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.
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.
I have a complicated relationship with Alexander Pfister games. And by complicated relationship, I mean I actively dislike most of his designs. Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo all illicit feelings of frustration and hatred from my heart when I sit down to play. That’s not to say I hate everything he touches, Broom Service and Isle of Skye are some of my favourite games of all time. But that dichotomy, the love it or hate it reaction I have to his games always makes me pause whenever I approach a new Pfister game. I won’t bury the lede here, Pirates of Maracaibo is pretty good.
The turn structure is very simple. On your turn, you just move your ship from the left side of the card display 1 to 3 cards to the up, down, and right, then doing the thing on the card you land on. That “thing” might be buying the card and bringing it into your tableau, offering you a persistent benefit or triggering one of the various actions of the game (exploring, raiding, or upgrading your ship usually, but I’ll expand on those later), or building a building. None of these actions are complicated on their own, and they all largely feel detached from one another, meaning that in your game you’ll need to choose which path you’ll want to focus on, being the jack of all trades and the master of none doesn’t often translate to very many end game points.
Regardless, your turn is simply move your boat, do the card thing, and that’s your turn. Once a player reaches the harbour on the far right side of the board, they trigger the end of the round for all players. The harbour has a (usually) stronger version of the actions that you can get from the cards for the player who landed there to take, then all other players take their last turn for the round. When it’s the player who reached the harbour’s turn, they move into Maracaibo, where they get 6 points and get to upgrade their ship. Then all ships are moved to the far left side of the card tableau, everyone gets their income, and the next round starts. After the 3rd round, the game ends and the player with the most points is the winner.
None of the little activities I just mentioned above are particularly thematic. The exploration action, for example, is just moving your meeple along a track and taking the benefit of whatever space you land on. Sure, you’ll cross rivers for end game points, and the rewards generally get better the further you move, but there’s no hidden depth in the exploration track. Similarly for raiding, you just roll 3 dice, then choose one to be your raid. The colour of the die you pick will affect which treasure you can claim (pearls, emeralds, or gold), but you just take the pip value of the die, add any bonus strength you may have, and then take various rewards based on your total raid value. Upgrading your ship is simply placing a single cube on the hull of your ship, covering up either a persistent benefit or a one time bonus. As you place more cubes on your ship, you’ll unlock better upgrade spots, but you’re always just placing a cube on a menu of benefits.
What I really like about Pirates of Maracaibo is how easy it is to play. Every action and benefit is uncomplicated. Even if the decisions you’re making have some weight, you can always see the consequences of your choices. Moving your ship might force you to make some trade-offs. If there’s a specific card you want, or you placed your black market tile somewhere a little inconvenient, you might need to decide exactly where to park your ship for a round so you can reach your preferred destination next round. But very rarely will you ever do something and say “Oh, I didn’t realize that was going to happen.”
The cards that make up the main space of the game offer a fair amount of benefits too. In addition to the action or persist benefit they offer, each card also is worth some end game points, and many will give you money or points income between each round, making every movement the result of several micro-decisions.
Adding to your decision space are the quest cards. Each player starts the game with one, but you can earn several more as the game progresses. The quest card will nudge you towards specializing in a specific way, and hopefully you can acquire a couple that synergize well together to really rake in those end game points. The quest cards are semi-random, perhaps the specific one you were hoping for doesn’t show up, but at least there is a quest card market, letting you pick from two face up quests, or drawing one from the top of the deck. You even have the option of wiping the card market before choosing to take one or drawing from the top of the deck. I appreciate the options instead of being subjected to total randomness.
What I really love about Pirates of Maracaibo are when you can hit a good combo on a turn. You move your ship, spend some money, get an effect that lets you move your explorer, which gives you more money funding your next turn. The cascading, barely in your control efficiency is really satisfying when it manages to come together. Starting a round with only 4 coins and being able to make it all the way to Maracaibo without needing to spend a whole turn taking income makes me feel really clever and smart. Unlike a lot of Alexander Pfister games that make me feel handcuffed, where I often feel like I’m staring at a bunch of things I *could* do, if only I had the exact three prerequisites lined up perfectly, Pirates of Maracaibo is much more forgiving. If I do run out of money I can just spend a turn putting my ship into a better position, and take 5 coins. It’s refreshing.
One thing that caught me off-guard was just how much of the game’s scoring lives at the end. During play, your points can feel modest. I think in my best game I managed to hit 60 points before the final scoring. Then the final scoring happens, and suddenly I’m sitting at 200 after everything tallies up. So if you’re mid-game and feeling behind because someone has 40 points, and you’re stuck at 20, it’s honestly not worth worrying about. Once you internalize how big that final scoring swing is, the whole experience relaxes. I don’t get that creeping sense of doom when I’m behind; I just keep playing and see how it all shakes out. And more often than not, it shakes out better than I expected.
Interaction is… there, but only just. You can land your ship on a card that has another players ship, and you’ll need to pay them a dollar for the privilege. On the exploration track, you can’t share spaces, but hopping over someone is free, so it’s actually more of a speed boost than a blockade. You can technically drain islands of their treasure, but that would just leave you holding less valuable loot yourself, so it’s not exactly a cutthroat strategy. There’s a small bonus for being the first to build certain buildings, but beyond that, everyone’s mostly doing their own thing. I think the most interactive element here is when someone rushes to Maracaibo and brings the round to an end while everyone else is playing around the middle islands.
And honestly, that’s fine. This isn’t the kind of game I come to for tense player interaction. Instead, it excels at being a good euro game, one where I feel clever in my efficiencies. If I win, it’s because I built the best point scoring engine, not because I managed to beat my opponents down more than others.
So where does that leave Pirates of Maracaibo for me? I’m happy to report that it totally subverted my expectations. It’s one of the few Alexander Pfister euro games I actively want to keep playing. Unlike Maracaibo, Great Western Trail, or Blackout: Hong Kong, Pirates of Maracaibo never makes me feel trapped beneath its own complexity. Instead, it feels loose, approachable, and surprisingly forgiving.
I think that’s why Pirates of Maracaibo works for me when so many of Pfister’s heavier games don’t. It doesn’t constantly punish me for not planning six turns ahead, nor does it make me feel like I’ve accidentally ruined my game because I missed one prerequisite thirty minutes ago. It just lets me play. Move the ship, take a card, build a little engine, chase a few quests, and hopefully stumble into a satisfying combo or two along the way. And when those combos hit, when all the tiny efficiencies start cascading into one another, the game feels fantastic.
Is it the most thematic pirate game? Not even close. Is it particularly interactive? Also, no. But as a breezy midweight euro where I can quietly optimize my little East India Trading company while feeling clever the entire time, it absolutely succeeds. More importantly, it succeeds at making me enjoy an Alexander Pfister design, which for me, was the biggest surprise of all.
