I’ve been on quite the Vladimir Suchy kick lately. He’s a prolific board game designer that has had some hits and misses with me, but more often than not, I find joy in his games. As I said in my Suchy Round Up, a Suchy game is generally a tight economic euro game with an interesting action selection mechanisim. Praga Caput Regni, Woodcraft, and Underwater Cities are the best examples of this.
Shipyard, was one of Suchy’s first published designs, way back in 2009. In 2023, it was treated to a second edition, which, beyond a complete graphical overhaul, most of the gameplay mechanics remain intact, perhaps speaking to the strength of the design. But let’s hold off on our judgment until the end, shall we?
In Shipyard, players each manage a shipyard during the turn of the dawn of the industrial age. The demand for ships, both commercial and military, are only growing, so it’s up to you to build the best ships to accrue the most points to win the game.
I’m starting the review with this picture of the obscene amount of cardboard sprues that comes in the box. I don’t know who the cardboard engineer is over at Delicious Games, but they certainly make punching out a board game interesting. Not only are there 175 crew and equipment tiles, but there are also 100 ship tiles, a cardboard bit holder that you need to assemble, a cardboard crane to hold those ship tiles while you play the game, but Shipyard makes you embark on a DIY craft mission to achieve dual layer player boards, and to make the action tile queue and game timer gear work properly. And by that I mean there are thin cardboard frames that you need to use adhesive stickers to achieve dual layered goodness.
Personally, I usually quite enjoy punching out games and assembling things. It feels like cardboard Lego. But I certainly wasn’t expecting it, which is a bit of a damper when I show up to game night and the host is only just pulling the shrink wrap off the game. A bit of a barrier to get started if you’re hoping to squeeze your first play of Shipyard into a somewhat tight time slot.
As I said before, the action selection mechanism is novel at the very least. Each of the actions in the game sit in a queue, and on your turn, you place your cube onto one of the actions. For every cube that’s further left on the track compared to yours, you earn a single coin. Then at the start of your next turn, you pick up the tile that your cube is on, and slide it in from the right, turning the gear that tracks how long the game takes.
It’s a pretty elegant system, dynamically adjusting the value of the actions as players take actions and slide them down a track, instead of something more pedestrian like dropping a coin onto all the unused actions each round. The game timer wheel spins around, and the cube will fall into a little slot, telling you it’s time to take a cube out of the row. Around halfway through, you’re instructed to toss some of your endgame victory points. I quite like that you don’t have to commit to and endgame victory point condition until about halfway through the game. Really lets you pivot from one plan to another, depending on how the game is shaking out.
As I said before, in Shipyard, you are trying to build ships, and almost all the actions available to you are in service of that goal. One of the central boards has a large wheel with 4 rings, each one supplying players with a different resource or ability. 4 of the 8 actions correspond to those rings. Beyond that, you can take commodity tiles, which allow you to trade for the resources at ever so slightly more efficient rate than the ring actions, another just gives you two coins, which in my opinion is largely worthless. The last two actions are claiming a canal tile, and taking 1 to 3 ship tiles.
You use the canal tiles to build a personal stream next to your board that kind of functions as building your own personal victory point track. When you take ship tiles, and complete a ship (a ship is complete when it was a bow, 1 to 7 middle pieces, and a stern), at the end of your turn, your newly completed ship will have a shakedown cruise, where you’ll determine it’s speed, and have it sail down your personal canal, earning points for the crew and equipment on the ship when it sails onto specific icons on your canal.
The real weakness of this action selection system is the fact that the goal of the game is to build ships, and there is only one way to get ship tiles. When a player takes the ship tiles action, no one else can take it until after that player’s next turn, when they slide it all the way to the right of the queue. We quickly found that you simply cannot afford to skip that action when it’s your turn to take it. Ships are the only way to earn victory points in Shipyard, and while you may be tempted to delay taking ship tiles for one extra turn just to really optimize the ship you want to complete, but doing so means you’ll be locked out of the ship tile action for another 3 rounds.
All of this complaining about being blocked out of actions or having no good actions available to you, or money being useless, I should mention there is a bonus action you can take, where you spend 6 coins to take a second action on your turn, which can be any action, even the one you took last turn, or one that is currently covered by another players cube. That does alleviate my problems somewhat, but not by much. It feels bad to essentially skip your main action to earn coins, just to spend all the coins you earned on a ‘wild’ action next round, assuming everyone else’s cubes were to the right of the coins action. Perhaps that’s just my loss aversion kicking in.
Near the end of the game, you’ll likely have all the tools and equipment you require for your final ship, and you’re just waiting for your turn to take the ship tiles action. In my play, a few of us expressed that on our turn, there was literally nothing valuable worth doing. All the actions we wanted to take were occupied, and the ones remaining, like coins, felt like a waste, especially on your last turn. If you don’t have the money to take the wild action, your last turn, you can take money? Sure, it’s a consequence of your own poor planning, but at the end of the game, no one is going to be taking the resource voucher action, or the money action, and probably not the player power action, making the rest of the actions so much more valuable if they happen to be open when it’s your turn.
The actions of Shipyard are specific and narrow, which makes it a fairly easy game to teach, but it offers no wiggle room. If the Ship tiles action is covered, there’s no other way to take ship tiles. I’m reminded of Agricola, and how that game has various ways to get all the resources you may need. Sure, the space that produces 3 wood each round is going to be the one taken most often, but sometimes the 2 wood action can accrue over a few rounds to give out 6 wood. It has a natural balancing effect, making all the actions feel useful at some point in the game.
In the end, I don’t think Shipyard is a bad game by any stretch. I really liked the canal aspect where you create your own victory point track, and really maximizing your ship speed to land on the Blue Riband space as your last movement, doubling your speed points, and the end game victory points did seem to be fairly varied. I always like it when you get end game victory point conditions, but don’t need to pick until the game is underway.
But all that being said, I found Shipyard to be kind of boring. The actions are narrow and don’t offer any wiggle room. The action selection design is supposed to create a tension between a totally optimized ship and the availability of the actions, but to often it devolves into turns where any meaningful decision-making is totally absent. There’s ship tiles are slightly varied in the equipment mounting points and life preserving equipment, which can modify the points each ship is worth, but building ships is the only way to earn points, it’s less important to have exactly the right equipment, and much more important to just get a ship onto the water at all costs. There aren’t multiple paths to victory. If you’re not building ships, you aren’t earning victory points. The actions you take to achieve this are repetitive and boring, and on all of your turns, nearly half of the actions will be inaccessible to you. Shipyard is a game about building ships, so it stands to reason that building ships is the path to victory. But if that’s all there is, and everyone has an equal footing, the whole game is just about being slightly more efficient with your actions than your opponents, and lucking into the ship and canal tiles that synergies together well.
Shipyard is probably my least favourite Vladamir Suchy game I’ve played to date, which is a shame. But hey, not every game is for every person, and at least it makes Evacuation more likely to make it back to my table!
Last time I was a grumpy, old, curmudgeon. It was a change of pace that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Turns out, I don’t actually like complaining all that much. So this week I want to highlight some games that I really love, that I think are woefully underappreciated.
A high-speed puzzle ‘SHUMP’ wrapped in the aesthetics of a futuristic magical girl anime, Bullet♥︎ is one of the slickest, most replayable games I’ve ever played, as evident as its placement as #3 on my top 100 games of all time list
It’s a real-time puzzle game, where you drop bullets onto a grid based on colour and number, trying to match patterns before your board fills up. Every heroine plays differently, and the combinations of Heroines and Bosses provide near-endless variety. It plays fantastically solo or with friends, and the real time rounds keep the game moving at a decent clip.
There’s nothing quite like pulling out the perfect bullet you need to complete a pattern just in the nick of time, clearing space on your board and sending a cascade of bullets flying at your opponent. That moment when the round ends, and they look at the mountain of wood you’ve sent their way, it’s just a pure delight.
2. Le Havre: The Inland Port
BGG Rank: #1,729
Le Havre by Uwe Rosenburg gets plenty of plaudits. It’s revered by many a Uwe fan, even sitting in Tom Vassel’s #1 spot in his yearly Top 100 Games of all time lists in 2020 and 2021. Myself, I think it’s okay. It’s a bit big and unwieldy in my experience, but a great game none-the-less. What I am enthuasastic about, however, is the 2 player only spin off, Le Havre: The Inland Port.
The Inland Port features a resource grid, with 4 trackers on it. Players alternate taking turns building or using buildings, which sit on your own personal dial. As turns go by, the dials spin, powering up each of the buildings. When using a building, you can use your own for free, or throw a franc at your opponent to use their building. The buildings are mostly just different ways of getting more resources so you can build more buildings, but the resource grid has a fun spatial element to it. One building may move your wood marker up and to the left, but it’s useless to you if the marker is already bumped up to the left side.
Now Boarding by Tim Fowers turns the stress and mundanity of air travel into an utterly delightful real-time cooperative experience. As always, featuring charming artwork from Ryan Goldsberry, and featuring a fast-paced, real time, pick-up-and-deliver framework, players are tasked with juggling angry passengers, unpredictable weather, and the literal ticking clock as they shuttle travelers back and forth across the U.S. What starts as a breezy morning shift ramps up quickly, with passengers piling up and the best laid plans unravelling in real time as new passengers and their destinations are revealed mid-round. The game encourages tight communication and flexible thinking, and yes, sometimes ejecting a passenger mid-route because someone more convenient popped up.
No game makes a table look cooler by the end than Tokyo Highway. It’s part dexterity challenge, part spatial puzzle, and part architecture simulator.
You’re stacking and stretching tiny wooden roads on top of pillars, aiming to sneak under or over your opponent’s highways to place your cars. There’s a magical moment in every game where the roads twist into wild, impossible shapes and the table becomes a miniature cityscape of gravity-defying construction.
It’s easy to teach, hard to master, and packed with tension. Plus, it’s the rare abstract game that tells a story—not with words, but with the shape of the board by the end of the game.
This solo word-building roguelike is what happens when a word game, a deck-builder, and a dungeon crawler walk into a bar and actually hit it off.
You’re building words to defeat a series of enemies, collecting power-ups, levelling up your deck, and trying to survive until the final boss. Each playable character offers unique abilities, which means your strategy shifts dramatically from one run to the next.
The progression is satisfying, the mechanics are sharp, and the design is downright clever. It’s not just “a good solo game” — it’s a great game, full stop. And once it hooks you, it really hooks you.
Final Thoughts
Not every great game gets the love it deserves. Some are too niche, too chaotic, too quiet, or just fall between the cracks of hype cycles and hotness meters. But these five games prove that sometimes, everyone else is wrong.
So if you’re the type of person who stops looking at board games if they’re ranked lower than 500 on BGG, give these underrated gems a try. You might just find your next favourite game hiding behind a bad rank.
I have somewhat mixed feelings on games designed by Simone Luciani. I disliked Tzolk’in for quite a while before coming around to the side of appreciating its complexities. I find The Voyages of Marco Polo, and it’s sequel to be quite satisfying, but I fail to see the enjoyment in Grand Austria Hotel and Rats of Wistar. Nucleum was cool, and while I enjoy Lorenzo Il Magnifico, I’m also not going to be the first one to sing its praises (that’s Tim from Board Game Hot Takes‘ job). What ties all these games together is the fact they’re all medium to heavy Euro games with an emphasis on resource management. So when I heard he was involved with a lighter set collection game, I was intrigued. I’m always interested when designers step out of their comfort zone!
Mesos is a card-driven strategy game set during the Mesolithic era, where players take on the roles of early tribal leaders guiding their people through the transition from nomadic hunting to settled life. Mesos focuses on drafting cards from a shared market linked to turn order: taking more cards generally means acting later in the next round, creating a tradeoff between short-term benefits and long-term positioning.
Players build their tribes by acquiring character and building cards, some providing immediate effects (like food collection or discounts on buildings) or long-term benefits (such as a set collection engine that scores points at the end of game, or a discount when it’s time to feed your tribe). Central to the game are recurring event cards that test how well players have prepared their tribes over time, with increasing rewards and penalties.
The cards themselves are all fairly simple. Artists and Cultists are mostly for satisfying event cards, hunters let you gather more food the more you have. Gatherers provide perpetual food to feed your tribe, builders make the powerful building cards cheaper, and the engineers rack up points based on how many you have, and how many different symbols they display.
What really drives the tension in Mesos is the card market. New cards come into the top row, at a rate of the number players +4. At the end of a round, whatever cards are left over, flow to the bottom row. Players take turns moving their totem from the player order tile onto one of the card acquisition tiles. The further down the row they go, they more cards they’ll be able to take, and further still, the more opportunities they’ll have to pick from the new, upper row instead of the stale lower row. Once all players have placed their totem, from left to right players pick the cards they’re allotted, and go back onto the player order tiles.
The obvious comparison for Mesos is 7 Wonders if you replaced the draft with the turn order mechanic from Kingdomino. There is more to it than that, but the feeling of 7 Wonders was on my heart and mind every time I played Mesos. Unlike 7 Wonders, there is much more than a single point of conflict. First, the way the cards flow into the system is wide open, everyone can see everything. If you’re gunning for a specific building, you can be sure that everyone else can see what you’re trying to do as well.
In Mesos, there are 4 events that come out every age. One punishes you for not having enough artists, another rewards the player with the most cultists. One sends your hunters to work to feed your tribe, while another triggers the feed-your-people mechanism. The rewards and punishments for each event increase in severity as the ages progress, encouraging lagging players to remain competitive.
The brilliance of Mesos lies in how these systems interlock. I saw Simone Luciani’s name on the box and immediately thought that it was going to be a much more complex game than it was. But was pleasantly surprised at just how simple and natural the game felt. Mesos rewards both tactical drafting just before events trigger and/or hate drafting and denying your opponents access to a suite of cards, and long-term planning for big end-game set collection points.
But don’t mistake “light” and “simple” for “mindless.” The turn order track decision offers such an intense trade-off, that every time you interact with it, it forces you to weigh your options. It’s incredibly tempting to go last to get 3 cards, but how will you feed them? What if the artist you need for the event is sniped before I choose? Maybe you should prioritize going earlier in the order just to get the single artist, and forgo the shaman altogether? Can you gamble that your opponent won’t grab that artist before you, and you can grab both the cards you wanted?
It’s an intense moment of weighing your options. And it can sound like a lot, but it really isn’t. These are small choices that create the context for the rest of the game. Each card essentially only has a single use, and everything is open and obvious to all players. It’s the market that creates the multiple choices and the tension of knowing what everyone else wants that makes this game so interesting.
I suffer pretty hard from loss aversion. And while points can always be paid in the place of food, I think a large part of the game is knowing when to forgo food collection and chose points in other ways. In one game, a player managed to earn over a hundred points from his engineer cards. He was on the bleeding edge of starving every round, but he handily won the whole game.
Mesos is much more interactive and heads-up than you’d expect a simple card drafter to be, it’s certainly more interesting than the ever popular 7 Wonders. The placement of your worker pawn to pick your drafting order and number of cards has a feeling of weighty consequence to it. All cards drafted are face up to everyone, so you’re always critically aware of where you stand in the race to grab certain cards. It hurts to make these decisions, the good kind of hurt that makes you rub your forehead while straining to think about what the other players are going to do.
Mesos proves that when a designer steps outside their established playbook, the results can be both surprising and exceptional. Stripping away the complexity of Luciani’s heavier games reveals just how sharp his instincts are when it comes to creating interlocking systems that generate tension, drama, and real decision-making. In Mesos, the open information, clever card flow, and agonizing turn-order tradeoffs make it a far more engaging game than it first appears. This isn’t just a lighter Luciani game, it’s a lean, tightly-wound experience that makes my brain hum.
It’s been a while since I did a book review. I started a new job in January, and that really took up all of my reading time. But one of my best friends recommended How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler to me. HtBtDLaDT is basically Groundhog Day meets Deadpool with a dash of Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a darkly humourous fantasy romp about what happens when the hero decides she’s done playing nice.
Davi was summoned to another world to save it from the Dark Lord. Noble enough. Except she’s failed. Hundreds of times. Every death sends her right back to the beginning, waking up in the same pool or water, in the same damn forest, being exposited to by the same old man, doomed to repeat the same futile quest. After 277 tries and over a thousand cumulative years of dying in increasingly ridiculous, tragic, and stupid ways… she snaps.
Screw destiny. Screw the prophecy. If the Dark Lord always wins, it’s time she joined the winning side.
Armed with centuries of knowledge, a fraying sense of morality, and an immature brand of gallows humour, Davi sets out to become the next Dark Lord. First step, she just needs a horde to take her to the convocation where the Dark Lord is crowned. How hard could that be?
HtBtDLaDT is told in Davi’s unhinged first-person voice, often careening between swaggering confidence and total panic. This is a tale of necromancy, time loops, save-scumming, and what happens when the ‘chosen one’ decides she’s had enough of being chosen.
Let’s get this out of the way up front: I’m annoyed. Not because the book is necessarily bad, but because it ends on such a blatant cliffhanger that it feels like half a story. I don’t mind a good sequel hook, but I like a book to stand on its own, at least a little. This was written with a blinking “To Be Continued…” sign hanging over every major plot thread.
My second major complaint came early, and it stuck with me the whole way through. The narrator, Davi, offhandedly says something like “I think I’m from Earth? Like, I know Darth Vader is Luke’s father, or something?” and then proceeds to pepper the rest of the story with modern pop culture references like she just stepped out of a Reddit comment thread. It immediately gave me Ready Player One flashbacks, but without the contextual justification. In RPO, the character was raised on a steady diet of retro media, so it made sense within the context. In How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, it felt jarring and out of place. A relentless stream of quips, one-liners, and pop culture references that constantly yanked me out of the high fantasy setting the book was trying to build.
And speaking of the setting, it had so much potential. The early parts, with the time loop playing a major role, and Davi experimenting with different outcomes, it felt sharp and fun. I loved the save-scumming vibes and the mild panic that crept into her narration when a time fork turned sour. But then… it just sort of softened. The world turned cozy. Characters were chipper. Consequences were few and far between. Even the main consequence of dying and having to start again feels flat. She says there’s no guarantee that she could make it back to the same spot a second time, but I don’t believe her complaints of having to redo a few months when she’s already lived for a thousand years.
Davi herself is chaotic, in that annoying terminally online young millennialhow kind of way. Very Deadpool-esque or Harley Quinn. She’s unhinged, quippy, and a bit of a jerk, which can work, but I didn’t find her particularly believable as a rising Dark Lord. She doesn’t lead so much as stumble into leadership, and her “horde” follows her with an ease that felt unearned. None of her captains challenge her authority in a meaningful way, and given how little she inspires, intimidates, or even organizes them, I couldn’t really buy that she was holding this would-be evil empire together. She’s woefully sincere and caring for someone aspiring to Dark Lord-om.
That said, HtBtDLaDT isn’t without its charms. I really enjoyed the initial worldbuilding, especially how the magic system was explained and used. The ending, in particular, where Davi overcomes a giant worm beast using the nuances of that magic system. Getting swallowed whole and then blowing it up from the inside? Genuinely me laugh
So, will I read the second book? Begrudgingly, yes. I’ve got it on hold at the library, and it’s the kind of story that’s decent to listen to while I’m working. But How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying isn’t cracking my top ten books anytime soon. It had a solid premise, flashes of brilliance, and a narrator who was fun in theory, but in execution, it all felt a bit too thin, too try-hard, and too sincere to really stick the landing of the “Dark Lord” moniker.
When I started this Final Fantasy Project, my challenge to play through every single player mainline entry in the series, it was mostly just an excuse to replay Final Fantasy IV again, if I’m being honest. That game was my first true JRPG, played on my SNES in the mid-90s, and it became my gold standard for the entire series. The bar to which I’ve held every Final Fantasy entry against. I’ve long claimed it’s my favourite Final Fantasy, but, truth be told, I hadn’t actually finished many of them. So this project is equal parts nostalgia trip and a chance to give the whole series a fair shot.
Nostalgia can be a fickle mistress sometimes, but in this section of my play through, it worked to each game’s advantage. I am a shameless fanboy of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Some of my earliest memories are of me holding that grey and purple controller while sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, the CRT screen glowing in the dim morning light. I’m sure it’s this experience during my formative years that has given me such a love for pixel art graphics over high-res or 3D games, even to this day.
The SNES Final Fantasy games are amazing. Each one is special in its own way, and each one is such an impressive step up from the games that came before it. It’s at this point in the series where you can see those who were working at Square in 1987 have been improving their skills at crafting amazing games. It’s during this 3 game era on the SNES that I think Final Fantasy really distills and cements what makes a Final Fantasy game, a Final Fantasy game.
Going from the relative mechanical freedom of the NES Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy IV is a stark shift for the series. Starting with an opening cutscene showing the main character, the Dark Knight Cecil, slaying innocent people to acquire the water crystal as ordered by his king, is quite the tonal change from the simple 4 warriors of light narrative that was featured in games I and III. It also took away a lot of mechanical freedom that was present in the past games, railroading your party to specific members for specific parts of the game, and each character being a firm archetype with no customization options for the player to mess around with. That said, the ATB system introduced dynamism and fluidity to the combat, that would become a mainstay for the next 6 entries of the franchise. Its story was also laser focused on Cecil, and his redemption.
Final Fantasy V on the other hand, returned to the static cast, and blew open the character customization options wide open with the overhauled job system. The story had its heavy moments, but was generally light-hearted and genuinely funny. The goofy character sprites bounced around manically, conveying as much emotion as you can squeeze into a 16-bit pixel art game.
Final Fantasy VI strikes balance between IV and V, telling a grand tale with a wide cast, and offering a decent amount of freedom to the player. It comes with its own mechanical shortfalls and frustrations, as I covered in depth before, but it does an incredibly good job in telling a story with some heavy narrative beats.
I think ultimately, which game is your favourite will come down to which characters or stories resonate with you, specifically. Final Fantasy VI is often lauded as the very best game in the series, but mechanically, V was much more fun to play. Personally, I love the character driven twists in IV more, from Cecil shedding his dark knight moniker to become a paladin, to the narrative influencing the gameplay, like how Rydia doesn’t learn the Fire spell until she overcomes her fear of fire, due to her hometown burning down around her. I also appreciate how the gameplay challenges and rewards are tailored to what characters are in your party. I can’t tell you how frustrated I would get chasing down a chest at the end of a long dungeon, only to pull a weapon for a character or class that I wasn’t using, a feeling which was particularly exacerbated at the end of Final Fantasy V when 8 of the 12 ultimate weapons didn’t mesh with my party.
I loved all 3 of these games. It was an absolute treat to replay IV, and experience V and VI fully for the first time. While I played the GBA remakes for each of these entries, each game absolutely holds up today. That’s kind of the joy of pixel art now that I think about it, it really holds up. At the time of writing this, I’m about a dozen hours into Final Fantasy VII, and I have to say, the rudimentary 3D polygons have not aged well. I recognize that in 1997, the graphics were absolutely cutting edge and mind-blowing, but in 2025, it’s a bit of an eye-sore. But this isn’t the time to start talking about Final Fantasy VII.
The steps this set of games takes into the modern age of Final Fantasy aren’t perfect, but they show that the team take great care in telling a great, character driven story. This is the era where I learned that I loved JRPGs, that I could emotionally connect with digital characters, and it’s something that’s been a part of my identity for my entire life. The SNES Final Fantasy games may be 30 years old, but all 3 are still great games, even to this very day.
