It’s been a while since I posted a set of my favourite games. At the speed I’m going it’ll be 2023 by the time this list is finished!
60 – Millennium Blades
Millennium Blades designed by Brad Talton is almost a fever dream of a game. Millennium Blades is a game about collecting cards and competing in tournaments of a fictional CCG called Millennium Blades. Each round of the game has two parts; a real-time deck building phase, and a tournament phase. In the deck building phase you have three 7 minute rounds where you’ll drop literal stacks of cash to buy new ‘packs’ from the store and buy and sell singles in the aftermarket. As cards and cash flow in and out of your player area, you’re trying to achieve two things: create a competitive deck and build a collection (a set of cards that share an attribute with increasing rarity). Cards in your collection cannot be used in the tournament
Once the real time phase is over, you flip over your playerboard and play a fairly simple game with your competitive decks. Each player takes a turn playing a card to the table in front of them, resolving the effects, and earning points, cards, and money for how well your deck performed.
Millennium Blades is a special game for a certain niche of people. The art by Fabio Fontes has a strong 90’s anime aesthetic, and makes dozens of references to the video games and anime from my childhood. Millennium Blades also comes with dozens of sets of cards that you can mix and match to create a unique store deck every time you play.
Because Millennium Blades is a throwback to competitive CCGs and 90’s era anime and video games, it feels like it was MADE for me. My gaming group however has never dabbled in these specific quagmires so all of the theming is lost on them. I’m sure Millennium Blades could be so much higher on this list if I had equally enthusiastic players to join me at my table. For now, it will languish at #60.
59 – Alhambra
Alhambra by Dirk Henn is a classic. In Alhambra you take turns taking money cards from the offer row and using that cash to buy tiles to place into your personal Alhambra. At two points during play a ‘scoring’ card will be drawn, instantly triggering a scoring phase. The player who has the majority for each of the colours earns the points, splitting the points if tied. The first scoring round only offers a prize to the person who has the most, but the next two scoring rounds have points for the person who has the most and for the person who has the second most tiles in each of the colours. In addition to earning points via the majorities in the tiles, you also get points for the wall going around the Alhambra. Most tiles will have a number of black boarders, representing a wall. Walls prevent you from building further in that direction from that tile. Often you will find yourself at odds with buying a tile from the shop because you just need one more green tile, but struggling to place the tile in your tableau in a way that doesn’t completely prevent you from building out even more.
Alhambra is a great game to begin or end a night. It’s fairly quick to play, not terribly complex, and offers a satisfying puzzle for you to solve.
58 – Targi
Targi by Andreas Steiger is a two player only game about placing workers on action spaces in such a way so that you get exactly what you want, while your opponent curses your name under their breath. Targi‘s theme is that you’re the leader of a Tuareg tribe trading goods and trying to expand your wealth, but the theme is pretty paper thin. Where Targi fails in theme it makes up for in gameplay. Targi has a 5 x 5 grid of cards. Along the outside edges are the action spaces, while the centre 9 cards are either resource cards, or a tribe card. During a round you and your opponent take turns placing your workers on available action spaces. You may not occupy an action spot that your opponent occupies, or a spot directly across the board from an opponents worker. Once all six workers have been placed, you place two more tokens on the centre cards that are in same row and columns as your workers. Then you perform all the actions available to you; getting various resources and spending them to gain tribe cards that give you various benefits when placed in your tableau.
Targi is a delightful game to play with a rival. Every action you take denies your opponent opportunities, but spend too much time trying to thwart their plans and you’ll find yourself falling far behind. Targi puts players in a dangerous dance as they try to achieve their objectives while getting in each other’s way. I’ve played Targi only a handful of times in person (every time I do a slew of profanities slowly slip from my mouth as the turns go on), but I’ve played dozens of games on Board Game Arena. I find that because there is very little hidden information, Targi played very well asynchronously. I highly recommend Targi if you and your gaming partner delight in stepping on each others toes.
57 – Azul
Azul by Michael Kiesling is one of the best games of 2017. It’s simple to play, difficult to master, and the Bakelite tiles are satisfying to play with. In Azul you and your friends are working to embellish the mosaic walls of a Portuguese palace. Each player has their own board, and there are a number of factory spaces in the middle. On your turn you take all matching tiles from any of the factory spaces. Once you take tiles from a factory, the left over tiles from that factory are deposited into the centre of the table. On and on the game goes, with people taking tiles from the factory or the centre of the table and queueing them up on their player board in hopes of filling a row. At the end of the round when all the tiles have been claimed, any full rows will move one of the pieces over to the scoring area, and the rest will be returned to the box.
Azul is a very abstract game and you will quickly lose the idea of creating a beautiful mosaic as you fall into the rhythm of the game. Azul is a great game to play with anyone, whether they have a deep and abiding love of games or show only a cursory interest. The game of Azul is satisfying and is one that often gets requested, even if that request is “can we play that game with the Starburst pieces again?”
56 – Tak
Tak has an intresting genesis. It began in a book, The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. The main character Kvothe described it as “The best sort of game: simple in its rules, complex in its strategy.” Never did Patrick Rothfuss try to describe how the game was played, as he envisioned Tak to be like the Chess of his world; classic, perfect, and timeless. And how could anyone invent chess today?
I saw an interview with Patrick Rothfuss where he said he was flabbergasted when James Earnest approached him and said:
“I want to make Tak.”
“You can’t just make Tak any more than you can invent the next chess!”
James Earnest said he’d come up with something and if Patrick Rothfuss veto’d it, that would be the end of it. The fact that this game is sitting on my favourite games list may spoil the ending of this story. James Earnest pitched a version of Tak to Patrick Rothfuss and won him over, successfully creating a game that was simple to play, but had deep complex strategies.
I’ll admit my bias; I’ve loved Rothfuss’ books long before I got into board games. But when I saw that Rothfuss had endorsed this version of Tak, I knew I had to get my hands on it. An abstract strategy game that’s elegant and fun to play, and no luck with the potential for misdirection and big moves, I was an instant fan.
55 – Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is the second meanest game about trees that I’ve played, but I’m ready to argue that this game by Hjalmar Hach has a much more impressive table presence. In Photosynthesis you struggle against the other players to grow your trees from little seedlings. Each round you’ll spend your energy growing trees taller so they catch the sun while simultaneously casting a shadow upon the trees behind them, denying those players valuable sunlight tokens. As your trees get taller you earn more points and the player with the most points win.
Each player has three different sizes of trees to place on the board, and after just a few turns this board game has a wonderful 3D effect. Trees are standing tall amongst smaller saplings and the sun is rotating around the table, changing who is receiving the benefit of the sunlight and the punishment of being in the shade.
Photosynthesis is a game I’ve only played a handful of times but it’s one that I remember fondly. I aspire to play it again soon!
54 – Le Havre
Le Havre is a huge game by Uwe Rosenburg. In Le Havre you need to manage 16 different resources to build the best buildings and ships to earn the most points to win the day. Each round has a total of 7 actions, meaning some rounds players will get more or less actions than the other players. This is particularly difficult in the 4 player game where you’ll get 2 actions at most every round and in some rounds get a single action. Coupled with trying to amass enough food to feed your workers and earn enough goods to build ships and buildings, it can feel like Le Havre is asking a lot of you.
I really enjoy the resource management, and the mechanism for using other players’ buildings. By the time you get to the end of the game you feel successful and powerful, as if you just overcame a large foe. Le Havre is one of Uwe Rosenburg’s best games, which is high praise considering just how many excellent games he has designed.
53 – Inis
Inis by Christian Martinez is a area majority game in which players are tasked with deciding who they’re going to crown as their king. Inis is probably one of the most satisfying area majority, troops-on-a-map games I’ve ever played. The artistic direction is unique and eye catching and I love the mechanic where players need to declare that they can satisfy one of the three victory conditions at the start of the round and hold onto it until the end of the round.
Inis can leave a sour taste in your mouth when two of your opponents can win and you only have the ability to stop one of them. Each round begins with a card draft in which you more or less have to decide what actions will be available to you this round. As you play more games of Inis you’ll learn what cards are available and how to utilize them properly. Eventually you’ll figure out how to predict what someone is going to do based on the cards that you didn’t see, giving you the important information needed to counter their moves.
I found in my plays of Inis that someone ended up being a ‘kingmaker’. By choosing to attack player A instead of Player B, Player B was able to amass their armies and lead their clan to victory. Personally I don’t like being in the situation where my one choice to stop someone from willing will directly hand the victory to another player, but if that feature doesn’t bother you I highly recommend giving Inis a try!
52 – Karuba
Karuba is not the first Rudiger Dorn design on my list and it certainly isn’t the last. Karuba gives all players the exact same challenge, with the winner being the player who completes the challenge in the most efficient way possible. All the adventurers and temples start on the same space for each player. Every turn all players get the same road piece and have to place it somewhere on their board, or discard it to move their adventurers across the jungle, stopping to pick up gems across the way.
Karuba ends once one player has managed to get all four of their adventurers to all four temples, or when the deck of road tiles runs out. Karuba has a particularly excellent Tabletop Simulator mod available that allows it to be played start to finish in under 10 minutes. During the COVID season where my group was playing games exclusively online, Karuba was a standout hit. Unlike a lot of other games, Karuba is easier to play online than it is in person. Because it was so easy for us to play and played so quickly, it ended up being the game of choice to end the evening or for a quick game while waiting for the rest of the group to show up.
51 – The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth by Nathan Hajek and Grace Holdinghaus is almost the opposite of Karuba. It is a large sprawling adventure across Middle Earth managed via an app. I have small qualms with The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth due to the character choices and their accuracy in reference to the Lord of the Rings novels (Aragorn and Bilbo do not adventure together!), but overall I really enjoyed the game system. All of the equipment, combat, skills, and damage are managed by cards, and the enemies are plastic miniatures that are entirely controlled by the app. I enjoyed the app integration for The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth as it removed most of the tedium of managing the opponents and the environment, and got us back to playing our turns quickly.
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth is on of the few campaign games that I’ve played all the way through to the end. I’m incredibly tempted to play through the main campaign again just to see where the story branches. I also really want to play the DLC stories, and get the Shadowed Paths expansion that adds in 6 more heroes (Gandalf and Balin) and a ton of new monsters and minis and another scenario to play. I saw recently that ANOTHER expansion was announced Spreading War that adds even more map tiles, roles, terrain types, heroes, and a 15 scenario story. If you have a proclivity to play the same game over and over, The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth has a ton of content to explore and more keeps coming out every year! Long may it continue!!
A copy of Hamsters vs. Hippos was provided by the publisher
Number of Plays: 4
Game Length: 15 – 40 minutes
Mechanics: Press your luck, Player Elimination
Release Year: 2021
Designer: James Freeman, James Staley, Adam Staley
Artist: César Ayala Delgado
Publisher: Tin Robot Games
Intro
There are many famous rivalries in the animal kingdom. mongooses vs. cobras, lions vs. hyenas, and hares vs. tortoises are the first examples that spring to mind. Never in my life have I heard of the epic and lifelong battle that exists between hamsters and hippos.
Hamsters Vs. Hippos is a press-your-luck game by designers James Freeman, James Staley, and Adam Staley, with art by César Ayala Delgadoand published by Tin Robot Games. The goal of the game is to be the hamster that collects the most lotus flowers while avoiding the hippos lurking deep in the water.
How to Play
To begin, remove two of the hippo tiles from the rest of the tiles and shuffle the remaining tiles up. Lay the tiles out randomly on the table in a grid of 5 x 5 (for 1-4 players) or 7 x 7 (5-6 players). On the centre 9 tiles, place a single pink lotus flower. Each player chooses a hamster, takes the associated player board and you’re ready to play.
Setup for a 2 – 4 player game
On your turn you must move your hamster onto an unflipped tile. When you move onto an unflipped tile you collect any flowers sitting on the tile, then flip the tile and perform the action depicted on the tile.
Anytime after your first turn you may choose to bow out of the round. Remove your tile from the board and place all the lotus tokens you’ve collected onto your player board. These points are now permanently yours and cannot be lost.
If you don’t want to bow out of the round for your second action, you must take another move action, exactly the same way as the first action.
If you move and flip over a tile and reveal a hippo, your turn is immediately over and any points you’ve collected this round are lost. Play continues for the rest of the players until either all players have bowed out or a second hippo is revealed. Once that second hippo has been revealed all players who are still in the round are hippo food.
Once the round is over, you’ll shuffle a third hippo tile into the supply, and set up for another round. And for the third and fourth rounds, you’ll add a fourth hippo tile into the supply. After four rounds the player with the most lotus tokens in their permanent supply is the winner!
Review
I’ll talk about the production first. I received a pre-production review copy of Hamsters Vs. Hippos, so any aspect of this game could change over the course of the Kickstarter campaign.
The first thing that I noticed was the charming art on the cover. A cute hamster blissfully unaware of the looming danger of the hippo. I like how bright, cute, and colourful the art direction is, which encourages me to play with a younger audience. Once inside the box, you’re greeted with some very nice screen printed hamster meeples, and a tall stack of wonderfully thick tiles. While this massive stack is hard to shuffle, the thick cardboard tiles feel good in your hands.
Are they Hamster Meeples, or are they Mamples?
Each player gets a little player board with a hamster on it, holding a bag of their colour. This player board has a linen finish, giving it texture and a nice feel, but is made of very thin cardstock, almost the antithesis of the thick tiles. This isn’t much of an issue, as you’re not interacting with the player board much, just using it as a space to designate the tokens that you’ve cached from round to round. The lotus tiles are also quite small and thin; I found my sausage fingers had some amount of trouble picking them up deftly. Luckily for me, Hamsters vs. Hippos is not a dexterity game.
Hamsters vs. Hippos is a press-your-luck game about trying to collect the most points before choosing to bow out of the game to cache your goods. It may seem obvious that a press-your-luck game is incredibly luck dependent. Every time you choose to play more, you risk all of the progress you’ve made in the round up to this point.
In the case of Hamsters vs. Hippos, the word that comes to mind is ‘arbitrary’. Your first action in every round is to pick a tile to move onto; any tile along the outside will do. You have no information on which to base that decision, so you just end up picking the tile closest to your seat. Your second choice is much like the first – you now have 5 unflipped tiles surrounding your hamster, and you arbitrarily pick one to move onto and flip.
There is some vague feeling of strategy in choosing where you want to move to. Because you cannot move onto an already flipped tile, you try to maneuver your hamster in a way that leaves you with more than one unflipped tile available, while simultaneously trying to pin and corner your opponents. Beyond that consideration, you just choose your destination arbitrarily. Unless one of your tiles provides an option to peek under an adjacent tile, you have no information to base your decisions on. You just end up picking one, and hope there are no hippos in the water.
The Hamsters vs. Hippos tempo settles quickly. Move and flip, move and flip. We found that we stopped moving our hamster meeples in-between our actions. We’d just flip one tile, collect any rewards and/or settle any actions, flip the second tile, then place the hamster on the tile. Once we stopped moving the Hamster meeple, it became clear that the game of Hamsters vs. Hippos is just tile-flipping.
As tiles get flipped over and players start to accrue lotus flowers, you may be tempted to bow out of the round to ‘save’ all the goods you’ve collected thus far. The trouble that comes with that decision is that it feels bad to choose to stop playing. Further to that, if you’re not already in first place it feels like a losing move. Yes, you could stop early and save the flowers you collected, but if the the leader is still in the round it feels like they’re getting further and further ahead of you. It feels bad when you stop the round with 3 flowers and the person who was already in first place collects 8 before stopping. Not only are you no longer playing the game, but you’ve put yourself into an even worse position.
The mirror opposite to that situation is when you arbitrarily chose a tile to start on, and that tile turns out to be a hippo. You are immediately out of the round before you even began. Again, in press-your-luck games you’re supposed to weigh the odds of getting points versus the odds of losing it all, and sometimes you can just have bad luck and lose right off the bat.
The game is not altogether without tension. In one of my plays I was the player who got the first hippo tile relatively early. I sat and watched as my friends scurried across the pond, snatching up lotus tiles left and right. I willed the tiles to reveal a second hippo, and when the player in the lead loudly postulated “Should I just leave the pond? Ah, I’ll flip over one more tile!” and that tile was the second hippo, I let out an audible gasp. That tension quickly deflated as we realized that because no one else had bowed out, the whole round was basically a wash. Poor decision making on our part I suppose.
I can’t help but compare Hamsters vs. Hippos to press-your-luck games that I really enjoy. Can’t Stop (which I’ve already reviewed) and Incan Gold are two great examples that come to mind. In Can’t Stop you roll four die, pair them off, and move trackers up a board. Before you choose to roll you have information available to you, which numbers are still available, how far you’ve gone on each of the tracks, and the probability of rolling one of the three numbers you’ve chosen for the round. If your three numbers are a 2, 11, and 12, you’re probably going to choose to stop playing for the round, just because you know the probability of getting one of those three numbers is low.
Incan Gold asks players to voluntarily choose to stop playing in order to save all the gems they’ve gained thus far in a round, but players have more information available to them when they make that choice. First, as players adventure into the temple and loot gets left on the floor, you can see the reward for choosing to bow out of the game; you’re not JUST choosing to stop playing, but choosing to scoop up all the points that were left behind. Tension builds as you contemplate what others are doing, you weigh the benefits and risks as you try to out-think and out-maneuver your opponents. Incan Gold has some very exciting moments as players choose to leave on the same turn, forcing them to split the crumbs, or as one player is alone in the temple, presses their luck and scores big! When a threat card is drawn, it doesn’t end the game for just one of the players at the table, it signals that the end of the round could be imminent for all players.
Getting back to Hamsters vs. Hippos, I feel there is a element of player agency missing from this game. Because you have no information to base your decisions off of, you’re just flipping tiles and hoping that you don’t get the first hippo. In a 4 player game with a 5×5 grid, half the tiles aren’t in the game. The odds of 2 hippos being in the grid at all feels quite low. In a 5 or 6 player game and a 7×7 grid, nearly all the tiles are included, which does increase the tension a little bit, knowing that the hippos are definitely on the table. The downside of playing with 6 players is that 10 tiles get flipped in between each of your turns, making the odds of two hippos coming up within those 10 tiles not unreasonable.
All in all, Hamsters vs. Hippos is a cute and well produced game. My ‘core’ game group bounced off it, citing the lack of information available to influence their decisions, but I can see it being a fun game to play with younger kids. I’ll be seeing my 6 year old niece in a couple months, so once we play it I’ll update my opinion on it. I imagine she will have a lot of fun with it.
Let’s flash back to 2008. I was 17 and had just moved into my first apartment in Winnipeg, leaving behind the tiny village in northern Manitoba that I had called home for my entire life. I desperately needed a job to pay the rent for my super sketchy apartment, and the only place that would hire me was the local Pita Pit, paying minimum wage.
With the experience I got From Pita Pit, I moved onto other restaurant jobs, including Joey’s Only Seafood, Chesters Chicken, and Wendy’s. It wasn’t long before I was promoted to shift supervisor at Wendys. I took their training seriously and for two years it was a good enough job to keep my bills paid and food on my table. Unfortunately the training stopped and rather than waiting to move into higher management, I chose to pursue a diploma in Culinary Arts.
I left Wendys part way into my first year of college. When I left, I described working in fast food as ‘absolutely soul grinding’ and I couldn’t get out of that restaurant fast enough. Looking back on that period of my life, I have an odd sense of bittersweet melancholy. For some reason, I miss my Wendys. I’m sure I’m just lumping my time at that job together with a time in my life where I was excited about my schooling and all the new friendships I was developing.
It’s with those rose-coloured glasses that I picked up Food Chain Magnate. This was early in my gaming career and easily my most expensive game. With almost no information other than a fast food theme that I felt drawn to, I payed the $120 and brought it home. After all, I love food and restaurants, any game with this theme is sure to be a hit for me! How bad could it be?
How to Play
Food Chain Magnate is an economic game where the player with the most money wins. That’s the goal, make the most money, there are no alternate objectives, no prizes for having the best food or the most restaurants or the most brand recognition. The only thing that matters is money. Every round of Food Chain Magnate moves through its 7 phases, and if there is still money to be earned from the central bank, a new round is started. On and on it goes until the bank has been depleted and one player stands richer than the rest.
I’ll be honest, I wrote out a ‘how to play’ summary that ended up being nearly 2,000 words long. I’m going to wager that if you found yourself on this page, it’s because you already have an opinion on Food Chain Magnate and aren’t here to learn how to play. If you’re intrested in learning how to play, I’d recommend just reading the rulebook. It’s only like, 7 pages long and does an incredibly good job in laying out how to play in an easy to digest manner.
The gang’s all here!
I will say that playing Food Chain Magnate isn’t difficult for the average player. If you have someone who knows how to manage the phases and can shepherd the game along, most of your questions can be answered by just reading the cards. The trick comes in playing well.
Review
The first time I cracked Food Chain Magnate‘s box open and laid everything out on my table, it was almost too much to bear. I found a solo variant on Board Game Geek and slowly played it, spending the better part of an afternoon and a literal litre of coffee to learn how to play Food Chain Magnate.
The very first time I laid everything out on my table
Where I’m at now in my gaming career, and with 16 plays of Food Chain Magnate under my belt, I’m ready to argue that it’s actually not technically difficult. The flow of each round is smooth and the natural progression of the game eases players into the tempo. The tempo ramps up considerably, but it’s rare for something to happen that you didn’t expect or at the very least couldn’t see coming. Unless of course you’ve been playing on your phone during someone else’s turn, at which point I have no sympathy for you.
To begin my review proper, I need to say that while I just said that Food Chain Magnate isn’t a difficult game to play, it is HARD. Being a no-luck, perfect information game, Food Chain Magnate is merciless in its punishment. Splotter’s design philosophy is “if you can’t lose on the first turn, what’s even the point of turn one?”. Food Chain Magnate doesn’t care that a poor initial restaurant placement can sink your entire game, or that the person in the lead gets rewards for doing well and there is no welfare system in place to assist those who are struggling. It is absolutely, 100% the case that someone new to Food Chain Magnate playing at a table with a group of experienced players will get stomped into the ground and walk away from this experience with a poor taste in their mouth.
Decide if you’re planning for a short or long game before you even take your first turn
Listen, I love Food Chain Magnate. I love Splotter’s design philosophy and mostly agree with their train of thought of ‘no mercy’. I can tell you that I I don’t want all my games to require such careful considerations and harsh punishments. Food Chain Magnate isn’t a game I recommend to everyone, or even want to play every single day, but under the sharp shell lies a delicious puzzle where every thread you pull can have wild and drastic effects on gameplay.
Food Chain Magnate is one of the few games where I’ve actually sat and pondered what optimal openings exist and how to counter particular strategies right from the start. You see, aside from the 30+ possible employees, there are 16 milestones that everyone is racing towards. These milestones can be incredibly powerful, and missing out some of the key ones absolutely could cost you the game.
The Milestones
A milestone is claimed when someone fulfills it’s requirement. Everyone who managed acheive the milestone on the same turn gets to claim the milestone. That milestone then becomes ‘locked’ for the rest of the game, permanently unavailable for everyone else. This makes the first few turns of Food Chain Magnate critical. On one hand players can copy what everyone is doing to ensure you get access to the same milestones. On on the other hand if you do something completely different you may find yourself as the sole owner of a very powerful persistent benefit.
These milestones include things like a freezer that lets you store food (everyone else has to discard unsold food at the end of each round), adding $5 for every burger, pizza, or drink sold, granting you the ability to use multiple trainers on the same person, rocketing them up the corporate ladder, or permanently offering a $15 discount on salaries, allowing you to have talented staff early in the game. Some of these milestones are legendary, and exploiting properly them is the key to winning Food Chain Magnate.
The quiet before the storm
The very first turn of Food Chain Magnate sets the foundation for the rest of your game. Like a massive ship, it can be incredibly difficult to turn quickly or react to sudden changes. A food chain CEO needs to be like a ship captain. When a sailor sees trouble ahead, calls for the sails to be adjusted, the rudder gets cranked all the way to the side, and the massive ship turns very slowly. In Food Chain Magnate you need to anticipate and be ready for the demands of your guests. You need to be catering to their demands before they even knew they had demands. Just reacting to other players actions is a sure fire way to miss. If you’re planning your next turn’s productions based on the demands of the current round, then you’re already two turns behind.
The first turn of Food Chain Magnate can feel like a whimper. Each player gets to recruit one entry level employee. That’s not very exciting at all! Company growth is almost exponential, every employee that you add gives you another action, allowing you to control the situation on the board and hopefully earn the hard earned cash that will win you the game.
The employees
It’s difficult to see how the gears of Food Chain Magnate‘s mechanics are interlocked and how each action changes how each future action will be taken. Every player is trying to suss out your strategy and either build their own exploitive engine whose growth will eclipse yours, or try to undercut you and steal your business.
Turn order feels critical in every round. at the beginning Food Chain Magnate it’s incredibly advantageous to go last, as you have the ability to react to anything anyone else did on their turn, You can also use the fact that no one is after you to choose to do something completely different, knowing that no one has a chance to react. midway though the game however, it becomes critical to be first, as turn order is the tie breaker for almost everything, and Food Chain Magnate often comes down to ties.
Pricing wars in Food Chain Magnate are not uncommon, if you and an opponent are the same distance from a house that keeps demanding food, it’s tempting to lower your price as getting $4 per sale is better than making no sales at all.
So this begs the question, do you go the McDonalds route and try to sell one hundred million $4 burgers, or do you posture yourself as the cream of the crop, and only sell a dozen $40 burgers? All this will depend on your opponents, as everything they do will push and pull you, forcing you into a dastardly dance of capitalism.
One of the things I love about Food Chain Magnate is that every employee can be the one that wins you the game if you find yourself properly prepared and in the right situation. if two people are racing to the bottom in a pricing war, you can eclipse their profits by flooding the market with demand, and use the Luxuries Manager to boost your price by $10. Couple that with a garden and CFO and all you need is a handful of sales to make a lot of money.
I can keep going on and on about the various situations and how Food Chain Magnate creates fascinating scenarios, but I’ve rambled on for long enough. The long story made short is that Food Chain Magnate is a wonderful, brutal design. The tempo of the games grows organically and exponentially, and I never feel like the game obfuscated what the consequences of my actions are. Every mistake I make is my own fault. A two player game is a cutthroat knife fight as you battle for control of the 9 square hamlet. A 5 player game feels like an all out war, with all the treachery and backstabbing you’d expect from corporations fiercely competing to carve out a section of market share.
Food Chain magnate has no mechanisms to help those falling behind. If you make a mistake and it puts you a turn behind everyone else, you very well may be unable to ever catch up. It’s entirely up to you to make the best of the situation you created. This also has the effect of making someone feel like they’re ‘out of the game’ 30 minutes in, and it’s no fun to sit in a game watching everyone else vye for the crown for 2 hours. And personally, even if I’m doing well in a game, I feel bad when someone is disengaged and obviously not having a good time.
Another common criticism of Food Chain Magnate is with the art. A lot of people are turned off by the way this game looks, calling it boring or bland. Personally, I love the 1950’s aesthetic, tying in the golden age of advertising really drives home the theme. I also recognize that at the start of the game the board is very plain looking. I maintain that Food Chain Magnate has a lot of important information to convey to players and it’s simple design aesthetic was chosen to minimize the information overload for an easier play over-all.
That’s a lot of demands
Another point I really want to bring up is the playtime. Everytime I think about playing Food Chain Magnate, I wince at the time commitment. Food Chain Magnate feels like a four or five hour game. Lately I’ve been recording just how long games actually take to play, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the average game of Food Chain Magnate is only two and a half hours (with 4 players). Food Chain Magnate does an amazing job of giving you a board game experience full of decisions and interactions and depth in a relatively shorter playtime. I’ve played other games that take a lot longer to play and have significantly less interesting decisions to make.
All in all, Food Chain Magnate is a beast. It demands players think ahead and prepare for future rounds. It insists that you ebb and flow with your opponents, responding and reacting to what they’ll do, rather than just to try and build your own little corner of the map where no one can bother you. It creates amazing and interesting decisions throughout its entire playtime. Playing is a joy and every single time I open the box and start playing this game, I celebrate. I love Food Chain Magnate so much, my heart accelerates during play. If that isn’t the sign of truly enjoying a board game, I don’t know what is.
Food Chain Magnate is my #1 favourite game of all time, and it has been for years. I have a hard time fathoming enjoying another game more, between the theme and mechanics, Food Chain Magnate just sings to me. I love the strategic decisions and the tense interactions between competitors. I get tingles just thinking about this game. I firmly state that Food Chain Magnate is the best game I have ever played. While I recognize that it really isn’t for everyone, it would be a disservice to call Food Chain Magnate anything other than a masterpiece in game design.
Artist: Jaroslav Jurica, Marek Loskot, Pavel Richter
Intro
Let me tell you a bit about my mom. Some of my earliest memories of my mother is of her morning ritual; she would sit at the kitchen table, steam pouring out of her coffee mug, and smoke lazily rising from the end of the cigarette gently held between two of her fingers of her left hand. In her right hand she held a pen, and on the table in front of her, a PennyPress puzzle book.
We had dozens of puzzle books in every room in the house.
My mom loves games and puzzles. When she wasn’t doing puzzles on paper at the kitchen table, she’d often be playing puzzle video games. Yoshi’s Cookie (SNES) and The New Tetris (Nintendo 64) were some of her favourites. As a child I also loved video games. Some of my first memories of Tetris were of my mom and I playing The New Tetris in the versus mode. She would mercilessly kick my butt to the curb. The phrase ‘git gud’ hadn’t been popularized yet, but that was the sentiment in our household.
Years later, I got my first job at the local video store. I used my first paycheque to buy a silver Nintendo Gamecube and Tetris Worlds. I practised and practised and practised at Tetris until I felt like I had improved significantly. My mom still kicked my butt, but less badly than before. I continued to practise until I finally emerged victorious! To this day my mom and I adore the memory of Tetris, and hold the versus mode in a special place in our hearts. However, when we play now I grind her into the dirt.
No, this is not candy
Why am I telling you all this? What does my hundreds of hours playing Tetris have to do with board games?
Let me introduce you to: Project L
How to Play
Project L begins with two stacks of tiles, differentiated by their different coloured backs. Next to each these stacks sits four face-up tiles, making up the offer row. Every player is given 2 pieces to begin their game, a single 1×1 yellow square, and a 1×2 green rectangle.
On your turn, you have three actions:
Take a new level 1 piece
Upgrade a piece
Take a puzzle tile (you can have up to 4 unfinished puzzles)
Place a piece on your puzzle
Master action (only once every round) — put a single piece on all your puzzles!
Should you complete a puzzle, remove it from the top of your player board, return your pieces to your supply, and place the puzzle in your scoring pile and take the reward from the top right corner of the (now completed) puzzle.
These tiles are wonderfully thick
Gameplay continues around the table until the black deck of tiles is depleted. Once that happens, you finish the round (so all players receive an equal number of turns), then everyone has one more turn. After that you may continue to put pieces on the puzzles from your personal supply, but at a cost of 1 point per piece placed.
Once everyone has completed their finishing touches, you total your score from your completed puzzles, subtract any points you lost doing the finishing touches and the player with the most points is the winner!
Review
The very first thing I want to talk about is the box cover. Project L‘s box is visually clean and aesthetically striking. The bold blue L on the matte black background stands out on a shelf. The lack of art here creates a mystery, “What is Project L?” you wonder, picking up the box and checking the back.
This is where my first criticism comes in. I appreciate the effect of having a stark black box and it looks fantastic. But I hate that there is no designer credit on the box. In the case of Project L, the people who make up Boardcubator (the publisher) are also the designers and have obviously made the decision to keep all logos and credits off the box. But I don’t like precedent this sets. Iworry that any other designer wanting to work with Boardcubator in the future will be strong-armed into a box cover without credits. Further, I don’t want any other companies using this as an example or an excuse to keep designer credits off the covers of boxes.
Designer and artist credits should not be relegated to the fine print
I get weirdly passionate when it comes to crediting creatives appropriately. I know the history of workers’ rights is rife with owners using every dirty trick in the book to oppress and keep from paying their creatives fairly. I’d hate for my favourite niche hobby to fall victim to terrible employment standards.
Moving on from that criticism, Project L is an excellently produced game. The acrylic tiles are glossy and rounded perfectly. They don’t feel cheap or too light in the hand. A few people have commented that they look like candy, which may or may not be a positive, depending on your proclivity for sweets and the number of small children in your life. The player aids are made of very light card stock, but that’s fine as they exist only to remind players of the few rules in the game.
So many options!
The final component are the pattern boards, which come in black and white and have inset grooves to lock your pieces in place. These tiles are thick, glossy and look fabulous. I’m less of a fan of how they’re rectangular, which also feels like an odd nitpick. I find it slightly tedious to re-orient all the tiles, and having a stack of tiles that isn’t aligned is simply not an option for me.
This bothers me to absolutely no end
Getting into the gameplay, Project L starts players off with a mere two pieces. The first few rounds of the game you are slow, taking puzzles, maybe taking more 1×1 pieces, or spending all of your actions to finish a single 4 piece pattern. After your first few puzzles and with more than 4 pieces in your personal supply, Project L falls into a predictive pattern. Take puzzles, do master action. Take puzzles, do master action. Repeat. The game lies in your ability to utilize the variety of pieces you have in your supply in a way that doesn’t waste actions or using 3 small pieces where one large piece would fit. Being able to spin multiple plates efficiently is the key to victory here.
During my first play of Project L, someone at my table exclaimed “This is just like Splendor!” which initially I agreed with. It had the same gameplay beats of choosing easy puzzles to build up your engine to effectively to accomplish the much harder goals. But after a few more plays of Project L, I’ve changed my tune. While Project L is reminiscent of other engine building games (like Splendor), it lacks the persistent benefits, which I feel is a very significant part of Splendor’s appeal. In Splendor you can amass a dozen or more gems and just take bigger and bigger cards for free, or at a steep discount. Project L on the other hand only gives you more pieces to play with (with the biggest pieces taking up 4 squares in a puzzle). Having more pieces is absolutely useful, but if you spend too much time just getting pieces, you’ll be left in the dust when it comes to scoring points at the end of the game.
It’s almost impossible to see the pattern on the back of the white tiles
The end of Project L arrives quickly. By the time players start pulling from the harder (or rather, larger) black tiles, everyone generally has enough pieces to play with and have settled into the routine of “take puzzles, master action”. The stack of tiles depletes quickly and suddenly the end of the game is triggered. Everyone gets one last action, then finishing touches, then the game is over.
When you first get your hands on Project L you expect solving each of the puzzles to be the crux of the game, but it isn’t. The game is effectively managing your pieces and actions. I’m glad the turns move quickly between players as it’s painful when you have a perfect plan that relies on a specific puzzle, but it gets snapped up by the player before you, forcing you to reconsider your entire turn. This however, is the entirety of interactions between players; there’s hardly a limit on the number of pieces (I’ve never run into a specific piece running out), there’s no way to slow down other players progress, and there’s no reason to even look at the other players until the game comes to an end. If strong player interaction is important to you, steer clear.
In summary, Project L is a fast, light, puzzle game with excellent production values. I find the latter half of the game a little predictable in that the only actions that seem worth taking are the ‘master build’ and the ‘take more puzzles’ actions. Project L is an excellent game to start or end an evening with, and anyone with a fond memory of Tetris will instantly like this game, even if it’s only due to the colourful pieces.
Designer: James Ernest, Heinrich Gumpler, Paul Peterson
Artist: Like, 25 people. Depends on the version you buy.
Intro
My favourite book of all time is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicles series. I absolutely love the way master wordsmith Rothfuss has crafted the story. My love for The Kingkiller Chronicles, and a lack of new books in the series has lead to a dangerous situation. In order to satiate my desire for more Kvothe, I feverishly consume nearly everything that is even tangentially related to the world that I’m desperate to return to. It’s that desire that lead me to owning 3 copies of the same game, with the only difference being the artwork each deck of cards features; each featuring a different set of artwork depicting the world of Temerant.
I bought the decks of cards not even considering the game that was being sold to me. Luckily I’m not the kind of person who likes to leave a game unplayed, even one bought solely for the art.
Each deck of Pairs comes with two rule sets. One is the normal rules that applies to all decks and the other is some variant for that specific set of Pairs. I’ve read over a few of the variant rulesets, but I’ve always default back to the normal, push your luck game that I use to pressure my friends and family into buying me treats.
How to Play
A deck of Pairs contains 55 cards. There are ten 10 cards, nine 9s, eight 8s and so on, all the way down to a single 1 card. Each round of Pairs begins by dealing every player a single card. The player who received the lowest card goes first. On your turn you have 2 options, either pass or hit. If you choose to pass, you take the lowest card from any other player and set it aside near you, marking your score and begin a new round by having all players discard any cards they had in front of them. If you choose to hit you simply receive another card and hope you don’t get a pair. If you do happen to get a pair, you keep one of the paired cards as your score, and begin a new round.
You continue to play like this until someone exceeds the score that ends the game (it’s variable based on the number of players – take 60 points, divide by the number of players, then add 1). The player who exceeds the end game threshold is the loser and they are obliged to buy the next round of treats.
Review
Pairs decks come in a variety of flavours; Fruits, Pirates, Barmaids, three different temarant packs, muses, goddesses, goblins, classic Vegas theme, and so much more! Touted as a new classic pub game, this is a just a deck of cards that you can play literally anywhere. It’s as portable as can be, super easy to teach and casual enough that people can drop in and out at their leisure.
The push-your-luck nature of the game lends to moments where you chew on a knuckle trying to decide if you should pass and take the 4 on the table, or push your luck and hope you just don’t get a 8 or a 10. You’ve seen a dozen 10s already, there can’t be any more left in the deck, right? I love the tension as my opponents are sucking in air through their teeth, hoping someone busts or gives up before their next turn.
Good…
I’ve found copies of Pairs on sale for as low as $5, it ends up being a great thing to give someone after a first meeting. You teach them the game, play a couple rounds, add some stakes, then at the end of the evening, just give them the deck of cards. I’ve run low on stock recently, but I’ve gifted over a dozen decks to friends and acquaintances over the past few years.
I’ve used Pairs as a fast, low stakes game while waiting for others to arrive, or just while catching up with friends you haven’t seen in a long time. Where more involved games would take over the conversation, Pairs can be played by intuition alone, leaving you free to chat or smack talk your opponents, egging them on to take another card when they already have a 7, 8, 9, and 10.
Speaking of stakes, my most recent experience with Pairs was at my Mom’s house, with my aunt and uncle. Five of us were gathered around the table, the evening waning. We were making loose plans for dinner the next day when I pulled the copy of Pairs that I had gifted to my mom years ago. “Alright, whoever loses this game, has to buy wine for dinner tomorrow” I said to them, dealing out the first card to each player. After 15 minutes we were setting chores for the next day, and using a game to divvy out the responsibilities that no one really wanted to tackle. By the end of the night, they were looking into buying their own copy of Pairs.
Damnit!!!
I gifted a copy of Pairs to a friend who was travelling to Germany one year as a small game he could fit in his pocket. When he returned he told me how he was able to teach a pair of people, despite them not sharing a language. He gave them his copy of Pairs when they parted for the night and he remembers the evening as one of the highlights of his trip. There’s something special about a game so simple that you almost don’t even need words to teach with other people. It becomes a catalyst for creating a fun experience with people you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to connect with.
Pairs does offer a ton of rule variations; over 30 to be more specific. I find when adding more rules, Pairs loses it’s light and easy-to-play charm. Suddenly, where there was a light and breezy game, now sits rules that need to be remembered and enforced, bets to hedge and gambles to make. I prefer Pairs when it’s less of a centrepiece and more of a catalyst. A game that you play while hanging out with your friends as something to busy your hands rather than demanding the full focus of the evening. It’s a cute diversion and with a very low price of entry it feels more of a side dish rather than an entrée. Whenever I pull it out, I know we’re going to have a good time full of laughter and light-hearted regret.
