Artists: Tim Baron, Matthew Ebisch, James Lyle, Kaysha Siemens, Adam Stoak
Release Year: 2014
Mechanics: Cooperative, Set Collection, Hand Management
A copy of Kings of Israel was provided by the publisher for review purposes
Introduction
There’s a knee-jerk reaction that happens every time someone mentions that a piece of media is ‘Christian’. Memories of kitschy messages layered on sub-par productions, fictionalized idyllic stories that lean too heavily into prosperity for the good guys and a lack of danger or consequences is generally what comes to my mind. Some people have complex and traumatic experiences with the church or religion, and will refuse to engage with that media, because no one likes trying to be bombarded with propaganda, especially if they’ve already rejected the message a dozen times.
I am of the Christian faith, but I generally rebel against the media that caters to my religion. It always feels lacking, more of trying to push an agenda or message, rather than focusing on good story for the sake of art. But when the opportunity arose to get my hands on a couple of Christian themed board games, my curiosity was piqued. Are board games subject to the same criticisms that I have for other Christian medias? Read on to find out
How to Play
Kings of Israel is a cooperative game set in the Northern Kingdom of Israel during the reign of its kings up until Israel’s destruction by Assyria. Players represent a line of prophets that are trying to stem the influx of sin and dismantle the golden idols, while also trying to build enough altars to win the game.
A round of Kings of Israel has four phases. The King’s Godliness phase will either bestow a blessing on the players, or a punishment, depending on if the current sitting king is good or evil. After dealing with the event for the round, the Sin Increases phase has players revealing location cards, and distributing black sin cubes. Should a location receive a third sin cube, they also erect a golden idol. If players ever need to put out a sin cube, or an idol, but there are none in the supply, they lose the game. After the sin has been distributed, the Prophet’s Work phase begins. Each player gets four actions. They may move, remove sin or idols, draw resource cards, build an altar, make a sacrifice at an altar, or give resources to another player. Once all players have taken a turn, the End of Round Phase has the starting player card passed clockwise, and the timeline token moves to the next king in chronological order. If the timeline token hits the bottom of the track, Assyria invades and destroys Israel, resulting in a loss for the prophets.
The only way the players can win is if they manage to erect altars. 7 in a 2 player game, 8 in a 3 player game, and 9 in a four player game. There is also a 7 game campaign in the back of the book if you want to challenge yourself to walking up that scaling difficulty ladder.
Review
“Biblical Pandemic” is how I described Kings of Israel when inviting people to come play. The similarities are obvious, there’s plague cubes spreading across the map (although Kings of Israel only features one colour of cubes), and players have 4 actions on their turn where they are trying to move and clear the cubes from the board. What separates Kings of Israel from Pandemic is the resource cards, and how players win. Instead of drawing two cards at the end of your turn like you do in Pandemic, Kings of Israel has you spending your actions to draw cards. Players need to decide if they want to draw cards to the resources they need, or focus their time in clearing sin cubes and dismantling the idols. The former is the path to victory, but ignoring the latter will result in a loss for the prophets.
Kings of Israel is fast to get started, and quick to play. All the decks of cards get shuffled and are ready to roll, no need to separate out cards to ensure an even distribution. This means it’s both quick and random. In my most recent game, I drew a card that had me reshuffle the discard and put it all back on top with only 4 cards in the discard pile, putting each of those locations in danger of getting an idol almost immediately. With a bit of luck and some great blessings, we found it not too difficult to get out of tough situations, making the randomness feel fair.
Beyond the set-up for the decks, each round is quick too. You draw and deal with the blessing or punishment, draw location cards to spread sin, then each player does 4 actions. After all players have taken a turn, the first player card is passed to the left, and you do it all again. As with most cooperative games, if you have players who prefer to discuss every possible option, the game can drag on too long. The rule book says for an “easy mode”, players can play with their cards on the table, but there are no restrictions on communication on what’s in your hand. I’m hard-pressed to figure out why you wouldn’t just play with open hands anyway, as you could just ask “anyone got gold?” each round. Playing with the cards face up on the table just removes a small memory aspect from the game.
The goal of the game is to build altars. To build an altar you need to play a gold, a wood, and a stone card from your hand. There are only 6 of each of those cards in the resource deck, meaning you’ll need to get through the entire resource deck at least once in order to win the game. This lead to players taking their entire turn to just draw cards, milling the deck, trying to run the deck out, so we can reshuffle and get the resources we need from the discard pile into our hands. This is doubly painful when the punishment cards destroy build altars, or force you to discard one of the necessary resources from your hand. I don’t particularly like it when the boring play is the smart play. Sure, you can distract yourself to clear some cubes that may cause a problem next round, but if you don’t mill that deck, you can’t build all the altars, and you’ll lose anyway. Thankfully, that’s not often the case and may only come up as you get down to the final handful of turns.
Let’s talk re-playability. There are about 14 full rounds in the game. During that time you’ll draw 4 or 5 blessing cards, and between 10 and 15 sin and punishment cards. Some blessing cards are permanent buffs that can really alter how you approach the puzzle, and the order that the punishment cards can cascade pain upon your game. Add into this 9 ability cards, and I’d argue that the variability in Kings of Israel is fairly high, even though the goal is always the same. Each game will feel different and have you using different tactics to keep the forces of sin at bay, which is something I’m looking forward to.
Now is where I come back around to the theme. I really appreciate that Kings of Israel doesn’t proselytize. At no point does it beat you over the head with scripture, or force the virtues of the church down your throat. The flavour text on every card does contain a relevant verse from the bible, but it’s incredibly small and serves to enhance the theme. I also enjoy that the game doesn’t turn God into a vending machine, doling out blessings and prosperity at every turn. Instead, it shows both sides, his blessings and his wrath. The prophets aren’t universally loved and granted unrealistic divine protection, but are persecuted. To me, this more accurately reflects my experience with the bible, having read it cover to cover a few times. There’s a lot of violence and wrath in that book that seems to be skipped over during Sunday morning sermons and in most Christian media. It’s plain to me that designer Lance Hill has done his homework and handled the theme very respectfully.
As I said before, Kings of Israel is Biblical Pandemic. That phrase alone will tell you enough if you should seek it out or not. I’m looking forward to the next time I have my friends of faith over, as I have no doubt this game will be a hit with them. I think I would have been even more enthusiastic had I played it back in 2014 before the other Pandemic spin-off games Fall of Rome and Rising Tide came out. Kings of Israel is quick and easy to play, making it a great game to play with any collection of people, whether it be you and your kids, or a youth group. Funhill Games also produced some Bible studies if you want to teach more about the Kings, locations, or prophets that are featured in Kings of Israel.
Mechanics: Bag Building, Hand Management, Area Control
Players: 2 or 4
Bigfoot and I played War Chest by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson as it had been on both of our ‘want to play’ lists for a while. I have a strong affinity for two player abstract strategy games, even if they don’t hit the table very much for me anymore. While I don’t think this is going to radically change my gaming habits any time soon, I do think War Chest is special and deserves a closer look.
The theme of War Chest is about as strong as any other abstract strategy game. “In War Chest you take on the role of medieval battlefield commanders, vying to take control of tactical battlefield positions”.
To begin a game of War Chest, each player is dealt 4 unit cards and takes the corresponding unit chips from the box and places them in their own supply. Each player than takes two chips from each unit and places them into their bag, along with their own royal chip. The bag is shaken and the game begins with each player drawing 3 chips.
Basically put, each round you and your opponent will draw chips from your bag, take actions with those chips, then redraw when you’ve both depleted your hands and repeat until one player has managed to lay out all 6 of their control tokens to win the game.
The units in War Chest are what give the game colour and texture. Some have passive abilities, like the Pikeman, who had a stipulation that when a unit attacks it from an adjacent location, they also take a damage, or the Knight who can only be attacked by a unit who has been bolstered.
Some units have restrictions, like the Archer who cannot take the generic attack action, but must use it’s tactic (which allows it to attack a unit two spaces away), and others just have a tactic that you can activate, like the lancer, who can choose move one or two spaces in a straight line, then attack, allowing you to close a wide gap quickly.
War Chest has a lot of push and pull to it. Because you need to have matching chips in your bag to activate units on the board, you’re compelled to fill your bag with as many chips as possible so you can activate your unit more often, but there’s a delay. The unit you’re recruiting chips for won’t be drawn until your bag runs out and you can refresh your bag, where you put all your discarded tokens back into your bag. If you do to have a unit on the board and 3 matching chips in your bag, great, you can start activating that unit frequently, but they’ll have a target painted on their back. Your opponent can see how many tokens you’ve recruited into your bag, and activating a unit requires you to discard a token face up, meaning your opponent knows when a unit is spent and can move in for the kill.
There’s 9 different actions you can do with each chip, which fall under 3 categories. Deploy, where you put your chip onto the board. Maneuver, where you discard a chip to take an action with a matching chip on the board (such as move, attack, bolster, control, or tactics). And finally, you can discard a chip face down to claim the initiative, recruit (move a chip from your supply into your discard pile), or pass.
Getting things done in War Chest is a slow affair. Your bag starts with 9 tokens, two from each of your 4 units, meaning it’ll take 3 rounds before your discard pile goes back into the bag. Assuming you deploy two of your units, that only leaves you with one matching chip for those two units in your bag. That’s only one Maneuver action per bag refresh. It can take 3 or 4 bag refreshes just to get a chip into position. Because it takes so long to do anything, combat feels dangerous. When you have a unit in the line of fire, you immediately start sweating and hoping against hope that you’ll be the first to attack, lest the progress you made with this token is undone with one fell swoop.
On the subject of attacks, when you’re attacked, you remove the attacked chip from the game. Your available chips will slowly dwindle over time. Again, because your opponent can count, they can figure out when they’ve effectively rendered a unit useless. The risk of being attacked can be mitigated by bolstering your units, placing another chip creating a stack. When you’re attacked, the top chip is still removed from the game, but the lower chip remains where it is. Now you don’t need to spend the extra actions returning a subsequent unit to the same position. Again, the push and pull of War Chest shows up, if you bolster, you have less chips in the bag to activate that unit on future turns. Everything is a trade-off.
The goal of the game isn’t to eradicate your opponent, but instead to control 6 points on the board. You control a point by moving a unit onto a control point, then discarding a chip matching the unit on that spot which allows you to place your control token. Once you have a control token down, you can deploy future units from this spot (assuming it’s unoccupied). Should your opponent manage to get one of their units onto your control space, it only takes one control action to remove your token, and install their own.
One of the games that we played, Bigfoot managed to win without attacking me a single time. The threat of combat was enough to keep me back and he managed to get all of his control tokens down. In another game, a single crossbowman was deployed to the board, and with 4 matching chips in the bag, he proceeded to move it into position and cripple my forces with multiple attacks. I had no units that could close the gap quick enough to get in and take out that one devastating unit.
I imagine every unit can be devastating in specific circumstances. While I’m still a beginner at this game, I can see there’s significant depth ahead of me. Like most abstract strategy games, this is best played against a single person multiple times, with both of you learning and growing together. Previous games experiences informing the decisions as you move forward. A unit that was ineffectual in one game can be the clutch unit in another. When a meta forms and develops over multiple plays as you and your opponent sharpen your skills against each other, something special is made. I suspect that as you play War Chest more, you’ll start drafting the starting units instead of dealing them randomly. This would allow you to craft your army in response to your opponent, offering even more strategic decisions.
It would be remiss if I didn’t mention the luck factor. Because you need matching chips in your hand to activate your units on the board, a lot of the game is putting yourself into the best (and potentially dangerous) position, and hoping you draw the correct chip that will allow you to activate a unit that’s in striking distance before your opponent can, or even further, that you can control a location before the unit gets wiped off the map. To me, the luck in War Chest comes across more as risky than anything else. If you’ve found yourself in a potentially dangerous situation it may be worth burning an action to ensure you get to go first after you draw your 3 chips in the next round.
War Chest feels ripe for expansions, and at the time of this writing, two have already been released War Chest: Siege and War Chest: Nobility. Both add more units and vary the battlefield, giving players new challenges to crash against. While I don’t feel ready to add expansions into my game yet, I’m glad to know they already exist.
If you’re looking for something along the same lines as War Chest, I can personally recommend Santorini. It’s a great strategic game with interesting asymmetric gameplay. If asymmetry is not your bag, I’d recommend Hive or Tak. I find such joy when playing these games against players of equal skill. Of course, there’s always Chess and Go if you want to wade into those waters, but with a skill ceiling so high it can be hard to find players of an similar skill.
Well, it’s May 2022 and my family and I have contracted COVID-19 for the first time. I thought I would spend our isolation time reflecting on the series of games with the name that no one really thought remarkable until it overtook our world; Pandemic.
How to Play
Pandemic is a cooperative game where players are trying to discover the cure to four diseases ravaging the world. The game begins by dealing players cards out of the player deck, then seeding the deck with epidemic cards, which serve to make things suddenly very bad in a random location, and to increase the pressure on the players.
In Pandemic, you and your friends will take actions to move around the world, treat diseases (which removes one disease cube from the location your player pawn is in), build research stations, and trade cards with each other. The goal of the game is to discover all 4 cures by discarding 5 cards of the same colour while your pawn is at a research centre. Players all lose together if the player deck runs out, or if the outbreak tracker hits 0, or if you ever need to place a cube of a specific colour, but you’ve run out. With 3 ways to lose, players are sometimes forced to figure out which crisis is the most demanding before choosing which actions to take.
To begin the game, 9 cards are drawn from the infect cities deck, with 3 disease cubes placed on the first three cities, 2 cubes on the next three cities, and 1 cube on the final three cities. With this initial seed and some potential hot-spots, the stage is set. All players begin in Atlanta (the home of the CDC), and the game is on.
Review
Pandemic has become a venerable classic. It feels like it singlehandedly defines the co-op genre, at least as I know it. I started playing board games in 2014, at which point the 2012 reprint of Pandemic had filled store shelves and was actively being pushed onto new gamers. I’m very glad it was, because the concept of a fully cooperative game seemed so foreign to me that I probably wouldn’t have tried it without a push. After trying Pandemic, cooperative quickly became one of my favourite genres of board games.
Now, I know there were cooperative games long before 2008’s Pandemic, but this game brought the concept into the mainstream (at least, mainstream for the board game hobby), and inspired a wave of excellent cooperative experiences after it. It’s hard to understate the effect that Pandemic and Matt Leacock has had on the board game hobby, but I’m not here to give you a history lesson. Let’s talk about Pandemic specifically.
The Pandemic system, as it’s come to be known, has a formula that many other games have iterated on (especially by designer Matt Leacock in his subsequent cooperative games, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, not to mention the other Pandemic spin-offs). The formula is thus: A player takes a number of actions on their turn, then draws some cards which are used to amplify actions or further the end game objective, and then bad stuff happens. While I’m simplifying it, the goal of the game is to manage the bad stuff long enough to accomplish your long term objectives. While randomness can play a part and utterly crush your team’s efforts, generally the experience is tense and gives you the feeling that you might just pull through, as long as you don’t draw one specific card that would cause catastrophic ramifications.
I want to talk briefly about the infection deck, because it is an absolutely brilliant mechanic. The infection deck is the engine that gives players something to do while they’re working on curing the diseases. When a city is drawn from the infection deck, it gets a disease cube placed onto it, then it’s placed into the infection deck discard pile. When an epidemic strikes, you draw a card from the bottom of the deck, put 3(!) disease cubes on that one city, then shuffle all the discarded infection cards together and place them on top of the deck. From that moment on the stress of the game leaps. Suddenly there’s a time pressure; all those cities that were somewhat fine, and not quite teetering on the brink of disaster are now in the crosshairs. At any time those cities can be drawn again during the infect cities step of the game, and if they do, it will spell trouble.
I always find Pandemic tense. With three ways to lose and only one way to win, you need to be quick on completing your objectives while not throwing away too many cards. It’s tempting to use the cards liberally to fly around the board, but doing so directly takes away from your ability to cure diseases. It’s also tempting to horde cards in your hand, but with a hard hand limit of 7 cards, you’ll quickly be discarding cards with absolutely no benefit. it’s important to strike a balance.
Speaking of balance I want to mention the character roles. Each person gets a role at the start of the game that offers them a special ability, but some feel significantly better than others. While some abilities are ALWAYS useful (like the medic, who can cure all the cubes of one colour with a single action, an ability that you’ll be using at least once per turn), others characters feel more situational (like the Contingency Planner who can re-use event cards). I always want to explore more characters, but I go into every game wanting to win and some characters just jive better with me than others.
Pandemic is a truly cooperative experience. As most people play with open hands and/or open information (because it’s a co-op game, there’s no reason to hide), it can be prone to someone gruffly taking over the table, dictating what each player should do on their turn, and turning it into a one player game instead of a team effort. I don’t fault the game for that, however; it’s up to the players to establish their own ground rules. Cardboard does a terrible job of maintaining boundaries after all.
I’m always surprised and how close my games of Pandemic end up. It’s incredibly rare that we win outright, without any fear that at least one of the lose conditions will overtake our efforts to save the world. Very often we win on the very last, or second to last possible turn, just barely curing the last disease through a convoluted series of actions that manage to get the last two cards into the last player’s hand so that they can just barely make it to the research centre with a single action to spare. And then there’s the blowouts – the bad luck games where you are given a binary option at the beginning. Cure red or cure yellow. With no further information you arbitrarily make a choice to cure red, only to have the next few cities to get infected be yellow, which is obviously followed by an outbreak in yellow, which triggers another and another and another outbreak, sinking your outbreak tracker deep into the doom end of the track.
The blowouts aren’t very common, but they do exist. I’m not sure if they can be ‘fixed’ or not, but they rarely bother me. Resetting the deck can be tedious if you want to reshuffle and try again right away, but it’s a small price to pay for a easy to learn and play game that offers such a interesting experience.
Because Pandemic is easy to learn, it’s often used as an on-ramp to the world of board games, showing players that there’s more to this cardboard hobby than rolling dice and slowly crawling your army around the world. There’s joy and teamwork, elation and tension, and it shows that not everything needs to be a competition.
My wife and I love cooperative games, and that love started with Pandemic. Since then, we’ve moved onto other great cooperative games like Burgle Bros and Now Boarding, both designed by Tim Fowers, and I’ve had a lot enjoyment playing the Pandemic spin off games, like Pandemic: The Cure, Pandemic: Fall of Rome, and Pandemic: Rising Tide. If you haven’t played Pandemic, or any other cooperative games, I can not suggest it enough. If you play it enough and start to feel tired on what the base box is offering, there are three expansions that drastically change up how the game is played, including many more character roles, a 5th disease, and mutations that make each of the diseases act in different ways.
Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich
Artist: Dann May
Release Year: 2022
Mechanics: Pattern Building, Set Collection
Players: 2 or 4
A copy of Abstract Academy was provided by the publisher for review purposes.
Introduction
I have never aspired to being an artist. I’ve scribbled little sausage people in the margins of my notebooks while in school, but chose to spend my efforts with the written word instead. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I’ve never applied paint to canvas.
That said, some of my family members are ardent artists. One will paint anything they can get their hands on, including their game controllers or the table they happen to be sitting at, and the other achieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Tangentially to this, I had aunts and grandparents who vary from incredible artists with paint to amazingly skillful with wood. What I’m trying to say is there is art all around me, but devoid in myself.
How to Play
Abstract Academy is a two of four player game where players are playing cards to a shared tableau in an effort to achieve the goals that are laid out at the start of the game.
What makes Abstract Academy unique is that the grid of cards doesn’t start out set; on your turn you can play a card orthogonally adjacent to any other card on the table, until there are 4 cards on the X axis and 4 cards on the Y axis. Once that requirement has been met, then the grid becomes locked.
Once the grid is locked, the ‘home row’ and scoring zones become set. The row of cards closest to you is your ‘home row’, your opponents cannot play cards in the row closest to you. Your scoring zone is the two rows of cards closest to you. Once the 4 by 4 grid of cards is completely full, you score each of the objectives. In the first round, you’ll be evaluating the colours. In the second round you’ll evaluate the composition of your scoring area, and in the third round you’ll have a mix of objectives from the previous two rounds.
After 3 rounds, the player with the most points wins.
Review
Abstract Academy‘s box is white with big colourful letters. If it were a much larger box it would certainly catch more attention. Thankfully the box is literally as big as it needs to be. Ninety-two cards is everything that makes up Abstract Academy. I really appreciate the packaging being slim and small, taking up almost no space on my shelf and making it very easy to travel with. What I don’t like is that the flap to open the box is difficult to open, and I suspect won’t stand the test of time.
The cards in Abstract Academy are excellent. The card stock is thick and glossy and the colours are vibrant, which is important in a game that focuses on the colours on the cards. The main deck of cards that you’ll be handling look to include various brush strokes and the textures of paint on canvas. If you’ve painted before, you’ll feel right at home.
The game was easy to teach, but had a few edge cases that made it slightly tricky. “You cannot play cards in your opponent’s home row, but the home row isn’t decided until 4 cards are played on the x axis. Also, you can play on your opponent’s home row if there are no other options.”
Once beyond the rules, Abstract Academy plays quickly. Turn by turn you’ll each place cards onto the tableau either trying to further your own goals, or try to hamper your opponents. If the goal is to have the most blue zones, you might play a card that connects a couple of their blue zones together, lowering their overall number.
It is possible to have an entire shut-out during a round where a single player wins all the objectives, which feels like it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Each player will also get a personal objective each round where they’re trying to create a shape somewhere in their scoring zone. You get an objective every round, but if you don’t accomplish your goal it can carry over to the next round. That said, you can only accomplish one goal per round, so holding onto them round to round isn’t very helpful.
When evaluating the goal cards, ties are broken by the ‘Teacher’s Pet’ card. If you have this card and there is a tie, you must surrender the card to your opponent, but you win the tie. I actually really like this decision as it feels like the most fair way to distribute who wins ties.
Luck does play a role in how well you can do at Abstract Academy, but it’s not obvious. Sometimes you may find you need a very specific order of colours in order to accomplish a shape that you just can’t seem to get. You’ll flip the card around and around desperately wishing you could just flip it over and get the mirror image. Alas, the paint is not always in your favour.
Overall, Abstract Academy is a cool little two player game that is worth playing with the artist in your life. While the art theme is just a window dressing, I’m a fan of games using a theme to appeal to an audience wider than the those already in the board game hobby. It may draw someone in who has always loved art, but hasn’t experienced the joy of board and card games yet.
You can get Abstract Academy from the Crafty Games website and it includes a promo card when ordering directly from the publisher.
Number of Plays: 14 (Mostly 3 – 4 players, a few 2 and 5 player games)
Game Length: 90 minutes – 120 minutes
Mechanics: Real Time, Tile Placement, Chaos
Release Year: 2007
Designer: Vlaada Chvatil
Artist: Tomáš KuYoučerovský, Radim Pech
Publisher: CGE
Introduction
Galaxy Trucker has the prestige of being my number 2 favourite game of all time. My top games list is a constant state of flux, but from the very first time I played Galaxy Trucker, it has enjoyed the prestige of being seated firmly at the top or penultimate spot. Spoilers for the end of the review, but Galaxy Trucker has more nuance that is worth discussing. The very reasons that make me love Galaxy Trucker could be the reasons you should stay away.
How to Play
In Galaxy Trucker, players have been hired by Corporation Incorporated to ship pipes across the galaxy. Of course everyone knows it’s terribly inefficient to build a whole spaceship and then put the pipes onto the spaceship. The obvious solution is to build a rickety, barely functioning spaceship out of pipes and fling said pipeship across the galaxy to deliver the product.
Galaxy Trucker is played over three rounds. each round players build a bigger ship and go on longer trips. Each round begins with each player having a blueprint of a spaceship and a shared pile of black tiles in the centre of the table. The bravest soul shouts “Start” then everyone begins snapping up starship components. One at a time, they bring the tile over their ship’s blueprint, flip it over, briefly judge it, and either affix it to their hot mess of a space boat or cast it back into the endless void from whence it came.
I firmly believe the rule book explains each of the components best. You have lasers for blasting asteroids and space pirates and youwant as many of those as possible. You have engines for moving faster through open space and youwant as many of those as possible. You have cargo space for picking up valuable packages from each of the alien planets you pass on your way. You want as many of those as possible. The crew cabins hold people, who are necessary to fly your ship. Youwant as many of those as possible. You have battery compartments which give energy to the special double strength lasers and engines, so you want as many of those as possible. You may sense a pattern forming here.
Each component has a number of connections branching off from it. You must start building from the centre of your ship and each subsequent part needs to connect correctly to an adjacent piece. Every connector has one, two, or three connections jutting out to the edges of the tile. Every adjacent tile needs to match connectors where they exist (don’t worry, the 3 connectors are wilds, they can connect to single and double connectors).
The first person to finish building their ship flips a sand timer telling the rest of the table to get their affairs in order. They take a #1 token and look over their ship. Usually followed with anguished exclamations of an entire set of components that they’ve forgotten to add, or an illegal connector that will need to be made right before the ship can legally fly.
Once the ships are lined up on the track and everyone has filled their boats with people, guest aliens and batteries, the event deck is handed to the person in first place and the race begins. Each card has an event that needs to be dealt with. You could be confronted to with open space, which allows each player to fire up their engines and overtake that sucker who finished building their ship first, but only managed to get one engine on. You might come across an alien planet with goods you can pick up and sell at the end of your race for a bit of extra cash, but if you chose to stop you go back a couple of spots on the track and someone might pass you.
Once the players make it through the deck, they are rewarded for making safely at their destination in order of arrival. First place gets the most, with second third and fourth getting increasingly less. The player with the least amount of open connectors also gets a bonus for the ‘prettiest ship’. After everyone has collected their credits, you move onto the next round. After round three, everyone counts up how many credits they’ve earned over the course of the game. Anyone who has earned 1 credit or more is a winner! After all, your goal was to make money. Of course, the player who earned the most credits is just a bit more of a winner than everyone else.
Review
Galaxy Trucker is a game played in two parts, and like most games that feature two separate and distinct sides to the game, you really need to understand both before you can play either. The rulebook suggests a specific subset of cards to play on your first game that will gently introduce you to the mechanics of Galaxy Trucker so players can focus on building their first ship with little consequences. Speaking of the rulebook, this one is funny. There’s plenty of jokes spread throughout the book giving humour and charm to the theme.
In a perfect world, your spaceship will be a thing of beauty. Engines all the way along the back, guns every three rows along each side and all the way along the front. Ample storage space, batteries to support all of your modules, plenty of crew, a pair of visiting aliens, shields covering every direction and every part connected to at LEAST two other parts. When you’re actually confronted with playing this damned game you’ll find yourself obsessively searching a very specific part, like an engine that has a one connector coming in from the top and a two connector going to the right. You’ll flip over tile after tile passing over everything that isn’t the exact component that you’re currently searching for. Eventually you’ll find the right component… already placed on someone else’s ship. So you lower your standards and keep searching for an engine, this time settling on one that has a connecter from the top and both sides. The left side will be pointing to the outside of your ship, which is ugly and dangerous, but it’s better than having no engines. Now that you’ve finally found the engine you were looking for you’ll look around and realize that in the time it took for you to find this one piece, everyone is almost done! You’re at least 9 tiles behind and the endless pile of components has dwindled down to nearly nothing. All the rest of the are gone now so you have to make do with the single one you agonized over. You’ll rush to catch up with your opponents and before you know it you’ve accidentally built a ship with 6 battery compartments and not a single component that needs a battery!
Galaxy Trucker is absolute chaos, but in the best kind of way. I’ve built shining ships that crumbled at the first sign of trouble. I’ve built ramshackle and misshapen boats that shouldn’t have made it out of port, but come out the other side in first place hauling a horde of goods. I’ve also had more than one experience where I made a catastrophic error by illegally placing tiles and needing to cleave off half my ship before the game even starts.
Board Game Geek defines a ’10’ rating as a game as “Outstanding – will always enjoy playing”. Within that definition, Galaxy Trucker is an easy 10 out of 10 for me. But a perfect game is still not above criticism. If you’re someone who enjoys the feeling of control over your experience, Galaxy Trucker is not for you. If you’re particularly sensitive when a game punishes you for being in last place, Galaxy Trucker is not for you. It is absolutely infuriating when your population gets crushed by an epidemic card which manages to wipe out both of your aliens, then a sabotage card (that only affects the person with the lowest population) blows off a critical part of your ship apart forcing you to lose an entire wing of your ship (including all of your engines and most of your guns), then you get fired on by slavers because you happened to be the first player in the line, reducing your ship to rubble. I can understand and empathize with the frustration that some people feel when they get punished over and over with no opportunity to fix the mistakes or react to the sequence of events that are making a mockery of their finely tuned specimen of engineering. It’s also frustrating when the game continues to beat down the player who is already in last place. On the plus side, each round is a hard reset; the sins of your past are forgotten and while you’ll have less money than everyone else, you aren’t saddled with the debts of a failed mission.
But perhaps the childlike glee I feel when I see a ship get separate cleanly into two halves like an onion immunes me from disliking this game. I’ve absolutely vehemently hated on other games that take away my control, or punish me for making a bad decision. But in the case of Galaxy Trucker, I’ve accepted the element of chaos and internalized that some runs are will be a tale of success while other rounds will make me hang my head in shame.
After playing the physical version a dozen times I bought the digital version on my phone. The app did a very good job of making me feel like was getting the Galaxy Trucker experience. I ended up playing through the full campaign, but at the end I found myself missing the raucous laughter that accompanies the perfect large laser blast that explodes a ship into a dozen pieces leaving their captain with his head in his hands. A by-product of playing the app however, is that I’m now very familiar with the components and have a vague idea of how many parts have what kind of connections I’m looking for. This absolutely gives me an edge when playing the game with people who have played less than me.
I also picked up The Big Expansion which adds more components, more ship varieties, a 5th player, and two more decks of cards that turn the randomness up to 11. Now that I’ve become a more competent ship builder than most of my local game group I almost require the extra cards and the more difficult ships to keep me from having a perfect run every single game. As much fun as it is to win, the challenge and destruction is what keeps me coming back to Galaxy Trucker. Building up a ship and subjecting it to everything space has to throw my way is exactly how I want to spend my Friday night.
I will admit that adding the expansion components makes it a bear to teach new players as it almost doubles the number of components types available. I’ve found success with leaving the back page of the expansion rulebook open near the new players so they can quickly reference the pieces with that book and they manage to make it through the ship building process without too much trouble. Inevitably they tend to ignore the expansion bits, but to be fair, so do I. I’ve also found that experienced players need to play with the advanced ships otherwise they end up head and shoulders above the rest of the pack.
I understand that Galaxy Trucker is a divisive game, it seems that people either love it or hate it. I find that the better I do in a round, the less fun I have. It’s not interesting when my ship successfully dodges every asteroid or repels every invasion. On paper, pulling into port carrying huge amounts of goods and a perfect ship sounds like the ideal situation, but it’s just boring. Galaxy Trucker is at it’s best and most fun when your plans have a wrench thrown into them and you’re forced to make decisions and concessions. You have one battery left, and an asteroid is coming for you. If it hits, you’ll lose two pieces, a small price to pay. But then four more pieces will be exposed to danger. Do you spend the battery now to protect against this small threat, or do you save the battery in case something much more damaging is just around the corner? I’m having the most fun when I’m confronted with these choices. If you’re able to enjoy the chaos of real-time ship building, then relinquish control of your ship as it gets pummeled by the terrors of space, Galaxy Trucker is an experience worth seeking out.
My wife and I are huge Lord of the Rings fans. We love the books and we love the trilogy of movies. Unfortunately, I grew up in the 90s where a licensed game (a game that had the same title as an existing property) generally meant that the game was absolute trash. I’ve played some really terrible movie tie-in games in my day (Batman and Robin for the SNES, I’m looking at you). The Lord of the Rings has had some great and not so great games made within the universe. Stick around to see if The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth falls into the former or latter camp.
Lord of the Rings world map neoprene playmat not included
How to play
The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a cooperative, app assisted adventure game. In LotR:JiME you and your friends take the role of familiar (Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, and Bilbo) and new heroes (Beravor and Elena) as they rush across various procedurally generated maps battling foes and helping friends as they attempt to strike a blow against the forces of evil. LotR:JiME is a campaign game where, win or lose, the story will advance regardless, potentially affecting how the story plays out. There are certain times where losing will end the adventure, but they’re clearly marked.
Playing LotR:JiME is straightforward and the app will guide you through most of the setup. Players pick a character and a role which will combine two decks of cards to create their personal skill deck for the mission. If they have ‘points’ in a role, they can add extra, generally more powerful cards into their deck.
Mouse and tablet not included
The players begin every round by ‘scouting’ – drawing cards from the deck and potentially ‘preparing’ one as a skill. This removes the card from your deck but allows you to use the card for it’s listed ability. The rest of the cards are placed either on top of the deck, or on the bottom.
Players decide the order in which they want to take their turns. On a player turn, they can perform up to 2 actions. The actions are to travel (move two zones), attack, and investigate.
Once all players have taken a a turn, the game moves into the Shadow Phase, where any enemies on the board will activate and the shadow meter climbs ever higher. Often the shadow meter will have thresholds that will trigger events should the shadow reach them. The app will guide you through all of these steps.
Gandalf not included!?
Play continues until the players have achieved the goal of the mission, run out of time, or any hero dies. Once finished, players can choose to continue playing the next scenario, or to save and quit. Each game took us at least 2 hours to complete, so we very rarely played more than one scenario in a night.
Review
I’m a mechanics first gamer. While a theme that resonates with my proclivities is enough to rouse my curiosity, it’s not always enough to fully grab my attention, let alone keep me coming back for more. Lord of the Rings is a theme that will always get me to at least take a look.
My first criticism is the character selection within this box. You have some of the standard characters that you’d expect; Aragon, Gimli, and Legolas. Then you have Bilbo, who never adventured with this party, and two new characters created for this campaign. I dislike that other main characters like Gandalf were omitted for what feels like an expansion hook (guess who the is on the front cover of the expansion box?). It’s a paltry complaint; the six included characters do feel varied and interesting to play as.
The production of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth feels lavish in some parts while lacking in others. All the heroes and enemies are nicely sculpted miniatures. I didn’t notice any droopy swords or spears during my playthroughs. However, instead of including different poses for enemies of the same type, they opted to use cardboard flags on stands to help identify which enemy corresponds with which icon on the app. Some scenarios will throw 3x separate Goblin Archer mobs at you, so you do need some way to tell them apart.
Pants not included
The terrain tiles are large and uniquely shaped. Each tile will have several (usually between 2 and 4) zones that you can move between. Due to the procedural nature of the app dictating where to lay the tiles down, once or twice we ended up in danger of extending the map off the table. Having such large zones for your characters to move between helps impart the feeling of progression and speed, especially if you use your whole turn for movement and cross four zones in a single bound.
The card quality leaves nothing to be desired. A quality linen finish and robust card stock makes these cards feel durable in your hands, which is important considering you’ll be shuffling your little deck several times each game. I am a little disappointed that the cards are so small. Nonetheless, I understand why they chose to use tiny cards, as full sized cards would take over the entire table leaving no room for the massive map that most missions require (Lotr:JiME contains 337 cards in the base game alone).
If you couldn’t tell from the size of the box itself, Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a very large game and demands a lot of time and space. Setting up this game is a chore, even if I use a card ladder that helps sort the dozens of decks of cards. Many of the cards won’t be used every game, or even at all if their associated characters or roles aren’t used or titles not acquired. On one hand, I like the variety and variability; playing through the game a second time as a different character is much more enjoyable than a repeat journey as Aragon. On the other hand, having extra unused cards can add to the sprawl your cards if you aren’t organized.
Playing Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth is a straightforward affair. In the app you’ll select your characters, roles, and who has which items. Then the app will deliver some story and instruct you on how to create the first bits of the map and where to place your heroes and various tokens around the board. The player phase begins with all players scouting from their deck; drawing cards and preparing one as a skill and returning the rest to their deck. And herein lies the only ‘hidden’ information of this cooperative game. Players are encouraged to discuss and strategize together, but the game takes no effort to solve the ‘quarterbacking problem’. If you have a particularly pushy person in your group ordering everyone around, I wouldn’t suggest playing this game.
The core of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth‘s gameplay is centered around skill checks. Often when you interact with something (including attacking), you’re asked to check a skill. You draw a number of card from your deck equal to the skill being checked. Many of the cards in your deck will have an icon in the top corner with either a success, a leaf (which can be turned into a success by spending an inspiration token), or nothing. Some skill checks will require you to have a certain number of successes while others will just have you input the number of successes that you earned and then tell you if you passed or failed after the fact.
And herein lies what really makes Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth a step removed from a traditional board game. The app obfuscates mechanics from the players, such as the number of successes to clear some challenges. When inspiration tokens are running low players may want to conserve them, but choosing to hold back may mean spending a whole other action if the skill check isn’t passed. The unknowing bucket to dump successes into is not my favourite game to play. There is also the equivalent of rolling critical failures; if you don’t have any inspiration tokens, you may only have 5 successes in your whole 18 card deck. There was one instance where I failed a check when trying to climb a tower and took enough damage to die. When you die, you make a saving check that gets progressively harder the more you’ve died. All I needed was one success, but I pulled none, ending that game right then and there.
The balance of some of the missions did feel off. In one case it felt like we were running through the cave as fast as we could and came to a fork in the road near the end. We arbitrarily chose left and it turned out to be a dead end. Backtracking and taking the other fork did let us find our objective, but it was too little too late. The end-game timer ran out and we lost the mission, by what felt like no fault of our own. On the other hand, there was a mission or two where we finished nearly everything on the map with plenty of time to spare, and when the big bad for the episode showed up, Gimli smote them with a single strike.
I know there is a subset of people that vehemently despise board games that require an app to play, and sometimes I understand their criticisms. One of the things that separates board games from video games is the mastery of the system. To play a video game, you only need to hold the controller and interact with the game. Yes, knowledge and understanding may help you accomplish the goals of the game, but they aren’t necessary. A board game on the other hand requires that you know the rules that govern the game; there can be no hidden numbers or systems running out of the view of the player, because the player needs to turn all the gears to make the game work themselves. In a hybrid environment such as Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth I feel like I’m experiencing the worst of both worlds.
There are some aspects to the app that I enjoy, like the dynamic set-up. The world map will be different each time you play. I also like that the app handles everything to do with the enemies, such as managing deployment locations and attack targets, special boons and health counters. Having the app run those aspects makes the enemies feel more challenging and unpredictable than if they were being managed by a set script such as always targeting the closest hero, or having to manage a deck for each enemy.
Overall I feel like I shouldn’t have enjoyed Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth as much as I did. The skill check system is fairly simplistic and somewhat prone to randomness, the app obfuscates certain things from you, and some missions felt too easy while others felt unfair. But in the end I enjoyed my time with LotR:JiME. It was a fun romp and the Tolkien thematic coverings appealed to my biases nicely to keep me interested in the theme. If this was a generic fantasy dungeon crawler, I’m sure I would have checked out ages ago. I am looking forward to more with this game, between the two big box expansions (Spreading War and Shadowed Paths), the additional campaigns offered as DLC within the app, and more characters than I can realistically play. I can’t help but think of this game fondly, and keep looking forward to this game hitting the table. It’s greater than the sum of it’s parts, making it an unexpected hit.
