Legacy games get a bad rap around my table. I’ve started more than half a dozen and completed only 2. It seems my thirst for discovery goes beyond incremental rule changes and I find it burdensome to feel the obligation to play a game, rather than picking it because it’s the game that I want to play. And yet, I still feel compelled to embark on these endeavors. Lured in by the promise of changing gameplay, an immersive story, and long term ramifications, I keep coming back to these legacy games hoping to find the one that shows me what I’ve been missing all this time.
My City by Reiner Knizia and published by KOSMOS is a 2 – 4 player tile laying legacy game that takes place over 24 games, broken into 8 chapters. Each chapter of the game introduces a new mechanic or a new major rule change, and each of the games within that chapter slowly increase the complexity or add wrinkles for you to contend with. It’s a little intimidating at first, hearing that you’ll have to play this game 24 times to see it through to the end, but each game only lasts between 15 and 30 minutes, making it simple to plow through 3 games in a single sitting, if you have the stomach for ever-changing rule-sets.
The gameplay of My City is smooth as butter. A card is flipped over, and all players need to place the tile that’s depicted on that card. Your first building needs to be adjacent to the river, and every subsequent tile must be adjacent to another building tile. The pieces range from little 2 square tiles, all the way up to pentominoes, 5 sided giant C shapes that you’ll struggle to fit into your commune. You can choose to pass, and give up a point, if the tile doesn’t fit, or if you simply don’t like the cut of that tile’s jib. You do lose a point for doing so, however.
So what’s the point of placing tiles? Well, your player board is littered with trees, rocks, and empty plains. You’ll try to cover all the rocks and empty tiles, while keeping your beautiful foliage intact. At the end of the first game, you’ll earn 2 points for every tree still standing, and lose 2 points for every rock marring your landscape, and 1 point for wasted, empty spaces.
As the campaign goes on, more and more scoring rules are folded in. You start scoring a point for your largest contiguous group of same coloured buildings, 4 points for 4 different buildings surrounding a well, unpassable churches that offer 3 points if it’s adjacent to all 3 colours. Thankfully, mercifully, it isn’t all rise. There reaches a point whereas new rules come in, old rules start to get pushed out. This helps reduce the cognitive load on players, as they try to remember the dozen different ways the game is offering points to you.
After each play, the winners are generally awarded something that will make their life harder, like more stones they need to sticker onto their board, while the lowest scoring players get a boon, like a tree that makes your board inherently more valuable, assuming you don’t bulldoze that bonus coniferous to make way for the blooming blue district that’s up and coming.
You’ll also earn mysterious little circles that you mark off along the top of your board. I don’t think it was spelled out during the start of the game, but the player who accumulates the most of these circles will be the victor of the whole campaign.
Playing My City is a fast and pleasant affair. Some chapters have players racing to cover two spots first, but beyond that, there’s nothing stopping you from just enjoying your own little game and comparing the scores at the end. You’ll curse the fact that you have the wrong Z or L shaped tile, no matter which one you’re trying to place. You’ll wish they were reversible as you place the tiles, making awkward shapes on your board. In the same vein, when the perfect piece gets flipped, and that tile slides in like a glove, connecting all the buildings of the same colour, it’s majestic. The rule changes keep the game feeling fresh and offer new wrinkles that flex the system in ways it might not expect.
I honestly thought my family would love this game. I picked up a brand-new copy, brought it out at Christmas with my wife and my mom, and going into the third game they both were annoyed that the rules kept changing. “Why can’t we play the same game?” they asked, apparently not understanding the whole point of a legacy game is for things to change from play to play.
My regular game group, on the other hand, played through this whole campaign, using the games are lovely little end caps of our evenings. After a much heavier game had wrapped, we cooled off with a game or two of My City, and it was the perfect way to experience this charming game. I don’t know if there’s a way to become good or skilled at My City, and I couldn’t tell you why I won some games and lost others, but it’s just plain enjoyable to fit little cardboard tiles together, like a jigsaw. When we got to the final game, I felt the whole experience ended with a sigh or a whimper, rather than a bombastic finale. It just, ended. The player who accumulated the most circles won, and we knew who that was going to be by the time chapter 5 concluded. There were no dramatic upsets, no surprise twists, just, the end.
My City offers an eternal variant, where you use the reverse side of the board for one-off games. It’s the mode I use with my family, but that mode would never be my first choice. In that same breath, I recognize that I can’t start a 24 game campaign with everyone who sits down at my table.
While the ending of the campaign left me wanting more, I remain charmed by My City. If you like polyomino tile laying games, My City is a no-brainer.
We call this one ‘Big Plus-y”. You always need to leave room in your city for Big Plus-y.
Kites, designed by Kevin Hamano and published by Floodgate Games, is a real time cooperative card game about keeping your kites in the sky, or rather, sand in the timers. Honestly, if a game has a real-time component, I’m instantly down to give it a shot, I love the pressure and delight in the stress that comes from having a real-time aspect. Also, it’s a great way to ensure a game moves at a decent clip. As a gamer who tends to act first and think later, it’s great for me.
How to Play
The game begins with the 5 coloured timers on their side. Everyone gets a hand of cards (6 cards each for 2 players, 4 cards each for 4 players, etc.) and play begins with the starting player flipping over the white timer to launch the game. From this point on, if any timer ever runs out of sand, the players collectively lose.
Each card has one or two colours on it. When you play a card, you must flip over the colours depicted on the card, then draw a new card. If the card you played only has one colour on it, you can choose to flip the white timer instead of the colour that was depicted on the card, which is important because no cards have white on them. When players exhaust the entire deck, the white timer becomes ‘locked’, it can no longer be flipped. If players manage to play all the cards from their hands before any timer runs out, then you’ve won!
It’s worth mentioning that if a timer runs out, players haven’t “lost”, but they can check how many cards are left in the deck and their hands, and call it their score, with the best score being 0. Personally, I don’t bother with counting cards at the end, Kites is a win or lose game for us.
Review
I love games that can be explained how to play in just two paragraphs. “Play cards, flip timers” is all players really need to know to get started playing Kites.
There are some advanced cards to challenge players once they clear the challenge of the base game, but we’ll leave those aside for now. The production of Kites is really simple and lovely. The cards feature lush illustrations of whimsical kites by the ever talented Beth Sobel. The cards feel like high quality card stock, and the final component is the timers, which are absolutely functional, if a bit prone to toppling over during the frenzied gameplay. I’m not sure if making the flared bases would have made them harder to top over, and keeping them slim was a deliberate design decision, but when playing with 4 players, it was a challenge to have the timers arranged in a way that each player could flip any of their timers without bowling over two other times at the same time. Maybe we have clumsy ham hands, but it was a component challenge we ran into.
It’s real hard to take photos of real-time games
The gameplay of Kites is straightforward, elegant, exciting, and kinetic. You’ll be anxiously looking at the red timer getting close to empty, play a card to flip it, then the next player will play a purple and red card. The anguish and stress that comes from trying to quickly parse what options your cards afford you, and which of the timers needs flipping, all while those timers are constantly draining, is simply delicious. Communication a short and to the point, you can’t have a calm and calculated discussion, detailing who has which cards and how best to approach the puzzle, because time is running out and every time a timer flips, everyone needs to reassess the situations.
At lower player counts, we found Kites to be quite easy. With 5 cards in each player’s hands, we had plenty of options each turn, and could even claim ownership over whole timers. “I’ve got red and blue”, letting the other player know that they can ignore those timers and focus on the remaining timers. With just two players, play feels even faster, as by the time you’ve finished flipping your timers and have drawn your next card, the next player is already halfway through flipping their timers, and the heat is right back onto you.
The final wrinkle in the basic game is the ‘grand finale’, where, when the deck runs out, the white timer can no longer be flipped. Players need to play out their hands to complete the game. This forces players to be aware of the deck running out, and when exactly should they flip that white timer. It’s not a major pain, but it’s one that caused a few ‘losses’ in my plays.
I’m not sure how much staying power Kites has, I imagine once your group figures out the ‘flow’, it’ll move from exciting to just an exercise in flipping timers. But this is where the challenge cards come in. The airplane halts communication for a round, the storm forces one player to flip every timer, and the crossed lines have players give one card to their left and one to their right. These challenge cards inject even more unpredictability and chaos into the game, which is an element of real-time games that I absolutely love. These challenge cards are not necessary to enjoy Kites, but they are a nice addition once you’ve mastered the basic game.
I think it’s clear just how much I enjoyed playing Kites. It’s frantic, a little chaotic, but if you can control your panic and find the flow, then the game just sings. The losses never sting, but the victories will have you cheering and shouting with joy. It’s fast, easy to pick up and play, the rules take 30 seconds to explain, allowing for players to leap in and out at gatherings. Kites feels thrilling and immersive, if a little crazy at times. It’s been a major hit for me, and it’s exactly the kind of game I would take on vacation to bust out at every family gathering.
Beast is a hidden movement game, designed by Aron Midhall, Elon Midhall, and Assar Pettersson, and published by Studio Midhall. As many Kickstarter darlings are, it’s an absolutely gorgeous production. The box art depicts a massive hydra before a lone warrior, weapon drawn. The scene promises an epic encounter with a mystical beast, a foe that needs to be overcome in the depths of the forest. The characters are lovely acrylic standees, and the board is littered with gold highlighted screen printed critter meeples (sheep, boars, and bears). The art on the cards is dark and mysterious, and each beast feels like it has an entire mythos behind them. A fable, passed down in whispers around campfires from generation to generation, which is exactly the feeling you want from this game.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is plodding at best. Beast is all about a hidden movement dance. You’ve got these hunters, dreaming of glory, and a beast, sneaking around like a Predator. In its mind, you’re already dead, you just haven’t realized it yet. But wait, it’s not all excitement and epic clashes. You know that feeling when you’re stuck in traffic, and it’s like the universe is conspiring against your progress? That’s how Beast makes me feel. It’s slower than a molasses, drafting cards and deciding on which top and bottom actions to use takes longer than trying to start a fire with nothing but a stick and string. You saw it work in a movie once, right?
Beast should be simple and straightforward. Players draft a hand of action cards, add them to their hand of personal cards, then, on their turn, play one or two cards and execute the actions on the cards. But Hunters need to confer with each other on what each player can do, and what they think the beast can do, all while be beast player sits by, smirking, or, bored out of their skull waiting for their turn to do anything. Then, when all the hunters have finally executed their turns, it’s finally the beast players turn to make the table wait while they consider every possibility. After every beast turn, the hunters need to re-confer with each other, as each action they take is precious. There’s a lot of time just spent considering everything that you as a player can do, and trying to guess at what your partners and opponents can accomplish on their turns.
The dance between the beast and the hunters is exciting at first. As the beast slinks in the shadows, circling its prey, the hunters take their first tentative steps out of their villages, moving in the direction they think the beast has moved to. Very quickly, it becomes clear that this dance is actually a frustrating game of cat and mouse. Each of the hunters can move one or maybe two steps with each of their cards, while the beast seems to get 2 to 4 movement on average. On the face of it, that doesn’t seem that bad, but at the end of the day, the hunters can move 10ish spaces between them, while the beast player can move like 12 spaces all on their own. Ideally, the hunters are spread out to cover more ground, but this leaves at least one hunter removed from the action, taking an entire day to cross the map only to have the beast slip by them going in the other direction.
I was endlessly frustrated by the hide and seek mechanics. There were scenarios where I had 100% logically deduced where the beast was, and was standing on that same spot, and had attack cards in my hand, but because I didn’t hold a card with the ‘seek’ keyword in my hand, I couldn’t reveal the beast to attack it. In contrast to that, the only thing the Beast needs to do to attack is to play one of those attack cards. Doing so, reveals their location, but to become hidden again, all they have to do is simply move again. It feels unfair for the hunters to require a keyword to find the beast when the beast doesn’t need a keyword to hide again. Coupled with my criticism above where the beast generally has so much more movement options than the players, it makes for a slippery and frustrating experience.
Beast gives both the hunters and the beast player plenty of tools to cut their own path. For every strategy, there’s a counter. For every boon one side gets, there’s a way for the other side to mitigate it. For the beast, it’s not terribly difficult to accrue enough grudge to be fully evolved and have all their skills unlocked by the final night. With all of your skills at your disposal, the beast is exponentially stronger than it was at the start of the game. The hunters, on the other hand, struggle to gain enough grudges to unlock any of their abilities. Add to that, the grudges are used to activate most of the items that are needed to counter the beastly talents. And yes, many of the beastly talents also cost grudges, but the Beast has so many more options to earn grudges over the course of a single day. The opportunity cost for using a grudge for the hunters is significantly higher doing similar things as the beast player.
I found the asymmetry of the beast and the hunters to be odd and frustrating. The beast gets grudges for killing the critters on the board, but the humans don’t get grudges for hitting the beast or killing its summons. If the beast kills one of the players, the beast gets to take one of their cards, and that player has to sit out for the rest of the round, but if the players hit the beast, then hitting the beast is the reward in itself. A lot of “I can do this, but you can’t” when explaining the rules continued to sow discord in my heart.
Speaking of dying, while there isn’t true player elimination in Beast, it’s possible for players to be knocked out of a whole day. In our most recent game, Bigfoot died on the third day, and was forced to just sit, and spectate. Maybe they can make suggestions for what the remaining two hunters should do, but still. Relegated to the sidelines, no agency of their own. Defeated hunters do recover at the dawn of the next day, but when each day takes at least 30 – 45 minutes to play through, that’s a lot of time to wait around with nothing to do.
One time, near the end of a round, I played the last card of my hand, and ended my turn on a town. Then the beast moved two spaces with their last card, ending their turn on my spot, revealing themselves, but with no one with any cards remaining, the round came to an end. As an upgrade, the beast spent their grudges to improve their damage, and then in the following day, the beast (who always gets the first action), used their first action to attack me, and consumed one of their ancient power to increase their attack, dealing a whopping 3 damage to me, knocking me out for the entirety of the final day. Not only did the beast get to steal one of my cards as a reward for killing me, but now the beast had 6 less hunter actions to worry about. I honestly stepped away from the table at that point, as I was done and out for the rest of the game. I had no investment to watch the song and dance of the beast and the remaining two hunters for the next hour. When a game has players disengaged and walking away from the table, that’s trouble.
I understand why all of these aspects exist, and for those who love the game, I fully understand why. For every complaint about a mechanic I have, there’s a good reason for that mechanic to exist. There’s always a strategy that I could pursue to face my struggles, and these problems I have with Beast will probably fade away with experience. I appreciate games that reward repeat plays, but I really struggle when my first impression of a game is so sour. It’s got such potential buried under layers of frustration, an the uneven playing field is rife with leaving first time players with a bad impression. For those who love Beast, I’m so glad you found your joy, but personally, it’s a game that I’m moving on from, and won’t be looking back.
As a kid, I absolutely loved the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, or more specifically, the “Give Yourself Goosebumps” game book series, which were billed as a ‘choose your own horror adventure’ novel series by R. L. Stine. If you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing these books, the basic premise is that you read a few pages, then you’re presented with a choice. Each choice will take you down the path of a branching narrative, and eventually, reach a conclusion. The Goosebumps books featured around 20 endings per book, and part of the fun was holding your fingers in your last place like a save point, only to flip back if your choice ended up with the protagonist’s untimely demise.
I spent hours flipping through every Give Yourself Goosebumps book that my local library would get in. luckily, I was on good terms with the librarian, and she seemed to always make there were one or two new books for me each semester.
Spires End, authored by Greg Favro and published by Favro Ventures through a highly successful crowdfunding campaign in 2019, presents an intriguing card game experience wherein players are able to shape their own destinies amidst a setting of intense suspense and horror. Boasting captivating artwork by Benjamin Wiesman, an array of six playable characters, and fifteen unique endings spread across seven chapters, Spires End aims to captivate and immerse players within its intricate and suspenseful narrative.
How to Play
Spires End starts with a deck of cards outlining all the rules, then, and eases you into your first combat. Every card will tell you how to engage with your encounter, but the core of the game comes from combat. In combat, you need to risk your life to be successful. Each character has a certain number of hit points, and armour points. On your turn, you can spend a number of hit points to preform an attack. Each character’s attacks are different, like Millicent’s level 2 attack hits on a roll of 4 and up. A 4 or a 5 will yield 3 damage, a 6-7 will deal 4, and an 8 will deal 4 damage and stun your enemy. Once you’ve cast your attack, you have the opportunity to recoup. Roll another dice, apply the effects (generally healing between 0 and 3 hit points), then the opponents have an opportunity to hit you back.
Each enemy have their own attacks and challenges to overcome. From a pair of twins who hit you twice, to a blob that splits, to a horde of angry mushroom men, every enemy offers a unique challenge.
After a combat encounter, you’ll be directed to flip cards and read more story. Sometimes, you’ll find yourself thrust back into combat, and other times, you’ll have simple choices. If you’re holding a specific item, go to this card, otherwise, go to this other card. Choose to follow the light to the left, or descend a dark stairwell. Either way, your fate is in your own hands.
Review
There’s a lot to love in Spires End, especially if you have an affinity for the dark and brooding theme. The art is absolutely stellar, with its rough lines and black and white and red colour scheme. Having the bright red on the black and white images is great, from highlighting a plaid shirt, to blood splattered against a shield, it draws your eyes in and highlights the danger.
Every card in Spires End is huge, and features gorgeous artwork. I cannot overstate how much I enjoy the style, and how that helped pull me into the experience. The large format Black cards with mysterious red glyphs are imposing and yet, intriguing. I’m excited every time I flip over a card.
The combat mechanism at the core of the game is all about sacrifice and playing with fire. To preform an attack, you need to sacrifice some of your life. You’ll constantly be tempted to go all in and blast the monsters into next week, but also, whittling their health down point by point feels like the safe and reasonable thing to do.
It’s absolutely brutal when you commit 4 of your 5 hit points, then miss the attack entirely, whiff the recoup roll, then get murdered by the opponent. But that’s what you get when a combat mechanism is entirely based on dice. The result is a combat that feels tactical and dangerous. You’ll lose a war of attrition, but a well-timed hit or a lucky miss will sing the pendulum of fate and create exciting moments that will have you fist pumping with elation, or mourning as Rulf succumbs to his injuries. The luck can be really frustrating at times; if you already don’t like rolling dice, Spires End isn’t going to change your mind.
Each character has a unique flavour to them, like Leofrick who can pierce enemies and will hit on a 2 or higher, or Hildegard, who can heal her partner, allowing them to be more risky in their attacks. How you approach each encounter will change depending on what character combination you have, as you’ll always and only have 2 characters in play at any time. Should one of them die, they’ll unleash a final effect, then be replaced by the next character from the deck. Spires End is a dangerous place, be prepared to lose some friends.
The narrative is well crafted, better than most narrative board games that I’ve experienced. The ebb and flow of story between encounters gives flavour and context to the world, and forcing the player to make choices gives a great feeling of agency. I particularly enjoyed the moments where I had to choose a branching path, then had to skip several cards, getting only glimpses of what adventures I could have taken. It’s tantalizing, making me want to return to Spires End again and again to specifically seek out the paths I missed.
Spires End is advertised as a 1 or 2 player game, but really, this is a solo experience. Having full control over both characters isn’t onerous, and having the freedom to pick the choices you want without another player pulling you in a different direction is pretty important. Even if you’re ‘not a solo gamer’, I would highly recommend playing Spires End on your own. The asymmetry in the characters and the branching narrative are the hooks that keep dragging you back for more. Spires End is full of character and style, and if you’re into these kinds of narrative solo games that demand multiple plays, then Spire End is sure to be a home run.
That’s right, I’m using its full, Klaus Teuber-given name, ‘The Settlers of Catan‘. Not this hip and trendy shortened name that everyone was using already. I’m just holding out for people to just start calling it C, as if it’s the only game that ever existed.
I find it hard to imagine anyone finding their way to a hobby board game review website without already having a fully formed opinion on Catan, so, this post isn’t going to be serious. This is an exercise in stress relief. Speaking personally, I think Catan is a just fine game. But hey, we’re both here, let’s have some fun.
Alright, so when you start playing a game of The Settlers of Catan, you’ll be all hopeful, imagining yourself as some master settler, forging roads and building settlements like you’re a grand architect. But guess what? The game’s like, “Oh, you want wood? Well, too bad, you’re getting sheep.” Seriously, it’s like the game goes out of its way to make you suffer. “You want some bricks? Nope, here’s more sheep! Good luck building a city out of that, genius”.
Now, let’s talk about trading. At its best, trading in Catan is like trying to barter with your buddies in real life, but with more yelling and frustrations. It’s like, “Hey, I’ll give you two sheep for that wheat,” and they’re all like, “Only if you throw in a brick, buddy.” “But I’m fresh out of brick” “Too bad, no brick, no trade” “Brick hasn’t been rolled in 6 rounds!” It’s like that American Chopper meme of red-faced men shouting and pointing fingers and flipping tables. At it’s worst, you’re negotiating with a brick wall. You offer the world and they give you nothing. They want for nothing, and nothing you can do will change their cross-armed stance.
And then there’s the dice, doling out resources like a cruel god. The most common number in the game is a 7, which summons that thieving robber, who snatches your hard-earned resources. What’s worse is when you have finally amassed resources, that bastard shows up and cuts your hand in half. I’m so glad that I spent turn after turn getting resources, only to have the robber show up and invalidate my last 30 minutes of game play.
And don’t even get me started on the victory points. You need ten of those bastards to win, and it’s a race against time and your friends’ schemes. You’re wheeling, and dealing, and shouting, scraping resources from the land to build roads and settlements, then suddenly, your friend is all like, “Oh, I won. Oops.” And you’re just sitting there, staring at your meagre three points, wondering what you did wrong in your past life to deserve this punishment.
The Settlers of Catan is an emotional roller coaster that starts with false hope and ends with shattered dreams. You’ll pine for sheep all night, but because no one ever rolled an 8, a sheep famine sweeps across your nation. It’s the battered box that sits in the back of my closet for a reason. When I get invited to a Settlers of Catan game night, I find better friends.
