I’ve been running this blog since January 2021, and in that time I’ve published over 200 reviews, which is kind of mind-boggling to me. One thing I’m not very good at, however, is keeping an index of all the games I’ve already reviewed. Sometimes I’ll sit down to write a review for a game I just played, only to realize I’ve already written one two years ago. Today was the opposite problem. My wife and I played a game of Hardback last night because our kids went to bed with no fuss for once, and we actually had the mental capacity to play a game together. So we pulled out one of our favorite games, Hardback. Afterwards, I went digging through my blog archives to see if my thoughts on the game had changed over the years, only to discover that I haven’t actually reviewed Hardback before. So let’s give it a go, shall we?
Hardback is a deck-building word game designed by Jeff Beck and Tim Fowers, and was published by Fowers Games in 2018. Perhaps it’s considered to be a spiritual successor to Paperback, Hardback uses the same deck-building word game core, but the mechanical changes to the way you acquire cards and how those cards work together change how the game feels in a pretty dramatic way, despite sharing the same categories on the BGG pages.
Right off the bat, I’ll say that if you own Paperback, I don’t think Hardback replaces it. They’re different enough word games that both can happily exist in the same collection.
Hardback begins with everyone having the same deck of eight cards plus two unique cards specific to their player. On your turn, you draw five cards and use them to make a word. If you need a wild letter, you can turn any card face down and use it as a wildcard, but of course you don’t get any of the benefits that card would bestow upon you if it’s face down. After you’ve assembled a word, you count up all the points and money it provides, track your score accordingly along the bookshelf track, and then purchase card(s) from the market. The card market is simply a display of seven cards drawn from a massive deck. The cards in the market come from one of four genres, and each genre pushes your strategy in a different direction or provides effects unique to that genre.
Any cards you buy go into your discard pile. All the letters you used for your word, along with any unused cards from your hand, also go to the discard pile. Then you draw a new hand of five cards. If you run out of cards, you reshuffle your discard pile and keep going until someone reaches 60 points. Once all players have had the same number of turns, the player with the most points wins. Pretty simple right?
One mechanic I haven’t touched on yet is the ink system. During the card buying phase of your turn, you can spend one cent to purchase an ink token. Then, during a future turn, while you’re trying to build a word, you can choose to ink a card. To do this, you draw a card from the top of your deck and place an ink token on it. Now that inked letter must be used in your word. You can’t turn it face down as a wildcard; you have to use the letter exactly as it appears. This push-your-luck element is wonderful, as truly bold players can ink four or five letters and attempt some ridiculous nine-letter monstrosity for a massive payoff. Longer words are generally more beneficial anyway because you’re more likely to trigger genre bonuses.
On the subject of the genres I mentioned earlier. There are four of them, and each has effects unique to that genre. Many genre cards also have layered benefits. All cards have an effect that activates when you play them, but many genre cards have a secondary ability that only activates if you have another card of the same genre in the same word. Anyone who’s played Star Realms will immediately recognize this system. It encourages you to focus on one or two genres because triggering those genre bonuses are the way to unlock to full potential of each of your cards.
The genres themselves are all quite distinct. Horror primarily focuses on gaining remover tokens, which let you remove ink from cards you’ve previously inked, giving you more flexibility in how aggressively you use that system. Romance revolves around removing cards from your hand and deck for small benefits, but the real hidden strength of Romance is how absurdly thin you can make your deck. I’ve had games where my Romance deck was only five or six cards, meaning I was playing the same hyper-efficent word every round.
The Mystery genre has two primary benefits. First, it allows you to jail cards from the market row, reserving them for later purchase or denying them to opponents. Since you can only jail one card at a time, it’s not especially useful for hate-drafting. The real power of Mystery is that it can reveal the face-down wild cards in your word, so you can reap the reward from the card without really using that letter in your word. This allows you to use those difficult letters much more frequently, provided you can place them adjacent to the Mystery card. Finally, Adventure is straightforward. Adventure mostly focuses on generating points and money.
There’s a lot to love about Hardback. The ink system lets you push your luck while mitigating some truly awful draws. No one likes drawing a hand that’s mostly basic cards when you know your deck is full of good letters and powerful effects. Likewise, if you’ve built a deck around a particular genre and only draw one of those genre cards taking a chance on an ink draw can be incredibly satisfying, especially when the card you’re digging for comes up. Drawing that second genre card and suddenly unlocking the full power of your cards feels wonderful.
I also love the flexibility of being able to turn cards upside down and use them as wildcards. Having that option makes me far more willing to buy awkward letters like C, X, or Q because I don’t need the perfect follow-up draw to make them useful. Sometimes those difficult letters give you better benefits than than three basic cards combined, so it’s still a win if you only use that letter with 3 face down cards. Using all your weak starter cards as face-down wilds while still benefiting from the powerful card you’ve added to your deck is a pretty great way to keep those starter cards at least somewhat useful as you approach the endgame.
I also appreciate how distinct the genres feel and how mixing and matching them changes the experience from game to game. Some games I’ve leaned heavily into Mystery, using all my powerful letters as wildcards and building around revealing them later. Other games have gone in completely different directions like mixing horror and adventure for some huge letter words with bombastic point totals at the end.
The game we played last night saw me focusing almost entirely on Adventure. It wasn’t flashy, it was simply a high-scoring point engine. I also got fairly lucky with my draws, consistently pulling my Adventure cards together at the right times. My wife, on the other hand, had some back luck and got stuck trying to unlock her engine that never quite got it going before the game ended.
This is noteworthy because after 23 plays, I have never beaten my wife at Hardback. Except for last night.
Let this be a lesson to everyone. No one beats me 24 times in a row at Hardback. NO ONE!
*ahem* I’ve gotten off topic.
I will say that the card market can be annoyingly fiddly. If four cards share the same genre or four cards cost six cents or more, players have the option to wipe the market and have it be refilled. It’s not a huge issue, but I find it annoying to have to sweep all the cards and deal out 7 more every other round. It interrupts the flow of the game just enough to be mildly annoying.
The market can also occasionally stagnate. If the conditions to refresh it aren’t met and nobody really wants the available cards, then the market can just sit there for several turns. That’s mildly frustrating, but thankfully it’s rare. Either the condition to wipe the market will pop up, or if players have stopped buying cards, it’s because the game is approaching its conclusion anyway. Adding new cards to a deck in the last two or three rounds probably won’t matter much, but it still feels bad to have seven cents available and not want a single card that’s on offer.
Earlier I said that Paperback and Hardback can happily coexist in the same collection, and I genuinely mean that. Whenever I compare the two, I inevitably arrive at the question of trying to figure out which is better or which one I prefer more. The problem is that I don’t actually have an answer. They’re different games that do different things, and both are enjoyable.
I think Hardback offers more strategic variety. The genre system encourages specialization, and the ink system gives players far more flexibility. Being able to use any card as a wildcard makes most turn feel viable, even if you draw a C, X, V, and T. Paperback, meanwhile, has a much more defined arc to the game. You’re gradually improving your deck, climbing the card row, and deciding when to stop buying letters and start investing in the permanent wildcards which clog up your deck. Knowing when to make that pivot is a genuine skill.
In Hardback, you don’t worry about that nearly as much. Instead, the challenge becomes recognizing when money has stopped mattering. Early in the game, money generation is important. By the middle of the game, though, you often don’t need more money-producing cards. You need points, and you need ways to consistently score them.
So in the end, I don’t think one game is better than the other. Both succeed at being excellent word games, but they achieve that goal in different ways. Paperback offers a more traditional deck-building progression, while Hardback provides greater flexibility and more room for strategic experimentation. Both have earned a permanent place in my collection, and which one I would rather play on a given night mostly comes down to my mood.
Though if I can recreate whatever happened last night and actually beat my wife at Hardback for a second time, maybe I’ll be reaching for Hardback a little more often.
I’m not going to bury the lede here. It’s a special moment when I play a game with my wife at our local board game café and she immediately grabs a copy off the shelf to bring home. Things in Rings is that game.
Designed by Peter C. Hayward and published by AllPlay in 2024, Things in Rings is basically Venn Diagrams: The Board Game. One player takes on the role of the mastermind, or the “Knower”, while everyone else is trying to figure out the hidden logic by dropping clue cards into the appropriate intersections of coloured yarn circles.
Perhaps that description on its own doesn’t sound all that interesting, but believe me when I say that Things in Rings is simply a delight.
Each of the rings corresponds to a different aspect of the words. The yellow circle has to do with the makeup of the word itself, things like which letters are present in the word. The blue circle has to do with attributes of the thing, usually something physical about it. The red circle focuses more on context, like where you might find the item represented on the card.
Gameplay has non-knowing players laying one of the item cards from their hand into the Venn diagram where they think it belongs. As more items get laid into the diagram, theoretically, the more clues you’ll have to help determine where your future cards should go.Then the Knower either confirms that the player was correct, in which case, they get to play again, or, the Knower shakes their head disapprovingly and moves the card to the correct intersection. The player draws a new card, and the next player takes their turn. The goal of the game being to shed all the cards from your hand.
I realize this concept is a little hard to visualize in the abstract, so imagine looking at a completed puzzle and considering everything in the blue circle. What does a guitar, a moose, a flamingo, and a belt all have in common?
You might be thinking that they all have holes, but then you have to ask yourself: why isn’t the button in that blue circle too? What do the carpet, button, and guitar have in common that the belt doesn’t? If you’re holding a card showing a teapot, is that more like a guitar, or more similar to a belt?
At first, figuring out where to put your cards is almost an exercise in futility. There are so many things that a thing could be that you’re largely just placing cards based on vibes. But after everyone has had two or three rounds and items start to congregate within each section of the Venn diagram, and you begin to intuit where certain things should go. You might not be able to explain exactly what the criteria are, but you can start making educated guesses. If a cow goes in one particular spot, then a moose is pretty close to a cow in attribute and context, so that feels safe. You stop solving the categories directly and start reasoning by association, which feels surprisingly satisfying.
Now, you can play Things in Rings two different ways. One has all players competing against each other while the Knower simply facilitates where things go. The way I prefer to play, however, is the cooperative variant. In the cooperative game, the Knower has ten cards of their own while every other player has five. The goal is for the group to collectively play all of their cards before the Knower runs out of theirs.
I enjoy this version much more because I really appreciate the communication between players. The discussions, assumptions, and suggestions about what each category might be are more fun than sitting in silence hoping you’re the smarty-pants at the table before your dumb friends figure it out too.
Having a cooperative spin on Things in Rings also makes being the Knower kind of agonizing. Often you’ll have to make judgment calls. Like, if a category is “flammable,” then, is a flamingo flammable? What about a school? Is anything flammable if you try hard enough? It’s these moments that make sorting cards into their correct spots just a little bit painful. You worry about how judgmental your friends will be once the categories are revealed. If you’re playing cooperatively, you also worry about how badly you’re misleading everyone by arbitrarily deciding one way or the other when these weird edge cases come up.
Like all the best party games, the score here doesn’t really matter. Winning and losing isn’t the point of playing Things in Rings. Instead, you get to revel in the unknown. You get to spend twenty minutes trying to figure out what a flamingo, a guitar, and a belt possibly have in common. Then, at the end of the game, the Knower reveals the categories and everyone gets to see just how close they were, or wonder how they somehow missed what now seems like an obvious connection. The moment of the reveal, when everyone goes “OOOOOHHHHH, DUUUH!” is something I absolutely relish. And Things in Rings excels at delivering that moment.
Depending on who you play with, the game can occasionally drag on. Some people become completely paralyzed by indecision. If they can’t definitively place a card correctly, they freeze up and don’t want to place anything at all. That’s tough because Things in Rings really rewards people who are willing to take a shot and see what happens.
I said it at the beginning, but this game feels pretty special. It’s rare that my wife and I can go to a board game café, learn a game, play it once, and then have her pick up a copy on the way out because she loved it that much. Usually games need to marinate for a while before either of us decides they’re worth bringing home. But not this one. We played Things in Rings in public, laughed our way through trying to figure out bizarre connections between random objects, and by the time we were leaving the cafe, my partner had already decided that a copy was coming home with us.
That’s probably the strongest recommendation I can give a game.
There’s no denying that Flip 7 has absolutely captured the attention of the board game media. I can see why, it’s really easy to evangelize. You buy five copies of the game, toss it into every bag you own, and bring to every gathering just in case people want to play something quick. It’s approachable in that magical ‘anyone can sit down and start playing immediately’ kind of way. New and old gamers alike can gather around Flip 7, laugh at bad luck, cheer at risky plays, and then, once the game’s over, you can just hand your copy away as a gift and move on with your life, because it’s cheap enough to replace without much thought. That accessibility is a huge part of its appeal.
My problem with Flip 7 is that I’ve already been playing this game for over a decade.
I’ll recognize that there are SOME differences, but I’ve always been a big fan of Pairs, which operates on almost identical mechanics. I’ll get into those differences in a bit, but first it’s worth talking about what Flip 7 actually does, because clearly it’s doing something right.
Flip 7 is simple. Every round starts with each player receiving a single card, and then the dealer goes around the table asking the same question over and over: “Hit or stay?” If you hit, you get another card. If you stay, you lock in your points. The catch, of course, is that if you ever collect two cards of the same value, you bust and score nothing for the round. If you manage to get 7 cards of different values, the round ends immediately and the player who achieved the feat earns 15 bonus points for their boldness. It’s pure push-your-luck design. The score is based on the total value of your cards, and the first player to reach 200 points triggers the endgame.
The clever wrinkle of Flip 7 is that the numbers in the deck aren’t evenly distributed. There are twelve 12s, eleven 11s, ten 10s, and so on all the way down to a single 1 and a single 0. That means that statistically some cards feel dangerous while others feel remarkably. The size of the deck and the speed of play makes it difficult to count cards and then players often act on instinct and vibes rather than actual probability. There are also a few action cards mixed in added flavour. Some score modifiers that can’t bust you, but don’t add to the 7 unique card bonus, second chances, and the flip three card that forces any player to flip three cards in a row with no opportunity to stop and bank your points between flips.
Flip 7 works because it’s incredibly easy to teach. You just flip a card and ask “hit or stay?” over and over until somebody groans in agony because they paired their 6 with another 6. It was a relatively safe move, but that’s the risk you tale. It’s a game your eight-year-old nephew can play with your ninety-year-old grandmother without any issues. And that’s a real achievement.
But let’s also be honest here: Flip 7 is a game of luck, not strategy. Sure, there are moments where you feel brilliant because you chose to stop, and then you see that the next card flip would have busted, that’s just luck. You didn’t know, nobody knows! There are no deduction mechanisms, no real information management, no meaningful strategic framework beyond deciding how lucky you feel in the moment and trying to remember if 3 or 4 of the 8’s have already come out of the deck.
Now, my biggest criticisms of Flip 7 is how it handles the end game, specifically as compared to Pairs. in Flip 7, at the end of every round you need to add up all all the numbers and add those scores to everyone’s running tally. It’s not onerous, but it does require a pen and paper, which is more than I might expect from a game that I just want to throw down and start playing.
And while I’m talking about score, I guess it’s time to talk about Pairs specifically in relation to Flip 7. Pairs was one of the first games I ever reviewed on this blog because I loved it so much. I literally bought six or seven different decks and handed them out like candy. It became my travel game. The thing I could bring anywhere. And this is really where the crux of my Flip 7 versus Pairs comparison comes into view.
In Pairs, the core game play is basically identical. You flip cards, decide whether to hit or stay, and bust if you pair a number. But the scoring is so much cleaner. Instead of totaling up a whole piles of cards every round, the player who busts simply takes the value of the card they busted on as points, and the first player to reach 21 loses the game. That’s it. It’s elegant in a way that makes the entire experience feel lighter. There’s no bookkeeping and it’s easy for everyone at the table to see how well each other is doing instead of asking the player keeping score how close everyone is to ending the game before deciding to take a risk or not.
That simplicity matters even more in the environments where these games thrive best: pubs, bars, coffee shops, someone’s kitchen table at midnight, and so on. Pairs feels perfectly engineered for those spaces. Flip 7 is good too, but not as good.
Also, the push your luck is more interesting in Pairs. In Pairs, when one player busts, they take a card for score, but it resets the round for everyone. Sure you might be sitting on an 8 and a 7, but if you can hold out until someone else busts, you get away scot-free! If the risk is too much for you, or you’re staring down really unfair odds, like if you have a 9 and 10, but the player next to you is holding a 1 and 3, you can choose to just prematurely end the round, and take the lowest card as your score instead, start a new whole new round. I find it more engaging and interesting.
I will concede that Flip 7 is dramatically easier to find right now. It’s available in every game store and Wal-mart across Canada and the US. Pairs feels niche by comparison, which is a shame because one of the things I adore about it is how many different themed decks exist. The cards are filled with artwork from different artists and settings, giving you something pleasant to look at while you play. Finding a Pairs deck that speaks to you feels custom and charming. Flip 7’s plain colorful-number aesthetic by contrast is utilitarian and boring. Sure, the big numbers in Flip 7 are perfectly functional, but Pairs has personality!
So part of me can’t help feeling a little sad watching Flip 7 become this massive commercial and critical success when, in my opinion, the better version of this game has been available on shelves for over ten years already.
And yes, I’ll fully admit some of my bias here is emotional. Pairs has collaborated with artists and created decks based on some of my favorite books, including Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. Meanwhile, the CEO behind Flip 7 publicly defended his decision to vote for Trump. Fair or unfair, that factors into where I’d rather spend my money. I know which company I feel more excited supporting.
So I suppose this review is less my thoughts on Flip 7, even if it is pretty good at being a fast and easy card game. But I can’t help but get onto a tiny soapbox asking people to please, for the love of all things cardboard, look at Pairs instead. Because every time I see people discovering Flip 7 for the first time, I can’t help but feel like I’m watching an old friend get overlooked in the background.
Those are the first voice-acted words spoken in the Final Fantasy franchise. They’re spoken by Tidus as Final Fantasy X begins in medias res. A group of people sit around a campfire looking forlorn and melancholy. There’s no context for who these people are or where they are, or what’s causing them to be so depressed. All we have is this beautiful piano piece playing over the scene as a blonde boy touches a girl’s shoulder and then walks up a hill to look at a ruined city in the distance. He asks us to listen to his story.
Before I dive any further in, I want to mention up front that Final Fantasy X is one of the few Final Fantasy games I had actually played a lot of before starting this blog series. I played the original PS2 release back in 2005 when I was about 14 or 15 years old. I vaguely remembered something, like running into a stone wall of a fight when Kimahri has his solo battle, and some another boss or two being incredible difficulty spikes. I remembered the major plot twists, and getting up to what I thought was the final boss. That said, something I’ve learned over the course of this series is that if you don’t play a game for twenty years, you really don’t remember very much of it when you come back.
Story
Final Fantasy X begins in earnest with Tidus about to head to a Blitzball game, a type of underwater soccer. He’s a star player of the Zanarkand Abes and treated exactly like you’d expect a professional sports celebrity to be treated. He’s cocky, full of himself, loud, kind of obnoxious. Just a downright jock in every sense of the word. But as the Blitzball game gets underway, an unknown monstrosity attacks the city of Zanarkand. Buildings crumble around him and, in the chaos, Auron appears. Auron was a friend of Tidus’s father, Jecht. Jecht disappeared at sea ten years ago and Auron has seemingly been watching out for Tidus ever since. He tosses Tidus a sword and asks if he knows how to use it. Before long, though, both Auron and Tidus are sucked up into the sky by this gigantic gaping maw.
Tidus then awakens in an unknown ruined location where he’s picked up by a ship with some Al Bhed peoples, who speak a language he doesn’t understand. Thankfully, one of the Al Bhed, Rikku, does speak his language and she recruits him to help recover some underwater treasure. Things go slightly awry, as that giant monstrosity appears again. The Al Bhed call it Cin, and the next thing you know, Tidus is once again waking up in the water. This time, however, he washes ashore on the island of Besaid, an idyllic tropical beach that feels almost aggressively peaceful after the destruction of Zanarkand.
In Besaid, he meets Wakka, captain of the local Blitzball team. Tidus can’t help but show off his Blitzball skills, Wakka. He asks who Tidus plays for, and Tidus proudly proclaims that he’s the star player of the Zanarkand Abes. The whole group is in a quiet shock. Wakka says Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years ago and its ruins are considered sacred ground. They chalk Tidus failed memory and general cluelessness to the customs of the world to Sin’s toxin messing with his head.
Wakka brings him back to the village where Tidus meets Yuna, who is about to embark on her pilgrimage. Yuna is a summoner, and the role of a summoner is twofold. Their first duty is to go on a pilgrimage across the world, praying at temples along the way until they reach Zanarkand where they obtain the Final Aeon and use it to destroy Sin, bringing about a temporary Calm to the world. But Sin always returns. The cycle continues endlessly until humanity has supposedly atoned for its past sins.
The monster Sin that destroyed Tidus’s Zarnakand in the introductory sequence is this cataclysmic force that appears seemingly at random to destroy towns whenever humanity becomes too technologically advanced. The local religion, Yevon, teaches that Sin appeared because Zanarkand relied too heavily on machina and that Sin is humanity’s punishment for becoming lazy and dependent on technology.
The second duty of a summoner is to perform sendings, guiding the souls of the recently departed to the Farplane, so they can rest peacefully. Otherwise those souls linger, consumed by resentment, eventually becoming the fiends you fight throughout the game. I actually really appreciated this because it’s a great bit of ludo-narrative cohesion. The monsters aren’t just there because it’s a JRPG and JRPGs need monsters. The game gives them an actual place in the world and mythology. These souls are often represented by pyreflies, floating streaks of light drifting through the air, and you see them constantly throughout Spira.
Yuna convinces her party to let Tidus join them as one of her guardians. Wakka is already traveling with her, and you’re introduced to Lulu, the black mage, and Kimahri Ronso, this giant muscular blue lion-man with a broken horn who sort of exists somewhere between a dragoon and a blue mage. The party sets off from Besaid, and thus begins Final Fantasy X.
What immediately sets Final Fantasy X apart from every previous Final Fantasy is that there’s no over world to explore. Instead, you are on a pilgrimage, traveling from one location to another down a series of narrow hallways. Seriously, Final Fantasy X is basically a straight line that you move along as the story progresses. Sure, there are often small diversions or forks in the road. But at the end of those diversions is generally a single treasure chest, then you just need to head back to your main road and keep following the carefully designed path.
On one hand, I genuinely appreciated this change. No longer are you aimlessly hoofing it across barren over world landscapes trying to find the next destination while random encounters chew through your patience. In past games these over worlds gave you a sense of freedom, of having an open world. But you aren’t really free in those games, there’s a specific place you need to be to progress the story. Having the open world gives you the illusion of freedom. And in many of the past games if you accidentally venture in the wrong direction, you’ll encounter enemies 30 levels higher than you are and get instantly KO’ed. I know Final Fantasy XIII was heavily criticized for being a series of hallways, but part of me has to wonder why XIII got all those criticisms and yet X seems to have dodged the hallway simulator moniker. Maybe it’ll make sense when I get to XIII.
Most of the world is rendered fully in 3D unlike the previous games which used 3D character models on pre-rendered backgrounds. Because the locations in Final Fantasy X are mostly narrow hallways with fixed camera angles, the camera can pan and zoom and frame scenes in ways earlier games really couldn’t. In Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX, the camera mostly just slid around on the X and Y axis. Here, the camera moves dynamically through forests, villages, and temples, creating this sense that the world is dense and alive beyond the path you’re walking. I wonder if the reason Final Fantasy X avoided the “hallway” criticism I mentioned, is because hallways evoke the feeling of being overly simplistic. These hallways are acceptable to me because the world feels textured and full in a way the older overworlds often didn’t.
The use of linear pathways does something that I really appreciate. It controls the pacing of the story. You don’t miss important details because you didn’t visit an optional location, you don’t spend days wandering between plot points. The story is delivered smoothly and cohesively.
Using Tidus as the protagonist in this story also works incredibly well because he’s effectively a stranger in a strange land. Since he doesn’t understand Spira, the game has a perfectly natural excuse to dump exposition to him, and by extension, to the player. Tidus doesn’t understand Yevon’s teachings because we don’t understand them either. Meanwhile, for the people of Spira, these rituals are just part of life. They’ve never known anything different.
So as Yuna’s pilgrimage begins, Tidus is this happy-go-lucky idiot. He makes all these promises that he and Yuna will come back to these locations later. He completely misses the awkward and sad looks people give when he says these things. Then, partway through the journey, Tidus learns the truth: summoning the Final Aeon to defeat Sin kills the summoner. Yuna’s pilgrimage is her offering herself as a sacrifice, so the people of Spira can experience a brief period of peace, called the Calm.
Everyone else already knew this. They understood from the very start that this journey ends with Yuna’s death one way or another. Tidus, meanwhile, absolutely refuses to accept it. He vows to think of something, like the irrational child he kind of is. Which to be fair, defeating Sin doesn’t mean Sin is gone forever. Quite the opposite, the Calm generally lasts for about 10 years, then Sin always returns. The teachings of Yevon say that when the people have atoned enough, then the cycle will break. So they just keep throwing Summoners at the problem, hoping that each new Calm will be the eternal one.
Tidus also finds himself directly at the center of this conflict when Auron reveals that Sin is actually Jecht. Auron brought Tidus here at Jecht’s request in the hope that Tidus might finally break this endless cycle. Tidus hates Jecht. Jecht was the Wayne Gretzky of Blitzball players, so even though Tidus is a star athlete in his own right, professionally he’s still living in his fathers shadow. When Jecht was at home, his mother ignored him, fawning over Jecht. When Jecht tried to be a parent, he would berate Tidus, calling him a crybaby and that the only thing he was good at was crying. Anytime Jecht’s name comes up, Tidus is quick to point out his resentment towards Jecht.
I actually really love the father-son relationship here. I grew up with a single mother and never knew my father, and one thing that always frustrated me throughout the 90s and 2000s was how media constantly depicted fatherless sons as being overwhelmed with joy the moment their deadbeat father returned. It’s never something I connected with because I don’t have those feelings. If my father appeared in my life tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly want a relationship with him. To me, family is so much more than blood, it’s the relationships between people.
So I appreciate that Tidus is angry. Jecht was a jerk to him as a child and then disappeared. Tidus doesn’t spend the game longing for reconciliation. He has this massive chip on his shoulder because he spent his entire life living in the shadow of his famous father. And then in a twist of cruel irony, throughout Spira, he learns that Jecht traveled alongside Yuna’s father, High Summoner Braska, and because Braska brought the last Calm, he, Jecht, and Auron are viewed as legendary heroes. It’s genuinely compelling watching Tidus try to reconcile these conflicting feelings about a man he hates and hearing from everyone how much of a hero he was.
Graphically, Final Fantasy X looks significantly better than Final Fantasy IX. Almost like there was a generational leap or something. Like the previous games, it uses both low-resolution and high-resolution character models depending on the scene. Most gameplay uses lower-detail models, while emotional cutscenes swap in the more detailed versions. Sometimes it’s kind of jarring. You’ll have Wakka’s high-detail face standing beside some poor NPC who looks like they were carved out of damp cardboard.
The character movement can also be hilariously stiff at times. There are scenes where characters pivot like forklifts before walking off in a different direction. While very often the aesthetic, music, and well realized world can look great, there are absolutely moments where you’re suddenly reminded that Final Fantasy X is over twenty years old.
But then the FMV cutscenes kick in and good lord. These cutscenes are what I remembered the game looking like back in 2005. The flowing water, the hair physics, the lighting, it’s all incredibly good looking. Squaresoft absolutely flexed everything they learned from the previous Final Fantasy games and from their failed movie venture Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. One thing I especially appreciated was how seamlessly the game transitions between in-engine scenes and FMV scenes. Sometimes the transition between FMV and in-engine is clunky, sometimes it’s smooth, but it always looks good.
As the story progresses, the party begins to reject the idea of feeding summoners into this endless cycle of death. They repeatedly clash with Seymour Guado, a high priest of Yevon who believes the only release from suffering, is death itself. Seymour wants to actually become Sin because he genuinely thinks annihilating humanity is its ultimate salvation.
The party, unsurprisingly, rejects his philosophy.
Another aspect to the world is you discover that some people can remain in Spira after death as “unsent,” essentially refusing to pass on. Eventually, near the end of Yuna’s pilgrimage, the party meets Yunalesca, the original summoner who defeated Sin a thousand years ago. They learn the full horrifying truth: not only does summoning the Final Aeon kill the summoner, but the Final Aeon itself must be created from one of the summoner’s guardians. Braska chose Jecht. The Final Aeon destroys Sin… and then becomes the next Sin.
The party refuses to continue the cycle and defeats Yunalesca, effectively destroying humanity’s only known method of combating Sin. I actually chuckled at the scene afterward where the group casually informs Maester Mika that they killed Yunalesca, and the poor man just completely breaks down, refusing to believe that there is any alternative to the current cycle. Instead of listening to the party or trying to help, he just gives up and sends himself to the Farplane, dissolving into pyreflies.
During all this, Tidus also learns the truth about his own existence. A thousand years ago, Zanarkand and Bevelle were at war. Zanarkand’s summoners knew they were doomed against Bevelle’s machina, so the leader of Zanarkand, Yu Yevon used the fayth, people locked in an eternal slumber, with their dreams getting physical manifestations. That’s what Yuna’s aeons are, dreams from the Fayth at each temple. Yu Yevon uses the Fayth to summon Dream Zanarkand, and hides it elsewhere in the world before Yu Yevon created Sin. Tidus is from Dream Zanarkand, and is therefore a dream of the fayth himself. All this means that when Sin and Yu Yevon die, the fayth will stop dreaming, and Tidus will disappear.
This is the most confusing part of the plot, and I’ll be honest in saying that I looked it up after the fact. But I do want to mention here that Final Fantasy X has the most approachable story of the series by far. There’s no alien cells being injected into people, no memory loss mixed with time travel, nothing that convoluted. The world has all kinds of texture and depth, the religion feels real and well thought out, but the overall story, Yuna’s pilgimage, is really straightforward. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to follow the entirety of the story without much confusion or needing to look up alternative resources to figure out exactly what’s going on.
The party eventually teams up with Cid and his airship, tears a hole into Sin. They journey inside Sin’s body Pinocchio-style to confront Jecht and Yu Yevon himself. Tidus’s reunion with Jecht is exactly the kind of messy emotional confrontation I wanted from the game. Tidus says he hates him. Jecht basically responds with “Yeah, I know.” There’s no magical reconciliation. No perfect healing. Just two deeply flawed people understanding each other a little too late.
And then Tidus says, “This is the only time I’m glad that you’re my dad,” right before they have to kill him. Perfect.
After defeating Jecht, the party confronts Yu Yevon in a final battle that’s kind of fascinating mechanically. Every time you hit him, he heals for 9,999 damage, so unless you’re breaking the damage cap, the fight becomes this long grind. At the same time, all your party members have Auto-Life, so no matter what Yu Yevon does, you just keep getting back up. I suppose there’s something thematically fitting about that. The battle feels less like overcoming a challenge and more like stubbornly outlasting the embodiment of an endless cycle. Apparently Yu Yevon will use Grativja and hit the whole party and itself at the same time, constantly knocking it’s health down, but I managed to overcome it by breaking it’s magic, and then casting reflect on it so it’s healing just reflected to my party instead.
Anyway, once Yu Yevon is defeated and Sin explodes into a mountain of pyreflies, Tidus begins to fade away. There’s this genuinely emotional farewell where Yuna runs to hug him and falls straight through his disappearing body. He stands behind her, wraps her arms around her for a tender moment, then leaps off the ship with a hasty ‘goodbye’.
Because the church of Yevon sits at the center of the story, the gradual dismantling of that institution gives Final Fantasy X an incredible sense of scale. Whether it’s the party being branded heretics or watching Wakka, who starts the game as a blind follower of Yevon, to the point of racism and bigotry, slowly confront and unpack the hypocrisy around him, it feels huge. When the game reaches its climax and you finally tear down the foundations of this entire religion, it genuinely feels like you’re killing God. Final Fantasy has always loved the “fight God at the end” thing, but I think Final Fantasy X executes that idea better than any game in the series so far by having the entire conflict and story and culture of the world being centered around the church of Yevon.
The Level System
For this playthrough, I played the original US PS2 release, meaning I didn’t get access to the Expert Sphere Grid, but I’ll touch on that in second. The Sphere Grid itself is this massive interconnected web of nodes where every character starts in a different location. Instead of traditional leveling, gaining experience and passively improving their stats with each level up, characters gain Sphere Levels which let them move within the grid following the lines and activating nodes to increase stats or learn abilities.
I actually really enjoyed this system. It feels highly customizable even if, in practice, the customization is a little illusory because most characters are clearly funneled along intended paths. Tidus moves toward agility and time magic like Haste and Slow. Lulu focuses on elemental black magic. Auron becomes a physical powerhouse. But because everyone exists on the same grid, you can absolutely do ridiculous things if you want. You can focus your time and efforts to turn everyone into black mages if that’s your dream.
Often characters will come across a branching path on the sphere grid. Perhaps it’s a dead end, but has access to a couple extra nodes for a stat boost, or a path will be blocked off by a lock. Often removing these locks are what give characters the ability to trespass on other characters routes, letting you double up on skills amongst your party members. That being said, most of the time I just followed characters along their intended routes. The one exception was Kimahri, who I pushed toward Lulu’s section of the board to turn him into a backup black mage so I could exploit elemental weaknesses more aggressively.
By the end of the game, each character was around the end of their sphere grid, or was just starting to overlap with others. Wakka got Auron’s Break skills, Auron was moving into Tidus’s path to get more speed, that kind of thing. I’ve read that some people put the time in to earn ludicrous amounts of sphere levels to then max out each character on the sphere grid, but that’s an insane task that’s wholly unnecessary to beat the game. I’ve also read that doing that largely robs each character of what makes them unique.
The Battle System
The Sphere Grid gives you stats and abilities, so it ties directly into the battle system, and I think Final Fantasy X has one of the better combat systems in the series so far. Gone is the ATB system that’s been present since Final Fantasy IV Now, battles are fully turn-based with visible turn order. Big attacks will cost more ‘time’, while quick attacks or using items might let you do 2 actions before the next enemy gets to make their move. Adding to this, you can (and are encouraged to) swap party members in and out mid-battle without forfeiting that characters turn. I can’t stress how much I like this flexibility. Now I’m no longer trying to think if I should have my black mage in the party, or leave them behind for a summoner like I was in Final Fantasy IX or VI. Everyone is available at all times, but only 3 characters are in a battle at any one moment. Sometimes it was a juggle trying to get the right 2 characters out at the same time so one could buff the other, but it was a tactical consideration I really enjoyed.
An important aspect of this battle system is that any character who participates in the battle gets the full SP rewards. The SP earned from a fight is not divided between all characters, everyone gets the full amount from the fight. What this means in practice is that you really want every character to take at least one action in every fight. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it becomes second nature. Using your first two turns to kill all but one monster, then swap in every other party member to do a non-damage skill before finishing off the last one. I’m also pretty sure this mechanic is why teenage me struggled so much with the game back in 2005. Especially because some story sections lock your party composition, and if you’ve neglected certain characters, suddenly you’re in trouble. I neglected Kimahri hard, so when he had a solo battle he had to tackle, it was essentially a brick wall for me. Thankfully older me is more wise and now that I understood the system from the beginning, I was much more prepared to deal with that twist.
A lot of the regular mobs have have specific weaknesses that you’ll want to exploit. Tidus hits fast enemies, Wakka takes down the flyers, Auron with piercing is best for enemies with high defence, and so on. It made most of the random encounters pretty trivial, as you generally just needed to use the right tool for each job, but the flexibility of swapping in chracters mid-battle created some very satisfying tactical considerations, especially in some of the bigger boss moments.
One thing I especially appreciated was how quickly the game gives you most of the party. Compared to Final Fantasy IX, where you don’t even get the final character until absurdly late, Final Fantasy X gets your core cast assembled relatively early. Sure, Rikku doesn’t join until about 10 hours in, but the other 6 characters are in your party nearly from the get-go.
The Equipment/Aeon Customization system
The equipment system, however, is a bit weird. Weapons and armor don’t really have traditional stats. Instead, they have slots containing abilities. One sword might give Auron +5% Strength while another gives elemental damage or counterattacks. Later, Rikku unlocks the ability to customize equipment by consuming massive piles of items to fill empty slots with abilities.
I barely touched this system.
The customization costs felt absurdly high for relatively minor benefits, and there’s NO way to undo modifications. I couldn’t justify spending 20 mega-Phoenix to embue one piece of amour with Auto-Phoenix on an armour I might need to replace eventually. I mostly just made do with whatever gear I found naturally. The same applies to Yuna’s Aeons, which are this games Summons. They can also be customized using enormous quantities of items. Sometimes it was tempting to give one of them a new spell, but raising one aeon’s single stat by a single point would cost ~30 spheres. It was something I was never willing to commit to doing.
Also, I didn’t engage with this system because the main story really didn’t need it. Sure, there were difficult bosses. Seymour on Mt. Gagazet took me several attempts. The optional Baaj Temple boss underwater where you can only use Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku while dealing with petrification and party members being swallowed for a turn was rough. But overall, I didn’t find the main game especially punishing. I’ve read that in the HD Remake, the Dark Aeons are brutally difficult, but that’s not a feature in my game so I can’t really comment on it.
End-game grind
One of the things I appreciated most about Final Fantasy X. was the fact that I could just play it. In most of the games I’ve played in this series so far, I’ve had a guide handy at almost all times. But Final Fantasy X was different. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the linear nature of the game, but I didn’t look at a guide until I was nearly finished and I wanted to dabble in getting some of the celestial weapons. And I was so happy that I was able to beat the final boss without grinding at all through the entire game.
Unfortunately, getting those celestial weapons was locked behind some tedious grinding that I just wasn’t willing to engage with. I only managed to get Tidus’s celestial weapon, and I think that’s enough, because having a whole party kitted out with the best gear in the game would make the final battles utterly trivial. And those celestial weapons are wildly over-powered. From breaking the damage cap, to tippling the Overdrive meter, to reducing the spell cost down to 1MP for Lulu and Yuna, these weapons are wild, but they’re really tedious to earn.
Near the end of the game you unlock a monster arena, where the proprietor asks you to go out and capture 10 of every enemy. Doing so gives you gobs of items and unlocks some tougher battles for better prizes, but the idea of just running back across the whole world capturing enemies is a lot more tedium than I’m willing to embark on. I’m already most of the way through a Living Dex in Pokemon, I don’t feel like doing it here too. Yuna and Auron’s weapons are gated behind this monster arena, while Lulu, Kimahri, and Tidus’s weapons are hidden behind some mini-games.
I’ve read horror stories about Tidus’s weapon, needing to win a Chocobo race with randomly placed balloons and birds. Some people report spending hours trying to win and failing. I somehow managed to win it on my 4th try. Lulu’s weapon requires you to dodge a randomly occurring lightning strike 200 times in a row. Kimahri has you hunting butterflies while dodging random encounters.
I haven’t even talked about Blitzball yet. It’s a sport that you can play, and there’s one mandatory match in the whole game. It’s kind of a shame the way they framed that one match, as you and your players are hopelessly out-matched. Your first game of Blitzball is a frustrating experience which made me never want to touch it again. By working your way through the tournaments you unlock overdrives and the celestial weapon for Wakka, but I found Blitzball to be a frustrating mess of a game. Each character has half a dozen stats and when you try to do an action based on those stats, it’s not deterministic. There’s a random variable element that means sometimes you’ll just be unlucky in your shot. I get that’s a better way to emulate sport, but I wasn’t willing to pour several hours into a mini-game that I didn’t enjoy.
All of this doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s unnecessary to get those celestial weapons, as cool as it is to be overpowered. They exist for the players who want to bring the battle system to it’s logical conclusion. For me, I’m happy enough just finishing the main story.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I had a fantastic time with Final Fantasy X. Sure, there are scenes where the age of the game shows itself. There are awkward animations and weird PS2-era stiffness. But the story is genuinely excellent, the characters are memorable, the combat remains satisfying moment to moment, and Spira feels like a real world with history, culture, religion, and consequences.
At this point, I would comfortably place Final Fantasy X among the best Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far. Certainly head and shoulders above the PS1 trilogy of games, but I’m not quite so sure if it supplants IV, V, and VI in my heart yet. It might, but I’m not ready to commit to a firm ranking yet.
But I will say that I do not want to be done with Spira yet. So I’m going to play Final Fantasy X-2 next, which I hadn’t originally planned on doing. I have vague memories of trying it about fifteen years ago and bouncing off almost immediately. I remember the opening J-pop concert scene, and the game play being focused around costume changes and then turning the game off after maybe half an hour. But now that I’m so much more familiar with the characters and the lore, I hope I’ll find a lot more joy this time around.
Final Fantasy X represents a pretty major shift for the franchise. Core series staples like the ATB that have been a staple were tossed out, voice acting was introduced, and the FMV cut scenes are just getting better and better. It’s another generational leap forward, and even 25 years later, the story still holds up to this day. I know some people hold Final Fantasy X as “the last good Final Fantasy”, which I doubt is fair. Nevertheless, I will continue to move forward in this series. Hope to see you again, soon.
There’s a certain kind of chaos that only real-time games can create. It’s the moment when your brain suddenly forgets every skill you’ve ever worked on the moment the time pressure is on. I delight in this feeling, and this is exactly where Illiterati shines for me. Designed by Gary Alaka, Rob Chew, and Jon Kang, with art by Audrey Jung, and published by Gap Closer Games in 2023, Illiterati is a cooperative real-time word game for 1 to 5 players. Illiterati tasks players with frantically building words from a limited supply of letter tiles, all in an effort to craft the necessary words to defeat the evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Or something like that.
I have to commend Illiterati for its premise. It’s unique and interesting, if a bit nonsensical. The League of Librarians are trying to save the world’s books, one word at a time, and the Illiterati are determined to destroy it. The theme doesn’t really matter, but I appreciate the attempt to bring theme into what could otherwise be just a straightforward word game.
Each round, players are dealt a number of tiles each, as well as having some tiles in the centre of the table. Each player is dealt a card that they’re trying to achieve. Maybe one player needs to make one long word, of 8 characters or more and have 3 purple symbols in that word, while another player can have multiple words, but all of their words need to related to restaurants & fast food chains. And have 3 orange symbols to boot.
During the real time phase, players can freely swap tiles with each other and with the library, that communal pile in the centre of the table. But when the time runs out, all the words in front of everyone need to be valid words. They don’t necessarily need to fulfill each players card, but the do need to be words. And no, CXYSF is NOT a word.
Any unused tiles get pushed into the library, and if the library exceeds its limit (which scales based on the difficulty you choose at the start of the game), then no one can complete their card this round, and the timer that triggers the loss condition ticks closer to doomsday. But if the library is clear, then any players who achieved their card gets to discard all the words they used to complete their objective. Then the Illiterati attack. You flip over one card from the Illiterati deck, and just do what it says. Often it’ll discard some random tiles breaking the words you had made in the real time phase, but where Illiterati gets really tricky is the row of villain cards slowly fills up. If you ever flip over a card and the artwork matches one of the cards already in your row, you place it on top, and you preform the actions for the whole stack, starting from the top and moving down. Once you’ve resolved the attack, all players draw more tiles from the bag to add to the pile in front of them (leftovers from last round, likely words that have had key letters removed, thanks due to the Illiterati attack), and a new round begins.
The players keep playing rounds until either everyone is able to complete their personal objective card, then a second personal objective card, and lastly, everyone completes the same final, harder objective card to win. They lose if the library is full too many times and the doomsday tracker fills up.
Right out of the gate, I have to say that I appreciate that there’s only one way to lose. It feels like in most cooperative games there’s half a dozen ways to lose and only a single way to win. I understand why, it forces players to trade off short term risks with long term goals, but I found the focused goals in Illiterati refreshing. That’s not to say that Illiterati isn’t without trade-offs, it absolutely is. Like, do you strain your brain to try and make words matching this rounds theme, or should you just hold off another round in the hopes you’ll get the right tiles to make the word creation process easier. If you need 3 hearts in your word, and your only heart tiles are C, F, and X, maybe it’s worth waiting. But every round that goes by means another Illiterati attack, and once those start to stack, they can really wreck your words, sending you into a death spiral.
I couldn’t stop myself from comparing Illiterati to Bananagrams, another real-time word game. Though Illiterati strips away the crossword-style layout and focuses more on free-form word construction. Each player can have and hold between rounds up to eight words in front of them, but those words can be as long as you can manage, which led to some great moments where someone manages to assemble an absurdly long word out of a pile of mismatched tiles. There’s also quite a bit of joy in the moment when you draw new tiles, and you look at your beautiful words and need to pull them all apart to fit in the newcoming tiles.
The real-time aspect of the game does something to my brain. Once the timer is going, my stress spikes, and suddenly I’ve forgotten every word I’ve ever know. I’ll be looking at a F, L, U, F, F, and Y, and try to spell YLUFFF. But when you manage to break past that mental barrier, you can start to feel really clever. Especially those moments when you feel like you’re in a safe space early, because all your tiles are ordered neatly into words, and you can start peering across the table to help others with their tricky tiles. I found immense satisfaction in the process of looking over a pile of random letters, then slowly shaping them all into words.
Illiterati is a wonderfully produced game, the wooden tiles are a delight to hold and handle. They have a satisfying clink in the bag as you dive your hand in. The artwork on the Illiterati cards is vibrant and full of whimsical villainy. The box itself even looks like a book when you stack it on your shelf. I love everything about this production.
As a Co-op game, Illiterati does a pretty great job of balancing having people focus on their own task, while offering moments where you can collaborate and work together. From shifting the right symbols to each other, to offering to take someone’s stray K, it does often feel like you’re working as a team. I can’t really comment on the dreaded ‘alpha gamer’ problem, as that’s not a dynamic that exists at my tables, but I suspect the timer is the real track to resolving that, though. A quarterback can’t tell everyone what to do until their own board is satisfied.
All this being said, your enjoyment of Illiterati is going to hinge almost entirely on how you feel about word games in general. If the idea of staring at a pile of letters and trying to form words fills your heart with dread, or if games like Scrabble or Bananagrams stress you out, then Illiterati probably isn’t going to change your mind. The pressure of the timer only amplifies that feeling. But if you enjoy that kind of challenge, there’s a lot here to like.
There’s also a decent amount of replayability built into the system. The objective decks are thick, and you only use a couple cards each game. There are multiple difficulty levels to explore, and the shifting combination of constraints and Illiterati effects keeps the experience from feeling too repetitive. It’s not endlessly variable, but it’s more than enough to support repeated plays with different groups.
At the end of the day, Illiterati is a fun, smart, and slightly chaotic cooperative word game. It might feel a bit simple at times, closer to Bananagrams without the spatial crossword puzzle, but I found Illiterati to be a ton of fun and am happy to add it into my permanant collection.
Disclaimer: A copy of Viticulture: Bordeaux was provided by Stonemaier Games
I’ve always found Viticulture to be a bit of a fascinating contradiction. On one hand, it presents this warm, inviting fantasy of running a Tuscan vineyard, slowly cultivating grapes, building various structures to support your wine making enterprise, and hiring the right staff to help launch your vineyard to success. On the other hand, the much more real hand, it’s a ruthless efficiency race where you need to optimize every single action if you actually want to win. Viticulture has gone through many iterations at this point, from the Tuscany expansion that blew up the options for players to choose, to the Viticulture: Essential Edition which shrunk it back down, taking the best ideas from the original game and expansion, to the Tuscany: Essential Edition which took that shrunk down version and bloated it back up just a little bit, to Viticulture World, which offered a collaborative spin on the wine making formula. Having so many options and ways to play means that there’s probably a preferred vintage for every Viticulture player out there. So when the Bordeaux expansion was announced, and it was “just a board” expansion, I was skeptical. Is just a board enough to meaningfully change the experience when there’s already so much variety in the Viticulture extended universe?
Bordeaux‘s main gimmick is the introduction of experts. By going to the “Hire and Expert” action in spring, you can place one of your expert cubes onto any action that does not already have an expert cube on it. The expert will then give you a unique benefit when you go to that space for the rest of the game. Another fairly large change from previous boards is the “make one trade” action, which now has a Buy/Sell grid where each trade can only happen once per game. Beyond that, there’s obviously been some tweaking here and there, and if you aren’t familiar with the Tuscany side of Viticulture, the game now takes place over 4 seasons instead of just 2.
The first thing that really stood out to me is how much intention seems baked into the design. There’s a clear awareness of Viticulture’s long-standing criticisms, especially around card draw luck and early-game inertia. In previous games, it would take me 3 or 4 seasons to produce a single wine. Yes, you could just say “skill issue” and call it a day, but I know I wasn’t alone in feeling that starting a game of Viticulture can feel like a bit of a slog. Now, you start the game with 2 fields sold, a grape and a wine already produced, a bit of extra cash, and 1 residual income already on the board. All of these changes made the game feel more honed. We spent less time clearing the cruft off our farms and our strategies diversified from each other much faster than in previous games.
Another major complaint that Bordeaux directly addresses head-on is the card randomness. The grape vine cards and the wine order cards now have two face up at all time for players to pick from, along with just drawing off the top of the deck. This sounds like a small change on paper, but it’s such a breath of fresh air, being able to plan earlier in the season which wines to cultivate with the expectation of picking up the associated order in the fall. This change makes the planting grapes, to harvesting grapes into wines, to fulfilling orders pipeline feel so much more straightforward and reliable. No longer are you aging masses of red wines in your warehouse only to draw nothing but white and sparkling wine orders.
I didn’t find the expanded wake up chart nor the 4 season structure of this board to be radical changes to the game, but my preferred flavour of Viticulture has always been with the Tuscany: Essential Edition board, which already incorporated those changes. If you’re coming from base Viticulture or even Viticulture EE, having 4 seasons to contend with will feel like a dramatic shift. I do like the tweaked actions on this board. With 4 actions in each season and only starting with 3 or 4 workers, you really need to pick and choose which actions you want to complete each year. In past games there were actions that were seldom taken, but in Bordeaux, every action feels viable and worthwhile.
Having every action feel worthwhile feeds into the expert system I mentioned above. Throughout the game you can place your experts on actions to give yourself an extra benefit when you go to that location, but only one expert per location is allowed. This further forces players to diversify their strategies and it creates a compelling reason to come back and play more Bordeaux. The winner of one game didn’t even sell any wine, they managed to earn most of their points through buildings and managed to clear the score threshold before I was able to accelerate my wine order fulfillment to a point where I would eclipse him.
The expert bonuses are anything but subtle. They provide real, tangible benefits, sometimes taking a mediocre action into one you want to use every round. You do need to be careful though, as it costs an action to put an expert out in the first place. If you do that, make sure you then use the expert, otherwise you’re just wasting time, and that spells disaster in a race game like Viticulture.
In older versions of the game, there’s a certain predictability to how turns unfold. Seasoned players largely knew which spaces were going to be contested, and you would roughly how people will progress. But with this new board, that predictability starts to fade. One player forced themselves to the top of the turn order track to guarantee themselves an extra worker in the first winter, but when the strategies start to drift earlier in the game, you’ll find those old habits biting you in the back. The other players exhausted all their workers in the fall, leaving the player who denied themselves the better benefits lower on the turn order track all alone in winter anyway.
There are moments where it almost feels like Viticulture is bending over backwards to make sure you can do what you want, whether that’s through flexible trade options, more generous resource flows, or even action spaces that let you sidestep traditional restrictions entirely. Some theme has been lost in favour of more engaging and honed mechanics. Sure, you can plant that Cabernet Sauvignon without a irrigation tower. It’s a small criticism, and I know I’m more than happy to take a better gameplay experience at the expense of some theme, but for a game like Viticulture, which always felt a little more theme heavy than your average euro game, I can’t help but weep a little.
I walked away from Bordeaux feeling a bit like I did the first time I revisited Viticulture after a long break. I was reminded of why I loved the game in the first place, but also surprised by how differently it approached problems I’ve simply accepted as part of the experience for years. The faster start, reduced card frustration, and expert system all push the game in a more flexible direction, and while I do miss some of the tighter restrictions and thematic touches that defined earlier versions, I can’t deny how much fun I had exploring this new board.
I don’t think that Bordeaux is the definitive way to play Viticulture, nor will it be the board I pull out when introducing this game to new players. Tuscany still offers a more focused and demanding puzzle, and that’s usually the experience I’m craving when Viticulture hits the table. But Bordeaux has earned something that very few expansions manage after a decade of releases: it made me excited to play Viticulture again. Not because it replaced what came before, but because it showed me there were still new strategies, new stories, and new mistakes waiting to be discovered in a game I thought I already knew inside and out.
