move on eh) and go put things right.

Each player picks a character who will have a special ability such as swapping their riff card or extra movement. They then get dealt out two objective cards and choose one to keep. These are personal missions you can complete to gain additional abilities going forward and will involve things like doing some repair work on multiple rifts, or having a particular character with you and travelling to a specific location. They’re then given one additional objective card, which you get as a free ability for the game, with no need to complete it (Excellent! *air guitars like a pro*).

To set up the board, you shuffle the location discs and place them in little divots on the board (which reminded me of Pokémon Master Trainer). Next you shuffle the location cards and place the personages of historical significance standees. Finally place the player minis in San Dimas and shuffle up the riff deck.

At this point in play, it’s your last chance to turn back, but you’re here for a review, so I guess I have to keep going. I do these things for you. I hope you appreciate it.

On your turn you draw a rift card and perform whatever action it demands. This could be something as simple as advancing the rift counter on your location; something bad, like advancing the rift counter on 5 separate locations; something annoying, like advancing a particular location’s rift counter and then transporting you, or even all players there. This can leave you feeling you have very little agency if you draw a lot of them in a row. There are like five Excellent cards in the riff deck that actually benefit you, but it’s a big deck so you don’t rely on them turning up when you need.

Next, players roll up to four action dice from their pool and perform actions based on what luck has brought. You do get one free re-roll, but after that, you’re probably on your own. There are four colours of dice, most of which show the same icons in differing amounts. There’s Move which allows you to travel through the circuits of time to connected locations; Interact which allow you to pick up characters, drop them off, or start repairing rifts in locations that have already had their correct personages of historical significance dropped off; Excellent which can be used as any other type of action; and Bogus which will cause you to raise the rift counter on your current location (or the San Dimas counter, if it’s already at its limit).

At the start of the game all locations are set to level 5, except San Dimas, which starts at whatever the player count is. Early on you’ll probably feel like things are a little dangerous as you will most likely feel like riff cards are seeing you constantly raising levels and really struggling to do anything to mitigate the gaping holes in freaking time!

As you pick up personages of historical significance (yes, the manual insists on using the full title every damn time) they will grant you temporary boons and/or banes while they’re travelling with you. Usually adding a blue die (mid-tier) to your pool and a move, interaction, excellent, or re-roll action to use each turn. Some of the more wild characters, like Genghis Khan, will add black Bogus dice, which you have to roll as one of your four each turn. These only have Bogus actions or blank sides. As such, it’s best to get these characters on a swift pick up and drop off service or risk a major bummer each turn.

Riff In Time (and yes, I was regularly tripping over riff and rift while playing this game, because both words come up so often) is a game of three parts. The early panic of trying to get things under control can feel kind of desperate, the solid mid-game where you’re starting to get into a rhythm and build your dice pool, and then the plodding, pedestrian final phase where you’ve got everything well under control and it’s just mopping up the last people and places.

Ultimately Riff In Time is… fine-ish, I guess. It’s easy to teach, easy to play, doesn’t require much in the way of strategy, but is ultimately quite a hollow experience. The manual spends too much time trying to be late 80s/early 90s cool and could have been simplified without really losing anything of the theme. The standees are of that design that doesn’t really grip the cardboard so won’t chew it up with continued use, but ultimately can’t always be picked up by the card part, as the plastic base just falls off. It’s fun enough for two thirds, but fails to stick the landing. It doesn’t stand up well against other modern board games and so just like Bill & Ted Face The Music, it feels about 20 years too late to be fully appreciated.

Pros:

  • Dice feel pretty decent.
  • Board art is nice, clear, and colourful.

Cons:

  • Feels like a movie tie-in board game from 1991.
  • Lots of empty space in the box.
  • The central location marker for San Dimas never seems to sit properly on the board, making it easy to knock and change the value it’s pointing at.

Final Score: 4/10

This Is The End For You – Pandemic Legacy Season 0

At the start of this year I had the idea to start playing some legacy games to keep us occupied during lockdown. My fiancée and I have since played all three Pandemic Legacy games (it’s a false sense of control during an actual pandemic). I didn’t have the foresight to take photographs of the first two before we started playing, so this review is for the most recent game – Pandemic Legacy Season 0.

All pictures are from a box fresh copy of the game so this is nothing you won’t see the moment you open the box from new, additionally I think I’ve kept this review as spoiler free as possible.

When you first open the box, you’ll be greeted with the usual dossiers (like the world’s most intimidating advent calendar), manual, legacy deck (actually two in this game, plus an operations deck that you will have to fish cards out of periodically), player pieces, board, cards, and 8 sealed boxes. There’s also a debrief book which uses paragraph numbers to feed you plot according to whether you pass or fail certain challenges in the game.

If you’ve never played a legacy game, some of this may need explaining. The legacy deck is basically your automated game/dungeon master. You unwrap the deck and start drawing from the start end. It will provide you with your objectives, plot beats, new cards to be put in other decks, and potentially whole new gameplay elements. Once you’re done with an objective for the month, you tear it up and throw it out. Your game is now changed forever. At various points you’ll add stickers to your passports, the manual, and even the board. These games are typically only able to be played through once and then all you have are (hopefully) wonderful memories of this experience you’ve shared.

Season 0 takes place back in the 60s, in the midst of the cold war. You’re a group of fresh-faced, newly qualified medical professionals, pulled into the CIA in order to stop a deadly bioweapon (apparently it’s easier to make a medic into a spy than to send a spy to medical school). You’ll get a cute little passport where you’ll hold your three identities (one for each affiliation – allied, soviet, and neutral), a card with a long list of possible actions (with space on the back to add more as the game progresses), a player pawn in your choice of colour, and off you go into the world.

Your first big choice will be picking a character head to represent you. You’ll be adding your choice of hair, hats, scarves, dresses, shirts, facial hair, and more later, but first you get a profile picture for all of your alises. There’s been some attempt to have some variety in skin tone, but I found when it came to hair, there was only one option for natural hair for a black character. Pretty shoddy when you have potentially two people playing black characters and each having three alises (come on Z-Man, you can do better than this).

Much like base Pandemic, you have a player deck containing cities of the world (accurate for the time period) which will also include any funded events (single use bonuses). You may recognise the threat level, which increases as you pull escalations out of the player deck, and a big map of the world as your board.

The first noticeable difference is in the threat deck. Like Pandemic classic you’ll be drawing from this deck and adding pieces to the board in the city that they show. However, as agents aren’t single-celled organisms given to mitosis when they have enough friends around, they don’t outbreak quite like diseases when you have to place a fourth one. Instead, you place an incident marker on that city, draw a card from the bottom of the threat deck and read the little text box for instructions. This could be nothing in a game that’s going well, an effect that doesn’t apply. On the flipside though, you might end up causing a chain reaction that will lose you the game.

I’ll give you an example: The game is going badly, you’re on your sixth outbreak (they’re called incidents in PL0). You draw a card from the bottom of the deck and it tells you to put an agent on every city with an incident marker in Asia. You have one, but it already has three agents. So you add another incident marker to that city and pull another card. Joy, this time you have to add an agent to a city in North America with an incident token. That city would also get an incident token, but there’s none left, so it’s an immediate game over. Now, that didn’t actually happen in any of our games (we had some really bad combos, but not that bad), but it’s entirely possible for things to badly snowball.

I should clarify that not all of the threat cards say to add agents, some say to remove safehouses from a region, some say to remove cover from players in a region.

On top of all this, during the game end phase, you’ll be adding surveillance to any city with an incident token. If you start your turn in a city with surveillance you will lose that much cover on your current alias (unless there’s a safehouse).

Losing cover is like taking scars in PL1 & 2. You scratch off panels under your current alias to reveal a symbol. It could be nothing, it might be the loss of a card from your hand, it might be that you take a liability (permanent downgrade on that alias), or you may just have to burn that alias entirely. No more Ms Definitlynotaspyovic, she’s gone. You’ll have to go on using those you have left. This could leave a player unable to complete certain types of mission at all, putting more pressure on the others.

Another big change is that you can’t just fly between safehouses as you could with research stations. This immediately limits your board coverage, especially in a two player game. There are visas which can be bought with game end upgrade points, but this will only get you to the city you name on the visa.

To fill in the gaps in your ability to get around so easily, you can trade in 5 cards of a matching affiliation at a safehouse in order to build a team (they’re these adorable little vans (you’ll have to imagine they have “perfectly innocent florist van” painted on the side)) these teams can be moved around using player actions. End your turn with one in a city matching its affinity and your team will clear all the agents out during the mop up step. It can be really helpful to get a van rolled out in an area that keeps popping up agents like espionage whack-a-mole. Just drive it around the problem cities and you won’t have to go there personally for a while. It’s very satisfying when it all starts working.

As with previous PL games, there are objectives each month. While these will have completely new cards each time, they fall into a few basic categories.

First up acquiring unknown targets. During setup you’ll need to go through the player deck, take out all the cities of a given region, shuffle them up, remove 1-3 of them and put them face down under the objective card. The rest are shuffled into the player deck before you start getting it ready to deal out. In regions like South America, this may not be so bad. 3 cities you need to target, there’s only 5 total and you get one in your starting hand, so you know most of the information you need. However, you will need a team in each city in order to acquire all of the targets.

With known targets, it’s a bit different, the city is printed on the objective card, get a team there, do the thing.

There are a couple of other mission types later on, but these two will turn up again and again, in various forms. With the consequences for complete or even partial failure being more or less catastrophic.

Speaking of partial failure, that is totally an option now. Whereas previous games in the series had you either fail and retry a month or succeed and move on. Season 0 lets you experience partial success. Complete one objective, but fail the others. That’s a partial failure. Try not to worry, off you go to next month. “But the horrific potential of what we failed to do last month?!” “The world is tough kid, you can’t always save everybody”. It’s really harsh and on at least one occasion had us asking if we shouldn’t just play to lose entirely so we could try again, rather than risk doing some of a thing and having to move on.

It’s not just complete missions either. Sometimes you might be asked to acquire targets in two cities, but only have the vans to get to one with the player deck about to run out. If you acquire the single target with the van you do have and the other one isn’t completed in the same turn, it’s gone. Sorry about that, but mission completed (technically).

There’s something about partial successes that make the game feel incredibly stressful some months. You’ve potentially got three missions, involving at least 5 different cities and some other goal, you were unlucky and got an escalation on the very first draw of the game and the incidents only spiral from there. Everything is on fire and you have to make some very tough decisions about what you can and cannot achieve. Hopefully you can live with the consequences.

While I agree with the designers that you could play this without playing the others, I feel that a lot will be lost as it makes frequent, off-hand references to events from the other games in the series.

One thing that I was asked a lot when I started playing was “is it uncritical of the CIA”. A reasonable question for a game set during the cold war. Since spy fiction set in that period is full of “aren’t the US great and those soviets are the most one-dimensional, dastardly, evil, mustache-twirling villains” tropes. Without going into any detail or spoilers, I can confirm that there is potential criticism of all factions (I won’t clarify the “potential” in that sentence because spoilers).

Overall, this was a great wrap-up to the Pandemic Legacy series. It’s still recognisably Pandemic, while being very much its own game. The plot of our story was great, and we looked through the rest of the material postgame to see how else it could have gone. We were really happy with how the plot expanded in other directions. Furthermore, it’s also the first in the series that we’ve felt like you could actually keep playing some of the objective types once the game is over (YMMV, if you’ve ended up with surveillance everywhere that may not be an option for you).

Pros:

  • Familiar yet unique gameplay.
  • Great story.
  • A fitting end to the trilogy.

Cons:

  • Not enough natural hair options for black characters.
  • The colours are very muted and it can look very bland before you get a lot of agents on the board.
  • Incidents have the potential to snowball.

Final Score: 9/10

A Deeply Satisfying Box – Lords of Waterdeep

I’ll get to the game in a second, but first off I have to address something incredibly important about Lords of Waterdeep. The box is hugely satisfying. Everything has a place. Things not only fit there, but can be retrieved easily. This is easy to get out, helpful during play and a joy to pack away in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever found with any other game. It’s an impressive feat to make even the cleanup a joy.

Lords of Waterdeep a worker-placement game for 2-5 players, and plays in about an hour. It’s set in the Forgotten Realms universe, which you may know from Dungeons & Dragons. This is a city of intrigue where Lords hatch plots for political power, manipulating the citizenry with hidden strings.

I enjoy worker-placement games immensely, and LoW takes that formula and expands it in a really interesting way. At the start of the game, there are basic locations you can visit to gain money or intrigue, acquire details of quests, hire adventurers to meet in a tavern to send on those quests, and build new locations to expand the city.

New buildings are given the mark of the player who purchased them and each will grant them a benefit when the building is used by anyone (including themselves). This can create dilemmas for other players. They want to gain a bunch of wizards for a particular quest, but doing so will aid you in completing parties for your own quests.

Once you’ve recruited enough of the right types of adventurer, you can send them off and complete your quests. This could have simply a victory point benefit, an ongoing benefit, or it could be one of the two types of quest that your secretive Lord gains a benefit for at the end of the game.

If you send a representative to the harbour, you can play an intrigue card from your hand. These may grant you extra adventurers or some coin to grease the wheels of your various schemes. Many of these will not only benefit you, but also your fellow players (though there may be a cost to those that want to ride your coattails).

The game is played over eight rounds. At the fifth round everyone gets an additional meeple to play during future turns. By this time there will be enough new buildings that they have space to be placed. It’s all very well balanced. Once the final round is over, you add your Lord’s bonus points for completed quests to your total victory points and declare a victor (and then you pack it away and the box itself brings you further joy. Or maybe that last bit is just me).

This game is beautifully finished. The board is nicely illustrated (if a little lacking in colour), but in such a way as to still be very clear about key information. The cards are printed on really nice stock, all the art, from the box to the manual, to the cards is not only lovely, but consistent. The cubes are a nice size and weight, the money is heavy card stock, and the meeples are a good size and very pleasant colours. For a game this reasonably priced, it’s a top quality product.

Pros:

  • Really fun.
  • Plenty of replayability due to the amount of content.
  • Beautiful quality.

Cons:

  • Due to the background colour, quest cards aren’t the easiest to read.
  • The main board could do with some more vibrancy.

Final Score: 7/10

Mental Gymnastics – Manifold Garden

NB: I was provided a review copy of the game.

I like weird shit. I’ve always liked weird shit. The dreamy, trippy, and impossible. Optical illusions, infinite landscapes, hyperbolic environments. A few years back I was singing the praises of Antichamber (nope, I checked the Steam page and that was released in 2013. What even is time anymore?!). I had an absolute blast, even if it took me nearly a year to finish, because I just didn’t understand one of the puzzles. Today though, I want to talk about a game far more beautiful, but no less logically confusing – Manifold Garden by William Chyr Studio.

First off, I just want to say, this game is pretty as heck. You can tell it was developed by an artist. Imagine all the flat walls with splashes of colour that were seen in Antichamber and then soften down the bright whites, turning down the saturation of the other colours. Make it all more soothing to the eye. It’s a delight to look at.

Most of the game takes place on structures hovering in space. Look off to the distance and you might even see the platform you’re on from the other side. Jump over the edge and you may land on the area above you. It’s this endless looping that allows you to navigate to places otherwise out of reach. Need to get a block to higher ground? Take it off the edge and glide in from above. Sometimes it’s quite soothing just to jump into the void and take a look at the area from multiple angles as you fall past. You might even spot the solution to a puzzle in a hidden tree or a tiny set of stairs.

Apart from the way the world wraps, there’s also the game’s main mechanic of gravity manipulation. Click on a wall, that wall is now the floor. Long corridor to walk down? Just find a pillar, click on the side, and now the far end of the hall is the floor, you’re there in seconds.

Using these two mechanics together the designers have crafted hours of puzzles to bewitch and befuddle. Each building on something they’ve already shown you, or silently taught you as you explore. Oh, you’ve seen a red block, and you know you can only move it while gravity is correctly oriented to it? What if now it was half red and half blue, well now it falls in two directions. It’s obvious to work out and even if it isn’t, it takes moments of experimenting with gravity to discover how it works. Now you just have to work out where you actually want said cube.

The game isn’t that long, but I think it’s the perfect length to not outstay its welcome. From the initial lessons of “turn the world to explore new areas”, to “this is a button”, or “place cube here”; right the way through to “redirect water”, “freeze water by moving gravity”, “use frozen water to hold a giant tetromino in place” everything is quite elegant. Sure, some parts are just for looks, but none of it feels wasted. Indeed, look from the right angle and you might find that what looked like scenery is a whole other area to explore.

At the end of each area you are given a tesseract to plant which will grow into a tree as the world shifts around you before opening up the way ahead, into the next set of puzzles. The visuals in these end of level areas are stunning, fractal-like geometries moving and shifting, a feast for the eyes (especially if, like me, you really love psychedelic art).

All told you can complete Manifold Garden in about 4-6 hours, depending how well you manage to keep your spacial orientation in a world where gravity keeps shifting. It’s everything I’d hoped for in the Nintendo Indie Direct videos that have trickled out over the last few years.

If you like games like Antichamber and Portal, this is almost certainly for you. No spoilers but the end is absolutely stunning and usually something I have to lick tiny stamps offered by old hippies in festival fields in order to experience. And like that, something I look forward to doing again, once a little time has passed.

Pros:

  • Beautiful level design.
  • Stunning visuals.
  • The perfect length.

Cons:

  • You might need some advice from YouTube to get through the last level.
  • That one level where you have to find a tiny set of stairs leading to a door on a huge, towering structure.
  • I could have gone another 15 minutes on that ending to be honest.

Final Score: 9/10

Manifold Garden is available now on Steam for Windows and macOS as well as PS4, Switch, Xbox (including Series S & X), and iOS

Not All Men – Language In Board Games

About five years ago I was first introduced to modern board games. I’d recently met some wonderfully nerdy people who were very into the hobby. They introduced me to the likes of Munchkin, Splendor, and Carcassonne.

At the time I was still mostly watching gaming YouTubers for entertainment (having given up on network television some years beforehand due to its lack of inclusivity or outright hostility towards people like me). A group I used to watch regularly, started making videos where they would play board games on Tabletop Simulator. One game that really drew me in was Battlestar Galactica. I’d really enjoyed the remake show and loved the idea of another way to experience that world.

So I bought my first modern game. It arrived, weighty and full of so many bits. So much punchboard (my favourite bit of opening a new game at this point), dials to put together, ships, cards, player stands, and (finally getting to the freaking point of this article) a manual. Every single example in the manual refers to players as he or him. Sure, they will sometimes say something like “current player”, but thereafter, everyone is he.

Are you a he? Come on in, pull up a hidden role card, dude. Experience life in the fleet, my guy. We’ll get that FTL drive up to speed in no time, fella. The rest of you, you don’t matter, get flushed out the airlock, the Men are playing now. Yes, we know there are women characters in this game, but they’re not for you, this hobby is not for you. Get flushed out the airlock and into the kitchen with the other toaster. Don’t come back without snacks. Frak off with that nonsense.

This is a blight across the world of board games. An unnecessary, insidious, boil on the bottom of the hobby I’ve come to love. With each new game, I add to my collection I tense as I read the manual for the first time. Is this going to be the same thing again? Will I be reading sections to my financée, and just correcting language as I read? It’s too common to find a game with this affliction.Too many board games, even ones released in the last five years, assume all the players are men. Almost as bad are games that go out of their way to write “he/she” and “his/her” over and over and over again. It’s completely unnecessary and still exclusionary. Do better.

null

(Alert. Alert. Brace for current year argument. Repeat, brace for current year argument). It’s 2020, (warned you) all sorts of people play tabletop games. Groups who play together are often as diverse as the games they play. Many big name games are still in print. It would be the simplest thing in the world to go through the manual (and in some cases cards), hit Ctrl + H and replace he/him/his with they/them/theirs. It’s a nothing resolution, but fuck me, it’s a ridiculous problem and it’s far too common.

There are plenty of companies out there making games where players are always referred to as just that, players. Thereby completely circumventing The Boys Club. If the team behind Binding of Isaac Four Souls can do it, so can a huge ass company like Fantasy Flight.

Women, non-binary, and agender people play games, read the manual for clarification, or just read the cards in their hand and all too often it states “…he must do x”, “…he adds y to his deck”, “…he may use this on himself”. It’s completely unnecessary and can leave some feeling unwelcome. These are people who play games (thereby encouraging sales within their group) or buy games themselves. They back expensive, big box Kickstarters.

My best friend is a non-binary gamer who – in a fit of drunken anger – spent an entire game going through the manual with a biro to change every he/him to they/them. I understand the anger, even if I lack that level of commitment.

We are non-male people, we have every right to be here, and your language is outdated and exclusionary. If a gendered pronoun means so much to you, why not add some variety throughout the manual. Use a mix of pronouns. You’re taking nothing from anyone and making more people feel welcome in a hobby where players can spend huge amounts on new games.

Despite the marketing, and historical anecdotes, board and tabletop gaming is not, and hasn’t ever been, exclusively a boys club. Do better.

Pleading Snack Meats – Carrion

If you watch my livestreams (twitch.tv/janeiac) you’ll probably know that I’m a *little* bit obsessed with tentacles (they’re just good cuddle friends). So it’s no surprise that when Devolver Digital announced Carrion was coming, earlier this year, I got tagged in the post by an awful lot of people (thanks everyone).

Carrion sees you take on the role of a lethal ball of teeth and tentacles as you try to escape from a scientific facility. As you go you’ll be eating scientists and soldiers, destroying mechs, solving basic puzzles, gaining new abilities, and getting freaking lost.

There’s a few different types of enemy scattered around the base. First the scientists (usually unarmed, always delicious), there’s soldiers (protected by shields, treat them like BBQ wings and toss out the armour once you’ve eaten the good bits), mechs (like a crab, you have to tear off all the armour to get to the delicate meats inside. Careful though, their claws (chainguns) will mess you up in seconds), and finally there’s autonomous drones which can be annoying in large numbers (taste bad and shoot you, best avoided).

The movement feels incredible either with a controller or keyboard and mouse. As you move in a given direction, your beast will throw out tentacles to pull themself along. Grab humans with your gory appendages, before moving them closer to consume them and gain additional mass. It’s just so natural and (at least during the early game) makes you feel really powerful and dangerous.

This is where the game shines. There’s a few sections where you just click. You move swiftly, back and forth, dropping from a vent and taking out multiple screaming, pleading snack meats. You cut a swathe across a room leaving nothing but viscera in your wake. It’s glorious.

But then you start to explore and the exhilaration vanishes. The game contains no map function (I get it, why would a tentacle beast have a map) so you either need to be making notes yourself – taking you away from the game – or just bumble around until you work it out. I regularly found myself lost for 20 minutes or more at a time, cursing the decision to have the roar function only point you towards save points and not towards your next target. It would be a simple fix and still stay within the logic of the game world.

This oversight is a real shame, because it takes a solid 9/10 game and knocks it down a lot. I spent the final hour of my playthrough wandering round and round in circles, growing more and more frustrated, because I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere new (I actually needed to go back to the beginning zone, an area I’d previously assumed I just couldn’t find a single secret from and that’s all that was there, so had given up on. Turns out this area couldn’t be completely cleared until the end). I really hope the team makes a sequel that’s a bit more user friendly and respectful of player’s time because there’s definitely an amazing game that could be made in this engine.

Pros:

  • It’s a single gimmick game that doesn’t go on too long (bar getting lost).
  • An amazing power fantasy.
  • Glorious tentacles!

Cons:

  • Lack of map leads to frustration.
  • Failure to deal with mechs correctly will see you starting a room over and over again as they cut you to ribbons in about a second.
  • I’m just going to say the lack of signposting again.

Final Score: 5.5/10

Loveable Food – Sushi Go Party!

Sushi is delicious, expensive, art-food that I wish had more variants I can actually eat. Sushi Go Party! by Gamewright is a 2-8 player card drafting and set collection game with adorable and tasty looking art that I would love to hug more than eat.

Your first action in the game is to pick a menu. The manual offers 8 set menu options for all group sizes (there are some items that just don’t work in a two player game and others that work better with low numbers), though you can create your own, once you’ve got the hang of things.

Once you’ve made your choice and slotted the items into the menu (which also acts as a scoring track (and omg, I haven’t even got to the adorable little sake bottles that act as your score markers)) you’ll go through the cards to find those you’ve selected (think Dominion setup) and shuffle all of them together to build the game deck (except the desserts, they only get slotted in a few at a time, before each round).

With the table layed, it’s time to deal out 7-10 cards each, depending on player count. Play is done simultaneously with each player taking a card, laying it face down, handing off their cards to the next player, and taking a hand from the player on their other side. Once everyone has selected and passed, they reveal what they took off the conveyor belt and perform any necessary actions based on their selection. Once all hands are exhausted, you score up and hand back everything that wasn’t a precious dessert to your server who will add more dessert cards, shuffle up, and deal out the next round. After three rounds, the player with the highest score is the most full and therefore the dinner winner.

It’s very simple and plays out in about 20-30 minutes, depending on how indecisive everyone is about what to eat (you know who I’m talking about, and if you don’t, it’s probably you). So what might you find on the menu?

Whatever else you picked there’s always some nigiri ready to net you a simple 1-3 points, based on the type you pick up.

The next major point scorers are rolls (maki, temaki, or uramaki). Depending on your selection for the game, they each have different ways of scoring. Be that by having the most or being the first to a certain number.

Appetizers include dumplings, sashimi, tempura, edamame, tofu, etc. These usually score based on having a certain number, but be warned, some will suddenly be worth less or no points if you eat too many (save room for dessert).

Specials are mostly about changing the rules or modifying other cards. For example the menu card allows you to draw 4 cards from the deck and add that to your collection for the round; while chopsticks allow you to pick up two cards by spending them on a future turn. It’s all well and good mid-round, but if you get stuck with them at the end, they’re worthless.

To round off the meal there’s pudding. You’ll be collecting these throughout each course, squirelling sweet treats away from your fellow diners. Once the courses are over, you can score your treats. One of these- I’m looking at you, Pudding, you adorable wobbly bastard- can absolutely wreck one of the players and benefit one another, while the desserts are generally more about set collection for bonuses.

The art on this game is absolutely adorable and this aesthetic shrouds how completely vicious this game can get, especially in smaller groups where you will definitely be getting your starting hand back more than once. It’s not just the super cute art, the whole presentation is really lovely. The board is good and thick, the menu items are a nice weight, the cards are decent quality, and the little sake bottle score markers are delightful and vibrant.

My only gripe is the size of the box. While I appreciate that the board has to fit in there, and it’s nice to keep everything organised between sessions, there is a huuuuuuuuge amount of wasted space. The box shouldn’t be bigger than a large print copy of Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music, but it’s more like a steelcase edition complete DVD box set of Battlestar Galactica.

Pros:

  • Cute art.
  • Easy teach.
  • Very replayable.

Cons:

  • The board needs straightening out, it tends to bend up from where it’s folded.
  • Pudding is mildly evil.
  • The box is so big that a ruthless London landlord would shove the cards and sake bottles down one end, build a partition wall out of the board, pop a napkin in as a mattress and charge £750 a week for this “centrally located, part furnished accommodation, perfectly suited to a young executive”.

Final Score: 9/10

Landlords are parasites.

Bussed In – Little Hope

This review is as spoiler free as it is possible to be.

Well, here we are again. Back for some spoops with the Dark Pictures Anthology. This time we’re off to the fog-shrouded town of Little Hope. A place with a sordid history of misogyny-in-the-name-of-religion. How they loved a witch trial back in the day, eh? Oh those Puritans. What a bunch of murderous, fanatical scamps.

The game starts off in the dead of night. A bus is diverted through the town of Little Hope, by a bastard (ACAB). On hearing the name of the town, a haunted look passes over the face of the bus driver, but he drives off before crashing the bus. Damn Silent Hill style vehicle crashes, they’re a dime a dozen out here.

There’s a whole scene with a family having some family issues and then we cut to the crashed bus where the previous few minutes will appear to have been the dream of Andrew (played by Will Poulter who I can only ever imagine belting out TLC’s song Waterfalls every time I see him in anything). He’s quickly joined by teacher John and fellow student Angela. You’ll quickly notice that this group all bare a striking resemblance to the family we just saw in the previous scene.

Thrown slightly further away are young rebel-types Daniel and Taylor, they’ll have to find another way around, so they’re clearly the best choice for the other player if you’re playing remote multiplayer. The bus driver meanwhile is nowhere to be seen (ooooh, spoopy. He’s probably been dead for 50 years (jk, I’m not giving spoop spoilers here)).

In a bit of a change for Supermassive Games, our protagonists have a bit of a variance in age on this occasion. Taylor, Andrew, and Daniel who I suspect are supposed to be teenagers, but in Hollywood style, they’re played by people in their mid 20s, so who can say. However, Angela and John look to be mid 50s. That said, the main cast don’t get much more diverse from there.

Gameplay is standard to the previous horror offerings from Supermassive, with you exploring in third-person and occasionally slipping into one of four types of quick time events: aim and shoot, hammer a button, hit the right button quickly, or rhythm action heartrate monitor (this last one can fuck right off, it killed two of my characters. Definitely wasn’t my useless fault).

It’s quickly evident that the party are being railroaded pretty hard by GM Fog(TM). They realise they can’t split up because the fog just turns them around and puts them back in the plot, but then later if they even get slightly too far apart, the fog moves in and keeps them apart while they handle whatever horrific thing they must deal with. This is why you never upset the GM Fog(TM).

As you move through the game, you’ll start to experience moments from the woman-murdery past and realise that the main cast exist in this time too. Albeit as different people. It seems they’re doomed to return, life after life to this corpse of a town, but can the past be influenced by the present or are such hopes in vain?

The graphics are great, the facial animation is impressive as always, the character design is impressive (though to keep spoilers away, I’ll not say which characters I enjoyed most), the environment is nicely designed, the storytelling is very engaging, the Curator is still a snarky dick (but in fun way), the endings are worth replaying for. Supermassive have definitely done it again because I’m already looking forward to the next entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology.

Pros:

  • It’s probably not what you expect from the trailers.
  • Worth replaying a few times just to see what you can change.
  • Graphically impressive.

Cons:

  • Heartrate monitor QTEs suck (I’m just bad at them).
  • It’s going to be a wait for the next one.

Final Score: 9/10

City Committee – 7 Wonders Duel

Sometimes in life you need a brick, whether that’s for constructing a home, assertively enacting positive social change, or building a fantastic city that outshines all others. In 7 Wonders Duel by Antoine Bauza & Bruno Cathala, two players will use bricks (as well as stone, lumber, glass, and papyrus) to build such a city, and fill it with wonders (as well baths, breweries, circuses, and more).

The game is divided into three ages. The first being primarily about building a foundation in resource generation; the second being your chance to increase your resources, but also to move into city improvements which grant other benefits such as making certain things cheaper; and then crashing into the final age, which is primarily about point scoring, but mostly about trying to screw up eachothers plans.

Each age features a deck of cards which are laid out like a fancy solitaire game, with some cards going face down. As cards at the bottom of the layout are removed they grant access to those higher up the pattern and reveal what was once concealed. This allows for a little thoughtful play by steering your opponent away from cards you’re aiming for.

At the start of the game each player will draft four wonders from the pool of eight. Each wonder has their own costs and benefits. Extra turns, victory points, the ability to destroy one of your opponents precious resource generation cards, all this could be yours if you manage to construct the Hanging Gardens, or the Colossus or whatever ancient dick-swinging exercise you have available. Once a total of seven wonders have been built. The unconstructed wonder gets the derision it deserves and is returned to the box to think about what it did.

Throughout the ages some things never change. Science will still plug away at understanding the world, and those with a thirst for blood will continue fighting. Should you manage to gather a pair of cards with matching scientific symbols, players can claim a bonus such as victory points, money, or bonuses for having certain cards at the end of the game. Alternatively, if a player gathers six different scientific symbols, they will immediately end the game with a scientific victory. On a less cerebral scale, you can keep taking military cards, keep pushing the military tracker towards your opponent and should you reach the far end you’ll immediately win, bathed in the blood of your vanquished foes.

7 Wonders Duel is a great, fast, light-weight, small-box game that’s easy to teach but tougher to master. It’s definitely a great warmup game for couples game day.

Pros:

  • Fairly cheap.
  • Nicely constructed.
  • Lots of fun.

Cons:

  • The box feels like it could be a lot smaller.

Final Score 8/10

They Should – Tiny Epic Dinosaurs

I looooooove the Tiny Epic games from Gamelyn Games. Since my first (Tiny Epic Zombies) I’ve picked up three others for myself as well as another three as gifts for friends. The matching, small boxes, packed with tons of great gameplay are always a winner amongst boardgamers. My most recent arrival is the wonderfully vibrant Tiny Epic Dinosaurs.

The box art is fantastic, with its bold, bright colours, outside and in. The contents follows this beautifully with 70+ wooden dinosaurs, food and supply markers for each player (1-4), and a number of ranger meeples.

TED is a worker placement game with a modular board (the four cards can be flipped depending on the number of players to keep things balanced). Your goal is to score points by fulfilling public and private contracts. By buying certain dinosaurs in, you can work towards fulfilling a contract. However, you have to keep each species of dino separate on your tiny player board. Not only that, they’ll need a full enclosure, if your park has no walls, they could just wander off and drink out of some rando’s swimming pool.

The game is played in a number of sections, over multiple rounds. Gain supplies according to what icons are showing on your play mat. Then players take turns to place rangers to gain food, supplies, dinos, fences, items, unique dinos, move fences that are already on the player board, claim the first player token, or complete a contract.

Next you arrange your park, placing down fences and putting dinos in enclosures. This can get a little Tetris and there’s hard decisions to be made. Especially as you can’t move fences that were already placed, during this part of the game.

Once safely in their enclosures, you must feed each dino (failure to feed them leads to them breaking out and potentially eating eachother). And finally breeding any dinos where you have a pair in the same enclosure which also has enough space to house the newborn. This could be a good thing if you need more of that dinosaur, but they will need feeding.

Then you start all over again. Once 6 rounds are over, it’s time to tot up the final scores for the contracts you’ve completed and declare a winner.

While it sounds pretty simple, the limited space on the player boards can often leave you scratching your head as to the best choice of position for fences and dinos. On top of that, there’s the risk that when you take a dino from certain spaces on the main board, that you’ll roll a die and end up with an extra baby for free. This could be great, or a sudden mouth you’ll need to feed that will be more hassle than it’s worth. You must also consider which spaces on your player board that you cover, as this will stop you gaining the benefit of unoccupied squares.

Tiny Epic Dinosaurs is a lot of fun, but it’s a much slower and considered game than a lot of Gamelyn Games other entries.

Pros:

  • So many adorable, wooden pieces.
  • Great artwork throughout.
  • Surprisingly cerebral.

Cons:

  • One or two of my dinos are a little wonky so they don’t stand up, but that’s not the worst thing in a box of over 70.
  • It feels like there is a ‘best’ first move for whoever starts with the first player token.
  • I’m bad at it.

Final Score: 8/10