In Applejack players are… actually, don’t worry about the theme. The goal of the game is to earn the most honey by growing cultivating collections of apples in your orchard, and arranging beehives to produce the most honey.
I think it’s safe to say we’re firmly in the era of “Cozy Games”. Games featuring zombies, war, and general turmoil, while not absent, are popping up less frequently. Meanwhile, farming, animals, and nature themes are becoming much more prevalent. Now, designer Uwe Rosenberg is no stranger to comfy cozy themes, with his biggest hits being Patchwork, Agricola, and A Feast for Odin, but something in Applejack hits differently. It starts with the delightful cover by Lukas Siegmon of a man admiring an apple, sitting on his bounty of fruity, taking a rest after a long day, with a flock of sheep grazing on the grass in the background. This single piece of art sets the tone for Applejack.
A game of Applejack starts with a fallow field, devoid of fruit, but full of promise. Turn by turn, the die will travel around the central board, and players take turns pulling tiles and placing them into their field. Each tile depicts one of the 6 apple varieties, and include some beehives, that indicate how much that tile costs, and how much it might get you later on in the game. At certain points during the game, the round tracker die will pass over various apple varieties, triggering income for anyone who has collected apples of that type.
I have nothing but respect for Uwe Rosenberg’s past tile laying masterpieces, and I feel Applejack is among his best work. Choosing and laying a tile is tough when you start, or, you may just pick the biggest numbers and hope for the best. But as you play Applejack more and more, the intricacies of the design begin to reveal themselves. Is it better to diversify and collect tiny bits of income frequently, or do you go all in on a single apple variety and reap a major bonus. Maybe placing a tile of the wrong variety would net you a huge honey bonus, but segment your red apple variety into two halves, cutting your potential income for the rest of the game. Honey is generated when two beehives meet, but only the lower number is what you’re scoring. It’s painful to pay 10 honey for a tile because it has the right apple, but you’re forced to place it against a measly 3 beehive, losing 7 honey overall. Foreseeing and managing these tradeoffs are what gives Applejack it’s delicious texture!
Perhaps a downside of the cozy setting is that the barbs of Applejack can catch players unaware. Much like Agricola (AKA Misery Farm), the start of the game sees players barely scraping by. The honey income is slow and more often than not you’ll have to pass up the more expensive tiles, simply because you don’t have the honey to afford them. Go big early, and you’ll starve for a couple rounds and fill your board with useless sheep.
Another complaint I have has to do with the chosen apple varieties, and the fact that they made two of them slightly different shades of green. More than once I’ve taken a tile, only to realize during the next scoring that one of my tiles was the wrong green, not only accidentally cleaving my biggest orchard in two, but also incorrectly influencing my decisions for several rounds until my mistake was discovered.
Overall, those are some pretty minor gripes about. Full disclosure, I’ve only played Applejack on Board Game Arena, which may sand off some other complaints, like, refilling the market with tiles and the fiddly activity of constantly trading in bits of honey tokens after doing the same basic math over and over again.
After my first play, I was lukewarm on Applejack, it felt shallow and devoid of interesting decisions. But the more games I played, the more layers were peeled back. I started to realize how you can plan ahead, and how some of the tradeoffs and timings really work. There’s depth and crunch to this game, from the spatial puzzle of apple placement to the timing of the economic decisions. Playing Applejack well requires some interesting decisions, and it’s turned out to be much more fun than I initially thought.
I’m thrilled that I gave Applejack more than a single play, as I am truly relishing in its charm with each subsequent game. The very first modern board game I experienced with my mother was Patchwork, a game she adored, and I believe she would also love Applejack, despite her unfortunate apple allergy. As it stands, I would happily use Applejack as a means to introduce novice gamers to my hobby. Uwe Rosenberg, once again, has fashioned a remarkable creation, a true gem of a game that has the potential to expand and share the joy of board games far beyond its current horizons.
Roll & Write games! Remember when these little gems were considered novel and few and far between, just a few years ago? Well, Nao Shimamura’s first kick at the can is a little title called Mind Space and is being published by Allplay. Is it a mind-blowing revelation, or just another set of dice with dry-erase markers to go stale on your shelf? Read on to find out!
Mind Space is a roll-and-write game with a few extra sulci. The first thing that sets it apart from those that came before it is the theme. Players are colouring sections of their brain, and each colour represents a different facet of your personality, and how those quirks interact will lead one player to being crowned the best person.
The gameplay of Mind Space has a row of 5 offer cards depicting various polyomino shapes. One will be placed face down, then 5 face up, and the rest of the deck put aside, creating the offer row. At the top of every round, the 5 dice are rolled, and are assigned to a shape based on the number you rolled. Players all simultaneously choose a die and draw the shape depicted on the card that the die was assigned to, in the colour of that die.
Each colour has its own scoring criteria, each one representing a different aspect of personality. The orange colour represents friendship, the more activities you do with friends, the more points you’ll earn. Even better if you can pair it with complementary purple hobbies. Hobbies score two points for every square that is adjacent to an orange square. The pink romance encourages you to have the same shape, while green just earns you money.
This isn’t the kind of game where you can achieve everything, and Mind Space reflects that. Life is all about compromises, and you’ll mourn as the deck of polyomino shapes (called activities) slowly flow through the offer row, ultimately reaching the end and becoming unavailable to you for the rest of the game. Those activities you used to love just aren’t available to you any more.
It’s incredibly appropriate that while spending money can let you break the rules, it’s also utterly useless in the end. Cash is just a means to an end, either buying you shaded cells or the occasional wild shape. If you don’t spend it, it’s gone with the wind. Charon doesn’t get paid in Mind Space.
The final result? It’s surprisingly pleasant. Mind Space might not be the most mind-blowing game out there, but it’s got a calm serenity to it, like sipping tea on a quiet morning. There’s more nuance here than the slot machine combo-tastic style of roll and write games such as That’s Pretty Clever. It imparts a little wisdom in unexpected places, and the trade-offs it forces you to consider make for a decent and enjoyable experience. In a crowded genre, Mind Space is a lovely surprise.
Have you ever walked through a jungle and thought to yourself, “I love how colourful this place is! The vibrant green, red, purple, and blue ferns?” and “Wouldn’t this bright yellow fern look lovely if it had an equally yellow parrot on it?” No? Me either. Rainforest, by Johannes Goupy and published by Funnyfox, uses the rainforest name and aesthetic, but the mechanics of the game are completely separated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, no one is arguing that Cascadia or Wingspan’s themes ties into their mechanics, and those games have won piles of awards.
According to the Board Game Geek description, In Rainforest, your aim is to create a jungle environment that offers a rich variety of vegetation, which will allow you to reintroduce and protect the region’s iconic species: Monkeys, frogs, butterflies, and parrots. The gameplay is simple enough and features a double draft much like Cascadia or Verdant. On each turn, you’ll draft a tile from the central board (the tiles are separated by colour), and take a set of animal tokens from below the tile that you just took. The animal tokens you take must share an attribute, either all the animals of a single colour, or all the tokens of a single animal. Then, you can place your animals on your rainforest tiles and, if completed, place into your tableau.
Each tile is worth a certain amount of victory points on their own, but you can increase the number of points that tile is worth by placing your special totem animal onto that tile. One extra point for each of your totem animal that makes it onto the tile.
Some tiles will require specific animals, and specific colours, but the real restriction comes when you place the completed jungle tiles into your tableau. They must be placed into a 3 x 3 grid, and starting from the bottom left and moving across. This becomes incredibly important as if you can have multiple tiles of the same colour touching each other, you’ll earn a multiplier token called a protected area bonus, which you place on a tile that multiplies the points of that tile. These multiplier tokes are quite limited, making them incredibly valuable.
The game comes to an end once someone places their 9th tile, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Rainforest is a tile selection and action efficiency game. To do well, you need both your tile selections and animal token picks to be working at the same time. On your turn you do have the option to return a tile to the bottom of the stack to only take the animal tiles, but considering the game is a bit of a race, doing so is really not ideal. You need to be first to the protected area tokens, and you want to be the first one to complete your 9 tile tableau, but doing so cheaply can actually cost you the game. If someone has a 4 point tile, with 2 of their totem animal on it, with a triple score bonus, that single tile could be worth more than your entire tableau.
At 4 players, Rainforest feels tight. The tiles and animals shift dramatically between each of your turns, making forward planning difficult. At the same time, forward planning is required, as you can’t adjust where the tiles go when they’re placed into your tableau. You can only hold 2 animals on your board, and situations will arise where you’ll need to discard an animal lest you complete the wrong tile first and ruin your chance for a protected area token. At 2 players, it’s much more open. You need to specifically target your opponents’ strategy to step on their toes.
I do like drafting games, and Rainforest delivers on that front. There are some tough choices you need to make as a player here. Do you bide your time building up your perfect tiles, or blaze forth and try to end the game before other players manage to recruit their army of butterflies? The tiles of Rainforest are bright and attractive, but incongruent with each other. That said, its attractiveness and ease of play makes it a perfect game to play with those who may not have expressed an interest in board games before, especially if they have a particular affinity for one of the featured animals.
Rainforest was quick to play and attractive to look at, but I don’t feel that it has the replayability that I’m looking for. The scoring is the same every game, with the only thing changing are the order of the tiles and which animal tokens get associated with each tile. Perhaps I’m spoiled by games like Cascadia, and it’s myriad of scoring opportunities, but Rainforest sits in a crowded market, and it’s a game-eat-game jungle out there.
I’ve never made anything that’s been massively popular, and as a by product, I’ve never had to follow up a massively popular project. I have sympathy for those who have, like Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch, both of whom are authors who created excellent and popular book series, that have been dormant for a decade. I get it, suddenly, there are a lot of eyeballs on your work, and anything you do will be compared to your previous projects, and probably unfairly just because it doesn’t live up to the image that’s been conjured up in the mind of the fandom.
I sometimes wonder if Renier Knizia suffers from this. But before I even have a moment to speculate, another one of his game designs is announced to the world. My City: Roll & Build is the 2022 follow up to 2020’s My City, both published by KOSMOS. My City: Roll & Build takes the essence of My City and reduces it down to a much smaller package, and one that feels much more replayable.
In My City: Roll & Build, 1 to 6 players will create 12 unique cities by rolling dice and marking off the resultant shapes on their terrain sheet. The two blue dice contain a number of squares on each side, and every side has a little semicircle. Press the two semicircles together to reveal the shape you must plop into your city. Unlike My City however, you’re free to flip and rotate the shape of the building to your heart’s content; you’ll never be cursing that you got the wrong L shape, like I did in every game. The white dice, on the other hand, dictates the texture of the city which is important for scoring purposes. Like My City, each chapter of the game introduces a main mechanic, and every episode of the chapter builds upon and twists that mechanic.
Also like the parent game, everyone is given the exact same tools and situations. Everyone will draw the same shape at the same time, but it’s the decisions that each person makes that will spiral off into interesting and unique boards. There’s nearly no interactions between the players, and the ones that do exist are just “whoever can cover these spaces first gets an extra 5 points”. Which leads me nicely into the scoring, every individual game has slightly different scoring opportunities. In the first game, the only thing you really care about is covering rocks and empty spaces while not covering your trees. Throughout the campaign, you’ll be trying to cover plains tiles, gold ore, ensure churches are touching all 3 types of buildings, surround wells and bandits, and more! Every game you play will earn you a score, and your final score is assessed at the end by a table of results.
I’m generally not a fan of “score attack” types of games, and this is no different. I don’t really care about trying to break that 300 point threshold, and when I play against other players, I struggle to really care about who wins or loses each individual game. With no interaction, the competition feels hollow, but that’s okay. My City: Roll & Build doesn’t have to be a fiercely competitive game. I found a lot of joy just in just drawing my little buildings on my pads of paper. Overcoming the puzzle of how to jam as many pieces onto my board at a time.
Part of my apathy toward the scoring is that there can be large swings from play to play. Breaking past that 300 point upper threshold could be simple if you roll a lot of small buildings. Meanwhile, a string of bad luck can see half a dozen large C shapes that don’t work together and can cost you a whole games worth of points. It’s marginally better when you’re comparing your score against people who played the exact same game that you did, but trying to get a high score feels too luck dependant for me to invest my time into it. You can’t plan for a specific shape to enter into your city like you could in My City. Here, you’re at the whim of the dice rolls.,
My City: Roll & Build is a charming, calming little dice game that you can take anywhere. You don’t need to play through an entire 12 game campaign with the same group, playing a single chapter in 35 minutes is absolutely adequate to give a satisfying gameplay experience. It’s the kind of game that I’d play on the train, or plane with friends or intrested strangers. The moment to moment decisions of drawing buildings, and the elation when the perfect building gets rolled feels great. While I still prefer the larger My City experience as it felt more tense with the tile placement restrictions, and the tactile nature of tiles is more satisfying for me, there’s space for My City: Roll & Build to exist on nearly any shelf.
Lucky Duck Games has announced that they’re bringing a special edition of Splotter’s hit game,Food Chain Magnate, to Gamefound on November 14th, targeting a late 2024 delivery.
Lucky Duck Games reports that the gameplay will be untouched and that this special edition features a complete visual overhaul for both the base game originally released in 2015, and the Ketchup Mechanisim & Other Ideas expansion that was released in 2019. In addition to new visuals, the project will bring plastic minis for the restaurants and houses, screen printed tokens, and a storage solution for the entire game. While they’re looking to maintain the original box dimensions of 31cm x 22cm, the new box will be significantly deeper. Lucky Duck Games has also promised that this will be a one-off print run with no retail release.
Victor Maristane is credited as the artist creating the new illustrations, and they’re collaborating with Matt Paquette & Co. which includes more artists and graphic designers.
Original designers and publishers, Splotter, has commented that they’ve known Scott Morris at Lucky Duck Games for years, which lead them to accept Lucky Duck Games proposal of making this new edition with completely overhauled graphics. Lucky Duck Games has taken on all the risk and work of this project, with Splotter only giving them their blessing, along with a few conditions, such as an English only requirement, no gameplay changes, and that there will only be a single print run. Splotter has also commented that they have deliberately stayed away from the design process of this edition to ensure that their aesthetic preferences aren’t influencing the Lucky Duck team.
Splotter will continue to produce and sell the original version of the game, and all non-English editions will be based on the original graphic design.
