Game Length: Each mission is between 5 and 15 minutes
Mechanics: Where’s Waldo/Wally, Cooperative
Release Year: 2020
Designer: Johannes Sich
Artist: Daniel Goll, Tobias Jochinke, Johannes Sich
Intro
As a kid, I was a big fan of Where’s Waldo. The cornucopia of colour and activity on the page encouraged me to take out every Where’s Waldo book that came to our local library. I would sit and scan the pages, feverishly searching out the striped devil, while also finding all the neat details hidden in the photo. As an adult, I have a mild obsession with the Wimmelbilder subreddit, again, loving the details and deriving joy from discovering hidden narratives in a chaotic scene.
My experience with MicroMacro: Crime Citybegan with an app; a small section of map on a screen that allows you to zoom in and out as you pan around Crime City. A man was murdered and it’s up to you to find the crime scene. By clicking the corpse you begin a adventure through space and time, retracing the victims steps and following the evidence, clicking the clues until you you find victim’s home, the murderer, the motive, the murder weapon, and the stolen loot. As soon as I discovered that this app was a demo for a tabletop game, I quickly made my way to the local board game store to purchase it.
Components
MicroMacro: Crime City is contained in a thin white and black box. In fact if you look closely there is even a puzzle to solve on the cover of the box. If you buy the game new you’ll need to sort two decks of case cards into individual little paper envelopes. Next, you’re instructed to apply a sticker to a little “magnifying glass” that comes with the game. Once both of those tasks has been completed you are free to unfold the massive map (75cm x 110cm) and begin unraveling the myriad of stories that have been laid out for you to explore. I specifically mention the components here because I think it’s important to know that that you need a big play area and need to sort out the crime deck before you begin to play.
This is pretty much all that comes in the box
How to Play
MicroMacro: Crime City tasks you with finding characters and stories on the large black and white map. Your first task is to find the scene of the crime for the case you’re trying to solve. You remove all the cards from the envelope and the first card will show you an image of your target and a general area where you can find them.
Once you find the scene, the cards will take you through the questions that need answering. The world that is MicroMacro: Crime City isn’t a snapshot in time where every detail on the map is happening simultaneously. Instead, it is a layering of several different stories, all happening in this one city. You follow characters that appear in different locations as they go through their day.
When a card asks you where the victim came from, you and your friends will search around the crime scene for where they were just before they met their untimely demise. Once you find their trail, you trace their day further back in time. Alternatively you may find yourself chasing the culprit as they try to escape the city. You’ll be surprised by how much detail you missed while exploring certain areas of the city for other cases. Once you think you know the answer to the question asked by the card, you can flip it over to ensure you’re correct and move on to the next card until you’ve solved all the questions for the case. In my experience, each case takes between 5 and 15 minutes.
Review
MicroMacro: Crime City tasks you with finding characters and stories on the large black and white map. Much like Where’s Waldo?, your first task is to find the scene of the crime for the case you’re trying to solve. You remove all the cards from the envelope, and the first card will show you an image of your target and tell you the general area where you’ll be able to find them. Unlike Where’s Waldo?, where the entire challenge and fun is in finding one correct detail in a large mess of irrelevant information, you are constantly discovering new and fun details in the lives and deaths of the denizens of Crime City.
As you follow people back and forth from rooftops to alleyways, you’ll pass by interesting snippets of different stories. While those moments won’t help you in your current case, it’s exciting when they show up in later crimes and you know exactly where to look.
Most of the cases focus on small sections of the map, but every now and then the case expands throughout the city, forcing you to search the wider world for clues of where people came from or where they were going. The box says this can be played with 1 – 4 players, but I wouldn’t recommend involving more than 2 at a time. The map may be huge and during the moments when you’re searching all four corners of the city for clues, it’s fine. But if your task is to search carefully in a small area, it’s awkward having four heads all converge on a spot, arms and hands covering the spots where people want to look, noggins casting long shadows across the map. It’s also incredibly hard to see any coherent details when looking at the map upside down. To combat that, you can try and fit four people shoulder to shoulder, but the person on the west side won’t be able to see what’s happening on the east side. While the map is over 100 cm long, the details are minute. You’ll need to ensure you have very good lighting and decent eyesight and/or corrective lenses. I’ve heard of some people needing to don reading glasses for the very first time while playing.
It’s not every day that a baby gets to meet its heroes!
Be aware that this game is not as “family-friendly” as you might first believe. Although the cutesy art depicting adorable walking bunny people on the cover and the description of finding details on a large map may make draw parallels to the aforementioned Where’s Waldo? book series, which is quite popular with kids as young as 5 or 6 years old, the content of MicroMacro: Crime City may contain scenarios that are upsetting for children. The game begins with ‘innocent’ crimes, like a pair of kids using a fishing line to steal someone’s top hat; however, it quickly dives into more mature themes, such as murder, infidelity and prostitution. There are no official content warnings on any of the cases highlighting which ones may be good to play with a 12 year old, and which ones are going to make them ask awkward questions about “what’s a prostitute?”
For people looking for more of a challenge, there is an ‘advanced variant’ where the only clue you get is first one. You arrive on the scene of the crime and it’s up to you to answer all the questions and find all the details without using the rest of the cards in the deck. Personally, I enjoy being lead by the questions. The variant leaves every case feeling open ended and only ends when you feel like you’ve searched enough. I sincerely dislike the “Look around until you feel you’re done!” sandbox nature of that variant. I need structure in my play damnit! But that’s just me. Maybe you like chaos and disorder.
Overall, MicroMacro: Crime City is a excellent and unique experience that is absolutely worth your time. Solving cases by tracing characters throughout this city, all the while questioning details like “Why is that random lady punching that dude with the long nose?” brings about many bursts of laughter and joy, especially if you’re like me and really value ‘discoverability’. Let me tell you, this game is nothing but discovery. With all that said, there is virtually no replayability. Once you’ve solved all the crimes, you’re just… done. You can spend more time combing through the map, creating your own narratives and puzzles, but it really isn’t the same. You COULD replay the cases, but be honest, have you ever re-read a Where’s Waldo? book?
MicroMacro: Crime City could be a centerpiece in your home; something you hang up on a wall that draws people in when they first visit your home; a conversation starter as you walk your friends through the first few cases, and be their sherpa through the Crime City experience. Perhaps after a few years you’d forget the details of each case and returning to Crime City would be like returning to your hometown. You remember most of the broad strokes, like where the churches are or where the best fish and chips shop is, but the details are hazy. Re-discovering the cases could be fun, but I don’t think it’s worth holding onto this box for years hoping your memory fades while your eyesight stays sharp. Instead, MicroMacro: Crime City makes a great gift. Nothing is permanently changed or damaged throughout the cases so when you’re finished solving all the cases, pass it around your game group then chat about your favourite cases. Alternatively, it would be easy to sell or donate it to someone else in your community! If none of those options appeal to you, it makes for a great colouring sheet.
It’s a good day to be a duck
MicroMacro: Full House was announced recently, along with 2 more titles in the MicroMacro universe. While I won’t be keeping this map around my house for long, I am eagerly anticipating the next installment in the series. While I wait for them to hit store shelves, I’ll need to find a new pair of reading glasses.
Calico by Kevin Russ is the first physical board game that I purchased since the COVID-19 pandemic ended my in-person gaming group in March 2020. It’s also the first game I’ve purchased since I launched MeepleandtheMoose.com and started playing my physical games solo. I purchased Calico not only because I was drawn in by the cozy cat aesthetic and endearing art by Beth Sobel, but because I knew the brain bending puzzle of fitting together the best quilt is a challenge that inspires excitement in my little gamer heart.
Coconut is the most comfortable cardboard kitten I’ve seen all day
Thanks to Covid-19, I’ve only had the opportunity to play Calico at 1 and 2 players. I plan on returning to this game once I’ve had the opportunity to play it more with larger groups of people. For now, I’m just so excited to share my thoughts that I don’t want to delay this post any further.
Calico, as I mentioned in my Top 100 post, is a cerebral tile laying puzzle game. In Calico you are given 7 different ways to earn points with the sneaky insinuation that if you’re a competent quilter, you’ll be able to achieve glory in every facet of the game. It’s all a bundle of lies! In Calico, you must first accept that you will not be able to score all the point and the only way that you’ll be able to survive is by picking and choosing which of the goals and objectives you’ll focus on in any given game.
Components
Calico’s components are bright, vibrant, and high quality. Each of the four player boards are dual layered, which helps keep your tiles in place. The tiles come in 6 different patterns and 6 different colours, with 3 copies of each. The cat scoring cards are adorned with artistic renditions of actual cats (you can read their biographies in the back of the rulebook). Associated with these cat scoring cards are miniature tokens of each cat that will dot your player board if you can satisfy that cat’s very specific desires. The cloth tile bag is thick and sturdy, with plenty of space to shuffle the tiles within. Speaking of those tiles, they’re very thick and have a linen finish. The game box cover and some of the tokens have a spot UV coating that will shine if you catch the light just right. The production of this game has left nothing to be desired.
How to Play
The gameplay of Calico is very straight forward. When you begin the game you have a empty player board that you’ll fill with your hopes, dreams, and regrets. Each player starts with 2 tiles in their hand, and 3 more tiles in an offer row. On your turn, you’ll place one of the tiles from your hand anywhere on your board. Then, you’ll take one of the tiles from the offer row, place it in your hand, and refill the offer row. Every turn proceeds in that exact fashion until the boards are full and you’re left with your head in your hands contemplating how everything fell apart so quickly.
Calico Set up for 1 player. More players just get their own boards with the same scoring tiles in the centre
Allow me to speak about each of the scoring opportunities separately, starting with colour coordination. If you are able to stitch together 3 tiles of the same colour, then congratulations! You just earned yourself a button in that colour, which is worth 3 points! If you’re able to earn at least one button for each of the 6 different colours, you’ll be awarded with a rainbow button which itself is worth 3 points.
Each game of Calico will have 3 different cats displayed to the side. To lure those cats onto your board you’ll need to match their requested shape with one of the two requested pattern tiles. Coconut might just want 5 tiles of the same pattern touching each other, while Misty wants a 4 tiles arranged in a cross and no other arrangements will satisfy Misty’s fickle nature. Each of the cats you draw to your board will grant you certain amount of points; the easiest kittens will bestow a piddly 3 points per feline laying cozily on your quilt, while the most demanding cats will award up to 11 points, which should make you purr with glee as you place your awarded cat token on your quilt.
Hey I got a button! This game won’t be so bad!
There are also 3 objective tiles on your board. While every player will have the same 3 objectives, each player is free to slot them into the objective spots on your player board in whichever order you wish. These objectives ask you to surround them with a certain set of colours and patterns. A pattern asking for AA-BB-CC will want 3 sets of 2 different colours or patterns. If you can satisfy the requirements in either colour or pattern, you’ll get the lower number of points (usually somewhere between 5 and 10). If you can pull off the super-human feat of satisfying both colours and patterns… well, along with bragging rights and a slow applause from myself, you’ll earn slightly more points (generally between 10 and 15).
When playing the solo mode, the only salient difference from the multiplayer game is how the offer tiles behave. First you imagine a conveyer belt and visualize the direction the tiles will move in. During your turn you are free to take any of the 3 tiles available. Once you’ve claimed your tile, the remaining tile furthest to the ‘end’ of the conveyer belt is flung into a proverbial furnace, never to be seen again. The final tile is spared such a cruel fate, but it moves to the end of the conveyer belt and two new tiles populate the row. That’s the extent of the differences between the multiplayer game, and playing the game on your own.
I call this board state: The River of Dread
Near the back of the rulebook there is a list of achievements laid out that chart your progress toward becoming a Calico master! The achievements dare you to win a normal game while exceeding 60, 70, or even the insane 80 point threshold. Can you win the game without collecting buttons? Can you get the elusive rainbow button? Can you do it all while standing on one foot while rubbing your cats belly and tapping your head? Both my wife and I really like this feature, as it gives us something to work towards, and amps up the replayability of the game.
Another feature that Calico offers is a list of scenarios. The game suggests 10 set-ups and asks you to accomplish a specific set of tasks. The first scenario requires you to earn a rainbow button and exceed 58 points. The next challenge has requires that you collect 5 cats tokens and exceed 59 points.
Well well well… If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.
I found the scenarios a wonderful reason to play Calico on my own. Considering the title of my Journal is “I am not a Solo Gamer, I shouldn’t have to reiterate how I rarely play board games on my own. I had this thought when I playedSagrada solo and the challenge of that game was just to exceed the sum of the undrafted die. Simple score attack solo games do not excite me, and perhaps because of that I have not returned to Sagrada’s solo mode since.
I very much enjoy the design of Calico‘s scenario challenges. I like that each scenario has been tested and calibrated to test my quilting skills, and, while it cannot account for the randomness of the tiles that come out of the bag (No, I don’t need a third green polka-dot tile, thankyouverymuch), at the start of each game I do feel the challenge is beatable if the tiles fall right and I play well.
It’s not the prettiest quilt, but my cats seem to like it
Review
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Playing Calico is a very simple affair. Each turn requires only three decisions and at the start of the game when your board is full of opportunity and promise, you’ll happily place tiles somewhat arbitrarily, perhaps chasing a short term goal like getting 3 colours together. As the free spaces start to dwindle and the need for specific tiles rises, you’ll quickly find yourself making concessions and saying “it’s fine if I don’t achieve both colours and patterns for that one objective. It’s fine if I don’t get all 6 buttons and achieve that rainbow button. It’s fine if I only get one cat token on my board. It’s fine if I only achieve one of my three goals…” This amount of negotiating with yourself and being forced to compromise when the wrong tiles come out of the bag is what elevates Calico from a neat puzzle to a fun game.
So, the production is fantastic, the puzzle is great, the aesthetic is wonderful. What’s the downside? Calico has almost no player interaction. If you look across the table and see your friend has sewn a perfectly colour coordinated and patterned quilt, there’s nothing you can do to affect them. The most you can do to affect your opponents is take the tile they may want or need, but then you better hope that you can use that tile, otherwise it’ll be taking up one of the two tiles in your hand and hurt you more than you hurt them. It really can feel like the whole game comes down to the last few tiles that get pulled from the bag. When you’re down to the last four spaces and you are needing a tile that is a specific colour and/or shape, your heart can drop when the next tile that gets pulled is the absolutely wrong one. It’s doubly frustrating when you see your opponent say “I just need a yellow stripes!” and then get it. Smug bastards.
Not a bad sized box
If you can accept that you won’t be able to complete all of the scoring objectives in a single game, I think you’ll find Calico is an enjoyable game. If you’re hoping for a game that has lots (or any) player interaction, Calico is not the game for you. Personally, I love Calico, and I can’t wait to introduce it to my family and friends. I know the production of the components, the art direction, and the deeper than expected gameplay will have my loved ones asking to set it up and play it again and again!
Great Heartland Hauling Co., designed by Jason Kotarski and published by Dice Hate Me Games, is a clever little game packed into a small box. The rules for Great Heartland Hauling Co. can be distilled to a single card, making it perfect for teaching people who only have a cursory interest in board games.
No room for bananas here!
Great Heartland Hauling Co. uses the theme of truckers rushing up and down the American interstate, picking up goods and dropping them off at the next town over for a huge profit. While spending hours driving in one direction may be the bulk of a haulers job, it’s difficult to make an invigorating game about rolling your truck on a straight road through the flat prairies. Luckily Great Heartland Hauling Co. doesn’t focus on the dozen brain melting hours in-between stops, and focuses on the excitement of buying and selling goods, and pushing your luck that the correct waybills will appear just when you need them.
How to Play
This land is ripe for truckers
In the beginning, the landscape must be created. The distribution centre location is laid down in the centre of the table, where all trucks are born. Surrounding the distribution centre are location cards, each one loaded with 5 cubes representing the type of good that can be procured from that location. Everyone gets a hand of 5 cards, and the player with the best moustache or longest hair gets to go first.
In Great Heartland Hauling Co. there are two different types of cards: waybills and gas cards. You use any number of gas cards to move from one location card to another (max movement is 3). When your truck ends its move in a city, you may discard waybill cards to either load or unload goods at that location. Once you’ve moved and loaded, you refill your hand to 5 cards and your turn is over. It’s important to mention that two trucks cannot exist in the same city at the same time, for long haul truckers are territorial creatures and are likely to shank each other in the gas station shower.
It’s not recommended to have a wide variety of goods
If you find yourself beginning a turn without any gas cards, you can spend money to move instead; $1 for each space you want to move. Be careful to not rely on this however, as money also represents victory points. It’s also important to note that you may not mix gas cards and money for movement – you must choose one or the other for the turn.
Each location has a pair of goods they are willing to buy from your truck, as well as the advertised amount they are willing to pay you for said goods. Should you arrive with the appropriate goods and necessary waybills, you can unload those goods and collect a tidy profit. The first person to hit the money threshold ($30 in a 4 player game, $40 in a 3 player game, and $50 in a two player game) triggers the end of the game. The rest of your fellow truckers get a final turn, then money is deducted from each trucker for the goods they left to spoil in the back of the truck. The person with the most money is the winner.
Review
Great Heartland Hauling Co.’s small form factor has caused this game to live a life of constantly travelling in my backpack. I’m sure my copy of Great Heartland Hauling Co. has seen more of the British Columbian coast than most of my prairie saddled family! It’s a light game to drop into your pack and simple to pull it out at a coffee shop when you’re in Gibsons and have an hour to kill before the ferry back to Vancouver departs. Also, if you find yourself at a Serious Coffee table with 3 others and 90 minutes to burn between a wedding ceremony and the reception.
Pick-up and deliver is not a mechanic I often feel drawn toward. Games with this mechanism often feel like a race without the feeling of momentum or speed. Great Heartland Hauling Co.’s satisfaction comes from the quick turnaround of picking up goods and being able to deliver them the very next turn. It can be frustrating when you begin your turn with 3 pig cards, spend all 3 waybills to get those 3 pigs onto your truck, then several turns go by without any more pig waybills becoming available, so you’re forced to take those pigs on a countryside tour.
Don’t get caught with leftover goods!
One thing that I really appreciate in games is forcing players to make decisions. In Great Heartland Hauling Co. you are forced to move each turn, which makes you decide if you want to take gas cards or fill your hand with waybills,. Also, because you cannot exist in the same town as someone else, you may find yourselves tripping over one another, squatting in the spot you know they need to go to, forcing them to delay their payday by an entire turn! The various locations also offer different values for the goods they’re demanding. You can choose to ferry all the corn from one city to the next for $2 per ear, but if you haul it clear across the country they’ll pay you $4! It’s double the money, but also wildly increased shipping costs. If a game doesn’t offer you good or interesting decisions, then why am I even involved? Great Heartland Hauling Co. makes me feel involved.
As I alluded to before, Great Heartland Hauling Co. is a simple game to teach and play. Because of it’s small size and easy to learn nature, I’m constantly introducing this game to new players, and even using it to showcase that board games are more than just Monopoly and Connect Four. Because I’m always introducing this to new players, I haven’t explored the “Inspansion” content that includes player powers and special effects. I look forward to one day exploring the game further, but for now, I really enjoy the simplicity of play offered by Great Heartland Hauling Co.
One of the ways that I have changed things up a bit is by changing the shape of the board, utilizing one of the suggested map layouts. Unfortunately, this made Great Heartland Hauling Co. feel more like a dreary slog in a hot cabin with no air conditioning. While the idea of having a different board layout is exciting, the shape we chose had two long corridors running nearly parallel with only one space where you could move between columns. This ended up dragging the game out extensively. We spent more money to move further as there were less alternative towns to visit when the particular space that we needed to go to was occupied by another player. One time the economy was so choked due to us spending so much on gas and the highest paying customers being so far away from the goods they wanted, that we were ending up with a net profit of $1 per good delivered. This experience really highlighted the limitations of the game and how modifying the route structure makes it a significantly less fun game.
I know that sounds incredibly critical, and it is, but here is where I come to grips with my opinion on Great Heartland Hauling Co. It’s a light, easy to teach game that is perfect for introducing people to the hobby. Having said that, it’s too light for my regular game group gatherings, so we naturally pass it over in favour of something more complex. Great Heartland Hauling Co. is a great game and it certainly won’t be leaving my backpack any time soon, but it’s rarely on the list of games that I’m desperate to play again.
Try as I might, I cannot fit my lunch in this box.
Takenoko was among the first designer board games I ever played. My wife pitched the idea of going to the local board game cafe as a fun date (slightly against my will actually). That date opened my eyes to the world that is cardboard within cardboard. Little did she know that she was introducing me to a hobby that I would fall deep into, hard and fast.
Shortly thereafter, while thirsting for more board games I discovered Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop show on YouTube and chose to watch the episode with Harley Morenstein from Epic Meal Time (of which I used to be a big fan). Tabletop introduced me to Takenoko, a beautiful game about trying to build an aesthetically pleasing garden and grow bamboo to specific heights, all the while a damned panda keeps eating it all.
If the panda is the symbol of harmony and diplomacy, I’m sure the gardener is the incarnation of rage and spite.
How to Play (First Edition)
Takenoko begins with a single blue tile in the centre of the table. On that lonely blue tile sits a single gardner and his eternal rival, the panda. Each turn begins by rolling the weather die (Skip this step on each player’s first turn). The result of the weather die gives you a little boost for your turn, like granting you a third action – the ability to do the same action twice in one turn, a free panda teleportation action, growing a single bamboo stalk anywhere on the map, an improvement tile, or your preferred choice of all the benefits I just listed!
The playerboard keeps track of everything you have, and the actions you’ve taken on your turn
After you apply the weather effect, you take 2 actions (3 if you happened to roll the sun weather benefit). You may not perform the same action twice in one turn (unless you have the wind weather benefit). The actions available to you are to draw 3 plots of land and choose one to add to the central play area; to take an irrigation channel; to move the panda in a straight line and eat the top section of bamboo from wherever he stops; to move the gardener in a straight line and grow bamboo on every irrigated tile of the same colour adjacent to the spot where the gardener stopped moving; or to draw 1 goal card.
The goal cards you hold are what influence all of your decisions. At the beginning of the game you’ll receive 1 card for each type of goal; plots, gardener, and panda. The plot goals encourage you to arrange certain colour tiles in specific shapes. Once the shapes have been satisfied with the required colours, and every landscape tile in the shape has been irrigated, you may claim that goal. The gardener goals task you with growing bamboo stalks to specific heights on certain tiles. Conversely, the panda goals are all about feasting on the appropriate type and quantity of bamboo, making the stalks shrink by one for every piece the little white and black bear stuffs his face with.
When an goal has been completed, you simply place the card down on the table. The first person to reach the required number of completed goals triggers the end of the game and earns the Emperor’s favour (which is worth a couple of extra points). Every other player gets one more turn to accomplish any remaining goals they’re holding before the game is over. The player with the highest sum of points on their completed goal cards has won the game and receives the congratulations of the Emperor.
Just because you’re the one to end the game and get the bonus 2 points, doesn’t always mean you’ll win the game
Final Thoughts
Takenoko is a light and charming game with bright and colourful components. I find the mechanics and goals easy to internalize, and I enjoy evoking ire of the other players by making the panda chomp down on their carefully pruned bamboo stalks that they’ve been trying to grow all game so they can accomplish their goal of having 4 green stalks, all at the height of 3.
Actually the mechanic of hidden objectives is something my wife absolutely detests. It’s one thing if some makes a decision to deny you what you need, but it’s another thing entirely when someone ruins all your plans without even knowing they’re doing so. Apparently she just doesn’t enjoy having her plans ruined.
I absolutely love the artistic direction and the components in this game. The plot tiles are thick and bright, and the panda and gardener miniatures come pre-painted. The real star of the show are the bamboo stalks that stand high off the table. The chunky wooden spires attract the eye and capture the attention of new players. Plus, it is fun to see how high you can stack them while you’re waiting for other players to take their turns.
The game itself is easy to play Each turn is straight forward with few opportunities for making any single turn overly complex or acheive big game changing combos. This is nice and keeps each turn moving quickly, but it can be frustrating when the player across the table from you had 4 more goals cards down, it can feel impossible to catch up.
Personally, I find the weather die to be a bit of a frustration. I find the sun benefit (an extra action) to be head and shoulders above the other benefits, each of which are only situationally advantageous. The other issue I have is many of the cards require specific advancements that either come preprinted on the plot tiles, or are only obtained by the cloud weather benefit. When you have one of the advancement tiles, you can only place it on a tile if there is no bamboo on that tile, meaning the tile must be either unirrigated or the panda must raze the vegetation before any advancements can be placed.
The Panda destroys what the Gardener grows
It’s not uncommon for players to creep close to the endgame without passing the line. In the 2 player game, the first person to reach 9 completed objectives triggers the end game. Often I’ll see the game suddenly stall at 7 objectives realized as each player tries to queue up extra points in their hand. Considering that each other player gets one last turn to complete as many of their objectives as possible, it just makes sense. I find that players draw several plot objectives at the beginning of the game, then slowly move to drawing mostly gardener objectives at the end as the garden sprawls further and further away and the spires of bamboo reach the sky. The randomness can be aggravating as you somehow draw the one goal card that nothing on the board is nearly close to, while your opponent draws cards that are one bamboo segment away from being finished.
Ultimately Takenoko is a lovely game that you can use to allure people who would otherwise turn their nose up at the waves of beige that dominate other board games. With a commanding table presence and easy to play mechanics, Takenoko is often a winner when I’m not playing with my normal ‘advanced’ board game group. I wouldn’t introduce this to a complete non-gamer, as the amount of decisions are a little much (5x weather effects, 5x different actions). If someone has expressed interest and is willing to be engaged in the experience however, this game is a hit!
Lesson of the day, never store Takenoko on its side
I also really like to imagine a world where a gardener is trying to carefully cultivate an aesthetically pleasing garden, but one patch of trees happens to grow much more aggressively than the rest, so his solution is to source a panda and hold it over the tall tree to cut it down to the proper size. I don’t know if that world exists, but that’s the world that I want to live in.
There are few games in my collection that get the chance to leave my doors once its been slotted into a spot on the bookshelves. Qwirkle By Susan McKinley Ross is not one of those games. I own the travel edition of Qwirkle, which has small tiles and a zipper bag to hold everything together in a conveniently tiny package. The ease of transportability coupled with the fact that this game only needs a relatively flat surface to be played means we have played this game in locations from sea to shining sea. As an added bonus, it is a relatively wind-resistant game, so playing it outdoors is less of a challenge.
Qwirkle, aside from being awkward to spell when you’re sleep-deprived, is a tile placement game for two to four players. You begin the game with 6 tiles in your hand. Each tile has two attributes; a shape and a colour. On your turn you place any number of tiles in a single line as long as every tile in that line shares one attribute (either all the same colour, or all the same shape). You earn one point for every tile you place from your hand onto the table.
A game of Qwirkle starts out simply enough
Very quickly the common play area becomes a sprawling mass of tiles. The rule of lines of tiles only a being a single attribute quickly becomes a thorn in your side as you search for a spot to place your 3 green tiles that doesn’t abut against tiles that are not green, or worse, the exact copy of what you have in your hands.
As you add onto and spin off of lines of tiles, the length and score will creep higher and higher. Placing a 4th tile in that green line earns you 4 more points. The next piece placed will earn that player 5 points, and if someone can complete the line with the 6th shape or colour, they get 6 points, plus a bonus 6 points for a “Qwirkle”. They are also contractually obligated to shout out the word “Qwirkle” as they tap that piece onto the table.
The play area quickly sprawls out
The challenge with Quirkle is that the player’s best move also tends to set up other players for even better moves. The more lines on the board, the more likely someone is going to earn 5 points or more per turn. Knowing what’s left in the bag isn’t to hard to parse. There are 3 copies of each tile in the bag at the beginning of the game. Subtracting the 6 tiles that each player has in their hand gives you a pretty good idea of what you can and cannot hope for. If there are 3 orange circles on the board, you had better not be hoping for another orange circle to come out of the bag or you’re going to find yourself quite disappointed.
This placement is a no-no
One issue that does come up is the fact that it can be hard to tell some of the colours apart from each other. Trying to differentiate the purple and blue colours, or the orange and the red colours, on the black tiles feels nearly impossible if the lighting is anything less than perfect. Also, if you’re colourblind, give this game a pass; there is no way to differentiate the the tiles from one another other than colour.
Qwirkle has traveled across the country with me and has been played on a dozen different surfaces. It’s an easy game to teach the in-laws while being just competitive enough that keep players engaged. The smaller travel edition makes a great stocking stuffer (I know because I stuffed it into my wife’s stocking one Christmas) and comes in a lovely zip-up pouch. The full size game comes in a larger cardboard box. I understand the concept of ‘shelf appeal’, and I’m not the one bringing these products to market. I’m just the guy who needs to find new and creative way of storing board game boxes lest my wife pitches my newest acquisitions onto the lawn because I stored games in the towel closet again (Note from the wife: It isn’t that I mind his board game collection; it’s just his choice to displace the towels in favour of his games!). Maybe my ‘travel’ games will just live in a backpack from now on, perpetually ready to go. I’ll tell my wife it’s motivation to travel! What could go wrong?
Bullet♥︎ exploded into into my life from seemingly nowhere and consumed my soul for nearly 3 weeks. I was drawn in by the promise of fast paced shoot-em-up (SHMUP) action and a gorgeous anime aesthetic. What I got instead was a compelling puzzle game where the player manipulates sliding discs to match patterns while learning how to best use each heroine’s abilities to defeat the multitude of bosses.
Adelheid, one of the eight playable heroines
Bullet♥︎ is a game that offers numerous play modes. You can play the head-to-head mode, which is designed for multiple players to battle to the death; the score attack mode that lets players see how long they can survive when their neighbours aren’t trying to kill them; or you can explore the co-op/solo option, the boss battle mode. Bullet♥︎ is designed so that players learn the head-to-head mode rules first, as that forms the foundation for the rest of the play styles.Bullet♥︎’s head-to-head mode begins with a real-time 3 minute timer dictating when a round ends. During each round players put a certain number of discs (called bullets) into their own bags and start the timer. As soon as the timer starts ticking, they’re free to furiously pull bullets out of their bags, one at a time, and place them on their board (players’ boards are referred to as their ‘sight’) according to the colour and number depicted on the bullet.
Each bullet colour has its own lane, and the number on the disc tells you how many spaces down your board the bullet must be placed, skipping over any spots that already have a bullet occupying them. Players can be as quick or slow as they want when pulling bullets out of their bag, and can spend energy freely to use their heroine’s skills to manipulate the bullets that are already in their sight. The goal is to utilize pattern cards to remove bullets from their board and send them off to an opponent. However, if the timer runs out and they still have bullets remaining in their bag, the bullets must be drawn and placed in the sight with no opportunity to manipulate or clear them. If a bullet ever hits the bottom row of the sight, the player loses 1 hit point, and if they run out of hit points, they’re out of the game.
Three of Mariel’s patterns. Each character has up to 10 different patterns.
At the end of a round, every bullet players have managed to clear from their sights gets put into the bag of the player to their left. As as the rounds proceed, more and more bullets get added to everyone’s bag from the supply. The game continues until there is only one player left standing. While this is supposed to feel like a victory, proving your superiority over your friends, in reality it feels like the winner is just the person who was able to tread water the longest. The head-to-head mode helped me to learn the fundamental rules of Bullet♥︎, but I’ve spend the vast majority of my time with this game in the solo or co-op mode, the boss battle!
The Intensity track adds bullets to every players bag at the start of each round
Every character in Bullet♥︎ has a boss mode that presents you with a wildly different challenge to overcome. The boss battle mode plays very similarly to the head-to-head mode, except all of the bullets coming into your bag are dictated by the current level of the boss, and how far you’ve broken down their shields. As you continue to send bullets and break the boss’ shields, the number of bullets that will get added to your bag each turn usually increases.
In addition to the multitude of bullets that you have to deal with, the boss has a pattern of their own that you must match in the end of the round, or suffer their penalty. In the case of Adelheid, your bullets are turned upside-down, which can make them difficult to use in your patterns. If you happen to break one of Adelheid’s shields while you have face-down bullets, the face-down bullets will automatically hit you.
Adelheid, how could you turn against us? We trusted you!
Each character and boss is wildly asymmetric in nature, to a degree that I didn’t think was possible when I first learned the Bullet♥︎ system. Playing different characters can feel like an entirely different game because the ways they interact with their boards is so diverse. To compound on that, every boss presents you with a fully different challenge, which drastically increases the replayability. Some bosses are a cakewalk to defeat when using a specific character, but feel completely insurmountable when using the other characters. It’s incredibly fun to explore each of the characters and change your strategies depending how they play off each of the bosses.
The boss battle mode does away with the real time aspect. This allows you to slow down and puzzle out exactly how you want to approach each wave of bullets as they enter your sight. I understand why you wouldn’t want to use a timer during this mode, considering the additional cognitive load of running the AI and ensuring that you’re not going to trigger an effect that will deal 4 damage to you in a single move. However, it does remove the action-packed, fasted paced nature the game promised to emulate.
I love Bullet♥︎, and whole-heartedly recommend playing it. I’ll be the first to admit my biases; I love the anime asthetic, I’m an avid gamer (even if SHMUPs aren’t my genre of choice), and I love puzzle games. Bullet♥︎ checks each one of those boxes. The publisher, Level 99 Games, has also released a soundtrack of 3 minute long character themes that you can listen to via Spotify while you play the game, which is a wonderful addition to the experience.
One of the major downsides of me playing Bullet♥︎ 40+ times over the last month is that when I return to in-person gaming and I introduce my friends to this game, I’m sure I’ll wipe the floor with them. There isn’t anything to assist new players against veterans, other than making the veteran use a character they’re unfamiliar with, but who knows if even that will be enough slow me down. I did have some success when introducing this game to a new player by playing 3 co-op rounds of the boss battle mode first, and then moving into the head-to-head battle. This way the other player has SOME familiarity with the system. Still, it’s hard to close the gulf separating our experience levels when I have dozens of plays under my belt.
The entirety of my experience with this game has been via Tabletop Simulator, which also gave me access to Bullet🍊, a 4 character expansion to the game, based off Orange_Juice games (Sora, Flying Red Barrel,SUGURI, and QP Shooting – Dangerous!!). This expansion adds even more asymmetric heroines and bosses to face off against, further expanding the matrix of play options available, and offering even more different ways to interact with this system.
While it does feel weird to recommend a physical product while having never put my own hands on it, the digital implementation allowed me to fall in love with the challenge presented within the box. As soon as this game lands in my FLGS, I know I’ll be picking it up.
3 – That Which Points was a tough nut to crack. Oh my elation when I finally knocked her ass to the curb
All above images ofBullet♥︎are screenshots of the Tabletop Simulator mod.
