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.
If you’ve been following some of board games largest and best creators on social media, you may have noticed that trick taking games are enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment. With dozens of fascinating games appearing, all with their own interesting spins on the genre, it can be a little intimidating if this is a genre of game that you haven’t spent a lot of time with. From Cat in the Box, to The Crew, to Jekyll and Hyde, to Ghosts of Christmas, all of these games are “Trick taking +” for the new millennium.
Going WAY back to 1997 for a moment, I want to introduce NYET! by Stefan Dorra to the mix. NYET! is a semi-coop trick taking game where the players determine the parameters for the round. Let me explain. In a round of NYET!, all the cards are dealt to the players. Then, beginning with the dealer, players take turns choosing one of the aspects of the round to be covered up. It’s less bidding for what to do, and more vetoing. Maybe your hand is void of blue cards, so you ensure that blue is not the trump for the round. Maybe you have nothing but low cards, so you really don’t want each trick to score for much, so you cover the 4 point spot. Around and around the table, players place their tokens on a little board, determining 5 aspects. The first player, how many cards are discarded, which suit is trump, which suit is super trump, and how many points the round is worth.
Once the parameters have been set, the first player chooses their partner, and the game commences! Like any other trick taking game, a lead card is played, players must follow if possible, if not possible, can play any card from their hand. The highest value card played that matches the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump is played, then the highest trump card takes the trick, and the winner starts the next round. One more hook, if you take a 1 from an opponent, it’s kept as loot. Once all cards have been played, score points based on the board for every trick and loot you and your partner managed to capture. The first player to pass 100 points is the winner.
There’s a few things in NYET! that are just fascinating to me. First, the board offers a dramatic, dynamic game. Each round, you assess your hand and then veto the aspect that would be most devastating to you. Some rounds you’ll have several things in your hand that, if they go right, means you’ll have a killer turn. On the other hand, someone arbitrarily vetoing the yellow 1’s as super trump can leave you with a handful of loot that you might have to give away. Those 1’s can either be the most valuable thing in your hand as a super trump, or, the worst thing in your hand as loot for your opponents.
There is no way this ends well
The next thing that makes NYET! shine is the fact that the start player every round chooses who their partner is going to be. Shifting alliances means the scores will rise unequally, and there’s a surprising amount of information that can be gleaned from what your opponents chose to veto. There will be times when you think the player across from you would meld well with your hand, but they’re in the lead. Are you going to assist them in earning more points, or do you choose one of the other players in the hopes you’ll close the gap?
The other fascinating aspect is that your partner won’t always be across the table from you. There were a few times in our plays where we got caught in a nasty pincer trap. The first player would lead a card, my partner and I would follow, and the lead player’s partner would come in with the hammer and win the trick. Not leading or concluding a hand felt like a tough position to be in, but I find it fascinating non-the-less.
There are lots of moments of tension in NYET!. When playing with odd number of players, the group with fewer players gets a doubler card, which creates some amazing come from behind victories. If you’re not careful, a round could end up with every trick and loot being worth -2 points, causing chaos and strife as everyone tries desperately to slough off their best cards at the right moment. Because the teams are ever-changing, players are playing for themselves. Moments of comradery are short-lived as you immediately stab each other in the back. There is humour and excitement in this trick taking game, especially when someone slams down their super-trump and completely changes the temp of a hand. A game of NYET! never fails to get me and my friends shouting.
NYET! is a fantastic game from a by-gone era. I’m sad that more people haven’t played this, especially as Trick-takings games continue to rise in popularity. NYET! is a game that I love to play, and while I’m not particularly good at trick taking games, the auction board makes me feel like I have just a little bit of control. And the chance that each trick in a round could be worth -2 points adds a tiny bit of chaos that I absolutely love.
I feel like everywhere I look, people are expressing their distress at the#666666 amount of stuff we all have. Our kitchen counters are full of air fryers, coffee machines, and tea kettles, our drawers are overflowing with knickknacks, and our board game shelves are buckling under the weight of triple layered cardboard. People everyone are calling out game boxes that are mostly empty, while praising other games for reducing their footprint on our shelves. Bezier Games looks at this landscape and says, “you know what the people want? Colossaleditions“
I know that Colossal Editions are not for me, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw a new in shrink Royal Collectors edition pop up in our local used marketplace. I hemmed and hawed, sold off my copy of Massive Darkness, and used the funds to procure this big fancy box for myself.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a 1 to 5 player game, where players are trying to build the best castle. Each round, the Master Builder takes all the tiles available for purchase this round, and sets their prices by placing each one below a spot on the market track. Then in player order to the left of the Master Builder, all players can buy a single tile, handing their money to the Master Builder. The Master Builder themselves gets the final option to buy a tile, but their money goes into the supply.
Players take the tile they purchased, and place it into their castle, adjoining rooms via doorways, and scoring points accordingly. There are 8 different kinds of rooms in a variety of sizes, and each room has different scoring opportunities. Some tiles will give points by being connected via an open door to other specific types of rooms, while activity rooms have a high intrinsic value, but will lose points if they share a wall with other kinds of rooms. You don’t want a bowling alley next to your bedroom after all. Then there’s the basement rooms, which will offer points based on specific types of rooms found throughout your entire castle, adjacency not required.
Rooms are considered complete when all of their doorways are connected to other doorways. When a room is completed, it triggers a special bonus based on the type of room that it is. All players will have secret goals in which they’ll earn points at the end of the game, and there’s some public scoring objectives that are revealed at the start of the game as well. When the deck of room cards runs out, the game is over, and the player with the most points has pleased the Mad King, and I’m sure the others are banished to the dungeons for their failures.
I already knew that I lovedThe Castles of Mad King Ludwig before I bought the Royal Collectors edition. There’s tension and conflicting decisions all over the place. From the Master Builder setting the price of the tiles, to deciding where to put the rooms into your castle and which bonuses to chase down, I’ve never felt bored when playing this game, but I’ll expound on that later. This new edition gives the game a gorgeous face lift. All the tiles are now vibrant and speckled with art and Easter eggs. I found a couple copies of Suburbia littered amongst the tables in my castle. The look of the game is great, but the functionality isn’t perfect.
Starting with the whole Big Box experience. All the tiles and game pieces are kept in 4 trays at the bottom of the box. Generally, I expect a Game Trayz inclusion to assist in setting up the game, but that’s not the case of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Instead, you need to lay out the board, slot in these green PVC looking holsters, pull all the tiles of each shape out of the trays, shuffle them up, and count out a certain number of tiles of each shape depending on the player count. I understand why this is necessary, as any stacks of tiles that are depleted at the end of the game are worth extra points, but I hate it. It feels tedious, and then I need to put the trays aside for the rest of the game, as they aren’t needed past the initial set up. Then, all the heaviest pieces, the Kings Favours poker chips, the metal coins, and the player pawns are all in a single tray, making it significantly heavier than the rest of the trays. I cringe as I pull that tray out of the box and feel the plastic bowing under its own weight. It hasn’t failed yet, but I have my concerns.
As for the player pawns, there are 20 colours to choose from. 20! In a 5 player game! Someone can say “I’d like to be blue please” and have 4 slightly different options! Combined with the 20 swans, there are 20 foyers as well. It feels even more excessive and unnecessary. On one hand, hooray for choice. On the other hand, I’m probably never going to play with more than half of these pieces, they were created for nothing.
My own production qualms aside, the gameplay of The Castles of Mad King Ludwig remains largely unchanged from its original debut 10 years ago. Each round a number of tiles comes out, the Master Builder chooses the price for each tile, then all other players get a chance to buy. I love this phase, the master builder has to balance making the best tiles expensive, but not unreasonably so. The other players similarly need to choose between giving the master builder all their money and taking the tile they want. The ‘I split-you choose’ bidding mechanism is great for creating delicious decisions.
Then building your castle is its own bundle of trade-offs. Rooms want to be adjacent to certain other rooms, but not adjacent to some. Sometimes you’ll really want to complete a room to earn its completion bonus, but the only tile available to you that round does nothing to help your score. I love building the castles, and seeing how sometimes they sprawl horizontally, and other times they seem to twist in on themselves, creating a crowded and hilarious castle.
The Royal Collectors edition also came with a couple of expansions, namely the Moats, Swans, Secret Entrances, Towers, and Royal Decrees. Each one is a small addition to the game. None of which are overwhelming, but each one being a separate entity that you need to teach. Most of them you could include with new players, but some, such as the Secret Entrances, I would leave out just because they can be quite influential if played right.
It’s hard to say much more about The Castles of Mad King Ludwig, because the summary of my experience is “it’s good! Real good!”. Years ago, I picked up Ted Alspach’s other game Suburbia, and felt like it was the better design. As time has gone on, however, I find myself much more inclined to return to the Mad King’s Castles. The dynamic market feels much more interactive, and I always find looking at each player’s castle a delight at the end of the game. There’s a whimsy here that Suburbia is missing. Not to say that Suburbia is a bad game by any stretch, heck no. But my appreciation for The Castles of Mad King Ludwig has grown over time, while Suburbia has stayed consistent. I love this game, and would play it at any opportunity. Yes, the Royal Collectors Edition has some missteps with the production, and I did read some people being displeased about a new expansion being announced before this “complete version” of the game was even delivered. That doesn’t bother me, I don’t need expansions to this game. I’m so happy every time this hits the table, and I get to play in my little sandbox building a glorious castle.
I’m writing this post as a first impression, mostly because I don’t actually know if I’m going to be returning to Voidfall or not. Not because it’s a bad game, quite the opposite. It’s a fantastic game that I really enjoyed, but the reality of my gaming life means that I may never play this game more than twice.
Let’s tell the story from the beginning. I did not back Voidfall on Kickstarter, Bigfoot did. Sci-fi heavy economic Euro games tend to be his jam. A few years ago at our first Cabin-con, he brought the Anachrony Infinity Box, which we spent an entire evening (from 8pm until 2am) unboxing, learning and playing the game. While it was a great game, and one I’ve always meant to return to, that experience remains the only play I’ve ever had of Anachrony.
In a bid to make getting Voidfall to the table easier, I volunteered to take Voidfall off Bigfoot’s hands to unbox, organize, and learn how to play ahead of time. Bigfoot has said before that he doesn’t enjoy the unboxing experience, and anything we could do to make it more likely to play the game he paid an arm and a leg for, is worth it.
Holy smokes that’s a lot of stuff
So Voidfall came home with me, and over 2 or 3 sessions I pulled everything out of the box and started familiarizing myself with all the components. The cardboard tokens were beautiful, they practically fell out of their sprues. Chef’s kiss. The GameTrayz insert on the very bottom tray, on the other hand, had a shattered corner. I’m not sure if Bigfoot will seek out a replacement, but it remains functional, although sharp.
My biggest frustration with setting up the game was assembling the resource wheels. Pushing the cardboard disks into the very tight plastic pegs gave me a fair amount of anxiety. Considering the long resource board has 10 holes in the centre, I was sure the cardboard would buckle under my pressure. But to my surprise and delight, it held strong! One more annoyance with those dials was that nowhere did it say to use the darker colour pegs on the science wheels. It wasn’t until I finished all 4 resource boards and started on the victory point boards did I realize that I didn’t have enough of the light grey pegs. So with a butter knife I managed to pry the light grey pegs off the bottom of the resource boards, then installed the dark grey pegs. Easy-Peasy.
Damn resource wheel
Assembling the houses wasn’t terrible in its own right. The decks of cards were fairly well organized, but because I didn’t know what all needed to be in each tray, I felt like I was guessing. For those who are curious, there’s 1 fallen house card, 6 technology cards (4 basic, 2 advanced), and 2 starting resource cards for each house. Some houses have different focus cards as well. Perhaps it was my own ignorance that made this process harder than it should have been, but here we are.
So with all the components unpacked and assembled, I repacked the box and started learning how to play. Gaming Rules! has a 1-hour long how-to-play video was excellent and meticulous. I ended up watching it twice, and by the end felt fairly confident in my ability to at least get us going.
On game day, we all arrived around 3:30 and pulled the lid off of Voidfall. Not wanting to waste time playing the tutorial (after all, if this was going to be our only play, we didn’t want it to be a pared down version of the game, and we weren’t confident in our ability to play the tutorial AND a full game in one day), we chose the mission that had the lowest conflict and complexity, and began setting up.
Setting up for our first game
I’ve read several times that while the iconography of the game is INTENSE, once you get into Voidfall and learn the language, the iconography really does become second nature. Everything makes sense, and there’s a pretty good cohesion between the icons. During setup, we quickly we realized the table we were playing on wasn’t big enough for everything, so we pulled a second table over to put the trays of miniatures on, giving more space to the Agenda board and the other main board that holds the player turn order and galactic event. We arbitrarily chose our houses (as the person who watched the rules video, I took the most complex house of the ones that were suggested), and with an iron grip on the Compendium, I talked everyone through the considerable setup.
One of the players was coming in cold, he knew next to nothing about Voidfall aside from the fact that we were playing it today. So I launched into the core concepts and side rules of the game. One part where I did deviate from the Gaming Rules! video is I did go through every focus card and agenda that was on the table. The Glossary book was invaluable at helping us really decipher what the iconography meant, and once we knew what some of the cards did, we became a lot more adept at figuring out what every icon meant and how to apply it to the game.
Actually Playing the Game
So, Voidfall. How does it play? We purposefully selected a low conflict map, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how isolated each of us were. I took a fairly aggressive stance and pushed into my boarders, but none of us came next to each other until the very last turn. While that will be different in other scenarios, I can definitely say that our scenario was very multiplayer solitare. There were precious few moments where our actions affected anyone else at the table. Perhaps a technology card was taken a turn before someone else, or someone missed out on a specific agenda card, but that’s really about it.
My starting Agenda card
Voidfall is a very determinstic game. Nearly no information comes out during each cycle aside from the offer of agenda cards, which having the right ones is literally the difference between victory and defeat. I’m not against deterministic gameplay at all, but this does mean that at the start of each cycle, all players will spend 20 minutes just figuring our their actions for the cycle. That part isn’t bothersome because everyone is doing that at the same time, but midway through cycle 2 one of our players realized they miscounted their resources and had to reconsider the rest of their cycle, stalling them for an additional 30 minute. That stall did have me thinking that Voidfall would make an excellent solo game.
Each action in Voidfall is generally quite simple. The complexity and challenge comes in understanding the ramifications of each action you take. Because all the actions are tied to nearly every other mechanism, everything you do is consequential to your game. If you squander actions, you’ll be left in the dust. A game of Voidfall lasts for 3 cycles, each cycle gives players between 3 and 6 turns. Each turn, players can do at least 2 actions, with a 3rd and 4th action being available if you spend resources. Voidfall is a tight experience, you’ll constantly be calculating and recalculating the resources you have and the best way to convert those resources into victory points.
Hand of focus cards and agenda cards, sorted in the order that I want to play them.
At first I was quite enamoured with the production of the Galaxy Box. This huge cube containing dozens of plastic ships and seeing everything assembled on the table for the first time was exciting. What I really didn’t like was that come the end of the game, we literally ran out of guild tiles and had to use some suitable proxies. The corvette ships, the basic ship type, while looked great, were fiddly as all hell, trying to keep them balanced on the little plastic sticks. Again, come the end of the game, we stopped putting the ship on the stick and just used the plastic bases to move our cubes around the map. For a box that crowdfunded at over $200, I feel like these are really obvious problems that could have been resolved.. Perhaps 4 players isn’t the optimal player count, and if I were a solo-primary gamer, I’d instead be complaining that there’s too many components in the box, but alas, I am not a solo gamer.
There’s also a breathtaking amount of variability in Voidfall. The Compendium has a dozen specific scenarios for every player count and play mode, each with a different map layout, different fallen houses/techs available, different suggested houses, each one having a special ability and making you choose between two different starting techs and resources. Each one has dramatically different amounts of enemies and resources on the map, leading you into a myriad of different directions. I felt excited flipping through the book of scenarios, just imagining on how the subtle changes would dramatically affect how the game plays.
Thoughts after my first play
It’s obvious that Voidfall is a labour of love for the designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi. Everything feels thoughtful and interesting, and I can tell that every action has been considered and could be vital given the right circumstances. The part that bothers me is that isn’t that the game is just deterministic, but that that the actions the other players take really don’t affect anyone else’s game at all, aside from a missed tech or an agenda card being snaked. Nothing the other players did during the game mattered to me. Come the end of the 3rd cycle, we compared victory points to see who amassed the most points in each of our own individual solo games.
I feel forced to compare Voidfall to my #1 game of all time, Food Chain Magnate, which is also fully and wholly deterministic. There is absolutely nothing random in FCM, but every action from every player affects you and the board state. It’s a knife fight in a closet, everything you do matters to everyone else. I realize they are two very different games, and the scratch different itches. Talking to Bigfoot, the interaction of FCM is exactly what he doesn’t like about it. He hates that he can have a grand, superior strategy only for someone to ram a branch into his spokes.
Those voidborn don’t stand a chance
I think the key to enjoying Voidfall has to come with expectation management. Yes, there’s a big time investment in getting started, from preparing the box, learning the rules, and getting the game to the table. It’s a very special and satisfying game, provided you’re not looking for a big 4x experience. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, 4X is a genre of game that refers to 4 main characteristics that happen throughout the game. Explore the world, Expand your territory, Exploit the land/system for resources, Exterminate your enemies. I’d argue that Voidfall is a 2X game at best, Expand and Exploit. Yes, there is combat, but not really. And the whole board is laid our right from the start, there is no exploration during the game. This isn’t a grand space combat game, if you want that, look towards Eclipse. Instead, Voidfall is a grand strategy game for those who want to puzzle out their way through a tightly designed game, and not have anyone get in their way.
I suspect I’ll play Voidfall again, but I doubt it’ll be at 4 players. Having more players doesn’t expand the number of interactions or decisions that I get to make during the game, but each additional player is another opportunity of analysis paralysis to drag the playtime to untenable lengths. I do think Voidfall is a absolutely faboulous solo game, one that may rival the infamous Mage Knight as the heavy solo game of choice. Designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi seem keen on supporting the system, with monthly challenges and an expansion announced for early 2025.
Energy Production is for suckers
If you’re eager to get into the world of Voidfall, I’d recommend picking up the retail edition for $115. It doesn’t contain the plastic minitures for all the ships, but instead uses perfectly functional double layer ship tiles. They hold your power cubes perfectly, and even assist players with keeping the rules straight, as the non-basic ships have a reminder that they can only hold a single cube until the ship tech is upgraded.
I’m curious to see how my opioning will change after a few more plays. For now, I’m going to dig into the cooperative mode rules. If the regular competitve gameplay won’t give me the interaction I’m looking for, perhaps the coop mode will at least push me to engage with my fellow players.
I sometimes forget that Kickstarter isn’t a thing that’s as well known outside of the board game circles. Every now and again I mention that I saw a project on Kickstarter to a work colleague or a parent at the playground, and I often get a “what’s a Kickstarter?”. It’s a bit wild to me that a platform that has become synonymous with crowdfunding to the hobbyist board game community is anecdotally unknown outside of this circle. I say this because I spend a significant amount of time reading about the games that are coming to, or are currently on Kickstarter. The podcasts I listen to (The Secret Cabal and Blue Peg Pink Peg specifically) often talk about just how many games the hosts have pledged to. Something else that’s significant is, considering how much time I spend browsing Kickstarter projects, is how few I actually pledge for. Flamecraft designed by Manny Vega and published by Cardboard Alchemy, was one of those projects that very nearly had me pledging, but like most, I ended up passing on, then felt the cold sting of FOMO when my social media feeds were covered in a deluge of deliveries and gameplay photos.
I don’t know where I’m going with this intro, but here we are. 2 and a half years after Flamecraft’s crowdfunding campaign launched, and I’m only just getting the opportunity to play it. The first thing anyone says about the game is just to mention how amazing it looks. The art is cute and charming, the names for the dragons and the shops are whimsical and adorable, the components (at least the deluxe upgraded ones) are absolutely stunning. Every single person who talks about Flamecraft will start with just how utterly gorgeous the game is. And for Flamecraft, that’s a very important point. The gameplay is quite simple, lending itself to be the kind of game that you use to coerce your non-gaming family and friends to the table.
Don’t get me wrong, a great looking game is an excellent tool for getting people to sit in the seats at your table. I’ve used Sagrada to successfully convince several people that board games aren’t in the doldrums like they used to be. Flamecraft is the kind of game that gets those around you to sit up and take notice. It’s not flashy, it’s charming. It has a quiet allure with its cute and colourful aesthetic. There is great value in looking good, and Flamecraft looks amazing.
Getting into the gameplay, it’s as simple as can be. On your turn you have to move your dragon pawn to any shop around the town board, then you gather all the goods at that shop (shops have a base value of 1, then each dragon in the shop gives another good, and each enchantment nets yet another good), and then either play a dragon card into a slot that matches the dragon from your hand (and gain the rewards from the slot) and/or use the fire ability of any one dragon in the shop, and if the shop has an ability, you may use that as well. Or, instead of doing all that, you can choose to enchant a shop instead. To enchant a shop, just pick one of the face up enchantment cards that matches the shop you just landed on, pay the cost, and Slide the enchantment card on under the top of the shop, then, fire all the dragons in that shop. Only If you want to, it’s not required.
Most of the game centres around gaining and then spending various resources to earn more points or get more dragons. All the normal dragons have unique names and artwork, but their abilities are static. Which at first I was a bit disappointed in, but after a few plays I realize how difficult it can be to parse just 6 abilities and 6 available shops. Giving every dragon a unique ability would have slowed the game down to a crawl, so I’m glad they chose to keep them all the same.
At the beginning of the game, you’ll find yourself looking at the enchantment cards and thinking, “how am I ever going to earn 4 leaves and 4 diamonds to complete Imp’anadas?”. But by the end of the game you’ll go to a shop, pick up 5 tokens from the dragons and enchantments, and fire a diamond dragon to gain an additional 3 goods. Flamecraft gives players an incredibly feeling of progression. Things get better, and faster, and easier, players build their engines up to a crescendo. Where there used to be poverty, and you were wondering about the 7 item limit that felt impossible to reach, suddenly you’ll find yourself buried in bread and having to throw some back into the supply.
In addition to the normal dragons, players can also earn Fancy dragons. The fancy dragons are a special type of card, and they come in two suits. Suns and Moons. The suns can be played at any time their conditions are satisfied for a nice little boost, while the moon dragons are end game scoring conditions, such as “have the most meat tokens” or “earn points if you have an even number of goods”. These can vary wildly, and if you just so happen to pick up 3 or 4 that work well together, then you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. It’s not quite a criticism, but more of a comment that I didn’t feel like I was in control of my own destiny when playing Flamecraft.
Flamecraft features very little player interaction. Most of it comes from just getting in each other’s way. When you want to visit a shop, but someone else is already there, you simply need to pay them a single good. A few cards will also see you distributing goods around the table for a bigger benefit for yourself, but that’s the extent of the interaction. You aren’t able to stop anyone from doing anything, other than doing it yourself before they do (such as completing those enchantments). And that’s fine, for a game that I’d use to introduce people to the board game hobby, I don’t want it creating any bad feelings. But for me, it makes me feel like I have very little agency. If I win, it’s not because I did the best, but just because I got lucky.
At the end of the day, Cardboard Alchemy has crafted a beautiful and charming game, one that is sure to be a hit with those perhaps on the periphery of this board game hobby. I love seeing all the stories of people discovering how munch fun board games are via a play of Wingspan, and I feel like Flamecraft has a lot of the same qualities. I don’t know what secret sauce Wingspan has that made it such a seminal hit, but I would love to see Flamecraft held up alongside it as an excellent, charming, beautiful game for people of all walks of life.
