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.
It’s the start of a new trilogy. Leaving the SNES behind and moving boldly towards the PS1 means bigger, flashier Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy VII released in 1997 for the PlayStation, and at the time, boasted absolutely revolutionary graphics. While the overworld polygonal characters were rudimentary, the in-battle models were more detailed, and during many of the most important moments, pre-rendered cutscenes captured the imagination of anyone who was lucky enough to experience this game before the turn of the century.
I was not one of those people. I was a Nintendo kid, so when Final Fantasy moved over to the Sony home consoles, I didn’t have the opportunity to play another Final Fantasy game until Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance came out for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. Final Fantasy VII became a cultural juggernaut, however. Even without playing the game myself, I became intimately familiar with many of the characters, from spiky-haired Cloud and his comically broad Buster Sword to antagonist Sephiroth and his comically long katana, the Masamune. Tifa, Aerith, and Vincent also seeped into my consciousness, including the big event that occurs at the end of Disc 1.
With that in mind, it’s weird playing Final Fantasy VII with so much of the story spoiled for me. Knowing what to expect robs the biggest moments of their emotional impact. Instead of an out-of-left-field surprise, I’m waiting with bated breath for the event that I know is looming on the horizon. And beyond losing the emotional weight, it seeps into the mechanics of the game, influencing and informing my choices because I know how some things end.
Mechanics
I think one of the biggest criticisms of Final Fantasy VI was the Magicite system. Yes, it was cool, but it was also tedious. You needed to constantly swap Magicite between all your characters so everyone could learn the magic you’d need to overcome any challenge. In Final Fantasy VII, they turn the system on its head. Instead of Magicite giving specific characters new abilities, the Materia itself is the ability, and the more a specific Materia is used in battle, the better it becomes. So if you manage to level up your Restore Materia to a higher level, then you can give that Cure3 spell to any of your party members. A huge improvement.
Further to that, you can swap Materia between any of your characters at any time, even if they’re not in your party. And the game is extra kind to you: when a character leaves the party, their Materia is automatically unequipped, so you can slot those skills onto whichever character replaces them. Hallelujah.
The Materia is more than just magic spells, too. Your weapon and armor will have a certain number of Materia slots, indicating how many of those precious gems that character can hold, and some of those slots will be linked. Some of the Materia offers enhancements to the linked slot, such as the All Materia, which makes the Materia ability connected to that slot affect all the characters on the field instead of just one. Some of the extra commands, such as Steal, Throw, Enemy Skills, and Summons that have been class abilities in the past are now achievable by any character via a specific Materia. It’s a pretty great evolution of the Magicite system.
The characters themselves are mechanically bland and interchangeable. Sure, some will have stats that lend them to being more of a spellcaster or summoner, but if I’m being really honest, any character can fill any role. Some characters such as Yuffie, Barret, and Vincent have long-range weapons, so they can be put into the back row for a defensive boost, but there is no clear ‘white mage’ or ‘black mage’ of the party. Everyone can do everything, it just depends on who you want to give the appropriate Materia to. In my game, Tifa ended up holding the All Cure and All Revive, so she was the one responsible for keeping the other characters alive. I suppose in theory she’s supposed to fill the Monk role, considering she pummels enemies with her fists, which she still did with aplomb. But in moments where Tifa wasn’t in my party, it was easy to give those skills to someone else.
Aside from the characters with long-range weapons being allowed to sit in the back row, they’re all totally interchangeable. The only thing that really makes them unique is their Limit Breaks, which, while having unique animations, all just do major damage. The exception to that is Aerith, whose Limit Breaks heal the party or inflict status conditions.
One big mechanical downside of Final Fantasy VII is just how damn slow the game can be. Like, some of the best and biggest attacks you can do are the Summons. But every summon has an unskippable animation that sometimes goes surprisingly long. This is even more frustrating when you’re in a time-limited section of a game, and you use a summon that just eats 45 seconds of your time with an unskippable animation.
Speaking of being slow, Final Fantasy VII employs pre-rendered backgrounds, which allow for an amazing level of detail and give every single location a unique and distinct aesthetic and vibe. Some of the dungeons, however, are zoomed way out, so Cloud is just a little speck on the screen, and you need to run across a wide expanse. Sometimes, it’s also nearly impossible to tell what is background detail and what is an interactive element. More than once, I found myself pressing against a wall mashing the action button, just looking for the magic spot that let me progress through an area.
The above screenshot is the worst, but not only offender in the game. To progress, you actually need to go down the girder on the right, go under the street tunnel, then walk onto the red tube going to the north end of the screen
Final Fantasy VII does have a lot of levity. There are plenty of cutscenes and mini-games to break up the flow and pacing of the generic run-around-and-have-encounters style of a traditional JRPG. It’s mildly frustrating when you come to a mini-game, though, you get a brief flash of the controls, and then you get one attempt to do well, like in the marching mini-game or snowboarding. If you want to practice or try for a higher score, you just need to reload your previous save and try again.
Unlike Final Fantasy VI and more like Final Fantasy IV, this game has a distinct main character, Cloud. The other main storyline characters (Barret, Tifa, Red XIII, Aerith, Cid, and Cait Sith) all get varying amounts of screen time and character development, while the two optional characters have optional side quests you can undertake to develop their stories more. And while these other characters do develop, the focus of the story is on Cloud and Sephiroth.
The Story
The story of Final Fantasy VII starts with a train. Eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE burst out of the train, followed closely by a back-flipping Cloud. They storm the train station, slaying guards, and rushing into the Mako reactor, hacking past doors, and descending into the heart of the machinery. Barret and Cloud plant a bomb, defeat a robot scorpion, then escape just as the whole reactor explodes into flames.
Back at the hideout, you learn that Mako is the lifeblood of the planet, and a mega corporation called Shinra is extracting that lifeblood through the reactors to create energy and wealth for themselves. AVALANCHE, lead by Barrett from the slums of Midgar, wants to stop them. Cloud, an ex-SOLDIER, a decorated military veteran, is a mercenary, not interested in saving the planet, but only sticking around long enough until he gets paid.
What’s immediately apparent is the tone shift the Final Fantasy series has undergone. Moving beyond the high fantasy aesthetic of the past 6 games, FInal Fantasy VII is rooted in science fiction. Sure, Cloud still wields a sword, but the Shinra soldiers come at you with rifles, Barrett has a gun attached to his arm, and instead of a castle casting a shadow across a quaint village, a massive building stands in the centre, surrounded by 8 mako reactors, and massive plates hold homes for wealthy citizens to reside in, while leaving the dirty ground below for the slums. Midgar casts an impressive profile, and by putting the players in the slums, instantly creates a feeling of inequity. AVALANCHE are justified in their quest to destroy the Mako reactors, they are the sympathetic Robin Hood of this world.
Avalanche is using the basement of a bar as it’s hideout, and as Cloud shows up to get paid, the bar’s owner, and Cloud’s childhood friend, Tifa, convinces him to join in on another reactor raid. During that next excursion, however, things go awry. They plant the bomb, but are cornered by the president of Shinra, who sicks a robot soldier after the party. They defeat it, but it explodes, destroying the catwalk the party was standing on, and leaving Cloud hanging. After the bomb AVALANCE planted explodes, Cloud loses his grip, and missing Tifa’s outstretched hand, falls from the upper plate to the depths below. He crashes through a church ceiling and wakes up to Aerith looking over him, as he lays amongst her flowerbed.
Tangent, in the original Final Fantasy VII, the in-game default name for this character is Aeris, but the intended name was supposed to be Aerith. The manual says Aerith, all subsequent media refers to her as Aerith, but I just stuck with the game default Aeris for my play through.
Aerith is soon visited by Reno, a Turk (think the FBI of this world), and Cloud helps her escape. She and Cloud eventually meet up with Tifa and Barrett and learn that the Shina’s response to AVALANCHE destroying the Mako reactors is to collapse the plate that sits above the slums they call home. They race to stop it, but are moments too late. In addition to this, Aerith is captured by the Turks. Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett narrowly escape the Sector 7 Slums as the plate comes crashing down, killing untold numbers of people.
Cloud and the party stage a raid on Shinra HQ in an effort to save Aerith. On their way, they’re captured and come face to face with the Shinra president who tells them only the last surviving Ancient (Aerith), can lead them to the promised land, a mythical land of limitless potential. He plans on finding the promise land and building another city on top of it, harvesting the Mako for even more wealth and power. He then imprisons the party. Cloud wakes up after some time has passed to find his cell door mysteriously open and the guard at the end of the hallway dead. The party follows the trail of blood up to the Shinra presidents office, and find him also murdered, with Sephiroth’s iconic sword lodged in his back.
The president’s son, Rufus appears on scene and vows to rule the company and the people who depend on it via fear. Cloud and the Party manage to escape Shinra, and the city of Midgar all together. And thus begins Final Fantasy VII
All of that takes about 5 or 6 hours of gameplay. But it really sets the stage and tone for the rest of the game. What follows is a mystery of Grand proportions. Aeris is the last surviving Ancient, which Shinra is chasing. Sephiroth has gone rogue, causing death and chaos, and Cloud’s singular ambition is to chase him down. Unlike previous games where there was a singular antagonist, Final Fantasy VII is more nuanced in the characters roles.
Shortly after leaving Midgar, Cloud tells his tale. He recounts the events of 5 years ago, when he was in SOLDIER, and he and Sephiroth were dispatched to his and Tifa’s hometown of Nibelheim. Tifa is hired as their guide as they make their way to the local Mako reactor. Inside the reactor, they find pods containing monsters. It’s revealed that Shinra creates SOLDIERS via inhumane experiments on humans, by injecting cells of Jenova into people and exposing them to Mako energy. Sephiroth finds records of the experiments done to him, and goes mad. He burns Nibelheim, townspeople slain. Cloud and Tifa confront Sephiroth at the reactor, who easily overpowers them, and then pulls Jenova from its pod.
If this all sounds confusing, it’s because it is. A lot of Final Fantasy VII is about unravelling the murky history of Cloud and the events that happened 5 years ago. Much closer to the end of the game, it’s revealed that Cloud’s retelling of Nibelheim isn’t accurate. Cloud never made it into the elite SOLDIER, he failed. He was a common Shinra goon for a while, and Zack was the SOLDIER partnered with Sephiroth, although Cloud was there at the events. Cloud was a failed Shina experiment, where Sephiroth was a successful one. The Mako energy fractured Cloud’s psyche, and all those who underwent the Jenova experiment do experience some connection with one another. A calling, a voice, something drawing them all to a ‘reunion’. Aerith asserts that she’s the only one who can stop Sephiroth. She goes to the city of the Ancients, and when Cloud follows her, he’s overcome with an urge to pick up his sword and slay her. When he successfully resists, Sephiroth depends from the ceiling, and does it himself.
Except was it actually Sephiroth? In a much later flashback, it’s revealed that Cloud managed to throw Sephiroth into the life stream 5 years ago, so, how is Sephiroth back and causing troubles? How does he keep getting his iconic Masamune back if he left it impaled in the Shinras presidents back? These questions do have answers, but they require a bit of research to find them.
The second half of the story is unwravelling the mystery of Jenova, Shina, Hojo, alien calamities, and shape-shifting villains, and how Cloud fits into the whole story. Cloud eventually regains his mental state and memories, the crew destroy some WEAPONS, they jump into a rocket ship and fly into space in a futile attempt to divert the incoming Meteor, and eventually descend into the northern crater to the centre of the planet to confront Jenova and Sephiroth. They succeed, and Cloud asserts that now it’s up to the power of Holy to save the planet. In the final cutscene, it’s shown that the Meteor is pressing down on Midgar, and the Holy barrier is failing. As the city begins to crumble however, green energy rushes forward, pushing meteor back. Aerith’s face is briefly shown bathed in green light, and the credits roll. Post credits, 500 years later, Red XIII is seen running through the plains with two cubs. They jump up some cliffs and reveal a abandoned and ruined Midgar, overgrown with greenery.
Experience
I think I’ve said it before, but I’ve never really played Final Fantasy VII. At the very least, I’ve never gotten very far in any of my past attempts, barely out of Midgar, if at all.
The story was quite convoluted, and a lot of the nuance of the mystery is easily missed and is found in optional areas or hidden text boxes if you check a character’s desk or something. As this was my first time playing FFVII, I did spend more than an hour after the final credits rolled just Googling some of my questions. Why was Sephiroth frozen in the Northern Crater? Who actually killed Aerith if Sephiroth was thrown into the Lifestream five years earlier? Why didn’t Tifa speak up when Cloud recounted the Nibelheim event? A lot of the game could have been avoided if Tifa spoke up and addressed Cloud’s schizophrenic episodes.
I have to say that for a 1997, first 3D game, Final Fantasy VII would have been absolutely earth-shattering to all those who played it back in the day. But for someone playing it for the first time in 2025, I think it’s a little overhyped. Considering it’s capped many best-game-of-all-time lists, it’s literally impossible to call it underhyped. The 3D graphics were astounding in 1997, but in the modern day, the visuals haven’t aged well, which is a shame.
I also don’t get the fandom for Sephiroth. He was present in Cloud’s flashbacks, and he killed Aerith, but he was largely missing from most of the game. This is probably a byproduct of Final Fantasy VII employing several antagonistic parties. Sephiroth was more of an ethereal threat and less of a foil to the party or someone pushing events forward. It’s a stark contrast to Final Fantasy VI‘s Kefka, who was constantly in your face, causing death and destruction, foiling your plans, while Sephiroth is just someone you’re chasing.
Some of the characters are bland or one-note in Final Fantasy VII. Cait Sith joins your party and is barely a character other than to spy on you for Shinra, and then, for that same person to grow a conscience and be a part of the final battle. Red XIII’s whole character arc is just, he’s young and brash and he learns to warm up to humans. Yuffie is a jerk who steals your Materia at least twice, after which the party just shrugs and lets her keep tagging along. I know a lot of these characters receive a lot more characterization in plenty of the content that followed the original release, but in the original game, they’re quite one-note. The story really revolves around Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and Aerith, with the rest of the team having much smaller roles.
I think taking into account all of the content that has come out for Final Fantasy VII, especially the remake, I think it eventually becomes a really amazing series. But taking Final Fantasy VII for the PS1 on it’s own, I don’t think it’s a particularly amazing game. At the very least at this point on my Final Fantasy pilgrimage, I’d say I prefer all 3 of the SNES games over this one. It may be sacrilege to say so, but hey, this is a subjective blog. My opinions are what they are. And I will concede that now that I’ve played this game, I can see the influence it had on several of my favourite games that came after it. It was a groundbreaking achievement, I’m just terribly late to the party.
I will say that seeing how some of the iconic cutscenes have been rendered in the remake, makes me really want to play the Remake series. When I do, I will come back and revise my opinion here.
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.
Tokyo Vice is a memoir by Jake Adelstein. As a young adult, he moved to Japan and managed to land a job at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun, the first gaijin (foreigner) to do so. The book covers over a decade of his experience reporting on the police beat, and eventually covering the Vice squad, bringing him face to face with Japan’s human trafficking and prostitution rings.
One of the main reasons I choose to read memoirs, is to get a glimpse of lives and experiences that are wholly different from my own, and Tokyo Vice fills that requirement wonderfully. Adelstein tells wild stories that I (thankfully) have never come across in my own life. I can’t help but respect Adelstein for having the courage to move to Japan and live in a culture so different from the one he was born and raised in.
The stories he shares often highlight his own incompetence, either real, or acted out. Adelstein uses his foreigner-ness to get away with plenty of acts that other people would be punished for, such as crossing police tape after a massive shooting.
As Mark mentioned in his podcast, there are some criticisms, accusing Adelstein of embellishing his stories, but I don’t think that matters to me very much. I didn’t read Tokyo Vice expecting an objective reporting of facts, this is his story to tell, and he can tell it how he wants. I appreciate that throughout the book, Adelstein rarely made himself out to be a big damn hero, smarter and stronger than everyone else. Instead, a lot of his stories focus on how lucky he was, or how often he made blunders.
I’m reminded that Frank McCourt’s book, Angela’s Ashes, also was the subject to a fair amount of criticisms from the residents of Limerick, saying his book was not an accurate portrayal of life in the city. On some level, I assume those slinging criticisms are stung when someone speaks badly about something they adore. In the case of Tokyo Vice, and the events Adelstein depicts, I am wholly ignorant. Sure, I’ve watched a lot of anime, and I knew of some of the words and places Adelstein references, like Yakuza and Ikebukuro, but I have no real understanding about the places or the culture surrounding it. I do know a lot of people have very fond memories and ideas about Japan and its culture, and Adelstein’s stories about the sex trade and how women are exploited, run afoul of their love for the country as a whole, especially when he calls Japan the king of the sex traffic trade. I may be completely off base in my assumption, but hey, I’m just an ignorant dude with a keyboard.
I found it utterly infuriating when Adelstein tries talking to the police about the women who were being trafficked in Japan. The cops can’t or won’t take action, because if any of the women come forward, they have to be arrested, as they are often in Japan on a tourist visa, or otherwise in the country illegally, so, they must be deported. By imprisoning and deporting the victims, they are unable to build a reliable case against those harming others. A vicious circle that requires laws to change, and while the cops aren’t the ones writing the laws, it is frustrating when the letter of the law runs afoul against the spirit of the justice system and prevents victims from receiving any kind of help. Now, Tokyo Vice was originally published in 2009, so it’s entirely possible that things have changed in the past 15 years, perhaps my next reading assignment will be to see how things have changed, I see Adelstein published Tokyo Noir in 2004, perhaps that book will answer my questions.
I will say that I’m becoming increasingly less keen on Authors reading their own books. Adelstein did a good job narrating his story, and having his voice deliver his tale is a unique and intimate experience, but there were a few moments where I felt like his cadence was off, or a joke didn’t land quite right. I had a similar experience when I listened to Deryck Whibley from Sum 41 read his book,Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell. Juxtapose Whibley and Adelstein’s books against Bill Gates’ recent book, Source Code, read by Wil Wheaton. Gates’ book was much less interesting, and dare I say, pretty boring, but Wil’s voice acting and reading was much more enjoyable.
Tokyo Vice was a compelling book. While I don’t usually seek out cop or crime stories (unless it’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine), I thoroughly enjoyed Adelstein’s story, and it made me appreciate those who do the work to bring these stories to the light. For every Lucie Blackman, whose disappearance makes the news, there are hundreds more that just simply don’t. Without people to shake the cages of the establishment, who knows what kind of filth would be swept under the carpet, even more than what is already overlooked. While Tokyo Vice doesn’t offer a neat resolution or profound philosophical takeaway, that absence feels honest to the world Adelstein describes, messy, unresolved, and often frustrating. Tokyo Vice is a series of glimpses into the shadows, each story shedding light on people and systems we’d often rather pretend don’t actually exist. I walked away with a deeper respect for those who keep shining that light, even when the job offers little glory and even less closure.
I’ll also include a link to Jake’s website, Japan Subculture if you’re interested in the stories he continues to tell https://www.japansubculture.com/
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!
