Considering how often I profess that I love dexterity games, I’ve never really liked Jenga. Even that’s an understatement. Jenga stresses me out and makes me want to leave a room. So imagine my surprise when I found Jenga Maker on clearance after Christmas at my local Canadian Tire. Perhaps it was the brightly coloured pieces that drew me in, but at rock bottom prices, I figured worst case, it’ll be a toy for my toddler to play with.
You’re supposed to play Jenga Maker with 4 or more players, split into two teams. One player on each team is the director, while the others are the builders. Each director draws a card, then dictates to their team how to build their structure. The first team to do so, snatches the crown piece, places it on top, then once the other team checks for accuracy, claims a point. The first team to 3 points wins.
It’s a treadmill
Oh. That’s how I knew I’d like Jenga Maker. Real time and dexterity. Love both of those mechanisms right from the start. The Jenga Maker box is thin and doesn’t waste much space. The pieces fit snugly within, but not too snugly that it becomes a challenge to put away at the end of the day. Each of the pieces are hefty and chunky wooden shapes, brightly coloured and really, a joy to handle. There are some interesting shapes beyond the normal tetromino shapes I come to expect.
I don’t recommend playing Jenga Maker with more than 4. Having extra people on each team doesn’t really add to the experience, as you’re still only building one structure per team. The dictator will tell you how to manipulate the yellow piece, one player will grab the yellow piece and start putting it in its place, and the other player(s) just watch the game unfold. Perhaps with lots of practise, directors could give directions to two players at once, but doing so isn’t going to add to the game experience.
A Canoe and a Sword
So, my fallback plan of “being a toy for my toddler” worked tremendously. Lately, she’s taken an interest to my board games, and will often say “I want to play a game”. Having a game like Jenga Maker is the perfect solution. Sometimes she loves drawing a card and just following the recipe, creating whatever is depicted. And sometimes she’ll just want to stack all the pieces together to create a boat or a castle. Either way, the wooden pieces are fun to manipulate, are weighted and balance well, and when she joyfully collapses whatever has been built up, there’s no harm to any of the pieces.
I can’t recommend Jenga Maker for much. I paid ~$10 for it, and it was a worthy investment for me. That said, I recently saw it again at a different store for $25, which is a bit more than I’d be willing to pay for it if I were looking for a gift. Jenga Maker does make a great gift for any child who likes stacking blocks, as they’re fun shapes to play with, and come with decks of ideas for what to build, if you can find one at the right price. I do love playing this with my toddler, and she loves it too. It’s kinetic, colourful, and nearly indestructible. But as a frowny face ‘serious’ board game, it’s a fine activity.
My trajectory as a board gamer has taken an interesting dip lately. When I first got into the hobby, I skyrocketed up the weights, seeking out heavier and heavier games at every opportunity. Nothing was too long, too complex, or too onerous for me. But over the past few years I’ve regressed back into the mid-weight range. Someone inviting me over for a 4.0 or higher on the Board Game Geek complexity scale would give me a lot more pause than it used to. I just don’t want to put in the effort of learning a big, complex game, only to play it once and never again.
Knarr, by Thomas Dupont and published by Bombyx in 2023 is a medium-light engine building game where players are in charge of a viking clan, and are tasked with growing your clan members and sending them out on expeditions. Gameplay wise, it’s smooth as butter. On your turn you can either play a viking from your hand to your crew and collect the benefits on all the cards of the same colour, or, send vikings on an expedition to claim a land card, which usually has some instant benefits, and increases the value of your trade action. After doing one of those two things, you can choose to trade, then your turn is over.
The goods you’re collecting are victory points, reputation points (which move you up a track that gives reoccurring victory points at the start of all your turns), silver bracelets (for trading), and recruit tokens. The game continues turn over turn until someone hits or exceeds 40 points. Then the current round completes and the player with the most points is the winner.
The first thing that I love about Knarr is the compact size. The game is 3 decks of cards, a cardboard player area, and a 6 cardboard tokens per player. It’s simple, elegant, and unobtrusive. The second thing that I love about Knarr is that the card art is quite beautiful. There’s a variety of vikings depicted on the crew cards, both men and women of all ages. Not every card features unique artwork here, the duplicates are on the cards that provide the same reward (so all the blue bracelet cards feature the same artwork). The land cards, on the other hand, are all unique, and gorgeous. And what’s more, each land card forms a panorama, if you can find it’s pair. That’s a lovely detail, considering I played Knarr half a dozen times and never noticed.
The gameplay of Knarr is smooth as butter. Either play a card from your hand, collect the benefits of the suit you played, and pick up a card, or, remove cards from your tableau to claim a land card, then, you may trade bracelets for more goodies. Game ends at 40 points. It’s easy to play, and the growth of the amount of goodies you get is really satisfying. At first, getting a point and a bracelet feels like an accomplishment, but near the end of the game, you might have 6 or 7 cards of a single colour, and each turn ends up being a cavalcade of rewards.
The trick of Knarr comes in learning when exactly is the best time to start dismantling your engine to gather those land cards. Those cards are powerful, they can bestow great rewards immediately (up to 9 points even), and they make your trade action better. Another slot machine to belch goodies upon you.
Knarr, at its heart, is a race. The first to hit or exceed 40 points triggers the end of the game, which concludes at the end of the round (so all players have the same number of turns), and then that’s it. There’s no bonus end of game scoring, just, whomever has the most points in the round when the game end is triggered. I’ve had games where I ended my turn on 39 points, only to have the next player just barely hit 40 to end the game before I get another turn, and I’ve had games where someone triggers the end game with 42 points, only for me to leap ahead of them by claiming a 9 point land card. It’s not over until it’s over, and the final moments of a race are the most exciting!
I feel like there’s multiple paths to victory in Knarr. I’ve won by maximizing my reputation track and earning 5 points at the start of every round, and I’ve won games without taking a single reputation point. I’ve had massive swaths of vikings in my tableau, doling out goods no matter what colour I play, and I’ve been highly specialized with 8 cards of a single colour. I’ve had games where my bracelet economy is strong, and games where bracelets would be a waste of my time. Knarr is flexible, every path feels viable.
I don’t have much in the way of criticisms. There is a lack of diversity, but it’s a game about vikings, of course every character is going to be Scandinavian. There is a lack of player interaction, if someone has built a great engine, there isn’t much you can do other than hate draft the cards away from them. Other players can’t drag you down, they can only beat you to the finish line. There is some amount of luck, in that the person who plays before you could reveal the perfect card for you, but hey, it’s a 30 minute game. Some luck isn’t going to hurt you. I guess my biggest complaint is that I didn’t find the artifacts variants particularly interesting. When you play with artifacts, you deal out a single card which offers a small extra rule. It’s fine, I’m glad it exists, but I wouldn’t hesitate to play without them.
Another thing that I appreciate is that publishers Bombyx have obviously engaged a cultural consultant to flesh out this project. From the foreward by Lucie Malbos, Senior lecturer, specialist of the northern worlds in the Middle Ages, particularly the viking phenomenon, to the glossary at the end, giving details to all the terms you’ll find throughout the rulebook. It feels like the creators of the game appreciate and value the theme, it’s not just something they slapped on because they thought it looked cool.
Knarr is an incredibly fun game, one that has immediately cemented itself as a favourite of mine. It’ll be one that I bring with me when I travel, it’s one that I’m looking forward to introducing to my family and friends. I have no doubt that it’ll appear in my next top 100 games of all time list (whenever I do that again), the only question will be how high it appears. I recommend Knarr without reservation, if you haven’t given this one a try, it’s available on Board Game Arena, although, you’ll need a premium account to start a game there.
There was a period of time when it felt like every board game coming out featured medieval austere white men staring over a city, kingdom, or grimly staring at you from the box cover. It was around that time when I started really getting into board games, so the theme of ‘trading in the Mediterranean’ became fairly synonymous with board games in my head.
Thankfully the hobby at large has moved on from that trend, and now we get more whimsical and fantastic themes, such as the one you’ll find in First Rat. You are controlling a colony of rats who have set their sights on landing on the cheese moon. You’ll collect resources to construct rocket parts, grow more members of your colony, read comic books to attain superpowers, collect bottle caps and energy drinks, train to be rastronauts, and more.
The gameplay is straightforward. On your turn you can either move one of your rats up to 5 spaces, then collect the resource from the space you landed on, or, you can more 2-4 of your rats up to 3 spaces each (provided they all land on the same colour) and collect resources from all the rats that moved. That’s basically it. There are a couple shops along the way selling useful items that you can either pay for with cheese, or, steal for no cheese, but the thieving rat gets punted back to the start space.
As you collect goods, you trade them in for rocket parts, which just has you placing cubes on tracks to earn end game points. The same goes for the apple core track, the light track, the rastronaut track. Once one player had placed 8 of their score cubes, or all 4 of their rats reach the top of the track, the game concludes, and the rat family with the most points is crowned the winner
I’ll be honest, I kind of love First Rat. First, the theme is whimsical and brilliant, and I adore telling people the story of what’s going on. The board is adorned with all kinds of charming details, like the cockroach thugs guarding the entrance to the shortcuts, or inserting the special personas onto the tails of the rats. There’s a lot of charm to this game. Then the game has a really satisfying growth to it, as more and more rats enter the tracks and the rats manage to get further along to the really powerful spots, players go from earning a measly 2 cheese per round to pulling in absolute ludicrous numbers of goods in a single round.
First Rat is a race in every respect. The first player to do anything gets the most benefits. The first to reach the shops gets first pick, the first player to find the comic book stash gets the first pic, the first player to turn in goods gets the most points. In that same respect, there’s tremendous value in being able to do multiple things first, as if you specialize in a single thing, you’ll be receiving diminishing returns. In our most recent game I had a banger of a turn, landing 3 rats on orange tiles, complete with backpack and lightbulb bonuses to get 7 goods, then used a soda can to double my total yield, and cashed in all those resources to get 2 cockpits and a thruster, which completed a full shuttle. A single turn, placing 4 cubes sounds amazing, doesn’t it? The downside was that I wasn’t first in any of those categories, making the average score of each cube just 6 points. The player who won, managed to be first on a couple tracks and got their rastronaut to the end of the track and won with a whopping 92 points over my 67.
On the flip side of the board, all the tracks are blank, which allow you to randomize the spaces and the values for accomplishing each of the tasks in the game, which can vary wildly. There are slightly more backpacks and comic books in the game than is required, meaning you won’t always have the same set of special powers each game, but those are minor to the experience. Every game will ultimately feel the same, run your rats up the tracks, amass resources, trade those in for points.
That being said, First Rat is a really satisfying engine building game. I love the trade-off of choosing which rat(s) to move, deciding between activating one space that you need right now, and activating 3 spaces for a bigger, but less urgent benefit. I like the concept of stealing from the stores to reset your rat back to the start of the race, which may or may not be very beneficial to you. I like everything about First Rat, it’s just a satisfying game to play. But at the same time, it doesn’t light my world on fire, nor does it beckon for me to return to it again and again. I think the real strength lies in its whimsical theme, plus it’s light and satisfying gameplay. It’s a game I won’t hesitate to suggest if I’m in a group of people whom I don’t game with often, as it’s a pretty inoffensive. There’s not too much you can do to cause bad feelings amongst your peers, and when you win or lose, it’s not because of randomness or luck. You can generally pinpoint what you did wrong and figure out how to play better next time.
You might be able to tell from my tone that I don’t really know where I come down on First Rat at the end of the day. I really like, I know I do. But the more I think about it, the more criticism I can draw. And I think I’m okay with that. It’s a great little game that’s fun to play. Not every game needs to be a lifestyle game, nor does every game need to be a desert island game. First Rat is a great game that you can play with almost anyone and have a good time. While it’s not something that I’m going to write a strategy guide on, nor will I spend a lot of time dwelling on the design or decisions the game presents, I’m still really happy each time I get to play First Rat. And that’s what I’m really looking for in a game. One that lets me have fun!
“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?”
The Fifth Season is a fantasy story told via 3 storylines. Essun, a woman, Syenite, an apprentice orogene (Earth Mage), and Damaya, a young, feral orogene. The narrative for Essun is told from the second-person perspective, while the other storylines are written with the present tense. It’s a bit jarring, and is a choice that I didn’t really like, but it didn’t chase me away from the book. The voice of the story is quite casual as well, with narrative lines like ”Back to the personal. Need to keep things grounded, ha ha.” and “Pyramids are the most stable architectural form, and this one is pyramids times five because why not?” (direct quotes). It was a bit of a rocky start, but once I got used to the book’s voice, it stopped bothering me.
What did turn my stomach was the fact that the story starts with a 3-year-old beaten to death by its father and Essun’s husband, and Essun sitting next to its corpse for days. It’s tough to read that as a parent to a 3-year-old child. I suppose that’s the inciting incident for Essun’s story, that she’s going to chase down her husband to save her other child. Oh, also the world is ending due to massive fissures in the north, and ash blotting out the sun. But that storyline doesn’t materialize in this novel. There’s a lot of utter disrespect for the human condition, like a Guardian who casually shatters the bones of a child just to teach the child a lesson. Listen to me, or else. The grimdark aspects are a huge turn-off for me, but that’s more of a personal preference than anything else.
The other two storylines don’t have an inciting incident, they seem to exist to provide context for the world around them. Damaya is on her way to the Fulcrum with a Guardian, and Syenite’s has her leaving the Fulcrum with Alabaster on a mission. Both stories showcase the world as it was, and the oppression that Orogene’s face. They aren’t treated as humans, but as tools at the best of times, despite wielding god-like power.
There’s no real villain for these stories, they just plod along, having things happen until each one reaches its conclusion. The Fifth Season is more of a character focused and world building story than a story about an event. I spent a lot of time just wondering where the story was going? What was the point of all this exposition and exploration. Why are there three characters, who’s stories have vastly different timelines (at one point Essun’s story mentions having 2 months pass, while a whole year passes in Damaya’s story). When it’s all revealed at the end, it’s a pretty cool twist, but it’s a long walk for a short drink of water.
I found a lot odd with this book. The story goes from detailing the nuance of Orogene power, and how they draw heat and feel stone and giving an incredible amount of detail, to flipping over to the obelisks and saying “no one knows what they’re for. They just float around” and an entire underground community with magical geodes that filter the air that “just work”.
I admire the world that author N.K. Jemisin built, and the story she’s telling. The Orogene magic system has a scientific edge to it that I love, the different races are inventive and exciting. The characters reference a history of the world and stumble upon dead-civs that makes the world feel more realized than many other stories I’ve read. But it feels like a prequel. Most of the story is creating the character that is actually going to do something in the next novel, and creating the cataclysm that will eventually tell a story, but The Fifth Season on its own, doesn’t feel like a complete book to me. I know that this is the start of a series, but I don’t know that I really want to continue reading. Personally, I like my books to stand on their own, and this one doesn’t inspire me to continue on with the journey.
I’ve started adding “Board Game Review” to the title of my posts to make it easier for me to schedule my posts according to my schedule, and because it’s surprisingly helpful with SEO, but I feel weird doing it when I’m reviewing a game that is just cards, like Too Many Poops.
I think I should start with the story of how this game entered my collection. My wife was out of town with her friend, and the two of them love to go thrift store shopping. Often, it’s more the hunt that they enjoy, over anything that they actually find, but recently she brought me home a present. A shrink-wrapped copy of Too Many Poops, solely because she knows I love games, and cats. A perfect gift, no?
To play Too Many Poops, players are dealt 2 cat cards and 2 tool cards. A pet shop is established in the centre of the table with 3 cats and 3 tools face up. To begin, all players pick one cat from their hand and plays it face up in front of them to establish their “house”.
On your turn, you must play at a cat card from your hand to your own house, your opponent’s house, or to the ‘wild’, which is just an oversized green card off to the side. After playing one cat, you may play up to two tool cards, and resolve their effects accordingly.
At the end of your turn, draw cards from the pet shop until your hand is back up to 6 cards, and add one poop for every cat in your house to your litter box. Players take turns one after another until one player has achieved 10 points to become the winner. Each cat is worth 1 point, but if you have cats of the same colour in your house, those cats are worth double. However, if you have two rival cats in your house, they’re flipped over to their colourless side and are worth 0 points. If your litter box ever has 10 poops at the end of your turn, then you’ve become overwhelmed with poops, and you’re eliminated from the game.
The first thing I noticed about Too Many Poops was the presence of pooples. Little wooden poop tokens. The next thing I noticed was that the rest of the production was pretty lush for a simple little card game. Each player gets a dual layered tile for their litter box, and a couple of the cards were iridescent. These rainbow cats have no rivals, and can belong to any colour. As a nice touch, the game also comes with non-foil versions of these cats, if you find their sheen distasteful. Another nice touch, they included a full set of rainbow cats, but with the names blanked, so you can add your own felines to the mix.
Playing the game is pretty simple, much along the lines of the incredibly popular Exploding Kittens. You play a cat to yourself to earn more points, or if you happen to have a rival for a cat in your opponent’s house, you can stymie their efforts. The tool cards are fairly varied, with effects that happen right away, or persist throughout the game, along with giving and stealing cats. There’s a lot of directly interacting or messing with your opponents, Nothing you have is safe.
When playing with larger player counts, the game descends into chaos. As more cats are on the table, more people taking turns and playing cats in between every one of your turns, the likelihood of your rival cat being foisted upon you gets exponentially higher. And with more cats in your house means more poops to have to clean up.
This was actually the part of Too Many Poops that I found the most interesting. The more cats you have, the more poops you generate, the more of the tools you take and use are spent mitigating your poop generating engine. It can feel like walking on a tightrope as you balance bringing more cats into your house for the points, but also needing to deal with the waste. That said, if you just so happen to get screwed on the tool cards a couple rounds in a row, there isn’t anything you can do to mitigate it. And other players can’t really affect the cards available to you, except via hate-drafting, and even then they’ll take the tool you wanted, only to have a similar one get revealed on the flop.
Too Many Poops was better than I expected it to be, but that’s hardly praise, as my expectations were in the basement. For fans of Exploding Kittens, Unstable Unicorn, or just cats in general, Too Many Poops offers a fast, chaotic, combative experience with a touch of set collection. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it’s best enjoyed with children who giggle every time you say poop. I won’t be bringing this out to my serious game group, but if you have a group who enjoy these kinds of take-that card games, Too Many Poops could be a hit!
