Grinivil is what I want to see more of—ambitious design with thoughtful development decisions throughout. It’s not perfect, there’s the characteristic rough edges of a one-man show, but even the grumpiest player at my table was chuckling when someone would randomly say the game’s bizarre tagline: “You want to live here!”

This is a rondel house

Evoking my beloved Urban Sprawl, Grinivil is a game about building a town and using it to score points. But, it isn’t about that card-driven lifestyle, it’s about ~time~.

Grinivil’s disorganized rulebook buries the lede about what makes the game great: the TIME ACTION RING. Slightly reminiscent of Glen More’s square rondel/tile draft, there’s a ring of 20 tiles around the game’s resource market. Instead of drafting these tiles, you’re going to move your action pawn to any position on the ring, take the action, and then be forced to move forward a number of spaces listed on the tile. You can even fully circumnavigate the entire rondel and take the same action again. There’s a sort of “passing go” mechanism where you have to pay for your workers which discourages this, but it’s refreshingly open. The action ring also has 7 variable tiles each game, which add a wild texture to the experience—the tiles range from goofy crowdsourced auctions, forced trades, and…

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As someone who finds the wanton violence, corruption, and who-cares-i-ttude that’s baked into American life truly repugnant, the sheer unadulterated fantasy of a fair contest or battle is intoxicating. An oasis in a desert. Game designers and publishers seem to agree—there are so many darn area control beat-em-ups. I’ve played so many, because, when they’re done well (the razor-sharp edge of Inis or the skull bludgeon-y Shogun) you get to have a rare experience—a test of will, bravery, and risk.

Gunsen: The Battle for Toshi Ranbo’s main problem is that it is sleight. It comes in a big box, it supports up to six players, it has faction asymmetry, tons of card powers, cool pieces, and a compelling premise. But each of these things, while initially compelling, reveal themselves to be paper-thin, and nothing becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

King o’ the mill

The way you win Gunsen is by being the first to accomplish 7 objectives. There are more than 7 available, and all of them, with one exception (holding the center) are permanent once you accomplish them. Most of the objectives are resource management things: build two buildings, play 3 tactics cards, occupy 2 shrines, use your 3 special action slots, etc. If…

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Gudnak has a great name, and maybe that’ll be enough to overcome the gigantic obstacle that the genre of games that are trying to become lifestyles struggle with.

That obstacle: gluttony. Customizable competitive card games are the definition of an oversaturated market. Step into any local game store, and you’ll see the locus of competition for space and time on full display.

Gudnak has a lot of things going for it, but it also struggles with a few usability issues. I also imagine it will have a market visibility problem going forward, but that’s not for me to decide.

What’s a Gudnak?

Gudnak is an ambigram, which the back of the box helpfully tells you, meaning a symbol that can be flipped and retains its shape. The game is played on a grid of different sizes depending on player count, with square cards functioning as units and spells. You have a 20-card deck that serves as your game timer/health bar (reminiscent of my beloved Ortus Regni). If the other player occupies your gates (the square in front of your stronghold/deck) at the start of your turn, you discard a card. No cards? You lose.

Gameplay is reminiscent of

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Hellas - Thomas Wells

Playte has been putting out this “L-series” of games, which are basically small boxes with folding magnet boards that unspool origami-style. I’ve played a few of them, and I appreciate the publisher’s focus on bringing back oldies that are also goodies. Hellas isn’t that old, it’s from 2016, but it was next to impossible to get in the US, so this Stefan Dorra multiplayer resource generation slugfest has been on my list for a while. 

Basically, you build buildings in various arrays to try and score points at the end of the game, but half of the actions in the game are shared—you build a house, and I get to build a house after you. There’s shared infrastructure in the form of quarries and point-scoring areas that players collectively develop. The best part though is the mining action—when it happens, everyone gets marble (game currency) at the same time, and then the three mines on the board degrade. Each has a number, and you draw new mine tiles—a higher number can cover a lower number, and if there isn’t something the newly drawn tile can cover, you close the highest number mine and open the newly drawn one. As mines get higher numbers, they have lower yields. 

It’s…

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Rebuilding Chicago - Thomas Wells

I’m not that crazy about polyomino games, but Rebuilding Chicago is the kind of thing I like—razor sharp. I think that that sharpness decreases at lower player counts, but at four players, our game was over in 20 minutes with a point spread of 50. The schtick of this one is that you can either lay the polyominos in your little city board or activate an event that affects everyone. So, you’re constantly seeing how little you can do to edge out opponents, and they’re doing the same with you. Multiple times during our game, an event resolution would result in someone scoring 15-20 points, with someone else getting nothing. It’s got an enormous amount of variability, and for my money, I’d happily polyomino Chicago any time.

Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★★☆ - Would like to play it again

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Dragonarium  - Kevin Brantley

This cute, cozy title comes from Wonderful World Board Games, a publisher that infuses Taiwanese culture and heritage into many of its games.

Dragonarium has players drafting polyomino tiles to create same-colored habitats, though doing…

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There’s a lot of things I want to like about Haunted Lands. I like the premise, where you’re adventurers/exorcists trying to help your little city expand out into the countryside by sending ghosts to the great beyond. There’s some mechanical flourishes that are genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, the game itself does not really rise above a rote resource-collection exercise.

It’s important to gather wood when exorcising

Haunted Lands is an action point game, where instead of getting a pool of action points, you have discs that correspond to different actions that you use to do various things in a sequence of your choosing. For example, you move, then gather, then build a building, move again, and finally, help a ghost.

You’re doing all this because helping the ghosts (which requires the right number of action tokens depending on how far the game has advanced), harvesting, and building buildings all give you resources, which you use to build more buildings, or sell said resources to buy upgrades. Building buildings and paying for upgrades gets you points, and in the late stages of the game, helping ghosts gives you points too.

The game forms a fairly simplistic loop. You move, making sure…

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Fuji Flush - Thomas Wells

Fuji Flush is a good time. It’s like super Uno that doesn’t fall into an infinite loop, especially at higher player counts. Basically, you play a card from your hand, and if the turn comes around to you again, and someone hasn’t “flushed” your card, you discard it. Get rid of your hand to win. Flushing is playing a higher card, but if someone plays the same card, your values are added together and you enter a sort of partnership where all same-card values are tougher to flush. 

Mainly, it’s an excuse to say flush a lot, but it’s a hoot with a larger count, and is really easy to table and play at the end of a night. 

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

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Terra Eterna - Kevin Brantley

We at Meeple Mountain always enjoy the chance to cover self-published titles, as they often don’t get the opportunity to be showcased to a larger audience. Terra Eterna is one of those titles, a semi-cooperative RPG focused on exploration and character building.

Unfortunately, the game…

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Man, I just love a civilization game. For a power-tripping megalomaniac like myself, there’s just nothing better than taking the helm of a conglomerate of violent individuals and making bad decisions.

Near: Echoes of Civilizations has a goofy name—you really have to do some mental gymnastics for it to make sense at all. But, there’s some real fun to be had here. All the hits are here: Technology! Combat! Resource management! Points!

Actually, part of what makes Near interesting is its commitment to synthesizing the heads-down-euro-bean-counter that constitutes a lot of its bone structure with a traditional build-stuff-kill-guys game. Unlike other civ games (for example, Civilization: A New Dawn, Mosaic, or Gentes) that have tried to incorporate concepts from euro-style mechanism-fests into their design framework, Near takes a holistic approach that makes it feel complete and cohesive, rather than a cobbled together bricolage.

A novel new mechanism: “cards”

At the beginning of Near, you get dealt a starting culture card (a personal endgame scoring condition), a wonder card (an in-game scoring condition), four regular cards from one of five colors, and a starting action bonus. Your wonder gives you a starting building, and in a very Terra Mystica-style start, you place some buildings out on the board and it’s…

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My view of criticism is that, when done well, it is generative and contextualizing to the form it critiques. Having the privilege of reviewing and analyzing games comes with a degree of responsibility. Don’t misunderstand me—there is zero responsibility to a corporation, a designer, and anyone else who has made the business of games their business. My responsibility is to the mysterious and magical mental maneuver that allows a game to become more than pieces and rules and become something that facilitates agreement between people. Lofty, I know.

In my mind, players of games are akin to guests. Sure, a guest can be a big ol’ jerk, but when you’re playing a game, you’re stepping into an experience that is supposed to connect you to other people, to new ideas, interesting decisions, new concepts. You’re not a line item in a budget spreadsheet.

This perspective, coupled with some professional jealousy (I think I have some really cool game designs of my own that are worth sharing) can lead me to be seemingly harsh about a game that another critic might deem “acceptable” or “fine.” But I’m not that other critic. Enormous amounts of resources go into the creation of a mass market game, and when the product is derivative…

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I’m going to hop into this review and almost completely agree with Andrew’s review of Nature. I don’t have that much to add to his assessment. I’ve played Evolution, Oceans, and now this, and I like what this series does mechanically, I think it provides a sharp, competitive experience that scales well with player count, and offers the possibility of drama without requiring players to understand a billion card interactions to jump in and start kicking each other in the teeth.

I’ll cover what the upcoming Climate module adds to the experience, and then I’ll play around in my ivory tower and conclude with some thoughts about edutainment products. I’m going to assume you have a sense of how the game works.

Get cooked (or frozen)

The Climate module for Nature adds variability to the amount of food that appears each round. Because of the game’s modeling of timescale, it’s doing big chunks of time between each round, so you have some pairing of the setting of the game with a mechanism. When the climate tracker moves toward an ice age or a scorching age, there will be less food available for everyone to compete over, and there is a new survival mechanism that every player will…

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I reviewed Snake Charmers awhile ago, and I found that experience punchy and delightful. Now, I’m feasting my eyes on Bubble and Shadow, a game that is prettier, slightly more complicated, and ultimately, flatter.

The game has lofty ambition, noting as its inspiration W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, but I’m not sure if any of that translates. I’ve only read Of Human Bondage, and I ~think~ the aforementioned story is a fictionalized account of Paul Gauguin’s life or something, but I couldn’t for the life of me find how this game was related, other than it having really cool paintings on the cards.

Anyway, the objective of the game is to collect the right distribution of three types of wooden token: If you have the most purple tokens (bubbles), you’ll be eliminated from the scoring consideration at the end of the round. Then, if you have the fewest gray (coins) you score a point and are removed from the scoring. Finally, the player with the most yellow (moons) gets three points, and second most gets two points. You play three rounds, and if someone gets to five-plus points before that at the end of a round, the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

But how do you acquire these tokens?

At the…

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My friend Joe and I share an interest in logistics games that feature planetary rotation. I’m not sure exactly why he’s into it, but I like it for the interesting questions that emerge from having to plot movement in two dimensions: distance and time.

Plutocracy got me excited because it puts landing on moving planets front and center. Unfortunately, while many of the mechanisms within the game are clever, the process of playing the game is frustratingly obvious. It puts you in the unenviable position of both having to do a significant amount of analysis and then discover that the analysis you did wasn’t really worth it.

As the world(s) turn

The object of Plutocracy is to turn money into majority points. You fly your ship around a truncated map of the solar system (sans Mercury, Venus, and if you’re not a hater, Pluto) buying and selling various goods. Each planet buys one type of good and sells one type of good. When you buy, supply price goes up 1, when you sell, demand price goes down 1. The objective is to buy low and sell high, and also land on planets where you can turn money into planetary council seats, which gain you points in the “Plutocratic Council” when scoring happens 3 times during the game.

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