Game Length: Each mission is between 5 and 15 minutes
Mechanics: Where’s Waldo/Wally, Cooperative
Release Year: 2020
Designer: Johannes Sich
Artist: Daniel Goll, Tobias Jochinke, Johannes Sich
Intro
As a kid, I was a big fan of Where’s Waldo. The cornucopia of colour and activity on the page encouraged me to take out every Where’s Waldo book that came to our local library. I would sit and scan the pages, feverishly searching out the striped devil, while also finding all the neat details hidden in the photo. As an adult, I have a mild obsession with the Wimmelbilder subreddit, again, loving the details and deriving joy from discovering hidden narratives in a chaotic scene.
My experience with MicroMacro: Crime Citybegan with an app; a small section of map on a screen that allows you to zoom in and out as you pan around Crime City. A man was murdered and it’s up to you to find the crime scene. By clicking the corpse you begin a adventure through space and time, retracing the victims steps and following the evidence, clicking the clues until you you find victim’s home, the murderer, the motive, the murder weapon, and the stolen loot. As soon as I discovered that this app was a demo for a tabletop game, I quickly made my way to the local board game store to purchase it.
Components
MicroMacro: Crime City is contained in a thin white and black box. In fact if you look closely there is even a puzzle to solve on the cover of the box. If you buy the game new you’ll need to sort two decks of case cards into individual little paper envelopes. Next, you’re instructed to apply a sticker to a little “magnifying glass” that comes with the game. Once both of those tasks has been completed you are free to unfold the massive map (75cm x 110cm) and begin unraveling the myriad of stories that have been laid out for you to explore. I specifically mention the components here because I think it’s important to know that that you need a big play area and need to sort out the crime deck before you begin to play.
This is pretty much all that comes in the box
How to Play
MicroMacro: Crime City tasks you with finding characters and stories on the large black and white map. Your first task is to find the scene of the crime for the case you’re trying to solve. You remove all the cards from the envelope and the first card will show you an image of your target and a general area where you can find them.
Once you find the scene, the cards will take you through the questions that need answering. The world that is MicroMacro: Crime City isn’t a snapshot in time where every detail on the map is happening simultaneously. Instead, it is a layering of several different stories, all happening in this one city. You follow characters that appear in different locations as they go through their day.
When a card asks you where the victim came from, you and your friends will search around the crime scene for where they were just before they met their untimely demise. Once you find their trail, you trace their day further back in time. Alternatively you may find yourself chasing the culprit as they try to escape the city. You’ll be surprised by how much detail you missed while exploring certain areas of the city for other cases. Once you think you know the answer to the question asked by the card, you can flip it over to ensure you’re correct and move on to the next card until you’ve solved all the questions for the case. In my experience, each case takes between 5 and 15 minutes.
Review
MicroMacro: Crime City tasks you with finding characters and stories on the large black and white map. Much like Where’s Waldo?, your first task is to find the scene of the crime for the case you’re trying to solve. You remove all the cards from the envelope, and the first card will show you an image of your target and tell you the general area where you’ll be able to find them. Unlike Where’s Waldo?, where the entire challenge and fun is in finding one correct detail in a large mess of irrelevant information, you are constantly discovering new and fun details in the lives and deaths of the denizens of Crime City.
As you follow people back and forth from rooftops to alleyways, you’ll pass by interesting snippets of different stories. While those moments won’t help you in your current case, it’s exciting when they show up in later crimes and you know exactly where to look.
Most of the cases focus on small sections of the map, but every now and then the case expands throughout the city, forcing you to search the wider world for clues of where people came from or where they were going. The box says this can be played with 1 – 4 players, but I wouldn’t recommend involving more than 2 at a time. The map may be huge and during the moments when you’re searching all four corners of the city for clues, it’s fine. But if your task is to search carefully in a small area, it’s awkward having four heads all converge on a spot, arms and hands covering the spots where people want to look, noggins casting long shadows across the map. It’s also incredibly hard to see any coherent details when looking at the map upside down. To combat that, you can try and fit four people shoulder to shoulder, but the person on the west side won’t be able to see what’s happening on the east side. While the map is over 100 cm long, the details are minute. You’ll need to ensure you have very good lighting and decent eyesight and/or corrective lenses. I’ve heard of some people needing to don reading glasses for the very first time while playing.
It’s not every day that a baby gets to meet its heroes!
Be aware that this game is not as “family-friendly” as you might first believe. Although the cutesy art depicting adorable walking bunny people on the cover and the description of finding details on a large map may make draw parallels to the aforementioned Where’s Waldo? book series, which is quite popular with kids as young as 5 or 6 years old, the content of MicroMacro: Crime City may contain scenarios that are upsetting for children. The game begins with ‘innocent’ crimes, like a pair of kids using a fishing line to steal someone’s top hat; however, it quickly dives into more mature themes, such as murder, infidelity and prostitution. There are no official content warnings on any of the cases highlighting which ones may be good to play with a 12 year old, and which ones are going to make them ask awkward questions about “what’s a prostitute?”
For people looking for more of a challenge, there is an ‘advanced variant’ where the only clue you get is first one. You arrive on the scene of the crime and it’s up to you to answer all the questions and find all the details without using the rest of the cards in the deck. Personally, I enjoy being lead by the questions. The variant leaves every case feeling open ended and only ends when you feel like you’ve searched enough. I sincerely dislike the “Look around until you feel you’re done!” sandbox nature of that variant. I need structure in my play damnit! But that’s just me. Maybe you like chaos and disorder.
Overall, MicroMacro: Crime City is a excellent and unique experience that is absolutely worth your time. Solving cases by tracing characters throughout this city, all the while questioning details like “Why is that random lady punching that dude with the long nose?” brings about many bursts of laughter and joy, especially if you’re like me and really value ‘discoverability’. Let me tell you, this game is nothing but discovery. With all that said, there is virtually no replayability. Once you’ve solved all the crimes, you’re just… done. You can spend more time combing through the map, creating your own narratives and puzzles, but it really isn’t the same. You COULD replay the cases, but be honest, have you ever re-read a Where’s Waldo? book?
MicroMacro: Crime City could be a centerpiece in your home; something you hang up on a wall that draws people in when they first visit your home; a conversation starter as you walk your friends through the first few cases, and be their sherpa through the Crime City experience. Perhaps after a few years you’d forget the details of each case and returning to Crime City would be like returning to your hometown. You remember most of the broad strokes, like where the churches are or where the best fish and chips shop is, but the details are hazy. Re-discovering the cases could be fun, but I don’t think it’s worth holding onto this box for years hoping your memory fades while your eyesight stays sharp. Instead, MicroMacro: Crime City makes a great gift. Nothing is permanently changed or damaged throughout the cases so when you’re finished solving all the cases, pass it around your game group then chat about your favourite cases. Alternatively, it would be easy to sell or donate it to someone else in your community! If none of those options appeal to you, it makes for a great colouring sheet.
It’s a good day to be a duck
MicroMacro: Full House was announced recently, along with 2 more titles in the MicroMacro universe. While I won’t be keeping this map around my house for long, I am eagerly anticipating the next installment in the series. While I wait for them to hit store shelves, I’ll need to find a new pair of reading glasses.
Calico by Kevin Russ is the first physical board game that I purchased since the COVID-19 pandemic ended my in-person gaming group in March 2020. It’s also the first game I’ve purchased since I launched MeepleandtheMoose.com and started playing my physical games solo. I purchased Calico not only because I was drawn in by the cozy cat aesthetic and endearing art by Beth Sobel, but because I knew the brain bending puzzle of fitting together the best quilt is a challenge that inspires excitement in my little gamer heart.
Coconut is the most comfortable cardboard kitten I’ve seen all day
Thanks to Covid-19, I’ve only had the opportunity to play Calico at 1 and 2 players. I plan on returning to this game once I’ve had the opportunity to play it more with larger groups of people. For now, I’m just so excited to share my thoughts that I don’t want to delay this post any further.
Calico, as I mentioned in my Top 100 post, is a cerebral tile laying puzzle game. In Calico you are given 7 different ways to earn points with the sneaky insinuation that if you’re a competent quilter, you’ll be able to achieve glory in every facet of the game. It’s all a bundle of lies! In Calico, you must first accept that you will not be able to score all the point and the only way that you’ll be able to survive is by picking and choosing which of the goals and objectives you’ll focus on in any given game.
Components
Calico’s components are bright, vibrant, and high quality. Each of the four player boards are dual layered, which helps keep your tiles in place. The tiles come in 6 different patterns and 6 different colours, with 3 copies of each. The cat scoring cards are adorned with artistic renditions of actual cats (you can read their biographies in the back of the rulebook). Associated with these cat scoring cards are miniature tokens of each cat that will dot your player board if you can satisfy that cat’s very specific desires. The cloth tile bag is thick and sturdy, with plenty of space to shuffle the tiles within. Speaking of those tiles, they’re very thick and have a linen finish. The game box cover and some of the tokens have a spot UV coating that will shine if you catch the light just right. The production of this game has left nothing to be desired.
How to Play
The gameplay of Calico is very straight forward. When you begin the game you have a empty player board that you’ll fill with your hopes, dreams, and regrets. Each player starts with 2 tiles in their hand, and 3 more tiles in an offer row. On your turn, you’ll place one of the tiles from your hand anywhere on your board. Then, you’ll take one of the tiles from the offer row, place it in your hand, and refill the offer row. Every turn proceeds in that exact fashion until the boards are full and you’re left with your head in your hands contemplating how everything fell apart so quickly.
Calico Set up for 1 player. More players just get their own boards with the same scoring tiles in the centre
Allow me to speak about each of the scoring opportunities separately, starting with colour coordination. If you are able to stitch together 3 tiles of the same colour, then congratulations! You just earned yourself a button in that colour, which is worth 3 points! If you’re able to earn at least one button for each of the 6 different colours, you’ll be awarded with a rainbow button which itself is worth 3 points.
Each game of Calico will have 3 different cats displayed to the side. To lure those cats onto your board you’ll need to match their requested shape with one of the two requested pattern tiles. Coconut might just want 5 tiles of the same pattern touching each other, while Misty wants a 4 tiles arranged in a cross and no other arrangements will satisfy Misty’s fickle nature. Each of the cats you draw to your board will grant you certain amount of points; the easiest kittens will bestow a piddly 3 points per feline laying cozily on your quilt, while the most demanding cats will award up to 11 points, which should make you purr with glee as you place your awarded cat token on your quilt.
Hey I got a button! This game won’t be so bad!
There are also 3 objective tiles on your board. While every player will have the same 3 objectives, each player is free to slot them into the objective spots on your player board in whichever order you wish. These objectives ask you to surround them with a certain set of colours and patterns. A pattern asking for AA-BB-CC will want 3 sets of 2 different colours or patterns. If you can satisfy the requirements in either colour or pattern, you’ll get the lower number of points (usually somewhere between 5 and 10). If you can pull off the super-human feat of satisfying both colours and patterns… well, along with bragging rights and a slow applause from myself, you’ll earn slightly more points (generally between 10 and 15).
When playing the solo mode, the only salient difference from the multiplayer game is how the offer tiles behave. First you imagine a conveyer belt and visualize the direction the tiles will move in. During your turn you are free to take any of the 3 tiles available. Once you’ve claimed your tile, the remaining tile furthest to the ‘end’ of the conveyer belt is flung into a proverbial furnace, never to be seen again. The final tile is spared such a cruel fate, but it moves to the end of the conveyer belt and two new tiles populate the row. That’s the extent of the differences between the multiplayer game, and playing the game on your own.
I call this board state: The River of Dread
Near the back of the rulebook there is a list of achievements laid out that chart your progress toward becoming a Calico master! The achievements dare you to win a normal game while exceeding 60, 70, or even the insane 80 point threshold. Can you win the game without collecting buttons? Can you get the elusive rainbow button? Can you do it all while standing on one foot while rubbing your cats belly and tapping your head? Both my wife and I really like this feature, as it gives us something to work towards, and amps up the replayability of the game.
Another feature that Calico offers is a list of scenarios. The game suggests 10 set-ups and asks you to accomplish a specific set of tasks. The first scenario requires you to earn a rainbow button and exceed 58 points. The next challenge has requires that you collect 5 cats tokens and exceed 59 points.
Well well well… If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.
I found the scenarios a wonderful reason to play Calico on my own. Considering the title of my Journal is “I am not a Solo Gamer, I shouldn’t have to reiterate how I rarely play board games on my own. I had this thought when I playedSagrada solo and the challenge of that game was just to exceed the sum of the undrafted die. Simple score attack solo games do not excite me, and perhaps because of that I have not returned to Sagrada’s solo mode since.
I very much enjoy the design of Calico‘s scenario challenges. I like that each scenario has been tested and calibrated to test my quilting skills, and, while it cannot account for the randomness of the tiles that come out of the bag (No, I don’t need a third green polka-dot tile, thankyouverymuch), at the start of each game I do feel the challenge is beatable if the tiles fall right and I play well.
It’s not the prettiest quilt, but my cats seem to like it
Review
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Playing Calico is a very simple affair. Each turn requires only three decisions and at the start of the game when your board is full of opportunity and promise, you’ll happily place tiles somewhat arbitrarily, perhaps chasing a short term goal like getting 3 colours together. As the free spaces start to dwindle and the need for specific tiles rises, you’ll quickly find yourself making concessions and saying “it’s fine if I don’t achieve both colours and patterns for that one objective. It’s fine if I don’t get all 6 buttons and achieve that rainbow button. It’s fine if I only get one cat token on my board. It’s fine if I only achieve one of my three goals…” This amount of negotiating with yourself and being forced to compromise when the wrong tiles come out of the bag is what elevates Calico from a neat puzzle to a fun game.
So, the production is fantastic, the puzzle is great, the aesthetic is wonderful. What’s the downside? Calico has almost no player interaction. If you look across the table and see your friend has sewn a perfectly colour coordinated and patterned quilt, there’s nothing you can do to affect them. The most you can do to affect your opponents is take the tile they may want or need, but then you better hope that you can use that tile, otherwise it’ll be taking up one of the two tiles in your hand and hurt you more than you hurt them. It really can feel like the whole game comes down to the last few tiles that get pulled from the bag. When you’re down to the last four spaces and you are needing a tile that is a specific colour and/or shape, your heart can drop when the next tile that gets pulled is the absolutely wrong one. It’s doubly frustrating when you see your opponent say “I just need a yellow stripes!” and then get it. Smug bastards.
Not a bad sized box
If you can accept that you won’t be able to complete all of the scoring objectives in a single game, I think you’ll find Calico is an enjoyable game. If you’re hoping for a game that has lots (or any) player interaction, Calico is not the game for you. Personally, I love Calico, and I can’t wait to introduce it to my family and friends. I know the production of the components, the art direction, and the deeper than expected gameplay will have my loved ones asking to set it up and play it again and again!
Great Heartland Hauling Co., designed by Jason Kotarski and published by Dice Hate Me Games, is a clever little game packed into a small box. The rules for Great Heartland Hauling Co. can be distilled to a single card, making it perfect for teaching people who only have a cursory interest in board games.
No room for bananas here!
Great Heartland Hauling Co. uses the theme of truckers rushing up and down the American interstate, picking up goods and dropping them off at the next town over for a huge profit. While spending hours driving in one direction may be the bulk of a haulers job, it’s difficult to make an invigorating game about rolling your truck on a straight road through the flat prairies. Luckily Great Heartland Hauling Co. doesn’t focus on the dozen brain melting hours in-between stops, and focuses on the excitement of buying and selling goods, and pushing your luck that the correct waybills will appear just when you need them.
How to Play
This land is ripe for truckers
In the beginning, the landscape must be created. The distribution centre location is laid down in the centre of the table, where all trucks are born. Surrounding the distribution centre are location cards, each one loaded with 5 cubes representing the type of good that can be procured from that location. Everyone gets a hand of 5 cards, and the player with the best moustache or longest hair gets to go first.
In Great Heartland Hauling Co. there are two different types of cards: waybills and gas cards. You use any number of gas cards to move from one location card to another (max movement is 3). When your truck ends its move in a city, you may discard waybill cards to either load or unload goods at that location. Once you’ve moved and loaded, you refill your hand to 5 cards and your turn is over. It’s important to mention that two trucks cannot exist in the same city at the same time, for long haul truckers are territorial creatures and are likely to shank each other in the gas station shower.
It’s not recommended to have a wide variety of goods
If you find yourself beginning a turn without any gas cards, you can spend money to move instead; $1 for each space you want to move. Be careful to not rely on this however, as money also represents victory points. It’s also important to note that you may not mix gas cards and money for movement – you must choose one or the other for the turn.
Each location has a pair of goods they are willing to buy from your truck, as well as the advertised amount they are willing to pay you for said goods. Should you arrive with the appropriate goods and necessary waybills, you can unload those goods and collect a tidy profit. The first person to hit the money threshold ($30 in a 4 player game, $40 in a 3 player game, and $50 in a two player game) triggers the end of the game. The rest of your fellow truckers get a final turn, then money is deducted from each trucker for the goods they left to spoil in the back of the truck. The person with the most money is the winner.
Review
Great Heartland Hauling Co.’s small form factor has caused this game to live a life of constantly travelling in my backpack. I’m sure my copy of Great Heartland Hauling Co. has seen more of the British Columbian coast than most of my prairie saddled family! It’s a light game to drop into your pack and simple to pull it out at a coffee shop when you’re in Gibsons and have an hour to kill before the ferry back to Vancouver departs. Also, if you find yourself at a Serious Coffee table with 3 others and 90 minutes to burn between a wedding ceremony and the reception.
Pick-up and deliver is not a mechanic I often feel drawn toward. Games with this mechanism often feel like a race without the feeling of momentum or speed. Great Heartland Hauling Co.’s satisfaction comes from the quick turnaround of picking up goods and being able to deliver them the very next turn. It can be frustrating when you begin your turn with 3 pig cards, spend all 3 waybills to get those 3 pigs onto your truck, then several turns go by without any more pig waybills becoming available, so you’re forced to take those pigs on a countryside tour.
Don’t get caught with leftover goods!
One thing that I really appreciate in games is forcing players to make decisions. In Great Heartland Hauling Co. you are forced to move each turn, which makes you decide if you want to take gas cards or fill your hand with waybills,. Also, because you cannot exist in the same town as someone else, you may find yourselves tripping over one another, squatting in the spot you know they need to go to, forcing them to delay their payday by an entire turn! The various locations also offer different values for the goods they’re demanding. You can choose to ferry all the corn from one city to the next for $2 per ear, but if you haul it clear across the country they’ll pay you $4! It’s double the money, but also wildly increased shipping costs. If a game doesn’t offer you good or interesting decisions, then why am I even involved? Great Heartland Hauling Co. makes me feel involved.
As I alluded to before, Great Heartland Hauling Co. is a simple game to teach and play. Because of it’s small size and easy to learn nature, I’m constantly introducing this game to new players, and even using it to showcase that board games are more than just Monopoly and Connect Four. Because I’m always introducing this to new players, I haven’t explored the “Inspansion” content that includes player powers and special effects. I look forward to one day exploring the game further, but for now, I really enjoy the simplicity of play offered by Great Heartland Hauling Co.
One of the ways that I have changed things up a bit is by changing the shape of the board, utilizing one of the suggested map layouts. Unfortunately, this made Great Heartland Hauling Co. feel more like a dreary slog in a hot cabin with no air conditioning. While the idea of having a different board layout is exciting, the shape we chose had two long corridors running nearly parallel with only one space where you could move between columns. This ended up dragging the game out extensively. We spent more money to move further as there were less alternative towns to visit when the particular space that we needed to go to was occupied by another player. One time the economy was so choked due to us spending so much on gas and the highest paying customers being so far away from the goods they wanted, that we were ending up with a net profit of $1 per good delivered. This experience really highlighted the limitations of the game and how modifying the route structure makes it a significantly less fun game.
I know that sounds incredibly critical, and it is, but here is where I come to grips with my opinion on Great Heartland Hauling Co. It’s a light, easy to teach game that is perfect for introducing people to the hobby. Having said that, it’s too light for my regular game group gatherings, so we naturally pass it over in favour of something more complex. Great Heartland Hauling Co. is a great game and it certainly won’t be leaving my backpack any time soon, but it’s rarely on the list of games that I’m desperate to play again.
Try as I might, I cannot fit my lunch in this box.
As we creep closer to the halfway point of my top 100 games, the variety of games begins increase, and dexterity games start to appear! Spoiler alert, I love dexterity games. Look forward to seeing more and more as the list counts down! In a wild departure from last time, this section of the list has no economic farming games!
70 – Pandemic: Fall of Rome
Pandemic: Fall of Rome Is a cooperative game designed by Matt Leacock and Paolo Mori that takes the main gameplay concepts from Pandemic and twists it into a struggle to survive against invading tribes. The biggest change in this version of Pandemic is that instead of having threats popping up all over the map and the need to cover a large area in a short amount of time, the threat cards push different tribes closer and closer to Rome in a (almost) straight line. It’s up to you and your Romans to set up defenses, push back the invading horde, and make the necessary treaties before Rome falls to the barbarian tribes!
I really loved this take on Pandemic. The mechanics felt vaguely familiar, but the challenge was wholly different. The change of having the barbarians marching toward Rome on a predetermined route added more predictability and allowed us to see our impending doom from further away. It also gave me the feeling that if we were better at the game, we’d be able to change our fate.
This is the version of Pandemic that I am eager to explore further. While I wouldn’t recommend this as a introduction to the Pandemic system, if someone told me that they couldn’t take the whole virus theme now that we’ve all collectively lived through a pandemic, I’d wholeheartedly recommend buying Fall of Rome over base Pandemic. Heck, these two games feel quite different, and I have no issues recommending having both in collection.
69 – Crokinole
Something that I’m discovering about myself more every day is that I have a deep affinity for dexterity games. Perhaps it’s the analog to sports, where you only have one chance to make that perfect shot, and although the tension mounts as the odds are stacked up against you, you get into the flow and manage to hit that triple ricochet to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It is something that most board games can’t compare to.
On the flipside, unlike most board games, if you make a bad shot you can’t just say “oh, I’m just going to undo and take my turn again”, like some people do. Instead you have to live with your mistakes and try to turn the situation around. At risk of sounding like a Scrooge, I firmly believe that when you take a turn, then pass play to another player, but then notice you made a mistake, taking your mistake back is poor form. Of course, I play games for fun so I’m not forcing my friends to adhere to my own moral standards, but the inability to undo a bad shot is a feature inherently baked into dexterity games, and I thoroughly enjoy it.
Crokinole is the classic family dexterity game. Each player takes turns flicking discs into the centre. If your opponent has discs on the board, you must first hit one of their discs for your disc to count. At the end of the round, you count up your scores and the first player to 100 wins. There’s also a rule about keeping your buttocks on the chair, and I’m just so happy that someone actually wrote “buttocks” in a rulebook.
68 – Hansa Teutonica
Hansa Teutonica has one of those “no, it’s good I swear” board games. It has terribly boring cover art, and an extremely boring beige board. However, Hansa Teutonica is an absolutely amazing and fun territory control euro game. My first experience playing Hansa Teutonica was at a friend’s house, where he pulled it off the shelf and said “I have this game up for sale online, but I kind of want to play it once before I sell it.”.
As the game teacher of the group I was handed the rule book and spent the next 20 minutes profusely swearing under my breath. Hansa Teutonica isn’t hard to play, but the rulebook has some peculiarities, such as having a “thematic” German name for every aspect. Also, certain concepts that are key to the game are quite difficult to conceptualize. For instance, having tokens that could either be in the general supply, your personal supply, or the board, and they move between those three places frequently.
Luckily the rulebook as been re-written for the big box edition of the game, and it makes learning the game so much easier. Hansa Teutonica is an excellent game about josteling your opponents out of your way while maneuvering yourself into advantageous positions. I get a kick out of placing my tokens in exactly the right spot then immediately trying to convince my opponents that it’s in their best interest to bump me (despite the fact that doing so would give me more power on the board). It’s just so enjoyable.
For the record, after our first play my friend immediately removed Hansa Teutonica from his ‘for sale’ list and still owns it to this day. If that’s not a recommendation, I’m not sure what is.
67 – Vast: The Crystal Caverns
Vast: The Crystal Caverns is similar to Hansa Teutonica in that it’s super hard to teach. Players who are tenacious enough to get past the barrier of a rulebook are rewarded with a great gaming experience. Vast is a heavily asymmetric game where every player is almost playing an entirely different game. Each characters goal lies directly in the way of another character’s goal; the Goblin wants to slay the knight, the knight wants to slay the dragon, the dragon wants to escape the cave, the cave wants to collapse in on everyone, and the thief wants to steal everything and get as much treasure out as possible. I, for one, am stoked to see that “the cave” is a character unto itself.
Because each character is so different, the game requires multiple plays in quick succession with the same group of players. As players become more familiar with the nuances of their own character, they start to realize how best to throttle each individual character to slow them down enough so they don’t run away with the win. The Dragon is great at slowing down the thief, but does poorly against the Goblins, for example.
I am always searching for the opportunity to play Vast more. This is a great game that’s waiting for me to delve deeper and uncover the gems that lay inside. The real unfortunate part for me is that as a gamer, I greatly value discovery, so I am constantly looking to discover new games. This game is fantastic for replayability, but my heart longs to discover new games. The list of new games I want to play and explore grows so rapidly I find myself leaving gems like Vast on the shelf for far too long.
66 – Just One
Just One is a party game by Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter that has been a consistent hit whenever I introduce it to people. In Just One, one player is the guesser while the rest offer clues. The guesser does not get to see the hidden word, and the clue givers are tasked with writing one-word clues to lead the guesser to the goal. However, if two people write the same clue, then that clue is removed from the game, giving the guesser even less information to use to form their guess.
My favourite way to teach this game is to just tell people to repeat the name of the game whenever they have a rules question. “How many words can we use in the clue?” “How many guesses does the guesser get?” “How many pieces of pie do I get?” The answer is always “Just one”.
65 – Mr. Jack
Mr. Jack is a clever 2-player hidden movement game from Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc. In Mr. Jack, one player has the role of the investigator, while the other plays Jack the Ripper. Jack’s goal is to sow confusion and escape the map, while the investigator’s sole goal is to capture Mr. Jack and hold him accountable for his actions.
The game begins with 8 characters on the board, a deck of 8 character cards which show each character’s ability, and a deck of 8 alibi cards, one of which is given to Jack to tell them which character they have to get off the board. Each turn 4 of the 8 character cards are revealed. The players take turns activating those four characters, moving them around the board and using their special abilities. Once all four are used, Jack must declare if he is visible or not (visible meaning next to another character, or in in the light of the gas lamps). After that declaration, any characters who can be ruled out as “not Jack” are flipped over to mark them as innocent.
Jack wins the game if his character escapes the map or hasn’t been caught at the end of the 8th round, or if the detective captures the wrong character. The detective can only win if they move any character on top of Mr. Jack’s character, capturing them.
Mr. Jack is an excellent and quick 2 player game. While the odds of winning do feel slanted towards the player who is playing Jack, it’s fast enough that once one game ends, it’s easy to just switch roles and start a whole new game, again and again.
64 – For Sale
For Sale by Stefan Dorra is a small auction game about buying and selling homes. A game of For Sale begins by auctioning off houses. Each round, a number of houses equal to the number of players is placed in the centre of the table. Players take turns bidding their limited funds to acquire one of the houses. If a player chooses to pass instead of increasing the bid, they take back half of the money they have bid up to this point and take the lowest value house. This continues until the all players but one are out of the auction. That player pays all of their money into the bank and takes the last remaining value card.
Once all the houses have been bought, it’s time to sell. Much like the first round, a row of value cards are laid out. Each player chooses one of their houses and simultaneously reveal their choices. The home with the highest number gets the most value, and so on. Once all the houses have been sold, the player who amassed the most money wins.
For Sale is the perfect game to begin and end a game night with. It plays quickly, and every turn has players wrestling with tough decisions. Your opponent bid 6 for that house, do you dare bid 7? Or, do you bow out to take the lowest house, but pay 2 for it? Is it worth paying 2 for a low house, or 7 for a high house? The amount of cost/benefit analysis going on in your head in a short period of time is just incredible.
63 – Star Realms
Star Realms is a quintessential deck building game. It has no extra boards or side mechanics to distract you from the goal of crafting the best desk possible and using it to crush your opponent. In Star Realms each player starts with the same weak deck. Turn by turn you earn currency by playing cards and buying new cards from a common store to add to your discard pile, which will be cycled into your deck eventually. Cards in Star Realms come in one of four suits, with many cards offering much stronger abilities if they’re played at the same time as other cards of the matching suit.
Star Realms has distilled the deck building experience down to an engaging and deep game that fits in your pocket. The entirety of the core game is comprised of 128 cards. Dozens of expansions exist if you happen to be one of those people who play the base game over a hundred times and really want to shake up the gameplay. Star Realms is a direct conflict 2 player game, so this isn’t the game to play if your partner doesn’t enjoy attacking or being attacked directly. With that caveat, if you and a friend or partner can enjoy a direct conflict game, and are looking for a fast playing 2 player duel that is eminently replayable, I suggest picking up the base deck of Star Realms and really getting lost in the game!
62 – Shogun
Shogun by Dirk Henn appeared on my table with a sticker from the local Salvation Army Thrift Store advertising that this game was purchased for the hefty sum of $4.00. Opening the massive box of bits, I was sure we’d find something terrible, like the box was just being used to contain grandma’s knitting needles. Fortunately, upon opening the box and performing a full inventory we were delighted to find that there wasn’t a single piece missing. I have often wondered if there’s a board gamer somewhere who returned home from a college semester only to find that their parent ‘cleaned’ up and donated Shogun amongst other valuables to charity.
The game of Shogun is encased in a large box that contains a lot of small pieces. The centrepiece of the game is the fascinating combat resolution mechanism. In Shogun each player is a Daimyo trying to take control of feudal Japan during the Sengoku period. If two players find themselves embroiled in conflict, they each drop cubes representing their troops into a cube tower, and whichever player happens to have more troops fall out the bottom decides the winner. There are situations later in the game where a player is attacked and only gets to drop a single cube of their colour into the tower, but several cubes that had been stuck in the tower in the previous battles suddenly come to their aid to create a unexpected victory. It’s a different kind of randomness from other combat resolution mechanics (such as dice), but I really enjoyed the mechanism.
61 – Keyflower
Keyflower by Sebastian Bleasdale & Richard Breese is an auction game where players are bidding their workers to get tiles into their village. These tiles assist in procuring resources, which you can then use to upgrade the tiles to earn more points. Honestly, the theme of building a village abstracts away very quickly, leaving only the excellent auction and worker placement mechanics behind.
A game of Keyflower takes place over 4 seasons. In each season tiles will be placed in the centre of the table for all players to use and bid on. Each player will have a mix of red, yellow, and blue meeples. You can either place these meeples on a tile to take the action, or place them along the outside of the tile to bid for ownership of the tile. The round ends when all players pass in succession. At the end of the round, tiles are distributed to the players that won them, and any meeples on the tiles become the property of the winners. Each player also gets to claim a boat with more meeples and play continues. After 4 seasons, the player with the most points is the winner.
Keyflower is a perfect hybrid of worker placement and auction mechanics. Tied into those mechanics is some resource generation and management that you’ll need to master to win the game. Keyflower has a fairly random setup making every game feel different. The art on the tiles is simple and perfect, and the auction injects a wonderful amount on tension. Keyflower is a unique game, and an excellent design that I feel everyone should experience at least once in their gaming career.
Takenoko was among the first designer board games I ever played. My wife pitched the idea of going to the local board game cafe as a fun date (slightly against my will actually). That date opened my eyes to the world that is cardboard within cardboard. Little did she know that she was introducing me to a hobby that I would fall deep into, hard and fast.
Shortly thereafter, while thirsting for more board games I discovered Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop show on YouTube and chose to watch the episode with Harley Morenstein from Epic Meal Time (of which I used to be a big fan). Tabletop introduced me to Takenoko, a beautiful game about trying to build an aesthetically pleasing garden and grow bamboo to specific heights, all the while a damned panda keeps eating it all.
If the panda is the symbol of harmony and diplomacy, I’m sure the gardener is the incarnation of rage and spite.
How to Play (First Edition)
Takenoko begins with a single blue tile in the centre of the table. On that lonely blue tile sits a single gardner and his eternal rival, the panda. Each turn begins by rolling the weather die (Skip this step on each player’s first turn). The result of the weather die gives you a little boost for your turn, like granting you a third action – the ability to do the same action twice in one turn, a free panda teleportation action, growing a single bamboo stalk anywhere on the map, an improvement tile, or your preferred choice of all the benefits I just listed!
The playerboard keeps track of everything you have, and the actions you’ve taken on your turn
After you apply the weather effect, you take 2 actions (3 if you happened to roll the sun weather benefit). You may not perform the same action twice in one turn (unless you have the wind weather benefit). The actions available to you are to draw 3 plots of land and choose one to add to the central play area; to take an irrigation channel; to move the panda in a straight line and eat the top section of bamboo from wherever he stops; to move the gardener in a straight line and grow bamboo on every irrigated tile of the same colour adjacent to the spot where the gardener stopped moving; or to draw 1 goal card.
The goal cards you hold are what influence all of your decisions. At the beginning of the game you’ll receive 1 card for each type of goal; plots, gardener, and panda. The plot goals encourage you to arrange certain colour tiles in specific shapes. Once the shapes have been satisfied with the required colours, and every landscape tile in the shape has been irrigated, you may claim that goal. The gardener goals task you with growing bamboo stalks to specific heights on certain tiles. Conversely, the panda goals are all about feasting on the appropriate type and quantity of bamboo, making the stalks shrink by one for every piece the little white and black bear stuffs his face with.
When an goal has been completed, you simply place the card down on the table. The first person to reach the required number of completed goals triggers the end of the game and earns the Emperor’s favour (which is worth a couple of extra points). Every other player gets one more turn to accomplish any remaining goals they’re holding before the game is over. The player with the highest sum of points on their completed goal cards has won the game and receives the congratulations of the Emperor.
Just because you’re the one to end the game and get the bonus 2 points, doesn’t always mean you’ll win the game
Final Thoughts
Takenoko is a light and charming game with bright and colourful components. I find the mechanics and goals easy to internalize, and I enjoy evoking ire of the other players by making the panda chomp down on their carefully pruned bamboo stalks that they’ve been trying to grow all game so they can accomplish their goal of having 4 green stalks, all at the height of 3.
Actually the mechanic of hidden objectives is something my wife absolutely detests. It’s one thing if some makes a decision to deny you what you need, but it’s another thing entirely when someone ruins all your plans without even knowing they’re doing so. Apparently she just doesn’t enjoy having her plans ruined.
I absolutely love the artistic direction and the components in this game. The plot tiles are thick and bright, and the panda and gardener miniatures come pre-painted. The real star of the show are the bamboo stalks that stand high off the table. The chunky wooden spires attract the eye and capture the attention of new players. Plus, it is fun to see how high you can stack them while you’re waiting for other players to take their turns.
The game itself is easy to play Each turn is straight forward with few opportunities for making any single turn overly complex or acheive big game changing combos. This is nice and keeps each turn moving quickly, but it can be frustrating when the player across the table from you had 4 more goals cards down, it can feel impossible to catch up.
Personally, I find the weather die to be a bit of a frustration. I find the sun benefit (an extra action) to be head and shoulders above the other benefits, each of which are only situationally advantageous. The other issue I have is many of the cards require specific advancements that either come preprinted on the plot tiles, or are only obtained by the cloud weather benefit. When you have one of the advancement tiles, you can only place it on a tile if there is no bamboo on that tile, meaning the tile must be either unirrigated or the panda must raze the vegetation before any advancements can be placed.
The Panda destroys what the Gardener grows
It’s not uncommon for players to creep close to the endgame without passing the line. In the 2 player game, the first person to reach 9 completed objectives triggers the end game. Often I’ll see the game suddenly stall at 7 objectives realized as each player tries to queue up extra points in their hand. Considering that each other player gets one last turn to complete as many of their objectives as possible, it just makes sense. I find that players draw several plot objectives at the beginning of the game, then slowly move to drawing mostly gardener objectives at the end as the garden sprawls further and further away and the spires of bamboo reach the sky. The randomness can be aggravating as you somehow draw the one goal card that nothing on the board is nearly close to, while your opponent draws cards that are one bamboo segment away from being finished.
Ultimately Takenoko is a lovely game that you can use to allure people who would otherwise turn their nose up at the waves of beige that dominate other board games. With a commanding table presence and easy to play mechanics, Takenoko is often a winner when I’m not playing with my normal ‘advanced’ board game group. I wouldn’t introduce this to a complete non-gamer, as the amount of decisions are a little much (5x weather effects, 5x different actions). If someone has expressed interest and is willing to be engaged in the experience however, this game is a hit!
Lesson of the day, never store Takenoko on its side
I also really like to imagine a world where a gardener is trying to carefully cultivate an aesthetically pleasing garden, but one patch of trees happens to grow much more aggressively than the rest, so his solution is to source a panda and hold it over the tall tree to cut it down to the proper size. I don’t know if that world exists, but that’s the world that I want to live in.
