Disclaimer: A copy of Mean 13 was provided by Sticky 13 Games for review purposes.
Mean 13 is quite the departure from the games that I usually cover on this blog, as I tend to focus on mid to heavyweight euro hobby board games. Mean 13 is not that, in fact, Mean 13 doesn’t even have a BGG page! Instead, it’s a twist on bingo, designed not to test your tactical or strategic mind, but to spark laughter amongst family and friends.
In Mean 13, each player gets dealt a tableau of 13 face-up cards, numbered 1 to 13 in four different colours. Players are also dealt 8 secret ‘mean cards.’ Each round, the dealer flips over the top card of the call deck, and if any of your tableau cards match the number and colour, you flip them over. The first person to flip all their cards wins.
The mean cards can be played at any time, and have different effects, from flipping your own cards face down, swapping cards with an opponent (ideally one of your face up cards for one of their face down cards), reshuffling the call deck, or cancelling the last mean card played. And that’s the whole game. There are some variants, like removing cards numbered 9-13 to shorten the game, or playing with fewer or no mean cards if you want a more friendly version.
So yeah, it’s Bingo with a twist. It’s simple, straightforward, and anyone can play— and I don’t mean that in a bad way. What I’m really getting at is that this game is perfect for playing with people who don’t want to deal with a bunch of (or really any) complicated rules.
There are plenty of occasions where Mean 13 would shine. I played a friendly game with my (almost) 4-year-old daughter, and she had a blast matching colours and numbers. I could see this being a hit at bars and pubs, which seems to be what the developers had in mind, as the cards are plastic and waterproof. It’d also be perfect for big family gatherings, like Christmas or Thanksgiving.
If you enjoy games like Uno or Munchkin, you’ll probably have fun with Mean 13. While it might not make it to the table with my regular gaming group, I can see it finding a place in many people’s lives, on tables surrounded by friends and drinks.
Disclaimer: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
Last time I talked about Kinfire Delve, I focused on the Scorn’s Stockade box, as I arbitrarily chose that box to be my introduction to the series. This time, I’m going back to the box that was released first, Vainglory’s Grotto, and taking this dive with the self-sacrificing Khor, and the Opportunist Asha.
Nothing about the core system has changed from box to box. This is still an endurance run down a deck of cards, tackling challenges one at a time until the well deck is exhausted, then completing the final gauntlet to overcome the boss, Vainglory. The gameplay still has players choosing cards from their hand matching the colour of the challenge, getting boosts from the other players, again, matching the colour of the challenge, and rolling dice in an effort to meet or exceed the difficulty of each challenge, and taking the rewards and punishments as you succeed and fail.
What is different is the theme of the game. Scorn’s Stockade was a body horror filled dungeon, with grotesque monstrosities in chains and bars. Obelisks, towers, and other prison themes permeated the art and flavour text of the cards, while Vainglory’s Grotto is more of a macabe symphony. The nightmare of someone who’s spent too much time at the opera. The art features unsettling beauty all around, like a slender lady in a red dress with a large blue rose obscuring most of her face, with only the top of a skull peeking out, and long daggers for fingers, or the marionette, which are a pair of ballerina legs disappearing into a cloud of ethereal roses. Beauty and horror mixed to create the feeling of high culture corrupted.
Vainglory’s Grotto two characters complimented each other quite well. Khor’s ability sucked up wounds, allowing him to take potshots at challenges and purposefully fail them, knowing he could absorb the punishment, then Asha’s ability added free progress to any challenge that already had progress on it. They worked well together, and the fact they synergized so well is likely part of the reason Vainglory’s Grotto feels much easier than Scorn’s Stockade. It helps that the Vainglory herself being nearly trivial if you manage to get to the bottom of the well with no cards attached to her. And even with cards attached, they’re more of a minor inconvenience, less of a show-stopping problem.
All that said, I can tell that Vainglory’s Grotto is the ‘first’ of the series. The card effects are a bit more muted and tame when compared directly to Scorn’s Stockade. Vainglory’s Grotto feels like a rock-solid, but safe first game, where Scorn’s Stockade saw designer Kevin Wilson having more fun with the system, seeing which ways the system could stretch and flex. It is less interesting, but only when directly comparing to its follow-up. That said, the entire time I was playing Vainglory’s Grotto, I couldn’t help but see the synergies that Asha and Khor would have with Naz and Feyn. I’m so excited to mix the character pairings to see how they play off each other and create a wholly different feeling game.
If you’re coming into Kinfire Delve as a new player, this is the box to start with. As an experienced player, It’s worth coming back to. The well cards themselves are less interesting than the successor, but the characters included here are unique and fun. I’m really looking forward to mixing them with the other heroes and seeing how they fare against the other challenges. Or use Vainglory as a testing ground while playing a new hero combination for the first time, so I have a safe space to see what makes them tick!
Last week I wrote about one of my favourite cooperative games, Burgle Bros by Tim Fowers. This week, I want to talk about the follow-up, Burgle Bros. 2: Casino Capers.
Burgle Bros. 2: Casino Capers retains a lot of what made Burgle Bros great, but also directly addresses some of the criticisms. In Burgle Bros. 2: Casino Capers, there’s only 2 floors instead of the default 3. The guards now always move 3 spaces during each of their activations, and when their deck runs out, they enter ‘hunt mode’, where they target characters specifically. The is now only one safe in the game, and in order to get dice on the safe, players need to seek out the moles, then move the dice from the Owner’s Office on the first floor up to the safe on the second floor, making it valuable and necessary to have characters on both floors.
Speaking of moles, there’s 16 poker chips littering both floors that provide a variety of effects. Some of those chips will be the aforementioned moles, but some will contain crowds, giving you a space to lie low from oncoming guards. Some chips like the drunk and saleswomen only take effect when you move onto the tile without peeking first, and with either send you flying into the next tile, or hold you hostage until someone rescues you. Similarly, the prima donna and undercover tokens only trigger when you peek into the tile, and will either pull you or the guard onto the tile you just peeked at.
The characters have changed too, now, each character has 3 gear cards that require an action to be prepped, but offer different effects. Some can be used multiple times, while others have a more powerful one time use. This makes each of the characters more varied flexible, which is an amazing change to the game. I’m much more likely to use a character multiple times in a row to see what kind of situations they can get out of, instead of just picking the hacker for every game like I used to.
The real big change is how players win the game. Once the safe is revealed on the second floor, all the tiles in the X and Y axis are revealed, the moles have sent their dice to the owners’ office on the first floor, AND someone has shifted the dice from the owners’ office to the safe, then a player can spend an action to roll all the dice to try and crack the safe. Every roll does send one die back to the owners’ office, giving a reason for some players to hang out on the first floor. Once the safe is cracked, the finale begins. Burgle Bros. 2 includes 8 finales, each one giving out specific instructions on how to win the game. In one, you need to find two Prima donnas and escape without a bouncer catching sight of them. In another, the safe contained a car that you can use to blow through walls, pick up your co-conspirators, then blast out the second story window. Players don’t know how to win the game until the safe is cracked, which adds a real exciting twist to the late stages of the game.
I’m of two minds for Burgle Bros. 2. On one hand, I dig the new tiles, the new heat system, the flexibility of each character’s gear card, it’s all great improvements on the base system, which was already rock solid. What I don’t like are the poker chips littered about the board. Half of them trigger when moved onto, while the other half trigger when peeked at, and cause just a bit more mayhem than I prefer. For a game as tight as Burgle Bros, the added randomness and risk just makes my buttocks clench.
Another complaint is the bigger box. Burgle Bros. 2 has this amazingly fancy insert and comes with plastic legs that you can jam into the corners of the box to create a 3D space. That second floor is now actually above the first one! While this creates an amazing visual, it’s not terribly functional. During our plays, we found it hard to see all the tiles on the first floor, and had to be ducking often to make sure we were reading the small text correctly, which was made more difficult from the shadow of the box looming over the tiles. Eventually, we chose to go back to the way that Burgle Bros managed multiple floors, just having them side by side. I applaud the efforts of the box design, even if that aspect ultimately was a miss.
I think the conclusion is thus: If you liked Burgle Bros, you’ll probably like Burgle Bros. 2. Maybe more so, if you enjoy the flexibility of the gear cards, and enjoy the tension that the randomness of the poker chips introduces. But if that randomness gets under your skin, Burgle Bros. 2 won’t be an improvement for you. Personally, the theme is better implements in this sequel, and the variety of the finales has hooked me and keeps me reaching for Burgle Bros. 2 over its beloved predecessor. I would never turn down a game of either, but given the choice, at the moment I prefer to play Burgle Bros. 2. We’ll have to wait and see if it can manage to stand the test of time.
Disclosure: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
I identify as a euro-gamer. Given the opportunity, my game nights generally include more food chain management (Food Chain Magnate), and wrestling with the economic intricacies of rats trying to build a rocket to get to the cheese moon (First Rat), and less of swords and dungeons and danger. Now and then a game breaks that tradition, such as One Deck Dungeon or Massive Darkness. Kinfire Delve becomes the latest game to press a blade into my hand and punt me down a well to deal with the overflowing threats that loom down below.
Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is a 1 – 2 player cooperative tactical card game where you take on the role of either Naz of the Windstrikes, the female orc tactician, or Feyn Longstride the Bard of Destiny. The goal of the game is to delve through a well of challenges to meet and contour the boss at the bottom, Scorn.
Naz, the Tactician
Each delve begins by randomly selecting one of three Scorn cards to place in the centre of the table, face down. Each Scorn card had a different challenge on the other side, so you won’t really know what you’re facing until you reach his lair. Surrounding the Scorn card are four cards from the well. These cards can either be an event or a challenge. On your turn, you select one of the cards to interact with. If you choose an event, do as the text reads. If you choose a challenge card (as most of the cards in the deck are challenges), you’ll play a card from your hand that matches the colour of the challenge as an action in an attempt to meet or surpass the difficulty. Each action can be boosted up to two times. If playing alone, you boost yourself, but if playing with others, then the boost needs to come from your comrades. Again, these boosts need to match the colour of the challenge. You’ll also need to roll the four dice, which may add extra progress to your action. If your final sum meets or exceeds the challenge rating of the challenge, you complete the challenge and gain the reward. If you fail, you place progress tokens on the card based on your action value, and suffer the penalty.
At the start of any turn, you may choose to exhaust yourself, which has you discard any cards in your hand, and redraw back up to the hand limit, as well as reveal an exhaustion card. The exhaustion cards have a few extra lose conditions, such as having 3 specific exhaustion cards up at the same time, or when a specific character plays a specific card.
The game continues to be played until either the players run out of health and lose, or exhaust the well deck and overcome Scorn in the final confrontation.
Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is a challenging game. I’ve only come close to beating Scorn a single time, with all my other plays see me fail about halfway down the well. I’ve tried solo with both characters, and a two player game, but I just haven’t been able to overcome this challenge.
I like how tactical the Kinfire Delvegameplay is. Each round, you’re presented with 4 challenges, and you need to pick one to tackle. Some of these challenges will have bold text that are in effect as long as that card is face up, such as “all other challenges are +2 difficulty”, or, “Everyone you roll a dark, lose one heart”. These become the obvious targets, but it’s also quite interesting when those effects start to overlap.
Another point of tactics are the cards in your hands. You must use a card of the matching colour to attempt a challenge, as well as a boost of the matching colour to boost. There have been times when I’ve been desperate to clear a blue challenge, but I have naught but red and green in my hand. Similarly, situations where I need to boost, as the penalty for failing a challenge feels drastic, but the only card I can boost with is a card that I really want to use for it’s effect on my next turn. Do I forfeit the effect until the next time I draw that card, or do I put my faith in the dice?
Heaven forbid I roll a blue
Capping every action in Kinfire Delve is a die roll. 4 dice that can add up to 4 extra progress to your challenge, should you roll well enough. But the randomness is also weighted in a way that rolling absolutely nothing helpful isn’t a terribly rare situation. It’s tempting to lean on the dice to conserve your cards so you take less exhaustion as you delve, but a terrible roll will spell disaster for you. I’ve failed more than one challenge because I needed a single progress point from the dice, only to be utterly denied.
The production on Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is fantastic. The cards are great quality and the art direction by Katarzyna Redesiuk is phenomenal. The art on the back of the player cards shines with gold that memorized me for longer than I want to admit. And while I’m not a fan of body horror imagery, the challenges depicted on the well cards did instill a level of grotesque fear that had me feeling like a terrible evil needed to be vanquished.
I received all 3 of the Kinfire Delve games at the same time, and I arbitrarily chose Scorn’s Stockade to be my first romp. On one hand, I’m interested and intrigued! I want to keep battling against this stockade until I make Scorn pay for his atrocities. I want to defeat all 3 variants of the boss before I move on. But at the same time, I’m excited to discover what the other characters feel like. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s in the next box and how well characters from other boxes would fare against this challenge. I do not know how I’m going to store all the content from all the boxes at the end, though, as I generally prefer to keep a game system contained to a single box.
All in all, Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is an excellent solo or cooperative game. At 30 to 45 minutes, it’s short enough that when I lost, I didn’t feel horribly demoralized, but it also gives a sense of accomplishment when I finally managed to confront the boss. I loved exploring the characters and am excited to explore the other boxes. I’ll be posting a review for each box individually, and then a final post looking at what a game feels like when all three sets get mixed and matched. Look forward to it!
In Burgle Bros, you and your co-conspirators are tasked with breaking into a 3-story tower, cracking the safe on each floor, and escaping out the ceiling to the conveniently placed escape helicopter with the loot that you gathered from the safes. You’ll need to work cooperatively to crawl through secret doors, evade laser, motion, and heat alarms, hack computers, dodge security guards, and decode keypads, all in an effort to escape mostly unnoticed. All players start with 3 stealth tokens, and each time the guard catches a glimpse of your hide, you’ll shed one of those tokens. If any player is caught by the guard and has no stealth tokens remaining, they’re caught, and because all your friends are spineless weasels, immediately rat out the whole gang, and everyone loses.
A game of Burgle Bros starts with 3 separate grids of tiles in a 4 x 4 grid, with wooden sticks to create walls and hallways. Each grid represents a separate floor of the building, and you’ll need to imagine that each grid is above the previous one, as there are staircases that allow you to move from floor to floor. Each player gets 4 actions per turn to peek, move, and activate tiles as they try to find the safes. At the end of each player’s turn, the guard on their floor activates, roaming the halls as they move to their destination.
A big part of Burgle Bros is working around these guards. Each guard has their own deck of destination cards that dictate where they’ll explore, and some simple rules on how they manoeuvre around to those destinations. Lots of the tiles and even some player abilities can trigger alarms, which give the guard on that floor an extra movement when they’re activated, and changes their destination to the tile that has the alarm. Generally, not ideal to have a bunch of alarms, but sometimes when you find yourself pinned at a dead-end hallway, having one of your teammates trigger an alarm on the other side of the floor is the saving grace you need.
The guards start off fairly slow, but as you crack those safes, and run the destination decks dry, their speed increases dramatically. It’s mildly terrifying when you’re taking shelter on a tile and the guard is moving 6 tiles every turn.
Each floor has a safe to crack, which requires that you reveal all the tiles on X and Y axis from the safe, then spend actions to put dice on the safe, and spend actions to roll those dice. Once cracked, you get a gear card, which are almost always good, a loot card, which often has a minor negative effect, and the guard on your floor and all floors below increase their speed by 1. The game ends when either a player gets caught, or the players collect all the loot and escape out the staircase on the third floor.
Burgle Bros. is one of my favourite games to introduce to people to cooperative games. When someone comes over to my house and asks, “So, what’s with all these board games?” Burgle Bros. is often the game hits the table. I put on the Ocean’s Eleven soundtrack, and guide them through the game. Just the theme of “We’re robbing a bank!” gets so many people excited! After all, everyone loves a good heist. The individual players each have special abilities, and I encourage each player to give their input on each other player’s turn, but am always firm in reminding people that they have the final say during each turn. Burgle Bros.
I know some people complain about quarterbacking or alpha gaming, when someone dictates what everyone else should be doing on their turn, but that’s not a phenomenon that I ever have to deal with. If quarterbacking is an issue that you need to contend with, just know, Burgle Bros. does absolutely nothing to alleviate that problem. This kind of leads into my biggest criticism of Burgle Bros, sometimes the best move for a player is to just hide on a lower floor while the other characters explore the upper floors. It sucks being the player that just runs in a circle and passes their turn, but understanding that the boring play is the smart play can help. This is also why we encourage for all players to be engaged on every other player’s turn, so that while your character is stuck in a corner, providing input to the other players still feels helpful and fun.
Speaking to the physical production, Burgle Bros. comes in a very compact box. There is absolutely no wasted space here, which I really appreciate. That said, some may construe this as a negative, as it can be difficult to put everything away without accidentally damaging the rule book. Furthermore, while compact, Burgle Bros has a very non-standard box size, meaning it won’t fit neatly between more games on cube-shaped shelves. The tiles and tokens are thick and feel like great quality, the meeples are custom shaped to the characters, and have stickers that you need to apply yourself.
I adore Burgle Bros. It’s tense, it’s exciting, and the gameplay serves an amazing emergent narrative. We’ve had uproarious moments when a player strapped on roller skates to get some extra actions, only to burn every single action on a door with a keypad. The mental picture of a burglar’s face pressed against a glass door and the iconic “squeeeeeek” as they failed to open the door is a gaming memory that I’ll never forget.
It’s this emergent narrative that really hooks players. I don’t think that Burgle Bros is particularly better or worse than most other coop games, but the gameplay and theme of robbing a bank is much more immersive than ‘saving the world from disease’. The actions make sense, the tiles and their effects make sense with regard to the theme, it all works together to create an engaging game that has been the centrepiece of several game nights. Burgle Bros. is a game that my older sister always asks for whenever I go to visit.
Burgle Bros. isn’t easy, and in fact, it’s kind of amazing how quickly a perfect heist can fall apart. I’ve had games where not a single stealth was lost until the third floor, then from just an awful turn of events, have one player get caught 4 times in quick succession and fail the game. That was a lesson on not standing on the Foyer tile that I’ll never forget. I find Burgle Bros excels in replayability, because each of the floors are randomized for every game, you don’t really know what challenges each floor is going to hold for you. Sometimes a long hallway will be your saving grace, and in other games, you’ll get blocked in a corridor with deadbolts all round you. The discovery isn’t in new/unseen content each game, it’s in which tiles come up and when.
As I said above, I adore Burgle Bros. it was one of the first games my wife and I really fell in love with together, and it remains as one of my most played games of all time (34 physical plays, numerous more on the app and a handful on BGA). It scales well from 1 to 4 players, and it’s easy to convince others to play. It’s strategic, but also has some exciting moments of luck. All the characters have different abilities, and mixing and matching them keeps the game fresh. Burgle Bros. is one my favourite games (Number 13 on my 2024 top 100 games of all time list) and one that I can’t recommend highly enough.
A copy of A Gentle Rain was provided by Incredible Dream for the review purposes
“Always changing, yet always itself” is the message from the game to the player on the front of the rule leaflet. Themed as a tranquil retreat to a quiet lake that will centre your mind, everything about A Gentle Rain is trying to be a calm, meditative experience.
The rule leaflet sets the scene. You have come to the lakeside hoping to see a rare and beautiful sight. The lilies of the lake only open their blossoms in the rain, and only rarely do all eight varieties bloom at once. The goal of the game, bloom those blossoms.
There are 6 steps to learning the game, with the first step being “get comfortable”. Make some tea, change into cozy pants. Put on some calming music and take a moment to centre yourself. A game of A Gentle Rain starts with a single tile placed onto the table, then your action is to just draw a tile, and place it adjacent to an existing one, matching flowers. These tiles have the corners taken out of them, and when you manage to get a perfect square, you place one of the eight wooden lily discs into the newly created circle at the corner of 4 tiles. If you manage to get all eight lily discs out before the stack of tiles runs out, you’ve succeeded. If not, well, that’s fine too. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.
A Gentle Rain is a svelte package. A box no bigger than my palm, although deep. 28 luxuriously thick tiles, eight wooden discs with colourful printing, are all that this game contains. There is functionally no barrier to entry for A Gentle Rain, it’s open the box, flip over a tile and start. Literally nothing is stopping you from playing this game at nearly any opportunity.
The rule book suggests taking a moment to relax before engaging with the experience. Remove any stressors, preform a calming, centring exercise, create a peaceful environment, then begin. The randomness of the tile stack means that you can’t really strategize, not effectively anyway, and that’s part of the point of A Gentle Rain. You aren’t here to focus and fixate on winning or surmounting this challenge. This game wants you to relax. Don’t take the world so seriously. Sip your tea, listen to your body, and flip a tile. Maybe that tile will work and maybe it won’t. Be mindful, be present, and be centred.
One of the tips that I’ve used in my parenting is that when your child is having a meltdown, or a tantrum, or some other kind of emotional outburst, their brains a locked in a highly emotional state. Emotional in this case means unconscious and irrational. Something that can help pull their brains out of that state is to engage the logic processors in their mind. Something like “Can you count the stars on the wall?” “Hey, you have paint on your toes! What colour are your toes?”, prompts like that. This brings the logic side of the brain online and helps kids come back to a more centred position (For more information, check out The Whole Brained Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson).
The gameplay of A Gentle Rain, while as simple as can be, the act of matching colours and looking for the perfect spot for each of your tiles is enough logic to pull your brain away from being in an emotional state. There’s just enough to look at, enough locations to consider before making your decision to engage the logic processors in your brain, which pulls your mind into a centred state, and not too much logic that you fall into a cold, calculating state. The other day, after a long day of parenting and a more difficult than usual bedtime, I felt myself fuming. I plopped myself down at my table, grabbed A Gentle Rain that was nearby, and started playing. By the time the 8th lily bloomed, my stress had seeped out, my brain felt calm, and I was ready to enjoy the rest of my evening.
I’m not saying that A Gentle Rain is a surefire stress breaker, but it is an exercise in centring yourself. I think A Gentle Rain is a catalyst; a reminder to take a moment and breathe. Rest your mind, play a little game, and face your day as a happier person. I feel like A Gentle Rain would be the perfect game to live beside your breakfast table. Playing a game in the early morning hours with a steaming coffee sounds like a lovely routine to be in, and a perfect way to start the day right.
