“Coffee.” Is it dark roast? milky tan? Burnt countertop? If it’s black to dark brown, which exact shade of dark brown is coffee?
Hues and Cues is a game that lives entirely in the disconnect between your brain and your eyeballs. A party game where you try to lead your friends to a single specific shade among an impressive gradient of 480 tiny squares using one word clues. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
Okay, a bit more detail. The active player draws a card, secretly picks one of four colours listed, then gives the group a single word clue. Then everyone guesses. Then they get a second word. Then, they guess again. Then the active player drops a frame around the specific shade they were trying to lead their friends to, and points are awarded based on how close everyone is to that frame. Then the next person becomes the clue-giver, and play continues until everyone’s had a turn (or until the mood sours, and you all decide to pack it in).
At its best, Hues and Cues delivers joy when you manage to lead people to the perfect shade of steely-blue with an off the wall clue like “Shark”. It’s great a facilitating fun conversations like “Are we talking Dutch Delft blue or Portuguese tile blue?” or “Blue-spruce green, or dark pine tree green?”. It’s especially great for larger groups, when you need something quick, casual, and low-commitment. If you don’t care about the score, players can drop in and out. There’s no setup. No fiddly rules. It’s as simple as pointing at a square and arguing about what shade of red Mario’s cap really is.
But while the concept is novel and clever, the experience can wear thin, fast.
In small groups, the game feels more like an exercise in tedium than entertainment. By the time everyone has given one clue, you’ve pretty much seen all the game has to offer. Sure, the board is massive, but so many of the colours are so similar that distinguishing F14 from F15 feels pointless and hopeless. And heaven help you if you’re even mildly colorblind, it’s actually unplayable at that point. It’s actually a bit ironic that a game about visual nuance has a big problem where the colours on the cards don’t really match the ones on the board. It’s a reminder why Pantone sells colour guides and swatches, so you can be sure that the colour you’re thinking of is properly replicated amonst all aspects of your production.
The clue-giving, while conceptually fun, is often harder than it should be. I spent more time agonizing over my second word clue than the rest of the table spent guessing. My first clue was already perfect, how can I improve on the last clue? I can’t think of anything any more light purple than lilac! It’s a frustration that sometimes just leads to awkward silence while one player is trying to think of anything helpful, while everyone else sits around and watches them think.
Hues and Cues is a fun idea, but it lacks staying power. The most fun you’ll have is probably the first time, when everyone’s discovering just how we all see “grape” as a different shade of purple (and one person chooses green). It’s really hard to recommend it, when other party games are so much more replayable and fun. Games like Dixit come to mind.
If you’re looking for a simple, social filler to throw down on a table during a family reunion, Hues and Cues might spark a weird debate about what the colour of kalamata olives are, or what shade of teal Bulbasaur really is. Just don’t expect much more than that.
Board Game Geek’s game ratings are usually a pretty good barometer for measuring the general quality of a game. My tastes generally align with the wider board game community, but now and then, everyone else gets it wrong. In this list, I’m going to preset the 5 games that the BGG community seems to think are are great, but I think are subjectively awful.
1. Terraforming Mars
BGG Rank: #7 Terraforming Mars looks great on paper. You’re building a corporate engine to terraform the red planet, managing resources and planning projects in a shared environment. But in my experience, it’s a frustrating exercise in deck lottery.
The deck of cards is enormous, and your ability to draw cards is brutally limited. Earning the benefit of drawing a single card is huge, which makes it expensive, or highly sought after. This shouldn’t be that be much of a problem, except that the corporation you start the game with often suggests a strategic path, but there’s no guarantee the necessary cards to synergize with your corporation will ever show up. Even when you’re playing with the drafting variant, meaning you’ll see much more cards, you’re still at the mercy of the deck.
My other main complaint, those cards that are so hard to come by, often have prerequisites, such as needing to be played before the oxygen level crosses a certain threshold. While I love the prerequisites thematically, they can show up long after they’re playable, making your limited draw feel even more useless. I cannot tell you how often I’ve held onto a card because I’m just one tag short, only for that tag to not show up for me for the rest of the game.
Terraforming Mars has its fans, but for me, it’s a hard pass.
2. Great Western Trail
BGG Rank: #17 Alexander Pfister is a well respected designer. But I am not a fan of most of his output.
In Great Western Trail, you’re herding cows, building up your deck, and placing buildings, as you run your meeple around and around a looping trail. There’s a fair amount going on, but little of it feels satisfying. It’s a flat, emotionless grind of getting your cows to the train, and then, doing it all over again.
GWTtechnically offers variety, you can pursue getting the train father, cull the low value cows out of your deck, or focus on building the buildings. But none of those routes feel especially dynamic or interesting. It’s a slow experience that overstays its welcome, especially at higher player counts. There’s no tension, no narrative, and no reason to return to the trail.
3. Grand Austria Hotel
BGG Rank: #67 At first glance, Grand Austria Hotel is a charming euro with elegant mechanics. You’re serving guests cake, strudel, and coffee, managing getting the rooms ready, all while dealing with the emperor’s whims. But when you start playing, you’ll discover that the dice system, which controls what actions you can take, is terribly arbitrary and restrictive, and the guest market can stagnate with no good options. The limited dice pool and scarcity of room-building options can make turns feel frustratingly out of your control.
What’s even worse, massive player downtime and analysis paralysis makes Grand Austria Hotel an absolute slog at four players. You can’t even really plan for your turn, because what the dice the other players take on their turn will dramatically affect what you’ll be able to do. The snake draft at 4 players means that if you were first player in a round, every other player will take two turns until it’s your turn again. It’s just a brutal amount of downtime.
My real sour grapes come from the last time I played this with Otter. He managed to roll the benefits from completing guests into the next guest, and the next guest, and the next. He was taking turn after turn, completing objective after objective, while I struggled to get a single strudel. Absolutely frustrating.
I like the Klemmens Franz artwork, though. And seeing characters from a bunch of different board games show up as guests is a nice treat.
4. Maracaibo
BGG Rank: #77
Hey, look! Another Alexander Pfister game. I really wanted to like Maracaibo. It has a rondel system similar to GWT, multi-use cards, and a pirate theme! But I felt that the experience was bloated, convoluted, and shockingly dull.
To evoke the feeling and imagery of pirates is a disservice to the players. There’s no tension, no risk, no high-stakes raiding, nothing to make you feel like pirates had anything to do with the game. Maracaibo is a swirl of disconnected mechanisms and tracks to progress as you fly around the islands, a la Great Western Trail.
I do not understand the appeal of Maracaibo. I felt nothing but frustration while playing it. None of the theme comes through, all of the fun things on your board are covered up and need to be unlocked, ‘combat’ is just comparing a track, and the game ends up being several hours long, every single time. At the very least, I’m very thankful that one player kinda can “rush” the endgame, so I can put myself out of my misery sooner.
5. Rajas of the Ganges
BGG Rank: #160 As I’ve already said in my full review: Rajas of the Ganges is pleasant. It’s colourful and has a unique “two types of points” scoring system (at least, it was unique until Ark Nova came along and stole it). But for all its charm, there’s not that much game underneath.
Once your engine gets going, Rajas of the Ganges plays itself. Once you get your income rolling in, the best action is obvious, every time. I get frustrated with how many of the worker placement spots are “trade one dice in for two”. A net gain of one dice means you may spend a whole round of actions just gathering dice so you can actually do something meaningful. And that’s just not my idea of fun.
It’s not a bad game. It’s just kinda forgettable. And given the sheer number of stronger euro games out there, like Castles of Burgundy, Orléans, or The Voyages of Marco Polo, I’m not sure why I’d ever choose to play Rajas of the Ganges again.
It’s OK to Disagree
If you love these games, that’s fine! More power to you. But for me, these titles don’t live up to their BGG hype. Each one of these have left me either apathetic after a play, or actually downright angry. And you’re not allowed to tell me that my feelings aren’t valid.
Do you have an overrated favourite game of your own? Let me know which wildly popular game you think is kinda garbage. And now that I have all this negativity out of my system, next week I’ll be much more positive. I promise.
Cooperative games can be a bit tricky for my group. Otter, absolutely loves them. He specifically loves the discussion and collaboration that comes from working together to solve a problem. He wants to analyze every possibility to arrive at the correct conclusion that will lead the team to victory. Unfortunately, this also means that it takes 4 hours to play Pandemic.
It doesn’t actually take 4 hours, but it sure feels like it sometimes. I’ve already mentally decided what I think the best course of action is, but he wants to talk through every possibility to be sure. And to his credit, sometimes we find a plan that is more efficient or just plain better than the one I had in mind. I should also point out that Otter wins at more games than I do.
Regardless, it was his desire to play Paleo when we met at our local board game café. I was a little hesitant to spend our evening with a cooperative game when we could be playing any of the new and exciting games that were in the library, but I’m nothing if not adaptable.
Paleo, as mentioned, is a cooperative game for 1 to 4 players. Designed by Peter Rustemeyer, with art by Dominik Mayer, Ingram Schell and Franz-Georg Stämmele, and published by Hans im Gluck in 2020. In Paleo, each player controls a group of pre-historic humans in their quest to create art. Kind of, the victory condition is to acquire 5 cave painting tiles, while the loss conditions is accruing 5 skulls. Each player is given a deck of cards, and each turn, each player draws 3 cards face down in front of them. The card backs depict a scene from nature, such as a babbling brook, a snow-capped mountain, or a dense forest. These backgrounds give you clues as to what is likely on the other side. There isn’t much wood on the mountain top, but there is meat and rocks up there.
Each player picks one card to attempt, and returns the others to their deck, then, everyone reveals their card simultaneously. Most cards will give you a couple challenges you can attempt to earn some resources, or give you the opportunity to help others complete their quests. Many of the cards will have you discarding cards off the top of your deck in return for resources, or asking you to acquire the correct number of tags amongst your tribe and tools to triumph over a challenge. When your deck runs you, you ‘go to sleep’, and when everyone’s decks are depleted, you move to the night phase. In the night phase, each tribe member requires a food, and there are a couple of end of day challenges that must be met. Falling short in any of those objectives will earn you one of those game losing skulls.
Earning the victory point mural pieces are no small feat, but they can be found in a variety of places. Some appear in the crafting deck, others appear after a particularly difficult battle, and so on. Either way, once you gather 5, you win the game. Paleo offers several scenarios, which has you adding some extra secret cards, different nighttime objectives, special crafting recipes, and adding a couple scenario specific cards to the main deck. The first scenario is focused around hunting mammoths, so most of the cards you add will have you hunting down those oversized dust bunnies.
Paleo rose to prominence when it won the 2021 Kennerspiel des Jahres, one of the most prestigious awards in cardboard, edging out fellow nominees Fantasy Realms and Lost Ruins of Arnak. While I personally don’t put a lot of stock into the Spiel des Jahres, I can’t help but pay attention to the games that get the Spiel nod, and Paleo is no different.
Starting the game with only two members of your tribe, doesn’t afford you a lot of leeway. Because all the game’s objectives are shuffled into a single deck, there is the chance that your first draw will be something that you cannot accomplish, even if everyone at the table pooled together to overcome. I’m talking specifically about the mammoth that requires 8 combat tags that I drew on my very first turn. But we can also blame me for making an ignorant decision.
The tribe members each generally have one tag, and often will come with a one time use benefit. If you can get lucky, you can start to build an engine. Acquire wood and rocks to craft a hand axe, giving you a perpetual combat and craft tag. If you’re unlucky, you’ll spend your one time use tools to overcome a challenge, and then be left weakened for the rest of the day. Do you want to discard your pelt to avoid a wound now, even though you need two pelts to craft the required tent for everyone to sleep in at the end of the day?
Most often, the cards aren’t difficult, but they do evoke a strong theme. The deer and dodo cards offer a large supply of food, but are then completely exiled from the game, as, they no longer exist after you eat them. The berry bush can either supply one food, and be used again next round, or three food and a wood but is then exiled from the game, evoking a little story in your head about your tribe ripping the bush out of the ground for a short term gain, long term loss.
The collaboration is pretty gentle, one player might announce they’re going to try and tackle one of their bramble cards, which will inspire others to choose more friendly cards so they can have the opportunity to help each other out, should the situation require it. Sometimes, you’ll pick a card thinking it’ll be a leisurely stream, but it turns out to be its own hazard, preventing you from helping others. There is a memory element to Paleo. Sometimes you’ll fail a challenge, like if you flip over the mountain card with the mammoth, only to be asked to produce 8 weapon tags. You’ll remember that every time one of the mammoth mountain cards comes up in the deck, and while you might skip past it for a few days in a row, eventually you’ll find yourself in a position to take it on.
Because all the events you’ll undertake are part of the same deck, there is the chance that you’ll just happen to pick the ones meant for the end game and are wildly too expensive for you to overcome at the start of the game. Sure, now you know what you’re working towards, but a string of these in a row will set you up for failure, all with little to no opportunity for players to avoid it. There were more than one rounds where players couldn’t resolve their own events because they were missing the required tags, and none of the other players needed their assistance. It’s not interesting to skip whole turns, thank you very much.
So many interesting decisions…
What I liked most about Paleo is the same thing that fills me with excitement when it comes to playing any Legacy games, and that’s the discovery. I LOVE earning the secret cards or revealing new dreams and crafting recipes, just to discover exactly what this treats the game has in store for us. But I also felt quite frustrated, as it felt like we were embarking on a quest of attrition. We started the game with 5 food, and at the start of each subsequent round, we had less than that. We were never making a surplus, instead, our resources were slowly dwindling as we milled the decks, searching for those victory conditions. I loved the moments when we found them, it was genuinely exciting. But I don’t believe that Paleo holds up to repeat plays. For me, once I’ve discovered the secrets and surprises, I have no motivations to return.
Paleo is a good, fun game, but I don’t see how it’s game of the year. The frustrations of an unlucky start kneecapping your ability to grow makes me hesitant to recommend Paleo in the first place. It certainly provides a unique experience, but I didn’t feel like I was having ‘fun’ in the strictest sense of the word. When we lost, it felt unavoidable, and when we won, it just felt like luck was on our side. There are many scenarios still to explore, but when I have the itch to play a cooperative game, there are so many others that I would rather pull off the shelf. For a thematic experience, Burgle Bros and Burgle Bros 2 are eminent favourites, and for a more puzzly experience, Pandemic: Fall of Rome and Viticulture World are both very strong contenders.
I often see people set up arbitrary goals for culling their board game collections. “If I haven’t played it in a year, I sell it”, is one I’ve seen a lot, and usually, I’d agree with that. Some people revel in having a shelf of shame, a list of games that they are obligated to play next. I once mentioned my shelf of dust games, the games that have gotten at least one play, but it’s been years since the last time I played it. In today’s post, I’m imploring you to keep your games. yes, it’s annoying to store a bunch of boxes that aren’t seeing a lot of play, and perhaps selling old games is what enables you to buy new ones, which is great! You should do what brings you joy! What I want to share today, is the joy that comes from introducing the games that were instrumental to your development in the hobby to someone else.
My daughter is 4 years old, and for the last year or so, we’ve spent about an hour each afternoon playing old-school Mario games together. It started one day when she was sick and laid out on the couch. Instead of putting on Bluey, I chose to play Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo Switch, because I bought the Mario 3D All-stars game while it was available. I don’t understand why Nintendo made this collection a timed exclusive, but apparently now this cartridge is selling on the after market for outrageous prices. What I find fascinating was that I bought the 3D All-stars collection in 2021, and never got around to playing it. I bought it with the intention of finally playing through Super Mario Sunshine, as I never had the opportunity to play it during the Gamecube era, but even after I got my copy of Mario 3D All-Stars, it just sat on my shelf. I considered selling it a few times, when I saw someone else list it on Marketplace for $300, but I’ve always leaned toward the idea that a game on your shelf is worth more than its resale value.
And I’m glad I never sold it. Playing Super Mario 64 was a pretty special time with my daughter. At first, she was content to just watch me play, then one day while I was getting her a snack in the kitchen, I came back to see the controller in her hands, and her running Mario around in circles. Over the next few weeks, she went from just running up and down the paths around the castles, to learning how to jump, to learning how to jump and move at the same time. It was fascinating watching her learn these mechanics. Eventually, she’d explore Peach’s Castle on her own, pick a world, and then pass me the controller for the tougher parts. I loved the joy in her face as I showed her the secrets, like the secret slide behind Peaches window, or the Snow Kingdom hidden in a wall. The way she screamed “WHAT?” when the game showed her something new, something she previously couldn’t comprehend, was a joy to behold.
Nowadays, she’s playing through whole Mario games on her own. I think Galaxy is her favourite, although she does still ask for my help on the really hard levels, or to get through the final gauntlet. She keeps restarting her save file in Mario Wonder, because she likes it better when the wonder seeds have colour, and she keeps getting all the way up to Bowser castle. Of course, she’s using the Yoshi character, who doesn’t die from the enemies on the stage, but more and more often, I’m catching her playing as Peach. She gets frustrated when she dies, but she is learning how to persevere.
Years ago, I was working as a cook, and I overheard two servers talking about a game of Catan they had recently played. I mentioned that I really liked board games too, and had just bought a couple new ones. The next morning, Ali and Mary came over, and we played Sagrada and Carcassonne. They were hooked. They continued to come over every other morning before we all went to work at the restaurant in the evening, and over the course of a few months, we played through every single board game in my entire collection. Eventually, they both moved away, and that little game group fell apart, but I still think back to it now and again. It’s a good thing I held onto some of the lighter games that my hardcore game group aren’t interested in playing very much, because those games became the catalyst for two newcomers into the hobby.
I’m not saying you need to keep every single game you buy, but consider keeping some of those games that are special to you, even if they haven’t seen a play in months, or even years. You never know when life will shift, and the right game on your shelf, the one you haven’t touched in years, might just be the reason someone else falls in love with the hobby. Because sometimes, it’s not about when you last played a game, it’s about who you might play it with next.
Mountain Goats was pitched to me as a competitor to Can’t Stop. Let me be upfront. It’s not. Can’t Stop has pure tension and excitement in the push your luck mechanism. The moments when you’re rolling and rolling and rolling, crawling towards the top, the table chanting to keep pushing, just two more “5’s” and you’ll hit the summit, only to cheer when bust. Mountain Goats on the other hand, is a more directly cutthroat. It’s more deliberate in its malice, relishing in the pain you inflict on others, rather than revelling in your opponents own bad choices. Let me explain.
In Mountain Goats, you’re sending your climbers up six different mountains, one tied to a different die result from 5 through 10. Just like Can’t Stop, you make combinations from four dice, then move the goats to based on those combinations, and slowly (or quickly) climb the numbered tracks. Once you get to the top, you start scoring. Stay there, and you can keep scoring, so long as you continue to sink die rolls into that goat. But if someone else reaches the summit of a number after you, they boot your goat off back to the start. It’s important to note that the only space that you can boot off and get booted from, is the summit, any number of climbers can bide their time on the penultimate tile. So Mountain Goats becomes less about reaching the top and more about reaching it at the exact right moment. Summit too soon, and you’re a sitting goat. Too late, and someone else has already plundered the number for all the points it offers.
Mountain Goats is a game of gentle aggression. It’s king of the hill with goats and pastel dice and a serene backdrop. You’ll constantly scan the table, trying to gauge how close someone is to the of the 9 mountain? Can I afford to park a goat on the 6 and hope for two quiet rounds before someone rushes up and usurps your spot? Or should I spend my time throwing my own goat at their goat, just to keep them from scoring that last 9-point token? This isn’t really push-your-luck, it’s tactical goat placement with some luck elements.
The dice selection is more forgiving than Can’t Stop. You don’t have to pair the dice off, if you roll low, you can choose to use all 4 dice to move a single goat. Similarly, if you happen to roll four 6’s, you can run that number 6 goat up four spots in a single turn. I do like how simple the rules are. You roll, combine, then move. It’s lean and easy to teach, which makes it perfect for family nights, casual settings, or winding down after something meatier.
That said, Mountain Goats falls short for me, especially when comparing it to the thrill ride that is Can’t Stop. There’s less tension, less holding your breath and waiting for your opponent to bust. There’s more straightforward math. Most turns, you’ll just do the best thing your dice allow, and that’s that. You can make choices, deciding which number combo to pursue, or whether to block or take a slightly less efficient turn to earn SOME victory points, but it rarely feels like the game hinges on a specific turn. It’s more about who rolls the numbers they need, when they need them.
And while there is player interaction, it’s narrow. You only knock players off the top tile. You can’t block progress, you can’t deny paths, except for exhausting a number from all its victory points. I’ve found it plays best at 3. Two-player feels oddly slow and open, while four players is too crowded. But even at its best, this is a game that peaks early. You’ll have fun getting one of your goats to the top, perhaps smirk when you punt someone down who just summited the turn prior, then you’ll wait. You aren’t that invested in other players turns, just waiting to see what they choose to do.
Still, It’s a quick dice game in a small box with some actual player agency, and just enough interaction to keep things lively. Mountain Goats earns its spot on the shelf, if only because it’s easily portable, and especially if you need something you can teach to just about anyone in three minutes.
It’s not Can’t Stop. But I can’t haul that plastic stop sign everywhere I go, so Mountain Goats does have something going for it.
