Game Length: Physically, 30 – 45 minutes. On Board Game Arena, 10 minutes
Mechanics: card drafting, tableu building
Release Year: 2007
Designer: Thomas Lehmann
Artist: Martin Hoffmann, Claus Stephan, Mirko Suzuki
Introduction
I like playing Super Smash Brothers, I always have. I’ve played every iteration, and it’s one of the few straight-up fighting games that I actually enjoy (sidebar, I recently borrowed Pokken Tournament from the library only to be reminded how much I don’t like fighting games). My enthusiasm for Smash Bros has led me to exist in a very weird state. I can crush all of my friends, no competition, but I’m not good enough for the competitive scene. The few times I’ve dabbled in tournaments, I’ve gotten eliminated almost immediately. This is the state I find myself with Tom Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy, I feel like I have an advantage over my friends, simply for having played it over 100 times, but when I approach other enthusiasts, I’m still a beginner, comparatively.
How to Play
Race for the Galaxy is a fast tableau builder. The entire game is managed via cards, with the only cardboard components being score chips. Race for the Galaxy begins with each player getting a starting world and a hand of cards. In your other hand, you’ll have cards depicting each of the actions that are available to you. At the start of the game, each player simultaneously picks one of the action cards and places it face down. Once all players have selected their action, the cards are turned face up.
Now, here’s the trick of the game. Only the actions selected will be available this round, and the action you selected will be taken by everyone else (you’ll get a small benefit for choosing that action). Actions are always taken in the following order
Explore – Draw cards from the deck
Develop – Play development (diamond) cards from your hand, discarding cards equal to it’s cost
Settle – Settle a planet (circle cards) from your hand, discarding cards equal to it’s cost
Trade & Consume – Discard one of the goods on one of your planets to draw cards, then use other planets consume powers, generally discarding a good to earn points or to draw more cards
Produce – Place one card face down on each of your planets that can produce a good. These are used during the Trade & Consume phase.
Once you’ve gone through all the actions that will be taken this round, you pick up your action cards and start again. The game ends when someone has played their 12th card in front of them, or, when the supply of victory points has been exhausted. The player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
To preface this review, I have only experienced the base game of Race for the Galaxy. My opinion is free from any expansions, which may or may not be sacrilege, depending on who you’re talking to.
I don’t often do this, but let’s start with the negatives. First, the art. The art in Race for the Galaxy is reminiscent of those old paperback sci-fi books that used to clutter my shelves, and it can serve as both a high or a low point, depending on your nostalgia. Many cards will look dark, boring, generic, or confusing, offering only a sliver of a story. The Glactic Federation is a yellow dome against a bloe background, and the Trade League is just two faceless people talking. For some, this style will hearken back to a by-gone era of science fiction, but for others, it comes across as dated and unattractive.
The other most common complaint is the heavy use of iconography. Personally, I find the icons incredibly apt at conveying information, but only because I’ve learned the language. Once the icons and card layout clicks with a player, Race for the Galaxy is a joy to play. You can understand what each card in your hand does with just a glance along the left side of the card, allowing you to quickly parse the information. Nothing feels obfuscated once you understand how to read Race for the Galaxy.
The goal of the game is to build an engine that can generate cards that will allow you to place more planets and developments into your tableau. Points are earned passively as you play planets and developments, and further points can be earned by consuming the goods of your planet’s produce. Some games will have a player rushing to get their 12 cards laid down to end the game, hoping their quantity of cards will overcome the quality cards the other players managed to get onto the table. Other games will see a player just consuming and producing ad nauseam until the supply of victory points are exhausted, which also triggers the end of the game. No matter which way you play, once you have your engine set up, it’s fun to see it run and produce a volume of cards and points that feels ludicrous compared to what you could do at the end of the game.
Each round of Race for the Galaxy is straightforward and quick. Once all players have selected just one action card, they’re revealed, and players move through the actions in order together. Any actions that were not picked are not taken, and once the final action is completed, players just pick up their action cards and choose what’s going to happen in the next round. It’s such a simple system, but it creates an amazing amount of tension. You’ll worry and fret over what other players will play, should you play your settle action so you can place a world? But if Bigfoot plays the settle action, you can play your world down anyway, so maybe you should choose to produce. But if Bigfoot doesn’t play Settle, you won’t have any worlds to produce! What to do?!
In a two player game, both players get to choose 2 actions per round, which I find absolutely wonderful. It gives you more control over the game, but still keeps the tension of trying to correctly assess what your opponent will be trying to do on their turn, so you can optimize and get the maximum benefit from their actions.
Race for the Galaxy is such a good tableau/engine builder, that it sours me on other experiences. I have a hard time playing Terraforming Mars, Wingspan, or Ark Nova because I would rather play this. In each of those games, your ability to draw and search for cards is sincerely limited. You’re at the whim of each game’s massive deck to deliver the prerequisites that you’ll need to get your engine going. Race for the Galaxy allows you to both search the deck with great speed, and has very few prerequisites that really require other cards, meaning that you’ll rarely be blaming the deck should you fail to get your engine going.
Just to drive the point home, in my last game of Terraforming Mars, I chose the starting corporation that gives a benefit to playing Jovian cards, as I had one Jovian card in my hand. I figured I’d dial in on that strategy, play the most Jovian cards possible to maximize the benefit from my corporation. Then, I didn’t draw a single Jovian card for the rest of the game. I had a similar issue in Ark Nova, where I played a card that would benefit me for every gorilla tag I played, then proceeded to not see a single card with that tag for the rest of the game. In both those examples, my ability to draw more cards was fairly limited, and I was locked into a two-hour game with an engine that wouldn’t turn over.
In Race for the Galaxy, I can draw 6 cards every turn if I want to, and still benefit from the actions other players take. There’s only 4 types of goods exist, so finding both a planet to produce a certain good, and a card that will consume that good is not difficult. And in the very worst cases, the game ends after 20 minutes. If you’re having a bad time, at least it’ll be over quickly.
Race for the Galaxy is a game that rewards multiple plays. Understanding and internalizing each of the actions and how to flow from building to producing to consuming to settling, and being able to accurately predict what your opponents are going to do and leverage their actions in addition to your own, makes this a fantastic game that pulls me back again and again. I do admit that I have a hard time justifying actually buying a copy of Race for the Galaxy when the version on Board Game Arena is freely available. No need to shuffle, no accidentally misplaying cards, and a plethora of people to play with makes it a fantastic way to play this clever card game. And, it even has tooltips, allowing you to hover over the cards to see exactly what they do, removing the need to learn the iconography up front. If you do learn that iconography, then games can be completed within 10 minutes, making this one of the fastest and deepest experiences on the site.
I adore Race for the Galaxy. It’s a fast, tense, excellent engine building game that offers a pure experience with lots of choices and strategies. Players have room to pivot, should a strategy not pan out, and when you can correctly identify the action your opponents will play and being able to capitalize those actions, the feeling of satisfaction is hard to beat. It’s eminently replayable, as evidenced by my 150 plays of the base game alone. I know some people swear by certain expansions, and maybe one day I’ll get into them. But for now, I’m just having too much fun with the experience that comes in the base box.
Artist: Collateral Damage Studios, Sebastian Koziner, Usanekorin, and Davy Wagnarok
Release Year: 2021
Mechanics: Pattern Matching, Push Your Luck
Players: 1-4
Introduction
I’ve been playing hobby board games since about 2015. I started recording my game-plays around 2018, and in the 4 years since I started logging, I’ve played 399 different games, and recorded 1,747 total plays. I recall when I first started playing games, every new game was exciting and amazing and would leave me frothing at the mouth wanting more. I voraciously consumed new games, and dove into the deep end to discover the world of hobby board games. At some point, something changed inside me. I lost the childlike glee and excitement that came with every new game. I stopped being wowed by each gimmick, as I had seen them all before. Sure, new games would mix mechanics in cool and interesting ways, but it wasn’t something wholly new. I still absolutely love playing new games, but it’s different now; I’m slightly jaded and worn. This is probably why I’m so excited that Bullet❤️ is now in my life.
How to play
Bullet❤️ is a puzzle-y, push your luck, pattern matching game for 1 – 4 players, designed by Joshua Van Laningham and published by Level 99 Games.
In Bullet❤️ each player takes control of one of the 8 very asymmetric heroines and tries to outlast their opponents. The game revolves around pulling tokens (called bullets) from your bag, placing them into your player board, and manipulating them to match patterns on your cards, so you can clear them from your board, and send them along to your opponent. The push-your-luck aspect comes into play as you pull bullets from your bag. Each bullet has a colour and a number, the colour indicates which column the bullet goes into, and the number indicates the number of empty spaces down it will go, skipping over any full spots. Should the bullet hit the very bottom row, BANG! You’re hit. Lose all your life and you’re out. The last player standing wins.
This is the setup for the solo game, but the multiplayer is basically this for each player.
Each round starts with a 3-minute timer. While the timer is running, players can draw bullets from their bag and place them on their board, manipulate the bullets by using their character specific powers (which cost action points or AP), and can clear the bullets off their board by using their pattern cards. When the timer ends, if players still have bullets in their bag, they must draw the tokens and place them on their board, no longer able to use their pattern cards or special actions.
Each round 4 special ability tiles will be laid out, these tiles will give you a small power, such as swapping two bullet locations, or allowing you to draw a new pattern, or just giving you one action point. As players empty their bag and declare themselves done, they get to take one of those tiles. Once everyone has finished, players take bullets from the centre bag equal to the current round’s intensity, and any bullets they received from their opponents and put them all into their bag, and the whole thing starts over again until only one heroine rises above the rest.
Review
A little over a year ago, I wrote about Bullet❤️and my experience playing primarily solo and on Tabletop Simulator. In this post, I’m going to focus on the multiplayer game.
I really didn’t think it would take this long to get Bullet❤️ into my hands, and in the ensuing year there’s been another core set published, called Bullet⭐ that contains 8 new characters that you can combine with the first set. Other than the new characters, Bullet⭐ is identical to Bullet❤️. There is also an expansion, Bullet🍊 that adds 4 more characters from the Orange_Juice series of games. It makes me quite happy to see Level 99 games supporting this product by releasing more and more characters.
In Bullet❤️ each character is unique, forcing you to approach the puzzle of the game from a new perspective every time you swap characters. I really enjoy the variability and discovery that comes from pulling a new character. Young-Ja Kim focuses on pushing the bullets off the edges of her board, while Adelheid Beckenbauer can flip bullets over to make them act as any colour. Senka Kasun has two crosshair tokens that sit on her board, and each of her cards will trigger on both of the cross-hairs simultaneously, and Ling-Ling Xiao has you adding up the numbers of the bullets in her patterns and the sum will dictate how many bullets you can clear and from where. Exploring these characters and discovering their quirks is a large part of what excites me every time I open the box.
By the time I got some friends around the table to play Bullet❤️ with me, I had already clocked in 40 plays of the solo mode. I knew I loved the game, and I had spoken really highly of it before they all came over to play. My expectations were high, I was very excited to share this experience with my friends.
The way you play the game in solo vs multiplayer is very similar, you pull bullets from your current, place them into your sight, and use your powers to manipulate the bullets in your sight and use the cards to clear them from your board. Instead of sending bullets to a boss, you’ll just pass them to your left, placing them in your opponents ‘incoming’. This gameplay is exciting and emotional, you need to quickly calculate risks when pulling bullets from the bag hoping against hope that there isn’t a level 4 pink bullet with your name on it.
The big difference between the Boss mode and multiplayer mode is the presence of a 3-minute round timer. Each round, the timer is sent, and play goes as per normal. Once that 3-minute timer goes off, all players are to stop using their actions and patterns. If a player still has bullets in their current, they’re to just continue pulling their bullets from their bag until the bag is empty.
I’ve tried playing both with and without the timer, and I have to say, the timer is necessary. Without it, one player can grind to a halt as they assess and reassess their board, struggling to commit to the risk of taking another bullet tile, or coming to grips of a slightly inefficient move. The timer adds tension, and on some level, forces players to make mistakes.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math
Gameplay encouraging mistakes isn’t a bad thing. It creates interesting situations. Kind of like when playing Tetris, getting the perfect block every time is boring, but when a mistake happens, you now have a short term goal of fixing that mistake while still trying to survive the larger game. Mistakes also give players something to work towards, knowing where you went wrong and striving to do better next time is a great way to build replayability.
One thing I didn’t expect was just how little player interaction is in Bullet❤️. Other than sending your cleared bullets to your neighbour, and grabbing one of the available extra benefits at the end of the round, you almost don’t even notice the other players at the table. During the 3-minute round you are so focused on pulling your bullets and arrange things in your current and trying to clear everything so quickly, that when the round ends, it feels like you’re coming up for air. Only at that moment do finally look around at your opponents to see what they are doing, and remark on how many bullets one player managed to clear, then just set up for the next round. During the actual gameplay, it feels isolating. Each player is just doing their own thing and trying to be the last one standing when the dust settles
This is fairly disappointing, it begs the question, why play together if we’re not ‘playing together’? It also makes it difficult for new players to ask questions, or for other players to catch rule mistakes. Just to drive a final nail into the coffin, when players are eliminated, they have to wait for everyone else to finish.
Thankfully, Bullet❤️ is a fast game. Games are on average somewhere between 5 and 7 rounds total, with most players starting to get eliminated around round 4. Another benefit to the 3-minute timer, when a player is eliminated, they aren’t sitting on the sidelines for very long. For some, player elimination is a cardinal sin, but considering the game only lasts for 20 minutes, it’s palatable.
As I said before, I absolutely love the puzzle of Bullet❤️. I enjoy the push-your-luck aspect of pulling bullets from your bag and slotting them into your current. I like the cerebral challenge of moving the bullets in the most efficient way to take full advantage of your pattern. And I really enjoy, at the end of a round, seeing the huge pile of tokens I’m sending to my friend. That said, the solo mode turns the puzzle up a notch by giving you a boss pattern you need to complete lest bad things happen in-between rounds. The puzzle aspect is the part that I enjoy the most, making the solo mode the definitive way for me to play
I’ve remarked earlier about how new games haven’t been exciting me lately. How all new games feel like iterative changes on previous games, and how none have been leaving a lasting impression. Bullet❤️ has left an impression, it has a spark that lit a fire in my soul. It’s the first game I’ve rated a 10 on BGG since 2016. I have so much fun with Bullet❤️ and I continue to come back to it. With it’s incredibly fast playing and satisfying gameplay, it’s already the board game that I have the most plays logged (although 10 of those plays were me as Muriel losing to 3 – That Which Points over and over again. What an incredibly difficult boss!). I will never turn down a game of Bullet❤️, and I’ll continue to sing its praises, even if the lack of player interaction left me slightly disappointed after my multiplayer plays.
Viticulture has the privilege of being a top 10 game for one of my most frequent gaming partners (698 individual plays recorded with this person), so when his birthday rolled around this year, we had the opportunity to surprise him with a new expansion to one of his favourite games and pick up the Wine Crate storage solution all at the same time, we just couldn’t say no.
We knew precious little of the expansion, other than it turns the classic Viticulture gameplay into a cooperative experience, which is intriguing in it’s own right.
How to Play
For the purposes of this section, I’ll assume you already know how to play the base game of Viticulture, and it’s worth saying that you’ll need to have the base game to play with this expansion. Viticulture World changes a lot around, but leaves the core of the game intact. You’re still placing your workers on actions spaces to harvest grapes, turning those grapes into wine, and fulfilling wine orders. You’re still building structures on your farm to allow you to access higher quality grapes, store higher quality wines, and collecting and playing visitor cards.
Viticulture World turns Viticulture on it’s head by making the game cooperative (duh, it’s right in the title of the expansion). This means every player needs to earn 25 victory points by the end of the 6th year, and collectively earn 10 influence points. The spaces on the Viticulture World board have been tweaked slightly, and don’t offer rewards simply for being the first person to take a specific action. Instead, there’s only 1 worker spot per action space (or 2 spots if you have 4 – 6 players). During the summer season you can put a worker into the develop action, which will either put an oval tile over the worker placement section of an action spot, allowing any number of workers to take that action and offer a small benefit, or, take a rectangular tile and massively increase the ability of a specific action.
Another change is that all players start the game with 5 workers. Two summer workers with yellow hats, two winter workers with blue hats, and a single grande worker. During the winter season you can spend money to train your workers, popping off their caps which allows them to be placed in either season. You aren’t able to gain any more workers beyond this initial 5 however, but having 5 workers right from the start helps speed up the early parts of the game.
The influence points are tracked along the bottom of the board, and can be bought during the winter for an eye-watering 8 coins each. Each player can also earn one influence point by earning 30 points during the game. Most of the influence points will come from the event cards. Each year a new event is revealed, which may offer a boon or bane, and will generally offer an influence point if a certain threshold is reached during the year.
At the end of the 6th year, if all players have earned 25 victory points and 10 influence points, they win! If not, better luck next time.
All the cool kids have hats now
Review
Viticulture World has me mulling over the definition of Cooperation vs. Collaboration. In cooperative games, all the players are working towards a shared goal. Cooperative games like Burgle Bros has all players trying to break open the 3 safes. Pandemic has all players trying to cure all 4 diseases, and Robinson Crusoe has all players just trying to survive the onslaught of the elements. In all of these games, it doesn’t matter who achieves the objective, just that the objective is achieved. The Rook in Burgle Bros can crack all 3 safes, while The Raven distracts the guard for the whole game. The Medic in Pandemic doesn’t need to discover a single cure, as long as all the cures are discovered before one of the loss objectives are realized.
Viticulture World has every player trying to build their own little farm and achieve the same 25 victory points. There’s little other players can do to throw points at a failing player, other than trading them the resources they need and ensuring they stay out of that player’s way. As I said in my previous Viticulture review, this is an action efficiency game, the best players can hope to do is help that player be efficient with their actions. Viticulture World doesn’t feel like those other cooperative games, but feels like a collaboration. Each player is building their own little farm and trying to earn the same 25 victory points. It doesn’t matter if Bigfoot massively exceeds that threshold if Bear doesn’t reach it at all.
By making the game collaborative, Viticulture World feels different from all those cooperative games. Suddenly I can’t really specialize myself or focus on one aspect of the puzzle. I need to be earning those victory points and not fall behind. I’m lucky in that my regular gaming group mesh super well together. There are no egos, there’s no one demanding that they’re the player who ‘gets the glory’ and we’re all willing to talk and discuss actions we should each do. At the same time, we all trust each other to make the right choices that will lead us to victory.
I’ve read a few accounts of people calling Viticulture World super hard; playing 8 times and only winning the introductory scenario. I can see the game being easier with 4 and more players, considering the number of action spots available on the board doubles. All the players are drawing cards, and the opportunities to trade between each other are plentiful and important. Adding more players, or removing one, would clog up the action spots. At the same time, a player who gets an early lead in points can use some of their later actions to earn influence points while the rest of the group catches up. 4 players seems to be a sweet-spot for this game.
Viticulture World comes with 8 scenarios. Each scenario introduces different mechanics into the game, and each scenario contains 8 or so event cards that can be shuffled to randomize the order they come out in. These event cards are what turn Viticulture World from a puzzle that can be solved, to a game that is played with. Suddenly, your perfect plan of planting grapes is scrapped because a nasty case of phylloxera has made planting grapes more expensive than you can afford. The need to pivot creates interesting decision moments and keeps players from simply doing the same thing over and over again. Some scenarios will nudge players down strategies they may never have considered. In one of my games, I fulfilled only a single wine order (for 6 points). My other 19 points all came from visitor cards, buildings, trading resources, and giving tours. In that particular game, I was far and away the leader in points! Something I never would have expected to work.
My biggest complaint about the base Viticulture game is that luck can play such a strong role in how you preform. If I use an action to draw grape cards, but both cards require a structure I don’t have, I can either spend actions raising money and building the necessary structures to plant those grapes, or I can try to draw again, hoping against hope that I happen to draw the cards that will fit my farm. By turning the game cooperative, that complaint is thrown out the window. If I draw grape cards that I just can’t use, I can coordinate with one of my fellow players and hand off these grape cards to someone who can plant them, and vice versa. Now, there is still luck involved, a game can be trivial or incredibly difficult depending on the order the progress tokens come out. We had one game where the year’s event gave everyone a discount on building structures, and the innovation tile for building structures came out, allowing everyone to build much more structures early in the game than is usually possible. This saved us countless turns and a boatload of money, allowing us to sail to victory.
I did have one experience where I had managed to earn 20 points within the first 4 years of the game. With two whole rounds to go, and knowing that I would get enough points from other players actions, we chose as a group for me to give tours to generate money, then buy the last four influence points we needed. By the end of the game, one player managed to get 30 victory points, earning us an influence point, and we earned another influence point from the final year’s event card, making my whole last year pretty pointless. It begs the question, if you finish your objective early, what should you do? Pass early to stay out of the way? That’s neither interesting nor engaging.
My goals are to train workers and build buildings. Who says a vineyard needs to produce wine?
Luckily, when it comes to cooperative games, I feel invested in other players turns. I can engage in discussion with my friends as we come up with a plan to get the struggling farmer over the 25 point threshold. It doesn’t matter to me that MY game was finished an hour before everyone else, I derive joy from sitting around the table with my friends and coming up with plans to solve the puzzle before us. It also gives me ample opportunity to heckle anyone who happens to have less victory points than I do, which is one of my favourite things about board games.
I quite enjoyed the competitive game, but I really love this cooperative expansion. It actually feels weird to call this an expansion, as this experience elicits a very different feeling from the base Viticulture game. I like the different mechanics hidden in each of the scenarios, giving each game a unique feel. Viticulture is a great game on its own, and adding in this expansion increases the ways you can engage with this excellent system. With this expansion, Viticulture now fills a rare niche of a great Euro game that can be played from 1 to 6 players, competitively and cooperatively. Viticulture World is a high recommendation from me, especially if you already own the base game.
Mechanics: Pick up and Deliver, Tile Placement, Route Building
Players: 2 to 4
Introduction
Some signs of a man rapidly approaching middle age may include weight gain, hair loss, and a sudden infatuation with trains.
Early last year I become mildly obsessed with a video game called Train Valley 2, and ever since then I’ve been more and more intrigued by train-focused board games. While most train games focus heavily on the economics of running a rail company, with the delivery of services being secondary, Maglev Metro removes all the money and fares and sets you to work on the urban design challenge of creating a rail line.
When I saw a used copies of Ted Alspach’s The Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Maglev Metro for sale in my neighbourhood, I just couldn’t resist picking them up. I had played the former previouslu and knew I loved it, but the latter was a mystery to me. If you’ve played Maglev Metro let me know how you felt about it in the comments below!
How to Play
In Maglev Metro, players are competing metro lines trying to collect and deliver robots and passengers to earn the most points. Robots earn you no points, but allow you to unlock upgrade your actions. Delivered passengers are worth points at the end of the game, and can be slotted into your player board to increase the number of points you earn in certain areas.
Maglev Metro‘s dual layer player board holds the entire menu of actions you can take, and the more robots you slot next to each action, the better that action will be. You can lay down tracks, move between stations, pick up and drop off passengers, increase your trains’ capacity, refill stations with passengers, adjust your robots (move them between your action spots, build stations, and turn your train around.
At the beginning of the game, the worker bag only has robots in it, but as the first station of each colour gets built, all the available workers of that colour get poured into the bag. Once all the colours are in the bag and the bag are subsequently emptied, the end of the game is triggered. All players get one more turn, then the points are tallied.
Review
Maglev Metro, designed by Ted Alspach and published by Bezier Games, is a fantastic looking game. The first time I opened the box and pulled out the tiles that get placed on the board and my jaw dropped. I’m used to the 3 mm thick tiles, but these were like 8 mm thick! I thought it was lavish and way overproduced, until we slotted the incredibly thick station tiles into their recessed slots on the centre board and placed our plastic track tiles next to them and realized a station sits flush when you have four line tiles next to it. What seemed unnecessarily extravagant revealed itself to have purpose. At first, we complained that the copper and gold robots were too similar in colour, but Bezier is offering free replacement copper robots, all you need to do is pay for this shipping. I can confirm that the new copper colour works great.
What sets Maglev Metro apart from other train games is the tracks are printed on clear acrylic tiles, which allows players to place their lines on the same tiles. Players can only use their lines, meaning while you can’t piggyback off someone else’s hard work, your opponents can’t explicitly block you from getting to a location.
Our first game of Maglev Metro was on the Manhattan map, which features “The Hub”. The Hub breaks a pretty major rule; you can have as many entrances and exits as you want, coming in and out of The Hub. This allows for players to pivot quickly and dash out to lucrative locations easily, without taking turns to rebuild their line, or turn their whole train around.
The other map available is Berlin. Berlin has more individual stations, but you can only build your metro line in one continuous path. With no options for forking paths, you may need to spend more time moving past stations you don’t want to stop at, or turn around more often in order to get to where you need to be. On this map, I found myself removing the ends of my line and reconstructing them, adjusting to the changing state of our board.
I found Maglev Metro to be a fascinating experience. At first, I was worried, three of the players did the exact same things during their first four turns of the game before finally diverging. Once our paths split, the game got exciting. The robots in Maglev Metro don’t give you any points, but they do make your train run better (and are necessary for unlocking the ability to pick up commuters, who DO give you points). I enjoyed the constrictions the game placed on us, it seemed to tap into our inclination to be as efficient as possible. We didn’t want to turn around, as that takes a whole action, and we raced for every robot, even though we all had robots languishing on our boards on actions that we weren’t taking.
In the end, I found Manhattan’s “The Hub” to be a good tool to introduce us to the game. It would be frustrating playing the Berlin map first, and making critical mistakes right out of the gate, bringing your progress to a screeching halt. Going forward, however, having a hub that lets you build branching paths and embraces short trips seems to be anthesis to the spirit of the game.
Maglev Metro triggers my loss aversion pretty hard. With only two actions per turn, the last thing I want to do is spend one of those actions rearranging my robots on my player mat. I would just so much rather gather more robots to make all my actions more powerful. After all, once I’ve used an action at its full power, it’s painful to purposefully reduce it back down, even if another action benefits. Unfortunately for me, there just aren’t enough robots to go around, so re-arranging the robots on your player board to unlock and improve actions is a must. For some reason this mechanic rubs me the wrong way, instead of it feeling like an action efficiency puzzle, I’m left feeling handcuffed and unable to do the things that I want to do, or used to be able to do.
One of the actions you’re able to do is to refill a station, where you pull random meeples out of a bag and place them on your tile. In my plays of Maglev Metro this meant you either needed to be very lucky and pull the meeple out that you wanted to pick up, or you were just injecting points onto the board for the other players to swoop in and pick up those workers before you could make the necessary modifications to your player board, so you could pick them up.
Maybe it was just back luck, but Maglev Metro isn’t inspiring me to return to its puzzle. While I don’t think I’ll be requesting to play Maglev Metro again, I’d play it if someone else was particularly interested. Granted, I’ve only played it twice at four players, perhaps reducing the player count will result in an experience I enjoy more. A lower player count reduces the number of meeples significantly, so it won’t solve my need to have a completely filled up player board, but I think would result in more opportunities where you could refill a station and be reasonably sure that the meeples you pull out of the bag will be there for you on your next turn.
“Sorry, I don’t have a license to carry anyone other than robots”
Bezier Games recently ran a Kickstarter campaign for the Maglev Maps: Expansion Volume 1, which includes 6 new maps, each with their own unique theme and mechanics. Exploring new maps would certainly encourage me to return to this game, but I’m not sure if they’d address my core issues. If I ever do try the new maps, I’ll be sure to come back and give my updated opinions!
Maglev Metro is a fun game, and if you’re a fan of pick-up and deliver and/or action efficency games, I highly recommend you give this a try. The components are brilliant, the theme is unique, and the two maps offer very different play experiences.
Number of Plays: 6 (since I started recording my gameplays, I have dozens more from 2017 and 2018 that are lost to time)
Game Length: 15 minutes
Mechanics: Hand Management, Hidden Movement
Release Year: 2017
Designer: Tim Fowers
Artist: Ryan Goldsberry
Introduction
How tense can a single deck of cards feel? Can you imbue all the excitement and fear of a get-away chase into a simple little card game? Prior to 2017 I would have been skeptical, but that’s the year Fowers Games published Fugitive, a 43 card two player game, set in the world of Burgle Bros. Thematically, this takes place at the end of a Burgle Bros game with the Rook trying to escape from the Marshall who is hot on his tail.
Fugitive has the distinction of being the first game I ever backed on Kickstarter. I was caught up in the excitement of getting more from the Burgle Bros. world, especially considering Burgle Bros. was both mine and my wife’s favourite co-op game. To this day, it sits high on my top games of all time list.
How to Play
To begin a game of Fugitive, the 0 card is placed in the centre of the table, and the cards with the number 1, 2, 3, and 42 are given to the Fugitive. Then, the rest of the cards are broken into 3 decks, 4 – 14, 15 – 28, and 29 – 41. These decks are shuffled and placed where both players can access them. The Fugitive draws 3 additional cards from the first deck, and 2 more cards from the second deck. The only thing the Marshall gets is a dry-erase board to scribble down notes.
Gameplay alternates between the Fugitive and the Marshall. The Fugitive will draw a card from any deck, then they may place a hideout. The Marshall will draw one card from any deck, then make a guess as to which hideout the Fugitive as placed on the table. If the Marshall wants, they can guess more than one hideout at a time, but if they get any wrong, none of the hideouts are revealed.
Fugitive is a quick two player only game where one player is trying to evade the other. To win, The Marshall needs to discover all the Fugitive’s hideouts. For the Fugitive to win, they must play the #42 card onto the table. The catch is, the Fugitive can only play cards in ascending sequential order, and only able to skip over 3 numbers at a time. At the start of the game with the #0 on the table, the next card played must be a 1, 2, or a 3.
The Fugitive can break this rule by playing additional cards face down when they place a hideout. Each other card will have a number of footprints under the number. The number of footprints played is the number the sequence can be extended. By playing two cards with two footprints each, the Fugitive can make a leap from card #3 to #10! This is a gamble however, should the Marshall discover that hideout, the footprint cards will be revealed as well, giving the Marshall even more information.
Review
Fugitive is a fun game. My favourite memory of this game happened when I first introduced it to my brother. I made him play the Marshall role first. Simply because I was the more experienced player, I managed to escape with relative ease. He quickly proclaimed that the Fugitive role is obviously the easier role to be in, there’s not enough time for the Marshall to find ALL the hideouts!
Then we switched. As the Marshall, I generally employ the road block strategy of stocking up on cards from the last deck, filling my hands with high valued cards. The Fugitive is lulled into a false sense of security, meandering around with half a dozen or more face down, hideous. Once they get to the last third of their escape, it’s too late. With all my previous guesses, I’ve deduced the vast majority of hideouts and correctly guess over half of them with a single turn. They are forced to stall as they need to draw more cards to stock up on footprint icons in order to make the long leap between hideout spots, not realizing the sheer amount of information that I already have. They’ll only have a scant few places to hide, and I already know them all. The trap snaps shut, and the Marshall wins!
To an inexperienced player, both sides feel impossible. As the Marshall, you’re in the dark, it’s difficult to make the logical leaps necessary to deduce how the Fugitive is snaking their way through the city. As the Fugitive, it feels like you have a spotlight on you, every move you make is telegraphed and the Marshall is just toying with you, like a mouse cornered by a cat.
I need to commend Fugitive, as it manages to achieve a great deal of thematic tension in a mere 43 cards and 15 minutes of gameplay. The feeling of momentum, the tension of hiding, and the joy of misdirection are all present in this little game. Much like its spiritual prequel Burgle Bros., adding an appropriate soundtrack can ratchet up the ‘Catch me if you can’ vibe that this game evokes.
The production is also top-notch. The box is styled as a tiny briefcase with a magnetic latch. The cards have a good linen finish, giving them a premium feel and the art on each card is unique and shows the story of the Fugitive enlisting the help of his comrades to evade the Marshall.
I’ve found that Fugitive doesn’t always make a great first impression. A few people I’ve introduced to the game bounced off of it, citing it too stressful, or too difficult to play well right off the bat. It’s anticlimactic when the Fugitive gets fully caught only a few rounds into the game, thanks to some lucky guesses by the Marshall. It’s a shame because I really enjoy this game. Unfortunately because it’s a 2 player only game, it doesn’t hit my table very often, as it’s quite rare that I sit down at a table with only a single opponent. That being said, it’s a great game that I would happily play at any opportunity.
Artist: Jacqui Davis, David Montgomery, and Beth Sobel
Release Year: 2015
Mechanics: Worker placement
Players: 1-6
Introduction
Viticulture has a storied past. It started out as a project on Kickstarter way back in 2012, long before the platform hosted a deluge of tabletop games that now makes up almost a third of the platform’s revenue.
Once Viticulture was successfully funded and released into the public, the revisions began. The second edition introduced Grande workers and other mechanics are hard to imagine the game without now. The 2014 expansion, Tuscany, ballooned the game by including several new mechanics such as Mamas and Papas that give players asymmetric starting positions, unique buildings that you could build on your farm that provided a unique action only you could use, an extended game board, special workers, arboriculture where you could plant and harvest tomatoes, apples, and olives, a cheese expansion, and even a module that has you offering gifts to a retired Capo. Needless to say, it was a lot.
Not all workers are created equal
In 2015 Viticulture Essential Edition (EE) came out, incorporating some of the most popular modules from the Tuscany expansion into the base game, and throwing the rest away. In 2016 Viticulture: Tuscany Essential Edition was released, featuring 3 more modules from the original Tuscany expansion (Extended boards, structure cards, and special workers). This is the version I’ve played the most, and will be focusing on today.
How to Play
Viticulture is a worker placement game where you’re competing against your fellow vintners as you each grow your meagre vineyards into bustling and prosperous farms. The game begins with an inheritance, your Mama and Papa bequeath you the resources that will lay the foundation for your farm. Each player places their rooster pawn on the turn order track, and then in player order, you can either place a meeple on a space to take the corresponding action, or pass.
It’s not uncommon for people to pass entire seasons, on the Extended board there are 4 seasons, and you only start with 3 meeples. When you pass, you’re unable to place any more meeples in the current season. All those who haven’t passed can continue to play. Once all players have passed, you progress to the next season, and resume taking actions in player order.
As players pass during winter, they recover their workers, age their grapes and their wines, collect any royalties they may have accrued, and choose their spot on the turn order track for the next year. On and on, players take their actions throughout the years until someone hits 25 victory points. At that point, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the current year, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
Viticulture: Essentials Edition begins by asking its players what actions they want to ignore. Players start with 3 workers, half their maximum capacity, and the main board contains 16 action spots. With only 3 actions available to you in the first year, you need to assess what your Mama and Papa left you to make the best start. Your inheritance may have included some grapes that you can plant on the very first turn, while other farms feature a nice set of trellis, allowing you to spend more time drawing grape cards, hoping you’ll find a variety that can take advantage of your existing infrastructure. No matter what you choose, the race is on!
Viticulture feels like it should be an engine building game. You need money to build up your farm to be more efficient. Money will allow you to train workers, build more supporting structures and bigger cellars, so you can age and produce wine at iridium quality (Cough I’ve been playing too much Stardew Valley cough) and sell it for a huge profit. Because Money is so constraining at the beginning, players may be fooled into prioritizing coin generating actions, thinking their early investments will pay off in dividends, it’s a trap! Excess money isn’t worth anything in the end, and before long you’ll have more money in your coffers than you can reasonably use. Because Viticulture ends the year someone achieves their 25th victory point, good players should approach this as an action efficiency game. There’s no need to plant vines that you’ll never harvest, or build a windmill after all your fields are sown. Each action should be in service of furthering your goal of getting those 25 victory points.
Unfortunately, this is where the luck comes in. Viticulture features 4 decks of cards. Grapes, Orders, and Spring and Summer visitors. The grape and order cards work together, dictating the value of the grape as they come off the vine and goes into the mash tub. You use grapes in the mash tub to create wine. The higher quality the grape, the better the resulting wine will be. The order cards simply request 1 – 3 wines of varying types and qualities to be delivered to the docks in winter, and offer between 1 and 6 victory points, along with some persistent royalties which will generate some coins every year thereafter.
Making a few bottles of very good wine should work out, right?
Should you happen to draw grapes that require a support structure (the trellis and the irrigation tower), you’ll need to choose if it’s worth building that structure before you can plant that grape, or if you should take another draw from the deck. The difficulty is, other players will be drawing from that deck too, making that action space coveted at the beginning of the game, and if you happen to draw another grape card that has the same restrictions, then 2 turns have now been wasted instead of just one. Thankfully, Viticulture features the Grande worker, who can take any spot, even if all the action spaces are full. This feature really helps alleviate the pain of having the other players take the action spot that you desperately wanted to take
The wine order cards are similar, in that luck can swing the game. It’s unfortunate if you happen to have a very strong red wine production farm, and you find yourself continually drawing white and sparkling wine orders. You can continue to draw cards to mitigate this luck, but in an action efficiency game, every wasted action hurts. It’s difficult to keep up with players who are blessed with lucky draws.
The visitor cards are a different kind of luck. Many will offer benefits and bonuses that can propel your farm higher and faster if used correctly. A great visitor can save you a whole year of actions, allowing you to convert resources that would normally take two or three whole actions to do so, or providing a discount on a structure that you desperately needed, but were one or two coins short. Some visitors are great early in the game, and it stinks when you draw them when you’re approaching the end of the game.
Hope I don’t need to make a rose or sparkling wine any time soon…
I’m not always against randomness in games. The amount of cards available does make Viticulutre feel more varied and replayable. I just end up with a bitter taste in my mouth when I see lady luck bless my opponents while I’m stuck with a handful of useless cards. Milling the deck is not optimal play here.
I’m perpetually fascinated by iterative board game designs. I find it hard to consider a specific edition of a game in a vacuum without considering all the previous versions that came before it. It’s also interesting to consider how the wider board game playing audience reacts to these changes. When two people talk about their experiences playing Viticulture, their experience might not be the same. Once you find your favourite way to play, it can be hard to deviate.
I ran into this ‘problem’ after playing Viticulture: Essential Edition with Tuscany Essential Edition half a dozen times with my friends, but then tried playing the classic version of Viticulture on BoardGameArena and was struck by how significantly the game has changed since its original release. Without going into the nitty-gritty details of all the differences, Viticulture Essential Edition with Tuscany Essential Edition is my favourite way to play. It feels smoother, more varied, and I’ve had a better experience overall. While you don’t need the expansion content to enjoy Viticulture, there may be some modules that sing for you specifically, and it’s easy enough to introduce new players to any amount of the available expansion content. It all integrates seamlessly, to the point where I was surprised to discover all the things that weren’t included in the original game.
I enjoy Viticulture. The setting of making wine in a Tuscan farm feels relaxing and unique. Aside from blocking action spaces, a few of the visitor cards offer ways to interact with your opponents. Either tasking them with giving you something (like 2 cards each), or offering a small benefit to each other player and rewarding you with points for each player who takes advantage. I like this kind of interaction, and I’m glad there’s no way for players to steal wine from each other, or destroy things they’ve built. In a race game, it’s more fun to go faster than your opponents rather than win by dragging them all down into the mud.
Viticulture: Essentials Edition with Tuscany: Essentials Edition is a great medium weight euro worker placement game. There’s mild interaction and luck, which may or may not detract from the experience. It’s smooth, inoffensive, and the setting is great for introducing new adults into the hobby. While this isn’t a MUST-HAVE game for me, I’m glad it exists, and I’m glad someone in my gaming group is quite keen on playing it, as I generally have a good and relaxing time while playing this game.
