Why, hello there. How have you been? It’s been a few months. I’m doing well, enjoying my retirement from the blogosphere. I’m not really back, I just wanted to pop in and give my annual recap of all the new-to-me games played in 2025. Plus, I’ll be picking the winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jesse award at the end. Thanks for joining me!

We’ll start with the new-to-me games. I’ll be providing a rating for each on my patented Yeah-Meh-Bleah scale (which, for legal reasons, I probably should let you know is NOT actually patented).

• 12 Days: A card game based around the 12 Days of Christmas song. It’s interesting, but becomes very much about luck in the end. The art is nice. RATING: Meh+.
• 12 Patrols: A print-and-play game that really ends up being a puzzle as to how to place your pieces in order to satisfy demands. It’s a very pretty game, and an interesting concept, but luck is definitely a factor and can frustrate the experience. RATING: Meh+.
• 14ers: A card game about climbing the highest peaks in Colorado. Actually, it’s more a game about upgrading your hiker, but summiting those peaks gets you actions to add using an interesting tuck mechanism. I’ve only played it online so far, but enjoyed it. RATING: Yeah.
• Abstract: A print-and-play game where you’re rolling dice and arranging colors to create your art. There’s variable scoring conditions from game to game. I only played solo, but you can compete for the highest score, even though there’s no competition. Not bad. RATING: Meh+.
• Ambagibus: A print-and-play tile placement game where’s you’re basically building a maze. It’s a puzzle, but there’s not a lot to it. You need a lot of luck to win. RATING: Meh.
• Bag of Chips: A light speculation game that comes packaged in a chip bag. It’s kind of silly, but good enough for what it is. RATING: Meh.
• Beer and Pretzels: A super light tossing game where you’re just trying to score points by getting your stuff in a circle to show their numbers. Not really desperate to try again. RATING: Meh-.
• Bites: Another speculation game where you’re trying to collect items you think will score the most points. Beautiful production, and a pretty good game that I was unaware of before trying it. RATING: Yeah.
• Bring Your Own Book: Players try to find lines in their own books to fit a certain prompt. It’s a concept that is more interesting than, say, Apples to Apples, but still has the shortcomings of being a subjective judging game. Still, one of the better ones of that genre. RATING: Meh-.
• Call To Adventure: Epic Origins: An adventure game where you’re throwing runestones to get the symbols you need for success. It’s a very interesting game. I’ve only played one game of the campaign so far, but enjoying it. RATING: Yeah.
• Canvas: A card-crafting style game where you’re creating art by putting transparent cards into sleeves. There’s drafting, there’s variable scoring conditions, and there’s the puzzle of trying to make your art worth more. It’s really good. RATING: Yeah!
• Clank! In! Space!: I love the original Clank, but this was my first time trying the space version. It was a lot of fun, and I like the modular system in place. I wish I had gotten to play more during the year. RATING: Yeah!
• CuBirds: This is a game I had played online, but I don’t think I ever really got it until playing it in person. It’s an interesting set collection game with an interesting draft system. I like it, and my wife loves it (possibly because she beats me all the time). RATING: Yeah.
• Daybreak: A cooperative game that won the 2024 Kinderspiel des Jahres. It’s all about trying to combat climate change. There’s a lot going on, and you’ve really got to communicate with your fellow players. I only played solo, but it would be good to play with others. RATING: Yeah!
• Deadly Doodles: Basically a flip and write game where you’re making a path through a dungeon, trying to kill monsters and collect treasure. I was expecting something very different than what I got – the only “doodling” was drawing lines through the dungeon. In the end, it felt like a weak imitation of Railroad Ink. RATING: Meh.
• Earth: With the buzz around this, I was expecting something I liked more. In the end, I thought it was more bloated than in needed to be. It’s got fairly simple mechanisms, but just so many moving parts that I wasn’t crazy about it. Also, didn’t like the solo mode – it felt rushed. RATING: Meh+.
• Everdell: Finally increased my Geek Cred by playing this game. It’s good – I liked the system of taking things at your own pace and deciding when to recall your workers. As cool as the tree looks, I can see that thing being very annoying. RATING: Yeah.
• Evergreen: From the designer of Photosynthesis, which is a game I disliked. And even though this is another tree game using a similar sun mechanism, I liked this one a lot more. Not quite as mean. RATING: Yeah.
• Faraway: A reverse scoring game where you’re going on a journey, then coming back to fulfill quests with things you have collected. It works really well, I wish I had gotten to play more. RATING: Yeah!
• Flamecraft: Dragons! The shops worked very well, but it felt like the game had a few too many parts for what was essentially a recipe fulfillment game. RATING: Yeah.
• Flyin’ Goblin: It was fun to catapult goblins. However, the game didn’t quite work for me. Part of the problem was probably that we got an important rule wrong, but I still don’t think it was quite my game. RATING: Meh.
• Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs: I still haven’t played the original Gloomhaven, but did play this tiny version for one player because my local library has a copy. It was fun, very small, but good. I’ll need to check it out again sometimes. RATING: Yeah.
• Green Team Wins: My mom always wants to be green, so we got her a copy of this for her birthday. I’m not much of a party game guy, but this one does the “game” part pretty well. RATING: Yeah.
• The Guild of Merchant Explorers: This game is VERY BEIGE. But I really liked it. It’s another one I got from the library, and has some really clever mechanisms. It’s almost, but not quite, multiplayer solitaire. RATING: Yeah!
• Home Alone: It’s a one vs. all game, and works pretty well thematically. It seems pretty heavily weighted towards Kevin, which makes sense, but can be frustrating. RATING: Meh+.
• Imperial Settlers: Got this in a math trade. I’ve only played solo so far, but I’ve enjoyed what I have played. It’s not terribly complicated once you figure out the basic mechanisms. My biggest problem with the game is that the text on the cards is very small. RATING: Yeah.
• LANTERN: Another print-and-play. There are some very interesting things going on here, and it was surprisingly strategic for a quick dice-roller. RATING: Yeah.
• The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth: This LOTR themed version of 7 Wonders Duel is really good, the components are just weaker than I was hoping for. RATING: Yeah!
• Make That Most Magnificent Thing: A kid’s game about building contraptions. Actually, I shouldn’t say game – it’s an exercise in creativity, but there’s not really any game in there. You’re just grabbing pieces, putting something together, showing it off, then arbitrarily assigning ribbons that don’t count for points and maybe don’t carry over from round to round? The rules are very vague. RATING: Bleah as a game, meh as an activity.
• Meadow: A drafting game about building up your meadow. I really enjoyed it – there are clever mechanisms, nice art, and a pretty good solo mode. RATING: Yeah!
• Monumental: A big, beautiful civilization-themed deck-building game with a modular board. There’s a lot to do on a turn, which can lead to a lot of downtime. Many moving parts, but overall enjoyable. RATING: Yeah.
• Mountain Goats: I had played this previously on yucata.de, but had my first physical play, so I’m counting it. It’s a very simple push-your-luck kind of game with dice and goat. It’s fun. RATING: Yeah.
• Noodle Knockout!: This is my son’s game. It’s got a good dexterity element to it, but not much game. RATING: Bleah.
• Oh My Pigeons!: This is really not my kind of game. Too much take that, too random. The pigeons are cute and the game is quick, but that’s about it. RATING: Bleah!
• River Valley Glassworks: A pretty set collection game with glass floating down a river. The scoring concepts are a little tough to get your head around, but it’s fun. RATING: Yeah.
• So Clover! I’m still not one for party games, but this was good. The deduction here is excellent. I’d classify it as more of an activity than a game, but it’s solid. RATING: Yeah.
• Spots: Probably my biggest surprise of the year. This is a dice rolling recipe fulfillment style game where you’re just trying to fill in the spots on your dogs. Different actions every game, and it produced one of the best in-jokes my family has had this year (Doog is Doog). RATING: Yeah!
• Super Mega Lucky Box: Basically Bingo with more strategy. There’s not much else to say for it – I like it more than Bingo. RATING: Yeah.
• Switchbacks: A small and light placement game where you’re just trying to get numbers in a row. It’s fairly simple, and a good quick game. RATING: Yeah.
• Tales of the Arthurian Knights: This updated version of Tales of the Arabian Knights moves the system to the Arthurian legend. It’s much more forgiving than the original with longer stories. It also has a cooperative mode, which is exclusively how we play it. RATING: Yeah!
• That’s Not a Hat: A party game that’s about memory. It’s very simple, and I can see how people who like party games might like it. Not for me. RATING: Bleah.
• Tiny Epic Galaxies: This is only the second Tiny Epic game I’ve tried, and I was able to check this one out from the library. I’ve only done the solo mode, and I liked it, though it took me a bit to get my head around the rules. RATING: Yeah.
• Trailblazers: Another library game that’s about building trails. It’s very puzzly and takes some luck to get to your goals. My wife really disliked it, but I enjoyed it. RATING: Yeah.
• Trogdor!! Probably my second biggest surprise this year. I am very familiar with Homestar Runner and TROGDOR!!, but had never had a chance to play this game before. It was honestly kind of a dumb game, but fun. There’s a lot of luck involved. RATING: Yeah.
• Urbion: Never played the original game, but the second edition is out now and I enjoyed it. It’s a game about balance, and very well implemented. RATING: Yeah!
• We’re Doomed: A game about trying to escape the end of the world. I will say this game was pretty funny, but in the end, it’s just too mean and lucky for me. RATING: Bleah.
• Wingspan Asia: A 1-2 player version of Wingspan. It adds an interesting new layer to the system with the duet board. My biggest complaint is that there weren’t enough eggs. Only played once, I need to explore some more. RATING: Yeah.
• Wordsnap: Scrabble, but with interlocking tiles and no board. It’s a good puzzle for people who like word puzzle, but I don’t know that it adds too much more to the genre other than the components. RATING: Meh.

And now, on to the nominees for this year’s Spiel des Jesse. Long time fans may know the criteria already, but here it is again for anyone new to this space: any game is eligible for the award if I played it for the first time during 2025, and as long as I played it at least twice. This cuts out a few games that probably would have made the nomination list, including Daybreak, River Valley Glassworks, and Everdell, among others. From the games that were eligible, here’s my shortlist:

• Canvas (2021; designed by Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger; published by Road to Infamy Games)
• The Guild of Merchant Explorers (2022; designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert; published by AEG)
• The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth (2024; designed by Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala; published by Repos Production)
• Meadow (2021; designed by Klemens Kalicki; published by Rebel Studio)
• Spots (2022; designed by Alex Hague, Jon Perry, and Justin Vickers; published by CMYK)
• Tales of the Arthurian Knights (2024; designed by Eric Goldberg and Andrew Parks; published by WizKids)

This was a tough year to decide – all of these are great games, but I don’t know how much any one of them stood out over the others. Still, there can only be one, and I think that this year it will be…

I really like the drafting in Meadow, and the way the cards interact to form new combos and scoring opportunities. It’s a beautiful game, plays well multiplayer and solo, and I like it a lot. So, that’s my pick, and it joins Argent: The Consortium (2014), Colt Express (2015), Burgle Bros (2016), Clank! (2017), Azul (2018), Rhino Hero Super Battle (2019), Roll Player (2020), The Isle of Cats (2021), Mandala (2022), Fantasy Realms (2023), and Lost Ruins of Arnak (2024) in the exclusive club of previous Spiel des Jesse winners.

Time to crawl back into my hole. Thanks for joining me for this annual recap. Right now, I plan to come back in June or July to do my annual Spiel des Jahres picks, but who knows. Thanks for reading!

On October 4, 2010, I published my first post here on Boards and Bees – my overview of a then-upcoming game I was excited about, 7 Wonders. Now, 15 years and over 1200 posts later, here we are.

Seems about as good a time as any to announce my retirement. Effective immediately, Boards and Bees is done.

This blog was actually my third. The first two were OK, but I eventually found myself needing to hit the reset button and try again. This is the one that finally stuck, and it grew out of my desire to talk about board games when there weren’t many people around to talk about them with. I was still relatively new to the world of board games, having only been really interested in hobby games for about three years (my BGG birthday is August 30, 2007). I found myself fascinated by what was coming out, and found that a good way to really decide if something needed to be on my personal radar was to write about it.

I started out just writing about games I was interested in. That grew into writing reviews, and later into making lists, looking at Kickstarter, and other things. And I had a lot of fun doing it. I got overwhelmed a few times and needed a small reset to get myself going again.

And then came COVID. A lot of things changed in 2020. One big thing for me was that we had our second baby, but even before that happened, I found myself pulling back from the blog. Burnout was starting to affect me, and I started giving myself permission to take breaks. Those breaks have come more and more frequently. Eventually, I stopped taking on reviews. It was just something I wasn’t feeling passionate about anymore. I still love playing games, and playing new ones, but I’ve found myself less excited about trying to wade through the onslaught of new stuff every year, and have mostly been just enjoying playing the stuff I have.

Around mid-August of this year, I realized that I hadn’t posted in over a month. And I also realized that I didn’t really miss it. Which then led to the realization that it was probably time to hang up my spurs and ride off into the sunset on whatever metaphorical form of conveyance might apply here.

Back when I first started, video wasn’t nearly as big as it is now. YouTube itself had only been around for five years, but there were really only a few people doing videos. There was of course the godfather, Scott Nicholson and his groundbreaking series Board Games With Scott, and Tom Vasel had been transitioning out of doing written reviews into his more well-known video format for the Dice Tower (which wasn’t nearly the empire it is now). There were a few others, but now it is not only the most common format, it seems like it is the most preferred. And I understand it – videos are a great way to convey visual information about games, and see the games in action rather than just play them.

With the rise of video came the decline in readership. It used to stress me out – at my height, I was getting 100-200 views a day, and now it’s a good day if I can break 20. And I know there are other blogs out there with higher readership – I just don’t have the time or resources to make this into a destination site. It has always been a one-man operation on a free site I opened. I did eventually stop caring about it – I’m just putting my voice out there into cyberspace, and whoever stumbles upon it is welcome to peruse my content.

I have experimented with some video content in the past (in particular for Argent: The Consortium and Impulse). They were hard to do, even in the rough format that I was attempting, so I have a lot of respect for the people that can take the time to put together video content and make it look good. I’ve thought about trying some more in my retirement, possibly in a TikTok format, but who knows. I may just rest on my laurels for a while.

OK, let’s wrap this up. It’s been a genuine pleasure to write this blog for the last 15 years. I’m not removing it – it will stay here as long as WordPress leaves it up. I may even drop in every now and then to do a post. I’d still like to do my annual best new-to-me games, and I don’t think I can just quite on an 0-3 year with Kinder-Kenner-Spiel des Jahres predictions, so I may be back for that. But I wouldn’t expect much else.

If you’re interested in contacting me for whatever reason, I’ll leave the contact form open at the top of the page. Otherwise, my username is asutbone on BGG, and you’re welcome to reach out to me there. I welcome all comments, unless you’re a robot. You know who you are.

Hey, thanks so much for being there for me over the last 15 years. And I think I’ll close this out with my traditional closer from the very early years of the blog…

Insert clever tagline here.

I live in Colorado, which is home to fifty-eight 14ers. What is a 14er, you ask? It’s a mountain that rises over 14,000 above sea level. We have the most 14ers in the United States, and they’re very popular with hikers who want to test their skills. And now there’s a game about them!

14ers is an upcoming 1-4 player game designed by Zach Sullivan to be published by Grazing Bear Games. It’s a card game where players are trying to build their hiker’s skills by conquering 14ers. The game is coming to Kickstarter in October.

The game comes with 60 tarot-sized. 39 of these are climb cards, each showing a different peak and divided into Classes I-IV. These are all shuffled separately, then stacked with Class I on the top, followed by Class II, then III, then IV on the bottom. Three are drawn and placed in a line next to the deck. A random accolade is chosen, which gives a scoring condition for the player who gets the most of a particular thing. Each player gets a hiker card, and you’re ready to play.

On your turn, you’ll first revel a new climb from the deck so there are four to choose from. You’ll then choose one of the cards based on how many boots and axes you have versus the requirements of a card. Some cards have hazard requirements, which are just an extra condition you have to meet beyond boots and axes. You’ll then tuck your chosen card under your hiker, but you tuck it in such a way that only one side is visible.

• If you tuck it under the bottom of your hiker, you’ll be using it as a training card, which will give you more boots and axes to use on other cards.
• If you tuck it on the left side of your hiker, it’s now gear which gives you extra benefits and rule breaking abilities.
• If you tuck it on the right side of your hiker, it’s now a plan that gives you extra point-scoring opportunities.
• If you tuck it under the top of your hiker, it’s a capstone that scores a flat number of points.

If you really want a card and can’t afford it, you can always discard a previously taken card to hire a guide. This allows you to ignore one requirement of a card – either all boot and axe requirements, the hazard condition, or the current weather effect (if you’re playing with weather cards). Guides are put in a personal discard pile, because those with cameras get you an extra point at the end of the game.

The game last nine rounds, which means each player will end up taking nine cards. Then you will score – determine the winner of the accolade points, then add all the points you got from plans, capstones, and camera guides. The player with the highest score wins.

There is a variant of the game where a different weather effect takes place each round. These could make climbs harder by increase their cost, block certain sides from adding climbs, or do nothing. The game also has a solo variant with an automated hiker you’re competing against, and more advanced hiker options.

As I mentioned, I do live in Colorado. I’m not a native (but, as the bumper stickers say, I got here as fast as I could). I’ve also never done a 14ers – not in NEARLY good enough shape for that. But I am really glad to see a game about these fabulous mountains, and was really excited to check it out.

My play of this game was on Tabletop Simulator rather than with a physical copy, so I can’t speak entirely to component quality. The art was nice, being provided by Hinterland Outdoors, a company that makes all kinds of gear based on the Colorado 14ers. Graphic design seemed pretty good, though it’s really hard to tell on TTS with all the zooming in you have to do. It can be a challenge to design stuff in this type of tableau building through tucking game, but I think things are laid out pretty well. The game comes with some cards that can be used to help track how many boots and axes you have available, and though these are optional, they can be helpful.

Thematically, I think the game makes a lot of sense. I think it’s important to realize that the game is not about climbing 14ers, it’s about upgrading your hiker so you can summit the harder peaks. You’re basically gaining experience with each climb, and that gives you more skills you need to finish off the Class IV beasts. The only thing that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me thematically is the weather variant. I’m not saying weather isn’t a factor in summiting a 14ers, because it absolutely is. I am saying that it’s a little strange that you know exactly what the weather will be for every round (which is apparently over the course of two months). Having lived in this state for nearly nine years at this point, I can say with absolute certainty that only thing predictable about Colorado weather is how unpredictable it is. This variant might be a little better thematically with a weather deck of some kind (possible expansion idea there).

The game has fairly simple mechanics. Basically, on your turn, you draft a climb card, then you tuck it somewhere on your hiker. You have to decide whether you want it to improve your hiker (training or gear), or for points at the end of the game (plans or capstones). It uses a tucking mechanism based on games like Glory to Rome and Innovation, which are two of my favorite games so I’m all for that. All four sides of the card have the potential to do something different, and where you tuck the card determines which side is visible and will activate.

With being able to include four uses of each card, the game has a very minimal aesthetic, which again is a good thematic choice – one thing I know about hikers is that they don’t want to carry any more than they absolutely need. As such, this game doesn’t take up a lot of space either on the table or in your pack. It’s a tableau builder, but not one of the sprawling ones like Race for the Galaxy. Your tableau is your hiker, and all the cards are getting tucked under him/her. Plus, you’re not going to have more than ten cards with your hiker by the end (and possibly fewer). Card count is low, with only 39 climbs included. All in all, it’s a nice small game.

Luck is going to play a role in the game as you don’t know exactly what climbs are going to come out and when. All cards are used in the four player game, but not with fewer, so you don’t know precisely which cards are in play. And because they come out in random order, it’s hard to strategize in advance. At least you know that the Class I cards will come out before the IIs, and so on, so you can work on building however you wish to prepare. Still, luck of the draw can affect things.

The game is quite light. Mechanics are easy to understand, the game plays quickly, and the strategy is fairly light. It makes sense for the kind of game it is. I do wonder about long-term replayability, but it’s a game that presents itself different depending on how the cards come out, so I don’t think that would really be an issue.

IS IT BUZZWORTHY? I enjoy 14ers as a quick and light experience. It’s really nice to have a game about some of the stunning topography in Colorado, and I think the game works very well. If you’re looking for a quick small-footprint tableau builder, I’d say check it out. The game should be going up on Kickstarter in October, so check out the page and follow to know when it goes live.

Thanks again to Zach Sullivan for guiding me through a playthrough, and thanks to you for reading!

It’s the fiftieth post in this Off the Shelf series, where I look at games on my shelf. And today, it’s time for

Park and Shop is a game designed by Donald Miller and first published by Milton Bradley in 1952. You can play with 2-6 players, and the object of the game is that you have a shopping list that you need to complete before you head home. The first player that does wins.

This was my grandparents’ game. When I was a kid and would visit them, I would often pull this out, set it up, and play by myself. There aren’t solo rules and I wasn’t really playing to win, I just wanted to play. I enjoyed walking around the city, shopping, and seeing how fast I could go through every card in the game. I had fun. When they passed, the game was part of my inheritance. It’s still on my shelf. I hardly ever pull it out because, if I’m being honest, it’s not really a very good game. But it scores high on nostalgia.

The game is played on a big square board, but I’m happy to report that it’s NOT a simple Monopoly ripoff. There’s not one track to move around, but rather a bunch of rectangles representing the streets of this town. Each player starts the game with up to 7 yellow shopping list cards, but everytime we would play, we’d use the whole deck.

You start the game at your house, one of the spots around the edge of the map. You can pic your own spot, and usually you’ll be trying to pick on that’s relatively close to a parking lot. You’ll roll a die and move that many spaces until your car ends up in a lot. At this point, you switch to your pedestrian piece and start rolling two dice every time you want to move? Why? Well, it’s obvious – you roll one die in your car because it only has one engine, but you roll two while walking because you have two feet. I’m not even joking, that is the actual rule.

You’ll look at the top card of your shopping cards, then find it on the map. Sometimes, there are several locations scattered around, but other times, it’s just one. You’ll need to walk there. You don’t need to land on a shop by exact count, but landing there does end your turn. Other standard roll and move rules apply – no backtracking, roll doubles and get an extra turn, but roll three doubles and go to jail, that kind of thing.

There are a bunch of gray spots along your route, and if you land on one, you have to draw a pedestrian card. These can be good (take an extra turn, move directly to your next stop, etc.) or horribly bad (lose a turn, add extra stops to your list, etc). There is an extra turn space in the middle of the board, so you can aim for that if you’re in the vicinity.

Once you have completed all your shopping items, head back to your car. But oh no, even though you were parked in a clearly marked lot, you have received a parking ticket! The parking tickets aren’t really penalties, just an extra task you have to do before heading home. So you’ll drive to that stop (using only one die) and drawing motorist cards for landing on those gray spaces.

Once that’s complete, you can head home. But even though you don’t have to land on shops by exact count, you DO have to land on your home by exact count. That means you can be in the space right next to it, but if you can’t roll a one, you’ll just be sitting there suffering until you finally get lucky enough to park in your own garage. The first one to do so wins.

There is a variant of the game I never played with that uses money – you actually have to pay for stuff. You start the game with $150, and every time you buy something or go somewhere that you’d have to pay, you roll dice to see how much it cost you. With this variant, you can go broke before the game is over because there’s no way to make money.

This game has a lot of problems. First, it’s roll and move, which is definitely an out-of-style mechanism these days. One person is rolling 12s and 11s to get next door while another is rolling 3s and 4s to get all the way across the board. There’s no skill, it’s really all just about rolling better and drawing better. The money variant doesn’t add any choice, just adds the possibility of getting randomly eliminated.

Another big problem is that the game is VERY dated. There’s a cool retro look to it, but some of the cards…

But still, I love the IDEA of this game. It’s a big shopping map, and the idea of moving around from store to store to get what you need is fun. It’s a lot better than just endlessly moving around a track, and I think that with some tweaking, this idea has legs today. Maybe set it in a mall with different obstacles around (survey takers, disruptive youths, security, mall walkers, etc), and you have to visit different stores. I don’t know. But the game concept works for me, it just fails in execution.

My enthusiasm for the game has everything to do with nostalgia, I know. If I hadn’t grown up with it, I’d probably laugh it off and never think about it again. But, it is an extremely important game to me – I even listed it in my old list, The Eleven: Games That Turned Me Into A Gamer. Nevertheless, objectively, I have to put it at #49 on my Off the Shelf rankings. (You may notice that it’s still above Apples to Apples. )

Anyway, that does it for this edition of Off the Shelf. Thanks for reading!

It’s been a long time since I did a Game Buzz post, but when your favorite board game designer is releasing his first original board game in eight years, you post about it. So, here’s my look at

Severton is an upcoming board game to be published by Albi that was designed by none other than Vlaada Chvátil. It’s his first board game since 2017’s That’s a Question – everything since then has been expansions or reskins of existing titles. In fact, I think it’s hist first non-party game since 2013’s Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends. The game is for 1-5 players, and is based in the world of Rychlé šípy, which is a Czech series I know nothing about. It apparently follows a group of young friends who have adventures together. Severton is a cooperative game, where players are taking on the roles of these youths to discover the secrets of Severton, a neighborhood in Prague that is ruled by Vonts.

The game comes with five scenarios, which progressively add new mechanisms. However, the rules do specify that you can replay them as much as you want because you’ll be making different choices each time to create a new experience. Additionally, there will always be five characters in the game, with some people controlling multiple characters in games with fewer players.

The game is played on a board, which the characters will move around. The five characters always start in a particular spot, but where they go from there will be up to the players. Additionally, there are ten progress boards in the game, two for each scenario. These are set up end to end, and you can change the difficulty of the game by flipping them to reveal more stars for a harder game. The left side of the board is reserved for the Vonts cards (group and movement). Some of these will be dealt out facedown, and Vont tokens will start in random spaces on the board. There is also an action deck from which each player will get four cards (some scenarios also give you other cards). The scenario will also direct you to set up a quest deck.

In the upper left corner of the map, there is a dial. This is used to track the phases of play, with a token moving clockwise as each phase is completed. This will continue until you win (or lose). There are seven phases: Actions, Vonts, Quest, Unrest, Vonts Refresh, Players Refresh, and Quest Replenishment.

1. ACTION: During this phase, you’ll be playing action cards to move and explore. Players can take turns in any order throughout the phase, taking a turn whenever it makes sense. There are two types of actions:
   • Move: There are 22 marked spaces on the board, and paths of different colors connecting them. To move along a path, you simply play a card of the matching color. Other characters can move with you by playing any card (color doesn’t matter for this). A character can make a maximum of two moves per action phase.
   • Explore: If you play a card with the flashlight symbol (purple or wild cards), you take an Explore action. You can use this to discover a secret passage, or to investigate Vonts that are within two movements of you. This reveals their Group and Movement cards.
   • Additionally, each character has a special ability which can only be used during this phase.
2. VONTS: During the Vonts phase, you’ll activate each group by first revealing their movement card, move them, and discarding the card. They’ll follow paths just like the characters do. Vonts can’t end on a space with other Vonts (and will regroup if they need to), but they can land in spaces with characters. If this happens, a Vont encounter occurs – reveal their Group card and resolve the encounter by fighting, outwitting, or hiding. Or getting caught, but try not to do that.
3. QUEST: Here, you’ll be looking at any revealed Quests and following their instructions.
4. UNREST: During this phase, the Unrest token advances two spaces. If it reaches the end, the game is over. It may cross certain symbols that trigger different actions, like adding more Vonts or giving players an extra move the next round.
5. VONTS REFRESH: Draw new facedown movement cards for each Vont group and deploy any that have not been sent to the board.
6. PLAYERS REFRESH: Players who were caught come back to the board, and all players draw new action cards.
7. QUEST REPLENISHMENT: Draw new quests to replace any that were completed. This doesn’t happen in Scenarios 1 or 3.

If you complete your objectives, you win! If not, you lose. And that’s pretty much it.

Not really knowing the source material for the game, I don’t think I can really comment too much on the theme. My interest in this game exists solely because of Vlaada Chvátil. And I do think it looks pretty interesting – it’s cooperative and scenario based, which he has done well at in the past. It seems like a game that would be pretty fun to explore, with all the different Vont groups and characters and scenarios. The rules seem fairly straightforward and basic, and with no knowledge of what the scenarios entail, I don’t think I can make a judgment call of how they play out. But, I am a Vlaada fanboy, so I feel like I can trust his designs, even if it has been a while.

I look forward to hearing people’s reactions when the game comes out, which should be at Spiel in October. But that’s it for me today, so thanks for reading!

And, we’re back! Here with another edition of Off the Shelf, let’s look today at

FUSE is a 2015 game designed by Kane Klenko and published by Renegade Games. It’s for 1-5 players, and is a real-time dice-rolling game where you are trying to defuse bombs in your spaceship within ten minutes. There are several games in the FUSE family now – along with the original, which got a new edition in 2019, there’s Flatline (2017 – this one is about saving patients injured in the original game’s attack) and FUSE Countdown (2023 – this one adds new stuff to the FUSE system, including multi-colored dice and roles).

At the start of the game, each player gets two cards (four in the solo game). You’ll then deal cards into a deck based on the number of players and desired level of difficulty, and shuffle them. Deal out five face-up cards, and then add six bomb cards to the deck.

There are no turns in this game. You start a ten minute timer (and Renegade has one on their app that will mock you throughout play) and start drawing dice – one per player in a 3-5 player game, four with two players, three in solo play. These are rolled, and each player will take one (two with two players, all in solo play). The chosen die (or dice) must be placed on a valid spot on a card. Most spots either have a specific number, a specific color, or both. Some have number or color of your choice, but these usually have to be identical (or not) to something else on the card. Sometimes you just need to place dice on the card, but other times you need to stack them into columns or a pyramid.

If you cannot place a die, you must roll it, then you must remove another placed die that matches the number or color of the rolled die. Once everyone is done, unused and discarded dice go back in the bag and you do it again.

When a card is completed, it is set aside into a score pile and you take a new one from the array in the center of the table. This card is immediately replaced with the top card of the deck. If it’s a bomb card, all players must discard a die that matches the number or color of the bomb card. The card then goes into the score pile and is replaced.

The game ends in two ways – either all cards are removed from the center of the table (deck is empty, all face-up cards are taken), or you run out of time and blow up. Either way, you score the points from your defused cards, two points per bomb card, ten points if you won, and one point per 10 seconds left on the clock. This is just for reference purposes to see how well you succeeded – you win if all bombs get defused.

I got my copy in 2016, winning it in some Twitter contest that I don’t remember. According to my logs, I’ve played it 53 times since then, most of which were solo. In fact, I’ve only played a couple of times with multiple people, and neither of them were terribly successful. There were too many times when players started bickering over dice they needed when someone else also needed them, and that wasted too much time. That led me to the conclusion that I much prefer it as a solo game, where I get to make my own decisions and am not beholden to others. Though I would like to try two players sometime.

The game is played in real-time, which is a turnoff for some people. It is highly stressful, as you only have 10 minutes to complete your bombs. And if you’re not rolling well, it can be pretty frustrating. But that’s part of what I really like about it – I think the tension works really well, and it ends up feeling like a really quickly played puzzle.

I happen to really enjoy real-time games. But I know there are a lot of people who don’t – the tension of not being able to pause and think can be highly stressful. For me, it works well. I love thinky games where I need to consider my options and make a reasonably educated move. But I also like chaos, and nothing says chaos like “you only have ten minutes before your ship explodes.”

The cards are pretty well laid out. The patterns are pretty easy to identify, and the dice fit in all the squares on the page. I do really like the 3-dimensional patterns as well as the 2-dimensional ones, because you have to be thinking about what has to come first. The bomb cards add an extra wrinkle to the game, and while it’s a sigh of relief when one comes up and you have nothing that matches, it’s pretty frustrating to discard something when they do.

Overall, the game is pretty high on the luck factor. You have to draw the right dice, roll well, and complete whatever challenges the game throws at you. You can try to strategize what bombs you want in front of you, maybe having a mix of easier and more complex patterns, but if only one or the other is coming out, you’ve got to deal with it. I personally love the 6-point bombs, as they always stack and are just a lot of fun to complete overall.

So, yeah, this is a favorite game of mine to play solo. I’m doing it as part of my 10×10 this year (ten games ten times each in a year), and have been enjoying it. I’ve lost more than I’ve won, but I always have a good time. I’ve currently got it at #5 for my Off the Shelf rankings.

That’s it for today! Thanks for reading!

It’s that time of year again – time for the des Jahres awards! These are a set of awards given to the German game of the year. The Spiel des Jahres (family game of the year) has been around since 1978, with the Kinderspiel (childrens game) being officially added as an award in 2001, and the Kennerspiel (connoisseur’s game) being introduced in 2011. Despite being only one of a myriad of awards out there, these tend to be the most like the Oscars and get the most scrutiny from the hobby game community. Every year since this blog started, I’ve done an annual rundown of the titles nominated and given my predictions, and I’m 22-16 overall with my picks. Last year, I broke my three year streak of getting all three winners correct as I only got the Kinderspiel right, so let’s see if we can get back on track this year.

I’m 6-4 overall with my Kinderpiel picks, which I only started picking in 2015. And here is how I’ve done over the years:

• 2015: Spinderella (correct)
• 2016: My First Stone Age (I picked Leo)
• 2017: Ice Cool (correct)
• 2018: Dragon’s Breath (I picked Panic Mansion)
• 2019: Valley of the Vikings (I picked Go Gecko Go)
• 2020: Hedgehog Roll (I picked Foto Fish)
• 2021: Dragomino (correct)
• 2022: Magic Mountain (correct)
• 2023: Mysterium Kids (correct)
• 2024: Magic Keys (correct)

You’ll notice that I have gotten the Kinderspiel winner correct the last four years in a row. We’ll see if we can keep that streak up this year. Without further ado, here are the nominees!

Cascadia Junior (Fertessa Alysse/Randy Flynn, Flatout/AEG) is a kids version of 2022 Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia. In the game, you’ll be drawing double hex tiles and adding them to your habitat. If you ever create a group of three animal icons, you’ll cover them up and draw a matching animal token, placing it on a panorama board (but not looking at it). Once everyone has placed 10 tiles, the game ends, and you collect habitat tokens for having groups of 3-5 and 6+ identical terrain groupings. You’ll then reveal all your tokens, add up the scores, and see who won.

It’s certainly not unheard of for the kids version of a game to win Kinderspiel – My First Stone Age and Mysterium Kids have both done it. And plenty have also gotten nominations – Taco Kitten Pizza got a nod last year. This one looks like an interesting distillation of the Cascadia rules, though I’m really not a fan of the hidden-from-everyone-including-the-player scoring. Still, it doesn’t look bad.

Le Clan des Souris (aka Die Mäusebande, Christoph Lauras, Débacle Jeux/Game Factory) is a game about collecting teeth, because apparently other cultures use a Tooth Mouse instead of a Tooth Fairy. A 3×3 (or, in a more advanced game, 4×4) grid is laid out, and players have to find animals on the tiles to collect their teeth. Before time runs out, as tracked by moons, players need to find different sizes of animals to collect their teeth. In the advanced game, there are monsters to be beaten, stuff to beat those monsters, and other bonuses/obstacles to discover.

This game is only available in French and German, but it seems like a fairly simple memory game. Memory games don’t tend to do well in Kinderspiel voting, but I have enjoyed seeing the different ways the mechanism is explored over the years. The three sizes of animals look like it really throws a wrench in just straight memorization. It looks fun.

Topp die Torte! (Wolfgang Warsch, Schmidt Spiele) is a game about building cakes. Each player starts the game with a unique base layer with a number of colored bars. You’ll also get a stack of 7 layers from which you’ll draw two. From those two, you’ll choose one to add to your cake, and you’ll pass the other. If the colored bars line between the tile you placed and the tile below it, you gain gems of those colors based on symbols present on the bars. Gems are placed in jars, which (when full) get you coins with points on them. After everyone has placed seven layers on their cake, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins.

This is a spatial game, where players really have to visualize where the layers will line up so they can get maximum gems. There is some luck in what you draw, as well as points from the coins. But the draft becomes the most important, as you have to pick both what you’re going to keep as well as what your neighbor will get. It looks like a pretty cool game.

My predictions for the winners are at the bottom of the post, but for now, let’s get to the granddaddy of them all, the Spiel des Jahres.

I’m 8-6 Spiel in my predictions for the Spiel des Jahres. Here’s how I’ve done over the years.

• 2011: Qwirkle (I picked Forbidden Island)
• 2012: Kingdom Builder (I picked Eselsbrücke)
• 2013: Hanabi (correct)
• 2014: Camel Up (I picked Splendor)
• 2015: Colt Express (correct)
• 2016: Codenames (I picked Imhotep)
• 2017: Kingdomino (correct)
• 2018: Azul (correct)
• 2019: Just One (correct)
• 2020: Pictures (I picked My City)
• 2021: MicroMacro Crime City (correct)
• 2022: Cascadia (correct)
• 2023: Dorfromantik (correct)
• 2024: Sky Team (I picked Captain Flip)

Captain Flip was the one pick I made last year where I was pretty certain I was correct, and then the jury went against tradition and picked the heaviest game nominated. I haven’t gotten to play Sky Team yet, and while I do think it looks very good, it’s still a surprise that a two-player game got picked for family game of the year. Anyway, I’m going to try to get back on the horse this year with my pick. Here are the nominees.

Bomb Busters (Hisashi Hayashi, Pegasus Spiele) is a cooperative game about being part of a bomb disposal squad. Each player has a rack of wires, and other players have to logically figure out what you have. On your turn, you can either do a solo cut, where you reveal two of your wires that have the same number, or a dual cut, where you ask another player if a particular wire is a number that matches one of yours. If they do, you both reveal. If not, you’re one step closer to blowing up. There’s equipment you can use to make your life easier, but the main goal is to find all the wire pairs before the bomb detonates.

This game kind of gives me Hanabi vibes as players are trying to logically figure out which stuff to reveal without having it all blow up in their faces. It also gives me a little bit of The Crew, as there are a ton of missions in the box to keep things interesting. And it looks like a pretty good logic puzzle style game with a slightly more intense theme than the cover art would suggest.

Flip 7 (Eric Olsen, KOSMOS/The Op) is a push-your-luck card game where you’re trying to score points by taking unique cards. In a round, players will take turns deciding if they want to hit and take another card, or if they want to stop and just take their points. If they hit and get a number (0-12) that they do not have, they are safe. If they get a repeat number, they bust and are out of the round. There are also special action and modifier cards that could come up. When someone gets to 200 points, the player with the most points at the end of that round wins.

This is a pretty light card game that seems like a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoy light push-your-luck games, and this looks like a good one. It bills itself as “THE GREATEST CARD GAME OF ALL TIME” right on the cover, which is kind of off-putting to me, even if it is just a joke. However, the game does look fun and it’s one I’d like to try.

Krakel Orakel (Die 7 Bazis, frechverlag) is a party style drawing game where players are trying to get their fellow players to guess a drawing. The trick is, you’re drawing on a board that has a bunch of scribbles already printed on it, and you have to use those lines. Each player gets a word, then has two minutes to make their drawing on their board. Once everyone is done, the words get mixed with some dummies from the deck, and each player gets to vote on one word they think was not drawn by another player. If players can survive four rounds without losing too many points, they win.

I’m not a party game fan, and I don’t think this one would make a convert of me. I think it has a clever twist with the preprinted lines, but at the same time, I can see that being really frustrating and limiting for some people. Sculptors like to talk about seeing their sculpture in the medium before they start, and that’s something I think you’d have to do here. It looks like an interesting twist on drawing games, but it’s not one that I’m personally interested in trying out.

Before we get to my pick, let’s look at the Kennerspiel des Jahres.

I’m 8-6 in my picks for the Kennerspiel, which is awarded to a slightly heavier game each year. It’s typically not a heavy game, more like a next step up from the SdJ. Here’s how I’ve done:

• 2011: 7 Wonders (correct)
• 2012: Village (correct)
• 2013: Legend of Andor (I picked Bruges)
• 2014: Istanbul (I picked Rococo)
• 2015: Broom Service (correct)
• 2016: Isle of Skye (I picked Pandemic Legacy)
• 2017: EXIT: The Game (I picked Raiders of the North Sea)
• 2018: The Quacks of Quedlinburg (I picked Heaven & Ale)
• 2019: Wingspan (correct)
• 2020: The Crew (correct)
• 2021: Paleo (correct)
• 2022: Living Forest (correct)
• 2023: Challengers (correct)
• 2024: Daybreak (I picked Guild of Merchant Explorers)

I had gotten five in a row correct before I talked myself out of picking Daybreak last year. I have played both that and Guild of Merchant Explorers this year, and like them both. But it was indeed a case of the jury defying tradition again and picking a heavier game than they usually do. Still, I’m going to try to get to 6 out of the last 7 with this year’s pick. Here are the nominees.

Endeavor: Deep Sea (Carl de Visser/Jarratt Gray, Burnt Island Games/Grand Gamers Guild) is the latest game in the Endeavor line. The original Endeavor came out in 2009, and was a game of exploration and economics. The 2018 reprint (subtitled Age of Sail) updated the game and brought a whole new set of fans to the system. This sequel is about underwater exploration, and while it has similar mechanisms, it is a different game. Players will be performing actions on different tiles that will make up the modular board. These include diving, traveling, using sonar, and research. The game has a conservationist bent to it, and the goal is to score the most points as you explore and understand the deep sea better.

I’m not getting into all the mechanisms of the game because there are a lot of moving parts, and I’m trying to keep this at least relatively brief. But, it looks like a good sequel to Endeavor (I’ve played the original, but not the reprint) that takes the system in a different direction. I’d imagine that the third game might head to outer space, but who knows. I think this looks like a lot of fun, with my only hesitation being that I think it might have just a few too many moving parts for the Kennerspiel this year.

Faraway (Johannes Goupy/Corentin Lebrat, KOSMOS) is a game about taking a journey and completing quests. In each round, players will simultaneously add a card to their journey rows. Starting with the player who played the lowest number, they will then draft a new card to their hand. After eight rounds, players will score their journey. This is done by flipping all the cards face down, then revealing them one by one, starting from the end (i.e. the last card they played). Cards have different scoring conditions, including different symbols to collect and colors needed, and you can only score cards that have been revealed. So the first card you play won’t get scored until the end, while the last card you played will score before anything else has been flipped. The player with the highest score wins.

Faraway is the only nominee from any of the categories that I have played. It’s a very interesting game that takes a little thinking to get your head around the concept. There’s a lot of thinking in the game, especially at the start as you figure out your strategy going forward. It can run long with higher player counts (my first game was with six players who kept getting very distracted), but it shouldn’t take too long once people understand the flow. I like it, and I think it’s a good nominee for this award.

Looot (Charles Chevallier/Laurent Escoffier, Gigamic/Game Factory) is a Viking themed game where you’re pillaging the land to build up your own community. Players are placing Vikings on a shared board to collect resources and building to put on their own board. The different buildings have different rules for capture. There are also different Longships you can get that will give you more points, and these have resource requirements to make them operational, and will lose you points if not completed. In the end, when all Vikings have been placed, the player who has the most points wins.

Looot seems like a pretty interesting puzzly game, as you’re trying to figure out the best way to get resources and buildings. That you’re picking up stuff from a shared board is interesting, especially that your Vikings don’t have to be adjacent to your own Vikings, which means you need to b mindful of what others need and try not to make it too easy for them. It seems like a pretty good game that, due to the title, I might have skipped over looking at had it not been for the nomination.

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OK, it’s time for my picks. For the Kinderspiel, I’ve been waffling between two choices. My general guiding principle is to pick the one with the dexterity element, but none of these have one. Memory games don’t tend to do well in voting, so I’m not going with Les Clans des Souris. That leaves Cascadia Jr and and Topp die Torte. After much deliberation, I’m going with…

This is a weird pick for me because I think it’s the game that I personally would be least interested in. However, at the same time, it’s the one that feels the most like a Kinderspiel winner. Topp die Torte looks really cool and interesting, but I can also see it being super frustrating for kids. I mentioned that memory games don’t tend to do well in KidJ voting, but Les Clans des Souris does have a great concept and looks like a pretty solid game. Cascadia Jr, despite having more randomness in the scoring than I would like, does have that light puzzle feel, nice art, and a panorama where you can build your own nature scenes. Also, it’s based on a popular board game IP, and those games do have a history of doing well (just since I’ve been doing my predictions, My First Stone Age, Dragomino, and Mysterium Kids have all won). So, I think it’ll be Cascadia Jr, though I’d be happy seeing either of the other two win.

On to my Spiel des Jahres prediction, and this is another one where I went back and forth between my choices. Ultimately, I think I’m going with

It was between this and Bomb Busters for me. Krakel Orakel seems like this year’s weird pick – the one that is interesting because it’s so quirky, but ultimately doesn’t have a shot. I ended up going with Flip 7 because I think it’s an easily accessible game that will really reach a lot of people who might not be that into gaming. While I think Bomb Busters looks great, I think the theme is probably going to turn a lot of people off. It coming the year after “avoiding a plane crash” was the theme probably doesn’t help. While Flip 7 does seem very small and simple for an SdJ winner, that’s my choice, and I’m sticking with it.

Time for the Kennerspiel prediction, and while I’m not 100% confident in my pick, I arrived at this decision quicker than the others. I’m going with

Faraway seems like the kind of game the jury will go for. Simple rules, the twist on scoring, and a fairly compact game make it seem like the clear frontrunner. Endeavor: Deep Sea and Looot seem like very good games, but just with a lot of moving pieces that might be kind of intimidating. I have played Faraway and haven’t played the other two, so maybe that’s my bias showing, but I’ll go with Faraway as this year’s Kennerspiel winner. If it doesn’t win, I think Looot would be my second choice, but I’m sticking with Faraway.

So, there’s my predictions. The award winners will be announced on Sunday at 6pm German time (GMT+2), so we’ll see if I managed to get it right this year. Thanks for reading!

EDIT: Well, that didn’t go well. For the first time since 2016, I’m 0-3. Topp die Torte won the Kinderspiel, giving Wolfgang Warsch his second dJ award – he’s now one step closer to the career Grand Slam, just need an SdJ. Bomb Busters won the SdJ, meaning that a cooperative game has now won 5 of the last 7 years. Endeavor: Deep Sea won the Kennerspiel, which was a surprise for me because I thought it would be a little too heavy. Between that and Daybreak last year, it seems the jury might be moving in a little bit of a heavier direction with these picks. Anyway, not a good year for me, so we’ll see if I can do better next time.

This edition of Off the Shelf is going to look at an odd little game called

oddball Äeronauts is a 2014 two-player game designed by Nigel Pyne, and published by maverick muse. It’s an in-hand game, where you are playing cards in an attempt to get your opponent to discard all of theirs. It has a steampunk theme to it, with two different factions included in the box. The game first caught my attention when it was on Kickstarter, and I got my copy shortly after it actually released. The game is no longer in print – I don’t think the publisher ever put anything else out, other than a sequel in 2015, and they aren’t in operation now.

Each player gets a deck of cards specific to their faction (Pirates or Pendragons). They also get a mercenary and two event cards. The decks are then traded, shuffled, and returned to their original owner. Players hold their deck in hand face up, and flip the bottom three cards face down. The deck is held with the top three cards splayed out as these are the cards available to be played.

In each round, one player is designated as the Leader. That player will choose a suit to lead – Sailing, Guns, or Boarding. These are listed in the upper left corner of the card. The opponent will then choose a suit, which can be the same or different. Players will then choose how many cards they want to play (1-3), and reveal this information simultaneously. Players will then add the main value from the suit they chose (the larger number) and add it to the support value from other cards they played (the smaller number with a +). The higher value wins. The winning suit gives a bonus – Sailing allows a player to recover two cards, which means they flip their first two facedown cards so that they are face up; Guns forces their opponent to discard two additional cards, meaning they are flipped facedown and moved to the bottom of the deck; and Boarding allows the player to recover one while the opponent discards one.

In addition to the Sailing, Guns, and Boarding values, each card has a trick. You can use the trick on your top card, which may give you a bonus for winning, increase the value of certain suits, or other benefits.

When one player has no face up cards remaining in their deck, their opponent wins.

What really makes this game stand apart is that it’s a game you don’t need a table for. It’s just cards, they’re all held in-hand, and this means it’s a game that you can play anywhere. Which is pretty cool. Each player’s deck consists of 29 cards – 26 faction cards, one mercenary, and two events – so they fit pretty well in-hand. The art is all steampunkily stylized, and it’s a good looking game.

The game boils down, basically, to War meets Rock-Paper-Scissors. Even that’s not entirely accurate as it only really bears a passing resemblance to RPS – there are three categories you can choose to fight in, and rather than one always beats another, it’s a case where you just have to compare strengths at that particular time. But still, this means that there is a lot of luck in the game. You can only play with your top three cards, your top card is always your main card, and the next two are always supports. There’s some tactics you can employ, such as trying to manipulate it so a certain card comes on top next, but you’re still at the whim of that initial shuffle. (Incidentally, I do really like how the game instructs you to have the other person shuffle your deck.) The manipulation becomes harder if your opponent is choosing a suit that will cause you to discard if you lose.

I like the flow of the game, where one person leads with a suit, then the other player chooses their response. Especially since the leader is the person who won the last hand, it gives the second player a chance to react to what they’re doing. Maybe tricks could be in play. The use of the term “trick” in the game always makes me think that this is some kind of trick-taking game. It’s not, the tricks are just little rule-breakers you can use to enhance your game. Their inclusion is pretty nice – it gives you something to consider other than just the numbers on your card.

I like the portability of the game, and the fact that it can be played all in your hand. However, in the end, there’s not a lot of strategy. Don’t get me wrong, there is some, but the choices are usually based on how you think you can get the highest score based on what’s in front of you. The game doesn’t require a lot of brain power, which is good, but at the same time, I feel like it should require a bit more than I get. That’s why I’m ranking this fairly low, currently at #43 on my Off the Shelf rankings.

I know I’ve kind of had some radio silence lately, but there’s been a lot going on with work and things. The next post I do will likely be my annual X des Jahres rundown. Thanks for reading!

Off the Shelf is back with another game off my shelf. This time, we’re looking at the first board game Kickstarter success story…

Alien Frontiers is a 2-4 player game first published in 2010 by Clever Mojo Games, designed by Tory Neimann. It’s a dice placement and resource management game about the colonization of a new planet, with zones named after different classic science fiction authors. When the game launched on Kickstarter in 2010, no other board games had really had any success on the platform. Alien Frontiers made over $14,000 on a goal of $5,000, which is wild by today’s standards. I did not get the game on Kickstarter, but I was aware of it shortly before it started delivering (it was the subject of my third post on this blog). The game has gone through a number of editions since its initial run, with a fifth edition and a big box released in 2017. I don’t know if there are rules changes from edition to edition, but I’ll be talking about my version.

The game is played on a board showing the surface of an alien planet, as seen here:

Each player starts the game with three dice, as well as one fuel token and one ore. On your turn, you’ll roll your dice and then distribute them to various spots around the board.

• You could place any die at the Solar Converter, which will turn a 1-2 into one fuel, a 3-4 into two fuel, and a 5-6 into three.
• You could place any die at the Lunar Mine to get one ore. However, the die you place must be greater than any other die there.
• You could place any die at the Alien Artifact to get rid of all the cards on display and see new ones. However, if the total of dice you place there equals or exceeds 8, you can take a card.
• You could place a pair of dice with the same value at the Orbital Market. This would allow you to convert fuel to ore at a rate of X:1, where X is the number on the dice you placed.
• You could place a pair of dice at the Shipyard, and spend fuel and ore to build a new ship. In other words, you’ll have another die to roll next turn.
• You could play a sequence of three dice (i.e. 1-2-3) at the Raiders’ Outpost. This would allow you to steal any combination of four resources from your opponents, or one card.
• You could place three identical dice at the Colony Constructor and spend three ore to place a colony directly on the planet.
• You could also just place a die at the Colonist Hub to advance a colony towards the end of its track. When it gets there, you can spend a fuel and an ore to place it.
• You could place a 6 at the Terraforming Station. This allows you to place a colony (at the cost of one fuel and one ore) on the planet immediately. However, that die is now lost to you – you’ll have one fewer to role next turn. You can always replace it at the Shipyard.

Each time you land a colony on the planet, you score a point, plus an additional point if you have control over the region you land in. If you ever lose that colony, or lose control, you lose the point. Control over a region gives you a special benefit, and that’s different from region to region.

The game continues until someone has placed all of their colonies. At that point, whoever has the highest score is the winner.

I got my copy of Alien Frontiers in 2011, so that’s the version I know. Future versions upgraded the colonies to be much fancier, but I like the little wooden lumps from the original (as seen in the picture above). The art has always had that retro pulp sci-fi look, and it’s cool that all the regions on the planet are named after influential sci-fi authors – Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, AE van Vogt, and so on. And the components are quite nice – it’s a well produced game.

The theme of colonizing a planet is good. It probably easily could have been an Earth-based colonial theme, though that probably would have proved to be more problematic these days. Since the dice are your “ships”, the theme does fall apart a little bit, but the look of the game really helps sell the theme.

This is a dice placement game, which was a genre that didn’t have too many entries before it – Kingsburg and Alea Iacta Est are the only ones listed prior to 2010 on BGG, with Troyes coming out the same year. There have been a bunch since then, but the mechanism was fairly novel for the time. And it’s still good, though I think it suffers somewhat due to a lack of variety in gameplay. The board is always set, the places you can send your dice is always the same, the regions on the board is always the same. The most variety the game gives you is in the tech cards, but even those feel a little samey after a while.

There are several other mechanisms in play. Resource management is a big one. Area majority comes into play with the planetary regions. And there’s some ladder climbing involved, as you need to beat what another player has placed somewhere in order to claim things – the Lunar Mine and the Raiders’ Outpost, in particular.

The game also has a fairly significant take that factor to it, which tends to leave a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth. It’s not just blocking spots other players might want to go to – there are ways to steal from them and mess up their plans. The tech cards are a big offender here, especially because they come out randomly. But my biggest problem comes with the Outpost, which is a set spot and allows you to steal all kinds of stuff. You can clog it up with a high straight that other players can’t beat, and when you claim your dice on the next turn, you could potentially end up doing the same thing again.

The scoring system is a little funky, though not really if you think about it. The way it is described is that you’re basically looking at a snapshot of where people are when you look at the scoreboard. It’s a dynamic thing – just because you have points doesn’t mean you will always have those points. Losing colonies and control of regions will bump you back, so you have to keep an eye on things.

It’s probably pretty obvious that I’m not the biggest fan of this game. I really want to be, but this has been the most disappointing game I’ve ever pulled out with people. I think the lack of variety hurts it, and the fairly obvious strategies mixed with the randomness of the dice. It took several games before I found anyone who enjoyed it, and by that time, I wasn’t really feeling it any more.

I will say, however, that I played once with the Factions expansion, and that made a world of difference in the game. It added special player powers, hidden agendas, and new orbital facilities. It made the game a lot more fun. I never got it, however – instead, I just have the basic game, and it’s fine. It’s not one that I’m dying to play, but it’s not bad either. I’m ranking it currently at #40 on my Off the Shelf rankings list.

That’ll do it for today. Thanks for reading!

Thanks to SD Toys for providing a review copy of this game.

It’s been a little while since I’ve gotten a review copy of a game – part of that is by design, it’s been really nice taking a break and not feeling the pressure of needing to write something up. But I’m still planning to do occasional reviews when someone reaches out to me, so here we go with

WordSnap is a 1-4 player word game published by SD Toys. It consists of 100 flexible, interlocking letter tiles in an octagonal tin. To set up the game, you just mix the tiles up face down, then each player draws eight. Players draw a tile and reveal, with the one closest to Z going first.

If you’ve ever played Scrabble, you know how this game plays – on your turn, you play a word of at least two letters and score the points listed on the letters. The first player plays in the middle of the playing surface, and all subsequent words have to build off something already out on the table. Because of the design of the tiles, you can build words horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Once you’ve played, you draw back up to eight tiles. You can always opt to use your turn to discard some tiles and redraw. Once all tiles have been drawn and someone is out, or if no more words are possible, the game is over. Players deduct tiles in their hand from their final score, and the player with the most points wins.

WordSnap is a very standard word game, and has a lot of similarities to Scrabble. And so, I’m going to frame this review by looking at what distinguishes it from that classic.

1. Scrabble has a board, WordSnap does not. Scrabble has a 15×15 board, which gives you 225 possible places to put words. That seems like a lot, but it can quickly get crowded when words get to the edge. WordSnap is only limited by the size of your table, and it will sprawl. The tiles are much bigger as well, so space can definitely be an issue. Still, I think the boardless nature of WordSnap is a good thing. Plus, it means you can build words diagonally, which is fun.
2. Scrabble pieces are subject to scattering, WordSnap pieces are not. If you bump the table while Scrabble is possible, it’s very likely that the pieces are going everywhere. Unless you have a board with an overlay to keep the tiles in place, and even then, a good knock would still mess things up. WordSnap has interlocking pieces, so that will never be a problem.
3. Scrabble games can be very long. So can WordSnap, though there is a Speed Mode. As the board (playing space) gets more and more words in both games, it can be difficult to decide what the best play is. WordSnap does have a Speed mode, where you can use their app timer as a kind of chess clock to time your turns. For that matter, there’s also a solo mode that’s basically just trying to play out all the tiles as quickly as you can. So, there is a way to speed things up. I would imagine serious Scrabble players also have rules like these in place.
   • It’s worth noting that the WordSnap app is really just a timer. I wish it also had the capability to keep score.
4. Both games reward large vocabularies. If you’re good at finding big words, you’re going to be better at both games. Or, if you’re better at word games in general, you’re going to do well. If your opponent is only making 3-4 letter words, and you’re consistently finding 5-6 letter words, you’re going to be doing better.
5. Both games have a significant luck of the draw factor, though WordSnap might have a bit more of it. If you’re drawing nothing but vowels, you’re going to have problems in both games. Letter distribution is very similar in the two games, though Q and Z are the only ones in WordSnap where there’s only one letter. WordSnap also has four wild tiles as opposed to two in Scrabble, and these are also the double word scorers. With Scrabble, you know exactly where the multipliers are and can strategize around them. In WordSnap, you draw them, so that increases the luck of the draw factor.

IS IT BUZZWORTHY? There’s nothing really new here in terms of gameplay. If you’re not really a fan of Scrabble, or games of that ilk, there’s not much here that would convert you. However, I do think the construction of the pieces makes this a worthy alternative to Scrabble. So if you’re looking for something that isn’t Scrabble, I’d give this one a look.

Thanks again to SD Toys for providing a review copy of this game, and thanks to you for reading!