How many puzzly abstract games do I actually need in my life? While the answer is N+1, I have to admit that I’ve been holding off on picking up Harmonies for much too long. Harmonies, designed by Johan Benvenuto and published by Libellud in 2024, garnered a lot of praise the year it was released, hitting a lot of peoples top games of the year lists, and even picking up a Spiel des Jahres recommendation and the Golden Geek award of Medium Game of the Year.
To oversimplify Harmonies, think Azul mixed with Cascadia. While that’s woefully underselling the game, it does put you into the right frame of mind. In Harmonies, you’re building a landscape on your personal player board, creating harmonious habitats for the various animals that could call your board home (see what I did there?) That’s largely where the Cascadia influence comes from.
The Azul part comes from the terrain disc market and how terrain discs are distributed. There are 5 market discs, each market gets 3 terrain discs randomly drawn from a bag. On your turn, you simply need to take all the discs from one of those markets, and place them on your board. There’s also a market of 5 animal cards that you can pull from, which will influence how you score points.
I suppose this is another Cascadia feeling part of the game. You’ll earn half your points from the terrain discs on your board, and then the other half of your points come from the animal cards you’ve drafted, depending on how well you’ve catered to their habitat needs.
Each animal card has a pattern of terrain discs that needs to be fulfilled, and a number of times that the pattern can be deployed. If at any point the pattern is present on your board, you move a cube from the card onto the pattern as dictated by the animal card. If there are no more cubes remaining on the card, then you can remove that card from your play area, freeing up a spot to take another animal card.
The cadence of Harmonies is calm, and the puzzle is satisfying. Ideally, you’ll want to pick several animal cards that synergize together well, so you can be working toward multiple cards at the same time. But inevitably, luck will decide if you’ll be able to achieve your goals or not. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a really great set of animals, all working together off the same terrain features, only for that terrain feature to just never show up.
With that in mind, I feel the need to comment on how little player interaction. In Azul, Cascadia, and others, an important part of being competitive is hate drafting the resources your opponents desperately needs. In Harmonies, the opportunity cost is dramatically high. Taking a card that’s at odds with the terrain you’re building only really hurts you. This isn’t the kind of game that you can win by dragging others down.
Thankfully, Harmonies is short. Once a player fills their player board up until they have 2 or less empty spaces remaining, the round is finished, and the game comes to an end. Not all players will achieve this on the same turn, as certain terrain types do stack. If you get a little screwed by the random chance, it’s real easy to drop everything into the bag and try again.
The production on Harmonies is beautiful. From the art on the cover and tarot sized cards, to the thick, bright wooden discs, Harmonies is a great looking game. And the cardboard insert the game comes with is very functional, which is a welcome treat.
Harmonies deserves all the praise it’s gotten so far. It’s a gorgeous spatial puzzle that’s both soothing and surprisingly demanding. It plays smoothly across player counts, teaches in minutes, and rewards careful planning without becoming punishing, unlike something like Calico. The tactile joy of placing its wooden tokens never really wears off, and the blending of terrain-scoring and pattern-matching keeps my brain pleasantly engaged every time I sit down to enjoy this puzzle.
My 4-year-old has recently been absolutely smitten with the movie WALL-E lately. A ruined world left barren and destitute, filled to the brim with trash and catastrophic dust storms suddenly whipping up to create a moment of tension. The first sign of life appears as a green shoot poking up from the dust, and that little speck of life is what brings the Axiom and all its inhabitants home from it’s 700 year journey.
Revive, by designers Helge Meissner, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson, and Anna Wermlund, and published by Artipia Games in 2022 seeks to replicate a similar feeling with the cover of their game. An icy, frozen wasteland marked by a pair of yellow flowers poking out of the desolate landscape, representing the earth healing itself. The game itself takes place on a blue board laden with icy blue tiles, with only the very centre of the map being inhabitable.
Each turn, a player has two actions. They can play one of their cards to the top or bottom of their player board, and take the corresponding resources or action on that card, or they can spend their resources to explore, where they flip over icy tiles and recruit new survivors, they can populate, where they leave a population marker that improves their clan ability, or they can build, which improves the technologies on their player board.
I’m trying to keep the actions of the game tied to the theme, but the honest truth is that while Revive has an incredibly distinct art style and presentation, the theme falls apart when trying to tie them to the mechanisms. The reality is that when you start playing Revive, you’ll quickly stop thinking about the theme of rebuilding society after 5,000 years of devastation. Instead, your mind will reduce everything to it’s base elements and abstract rules that make up the gameplay.
And I’m okay with that, because the gameplay is incredibly satisfying. The player board for Revive is incredibly striking. First, it’s huge. Secondly, it’s such an irregular shape with notches carved out of the top, bottom, and right side for you to place your cards, and a small notch on the left for you to stick your clan board. Lastly, the centre is dual layered and dominated by 3 tracks spiralling out with over a dozen things to uncover.
Building the buildings will send the little cylinders on your player board along their designated tracks, pulling discs off your board and earning you machines, which are bonus actions that cost energy to use. The machines can offer you a plethora of goodies, from just straight resources, to beneficial conversions, to discounts on certain actions, and even allowing you to play the bottom half of a card on a top slot.
Speaking of the slots, at the beginning of the game, playing one of your cards for resources will net you only the resources on the cards. But plugging in slot modules will net you extra resources, if the card you play to that slot matches the colours of the slot modules. Some of the cards even allow you to layer further cards on top of the same slot, allowing you to trigger those slot modules again and again. But you can’t JUST play cards, each of the 3 resources has a hard limit of 6, encouraging you to consider timing and tempo as you earn and spend your resources.
The board itself starts the game shrouded in mystery. From a central point, all players fan out, flipping over tiles to earn points, get new cards, and reveal terrain types, which will push the cylinders on your player board when you build next to them. But just because you revealed a terrain tile, doesn’t mean that it’s your terrain. If you decide to leave it for a turn, another player can swoop in and plonk their building down on your newly discovered home. And you’ll really need to ensure other players don’t do that, because building on the juiciest spaces is lucrative and propels your engine further and further, and each hex can only accommodate a single building.
Every time you build a building, you’re establishing for yourself another post from which you can venture outwards. When you explore, build, or populate, you’ll need to pay food to cover the distance. The more you put out onto the board, the easier it is to get around. Each of the corners of the maps is also home to a large scoring tile, which you only get access to if you populate onto it. Speaking of populating, not only does putting your meeples onto the board give you a jumping off point for future actions, it also unlocks more of your tribe’s ability. The base game comes with 6 factions, each with unique quirks and powers. Each of those factions are also double-sided, giving you plenty of asymmetry to explore.
Revive doesn’t have rounds per-se. Instead of a regular turn, you can choose to hibernate. Doing this pulls all the cards from your hibernation state, all the cards you’ve slotted in are then moved to the hibernation state, freeing up the slots to be used again. You pull all the energy off your machines, enabling them to be activated again, and then you get a little bonus depending on how many times you’ve hibernated. The hibernation track also has a built-in end game accelerator, where if you hibernate for the 4th time, you discard one of the artifacts from the game entirely. But in all my games, I think I’ve only seen that happen once.
I’ve talked a lot about what you can do, but I haven’t talked about why you do. At several junctions in Revive, you’ll earn an artifact. Populating the top tier of your tech tracks, getting your 6th disc onto your player board, getting your 10th and 5th cylinder movement on each of the tracks, and earning 15 points all allow you to take an artifact. These strange, alien skull things come in 3 flavours, silver, orange, and purple, and each flavour of artifact one corresponds to an end game victory condition that’s different for every player, as dictated by a hidden card you’ll receive at the start of the game. Perhaps my silver artifacts give me a point for every slot module I’ve earned, while your opponent’s silver artifact nets them a point for every card they’ve obtained throughout the game. The important thing to remember here is that the artifacts are limited, and their score is multiplicative.
Combining the corner victory point tiles with the victory points you’ll earn from the artifacts you collect are how you will claim victory in Revive. Being able to combine or double dip on a scoring criteria, such as a corner tile giving you one point per slot module, and one of your artifact conditions giving you one point for every 2 slot modules per artifact you collect can inform your choices during the game, but it’s important to remain flexible. There are only a small handful of each artifact available, and if someone else is chasing the same artifact you’re chasing, then by the time the game is half over, the artifacts that would benefit you the most, are simply exhausted.
The end of Revive comes up dramatically quickly. The end game trigger is when all the artifacts are exhausted, which, taking an artifact is generally a reward for maxing out one aspect of the game. At the halfway point, one or two players may have claimed a single artifact. But in the last round or two, it’s not uncommon for a chain of actions to result in one player picking up multiple artifacts. You might feel safe when there are 4 artifacts remaining on the board, but the game can come to an end surprisingly quickly.
I think my only real complaint or criticism about Revive is the included ‘campaign’. When you open a new copy of Revive, you’ll be suggested to play this 5 game campaign, which introduces concepts and rules piecemeal over the course of the campaign. It’s unnecessary, slow, and a perfect way to ensure players don’t experience a full game of Revive. In a world where I only have 1 game night per week, and 4 friends all with their own board game collections and new games trickling in all the time, having a watered down first experience as a stepping stone modular tutorial towards a full game is a recipe for a great game getting lost in the shuffle. Perhaps the bigger sin is putting some of the advanced rules that come in during the campaign on cards that I keep forgetting when I’m trying to reference an edge case in the rulebook.
Revive has become one of my favourite medium-heavy euro games of the past few years because it delivers that rare mix of momentum, creativity, and tension that keeps me thinking about it long after the game is over. Even if the theme melts away the moment you start optimizing your gameplay, it does manage to evoke the feeling of moving from scarcity into abundance. Turn by turn, you chip away at this frozen puzzle until suddenly everything starts to hum, and your engine erupts in a cascade of actions you spent an hour patiently setting up. Those moments where you chain machines, chests, cards, and faction abilities into a single, absurdly powerful turn are the reason I keep coming back. It’s clever, it’s crunchy, and it’s endlessly satisfying.
Azul, by designer Michael Kiesling, was released to the world in 2017. A puzzly little abstract game, it was an instant hit in the board gaming world. That same year, at the exact same time from my perspective, Sagrada, a puzzly little abstract game was also released, and much like the console wars of my childhood, I picked a side (Sagrada), and heckled the other team, for no good reason other than base tribalism. But here we are 8 years later, and I’ve finally come around to sing Azul’s praises
Over the years, Azul‘s continued popularity has only grown, and I’ve really come around to seeing how great this game is. With several more games building off the core concept, including Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, Azul: Summer Pavilion, Azul: Queens Garden, and Azul: Duel. Now, I’ve played all these spin-offs, and I can say that the original Azul is my favourite, so today I’m going to dig into what makes this game so special.
In Azul, players are trying to build a wall. The rulebook says that Portuguese king Manuel I was struck by the beauty of the Moorish decorative tiles in the Alhambra, that he ordered his own palace to be decorated with similar wall tiles, but the theme doesn’t exactly shine through the gameplay here.
The gameplay of Azul has a number of coasters set onto the table in a circle, and 4 tiles pulled from a bag and placed on each one. On your turn, you chose one of the coasters and take all the tiles of one type to place into your staging area on your player board. Any tiles you didn’t take, get pushed to the centre of the table, which is another location you can choose to take tiles from.
Once all the tiles have been taken, any rows in your staging area that have been completed flow onto your finished wall, from top to bottom. When you move a tile to the finished side, it earns you 1 point for every connected tile on the X axis, and another point for every tile on the Y axis. There are also some bonus points for finishing each row, column, and for getting a colour in all 5 rows.
A couple restrictions to be aware of, though. If you already have a colour finished in a row, you can’t add a colour to that row again. If you take a bunch of tiles and have more than the row can allow, they ‘fall to the floor’ and are worth negative points. A game of Azul comes to an end when one player has completed a single row.
Azul is deceptively simple. It starts off by looking like a no interaction abstract puzzle, but as you dig deeper into the game, you start to find the ways to manipulate situations to your advantage. It only takes one time getting saddled with nearly a dozen black tiles when all of your rows are spoken for to teach you that you need to pay attention to what the others are doing.
Your staging area dynamically shrinks and expands as tiles are left over from round to round, as the rows only empty at the end of a round in which that row was full. I’ve seen players end a round with 4 of their 5 rows one tile away from being complete, and being utterly choked for the entire next round.
Azul isn’t Calico, where you can spend most of the game with your head in your hands staring at your own board. It requires you to be aware of what your opponents want, and for you to seize your opportunities the moment they arrive. There are plenty of opportunities to hate-draft precious tiles away from your opponents, or saddle them with excess baggage. Playing Azul well is as much as getting the tiles you want as it is denying your opponents the tiles they need.
But all this meanness, all this punishment, is below the surface of Azul. For a beginner, the tiles available to them are random, and building pretty little patterns is a delightful way to pass the afternoon. It’s pretty impressive, really, that Azul manages to appeal to such a wide audience with its ease of gameplay, while also having a deep tactical pool to plumb, for those willing to do so.
I like Azul a lot. More than I ever expected to, and maybe even more than Sagrada, if I’m honest with myself. It’s elegant without being cold, interactive without being overwhelming, and welcoming to anyone who can appreciate a handful of pretty tiles. It’s the rare abstract game that grows with you; gentle for newcomers, sharp enough for veterans, and endlessly replayable in between. When you finally build that perfect wall to earn 10 points on a single placement, it feels like a masterful stroke of genius. Azul has earned a permanent place on my table, but if you haven’t encountered the meanness inherent in the tiles, be prepared to feel the sting of betrayal when you finally do.
The late 00’s and early 2010’s were a beige time in board games. Lots of board games with shades of brown and themes about trading spices and goods for prestige in the Mediterranean. Let’s not forget all the covers with grumpy men staring either at you, or off into the distance. Rococo, designed by Matthias Cramer, Stefan Malz, and Louis Malz and published by eggertspiele in 2013 decided to buck this trend by having a beige cover with a woman staring at you instead. Oh, also instead of trading spices, you’re trading silks, threads, and laces as you craft ballroom gowns to sell for cash or rent for prestige.
Rococo is a euro game through and through, but a bit of an interesting take on deck building. Each round, you pick up your whole deck of employee cards and choose 3 to put into your hand. These employee tasks allow you to preform one of the six main actions, but not all employees can preform every action. Masters can do everything, apprentices can do most of the actions, excluding only crafting master dresses and hiring new employees. Journeymen are cut off from seeking the Queens Favour, and from making dresses entirely.
To take an action, you must play one card from your hand and then choose one of the six main actions. Taking the queen’s favour earns you 5 Lirve (the currency for Rococo) and you get to go first next round. Visiting the silk market allows you to take silks, or, discard the silk tile for thread and laces. All of which are important for building the dresses. Building dresses is another main action, where you pick one blueprint from the row along the bottom of the board, turn in the required resources, then either sell the dress for cash, or rent it out and place it in the hall in an area majority contest that will net you a small amount of prestige. Each round, there are 4 employee cards available for purchase, and this action can only be taken by a master. When you buy an employee card, they do go right into your hand, so you can use their ability on the round you purchase them. The next action is to depute a worker, which has you send them off to get a small amount of cash equal to their skill level (and removes them from your deck), and the final action is to sponsor a decoration, which just has you trading in a sum of money and placing a disc onto the board.
Most of the employee cards also have a special ability that gets activated after you preform the main action. These can be as pedestrian as earning you a single coin for their labour, while others will net you resources, or allow you to preform a specific main action with a discount. Each player takes a turn playing an employee card, doing one action, then activating the employee bonus, and their turn is over. Once all players run out of cards, the round ends. After 7 rounds, the game ends, and the player with the most prestige points, is the winner.
Rococo does have some really interesting concepts. First, its approach to deck building is novel and full of control. Instead of shuffling your discard and drawing 3 cards, you get to just pick up your whole deck and choose any 3 cards you want. Once used, those employees will sit in the discard until you go through your entire deck, but still, it’s deck building without the luck of the draw.
The other aspect of Rococo that I really enjoyed was the dynamic markets. Both the resource market and the employee market cost money, but the amount of money you need to spend goes down as players buy from those markets. It creates a fascinating tempo consideration. If there’s a juicy employee that you want, is it worth 5 Livre to buy immediately? Or can you wait until someone else buys a different card so you get the employee you want for 3 Livre, or even for free if they’re the last employee available for the round.
All of the markets refresh at the start of each round instead of during gameplay, so it’s not uncommon for a market to run out of options. This creates another timing consideration. Do you take a resource from the market now? If you wait, will there even be anything left the next time your turn comes around?
Everything I’ve talked about so far is in service of the main board, where you’re making and renting dresses to people lining the halls. Each of the 5 halls will give prestige to the player who has the most dresses in that hall, as well as prestige for the dresses themselves. This is where the bulk of your points will come from.
But at the end of the day, Rococo is still a euro game. There’s not a ton of player interaction other than taking a resource from a market first, or sneaking in one last disc into a hall to secure the majority.
I think Rococo shines best at odd player counts, as having an even number of players makes the area majority aspect of the game a bit of a tit-for-tat tug of war instead of something a bit more competitive. At the same time, I don’t think having a lot of players will do the game any favours, as the entire stack of employee cards will be used no matter the player count. With more players, you’ll be stuck reusing your same basic employees again and again, leading me to think the ideal player count is 3.
Rococo is a great mid-weight euro game. It has all the familiar trademarks of other games (resource markets, deck building, recipe fulfillment), but utilizes the mechanics in novel and dynamic ways. The theme of creating dresses in 18th century France is whimsical and unique. It’s not a hard game to play, making it a good choice to play with those who have graduated past gateway games and are on their way to a more meaty affair. It doesn’t break traditions, or reinvent the wheel, making it an easy game to enjoy.
I’m not really an expansion kind of guy. In general, when given the choice between buying an expansion to a game I already know, or buying a whole new game, I’m going to pick buying a new game almost every time. Yes, I realize expansions are usually cheaper, and there is something lovely about injecting a bit of new into something you and your group are already familiar with, but still. I own very few expansions.
In 2023 I reviewed Akropolis, the tile laying game designed by Jules Messaud and published by Gigamic. I was absolutely smitten with it then, to the point that it landed as number 36 on my top 100 games list, the last time I made that list. Akropolis: Athena is the small box expansion that adds just a few tiles, but can absolutely bend the game if you let it. Let me explain.
Akropolis: Athena basically consists of a deck of goal cards, and a bunch of single hex tiles. That’s right, single hexes. At the start of the game you lay out 4 goal cards, and below each goal card, lay out 4 hexes for a total of 16 single hexes. During the game if you manage to achieve one of the goal cards, you get to take one of the single hexes from that goal card, and place it into your city. You can only achieve each goal once, so you also take a piece of an Athena statue to remind yourself you’ve already completed that objective. If you manage to complete the whole statue, the leftover stone at the end of the game is now worth 5 instead of the usual 1.
What makes Akropolis: Athena special, is that the goal cards are often pulling you in different directions. They offer objectives that by themselves offer no strategic benefit, but those single hex tiles can be game changing. I can’t tell you how often I play a tile laying game, and want to snap a piece in half (looking at you, My Island), or cursing the orientation of a polyomino tile (The Z tile is always facing the wrong direction in My City). Akropolis: Athena gives you the satisfaction of a single hex, allowing it to just drop into the perfect place in your city to make everything feel whole again.
And these single tiles can be really powerful. They may give you stars to improve the score of a certain colour in your city, and many of them are actually split in half, giving you the power of two districts on a single tile. This can allow you to bridge the gap between blue districts while strategically keeping the yellow half away from another yellow tile, or, it can be useless as the spot where you need the tile to go just doesn’t work for the colours that are surrounding it.
Depending on what set of goals you have, it’s entirely possible that no one manages to complete all 4 in a single game. They do ask you to do some odd things, which you often won’t accidentally stumble into doing on your own. Like having a straight line of red tiles, or putting a green tile next to a green star. You might luck into it, but you’ll more than likely need to make a concerted effort to achieve the goals.
The payoff for managing to complete all 4 goals can be almost game breaking. In one of my plays, I managed to complete all 4 objectives, and then hoard 15 pieces of stone for a bonus 75 points. Considering that in the base game, an average score is 114, it’s a pretty lucrative path to take. But if chasing that stone dragon takes up entirely too much of your time, and your opponents’ manage to collect everything they’ve ever wanted, then Athena on her own is unlikely to save your game.
What I’m trying to say is that it is possible to ignore this expansion completely and still come out the victor. Especially if the players overcommit to completing the objectives and don’t properly capitalize on the benefits Athena brings. For some people, if an expansion can be ignored, they ask why have it at all? I have to say that I really appreciate this expansion. Having the goals shift every game keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. Now you can’t just rely on hording the green tiles to carry you to victory every single game. Because the Athena tiles do shift the balance of the stars, perhaps in one game the purples just have that little bit higher chance to be even more powerful than the other colours. I also really appreciate having something extra to shoot for, especially when the market is bare and none of the tiles available to be are useful.
Akropolis: Athena hits a pretty great balance between being powerful and exciting, but not overwhelmingly so, in that if you ignore the expansion bits, you have no hope to compete. At the very least it adds variety to the strategy of Akropolis. Athena definitely improves Akropolis, and I feel comfortable in teaching the expansion to new players right from the start. I think my only main complaint is that I can’t fit the expansion into the base box without tossing the entire insert away and just letting everything be loose in there. But even with that gripe, If you enjoy Akropolis and want a small expansion that meaningfully refreshes the puzzle without complicating it, Athena is a must-have.
I like mushrooms, but only in the context of the kitchen. Some tasty morels, lobsters, and oyster mushrooms will always get me excited. I do find mushrooms kind of fascinating, how fast they can grow, how different they can all be, but their poisonous nature has always made me rather just get my mushrooms from a store instead of trying to venture out and pick my own. The last thing I need is to get a hospital visit because I mis-identified the gills of a chanterelle or something.
Undergrove is designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, and published by AEG in 2024. In Undergrove, players are Douglas-fir trees, and are tasked with trading resources with the mushrooms that dot the forest floor. Your actions involve trading Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium with the mushrooms, to get special benefits or to just get more resources than you’re generally putting out. The core of the game is to use the Carbon to activate the mushrooms, then absorb that carbon through your roots to grow a mighty evergreen.
The care and interest of the mycology science shouldn’t be a surprise. Elizabeth Hargrave is the president of her local hobbyist mushroom club, the Mycological Society of Washington, DC, and she and Mark Wootton had many conversations with entomologists and PhD students to discuss how the science works. Sure, Undergrove abstracts some concepts, and the giant mushroom tiles may indicate the outsized abundance of the mushrooms in a real forest, but hey. It’s a board game, it’s often more important to be fun than correct.
The mycology theme is wonderful, and the production is utterly gorgeous. I have the Kickstarter edition with all the wooden pieces, including the amazing painted wooden tiles. The screen printed wooden pieces are all beautiful, and there are snug little circles cut out of the corners for your player pieces to sit. The art on the tiles by Beth Sobel is fantastic, colourful, and beautiful. Building out a large tableau of mushrooms is a sight to behold! There are sturdy tuck boxes for every resource and for every player’s pieces, making the inside of the main box a tidy affair. AEG absolutely knocked this production out of the park.
So the science is good. The art is great, and the production is fantastic. How’s the gameplay? Well, here’s where my notes turn a bit sour. Undergrove is a tight resource management game. Activating most of the mushrooms on the board require you to at least spend 1 carbon, and often will have you flip a mushroom activation disc (so you can’t just juice the same tile over and over again). The only way to get carbon is to take the photosynthesis action, which provides you with 2 carbon as a base. Then, you may choose to throw away any nitrogen you’ve accumulated for more carbon. The economy is already tight, it feels punishing to be jettisoning your nitrogen in exchange for carbon that you’ll spend to get a surplus of nitrogen so you can do other actions.
Spending the carbon onto the mushrooms feeds really nicely into how you score points and win the game. The absorb action lets you take a carbon from a tile and move it onto your seedling. Once a seedling has absorbed 3 carbon, it blossoms into a full tree, unlocking the ability for that tree to score all four of its roots. But fret not, if the game comes to an end and some of your seedlings have one or two carbon on them, they can score one or two of their roots. Speaking of game end, there is a carbon track. Anytime a player absorbs any amount of carbon, they move one step up that track, collecting bonuses as they do so. Once someone has reached the end of that track, everyone gets one final action and the player with the most points, wins.
One of the challenges with that carbon track is that the pace of the game is solely controlled by the players. If no one is absorbing carbon, you’ll all just be having a merry time spreading your seeds and roots, building an impressive forest floor, and maximizing each one of their seedling investments, only to realize that the end of the game is still an hour away. Conversely, a player with a singular focus can rush the game to an end, rendering your efforts in building any semblance of an engine moot. I suppose it depends on what you want out of your mushroom game. Is the player who plays lean and fast the one to win, or can a player build strong enough to put up a fight?
A small anecdote. Bear, Otter, and I played this one together. Bear was having an absolute blast chaining actions together to squeeze out one more resource, hitting the public objectives where possible, and getting out nearly all of their seedlings and roots. But completely failed to absorb carbon, so when Otter and I completed the carbon track on the same turn, his score was half of ours, despite his far superior forest structure.
The other things you can do on your turn include spending carbon and phosphorus to throw your seeds to the wind and settle your seedlings elsewhere on the tableau. Similarly, you can spend a carbon and two potassium to sprout two roots on any of your seedlings. The roots play an important role for your trees (no duh), as the roots are what give you access to any of the abilities or actions the mushrooms provide.
I feel like Undergrove is supposed to be an engine building game. It has all the hallmarks for it. But in play, it’s really not. Many players will get excited at the chance to put down new mushrooms, to add to the board, but putting mushrooms down doesn’t get you anything. Sure, you can control the location of it, which may slightly benefit you more than others, but it’s not like putting down a mushroom gives you ownership or a strong benefit. You’re not really building and engine in Undergrove, you’re claiming slightly more efficient action spots, then choosing which one you want to use on your turn. Because of that, Undergrove’s gameplay arc feels flat. From about the 5th turn until the end of the game, not a whole lot really changes, robbing players a real sense of progression that other, perhaps bird themed games, have.
Undergrove left me in a curious state. I love its celebration of fungi and nature, the obvious reverence for real science, and the sheer beauty of its production. Sitting around a table filled with colourful mushrooms and tidy wooden trees is genuinely delightful. But once the novelty and aesthetic glow fade, the gameplay settles into a low, pleasant rhythm. Pleasant, but rarely stirring. Its tight economy and player-driven pacing create interesting decisions, yet the lack of meaningful progression makes those choices feel more iterative than transformative. If you’re looking for a contemplative, tactical puzzle wrapped in a stunning package, Undergrove is right up your alley, but if you’re hoping to build a powerful engine, then this isn’t the mushroom you’re looking for.
