I’ve started adding “Board Game Review” to the title of my posts to make it easier for me to schedule my posts according to my schedule, and because it’s surprisingly helpful with SEO, but I feel weird doing it when I’m reviewing a game that is just cards, like Too Many Poops.
I think I should start with the story of how this game entered my collection. My wife was out of town with her friend, and the two of them love to go thrift store shopping. Often, it’s more the hunt that they enjoy, over anything that they actually find, but recently she brought me home a present. A shrink-wrapped copy of Too Many Poops, solely because she knows I love games, and cats. A perfect gift, no?
To play Too Many Poops, players are dealt 2 cat cards and 2 tool cards. A pet shop is established in the centre of the table with 3 cats and 3 tools face up. To begin, all players pick one cat from their hand and plays it face up in front of them to establish their “house”.
On your turn, you must play at a cat card from your hand to your own house, your opponent’s house, or to the ‘wild’, which is just an oversized green card off to the side. After playing one cat, you may play up to two tool cards, and resolve their effects accordingly.
At the end of your turn, draw cards from the pet shop until your hand is back up to 6 cards, and add one poop for every cat in your house to your litter box. Players take turns one after another until one player has achieved 10 points to become the winner. Each cat is worth 1 point, but if you have cats of the same colour in your house, those cats are worth double. However, if you have two rival cats in your house, they’re flipped over to their colourless side and are worth 0 points. If your litter box ever has 10 poops at the end of your turn, then you’ve become overwhelmed with poops, and you’re eliminated from the game.
The first thing I noticed about Too Many Poops was the presence of pooples. Little wooden poop tokens. The next thing I noticed was that the rest of the production was pretty lush for a simple little card game. Each player gets a dual layered tile for their litter box, and a couple of the cards were iridescent. These rainbow cats have no rivals, and can belong to any colour. As a nice touch, the game also comes with non-foil versions of these cats, if you find their sheen distasteful. Another nice touch, they included a full set of rainbow cats, but with the names blanked, so you can add your own felines to the mix.
Playing the game is pretty simple, much along the lines of the incredibly popular Exploding Kittens. You play a cat to yourself to earn more points, or if you happen to have a rival for a cat in your opponent’s house, you can stymie their efforts. The tool cards are fairly varied, with effects that happen right away, or persist throughout the game, along with giving and stealing cats. There’s a lot of directly interacting or messing with your opponents, Nothing you have is safe.
When playing with larger player counts, the game descends into chaos. As more cats are on the table, more people taking turns and playing cats in between every one of your turns, the likelihood of your rival cat being foisted upon you gets exponentially higher. And with more cats in your house means more poops to have to clean up.
This was actually the part of Too Many Poops that I found the most interesting. The more cats you have, the more poops you generate, the more of the tools you take and use are spent mitigating your poop generating engine. It can feel like walking on a tightrope as you balance bringing more cats into your house for the points, but also needing to deal with the waste. That said, if you just so happen to get screwed on the tool cards a couple rounds in a row, there isn’t anything you can do to mitigate it. And other players can’t really affect the cards available to you, except via hate-drafting, and even then they’ll take the tool you wanted, only to have a similar one get revealed on the flop.
Too Many Poops was better than I expected it to be, but that’s hardly praise, as my expectations were in the basement. For fans of Exploding Kittens, Unstable Unicorn, or just cats in general, Too Many Poops offers a fast, chaotic, combative experience with a touch of set collection. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it’s best enjoyed with children who giggle every time you say poop. I won’t be bringing this out to my serious game group, but if you have a group who enjoy these kinds of take-that card games, Too Many Poops could be a hit!
Every now and then a game comes along that becomes my obsession for a short period of time. Those obsessions eventually fade as the next game comes along to steal my attention, but rarely one manages to keep my heart and become a comfort game for me. Istanbul was one of the first games that managed to worm its way into my heart and become a seminal classic for me.
Istanbul, designed by Rudiger Dorn and published by Pegasus Spiel in 2014 is a race game. You’re racing the opposing merchants to be the player to earn 5 rubies before the others. Throughout the game you’ll collect coins and resources, and use those to pay for those said rubies, by giving gifts to the mosque, selling at the market, upgrading your wagon, and visiting the gem sellers.
The main board of Istanbul is created by laying out 20 cards in a 4 by 4 grid. Each of these cards are an action space that you’ll utilize in your quest for the fastest rubies. One of these cards is the fountain, where the stacks of player discs begin the game.
The top disc of your stack as a sticker on it, that’s you. The discs below you are your merchants, and when you want to move onto a new action space, you’ll move your entire stack, and drop off a single disc onto the action space to take that action. On your next turn, you’ll leave that disc behind and move your remaining stack to a new action, depositing a disc again. Should you ever take an action a second time by moving yourself onto an action card where you have already deposited a disc, instead of shedding another one, you instead pick that disc up to replenish your stack. I think it goes without saying that if you move onto a new action, and you don’t have any discs to shed, you cannot take that action.
Keeping on with the race motif, almost everything in Istanbul starts out cheap and gets more expensive as the actions get used. The first gem to buy costs 12 coins, the first mosque tiles only require a showing of 2 goods, but by the end of the game, a gem can cost 18 or 19 coins, and those mosque tiles want you to have 4 goods before they bestow their power upon your carriage. It’s wonderfully satisfying to see that an opponent has JUST enough resources to take an action, but getting there first puts it just out of their reach again.
The other point of interaction with your opponents is just being in the space where they want to go. Your merchant existing in a spot doesn’t prevent anyone else from going to the same action, but they do have to pay you 2 coins for the privilege of standing next to you. It’s only right.
So, you run around the board, scattering discs to get coins, goods, and powers, all in an effort to earn rubies. The rubies can be bought directly for just coins or sets of goods, but there are a few extra ways to pick up a bonus ruby. If you manage to earn the favour of both mosque tiles that exist on a single card, you get a ruby. If you manage to completely fill out your cart, expanding your cargo capacity, you earn a ruby. First player to earn 5 rubies, wins the game.
There are two tiles on the board which have you rolling dice to earn goods or coins. The tea house has players say a number, then roll the dice. If your sum is higher than what you spoke, you get your bet. If it’s lower, you get a 2 coin consolation prize. Similarly, the Black Market lets you roll the dice, and if you get more of the luxury blue resource the higher you roll. These push your luck elements of the game can and will alter a player’s fate. If someone chooses to go to those spots and just happens to roll super well, they get a massive head start. That said, if someone goes there and fails two or three times in a game, they’ll be so far behind the other players that they might as well not even be playing. It’s an odd beast, gamble at your own peril.
Istanbul is fast and satisfying. I particularly love the phone implementation, as I can play a full 4 player game against some AI opponents in just 5 minutes. Perfect for when I’m idle, waiting for something to happen. Generally near the end of the game, you can figure out who is 4 turns away from ending it, and you are either in a position to get in their way, or you aren’t, and that’s just that. Thankfully, as long as players aren’t agonizing over their turns, by the time the game gets to that point, it’s over fairly quick. One more boon, because the game is ended by someone collecting their final ruby, there’s no need to count points. It’s just, done, and the player who achieved the goal has won!
It’s kind of amazing that I enjoy Istanbul as much as I do, considering how much I value discoverability in my games. Specifically with Istanbul, once you’ve played it, you’ve seen everything that’s there. But I find so much joy in running through game after game of Istanbul. And I’m not even seeking the mastery here, like I would be in Chess, I’m just enjoying the tight race that Rudiger Dorn has designed. Every turn feels like it has good decisions to make, and the action selection mechanic of dropping discs is super satisfying, especially when you can make it through a whole game without needing to go back to the fountain. I recommend Istanbul without reservation, and even more so when you add the expansions, but I’ll talk about those another day.
The following pictures contain content from the Arcs Expansion, during my webhost move, some photos were lost.
I like having control. If you’re already familiar with Arcs by Cole Wherle and Leder Games, that should tell you how this review is going to go.
In Arcs, Players are controlling space faring factions as they bump elbows with each other and vie for victory points. The core action selection mechanism is a twist on trick taking. Each chapter of the game deals each player 6 cards in 4 suits. Each suit has access to 2 or 3 different actions, and the numerical strength of the card is inversely related to the number of actions that card can provide.
Each round of the game starts with the player who has initiative. That player plays a lead card, and may choose to Declare and Ambition. The ambitions are how victory points are scored, and the ambition the lead player is allowed to declare is entirely based off the numerical value of the card. Declaring an ambition also reduces the numerical value of the card down to 0, which is quite important for the players who will be following.
The lead player takes however many actions that the card they played allows them to take, then the next player takes their turn. They can choose to Surpass (play a card of the same suit, but higher value), Copy (play a card face down to take a single action that the lead card has access to), or Pivot (play an off suit card, and take a single action that the card has access to. Any player can also play a second card face down to seize the initiative to go first next round, unless the initiative has already been seized this round. If initiative wasn’t seized, then whoever played the highest surpass card takes the initiative for the next round.
That’s the basic rules of how Arcs plays. I won’t really get into the details of what each action does, or battle, or the nuance of the ambition markers, because those aspects aren’t at the core of what I want to talk about. My experience with Arcs was a frustrating one. From the context above, you may have noticed that what you can do is almost entirely dependent on which cards you were dealt at the start of the round. I think everyone at our table every round said something to the effect of “This hand is awful!”. The ambitions you can declare are dependent on the cards you have, the actions you can play are dependent on the cards you have, if you’re void in a suit, the only way you can access those actions are if someone leads with a card of that suit, and you copy them, taking a single action.
A game of Arcs isn’t about doing what you want. Arcs doesn’t support players who have a grand strategy and goals that they want to accomplish. Arcs is about tactics, it’s about being opportunistic. Action efficiency means something entirely different in the context of Arcs, it’s not about how many actions you get. It’s about having that one or two REALLY GOOD actions that enable you to score an ambition. It’s about sneaking in to get a majority in the 11th hour, it’s about positioning yourself to have the chance to do things in the future. You need to be on your toes in Arcs.
And that’s all well and good, but ultimately, it’s not the type of game that I really enjoy. I mostly enjoy dice combat games like Eclipse. I like mean games like Food Chain Magnate, but I do not enjoy the feeling of being handcuffed. I don’t like being cut off from core actions entirely, just because I was dealt a hand of manoeuvre cards.
The last chapter of Arcs I played, I was dealt 5 manoeuvre cards. The actions available to the manoeuvre cards are to Move, or Influence. I felt entirely out of the game, because those to actions have absolutely nothing to do with the ambitions. And because I had 5 of the 7 manoeuvre cards, I was fairly certain that a manoeuvre card wouldn’t be lead. My whole round was a series of copy actions, taking a single action of whatever the lead card is. Unable to plan, unable to score, I felt dejected. Perhaps that hand of that calibre is an anomaly, but it cemented my thoughts that I prefer games where I can do the core actions of the game.
That last chapter ended in quite the upset, too. One player had a near monopoly on Fuel, so he put two tokens on the Tycoon ambition. The other two players manoeuvred and raided his cities, stealing nearly everything he had. On the final turn, one of the players took a single tax action, gaining a material, and the majority on both of the ambitions that were declared that round, and went from 7 points to winning the game entirely. The whole table was floored at the sudden change of fortunes. As I said above, opportunistic.
Make no mistake, Arcs is not a Bad Game. It’s just not a game for me. I prefer to have more control over what I can do, instead of putting my fate into the heart of the cards.
I do plan to embark on the campaign expansion with my friends. I look forward to what kind of crazy situations Cole Wherle has crafted for us. I don’t think it’ll change my mind and my preferences towards games that let me plan out a strategy. But with an updated mindset of what action economy means in the context of Arcs, I look forward to those great moments of upset and triumph.
A complimentary copy of The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls was provided by the publisher for the purposes of review
I am a big fan of the Roguelike video game genre, and while I’m not a huge fan of The Binding of Isaac specifically, it’s been impossible for me to ignore The Binding of Isaac, as it really was one of the first the rougelike games, before roguelikes became as popular as they are today. My main beef stems from the grotesque subject matter, references to abuse, and the cartoony body horror. Nevertheless, I’m always intrigued when a roguelike video game gets a tabletop adaption.
The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls attempts to distill the essence of the roguelike genre into a deck of monster, loot, and treasure cards, while offering a multiplayer experience that diverges from its digital counterpart. Played either solo, cooperatively, or competitively, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls has lots of content to explore following its two successful crowdfunding campaigns totalling more than 8 million dollars.
Starting with the physical production, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls has some odd design choices. A long, half empty rectangle box, a tiny pamphlet rule book, and 100 cheap, plastic pennies does not scream “8 million dollars” worth of components. It’s important to say here that the version I’m playing is the 2nd editions retail version, so no added content in my box, and there is space in this box to expand if you choose to do so. The cards themselves are good quality, and the art is very invocative of the video game. If you like bloat flies, and crying babies, you’ll have a good time with artist Krystal Fleming’s creations.
As for gameplay, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls has players take on the personas of various heroes, each equipped with unique persistent items to aid in their quest to collect four souls and claim victory. On your turn you gain and play loot cards, activate abilities, and can choose to attack one of the monsters on the table. Should you defeat it, you’ll claim its rewards. The hook of the gameplay is that nearly every time you want to do something, you need to take a pause and “Pass priority”, where in player order, you ask everyone else if they want to react. All the card effects are arranged in a stack that gets resolved in a ‘last in, first out’ order that only gets resolved once everyone passes priority in succession.
This stack concept is the core of the game. Everyone can react to almost anything, creating a chaotic game experience. It’s rare to play extra cards during your own turn; instead, the real fun comes from using your cards to thwart your opponents’ plans. This aspect creates a high level of engagement and interaction, as the loot cards you hold are more often geared towards disrupting your opponents rather than benefiting yourself. If you like the ‘Take-That’ mentality, you’ll surely be howling with laughter, especially when what looked like a sure-fire victory for one player, turned into a 6 card combo that blew up in their face.
Interestingly, player elimination in The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls isn’t as harsh as it initially sounds. You will die while playing The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls. It’s less ‘elimination’ and more ‘minor inconvenience.’ Players who die lose a loot card, a coin, and exhaust all their cards, but then are plopped right back into the game, invoking that roguelike charm where dying isn’t that terrible and starting another run from a fresh start. That being said, the core of the game thrives with higher player counts, where the mechanics of stacking and interrupting are most effective, thus leading to more deaths. At lower player counts, the game can feels too simple and stagnant. It lacks the chaos that make the game actually enjoyable.
Unfortunately, combat feels arbitrary, as you’ll pick one of the two monsters on the table, and roll the dice a few times to see which of you falls first, either boosted by teammates, or sabotaged by opponents. I found the cooperative experience more fun, but that’s more of a reflection on my gaming tastes. I generally don’t like chaos, and I don’t like directly sabotaging my opponents. If you have good memories of Munchkin, or Exploding Kittens, you should have a pretty good idea if The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls is for you. It’s unfortunate that combat is so prevalent to the game, and yet it feels so pedestrian. I wish combat was more interesting, but the fun lies when players get involved with each other’s turns. Gloomhaven, this is not.
The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls offers a wild, interactive experience that shines with a full table of players. It’s a game built for fans who enjoy the aesthetic, unexpected betrayals, and don’t mind getting knocked down a bit. While it may not perfectly replicate the rougelike experience, it does manage to provide a unique and engaging way to enjoy the world of The Binding of Isaac with friends. If you like getting under your friends skin, or don’t mind having your own plans thwarted, The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls promises an entertaining time.
Not many games do this very well, but one of the mechanics that I absolutely adore is positive player interaction. When someone does a thing, and everyone benefits. Concordiadoes this incredibly well, a couple birds in Wingspanbenefit all players, but give extra benefit to the player who played the card, Brass: Birmingham has brilliant mutually beneficial relationships, where you can use other players things to fulfill what you’re trying to do to earn stuff for you, and the player whose stuff you used also benefits. I could go on, listing a ton of games as examples of this, as it’s one of the mechanics that when I hear it’s in a game, it makes me sit up and take notice.
So now I need to figure out why Isle of Trains: All Aboard has left me feeling cold, despite the entire game being built around this mechanic.
Let’s set the scene. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is designed by Seth Jaffee and Dan Keltner and published by Dranda Games after a successful Kickstarter campaign. This is a 2023 remastering of Isle of Trains from 2014, where they’ve added a bunch of things and completely revamped the art and graphic design. Isle of Trains: All Aboard is an attractive game, with vibrant colours, screen printed meeples, and bright and detailed train cars on each of the cards.
In Isle of Trains: All Aboard, players are racing to earn the most points by the end of the game. To begin, all players have a train engine. On your turn you can build train cars by playing them from your hand, loading goods on train cars (either your own or your opponent’s cars), delivering goods and passengers for various benefits, and take cards from the market or deck. Each turn you’ll have 2 actions to perform, then play continues round and round until the end game trigger has been reached.
The interesting twist in Isle of Trains: All Aboard is that all the trains that can carry passengers or goods generally have a special ability that gets triggered whenever an opponent loads them. This can be something like drawing 3 cards, or draw 2 cards and take an extra action. But this special ability never fires when you load goods onto your own train. You can only take advantage of the special abilities on your opponent’s trains when you load them.
The cards have multiple uses too. Every card is something that can be built, either a building for end game points, or a car on your train. Every card can be spent as a good to be loaded onto a train, and when you do build something, the cost is the number of cards you have to discard to build it. The cards are incredibly useful and versatile here.
Perhaps that’s where my criticism starts. It’s difficult to get cards into your hand, and keep them there. That’s obviously on purpose, the game is pushing you to use the mechanic of loading other players train cars so you get those powerful abilities, but that’s not always an option. Each train car can only carry a specific type of load (ore, oil, crates, and passengers). If you don’t have what your opponents need in your hand, you’ll need to inefficiently draw cards until you do. If the opponent’s train cars are full because they haven’t been delivered yet, too bad, you can’t access that ability.
Isle of Trains: All Aboard has a hand limit of 5 cards. If you’re over that limit at the end of your round, you’re forced to pitch cards until you’ve reduced down to that limit. This makes building things fairly difficult. To build a level 1 Boxcar, you need to have it, and 3 cards you’re willing to junk in order to build it. Assuming you have the max of 5 cards in your hand at the start of your turn, sure, you can pitch almost your entire hand to build that single car. Hopefully your remaining card will be something someone else can use, so you can quickly refill your hand. The end game scoring cards cost 6 each, so you really need to commit a whole turn by spending your first action to get the extra cards into your hand, exceeding the limit, then spending your whole hand to erect that station. If there were more actions per turn, or if that hand limit were higher, perhaps this wouldn’t grate on me so hard, but here we are.
For a train game, I did surprisingly well with almost no train (lost by a single point)
There is a mechanic where if you’re upgrading your cars, you only need to pay the difference between the levels. So a Level 1 boxcar costs 3, and a level 2 costs 6. If you’re upgrading, you only need to pay 3 cards and remove the level 1 boxcar from your train. This is helpful, but with the problem above of spending all your cards any time you want to do something, you can’t really keep cards in your hand to hopefully build later. More realistically, you’ll be drawing cards from the top of the deck and just hoping that you manage to pull the card that you want. It’s quite unsatisfying.
Each station starts by wanting 2 goods. Only one player can deliver to a station. When someone delivers to the station, they claim the card and have the opportunity to then deliver to one of the two extra contracts on that card. Each time the initial contract on a station is fulfilled, or, 3 passengers are delivered to a single location, the end game trigger progresses. Completing 4/5/6 progresses in a 2/3/4 player game triggers the end. I’ve mostly played 4 player games, and only once has someone managed to complete the secondary objectives. Getting 6 goods onto your train feels like a really steep ask, considering that if each player claims a single contract, you’re already approaching the end of the game. By that point it’s pretty likely that some of the cities will be close to being full of passengers and the game comes to a screeching conclusion before anyone really wants it to.
I don’t want to hate Isle of Trains: All Aboard. On paper, I was super excited to play it! I had such high expectations for it, that I’m kind of crushed that it fell flat for me. It looks great, it comes in a small box, I love the multi-use cards, I just feel like it could have been more. I hate it when a game falls flat, especially when I was so excited for it before I started playing it.
I feel like it might be a better experience at 2 players, but it’s so rare that I play anything at that player count, I’m just left with a sour taste in my mouth. Isle of Trains: All Aboard isn’t for me, and that’s okay. I have seen some positive reports from the solo community, especially with the dozen or so scenarios included in the back of the box. So if you love train games, and play solo, you might have a better experience than I did.
Growing up, we joked that my mom not only had a ‘black thumb’, but a black aura. That any houseplant that came into our home was destined to die. This may be because she was a single mother raising 3 kids, or because we grew up in frigid northern Manitoba, but in any case, being unable to care for houseplants was a common joke in our home.
Now that I’m grown and living in a much more temperate zone, some greenery has started to adorn my windowsills. Mostly inspired by my wife, but still, it counts. A few of my friends are enthusiastic gardeners, such as Otter, who I’ve talked about before, has 10 foot tall sunflowers adorning the front of his home, his backyard is abundant with raspberries, and his living room couch fights for space amongst a dozen potted plants. Being in his space, I can really appreciate how having green, living things can make a room feel cozy.
Verdant is a puzzly card drafting game for 1 to 5 players designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Aaron Mesburne, Kevin Russ, and Shawn Stankewich, and published by Flatout games. The game centres around a market row, with 4 tokens in the centre, and a room card below each one, and a plant card above each one. On a player’s turn, they much choose a token, and one of the two cards next to that token. Plant cards have a verdancy requirement, indicating how much love and care they need to reach their full potential. This can come from items, like the watering can or hand trowel, or from being next to room cards that give the appropriate amount of light to that plant.
If a plant reaches full verdancy, you clear the card of all its tokens and place a single plant pot onto the card, giving it bonus points at the end of the game. The room cards come in 5 different colours, and simply offer victory points if they’re adjacent to the appropriate type of plant. In addition, the tokens that don’t give your plants verdancy are a collection of furniture and pets that you can use to adorn your rooms. If your token colour matches the colour of the room, it doubles the adjacency bonus for that card.
One of the tricks of the game is that you cannot place a plant card next to a plant card, and you cannot place two rooms together. Instead, you’ll make a 5 x 3 chequerboard of cards as you try to maximize the number of plants you can sustain within your tableau.
The challenge here is that board games don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s difficult to talk about Verdant without also mentioning Flatout Games prior project, Cascadia, especially because they both share the market row draft mechanism, but Verdant throws an extra choice layer on top, making you choose from a room or a plant in addition to the item on offer.
In theory, I feel like I should like Verdant much more than Cascadia. The choices are a bit more complex without adding on much more rules grit, but the breazy simplicity that was found in Cascadia and Calico feels gone here. Perhaps because you’re constrained to the 5 x 3 grid of cards, and you can never place a plant next to another plant, it’s just something more to keep in your head. In Cascadia and Calico, you COULD place any tile anywhere. It was freeing. You’ll do horribly if you place tiles without careful consideration, but you CAN do it, the only thing stopping you from doing so is the allure of victory.
Much like in Cascadia, there’s a fair amount of luck involved. There’s 5 plant types, 5 room types, and like, 8 different animals. Getting the right rooms and the right animals paired next to the plants of the correct time is hugely important. More than once I committed to succulents, because I had 2 next to the associated room, but then a succulent item never materialized to help boost that score. And the only other succulent card that came out that game had the wrong sunlight requirement. If another player just so happens to have the right cards come out for them, they’ll run away with the game, no matter how skilled the other players are.
As always, Beth Sobel’s artwork is incredible, and every gardener I’ve played Verdant with has gushed over the illustrations.
Verdant continues the trend of pleasant themes to lure people to the table. A lush green box, beautiful artwork, and an inoffensive theme of arranging plants and rooms does wonders in engaging those who may only be casting a passing glance at this game. But for me, it’s my least favourite of the trilogy. I utterly adore Calico, and I even quite enjoy Cascadia. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With these two other GREAT games made by the same company, let alone countless other puzzly tableau building games, I find it really challenging to recommend Verdant, unless you have great affinity for the theme.
