Number of Plays: 14 (Mostly 3 – 4 players, a few 2 and 5 player games)
Game Length: 90 minutes – 120 minutes
Mechanics: Real Time, Tile Placement, Chaos
Release Year: 2007
Designer: Vlaada Chvatil
Artist: Tomáš KuYoučerovský, Radim Pech
Publisher: CGE
Introduction
Galaxy Trucker has the prestige of being my number 2 favourite game of all time. My top games list is a constant state of flux, but from the very first time I played Galaxy Trucker, it has enjoyed the prestige of being seated firmly at the top or penultimate spot. Spoilers for the end of the review, but Galaxy Trucker has more nuance that is worth discussing. The very reasons that make me love Galaxy Trucker could be the reasons you should stay away.
How to Play
In Galaxy Trucker, players have been hired by Corporation Incorporated to ship pipes across the galaxy. Of course everyone knows it’s terribly inefficient to build a whole spaceship and then put the pipes onto the spaceship. The obvious solution is to build a rickety, barely functioning spaceship out of pipes and fling said pipeship across the galaxy to deliver the product.
Galaxy Trucker is played over three rounds. each round players build a bigger ship and go on longer trips. Each round begins with each player having a blueprint of a spaceship and a shared pile of black tiles in the centre of the table. The bravest soul shouts “Start” then everyone begins snapping up starship components. One at a time, they bring the tile over their ship’s blueprint, flip it over, briefly judge it, and either affix it to their hot mess of a space boat or cast it back into the endless void from whence it came.
I firmly believe the rule book explains each of the components best. You have lasers for blasting asteroids and space pirates and youwant as many of those as possible. You have engines for moving faster through open space and youwant as many of those as possible. You have cargo space for picking up valuable packages from each of the alien planets you pass on your way. You want as many of those as possible. The crew cabins hold people, who are necessary to fly your ship. Youwant as many of those as possible. You have battery compartments which give energy to the special double strength lasers and engines, so you want as many of those as possible. You may sense a pattern forming here.
Each component has a number of connections branching off from it. You must start building from the centre of your ship and each subsequent part needs to connect correctly to an adjacent piece. Every connector has one, two, or three connections jutting out to the edges of the tile. Every adjacent tile needs to match connectors where they exist (don’t worry, the 3 connectors are wilds, they can connect to single and double connectors).
The first person to finish building their ship flips a sand timer telling the rest of the table to get their affairs in order. They take a #1 token and look over their ship. Usually followed with anguished exclamations of an entire set of components that they’ve forgotten to add, or an illegal connector that will need to be made right before the ship can legally fly.
Once the ships are lined up on the track and everyone has filled their boats with people, guest aliens and batteries, the event deck is handed to the person in first place and the race begins. Each card has an event that needs to be dealt with. You could be confronted to with open space, which allows each player to fire up their engines and overtake that sucker who finished building their ship first, but only managed to get one engine on. You might come across an alien planet with goods you can pick up and sell at the end of your race for a bit of extra cash, but if you chose to stop you go back a couple of spots on the track and someone might pass you.
Once the players make it through the deck, they are rewarded for making safely at their destination in order of arrival. First place gets the most, with second third and fourth getting increasingly less. The player with the least amount of open connectors also gets a bonus for the ‘prettiest ship’. After everyone has collected their credits, you move onto the next round. After round three, everyone counts up how many credits they’ve earned over the course of the game. Anyone who has earned 1 credit or more is a winner! After all, your goal was to make money. Of course, the player who earned the most credits is just a bit more of a winner than everyone else.
Review
Galaxy Trucker is a game played in two parts, and like most games that feature two separate and distinct sides to the game, you really need to understand both before you can play either. The rulebook suggests a specific subset of cards to play on your first game that will gently introduce you to the mechanics of Galaxy Trucker so players can focus on building their first ship with little consequences. Speaking of the rulebook, this one is funny. There’s plenty of jokes spread throughout the book giving humour and charm to the theme.
In a perfect world, your spaceship will be a thing of beauty. Engines all the way along the back, guns every three rows along each side and all the way along the front. Ample storage space, batteries to support all of your modules, plenty of crew, a pair of visiting aliens, shields covering every direction and every part connected to at LEAST two other parts. When you’re actually confronted with playing this damned game you’ll find yourself obsessively searching a very specific part, like an engine that has a one connector coming in from the top and a two connector going to the right. You’ll flip over tile after tile passing over everything that isn’t the exact component that you’re currently searching for. Eventually you’ll find the right component… already placed on someone else’s ship. So you lower your standards and keep searching for an engine, this time settling on one that has a connecter from the top and both sides. The left side will be pointing to the outside of your ship, which is ugly and dangerous, but it’s better than having no engines. Now that you’ve finally found the engine you were looking for you’ll look around and realize that in the time it took for you to find this one piece, everyone is almost done! You’re at least 9 tiles behind and the endless pile of components has dwindled down to nearly nothing. All the rest of the are gone now so you have to make do with the single one you agonized over. You’ll rush to catch up with your opponents and before you know it you’ve accidentally built a ship with 6 battery compartments and not a single component that needs a battery!
Galaxy Trucker is absolute chaos, but in the best kind of way. I’ve built shining ships that crumbled at the first sign of trouble. I’ve built ramshackle and misshapen boats that shouldn’t have made it out of port, but come out the other side in first place hauling a horde of goods. I’ve also had more than one experience where I made a catastrophic error by illegally placing tiles and needing to cleave off half my ship before the game even starts.
Board Game Geek defines a ’10’ rating as a game as “Outstanding – will always enjoy playing”. Within that definition, Galaxy Trucker is an easy 10 out of 10 for me. But a perfect game is still not above criticism. If you’re someone who enjoys the feeling of control over your experience, Galaxy Trucker is not for you. If you’re particularly sensitive when a game punishes you for being in last place, Galaxy Trucker is not for you. It is absolutely infuriating when your population gets crushed by an epidemic card which manages to wipe out both of your aliens, then a sabotage card (that only affects the person with the lowest population) blows off a critical part of your ship apart forcing you to lose an entire wing of your ship (including all of your engines and most of your guns), then you get fired on by slavers because you happened to be the first player in the line, reducing your ship to rubble. I can understand and empathize with the frustration that some people feel when they get punished over and over with no opportunity to fix the mistakes or react to the sequence of events that are making a mockery of their finely tuned specimen of engineering. It’s also frustrating when the game continues to beat down the player who is already in last place. On the plus side, each round is a hard reset; the sins of your past are forgotten and while you’ll have less money than everyone else, you aren’t saddled with the debts of a failed mission.
But perhaps the childlike glee I feel when I see a ship get separate cleanly into two halves like an onion immunes me from disliking this game. I’ve absolutely vehemently hated on other games that take away my control, or punish me for making a bad decision. But in the case of Galaxy Trucker, I’ve accepted the element of chaos and internalized that some runs are will be a tale of success while other rounds will make me hang my head in shame.
After playing the physical version a dozen times I bought the digital version on my phone. The app did a very good job of making me feel like was getting the Galaxy Trucker experience. I ended up playing through the full campaign, but at the end I found myself missing the raucous laughter that accompanies the perfect large laser blast that explodes a ship into a dozen pieces leaving their captain with his head in his hands. A by-product of playing the app however, is that I’m now very familiar with the components and have a vague idea of how many parts have what kind of connections I’m looking for. This absolutely gives me an edge when playing the game with people who have played less than me.
I also picked up The Big Expansion which adds more components, more ship varieties, a 5th player, and two more decks of cards that turn the randomness up to 11. Now that I’ve become a more competent ship builder than most of my local game group I almost require the extra cards and the more difficult ships to keep me from having a perfect run every single game. As much fun as it is to win, the challenge and destruction is what keeps me coming back to Galaxy Trucker. Building up a ship and subjecting it to everything space has to throw my way is exactly how I want to spend my Friday night.
I will admit that adding the expansion components makes it a bear to teach new players as it almost doubles the number of components types available. I’ve found success with leaving the back page of the expansion rulebook open near the new players so they can quickly reference the pieces with that book and they manage to make it through the ship building process without too much trouble. Inevitably they tend to ignore the expansion bits, but to be fair, so do I. I’ve also found that experienced players need to play with the advanced ships otherwise they end up head and shoulders above the rest of the pack.
I understand that Galaxy Trucker is a divisive game, it seems that people either love it or hate it. I find that the better I do in a round, the less fun I have. It’s not interesting when my ship successfully dodges every asteroid or repels every invasion. On paper, pulling into port carrying huge amounts of goods and a perfect ship sounds like the ideal situation, but it’s just boring. Galaxy Trucker is at it’s best and most fun when your plans have a wrench thrown into them and you’re forced to make decisions and concessions. You have one battery left, and an asteroid is coming for you. If it hits, you’ll lose two pieces, a small price to pay. But then four more pieces will be exposed to danger. Do you spend the battery now to protect against this small threat, or do you save the battery in case something much more damaging is just around the corner? I’m having the most fun when I’m confronted with these choices. If you’re able to enjoy the chaos of real-time ship building, then relinquish control of your ship as it gets pummeled by the terrors of space, Galaxy Trucker is an experience worth seeking out.
My wife and I are huge Lord of the Rings fans. We love the books and we love the trilogy of movies. Unfortunately, I grew up in the 90s where a licensed game (a game that had the same title as an existing property) generally meant that the game was absolute trash. I’ve played some really terrible movie tie-in games in my day (Batman and Robin for the SNES, I’m looking at you). The Lord of the Rings has had some great and not so great games made within the universe. Stick around to see if The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth falls into the former or latter camp.
Lord of the Rings world map neoprene playmat not included
How to play
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a cooperative, app assisted adventure game. In LotR:JiME you and your friends take the role of familiar (Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, and Bilbo) and new heroes (Beravor and Elena) as they rush across various procedurally generated maps battling foes and helping friends as they attempt to strike a blow against the forces of evil. LotR:JiME is a campaign game where, win or lose, the story will advance regardless, potentially affecting how the story plays out. There are certain times where losing will end the adventure, but they’re clearly marked.
Playing LotR:JiME is straightforward and the app will guide you through most of the setup. Players pick a character and a role which will combine two decks of cards to create their personal skill deck for the mission. If they have ‘points’ in a role, they can add extra, generally more powerful cards into their deck.
Mouse and tablet not included
The players begin every round by ‘scouting’ – drawing cards from the deck and potentially ‘preparing’ one as a skill. This removes the card from your deck but allows you to use the card for it’s listed ability. The rest of the cards are placed either on top of the deck, or on the bottom.
Players decide the order in which they want to take their turns. On a player turn, they can perform up to 2 actions. The actions are to travel (move two zones), attack, and investigate.
Once all players have taken a a turn, the game moves into the Shadow Phase, where any enemies on the board will activate and the shadow meter climbs ever higher. Often the shadow meter will have thresholds that will trigger events should the shadow reach them. The app will guide you through all of these steps.
Gandalf not included!?
Play continues until the players have achieved the goal of the mission, run out of time, or any hero dies. Once finished, players can choose to continue playing the next scenario, or to save and quit. Each game took us at least 2 hours to complete, so we very rarely played more than one scenario in a night.
Review
I’m a mechanics first gamer. While a theme that resonates with my proclivities is enough to rouse my curiosity, it’s not always enough to fully grab my attention, let alone keep me coming back for more. Lord of the Rings is a theme that will always get me to at least take a look.
My first criticism is the character selection within this box. You have some of the standard characters that you’d expect; Aragon, Gimli, and Legolas. Then you have Bilbo, who never adventured with this party, and two new characters created for this campaign. I dislike that other main characters like Gandalf were omitted for what feels like an expansion hook (guess who the is on the front cover of the expansion box?). It’s a paltry complaint; the six included characters do feel varied and interesting to play as.
The production of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth feels lavish in some parts while lacking in others. All the heroes and enemies are nicely sculpted miniatures. I didn’t notice any droopy swords or spears during my playthroughs. However, instead of including different poses for enemies of the same type, they opted to use cardboard flags on stands to help identify which enemy corresponds with which icon on the app. Some scenarios will throw 3x separate Goblin Archer mobs at you, so you do need some way to tell them apart.
Pants not included
The terrain tiles are large and uniquely shaped. Each tile will have several (usually between 2 and 4) zones that you can move between. Due to the procedural nature of the app dictating where to lay the tiles down, once or twice we ended up in danger of extending the map off the table. Having such large zones for your characters to move between helps impart the feeling of progression and speed, especially if you use your whole turn for movement and cross four zones in a single bound.
The card quality leaves nothing to be desired. A quality linen finish and robust card stock makes these cards feel durable in your hands, which is important considering you’ll be shuffling your little deck several times each game. I am a little disappointed that the cards are so small. Nonetheless, I understand why they chose to use tiny cards, as full sized cards would take over the entire table leaving no room for the massive map that most missions require (Lotr:JiME contains 337 cards in the base game alone).
If you couldn’t tell from the size of the box itself, Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a very large game and demands a lot of time and space. Setting up this game is a chore, even if I use a card ladder that helps sort the dozens of decks of cards. Many of the cards won’t be used every game, or even at all if their associated characters or roles aren’t used or titles not acquired. On one hand, I like the variety and variability; playing through the game a second time as a different character is much more enjoyable than a repeat journey as Aragon. On the other hand, having extra unused cards can add to the sprawl your cards if you aren’t organized.
Playing Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a straightforward affair. In the app you’ll select your characters, roles, and who has which items. Then the app will deliver some story and instruct you on how to create the first bits of the map and where to place your heroes and various tokens around the board. The player phase begins with all players scouting from their deck; drawing cards and preparing one as a skill and returning the rest to their deck. And herein lies the only ‘hidden’ information of this cooperative game. Players are encouraged to discuss and strategize together, but the game takes no effort to solve the ‘quarterbacking problem’. If you have a particularly pushy person in your group ordering everyone around, I wouldn’t suggest playing this game.
The core of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth‘s gameplay is centered around skill checks. Often when you interact with something (including attacking), you’re asked to check a skill. You draw a number of card from your deck equal to the skill being checked. Many of the cards in your deck will have an icon in the top corner with either a success, a leaf (which can be turned into a success by spending an inspiration token), or nothing. Some skill checks will require you to have a certain number of successes while others will just have you input the number of successes that you earned and then tell you if you passed or failed after the fact.
And herein lies what really makes Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth a step removed from a traditional board game. The app obfuscates mechanics from the players, such as the number of successes to clear some challenges. When inspiration tokens are running low players may want to conserve them, but choosing to hold back may mean spending a whole other action if the skill check isn’t passed. The unknowing bucket to dump successes into is not my favourite game to play. There is also the equivalent of rolling critical failures; if you don’t have any inspiration tokens, you may only have 5 successes in your whole 18 card deck. There was one instance where I failed a check when trying to climb a tower and took enough damage to die. When you die, you make a saving check that gets progressively harder the more you’ve died. All I needed was one success, but I pulled none, ending that game right then and there.
The balance of some of the missions did feel off. In one case it felt like we were running through the cave as fast as we could and came to a fork in the road near the end. We arbitrarily chose left and it turned out to be a dead end. Backtracking and taking the other fork did let us find our objective, but it was too little too late. The end-game timer ran out and we lost the mission, by what felt like no fault of our own. On the other hand, there was a mission or two where we finished nearly everything on the map with plenty of time to spare, and when the big bad for the episode showed up, Gimli smote them with a single strike.
I know there is a subset of people that vehemently despise board games that require an app to play, and sometimes I understand their criticisms. One of the things that separates board games from video games is the mastery of the system. To play a video game, you only need to hold the controller and interact with the game. Yes, knowledge and understanding may help you accomplish the goals of the game, but they aren’t necessary. A board game on the other hand requires that you know the rules that govern the game; there can be no hidden numbers or systems running out of the view of the player, because the player needs to turn all the gears to make the game work themselves. In a hybrid environment such as Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth I feel like I’m experiencing the worst of both worlds.
There are some aspects to the app that I enjoy, like the dynamic set-up. The world map will be different each time you play. I also like that the app handles everything to do with the enemies, such as managing deployment locations and attack targets, special boons and health counters. Having the app run those aspects makes the enemies feel more challenging and unpredictable than if they were being managed by a set script such as always targeting the closest hero, or having to manage a deck for each enemy.
Overall I feel like I shouldn’t have enjoyed Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth as much as I did. The skill check system is fairly simplistic and somewhat prone to randomness, the app obfuscates certain things from you, and some missions felt too easy while others felt unfair. But in the end I enjoyed my time with LotR:JiME. It was a fun romp and the Tolkien thematic coverings appealed to my biases nicely to keep me interested in the theme. If this was a generic fantasy dungeon crawler, I’m sure I would have checked out ages ago. I am looking forward to more with this game, between the two big box expansions (Spreading War and Shadowed Paths), the additional campaigns offered as DLC within the app, and more characters than I can realistically play. I can’t help but think of this game fondly, and keep looking forward to this game hitting the table. It’s greater than the sum of it’s parts, making it an unexpected hit.
Artists: Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, Beth Sobel
Release Year: 2019
Mechanics: Card Drafting, Dice Rolling, Hand Management, Engine Building
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Introduction
Hoo-boy, talk about a sleeper hit. I remember so much drama when Wingspan was first released by Stonemaier Games in 2019. It hit store shelves and immediately sold out. Everyone wanted to get their hands on the hot new bird game, to the point where nasty rumors of ‘artificial scarcity’ began to circulate and people criticized Stonemaier Games for having poor forecasting. The reality of the situation was that no one could have predicted just how successful Wingspan would become.
How to Play
Wingspan begins each player with an empty ecosystem board, 5 bird cards, 2 goals, and 5 food (one of each type). Players can keep as many birds from their initial draw as they wish, but they need to sacrifice 1 food for each card kept.
On your turn you may place one of your cubes in any one of the four action spots on your player board, simultaneously helping keep track of how many turns in the round, and helping you remember how to run your engine.
The first possible action is to play a bird card. From your hand, simply pay the required food from your personal supply back to the bank and place your bird on one of the three ecosystems on your board (Woodlands, Plains, and Wetlands). Your bird card must go in the leftmost empty column, and depending on the column you may also need to pay an egg.
If you choose not to play a bird, You can instead play your cube in one of your three ecosystems. Each ecosystem will net you different benefits. If you place your cube in the woodland area, you’ll get to generate food based off the die on the table. The Plains allows you to lay eggs on your bird cards, and the Wetlands allow you to draw cards. As you play birds to an ecosystems, choosing to play your cube there becomes more lucrative. When you take any of the actions that correspond to the ecosystems you place your cube in the left most empty spot on that track. As bird cards fill up the weaker left slots, the basic action will get stronger (for example, the first woodland column generates 1 food while the right most generates 3). Not only will your action be better, you will also benefit from the specific bird cards that you activate as you move your cube left, completing your turn.
The charm of Wingspan lies in its great variety. The base game contains 170 individual cards, all with lovely and unique art depicting each bird. While not every card power is unique, there is still a huge variety to behold.
The game continues with players taking actions until they all run out of cubes. Players score for the goal of the round and move to the next round. After the 4th round the final score is tallied and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
The production of Wingspan is simply fantastic. The box and rulebook have a luxury linen finish, and the card stock for all the cards is thick and satisfying. The artwork is breathtaking, and the pastel coloured eggs are sure to give you candy cravings. Everyone I’ve shown this game to has complimented how nice everything is; it is clear that no compromises were made during production.
The game play of Wingspan is simply and straightforward. Everyone has their own goal that they’re working towards and some shared goals to help nudge players in a specific direction. The public goals generally refer to having birds in specific ecosystems, or eggs in certain types of nests, while the private goals are much more varied. Some goals will have you seeking birds with colours in their name, while others want you to amass a flock of birds with a wingspan of 76cm or less. While you only start with one of these goals, some bird cards will give you the chance to obtain more.
The bird cards are the core of Wingspan. The entire game revolves around collecting, playing, and activating the birds on your player board. Often players will find themselves grappling with the desire to activate a certain row of birds, but really needing the effects of a different action.
Over the course of a game of Wingspan you’ll likely play anywhere between 8 – 14 cards into your tableau. With 170 unique bird cards there is a great amount of variability and many paths and engines for you to explore. There is no need to do the same thing over and over again, game after game.
A game of Wingspan starts off slowly, which can be a bit painful. It takes over half of your turns of the first round to get enough food and cards to play just a couple of birds. Luckily a lot of the cards you play will give you a benefit every time they activate, making your subsequent turns more effective and allowing you to reach heights you previously thought impossible.
Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of Wingspan. It’s pleasant to look at, easy to teach and play, and offers a great amount of replayability, but I dislike how much luck is involved. The card deck, while tall and varied makes it difficult to find the specific card you need, and if one of your opponents was lucky enough to pull a food generating crow early in the game, it can be difficult to keep up. I do enjoy the small amount of positive player interaction (some cards will give all players a food, and others will give you a point when a other player takes a certain action), but I wish there were just a little more. Again, this has to do with the size of the deck and just how varied the cards are. While I know I would prefer a more focused tableau building game such as Race for the Galaxy, I recognize that the wide variety is important for the replayability of Wingspan.
But who cares about what I think – my wife absolutely LOVES Wingspan. This is one of the few games she actively asks to play, and any game that inspires a level of enthusiasm from my partner is a game that deserves applause. She loves the feeling of building an engine, she enjoys the fact that no one can throw a wrench into her mechanics and slow down her process, and she particularly enjoys when a satisfying combo can be created.
It’s also worth pointing out that the theme of birds is just plain pleasant. It’s so nice to see lovely illustrations of birds that we could see in our back yard. If Wingspan had a goblin or mountain troll theme, it would be eminently less pleasant. I think this is where Wingspan shines the brightest; it’s a fun, comforting, enjoyable experience and it is completely inoffensive. Wingspan welcomes players into the board game hobby with open wings.
We’ve arrived at my favourite 10 games of all time (as of March 2020). I did not anticipate how long this series would go when I started it over a year ago.
It’s been nice reflecting on my favorite games, verbalizing why I like each one so much. A few of the games descriptions were enough to peak my wife’s interest, which always makes me happy.
I’ve played a lot if games over the last two years, and while this list will have changed quite a bit, I know that these top 10 are firm in their spots. It would take something pretty special to come a dislodge any one of these from the pantheon of my top 10 games of all time.
10 – Glen More II: Chronicles
Glen More by Matthias Cramer was one of the few games that I lamented ‘missing’ out on when I first got into the board game hobby. Our local board game cafe had a copy and I loved it. I really enjoy how the scoring is all based on how well you’re doing in certain aspects compared to the other players, and I love the push and pull of selecting tiles to add to your tableau. Leaping ahead to grab the best tiles is tempting, but then players who take their time have a much better chance of growing a strong whiskey engine. Alas, by the time I became a Board Gamer™ Glen More was out of print
Glen More II: Chronicles takes everything that I enjoyed about the original game, adds some gorgeous art, and throws in a boat load of discovery. While the new clan board is not my favourite addition, I love that there are 8 expansion modules in the box that can be mix and matched for a unique game every time we play.
Glen More II is the game we play on Robbie Burns night after feasting on Haggis and drinking scotch. It plays well at 2 and 4, and is a very satisfying experience every time it hits my table. Because Glen More II is the game we play during a special event, it ends up holding a very special place in my heart.
9 – Scythe
If you’ve been paying attention to my list, you’ll notice that there aren’t very many games that offer direct player combat. Scythe by Jamey Stegmaier is one of the few board games where conflict is the main focus that I really enjoy.
I’ve often said that Scythe is a ‘cold war game’, meaning that the threat of combat is often more important than the combat itself. Military posturing and threats go a long way in this game about farmers and mechs.
While my friends enthuasim for Scythe is infectious, what really cemented Scythe for me was playing through the Rise of Fenris campaign. Playing Scythe over and over again each week and finding new statagies and discovering the emergent storytelling from the gameplay brought me so much joy. I look forward to every game I play of Scythe, and I’ll never forget one game where I managed to win the whole game, while losing every single combat levied against me!
8 – Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
It feels very odd to have a game that I adore so much and have so high on top games of all time list that I’ve never played in person.
That’s right, I’ve never actually played a physical copy of Vlaada Chvátil’s civilization building card game Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization. What I have done is played dozens of games on Board Game Arena, and even more on the excellently designed Android app.
While my win rate is absolutely abysmal (3 victories in 25 games), I enjoy every play. Each game has a feeling of progression and momentum that other games can only hope to emulate. Oddly enough there isn’t a whole lot of discovery in Through the Ages as you’ll see every single card in each game, but there is so much depth to mine. Given enough thought and smarts you absolutely can master this system and prove your superiority over all who dare oppose you.
7 – Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy by Thomas Lehmann is another Board Game Arena obsession that I’ve almost never played on the table (2 physical plays!). The BGA implementation is slick, fast, and with a very healthy player base it takes no time to find an opponent and games almost never last longer than 10 minutes.
Race for the Galaxy is a tableau building card game, laden with iconography not for the faint of heart. Of course, once you crack the code and understand the logic of the icons, you can ascertain what each card does at a glace, but this can Race for the Galaxy can be intimating for new players.
I find RtfG best at 2 players as it’s quick, exciting, and strategic. If you have a gaming partner who is near the same skill level and enthusaiam as you are, I’d highly recommend picking up Race for the Galaxy and playing a half dozen times in quick succession.
6 – Concordia
Concordia by Mac Gerdts is probably best known for it’s somewhat controversial (read, bad) cover art. While later editions updated the art (although some people still detest it), the game inside has always been a wonder to behold. Concordia was one of the first games to introduce positive player interactions to me. Whenever a player activates a province to produce resources, they activate every building within that province, which could land your opponents with a sudden windfall of goods.
I also really enjoy the action selection mechanic, where you have hand of cards, each one offering you a different action, and as you play the cards to take their action they just sit beside your player board, waiting for their chance to strike again. One of the cards in your hand will be to retreive all your cards, which is almost skipping a turn just to get access to all of your actions again!
We most often play Concordia with the Salsa expansion which includes player powers, one time benefit tiles, and the special wild ‘salt’ resource. There are many maps available as well for those who crave a little variety in their Mediterranean resource trading games.
5 – Istanbul
Istanbul by Rüdiger Dorn is my favourite game that I don’t own. And it’s a bit of a tragedy too because it’s a fast, light, excellent game where players are racing to collect 5 gems from various merchants around the turkish bazaar. Each player begins with their merchant disc and a stack of assistants. As you move around the board you deposit assistants and take actions. Should you return to that location again you can collect your assistant and take the action again. The catch is if you don’t have an assistant to drop off or pick up at a location, you don’t get to take the action!
It always feels odd when the goal of the game is to stop playing as soon as possible, but in the case of Istanbul, the potential for an incredibly short game exists. Filling your cart with 5 rubies first can be done in as little as 18 actions (depending on the tile layout and how much your opponents are getting in your way). I find Istanbul charming and incredibly replayable. I love shuffling the location cards, dealing them out at random, then try to find the most efficient route to claiming those precious rubies.
Two expansions exist for Istanbul, but I don’t find them necessary. Expanding the number of action spaces can make this game tedious to play. The only reason I haven’t priortised getting a copy of Istanbul into my collection is because two of my close friends already own it, and the last thing I want is for our collections to start overlapping. If I ever moved away from this game group however, this is would be one of my first purchases!
4 – Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King
The eagle eyed observer may have noticed some glaring omissions. I don’t know why, but I seem to love when Alexander Pfister and Andreas Pelikan work together. I really enjoyed Broom Service and I love Isle of Skye. There’s not many bidding games on my list, because I keep coming back to this one! I adore the variety in scoring objectives (especially after I got the expansions that included even more), I love how simple the base gameplay is, and I even enjoy cursing my friends when they pitch the perfect tile back into the bag.
7 Wonders Duel by Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala is the game that my wife and I played together the most. we bought it early in our board game career, when we were coming off the high of discovering that board games could actually be fun and exciting! We had played the 2 player version of 7 Wonders and found it fell flat as we really didn’t enjoy managing a dummy player.
7 Wonders Duel was one of the first games I chose to review, mostly because I love it so much. It’s small enough that it can fit on a coffee table and deep enough that it can withstand dozens of repeated plays. There’s an android app available, and a wealth of players on BoardGameArena if you’re seeking a variety of opponents.
2 – Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker by Vlaada Chvatil is the game that divides my group. Myself and Bigfoot absolutely adore the chaos and insanity that Galaxy Trucker revels in. Otter is somewhat luke-warm on it and Bear detests this game. He’s proclaimed that he’d rather take up knitting than play Galaxy Trucker.
In Galaxy Trucker players are racing to build the best ship they can, full of guns, storage containers, engines, batteries, and crew cabins. Once constructed, ships are run through a gauntlet of asteroids, space pirates, epidemics, and wide open space. The players to manage to survive and deliver their goods earn credits and at the end of the game anyone with at least one credit is a winner! Of course, some players will win more than others!
The chaos and randomness will either draw players in, or chase them away. Personally, I find myself laughing uproariously when a single stray asteroid cleaves your ship in half, but for some, that pain is too much to bear. There is also a run-away leader problem where often the players who are struggling get punished for struggling. Even with those criticism in mind, Galaxy Trucker lands in the number 2 slot of my top 100 games of all time.
1 – Food Chain Magnate
Food Chain Magnate is the game that excites me the most. Almost the anthesis of Galaxy Trucker in that there is nearly no randomness. I’ve talked in depth about Food Chain Magnate recently, but it’s one that generates the most excitement when sitting down to play.
Every game of Food Chain Magnate feels unique. I can pursue the same strategy over and over and have wildly different results every time. Because Food Chain Magnate is highly interactive and so much of doing well in this game relies on anticipating what your opponents are planning and capitalizing on their actions, simply following the same pattern in every game will quickly lead your opponents to knowing exactly where your weaknesses lie.
I could literally talk about Food Chain Magnate for hours, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just thank you for reading to the end of my top 100 games of all time as of March 2020! It’s been quite a journey actually sitting down and writing my impressions of each of these games. Some I haven’t actually played for a couple years but writing about them renewed my desire to get them back to the table! I hope you had as much fun as I did!
Soon I’ll make a post about some of the more radical changes that have happened in my top 100 list, like how Bullet<3 debuted at number 7!
Number of plays: 2 Designer: Maxime Tardif Release Year: 2023 Mechanics: Tableu building, Card Drafting, Hand Management
A prototype of Earth was provided by the publisher for review purposes
Introduction
Earth, designed by Maxime Tardif and published by Inside Up Games, is an engine building, hand management, tableau building game for 1 – 5 players. In this post I’ll be focusing on the multiplayer mode of play, which generally takes between 60 to 90 minutes to complete. Earth is on Kickstarter until March 7th, so if anything I say below interests you, check out their fundraising project here!
And if you’re interested in the solo game, you can find my review of it here!
How to Play
In Earth you are an island, with a distinct and unique ecosystem. Your goal is to plant flora into a 4 x 4 tableau that will grant you special abilities and amass points, as its the player with the most points who gets the distinction of being the best island.
Every player starts with 3 double sided cards, an island, an ecosystem, and a climate. These cards will dictate how many cards and soil you start with, grant you a special ability to use throughout the game, and give you an end game scoring condition that only you can fill.
In the centre of the table four Fauna cards are laid out, each offering a unique goal (such as “have 6 plans with 3 or less cube spots” or “have 4 cards completely full, all their growth and plant tracks complete”). Should you accomplish any of the requests of the fauna cards, you’ll earn victory points. The first player to satisfy each one will earn slightly more than those who come after them. On this board two more ecosystem cards are laid down, offering even more end game scoring conditions that all players can fulfill.
Now the stage is set and everyone draws their initial hand of cards based off their individual island. Some will draw 10 cards and need to compost 4 of them, others will draw 3 cards, but get extra soil to start with. Either way, each player will have an asymmetric starting position with their own benefits and drawbacks
The active player chooses one of the four actions (Planting, Composting, Watering, and Growing). That player gets a major benefit based off that action while all other players get a minor benefit. Then all players trigger any abilities on their cards from top left to bottom right that match the colour of that action. Once resolved, the next player becomes the active player, and the game continues in this fashion until someone has completed their 16 card tableau and triggers the end of the game. Play continues so all players had the same number of turns, then the final scores are tallied.
Points in Earth come from a wide variety of places. Cards in your tableau have a base VP, cards in your event space usually have a negative VP, you get 1 VP per card in your compost pile,1 VP per plant cube in your tableau, 1 VP per growth token, unless the canopy has been placed, in which case you gain the completion bonus instead, Terrain cards in your tableau may offer VPs, the Fauna board offers VPs to those who completed them, and finally, the ecosystem cards will offer VPs as well.
Review
Earth is a rare game where the player interactions aren’t negative; you’re not trying to cut your opponents down or steal their resources to gain a better position for yourself. Instead, there’s a beneficial relationship here. When you choose an action all the other players gain a fraction of the benefit you received, and everyone gets to trigger any cards of that colour.
With over 360 unique cards in the main plant deck, there’s no real way to hate draft or otherwise stifle your opponents, other than capitalize on their weaker positions. If you see they’re low on soil, it may be in your interest to choose the Plant action as they may not be able to fully utilize the benefit. Likewise, if you notice that both your opponents are full on cubes but you aren’t, consider taking the action that gives everyone cubes and laugh as they groan!
You won’t get far in Earth if you’re playing this way however. The goal is to grow the best ecosystem you can, and that is only achieved when you can create and maintain a well balanced engine. Having too many cards that produce cubes is a detriment when you’ve reached your capacity. I’ve really enjoyed playing cards into my tableau that create a self-sustaining ecosystem; the first card earns me a soil, the second card let’s me compost a card from my hand. The third card lets me pick up a card from the deck, and my fourth card discards a soil and a compost to earn 2 cubes and 1 growth. It’s so satisfying when you can align your abilities to create the perfect perpetual motion machine.
Earth has been billed as Terraforming Mars mixed with Wingspan. While it has much more in common with the latter, I can see the comparisons to both. Like Wingspan, you have 4 actions to choose from on your turn, and the action you take dictates which aspects of your engine will trigger. It also features point scoring cards based on various features (like 3pts per plant with a colour in its name) which Earth does its very best to inform players of the likely-hood of obtaining cards by including how many cards in the deck include that feature. I’m curious as to how that would change with future expansions, if diluting the deck would modify those odds, or if every expansion that adds cards to the Plant desk will need to maintain the appropriate ratios of cards.
Also like Wingspan the cards of your engine trigger in a specific order, making where and when you place them important. While some will agonize over the loss of efficiency when you’re forced to put a card that scores points based on being adjacent to other cards along the edge, it absolutely does cut down on some analysis paralysis. Considering you’ll be triggering the abilities on your cards on every players turn, it’s nice that you can just start from the top left and go to the bottom right, collecting and converting resources. This step can happen simultaneously and helps cut down on the play time.
While the comparisons to other games like Wingspan are apt, another mechanic I want to touch on is the benefits players give to each other on their turns. Harkening back to games like Puerto Rico or Race for the Galaxy, when the active player picks an action they get a major benefit while all the other players get a minor benefit. This system manages to keep all the players at the table involved, as their actions directly affect and benefit you. It’s wonderful when you’re agonizing over your cards trying to figure out which two you’ll want to plant but being constrained by your low soil supply, then the player before you takes an action that pours soil onto your player board. I really enjoy this positive player interaction and think it’s one of the more interesting parts of this design.
Earth has been fun to discover. I love the slight amount of asymmetry from the start and more as each player grows their engine in a different direction. I particularly enjoyed my friends as all the pieces started to fall into place. When deciding on their first hand of cards and exclaiming “oh! OH! But then… ooooohhh!”, their excitement was contagious. if you’ve enjoyed games like Wingspan or Terraforming Mars in the past, I’m willing to bet that you’ll enjoy Earth. Even if you don’t, at the very least you’ll get to enjoy some really lovely nature photography and learn about some fascinating plants. Like how cool the bleeding tooth fungus looks!
If you’re in the market for a medium weight engine builder that’s high in discovery and low in direct conflict, Earth will not disappoint!
