By this point, you probably know that I’m a fan of word games. From Hardback to Paperbackto Paperback Adventures to Bananagrams and Illiterati, I enjoy word games quite a bit, and I enjoy discovering new ones. I know there are books and books of word games, and dozens of apps with daily word puzzles that I could be playing, but I’m always fascinated by how many different games there are to play using nothing more than letters and words. Half the fun for me is simply discovering another take on such a familiar idea.
Letter Tycoon has players making words with cards. Each player starts with seven letter cards in hand, and there are three common cards available in the middle of the table. On your turn, you can use as many of those common letters as you want to make a word. Depending on how long your word is, you’ll earn money which is points. The only thing you use your money for is to buy patents. Patents are really the heart of the game because some of them will give you persistent abilities for the rest of the game.
Most patents simply give you an extra cent whenever another player uses one of your letters. Naturally, that means you should probably grab the E, T, A, O, and I patents first. They’re more expensive, of course, but they also seem like they’ll pay for themselves over the course of the game. The less common letters like Q, W, and X are cheaper, but they usually come with unique powers as well. Some let you double the money you earn from a word, while another lets you create two words in a single turn. There are some neat ideas in the patent system, and I do like the feeling of gradually building a little engine around the letters you own.
The goal is ultimately to accumulate wealth. The game ends once someone reaches the wealth threshold, which is calculated using both the money they have on hand and the value of the patents they’ve purchased. Buying an expensive patent doesn’t actually reduce your wealth because its purchase price counts as part of your assets. It’s kind of like buying a house. Yes, you spend a lot of money, but you also gain an asset that’s theoretically worth the same amount. Well… maybe that’s not the best comparison these days.
Letter Tycoon is an interesting concept, but it falls short compared to many of the other word games I’ve played recently, especially Hardback. The biggest issue for me is randomness. You’re drawing back up to seven cards every round, and sometimes you just draw a terrible hand. There were turns where I had a single vowel available between all ten letters I could use, and there were other turns where it felt like I had nothing but O’s and U’s. Sometimes a bad draw simply means you don’t have a worthwhile turn, and that kind of sucks.
Another issue is that there are no wild cards. You’re completely beholden to the ten letters available to you. Maybe those letters don’t let you spell anything useful. Maybe they don’t let you create a word long enough to afford the patent you wanted. That’s probably uncommon, but the possibility exists, and it’s frustrating. Coming from games like Hardback and Paperback, it’s hard not to compare them. Paperback always has a common vowel available, while Hardback lets you turn any card into a wild. Those little design decisions give you just enough freedom to make the words you want to make, or at least turn a bad hand into something salvageable. I never quite felt that same flexibility here.
Another reason the game frustrates me is that you simply earn more money for making bigger words. There’s nothing really pushing you toward making interesting words or finding clever combinations of patents. You just make the biggest word you can because bigger words equal more money. Yes, to buy a patent you have to use a letter in your word, but you’ll rarely be blocked out of buying patents due to none existing for the letters you just used. Compare that to Hardback, where you might deliberately use certain letters because they synergize with one another or because they activate special abilities. Here, having a larger vocabulary is simply better. I’m not terribly against that in principle, but it also feels like the design could have done something more interesting with the letters.
I guess that’s where a lot of my frustration comes from. I’ve played a lot of great word games, so when I play one that hasn’t really solved these issues, I notice it immediately. That’s probably a little unfair. Not every word game needs to solve problems the same way, and not every game should copy Hardback. But after seeing other designs tackle these issues so elegantly, it’s difficult not to miss those ideas when they’re absent.
My next criticism is that individual games don’t really feel that different from one another. Every time you sit down to Letter Tycoon, the only thing that’s changing is the letters in your hand. There’s no real arc to the experience. Sure, you might pick up a couple of powers that let you double your earnings or make two words, but for the most part you’re simply using ten letters to make words over and over until someone accumulates enough wealth to end the game. I never got the feeling that I was discovering new strategies or that future plays would unfold much differently than the previous one.
I will say that I really enjoy the artwork. All of the patent cards are illustrated as blueprints for different inventions and technologies, and they look great on the table. It’s a small thing, but I appreciated the presentation every time I looked at a new patent.
I think Letter Tycoon is worth trying once. I don’t think there are many hidden strategies waiting to be uncovered, and I don’t think there are many reasons for me to come back after a play or two. If you don’t have a large vocabulary, you’ll simply do worse, and unfortunately there are plenty of other word games that offer more interesting decisions, more variety between plays, or better ways to reward clever use of shorter words instead of simply making the longest word possible.
At the end of the day, I played Letter Tycoon twice on Board Game Arena, and I think that’s where I’m going to leave this one. It has a few neat ideas, particularly with the patent system, but when I have so many stronger word games on my shelf, it’s hard to justify coming back.
Hansa Teutonica has got to be one of the most uninviting board games around. Granted, it came out in 2009, but in a market where every game has bright, vibrant, beautiful artwork on full display, here’s Mr. Beige Boy with his stupid little moustache staring morosely at the player as he signs his tax documents. And yet, Hansa Teutonica has endured because its gameplay is so interactive and interesting. This is the quintessential example of “don’t judge a book by its cover.”
In Hansa Teutonica, players are members of the Hanseatic League trying to spread their influence by establishing routes of traders and merchants. On your turn, you’ll place a number of your pieces onto spaces between towns on the board. If every space on a route is your colour, you can claim that route and establish your influence in one of the trade houses at either end.
If someone happens to be in your way (and trust me, they will be in your way a lot), you can bump players off their space on a route. Displacing people is a core part of the game. It costs you, though. When you place one of your cubes in a spot where an opposing cube already lays, you must discard an extra cube from your supply into the general stock. Then the displaced player gets to place the kicked out cube, plus an extra cube onto an adjacent path. This feels like a huge cost, giving your opponent an extra token on the board, but you know what they say. A cube on a prime route is worth two on other routes.
Once a route belongs entirely to you, you can spend an action to claim it. Whoever has the most recent trading post in the trade houses connected to that route earns points, and then you have a decision to make. You can establish a trading post by placing one of your markers into a trade office beside the route, potentially scoring points every time that route is completed in the future. Alternatively, if the route is connected to one of the guild houses, you can instead improve one of your abilities. These upgrades remove pieces from your player board, increasing the number of pieces available in your supply while also making your actions stronger. It’s one of those satisfying upgrades where you don’t really feel like you’re giving anything up. There’s also a third option available on one specific route that lets you place one of your discs onto the board for an immediate point bonus. Regardless of which option you choose, every cube on that completed route is removed from the board and returned to the general supply.
A big part of the game revolves around establishing yourself in those trade offices and guild houses scattered across the map. One of the biggest scoring opportunities comes from being the first player to connect the left side of the board to the right, rewarding players who expand efficiently across the entire network rather than simply fighting over one corner.
The other major source of points comes from controlling those trade offices. Whenever someone completes a route next to a trade office you control, you score a point. That can become incredibly lucrative. One of my favourite spots to grab is the trade office beside the route that allows players to upgrade their actions. That route gets completed over and over throughout the game because everyone wants those upgrades. Instead of placing their own marker into the office, they’ll usually take the upgrade instead, and every single time they do, they’re quietly feeding you points.
And that decision itself, the short-term gain of upgrading your actions versus the long-term investment of claiming that trade office, is absolutely delicious. There are decisions like that scattered all throughout Hansa Teutonica. How often should you bump opponents, knowing it costs you an extra worker while giving them an extra worker in return? How often should you intentionally get in someone’s way, hoping they’ll eventually bump you off so you can place two cubes with a single action? Sometimes that first placement is almost a sacrifice. You’re betting that another player will follow through with the route you expect them to take. Of course, if they suddenly pivot somewhere else, you’re left with one lonely worker languishing on a forgotten route, wondering what could have been.
As the game goes on, everyone becomes more powerful. Players earn more actions, their actions become stronger, and the pace of the game accelerates dramatically. One of the upgrades lets you move workers already on the board. Getting cubes onto the board in the first place can be expensive, but once they’re out there, they’re surprisingly mobile. Being able to move three workers before claiming a route lets you swoop into opportunities that didn’t even exist a turn earlier. You spend the early game building your infrastructure, and then the late game becomes this wonderful scramble where everyone is repositioning pieces and trying to capitalize on whatever opportunities appear.
And that’s really what Hansa Teutonica is all about: capitalizing on situations as they present themselves. You’re constantly watching what your opponents are doing, trying to predict where they’ll go next, and slipping just enough into their plans to gain a small edge. Maybe you occupy a key route they wanted. Maybe you establish yourself in a guild house because you’re almost certain they’ll use that adjacent route to upgrade an action. Maybe you leave a cube in just the right place, practically inviting someone to bump it because you’ll benefit slightly more from the displacement. The game ends as soon as someone reaches twenty points, and once everyone’s engines have developed, those points come surprisingly quickly. Hansa Teutonica doesn’t so much end as it comes to a screaming halt.
This game is an absolute delight to play, provided you enjoy bumping shoulders with your opponents. If your favourite Eurogames are the kind where everyone puts their head down, quietly optimizes their own little puzzle, and compares scores two hours later, this probably isn’t the game for you. Hansa Teutonica wants you paying attention to every single move everyone else makes. It wants you delighting in getting in each other’s way. It wants you relishing the opportunity to bump someone off a route or profit from their decision to improve an action instead of taking a trade office. It’s a far more interactive game than that beige board and drab cover would ever lead you to believe.
The first time I played Hansa Teutonica, the person who owned it pulled it off the shelf and casually said, “Oh, this one’s actually on my sell list. I haven’t played it yet, though, so we should probably give it one play before I get rid of it.” After we finished, he immediately took out his phone and removed the “for sale” listing. Honestly, I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. There really is a fantastic game hiding underneath that unbelievably drab presentation.
To be fair, the subsequently released Big Box Edition does improve things. The board is more colourful, the cover art is better… although only slightly better. It’s still hardly going to catch your eye from across the room, but it is easier to look at than the original. Perhaps more importantly, the rulebook is significantly improved. I had an awful time working through the original rules, trying to remember the differences between cubes and discs, what counted as supply, what was available, what wasn’t available… it was just a chore. The newer rulebook presents everything much more clearly, which makes learning the game considerably easier.
Overall, I don’t have much to complain about with Hansa Teutonica. I’ve played it quite a few times now, and I’ve enjoyed every single play. Sure, your group might eventually develop a bit of a meta around which opening routes are strongest, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. Once the early game settles, strategies naturally branch off as opportunities appear, and reacting to those opportunities is what makes the game so much fun. I also think it plays better with more players than fewer. The extra interaction really brings the board to life. This is the kind of Eurogame that gets people talking, laughing, blocking each other, and generally messing with one another’s plans, and those are exactly the kinds of Eurogames I enjoy most.
Last week I talked about Gaia Project and how that game, with all of its decisions and cascading consequences, makes my brain hurt. Hansa Teutonica makes me smile. Yes, there are still plenty of meaningful decisions to make, but they’re so much less mentally taxing. There are fewer gears constantly turning in your head. Instead, the joy comes from putting down a cube, knowing you’re getting in someone’s way, looking them square in the eyes, and silently daring them to bump you off the route. Not many Eurogames encourage that kind of interaction, and I think that’s what makes Hansa Teutonica so special.
It can be difficult to review a game like Gaia Project. At this point, everyone who likes the game has already played it or already knows they like it. It feels like everyone who hasn’t played it yet has a reason. Either it’s too intimidating, or they bounced off the pedigree that Gaia Project was born from, namely Terra Mystica or Age of Innovation. It’s one of those games that has built such a reputation for itself that most people have already decided where they stand before the box even hits the table. And the people who love it, LOVE IT.
Gaia Project is a one-to-four-player resource management Euro game where players take on one of fourteen asymmetric factions and attempt to utilize their limited resources to expand their influence across the galaxy and earn the most victory points. There’s a lot to do in Gaia Project, and the game is played over six rounds. Every round, players take one action on their turn, with turns continuing around the table until each player eventually passes. Once you pass, you’re done for the round, but everyone else gets to keep going until they’ve exhausted what they can do.
One of my favourite mechanisms in the game is actually its player interaction through the power system. On your player board, each faction has these little power bowls with power tokens slowly cycling between them, Mancala style. Whenever someone builds or improves a building near one of yours, you get the opportunity to charge power. If all you have nearby is a humble little mine, you’ll get a single power charge for free. But as your buildings become more advanced, you’ll often have the option to charge two or even three power instead. The catch is that charging the extra power costs you one or two victory points.
At first that sounds completely backwards. Why would you willingly throw away points? The answer is that power lets you perform additional actions or convert it into resources that will often earn you more points than you sacrificed in the first place. It’s one of those wonderfully Euro-style decisions where you’re constantly evaluating whether a short-term loss creates a larger long-term gain.
The game starts with everyone choosing a faction. I’ve read online discussions where people argue this is where games are won and lost. Some groups will study the map before the game even starts and actually bid victory points just for the privilege of choosing factions first because they believe they can exploit that particular galaxy layout better than everyone else. Our group is nowhere near that level of meta. We simply deal two faction boards to each player and let everyone choose between those options, which honestly is more than enough decision-making for us.
Every faction has its own home planet type. One of the primary actions throughout the game is building mines, but before you can build anything, you first have to reach a planet. At the beginning of the game your ships can only reach adjacent spaces, but one of the technology tracks gradually extends that range to two, three, or even four spaces away, letting you leap across the galaxy, but I’ll touch on technology tracks in a little bit.
Of course, simply reaching a planet isn’t enough. Unless it’s your faction’s native planet type, you’ll also have to terraform it. There are seven planet types in the game, and every faction naturally lives on only one of them. Every other planet requires varying amounts of terraforming before it becomes habitable. That’s another important consideration when choosing your faction. If your faction is only one terraforming step away from the same planet types as two other factions, all three of you are going to spend the game fighting over those worlds.
So to build a mine you need to reach a planet, terraform it if necessary, and then simply pay one ore and two credits to place your mine. Once a building goes onto the board, it never leaves your control. That permanence is important because players can absolutely box one another into corners, limiting future expansion and cutting off access to sections of the galaxy. Since every building you place also uncovers additional income on your player board, every placement feels significant. Early on, each mine you put down increases your ore income, slowly growing your engine one building at a time.
Another major action is upgrading your buildings. Buildings follow a strict technology tree. Mines upgrade into trading stations, trading stations can become either planetary institutes or academies, and academies can eventually receive one final upgrade. Whenever you upgrade, the old building returns to your player board and the new building replaces it on the map. Earlier I mentioned that buildings never leave the board, and that’s still true. You’re simply replacing your own structure with a better one, retaining control of the planet you initially placed it on.
The interesting part is what happens on your player board. Returning a mine means covering up the income that mine was providing. Sure, your new trading station will earn you credits each income phase, but you’ve also just reduced your ore production by reclaiming that mine. You’re constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It’s also worth mentioning that upgrading a mine into a trading station costs either three credits or six credits. The cheaper cost only applies if the upgraded building will charge another player’s power, rewarding players for building near one another (and punishing those who choose to build in their own little corner of the map). Otherwise, you’re paying the full six credits. Trading stations produce more income over time, but they’re still expensive enough that timing really matters. Upgrade too early and you suddenly find yourself with fewer mines on the board and not enough ore to continue expanding. Upgrade too aggressively toward the higher-tier buildings and you may have these incredible abilities while simultaneously wondering why you’re broke all the time.
Another action is forming federations. Whenever you can connect buildings with a combined power value of seven or more, you may create a federation. If there are empty spaces between your buildings, you can bridge those gaps with satellites. Completing a federation earns you a federation token, which is usually worth a healthy chunk of points along with some useful resource bonus. More importantly, federation tokens become incredibly important later in the game.
Then there are the technology tracks. By spending four knowledge, you can advance one step on any of the game’s six technology tracks. These tracks affect all sorts of things: reducing terraforming costs, increasing your shipping range, providing Q.I.C. cubes that let you travel or terraform special planets, or unlocking Gaiaformers that let you colonize the strange purple Gaia planets that eventually become habitable. Every track pushes your engine in a different direction.
Getting to the top of a track isn’t easy. You need a federation token before you can move from the fifth to the sixth space, and when you do, you actually flip that federation token over as payment. On top of that, only one player may occupy the top, most powerful space of each technology track, so getting there first can be a huge advantage.
You can also advance these tracks by acquiring technology tiles. Building an academy lets you claim one, and these tiles vary wildly. Some provide additional income every round, some grant one-time resource boosts, and others offer entirely new bonus actions you can perform each round. Whenever you claim a standard technology tile from a row, you also advance one step on that corresponding technology track.
Near the top of the technology board are advanced technology tiles. If you’re already sitting on the fifth or sixth step of a technology track, you may claim one of these instead. They’re much stronger, but they come with two costs. First, you need to flip another federation token. Second, you have to cover one of your existing technology tiles. Sometimes that’s easy if you’re covering a one-time resource bonus you’ve already used. Other times you’re giving up an income bonus you’ve relied on all game. Every decision seems to create another decision.
There are plenty of other actions available as well, but I think by this point you probably get the idea. Gaia Project is a huge, complex board game built on interlocking systems. It’s a game about efficiency and squeezing just enough resources together to perform one more action before the round ends. A critical mistake early in the game might mean that next round you only get two or three actions before having to pass because you’ve completely starved yourself of resources. It is absolutely brutal by design.
The flipside is that when you finally unlock the puzzle, it must feel incredible. You spend six resources here, gain four resources back there, use those four resources to perform two additional actions, move up multiple technology tracks, expand across the galaxy, and somehow everything falls into place. I think that feeling is exactly why Gaia Project is so beloved. It’s the kind of game that rewards careful planning and deliberate sequencing. There isn’t random luck waiting to ruin your strategy. The only thing standing between you and victory is how well you’ve thought through your decisions.
That being said, this is absolutely not multiplayer solitaire. You cannot simply stare at your own player board and expect to do well. So many things in Gaia Project are finite, especially the real estate. Players are constantly trying to snake planets away from each other one turn earlier than expected. The shared power actions and Q.I.C. actions can only be claimed once per round, so being first and grabbing the action everyone else desperately wanted can completely swing an entire round. It’s an incredibly crunchy, cerebral experience.
So why don’t I like it?
I think my biggest problem is that I’m just not very good at Gaia Project. I am the player who reaches round two or three and suddenly realizes I only get two or three actions because I mismanaged my resources somewhere half an hour earlier. Then I spend half the game trying to recover enough income just to function again. Nearly every time I’ve played Gaia Project, I’ve come in dead last. I’m scoring around one hundred points while everyone else is sitting comfortably between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and ninety. It doesn’t feel particularly good. I constantly feel hamstrung because I’m missing one credit, or I don’t quite have enough knowledge to reach the next technology level that would unlock the thing I actually wanted to do.
So my main problem with Gaia Project is really just a skill issue.
The game also takes about four hours, so it’s not exactly something I’m eager to pull off the shelf on a Wednesday night when everyone has work the next morning. I’ve made similar criticisms of Terra Mystica and Age of Innovation. They’re all descendants of the same system. They share a lot of DNA, even though people who have played them extensively will rightfully tell you they’re all very different games and that those differences matter tremendously. I don’t doubt them. They’re just all built around a style of resource optimization that I consistently struggle with.
The question I’ve been asking myself after my most recent play is this: how many times am I willing to play a game I don’t particularly enjoy because someone else at the table absolutely loves it? I think the important context to answer that question is frequency. We probably play Gaia Project once a year, at best. Once a year I’m perfectly happy to sit down, play a game I know I’m not good at, and get absolutely curb-stomped because my friends genuinely enjoy pulling the levers and dancing with the system. I can absolutely see where people derive joy from Gaia Project. I really can. I’m just not one of those people. Maybe we’d play faster if we played it more often. Maybe I’d remember to build a resource engine first before rushing the top tier buildings if we played it twice in a row. But we’ll never know.
For me, Gaia Project ends up being a frustrating experience because I constantly feel handcuffed by my lack of resources. I’m constantly one credit short of a Happy Meal. There are literally hundreds of games I’d rather play. At the same time, I can’t ignore the incredible design achievement sitting in front of me. Balancing fourteen asymmetric factions while creating this kind of strategic depth and ridiculously high skill ceiling is remarkable.
It’s honestly amazing looking at the highest-rated players on Board Game Arena and seeing people with over sixteen hundred games played maintaining something like a ninety-one percent win rate. Then I watch expert playthroughs where players casually break two hundred points and it feels almost unreal. Watching them play is kind of like watching Bruce Lee smash concrete with his bare hands. Then I stand up, turn around, and immediately stub my toe on a brick wall.
I am not Bruce Lee. I will never be Bruce Lee.
But for all the Bruce Lees of the board gaming community, I’m genuinely glad Gaia Project exists.
Before I started this whole Final Fantasy endeavour, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was my most-played Final Fantasy game by a long shot. I played it on my platinum Game Boy Advance SP, and I played the daylights out of this game. It’s one of the first times I remember going onto good old GameFAQs to figure out which abilities I needed to unlock the various classes, which, on dial up internet was quite the chore. But I don’t want to launch straight into my nostalgia. Let’s talk about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance itself, what I love about it, and what changed during this most recent playthrough.
The Story Begins
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens with a school-sanctioned snowball fight. You play as Marche, the new kid at school. On your team are the weakling Mewt and the strong, confident redheaded Ritz. The teacher gives everyone a little bit of instruction before setting the kids loose to pelt each other with snowballs.
I actually love this as a tutorial. It teaches the player movement, positioning, and attack range, all wrapped up in a scenario that feels surprisingly natural instead of throwing you into a random battle against goblins for no particular reason. Unfortunately, the other team is full of bullies, and they all decide to pick on Mewt. After a couple of rounds of combat, the cutscene takes over, and one of the bullies beans Mewt with a rock hidden inside a snowball. Little jerks. The teacher watching the scene puts an end to the snowball fight and the kids go their separate ways.
After school Mewt says he’s picking up an old book from the bookstore and asks if everyone wants to come over to Marche’s house to read it together. During this conversation you also see Cid across the street getting reprimanded by some adults while looking pathetic and defeated. It’s here you learn that Cid is actually Mewt’s father and that Mewt’s mother has passed away, leaving Cid trying to deal with his own grief while raising his son. It’s not exactly an easy situation, and it’s one of the first hints that beneath this bright, colourful fantasy game there’s something much sadder going on.
The group heads over to Marche’s house, where we meet Marche’s brother Doned, who uses a wheelchair and has been in poor health for quite some time. Then comes a conversation that probably every adolescent nerd who’s ever played video games or read fantasy books has had with their friends. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this fantasy world was real?” and “I’d love to live in a video game.” It’s that childhood dream of escaping into a world where you have power and agency instead of feeling helpless. After this escapist fantasy, Ritz and Mewt depart, and the kids go to bed.
That night, the world changes. The school transforms into a rocky plains crawling with monsters. Your school transforms into a bustling city crawling with various colourful races. Marche is lifted into the air, his pyjamas transform into battle leathers, and suddenly he’s standing in the middle of a fantasy world.
Marche immediately bumps into a Bangaa, a humanoid lizard race, and casually calls him a lizard—which, it turns out, is a terrible slur. Montblanc, the ever-cheerful Moogle, rushes in to save you before the offended Bangaa challenges you to an engagement.
Enagements & The Laws That Govern Them
In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, every battle is called an engagement, and every engagement is overseen by judges. These judges enforce a different set of laws that everyone in the engagement is expected to obey. One battle might forbid fire magic while rewarding ice attacks. Another battle might prohibit swords entirely. Sometimes the laws will barely affect your party, while others completely cripple a specific character, or essentially render a battle unwinnable. If swords are forbidden, suddenly your soldier class characters are having a very bad day. On the other hand, whenever the law prohibits Control actions, I always cackle because I’ve basically never used Beastmaster’s Control ability, so it’s practically a law-free battle for me.
Usually, breaking a law earns you a yellow card, earning you a fine of some gil or an item that you’ll lose after the engagement. Sometimes characters will get punished by having a certain stat reduced, which feels like a much worse punishment. Break enough laws, though, and you receive a red card, and that unit gets ejected from the engagement entirely, and you’ll need to bail them out of jail for a much larger sum.
From what I remember, this law system is at the centre of a lot of people’s complaints about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. There are situations where you’ll be fighting five monsters and one of the laws is “Don’t damage monsters.” So… what exactly are you supposed to do? The answer shows up partway through the story when Ezel opens a card shop, allowing you to add or remove laws before battles. At first you might wonder why you’d ever add another law, but it’s important to remember that every law that forbids something will also reward something else. If swords are forbidden, bows earn Judge Points instead. Judge Points, or JP, are awarded for following the rewarded law or for delivering the finishing blow to an enemy. Later in the story those Judge Points can be spent to summon powerful Totemas, dealing large MP or HP damage, depending on the race of the character who summoned it.
I feel that the law system is much more interesting than people often give it credit for. Yes, there are moments where the laws feel arbitrary or downright unfair, but more often than not they push me to think about battles differently or use classes and equipment I might otherwise ignore. It pushes me to diversify my party instead of railroading everyone into one specific path.
Clans, Your Found Family
Montblanc invites Marche to join his newly formed clan, and from there Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens up. You take on missions, recruit new members to your clan, and explore Ivalice, plonking down new locations on a barren map. Along the way you reunite with Ritz, meet Ezel, who as I said above has figured out how to manipulate the laws, and eventually encounter Prince Mewt. In this fantasy world, Mewt’s mother is alive again, and his disgraced father is now the respected Judge Master. Everything he’s ever wanted exists in this world. Marche, however, is determined to get home because he asserts that this world simply isn’t real. Ritz doesn’t necessarily disagree with him, but she enjoys the freedom and confidence she’s found here and has little interest in helping Marche return to the old world. Prince Mewt actively opposes Marche’s quest, strengthening the laws, sending judges after him, and even placing a bounty on his head. Honestly, it makes perfect sense. Here Mewt has power, privilege, and status. Back home he has almost nothing.
I was telling my wife recently that when I originally played this game, I didn’t agree with Marche. I was firmly on Team Mewt. Why would I ever want to leave this fantasy world and go back to reality? It wasn’t until I stood there and actually spoke those words out loud as an adult that I realized how sad that proposition really is. Only someone who’s deeply unhappy with their real life wants to abandon it entirely for a fantasy. As a kid, I understood Mewt completely. As an adult, I understand Marche and why escaping to a fantasy isn’t healthy. Throughout the story, Marche wavers. While he tracks down the crystals guarded by the Totemas and destroys them one by one, believing that breaking the fifth crystal will unravel this world and send everyone home, he’s riddled with doubt. Is it fair of him to rip Mewt away from his fantasy? Does he even want to go back to being the new kid at a new school, living with a single mother whose attention is spent mostly on his sickly little brother? It’s actually a surprisingly melancholy story when you stop and think about it. Three friends fundamentally disagree about what’s best, and eventually those disagreements are settled through violence because there simply isn’t another option.
Unfortunately for Marche, even after destroying the fifth crystal the world doesn’t simply disappear. It continues to exist because there are still people who genuinely want it to. His brother, Doned is one of them. In the real world he’s sickly and confined to a wheelchair. Here he can run, fight, explore, and live a full life. Of course he doesn’t want to leave. He spends the later half of the game actively sabotaging Marche’s plans because, from his perspective, Marche is trying to destroy the only world where he’s able and happy. It’s an interesting premise because Marche spends the entire game trying to save everyone by dragging them back to reality, while almost everyone he cares about is desperately trying to stop him because they’ve escaped the difficult circumstances back home. As a kid I understood the desire to escape. As an adult I understand why living permanently inside an escapist fantasy isn’t really living at all.
I will say that I find Ritz’s motivation for staying in this world relatively weak. In the real world, her hair is naturally white and she dyes it red every day. In this world, her hair stays red. And that’s about it! At least with Marche, Donad, and Mewt they have much stronger reasons for their conflict. Although I will say Donad coming around to agreeing with Marche to leave this world felt a little too easy. I can’t imagine someone agreeing to give up their ability to walk so easy, but hey, this game is intended for a younger audience. For the most part, the game does a really good job of giving each character their own motivations and showing how they are challenged and grow. Which is more than I can say for the sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, but that’s a tale for another day.
Jobs & Character Customization
What really made me fall in love with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, though, was the gameplay, and more specifically how the game lets you build your characters. Each character belong to one of five races, and every race has its own collection of jobs, with some overlap.
The Humes are your traditional human characters, beginning as Soldiers and Archers before branching into Defenders, Paladins, Ninjas, White Mages, Black Mages, and Thieves. Every job allows the character to equip different weapons, and most weapons will teach a different ability to the character holding it. Equip a sword with Mindbreak, and your Soldier can immediately use that skill. At the end of each battle, the entire party receives some Ability Points, or AP. Keep that weapon equipped for long enough and eventually you’ll master it, allowing you to continue using the skill even after swapping out the weapon that provides it.
New classes unlock by mastering abilities from previous jobs, so you’re constantly planning several steps ahead. If you want to get your Hume to the Ninja Job, you’ll need to master 2 thief action abilities. If you want access to the powerful Illusionist class that can damage all enemies at once, you’ll need 5 black mage abilities and 3 white mage abilities.
The Moogles lean toward magical and technical roles with the Gadgeteer, Gunner, and Mog Knight classes. The Bangaa focus on brute force with the Templar, Dragoon, and Gladiator classes. The Viera become elegant Archers, Snipers, Assassins, and Red Mages. Then there are the Nu Mou, who are probably my favourite race in the game. They’re these wonderfully melancholy, Eeyore-looking creatures who specialize almost entirely in magic. I’ve honestly never really explored their Beastmaster line because their spellcasting is just so absurdly good. Once you unlock Turbo MP, these little magical Eeyores transform into walking tactical nukes, dropping Firaga’s left and right, and I absolutely love them.
Most of the battles will let you bring 6 characters into battle, with Marche always being included. This means 6 sets of equipment and skills to balance and swap around between each battle. It takes 2 or 3 battles to master some of the cheaper abilities, but with 6 characters all earning AP, it’s pretty likely that at least one character will master an ability every battle. This means between every battle you’ll need to go into the party screen to swap gear to continue unlocking new abilities for your characters.
Doublecast + Summon knocked out all 5 of these enemies in one turn.
I know this level of party management probably sounds tedious to some people, but I absolutely love it. Between almost every battle I’m opening menus, swapping equipment, changing jobs, assigning abilities, and figuring out what everyone should learn next. Sometimes that means intentionally giving someone a weaker weapon because it teaches an ability they haven’t mastered yet. Because I’ve played this game so many times, I inevitably railroad Marche toward Ninja so he can learn Double Sword as soon as possible to wield two blades at once. Likewise, I almost always push a Viera into Sniper and then Assassin so they can combine Concentrate with Last Breath, Ko’ing enemies with an 80% hit rate. That, combined with their absurd speed means I start every battle immedately deleting one opponent from the battlefield before they even get a chance to move.
I do like this system and how it creates an arc for your characters, but there are certainly some downsides. First, it does take a long time to train up a unit to a point where they’re use able. It can be frustrating when you send your main units off on Dispatch missions, using a non-default unit just feels anemic. Also, sometimes grinding abilities just to satisfy prerequisites can feel like wasted time, like needing to learn thief skills to unlock the Ninja. As soon as I unlock the ninja, I never touch those thief skills again. This system sounds like it would reward exploring, but really, once you get every character dialed in on the two classes they’re going to utilize in the end game, then you’re pretty well done building those characters.
Even with my favourite classes dialed in, every time I replay Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I try to explore at least one or two jobs I usually ignore. This time I invested heavily into turning a Moogle into a Mog Knight, and after getting a decent amount of strength through their level ups, I swapped them over to a gunner, dealing really decent damage from clear across the map. Those were both classes I’d barely touched before.
Unfortunately this playthrough also brought along something I’d never experienced before. I lost Montblanc forever during a battle in the Jagd regions, where the judges don’t exist, the laws don’t apply, and death is permanent. Thinking back, I don’t think I’d ever actually lost a character before.
My Criticisms
Which brings me to one of my biggest criticisms of the game: saving. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance does a remarkably poor job of reminding you to save. In between battles on the map screen, you have to press Start, enter the System menu, and choose to manually save. It’s incredibly easy to forget for literally hours at a time, especially if the device you’re playing on has a decent sleep option, like the Steam Deck has. Back when I played this on my Game Boy Advance SP, I’d just snap the lid shut whenever I was done and rely on sleep mode to pick up where I left off. To really drive this pain point home, if you happen to lose a battle, or if Marche breaks the law and gets a red card, you get a Game Over screen, which kicks you back out to the title screen to load a saved game.
There were definitely times where I lost a battle and ended up losing eight or nine hours of progress because I simply had forgotten to save. Recently I made another equally stupid mistake. I sent almost my entire main party away on dispatch missions, figured I’d just walk around the map until they came back, and accidentally wandered into a new location, which threw me into a hidden engagement. Suddenly Marche was fighting 5 enemies alone. To make matters worse, the battle forbade damaging monsters, and I didn’t have an appropriate Anti-Law card. I had effectively walked straight into an unwinnable situation. Thankfully I’d saved a few missions earlier, so I only lost a little bit of progress instead of an entire evening.
One thing I noticed during this playthrough that I’d never really appreciated before is just how slow this game can be. The only reason I noticed it was because I played almost the entire game with a 2x speed hack enabled. Whenever I turned it off, everything suddenly felt glacial. Animations take much longer than I remember. There’s a noticeable slowness to the actions. Half of the battles are just watching the enemy units take their turns. This is a pretty common problem in every Tactics game though, and after sitting through the absurdly long summon animations of the PS1 era games, I really can’t complain about the “wasted time” here.
I don’t even feel guilty using an emulators speed-up feature anymore. Modern Final Fantasy remasters regularly include fast-forward buttons, encounter toggles, or experience multipliers. At this point it almost feels like an expected quality-of-life feature.
Living in the Shadow of a Giant
While I realize that nostalgia might be playing a role here, I enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance more than War of the Lions. That statement might be sacrilegious to some people as War of the Lions is routinely touted as one of the best games ever made. Yes, War of the Lions tells a much stronger story. Its political intrigue and complex factions are objectively more sophisticated. But Tactics Advance is simply more approachable. It’s brighter, more colourful, and more fantastical, and the race and job system feels much deeper. And the isekai plot is exactly what thirteen-year-old Alex wanted. Back then I couldn’t appreciate the political maneuvering and power struggles of War of the Lions. While I appreciate that story now, Tactics Advance has a story that spoke to me on a personal level. I also had more gripes for War of the Lions, like not seeing the map while staging your units at the start of a battle, or not being able to take back your movement, or just how absurd the zodiac system was and how consequential your characters star sign would be to how much damage they’d deal to enemies. Now, I know some of those complaints have been fixed in the 2025 remaster, but I didn’t play that version.
I still love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It’s bright, colourful, cheerful, and endlessly fun to revisit. The job system on display here remains my favourite iteration of job systems in the entire Final Fantasy series. Unlocking new jobs, mastering abilities, experimenting with different combinations, and not spending 20 minutes throwing rocks at chocobos puts Tactics Advance above War of the Lion for me. Slowly building your perfect squad never stops being satisfying. Yes, the law system can occasionally be frustrating, and yes, forgetting to save can lead to some absolutely brutal losses, but every time I return to this Ivalice I find myself smiling. At the end of the day, I just feel joy while I play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is more than I can say about War of the Lions.
I bought Pies for a lot of reasons. First, I like trick-taking games. Second, I’ve really been appreciating small-box games that I can bring to people’s houses or out on our adventures without having to haul a whole separate bag. Third, the designer, Matthias Kramer, is also the designer of one of my favorite games, Glen More II, so I was quite intrigued to see what he could do with a small-box card game.
And probably the biggest reason I bought Pies is because Allplay sold it for $3.14 on March 14th. I do love me a good deal.
Now, I said above that I love trick-taking games, but I’d argue that Pies is not really a trick-taking game. It’s more of a tricky card game.
In Pies, there are three rounds, and each round has its own deck of cards. Each round, you’ll deal out all the cards to all the players and then, turn by turn, place a single card face up on the table. After everyone has placed one card, you’ll determine who played the highest number. They get the first-player token. The person who played the second-highest value gets the second-player token, and so on, all the way down to the player who played the lowest value card, who gets the last-player token.
Once player order has been decided, the person who played the highest-value card gets to take any one of the face-up cards and place it in front of them, creating a tableau. Then the next player does the same, and so on down the line. The last player takes the final card on the table plus one plum card as compensation for their poor showing.
Many of these cards will have a special action on the top, and when you take a card with a special action, you must perform it immediately. That can be anything from stealing a card from another player to gaining pie tokens, which you can use on future turns to increase the value of your card. Or it might be taking the dog token and placing it in front of you, protecting you from those dirty fruit thieves.
The other thing that can appear at the top of these fruit cards is a recipe, which is how you score points and ultimately win a game of Pies.
At any time when you take a card from the table, you can then fulfill a recipe, or make a fruit mix. To do so, you’ll take one of the cards in your tableau that has a recipe on top and discard cards from your tableau that match the requirements shown on that recipe.
These recipes might ask for two or three of one type of fruit, two matching pairs of fruits, or even five completely different fruits. The recipe card itself can be part of the fruit mix, but it doesn’t have to be. If you use a recipe card with fruit on it but don’t include that fruit as part of the mix, you still have to discard all the cards that make up the fruit mix plus the recipe card itself. So it’s slightly more efficient if the recipe card is actually contributing fruit to the recipe you’re completing.
And that’s largely the whole game. You’ll play cards, take cards, trigger special actions, and make fruit mixes. At the end of three rounds, you’ll reveal your fulfilled recipe cards, count up your points, and whoever has the most points is the winner.
I think the first point to make here is that the fruit artwork is really beautiful. It’s very reminiscent of the kind of art that adorns Wingspan cards, or the tree artwork in Arboretum, or the artwork that adorned my grandmother’s porcelain bowls. It’s just quality, real-life fruit artwork.
The gameplay is nicely interactive, but in the mean way where you’re actively undoing what other players did on their turns. Because you play a single card each round, having a card stolen from you feels pretty punishing. It’s not the kind of interaction that I particularity enjoy. I do enjoy the tension of the card play, though. Trying to reserve certain cards so you can play them at the moment you can use their abilities for full effect. Or, waiting until you’re last in player order so you can play the card you really want to take into your tableau when you can be certain you’ll pick first.
I don’t think Pies shines at 3 players, however. There were not many Dog cards, so one player just had immunity from being stolen from for the majority of the game. Unsurprisingly, that player won that game. But the player who steals the most is certainly not guaranteed a victory. The player who manages to actually fulfill their pie recipes is the winner, as ending the game with a tableau full of fruit will give you nothing but fruit flies at the end of the day.
There was a fair amount of luck in Pies, whether you’re gifted the cards that you want, or if you have the opportunity to snag any recipes when it’s time to pick cards. Of course what often feels like luck is other players conspiring against you to get the good cards for themselves. I think as players get more and more familiar with the cards, you’ll be able to make some clever plays, but most of the score will come from snapping up the right card at the right time.
At the end of the day, we enjoyed Pies, but not as much as some other trick taking games, such as The Crew or NYET!. Especially at 3 players where 3 Witches absolutely shines. The card play is a little too thoughtful to be a pub game, but if you’re really into trick taking games and want something to end a board game night with, Pies is the perfect gaming dessert.
I’ve loved Orléans for a decade now. Twice it’s made it into the top 20 of my top 100 games of all time, which is not a small feat when you consider how many games on that list get shuffled around. Whenever I think about Orléans, it’s mostly fond memories. Those plays where you manage to pull everything you need from the bag, where you’re one turn ahead of someone, blocking them from building guild halls, or just the fact that when you play Orléans, everything just feels satisfying. But something unexpected happened recently. I joined a two-player tournament for Orléans on Board Game Arena and played ten two player games in fairly quick succession, and by the end of it, I found myself a little less in love with the game than when I started.
But before I get into that, it’s worth touching on what Orléans actually feels like to play. At its heart, it’s a bag-building game where you’re slowly constructing a pool of workers. Everyone starts with the same handful of tokens, and each round you’re drawing a number of workers from your bag and slotting them into these little “recipes” on your board to make things happen. Those actions might get you more workers, push you up tracks, or unlock new abilities. Most of what you do feeds back into this loop of adding workers to your bag to expand your capabilities, improving your board, or letting you draw more workers each round. And that sense of constant forward motion is a big part of the appeal.
The tracks in Orléans are the focal point of the game. In general, you’ll take an action, you move up a track, and you usually get two things: a new worker corresponding to that track, and some kind of bonus. Farmers get you food, fishermen bring in coins, guards increase how many tokens you draw each round, and craftsmen let you place these little gear tiles that permanently discount your actions. Those gears are especially satisfying, locking in an efficiency boost that you can’t ever undo, but also means you’ll never have to pay for it again. There is also a track that will give you new actions, which can either tweak something you already have access to, or give you entirely new, often better, actions to work with. And then there’s the development track, which is a score multiplier for the end of the game. Ignore that track at your own peril.
Alongside all of those tracks, you’ve got movement on a map. Using carts on roads and boats on rivers, you’ll race to establish guild halls in cities. There’s only one spot per city (except in Orléans), so getting to each city first matters. A lot. At the end of the game, a large portion of your is the combination of how many citizens you’ve picked up and how many guild halls you’ve placed, multiplied by your development level. I find it endlessly satisfying at the end of the game when players are rushing about trying to drop as many guild halls as possible, to jump ahead on the road and put a house up right before they arrive. I know, I’m evil.
One of the more subtle pressures in Orléans is that nothing is infinite. Tracks have caps, worker pools can run dry, and if a type of worker is gone, the track becomes unavailable to everyone, even if you haven’t maxed out that track yet. So there’s this constant race happening. Often, being just one step ahead or other players on these tracks is often enough to completely derail what they were hoping to do.
What I’ve always loved about Orléans is that sense of progression. You start off painfully weak, and almost everything you do makes you better. You draw more tokens, your actions get cheaper, your options expand. By the end of the game, when you’re pulling eight workers out of your bag and some of your key actions only cost one or two workers, it feels great.
With more than two players, the game really sings. People are constantly sniping the thing you were just about to do, finishing a track to snag a citizen, grabbing a new action tile, completing a beneficial deed one turn before you, it all forces you to stay flexible. There’s a nice amount of tension around the shared spaces that makes the turn order feel really consequential, especially those citizens that reward whoever finishes something first.
But in that two-player tournament, something else emerged. Everyone seemed to fall into very well-worn strategies almost immediately. It didn’t take long for optimal openings to reveal themselves, and once they did, it felt like deviating from them was just… wrong. You’d have to prioritize those development tiles that make your actions cheaper, because if you don’t, the other player will take them all and run away with the game. I had one match where that happened, he ignored them and I hoovered them all up. By round 10 of 18 my opponent basically said, “I don’t think I can come back from this,” and he was right. I was drawing eight workers and paying one or two workers for most of my actions while he was paying three, the math just doesn’t work in his favour, especially because we were both hitting that draw cap.
The same thing happens with the tiles that grant new actions. In theory, having access to all of them when you gain one is exciting. It lets you tailor your strategy to the emerging situations. In practice, it often leads to players picking the same strongest or most comfortable options over and over again. Over multiple plays, especially back-to-back plays in a tournament, that starts to feel boringly repetitive. The variety is technically there, but you have to choose to engage with it, and optimal play doesn’t always reward that.
So between the potential for runaway leaders and the emergence of scripted openings, is Orléans still a game I’d recommend? Yeah, I think it is. But with a caveat. I think Orléans is at its best with more players, where the board state is more chaotic, the competition is tighter, and you’re forced to adapt more often. That’s where the game feels alive.
I also know there are variants that limit the available tiles to a small display instead of the full set, and I might prefer that approach when it comes to playing 2 player games. It nudges players toward trying different things and occasionally making suboptimal choices, which paradoxically often makes the game more interesting.
Even with some of the shine worn off, Orléans is still a great bag-building game. And the fact that it took me 20 or 30 plays to even start feeling that fade says a lot. Any game that hits the table that many times has earned its place in my top 100, even if it’s no longer quite as untouchable as it once felt.
