Dave Reviews: A Whole New World

Ecos: The First Continent

Did you ever wonder how Pangaea was formed? Read a science book!

I'll wait.

OK. Now, did you ever want to form your own Pangaea? Play this game!

Ecos is the world-buildingest world-building game on the market. When people usually talk about world building, they're referring to the construction of civilizations and backgrounds for broader storytelling, not crafting the land itself. In Ecos, you use hex tiles to build (and alter) the landscape on which the flora and fauna of your world shall grow and thrive (and die, if you wish it).

The hexes work very simply. The game starts with four tiles laid out in a particular pattern (first-timers are suggested to have a grassland and desert together with water on either side, but there are others once you're used to the game). From there, when hexes are placed, they're either grassland, desert, or water, and they can generally be placed anywhere adjacent to at least one other hex. Mountains can be placed on any land tile. Forests can be placed in any grassland, and an extra forest can be placed if there is a mountain on the tile (so grasslands max out at a mountain and two forests, deserts at a mountain and one forest). Animal tokens have icons to indicate where they can go.

The core gameplay loop involves the elements and players' cards. Each player starts with twelve cards, three of which begin face up on the table (the active cards). There's a bag with forty nice, chunky element tiles inside, representing sun, water, and so on. One player pulls an element from the bag; everyone then takes one of their seven energy cubes and places it on a matching symbol on one of their cards. When you have all the element symbols on a card covered by cubes, you use its effect(s). Rather than discard it, though, you rotate it clockwise. Every card has leaves on top, usually more than one; when you rotate it, the next side facing up will have one fewer leaf. In this way, you can keep using a card until it's down to one leaf, at which point you can use it once more, then discard it. Since there's no limit to how many cards you can have active at any given time, this is a clever way to give value to cards with less powerful effects.

But how do you get those cards? And what happens if you can't play one of your cubes?

These issues are where the dial comes in. Every player has a square dial. If you can't play a cube, or don't want to, you rotate the dial clockwise. Once you rotate it twice, you have the option to take a new card. If you pass on that and rotate it a third time, you have the option to either play another card on the table (which gives you more elements to play and/or more options for certain elements) or take another energy cube (which you'll need as you increase your number of active cards). And you want more cards in play; many of them let you add energy cubes of particular elements to other cards, which can let you finish those cards and obtain those effects, creating turns with some serious combo effects. And if you can't use the bonus elements, you get more dial turns, letting you play more cards so you can land combos later.

One player keeps drawing element tiles until they hit a wild. Then, if no one's reached eighty points, the next player draws in the same fashion. With forty tiles and only two wilds, this means one player can draw for quite some time before they have to stop... or only be able to draw a few. In theory, this sounds unfair, since effects are resolved with the Harbinger (tile-drawer) first and then around the table. However, this has little practical effect on the game, since it's quite rare to wind up in a situation where the first person's card dramatically impacts the second's, and even if it does, the second has the option to pull the last-placed cube off and turn their dial instead. At worst this effect might cost a player a couple of points, and with eighty being needed, it's extremely unlikely one person will benefit from this occurrence enough to swing the game unless it was already very close.

Overall, Ecos doesn't try to do too much with its system, and what it does is very clean. Every aspect of the gameplay loop is filled with an option, which means you're never really at the mercy of the system. Your twelve starting cards will carry you either to the end or close, which means it's good that they offer an option to get more, but you can focus on ramping up your capabilities with more active cards and energy cubes rather than trying to get enough cards to stay afloat. That's more fun. The luck factor of elements being pulled from the bag is mitigated by the fact the number of each element type is listed on your dial, and you can make decisions about which cards to play with maximum information about what the odds are of pulling the elements you need, both generally and on the current turn.

It's worth noting that this is not a game that leans heavily into its theme. Some cards let you play animals onto the tiles and move them around, and it can be fun to watch the antelope run once leopards are on the board, but the appearance of specific animals (as well as forests and mountains) is pretty random. You're not building a coherent ecosystem or anything like that; you're playing a game with a planet-building aesthetic. It will be much more of a draw for players who appreciate excellent game systems rather than games which play strongly into their themes.

One other thing: Bonus points for the containers. There are dozens of cubes and over a hundred animal tokens, but the game includes clever cardboard boxes you build when you first open the game that keep everything sorted. It's outstanding, and three years after Histrio came out, I'm still waiting for more games to do players this kind of service.

Score: Ten herbivores out of eleven animals (which makes for one happy predator).

Dave Reviews: Space Battle System #468

Star Realms

I've been told that my reviews are, and I quote, "funnier when (I) lose". I strenuously deny that I review games differently based on my personal results; I am always funny.

To that end, I will now review a game that is good and which I never, ever win.

Star Realms is a deckbuilder with, somewhat obviously, a space warfare setting. Like other deckbuilders, it uses some core mechanics deckbuilding veterans will be used to along with its own twists on the genre.

The familiar: a starting deck of ten cards, eight with money for buying other cards and two with attack so you have a bit of uncertainty early on. A resource for buying cards (trade) and a resource for doing damage to the enemy (attack). Cards of varying price with effects that strengthen as their cost goes up, creating a bit of a luck-based situation if one killer card hits the board and the first person who draws enough money to buy it winds up with a notable advantage.

The main difference: All cards in the deck are one of four colors. These colors are used to trigger team bonuses on a large percentage of cards. Those familiar with Ascension may recall an expansion where each player takes the role of a hero relating to one of the four factions in that game, making the purchase or use of that faction's cards a bit more useful, but in Star Realms this is core to the gameplay loop.

Each color has its own style. Green cards are nearly all attack-focused, with some card draw tied in. Yellow is aggressive with discard effects and decent attack resources, but it offers more gold than green. Red is built around scrapping cards (removing them from your deck). Blue offers the most gold and authority (which is Star Realms' version of hit points, so you can think of it as life gain), and its combos can dominate if given a chance to work, but they take more time than the other colors to get going.

Most modern deckbuilders offer some way to remove starting cards from your deck. How useful this mechanic is varies by the game; in Star Realms, because playing multiple cards of one color is central to winning most of the time, getting rid of non-colored starter cards is a huge benefit. So you want red, right? But the scrap cards come at the expense of having fewer resources than other cards of the same cost, so if you have access to more cards of a different color, it should be fine to get those, right? Well...

In general, you're trying to avoid building a deck with a few of each color. Some cards are individually powerful and don't have a team bonus worked into their design, so if you rely on those, not focusing on a color might be fine. But, when you play a couple of Cutters (two-cost blue cards) and you earn four authority, two trade, and four attack from each one, it feels like you robbed your opponent blind. It feels especially good when you're used to other deckbuilders, where you work to scrape together a few more resources each time through the deck, and here you land a couple cheap cards that work together to bring in a veritable bounty.

The real upshot is that while expensive cards certainly are powerful, and you pretty much always want them, the right set of cheap cards can have powerful effects as well when they work together. More over, because you want combos, there's a certain benefit to buying more cheap cards, since you're more likely to match them in any given hand. And, because so many cards are attack-based, it's less likely for you or your opponent to pile up early trade cards to buy something expensive quickly that might break the game.

There's another difference which explains some of the plethora of attack cards: bases. Once played, they stay on the board until destroyed, and each one requires a certain amount of attack to remove. Some of them, the outposts, must be destroyed for you and your other bases to be attacked at all, meaning they provide a certain amount of effective health each time through the deck, just like cards that give you authority. Other bases can be bypassed, but bases trigger color combos, so unless you're close to beating your opponent, you usually want to destroy the optional ones as well. Bases that stick on the board for more than a turn or two are usually big benefits to your side, which is why they tend not to stick on the board. It's also why blue offers such massive amounts of resources—going hard into blue means you'll be less likely to break bases on any given turn, and your opponent can start to come back with monster combos using the bases they have on the board.

Star Realms one-ups its competition by being, for the most part, balanced. I have learned how to bend my strategy towards each of the colors, and I have been able to lose terribly in every instance. Sometimes I lose to the giant card the opponent landed before me; sometimes I get combo smashed into the dirt. I have lost to small clusters of yellow ships, giant armies of green ships, and red decks that threw half their ships in a junkyard before beating me with the rest. I have lost this game, where each player starts with fifty authority, by 100. I have lost by wide and narrow margins, disastrously and hopelessly, with every gaming trick I know short of actually sleight-of-handing cards out of the deck.

It's, frankly, impressive.

Score: Five blob ships in hand out of six in the deck.

Dave Reviews: Mel Kiper's Dino Derby

Draftosaurus

Draftosaurus is a sweet little dinosaur-based game from the mind of Antoine Bauza, creator of Ghost Stories and Samurai Spirit...

...oh god, what happens to the dinos? What happens to us?!

Although the guy on the cover with the selfie stick definitely deserves to be eaten by the roaring T-Rex behind him, nothing so brutal happens in Draftosaurus. It's just about the simplest game you could imagine with Bauza's name on it, which means it's simple enough until you hit that "oh shit" moment where you realize you have entirely borked your strategy.

Draftosaurus has a game board for each player and a bag of dinos for everyone to use. At the start, everyone gets six dinos, which they keep hidden from everyone else. One player rolls a die to determine where people have to place one of their dinos. The trick is that the player who rolls doesn't have to follow the rule. For example, most of the potential die rolls limit you to placing your dino on one half of the board or the other (they're split in different ways, so there's left half/right half, and also forest/dirt, which comprise different groups of dino pens). The main benefit is obvious, but you can also play around it if you pay attention to when your turn to roll is coming up. If it's at the end of the round, you might be able to play a dino in a spot where only one fits because you'll be able to place the next one anywhere, whereas if someone else was rolling that might be a riskier play.

Once you play a dino, you take all your remaining dinos and pass them to the left, thus the "Draftosaurus" name. Every pen scores points in different ways. True to a Bauza game, your goal is to maximize how many points each dino earns, and all the pens are pretty close in terms of what's possible. The easy pen to fill is the Woody Trio, where you only need three dinos of any type, earns you seven points if you fill it—2.33 points per dino. The Forest of Sameness, on the other hand, requires all dinos to be the same type. (This is harder in some games, depending on the number of players, because that affects how many dinos of each type are used.) If you can fill all six slots, you earn twenty-four points, or four per dino. That's obviously much better, but rarely does it happen. Four will earn twelve points, which is still three per dino, better than the Woody Trio. But if you only land one or two, they're worth less.

Oh, and if you put some in the Woody Trio pen but don't get all three, they're not worth anything. Oops!

Basically, you have to commit to getting as many points as you can in the pens where you put anything, which can of course be thwarted by bad die rolls or other people taking the dinos you need before they can circle the table to you. You have control over your ability to see how many of each dino you start with and how many of each type other players use, so you can figure out which pens you're likely to be able to use well, but there are aspects of luck and people playing keepaway which are out of your control. On the plus side, the game plays very quickly, so if everyone's having fun it's quite easy to play several games if you so choose.

Draftosaurus is perfectly good filler. Few people will come over just to play it, but it's something to throw down while waiting for everyone to get to the house. It's also good for a very casual type of night. Most people can have a few of these in their collections, so if you need a quick and easy game, check it out.

Score: 7/10

Dave Reviews: Dice Gardens

Alhambra: The Dice Game

Alhambra, the base game, is mainly about laying tiles to create a city, keeping one eye towards how it's walled (gotta keep out those pesky bandits) and the other towards the types of tiles, both which you have and which your opponents have. Everything revolves around tiles and the types of money you collect and use to buy those tiles.

Then we have the dice game, which begs the question: If it has no tiles and it has no money, is the game really Alhambra?

So, how does Alhambra with dice work? To its credit, it isn't a 100% different game with the Alhambra label to earn more sales. The colors you're chasing and scoring system are the same—three rounds of scoring with increasing points available each round, and the ability for more players to score some number of points each round. Alhambra players will immediately recognize those aspects. The change, of course, is how you get in position to score those points.

Dice are rolled in a Yahtzee style—roll everything, then choose what you want to reroll, for up to three rolls. You have eight dice, and since Alhambra has six types of buildings, that lines up nicely with using regular dice for this game. Your goal is not just to get as many of one type as you can, but if possible, to do it in as few rolls as you can.

This is where there's a little more strategy than it might first appear. Each combination of dice outcomes and total rolls is represented one time for each color. That is to say, if you land five purple towers on three rolls and put your marker there, no one else can take the 5-3 spot on purple. If someone else gets five towers on three rolls later in the round, they're automatically bumped back to 4-1 (four towers on one roll). If someone is already there, they get bumped back again, and so on.

Dice math being what it is, outcomes in the middle of the range are most common, leading to a different type of risk-reward consideration than dice games tend to have. It becomes a little more like poker—you can know the odds of your next roll, but what will your opponents do? Can you put them in a tough situation? Will they be prone to taking more risks, ones which might short-circuit their chances of winning?

Most of the harder decisions come earlier in the round, before many markers are on the board. One example someone is likely to see is getting five of a building in two rolls. To do that beats the odds, and getting five in one roll is very difficult, so 5-2 is a safe spot to be (especially if no one's ahead of it already). Getting a sixth one is a 50/50 proposition with the three remaining dice, and if you fail, you go to 5-3, which gives someone else a much better chance of getting ahead of you than they would have had otherwise. But getting to six is also quite difficult, and a 50/50 chance of making it is is almost as good as it gets.

Likewise if you land four on the first roll—it's not extremely hard to beat five, but 4-1 might be a safe second place. If you don't need to move as far up the track for that color as possible—if you're already well in front, or can't catch the next person, or just need to play a spoiler—do you stay with that and hope for the best? This especially happens if someone is already in the 5-3 spot, since if you take 4-1, you're extra-protected, but still, five on two rolls is hardly impossible...

This really is the whole game, so if you don't like dice math, you may find the depth of strategy lacking. Your humble reviewer is a fiend for games of not-entirely-chance, so this is admittedly in my wheelhouse. It's not wildly groundbreaking or made with a special kind of genius. But if you see "Alhambra: The Dice Game" on the shelf, and you're a cynical board game veteran, you may well think, eh, just another money grab, when it is in fact a reasonably good game. If you like dice and/or you have more casual friends who might enjoy the Alhambra aesthetic but not the entire kit of regular Alhambra, it's worth a go.

Score: Five winning colors out of six.

Dave Reviews: The Wonder War

Mare Nostrum: Empires

War!
What is it good for?
Bragging to your friends about how you can lead an army of both real and legendary heroes to victory in the battle for the ancient Mediterranean!
Say it again now!

In Mare Nostrum, you control an ancient civilization, ruled by one of its real-life leaders, though in some cases those leaders are dragged substantially out of their time frames to partake in the conflict. Caesar and Cleopatra lived at the same time, obviously, but Hannibal, Pericles, and Hammurabi are dragged from way out of the past. No big deal, though; along the way you'll get to hire heroes like Hercules and Perseus, who didn't actually exist, so it's not like they're pretending this makes sense. This is a title that wants to give you maximum ancient name recognition with your war game, and in that it absolutely succeeds.

Like any good war game, Mare Nostrum is about resources first and armies second. In fact, managing your resources is in many ways the entire game. Every empire starts with access to nine resources, a mix of coins and various commodities. Once resources are collected, whichever empire is the trade leader (Carthage starts in this role) decides how many resources must be traded by each empire, from zero to five. Everyone places that many resources on their player boards, face down; this can include coins, not just commodities. Then everything is flipped up, and the trade leader takes one thing from the person of their choice. Then that person takes an item from someone else, and so on, until all trade commodities are taken. (Two people can only go back and forth one time each, then they must move on to a different person.) If there's a trade imbalance at the end, whoever has an extra good gives one of their choice to whoever is short one, so that everyone has the same number of resources they started with.

Then you spend those resources, and here is where what you picked up matters. Normal units and buildings cost either three or six resources; heroes and wonders start at seven and go up from there. To buy something, you must spend either commodities or coins, and if you spend commodities, they all have to be different. At the end of the buying phase, all your commodities are lost, and you can only keep up to two coins. Therefore, when you trade, you have to keep an eye on what you want to buy and make sure you don't end up with multiples of the same commodity unless you plan on using them in different sets. If you're going to have unspent resources, you want them to be coins; wasting as little as possible is critical to the early game, and only becomes less of a concern later if you take over enough territory that you can outspend your rivals even if you have some unused resources.

There are four different ways to win, all of which require good resource management.

• Build the Pyramids. This requires spending twelve commodities (there are only thirteen types) or twelve coins. Because you can't end up with more resources through trade than you started with, this means you have to gather at least twelve resources on your turn and then get exactly what you need through trade. This is more doable than it seems if your opponents don't notice what you're doing and stop you, or if they attack the nearest neighbor who isn't anywhere near the point of collecting that many resources (TOM).
• Build five heroes or Wonders. You start with one, so you only actually need to build four, but they cost seven, then eight, then nine, then ten resources. In theory you could pick one up on each of the first three turns, but then you would need to expand to have the resources for the last one. That's after your opponents already see you're near victory, so this requires a bit of craftiness. It's more plausible if you have one or more of the heroes/Wonders that let you acquire extra resources or keep unused commodities, but even then it requires that nobody attack while you build no troops or defenses or... anything else, lest you lose some of those resources.
• Hold four capitals or legendary cities. Each empire has reasonable access to one legendary city, but this still requires smashing opponents and likely taking one capital and another legendary city near someone else's territory. If you can build after your opponent and pull together several legions while they have few defenses, this can work, but against someone who is in control of the turn order (the culture leader), or if the culture leader simply doesn't want to give you the chance to run someone over in this way, it's quite difficult. You will lose troops, and troops are costly.
• Holding all three leader titles (military, culture, trade). If you can do this, you're basically dominating the game and can throw resources at whatever you want. It's most likely to happen if you're able to hold a lot of territory—again, requiring numerous resources—but the other victory conditions are somehow stalemated.

Mare Nostrum is not a long game, at least as war games go. If several evenly matched opponents act carefully around each other, cutting off each other's routes of advancement but not willing to really push out of concern that it will give someone else an opening, the game might stretch out, but it's not designed for that to happen. For those who are really into the drawn-out planning of a war machine, it may feel a bit unfulfilling, because the bulk of these forces frequently never see the board. If you're not willing to fight, or at least to build a force that will scare your neighbors out of taking more territory, gathering the resources for a relatively quick Pyramids victory is very doable (especially for Carthage). 

But we're in an era where two hours is a long game to many people, and this is the type of game that might draw them into the idea of something more fleshed out (e.g. Game of Thrones 2E). It's well-built, as long as you understand exactly how it works and make sure everyone knows how to plan their resources (TOM). If you want a war game that doesn't require planning an entire night around getting the people together to play it, this may be a good choice.

Score: Four defeated ancient empires out of five (fifth, of course, is the glorious victor Cleopatra). 

Dave Reviews: Denmark Tetris

Copenhagen

For entirely unknown reasons, my brain laid a bit of music under the name of this game, and now it's an earworm.

Copenhagen! Copenhagen, Copenhagen!

This has nothing to do with the game itself. I just want to see if sharing it will help the sound go away.

Copenhagen is a game about making buildings. Contrary to the box art—the filthy liars—not every block of your buildings will have a window. And why not? Look at the city itself:

Windows! Nothing but windows! Why don't you give us more windows? Yeah, if everything was a window there wouldn't be any gameplay and everyone would have the same score and there wouldn't be any challenge, but it's so purdy!

Alas, we have mostly but not entirely windows in Copenhagen: The Incorrect Game. You have a tall, narrow space in which to construct your building—the dimensions are pretty accurate, at least—and your goal is to entirely fill in rows and columns of the building with no gaps. This isn't too difficult for anyone even passingly familiar with Tetris, and it's made easier by the inclusion of single-square windows that you can place with the bonus actions you earn by covering shields on the board or completing certain rows of the structure. Alternately, if you don't need that terrible crutch, you can earn different types of additional actions that can help tip the balance in your favor.

Constructing the building itself requires pieces, and getting pieces requires cards. A set of seven colored cards awaits your perusal, from which you can take two that are next to each other. Your default extra action lets you take two cards not next to each other, but you can only do that once unless you refresh your extra actions (the third and final option you can take when earning a bonus action). Alternately, you can buy and place one of the building pieces—purchases are made with the cards matching the color of the building piece. If the piece will touch a piece of the same color, it costs one card less. Other than that, the only real placement rule is that the piece has to sit on the ground level or on top of another piece. Balance is irrelevant; you can shove a five-block-long piece where only one block on the far edge supports it. Furthermore, if you have the space, you can build underneath placed tiles (they don't drop from the top like Tetris pieces, regardless of the two games' other similarities).

Scoring is simple: you get one point for a complete row, two if it's all windows. You also get two points for a complete column, four if it's all windows. These are the only ways to score points. The game ends when you hit the mermaid near the bottom of the deck (a nod to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, which is a nice touch), or when someone reaches twelve.

Here's the thing, because there's always a thing—your building space is nine tiles high and five wide. Therefore, if you notice that fact, it becomes pretty obvious that you want to build up rather than out, since you can get equal points with fewer tiles. Getting the bonus actions from completing certain rows is all well and good, but since you don't need to complete the rows underneath, all you need is to leave a space to build on and save the cards to buy a long piece that will finish the row despite only having, say, two columns going up. Two columns full of windows is eight points; finishing the right rows gives you extra points and extra bonus actions, and unless someone else is pulling off the same strategy, it's probably enough to win.

Because the very long tiles you need to maximize this strategy are in short supply, it's not guaranteed to work, so thankfully knowing this doesn't solve the whole game. You still need to think around what color cards you can get, what your opponents are taking, and how you can beat them to the punch, or if you can find a way to thwart their plans. It's very difficult to stop people from building columns, however, due to the larger number of cheaper, smaller pieces available, so once everyone knows how to play, a victorious strategy is built around the margins rather than being able to take substantially different routes through the game.

Is that a problem? Depends on you. It's not designed to be a heavy game, and sometimes you just want to play something familiar. It's a very good game to introduce to relative board game noobs, who need something more controllable (and probably enjoyable) than Catan but really just want a relatively relaxing experience that still gives their brains some work. It's good for a few plays no matter who you are; beyond that depends on whether Copenhagen speaks to the gaming centers in your brain and the tiny nerds who control them.

Score: Seven windows out of nine building blocks.

Dave Reviews: Fuck Your Goddamned Werewolves

Silver

Ted Alspach makes the Werewolf games. He can do what he wants with werewolves.

How often does "he can do what he wants" turn out well?

That's a dire beginning, so let me be fair up front and say that Silver isn't a bad game. It's a game where the concept is very, "Wait, what?" Then you play it and it's OK.

So, let's begin with the concept. There's a deck of 52 cards with ranks from 0 to 13. There are two zeroes, two thirteens, and four of everything else. The number on the cards could very reasonably represent the strength of the characters, but your goal is to tank your village's score as low as possible, so it needs to mean something else. And it does.

The number on a card represents the number of werewolves that have followed your villager home.

How, exactly, does this situation not end up with all villages scoring zero because everyone gets eaten immediately? Are the werewolves turning into anthropologists, and they're more interested in studying villagers who live in a constant state of terror? Has all the predatory behavior been bred out of them? Is this the game with werewolves that are like real-life raptors, and they're all the size of turkeys?

Anyway, you start a round of Silver with five cards face down in front of you. You get to look at two of them at the start, but different effects you'll encounter let you look at others or turn them face up. All the cards numbered zero through four have abilities that work when they're face up in your village; you want to keep these cards for their low score, but it's for you to judge whether to try and keep them hidden (face down) or turn them up when the opportunity arises for their extra abilities.

You have three options on your turn: draw a card from the deck, pull one out of the discard pile, or call the round early and hope you'll have the lowest score after each of your opponents takes one more turn. Most cards have an ability you can only use when you draw it off the deck (all the cards five through twelve), and it's the most common way to find cards that will let you replace high cards in your village, so this is what you'll do on most turns. If you don't like the ability, you can discard the card without using it, so you're never hosed by pulling a card and having it force you to do something you don't want to do. Because you draw the card face down, you place it in your village face down, even if you replace a card that was face up.

If a low(ish) card hits the discard pile, you can take it off the pile and put it in your village. Again, because you draw it face up, you place it face up, even if the one it's replacing was face down. For this reason, discarding anything 0-4 is rare and usually to be avoided, but occasionally it has to be done. The final option, calling the round early, is risky; you're usually not 100% sure where your opponents are on score, and if anyone's score is lower than yours, you have to add ten to your score (which hurts a lot). On the other hand, no matter your village score, you take no points if you have the lowest, so it's great if you can call it early and it works.

There is one other aspect of calling the vote early: if it works, you get the silver amulet. Winning the amulet in this way means that, until someone else calls a successful vote and takes it away, you can place it on a card and protect it from being looked at or moved. That's pretty good. However, the rules have you do other things with the amulet that make no goddamned sense at all. Why am I putting it on the table near somebody if they can't use it? If the amulet is on your last card—is that the last card in the village, left to right, or the last card I placed? Later in the rules, it clearly states that whoever gets the low score for a round receives the amulet and is the next starting player. That's great, but then, why does it keep saying earlier that the amulet is placed "in front of them near the deck of cards"? Just say they get the damn thing, and the circumstances under which they can use the special ability.

Once you understand how Silver works, it's fine, especially if you enjoy card counting and sussing out what your opponents have with incomplete information. The mechanic of letting you exchange multiple matching villagers for one new one lets you pop off some massive combos if you get the right cards, as long as nobody calls the end of the round before you can get there, and creates some strategy outside of hoping to draw low cards and using the abilities you come across as effectively as you can. The rulebook needs to be set on fire, though.

Score: Nine tiny werewolves out of thirteen.