Disclaimer: A copy of Pond was provided by the publisher for review purposes
I used to say that how a game looks didn’t matter to me. I said it most often about video games. I never cared for the realistic graphics the AAA industry pushed to sell a game, because what I ultimately cared about was gameplay. Give me pixel art, give me the NES, the Super Nintendo, the Atari quality graphics, whatever. It didn’t matter to me how a game looked as long as the gameplay was fun.
I’m starting to realize I may feel differently about board games. Case-in-point, POND.
POND is an area majority conflict game from Brother Ming Games, designed by MingYang Lu, and published in 2025 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Area majority and direct conflict games are two genres I don’t traditionally enjoy, yet I can’t help being utterly charmed by Pond’s visual presentation.
POND is a simple game to play. Each player takes control of one of four frog factions with their own asymmetric abilities. Every faction has two kinds of units. The little frogs are your troops on the ground, the creatures that do battle with one another. Then you have your Long Fwooogs (Yes, that’s literally what they’re called, and you’re contractually obligated to say fwooogs every time you reference them), which function more like spawn points and point pinatas. At the start of every turn, each Long Fwooog spawns one little frog. The Long Fwooogs count toward claiming the majority in a pond, but they themselves can’t attack and can’t be removed from the map by battle. They exist to put new frogs on the table and to be juicy point piñatas for your opponents to come and beat the stuffing out of for major points.
After spawning, you move into your main phase. You hold five cards and play them to do the actions printed on them. It’s more Dominion-style than anything else, where you just follow the rules on every card to deploy, march, battle, build, and more. Some cards will let you gain berries, which are an ethereal resource that doesn’t persist between rounds, so you use them or lose them. Berries are spent on new frog cards, which go into your discard pile. At the end of your turn you score one point for every pond where you hold the majority of frogs, and ties don’t count. You also score one point for every lily pad one of your frogs is sitting on. If you ever find yourself in a pond with an empty lily pad during your turn, you may move one of your frogs onto it for free. Then every card you played goes to your discard pile, you draw five new cards, and play passes to the next player.
When you need to reshuffle your deck, you must first exhaust one of your frogs, which removes it from your deck entirely, but not from the entire game. The exhausted frogs become a second resource, as there are Hero Frog cards you can pick from, and the only way to pay for them is to consume your exhausted frogs. Those Hero frogs offer players persistant, permanant powers for the rest of the game. I really appreciate that deck culling is baked in as a mechanic here, available to everyone. This mechanic also makes each player’s abilities scale up the longer the game goes on, depending on how many heroes they’ve gathered, creating a nice arc to each game of POND.
Players take turns one after another until the pool of victory points runs dry, and the moment the last point is claimed, the game ends. It ends suddenly, too. If a player was supposed to earn nine points from their controlling interests but only four points are left in the pot, they take four. The winner is whoever has the most points at the end, counting both the points they accrued during their turns and the points printed on the frog cards they acquired.
The first and most salient thing that attracted me to POND is the art and aesthetics. There’s so much style on display. The art on each frog card is delightful, with jokes and references all over the place, and the little frog meeples have tiny bums peeking back at you. I adore everything about this production. The brightly coloured board is littered with details too, and its little vignettes of frogs having misadventures are simply delightful.
The gameplay plays on my loss aversion. At first I fervently wanted to defend my ponds. “These are my ponds! You’ll take them from my cold, dead hands!”, But as the games wore on, I realized a good POND player might not care if someone comes stomping through a pond that was once theirs. What really matters is whether you can hit the other players’ Long Fwooogs harder than they’re hitting yours.
Games of POND have generally wrapped up rather quickly. In one game, a player picked up an extra exhausting card in the first round, and by the end of the game he had exhausted a total of nine cards, and held 4 hero frogs while the other two players had exhausted only three frogs each. That threw the hero frog balance completely out of whack, and he won by about 20 points.
I usually like games that let players control when the game ends. I’m not a big fan of set rounds, because if someone happens to have a fast, hot strategy, and it burns out when there’s still half a game still to go, that’s just a frustrating feeling. POND sounds like it should be in the player-controlled camp, but I think the first-player advantage is a little too steep. In most of our games the first player usually had more turns than everyone else, and more turns means more chances to score. To compensate for this first player advantage, the starting player begins with 0 victory points and everyone after gets one point increasing down the player order. But that tiny benefit doesn’t feel like the having a whole extra turn at the end of the game, especially because it’s pretty reasonable to earn eight, nine, or ten points in a single turn. It simply feels unfair.
The back of the box promotes POND as “Root if Root only took five minutes to learn”, and that’s a fair comparison. Root is MUCH harder to teach, but its asymmetries are wildly more dramatic. I wouldn’t dare call POND shallow, but it certainly doesn’t have as much depth as Root. Still, there is quite a lot to enjoy in a game that takes only five minutes to learn and plays in around 60 to 90 minutes and that looks as good as Pond does.
POND never gave the bad feelings I usually get from high-conflict games. Sure, someone stomped through one of my ponds and blasted three of my little dudes off the board, but the next turn I spawned them all right back onto into the game. There is a hard limit on how many little frogs each player can have on the board at one time, so once all your spawning frogs are out, it’s fairly easy to respawn back up to your max strength. Losing units in a combat isn’t that consequential in the end. A game of POND has a pretty decent arc, with a slow start, a tense middle, and a fast and furious race for the final points at the end. It’s satisfying in a way I don’t find in many other majority games.
There might be a runaway leader problem. If someone gets a wild head start on hero frogs, or stumbles into an incredible combo, I think it’ll be pretty difficult to catch up. But you won’t see every hero frog in every game, since the deck is thick with frogs and the combinations won’t all be available each time, making every game of POND feel varied and interesting.
I really enjoyed POND. I enjoyed the art, and I enjoyed how fast it is to learn and play. I’m also impressed by how friendly a combat-heavy game can feel. I’d recommend it especially if you have players who haven’t tried many area majority games, because it’s a great introduction to the whole genre. And really, I dare anyone to take a gander at these amphibian posteriors and not be utterly charmed.
I can’t believe I’ve never talked about Keyflower before. This happens now and then, I think to myself “I’ve definitely already reviewed this game”, only for my search to turn up absolutely nothing. Well that’s certainly a treat, because I love Keyflower and am so excited to talk about it.
Keyflower is a worker placement auction game designed by Sebastian Bleasdale and Richard Breese, and originally published in 2012. In Keyflower, you are taking meeples and using them to bid on parcels of land, but those same meeples that you used to bid on tiles to expand your village are the very workers that you will use to activate the tiles ability. Keyflower is a fascinating experience the first time you play it because you will find yourself caught between these core two desires: one, to acquire as much land as possible, and two, to exploit the land that you have acquired.
The meeples come, by default, in one of three colours: blue, yellow, and red. But some of the tiles will let you exchange them for a special green one, which only shows up when someone has used that tile. And the reason why the specific colours are important is that when you bid on a tile or use it for an action, suddenly you’ve locked that tile to only be able to be used by meeples of that colour for that round. This can get very important when you are running really low on blue, for instance, and then someone plops a blue meeple as a one-meeple bid on a tile. It’s only one meeple, but if you’re void in blue, you’re up the creek without a paddle.
This mechanic creates interesting and tense dynamic moments. Another aspect that helps facilitate those feelings is the fact that you can always pass instead of taking an action. There’s no punishment for passing or set round timers. Sometimes you’ll want to go first to stake your claim on a tile, while other times you might want to hold back so you can react to the moves and machinations of your opponents. When the other players take their turns and it comes back around to you, you can choose to jump back into the action, or you can choose to pass again. The round only ends when all players pass in succession. There’s a little bit of push-your-luck, playing-chicken-with-the-other-players feeling when you maybe want to do something, but you’re waiting for someone else to tip their hand. Maybe you want someone to spend their yellow people somewhere else before you commit to bidding yellow on a different tile.
Keyflower is played over four seasons. In each season, there will be a market of tiles to bid on, and at the end of each season, each player gets to choose a boat to inject their house with more meeples. At the end of the fourth season, everyone score their points and whoever has the most points is the winner.
Keyflower is such a unique Euro game with its worker placement and auction mechanics. It’s one of those few games that plays well all the way up to six players. It’s especially exciting when you manage to read a situation correctly; when you play a single meeple to a tile completely throw a spanner in the works of your opponents, just because you used the one colour they didn’t have. it makes you feel really smart and clever.
One of the major strengths of Keyflower is that it feels incredibly replaybale and scaleable. It plays well at 2 players, it plays great at 6 players. Not many euro games can boast that. Another aspect of Keyflower that I really love is the element of positive player interaction. At any time on your turn, you can choose to play one of your workers on any tile in the game, whether that is on the auction market or in one of the other players’ villages. You place your people on the tile and you activate it. The rub being whoever owns that tile will take the workers that were used to activate the tile into their supply to use next round.
But sometimes that’s pivotal. Near the end of the game, especially in the final round, players will be using each other’s markets quite freely because you want to be using the best actions available. It’s worth giving your opponent one or two meeples to use their cart to move five goods with one action rather than try to struggle along with your own cart that might only let you move one or two goods per action. Efficiency is the name of the game. And, each tile can only be activated 3 times per season, with an ascending cost. The first time it’s used, it costs 1 meeple. The second time costs 2, and the third time costs a whopping 3 meeples. So not only are you getting the benefit of using that tile, but you’re depriving your opponents of the opportunity to benefit from that action.
Another dynamic part of Keyflower is that every player is dealt three end-game goals at the very beginning of the game, and no one reveals any of their goals that they have until the final round. Hell, in the final round you don’t have to put all your goals out onto the table. If you are holding a goal for the most green workers and you have no green workers at all. It behooves you to hold that goal back, deny it’s existance in the game. Of course, the more goals you put out, the less competition there will be for the goals you really want. After all, the end game scoring tiles are what fill the auction market in that final round. All players get to bid on those goals, meaning that one that you’ve been building towrds all game can get stolen. And the alternative is that you can steal a goal away from someone, denying them points even if it barely benefits you.
Sure, maybe they have a huge stockpile of resources and they were going to clean up, but if they can’t win that auction, those resources aren’t going to help them. It’s that dynamism that makes Keyflower so attractive.
The interaction makes Keyflower a top-tier game. It’s one that gets your elbows up as you try to outmenauver your oppoents. It’s a delicate dance of timing and being flexible with your plans, as you never really know how the meeples are going to shake out in the end. It actualyl evokes a lot of the same feelings as Hansa Teutonica, but with an auction mechanic instead of route building and overt bullying. If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Keyflower yet, you really owe it to yourself to get it to your table.
If you’re reading this review, I’m going to guess you fall into one of two camps: one, an elderly member of your family taught you how to play Cribbage as a child and now you harbour a deep love for the game. Or two, you’ve never played it and you think it’s a boring game for old fogies.
Cribbage, on its own, is just a card game where you are trying to score the most points. If the only thing that you know about Cribbage is that there’s a special board, then all you need to know is that board is literally just a score tracker. As you score points in the game, you move your peg along the board, and the first player to get 121 points is the winner. You literally don’t need a board to play Cribbage, you can just keep score with a piece of paper.
And let’s be honest, simply racing to 121 points can get stale over time and repeated plays. If the goal of every hand of every game is to just to score the most points, then after repeated plays, Cribbage can kind of start to feel like it can play itself. Eventually you’ll intuit the statistics at the heart of the game. You’ll know which cards you should keep, what you should throw, and which card combinations would give you the greatest chance of getting the most points. There might be a little bit of reading your opponent and thinking about what they might have, and playing based on what they might have, and perhaps tempting them into playing the right card for you to score even more points than you might have otherwise thought possible. But that’s quite on the periphery of Cribbage. The game is just, score the most points.
So Crib Wars has a much larger board, with 363 pegs, making this game last about as long as three regular games of Cribbage. At first glance, this monstrosity of a board can seem overwhelming. There are lines and shortcuts and extra tracks and speed traps and all kinds of things that you really are not used to seeing on a Crib board.
The first 121 pegs are basically nothing. It’s just a regular game, but it has the potential to set you up for success. After the first third of the game, it suddenly gets more interesting. There are speed traps that, if you land on them, you have to go back 20 points, and your opponent gets to go forward 20 points. In a two-player game, there are penalties that you can fall onto that make you run backwards on the track, depositing you back on an earlier spot, or conversely sneaky shortcuts that let you skip whole sections of the main track, shortcuts boosting your score as you race towards the finish line.
Suddenly, as you approach the spots on the board that will give you positive or negative benefits, you need to start thinking about Cribbage in a way you might not have ever had to do before. You might have to play suboptimally to dodge a punishing time sink. Or maybe you’ll choose to let a run pass you by, because you only need 2 points to nail that shortcut. You could play a card to score six-points for a trips, but suddenly that’s not actually in your interest anymore.
It seems like such a small wrinkle to add to Cribbage, but I love how it changes the way I approach each hand. It makes the game three times as long, but it also allows for wild swings in score. Someone can be 45 points ahead and feeling hopeless, but then they accidently land on a time trap and they go back 20 points and you go forward 20 points, and suddenly the tables have turned.
Crib Wars is more dynamic. It’s more interesting, and I enjoy it more, even if it distorts the pure Cribbage experience. But it’s the kind of game that I can recommend only to people who have played a fairly significant amount of Cribbage. You should know if you’re the kind of player who fits the bill. If you’ve ever found yourself letting your hands play themselves, Then Crib Wars offers a wrinkle that helps you to start thinking again.
I have to say that it also feels incredibly satisfying when you are successful in manipulating your opponent and giving yourself an extra point to land on that shortcut, or playing your cards in a way that forces them to hit that negative track. Those moments are few and far between, but it’s fun to try and maniupulate your score and your opponents score. And when those moments do come to fruitition, they’re incredibly exhilerating.
So really, Crib Wars is for someone who already knows they like Crib. And if you already know you like Crib and you saw the board at the start of the article and started salivating, then you already know that this game is for you.
Meanwhile, if you have never had an interest in Cribbage, this is not where I would recommend you start.
Disclaimer: The Print and Play files were provided by the publisher
I always aspire to play more print-and-play games, especially now that I have a new ink tank printer and a desk job. They seem like such a perfect game, small, generally simple, something to always have on hand when I have a few down minutes between tasks. That’s where my head was at when I came across Forgotten Paths by Myrto Gkizli and Spyros Kallos, a solo roll and write adventure.
To start a game of Forgotten Paths, you only really need to print 2 sheets. A map, and a character. Well, less of a character and more of a class, really. I chose the Paladin, as I generally tend towards the bulky knight classes rather than struggle through combat encounters with a spongey mage or Wiley thief. The story begins with you, the last of the Mistwalkers now that Alton has gone missing, defending the nearby farms from zombie-like monsters. Monsters that have never before come this far out of the mists. There’s trouble brewing in the Misty Isles, and it’s up to you to figure out where everything has gone astray.
I find it somewhat ironic that I literally just finished playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, where the story revolved around a caravan wandering out into the dangerous Miasma, with memories fading being a core theme of the game. It’s funny when stories separated by decades just happened to show up in my life at nearly the same time.
In addition to the 2 printed sheets, you’ll also need to assemble a pair of dice, a pile of cubes, and a pencil to play the game. The storybook gives a page of narrative context and introduces the gameplay quirks of the upcoming map. Forgotten Path‘s gameplay is simple enough, each round you’ll roll 2 dice, then use those dice to traverse the quest map. You are represented by a cube on the main map, while the rest of your cubes are used to move up and down on various tracks, keeping track of the various resources you collect along the way. See, the game is mostly about you running around powering yourself up so you can tackle the mini-bosses, and eventually, the main boss of the level.
To reveal new locations, you need to spend a die to ‘place a tile’. The size and shape of the tile you place depends on the die you choose to use, and you must cover the corresponding number hex with the tile you place. So if I played a level 3 tile, I have to place at least 1 of the 3 hexes next to my character, and at least 1 of the 3 hexes I cover with that tile must be a 3.
I say ‘place a tile’, but I mean that in the metaphorical sense. You shade the area with a pencil, not placing any physical pieces. This is a print and play, after all.
But once you place your tile, you need to go through and resolve each tile you placed, starting with the lowest number and moving up. For every hex, you’ll roll a die and claim the result on a table. The lower number hexes are chock-full of benefits, letting you slide your power meters to the right, while the higher number hexes might make you fight a monster or deal with a trap.
The traps and monsters behave in mostly the same way, when you encounter one of them, you roll a die that dictates the strength of that trap or monster. Generally, you’ll need to expend some of your resources to overcome the challenge, and get rewarded for doing so. Or fail and tactically retreat like a coward.
That’s the bulk of the game, really. Cover the map in tiles, collect resources, and spend them on defeating the baddies. The mini bosses are a bit trickier, as they require more resources, but will give much greater rewards, like permanent resources and help make the final boss fight easier.
Speaking of the final boss, once you engage the big bad of the day, you’re committed, win or lose. You need to dump the appropriate amount of resources into the boss, and spend the right dice to fell the foul beast. It’s nothing a little forward planning can’t take care of. If you need to take multiple rounds to beat the boss, you’ll need to withstand multiple of their very heavy attacks.
Forgotten Paths plays on a strict timer. Each adventure is a firm 20 rounds, and in each round you only roll 2 dice. You can earn bonus dice in a variety of ways, but dilly dally long enough and you’ll find yourself at the end of your rope. The lethebane resource you pick up helps a lot, as you can spend one to modify your die up or down one, or spend 2 to roll an extra die for the round. Should you choose to progress through the campaign, you’ll spend your leftover lethebane on items in the shop, just like you’ll spend your XP on powerful skills to make your character stronger or more versatile.
I enjoyed the flow of Forgotten Paths. It was easy to play, and once I got into it, I didn’t find myself needing to check the rules every few seconds. I just rolled and rolled and rolled, scratching my way across the green map. There’s randomness, sure, but plenty of ways to mitigate that randomness. Only once did I find myself kind of stuck in a hallway, requiring a specific number to get out, but that is probably more of an example of my own ignorance.
I chose to play as the Paladin, who has a perpetual defence resource. Some of the other characters like the Wizard and the Fighter have a perpetual magical and physical attack respectively. At first, these characters don’t feel different from each other at all, but as you make your way through the maps and earn XP, you’ll acquire new skills that help make each character feel unique. There is a fair amount of overlap in the skills however, making them feel less unique than they possibly could.
Overall, I quite enjoyed playing Forgotten Paths. I enjoy when the rules of a game melt away and I can just get into a flow state of play. While the game doesn’t have as much replayability as you might first expect with the variety of different characters. I did enjoy the growing complexity as I crawled through each of the maps, and how each map felt fairly different from one another. From mini-bosses gating off the rest of the map, to hopping around on thin ice, each new map was an interesting puzzle to dive into. I felt more pull to revisit a map to see if I could finish it quicker, and having multiple character classes to play with was the perfect reason to dive right back in.
If you like your print and play solo games with a dose of narrative and variety, then Forgotten Paths fits the bill quite well. When I first sat down with Forgotten Paths, I was looking for the kind of game I described at the beginning: something small and easy to pull out when I had a bit of time to kill in between tasks. What surprised me was how quickly it became something I wanted to sit down and actually play in my off-time, rather than something I only played because it was convenient.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was another one of those games that I had some fond childhood memories of. I’ve played a smattering of the game here and there throughout my teenage years, and one time I even got to play it multiplayer, which I’ll go into depth on that later. I’ve always remembered really enjoying Crystal Chronicles, but I’ve never owned it, so I’ve never beaten it before. That changes today, let’s dive into one of the first multiplayer, non-turn based Final Fantasy games, originally published for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2003.
Story
The world is covered by a toxic substance called Miasma. Settlements are able to survive only in the shadow of a crystal, which provides a purifying presence. But these crystals lose their purifying power over time, so each village sends a caravan out into the world. The caravanners are able to travel around the world thanks to a crystal chalice, that has a small shard of crystal embedded in the top. The crystal shard provides a small sphere of safety from the Miasma. The caravan’s goal is to find myrrh trees to collect myrrh drops that can be used to recharge the town’s crystal. The world is gated by these intense Miasma streams, which require your crystal chalice to possess a specific element to pass, which can usually be acquired in a nearby dungeon.
As you adventure out into the world, you’re fed little vignettes as you encounter other caravanners and characters. Every encounter is then recorded in your journal. Similarly, when you enter a dungeon, you’re given a small narration that sounds like the entry from someone else’s journal. And once you beat the boss of the level and collect a Myrrh drop, you record your adventure in your own journal.
It only takes 3 drops of myrrh to recharge the crystal, after which you are forced to return home and your hometown of Tipa throws the yearly celebration to celebrate your return and the charging of the crystal. Then, after the town mayor tells you a little tale of a past caravan’s actions, you set out again to collect more myrrh drops.
Throughout your adventures you’ll hear of, and eventually run into a character called The Black Knight, who screams about a light stealing his memories and he can’t remember who he is anymore. You’ll also run into a group of inept thieves, a clan of armoured Lilties, and various other minor characters, each encounter making the world feel more fleshed out and lived in.
Eventually, you’ll make your way to the Lynari Desert, where if you’ve been paying attention to the poems shared by the charlatan Gurdy, you can solve a puzzle to unlock a 5th element for your chalice. This 5th element allows you to pass through all the Miasma streams, including the one gating off Mag Mell, a village of Carbuncles at the foot of Mount Vellenge. At the end of Mount Vellenge, you encounter the Meteor Parasite, which is a 3 phase boss battle. As you prepare to deliver the final blow, you’re interrupted by a disembodied voice, and you suddenly find yourself on an ethereal plain with a figure made entirely of light.
The figure of light reveals herself to be Dio, Dio, together with Ream, eat memories. While Ream prefers to gorge himself of the negative memories, Dio just nibbles on little memories from time to time, which explains the Black Knight’s madness. Ream won’t allow you to destroy the Meteor Parasite, as it’s the source of the Miasma, and the Miasma causes so many negative memories that he just loves to devour.
Once you defeat Ream, he absorbs Dio into himself, and again attacks, refusing to allow himself to fade away. Once you defeat Ream a second time, you find yourself back at the Meteor Parasite, which appears to be withered and dying. You strike it once more, it dies, and the land is free from the scourge of Miasma.
The story of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is fairly non-linear and is light on exposition. Dio and Ream being the unseen final bosses of the game were a complete surprise to me. But I suppose at this point it’s almost more expected for a random and sudden deity to appear as the final final boss in this series.
Gameplay
Unlike past Final Fantasy games, Crystal Chronicles is a 3D real time action RPG. As you crawl through the dungeons you’ll acquire items and magicite, which you can add to your command list. Attack and Defend are always available in your command list, and you cycle through your commands with the shoulder buttons before pressing A to activate the command.
You can chain up to 3 attacks together with some careful timing, and most of the game is just you, wailing on the enemies with your sword until they fall. In fact, most of the combat in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is just you rushing in, hitting the monster 3 times, then moving slightly to dodge its attacks, before delivering 3 more hits. Rinse and repeat until everything is dead. Another aspect of the combat is the Focus attacks. All magic requires a few seconds of focus (holding the command button) before they’re ready to cast. Then a spell reticle appears on the ground, allowing you to target areas far away from your avatar.
You retain items like food and crafting materials from level to level, but you need to recollect your magicite every level. The most important one being Cure. There is no MP or mana system here, so once you get a Cure spell, you’re able to easily keep your health at full. Sometimes it requires some careful timing so you don’t get smacked in the face as you charge your spell, but in general, once I found a Cure, I felt pretty safe for the rest of the dungeon. You can also fuse magicite together to create stronger spells. 2 Fire spells will give you a Fira, while two different elemental magicite will let you cast Gravity. Sometimes you can get Mog to help you out a bit, too.
Oh yeah, Mog. Remember in the story section where I said caravans have a crystal chalice to keep the Miasma at bay while they adventure throughout the land? Yeah, Mog is a Moogle that carries your chalice. You can have him drop it, and he’ll sometimes provide a bit of support if you charge a spell. He’ll charge a spell of the same type, and move his spell reticle on top of yours, combining your spells, as if you had multiple magicite fused together. The problem with this system is 2 fold. 1, Mog is entirely unreliable to actually cast a spell. And 2, if he’s not holding the chalice, you can’t move around freely without dipping into the Miasma, which saps your health.
Throughout each level, you can find 4 artifacts that will boost your stats, provide extra command slots, or extra hearts. At the end of each level, you’re given a chance to keep one artifact permanently. The level always provides 4, no matter how many you find, so finding them all just gives you a choice of 8 in the end.
As I touched on above, every dungeon holds a Myrrh tree for you to harvest a drop from. Each tree only produces one drop of myrrh every 3 years, meaning you’ll need to travel further and further to find myrrh drops until 3 years have passed. When you do revisit an area, you’ll often find that it’s changed. The monsters are stronger, maybe a drought cleared a river path that didn’t exist before, and the level boss will have acquired new abilities for an added challenge, too.
Thoughts
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a game that is short on plot but strong on vibes. There’s a real sense of loneliness and melancholy as you adventure through this tortured world. Everyone is struggling to survive, the Miasma is ever-present on your doorstep, but no one seems to mind. They go through their days, seemingly fairly carefree, secure in the thought that the caravan will return by the end of the year to recharge their crystal. There is one dungeon, Tida Village, that is an abandoned town where the caravan never returned. The narration introducing the location is haunting:
The sun once smiled on this village more than any other. But one day, their crystal’s blessing faded. The villagers eagerly awaited their caravan’s return; but for them, the crystal would never shine again. It is said that not a single one of them tried to escape. All stood fast waiting for the caravan, hoping to the very end. After hearing that tale, I felt the weight of my burden like never before.
There is a sense of sadness that is pervasive throughout the game, but you won’t know it by the music. Beautiful woodwinds and simple, jaunty tunes make this soundtrack absolutely wonderful. I can’t help but bob my head to the gorgeous, provincial tunes. All the music is made using classic or ‘ancient’ instruments. No heavy metal guitar riffs like the final boss music of Final Fantasy X over here. Composer Kumi Takano knocked it out of the park with beautiful, simple music that imbues the game with an incredible amount of charm. Easily one of the best OSTs in the series.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a surprisingly short game. My in-game timer reads only 12 hours after beating the final boss, but I suspect that timer is somewhat truncated, considering how often I died and had to reset in a level. If you do fall, you have the option to continue the dungeon you’re currently working on, or reload your last save. If you choose to continue the dungeon, you’ll be dropped at the start of the room you’re in, all the items and magicite you’ve collected will remain in your inventory, the monsters you defeated stay gone, but any items you consumed are also gone. This was mostly a problem during boss fights where I used one or two phoenix downs, only to die anyway, and have to retry the boss from the start, but with less phoenix downs.
The final dungeon represents a significant difficulty spike that is worth mentioning. The Final boss in particular was a horrid 5 stage affair. I quickly burned through my phoenix downs and had to take down the last two forms one at a time. If only I had a friend around to revive me when I fall.
The Multiplayer Elephant in the Room
Back in 2003 when Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was released, it had a novel mechanism to allow for multiplayer play. Because a player has to go into their menus a fair number of times, having all players play from the same screen just wouldn’t make sense, it would destroy the flow. So instead, each player needs to have their own Gameboy Advance and a GameCube link cable. This gives every player their own screen to manage their inventory from and access their won information without disrupting the flow of the game. The downside for me, however, was that I grew up in a small town and never had access to the GameCube link cables. I was never willing to spend my few coins back then on a peripheral over a new game. But I did get to try multiplayer once when I was traveling to a cousins house, so I’m not totally ignorant of the multiplayer experience.
There are a couple of downsides to this approach, however. Because all players need to remain within the range of the crystal chalice, when one player dives into their menu, the whole party has to wait for them anyway. Secondly, the moment you have at least 2 players, Mog is no longer a part of the team. Someone always has to carry the chalice, which cuts their movement speed by at least half. It’s not exactly fun being the chalice holder while your teammates run up and kill the monsters before you even have a chance to drop the chalice and pull your weapon.
Now, the loss of Mog is regrettable, but it is still fun to play this game with your friends. The bosses are an interesting challenge, and syncing up and casting your spells on the same spot offer a really exciting moment of collaboration. The character you played was saved in the village, letting you power them up as you and your friends moved through the dungeons together.
Without other players though, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles feels like a lonely affair. Your avatar walks alone into battle, sits alone at camp sites, meets up with other caravans on the road, totally alone. The loneliness does play into the overall sense of melancholy that Crystal Chronicles presents, and I would largely be fine with it. There were some particularity frustrating moments where the puzzles of a dungeon obviously wanted 2 or more players to do something at the same time. Or one player is supposed to stand on a pad and another player is supposed to grab a key that reveals itself. Never mind the existence of the Life spell to resurrect your fallen comrades, which is largely wasted in the solo experience.
My in-game timer tells me that it took a mere 12 hours to beat Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, but it feels much longer than that. Perhaps it’s because the pace of the game is slower, or the timer for a level restarts after you die. Either way, I came away from my Crystal Chronicles play though less keen on the game than my nostalgic memories had me feeling before. I still enjoyed the experience, especially the music. But I won’t lie and say that I’m likely to replay this game sometime in the future. The story is drip-fed to players, the villain comes out of nowhere, and there’s never a sense of over arcing progression or building tension. You just keep adventuring until you happen to take down the cause of all the Miasma. The combat is repetitive and without multiplayer, the slow pace made it harder for me to want to come back to this game at the end of each day. I don’t think it’s a bad game by any means, it’s certainly charming and nostalgic. But it sure does show its age and technical limitations in 2026.
Disclaimer: A copy of Pioneers in Peril was provided by the designer for review
I don’t normally begin reviews by talking about the production, but in the case of Pioneers in Peril, the production is the star of the show. A fully wooden, hand made game by designer Matt Terry in his solar and wind powered garage. This game isn’t just another product, it’s obviously a passion project, marrying a love of board games, wood working, and western story telling.
Pioneers in Peril stands out on your shelf because of it’s all wood production. When you lift the lid and start riffling through the hundreds of wooden chits, you’ll smell the cut wood, you’ll feel a splinter here and there, and you’ll see the imperfections that make every copy of this game unique. A whole big game made my one guy in his garage is the kind of artistry that I want to see more of in the board game scene, and I applaud Matt Terry in taking this approach. Instead of shipping files off to China for a quick print, he’s built himself a tiny production facility and his labour of love truly shines through. And this has to be a labour of love, because there are a lot of wooden pieces in the box, all laser cut and assembled by hand. It’s rustic and handmade, it feels purpose built rather than cheaply produced.
I’ll be the first to say that I don’t want every single one of my games to get this all wood treatment, but for Pioneers in Peril, it fits the theme. The handmade wooden aesthetic fits the old west pioneer setting so very well. The game starts with the centre tile, showing the bank, store, blacksmith, school, church, and saloon, and nothing more. Beyond the edges of town is wilderness, yet to be explored. On your turn, should you choose to, you’ll press yourself against the boundaries of the map and reveal what lies beyond.
A 4x game at its heart, Pioneers in Peril wants you to Explore, Expand, exploit and exterminate. Moving has you rolling a D6 (and doubling the number if you have a horse), then exploring has you revealing tiles as you walk your pieces into empty space. Forests, mountains, pastures, fields, rivers, deserts, all these land types also represent a resource that can be extracted and exploited. You’ll stake a claim, build buildings, and then you’ll need to defend your buildings from your competitors. You’ve staked this land, so you need to defend it from interlopers.
Also there’s a bandit that needs shooting every now and then, lest he causes havoc, but I’ll touch on him later.
One of the first things that struck me about Pioneers in Peril is just how much stuff there is. Both in the box and in the game. On your turn, each of your pioneers can do 2 actions, and there are, and I kid you not, 16 actions in this game. Most are fairly simple, like praying where pay $2 and draw a card (unless you have less than $5, then praying is free). And that rule example of “Do a thing, except for in this circumstance”, is fairly indicative of the entire rulebook. There are different win conditions and consequences for shootouts, depending on the participants. Player vs. Player, Player vs. Bandit, Sheriff vs. player, and Sheriff vs. Bandit, all of these scenarios exist, and requires the person holding the rulebook to remember what to do in each of those scenarios.
What I’m getting at here is that this game, production and rules both, are not Svelte, elegant productions. They don’t achieve a great deal with minimal components or rules overhead. Instead, they’re bulky, cumbersome at times, but if this is the kind of game you have a craving for, it’ll satisfy that craving like few other games will.
A game of Pioneers in Peril ends when someone achieves 20 points, and you earn points by having pioneers, buildings, homesteads, and diplomas. Each round you activate your workers and explore the land, adding hex tiles to the board. The hex tiles can be useful, developable land, like mountains, forests, and pastures, each land type will support a specific industry. But it can also be unforgiving and tough terrain, such as Deserts and Canyons. Should you so desire, as an action, you can pay some cash to stake a claim on a tile. Then in a future action, you can pay some more cash to build a building on that tile. If you happen to build a Ranch, Farm, Mine, or Sawmill, you’ll roll a dice and place that many resources onto that building. As yet another future action, you can choose to process that resource, provided you own the corresponding tool, like an ax for processing timber from a sawmill or a pickaxe for pulling coal from a mine.
In case you were wondering, if someone develops a coal mine and then wanders off, yes, you can sneak in behind them and pull coal from their building. Doing so is likely to get you shot, however.
So all these actions serve to earn you resources, which you can then use to sell or trade with. Because at the end of the day, all the things that earn you points cost money. Expanding your homestead costs a lot of money, but doing so allows you to have more pioneers in Peril. Of course that means you have more mouths to feed, and failing to feed those mouths will result in your pioneers perishing. Cash also works for tuition, earning your pioneers a diploma, giving you a special ability for the rest of the game. Again, 20 point of buildings, pioneers, and diplomas is how you win the game.
The last thing the players do on their turn is move the bandit. He starts off the board, but slowly crawls down a track before entering Peril. The bandit has a bunch of rules dictating where he wants to go (largely the saloon to buy a drink), but he can and will hold players up. Players can choose to have a shootout, or just succumb to the holdup, in which they roll the dice and lose that amount of money from their supply to the bandit.
At this point, I’ve mentioned the shootout a couple of times, so lets dig into that. Unlike the rest of Pioneers in Peril, which is a economic game about buying and selling goods to build a wild west empire, the shootout is more reminiscent of Dutch Blitz. Both players take their decks, ante up the number of bullets they want to spend on this encounter, then SPRAY AND PRAY BABY!!!!
*ahem*, I mean, both players count down, Three, Two, One, Draw! then both players flip over cards one at a time as fast as they can until one player pulls a HIT card and that player shouts HIT. The attacker deck has a single hit card out of the 10 in the deck while the defender has 2 hit cards. You only get to flip as many cards as bullets you put up for ante, and if you chose to put up less than 10 bullets, well, you might just never hit anything.
This shootout mechanic is quite a change of pace from the rest of the game, it’s fast and frenetic. I won’t lie and say my heart didn’t beat a little faster when I stared into the eyes of my enemy, wondering which one of us was going to walk away from this encounter alive. The player who looses the shootout, loses their pioneer, and the winner has the chance to loot the body, adding insult to injury.
Pioneers in Peril is an interesting game. It’s economic focus on building and accruing wealth, and using that wealth efficiently to earn the points required to win make it feel like a euro game. But the randomness from the 6 sided die and the shootout mechanics keep one boot firmly planted into the amerithrash zone (although that’s not a term I’ve used for a long time). I think players who really prefer economic games will feel frustrated by this experience in more than one turn. The events can bestow random blessings and just as quickly take them away each round, the D6 might mean the mine you spent so much time and effort building only spits out a single nugget of coal. Sometimes life is unfair, and Pioneers in Peril leans into that cosmic irony.
In fact, Pioneers in Peril leans into a lot of that difficult homesteader lifestyle. From the production, to the aesthetic, to the boons and banes doled out seemingly at random. It captures that feeling that life and the world is always against you. You constantly need to worry about your food supplies, if your industries are producing, and worry if some ne’er-do-well is going to try to steal what you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Maybe you’ll be that person, because you desperately need just a little more food to feed your growing family, and someone left their field unattended. Maybe you’re just 2 dollars short of your next milestone, and a shootout is the fastest way to get that cash. Maybe you’ll do it, just because its fun to be an agent of chaos and your opponent is only one turn away from winning the game.
Pioneers in Peril is a rules dense game, but the rules almost always make sense thematically, making it a bit easier to digest. The whole game feels like the theme was in mind from the first moments of conception, rather than a window dressing pasted on after the fact. Maybe it’s the fresh cut wood smell in my nose, but playing this game certainly made me feel like we were toiling away in the western frontiers.
It’s a very sandbox-y game, one where you aren’t going to follow a scripted opening every time you play. Pioneers in Peril isn’t going to end in 90 minutes, every time you play. The game will ebb and flow as players expand and constrict. Having more stuff means more points, but it also means having more stuff to protect. I can’t deny the feel-bad moments when someone is making progress on their goals, only for the rug to be pulled out from under them by a devastating event or a shootout gone wrong. There are rules where players can lower the point threshold for victory, and even rules for players to leave and/or join mid game and what to do with all of that players stuff. Players can be eliminated from the Wild West. I think a lot of players will chafe at that idea, but I also think Pioneers in Peril is doing something a little special here.
In an era of companies off-shoring productions to cheaper regions, and AI slop showcasing the lazy producers urge to do things the cheapest, easiest way possible, I can’t help but admire Matt Terry and Deadwood Games. This is a game he built himself in his garage. This isn’t just another SKU to have on store shelves, but it’s a labour of love. And I think some of the rules sprawl I mentioned earlier is indicative of this; this is a game that he loves. It hasn’t been honed down to a fine edge, developed away all the potential pain points with blind play testers, and turned the game into a bland, samey experience. While the take-that aspects and potential to lose some of what I built are not things that I enjoy in my games, I feel like this game is exactly what Matt loves, and I can’t help by applaud his ambition as he toiled away in his garage, making the game of his dreams. I admire and cheer on this intensely independent creation, and encourage you to do the same.
