Dave Reviews: Traindrawing

Railroad Ink
Choo choo, goes the train. Vroom vroom, goes the car. Rattle rattle, go the dice. Squeak squeak, goes the dry-erase marker. Mailing in the opener, goes the review writer.

That box looks pretty big, but Railroad Ink is a tiny little thing from Horrible Games that is weirdly entertaining if your brain functions like mine. I don't wish that on anyone, but still, there's an audience for this.

Each player gets a 7x7 dry erase grid to draw on. The even numbered squares (2, 4, 6) along all four sides have either a highway or a railroad track on their edges. There are four dice rolled each round (seven rounds total) that have highway and/or railroad tracks on them; players all use the same rolls each round, and new roads and tracks being drawn either need to come in from a matching type on the edge or connect to something already on the grid. Each of the tracks coming in also counts as an exit point; your goal is to connect as many of the exit points together as possible, preferably with one set of tracks and roads, no matter how convoluted it may look at the end.

Game boards unfold into the dry erase surface and a small guard that protects some of your drawing surface (it doesn't need to protect everything; the only useful information would be if opponents could see your whole map clearly) and shows both the possible dice rolls and special tiles you can use once per game. There are six specials in all, of which you can use three total. These are especially important because they're the only reliable source of stations—black squares that serve as the only way to connect highways and railroad tracks.

There's no interplay between players, unless you want to talk shit or draw on each other. All you're trying to do is score the most points via connecting the most exists, having the longest contiguous set of highway and rail lines, and using as many center squares as possible, while having the fewest dangling roads and rails on your grid. It's basically competitive solitaire, which allows it to function as a single player game, where your goal is to simply do better than you did last time. A common complaint with games is when players don't get to affect what happens to each other, and if you're a person who feels that way, this is not going to be for you.

But, if you're fascinated by games where everyone gets the exact same resources, has to do the best job they can with them, and victory is decided by who plans the best (and gets a little lucky if they take a chance on certain dice rolls hitting), this is a great little game. Once again, the core theme of these reviews comes into play: whether you like it or not, Railroad Ink is doing exactly what it's trying to do.

Score: Ten happily biased choo choo trains out of eleven.

Dave Reviews: Furry Cash 'N' Guns

Goodcritters
You dirty rat! You actual dirty rat! Wash your fur, you're disgusting!

Goodcritters is a pseudo-bluffing game very much in the spirit of Cash 'N' Guns, but without the nerf guns and with slightly fuzzier gangsters. Each round there's a boss and a selection of loot set to be passed out among the criminals, and victory depends on your nerve, your ability to figure out what your opponents are doing, and how well you can maximize your take on every round. How the looting works is how the two games most differ.

One player starts as the boss. A number of loot cards are drawn equal to the number of players plus two, as opposed to the flat eight per round of Cash 'N' Guns. (There's a larger deck of loot cards with a Fuzz card slipped into the bottom third, so the end of the game is harder to predict.) Rather than players trying to brave their way into the heist so they can split the loot, the boss hands out the loot herself. The players get a vote, though; if more people vote no than yes, the loot is put back in the center and the next person becomes boss, passing out the same loot however he sees fit.

Of course, nothing's ever as simple as a vote.

After the loot is distributed, everyone gets an action. Voting yes or no are only two of the options. The others are to rob another player; guard against a robbery; or skim money off the top of the deck. Skimming only works if you're the first person to do it, which makes it great for the boss and a more chancy proposition the farther down the line you are. Robbery can only be done if you put your threat token in front of somebody else, which means if you do try and rob someone everyone knows who it will be already. It also means that if no one is threatening you, there's no need to guard yourself.

Therefore, if you're the boss, passing out the loot isn't a simple matter of making enough people happy with the split to keep you in charge. It's also a question of not giving people a reason to vote against you. Since not everyone has to use their threat token, the game ends up leaning more towards the politics of getting people to do what you want rather than calling their bluffs when guns are pointed at you, and the money split is a major part of that.

There are optional rules that involve bribes and payoffs, and each loot card as a type of loot attached to it (jewelry, paintings, etc.) which are currently irrelevant but should be put to use in future expansions. However, none of this affects the main drawback of the game: no catch-up mechanism. Not every game needs one, but it's pretty important in a game with a light tone that's designed to be an enjoyable experience.

For example, in Cash 'N' Guns, it can be difficult to make up ground if you're behind, but you do have an option—stand up and take part in every heist no matter how many guns are pointed at you. No, it may not work, but you can at least try. It's possible that other players were constantly throwing bullets at you, so that you never had a chance, but in most circumstances falling behind happens because you sit out a heist when the people threatening you were bluffing. Even if your decisions made perfect sense, at least it was your decisions that created the situation.

In Goodcritters, unless you're the boss, you have no control over the loot split. You can't make anybody give you anything. You can rob people, but that only gets you one random card from their stash (if they don't guard against it and rob from you instead). You can vote no, but even if it works, you don't make up any ground, you just stop everyone else from getting their loot. The balancing factor is supposed to be that if you're a good boss, you can keep the troops happy while also making more profit for yourself than you're giving to them, and it's better for the boss to give you money if you're behind because you'll vote for them while also being less of a threat. In theory, that should work, and with a group that knows how to play, it probably does. However, if everyone's just chucking loot splits in a way that will get them votes, it may keep going to the same people. If you're not among them, it leaves you pretty helpless, as you don't have the tools to do much about it.

There's also the question of what they plan to do with the loot types. In theory, there are ways to do set collection that function as a way to have fewer cards but more value, which may go a long way towards fixing the catch-up problem. But selling the game with aspects that don't come into play right away—especially when they're so prominently featured on the website—is some shenanigan behavior. When whatever expansion makes use of the loot types comes out, this game might be great. Not giving us that game is not OK.

Score: Six moderately valuable paintings out of nine in the stash.

Dave Reviews: Blenderized Egypt

Kemet

War games about the ancient world are obviously not designed to re-enact every aspect of conquest in the ancient world. Warfare back then was mostly about not letting your troops fall prey to disease and boredom, and determining travel routes well in advance because it could take weeks to reach a destination.

But there's skipping the boring parts of army management, and then there's adding teleporters.

Kemet is a game for two to five players about armies, monsters, territory control, and eventually smashing the ungodly hell out of your enemies (unless you don't). Players pick a city, stick their armies and pyramids in the city, and set out a huge array of abilities to choose from. You have several actions per turn (the number varies depending on if you purchase abilities which give you bonus actions), and your goal is to balance things so you have enough energy/mana/Ankh Bucks to buy the things that will make you strong enough to hold temples for points (which can be taken away if temple control is stolen) and defeat your enemies in battle (which gives you permanent points). Focusing too much on the army will stifle your economy, and focusing too much on the economy will handicap your army.

So far, so normal. Here are the tricks in a fight: barring an ability that lets you expand the army, you can only move five troops together at once. However, if you hire a monster, that monster can move with an army on top of that five max. This can dramatically alter the strength of the force you bring to bear. Once battle is engaged, you play one of your battle cards, which can cause casualties, protect you against casualties, and/or just add to the effective strength of the army. You can also play other special cards, if you have any, that impact the fight. You attack and win, you get a point. (If you defend and win, you don't get a point, which strongly incentivizes aggressive behavior.)

What's possible—and not exceedingly rare when non-max strength armies fight—is that an army can be wiped out but still win the battle. If you attack and lose all your troops, you still force the opponent to retreat. This is most likely to give people a reason to take a miracle shot at dislodging an enemy from a temple when they're about to win the game, but it's still a little weird. In a slight nod towards logic, if you attack and win, you still need someone alive in order to earn a victory point.

The wide array of abilities you can buy are based not just on if you have the Ankh Bucks for them, but also if your pyramids are high enough level to get the abilities you want. Some abilities let you ramp up your pyramids faster so you can get better stuff! Of course, you need the Ankh Bucks, and you still need your army to be big and strong enough to win battles, and you can't quite do everything before things wrap up. It's one of those games where you start to get an ability engine going, and the game ends before it really gets steaming.

However, while in most games you can sort of see why the game ends when it does, even though you want it to go a little longer, Kemet really feels too short. Maybe an experienced player understands exactly what to do, and how to make the time limitation work in her favor, but when you're in the learning process it feels like you have the potential to get some really interesting things going when the game gets cut out from under you. A game of all new people who don't play very aggressively might actually be a lot of fun, as I'm sure a game between very experienced players is a quick, brutal affair, where any mistake is horrifically punished.

If that latter description is something that sounds like fun, Kemet's probably your kind of game. It does not allow for mistakes, or at least it doesn't allow you to make more mistakes than your opponent and still have a reasonable chance to win. On the bright side, if you do make that mistake, the game doesn't take as long as most war-type games, so the beating will be over relatively quickly. Bonus!

Score: Twelve functional pyramids out of fifteen.

Dave Reviews: Third Generation Creeps

Arkham Horror

Arkham attempts to not get transformed into Tentacle Ground Zero for the third... seventh... twelfth... however many times across however many games. Because, in the end, barring the greatest luck, no matter if you're playing Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror, Elder Sign, or whatever other Cthulhu game is out there, Arkham, and the world, are destined to fall.

But cheer up! You usually find an interesting way to die. Just look at Old Man Henderson.

This is the third edition of Arkham Horror, and it marks a massive departure from the first two. Gone is the massive board displaying the glory of Arkham, the kind of board that (along with the many, many peripheral pieces) requires a legit gaming-friendly table to play. In this game, Arkham consists of five hexagonal tiles, each representing a neighborhood. Like the neighborhoods in the other versions, each one has three locations, with encounter cards for each neighborhood split into the three locations, so this edition manages to basically maintain the number of places you can go while containing it to a much smaller area.

However, the game's functions are largely similar to previous Fantasy Flight Cthulhu games. You take two actions per turn, performing no action no more than once; movement is limited to two spaces, though there are ways to extend that; and monsters are a roadblock unless you manage to evade them. The game moves in phases, investigators first, and if your character dies, you pick up a new one and keep going.

The main changes (besides the style of the board) are with the characters and the storytelling. Every character still has a familiar set of stats, albeit familiar from Eldritch Horror, not the slider system of old Arkham Horror. However, improvements to stats are called focus, and boosting a stat through focus doesn't require a special event or item; you just take the focus action and raise a stat. The limitation is that almost every character has a limit on how many focus tokens they can have, and almost every character can only have one focus boost in a given stat. Still, the ease of ramping up your character is nice. Furthermore, focus tokens can be discarded for rerolls, which adds to the strategy in their use.

The storytelling is... different. It's better, mainly, since the old game didn't really try to tell a story at all. In this version, there are story cards that see use depending on the scenario you're playing. The scenario card tells you which cards to start with, but from there you have to dig into the deck to find whatever the initial cards say you need, which is generally dependent on game state. Did the investigators complete their goal? Take one card. Did too many doom tokens pile up before that? Take a different card. Some goals can both happen, and eventually you'll get the cards from both sides of that equation. Each scenario has its own set story, so if you play one through, you'll see the same one coming next time you run it. But it adds a nice flavor to the proceedings, especially on your first run through any given scenario.

Like all FF Cthulhu games, there are a TON of cards and tokens that you need to keep track of for potential use. If you didn't mind it before, it's no worse; if you hated it before, it's no better. What does suck is that there is basically nothing to help you sort or organize all those pieces. There aren't nearly enough baggies to keep you from dumping a bunch of stuff into the box loose, which makes finding everything the next time a huge pain in the ass. It's a relatively small problem, at least in the sense that you can fix it with a handful of your own baggies, but it's a dumb oversight.

The game itself is a definite improvement from the old Arkham Horrors. Mind you, that's on the most objective level possible—the storyline aspect means it's basically impossible to wind up in the six-hour slog that a big game of old Arkham Horror could become. The game runs like other Cthulhu games in style and pace; if you enjoyed those games on a basic level before, you'll probably like how this one palys as well.

Minimizing the space taken up while not carving off any substantial part of the game is extremely impressive. I saw back of the box and immediately questioned what kind of nonsense they were pulling, but it works, and it definitely feels like Arkham Horror. That said, the smaller physical space taken does mean that a bigger (5-6 player) game can get cramped with stuff. The same concept with bigger hexes would have also taken up much less space, but with room to place everything you need in any size game, not just 2-4 players. It's more a quality of life issue than anything with the game itself, but unlike the baggie problem, this isn't anything you can change.

Basically, this is an updated Arkham Horror that makes some things better and nothing worse, unless you require an epic board to have fun. If that's a need of yours, I can't help you.

Score: Seventeen wriggling tentacles out of twenty.

Dave Reviews: Markered for Death

Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space

This game has it almost everything: heroic, capable humans; vicious, hungry aliens; and no guarantee that your escape pod will fire, if you're able to reach it at all.

It's only missing one thing.

Escape from Etc. is a competitive team game... mostly. Kind of. There are human and alien sides, at least. Everyone has a secret role, however, and nobody knows who's on what team except through contextual clues during the game. Only the aliens are a team—the humans are all competing for the escape pods, so helping each other isn't useful except in edge cases, while the aliens are all trying to eliminate the humans—but it's entirely possible for one alien to kill another.

Quick overview: each player gets a dry-erase map and a marker. They keep track of their own movements step by step, and track the enemies in whatever way they want. Humans move one space per turn; aliens move one or two. Ending your turn on a silent (white) sector doesn't trigger anything. Ending it on a dangerous (gray) sector makes you draw a danger card, which could force you to reveal your location (or not, or give a false location). Aliens who aren't careful can give away their identities by moving multiple sectors on early turns and then giving away their locations. That's not necessarily bad; only one human role, the soldier, can attack during the game without an item card that allows it, and aliens don't want to kill other aliens. Having the other players determine your location is a bigger problem than your identity, which sort of makes sense (OH GOD IT'S THE ALIEN RUN).

There are roles for each human and alien, with a special ability assigned to each role. In addition, there are items that can be collected, though only used by humans (aliens keep them to mask their identities). Combined with the eight different maps, this game has a ton of replayability; it's unlikely in the extreme that you ever come across an identical, or even similar, combination of roles and items in any two games. It's Alien Blood Battleship, and it's set up to be awesome.

What's missing is the awesome.

The concept is great. The ideas put into the concept are great. But the game is, at best, amusing; it's not really much fun.

Here's why, as far as I can tell: in every piece of media that depicts this kind of situation—group of humans versus invading force of others—the goal of the humans is to work together to overcome or escape the enemy. Anyone who goes against this goal, preferring instead to save themselves at all costs, is the traitor. In games, the traitor's success depends on the players, but in movies the traitor almost always dies, because the traitor is an asshole.

In this game, everyone is a traitor. It's philosophically correct to say that because everyone is working for their own benefit and nobody has a reason to team up, there are no traitors, but that doesn't matter. You're thrown into a situation where we're all trained to think of the humans as needing to band together to survive, not flee like selfish roaches. Sure, it's funny when the aliens eat each other, and it's nice to escape and win, but if you lose as a human, there's no sense of moral victory, there's no team goal you were a part of. You were the food. Period. And while that may play truest to how this type of scenario would run with real people and real... aliens, it's a depressing game experience.

What about if the aliens lose? Well, grasshopper, one other strange thing is that it's extremely difficult for the aliens to lose. Or, maybe it is. That's not a question which should have an unclear answer.

The aliens live "when the last human dies". What's strange about this definition is that, taken literally, if it's 4v4 and the aliens kill the last human after the other three escape, they win (as do the three humans who made it out). However, if the aliens kill three humans and the last escapes after that, they lose. Was that intended? If so, it makes no sense. If not, then it basically means the aliens win if they have any people to feed on. If it's 1v1, there's a winner and a loser. If it's 4v4, there are the people who escape and the aliens who almost certainly will meet some version of their win condition.

You bust this game out and it seems like it has to be a good time. Then it might be. Or not. Meh.

Score: Five winners out of eight whatevers on the ship.

Dave Reviews: The World's Cleverest Board

Dice Forge

Sadly, the world's cleverest board doesn't come with the world's cleverest board game.

Dice Forge is a game more literally about forging dice than you might think is possible. At its core, though, is a resource management game. Rolling dice and taking spots on the board earn you gold, sun shards (red), moon shards (blue), and of course the ever-important victory points. Spend some shards and you can get cards that help you towards victory. Collect some points and you get points. Spend some gold...

And this is where a game of resource management tries to do better than just making you collect different, more, or better cards/dice/cubes/insert abstract resource symbol here. Spending gold improves your dice. Not gets you better dice, but literally improves your dice. In much the same way that you improve your cards in Mystic Vale rather than add to your deck, you pull faces off your dice and replace them with better faces. It's viscerally fun, there are strategic choices with what you need better odds of rolling, and the game stays relatively casual—all you can do in a dice-based game is maximize your odds of winning, not shut out your opponents completely.

Plus, the way they set the board up is fantastic. There are a bunch of fiddly bits that have to sit in the board, and setting them up initially is kind of a pain in the ass. But rather than make you dump them all out after the game and put the pieces in baggies, there's a sleeve for all the board pieces to go in that keeps them locked down tightly, making sure the fiddly pieces stay in place. You only ever have to replace the parts you use in a given game. It's brilliant, and it's something other games should emulate if possible.

And... yeah. That's Dice Forge.

Short review, right? Here's the thing: Dice Forge is a good game. It has clever bits, it has functional bits. It has a more complex design than you'd expect from the cartoonish aesthetic, but board game veterans shouldn't have a problem figuring it out. New players may get a little hung up on some of the rules, but by the end of their first game they should understand how it plays.

But these days, in what has been an extended golden era for board games, good is the expectation. Good is normal. Good is the average. Understandable game? Check. Nice art? Check. Unique selling point? Check. An experience that creates makes you anticipate the next time you'll get to play? Not so much. Play, enjoy, play again, enjoy. This is a game that will win many fans but relatively few true admirers. It's a shame, but it's the truth.

Score: Three glowing celestial bodies out of four.

Dave Reviews: Key Creation Simulator

Keyforge

Keyforge is hailed as a game where "every deck is as unique as the person who wields it".

To that I say... have you met people?

Keyforge comes straight from the mind of Richard Garfield, creator of Magic, and Fantasy Flight Games, publishers of card games that aren't really like Keyforge at all. The premise is simple: most competitive card games have an effective entry cost, where you can't expect to do much at even small tournaments unless you spend a certain amount of money building your deck. Keyforge attempts to do away with that scheme, selling full-fledged decks for $10 a pop and—most importantly—making them unalterable. The deck you buy is the deck you play with. Every deck is procedurally generated by a system that's supposed to make them relatively balanced against each other, maximizing player agency and minimizing cost in the competitive scene.

Let's cut to the main question: Does it work? Did they succeed?

The answer: Yes...?

Better answer: It mostly seems like it, though we're early in the game's run and that could change for better or worse.

By and large, as far as I can tell, not many decks stomp hard or get stomped hard. Given the breadth of the card pool, it makes sense. The number of potential deck combinations is bonkers, and mathematically only a tiny percentage of decks will roll over everyone (except similarly powerful decks) without the player needing to be better than her opponent. Likewise, rare is the deck that's hopelessly outmatched by almost everybody. There will be small advantages for some decks over others, but it seems that you're as likely to find those advantages because one deck matches up well against another as you are because one is simply stronger.

More importantly, to the designers' credit, they're implementing methods of curtailing the power of those oddly mighty decks on the competitive scene. First is the deck-switch method. Players play each other, then switch decks and play again. If the match is tied, if they each would prefer to play the same deck for a tiebreaker, they bid chains for the right to use it. This is a very useful way of keeping competition balanced, but may suffer from game length (more on that later).

Another method uses the game's chain system. Normally, the chain system is similar to the overload mechanic in Hearthstone—play a card that's very strong, but suffer consequences on later turns, in the form of reduced card draw. Competitively, however, chains are also used to handicap decks that overwhelm all the others.

On a small-time level, if a deck wins a local competition (going 3-0, for example), that deck is tracked and given a chain for its next competition. If it wins again, it gets another chain, because it's clearly too strong for the available competition. If it doesn't, the chain goes away, because maybe it's only slightly stronger.

At larger competitions—and this is through the grapevine, nothing solid is written and posted—decks that keep winning will have chains added during the tournament. At a glance, this may seem unfair, like success is being punished. However, if a serious, large-scale competition didn't have this in play, one of two things one happen. First, the slim percentage of powerful decks would run everyone else over, making serious competition feel like it requires either a lucky draw or buying the deck from whoever has it, killing the entire goal of making Keyforge a minimally pay-to-win game. Alternately, if decks were tracked and chained going into the tournament, it would incentivize players to never take place in trackable events and instead test decks on their own, which would hurt community events and participation.

In the long run, Keyforge's viability will depend on the competitive scene's foundations, which makes these questions of paramount importance. Let's set that aside, now, and briefly talk about the game itself.

The system of play, where you choose one of your three houses and are free to play or use any cards from that house on that turn—but you can only use cards of that house, barring some special effect—will offer a welcome sense of freedom for some and a weird sense of limitation for others. Players who are comfortable using and manipulating outside energy sources in CCGs (mana in Magic, mana crystals in Hearthstone, wind stones in Force of Will, etc.) may find it awkward figuring out how to play efficiently with this system. The simplicity will be a major draw to some, though, and given time most players who are used to maximizing efficiency will adapt to Keyforge's mechanics.

The games tend to run longer than other games, though. Things speed up once you're comfortable with the game, but the mechanics combined with the fact you're less likely to be familiar with what your opponent is playing compared to a Magic tournament (where the same relatively small subset of cards keeps showing up) slows down the proceedings. A best-of-three finishing in fifty or sixty minutes is less likely than in other CCGs, which is unfortunate since the aforementioned best-of-three style has the best odds of creating a strong competitive format. The game is young, though, so game speed may increase more and more with time, rendering this issue moot.

Finally—and this isn't about the function of the game itself, but man, did it irritate the hell out of me—Keyforge is advertised as a game that doesn't require anything besides a $10 deck to play and compete. Technically, that's true. However, where cards on the battlefield in Magic have two states—tapped or untapped—that's not the case in Keyforge. Tokens are necessary for a number of things, including stuns on creatures (stuns can add up, so keeping it tapped isn't enough), embers (I'm not calling them 'aembers', bite me Garfield), and keys. You need something to represent these things. Unless you buy the starter set, the game doesn't provide any of them. You can use whatever you want, be it coins, dice, whatever, but that still requires having those things available. Someone new to the game isn't going to know that and is unlikely to be appropriately prepared, making the whole "buy a deck and play" not exactly how it works.

All that being said, if the biggest complaint I have is about peripherals, the game can't be that bad. The biggest concern about Keyforge as a gaming experience is if long games (30+ min.) are the norm or outliers. In addition to the previously mentioned issues, because Keyforge is a game where the deck cycles its discard pile, you see the same cards again and again, which can become tiresome when the game just won't end. But if the game matures and game times shorten to twenty minutes or so, I think that problem will be largely alleviated. Then it's just a matter of whether or not they can sort out the competitive scene.

Short version, Keyforge needs work in some spots, but it's better than I expected.

Score: Twenty EMBERS out of twenty-four.

Dave Reviews: Sailing The Wide Accountant-cy

Century: Eastern Wonders
The second in the Century series of games, Eastern Wonders blends with Spice Road to create a third game called From Sand to Sea. Maybe this is how they're going to get to a hundred*.

*the author has no information suggesting they plan on getting to one hundred.

Where Century: Spice Road involved trading spice cubes with cards, Century: Eastern Wonders involves trading spice cubes with travel. The abstractness, then, decreases slightly—you're on a boat! Rather than collect a hand of cards that lets you make trades, you place outposts on pieces of land that let you make trades (once the outpost is up, you don't need to be on the tile to make that tile's trade). The overall mechanics are similar, however—you place an outpost rather than take a card, make a trade where you have an outpost rather than with a card in your hand, or visiting a port with the cubes that will earn you the VP tile in that port rather than simply trade in the cubes for the VP card on the table. You also have the option to simply take two yellow cubes on a turn (harvest), in lieu of having a card that gives you that ability.

The difference in the core gameplay, if it's not glaringly obvious, is the travel aspect. You move one space per turn, unless you earn upgrades that let you move more spaces per round. The faster you swing across the board, the faster you place outposts, especially since outposts are free if you're the first one to place one in an area—once opponents have outposts up, it's a little more costly, since your outpost costs one cube per outpost already on the tile. Thus, while sticking with one move per round is doable, two tiles of movement is very helpful; whether you want more depends on when you get your upgrades and, in many cases, how many players are in the game. You also can't land on a tile with an opponent, so extra movement helps you avoid that scenario.

Upgrades are the main new feature in Eastern Wonders. You start with a board that has numerous outposts laid out in rows. Each row has a symbol replicated on some of the island tiles. If you place an outpost on a tile, you take the next outpost in line from the row matching the symbol on that tile. When you empty a column, you get an upgrade. You can choose from the aforementioned extra movement, extra cargo space, gain red cubes when you harvest, upgrade a cube when building an outpost, or take flat points for the end of the game. This, obviously, incentivizes spreading your outposts across certain spaces. However, the farther along a row you go, the more points each of those outposts are worth at the end of the game, so you're doing fine as long as you throw down outposts wherever you can for free, and anywhere else that it's worth the associated cost (keep some yellows handy).

Other than that, it's still seventy percent recognizable as Spice Road. There's not so much going on that you need to have played Spice Road to understand Eastern Wonders, but it definitely helps if you have that background knowledge so you only have to add the parts about the ships and the outposts. It's probably better as a game in an objective sense; it's just as solid, just as coherently designed, but there's more going on, more options, and the lack of a hand of cards you need to reshuffle every so often smooths out the gameplay.

The option to sit in a space (like a port) and force an opponent to pay you a cube if they want to land there seems silly, but I got screwed over by it, so I'm definitely biased. Game's still good.

Score: Eleven filled cargo spaces out of thirteen.

Dave Reviews: Spooky Card Magic

Illusion
Look at the pretty colors... look at them... looooook...

How much color did you see WRONG WRONG WRONG

Illusion is a party game for a small party, which is to say it's for a relatively small number (two to five), but also for people who don't have to know anything about games to understand it and better if they're all drinking.

The game is played with a deck of cards, each of which has a unique colored pattern on it. One card is placed face up and set on the table, along with a card from a smaller deck that just has a collection of colored arrows. The first player places one of the patterned cards face up and decides if it has more or less of the color on the arrow than the first card. So, for example, if blue is the color, the player decides if his card has more or less blue than the card on the table. If he thinks it has less, he places it closer to the arrow. If he thinks it has more, he puts it on the far side from the arrow. Simple.

The next player decides if the first player made the right choice. If not, she can challenge (more on that shortly). If she's fine with it, she flips the next card and decides if it has more than both cards on the table, less than both, or should go in the middle. Then the following player decides to challenge or play the next card, and so on.

Once it comes around to a player who thinks the order is incorrect, they can challenge. The card is flipped over; on the back is the percentage of the card that is blue, red, green, or yellow. If any of the cards are out of order, the challenger gets the arrow card, which counts for a point. If all the cards are in the correct order, from lowest percentage to highest, the person whose turn just passed gets the arrow card. In essence, the challenge is to the previous player, saying they made an incorrect judgment either on the card they placed or in not challenging when they had the opportunity. Then whoever wins the challenge starts the next round. Play until one person collects three arrow cards, or just play through the arrow card deck (there are only twelve) and whoever has the most at the end wins.

If it wasn't apparent, this is a game whose simplicity is its strength and weakness. Anybody can understand it and there's no great strategy to it—you can try to figure out the math on when it's good to challenge even if you're not sure there's anything wrong, but there isn't much of an advantage to be gained. Everyone will get what's going on almost instantly, so it's a fun warmup, especially on a game night with some very casual players around. You're not going to play it a ton, though; even if you're extraordinarily fascinated by the game, eventually you'll play so much you start to memorize the patterns and percentages on some of the cards, and that would be a huge advantage, possibly to the point of breaking the game for you.

Basically, if your collection could use a cheap casual game that acts as a good starter to game night when not everyone's shown up yet, this is good. If you already have games like that which you're still playing, you can hold off on buying this.

Score: Three good colors out of four (fuck green).

Dave Reviews: Palace Alleys

Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig

How many fucking castles does this asshole need?

Between Two Castles is, as the name does not make any effort to hide, a mash-up of Between Two Cities and the Mad King Ludwig franchise. The core gameplay comes from Between Two Cities—there are two rounds, and at the start of each round, each player takes a stack of tiles. Draft two tiles, pass to the left, draft two tiles, pass to the left, until only one tile remains, which is discarded. You're building a castle with each of the people adjacent to you, and your score is the lowest of the two castles you help build, which means you can't let one of them suck.

The Mad King aspect is how all the tiles go together. There's no spatial aspect like the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig; instead, you have several types of square tiles which can be placed around the core of your castle, the throne room. Like Castles, each tile has a type, and most tiles have a way to score points that relates to other tiles in the game. The most common adjacency rules are to score for tiles in the eight spaces around a given tile, or for all tiles above a tile, below it, or both. These can relate to the room type itself (utility room, outdoors area, etc), or the second icon on these tiles (swords, a mirror, and so on).

Another similarity to Castles is that you have much more freedom to build your castle however you want. Most rooms have to be built at the ground floor (the level of the throne room) or above, but there are downstairs rooms that can go below. Tiles have to be placed adjacent to other ones. The castle can go as high as you want, but all rooms must be supported by actual room tiles beneath them (you can't place a tile above an outdoor area). Alternately, you can go as wide as you want—whatever works for your grand architectural plan.

Also like Castles, you get bonuses for fulfilling certain basic requirements. In this case, if you place three of a tile type, you get an associated bonus, and if you place five of one type, you get a specialty room tile that can add substantially to your final score. It takes some getting used to the bonuses; none of them are hard to understand individually, but understanding them well enough to grab them quickly in the flow of the game can be hard.

And if there's a flaw in this game, the bonuses are it. Between Two Cities is a fantastic game. Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a game I don't like playing, but which I can't deny is well-designed—I'm just crap at spatial awareness. Putting together a castle in the Ludwig vein, according to BTC rules, is quite fun on a basic level. But the draft mechanic works best when everybody sorts through the available tiles, picks two, then everyone plays their tiles together and moves on to the next decision. When people get bonuses, new players will often overlook them because they want to move on to building more castle pieces; once everyone's used to grabbing their bonuses, then the game either slows a bit while decisions are made (some of the bonuses require players choose from tiles or bonus cards), or some people move on with their next decision and are left to wait while the bonus earners catch up.

I didn't have a chance to play this with a group who was experienced enough to blow through the bonus-grabbing process, so it's theoretically possible the game plays very well once everyone is on point. Thing is, BTC is a fairly casual game, and it's unlikely this game (especially with a bigger group) is only going to have experienced players in it. The rhythm of Between Two Cities that this idea relies on gets thrown off by the Mad King Ludwig aspects. Thus, while the idea is sound and the baseline game is pretty good, it winds up being about 90% as good as what you'd hope to get when putting two games of this quality together.

Still, when you're working at this level, 90% is solid. If you liked both of the component games, you'll probably like this. If you liked one and didn't play the other, it's worth trying. If... look, just play the damn game if you get the chance.

Score: Thirteen well-built castle rooms out of sixteen (nobody knows how to build a dungeon anymore).

Dave Reviews: Hexagonal Universes

Orbis

YOU ARE A GOD. The god of a pyramid-shaped universe. Make it a properly blasted hellscape.

Orbis is a game about managing two types of resources: your territory and your worshipers. Your goal, as is the goal of every reasonable god, is to accrue the most victory points (little known fact: the concept of victory points was first alluded to in the Book of Moses). By the end of the game, you'll have chosen fourteen land tiles and one tile which solidifies your deific identity; this will create a pyramid, with yourself at the top, that is the finest universe in the cosmos, unless you lose.

Every round, you pick one tile from a 3x3 grid to add to your universe. Each of these hexagonal tiles has a color. You put a worshiper cube of the appropriate color on each of the adjacent tiles, then place the tile in your universe. And from this simple baseline, things get interesting (in the legitimate way, not the "I don't have any other word to describe this" way) very quickly.

When you take a tile, you take under your wing all the worshiper cubes on that tile. These cubes are used for various purposes—at first, you might use them to pay for effects on the tiles you take, but relatively quickly you'll need to start discarding certain sets of worshipers to take tiles off the grid. Tiles are placed according to a few particular rules. First, after you place one tile, all others must touch at least one tile already in your universe. Second, to place a tile on a level above the bottom row, there must be two tiles below it (so it makes the pyramid). Third, if a tile is placed above the bottom level, it must match the color of one of the tiles below it.

Once your on to your third or fourth tile, you already have some major decisions to make. Do I take the tile with more worshipers or that's worth more points? You can only have a max of ten worshipers, but you can trade three of one color to get one of another, so you rarely have to discard any. Do I take the tile that's more useful but which puts yet another worshiper on a different tile that I know one of my opponents is likely to take? Just how do I build my universe? (Something that doesn't become obvious until you're well into your first game is how the pyramid structure limits the types of lands you're able to make maximum use of, since you have to string colors up the chain rather than place them wherever you want.)

On one turn during the game, you have to pick the god you want to be. Each of them potentially offers bonus points of you meet certain requirements. This choice is less impactful than it seems like it should be, as you will frequently be the only person able to make good use of a certain god. In many cases, you'll wait until the end or take it on a turn when there are no tiles you want. However, in some cases—especially ones where a god is out that offers a bonus for having the most of a certain tile type, and you and an opponent are both going hard after that type—this does become a serious matter.

Now, what happens if you can't pay the worshipers for a tile? Then you turn it into wilderness, which fits into a slot and is worth -1 at the end of the game. That sucks... except the wilderness counts as all colors. This means that it's not just a penalty for poor planning—you can, and often should, strategically place wilderness in your universe so you can take a tile that doesn't match the rows that come before. It's another angle for building your realm that takes a bit of cleverness to use well.

All in all, Orbis is fairly light and easy to understand, but it's a game that is going to leave people mulling over most of their moves. Planning is paramount, and for this reason an experienced player is going to have a major advantage over new ones, more so than is the case in most light games. But that just means you need to play it again. There are worse fates than a second go at Orbis.

Score: Nine pocket universes out of eleven universal dimensions.

Dave Reviews: Escape Boxes

Unlock!

$15 gets you an escape room in a box! It's a great deal, as long as you don't need the room part.

Unlock! is a type of one-shot game, serving up puzzles to the players in an approximation of the escape room experience. You're given a starting scenario and a handful of clues, which you need to inspect, use, and combine to access more areas and more clues, until you meet the ultimate goal (generally to escape from a place—they stick to the theme well). Everything is on cards, most of them with numbered backs; frequently your clues will require putting two cards together, which means adding them up and pulling the card with the sum of those two out of the deck. If you've solved the puzzle correctly, that card will move the experience forward. If not, usually it will be a penalty card that subtracts from the timer.

Oh yeah, this is timed, just like a regular escape room. (You can go beyond the timer if you want. There's no one to kick you out.) The game works through an app, which keeps track of time, lets you input codes, use machine cards, give clues, and so on. Unlike some games with apps, this one doesn't need much screen space; it's very effective on a phone. A tablet or laptop isn't necessary to really get the experience, a la Mansions of Madness.

As of this writing, there are twelve different varieties of Unlock! adventure, along with five demos. Only two of the demos appear to actually be available—one of which comes in the box after you buy it—but there's still one to download and print out if you want to see if this is your kind of thing. Beyond that, the twelve are grouped in four different "styles" of three adventures each, with a one, two, and three-lock difficulty box in each style.

Are they all good? No.

Are they all bad? No.

Is it easy to say which ones are good and bad, or is it a matter of taste? Now that is the question.

Some of this is definitely subjective. Sometimes, however, the design of a puzzle is objectively good (or bad) to a degree that it can be recommended (or not). The Wizard of Oz, although a max-difficulty puzzle and longer than most (ninety minutes versus the usual sixty), is very cleverly put together and designed with lots of pieces that work together very well. It's not for a group of players all new to Unlock! puzzles; it goes beyond the basic deck of cards, and requires a certain amount of creative thinking from experienced players that may simply not occur to those who haven't done these before. If you do have that group, though, it's fantastic. The only downside is that there are so many parts, it's easier in this one than most to flip an incorrect card but have it not be a penalty, which can either give you an undue advantage or just confuse the hell out of everything. That's not as big a deal as it may sound, though.

On the other hand, The Island of Dr. Goorse is supremely disappointing. It starts with a terrific concept—all players are split into two sides and have to solve their puzzles as smaller groups (or even individually, if you have fewer than four people) before they meet up and continue to the end as a whole. But, without spoilers, some of the puzzles en route are questionable in their design, and the final escape puzzle is intensely frustrating and poorly executed.

Of course, there will be people who disagree. Some people who pulled their hair out over the Wizard of Oz adventure will say I'm mad, as will those whose minds worked in just the right way as to solve the Island adventure without the hassles we encountered. Those people may even be right; I'm gauging these based on how I perceive their design, not how easy or difficult it was to solve the puzzles, but there could be aspects of these puzzles none of us saw that would make perfect sense if they were pointed out to us. Thus, although it's not especially gratifying, there aren't any specific adventures I can say you'll want to play or avoid and be almost completely sure you'll have a good time.

As a whole, though, the Unlock! series is well-designed, and the fact all the pieces survive (unlike Exit games, where there can be pieces which need to be torn up or otherwise destroyed to solve puzzles) means you can pass along or resell them when you're done. There's a lot of value here if you have a group of friends interested in this type of game; by all means, try the demo, but if you like escape rooms you'll probably have some fun here.

Score: Eight good escape adventures out of twelve (generically counted).

Dave Reviews: Competitive Hanabi

Fireworks

Remember, fireworks are scary for pets! Keep your doors and windows well shut and locked so they don't run away.

Fireworks is a game about—wait for it—building the most aesthetically pleasing set of fireworks. It's Japanese, which should explain why it's called Fireworks and not "Glowy Sky Booms" or "Sparkly Wonder Stars" or "Boom Goes the Glittery Dynamite". You take tiles with multiple partial fireworks on them and play them to set up certain artistic combinations (big fireworks, kaleidoscopes, saturns, and small flowers), along with special extra-artsy tiles, to score points and win the game. It's about as simple a concept as you can find.

But the game gets complicated by a few aspects. One is the types of fireworks. You start with the core of two big fireworks. The game suggests these start with at least two spaces between them, and it's a good idea; if they're any closer, you won't have space to pop off all the extra fireworks you need around them to finish them. Because the board has twenty-five spaces on it, and the big fireworks will fill seven when completed, it does an effective job of making you think about where you're going to put everything.

Furthermore, although the kaleidoscopes and saturns are each made from putting two firework halves together, you have to pay attention; some have tails and some don't, which are used for kaleidoscopes and saturns, respectively. The two also score differently—kaleidoscopes are better if you have different colors on each side, while saturns are better if they match. (Given the number of colors, this generally makes kaleidoscopes easier to finish.)

However, balancing out the difficulty in putting good fireworks together is the fact you can rearrange your board every time you place new tiles. You're not just mashing in each piece the best you can, having to plan for any number of possibilities (which would be impossible). If you can find a way to use your tiles more effectively, you can move them to take advantage of that. But it's harder than it sounds. Envisioning the best way to move twenty-plus tiles around at the end of the game is very hard, at least at first.

So, they give you a basic concept, complicate how you work with that concept to make it harder, introduce another aspect to make it easier, but then add a challenge to that aspect. On top of that, you don't just roll a die to decide how many tiles you take; you dump that die out of a fireworks tube from a couple feet over the board, only choosing from the tiles that are face up, which is awesome. And if you don't flip any, you roll again with an action card, which usually makes you do some contortions with a friend to get the die out of the tube (and the friend gets to take tiles as well). It's a mix of small party game, visual acuity tester, and strategic thinking.

Sounds great! And it is good. The problem is... that I can't tell you what the problem is. It doesn't feel like they're trying to do too many things, because each aspect of the game is pretty cool. It may be that the mix of things don't necessarily create something more than the sum of its parts. But for whatever reason, we finish playing, shrug, and say, "Yeah, that was pretty good." And we're not dying to play again.

The issues with Fireworks are small, and what you like or dislike may easily not be what I like or dislike. It just doesn't quite get over that hump of being a game that entrances you.

Score: Nineteen useful fireworks tiles out of twenty-five.

Dave Reviews: Ball Science

Dr. Eureka

If all science were this easy, we'd have no reason to know who Neil DeGrasse Tyson is.

Dr. Eureka is a manual dexterity game designed to keep kids entertained, if the box art wasn't enough of a clue. The BGG community is wise in this case; the game is listed as being for ages eight and up, but the community vote is for age five and up, and they're probably right. If you like watching small children fumble objects all over the floor so you can feel more accomplished in life, they're definitely right.

You start with three test tubes, each holding three balls of a single color—red, purple, or green. A card is flipped over with a way of sorting the balls in the test tubes. There may be any number of balls in a given tube (up to the five they can hold); some cards have an empty tube on them. Your job is to figure out the most effective way to move the balls from tube to tube until they match the pattern on the card. The catch is that you have to tip one tube into another to move the balls. You can't move them with your hands. And if you drop a ball, you're out of the round. First person to complete the pattern wins the round, takes the card, and the first to five cards wins.

That's the whole game. Is it fun? Yeah. It's not going to amuse adults for more than a couple playthroughs against each other. Kids might get a kick out of it if they're at a level of coordination where this is a challenge, but a doable challenge. (Actually, by that standard, a lot of adults might like it too.) It's something you want to find for cheap and stick on a shelf if you know you have to deal with kids that like to constantly do things with their hands.

Score: Six Science Guys out of nine.

Dave Reviews: Numbers, Used Poorly

The Mind

Can you read your friends' minds?!

No. Stop trying. And if you do want to try, find another way.

This is what you do in The Mind: Everyone has a hand of cards equal to the level of the game. One person plays a card. Then another. Do that until everyone's hands are empty. The goal is to play the cards, numbered 1 through 99, in numerical order while hardcore pokerfacing everybody at the table. You cannot speak, you cannot make expressions that potentially give away any information about your hand, nothing. (Of course, that's necessary, since clues would make this game idiotically simple.)

Your group starts with a certain number of lives and throwing stars. As you pass through the levels, more of these become available. Lives are lost if someone plays a card and another player has a lower card in hand; throwing stars are used to allow everyone to discard one card from their hands. Run out of lives, you lose. Get to the end with any lives left, you win.

If you're familiar with The Game, this is extremely similar, just with slight tweaks to make it more engaging. Its main advantage over The Game is this: The Game requires you to go through the whole deck, which means a bad shuffle can make it extremely difficult to finish. The Mind never has you deal out more than about one-third of the deck, so while you certainly can end up with a bunch of cards with similar values spread among the players, it's less of a problem.

Problem is, they're just tweaks, and it's not much more engaging. The instructions have a bit that say "Don't read until you've finished a game", at which point they say this is a game about timing—the longer you wait to play a card, the farther away from the current card you probably are, so the players need to get a sense for how long each other will wait before playing a card X number away from the current one. They're not lying; that's what this game is, to the point that's basically all this game is.

This is the kind of game that might have value with kids who need to learn teamwork, especially if you need them to shut the fuck up for five minutes. And there will always be people who enjoy this specific brand of mental cooperation. But as a game, it's just.. not much of one.

Score: Six beers—the number it would probably take for me to enjoy this.

Dave Reviews: Old McDonald Had A Spear

Lords of Xidit

The fantasy land of Xidit cries out for a champion, a leader that will save it from the terrible monsters which traverse the realm! Someone noble, someone grand of vision, someone who will conscript farmers to the cause before actual trained warriors!

In Lords of Xidit, you play the role of an army commander who is identical to all other commanders except for how sweet they look (fuck yeah, ninja lady). It's a programming game in the vein of Robo Rally; you select six actions, your commander does each of them in turn, and if someone ninjas in to take whatever you wanted to get, well, fuck off. At least you can't drop into a bottomless pit.

The possible actions are few, but they're enough. Each location has three roads leading away from it: blue, red, and black. If you choose one of those roads as your action, you travel that road from whatever location you're in, whether you want to anymore or not. You can conscript the lowest-level unit type available in the location, assuming it's a city; once all the possible conscripts are gone, this action does nothing. You can also do battle with a monster in a location. Or pass the move, if you think a delay will get you what you want.

Each monster requires a specific set of unit types to defeat it. You cannot use higher-level unit types in place of whatever's necessary. Beating monsters earns you two of three possible rewards: lyre points, towers, or gold. There's a different balance of these rewards on each monster, such that most of them have a pretty obvious 'two best' rewards, but in some cases you can't choose those (most likely because someone has a tower built in that location, forcing you to take the other two rewards). One curious mechanic is that tiles have a monster on one side and a city in the other, which means when a city runs out of conscripts, it flips into the monster pile, to be drawn when you run low on monsters, and so on forever. (There are titans you can fight in any location, with any set of troops, if no monsters are available to be drawn.)

That's all of the mechanics. Your goal is to score the most points in... well... it changes. And it's not exactly the most points.

The win condition is intriguing but takes a bit of getting used to. There are three ways of scoring, based on the aforementioned monster-smash rewards: lyre points (gained from having the most lyre tokens in a territory), the most levels of towers (height is irrelevant; nine one-story towers is better than two four-stories), and straight cash. These scoring methods are chosen randomly at the start of the game into the first, second, and third scoring slots.

Scoring for each of these is straightforward—count the appropriate item. How they apply to winning, however, is pretty different from most games. For the first scoring metric, being first does not matter; you only need to be in the top three. (In a three player game, an NPC gains points in each metric slowly as the game progresses so there's someone to eliminate in the first round.) For the second metric, you need to be in the top two. Having the highest score only matters with regards to the final metric, and you only need to beat the other person who has made it that far.

Since gold is hidden, and lyre points in the center are as well (they go into a strongbox), each game plays different in part around how readily available information is on the first two metrics. A game that counts towers first, where all info is open, plays differently than one where gold is first and everyone's just taking their best guess.

So, there are two main aspects to the game outside of the theme that will determine if you like it: the programming gameplay and the shifting win conditions. Programming requires some forethought, but if everyone is experienced, the "I know what you know, but you know that I know what you know" shenanigans can run deep. If you're into that, it's great. Likewise, some people are more comfortable going into a game knowing what their goal will be, and even those who are fine with a shifting win condition may struggle with some setups (ie. gold -> lyres -> towers) while excelling with others (towers -> gold -> lyres). It's a real challenge to be good at the game no matter the set of win conditions.

Short version: Lords of Xidit a game that's hard to broadly recommend, as there are a lot of speed bumps any given player may not like, but it's very good for the people who would enjoy the game that it is.

Score: 8/10 (clever scoring past deadline is hard)

Dave Reviews: Something Something Fuck Disney

Villainous

Oh god. Disney IP at work. This can't possibly be good.

Right?

Villainous is a game where up to six players take on the roles of some of Disney's most nefarious villains: Maleficent, Jafar, Captain Hook, The Queen of Hearts, Ursula, or Prince John (animal version). Each player has a board with four sections full of actions they can take on their turns, a deck of cards, and a second deck of Fate cards to throw them off track, but that's largely where the similarities between the characters end.

In keeping with the small but growing trend towards asymmetrical gaming, Villainous offers a different win condition for each character, a different deck of cards with different items and abilities, different Fate cards (which reflect that character's nemeses—Captain Hook has all the children from Peter Pan, for example)—and different sets of actions on each of their four board sections. In fact, not all characters have access to all four sections on their boards at the start of the game, or at any point—Ursula constantly has one end of the board or the other locked off.

Each turn, the player takes their very well-made pawn and moves it to a board section other than the one they were just on (think Scythe). They then perform all the actions on that section. This can be partially thwarted by their enemies; one action is to play a Fate card off someone else's deck, which can be used to cover the top two actions on one section of that player's board. These heroes can't be defeated unless the player puts minions on, or moves them to, the same space with power equal to or greater than the hero's. Items can be attached to minions to make them stronger, but the same goes for the heroes. It's a take-that mechanic without the rage inducement; rarely does a player not have any board options without all of the actions on it available unless they're winning handily and everyone is coming after them, in which case, hey, be a better villain.

For a deck-based game, the balance between when people reach their win conditions is pretty remarkable. This isn't to say that everyone gets there at about the same time, but rather that everyone has a win condition other players can see coming. Whoever's closest to winning can get slowed down, but not to a degree that effectively stops them from being able to win unless they get dogpiled hard (which is itself just a strategy that hands the game to someone else). It could have been successful with any theme; the game is strong.

But beyond that, Villainous has more flavor than atomic wings. All the minions, heroes, items, abilities, and everything else associated with each villain is spot on. The game even allows for some seriously messed up situations; for example, Jafar can hypnotize Aladdin and make him kill Jasmine. If you don't think that's great—not the domestic violence aspect, but the sheer evil in the act of making it happen and the fact you can get so dark—this game might not appeal to you as much as others.

It's a really good game, though. Play it. You want to be bad. You do. You doooooo.

Score: Five non-pedophile villains out of six (Captain Hook is a mega-creep).

Dave Reviews: Giant Reptile Zen

The Tea Dragon Society

For some time, Renegade Games has been held up as an example of a company that consistently puts out quality products. I'm starting to wonder if it's more a matter of them very consistently putting out products, and some of them are quality.

The art on the box is exactly like the art in the game: fucking adorable. If you want a game you can hug because it's so KAWAII, this is definitely your thing.

For everyone else, it's Fisher-Price: My First Deckbuilder. Everyone gets a character and a starter deck (differences are aesthetic only). You don't have a hand of cards; all cards are face up in your 'hold'. However, you draw cards and add them to your hold, which is functionally the same as adding them to your hand in a more normal card game. It's like the entire point is to keep the information open so you can teach kids how to play, as if you couldn't figure out playing with hands on the table if the kid's problem was struggling with what to do without advice.

Cards can have up to four parts to them. Growth is effectively mana, the resource you use to buy cards. You can find growth in the upper left (that's what she said...?). The cost of a card is in the upper right. If there's an effect, that's in the lower middle. Points are at the bottom/middle. And some icons are also in the bottom middle, while others are on the pictures, which is confusing but not a huge deal.

Your entire turn is drawing a card and, if you want to, buying a card. This at least has the effect of keeping the game moving. Your hand is sitting in front of you (that's probably what she said), and you don't throw it out every turn, so you already know how much growth you're working with (she definitely said that) minus the card you draw next. The market and memory cards are all sitting there for you to peruse, so you're considering your next play on other people's turns, which don't take long, and the game stays fairly active.

Market cards get added to your deck by using sufficient growth (do you think she said that? I do) and putting it in your discard pile. Memory cards also get added to your deck, but tend to be worth more points, have different effects, and are related to specific seasons—the game is played in four rounds, representing the seasons, and once one memory card is left you move on to the next season. When one memory card remains in winter, the game's over. Count up your points.

It's... fine. There's not much here for adults to enjoy in terms of rich strategy. Anyone who comprehends deck builders will talk more about how cute the artwork is than the game. Bump it up in priority if you have kids in the mid-single digits to whom you'd like to teach very basic game ideas. Other than that, this isn't going to entertain most people for too many playthroughs.

Score: Two and a half dragons out of four (OH GOD THE HORROR)

Dave Reviews: Alexa's World Tour

When In Rome

If there's a potential issue with any trivia game, it's the possibility of seeing a question twice. The Internet is full of trivia. So running a trivia game through Amazon's Alexa service has to be perfect, right?

Quoth the Internet: LOL

When In Rome is, if nothing else, a clever little idea. Once computer/phone apps started becoming integrated with board games, it was only a matter of time until online services were used to expand the possibility even further. When In Rome lays a map of the world in front of you; you pick a city in which to start, then answer a trivia question about that city to make a friend. If you make a friend, the other player can't (two players or teams max), because apparently there are only twenty people in Alexa's world. You can normally only travel to a city connected to the one you're in, but having friends lets you chain moves together, because the world is a mosh pit and we're all just crowd surfing on it.

In every city, you have a choice between an easier, three-point question of a random category, or a harder, five-point question in a different category. All questions are about the city you're in. Between the points for answering questions correctly and for picking up special souvenirs that pop up from time to time for bonuses, you play through either nine rounds or when three souvenirs total are collected (the latter is much more likely). Highest score wins.

I'm not going to say you can't have fun playing When In Rome. It's possible. But that sentence alone should tell you where this review is going.

The tricky thing about a review is that I'm not sure if it's trying to do too much or not enough. That shouldn't generally be a point of confusion about anything. But this is a game where they hired twenty different voice actors to play the friends in each city and ask the questions related to that city. Considering this is the first real Alexa-based board game, nobody would have expected them to go so far in their efforts, so it was really an above-and-beyond decision. However, using voice actors dramatically limits the number of different questions that can be asked. This thing is connected to the Internet, but in the first two games I played, I got the same question both times I ended up in San Francisco. That's beyond unacceptable for a trivia game, and the way the voice acting is used isn't even that good (between the actors and Alexa, there's often too much of a gap between questions).

Worse yet—and that first problem is pretty bad—they put all this time into the aesthetics but couldn't even figure out a good way to make the souvenir system work. First, when a souvenir pops up, it's in a randomly generated location. Fine. These locations seem to always be relatively equidistant between the two players. That's reasonable; it would be pretty fucked up if one player could move one space to the souvenir city while the other had to move five, giving the first one several chances before their opponent had one. But the souvenir can pop IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROUND.

Here's how a round works: a challenge for both players is put forth. Sometimes they need to come the closest to a percentage-based statistic (ie. guess what percentage out of 100, closest wins); sometimes the players alternate answering different questions until one of them gets one right. The winner of the challenge makes the first move that round. If there's no souvenir and no reason to go any particular direction, then going first doesn't matter.

The only real advantage to going first is if it gets you to a city with a souvenir sooner. Therefore, giving a potential disadvantage to someone for winning the right to go first (you don't get a choice) is completely batshit. The fact they didn't realize this tells me we're talking about a bunch of programmers who never made a game and thought they could do something cool with Alexa. They apparently nailed it with a game called Beasts of Balance a couple years ago; the ball got dropped in every conceivable way here.

It shows. Play this game if someone else has it or you find it in a thrift shop for a buck, just so you can see the problems and dream about what could have been if they hired anybody who knew what the fuck they were doing with this, or even just some competent game testers. They're in London, they should have asked Shut Up and Sit Down to do it.

Score: Six dystopian dumpster fires out of twenty.

Dave Reviews: The Original Purdy Pictures

Dixit

The game that spawned Mysterium. Or the idea for Mysterium. Basically, Mysterium exists because of this game.

To the point!

Dixit is a family-friendly game that is ostensibly for up to six people. In reality, if you come up with more pieces for scoring and voting, and you have enough cards (there are numerous expansions), you can expand it as much as you want. So, in theory, it can be a real party game. It's definitely better when you're drunk.

The game's premise is simple: everyone has a hand of six cards. The active player chooses a card and creates a clue around it. Then every other player chooses the card they think will best match that clue, and all the cards go in a pile. They're shuffled, laid out, and everyone secretly votes on which card belonged to the active player.

Unlike a game like Codenames, the clue you give isn't particularly restricted; you can use one or more words, sounds that aren't words, references to familiar things, etc. Pretty much anything goes. The reason is that you don't actually want everyone to guess your card. However, you want somebody to guess your card—you only score if some, but not all, of the opponents figure out which card is yours.

So how the bloody fuck does that work? Pretty easily, once you've gone through a few rounds.

One of three things can happen: Everyone guesses correctly, some people guess correctly, or no one guesses correctly.

• Everyone's right: Everyone except the active player gets two points. The active player gets zero.
• Nobody's right: Everyone except the active player gets two points. The active player gets zero. In addition, each player gets a bonus point for each person who guessed their card.
• Some people are right: Everyone who guessed right gets three points. The active player gets three points. Everyone also earns a point for each person who guessed their card.

It's not a complex scoring system, but it's awkward relative to how most game scoring works (do thing -> get points), so mistakes can happen. Reading the directions again for purposes of this review, I realize we may have never done the scoring exactly right. Professionalism!

In terms of fun, I must reiterate a previous point: Bring alcohol.

Wait, are you twenty-one? If you're not twenty-one, disregard that last paragraph.

If you are twenty-one, bring alcohol. Drunk people make the best clues. BUTTERFLIIIIIIIES

Is this a good game? It is.. a... simple game. It's very easy to play (keep one person semi-sober for scoring). That's good for some people! It's quite good for people who don't play many board games, the ones who would see the cards, pieces, and scoring track come out and wonder what kind of over-complicated insanity they've gotten themselves into, so you can show them it's really simple and fun.

But just for a normal sober game night? Eh. It's strange in that the game is totally in control of the players—everyone picks their cards, the active player makes the clue, there is almost no randomness involved, and skill will win out most often—and yet it frequently feels as though you're not really in control of your outcome. You have a game where every time it's your turn, nobody can play anything even close and everyone guesses your card, so you're getting zeroes while everyone else is getting threes, and you just can't win enough guesses for your cards on other people's turns to catch up. Or all the guesses seem to work your way points-wise, even though you don't feel like you've done a great job and maybe even think someone else had really done a better job playing.

Really, just drink. Or smoke. Maybe don't do acid, not with the pictures on these cards.

Score: Six empty beer bottles, or eight full ones, out of ten.

Dave Reviews: Previously Looted Mayan Temples

Lost Cities

I don't know why I always assume games with the 'South American explorer' vibe revolve around Mayans. The Incas were pretty legit.

Fuck the Aztecs, though. Goddamned Eagle Warriors.

Wait, which game are we playing?

Lost Cities is a Reiner Knizia game, which is good! Reiner makes good games! So Lost Cities is... it must be...

Ok, look. This is a 2008 reprint of a 1999 game. Less was expected of the industry back then. It's useful to go back and look at games like this so we see where our hobby came from while also looking towards where it's going.

So.

In Lost Cities, you have five explorers and five tracks for them to go down. Each track has a randomized set of bonuses on certain spaces, and are worth a certain number of points at the end of the round depending on how far your explorer moves. There's also a huge deck of cards, with cards numbered zero through ten and corresponding to the color of one of the tracks. If you want to put an explorer on a track, you play a card of that color. Easy.

However, if you want to move the explorer further along, you have to play a card of the same value or higher. Therefore, in order to move the explorer a decent distance (hopefully all the way to the end), you need to start with low value cards and work your way up as slowly as you can. You can discard a card and draw a new one rather than play a shit card; however, you can't take too long, because as soon as a certain number of total explorers reach the break line on their tracks, the round ends, and explorers who haven't moved very far are actually worth negative points.

The points get kind of stratospheric, which is neat—many games don't go above fifty, and most don't go above one hundred. If you're not getting triple digits in a single Lost Cities round, that wasn't a very good round.

But there's not much strategy here. As the round draws nearer to a close, you may need to decide whether it's worth the risk to start an explorer down a new trail when they could be worth negative points. It can be a consequential choice, but it's about the only intellectual decision you'll need to make. If you can go down a track and you have a low card, you play the card and go down the track. If you can hit bonuses that give you extra moves, you link them together as best you can. Maybe you play a 2 on one track rather than a 0 on another because you like the bonuses on that first track more, but you still have the 0 and you'll still play it pretty soon.

I imagine that people looking for games that weren't Twilight Imperium-sized but more friendly than Monopoly and less mindless than Chutes & Ladders were probably happy with this in 1999. Today, it's quite possibly a good tool for teaching game basics to kids. Beyond that, it's just a casual game that can kill an hour. Don't avoid it like the plague, but it's not much more than a thrift store purchase.

Score: Three Macklemores out of five.

Dave Reviews: Fun With Fascists

Secret Hitler

This one's been out for a little while, with all the fanfare that anything which says "Hitler" is going to obtain. I just got a chance to play it, though. So let's write the 379th review on the Internet about:

How Fun Is Hitler?

Secret Hitler is, as the name very strongly indicates, a hidden role game. To my surprise, it doesn't just resemble other hidden role games; it's damn near a re-skin of The Resistance. If you're going to basically copy a game, of course, The Resistance is a fine one to use as a basis. Then again, you're setting the bar awfully damned high for anyone who recognizes the core mechanics.

Let's go over those mechanics, vis a vis The Resistance.

• Two teams: check. 
• Plucky blue-colored good guys versus the terrible red power: check.
• Rotating leadership position: check.
• Voting for teams: pseudo-check. Where The Resistance had a vote for a proposed team, Secret Hitler has a single Chancellor to vote on.
• Target number of 'wins' for victory: check. Secret Hitler requires more—six for Fascists, five for Liberals, versus three for either side in The Resistance—but the rounds are shorter.

There are differences, but they're really adjustments to the same core gameplay. The biggest change is the alternate victory conditions that become possible once there are three Fascist policies on the board. From then on, voting Hitler in as Chancellor makes him Chancellor for Life, and the Fascists win. However, every time a new Fascist policy is enacted, the President has to assassinate a player. If the President assassinates Hitler, the Liberals automatically win.

Policies are enacted by the President and Chancellor. The President picks up the top three policy tiles from the stack, discards one face down, and hands the other two to the Chancellor. The Chancellor then discards another one face down, and plays the last one face up. The stack contains eleven Fascist and six Liberal policies; as the game goes on, especially if the Liberals get a lead, it can become very easy to draw three Fascist policies and be forced to use one even if you're a Liberal President and Chancellor.

There's one rule that I haven't figured out the logic behind: during the policy-making stage, the President and Chancellor can't talk. However, once the policy is played, they can lie about what tiles were available. So what's the point of not letting them talk or otherwise telegraph what's in their hands during the policy phase? If they're allowed to say it afterwards, there's no material difference if they're allowed to speak during the phase as well. Their messages will be the same, and players will have the same data to base their judgments on.

I wanted to like Secret Hitler, and I kind of do. However, I can't shake the feeling that Secret Hitler is fun because including Hitler in silly games is fun. The difference between this and the Resistance is that in Secret Hitler, the decisions are much simpler—do I trust this Chancellor or no? And, especially if there aren't many Fascist policies left, do I trust this President not to throw a Liberal one out if they see it? After that, it's mainly a numbers game. If the Liberal President/Chancellor combo (which is what you usually get) see a Liberal policy, they're going to pass it, so you're just hoping the good guys see what they need. Or don't, if you're a horrible Fascist.

On the other hand, The Resistance requires you to solve the entire proposed team while not nixing so many teams that the government automatically wins. There are more strings to pull when you know the odds are, especially later on, that someone on the team is a government spy unless your team has figured out everyone's identity, and even then there's usually a bit of everyone holding their breath until the mission votes are cast. Everything revolves around your capacity to solve the puzzle of your fellow players.

Some people will like the relative simplicity of Secret Hitler, and that's fine. It's not bad. Just know that's what you're getting.

Score: A filibuster-proof 77 Fascists out of 100 U.S. Senators.