Mechanics: Cooperative, Dice Rolling Combat, Variable Player Powers
Players: 1 to 5
A prototype copy of the game was provided for review purposes
How to Play
Familiars and Foes is a 1 to 5 player cooperative boss battling game where you play as an elemental fox familiar on a quest to save the good witches and wizards of Joralee. A game of Familiars and Foes lasts for 4 waves, and pits players against a variety of enemy monsters.
To begin the game, all players chose an asymmetric familiar, and their corresponding spell cards. One will be the basic spells that you can use right from the start of the game, and the other will be the advanced spells that need to be unlocked by completing a variety of basic actions. The back of the rule book has a chart that seeds the board with a number of foes based on your player count, and chosen difficulty level.
To begin a round of Familiars and Foes, players first draw the witch or wizard they’re rescuing. If the element of the sorcerer matches one of the familiars, great! They have access to an extra special power during this wave. If the mage in distress doesn’t have a matching familiar in play, they’re simply discarded.
The foes for the wave are set into their slots, with their health dependent on the number of players at the table. The turn order is set, and the game begins. Players on their turn can either preform a physical attack, cast a spell, or play their artifact.
Physical attacks tables are listed on each player’s sheet, with a varying threshold for successes and failures for each character. One character would hurt themselves if you rolled 6 or under, but would do 4 damage if the die exceeded 16. Another character had easier thresholds, but lower rewards.
Each character has their own set of spells, although the basic spells are all pretty similar. On your turn if you chose to play a spell you simply select which one you’d like to cast, pay the required mana, and roll the die, hoping to earn a success by exceeding the threshold, which is different for each spell. Again, higher risks mean higher rewards. If you manage to land a hit using a basic attack, each other player at the table had the opportunity to pile on, using the Ballyhoo mechanic. They pay a single magic point, then flip a coin. Heads, they deal two damage. Tails, they take one damage. If the Ballyhoo succeeds, the next player can pile on too. The Ballyhoo either continues until all players have piled on, or someone fails the coin flip.
At the beginning of the game, each familiar draws an artifact card that offers a powerful onetime bonus. On your turn, you can choose to use your artifact, but then it’s gone for the rest of the game. Each player also has a special ability that they can use 3 times during the game. Again, once those charges are gone, so is the ability.
Play continues from character to character as dictated by the turn order tracker, until it finally reaches the enemy. All the foes that are still alive at this point roll a die, and act according to their table.
Once all the foes are defeated, players restore their magic points to full health, and proceed with the next wave. Finish 4 waves and you’ve won! If all players have their health points reduced to 0, the Familiars have failed.
Review
I was not prepared for how adorable Familiars and Foes was. This game exudes charm and character. I absolutely adore the art all over everything. The Familiars are cute, and I desperately want their pushes to adorn my shelves, the enemies are charming and clever, and the little artist flourishes left me absolutely charmed. Even the Familiars’ Familiars, the frogs, are adorable. I’ll say it loud and proud right now, I would die for Spike.
The copy I got to play is a prototype copy, and the designers assure me that every component that I had my hands on will be upgraded during the course of their crowdfunding campaign. Everything physical was fine, but I am looking forward to higher quality card stock. The tarot sized cards I got were a little bowed during my first play, which is only slightly disappointing. All the cards sit on the table for the entire game, meaning the bending isn’t a big deal, but it’s a minor annoyance with the physical production.
That being said, I love the large cards. It makes it easy to read the text from across the table, and gives the artist lots of room to display their charming foes. Seriously, Familiars and Foes art direction has absolutely charmed me. The heroes, the villains, everything is a joy to look at.
The gameplay is fast and simple, which is good for a game you plan on playing with your family. On your turn you choose to either do a physical attack, or cast a spell, then roll the die to determine if you were successful or not. In some cases, a low roll would see you suffering self-damage, while high rolls would deal critical hits.
The spells each character can cast are listed on their player sheet, and generally ask players how much risk they’re willing to take on, in return for how much damage they want to deal to the foe. The choices are straightforward and simple. Once you’ve made your choice, you roll the die and let fate decide if you made the right choice or not. There are precious few chances to re-roll a bad result, meaning sometimes the game might be a cakewalk, while other times you’ll find yourself getting crippled by the first Foe.
I’ve often talked about how I like progression in games, how I want to get stronger as the game goes on instead of trying to just survive a series of attritional battles. In this regard, I wish there were ways to earn more artifacts during the gameplay instead of only having one at the beginning. That said, I do enjoy the achievement system that unlocks your stronger spells. It’s also a helpful teaching tool, reducing the number of actions each player needs to consider at the start of the turn, and gives players a reason to try all their basic actions first, before giving them the real juicy attacks. I also appreciate that each witch or wizard you manage to rescue offers a boon to their corresponding familiar, potentially giving you a game-saving benefit.
I’m a fan of the Rougelike genre. Rogue Legacy, Enter the Gungeon, Wizard of Legend, and Slay the Spire are some of my favourite video games. Familiars and Foes has aspects that remind me of those rougelike games. Each time you set the game up, you’ll be in for a different combination of monsters and different artifacts that can drastically change how you will approach the wave. I really enjoy this variability, and I am looking forward to seeing more foes, more artifacts, and more familiars, hopefully in the form of stretch goals or future expansions. I would like to see the asymmetry in the characters expanded on even further, or having different ‘advance spell builds’ available for each Familiar to increase the replayability.
I enjoyed Familiars and Foes more than I expected. The charming art captured my heart and helped build a narrative in my head. The game-play is simplistic; choose an attack and roll a die to see if you hit, but I’m okay with that. I’m sure this would be a hit with my 6-year-old niece, even if she needs an adult to help her manage the game system. The cute art draws her in, the simple rule set doesn’t scare her away, and the pure joy that comes from rolling the die and scoring that critical hit is unparalleled. Familiars and Foes is a great cooperative game to introduce younger members of the family to the joy of board games.
Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a top 100 games of all time. Today I’m continuing the series in which I trash on my friends favourite games, because apparently, I hate fun.
Hate is a very strong word, and most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if Bigfoot was really keen, but they are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
Today I’m picking on Bigfoot. He would identify himself as a euro gamer, while not specifically some who delights in trading cubes, he does seem to excel at it. Bigfoot is generally ‘the person to beat’ and more than once we’ve finished a game only to find his score is more than the rest of ours combined. While he’s not totally against the odd direct conflict game, his preferences are firmly in the economic side of the spectrum. For each of the games on this list, I’ve included where in his top 100 each of these games sit
Gaia Project #2 & Terra Mystica #14
My dislike for Gaia Project stems more from my dislike of its spiritual prequel Terra Mystica than anything else. While Gaia Project does address some of the more common complaints from its predecessor, such as helping prevent getting pinned in the corner and unable to do anything, It doesn’t do enough different to make me enjoy it.
I find the actions in Gaia Project to be prohibitively expensive. My biggest complaint is that I don’t like having to manage four different resources (Ore, Knowledge, Credits, and Power), to do anything, and that I always seem to be short on at least one of the resources, grinding my progress to a halt. I also complain about runaway leaders, It’s tough to watch one player pass early because they ran out of a resource, and watch another player take action after action, rush up a technology track, gain more benefits and start the next round in a much better position. I know this can be resolved if you ‘git gud’, but I’m just a scrub.
Gaia Project and Terra Mystica both reward players who plan out far ahead, and are able to squeeze efficiency out of every last action, and I’m jealous of those who have cracked the puzzle and able to score more than 50 points in every game. I can see that Gaia Project and Terra Mystica are very deep games that reward those who put the time and effort into learning the system.
Somewhat ironically, I really enjoy Clans of Caledonia. It shares the resource generating buildings of Terra Mystica, but combines everything into one resource (gold). It also has a fluctuating market a-la Navagador, which is one of my favourite Mac Gerdts games.
Gloomhaven #6
My first experience with Gloomhaven wasn’t great. The other three people I was playing with were not exactly the best at learning and remembering all the rules to a game, so it fell to me to learn and run the game’s system for the group. We played 12 times over the course of a couple of months with 6 losses before we as a group decided not to continue with the campaign.
Flash forward to just a couple of weeks ago, I gave Gloomhaven another shot via the video game on Steam. This experience helped me figure out why Gloomhaven always left a sour taste in my mouth. My fundamental problem with Gloomhaven is I don’t like the core of the game, the card burning mechanic.
If you haven’t played, the core of the game is that you have a hand of cards – between 8 and 12, depending on your character. Every card has a top half and bottom half. On your turn, you pick two cards from your hand, and you do the top action on one card and the bottom action on another card. After you play those cards, they go into your discard pile. To get your cards back, you need to rest, which will “burn” one of your cards, removing it from your supply for the rest of the mission. If your entire hand of cards is burned and/or you can’t play 2 cards on your turn, you’re ‘exhausted’ and you’re out off the game for the rest of the mission
This means your hand is functionally your timer for the game, your options will dwindle as the game goes on, feeling like a noose tightening around your neck. Your hand is being depleted quicker and quicker, and you need to complete the objective.
Most of your strongest actions will burn the card instead of sending it to the discard pile, which means to do a big cool thing, you just straight-up burn the card. It’s that fundamental aspect that I dislike, I feel like I’m being punished for doing the big cool thing, and that’s not how I like my games to feel. If I’m playing a combat-centric game, I want to be a big damn hero, not a rag-tag adventurer just barely making it out of each encounter alive.
All that said, I can see why Gloomhaven is so beloved. It’s a tight and clever puzzle with lots and lots AND LOTS of good, tough decisions to make. When you manage to survive the encounter with a sliver of health left, it feels great! But I don’t derive joy from that kind of game. I don’t enjoy feeling powerless during a battle. I tend to swing more towards the Massive Darkness end of the spectrum. A big dumb dungeon crawl where I’m chucking handfuls of dice and slaying a Elite monster in a single blow.
There aren’t many dungeon crawl games that I enjoy, but I have had a bunch of fun playing Massive Darkness (Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien and Nicolas Raoult), and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth (Nathan I. Hajek and Grace Holdinghaus)
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar #26
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini is a game that absolutely has depth and the capacity for mastery. Tzolk’in‘s main hook is how it simulates the passage of time. In the centre of the board is a large gear, and connected to that gear are five other smaller gears with spaces to place workers. Every round, the centre gear will turn one space, moving all the workers one spot up their tracks. On a player’s turn, they can either play workers from their supply (costing corn if they play more than one) or take works off the gears and preforming the associated actions.
Tzolk’in absolutely rewards mastery and forward planning. It’s not enough to take Tzolk’in one turn at a time, you need to be making plans and moves several turns in advance. While it is satisfying when all your place can come together, I struggle with Tzolk’in in that I just cannot seem to balance long term strategies with short term goals. I can place a worker down knowing that I want to pull him off in four turns, but in just two turns I find myself up the creek with no corn and no workers and required to pull my workers off early only to have something to do!
Tzolk’in a neat game, and I appreciate that some will enjoy its strategic offerings more than I have. It’s fine, and I wouldn’t deny playing it again, but it’s not one that I’ll ever suggest to play.
El Grande #60
This one is easy, I simply don’t like area control/area majority as a mechanic. I don’t find it fun or interesting. El Grande is a pure distillation of area control, that’s all there really is to this game. If you enjoy area control games, look no further because this one will serve you well. It’s just not my cup of tea. You go and enjoy your gerrymandering, I’ll be over here playing dexterity games.
Game Length: Physically, 30 – 45 minutes. On Board Game Arena, 10 minutes
Mechanics: card drafting, tableu building
Release Year: 2007
Designer: Thomas Lehmann
Artist: Martin Hoffmann, Claus Stephan, Mirko Suzuki
Introduction
I like playing Super Smash Brothers, I always have. I’ve played every iteration, and it’s one of the few straight-up fighting games that I actually enjoy (sidebar, I recently borrowed Pokken Tournament from the library only to be reminded how much I don’t like fighting games). My enthusiasm for Smash Bros has led me to exist in a very weird state. I can crush all of my friends, no competition, but I’m not good enough for the competitive scene. The few times I’ve dabbled in tournaments, I’ve gotten eliminated almost immediately. This is the state I find myself with Tom Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy, I feel like I have an advantage over my friends, simply for having played it over 100 times, but when I approach other enthusiasts, I’m still a beginner, comparatively.
How to Play
Race for the Galaxy is a fast tableau builder. The entire game is managed via cards, with the only cardboard components being score chips. Race for the Galaxy begins with each player getting a starting world and a hand of cards. In your other hand, you’ll have cards depicting each of the actions that are available to you. At the start of the game, each player simultaneously picks one of the action cards and places it face down. Once all players have selected their action, the cards are turned face up.
Now, here’s the trick of the game. Only the actions selected will be available this round, and the action you selected will be taken by everyone else (you’ll get a small benefit for choosing that action). Actions are always taken in the following order
Explore – Draw cards from the deck
Develop – Play development (diamond) cards from your hand, discarding cards equal to it’s cost
Settle – Settle a planet (circle cards) from your hand, discarding cards equal to it’s cost
Trade & Consume – Discard one of the goods on one of your planets to draw cards, then use other planets consume powers, generally discarding a good to earn points or to draw more cards
Produce – Place one card face down on each of your planets that can produce a good. These are used during the Trade & Consume phase.
Once you’ve gone through all the actions that will be taken this round, you pick up your action cards and start again. The game ends when someone has played their 12th card in front of them, or, when the supply of victory points has been exhausted. The player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
To preface this review, I have only experienced the base game of Race for the Galaxy. My opinion is free from any expansions, which may or may not be sacrilege, depending on who you’re talking to.
I don’t often do this, but let’s start with the negatives. First, the art. The art in Race for the Galaxy is reminiscent of those old paperback sci-fi books that used to clutter my shelves, and it can serve as both a high or a low point, depending on your nostalgia. Many cards will look dark, boring, generic, or confusing, offering only a sliver of a story. The Glactic Federation is a yellow dome against a bloe background, and the Trade League is just two faceless people talking. For some, this style will hearken back to a by-gone era of science fiction, but for others, it comes across as dated and unattractive.
The other most common complaint is the heavy use of iconography. Personally, I find the icons incredibly apt at conveying information, but only because I’ve learned the language. Once the icons and card layout clicks with a player, Race for the Galaxy is a joy to play. You can understand what each card in your hand does with just a glance along the left side of the card, allowing you to quickly parse the information. Nothing feels obfuscated once you understand how to read Race for the Galaxy.
The goal of the game is to build an engine that can generate cards that will allow you to place more planets and developments into your tableau. Points are earned passively as you play planets and developments, and further points can be earned by consuming the goods of your planet’s produce. Some games will have a player rushing to get their 12 cards laid down to end the game, hoping their quantity of cards will overcome the quality cards the other players managed to get onto the table. Other games will see a player just consuming and producing ad nauseam until the supply of victory points are exhausted, which also triggers the end of the game. No matter which way you play, once you have your engine set up, it’s fun to see it run and produce a volume of cards and points that feels ludicrous compared to what you could do at the end of the game.
Each round of Race for the Galaxy is straightforward and quick. Once all players have selected just one action card, they’re revealed, and players move through the actions in order together. Any actions that were not picked are not taken, and once the final action is completed, players just pick up their action cards and choose what’s going to happen in the next round. It’s such a simple system, but it creates an amazing amount of tension. You’ll worry and fret over what other players will play, should you play your settle action so you can place a world? But if Bigfoot plays the settle action, you can play your world down anyway, so maybe you should choose to produce. But if Bigfoot doesn’t play Settle, you won’t have any worlds to produce! What to do?!
In a two player game, both players get to choose 2 actions per round, which I find absolutely wonderful. It gives you more control over the game, but still keeps the tension of trying to correctly assess what your opponent will be trying to do on their turn, so you can optimize and get the maximum benefit from their actions.
Race for the Galaxy is such a good tableau/engine builder, that it sours me on other experiences. I have a hard time playing Terraforming Mars, Wingspan, or Ark Nova because I would rather play this. In each of those games, your ability to draw and search for cards is sincerely limited. You’re at the whim of each game’s massive deck to deliver the prerequisites that you’ll need to get your engine going. Race for the Galaxy allows you to both search the deck with great speed, and has very few prerequisites that really require other cards, meaning that you’ll rarely be blaming the deck should you fail to get your engine going.
Just to drive the point home, in my last game of Terraforming Mars, I chose the starting corporation that gives a benefit to playing Jovian cards, as I had one Jovian card in my hand. I figured I’d dial in on that strategy, play the most Jovian cards possible to maximize the benefit from my corporation. Then, I didn’t draw a single Jovian card for the rest of the game. I had a similar issue in Ark Nova, where I played a card that would benefit me for every gorilla tag I played, then proceeded to not see a single card with that tag for the rest of the game. In both those examples, my ability to draw more cards was fairly limited, and I was locked into a two-hour game with an engine that wouldn’t turn over.
In Race for the Galaxy, I can draw 6 cards every turn if I want to, and still benefit from the actions other players take. There’s only 4 types of goods exist, so finding both a planet to produce a certain good, and a card that will consume that good is not difficult. And in the very worst cases, the game ends after 20 minutes. If you’re having a bad time, at least it’ll be over quickly.
Race for the Galaxy is a game that rewards multiple plays. Understanding and internalizing each of the actions and how to flow from building to producing to consuming to settling, and being able to accurately predict what your opponents are going to do and leverage their actions in addition to your own, makes this a fantastic game that pulls me back again and again. I do admit that I have a hard time justifying actually buying a copy of Race for the Galaxy when the version on Board Game Arena is freely available. No need to shuffle, no accidentally misplaying cards, and a plethora of people to play with makes it a fantastic way to play this clever card game. And, it even has tooltips, allowing you to hover over the cards to see exactly what they do, removing the need to learn the iconography up front. If you do learn that iconography, then games can be completed within 10 minutes, making this one of the fastest and deepest experiences on the site.
I adore Race for the Galaxy. It’s a fast, tense, excellent engine building game that offers a pure experience with lots of choices and strategies. Players have room to pivot, should a strategy not pan out, and when you can correctly identify the action your opponents will play and being able to capitalize those actions, the feeling of satisfaction is hard to beat. It’s eminently replayable, as evidenced by my 150 plays of the base game alone. I know some people swear by certain expansions, and maybe one day I’ll get into them. But for now, I’m just having too much fun with the experience that comes in the base box.
Artist: Collateral Damage Studios, Sebastian Koziner, Usanekorin, and Davy Wagnarok
Release Year: 2021
Mechanics: Pattern Matching, Push Your Luck
Players: 1-4
Introduction
I’ve been playing hobby board games since about 2015. I started recording my game-plays around 2018, and in the 4 years since I started logging, I’ve played 399 different games, and recorded 1,747 total plays. I recall when I first started playing games, every new game was exciting and amazing and would leave me frothing at the mouth wanting more. I voraciously consumed new games, and dove into the deep end to discover the world of hobby board games. At some point, something changed inside me. I lost the childlike glee and excitement that came with every new game. I stopped being wowed by each gimmick, as I had seen them all before. Sure, new games would mix mechanics in cool and interesting ways, but it wasn’t something wholly new. I still absolutely love playing new games, but it’s different now; I’m slightly jaded and worn. This is probably why I’m so excited that Bullet❤️ is now in my life.
How to play
Bullet❤️ is a puzzle-y, push your luck, pattern matching game for 1 – 4 players, designed by Joshua Van Laningham and published by Level 99 Games.
In Bullet❤️ each player takes control of one of the 8 very asymmetric heroines and tries to outlast their opponents. The game revolves around pulling tokens (called bullets) from your bag, placing them into your player board, and manipulating them to match patterns on your cards, so you can clear them from your board, and send them along to your opponent. The push-your-luck aspect comes into play as you pull bullets from your bag. Each bullet has a colour and a number, the colour indicates which column the bullet goes into, and the number indicates the number of empty spaces down it will go, skipping over any full spots. Should the bullet hit the very bottom row, BANG! You’re hit. Lose all your life and you’re out. The last player standing wins.
This is the setup for the solo game, but the multiplayer is basically this for each player.
Each round starts with a 3-minute timer. While the timer is running, players can draw bullets from their bag and place them on their board, manipulate the bullets by using their character specific powers (which cost action points or AP), and can clear the bullets off their board by using their pattern cards. When the timer ends, if players still have bullets in their bag, they must draw the tokens and place them on their board, no longer able to use their pattern cards or special actions.
Each round 4 special ability tiles will be laid out, these tiles will give you a small power, such as swapping two bullet locations, or allowing you to draw a new pattern, or just giving you one action point. As players empty their bag and declare themselves done, they get to take one of those tiles. Once everyone has finished, players take bullets from the centre bag equal to the current round’s intensity, and any bullets they received from their opponents and put them all into their bag, and the whole thing starts over again until only one heroine rises above the rest.
Review
A little over a year ago, I wrote about Bullet❤️and my experience playing primarily solo and on Tabletop Simulator. In this post, I’m going to focus on the multiplayer game.
I really didn’t think it would take this long to get Bullet❤️ into my hands, and in the ensuing year there’s been another core set published, called Bullet⭐ that contains 8 new characters that you can combine with the first set. Other than the new characters, Bullet⭐ is identical to Bullet❤️. There is also an expansion, Bullet🍊 that adds 4 more characters from the Orange_Juice series of games. It makes me quite happy to see Level 99 games supporting this product by releasing more and more characters.
In Bullet❤️ each character is unique, forcing you to approach the puzzle of the game from a new perspective every time you swap characters. I really enjoy the variability and discovery that comes from pulling a new character. Young-Ja Kim focuses on pushing the bullets off the edges of her board, while Adelheid Beckenbauer can flip bullets over to make them act as any colour. Senka Kasun has two crosshair tokens that sit on her board, and each of her cards will trigger on both of the cross-hairs simultaneously, and Ling-Ling Xiao has you adding up the numbers of the bullets in her patterns and the sum will dictate how many bullets you can clear and from where. Exploring these characters and discovering their quirks is a large part of what excites me every time I open the box.
By the time I got some friends around the table to play Bullet❤️ with me, I had already clocked in 40 plays of the solo mode. I knew I loved the game, and I had spoken really highly of it before they all came over to play. My expectations were high, I was very excited to share this experience with my friends.
The way you play the game in solo vs multiplayer is very similar, you pull bullets from your current, place them into your sight, and use your powers to manipulate the bullets in your sight and use the cards to clear them from your board. Instead of sending bullets to a boss, you’ll just pass them to your left, placing them in your opponents ‘incoming’. This gameplay is exciting and emotional, you need to quickly calculate risks when pulling bullets from the bag hoping against hope that there isn’t a level 4 pink bullet with your name on it.
The big difference between the Boss mode and multiplayer mode is the presence of a 3-minute round timer. Each round, the timer is sent, and play goes as per normal. Once that 3-minute timer goes off, all players are to stop using their actions and patterns. If a player still has bullets in their current, they’re to just continue pulling their bullets from their bag until the bag is empty.
I’ve tried playing both with and without the timer, and I have to say, the timer is necessary. Without it, one player can grind to a halt as they assess and reassess their board, struggling to commit to the risk of taking another bullet tile, or coming to grips of a slightly inefficient move. The timer adds tension, and on some level, forces players to make mistakes.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math
Gameplay encouraging mistakes isn’t a bad thing. It creates interesting situations. Kind of like when playing Tetris, getting the perfect block every time is boring, but when a mistake happens, you now have a short term goal of fixing that mistake while still trying to survive the larger game. Mistakes also give players something to work towards, knowing where you went wrong and striving to do better next time is a great way to build replayability.
One thing I didn’t expect was just how little player interaction is in Bullet❤️. Other than sending your cleared bullets to your neighbour, and grabbing one of the available extra benefits at the end of the round, you almost don’t even notice the other players at the table. During the 3-minute round you are so focused on pulling your bullets and arrange things in your current and trying to clear everything so quickly, that when the round ends, it feels like you’re coming up for air. Only at that moment do finally look around at your opponents to see what they are doing, and remark on how many bullets one player managed to clear, then just set up for the next round. During the actual gameplay, it feels isolating. Each player is just doing their own thing and trying to be the last one standing when the dust settles
This is fairly disappointing, it begs the question, why play together if we’re not ‘playing together’? It also makes it difficult for new players to ask questions, or for other players to catch rule mistakes. Just to drive a final nail into the coffin, when players are eliminated, they have to wait for everyone else to finish.
Thankfully, Bullet❤️ is a fast game. Games are on average somewhere between 5 and 7 rounds total, with most players starting to get eliminated around round 4. Another benefit to the 3-minute timer, when a player is eliminated, they aren’t sitting on the sidelines for very long. For some, player elimination is a cardinal sin, but considering the game only lasts for 20 minutes, it’s palatable.
As I said before, I absolutely love the puzzle of Bullet❤️. I enjoy the push-your-luck aspect of pulling bullets from your bag and slotting them into your current. I like the cerebral challenge of moving the bullets in the most efficient way to take full advantage of your pattern. And I really enjoy, at the end of a round, seeing the huge pile of tokens I’m sending to my friend. That said, the solo mode turns the puzzle up a notch by giving you a boss pattern you need to complete lest bad things happen in-between rounds. The puzzle aspect is the part that I enjoy the most, making the solo mode the definitive way for me to play
I’ve remarked earlier about how new games haven’t been exciting me lately. How all new games feel like iterative changes on previous games, and how none have been leaving a lasting impression. Bullet❤️ has left an impression, it has a spark that lit a fire in my soul. It’s the first game I’ve rated a 10 on BGG since 2016. I have so much fun with Bullet❤️ and I continue to come back to it. With it’s incredibly fast playing and satisfying gameplay, it’s already the board game that I have the most plays logged (although 10 of those plays were me as Muriel losing to 3 – That Which Points over and over again. What an incredibly difficult boss!). I will never turn down a game of Bullet❤️, and I’ll continue to sing its praises, even if the lack of player interaction left me slightly disappointed after my multiplayer plays.
Viticulture has the privilege of being a top 10 game for one of my most frequent gaming partners (698 individual plays recorded with this person), so when his birthday rolled around this year, we had the opportunity to surprise him with a new expansion to one of his favourite games and pick up the Wine Crate storage solution all at the same time, we just couldn’t say no.
We knew precious little of the expansion, other than it turns the classic Viticulture gameplay into a cooperative experience, which is intriguing in it’s own right.
How to Play
For the purposes of this section, I’ll assume you already know how to play the base game of Viticulture, and it’s worth saying that you’ll need to have the base game to play with this expansion. Viticulture World changes a lot around, but leaves the core of the game intact. You’re still placing your workers on actions spaces to harvest grapes, turning those grapes into wine, and fulfilling wine orders. You’re still building structures on your farm to allow you to access higher quality grapes, store higher quality wines, and collecting and playing visitor cards.
Viticulture World turns Viticulture on it’s head by making the game cooperative (duh, it’s right in the title of the expansion). This means every player needs to earn 25 victory points by the end of the 6th year, and collectively earn 10 influence points. The spaces on the Viticulture World board have been tweaked slightly, and don’t offer rewards simply for being the first person to take a specific action. Instead, there’s only 1 worker spot per action space (or 2 spots if you have 4 – 6 players). During the summer season you can put a worker into the develop action, which will either put an oval tile over the worker placement section of an action spot, allowing any number of workers to take that action and offer a small benefit, or, take a rectangular tile and massively increase the ability of a specific action.
Another change is that all players start the game with 5 workers. Two summer workers with yellow hats, two winter workers with blue hats, and a single grande worker. During the winter season you can spend money to train your workers, popping off their caps which allows them to be placed in either season. You aren’t able to gain any more workers beyond this initial 5 however, but having 5 workers right from the start helps speed up the early parts of the game.
The influence points are tracked along the bottom of the board, and can be bought during the winter for an eye-watering 8 coins each. Each player can also earn one influence point by earning 30 points during the game. Most of the influence points will come from the event cards. Each year a new event is revealed, which may offer a boon or bane, and will generally offer an influence point if a certain threshold is reached during the year.
At the end of the 6th year, if all players have earned 25 victory points and 10 influence points, they win! If not, better luck next time.
All the cool kids have hats now
Review
Viticulture World has me mulling over the definition of Cooperation vs. Collaboration. In cooperative games, all the players are working towards a shared goal. Cooperative games like Burgle Bros has all players trying to break open the 3 safes. Pandemic has all players trying to cure all 4 diseases, and Robinson Crusoe has all players just trying to survive the onslaught of the elements. In all of these games, it doesn’t matter who achieves the objective, just that the objective is achieved. The Rook in Burgle Bros can crack all 3 safes, while The Raven distracts the guard for the whole game. The Medic in Pandemic doesn’t need to discover a single cure, as long as all the cures are discovered before one of the loss objectives are realized.
Viticulture World has every player trying to build their own little farm and achieve the same 25 victory points. There’s little other players can do to throw points at a failing player, other than trading them the resources they need and ensuring they stay out of that player’s way. As I said in my previous Viticulture review, this is an action efficiency game, the best players can hope to do is help that player be efficient with their actions. Viticulture World doesn’t feel like those other cooperative games, but feels like a collaboration. Each player is building their own little farm and trying to earn the same 25 victory points. It doesn’t matter if Bigfoot massively exceeds that threshold if Bear doesn’t reach it at all.
By making the game collaborative, Viticulture World feels different from all those cooperative games. Suddenly I can’t really specialize myself or focus on one aspect of the puzzle. I need to be earning those victory points and not fall behind. I’m lucky in that my regular gaming group mesh super well together. There are no egos, there’s no one demanding that they’re the player who ‘gets the glory’ and we’re all willing to talk and discuss actions we should each do. At the same time, we all trust each other to make the right choices that will lead us to victory.
I’ve read a few accounts of people calling Viticulture World super hard; playing 8 times and only winning the introductory scenario. I can see the game being easier with 4 and more players, considering the number of action spots available on the board doubles. All the players are drawing cards, and the opportunities to trade between each other are plentiful and important. Adding more players, or removing one, would clog up the action spots. At the same time, a player who gets an early lead in points can use some of their later actions to earn influence points while the rest of the group catches up. 4 players seems to be a sweet-spot for this game.
Viticulture World comes with 8 scenarios. Each scenario introduces different mechanics into the game, and each scenario contains 8 or so event cards that can be shuffled to randomize the order they come out in. These event cards are what turn Viticulture World from a puzzle that can be solved, to a game that is played with. Suddenly, your perfect plan of planting grapes is scrapped because a nasty case of phylloxera has made planting grapes more expensive than you can afford. The need to pivot creates interesting decision moments and keeps players from simply doing the same thing over and over again. Some scenarios will nudge players down strategies they may never have considered. In one of my games, I fulfilled only a single wine order (for 6 points). My other 19 points all came from visitor cards, buildings, trading resources, and giving tours. In that particular game, I was far and away the leader in points! Something I never would have expected to work.
My biggest complaint about the base Viticulture game is that luck can play such a strong role in how you preform. If I use an action to draw grape cards, but both cards require a structure I don’t have, I can either spend actions raising money and building the necessary structures to plant those grapes, or I can try to draw again, hoping against hope that I happen to draw the cards that will fit my farm. By turning the game cooperative, that complaint is thrown out the window. If I draw grape cards that I just can’t use, I can coordinate with one of my fellow players and hand off these grape cards to someone who can plant them, and vice versa. Now, there is still luck involved, a game can be trivial or incredibly difficult depending on the order the progress tokens come out. We had one game where the year’s event gave everyone a discount on building structures, and the innovation tile for building structures came out, allowing everyone to build much more structures early in the game than is usually possible. This saved us countless turns and a boatload of money, allowing us to sail to victory.
I did have one experience where I had managed to earn 20 points within the first 4 years of the game. With two whole rounds to go, and knowing that I would get enough points from other players actions, we chose as a group for me to give tours to generate money, then buy the last four influence points we needed. By the end of the game, one player managed to get 30 victory points, earning us an influence point, and we earned another influence point from the final year’s event card, making my whole last year pretty pointless. It begs the question, if you finish your objective early, what should you do? Pass early to stay out of the way? That’s neither interesting nor engaging.
My goals are to train workers and build buildings. Who says a vineyard needs to produce wine?
Luckily, when it comes to cooperative games, I feel invested in other players turns. I can engage in discussion with my friends as we come up with a plan to get the struggling farmer over the 25 point threshold. It doesn’t matter to me that MY game was finished an hour before everyone else, I derive joy from sitting around the table with my friends and coming up with plans to solve the puzzle before us. It also gives me ample opportunity to heckle anyone who happens to have less victory points than I do, which is one of my favourite things about board games.
I quite enjoyed the competitive game, but I really love this cooperative expansion. It actually feels weird to call this an expansion, as this experience elicits a very different feeling from the base Viticulture game. I like the different mechanics hidden in each of the scenarios, giving each game a unique feel. Viticulture is a great game on its own, and adding in this expansion increases the ways you can engage with this excellent system. With this expansion, Viticulture now fills a rare niche of a great Euro game that can be played from 1 to 6 players, competitively and cooperatively. Viticulture World is a high recommendation from me, especially if you already own the base game.
