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.

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!

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!

This edition of Off the Shelf will look at small deck-building game that I first learned through an app. It’s called

Star Realms is a 2014 two-player game designed by Robert Dougherty and Darwin Kastle, published by Wise Wizard Games (originally White Wizard Games, but rebranded in 2021). Dougherty and Kastle are champion Magic: The Gathering players, and had a goal to make an affordable strategy game. Star Realms is a space combat game where players are building their fleet and trying to blow their opponent out of the sky.

As with most deck-builders, players begin the game with a starter deck. In this case, it consists of eight Scouts (with one purchase power each) and two Vipers (one attack each). Players also get 50 Authority, which is their health for the game. It can be tracked using cards in the game, or on a piece of paper. The trade deck, which consists of 80 cards is shuffled and five cards are laid out in a trade row players can buy from. Additionally, some Explorer cards are set to the side, which can be purchased for 2 and give 2 purchase power (plus 2 attack if you trash them). The start player draws three cards from their deck, and the second player draws five.

On your turn, you can play all cards from your hand. Attack points go into an attack pool you can use against your opponent, while purchase points can go to buying new cards for your deck. Attack points can be split between any bases your opponent has in play and their Authority as you see fit. More on bases in a bit. When you purchase cards, they go directly into your discard, and you can buy as many as you want on a turn. Each card is immediately replaced on the trade row when you buy it.

Cards in this game come in four different factions: Trade Federation (blue), Blobs (green), Star Empire (yellow), and Machine Cult (red). If you play multiple cards of one faction, you often get a bonus – cards become stronger and do more damage, or give you more money, or let you draw cards, or give you other benefits. So it’s good to try to get cards from the same faction, but having cards from other factions is OK too. Some cards also have abilities that are triggered when you trash them from your deck. Then you don’t have the cards anymore, but you’ve got a powerful one-time blast of something to use.

Some of the cards are bases, and when played, they stay on the table. These can be attacked as normal, and each has its own defense. You have to completely destroy one for your attack to work, however – if you send three attack against a four defense base, it doesn’t do anything. Some bases are outposts, and these will absorb damage. In other words, you have to destroy them first before you destroy other bases or attack your opponents’ Authority. If you have attack left over after attacking one of these bases, it can be applied to another base, or even to the player themself (as long as they don’t have another outpost in the way).

When a player is done with their turn, they discard all cards played, all cards purchased, and any that might be left in their hand for whatever reason. Then, they draw a new hand of five and it’s their opponent’s turn. If there aren’t enough cards in their deck to draw five, they shuffle their discard and use that as the new deck. Play continues like this until one player has brought their opponent down to 0 Authority. They win.

I believe I got my copy of Star Realms for Christmas in 2014. I played the physical version a few times over the next few months, but I haven’t played the physical version since 2015. Most of my plays have come on the app, which I don’t count for play logs.

One of the best thing about Star Realms is its portability. It’s a whole game in a small package, just coming in a tuck box. It’s easy to carry around, and it’s just cards, so there’s nothing else to deal with. There are a good amount of cards in the box, and there are of course expansions if you just want more. I don’t have any of the expansions, but I might be interested in getting at least the ones that let me play solo sometime.

Gameplay is basic deck-building stuff. It deviates from the Dominion model in that you are allowed to play every card from your hand and buy as much as you want to. Also, it’s attack-based rather than VP-based, which makes more sense considering the theme here. But, other than that, you’re putting newly purchased cards into a discard pile, reshuffling that when your draw deck runs out, and trying to build synergies between the cards so you can do maximum damage.

The four suits of the game are really helpful in building combos, especially since a number of them have extra actions you can do if you play another card of that suit. And the suits all have general tendencies you can focus on. The Blobs are primarily focused on combat. The Star Empire is also combat-focused, and also have the benefit of making your opponent discard cards. The Trade Federation gives you money to spend. The Machine Cult helps you thin your deck. It’s likely that you won’t have a deck full of one of these types of cards, but it’s good to kind of focus on something so you have a better chance of triggering those extra abilities.

The Base mechanism in play here, where certain cards just stay out on the table, adds an interesting layer to the game. Especially because a lot of the bases act as shields, preventing the player’s main authority count from being attacked until they themselves are destroyed. Plus, these bases can be used to make combos, which makes them very strong and desirable to get out.

The game uses a trade row, which is another way it differs from Dominion – this is more like Ascension. It does lead to some luck of the draw – if you buy a card only to reveal something extremely good your opponent can snatch up on their turn, it can be frustrating. But, luck of the draw goes both ways.

Thematically, the game has a pretty good storyline behind it that I hardly ever think about. It’s red cards, blue cards, green cards, and yellow cards, and I’m just trying to hit my opponent as hard as I can while preventing them from hitting me. It’s a combat game, so you’re fighting, which never seems to bother me as much in a two-player game as with larger player counts – it doesn’t feel like you’re ganging up on someone, you’re just playing the game. And that’s fine.

I do like Star Realms a lot, and writing this up has me wanting to play it again. I’ve got it ranked #16 on my current Off the Shelf rankings out of the 46 games covered so far.

And that’s it for today. Thanks for reading!