I really respect the mission of Restoration Games. They take old games, refresh them for modern gaming sensibilities, a fresh coat of paint, and give the games a second chance. Games like Whosit turning into Dinosaur Tea Party, Star Wars: Epic Duels into Unmatched, and Top Race into Downforce. I love seeing how they manage to retain the core of the game, but breath so much life and character into these dated games.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is designed by Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Jim Keifer, and Brian Neff, and published by Restoration games in 2023. Ostensibly, this is a racing game, but more realistically, it’s a death run game. Each player has 3 cars, and are tasked with either being the first to cross a finish line, or be the last one standing. Basically at the start of a round, everyone rolls 4 dice, and on a turn you assign a die to one of your three cars, moving it that number of spaces. There are also some special actions that you can do once per round by assigning a specific die to do that special action.
If during your move you land on a spot that another car is in, you bump them, rolling two die to determine which car gets moved, and where. This can cause chain reaction bumps too. Now your three cars come in different sizes, large, medium, and small. Large cars get shot more easily, but they have the option to reroll when a bump occurs.
Now, the board that you’re moving on, has a side scrolling element. When someone reaches the end of the last board, you take off the earliest board and put a new board on the end of the track. I think the game ends after 6 boards, but we’ve never gotten to the end of a race. The board has road segments, dirt, oil slicks, and a bunch of face down hazards that might cause chaos. Also, impassible spaces that, if you’re forced onto those spaces, blam, that car is dead.
When cars take two damage, they’re incapacitated, and when a player has all 3 of their cars destroyed or incapacitated, they’re out of the game. At that point, the current final tile gets the finish line added to it, and the first player to get a car to that finish line is the winner, or, if there’s only one player left with operable cars, they’re the victor.
So, my game group is usually really boring. We like predictability, deterministic outcomes, economic simulations, you know, boring euro game stuff. But for some reason, the chaos that is Thunder Road: Vendetta gets us all cackling with laughter every time. In the game we played last night, one player put his car in between two impassible spots, and three people came and bumped him from behind. All three cars were thrown backwards into the impassible spot and were destroyed, on like, the second round of the game! Other things inject chaos too, like the damage tiles can make you blast off in a specific direction, or have you wobble around randomly, sometimes someone will damage you, then a piece of shrapnel will fly off and incapacitate their car in return. It just good fun to see everything go wrong.
The slams are a really fun and integral aspect to the game, but it’s also really flow breaking. You’re moving your car, then slam, then you have to stop and roll two dice, take a second to orient the direction die so you can see who is going where, decide if you want to reroll or not, and if that triggers a chain, then you do it over, and over, and over again. We’ve had a few slam sessions that chain 4 or 5 cars together, shuffling and reorienting a cluster of cars into something unrecognizable. It’s pretty fun, but it does feel like the game grinds to a halt during these segments.
Sometimes I feel like complaining about the dice rolls. In my last game, one round I rolled three 1’s, and one 4, so two of my cars just crawling along the back of the pack. Meanwhile, the other players all rolled a pair of 6’s, leaving me in the dust. It doesn’t feel very fun to move a single space, but on the other hand, there is a tactical advantage to being in the back. If no one is rushing the last tile and putting your cars in jeopardy of getting shunted off the board, then on the next round, it’s very likely all the obstacle have been cleared and you can just rush up and start shooting your opponents in the bum.
I’ve only played the retail version of Thunder Road: Vendetta, and as that product stands, it’s an excellent game. That said, I’ve found myself more than once looking over the plethora of expansions and salivating at the potential chaos that all these modules would add. From a big rig that is 3 big car pieces linked together to 5 little motorcycles, jumps, player powers and a demolition derby style arena that changes how the game is played altogether. I love the base game, but I’m so excited to explore all these expansions.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is a game about violence and player elimination. Sometimes you’ll roll poorly, and that’s just how it’s going to be. If you crave control, you aren’t going to find it here. Having a good time in this game is about embracing the chaos. Not always picking the safe, smart option, but the one that would make for a great story. Yes, you’ll more often than not crash into a ball of flames, but at least you’ll have a story to tell.
A copy of Bark Avenue was provided by Good Games Publishingfor review purposes
The life of a dog walker seems like an envious one. Picking up playful pooches, giving them a job around the block in the sunshine, throwing a ball or a Frisbee at the park, then depositing them back at their home and collecting a paycheque. That said, I also know the struggle of starting and building a business, which is a ton of effort and stress. So instead of building a business for real, let’s talk about Bark Avenue, designed by Mackenzie Jungck and Jonathan Jungck, with art by April Borchelt and Chris Martinetti.
In Bark Avenue, you are an intrepid dog walker, ready to earn your day’s wage. Each turn, you’ll roll the dice, move the number of steps as your slowest dog, then preform an action. To end your turn, you’ll advance all the timers for your dogs, then the next dog walker takes their turn. After everyone has taken their turn, the game timer advances down the track and triggers an event.
The crux of the game is in the actions. You’ll pick up new pups, engage with their favourite activities, take their pictures, perhaps buy a coffee or a treat, then drop off dogs back at their home, once their walk timer has been satisfied. There’s plenty to do on every turn, but you’re restricted to only doing one action per round. Unless you cheat and drink a coffee, which gives you a boost and lets you take a second action during your turn.
When you drop off dogs, you have the opportunity to earn tips. Each dog has 3 criteria that can be accomplished during their walk, which is pooping, taking their picture, and engaging with their favourite activity. For each one of those criteria you accomplish, you earn an extra $2 tip. There’s also a subset of requirements along the left side of the board that will let you place out review stars, which will unlock more abilities for you during the game, and in the last 3 rounds, if you have no dogs to walk, you can take a review star from the left side of the board and place it on a coffee shop for some extra points.
The game plays over 16 rounds, at which time the scores are tallied and the person with the most cash is the winner!
Watching the how-to play video on Terradice’s website reveals that Bark Avenue was inspired by MacKenzie’s experiences as a dog walker in New York City, The reverence to the theme is obvious and unmistakable. If you like dogs, and Upper Manhattan, then I’m sure the theme will carry a lot of enjoyment for you. For the rest of us, there’s not much to write home about.
Bark Avenue is described as ‘gateway plus’, meaning it’s a hobby board game that’s approachable. It’s meant to be the next step from being relatively inexperienced, into the world of board games. And in that vein, I can appreciate Bark Avenue. One of the easiest ways to get non-boardgamers to sit down at my table, is to find a game with a theme that appeals directly to them. For someone who has an ‘I love doggos’ bumper sticker on their car, all the doggie portraits should be enough to engage their interest for an hour.
As a pickup and deliver game, I felt it was an exercise in tedium. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to say that, but hear me out. Bark Avenue is about as complex as Wingspan, but doesn’t offer any of the exciting combo building from that game. Instead, Bark Avenue is a game about optimization and efficiencies. Yes, it feels good to be walking three dogs at the same time, roll that golden poop to accomplish that task for all dogs, and align all of their favourite activities in one fell swoop. But all the dogs are functionally identical. Nothing really separates Beasley from Pixel aside from their home location and the amount of cash you’ll earn from their job.
Each game of Bark Avenue feels identical, even with the event cards shaking things up every round. The map is massive, with dozens of spaces to go, but nothing really differentiating them from each other. You won’t have a different experience playing east side vs. west side, other than the portraits of the dogs will change. Mechanically, there’s nothing really pulling you back for multiple plays. Once you’ve played a handful of rounds of the game, you’ve functionally experienced everything that Bark Avenue has to offer. There’s a sprinkling of set collection and other goals for you to chase, so your actions aren’t entirely rote, but it doesn’t have any real tension or excitement.
At the end of the day, Bark Avenue is a product for dog lovers. If your main joy is looking at portraits of happy doggies and imagining yourself at the helm of a dog walking venture, then Bark Avenue will provide you with entertainment for an evening. It’s not a game that I feel compelled to play again, nor would I recommend that anyone rush out and buy it. I actually think the cover does a pretty good job of signalling who this game is for. If your first thought at the sight of the cover and title was “Awe, cute!”, you’ll certainly dig this game. If you had any other thoughts or feelings than that, well, nothing I said above was going to change your mind.
How many times have you almost been in a fight? How many times have you talked a big game only to realize, yeah, it’s probably smarter to sit back and let someone else take the hits? Scythe is all about that moment; the tension before the clash, the slow buildup where everyone is flexing just enough power to scare off rivals. Despite the war machines that are front and centre in players hands, Scythe isn’t just about throwing punches. It’s a game about power, efficiency, and a dance of anticipation where actual combat is rare, but impactful.
Scythe is a beautiful game. It was the first time I had ever seen a dual layered player board, something that just seems so obvious and prolific in today’s world. Each faction has four mechs plus a hero and animal companion, represented with unique sculpts. The world building and art by Jakub Rozalski draws on 1920 era industrial revolution motifs, with hulking behemoths in the background. It’s immediately arresting and sets up an atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re on the doorstep of a great conflict.
The gameplay hinges on a unique action-selection system. Each player gets a personal action board with four sections, each section links a pair of actions. On your turn, you choose a quadrant, pay any visible costs, and carry out the top action. Then, if you can, you also pay for the bottom action for an extra benefit. Turns are quick and efficient, hopping from one player to the next until someone manages to place their sixth achievement star, and immediately end the game.
Scythe‘s top row actions are deceptively straightforward. Move, produce, trade, and bolster. Moving lets you expand your influence across the map, dragging along your loyal workers to work the fields. Producing generates resources based on your where and how many workers you have on a location. Bolstering raises your strength or gives you power cards, and trading lets you spawn any two resources for a coin. But it’s the bottom row actions and being able to exploit the timing is where the strategic depth really lies. Each bottom action costs resources, and different player boards mix up which actions and benefits are linked together, making every faction’s strategy feel unique.
These bottom actions are what really get your engine running. Upgrading moves a cube from the top row to the bottom, making a main action better and making a bottom action cheaper. Enlisting gives you benefits when your neighbours take specific bottom row actions, deploying drops those hulking mechs onto the table, plus unlocking asymmetric abilities for all your plastic figures, and building creates structures that produce persistent benefits, not to mention may be worth points at the end of the game.
All of these actions build towards earning coins, which are the measure of victory in Scythe. Though you might not notice it at first, coins are critical. And everything you do in the game, from piles of resources you’ve amassed, to all the territory you control, converts into coins based on your popularity at the end fo the game. Placing six stars ends the game, but it’s not a strict “race.” players who are beloved by the populace will get far more coins from the same accomplishments, turning what may seem like a run away leader game into a narrowly close end result.
Scythe isn’t a typical war game. It’s more a cold war game, a palpable tension where strength is a resource, just as important as oil or food. Combat is rare in this game, and its real benefit is really limited by a star cap, so strong players aren’t encouraged to just beat down on weaker players indefinitely. When combat does finally occur, it’s a high-stakes gamble. Each player commits strength and power cards secretly, then both strengths are revealed simultaneously. The winner takes control of the contested hex, and gets to place a star, if they haven’t hit that cap. Both players lose all the strength and cards they committed to the fight, however. One time, I made the mistake of going all-in against Clare, only for him to one-up me with a power card, leaving his sum a single point above mine. With my strength utterly depleted, the other players descended on my mechs, pummelling me for easy stars, and leaving me destitute and licking my wounds at home base.
Scythe manages to build a sense of threat. As players expand and build themselves up on the power track, they’re hesitant to get into fights. Many games see a couple of players pushing toward the top of the strength track, throwing fights to conserve their power. But once they max it out, suddenly they have all this strength to burn.
As much as I’ve talked about warfare, winning Scythe isn’t about being the strongest. Victory comes from resource management and having efficient productions, being able to optimize every turn. Every action has a milestone to earn at its end, whether it’s enlisting, upgrading, or building structures and mechs. Like many action efficiency games, the more you play, the more you see the nuances. It was only on my third or fourth game that I really started to understand how to link actions into something that resembled efficiency. After every game, I’d find myself mulling over every decision and thinking about how I could have shaved off a few turns here, or accelerated my engine just a bit faster. It’s the kind of system that digs into your brain and stays there, whispering, “next time…”
Scythe is a special package. It offers a unique blend of cold war tension and engine building bliss. It’s not for everyone, as evidenced by half my game group ‘being done with it’ after 15 plays. But my other friend and I are 20 plays deep, and are looking to embark on some of the fan made campaigns soon. There is so much game to plumb here, from the faction’s starting positions to which action board pair best with each faction, to even just learning how to use each faction abilities themselves! Learning when to push forward and when to back off, there is a tonne of nuance here. Scythe is a masterpiece in my opinion, and a game that I would happily play, any time, anywhere.
I’ve said this a lot in the past, but I don’t really play a ton of games in the year they come out. Between my impressive backlog and my unwillingness to go to any board game conventions, I’m usually a year or two behind when it comes to playing the hot new games. In fact, I usually do this list around July, but this year, I’ve been much more active on Board Game Arena, and more and more games are launching on BGA close to their physical release date. It also helps being on the Alpha test list, so I can play lots of games as they’re being added to the site, with the caveat that there may be bugs. ANYWAYS, I’m not here to talk about BGA, I’m here to run down my 10 favourite games that released in 2024 (so far)
Also, side note for myself. Next year I really need to complete this list before my kid goes on Christmas break, because, I was completely unable to get ANY writing done during the last 2 weeks!
Harmonies was incredibly popular when it hit the scene in March. Pitched as a cross between Azul and Cascadia, it felt like everyone was talking about this little game. Now, I’ve only had the opportunity to play Harmonies on BGA, but I can see why this game had everyone so excited.
Designed by Johan Benvenuto, Harmonies tasks players with building specific shapes in their personal ecosystems to satisfy the demands of the fauna cards. Each animal wants something different, perhaps a lion wants a mountian 3 discs high, with 2 plains discs adjacent, while the boar wants a tree thats only 2 discs high next to a 2 disc high building. The name of the game (literally) is finding the animals that can exist harmoniously, as each of their requirements compliment each other.
While luck plays a major factor in which discs are available to you each turn, and you’ll quite often be forced to take discs you don’t want or can’t use just to claim the few that you really need, Harmonies remains a calm, enjoyable experience. I really look forward to fleshing out my thoughts in a full review, once I can get a few more plays under my belt.
9 – Castle Combo
Another game introduced to me via Board Game Arena, Castle Combo, designed by Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel, is a fast, simple tableau builder about trying to squeeze the most points out of a courtyard of servants.
The cards you’re drafting come in two rows. The servants, and the nobles. All cards cost money to bring into your tableau, and once you take possession of the card and slot it into your 3×3 grid, they’ll offer some immediate benefits, as well as offer some end game scoring. After 9 rounds, you evaluate all the cards in your grid, and whoever has the most cards wins!
The artwork by Stephane Escapa is colourful and full of funny caractures, and the gameplay is so fast and butter smooth that it fits the role of ‘filler game’ perfectly. There are still satisfying decisions to make, as a lot of the end game conditions will depend on where each card is, and how many of the other tags are in the rows and columns next to each card.
It’ll remain to be seen if Castle Combo will stand the test of time, but it’s worth at least a dozen plays or so!
An area control and stock market game about the ever increasing value and presence of flowers was a bit of a surprise hit for me. Another BGA game, Stalk Exchange by Christopher Ryan Chan, gives players some hidden information that will inform their final score, then tasks players with swapping the flowers they have behind their screen with the ones that are able to go onto the board.
When flowers are on the board, they start off as bulbs, after a single turn if they have an open side, they grow into flowers. If a cohort of flowers are ever fully contained by the borders created by other flower varieties, they’re removed from the board, and the value of that flower goes up 1 spot for every flower token removed from the board. At the end of the game, you score your portfolio. But before you do that, the bubble bursts on the most valuable flower, its value gets cleaved in half.
Stalk Exchange is clever, quick, and simple to teach, making it a pretty appealing game. I’ve enjoyed the few plays I’ve gotten of this one, and if I can source a physical copy, I’ll be sure to push it onto my local game group.
7 – Wyrmspan
Building off the core gameplay mechanics of the massively successful Wingspan, Connie Vogelmann crafted a new game in which players hew homes for dragons out of caves, then entice those dragons into your sanctuary, all in the effort of building an engine by chaining together powerful abilities, and turning those abilities into victory points.
In classic Stonemaier Games fashion, Wyrmspan is a beautiful product. The art is lush and fanciful, the eggs are speckled, the components have a premium finish, it’s a wonderful production to hold in your hands. Gameplay wise, Wyrmspan is much more complex than Wingspan, there’s a lot more interactions between the dragons and caves and the resources you hold that players need to be aware of. The potential to craft a runaway combo feels greater in this rendition.
Personally, I’d be much more willing to play Wyrmspan over its predecessor, but I’d also be much more reluctant to introduce newer players to Wyrmspan, at the very least without the Wingspan background. It’s a great ‘next step’ game, where it has some familiar mechanisms to ease the learning burden, but offers a more satisfying gameplay experience.
6 – Draft & Write Records
A prototype was provided by Inside Up Games
I was fortunate enough to receive a prototype copy of Draft & Write Recordsto review from Inside Up Games back in the fall of 2023, but it was officially released this year, so I’m including it on this list!
Draft & Write Records by Bruno Maciel, is as the title indicates, a draft and write game. Each player gets a large sheet of paper and every round, they’ll draft a card from their hand, cross off the appropriate resource from their sheet, and pass all of their unchosen hands to the next player. After each hand of cards has been picked down to nothing, there’s a short weekend, where players evaluate goals, and play continues in this fashion until someone triggers the end of the game.
In 2024, Draft & Write Records came to Board Game Arena, and I decided to hop into a couple friendly tournaments for it, which ended up putting another 10 games of it under my belt. Draft & Write Records is the perfect async game, as on your turn you just need to quickly assess your board state and the few cards passed to you, before making your choice. And the combo-tastic nature of the game is really satisfying when you manage to stretch a single action into 5 or 6 resources getting crossed off.
5 – Nucleum
While I haven’t reviewed Brass or Barrage on this site (yet), I’ve touched on how much I enjoy Brass: Birmingham as it sits at number 18 in my top 100 games of all time list. Nucleum by designers Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi has players erect power plants, build links between urban buildings, and completing milestones. Each player has asymmetric technologies, and throughout the game the action tiles you’re using to take actions are spent to establish links, giving the game a really great feeling of tension.
If I’m being really honest, I suspect that when I look back at all the games on this list, Nucleum will have the most staying power. That said, I didn’t like it more than Brass, so I’d be more inclined to return to that game if my group is in the mood to play a heavy economic euro game. Not to diminish how great Nucleum is as a game, it’s really amazing! It just has some close parallels that evoke similar feelings to other games that I already love.
4 – Fromage
Coming in right at the end of the year on BGA, Fromage was a really enjoyable euro game that played fast and offered intresting decisions. With simultainous worker placement, and 4 different scoring areas to play in, I had a really good time exploring this french cheese game.
I enjoyed it so much, I felt compelled to give this one a full review, which you can read here!
All 3 Kinfire Delve games were provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes
Are these technically expansions? They can be mixed with the previous Kinfire Delve games, but each box is stand-alone. While the core gameplay is the same between all sets, each character and boss are wildly different. Mixing characters to address specific challenges for each boss is a real treat.
In 2024 I transitioned to being a stay at home parent, and solo gaming suddenly became much more of a reality for me as my child napped during the day. My time with Kinfire Delve was a delight, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring the rest of the Kinfire universe, whenever that opportunity arises.
Another game that got the full review treatment, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth is a reworking of the 7 Wonders Duel system. Folding in both the Pantheon and Agora expansions, then streamlining the whole package down into something that is just a joy to play, LotR:DfME is an achievement of game design.
That said, when all is said and done, I find more fun in the 7 Wonders Duel experience, especially with the Pantheon expansion. I don’t mind the dozens of little calculations you need to do every time you want to buy a resource that you don’t have, and the engine building powers of the yellow cards is something I dearly missed in this new edition.
1 – Bullet: Paw & Palette
How dare an expansion take up the number 1 slot? Well, the answer is easy. Bullet remains one of my favourite games, especially the solo mode, and getting 8 new characters and bosses was a highlight of my board gaming year. Bullet: Paw focuses on animals, while Bullet: Palette puts the emphasis on heroines with an art pursuasion. I have indepth looks at both of those expansions, linked above, so if you want to read about those games specifically, please check out those reviews.
As for the new year, Bullet Cubed is coming to Gamefound with two more expansions, which means Level 99 Games is going to continue to get more of my money. Dang, I hate it when companies give me what I want!
And those are my top 2024 games. Soon I’ll have a couple more lists out, my top 10 best new to me games that aren’t from 2024, and my top 10 BGA games from last year. Let me know if you’ve played any of the games on this list, and what your favourite games of the last year are! See you again soon!
I have a regular group of fellows that I play board games with every Wednesday night. After work, dinner, and kids are mostly in bed, we gather at one of our houses around 7pm, and play until 9 or 10. This means that our usual games are the ones that we can teach and play within 3 hours. That said, we’ve all been board game fans for over 10 years, we all enjoy games that are more complex in nature. The downside is that some of our biggest games don’t see the light of day because we’re a bit nervous to break out a big game on a weekend game night.
Enter The Gallerist, designed by Vital Lacerda, and published by Eagle-Gryphon Gamesin 2015 following a successful crowdfunding campaign. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about Vital Lacerda games before, but as a board game designer, he’s quite prolific. All of his games are these big, complex boxes of interconnected mechanisms that require a thorough studying in order to understand and comprehend. In the past I’ve played two other games of his, 2014’s Kanban and 2019’s Escape Plan, both were similar in that they required more than a weekend game night to get through.
Players in The Gallerist take on the roles of gallery owners, and must discover artists, commission and display works of art, promote the artists, then sell those works of art to make a profit. The goal of The Gallerist is to make the most money, but the path forward is not always clear.
It shouldn’t be difficult to play The Gallerist. On your turn, you take a single executive action (which can be one of two options), then move your pawn to one of the four locations (if someone is already there, bump them out and they get a kicked-out action after your turn is done), and take one of the two actions at that location. A total of 8 possible location actions in the whole game. It can’t be that difficult to learn just 8 actions, can it? It turns out, Vital Lacerda’s games are like clockwork. Every mechanism, each action turns a gear, which influences everything else in the game. It’s not enough to know how to do each action, what’s important when playing The Gallerist is that you understand why and when you want to do each of the actions for maximum benefit.
The devil is in the details when it comes to these 8 actions, but thankfully the included player reference cards are verbose and cover the major points of every action, making them invaluable to learning players. I’m not going to go into detail about all 8 actions, this review is not intended to teach you how to play The Gallerist, after all.
In preparation for game night, I watched Rodney Smith’s excellent Watch it Played video, and then read the rule book, which made me feel fairly well-prepared, although during the process I felt like I was crunching for an exam. My wife came out as I was pouring over the rule book and asked, “Is this fun for you?”. And the truth is, yeah, I really do enjoy learning how to play Lacerda games. As you process each mechanism, each action space, as you peel back one more layer of the onion, slowly the shape of the whole comes into focus. Thematically, things mostly make sense, and the thematic integration assists with learning how to play. When you sell an artwork, one of the people in your gallery leaves with the painting. Little details like that make sense and help me retain the rules to this complex game, and made the gameplay feel a lot smoother than many games of a similar complexity.
I remember reading once that some designers design mechanics first. Their early prototypes are plain cards with numbers, and the game is just manipulating numbers. Theme comes afterwards. I doubt this is the case for Vital Lacerda, as the theme and the mechanisms are often so well tied together. I feel like he gets inspiration from the theme that informs the mechanics of the game he wants to create. It’s something I really appreciate about his work, and it’s something worth highlighting here.
Talking about The Gallerist specifically, gosh, I’m bad at this game. I don’t know how or where I go wrong, but golly do I ever flounder. I fall behind at buying artworks, which means I don’t have the money to buy more artworks, and I fail during the end game scoring. I never seem to have the right guests in my lobby so I’m shut out of the influence actions that inform another large aspect of the end game scoring. But I do have fun. It’s fascinating seeing all these mechanics work together, and the main board is tightly packed with action spaces that you’re going to constantly rub elbows with your opponents, which is to your benefit, as getting kicked out of a space awards you a benefit.
I’ve talked about positive player interaction before, and I quite enjoyed it here as well. Getting bumped out of an action spot awards you with an extra action. No one owns the artists, so buying their works of art and promoting them benefits everyone. A rising tide lifts all ships, after all. The point of The Gallerist isn’t to step on each other’s necks, but to be the player that excels. The most ‘feel-bad’ part of the game is when you drag a visitor kicking and screaming out of an opponent’s lobby and into your own, but that’s it. The kick-out mechanism has an added bonus of making the time between your main turns feel a lot shorter, as you may be gifted a bonus action during someone else’s turn. I quite appreciated that aspect.
I find myself wanting to replay The Gallerist again and again, mostly to see if I can figure out where I’m going wrong. So many of the mechanics have players looking at the thing they want to do, and work backwards through all the steps they need to do in order to make their plan happen. It’s a satisfying puzzle, and one that has me interested and intrigued, even if I’m awful at it.
The Gallerist is a big, well produced game. It looks gorgeous on the table, and the components are high quality, even judging by today’s standards. The puzzle is solid and engaging, and I can’t really find any place to truly fault it. I’m not a Lacerda fan-boy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have reverence for his craft. A Lacerda game has a certain, specific quality to it. When you play one of his games, you know what kind of experience you’re going to have. Part of me really appreciates when a designer has a specific flavour, that I know what I’m getting into when their game hits my table, but at the same time, I wonder how many Lacerda games I need in my life. It’s been too long since I played with Kanban or Escape Plan, and I’d gladly play them again at any request. But if someone asked me what Lacerda game I wanted to play, The Gallerist is sitting right at the top of my chart.
