In Applejack players are… actually, don’t worry about the theme. The goal of the game is to earn the most honey by growing cultivating collections of apples in your orchard, and arranging beehives to produce the most honey.
I think it’s safe to say we’re firmly in the era of “Cozy Games”. Games featuring zombies, war, and general turmoil, while not absent, are popping up less frequently. Meanwhile, farming, animals, and nature themes are becoming much more prevalent. Now, designer Uwe Rosenberg is no stranger to comfy cozy themes, with his biggest hits being Patchwork, Agricola, and A Feast for Odin, but something in Applejack hits differently. It starts with the delightful cover by Lukas Siegmon of a man admiring an apple, sitting on his bounty of fruity, taking a rest after a long day, with a flock of sheep grazing on the grass in the background. This single piece of art sets the tone for Applejack.
A game of Applejack starts with a fallow field, devoid of fruit, but full of promise. Turn by turn, the die will travel around the central board, and players take turns pulling tiles and placing them into their field. Each tile depicts one of the 6 apple varieties, and include some beehives, that indicate how much that tile costs, and how much it might get you later on in the game. At certain points during the game, the round tracker die will pass over various apple varieties, triggering income for anyone who has collected apples of that type.
I have nothing but respect for Uwe Rosenberg’s past tile laying masterpieces, and I feel Applejack is among his best work. Choosing and laying a tile is tough when you start, or, you may just pick the biggest numbers and hope for the best. But as you play Applejack more and more, the intricacies of the design begin to reveal themselves. Is it better to diversify and collect tiny bits of income frequently, or do you go all in on a single apple variety and reap a major bonus. Maybe placing a tile of the wrong variety would net you a huge honey bonus, but segment your red apple variety into two halves, cutting your potential income for the rest of the game. Honey is generated when two beehives meet, but only the lower number is what you’re scoring. It’s painful to pay 10 honey for a tile because it has the right apple, but you’re forced to place it against a measly 3 beehive, losing 7 honey overall. Foreseeing and managing these tradeoffs are what gives Applejack it’s delicious texture!
Perhaps a downside of the cozy setting is that the barbs of Applejack can catch players unaware. Much like Agricola (AKA Misery Farm), the start of the game sees players barely scraping by. The honey income is slow and more often than not you’ll have to pass up the more expensive tiles, simply because you don’t have the honey to afford them. Go big early, and you’ll starve for a couple rounds and fill your board with useless sheep.
Another complaint I have has to do with the chosen apple varieties, and the fact that they made two of them slightly different shades of green. More than once I’ve taken a tile, only to realize during the next scoring that one of my tiles was the wrong green, not only accidentally cleaving my biggest orchard in two, but also incorrectly influencing my decisions for several rounds until my mistake was discovered.
Overall, those are some pretty minor gripes about. Full disclosure, I’ve only played Applejack on Board Game Arena, which may sand off some other complaints, like, refilling the market with tiles and the fiddly activity of constantly trading in bits of honey tokens after doing the same basic math over and over again.
After my first play, I was lukewarm on Applejack, it felt shallow and devoid of interesting decisions. But the more games I played, the more layers were peeled back. I started to realize how you can plan ahead, and how some of the tradeoffs and timings really work. There’s depth and crunch to this game, from the spatial puzzle of apple placement to the timing of the economic decisions. Playing Applejack well requires some interesting decisions, and it’s turned out to be much more fun than I initially thought.
I’m thrilled that I gave Applejack more than a single play, as I am truly relishing in its charm with each subsequent game. The very first modern board game I experienced with my mother was Patchwork, a game she adored, and I believe she would also love Applejack, despite her unfortunate apple allergy. As it stands, I would happily use Applejack as a means to introduce novice gamers to my hobby. Uwe Rosenberg, once again, has fashioned a remarkable creation, a true gem of a game that has the potential to expand and share the joy of board games far beyond its current horizons.
Roll & Write games! Remember when these little gems were considered novel and few and far between, just a few years ago? Well, Nao Shimamura’s first kick at the can is a little title called Mind Space and is being published by Allplay. Is it a mind-blowing revelation, or just another set of dice with dry-erase markers to go stale on your shelf? Read on to find out!
Mind Space is a roll-and-write game with a few extra sulci. The first thing that sets it apart from those that came before it is the theme. Players are colouring sections of their brain, and each colour represents a different facet of your personality, and how those quirks interact will lead one player to being crowned the best person.
The gameplay of Mind Space has a row of 5 offer cards depicting various polyomino shapes. One will be placed face down, then 5 face up, and the rest of the deck put aside, creating the offer row. At the top of every round, the 5 dice are rolled, and are assigned to a shape based on the number you rolled. Players all simultaneously choose a die and draw the shape depicted on the card that the die was assigned to, in the colour of that die.
Each colour has its own scoring criteria, each one representing a different aspect of personality. The orange colour represents friendship, the more activities you do with friends, the more points you’ll earn. Even better if you can pair it with complementary purple hobbies. Hobbies score two points for every square that is adjacent to an orange square. The pink romance encourages you to have the same shape, while green just earns you money.
This isn’t the kind of game where you can achieve everything, and Mind Space reflects that. Life is all about compromises, and you’ll mourn as the deck of polyomino shapes (called activities) slowly flow through the offer row, ultimately reaching the end and becoming unavailable to you for the rest of the game. Those activities you used to love just aren’t available to you any more.
It’s incredibly appropriate that while spending money can let you break the rules, it’s also utterly useless in the end. Cash is just a means to an end, either buying you shaded cells or the occasional wild shape. If you don’t spend it, it’s gone with the wind. Charon doesn’t get paid in Mind Space.
The final result? It’s surprisingly pleasant. Mind Space might not be the most mind-blowing game out there, but it’s got a calm serenity to it, like sipping tea on a quiet morning. There’s more nuance here than the slot machine combo-tastic style of roll and write games such as That’s Pretty Clever. It imparts a little wisdom in unexpected places, and the trade-offs it forces you to consider make for a decent and enjoyable experience. In a crowded genre, Mind Space is a lovely surprise.
Have you ever walked through a jungle and thought to yourself, “I love how colourful this place is! The vibrant green, red, purple, and blue ferns?” and “Wouldn’t this bright yellow fern look lovely if it had an equally yellow parrot on it?” No? Me either. Rainforest, by Johannes Goupy and published by Funnyfox, uses the rainforest name and aesthetic, but the mechanics of the game are completely separated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, no one is arguing that Cascadia or Wingspan’s themes ties into their mechanics, and those games have won piles of awards.
According to the Board Game Geek description, In Rainforest, your aim is to create a jungle environment that offers a rich variety of vegetation, which will allow you to reintroduce and protect the region’s iconic species: Monkeys, frogs, butterflies, and parrots. The gameplay is simple enough and features a double draft much like Cascadia or Verdant. On each turn, you’ll draft a tile from the central board (the tiles are separated by colour), and take a set of animal tokens from below the tile that you just took. The animal tokens you take must share an attribute, either all the animals of a single colour, or all the tokens of a single animal. Then, you can place your animals on your rainforest tiles and, if completed, place into your tableau.
Each tile is worth a certain amount of victory points on their own, but you can increase the number of points that tile is worth by placing your special totem animal onto that tile. One extra point for each of your totem animal that makes it onto the tile.
Some tiles will require specific animals, and specific colours, but the real restriction comes when you place the completed jungle tiles into your tableau. They must be placed into a 3 x 3 grid, and starting from the bottom left and moving across. This becomes incredibly important as if you can have multiple tiles of the same colour touching each other, you’ll earn a multiplier token called a protected area bonus, which you place on a tile that multiplies the points of that tile. These multiplier tokes are quite limited, making them incredibly valuable.
The game comes to an end once someone places their 9th tile, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Rainforest is a tile selection and action efficiency game. To do well, you need both your tile selections and animal token picks to be working at the same time. On your turn you do have the option to return a tile to the bottom of the stack to only take the animal tiles, but considering the game is a bit of a race, doing so is really not ideal. You need to be first to the protected area tokens, and you want to be the first one to complete your 9 tile tableau, but doing so cheaply can actually cost you the game. If someone has a 4 point tile, with 2 of their totem animal on it, with a triple score bonus, that single tile could be worth more than your entire tableau.
At 4 players, Rainforest feels tight. The tiles and animals shift dramatically between each of your turns, making forward planning difficult. At the same time, forward planning is required, as you can’t adjust where the tiles go when they’re placed into your tableau. You can only hold 2 animals on your board, and situations will arise where you’ll need to discard an animal lest you complete the wrong tile first and ruin your chance for a protected area token. At 2 players, it’s much more open. You need to specifically target your opponents’ strategy to step on their toes.
I do like drafting games, and Rainforest delivers on that front. There are some tough choices you need to make as a player here. Do you bide your time building up your perfect tiles, or blaze forth and try to end the game before other players manage to recruit their army of butterflies? The tiles of Rainforest are bright and attractive, but incongruent with each other. That said, its attractiveness and ease of play makes it a perfect game to play with those who may not have expressed an interest in board games before, especially if they have a particular affinity for one of the featured animals.
Rainforest was quick to play and attractive to look at, but I don’t feel that it has the replayability that I’m looking for. The scoring is the same every game, with the only thing changing are the order of the tiles and which animal tokens get associated with each tile. Perhaps I’m spoiled by games like Cascadia, and it’s myriad of scoring opportunities, but Rainforest sits in a crowded market, and it’s a game-eat-game jungle out there.
I’ve never made anything that’s been massively popular, and as a by product, I’ve never had to follow up a massively popular project. I have sympathy for those who have, like Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch, both of whom are authors who created excellent and popular book series, that have been dormant for a decade. I get it, suddenly, there are a lot of eyeballs on your work, and anything you do will be compared to your previous projects, and probably unfairly just because it doesn’t live up to the image that’s been conjured up in the mind of the fandom.
I sometimes wonder if Renier Knizia suffers from this. But before I even have a moment to speculate, another one of his game designs is announced to the world. My City: Roll & Build is the 2022 follow up to 2020’s My City, both published by KOSMOS. My City: Roll & Build takes the essence of My City and reduces it down to a much smaller package, and one that feels much more replayable.
In My City: Roll & Build, 1 to 6 players will create 12 unique cities by rolling dice and marking off the resultant shapes on their terrain sheet. The two blue dice contain a number of squares on each side, and every side has a little semicircle. Press the two semicircles together to reveal the shape you must plop into your city. Unlike My City however, you’re free to flip and rotate the shape of the building to your heart’s content; you’ll never be cursing that you got the wrong L shape, like I did in every game. The white dice, on the other hand, dictates the texture of the city which is important for scoring purposes. Like My City, each chapter of the game introduces a main mechanic, and every episode of the chapter builds upon and twists that mechanic.
Also like the parent game, everyone is given the exact same tools and situations. Everyone will draw the same shape at the same time, but it’s the decisions that each person makes that will spiral off into interesting and unique boards. There’s nearly no interactions between the players, and the ones that do exist are just “whoever can cover these spaces first gets an extra 5 points”. Which leads me nicely into the scoring, every individual game has slightly different scoring opportunities. In the first game, the only thing you really care about is covering rocks and empty spaces while not covering your trees. Throughout the campaign, you’ll be trying to cover plains tiles, gold ore, ensure churches are touching all 3 types of buildings, surround wells and bandits, and more! Every game you play will earn you a score, and your final score is assessed at the end by a table of results.
I’m generally not a fan of “score attack” types of games, and this is no different. I don’t really care about trying to break that 300 point threshold, and when I play against other players, I struggle to really care about who wins or loses each individual game. With no interaction, the competition feels hollow, but that’s okay. My City: Roll & Build doesn’t have to be a fiercely competitive game. I found a lot of joy just in just drawing my little buildings on my pads of paper. Overcoming the puzzle of how to jam as many pieces onto my board at a time.
Part of my apathy toward the scoring is that there can be large swings from play to play. Breaking past that 300 point upper threshold could be simple if you roll a lot of small buildings. Meanwhile, a string of bad luck can see half a dozen large C shapes that don’t work together and can cost you a whole games worth of points. It’s marginally better when you’re comparing your score against people who played the exact same game that you did, but trying to get a high score feels too luck dependant for me to invest my time into it. You can’t plan for a specific shape to enter into your city like you could in My City. Here, you’re at the whim of the dice rolls.,
My City: Roll & Build is a charming, calming little dice game that you can take anywhere. You don’t need to play through an entire 12 game campaign with the same group, playing a single chapter in 35 minutes is absolutely adequate to give a satisfying gameplay experience. It’s the kind of game that I’d play on the train, or plane with friends or intrested strangers. The moment to moment decisions of drawing buildings, and the elation when the perfect building gets rolled feels great. While I still prefer the larger My City experience as it felt more tense with the tile placement restrictions, and the tactile nature of tiles is more satisfying for me, there’s space for My City: Roll & Build to exist on nearly any shelf.
Legacy games get a bad rap around my table. I’ve started more than half a dozen and completed only 2. It seems my thirst for discovery goes beyond incremental rule changes and I find it burdensome to feel the obligation to play a game, rather than picking it because it’s the game that I want to play. And yet, I still feel compelled to embark on these endeavors. Lured in by the promise of changing gameplay, an immersive story, and long term ramifications, I keep coming back to these legacy games hoping to find the one that shows me what I’ve been missing all this time.
My City by Reiner Knizia and published by KOSMOS is a 2 – 4 player tile laying legacy game that takes place over 24 games, broken into 8 chapters. Each chapter of the game introduces a new mechanic or a new major rule change, and each of the games within that chapter slowly increase the complexity or add wrinkles for you to contend with. It’s a little intimidating at first, hearing that you’ll have to play this game 24 times to see it through to the end, but each game only lasts between 15 and 30 minutes, making it simple to plow through 3 games in a single sitting, if you have the stomach for ever-changing rule-sets.
The gameplay of My City is smooth as butter. A card is flipped over, and all players need to place the tile that’s depicted on that card. Your first building needs to be adjacent to the river, and every subsequent tile must be adjacent to another building tile. The pieces range from little 2 square tiles, all the way up to pentominoes, 5 sided giant C shapes that you’ll struggle to fit into your commune. You can choose to pass, and give up a point, if the tile doesn’t fit, or if you simply don’t like the cut of that tile’s jib. You do lose a point for doing so, however.
So what’s the point of placing tiles? Well, your player board is littered with trees, rocks, and empty plains. You’ll try to cover all the rocks and empty tiles, while keeping your beautiful foliage intact. At the end of the first game, you’ll earn 2 points for every tree still standing, and lose 2 points for every rock marring your landscape, and 1 point for wasted, empty spaces.
As the campaign goes on, more and more scoring rules are folded in. You start scoring a point for your largest contiguous group of same coloured buildings, 4 points for 4 different buildings surrounding a well, unpassable churches that offer 3 points if it’s adjacent to all 3 colours. Thankfully, mercifully, it isn’t all rise. There reaches a point whereas new rules come in, old rules start to get pushed out. This helps reduce the cognitive load on players, as they try to remember the dozen different ways the game is offering points to you.
After each play, the winners are generally awarded something that will make their life harder, like more stones they need to sticker onto their board, while the lowest scoring players get a boon, like a tree that makes your board inherently more valuable, assuming you don’t bulldoze that bonus coniferous to make way for the blooming blue district that’s up and coming.
You’ll also earn mysterious little circles that you mark off along the top of your board. I don’t think it was spelled out during the start of the game, but the player who accumulates the most of these circles will be the victor of the whole campaign.
Playing My City is a fast and pleasant affair. Some chapters have players racing to cover two spots first, but beyond that, there’s nothing stopping you from just enjoying your own little game and comparing the scores at the end. You’ll curse the fact that you have the wrong Z or L shaped tile, no matter which one you’re trying to place. You’ll wish they were reversible as you place the tiles, making awkward shapes on your board. In the same vein, when the perfect piece gets flipped, and that tile slides in like a glove, connecting all the buildings of the same colour, it’s majestic. The rule changes keep the game feeling fresh and offer new wrinkles that flex the system in ways it might not expect.
I honestly thought my family would love this game. I picked up a brand-new copy, brought it out at Christmas with my wife and my mom, and going into the third game they both were annoyed that the rules kept changing. “Why can’t we play the same game?” they asked, apparently not understanding the whole point of a legacy game is for things to change from play to play.
My regular game group, on the other hand, played through this whole campaign, using the games are lovely little end caps of our evenings. After a much heavier game had wrapped, we cooled off with a game or two of My City, and it was the perfect way to experience this charming game. I don’t know if there’s a way to become good or skilled at My City, and I couldn’t tell you why I won some games and lost others, but it’s just plain enjoyable to fit little cardboard tiles together, like a jigsaw. When we got to the final game, I felt the whole experience ended with a sigh or a whimper, rather than a bombastic finale. It just, ended. The player who accumulated the most circles won, and we knew who that was going to be by the time chapter 5 concluded. There were no dramatic upsets, no surprise twists, just, the end.
My City offers an eternal variant, where you use the reverse side of the board for one-off games. It’s the mode I use with my family, but that mode would never be my first choice. In that same breath, I recognize that I can’t start a 24 game campaign with everyone who sits down at my table.
While the ending of the campaign left me wanting more, I remain charmed by My City. If you like polyomino tile laying games, My City is a no-brainer.
We call this one ‘Big Plus-y”. You always need to leave room in your city for Big Plus-y.
Kites, designed by Kevin Hamano and published by Floodgate Games, is a real time cooperative card game about keeping your kites in the sky, or rather, sand in the timers. Honestly, if a game has a real-time component, I’m instantly down to give it a shot, I love the pressure and delight in the stress that comes from having a real-time aspect. Also, it’s a great way to ensure a game moves at a decent clip. As a gamer who tends to act first and think later, it’s great for me.
How to Play
The game begins with the 5 coloured timers on their side. Everyone gets a hand of cards (6 cards each for 2 players, 4 cards each for 4 players, etc.) and play begins with the starting player flipping over the white timer to launch the game. From this point on, if any timer ever runs out of sand, the players collectively lose.
Each card has one or two colours on it. When you play a card, you must flip over the colours depicted on the card, then draw a new card. If the card you played only has one colour on it, you can choose to flip the white timer instead of the colour that was depicted on the card, which is important because no cards have white on them. When players exhaust the entire deck, the white timer becomes ‘locked’, it can no longer be flipped. If players manage to play all the cards from their hands before any timer runs out, then you’ve won!
It’s worth mentioning that if a timer runs out, players haven’t “lost”, but they can check how many cards are left in the deck and their hands, and call it their score, with the best score being 0. Personally, I don’t bother with counting cards at the end, Kites is a win or lose game for us.
Review
I love games that can be explained how to play in just two paragraphs. “Play cards, flip timers” is all players really need to know to get started playing Kites.
There are some advanced cards to challenge players once they clear the challenge of the base game, but we’ll leave those aside for now. The production of Kites is really simple and lovely. The cards feature lush illustrations of whimsical kites by the ever talented Beth Sobel. The cards feel like high quality card stock, and the final component is the timers, which are absolutely functional, if a bit prone to toppling over during the frenzied gameplay. I’m not sure if making the flared bases would have made them harder to top over, and keeping them slim was a deliberate design decision, but when playing with 4 players, it was a challenge to have the timers arranged in a way that each player could flip any of their timers without bowling over two other times at the same time. Maybe we have clumsy ham hands, but it was a component challenge we ran into.
It’s real hard to take photos of real-time games
The gameplay of Kites is straightforward, elegant, exciting, and kinetic. You’ll be anxiously looking at the red timer getting close to empty, play a card to flip it, then the next player will play a purple and red card. The anguish and stress that comes from trying to quickly parse what options your cards afford you, and which of the timers needs flipping, all while those timers are constantly draining, is simply delicious. Communication a short and to the point, you can’t have a calm and calculated discussion, detailing who has which cards and how best to approach the puzzle, because time is running out and every time a timer flips, everyone needs to reassess the situations.
At lower player counts, we found Kites to be quite easy. With 5 cards in each player’s hands, we had plenty of options each turn, and could even claim ownership over whole timers. “I’ve got red and blue”, letting the other player know that they can ignore those timers and focus on the remaining timers. With just two players, play feels even faster, as by the time you’ve finished flipping your timers and have drawn your next card, the next player is already halfway through flipping their timers, and the heat is right back onto you.
The final wrinkle in the basic game is the ‘grand finale’, where, when the deck runs out, the white timer can no longer be flipped. Players need to play out their hands to complete the game. This forces players to be aware of the deck running out, and when exactly should they flip that white timer. It’s not a major pain, but it’s one that caused a few ‘losses’ in my plays.
I’m not sure how much staying power Kites has, I imagine once your group figures out the ‘flow’, it’ll move from exciting to just an exercise in flipping timers. But this is where the challenge cards come in. The airplane halts communication for a round, the storm forces one player to flip every timer, and the crossed lines have players give one card to their left and one to their right. These challenge cards inject even more unpredictability and chaos into the game, which is an element of real-time games that I absolutely love. These challenge cards are not necessary to enjoy Kites, but they are a nice addition once you’ve mastered the basic game.
I think it’s clear just how much I enjoyed playing Kites. It’s frantic, a little chaotic, but if you can control your panic and find the flow, then the game just sings. The losses never sting, but the victories will have you cheering and shouting with joy. It’s fast, easy to pick up and play, the rules take 30 seconds to explain, allowing for players to leap in and out at gatherings. Kites feels thrilling and immersive, if a little crazy at times. It’s been a major hit for me, and it’s exactly the kind of game I would take on vacation to bust out at every family gathering.
