For me, General Orders: World War II was a highly anticipated design, authored as it was by the dynamic duo of David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin (Undaunted, War Chest). My interest increased as more information came out. A light wargame that takes thirty minutes to play and uses worker placement? No need to draft me, I volunteer!

I was not expecting the box to be so tiny. Well, “tiny” is an overstatement. It’s deep, approaching equilateral cube, but the length and width are surprisingly and endearingly petite. Then you open it, and inside is the tiniest li’l quarter-fold board. This must be how Shaq feels when he plays Concordia. I’m worried I’ll break it. I feel some sort of primal drive to protect this board, to feed it milk from a bottle until it’s strong enough to make it out in the wild.

What I mean to say is, this may be the tiniest quarter-fold board I’ve ever seen. Usually, at this size, they don’t bother folding them.

Deployment

A game of General Orders is divided into four rounds, which follow standard worker placement conventions. Taking turns, each…

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I did not expect to be playing Wroth within ten minutes of sitting down. Chip Theory’s latest offering, a collaboration with designer and artist Manny Trembley, is an area control game with remarkably straightforward rules. This may be unfair to Chip Theory Games, but I have not previously associated the publisher of Too Many Bones and Cloudspire with approachability.

Nevertheless, I found Wroth easy to get going. Better still, even while dealing with some of the issues that can plague a preview copy—poor printing on neoprene mats, as-yet-unclear action icons, some minor balance issues that the publisher has already assured me they’re in the process of recalibrating—I thought Wroth was crackerjack.

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

I find that a lot of contemporary games get ahead of themselves, burying interesting decisions under too much of the window dressing that the Era of Crowdfunding seems to demand. I was delighted to discover that Wroth, a streamlined area control game, doesn’t do that. The rules and mechanics are no more complicated than they need to be.

Each round, somebody rolls a bunch of dice, equal to twice the number of players plus 1. The die faces feature different actions, and are drafted one…

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Time Division - Andrew Lynch

Time Division is a card game with a simple premise. The first player plays a card, and then the second player plays one. Whomever plays the higher card gets to make a choice: one player scores their card, the other player uses their card ability. That’s a great premise for a game, and I know the kind of game Time Division wants to be, but it isn’t very good. There’s almost never an interesting tradeoff to be found. Whether it’s better to score or to use your ability is always obvious.

I held out hope that the game would grow with familiarity, that new layers of complexity and planning would reveal themselves. It doesn’t, and they don’t. Time Division wants to be a game like Match of the Century, a game filled with tense trade-offs and hard decisions about what’s better in the long run. It doesn’t get there. Even after five or six games, there’s not much of anything to discover.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★☆☆☆ - Would play again but would rather play something else

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Odin - Andy Matthews

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Puerto Rico was first released in 2002, and is one of my favorite board games. I’m hardly alone in that. Andreas Seyfarth’s masterful design was the #1-rated board game on BoardGameGeek for five years in the mid-2000s, and it still sits in the top 50 today. It directly inspired Tom Lehmann to design Race for the Galaxy, a fraternal twin of a game and another of the all-time greats. Puerto Rico’s system is so good that even a knock-off constitutes one of the best games ever made.

Despite its considerable laurels, Puerto Rico has fallen out of favor in recent years, particularly as the hobby has (slowly) grown more inclusive. Like many Euro games, particularly of that time, Puerto Rico’s setting prominently features colonialism. Unlike many games of that era, in Puerto Rico, it is hard to ignore. As cultural sensitivities shifted and awareness increased, people grew uncomfortable with playing as Spanish colonial governors assigning brown laborer discs to work in their fields.

In 2022, Alea and Ravensburger announced Puerto Rico 1897, an updated version of the game. The title refers to the year in which Puerto Rico was granted a level of autonomy by the Spanish government. After 400 years of colonial status, Puerto Ricans could form their own parliament, which, among other things, allowed them to make…

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Doing another series for Final Girl was a no-brainer. The first set of modules in this endlessly customizable survival horror game was a massive success, taking the world of solo board gaming by storm. Our own Justin Bell had nothing but glowing praise when he reviewed the Final Girl base set, and I’m no different.

But a second series brings with it risks. There’s the dreaded sophomore slump, buckling under the pressures of expectations. Could Final Girl add extensions to the house without creating cracks in the foundations?

The Root of All Evil

If you’re looking for a more exhaustive description of Final Girl, I’ll direct you to Justin’s review, but here’s the quick pitch: the entire series is premised around the horror trope of the Final Girl, a female protagonist who manages to survive everything and lead the baddie to their ultimate demise. The roots of the Final Girl can be traced at least as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but the trope wasn’t identified until the late 1980’s.

Final Girl the game puts you in…

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Vienna - David McMillan

This past weekend, I finally got my copy of Vienna to the table. Vienna, for those not in the know, is the 5th game in the much-lauded (and also highly criticized) Stefan Feld City Collection from Queen Games. Reimplementing La Isla, which I reviewed as part of my Focused on Feld series, Vienna plops the players down right smack dab in the middle of Austria during the early 1950s. World War II has ended, but the Cold War is just getting started. Espionage is the name of the game.

Vienna comes with two modes of play: the basic mode—which plays almost exactly like La Isla— and an advanced mode that introduces a whole lot of new elements. I got to play the basic mode. A few mistakes were made, but I enjoyed the experience overall, and I feel like that was the consensus among the other players at the table as well. I’m really excited to get it to the table again so that I can dig into the new material.

Keep an eye out for my upcoming review!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles…

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Senjutsu is a skirmish game for 1-4 players, set in feudal Japan during the civil war that followed the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Each player takes on the role of a samurai protecting their Daimyo, but the narrative doesn’t make its presence known. This is Street Fighter in three dimensions. Another name for that might be Tekken. Players battle it out, trying to be the last man—hey, that’s what’s in the box—standing.

Mechanically, Senjutsu is a card game with heavily customizable decks. At the beginning of each session, both players construct a deck that corresponds to their chosen character. The flexibility of the system is tremendous. Each character has a set of special cards only they can use, on top of a large stack of general cards that can be used by anybody. This portion of the game reminds me of Sakura Arms, a dueling game in which players select characters and choose cards from within their supply. Though Sakura Arms is a bit tidier about how it implements its version of this system, Senjutsu offers a similar promise: the more you play, the better you know the characters and their cards, and the more emotionally satisfying the deck-building portion of setup becomes.

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My first play of Mori was one of the least impressive gaming experiences of recent memory. Not for one moment did it work. All four of us were miserable. The rules were impermeable and the experience was entirely flat.

“I can’t believe I have to play this again,” I grumbled as I took the subway home.

So I Played It Again

The next night, I brought it out for a different group. “This is Mori. I played it last night, and it wasn’t particularly good, but if there’s a group that can find the beauty in a trick-taker, it’s this one.”

Mori is a bit of an odd bird, welding about as much onto a “simple” trick-taker as I think the genre can withstand. We start in familiar territory. There are four suits, each with cards from 0-10. It’s a must-follow game. The highest card in the led suit wins, unless someone has managed to play a trump card.

This brings us to the first wrinkle: the trump suit depends on the led suit. Each suit corresponds to a season, and each season is trumped by the season that comes next. Winter always loses to Spring, which always loses to Summer, and so on.

The winner adds all the cards from the trick to their score pile, then takes…

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Border Reivers: Anglo-Scottish Border Raids, 1513-1603 has a terrific theme. This GMT game for 1-6 players takes place on the border of England and Scotland, and concerns itself with the activities of the border raiders who populated the region. English and Scottish alike, the border reivers stole livestock, nursed grudges, and generally made life for one another difficult.

This is delightful fare for GMT. So fully does Border Reivers commit to its pastoral setting that it comes with sheep and horse meeples. This is GMT-does-Agricola, and it is absolutely charming. Well, I say "charming." There’s an awful lot of pummeling one another for Border Reivers to be charming.

Sheer Madness

Each of the three rounds is divided into four seasons. During the summer, players draft cards to build alliances, gain resources, and lay traps that can be sprung during subsequent seasons. Autumn involves bookkeeping, when players check that they’re not holding too many cards or in possession of too many horses. Winter is the most involved season, when all of the attacking occurs, so we’ll come back to that in a moment. Spring is a maintenance phase, resetting for the next…

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I love old paintings and illustrations of fruit, like the kind you find in botany textbooks from the  late 1800s. The attention to detail is astonishing, the gradations of shade and form, the imperfections. The card art for Pies drew me right in, lovingly rendered in an identical style. I found myself falling into the cards as I rifled through them. These cards build a world with a distinct pastoral feel, a book spine covered in dust.

Then I came to the dog, and the pie tokens with Pi carved into them, and I started to worry. They didn’t feel aesthetically consistent. I found myself thinking about the old writing maxim, “You don’t put a hat on a hat.”

Pies is allegedly a trick-taking game, and it’s marketed as such, but that is categorically incorrect. There are no suits, there is no pressure to follow, there are no trumps. It shows none of the defining characteristics of the genre. This is an auction game, themed around gathering fruits and recipes to turn into pies.

Each player, one at a time, puts a card from their hand into the middle of the table. Then, from highest card to lowest, each gets to pick any one…

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I would have told you that Decrypto had been out for way longer than five years. Like Just One, Decrypto arrived in 2018, out of the blue, and immediately established itself as a go-to word game. To think there was a year in which we received Decrypto and Just One. The heart quickens. We had no idea how good we had it.

To celebrate five years of success, Scorpion Masqué has released a 5th anniversary edition, spicing up the classic—board gaming has a short memory—with 440 new words. Does it change the game in any appreciable way? No, this is still very much the Decrypto people know and love. It does freshen things up a bit, though, for those who’ve put their copy of the original release through its paces.

It takes a round or two to get used to Decrypto’s structure, and it’s difficult to describe in absence of the game in front of you. What I’m trying to tell you is, what I describe may not sound fun. I assure you, it is.

The players are divided into two teams, each of which has four secret words that everyone on the team can see. Each round, one player on each team (the “Encryptor”) has a secret three digit code that they need their teammates to guess.…

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I love an archival project. Publisher Eagle-Gryphon Games went through the notes of legendary designer Sid Sackson, creator of Acquire and Can’t Stop amongst others, and selected four of what he considered his best unpublished games. The results are here, in the two volumes of The Sackson Legacy Collection, which combine those four unpublished games with new printings of two Sackson obscurities.

There is no publisher I would rather have do a project like this. Eagle-Gryphon’s production is always exemplary, luxuriant without being fussy. With Eagle-Gryphon’s typical thick box stock and vibrant colors, these are games that would look good on a bookshelf. I suspect that’s exactly what the team had in mind. All they’re missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a spine number.

I love a spine number.

Blue

The blue volume includes three previously unpublished titles: I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game, Banana Blitz, and Scope.

I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game is a negotiation game inspired by Sackson’s own I’m the Boss!. Players take turns rolling dice, attempting to move to the top of various Expertise tracks while jockeying to negotiate different deals. Any time a player earns enough stars to be the Boss, they…

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Monikers: Monikers-er - Andrew Lynch

Monikers is a great party game if you’ve got a group that isn’t afraid of getting silly. Monikers-er cranks things up, with a collection of obscure, seemingly impossible cards. All your new favorites are here: Mukbong, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Reiner Knizia. It’s the Monikers set for those who like their word selections eclectic, which I certainly do. The final endorsement: I’d rather play Monikers with just these cards than mix in the base set.

Ease of entry?:
★★★★★ - No sweat
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Andrew Lynch.

Faraway - Andy Matthews

Faraway is a game about journeys—traveling through a magical land called Alula. Over the course of 8 rounds players will play cards in front of themselves in order to arrange resources and scoring conditions for end of game scoring. The catch is that you lay down cards from left to right, but score from right to left after first flipping all the cards face down. This means you have to constantly be thinking in two directions—setting yourself up with difficult scoring cards on the left side, while giving yourself things TO…

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