A copy of Wyrmspan was provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes.
Introduction
Wyrmspan is an odd game to describe. On the one hand, it’s clearly the spiritual sibling of Wingspan, the bird-collecting blockbuster that has brought countless people into our hobby. On the other hand, it trades the gentle avian charm for fire-breathing dragons and cavern excavation. I know I prefer dragons, but I’m not sure if my wife will agree.
I’ll admit, I was sitting on a bus at 7 in the morning shortly after my son was born when I first heard about Wyrmspan, and I let out an audible “pfft”. What I expected at that point was just a full art reskin of Wingspan, perhaps as a collectors item. What designer Connie Vogelmann has done, however, was create something that feels familiar enough to have the “-Span” name, yet is distinct enough to stand proudly on its own.
How to Play
At its core, Wyrmspan keeps the same rhythm as Wingspan. You collect and play dragons to your tableau, hopefully craft an engine, and watch as your combos grow more satisfying every round. But instead of happy little ecosystems, your tableau is a mountain cavern, and your first job is to excavate chambers and then entice dragons to come live in them.
On your turn, you’ll spend dragon coins (a new form of action economy) to do one of three main actions:
Excavate – carve out a new cave, opening up space for dragons and gaining a small bonus.
Entice – pay resources (meat, gold, milk, crystals) to bring a dragon into one of your caves.
Explore – send your pawn through one of your three caverns, triggering resources from your dragons and the spaces between them, effectively activating your engine.
Along the way, you’ll lay eggs, care for hatchlings, and advance on the Dragon Guild track for extra perks. Like in Wingspan, you’re aiming to balance resource management, end-of-round goals, and long-term scoring opportunities, but while the gameplay beats are all familiar, the finished product feels fresh.
Review
The production is everything you’d expect from a Stonemaier Games production. Thick cards, gorgeous speckled dragon eggs, and beautiful artwork that gives each dragon personality. I particularly appreciate that the dragon lore isn’t crammed onto 5 point text on the bottom of the cards themselves, but instead presented in a separate booklet, something that I spent a surprising amount of time flipping through between turns. It’s a nice nod to the theme, and if I can’t use an app to hear each birdsong in my tableau, this is probably the next best thing.
I really have to comment how Wyrmspan improves on some of Wingspan’s rough edges. In Wingspan, early turns could feel painfully slow as you scraped for food and cards, before really opening up in the second and third rounds. Here, the excavation system gives you immediate bonuses, and the Dragon Guild provides a trickle of resources to easily keep things moving. The action economy with dragon coins also gives players more direct control over how and when the round comes to an end. It feels less restrictive, less at the mercy of a bad food dice roll or stagnant card row. I also appreciate that you have a bit of control on when your round ends, in the form of the silver coins. Instead of a set number of rounds, you can choose to keep playing, although it gets crushingly expensive as you choose to do so. I enjoyed managing my silver, choosing to have a lean round so that my next one could be bombastic.
What hasn’t changed, is that like Wingspan, Wyrmspan is still largely multiplayer solitaire. You’ll compete for end-of-round goals, but the bulk of your attention will be mostly focused on nurturing your own cavern of dragons. Personally, I wish there was a bit more friction between players, but the payoff is that Wyrmspan remains friendly and approachable, even with these added layers of complexity.
And speaking of layers, I love the cavern exploration action. Getting bonuses from excavating caves, and bonuses from attracting dragons, turning those bonuses into playing cards, and then moving your pawn through chambers and triggering each dragon as you go is incredibly satisfying. In one game, I had a dragon that cached meat to gain a resource, the next dragon cached meat to gain crystals, and the next dragon paid a crystal to lay 2 eggs, who fed into another dragon who ate eggs for Dragon Guild points. Each dragon fed into each other wonderfully, and made running through that cavern exciting. Discovering those combos is what brings me back to a game time and time again.
Final Thoughts
Is Wyrmspan better than Wingspan? Not necessarily. Wingspan is simpler, cleaner, and more universally appealing. It’s still the game I’d pull out with new players, and it’s the one that has some expansions that improve on the base game quite a bit. Wyrmspan is the heavier sibling, offering more control and more opportunities to shape your engine in clever ways, but overall does require more commitment from its players.
For my collection, the two can happily coexist. My wife still prefers Wingspan for its comfort and accessibility, but I find myself much more drawn to the richer systems of Wyrmspan. And honestly, having dragons to look at instead of backyard sparrows doesn’t hurt.
If Wingspan invited us into the hobby with open wings, Wyrmspan pulls us deeper into the mountain, and rewards us with fire-breathing companions once we get there. I guess the only question remains, is how does Finspan compare?
A perpetual argument amongst ignorant anglophones in the board game community is how you pronounce certain game tiles. Orléans gets the or-LEENZ or OR-le-enh. Being a written medium, I don’t need to wade into this argument. I have the benefit of copy and paste, then everyone can read the word how they choose. My dilemma is if I include the accent over the e or not. Including the accent is technically correct, but leaving it off is almost certainly better for SEO. Is my goal with this blog to be seen, or is it more important to me to be correct? Bah, who’s even searching for Orléans these days, anyway?
Released in 2014, Orléans by designer Reiner Stockhausen hit the scene to critical acclaim, and was promptly nominated for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres. Now, it lost to Broom Service, but I think that speaks more to the proclivities of the Spiel des Jahres judges, and less about the quality of the game itself.
Orléans is a bag building game. Players pulling worker discs from their sacks, then placing them on various work houses on their player boards. Once an action has all the necessary staff, players take turns activating those actions. Generally, they gain a new worker disc, and move up the corresponding track, gaining a specific benefit. Then, the worked workers are also tossed back into the sack until it’s time to draw again.
The actions you’re taking in Orléans are all fairly simple. You move a meeple around a board, dropping guild houses in each of the cities (hopefully doing so before your opponents). You’re earning coins, books, citizens, building new technology tiles, and eventually, sending your staff to the town hall, where they will go onto contribute beneficial deeds, and then… never come back to work for you?
Okay, the theme falls apart pretty quickly when you try to examine it closely. But what’s important here is that the game mechanics are solid. Each turn, you pull a handful of disks out of your bag, and you get to decide which actions you want to take that turn. Sometimes, you’ll be blocked out of an action because you didn’t pull enough blue fishermen. Other times, you’ll draw 4 of him, and get to do almost nothing anyway. I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but bear with me here. I promise it gets good.
The score track in Orléans features these development status spaces, which has the opportunity to multiply some of your endgame score (your guild halls + your citizens). I’ve already touched on the guild halls, just litter them across the province. The citizens generally rest at the end of each of the tracks, which means gunning for one of them is going to fill your bag up with one type of worker. Another way to earn those citizen tokens are for being the last person to contribute to a beneficial deed. In classic group project fashion, all the glory goes to whomever reads the conclusion, not whomever did the most work.
Orléans often feels like a race, you’ll nervously eye your opponents player boards trying to ascertain if they’ll be able to snag the bonus tile that you’re gunning for, or waiting for just the right moment to place your workers onto the beneficial deeds track. Remember, those workers won’t ever come back to your sac, but a well-timed placement can net you one or two of the coveted citizen tokens that multiply your development status.
On one hand, It’s hard to compare Orléans to anything else I’ve played because it feels so unique. Other bag builders (Quacks of Quedlingburg and Automobiles) don’t come close to the same feeling of strategy and engine building that Orléans offers. Crafting your bag to deliver you the perfect workers turn after turn feels satisfying. By the end of the game, you’ve built several new action spaces that only you can use, you’ve covered 4 worker spaces with gears so the actions have become way cheaper, and you’re pushing up on the end of each of the tracks. Orléans
There is such a sense of progression in Orléans. Your bag grows and shrinks, disks come in as you take actions and go up the tracks, and flow out as you commit them to the beneficial deeds. Your actions get stronger as you crawl up those tracks, making it feel like you’re making way more progress that you ever thought possible at the start of the game. That said, Orléans can be a long game, 2 hours or more in the higher player counts. It’s not terrible, but considering you’re kind of doing the same 6 actions/ manipulating the same tracks over and over, it can start to drag if players are ruminating too much on their turns.
It’s kind of fascinating to have such a luck element such as bag building in a strategic euro game. I feel like I should be frustrated by the handcuffs of only being able to take the actions based on the workers that came out of the bag. But that luck is what makes Orléans special. Also, it feels like there are several paths to victory, from having guildhalls all over the place, to running up on the tracks, to just amassing an impressive hoard of goods tiles.
Orléans is one of those rare Euros that manages to be both strategic and a little chaotic. You craft your bag and then just hope the right people show up to work. It rewards careful planning and punishes tunnel vision, offering a dynamic bag-building arc that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.
It’s not perfect. The theme barely hangs together, the rounds can DRAG with overthinkers, and at higher player counts it might outstay its welcome. But what it lacks in narrative flair, it makes up for in mechanical satisfaction.
For Euro fans who enjoy engine-building with just enough luck to keep things spicy, Orléans is a classic for good reason. It’s easy to teach, deeply replayable, and always leaves you wondering how you could’ve done just a bit better.
I’ve never dreamed of running a coal and beer fuelled canal empire in industrial era England, but the creative team behind Brass: Birmingham decided that the dirty, dark background was the best idea for an award-winning board game, so here we are.
Brass: Birmingham is a 2018 redesign of 2007’s Brass, by game designer Martin Wallace. Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman join Martin Wallace in this redevelopment, published by Roxley. Brass: Birmingham is played over two eras, the Canal era and the Rail era. During each era, players will take actions by playing cards to develop their industries, spend and produce coal and iron, and place their businesses across the board (in their network), while utilizing other players industries to ship their goods, providing income and victory points for everyone involved.
My first experience with Brass: Birmingham really ran against my loss aversion. See, in Brass, taking loans is kind of important. Critical, even. Yes, taking a loan diminishes your income, but having money to build businesses is what earns you more income. But in almost every game I play where loans are an option, I make it my personal goal to stay far away from them. Something about seeing my mom being buried in credit card debt or something, but that’s neither here nor there. Seeing my opponents take the loans, and then catapult into riches, really highlighted to me the nuance of loans here.
I’m a little head of myself, though. Brass is a masterclass in Euro design. Every action, every building feeds into each other. The map is simultaneously open and restrictive. Most of the actions you’ll take will be affected by the card you discard, either which industry you’re allowed to play, or which locale you’re allowed to play into. Many buildings need coal and iron to be built, and players can buy this resource freely from the market, which slowly raises in price as players consume it. But players can also open their own coal and iron mines to feed back into the market, earning them money and potentially perpetual income once the mine has been totally consumed. The real twist here is that anyone can (and sometimes must) consume the resource of an opposing player. But hey, that’s a good thing, you get the resource to build one of your industry tiles, and they get the money and points for providing that resource. It’s positive player interaction, everyone wins, right?
A large part of Brass is developing your network, which is a series of cities connected via one of your canal links. At the end of the first era, every canal link will earn points based on the completed buildings it’s adjacent to, regardless if they were your buildings or your opponents. Then, all the era 1 buildings and canal links are wiped off the board, and players launch into the second era.
The turn order mechanism offers such a great moment of tension. The player who spent the least amount of money gets to go first in the next round. It’s amazing. It allows players to jostle and hold back so they can go earlier in the next round, or let players make some clever plays so they can engineer two turns in a row, giving them 4 back to back actions with no opportunity to interrupt their machinations. I generally have no idea how to play well in Brass: Birmingham, but sometimes, the path forward is obvious. Doing a loan plus building a beer on one turn, then building 4x rails during the next turn, utterly clogging up the rail spots on the board can be wildly lucrative. Other times, you’ll find yourself mired in Brass’s opaque-ness. You might feel like the right answer is to build the early and easy industries, but an experienced player will tell you that you should be developing away your early industries so you can build the more lucrative later ones.
Brass is a game that demands smart, efficient play. You’ll be punished for waste, rewarded for foresight, and constantly on edge, watching the map shift as beer disappears and connections get choked off. It’s a tense, economic knife-fight, and it earns every accolade it gets.
And yet, I’m not totally in love with it. Don’t get me wrong, Brass: Birmingham is brilliant. It’s a heavyweight Euro with teeth and polish. It deserves its spot at the top of BGG. If you consider yourself a serious gamer, you owe it to yourself to play Brass: Birmingham several times. But the more I play it, the more I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over again. Am I going to be the big coal baron this game, or is Otter going to take that role? Someone has to, it just depends on who is in the best position to build coal on their turn. I’ve read accounts of people who played the original Brass over 100 times, revelling in its tight action economy, and pushing the system to its limits, eking out every last point and proving that mastery is possible (looking at the bell curve on Goodat.Games, the range of scores goes from 49 all the way up to 217). I know there’s a high skill ceiling, but I don’t know if I’m the type of person who is going to plumb the depths of Brass.
Brass: Birmingham is an easy recommend. It’s easy to recommend playing it 10 times. It was number 18 on my top games of all time list, because I recognize just how well designed this game really is. And yet, I have this feeling in my heart that I don’t love it as much as most of the BGG community does. I don’t even have any reason why, I have no real criticisms. It’s a brilliant game, incredibly designed, finely balanced. It deserves all the awards and plaudits that it receives. Perhaps I could nitpick on how simultainously elegent yet cumbersome the rules can be, how obtuse the network mechanic can be to understand, how tedious it is to do a mid-game scoring, then wipe all the level 1 tiles and canal links off the board, and then play the game a second time.
Brass: Birmingham is a game I admire more than I crave. It’s heavy and smart, I’d happily join in a session when my friends request it. It’s tends to be a bit heavy and a bit too opaque for me to really find joy in, which means when it’s my turn to pick the game, Brass: Birmingham does not float to the top of my list.
Being from the northern Canadian prairies means I was culturally isolated for most of my youth. It didn’t even cross my mind that some people go their whole lives without seeing the northern lights (or, aurora borealis) on an almost nightly basis. That trees could stand taller than 12 feet tall, and had trunks with a diameter wider than both my hands put together. I also just assumed that everyone’s uncle had a Crokinole board in their basement, even if the rules for the game were hotly contested from house to house. Turns out, my lived experience is not universal, and not everyone has experienced the enduring excellence that is Crokinole.
How to Play
A Crokinole board is a large, waxed circle broken into 4 quadrants, with 3 circular scoring zones of decreasing size, but increasing point value, and a recessed centre pocket. Surrounding that smallest scoring circle are 8 pegs, that will become the bane of your existence.
Crokinole is played between two players, or four players in two teams. Each team has 12 discs of their colour, and alternate taking turns flicking their discs, putting them into play. If there are no opposing discs on the board, you must ‘play to centre’, which means your disc needs to be touching the line of, or within the smallest scoring zone when movement ceases. If there are opposing discs on the board, you must strike an opposing disc instead, either with the disc you’re flicking onto the board, or, by ricocheting off one of your discs remaining from a previous turn.
If your shot isn’t valid (either you failed to play to centre, or strike an opponent’s disc), then the disc you flicked into action this turn is removed, and if you happened to hit one of your own discs, that disc is removed as well. Once each team has shot their 12 discs, the scores are tallied. 5 points for each disc remaining in the largest circle, 10 for the next circle, 15 for the centre circle, and 20 points per disc that made its way into the recessed centre. The team with the higher total earns the difference as points. First to 100 wins.
On last rule that is just fun to stress. Once you sit in your chair, your chair cannot move and at least one “buttock” must be touching the chair at all times. That said, I play at such a beginner level, and not all of our tables are created equal, that this is a rule we often choose to omit.
Review
Nothing elicits strong emotions quite like sport. The team spirit, the joyous highs and crushing lows, the satisfaction of a game well played, and the tension of those critical plays that turn the tide, allowing you to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It’s not something that shows up in my board game hobby very often, but I feel it in dexterity games.
There’s a running joke in my game group that we’re a bunch of guys whose hobby is to sit around a table with our heads in our hands for 2 hours in silence, then when the game ends, we look up, nod, and say “Oh I’ve won. Jolly good”. Many modern board games lack excitement, as games get more deterministic, the opportunities for true surprise get fewer and further between. There are dozens of great dexterity games available, from flicking wobbly penguins in Ice Cool to dexterously threading popsicle sticks over and under each other in Tokyo Highway, but Crokinole is the king of them all.
Normally I’d commend on the component quality of the game I’m reviewing, but the truth is that there are hundreds of ways to get a Crokinole board. The type of wood and finish will affect how the discs sail across the board. Some boards feature the classic wood grain, while others are painted to the 9’s, emblazoned with a favourite hockey team, or super hero logo. Searching the image archives on BGG will reveal as many different boards as there are personalities, and a custom Crokinole board is one of the few places where a board gamer gets to showcase their uniqueness, and because of it’s size, it’s not uncommon to see it mounted on the wall, where it becomes a family artifact or a work of art.
Crokinole is a simple pleasure, and the rule requiring that if your opponents have a disc anywhere on the board, you have to strike their disc forces interaction. This elevates the experience from just a pair of players shooting for the centre into a tit-for-tat battle. Discs that hit at an angle to hide behind a peg, the seemingly impossible shots that cause players to pump their fists when they hit it, or bemoan when they whiff a seemingly simple shot, there’s adrenaline in the air. When your opponents have 5 or 6 discs on the board, and you manage a shot that knocks out two discs AND lands in the 20 point pocket, you’re left with a moment that you’ll be talking about all night long.
Playing Crokinole is a delightful break for modern board gamers. There’s no randomness, no 40-page rulebook or hours spent punching cardboard tokens from their sprues, no sorting cards or explaining how to play. Crokinole is simply charming. You place the board on your table, divy up the pucks, and just start flicking. It’s so dead simple that anyone watching can intuit many of the rules. New players can find great fun in just firing off their pucks as hard as they can, but there’s also a high skill ceiling if players choose to invest the time in honing their skills. And yet the simplicity doesn’t mean the game is boring, quite the opposite. Every player can see what they should do on their turn, the only question that remains is if they can do it.
And answering that question, over and over again, is what makes Crokinole thrilling. It’s the simplicity of the task, the elegance of the challenge, and the visceral satisfaction of success that makes this game an enduring classic.
A copy of Cretaceous Rails was provided by Spielcraft Games for the purposes of review
As someone who has never actually sat down to watch a Jurassic Park movie, I don’t necessarily understand how the dinosaur theme and the theme park aesthetic have become so intrinsically linked. From Dinosaur Island, to DinoGenics, to Draftosaurus, and now Cretaceous Rails, it feels odd that we have so many games about building the best theme park featuring dinosaurs. I assume Jurassic Park is to blame for this, but I’ve always found it dubious that if we invented time travel or resurrected dinosaurs, our first inclination would be theme parks.
Cretaceous Rails, designed by Ann Journey and published by Spielcraft Games in 2025 after a successful crowdfunding campaign, tasks players with building the best dinosaur theme park, although the theme park element is mostly absent from the gameplay.
Before I get into the aforementioned gameplay, the production of this game is a little gregarious, as is somewhat expected from a game that came from crowdfunding. The box is quite large, giving plenty of space for the brightly coloured dinosaur miniatures. The custom insert looks very well-made, but I’ll be really honest, I couldn’t quite figure out how everything was supposed to go back into the box after playing it. Thankfully, those wells for dinosaur miniatures are voluminous enough to hold nearly all the components for the whole game, leaving the top tray mostly barren.
I’m not always against big boxes, but I feel like in this case, the product size could have been shrunk a little to be a bit easier to fit on my shelves. I know the Kickstarter came with an expansion, Cretaceous Skies, perhaps the insert and box were designed to fit the expansion in as well, but for my experience, the box is larger than I feel is necessary. That being said, I cannot deny that the table presence is impressive. Seeing Cretaceous Rails set up on the table looks great, and makes you want to sit down and start playing.
What hooked me into Cretaceous Rails at first was the worker placement/action selection mechanism. A 4 x 4 grid of action tiles is shuffled every round, and then players take turns placing their worker onto the space between two action tiles, then taking the two actions their worker is adjacent to, in any order. The actions themselves are quite simple, lay some trains to expand your network, cut down some trees to provide better dinosaur viewing angles, take tourists on tours to increase the value of the dinosaurs, and capturing those dinosaurs to exhibit in your theme park. This system intrigued me, especially given that the grid gets shuffled every round to create some variety in what combination of actions are even available each round.
At first, I thought that Cretaceous Rails was going to be a pretty straight-forward game. It only took about 10 minutes to teach my friends, and we were off to the races. But then we immediately crashed up against the grit of Cretaceous Rails, in that each of the systems want to pull you in different directions. First, there are cards that offer some pretty fantastic player powers, it takes one action to bring two cards into your hand, and another action to build cards in your park. To build cards, you have to pay their costs using the appropriate dinosaurs, tourists, and jungle tokens. To get jungle tokens, you need to build your train into the jungle, and take the chainsaw action, pulling the jungle token from a tile onto your train. You can capture dinosaurs in the same way, but you can only capture a dinosaur if the jungle token on that tile has already been removed. Tourists, on the other hand, go on tours. You load one onto your train, and they increase the point value for every dinosaur of the same colour adjacent to your entire train network, but only if the jungle token has been removed (after all, you can’t see dinosaurs through trees). This push and pull of tourists needing to see dinos to increase their value, and capturing the dinosaurs so you can score them, creates some tense decisions between players who can both access the same dinos.
Once you’ve pulled things onto your train, you can forfeit an action to empty the whole train onto your player board, which allows you to spend those resources to build the cards. The challenge shows up when you remove a jungle token with one action, and then another player captures that dinosaur before you have the opportunity to take someone on a tour. Or, do you take a sub-optimal tour now, so you can use the tourist to build a card, or do you spend an action or two making that tour even better? All the while hoping against hope that the other players don’t step on your toes. And even worse feeling, when there’s something you desperately want to do, either because it’ll earn you a tonne of points, or deny someone else, but then your train is full, so you need to spend an action unloading, creates some fascinating trade-offs.
The card powers are pretty great, and many of them will make you jealous when your opponents use them. Things like your tourists are no longer impeded by trees, or placing up to 3 extra rails when you take the rails action. The downside of the cards, is that most of the card powers will be improved depending on how high up in your structure you build them. Again, do you hold onto the best card until you can build it on the 3rd level and use it to it’s maximum potential, or do you build it early, and use it more often, but to less effect?
All of these systems play into each other in different ways. I never found any obvious optimal paths to take, the puzzle was always very open with seemingly multiple viable options available to me at all times. I will say I enjoyed the plays with more player counts, as at two players it was really easy for the two players to just go off in different directions and largely do their own things. Also, the action grid doesn’t change with the number of players, making the 2 player experience even more open, which I felt robbed the game from some of its tension.
Despite its oversized box and a theme that doesn’t really quite jive with its mechanics, Cretaceous Rails surprised me with how engaging and cleverly interconnected its systems are. The game strikes a compelling balance between accessibility and strategic depth, offering a satisfying puzzle of timing, positioning, and resource management. Its modular action grid, open-ended decision space, and tight competition over shared resources make each play feel fresh and dynamic, particularly at higher player counts where tensions naturally escalate.
Cretaceous Rails manages to shine amongst the dinosaur theme park games through smart design and solid gameplay. It’s an impressive debut for designer Ann Journey, and a title that fans of mid-weight strategy games will find themselves returning to more than once. Whether you show up to play with the great dinosaur miniatures, or are settling down to just wrestle with the puzzle, there is plenty of fun to be had in Cretaceous Rails.
I’ve been on quite the Vladimir Suchy kick lately. He’s a prolific board game designer that has had some hits and misses with me, but more often than not, I find joy in his games. As I said in my Suchy Round Up, a Suchy game is generally a tight economic euro game with an interesting action selection mechanisim. Praga Caput Regni, Woodcraft, and Underwater Cities are the best examples of this.
Shipyard, was one of Suchy’s first published designs, way back in 2009. In 2023, it was treated to a second edition, which, beyond a complete graphical overhaul, most of the gameplay mechanics remain intact, perhaps speaking to the strength of the design. But let’s hold off on our judgment until the end, shall we?
In Shipyard, players each manage a shipyard during the turn of the dawn of the industrial age. The demand for ships, both commercial and military, are only growing, so it’s up to you to build the best ships to accrue the most points to win the game.
I’m starting the review with this picture of the obscene amount of cardboard sprues that comes in the box. I don’t know who the cardboard engineer is over at Delicious Games, but they certainly make punching out a board game interesting. Not only are there 175 crew and equipment tiles, but there are also 100 ship tiles, a cardboard bit holder that you need to assemble, a cardboard crane to hold those ship tiles while you play the game, but Shipyard makes you embark on a DIY craft mission to achieve dual layer player boards, and to make the action tile queue and game timer gear work properly. And by that I mean there are thin cardboard frames that you need to use adhesive stickers to achieve dual layered goodness.
Personally, I usually quite enjoy punching out games and assembling things. It feels like cardboard Lego. But I certainly wasn’t expecting it, which is a bit of a damper when I show up to game night and the host is only just pulling the shrink wrap off the game. A bit of a barrier to get started if you’re hoping to squeeze your first play of Shipyard into a somewhat tight time slot.
As I said before, the action selection mechanism is novel at the very least. Each of the actions in the game sit in a queue, and on your turn, you place your cube onto one of the actions. For every cube that’s further left on the track compared to yours, you earn a single coin. Then at the start of your next turn, you pick up the tile that your cube is on, and slide it in from the right, turning the gear that tracks how long the game takes.
It’s a pretty elegant system, dynamically adjusting the value of the actions as players take actions and slide them down a track, instead of something more pedestrian like dropping a coin onto all the unused actions each round. The game timer wheel spins around, and the cube will fall into a little slot, telling you it’s time to take a cube out of the row. Around halfway through, you’re instructed to toss some of your endgame victory points. I quite like that you don’t have to commit to and endgame victory point condition until about halfway through the game. Really lets you pivot from one plan to another, depending on how the game is shaking out.
As I said before, in Shipyard, you are trying to build ships, and almost all the actions available to you are in service of that goal. One of the central boards has a large wheel with 4 rings, each one supplying players with a different resource or ability. 4 of the 8 actions correspond to those rings. Beyond that, you can take commodity tiles, which allow you to trade for the resources at ever so slightly more efficient rate than the ring actions, another just gives you two coins, which in my opinion is largely worthless. The last two actions are claiming a canal tile, and taking 1 to 3 ship tiles.
You use the canal tiles to build a personal stream next to your board that kind of functions as building your own personal victory point track. When you take ship tiles, and complete a ship (a ship is complete when it was a bow, 1 to 7 middle pieces, and a stern), at the end of your turn, your newly completed ship will have a shakedown cruise, where you’ll determine it’s speed, and have it sail down your personal canal, earning points for the crew and equipment on the ship when it sails onto specific icons on your canal.
The real weakness of this action selection system is the fact that the goal of the game is to build ships, and there is only one way to get ship tiles. When a player takes the ship tiles action, no one else can take it until after that player’s next turn, when they slide it all the way to the right of the queue. We quickly found that you simply cannot afford to skip that action when it’s your turn to take it. Ships are the only way to earn victory points in Shipyard, and while you may be tempted to delay taking ship tiles for one extra turn just to really optimize the ship you want to complete, but doing so means you’ll be locked out of the ship tile action for another 3 rounds.
All of this complaining about being blocked out of actions or having no good actions available to you, or money being useless, I should mention there is a bonus action you can take, where you spend 6 coins to take a second action on your turn, which can be any action, even the one you took last turn, or one that is currently covered by another players cube. That does alleviate my problems somewhat, but not by much. It feels bad to essentially skip your main action to earn coins, just to spend all the coins you earned on a ‘wild’ action next round, assuming everyone else’s cubes were to the right of the coins action. Perhaps that’s just my loss aversion kicking in.
Near the end of the game, you’ll likely have all the tools and equipment you require for your final ship, and you’re just waiting for your turn to take the ship tiles action. In my play, a few of us expressed that on our turn, there was literally nothing valuable worth doing. All the actions we wanted to take were occupied, and the ones remaining, like coins, felt like a waste, especially on your last turn. If you don’t have the money to take the wild action, your last turn, you can take money? Sure, it’s a consequence of your own poor planning, but at the end of the game, no one is going to be taking the resource voucher action, or the money action, and probably not the player power action, making the rest of the actions so much more valuable if they happen to be open when it’s your turn.
The actions of Shipyard are specific and narrow, which makes it a fairly easy game to teach, but it offers no wiggle room. If the Ship tiles action is covered, there’s no other way to take ship tiles. I’m reminded of Agricola, and how that game has various ways to get all the resources you may need. Sure, the space that produces 3 wood each round is going to be the one taken most often, but sometimes the 2 wood action can accrue over a few rounds to give out 6 wood. It has a natural balancing effect, making all the actions feel useful at some point in the game.
In the end, I don’t think Shipyard is a bad game by any stretch. I really liked the canal aspect where you create your own victory point track, and really maximizing your ship speed to land on the Blue Riband space as your last movement, doubling your speed points, and the end game victory points did seem to be fairly varied. I always like it when you get end game victory point conditions, but don’t need to pick until the game is underway.
But all that being said, I found Shipyard to be kind of boring. The actions are narrow and don’t offer any wiggle room. The action selection design is supposed to create a tension between a totally optimized ship and the availability of the actions, but to often it devolves into turns where any meaningful decision-making is totally absent. There’s ship tiles are slightly varied in the equipment mounting points and life preserving equipment, which can modify the points each ship is worth, but building ships is the only way to earn points, it’s less important to have exactly the right equipment, and much more important to just get a ship onto the water at all costs. There aren’t multiple paths to victory. If you’re not building ships, you aren’t earning victory points. The actions you take to achieve this are repetitive and boring, and on all of your turns, nearly half of the actions will be inaccessible to you. Shipyard is a game about building ships, so it stands to reason that building ships is the path to victory. But if that’s all there is, and everyone has an equal footing, the whole game is just about being slightly more efficient with your actions than your opponents, and lucking into the ship and canal tiles that synergies together well.
Shipyard is probably my least favourite Vladamir Suchy game I’ve played to date, which is a shame. But hey, not every game is for every person, and at least it makes Evacuation more likely to make it back to my table!
