Not much media consumption these last few months….
Recommended
Nothing
Maybe
Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes — Fascinating book covering what the title says.
A History of Japan by Kenneth Henshall — I think intro history books should be short-ish, not showstoppers, and this fits. Worth reading if you have an interest.
The ‘Sharpe’ series (BBC) — This is ~2 movies a year for several years, starring Sean Bean in the mid-90s. Never read the books, but they are supposed to be good. Only seen a few but planning on watching the rest (on Tubi). Also has some “before they were famous” cameos…. In general these are fine, although at least once I watched it, turned it off then hours later went “Wait, the big reveal makes no sense when ….”
Star Trek: First Contact — Watched this again to get the taste of ST:Insurrection out of my mouth. I kind of want to re-watch TNG and/or DS9. I mean, not enough to spring for Paramount ….
Maybe Not
Passengers — Passable. Meh. An interesting premise that gives way to big space explosions. (Arguably that’s the way of most modern SF movies).
Nope
Star Trek: Insurrection — I’d never seen this. Man was it bad. Maybe not Nemesis bad, but bad. Actually, maybe Nemesis bad.
War is morally questionable, at best a compromise between inaction and horrific aggression. The societal and human costs are often extreme. There are benefits, however. Achieving independence. Ending tyranny. Freeing an enslaved population. Often, violence is the only remaining option. Rapid technological advancement is another benefit. One typically overlooked due to its insignificance in contrast…
Politik is one of those games I wish were more fantastical, which isn’t a ding on the game but rather a reflection of the slow-motion dystopia we have come to inhabit. Designed over the course of more than a decade by Jonathan Klabunde and Lukas Peregrine, Politik is the story of nation-states that use ideologies as cudgels, wage shadow wars over the airwaves, and spend lives like discontinued currencies. When its pretentious old men play at running the world, we are the counters they shove around the board. And they aren’t even bothering to hide it anymore.
Perhaps more relevantly, it’s also a mashup of new and old ideas, a flawed but enthralling piece that’s tough to learn but rewarding once the work has been put in.
Our influence spreads across the globe.
Set in a world not unlike ours, Politik begins sometime after a collapse — capitalized, articled, and adjectived as The Great Collapse — has riven the political scene into a near-total vacuum of little states with hardly any defensive capabilities, a fragmented global economy ready to be pieced together by vulture corporations, and a handful of ascendant nations hungry to gulp down the whole bowl of noodles.
Right away, Klabunde and Peregrine put their best foot forward by asking players to select which of those nations they will command. Politik isn’t a narrative game, but it excels at weaving together little strands of story, and the first filaments of those yarns are the nations themselves. These introduce the basics, drawing everybody in with those first snippets of ideology. There’s Libris, marked with the gyroscope and the torch, indicating itself as a state that tries to walk the line between radical education and propagandistic unity. If that sounds too care-bear, there’s Gran Santi, all intimidation tactics and steely wit, or Indoverra, its honor culture clashing with an oath of poverty.
More than colorful nouns, these statements bear in-game import, providing a single starting propaganda card that dictates the nation’s opening ability and ideological tendencies. Indoverra’s honor culture, for example, means that conflict is the principal driver of their national research, not to mention that they’ll be shoring up their support of fascism as political ethos. If instead they select that oath of poverty, they become communists who can use their surplus goods to manipulate the markets. Libris, when leaning into their more humanistic impulses, closely links education and research. When they focus on unity, they earn icons for each of the game’s ideologies — capitalist, statist, communist, and fascist — marking themselves as hopeless centrists, but also effective at parlaying popular support by speaking out of both sides of their mouth.
Nation selected, everybody now gets down to the serious business of cobbling together a functional global power.
The art style is brutal and chilly, which is exactly right for this project.
This is much easier said than done. For one thing, everybody at the table is a hurdle on everyone else’s road to global domination. For another, Politik is about building a powerful tableau where the central components of that tableau aren’t especially amenable to being hammered into a self-sustaining engine.
Drawn at random, there are 450 cards in the deck, only a fraction of which will be seen in any given session. For all their variety — and it’s impressive how many concepts the game covers — Klabunde and Peregrine throw us a few bones. First, there’s the art. Evoking the Bauhaus, every card is hand-drawn with shapes and splashes of color that speak to its ideological function. Companies, the game’s primary method for securing resources and bullying markets, are sprawling brutalist edifices. The assets that transform them into even greater consumptive engines are more abstract, showing blueprints or term sheets or inventions. Propaganda cards are suitably ideological and colored according to their tendencies. Events, the game’s fire-and-forget attacks, might as well be printed on a poster and wheat-pasted to a concrete wall.
As with the nations, these cards are dense with iconography. Those icons come fast and heavy, and it takes a good few minutes to learn their exact phraseology. At that point, however, they become the game’s beating lifeblood, an expressive language that allows for impressive depth.
Companies are an essential tool for any horrible nation.
Take companies, for example. Most players will begin by founding their first firm, a process that requires a sideboard for tracking that company’s profit margin and market shares. What makes these companies interesting to handle is not only their newfound ability, but also their inborn limitations. I might set up Drundlworks, a company that can simultaneously conduct research (translation: draw cards) and improve its own margin (translation: get stronger). But Drundlworks is starkly limited to manufacturing, which means all its expansion will be wasted if I can’t diversify into other markets.
Okay, so I need to add an asset. I’m holding two. The first, Private Security, will expand Drundlworks into the humanities sphere. That’s great! Now Drundlworks can enter a new market, and it gains the ability to use its personal army to bolster our strength on the map. The hangup is that Private Security requires a certain degree of corruption to attach to a company, the cost of deploying this world’s equivalent of Pinkertons to police our states. Since I’m inadequately corrupt, I might settle for Joint Ventures. This expands our company into the financial market, which is good, although unfortunately the financial market is currently dominated by a rival. But at least our Joint Ventures will give Drundlworks some money-making potential, not to mention a negotiation icon, good for breaking ties in our favor.
By now a few things should be apparent. First, Politik is a densely knotted game. Every element touches every other element. It isn’t enough to stare at your own tableau. Success requires knowing who owns what.
And furthermore, knowing how those things can be broken or pillaged. There’s a mercantilist core to the way Politik’s scales are balanced to zero. In the game’s early stages, this is most apparent on the map, where states threaten to change hands early and often. I invade, you counter-attack. That’s the nature of the beast. It isn’t even necessary, in this age of hybrid warfare and jet aircraft, for our nations to be neighbors. Crud, I don’t even need to invade with actual forces. The right burst of noise from a broadcast station might be enough to fatally undermine a space on the map.
Broadcast stations, propaganda, and multinational corporations are the tools of your trade.
The game’s other domains are similarly imperiled. Companies can raid one another, their respective margins becoming an analog for military might and their market tokens traded in place of geography. There’s nothing quite like a late-game swing when one of the session’s oldest companies suddenly loses their market dominance to some upstart.
The same goes for council seats, the game’s representation of political might. Earlier I mentioned ideology tokens. These eventually come to represent support for seats on the global council, each of which provides its own benefit. Chairing the council lets you veto someone’s position; the board of commerce can secure the best market shares for their own nation; the defense seat grants immunity to those pesky propaganda broadcasts. And so forth, each conferring its own advantage. But these positions are shaky. All it takes is a well-timed clash, a few solid cards tossed out for their political modifier, and suddenly the player who was sitting pretty on the board of justice is out in the cold.
Despite their similarities, these domains — the territorial, corporate, and political — are distinct enough that they warrant their own approaches. Conquest on land is piecemeal, but can be bolstered or undermined by propaganda. Market shifts are as seismic as the markets. Political strength takes a long time to build but can be altered in an instant.
In each of these cases, players are encouraged to expand, but always to think through the repercussions of their newfound girth. This is probably my favorite element of the design. Expanding your territory means stretching your forces thin. That’s normal enough. But expanding in the corporate world means temporarily bottoming out a company’s margin, leaving it open to attack. Expanding on the council means there’s more room for somebody to swoop in and claim what you’ve so carefully built.
This isn’t to say you won’t expand. Indeed, there’s no winning without expansion. Victory in Politik is a tense thing, contingent on claiming enough “power grabs” in the game’s three domains. Each power grab requires a majority, whether on land, the corporate world, or on the political council. This initially seems impossible, especially in sessions with three or four other players. In practice, it’s a deft little piece of design, one that puts players within reach of an objective, only to snatch it away.
Some actions are more involved than others.
Even more cleverly, the way power grabs are handled makes them more viable once somebody has already secured one. There’s a limit, you see. If I obtain a power grab via conquest, I’m done, I hold that objective, there’s no longer a reason for me to keep all that territory. I mean, sure, there’s a reason. Raw resources, all that. But the victory condition has been wrapped on my end. My focus will now shift to the markets or the council. I might put up a token defense of my empire, but it won’t be as diligent as it might have been otherwise.
To some degree, this can result in a sticky status quo. If everyone is firing on all cylinders, it’s possible for the game’s length to grow indeterminate. Politik is only short when played inattentively, and since victory is tied to outright (if temporary) dominance, collaborating players can pull a leader back from the brink. Not always, and not reliably, but the threat is there. The game contains no version of the deeds from Inis, those little tokens that gradually deteriorate the game state away from its center to ensure that somebody eventually succeeds. It’s all or nothing, and there are plenty of ways to wrench a would-be dictator down from the throne.
Fortunately, the threat of stagnation has thus far remained theoretical. In my experience, the game’s innate swings have been enough to keep it moving toward a conclusion. It isn’t uncommon to suffer setbacks, and the clarity of the game state makes it easy to point out when somebody is getting a little too big for their britches. But my sessions have hovered at the three and a half hour mark, long enough to be satisfyingly fatiguing but not so long that anybody started into cussing. Cussing in earnest, anyway. Cussing is mandatory in such a game, but there’s cussing and then there’s cussing.
Corruption is powerful but also dangerous.
There are other little touches I can’t help but appreciate.
Like how your resources are tallied on paper rather than with tokens. At first this throwback seemed musty. Eventually it won me over, if only because it’s possible to leverage a company into some truly impressive profits, and I’d much rather just write “89” on a piece of paper than manhandle another stack of tokens into its proper change the way Hegemony inflicted on me again and again.
Or there’s the corruption system. Certain cards increases your corruption level; others require a degree of corruption before they become playable. But rather than leaving this as a mere threshold, Klabunde and Peregrine tack on another system that’s perfectly evocative of the way elites trade patronage only to entrap themselves in weird cabals. The gist is that each step on the corruption track forces you to draw an obligation card. When deployed at the right moment, obligations produce tremendous rewards. Then again, you don’t know what you’re about to draw. Some are harder than others to play, resulting in a black mark hogging up precious space in your hand. You thought you might owe some cash, only now you’re listening to Peter Thiel bray on about how high-visibility vests for warehouse workers are the antichrist.
Or there’s the way Politik takes place in an alt-history that has somehow produced the best and worst of our own recent past. This is a dark game, packed with ideologies of convenience and wars of plausible deniability and a global council whose flag is probably a giant hand choking the entire planet. Far from portraying itself as lurid — or worse, as aspirational — Politik adopts a tone of warning. Every so often, a card will reveal some effect that brushes up against our lived reality. A think-tank. Drone strikes. Data vaults, industrial farming, international monetary funds. The many little tools that make a state, that make surveillance, that can be bent toward absolute control. Just as they combine and slot together in Politik, so do they combine and slot together in our world. It might seem a bridge too far to call the game thought-provoking, but there are enough ideas floating around here — and time enough to fill between turns — that I found myself provoked anyway.
Sending out our tunes on the airwaves.
Ultimately, Politik is a peculiar beast. Its rules are convoluted. Its iconography takes some deciphering. It can run long. When somebody achieves their final power grab, it isn’t uncommon to hear someone breathe an unquiet “Thank goodness.” And not necessarily the winner.
But it’s also interesting and abrasive and spiky in exactly the way that most modern board games are not. It calls to mind some of my favorite games, but never too proximately. It reminds me of the Pax series in its broad noosphere, the sheer breath of what it invokes, with a directness that those games lack. It recalls Inis in its inter-player squabbles and collaborations, The King Is Dead in its oppressive tie-breaker considerations, but with harsher bristles and more granularity than either of those titles. Any number of tableau-builders, but with hostile cards that buck at being hammered into easy shapes.
Mostly, it makes me want to keep trying to rule the world. Not the real world. Only the loveless want that. But this shadow version of our world. It makes me want to be the horrid bottomless wretch determined to possess more than I already have, to spend a few hours in the company of these broken cards that can accomplish so much, to glare at the ruins of my plans and plots, to grasp and fail, and to be all the bitterer and emptier for the attempt. And then to step back, free of the circle, and laugh about how so-and-so pillaged my company for the privatized remains of the university system. Now that’s a game.
Politik is on Gamefound right this instant. A prototype copy was temporarily provided by the designers/publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)
Plaid Hat Games has cancelled its successfully-funded Kickstarter for upcoming title The Monolith three days after launch, saying it failed to give prospective backers enough reasons to pledge rather than wait for retail.
The Monolith quickly beat its $20,000 funding goal after launching on June 25, but Plaid Hat CEO Colby Dauch told BoardGameWire pledges had “completely stagnated” by the second day of the campaign.
That led the publisher to scrap the crowdfund for the Phil Gross-designed game on day three, having collected $27,400 from 290 backers.
Dauch said Plaid Hat plans to relaunch the crowdfund shortly after Gen Con with additional content and more pledge tiers, while keeping the game’s existing delivery timeline intact – with manufacturing having already begun on the title.
That manufacturing process has included Plaid Hat spending $35,000 on plastic moulds alone, given the large amount of plastic components in the game – including the namesake monolith, a large plastic tower which sits at the centre of the board.
Dauch told BoardGameWire the company estimates it would have to sell 10,000 copies of the game in order to spread the mould cost widely enough that the retail price could be kept down, adding that the long lead times on making plastic moulds was a big motivator in starting manufacturing prior to the campaign – as well as a desire to launch the game at a convention this year.
Plaid Hat CEO Colby Dauch
Plaid Hat said in an update to Kickstarter backers, “While we hit our funding goal at a decent rate, almost as soon as we did, the pledges stopped. Another 24 hours passed, and the needle didn’t move.
“Of course, we had questions since we’ve run several campaigns now and this experience is completely new to us.
“What we found was that our visually striking campaign was drawing in lots of people, but they weren’t pledging.
“While there wasn’t a ton of feedback, one thing we heard on several occasions was, ‘Why pledge now? Why not just wait for retail?'”
“For everyone here who’s backed, you already know the answer to that question, but we must acknowledge the simple truth that along the way, we could have done better.”
The company added in a follow-up post on BlueSky, “We could have limped over the finish line, but it would have been such a disservice to a game worthy of so much more.”
Dauch told BoardGameWire that all of Plaid Hat’s prior Kickstarters had followed the common practice of setting a low goal amount which can be quickly celebrated as having been beaten, providing momentum for the campaign.
But after seeing The Monolith quickly fund before effectively flatlining, Dauch said reaching a funding target was no longer enough to demonstrate sufficient market demand.
The company has said it will revisit that practice in the wake of cancelling The Monolith, instead likely setting the target as costs plus a certain margin that would need to be crossed to indicate there is enough overall enthusiasm from backers.
Dauch told BoardGameWire, “I think it is just public knowledge that there are certain rules you have to follow to make a Kickstarter work.
“We’ve tried to challenge some of the rules – for example, as a company we try not to lean too hard on FOMO to get people to pledge.
“But we’ve accepted other rules for success as standard practice in a crowdfunding campaign. One of those rules is that you really want to set a low goal that you can blow past early.”
The Monolith || Kickstarter Image
Asked whether the game potentially suffered due to its $90 price point – not necessarily that it was too high, but that it fell between the extremes of ‘very affordable’ and ‘massive, multi-hundred dollar multibox crowdfund’ – Dauch told BoardGameWire:
“I think there is evidence that people want a variety of price points they can buy into, and we are exploring options to make that happen. I think that is more to blame than being in some middle ground.”
Plaid Hat has been making successful board games since 2009, when Dauch created the company to sell his highly-regarded card-based fantasy battler Summoner Wars.
The publisher scored another hit with animal-themed co-op adventure game Mice and Mystics in 2012, and followed that two years later with the hugely successful Dead of Winter, which scooped a string of awards – and big sales numbers – for its thematic mix of zombie survival, traitor mechanics and story-driven gameplay.
Plaid Hat was bought by Asmodee in 2015, but became a rarity five years later as one of just two studios which have gone on to become independent from the publishing and distribution giant.
Dauch told BoardGameWire Plaid Hat had long delayed embracing Kickstarter because it was uncomfortable with some of the accepted conventions of crowdfunding, including the pressure to create artificial urgency.
He said, “The reality is that we held off on doing crowdfunding campaigns for a long time as a company because parts of them do feel artificial and we weren’t looking to deceive anyone.
“These large companies on Kickstarter don’t NEED the campaign funds in order to fund a project. It’s self-evident from the fact that a campaign must have a certain amount of polish and progress to even be taken seriously, which already represents a sizeable investment made to get a game to that state.
“Our decision to enter the crowdfunding arena was based on the belief that we were missing out on a portion of the market that enjoys getting their games through crowdfunding campaigns, not because we could no longer fun projects on our own.
“We felt that crowdfunding has been such a mainstay for so long, that most people who participate in them are aware that this is how many established companies use Kickstarter – as a sort of pre-order campaign.”
In March 2020 I was lucky enough to meet the company that held the Studio Ghibli licence for North America at GAMA Expo - I asked them if they would be interested in games designed around the Ghibli movies and they said they would love to see what I could do.
My wife had introduced me to the Ghibli classics like Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and Spirited Away a few years prior and I had instantly fell in love with them.
Once returning to Australia, and with lots of newfound time from COVID lockdowns, I set to work coming up with concepts for many of the titles. One idea I settled on was a game inspired by the bathhouse in Spirited Away where players are employees collecting ingredient tickets to make baths for spirits, cleaning the dirty baths once the spirits leave, and managers providing assistance to players via special abilities.
After four months of design and multiple playtests a week, I pitched the game back to the company I'd met at GAMA. Spoiler alert, although the publisher loved the game, due to licensing it was not to be. At that point I decided to keep working on the game and try my hand at self publishing.
Jumping back to the start, how did the design progress?
A lot of inspiration was taken from the movie. I set to re-watching the bath scenes to really understand how the baths worked.
Players would collect bath tickets with ingredients to satisfy the spirits’ wants. I started with five spirit types and five ingredient types. The bath tickets with ingredients were long rectangles in the movie which led me to have two ingredients on most, and some with some singles. This deck makeup led to the idea that players could overpay spirits ingredients to complete a treatment but would receive amber for giving spirits exactly what they wanted, creating an interesting dynamic of playing for efficiency vs accuracy. This tension is fundamental to the design and has survived every iteration.
The spirits themselves needed to start dirty and become clean, this was accomplished by using both sides of the card (dirty with their requirements, and clean with only the points shown on the back). Spirits had between three and six ingredients, with the harder spirits worth more points. The other interesting dynamic was the cleaning the baths. After a spirit left, the bath should be dirty - achieved again by flipping the card over to a dirty side - and need to be cleaned before another spirit could enter.
An early prototype of what became Mythic Baths
As with a lot of my family-weight games, I tend to favour quick turns with a single action. So to incentivise cleaning the baths, I decided that all dirty baths would be cleaned at once. This action would earn you one amber per bath cleaned (as with Chihiro finding gold on the bottom of the bath from Noface) and fill the tableau with new spirits from the deck. As you can only take one action a turn, this gives the next player a full set of spirits to clean so the decision on how long to wait / how many dirty baths became a core balance in the game.
These core elements remained basically unchanged with balancing of points and resources over the coming iterations.
The managers, who add modifications to the basic rules (like event cards in other games) had many more changes, predominantly in how they entered and exited the bath house. In the early versions, the managers were simply shuffled in with the guests and once X managers were drawn the game ended. This ending was too random as the game length could be very long or very short, and managers could be in for only one round. After that they were added into the manager deck at regular intervals. This was in place for a time but was still not perfect and had more setup than I liked for game of this weight.
After many more iterations, I decided to detach the managers from the guests, and attach them to the ingredient deck, with a new manager appearing each time the deck ran out and was reshuffled. This kept managers in play for longer, but players may only see two managers throughout the game. From there they jumped to when the baths were cleaned, with a new manager starting after each time the 'clean the baths' action was taken. This worked relatively well with managers staying out long enough to be useful, and generally not cycling away too quickly so it was kept for the time being - more on managers later.
The last element with many, many changes was what happened when you collected sets of creatures. At the start, players scored additional points at the end of the game for pairs and sets of one of each creature. This worked well at lower player counts, but in 4- and 5-player games players finish with six creatures not leaving much room for set scoring which was not the feeling I wanted at the end of the game.
Mythic Baths at PAX Aus Collaboratory 2023.
After many months of testing and feedback I decided to add an extra element to the game which replaced the set scoring - gaining favor from the creatures. Once you completed a pair of creatures you could choose to take that creature's special action, a set of 1 of each would let you choose any creature's action.
This added an engine building-like element to the game, giving it a much better arc overall, but still had similar issues at higher player counts. More on this later also!
Another element that came into play part way through the design was the reserve mechanic, as often I would have a player express they wanted to 'lock in' a creature they were aiming to complete, giving them more certainty at the cost of a turn.
Interestingly, once introduced this was one of the most divisive actions, with about half playtesters thinking it was the strongest action, and the other half thinking that it was useless, often debating with each other in the feedback sessions - to me, this said it was working perfectly as it allowed for many play styles.
At this point, I was confident that I had a good game and moved to finding an artist.
Art Direction of the Game
Deciding on how to theme the game was a tough decision. I had originally thought to use generic spirits, but after some consideration and consultation from others in the Australian tabletop industry, I decided to make the game its own and use mythical creatures from all over the world. I set to researching mythical creatures from around the world for an art brief and looking for an artist in a cute whimsical style.
The creatures I settled on were: • Jackalope - a half jackrabbit half antelope from North American folk law • Tatzelwurm - a half cat half snake from south central Europe • Cerberus - three-headed dog from Greek mythology • Sea-lion - half lion, half fish from the Philippines heraldry • Owlbear - half owl, half bear from fantasy tropes
I spent many hours looking for artists on deviant art and art station before seeing some of Emily Hancock's art on the game Gift of Tulips. I remembered we had actually met at GAMA in 2020 and I hurriedly hunted down her business card to reach out.
Emily's cute animal drawings and vibrant plant drawings would fit perfectly in the world I was creating bringing color and life to the game so I jumped at the opportunity to work with her on the game.
As soon as Emily's sketches started to come through, I knew I'd made the right choice as her creatures were adorable.
Part of the brief was to have various clean and dirty elements that I could add to the creatures to make each image in the game unique - Emily did an amazing job making each creature look different while keeping everything coherent.
For the managers, I asked Emily for a diverse range of characters and let her creativity lead the art for eight of the ten characters with amazing results. The last two characters were to be of my wife and myself.
Look ma! I'm in a game!
But wait, you said you were going to self publish the game?!
You are correct dear reader, that was my original plan until Good Games Publishing expressed interest after playing at Pax Aus Collaboratory 2023. The game fit well into their catalogue and they liked how Emily's art was progressing, so the deal was made.
One big advantage of having a publisher on board was the additional development put into the game by Kim Brebach.
One of the first changes was to increase the frequency of being able to use the creature favors. To do this, we changed the favors from abilities that would trigger on sets, to a token you would earn if you used your nourish token (reserve action). These become a one-time use that you can use on any turn giving more flexibility, with the tokens refreshing each time any player completes another of the same creature. This change kept players more engaged out of turn while allowing players to go for breadth (collecting each creature to get all the actions) or depth (to trigger the same action multiple times).
Favour tokens and reference card.
Kim is also a huge fan of Japanese culture and Spirited Away so we leaned into the theme, changing the highest value creatures into troublesome guests. These creatures have global negative effects that restrict play to all players in some way and were designed to be the opposites of the same creatures favor action.
To bring in the sense of staff rushing around to remove the troublesome guests while trying to keep the other guests happy, we added a semi-cooperative element where players can partially complete troublesome guests, earning amber (points) for the ingredients you contribute. Alternatively, you might just ignore them and let someone else focus on them, or you may try to complete them entirely yourself, scoring big points. This allowed us to change how the managers functioned too, having the managers change when a new troublesome guests enters (the previous floor manager making a swift exit when they see trouble approaching!). This brings all the upkeep into one step (flip baths, welcome guests, change manager if a troublesome guest arrives) keeping the majority of the turns flowing fast around the table.
Who's a troublesome little puppy?
It was a great experience designing and art directing the game and I am so happy with how everything has turned out, I want to end on one of my favorite comments on the game from many players over the years that
Mythic Baths is the most fun they have ever had cleaning a bath!
Mythic Baths was released at UKGE 2026 and is now available around the world!
Here at Meeple Mountain, we’ve written a lot about Wingspan. Since its inception in 2019, Elizabeth Hargrave’sSpiel des Jahres winning masterpiece has inspired and captured the hearts of gamers worldwide. I’m not going to go into detail about how to play the game here. If you’re unfamiliar with Wingspan, then I suggest you familiarize yourself with the base game before reading any further.
It’s been four years since the Wingspan: Asia expansion (2022) was released. Unlike that expansion, the subject of this review, Wingspan: Americas is not a standalone expansion. To play Wingspan: Americas, you must have the base game or the Wingspan: Asia expansion in order to do so.
Something Old
Americas introduces a whole host of new birds, each featuring new and interesting abilities. A couple of standouts for me are the White-Throated Magpie-Jay which lets you tuck cards behind its neighbours, replacing the tucked cards with newly drawn ones, or the Firewood-Gatherer which steals eggs from other birds in your tableau and dispenses eggs of its own to other birds in your tableau.
This is a guest post from Adam Joraanstad. I was in a comic book store about 10 years ago looking at the contents of The DC Deck Building Game and all its expansions. Not knowing much about it, I was impressed with all the different heroes, villains, and storylines that were part of the game. […]
With this My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.
#84: Marconi Transmitter from The Hunt from Salt & Pepper Games
I have played several hidden movement games over the years and enjoyed them all. Some of these titles have included wargames such as They Come Unseen from Osprey Games, Sniper Elite: The Board Game from Rebellion Unplugged and Bomber Command from GMT Games as well as a few board games including Hunt for the Ring from Ares Games. The concept of moving cautiously, attempting to evade pursuers, all while trying to locate and acquire or destroy objectives makes for a very interesting gaming experience. These situations can make for some really tense games that cause your head to ache and your wits to be tested. But they rely on some bluffing as well. Trying to force your opponent to anticipate where they think you should be and then trying not to be there. A really great mechanic in board games but not always easy to pull off and make for a very playable and interesting game. In 2022, we played a new design from Matthias Cramer and Engin Kunter that took this hidden movement concept and put it into a historically based game about the struggle over control of the South Atlantic between the British Royal Navy and the German Kriegsmarine during the early years of World War II called The Hunt from Salt & Pepper Games.
The Hunt is a Card Driven Game where the German player has to attempt to stay hidden while trying to sink merchant shipping as the Royal Navy hunts for them throughout the South Atlantic. The players each have asymmetric actions to use to accomplish their missions and each has a tough time doing what they have to do. But, if they manage their cards wisely, using them as effectively as possible, they can successfully either evade their pursuer or catch their prey.
In today’s post, we will take a look at the very useful German card Marconi Transmitter. Marconi Transmitter is a 5 Ops card, which makes it a very important card in the German deck as it allows for the taking of 2-3 actions in a single turn, but for which there is an even more important use as a means of setting yourself up for that easy score to sink a merchant vessel. In the game, the British have multiple Task Forces that will search the South Atlantic for the Graf Spee attempting to find her, engage her and sink her to the bottom. As a Hidden Movement game, the German player has surprise on their side and must use tactics that manipulate and change things for the British player making their searches much more difficult and time consuming. The Marconi Transmitter allows the German player to move a British Task Force up to 3 hexes away and then to choose a Freight Ship and then place that ship back onto its starting location on the board. This card has the ability to clear the way of enemy ships searching for the Graf Spee but then follows that up with the relocation of an unsuspecting Freight Ship to place it within striking distance of the pocket battleship for an easy kill. I just love these kind of cards that manipulate things and provide means to change up the current situation.
Marconi transmitters were pioneering early radio devices developed by Guglielmo Marconi in the late 1890’s. Primarily consisting of spark-gap transmitters, they generated radio waves that allowed ships and continents to communicate via Morse code without wires, paving the way for modern broadcasting and other telecommunications. This advancement was used by the Allies to hunt for the Graf Spee in the South Atlantic and caused the German pocket battleship to change some of its operating procedures. The Admiral Graf Spee did not elude the Marconi radio transmitters through electronic jamming. Instead, her commanding captain, Hans Langsdorff, successfully evaded Allied interception by using strict radio silence and executing aggressive threats to ensure merchant vessels never broadcasted their distress calls.
When the Graf Spee intercepted a merchant ship, she used her speed and imposing silhouette to intercept before a signal could be sent. The standard British raider defense was to use their Marconi-equipped transmitters to call for help. However, as soon as a merchant ship began transmitting a warning, the Graf Spee would flash a signal demanding they cease transmission immediately, threatening to open fire with her devastating main armament. Outgunned and at the mercy of the German ship, the merchant crews complied, shutting off their wireless.
Because the Graf Spee traveled thousands of miles across the remote South Atlantic and Indian oceans, she remained unseen by simply avoiding the heavy shipping lanes. Captain Langsdorff further deceived Allied forces by utilizing visual camouflage. By attaching fake turrets and a dummy funnel, and flying false colors, he bypassed merchant shipping unmolested while maintaining strict radio silence to keep his location hidden.
Here is a link to our full video review of the game:
Awards often attract attention because of the games they recognise. Far less attention is usually paid to how the organisations behind those awards operate. In the case of Spiel des Jahres, the financial side of the story is particularly interesting because it helps explain how the association funds its activities while maintaining the independence that it considers central to its mission. The famous Red Pawn appears on millions of game boxes, yet many players know little about the licensing system behind it or the way that income supports projects far beyond the annual awards ceremony. In this fourth article in the series, I look at the finances that reveal how the organisation has transformed the commercial success of its award into support for a much broader cultural mission.
Tiny Towns: Villagers Designers: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood Publisher: AEG Players: 1-6 Age: 12+ Time: 45-60 minutes Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4ahS86Z Played with review copy provided by publisher In Tiny Towns: Villagers, word has spread far and wide … Continue reading →
Legions is a 2-player card game set in the world of Abyss. There are five regions between the two players, and you play cards to compete for dominance in each of these regions. There are two ways you can win. If you manage to capture five banners, you win immediately. Banners only appear on some cards, and it is not easy to achieve this victory condition. If no one achieves this by the
Thus it came to pass that Postmark Games graduated from dice to cards. After some of the finest print-and-plays in recent memory — after Voyages, Aquamarine, Waypoints, and Scribbly Gum — I suppose we were overdue for a title where the input isn’t limited to six sides.
How about fifty-two random numbers instead? Using nothing but an ordinary deck of cards, which surely you have lying around the house somewhere, 52 Realms: Adventures generates an entire dungeon dive. In a vacuum, it’s quite the accomplishment. If only vacuums weren’t so chilly.
That pebble is me. It is I.
It begins with a dungeon. Or maybe it begins with a menu of items. On the surface, 52 Realms: Adventures is about exploring a dungeon. Ostensibly, your objective is to reach the final chamber and slay the boss monster therein. Really, though, it’s to reach the highest score possible, accumulated one loot card at a time.
As with their previous titles, designers Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon plumb their system to its maximum depth. It’s truly impressive how much mileage they cover with just a single deck of cards. The deck, you see, governs everything. A single card might indicate the monster you face when stepping into another room, tallying their health pool and type. As battle unfolds, additional cards become instructions for said monster: how hard it hits, whether it slinks away to heal, the amount your attacks are reduced by when it raises its limbs in defense.
Those same cards also become the tools your hero utilizes to overcome the dungeon. When placed to the side of your character sheet, a card’s suit indicates an item, whether a generic potion for the basic starting heroes, a vial of dragon blood for someone more masochistic like the Fell Knight, or ingredients in an Alchemist’s pouch. Beneath the sheet, the cards are instead transformed into “equipment,” a catch-all term for what are really your action cards and the closest thing the game has to experience points or leveling up.
The function of cards isn’t limited to enemies and equipment. It’s also the game timer, ticking away one card at a time, punishing your hero for every enemy they spend too many rounds grappling with and every detour on the path to the boss chamber. Aces become events, nasty surprises that exhaust your equipment or inflict wounds.
And, of course, there’s loot. Loot is dull on its own, a face-down pool that determines the lion’s share of your score. In a game that packs its corners with interesting tidbits, a scoring pile is almost surprising in its deficit of pizazz. Call it a necessary evil.
There are plenty of heroes to use.
For the most part, Dunstan and Muldoon pitch their delves as miniature races. Your goal is to slay the boss while amassing a minor fortune, but the constant depletion of the deck means there isn’t time to dally. It isn’t actually that difficult to conclude a scenario, provided you beeline for the exit. But anyone who’s played even one video game can tell you that heading straight for the final room is a surefire way to miss out on all the stuff that makes these things worth experiencing. Hence the game’s core tension. Sure, it’s possible to race to the end and secure a safe but measly score. But it’s more rewarding by far to push yourself to the absolute limits, spending resources like crazy and never pausing for breath, only to watch in despair as your efforts are rewarded with the boss peeling a few too many cards off the deck.
Glancing at the ratings for 52 Realms: Adventures, one of the more common complaints is the system’s chanciness. To be sure, those fifty-two cards produce quite a range of outcomes. Unlike the and-then nature of Dunstan and Muldoon’s roll-and-move titles, where a flub means a lower score rather than a premature game over, it isn’t uncommon for a delve to terminate thanks to a few too many injuries. Which reminds me: Cards also represent damage values. Absorb too many hits and you die.
Personally, the game’s long odds aren’t one of its problems. If anything, the possibility of an early grave is a suitable nod to the game’s roguelike roots. Sometimes the first three monsters you meet are face cards. Sometimes the rewards they offer are barely worth collecting. Sometimes you draw two aces in a row. That’s the nature of the beast. It helps that a full session only lasts twenty minutes. That includes a stretch break. I can handle a loss that comes three minutes into a session.
Enemies are randomly generated.
What I miss, though, are those earlier games’ shared nature. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy solitaire games. But while Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints included solo modes, they shone in multiplayer, everyone at the table utilizing those shared inputs to see where their private adventures took them. By its nature, 52 Realms: Adventures is solitaire-only. I’m sure someone could bash this thing into a shared mode, but it would be a wonky solution. There are simply too many card-flips, too many cases where a theoretical extra player would desynchronize with their partner.
Without that partner, 52 Realms: Adventures is nice for a visit, but doesn’t really compel me to return over and over again to maximize my score. The problem lies in the dungeons themselves. There are four in all, but the way they function lends them to feeling like two separate games that use a single system. The first two are linear with branching paths, your hero marching relentlessly toward the boss chamber, backtracking forbidden. This gives those dungeons a choose-your-own-adventure feel, choose A or B, left or right.
The latter two are more interesting, in no small part because they widen the one-way lanes to proper two-way corridors. One, a clockwork labyrinth, allows your adventurer to approach the central chamber only to boot them back out to the periphery. The other, a watery cathedral, is slowly flooding, its rising waters granting advantages but also empowering the local beasties. In both cases, the player is given more freedom, with little side objectives that might pad their score or beef up their hero for the final encounter.
Two of the dungeons are especially interesting.
Even so, 52 Realms: Adventures never quite feels as elegant or freeform as those earlier Postmark titles. The game’s innate chanciness means that one score is hard to differentiate from another. Sadly, the game declines to provide a target. Is 48 a good score? How about 67? It probably depends on the map, or maybe the hero. But where Dunstan and Muldoon’s earlier efforts allowed players to compare their outcomes, here I’m tabulating a number that exists only in that aforementioned vacuum. Barring many repeat plays, that is. And the core gameplay loop isn’t strong enough to bring me back for more than two or three wins per map.
This squeezes the game into an unfortunate corner. It’s interesting to look at, and I’m duly impressed by the system. But I also wish it had been a little more ambitious, whether by letting multiple players share a challenge or by producing a fuller-fledged adventure. Good for a delve or two, but for now I’ll keep my feet warm by the fire.
Access to the files to print 52 Realms: Adventures was provided by the publisher.
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A long time ago in a fulfillment center far, far away, Stonemaier Games offered a few ala carte options to webstore customers. Glass beads for Viticulture, plastic mechs for Scythe, metal coins for Charterstone…these were all included in their respective games, but sometimes people wanted more/extras.
Back in those days, we didn’t have many products, we only had one webstore, and we had lots of spare replacement parts. So we would have our replacement parts helper label a few cartons with a new SKU, and I would snap a few photos and add the ala carte item to our webstore. Typically we would also ship a few cartons from the US to our fulfillment centers in Canada, Europe, and Australia.
Now in 2026 we have over 250 SKUs, ranging from games to expansions to accessories, promos, and more. Not only have we grown, but so have our fulfillment partners: They employ dozens of people to service a number of companies. They process hundreds of orders every day using robust inventory management systems that require every item in an order to be scanned. These are massive warehouses filled with thousands of different products.
Every product needs to have a barcode (either integrated into the packaging or printed as a sticker and applied by the manufacturer). Every product also needs a production quantity, and then that production quantity is split between our 4 fulfillment centers and distribution/retail based on our best-guess forecasts. Every product needs a listing on our 4 Shopify webstores, and every product requires ongoing inventory and webstore management.
Basically, it’s a huge logistical challenge to produce and stock even just one product. Each additional SKU is exponentially more complicated, both up front and on an ongoing basis.
This is why games are sold as they are: One preset package, not a dozen different components that you can pick and choose from. Look at any game on your shelf, and there are probably a few components in it that you don’t use (maybe based on player count or modular preferences), but that’s okay. It’s much more optimized–and more cost-effective, which carries over to the price you paid–to combine those components into a cohesive product instead of selling everything ala carte.
Why is this on my mind today? Duel of Meloch, our new game (which is also an expansion for Scythe and Expeditions), has a lot of components. Scythe components, Expeditions components, overlapping components specific to the duel, etc. One of the most common questions I’ve heard so far is if someone can buy just some of those components but not others; as explained above, the answer is no.
The game also has two optional add-ons available for the July 15 webstore launch, despite the logistical complexity of extra SKUs. We split off the plastic airship miniature because it isn’t used in the duel format and would have increased the price (both for the component itself and the increased box size). There is also a metal mech pack (4 metal mechs for Scythe and 1 for Expeditions); due to the factors described in detail above, we can offer them combined at a better price than if there were two separate metal mech packs.
I mention all this because it’s an interesting area of customer service. On the surface, it might seem like we could best serve each customer by enabling them to buy only the precise components and elements they want. But in reality, ala carte makes it much harder to serve everyone, and it makes things more expensive for everyone.
Please note that I put ala carte in a completely different category than replacement parts. If any of your Stonemaier products have missing or broken components, it is our job to fix that problem. We consider our replacement parts system essential to serving customers despite it being a suboptimal, money-losing endeavor.
Also, just like most products, Duel of Meloch is more than just a sum of its parts. For example, you might buy it primarily as a Scythe expansion, but along the way you might discover that you love the duel mode (which can even be played Scythe vs Scythe if you already own Scythe or the Invaders from Afar expansion) or that you enjoy Expeditions.
Are there other industries where it’s common to request individual components instead the entire product?
Welcome to this week’s batch of crowdfunding campaigns. We have a variety of offerings here, so we hope you will find something that catches your eye. Also, if you want to chat with the BGQ team, join our Discord Server where we talk about games, movies, sports, and other fun stuff. Check it out and […]
Whenever I go on vacation or travel for any reason, I always pack a few board or card games. When we go out in our RV I can pack some full sized games (I tend to stick with the theme and pack games like Parks or Trekking the National Parks), but when we travel by plane, ship or car, you can be sure there are some card games or small board games crammed in the corners of my luggage. Even some big-box games get stripped down and their components stuffed in a makeup bag or small storage box. (And then I keep them there because oversized boxes are such a waste, but that's a topic for another article.)
People often ask me, "If you're going on vacation, why take games? You're going somewhere to do things you can't/don't do at home. Why not enjoy those things and save the gaming for when you're stuck at home?"
Here are six reasons why my games hit the road with me.
1. Meet new people
We started by playing games on camping trips as a way to unwind at the end of the day. We'd set up outside on the picnic table (by the campfire in season) and have…
Grant: Javier welcome back to the blog. What is your new game Battle of Pensacola 1781?
Javier: Thanks for having me again. Pensacola 1781 is a simulation of the American Revolution in the southeast region, stretching from the Mississippi River basin to the Floridas, from the Spanish entry in the war in 1779 to 1782. I must say that the title is a bit deceptive in its scope and included battles.
Grant: What was your inspiration for this game? Why did you feel drawn to the subject?
Javier: The Spanish participation in the American Revolution has recently attracted much interest in Spain. It was, so to speak, the swansong of the empire in the Americas. There aren’t any games that cover the entire campaign. There is only a wargame on the siege of Pensacola from GMT Games which is a part of their Battles of the American Revolution Series, which is a detailed and interesting situation. But I wanted an operational level game showing the big picture, from New Orleans to Mobile, Pensacola and St. Augustine. The game highlights the operations of Bernardo de Gálvez, who led one of the most brilliant campaigns in that theatre, clearing the Mississippi basin of English outposts as well as taking Mobile and Pensacola fighting against all odds. Against the advice of his subordinates, who deemed impossible defending Louisiana without reinforcements from Cuba, Gálvez declared that he preferred “having to answer charges of recklessness, than other type of charges” and took the offensive against the British in the lower Mississippi.
Grant: What was your design goal with the game?
Javier: My goal was to show a “multi domain” 18th century campaign, including amphibious operations, sieges, Indian warfare and diplomacy. The design puts the focus on leadership quality, Indian warfare and chaos. The campaign in Louisiana, modern day Alabama and the Floridas was a bit of a sideshow in a worldwide conflict fought from Canada to the Mediterranean, the 13 colonies, the British channel, Gibraltar or India. The design reflects this in several ways. In this game, reinforcements arrive at the beginning of each year and their arrival depend upon a number of factors, such as victories in earlier turns (thus gaining the favor of their respective courts in London and Madrid) as well as events elsewhere. Fleet squadrons come and go because this is an oceanic war being fought out across the seven seas, and the Caribbean was just only one more front.
Grant: What type of research did you do to get the details correct? What one must-read source wouldyou recommend?
Javier: There are plenty of Spanish sources on the campaigns of Bernardo de Gálvez in the Americas, many of them published in recent times. There are recent English language sources that recognize the major role of Spain in arming and supporting the American Revolution. For instance, the book by Larrie D. Ferreiro Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It. Another interesting source in English is the work by Joshua Provan Every Hazard and Fatigue: the Siege of Pensacola, 1781 published by Helion Books. This book provides solid evidence of “the true military consequences of the siege [of Pensacola] on the War of American Independence.”
Grant: What from the American Revolution in the Southeast was most important to model?
Javier: It was important to model that the Mississippi-Floridas campaign was one more theatre in a global war spanning from the Americas to Europe and India. Keeping open the Mississippi River basin to the arms and supplies shipments coming from Spain, France and other nations was a decisive factor in keeping alive the American Revolution. Being just one more theatre, the arrival of reinforcements depends on a number of a factors and events elsewhere. After the first successes of Gálvez, the Spanish decided to reinforce success and provide him with more ships, troops and resources.
Grant: What is the scale of the game? Force structure of units?
Javier: Units are basically regiments and Indian warbands, rated for Indian and Linear warfare. Using one or the other depends on a number of factors, namely leadership quality.
Grant: What area of the Southeast does the map cover?
Javier: The map covers a large area, from the lower Mississippi to Eastern Florida, with off map boxes for outposts in the upper Mississippi and Georgia.
Grant: What off map areas are represented and why are they important?
Javier: There are three: St. Joseph and St. Louis, which are important to keep the Mississippi supply route open, and Georgia, from where the Spanish/Patriot player can launch attacks against East Florida. The 1778 Patriot invasion of East Florida was defeated, but there was the possibility of new offensives in the following years. After the conquest of Pensacola the Allied forces (Spanish, French and Patriots) planned a joint operation against British forces in the Carolinas, but the end of the war cancelled it.
Grant: What key strategic points are contested in the area and what is the geographic goal of the combatants?
Javier: For the Spanish, the first objective is to defend the Mississippi Basin, although Havana is also included in the map so that the Spanish has to keep a sizeable defense there. Historically, the Spanish commander in chief in Havana was extremely reluctant to spare ships and troops for the Floridas. In the words of the chief of the Spanish navy in the island, “This [Cuba] is worth 50 Mobiles or Pensacolas…if the King was here, he would do the same”. The British capture of Havana in 1762 still loomed large.
For the British, the objective is to reach the Mississippi Basin, and, if not possible, to defend West and East Florida. With the arrival of Rodney’s fleet, he can also chance a surprise attack on New Orleans, or even Havana if the Spanish player doesn’t keep there a sizeable force.
Grant: What different unit types does each side have access to?
Javier: There are line infantry, militias, artillery, siege trains, supply trains, Indian warbands, fleets, transport ships, and leaders.
Grant: What is the anatomy of the counters?
Javier: Land units are rated for linear warfare (representing “proper” 18th century warfare) and Indian warfare (irregular tactics, hit and run, pillage, ambushes). Linear infantry and field artillery are better for the first, while militias and Indian warbands are better for the latter. Militias and Indian warbands are also very useful for finding out the makeup and location of the enemy or avoiding interception/ambushes by the enemy force. Leaders are rated for their tactical and diplomatic skills that add modifiers to initiative, combat, diplomacy and other actions. Supply trains are spent to avoid attrition, which can be heavy in the hostile wilderness.
Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?
Javier: The sequence of play begins with the stratagem markers phase (both players pick at random stratagem markers), followed by reinforcements die rolls at the beginning of the campaign season. Then comes the Indian diplomacy phase, where both players use diplomacy stratagem markers to break or establish alliances with the various Indian tribes. After that both sides can try to recruit Indian warbands among neutral or allied Indian nations. Then comes the recruiting phase, where both sides use accumulated Treasury Points to rebuild destroyed units. Finally, the Spanish operates his naval and land forces in any order he sees fit, followed by the British operations phase. At the end of the turn, both sides roll for attrition, and for the possible withdrawal of Indian bands.
Grant: What type of experience did you want the Sequence of Play to invoke?
Javier: Players can activate their forces in any order they want, so that they can use any combination of land, amphibious and naval operations. The experience I wanted to invoke is that of uncertainty- this is the 18th century warfare in a remote colony. As in many other wars, both sides make plans, but there are many factors that can disrupt them, from hurricanes to unexpected arrival of enemy forces to events elsewhere. There are no communications other than messengers and courier ships, so the possibility of an enemy expedition arriving out of nowhere should make players to be cautious.
Grant: How do the different nations troops coordinate their maneuvers and attacks? What difficulty of command will players experience trying to coordinate French, Spanish and Patriot forces as well as British, Hessian and Loyalist forces?
Javier: In general the troops of different nations can operate together without problem. The Indian forces are a double edged weapon-very useful for reconnaissance and ambush (or to avoid enemy ambushes) but they can leave a force if they decided that they have to return or that they have captured enough loot and captives. Forces can operate any number of units of different nations.
Grant: What role do the Indians of the region play in the game?
Javier: In this game I wanted to emphasize the role of the various Indian nations. Indian warbands are useful for raiding and reconnaissance although they tended to return to their villages after a successful campaign. Historically, the British had a well developed network of Indian agents which gave them advantage in their Indian diplomacy. This is reflected in the “Indian agent” markers, that provide die roll modifiers to the British diplomacy attempts. Historian Josh Provan pointed out in his book on the Pensacola campaign that the Spanish victory was achieved with the assistance of Native American nations, “whom have routinely been dismissed outright for over two hundred years”.
Grant: What are Stratagem markers?
Javier: The Stratagem Marker is a mechanism that I use in many of my designs. These are very useful to simulate things that are beyond the control of players. Represent anything from tropical diseases, campaigns elsewhere in the Americas and in the World, to tactical events such as lucky hit, ambushes or military advantage. The marker “Surprise move” is particularly useful to simulate the uncertainties of 18th century in a remote wilderness such as the old Southeast. Given the right conditions, a surprise move may make a fleet appear out of nowhere and destroy an enemy force. This is the 18th century…there are no communications other than messengers and courier ships. Historically, upon learning about the presence in the Caribbean basin of the squadron of Admiral Rodney, the Spaniards feared that they could catch by surprise the forces besieging Pensacola. Stratagem Markers also simulate the spy networks of both sides. Before the war, Gálvez setup an extensive spy network that was very useful. For instance, his spies got hold of a copy of the secret orders sent to General Campbell at Pensacola, ordering him to organize, if possible, an attack on New Orleans with armed vessels from Jamaica and “as many faithful Indians and the Superintendent could supply”. Gálvez took the initiative and took the British outposts along the lower Mississippi before Campbell could arrange his own offensive.
Grant: What are Treasury Points? How are they gained and lost?
Javier: TP’s represent resources received from their respective metropolis, as well as local contributions used to recruit units. Treasury Points are received from their respective countries during reinforcement turns. Unlike other games, there are no treasury generating regions or cities-everything comes from Havana, Madrid or Britain. Treasury Points are used to rebuild destroyed units.
Grant: What role do Leaders play? What historic personalities are represented?
Javier: Leaders play a key role in diplomacy and combat. The better the leadership, the better chances of gaining initiative in combat, recruiting Indian allies, and so on. Among the historic personalities, the most notable is perhaps Bernardo de Gálvez, the most noted commander in that theatre. After fighting in Europe, North Africa and the Americas (against the Apaches), he was named governor of Louisiana in 1777. In May 1779, a month before Spain declared war on Britain, and three years after the Declaration of Independence, Gálvez assembled a small army with which he attacked the defensive posts the British held along the Mississippi. With a contingent that included free African Americans, Choctaw Indians, Canadians, and American volunteers, Gálvez captured forts such as Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, and expelled the British from the region. His greatest victory was the conquest of the port city of Pensacola, in northwest Florida in 1781. Galvez’ adversary at Pensacola, Major General John Campbell, a veteran of Culloden in 1746 and the siege of Havana in 1762, is an interesting figure as well.
Grant: How does combat work?
Javier: There are two odds-based Combat Tables-Indian and Linear. Indian represents Indian Warfare-emphasizing mobility, with night attacks, ambushes. Local militias and, of course, Indian warbands are better at them. The other CRT is linear warfare, representing “proper” 18th century linear warfare. In this, Line infantry are artillery are most useful. The choice of CRT is determined by an initiative die roll, modified by the leadership rating of any leaders in the forces, plus the play of Stratagem Markers such as military advantage or ambush.
Grant: What are Military Advantage and Ambush Markers used for?
Javier: They represent tactical opportunities and junior leadership and can be used to modify initiative, interception or operations points die rolls.
Grant: What is the makeup of the CRT?
Javier: As mentioned above, it is odds based. Units add their linear or Indian warfare factors-Linear units add 2 combat factors on the linear CRT, 1 on the Indian CRT. Artillery adds 2 combat factors on the linear CRT, 0 on the Indian CRT. So, a force containing mostly militias and Indian warriors against a force containing line infantry and artillery will chose the Indian CRT. Of course, the system rewards combined arms-it is advisable to combine all types of units in a single force. The Linear CRT is bloodier (more chances of completely destroying an enemy force) the Indian Warfare CRT is more indecisive.
Grant: How do Sieges work?
Javier: In the game there are Fortresses and forts. The first represent stone fortresses such as the ones in Mobile, St. Augustine and Pensacola, while forts represent minor positions made mostly of wood. Players can build siege works to approach the enemy defenses (representing parallel trenches, mining and so on). The force under siege may choose to launch a sortie to destroy the siege works. If the sortie fails, the siege works add a positive modifier to the assault operation against the fortress hex. The player then rolls on the siege table and apply results, which may include Bloody Repulse (Eliminate besieging units equivalent to the number of defending units), Honors of War (with Age of Enlightment chivalry), the defender is given the option to withdraw from the fort or fortress. The defenders are withdrawn and can enter as reinforcements during the next game turn) or Surrender: the fortress is conquered and all defenders are eliminated, including any naval units if it is a coastal fort or fortress.
Grant: How is victory achieved?
Javier: Victory is achieved by taking geographical objectives (Mobile, Pensacola, St. Augustine, New Orleans…) or by preventing the enemy from taking them. The British may win a sudden death victory if they manage to take Havana as in 1762.
Grant: What role do Naval Operations play? Why were they important to include?
Javier: Naval operations were very important because it was the only means to move sizeable forces in this theatre. Overland movement and supply was extremely slow, so the best way to move reinforcements, supplies and to take the fight to the enemy strongholds was by sea.
Grant: What optional rules are included?
Javier: There are four optional rules. In general, these add to the game narrative although it might make game turns somewhat longer. Optional rules are naval infantry. In this one, players can “land” marine infantry from naval ships, which can fight overland in a siege, for instance-if the naval ship is involved in naval combat, it has a negative modifier in combat, representing the missing crew and marines. The other optional rules are Indian supplies (players can purchase supplies to local Indian tribes, like Gálvez did, for instance, during the siege of Pensacola), destroyed forts (players have the option to burn forts, but not fortresses) and valley movement, where players follow river valleys to move faster across the wilderness territory.
Grant: What type of an experience does the game create?
Javier: It creates an experience of uncertainty, in particular with the unexpected arrival of enemy forces from out of nowhere. If this could happen at the tactical level, more so in a strategic game covering all of North America from the Mississippi river basin to Florida. Also, gamers must keep in mind the importance of the human geography-the Indian nations played key roles in the operations of the war, by supplying, providing information and combat troops to the empires at war. Elements such as the “Surprise move” markers, and the arrival of Rodney’s Fleet, provide the game with wild changes of initiative. The British, in particular in the early turns, can try to grab the initiative and attack towards the lower Mississippi or St. Louis.
Grant: What are you most pleased about with the design?
Javier: I think it makes a good work at simulating “multi domain” 18th warfare, covering many aspects, from conventional operations to irregular warfare to diplomacy with a relatively simple set of rules.
Grant: What other designs are you working on?
Javier: I am currently working on several games for SNAFU Design Team, Decision Games, VUCA, Bonsai Games and Compass Games/Paper Wars. S&T will publish in May-June 2026 another of my operational WW2 designs, Forgotten Front: Italy 1944-45. I just turned in to Decision Games the prototype for Ukraine Battles 2. This one covers the early, mobile campaign in Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine in the spring and summer of 2022. It is an evolution of the system first used in Ukraine Battles 2014-15. Artillery plays a very important role in the system. It is precise and deadly, and can do a number of missions, from interdiction to destroying command posts to supply depots. Plus drones and long range fires, of course.
1942: Battle for the Mediterranean for VUCA Simulations, is, I hope, approaching completion. It is an old project that I first agreed to publish with the company of the late Jack Greene, Quarterdeck International, but later he suggested me to contact VUCA for publication since they did a great job with the new edition of his Bismarck design. 1942: Battle for the Mediterranean is what I would call an operational naval game, with turns representing one month of naval operations. Apart from supplying the war fronts and fighting the enemy at sea, players have to manage their assets and think in the long term. The campaign game covers 10 game turns, from January to October 1942. There are also shorter one turn scenarios simulating the major convoy battles of the 1942 campaign: Second Sirte, Harpoon/Vigorous (Battaglia di Mezzo Giugno, “Battle of Mid June” for the Italians), or Pedestal (Battaglia di Mezzo Agosto, “Battle of Mid August”).
Aragón 38 for SNAFU Team is also in development. Nils Johansson is working on the graphics aspect (map, counters, play aids and cover). It uses an evolution of the Santander ’37 System. While in the Santander campaign we have Brigade-sized units attacking across a mountain range, using speed, firepower and infiltration to overcome the Republican defenses, in Aragon we have a “push” of several Army Corps operating together, with front collapse followed by exploitation, consolidation and conquest of several bridgeheads as bases for future offensive operations. So we had to adapt the system to better simulate that campaign. Bonsai Games from Japan will publish my game Assault on Europe 1943, covering land operations in the Mediterranean Theatre in 1943, from Tunisia to Sicily and Southern Italy. The Allied player can decide whether to land in Corsica and Sardinia before Southern Italy. Rules simulate the painful US Army learning curve (from being called in Tunisia “our Italians” by the British, to a much better performance in Sicily and Southern Italy) and the surrender/collapse of the Italian army (operation Achse). After publishing Red Partisans for Paper Wars, I am working on a small unit game of the fight around Kyiv in February 2022. It is still in a very early design stage.
Thanks for your time Javier in answering our questions as I know you are a busy man and obviously have lots of interesting gaming subjects on your design table. I am very interested in this one, as the American Revolution is one of my favorite gaming topics.
Let’s talk about stuff for a moment, shall we? Because while we sometimes like to talk about how much we love playing games, today we’re going to remind ourselves why it is so much fun to just open the daggone box.
When a new game arrives—be it a deck of cards, or something bigger—I love to spend time absorbing the total package. That starts with all that stuff, a process that begins as soon as I rip off the shrink. In the case of a new game like Revenant, you sit back and really marvel at how far game production has come, especially when companies like Mindclash Games partner with Panda Game Manufacturing to get every single bit of the production and storage solution process just right.
Mindclash sent a review copy of the Admiral Edition of Revenant a couple weeks ago. I decided to set the game aside until I returned from a family vacation to spend an evening sifting through the goodies. I can see why so many BGG users are happy with their new toy based on the comments I see here on our site as well as other distant corners of the interwebs. It reminds me of the many reasons why I think tabletop production is at its peak. From a production perspective, there’s no better time than now to be a fan of these glorious, and admittedly somewhat overdone, packages.
My rule is simple: when it feels like everything in the box is one step too far, that means a company absolutely nailed it.
With Revenant, that starts with the box. It’s big, maybe even too big, with a sharp image of an endangered spaceship on the cover that can be seen from across the street. Revenant’s cover announces itself from across a large living room. It shouts “play me” from its position on a high shelf at your local board game cafe. The box is too big…and perfect for the purposes of this discussion.
Did I need both plastic Voidborn ship miniatures AND cardboard Voidborn tokens? Absolutely not…which also means I have just enough ships for the moment when my nine-year-old gets his hands on the Revenant box and decides to have a miniatures battle between the ships from the Voidfall Galactic Box and the ships from the Revenant box. It’s good to have options when your kids destroy your stuff.
(An aside: I know that some of you really do prefer the cardboard options in both Revenant and Voidfall over the plastic minis. Fine. Let’s just agree to disagree and move forward as friends.)
I don’t want a storage solution sheet or reboxing video. I want a full color, written guide that takes me through where each little bit, where each oblong cardboard bit, where each set of tarot-sized cards should go. Publishers can’t skimp on this. When I say deluxe, we mean deluxe. I want to feel like I just strolled onto the 18th green at Augusta National, living that country club life with all the fixins. I want to feel like a VIP, like the restaurant only exists to serve me. That “Employee of the Month” parking spot? It’s mine…all mine, every month, not just this one.
If I pony up Admiral, Deluxe, Ultimate, Kingpin, Anniversary, or Collector’s money, I want to see that money on my table and feel it in my soul. That means I need to know how to put away 400 components, from the people that built the storage solution, without the need to go online to watch my neighbor Stu doing it from his poorly-lit basement. (Stu’s a good guy. He just needs deluxe lighting to show us a deluxe unboxing, right?)
Oh, and that storage solution? I want it to look like the one I have in the Revenant Admiral Edition. Spaces for both the big stuff and things as small as a single token or a set of four small cards. Sections for each player’s bits. Pockets deep enough to comfortably fit cardboard components, both to place these tokens but also to easily get them out. Plastic covers that seal each layer real tight, because I am definitely taking this game to a friend’s house and need to ensure I can whip that thing out and get it set up quickly for the nerds in my life.
I’ll even take a little foamcore or sturdy cardboard to use around the edges, so that my rulebooks and my player mats and my common boards and my market boards and my solo boards and my player aids don’t move around when my car hits a speed bump at just the wrong speed. (I blame the bump, not my bad driving.) I’ll even accept a little “lid lift” as long as the bits don’t move around inside the box.
While I was arranging some of the Revenant cards, I found myself once again marveling at the graphic design from Ian O’Toole and the Mindclash team, some of which has carried over from the artist’s world-class work on Voidfall. (It’s shocking how well this works in Voidfall, isn’t it? For a game that has four rulebooks, I’m amazed to find that I never need to relearn the game thanks to the excellent iconography.)
Some of that marveling was also tied to the unnecessarily high quality of the card stock. I found myself sorting the Scanner and the Operations cards, flipping each one, making sure there were words or icons on the backs, as if the cards would have shown up accidentally blank or something. The cards look good in the light and feel great in the hands.
Should the unsleeved cards feel this good? No. That means the card stock is one step too far…which means it is just right.
All this deluxe toy business made me think back to some of my favorite all-in editions over the last couple years, ones I have bought, titles I have received as review copies, games I’ve been lucky enough to play thanks to the people in my network.
Nothing beats the moment a friend opened their Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale years ago. Things that we know to be standard now weren’t quite the standard five or six years ago, from a Game Trayz storage solution to a fancy rulebook to a box that, when thrown at just the right velocity, could take out an intruder thanks to the sheer weight of the thing.
But the Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale is legendary for another reason: miniature standee bases with sound effects built in. I don’t want to just see a large demon, troll or Kraken on the board…I want to hear it! Did these toys need sound effects? Of course not…which means we need to have them.
(Yes, I continue to remind the fine people at Cardboard Alchemy that Andromeda’s Edge—also known in my circles as “Dwellings, in space”—only missed on one part of their own gloriously massive All-In Deluxe edition: raiders like the Mortality Sphere need a base where I can hit a button and hear a sound effect. EVERYONE knows that this is a requirement. It is a requirement, because it is completely and totally unnecessary…meaning, you guessed it, that it is completely necessary for the needs of myself and every other self-respecting, dice-chucking fan of Andromeda’s Edge.)
I recently reviewed the Arkwright Anniversary Edition over at Meeple Mountain, and after finishing my review plays, I gave the game to a friend in my network. When this friend saw the rulebook, we both joked about the unbelievably massive size of the 50+ page manual. It feels like you are reading a copy of the 1982 Sears gift catalog (not Seers Catalog, but Sears, Roebuck & Co.!). The rulebook is so large and so readable and rich with so many pictured examples that I can’t think of another rulebook that went out of its way to be ridiculously, gloriously deluxe.
“That means the rulebook is just right,” I said to an empty room.
Sweet Lands. Oh my goodness, Sweet Lands! I still can’t believe how ridiculous the Sweet Lands components are, in part because the game’s components are the same in both the retail and the Deluxe version. (The Deluxe version has minor additions, such as card sleeves and different player tokens.) I’m not even sure I recommend playing Sweet Lands so much as I recommend seeing the production in person. The game looks fantastic, all the wooden bits look fantastic, and the cards are gorgeous, with illustrations that made me sit and stare for long stretches.
Everyone in my circles knows about titles like Galactic Cruise and Luthier, but I like that the publishers of those games (Kinson Key and Paverson, respectively) have branded themselves as newer publishers who care about both form and function in equal measure. That means everything about those productions feels over the top, in a way that makes those games easier to table. The games play well and they look sensational.
As I was putting the Admiral Edition of Revenant away, I snuck another look at the Tray Manual to make sure I had everything in its proper place. (Mindclash really does these Tray Manuals better than anyone; between Voidfall, Perseverance, and Revenant, putting the game away is almost as much fun as setting it up.) Signed, sealed, and delivered back to my review game stack, I admired the box one last time before making my way to bed.
Now the real fun begins: getting a game that looks great to the table, in the hopes that the game’s gameplay matches its stellar production.
Breaking out those shiny new toys is such a thrill. What’s your favorite deluxe version of a game? Share it in the comments…I’m excited to hear more about the toys you tabled this weekend!
Anmelden
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