I wonder if every gamer experiences an overcorrection in their hobby life. When I first got really into the board game hobby, I wanted to play the biggest, most complex game. The drier and crunchier the game, the more excited I got. But over time, I found myself pulling back. A game having a 4-hour play time is a significant barrier. When the rule book passes 20 pages, I start to shudder and feel exhausted, before a single deck of cards is even shuffled.
Lately, I’ve been quite keen on really light games. The kinds of games that are basically just a deck of cards. Set up is little more than shuffle the deck and deal them out. The one I want to focus on today is 6 Nimmt! by Wolfgang Kramer, and first published in 1994!
6 Nimmt is a single deck of 104 cards. All the cards have a number of bulls on them, which are the points in the game. The dealer gives each player (up to 10 players) 10 cards each, then places 4 face up onto the table, starting 4 rows. Each round, every player will choose a card from their hand, and reveal it simultaneously. The rest is automatic, the lowest played card moves into position first, and the position it takes depends on what’s in the rows. It will sidle next to the card that it’s closest to, keeping true to the rules that the card must be in ascending order, and it is next to the card that has the lowest difference. If a 33 and a 38 are in two different rows, and 37 would go next to the 33, while anything 39 and over would move in next to the 38.
If someone happens to play a card that’s lower than the last card in every row, they instead take the whole row as their ‘score’, and their played card becomes the new start for that row. If a card is being placed in the row, and it’s the 6th card for that row, the whole row is collapsed for that player’s score, and that 6th card becomes the first card in that new row.
Players play all their cards until all hands are empty, scores are tallied, and once someone has 55 points, the end of the game is triggered. At that point, the player with the lowest score is the winner!
While 6 Nimmt! is remarkable in the fact that it can accommodate between 3 and 10 seamlessly, going too big or too small a player count can turn the game into a mad scramble. Portability is a huge boon for 6 Nimmt! As it’s literally just a deck of cards. No tokens or extra bits anywhere to be found. This portability ensures that you’re prepared for impromptu game nights, even if nine unsuspecting victims appear at your campsite.
6 Nimmt’s rules are so straightforward, it takes almost no time to teach a complete novice. The speed at which you get people playing is perfect for those who don’t play many games, and just want to get into the action quickly. The shorter the teach, the less likely people are going to get distracted by idle conversation when I’m trying to impart the rules.
This was a good day
Both strategy and randomness are present in 6 Nimmt. There’s enough luck to smooth out the playing field a bit, but enough strategic depth to give serious players meat to chew on. What really attracts me to 6 Nimmt is the chaos and excitement that is found in the reveal. When players flop over their card and find they managed to avoid a huge number of points by a narrow margin, the whole table gets excited. The last time we played, the #100 card was on the board, and we all were holding our final cards. One player revealed they had the 104 card, another showed their 103. They both exclaimed, one breathing a sigh of relief, and the other groaning at their bad luck. Then I revealed my 102 card, making all the players erupt with laughter as I took the row of points. It may seem small, but unexpected moments like this create memories.
30 years later, 6 Nimmt! remains a masterpiece. It flawlessly blends simplicity with depth, and accessibility with excitement. It never fails to deliver fun, no matter who happens to play, and it does so with an elegance that’s hard to find in the world of tabletop games. 6 Nimmt! is an absolute joy, I recommend it without reservation. And if you ever find me in a pub, there’s a fairly good chance I’ll have this deck of cards nearby.
It’s difficult trying to review a game like El Grande. For one, it’s quite revered. Some of the biggest names in board games call it their favouritegame. El Grande was released in 1995, and to this day still sits in the Board Game Geek’s top 100 games list.
My problem with El Grande has nothing to do with El Grande. It’s a me problem. I generally don’t like area majority games. I struggle to find the fun in gerrymandering, and generally amassing armies and controlling plots of dirt feels more like a pissing contest than an exciting game.
With that introduction, let’s talk about El Grande specifically. El Grande, designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich, is a 2 – 5 area majority game, where players are playing as Grande’s in medieval Spain. The King’s influence is sagging, and everyone is in a hurry to grow their influence in each of the regions.
In play, Players have a hand of power cards, numbered from 1 to 13, and each card offering a vanishing number of caballeros that will be brought in from the general supply to your court, ready for deployment. In player order, each player plays one of their cards, ensuring they don’t play the same number as anyone who came before them. Then, whoever played the highest card gets to go first. They select one of the 5 action cards along the bottom of the board. Each of these power cards pull double duty. They both have an action on it, and allow you to place a number of caballeros from your court onto the board. Once each player has taken their action card, the round is over and whoever played the lowest number last round starts the next one. A scoring happens every 3 rounds, and after 3 scorings, the player with the most points, wins!
That’s literally it. It’s such a simple set of rules, it’s so clean and pure as far as games go, that if you do like area majority games, El Grande is this brilliant gem. The perfect distillation of an area majority game. It’s real easy to teach, very quick to get started, and while you’re playing, each turn is really smooth. There’s not much for players to forget and get caught up on. It’s a joy to behold!
All the actions in El Grande have consequence. Everything you place out, anything you move or influence, affects everyone else at the table. Sometimes the consequences of your actions aren’t immediately apparent. Like turning one of the lowest scoring provinces with a measly two caballeros on it into the single highest scoring region, and ultimately, drawing the attention of every other player.
This province started with 2 red cubes, then I made it lucrative.
Every decision feels impactful. The power card you put down determines both the turn order and how many caballeros move from the general supply into your court. The action cards determine both the number of caballeros you can move from your court onto the board, and what action you get to take. The province you’re allowed to place in is restricted by where the king is, but many of the actions allow you to bend that rule. Perhaps you’re tied for majority in a particularly juicy region, one of the actions could allow you to slip an extra caballero into that region, or even better, eject an opposing one back to their court.
The actions give flexibility where the placement restrictions of the game give security. I can see why people like this game, it’s really a marvel to behold! It’s so simple and yet so deep, tense and exciting, interactive and yet approachable. To this day, I haven’t seen anyone suggest there’s been an El Grande ‘killer’. It’s elegant, which is particularly spectacular, especially when modern area-majority games seem to be over-complicated and over-wrought in plastic.
And yet, I didn’t have fun. I won the most recent game we played, mostly by focusing on just getting the most caballeros around the board, got an early lead, and held onto it for dear life while the other players tried to buck me from my precious soil. El Grande feels much more tactical than strategic. The only things that REALLY matter are how your units are situated when the 3 scorings happen, everything else is just posturing for that moment.
I also think that El Grande has a run-away leader problem. Once someone has points, you can’t take them away. Someone getting away in the first scoring may paint a target on their back, but each other player still needs to overcome their lead. Something else that isn’t a problem with El Grande, is that experienced players would/should utterly crush inexperienced players. There’s very little you can do to stymie a well-thought-out move.
Unlike a lot of other area majority games, adjacency largely doesn’t matter. The caballeros enter play next to the king, and the majority of the actions give very free movement (when they give movement). Even moving units out of the Castillo is very free (aside from the taboo area of the King).
I can see the brilliance of El Grande, which really cements the fact that area majority games are just not for me. The tactility of spreading your influence across the board, biding your time to make a clutch move, the exciting reveal of who had the most units in the Castillo, AND where they’re going to provide support, creating a last minute shake-up in who controls which province. It’s easy to get excited about El Grande! It’s a great game, if you enjoy area majority games.
For me, El Grande isn’t fun. I don’t like spreading my influence around and hoping that the others players won’t take away the thing I’ve chosen to chase. I can see why some people love it, but I just do not find this game mechanic fun. I’m bored during the first two rounds Because only the scoring round matters. I’m exhausted when my whole turn is undone by someone putting the same number of callberos into the same province as me. There isn’t anything objectively bad in El Grande, but this game really isn’t for me.
There are other area majority games that I do enjoy, like Inis or Brian Boru, but in those games, area majority is only a part of the gameplay, there are other aspects for me to focus my attention. The other game that comes to mind is Hansa Tetunica, which I adore, but there’s a bit more of an action efficiency and engine building mechanic that I really enjoy, more than controlling specific areas. Also, once you have your cube or disc in a building, the only thing other players can do is place their own resources in the same spot, they can’t kick you out.
Honestly, El Grande hits like a required reading novel. The kind where educated and experienced people tell you that “it’s brilliant” and you can find dozens of essays dissecting every aspect of the book, but when a student reads it, it’s just another book. What’s so great about Animal Farm anyways? It’s just a bunch of pigs putting on clothes?
Do not take my opinion for El Grande. If you find any enjoyment in area majority games, this is THE ONE to play. A colourful new edition was just released that looks fantastic. Please seek out others who enjoy El Grande and enjoy this game. But please don’t invite me to that game night.
There aren’t a lot of deduction games that I enjoy. At least, competitive deduction games. I really enjoy solo logic puzzles, but when deduction becomes a competition, I freeze up and my brain becomes a puddle. It probably doesn’t help that the people who make up my regular game group are brutally smart, I always feel like I’m playing catch up. It’s probably because they’re SO much older than me.
Sorry, I’m off track. Cryptid is a deduction game by Hal Duncan and Ruth Veevers and published by Osprey Games in 2018. Playing Cryptid is quite straightforward. The concept is there is a Cryptid on the map, and each player wants to be the one to discover it. To facilitate this, all players are given a single clue pertaining to where the Cryptid could be, and when all the clues are collated, only one hex on the board satisfies all players clues.
Players take turns asking each other if the Cryptid could exist in a specific hex. If yes, a disc goes down. If no, a cube goes down. When someone thinks they know where the cryptid is, they announce their search by placing their own disc on that space, then all players either place a disc or a cube. If all players placed a disc, the searching player is declared the winner.
The first thing that pops is Cryptid’s map. It’s eye-catching! Vibrant colours depicting 5 different terrain types, and really, hexes always look good. A handful of wooden landmarks dot the landscape, and getting closer to the board, you’ll find animal tracks in the bear and cougar habitats. Everything is distinct and clear, which is vital, as the last thing you want getting in your way while playing Cryptid is hard to parse information.
The clues that get doled out have to do with proximity. Things like “Within 1 hex of a water space” or “within 2 spaces of a cougar habitat” or “on either swamp, or mountain” Each of these clues gives players a tiny slice of the puzzle, something that whittles the potential spaces down by ~60%. It’s kind of fascinating that with these clues, only a single hex on the board satisfies all the conditions. I keep expecting to find a fault, an instance where there’s more than one hex, but it’s true, every time.
Cryptid should flow quickly. Each turn is simply pointing to a hex, and asking a player “Here?” and receiving your answer with either a cube or disc. Unfortunately, as with any game that has significant cognitive load, player turns can drag on as they sit with their head in their hands trying to figure out the perfect space to ask a question.
There’s risk in asking a question. If the query returns a ‘no’, then you must also place a cube somewhere else on the board, giving all players more information about your clue. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s the real goal of the game. Figuring out what everyone else’s clue is, and finding that single hex that satisfies all the clues.
My brain burned while playing Cryptid. I struggled to keep all the other players clues in my head all at the same time. It was also a very quiet game, where we all just sat staring at the board, sometimes grunting as a cube or disc got placed, until finally the search happened, and the cryptid was discovered. But then an explosion of discussion on what we all thought each other’s clue was, made for quite a good experience.
I hold some reservations toward Cryptid that are not its fault. Things like, if a player misinterprets their rule and makes a mistake with their cube, it can completely break the game. Also, if you play with others who are incredibly logical, there’s nothing that’s going to help you overcome your opponents. All the information is right out on the board, and a players’ ability to parse the information is what determines the winner here.
Cryptid is a pretty little puzzle. There isn’t much variety to the gameplay, each time you shake up the map and drop new landmark locations, but that’s about it for discovery. It’s the kind of game that can be likened to a Sudoku, it’s a great puzzle, but every time you come to this game, it’s going to give you the exact same experience. That’s not a negative, but it will feel worn after several plays in quick succession.
It’s kind of fascinating to read some of the BGG forums, where people claim to have written a python script that can reliably find the Cryptid within just 2 turns. If you were inspired, you could train yourself and figure out the key to this puzzle. I’ve also seen a lot of people who have created deduction sheets to lessen the cognitive load of keeping each player’s clues in your head. Personally, I feel that the choice to omit deduction sheets from the game was intentional. Most of the game is happening inside your head, the workout of deducing the location is a huge part of the experience. Relegating that whole part of the game to paper turns Cryptid from a cerebral puzzle, to a checklist.
As I said above, deduction games are not my forte. Cryptid is an excellent game for those who like deduction puzzles. At the end of the day, I’d happily play Cryptid again, but it’s not one that I’ll ever be requesting to play. I much prefer Alchemists, where if my deductions fail, there are more game elements for me to focus on. I can still publish my findings, and in the event of catastrophe, poison a student for my own enjoyment.
SCOUT by Kei Kanjino and published by Oink Games has got to be one of the most widely popular little box of cards Oink games has published so far.
Each card in SCOUT is double-sided, with different numbers on either side. Each round begins by dealing out the whole deck to all players (with certain cards removed in less than full player count games). When you receive your cards, you are not allowed to re-arrange them in your hand. What you can do, is choose to use the top or bottom side of your hand, flipping the entire collection of cards over in one movement.
Each turn, players either Scout, or Show. When you show, you pick a set of cards from your hand (either cards of ascending or descending value, or, a collection of identical numbers) that are adjacent to each other, and place them on the table, making it the ‘active show’ Each subsequent player may either Scout, which has them taking one card from either end of the show and adding it to their hand, giving the player whose show is being picked apart a victory point, or, play a competing show by playing cards from their hand with more cards, or higher value cards, than the current show. If you beat a show, you take the defeated show into your play area, to count as points after the round is over.
Once per round, players can perform a special “scout and show” action, which allows them to pilfer a card from the existing show, then, immediately play their own show.
The round ends when either someone has no cards left in their hand after a show, or, every other player scouts after a show. The cards left in your hand are negative points, while the cards you’ve collected from beaten shows are positive points.
SCOUT is a brilliant little game. It’s light and easy, so anyone can get into it, but it’s not too light that it becomes mindless. I like the first moment where you get your hand, and you try to figure out which way you want to keep your hand. Which side has more immediate Shows, and which one has the potential for a much longer show. Both are important, and the importance can vary wildly depending on the player count.
Because the round ends if your show gets back around to you, in a 3 player game a show of just 4 cards could bring the round to an end, if the other players are unlucky enough. Speaking of luck, there is a pretty large element of luck in that you can get really hosed on how the cards are dealt out to you. If that bothers you, stay away from SCOUT, there is no way to mitigate bad luck. That said, there is strategy to be plumbed, which has kept me engaged throughout all my plays.
I don’t know what exactly what parameters need to exist for me to decide that luck is okay, but in the cast of SCOUT, I’m fine with it. There are no stakes, no lost time or wasted game nights when I get boned by bad luck. Just reshuffle and play it again, no biggie.
I love the hand management aspect of the game. It’s so satisfying when you can play strategic Shows to have the remaining cards in your hand fall perfectly into place. Similarly, when you have a 3,4,5,7,8 in your hand, and your opponent plays a 6. The moment when you can scout and show and drop a massive 6 card run onto the table gets the whole table exclaiming. That said, there is tension in hording a handful of cards. Sure, you might play a 6 card run next turn, but when the player before you drops their final 4 cards from their hand and saddles you with a bunch of negative points, it stings!
I could talk negatively about the theme of poaching circus staff from each other, but I don’t really feel like this criticism takes away from the enjoyment of the game. If the names and professions were scrubbed from the game, and they were just numbered cards, I’d be totally fine with it.
SCOUT is a great game, and one that I recommend without recommendation. Its tiny box makes it easily portable, its light ruleset allows nearly anyone to sit down and start playing after 90 seconds of rules. It’s fast, allowing players to hop in and out as needed. SCOUT will be one of the few games that I’ll be bringing on my travels this summer, and I’m sure more than a few new fans will be created.
Sometimes I feel like I’m becoming a curmudgeonly old man. Bitter at the world and have a deep disdain and loathing for ‘fun’. Soon I’ll be chasing the roaming street youths off my lawn with a stick, how dare they play? Everyone should be out working! No one wants to work anymore!
Sorry about that. Ticket to Ride by Alan R. Moon and published by Days of Wonder in 2004 needs no introduction. In a world where the latest and greatest board games get a mere 10,000 copy print run, Ticket to Ride has eclipsed 10 million copies sold. It is eminently popular, beloved by many, and I just don’t understand why!
A game of Ticket to Ride begins with a map. Tones have been printed, so pick your favourite region and go to town. Each player gets a hand of 3 destination tickets, of which you must at least two. Players start with 4 train car cards in their hand, and a pile of plastic trains on front of them. On a player’s turn, they can choose to do one of the following 3 actions:
Take 2 normal coloured cards from the face up display, or the face down draw deck. Unless you take one of the wild face up cards, then you only get to take one.
Play cards to place your trains on the board, and score points for doing so.
Draw 3 more destination cards, which you must keep at least one of those cards, but you can keep all the cards if you wish.
Players continue taking turns until someone has less than 3 trains left. Everyone gets one more turn, then the game is over. At game end, players reveal their destination tickets, and earn points if they were able to connect the two cities on their tickets, and lose points if they failed to do so. There’s also a 10 point bonus to the player who has the longest continual path of trains. Then, the player with the most points is the winner.
Listen, it’s not that I think Ticket to Ride is a bad game, because it’s not! It’s more that I just don’t understand why it’s so popular. The turns are fast and simple, sure. It’s rules-light, so the whole family can play, okay. There’s a constant stream of new expansions to keep the experience varied, check. But I just find the core of the game utterly uninteresting. So much of the game is just “draw two cards”. Over and Over again.
In 2 and 3 player games, all the double routes are knocked down to 1, making the game tighter at 3 players. I know skilled players can and will watch what routes another player places, and specifically try to get in their way, but at my level of play, it’s fairly arbitrary. There’s no hate drafting going on, each person is just trying to complete their routes. Yes, you could be keeping track of what cards everyone has drawn, and deduce what they can and cannot play on, but in reality, it’s a crapshoot. Destination and hand cards are hidden, and without all that forethought and really watching the board, you don’t know what the other players want to do, and blocking each other becomes accidental, which is frustrating for the person being blocked and boring for the one who is doing the blocking.
I often find that as the end of the game is drawing near, everyone fills up their hands with useless cards as they mill the deck, trying to get one or two last routes to complete a ticket, ending the game with a mittful of useless cards. Turn after turn is wasted drawing cards from the top of the deck, waiting to draw 2 yellow cards, because nothing else really matters, isn’t my idea of fun. I also hate the idea that some winning strategies can really be to just horde cards for the first 20 turns of the game, then just start placing down routes that work for you.
I played one game recently where I kept two cards with the Vancouver destination. I was 3rd in player order. The first player played 3 trains from Vancouver to Calgary, and the second player played 1 train from Vancouver to Seattle, locking me out of Vancouver for the rest of the game. Like, come on!
I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but Ticket to Ride is a hard pass from me. Alan R. Moon has designed games I like a lot more, like 10 Days in Europe, Elfenland, and Incan Gold. There’s other route building games that I like a lot more, with actual decisions to make, like Thurn and Taxis and Hansa Tetunoica. Almost anything else would be a better use of my time.
And before anyone gets on my case about how the Europe map has stations that allows you use other players routes, I know. I played it, and it helps the getting blocked out part, but I still find the core of the game boring. Thanks for reading.
Way back in 2003 I picked up my first manga. The Monthly Shonen Jumps just started getting stocked at the local pharmacy and while my mom was looking over the newest set of romance novels that had just come in, the bright colours and exciting cover lured me in. I was instantly hooked, and started saving up my pennies to buy it every month. This was the start of my fast descent into what would be a decades long anime and manga obsession. I was already a hopeless nerd, with my love of reading and voracious Super Nintendo habit, I was already an outcast in my tiny village, so, in for a penny in for a pound, may as well embrace the nerd-life.
Over the next few years, I managed to convert two others to my hobbies. Together we devoured the Shonen Jump every month, discovered fan translations online (that we downloaded via our pitiful dial-up internet), and spent every favour we could with the librarian of our high school to include some new manga on her yearly book orders.
Now, I’m not really here to tell you about my anime and manga roots, although it’s important for context later. Thanks to Shonen Jump’s inclusion of the Yu-Gi-Oh series, we eventually got into the de-fictionalized card game. That was a fairly special time in our lives, having a close group of friends all equally invested into a TCG as each other. We’d develop metas, craft specific strategies against certain decks, and our worlds were rocked every time someone got an awesome new card and revealed it for the very first time during a match. This special time in my life is exactly what Millennium Blades by D. Brad Talton Jr. and published by Level 99 Games seeks to replicate.
Cards, cards, glorious cards
Millennium Blades is a TCG simulator for 2–5 players. Each game takes place over 3 years, with each year containing a deck building phase and a tournament phase. During the deck building phase you’ll be dropping fat stacks of cash to buy random packs, buy and sell singles on the used market, all in an effort to create both a tournament winning deck and an impressive collection in your binder. In the Tournament phase, players take turns playing a single card from their hand, resolving the effects to earn points. At the end of the tournament, the player with the most points is the winner, and earns victory points. At the end of the third tournament phase, the player with the most victory points is the winner.
It sounds simple when I condense the game into a single paragraph like that, but like most TCGs, the basic rules of the game are fairly simple, but the devil is in all the cards effects and how they interact. First off, the stack of cards that makes up the pool of potential cards is absolutely massive. And, that’s not even all the cards that are in the base game! Prior to your first game, you’ll need to combine several sets of cards into a huge deck. Each set features a different mechanism or twist that can interact with other sets in various ways. On one hand, it’s a pain if you’re pulling apart that store deck every game. On the other hand, you can just leave it assembled for several plays, and refresh it when it’s getting stale.
The other pain point is ‘assembling’ the currency. Yes, Millennium Blades uses paper money, but it’s wads of bills taped together to give it more heft. It’s incredibly effective at evoking the feeling of throwing down entirely too much money on a coveted single, or getting a huge influx of cash from selling your rarest card. Paper money gets a bad rap in board games, so much so that I have a difficult time thinking of the games I’ve played in the last decade that use just plain paper money. The cash stacks in Millennium Blades don’t look as nice as, say, the Iron Clays from Roxley, but they’re simultaneously hefty and cheap feeling, so players have no reservations about flinging them across the table, creating a small mountain of spent currency. There’s a childlike fantasy whimsy the throughout the production, and it shows up even in the cash.
Millennium Blades, the game, is broken into two parts. The preparation phase and the tournament phase. Unfortunately, to play one, you kind of have to know how the other plays. The preparation phase is where all players build their collections and try to craft a winning deck. This phase is broken into 3 real-time chunks, where new cards and money are injected into the system. This phase lasts literally 20 minutes, and in those 20 minutes players are frantically heads down reading dozens and dozens of cards trying to figure out a combination. It’s genius that the cards that go into your collection need to share an attribute while being a different star value, and those cards are ineligible for tournament play. You’ll find yourself with the card that would be perfect in your deck, but it’s also exactly the missing value in your collection, so you choose to rework your deck with a different strategy, but then someone just sold a card into the market that could fit into your collection, so you pick it up and start rebuilding your tournament deck, only to find the combo you thought was awesome is 2 cards short, so you start looking for alternatives, and then the timer goes off.
Like many real time games, Millennium Blades gives players a frantic feeling. Playful stress in being under a time crunch that can and will force players to take actions they’ll regret. Selling a card for money only to realize its true value later. There are so many things to consider during the real time phase, and you’re constantly being barraged with new information, that it’s impossible to make a fully calculated choice on every card. Eventually you’ll just default to “Not a fire card? Then into the sell pile it goes!”
There’s real effort here to try to impart the feeling of collecting cards from a TCG. Every 6 minutes, you get new cards to mull over. If they don’t match your deck or your collection, then they effectively become money. You sell singles to the market to buy more cards. Your friends will unwittingly sell cards that would be perfect for you, so you snap it up. There is some anxiety here, when trying to decide which cards to sell and which of the many packs you should open up. There’s a rule in the book that explicitly forbids ‘take-backs’. If you make a mistake, you’re supposed to just own it and live with that regret. Anyone who’s made a bad trade, only to realize their folly later, is intimately familiar with that feeling.
The Tournament phase is comparatively simple, you selected 8 singles, 2 items, and a deck box, then players take turns playing a single card to their tournament row one after the other until they’ve filled up their card rows. Every card does something different, and can earn you points at different times. Some of the best cards only earn points at the end of the round, and goosing a single card for a boat-load of points is really just painting a target on that card’s back, as some cards can trigger clashes which results in a card being flipped face down, effectively voiding the card all together.
The Tournament phase feels short, comparatively. In the collection phase, you spend 20 real minutes just reading and preparing and reading, and sorting. Then in the tournament, you only have 8 cards to worry about, and a plan on how you want to play them. Sure, some unexpected moves from the opponents can make you pivot, but there’s only so much you can change when you’re in the thick of tournament play.
That isn’t to say that the Tournament phase isn’t important, or fun. The two halves of Millennium Blades make a whole, cohesive game. The Tournament phase gives purpose to the deck building phase, and vice versa. I love the fact that you keep your tournament deck in the subsequent rounds, and you really could just run a winning deck again, but now your opponents have seen your tricks, and will have baked in specific counters to your old deck, and you’ll find yourself ground into the dirt. Adapt or be left behind, as they say.
Millennium Blades is a fantastic game. It absolutely nails the “CCG-Simulator” game that it set out to emulate. Nostalgia is a tricky thing, and Millennium Blades hits me right where it hurts. From the dozens of on-point references to 90s anime and video games, to the actual betrayal I felt when I got targeted during a tournament. When I play Millennium Blades, for a brief evening, I’m not a 30-something year-old father of 2 kids and husband. I’m suddenly 14 again, back in my buddy’s basement, salivating over the sweet mythic he pulled from the pack he bought last Friday. Drinking soda, blasting tunes and playing game after game after game, refining our decks each match until the sun rose the next day. All my adult worries abate for an evening, and I’m just a kid playing a game again.
I’ve had so many fun moments playing Millennium Blades, and the real praise here is that it actually makes me feel something. A tall order for a board game to do, but it does. I wholeheartedly recommend Millennium Blades, especially if you have any experiences with TCG/CCGs and/or anime and video game knowledge from the 90s. To this day, I haven’t had an experience that nails the meta commentary or pulled at my nostalgia heart strings as well as this game does. Do not pass on Millennium Blades because it was published 8 year ago, this game about collectible card games and the gamers who play them, offers a timeless experience.
