Not that I’m particularly well travelled or cultured, but I had never heard of a Tuscan castle before. I visited English and Dutch castles in my youth, and like most things, if I haven’t experienced them, I just assume they don’t exist.
The Castles of Tuscany is Stefan Feld’s 2019 follow-up to one of his most popular games, The Castles of Burgundy (2011). I won’t get into the specifics of what makes these two games different, because I’ll dedicate a whole article to that in the future. Make sure you’re following me on Twitter and Instagram to be notified when that article is live!
Overview
Disclaimer: The rulebook contained several ambiguities that required clarifications from the community FAQ. Publisher Alea has revised the rulebook (available here) which changed some rules; most notably, the ‘draw two cards’ action is now ‘draw three cards’ by default.
The Castles of Tuscany is a 2 – 4 player game that usually plays in under an hour. In The Castles of Tuscany players will collect tiles representing towns, villages, and monasteries and place them into their lands surrounding their castle, collecting special benefits to accrue points. The neat twist on scoring in The Castles of Tuscany is that there are 2 score tracks and two types of points that you can earn: green points and red points. During each of the 3 scoring phases, you gain red points equal to the number of green points you have. This means that a green point you earn at the beginning of the game will score you 3 red points by the end. At the end of the game the player with the most red points is the winner.
Each individual turn in The Castles of Tuscany is quick and smooth. You can only do one action per turn (although if you have a marble you can spend it to take a second turn). You maychoose from the following actions: take a tile from the centre and put it into your supply, pay two cards from your hand to play a tile from your supply into your province and gain the special benefit of the tile, or draw cards into your hand.
The ‘timer’ for the game comes from the number of tiles each player takes. When a player takes a tile from the offer row they must replace the tile they took with one from their own stack. When the first player depletes their first stack of tiles, the first scoring is triggered. When a player depletes their second stack, the second scoring is triggered, and when one player runs entirely out of tiles, the game ends.
Review
A new game from prolific designer Stefan Feld and being the successor to a wildly popular game means The Castles of Tuscany had some big shoes to fill. And the quick summary is, The Castles of Tuscany is easier to teach and faster to play. It feels streamlined and smoothed, almost as if it’s been finely developed by someone who has been making board games for decades.
Because it’s so smooth and streamlined, the gameplay flows well. Turns come and go quickly, leaving little downtime between turns. In my experience, because players only get one action per turn there is very little action paralysis.
Due to turns being so short, I found each individual turn to be somewhat unsatisfying. It may take several turns to queue up anything of value. This is especially true during the first few rounds of the game. It takes two cards of the same colour to play a matching coloured tile, so it’s not unheard of to spend two or three turns in a row just drawing cards, hoping you get the correct ones. You can always spend two cards as one card of a different colour, but my instinct refuses to let me do something so inefficient.
Restricting players to only one action per turn means that you can generally see what other players are planning on doing. You can afford to defer specific actions, safe in the knowledge that your plans won’t be foiled by a sudden rug pull. Of course, it’s important to notice when a player has a stone and they are able to pull off a double turn, both placing a tile and snagging the last blue tile available, much to your own chagrin.
The Castles of Tuscany is a perfectly fine game. The component quality is nice, the rules aren’t too onerous, and it’s easy to pick up and play. I find it lacking the punchy moments where you’re able to build up to big exciting moves. “I play this tile, which gets me this tile, and I use a stone which lets me play this tile, which gets me six points” is about as exciting as it gets. Now, not every game needs to have moments where the whole table leaps to their feet, hooting and hollering (especially when the baby is napping), but the entire experience of The Castles of Tuscany feels subdued.I enjoy that play time is less than an hour, which means that The Castles of Tuscany is more likely to get played than some of my other more exciting, but longer board games, but in the end it falls short of the expectations that were heaped upon it.
Rogue Angels: Legacy of the Burning Suns was pitched to me as if Mass Effect had a board game baby. What a hook! My interest was immediately roused, but I was also skeptical. Comparing your game to a critical juggernaut like Mass Effect is quite the gamble; if it fails to deliver on the rich narrative that made Bioware’s space opera such a beloved experience among millions of players, myself included, then you’re setting everyone up for disappointment.
The longer, more technical description of Rogue Angels is that it’s a cooperative sci-fi legacy game containing a strong narrative with multiple paths, tactical combat with fluent turns, action management and asymmetric abilities. If that description catches your attention, read on as I detail my experience with the first couple missions.
The preview box I received contained 3 characters to whet my appetize (over 20 characters are promised to be included in the full game). Players assume the role of a rag-tag crew of freelancers or mercenaries as they traverse the stars and interact with various characters and factions. Missions can vary from gun blazing all-out battles, to stealthy subterfuges. As each mission progresses, players may be forced to make choices that directly impacts how their story develops.
The introductory mission has players escaping a hanger as they’re being hunted by guards of the Hellfire faction. The mission is broken into small chunks, giving players room to explore each of the main mechanics of Rogue Angels one-at-a-time before submerging themselves into the system. This method offers the person tasked with teaching the rules a very easy on-ramp to the system. The introduction goes as far as to take away all the players equipment at the start so no one gets overwhelmed by the myriad of options their cards present.
The mission begins by simply moving a single character adjacent to a point-of-interest, and continues by having other players interact with a door and a console. Interacting with objects, like trying to pick the lock on a door, or hack into a console, is achieved by drawing tokens out of a bag, and trying to match 3 colours together. This may take several actions as tokens of the wrong colour are returned to the bag. Finally, the mission gives you all your equipment back, and introduces enemies. This has players managing interacting, attacking, and moving simultaneously. At the same time, players are managing the scripted behaviour of enemies. Finally, players have arrived at the full Rogue Angels experience.
The core of Rogue Angels gameplay is the card action system; each card has a cost, and when you play a card for the action, you slot it into the appropriate spot under your player board. At the end of each of your turns, you ‘rest’, which slides all your action cards one slot to the left. Any cards that happen to fall off the track are returned to your hand and are able to be used again.
In addition to playing cards to the action row, most cards allow you to roll dice to accent your action. The die can boost the listed effect of the card, regenerate your shields, or offer you extra movement. Initially I was worried about the potential for bad die rolls to screw me out of achieving victory, but in Rouge Angels, dice are only ever positive; they always enhance your card actions. In some situations you may be really hoping to get a specific benefit, but the base effect(s) of your card will always trigger, and that’s a really nice feeling. No critical misses here!
One more aspect to the card play is some cards can gain even further benefits based on the personality of the one the wields it. As your characters go through the campaign and make choices, they’ll gain personality tokens. These personality tokens can be played to enhance a card action, and can change how a card functions significantly.
Rogue Angels is quite forgiving. Should you have multiple potential targets during an action, you get to roll any applicable die, see exactly how well you did, then get to decide who you want to target. The gameplay is very flexible.
The Rogue Angels rulebook is extremely intimating, clocking in at 44 pages long. I found that there are several pages of examples, walking you through how every action works and covering many of the edge cases that we experienced during the first few games. It was a lot of pages to get through, but I found a fairly straightforward rule-set underneath.
The other (massive) book involved is the Campaign book. At the time of writing the campaign has 8 missions, and is already over 100 pages long. Every mission has several checkpoints and updates where the stated goal may suddenly change, or you and your players are forced to react to an unexpected event. It makes for a lot of reading, but once you get past the initial shock factor of just how many pages exist for this game, there’s a well executed system for progressing the mission without interrupting gameplay too dramatically.
My initial impressions of Rogue Angels: Legacy of the Burning Sun is that it’s a deep game – much deeper than I initially expected. I can tell that designer Emil Larson LOVES the universe that he has created, going as far as to create a Wiki to aid the players in submerging themselves in the lore. The campaign book is already over 100 pages long and filled with story and dialogue. The full version of Rogue Angels is advertised to have a spiral bound book containing a large number of maps, making the game fast to set up.
While playing Rogue Angels I kept thinking about Gloomhaven. While I’m not proclaiming that this is going to be the next Gloomhaven, the best way I can describe Rogue Angels is if Gloomhaven and Mass Effect had a board game baby, this would be it. If you know either (or even better, both) of these games, you’ll know that this is high praise.
It’s difficult to tell just from the demo missions I played, but I do have very high hopes for the story and legacy aspects. All the groundwork has been laid for the consequences and call-backs that made Mass Effect so popular. I would love to see the decisions we made early in the campaign return and affect players later in the game. The systems seems to be in place for this to happen, but I didn’t experience any payoffs during my short playthrough. That being said, I have only scratched the surface of what Rogue Angels has in store for it’s players.
I played Rogue Angels solo. While there is a lot of reading, the action stays on the table for the bulk of the playtime. It’s quite easy to manage three different characters when playing solo, and I would recommend playing multiple characters, as each one is quite different and has wildly different strengths and weaknesses. The enemy AI is straightforward, and I enjoyed seeing the different stratagems or rules to control the enemies in simulating different situations, such as patrolling, a disorganized attack, or tactical retreat.
I am excited to see where this project goes and what Emil Larson has in store for players. I eagerly anticipate seeing the project grow and evolve, and cannot wait until I get my hands on the full-fledged product. I’m sure I can easily sell this experience to a couple of my sci-fi loving friends to form a crew and dive deeply into this excellent system. The gameplay is smooth, and the story has hooks that will have you and your friends eager to play again.
The Evolution app recently launched the Climate expansion, which adds significant changes to the Evolution landscape. If you haven’t already, you can check out my thoughts on the base game of Evolution here!
What’s Different?
Evolution: Climate adds a weather mechanic that really comes into play during the food phase. All the cards that were discarded to seed the feeding pool now may influence the climate as well, shifting the ecosystem into either a new ice age, or a deadly heatwave. In colder climates, less vegetation is available and small animals perish easily. On the hot end of the spectrum, vegetation is plentiful, but the largest animals can’t handle the heat. On both sides of the climate board lay events that may get triggered and will all the animals, or the ecosystem dramatically.
Of course, with this new mechanic comes many more traits that allow you to mitigate the effects of the weather, at the expense of taking up one of your precious trait slots. Do you want to evolve Cooling Frills to survive in heat? Is it worth replacing your Hard Shell, potentially leaving you open to carnivores? You’ll need to adapt to survive!
The smaller, but just as important changes are that players all now draw one more card by default, and each species can hold 4 traits instead of just 3. This gives you space to add a climate trait, but the situation may demand you evolve along a different path. Also, if you’ve spent some time with just the base game, a few of the previous traits have been modified to negate some of the climate effects as well (such as Burrowing preventing some population lost due to heat and cold effects).
How is it?
The base game of Evolution had players struggle against the threat of hungry carnivores, and against the dwindling food supply. Evolution: Climate adds yet another threat to manage. As before, you can push your luck and play traits that primarily assist you in getting food, but eschewing your defence or neglecting to acclimatize to the shifting weather patters will lead to your extinction.
The climate marker only moves one space up or down each round, and with most games lasting between 6 and 8 rounds, the odds of hitting the ends of the track seems fairly limited (but not impossible). As expected, hitting the very ends of the climate track and trigging extreme temperatures can spell disaster for everyone involved. The available food plummets, all creatures suffer massive population loss, and the odds of trigging one of the cataclysmic events rises.
Wildfires, Volcanic Eruptions, and even Meteorites are all options if you let the ecosystem get hot enough
The Climate expansion does add a lot more variability to an already very variable game. Personally, I feel like it adds just a bit too much randomness, as your ability to control the weather is fairly low. Because the weather modification is tied to the same card that you use to seed the pond, it’s not uncommon for you to be in a bit of a pickle; you need to add food to the board, but the only card that adds food also makes it colder. Generally you’ll find yourself picking the lesser of two evils and then trying to adapt to survive.
That said, I do enjoy another threat being added that can punish an overly aggressive player. If the heat rises, larger animals begin to die. Carnivores depend on their large body size to eat their prey, which can give a player who has mustered an army of small rats a bit of a fighting chance.
Evolution: Climate is a great addition to an already great game. The new mechanic offers considerable depth with very little rules overhead. Evolution‘s mechanics already produce an emergent narrative, and Climate only adds to that story. I can’t help but think about the tale where my populous, but small animals narrowly avoided being chomped on by an overzealous carnivore, only to be saved by a sudden heat wave driving the carnivore into extinction.
As I said before, the Evolution app is simply excellent, and the Climate expansion adds even more content to play with. I really enjoyed my time with the app, especially because I have absolutely no qualms about becoming a carnivore and tearing into AI flesh. If you’re a fan of Evolution, adding Climate is a no-brainer!
Number of (physical) plays: 6 Designers: Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin Artists: JJ Ariosa, Giorgio De Michele, Catherine Hamilton, and Kurt Miller Release Year: 2014 Mechanics: Hand Management, Direct Conflict, Secret Unit Deployment Publisher: North Star Games
Introduction
When I’m not playing board games at a table, I’m often playing digital implementations of board games. And because I crave discoverability and am always trying new games, my ‘Games’ folder on my phone has slowly grown out of control.
In 2019 North Star Games released the Evolution Board Game app for Android and iOS, bringing their hit 2014 title designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin into the digital age. The app launched ‘free’ and allowed players to sample the core game. With a robust tutorial, 10 missions of the campaign, and one online multiplayer game per day, it was much more generous than many other apps that demand money upfront, or offer a severely stripped down demo.
I installed Evolution as soon as it became available and played through the free campaign. I had enjoyed the physical game previously, even if it had a tendency for players to pick on the player who falls behind.
North Star Games hasn’t let this app become stagnant. Over the past two years, it’s received a multitude of updates, including Single Player Weekly Challenges, Monthly Tournaments, a Pass and Play mode, various new traits, Asynchronous play, and a ton of bug fixes. In addition to all these new features that have been added, one of my favourite aspects of Evolution is cross-platform play. I love apps that let me play with my friends, no matter their chosen device.
The full game (which includes the rest of the campaign and unlimited online matches) in unlocked via a single In-app purchase. This means if you generally share your purchased apps with members of your family via Google’s Family Library feature, each member will need to pay for the full game individually.
How to Play
I’m writing this section from the perspective of playing the game at the table.
Evolution’s gameplay revolves entirely around cards. At the beginning of each round players draw trait cards into their hand (3, plus 1 more for every species they control). Each player must discard one card (face down) to seed food into the central feeding pool, then in player order, may play a trait card (face down) to any of their species to give them a competitive advantage in the ecosystem, or discard a card to grow their species’ population or body size. Players can also discard a card to create a whole new species. Each animal can only have 3 unique traits at a time, but traits can be replaced; they aren’t necessarily permanent.
The first rounds usually have plenty of food for everyone
After everyone has had a chance to play cards to grow and evolve their species, the face down food cards are revealed and players have to start living with the consequences of their decisions. All the trait cards are flipped face up (and are now active), and beginning with the starting player, may feed one of their species. Herbivores take food from the shared central pool while any animals with the Carnivore trait eat other species around the table (Carnivores must have a larger body size than their prey).
Once all animals have fed as much as they can, the collected food is deposited into a bag (to be revealed at the end of the game) and a new round begins. If any species collected less food than their population, their population is reduced (and could go extinct if no food was gathered).
If the deck runs out of cards during the the deal cards phase, the end of the game is triggered. Players finish the round as normal, then score one point for every food in their bag and one point for every trait and population on your species that managed to survive until the bitter end.
Review
Playing Evolution with your friends can be dangerous. While the first round or two is a utopia, with plenty of food to go around, and a gaggle of herbivores happily growing their populations and evolving traits that allow them to harvest food more quickly than the others. The tenor of gameplay changes the second you see someone build up their body size and play a face down trait. Suddenly you find yourself double-guessing your friends. “Did they just develop a taste for flesh? Do I play the Long Neck trait or the Hard Shell trait? One will defend me, while the other gives me more food…”
Only after all players have had a chance to grow their population and body sizes are the traits revealed. This is such an exciting moment of the game where everyone’s strategies are laid bare. Taking the risk to gather more food (which is points at the end of the game) while eschewing defenses can be lucrative. At the same time, seeing a poorly defended animal gives incentive to other players to grow fangs and take a pound of flesh for themselves.
Evolution is rife with player interaction, and it manifests dramatically as soon as someone turns into a Carnivore. Suddenly everything feels scary and you scramble to build a defense. Warning Calls, Burrowing, and Climbing are all useful ways to ensure your precious creatures don’t become someone else’s snack.
Personally, I enjoy Evolution, but it almost always leaves me feeling just a bit sour, due to the fact that sometimes the best option is to kill someone else at the table, or, someone else has evaded my defenses and drove me into extinction. I’ve said before that I’m a conflict adverse player so it should be no surprise that playing a game with carnivores and tearing into my friends doesn’t exactly illicit joy in my heart. However, playing against AI opponents is an entirely different; there are no hard feelings when playing a cold, heartless robot.
The easy AI is real easy
Playing the Evolution app is a perfect way to enjoy this game design. The animations are fast and snappy, the AI ‘thinks’ quickly, and holding each of the cards brings them up on the screen for easy reading. The End Turn button even requires that you hold it for a few seconds to resolve the dreaded “mis-click”, which is a stroke of UX genius.
The first 10 missions (which are available for free) of the campaign ease you into playing. They keep some of the advanced traits out of the first few games, and even present you with situations to teach you some unconventional strategies (such as using the Intelligence trait to attack a species, which reduces its population, making its Defensive Herding trait useless, allowing you to attack it a second time).
Because the animations are fast, and the AI doesn’t slow the game down, it’s so easy to blaze through game after game of Evolution. I’m much more willing to explore different strategies when the time commitment is reduced down to mere minutes.
Between pass & play, cross play between devices, AI solo games with various AI levels, campaign, and weekly challenges, I have to admit that the Evolution app has everything that I look for in a digital board game adaption, AND the game itself is excellent! Take care that you don’t play the app too much, lest you become an Evolution master and crush your friends the next time you play the game in-person.
Mechanics: Dice Rolling, Modular Board, Direct Conflict
It’s always fascinating when a piece of media tries to cross barriers between genres. I’m thinking of games such as Bloodbowl, which marries a strong fantasy setting with American football, or Forgotten Waters which leans heavily on story telling and role-playing elements to elicit joy in players instead of strong or clever board game mechanisms.
Most people know what they like. Personally, I know that I do not enjoy horror or sports, so any media catering to fans of those genres is lost on me. People who really love story-telling and role playing generally won’t enjoy games that don’t tell a story (looking at you, dry economic train games). If we imagine each genre of game as a slice of the bigger ‘gaming pie’, we all on some level know which slices of pie we’ll enjoy the most.
The reason I’m talking about proclivities is because I know I am not a war gamer. I know for a fact that I don’t like games with a lot of direct conflict, nor do I relish in games that rely on chance for resolving outcomes. I cringe when games like Root and Oath hit our tables because I know that no matter how well regarded or praised a game is, I know that I don’t enjoy games that involve a lot of direct conflict (I’ll refer to these as ‘war games’ going forward).
Apparently the way my game group convinces me to play a direct conflict game is to downplay the more random elements; “Eclipse is barely even a war game” they said; “You only have one, maybe two battles in the whole game!” they claimed. With these comments in mind, I sat down at the table to play Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy designed by Touko Tahkokallio.
How to Play
Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy begins with every player situated on their own system with naught but empty space between them. In the centre of the table is the Galactic core with a big ‘ol baddie just waiting for someone to rush in, pummel them, and claim their lucrative spot.
On your turn you can take one of six actions: explore, influence, research, upgrade, build, and move. Each action requires a disc and usually has you spending some of your resources in order to gain something in return. Exploring allows you to put new tiles on the board, potentially connecting your system with the other players in the game and discovering planets that will net you more resources during the income phase. Influence allows you to move discs from the central play area to your own board, and back again. Research lets you spend your science resource to discover a new technology. Upgrade lets you reap the benefits of your research and equip your various ships with better weaponry and shields. Building costs materials, but puts ships onto any hex you control, and moving lets you move said ships into adjacent tiles.
Player board at the end of the first round
Action taking continues around the table until players decide to pass on further actions. Once all players have passed, the game moves into a combat phase. Any tile that contains more than one colour of tokens breaks out into combat. Players roll die according to their units initiative toresolve the combat. By default, a 6 is a hit and deals one damage. Upgraded weapons will deal more damage per each success rolled, computers will lower the number required for a hit, while shields raise the number required to hit your ships(6’s ALWAYS hit and 1’s ALWAYS miss). Once a ship has taken damage exceeding it’s hull strength, the ship is been destroyed.
Once all combat is resolved, players gain income based on the number of planets they’ve occupied. Finally, upkeep costs need to be paid based on the number of discs that you have out. Having completed this phase, the next round starts.
At the end of the game your score is derived from the points on the tiles on which you have a disc, any reputation tiles, any ambassador tiles, discovery tiles, monoliths, and your progress on the technology tracks. The player with the most points is the Supreme Galactic Ruler!
Review
The “How to Play” section above isn’t meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on how to play Eclipse. After all, the rulebook is 25 pages long and offers plenty of examples to help players navigate the considerable depth of rules. Board Game Geek’s forums also has a lot of discussion on some more edge-case rules questions, but it can be tricky to navigate as there were some rules changes and balance changes that happened between editions of the game and the expansions.
My friends weren’t lying when they said Eclipse is barely a war game. Rather, it is more of a resource management, economic game. As players take actions and spread their influence across the galaxy, they’ll be putting discs from their player board onto other things. The more discs you take off your track, the more money you’ll have to pay at the end of the round. If you can’t pay for your actions, you go bankrupt and may be forced to return some of your influence from the board to cover your shortfalls.
If I take any more actions, I’ll end up with a trade deficit But I won’t get very far on a single action per turn…
Like many games in the 4X genre (eXplore, eXploit, eXpand, eXterminate) the first couple of turns have players individually exploring the area around their home, gobbling up any resources to really kickstart their engines. While exploring, you may run into an neutral enemy called an ‘Ancient’. The Ancients aren’t terribly difficult to destroy (especially after a few researches and upgrades), but this is where the first instances of luck can start to make or break your Eclipse experience. It’s not unrealistic for one player to draw tiles that contain no threats and offer a variety of benefits. Plentiful planets, artifacts, and useful wormholes that make it easier to explore even more. To add to the momentum, artifacts can often give a player a bunch of resources that greatly assist them in their next few actions.
Conversely, If you explore and happen to find an Ancient, you’ll need to use a subsequent action to move some of your ships into that space. Then, after all players have finished taking actions and the game has moved into the combat phase, you’ll roll dice to resolve the combat. Assuming you win, you may put an influence disc in the sector and gain the rewards and/or place cubes on planets. It feels stifling to get surrounded by Ancients on your first few explore actions, while watching your opponents easily gobbling up planets left and right.
He who controls the centre, controls the universe
Eclipse is a resource management game, make no mistake. During each of your actions you move a disc off a track which dictates how much money you need to pay at the end of the round. If your actions exceed the amount you pay, you may end up going bankrupt. If your faction expands too far and you just happen to not find any orange plants (which increase the amount of money you generate at the end of every round), you may find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place, deciding to go bankrupt and lose discs off sectors (which also return any cubes on planets to their tracks), or choosing to end your turn early.
Combat in Eclipse is anything but deterministic. Ships come in a variety of shapes and abilities and players can tweak their powers to fit each game. If you’re going up against someone who is very likely to hit, but does little damage with each success, you may want to improve your hull to survive multiple hits. Perhaps your opponent is a glass cannon; dealing 4 damage on every hit, but has no hull. In this case its worth investing in missiles, which only fire once per combat, but always shoot first. Of course, all of these modifiers and add-ons are locked behind specific technology tiles, which are randomly drawn at the beginning of every round, meaning sometimes the technology you really want just isn’t available, or the first player took it before you even had a chance. In addition to needing the technology to be available to buy, you need to pay for it using the science resource (pink). Hopefully during your explore actions you managed to find some pink planets to plop your cubes onto.
Bigfoot! Get out of my galaxy!!!
A lot of progress in Eclipse is cumulative; the more success you have early, the more you can do later. The more techs you research, the cheaper future techs are and the more upgrades you can slot onto your ships. The more sectors you explore the more cubes you’ll put onto the board which gives you more resources, allowing you to take more actions and buy more ships. It’s a pretty classic engine builder in that regard, including how your game can grind to a halt as soon as someone throws a wrench in your plans.
My most recent game showed a nasty edge of Eclipse. Otter had some bad luck with his explore actions right at the beginning of the game, leaving his starting hex adjacent to two Ancients. Simultaneously his neighbour Bigfoot explored right to the edges of his tiles, and laid them in such a way that Otter couldn’t reach the rest of the board, save for one single tile that he could use to reach the centre, that happened to have another Ancient guarding it. That tile was then quickly occupied by Bear (whose faction could occupy tiles guarded by Ancients), who promptly turned it into a stronghold, gating Otter into his own little sliver of space from which he could not escape.
Because Otter couldn’t explore, he was getting a paltry amount of resources during each income phase. He poured everything into defeating the Ancients and then trying to break down the gate setup by Bear. Unfortunately he just couldn’t compete with Bear who had access to twice as much space as Otter and was reaping the rewards that comes with colonizing that much space. His game was absolutely frustrating right from the first turn.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the downsides of randomness. I’ll give Eclipse credit where it’s due: the randomness does create very exciting and tense moments. In one game, I pushed my luck and attacked the centre tile on my second turn. Had I been successful, it would have set me up to absolutely dominate the game (I failed and ended up bankrupt, but that’s not the point of the story). In other games, factions build and prepare their ships until finally they crash into each other, each player rolling half a dozen die each, but sometimes a horrible upset can happen! A single starbase defending against a dreadnaught, or a pair of small cruisers dominating against a force three times their size.
Inevitably, the centre tile is a common battleground for the final round of the game as it ends up being easily accessed by everyone, and is worth the most points. I do love how the tension crescendos at the end of the game where suddenly players have nothing to lose and everyone strikes out for the final battles, trying to snatch poorly defended points away from their neighbors.
I’m not sure if Eclipse succeeds in satisfying both the Euro gamer crowd and the war gamer crowd. All the randomness I’ve listed above is more than enough to sour the experience of someone who doesn’t enjoy randomness in the first place. The action-efficiency puzzle/engine building aspect doesn’t seem like it’s something a war gamer would particularly enjoy; ‘senseless bookkeeping’ is the term that comes to mind.
That said, if you’re the type of person who can enjoy both sides of the gamer pie, Eclipse is a solid design. Highly dynamic gameplay, incredible replayability, and strategic depth that allows players to change their strategies from game to game (and allows other players the space to adapt and counter), all within a 3 hour play time! Eclipse has the potential to be a brightly shining star in your board game collection, if you can stomach the luck.
A pre-release review codewas provided by Direwolf Digital. I played the Steam version of The Fox and the Forest.
Trick taking games are a tale as old as time and have been ubiquitous throughout my growing up. My mom had a group of three other ladies who would gather and play Hearts until the wee hours of the morning. Later on in life, Euchre, Whist, and Spades were added to the rotation, with slight tweaks to the rules depending on who was joining the table that night and where they came from. As I got older, my family started playing Wizard during our reunions, and now we have reached the point where everyone in my family owns their own copy.
One thing most trick taking games have in common is that they often require three or more players. It is rare that a trick taking game works when only two players are at the table. Enter The Fox in the Forest by Joshua Buergel. The Fox in the Forest is a trick taking game for 2 players. No more, no less. Players are tasked with utilizing the cards in their hand to manipulate the game in order to win most of the tricks.
The Fox in the Forest offers a couple spins on the traditional trick-taking game model. First, there are only 3 suits available. Second, all of the odd cards have some kind of special ability that can spin the game in different ways, and third, you can earn a lot of points by losing nearly every trick.
How to Play
For anyone who hasn’t played a trick taking game before, some of these terms may be a bit foreign to you. Real quick talk about the core of almost all trick taking games – a trick is all the cards played in a round and ‘trump’ is the suit of cards that overpowers the other suits. In general, when the first player in a round ‘leads’ by playing a card, all subsequent players have to ‘follow’ by playing a card of the same suit if they have one. If someone doesn’t have a card of the lead suit, they’re free to play any card from their hand. Once all players have played a card, whoever played the highest card of the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump card was played, in which case the player who played the highest trump card wins the trick.
With that out of the way, you now have the basic rules to dozens of games. What makes The Fox and the Forest special is how it takes that basic concept and offers clever wrinkles and ways to manipulate the game state. Let’s talk about what The Fox and the Forest does differently.
First, Each player is dealt 13 of the 33 card deck, with the remaining 7 cards being set aside as the draw deck. The top card of the draw deck is flipped faceup. The faceup card is called the Decree, and dictates which suit has ‘trump’.
The non-dealer player leads on the first trick of a round. After that, unless specified otherwise, the winner of the last trick leads the following trick. The leader can play any card from their hand without restrictions. The follower must play a card of the same suit as the leader if they have one.
In The Fox and the Forest every odd card has a special ability. Those abilities are resolved as soon as the card is played, before any other cards are played or tricks are resolved. Some will have you drawing and discarding cards, others will have allow you to change the decree cards, and others will let you lead the next trick if you lose this one.
Play continues until all the cards in your hand have been played. At the end of the round each player totals how many tricks they won, and earn points based off the chart below. In general, you want to win more tricks than your opponent, but don’t get greedy or you’ll be punished with a big fat 0 points.
Shuffle all the cards back together and deal out another round. Play continues until someone meets or exceeds 21 points.
Review
My experience with the physical game has been a story of hardship and trials. I played The Fox in the Forest half a dozen times against the same opponent over the course of the last two years, and in every game I get pushed around. I start off the hand doing well, snagging up the first four tricks with no resistance, only to be denied every trick thereafter through my opponent’s clever card play. Or somehow even worse, to be deliberately giving away tricks, trying to achieve the Humble status, only to have tricks forced into my hand, causing me naught but pain.
The Fox in the Forest is a lovely game for a pair of players. Only being a 33 card deck instantly makes this a contender for travel or playing while out of the homestead. The art on the cards is lovely, and the theme is calm and serene. If you really want to get into the story, Foxtrot has published the fairy tale that inspired this design over on their website. Even more portable than a 33 card deck is your phone with the newly published app.
Direwolf Digital is no stranger to making digital adaptions to board games. Root and Sagrada both have excellent apps that live up to the excellent quality of game as it’s cardboard counterparts, but also exudes charm with subtle animations and good UX choices.
I enjoyed playing The Fox in the Forest on my computer. The sepia toned forest background made me feel at ease, in the same way that a lovely autumn walk does. The flourishes of colour and light when ‘cards’ are placed imbues a semi-magical feeling. My only qualm with the interface is that you had to drag the card to play it, not simply click it. I can only imagine that during playtesting someone was the victim of errant mis-clicks and the decision was made to set dragging your card as the best way to play.
The in-game tutorial does a very good job of walking you through the first half of a game, explaining what’s necessary to get you started before leaving you to discover the nuance of the special abilities on your own. Beyond the tutorial you have options to play locally against the AI (no pass and play options at time of this writing). I tried two games against each of the 3 levels of AI and honestly didn’t notice much of a difference in difficulty. I managed to thoroughly trounce each one of them, earning myself 7 or 8 points per round. I’d say maybe I just got lucky, but my experience with the card game and getting utterly trounced over and over tells me there’s more needed to win than luck.
The Fox in the Forest also includes challenges. The challenges offer different scenarios that introduce new aspects to the core gameplay of The Fox in the Forest. The challenge “Might Makes Right” throws out the Humble victory condition and tasks you with getting as many tricks as possible. The “Meek Shall Inherit” challenge flips the script with the player earning between 4 and 6 of the tricks earning the bulk of the points. One scenario randomizes your cards after every trick, and another adds an entire other suit! Each of these challenges come in two difficulty levels and offers a fun twist to test your mettle and mastery of the trick taking system.
Over all, I enjoyed the digital implementation of The Fox in the Forest. It’s fast to play, pretty to look at, and doesn’t waste your time with overly egregious animations. The Fox in the Forest is kind of game best played in a cool morning with a hot cup of tea while you slowly rouse yourself from your slumber. Direwolf Digital has created a faithful implementation of the original game, and has even offered interesting challenges to shake up the experience so the app isn’t just a plain recreation of the physical version. I’m hopeful there will be some updates, possibly with more challenges or with the implementation of a local pass and play feature. I’m excited to explore the online mode when The Fox in the Forest launches on Steam, iOS and Android on October 18th.
