Generally, I prefer to play games in person before I start playing them on Board Game Arena. For one thing, I’m much more likely to actually sit down and learn the rules, rather than rely on click-and-pray and letting the computer manage all the rules. But for River Valley Glassworks, designed by Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, and Matt Riddle, with art by Andrew Bosley, and published by AllPlay in 2024 after a successful crowdfunding campaign, I was drawn into a tournament and ended up playing 5 games back to back.
The others in my online game group, refuse to play a game on BGA before they’ve played it on the table, so when I visited a local board game café with Otter, and saw River Valley Glassworks on the shelf, I knew it would be a great opportunity to teach him, and get some more online games played.
River Valley Glassworks is a game about collecting glass. The main board is a series of tiles forming a river, ending at a small pool. Each river tile has a number of rocks, indicating how many glass pieces get placed onto that tile, and a shape. On your turn, you take one of the glass pieces from your satchel, and place it on a river tile that matches the shape of the glass that you’re placing, and then take all the glass from one of the adjacent tiles. You take the tile, put it at the end of the river, refill it with glass based on its stones, and place the glass you collected into your player board.
Your player board consists of 5 rows, with 7 columns each. You can choose the order in which you place your glass, but if you already have glass of the same colour, then that glass has to go onto that column. Should you exceed 5 pieces, the extra goes into the overflow. Glass in the overflow will cost you 3 points at the end of the game, which comes up surpisingly fast. the first person to reach or exceed 16 pieces of glass triggers the end game, which has all players complete the same number of turns, then take one final turn, and then you move into end game scoring.
For end game scoring, you simply count each of your rows from left to right until you reach the first empty spot, then you score your two tallest columns. If multiple columns are of equal height, you score the lower value one. Subtract your overflow, and that’s the entire game!
River Valley Glassworks plays lightning fast on the table with two players. Averaging 10 minutes per play, I couldn’t believe how quickly the game came to a screaming end, which makes this game perfect for starting the night off, or a tidy night cap before everyone heads home.
The gameplay is smooth as silk, with the only real decision you need to make is which piece of glass you want to put down, and which of the two adjacent river tiles you want to take from. Once you have the glass in your hand, it simply flops onto your playerboard into the appropriate spots (unless you have two new colours being added to your board, then you choose which order to add them in, but I digress). There is the decision of when to take glass from the lake to replenish your options, but that only really comes up once or twice in the game. Although I have been sincerely tempted before to take the lake glass ‘early’, forcing one into the overflow before. The loss aversion I hold refused to let me do it, however, even if it would had given me the tactical advantage in the moment.
There are 8 different colours of glass, but only 7 columns on your board. It is an interesting challenge to consider if you want to get the common colours early so you can build fuller rows, or if you hold out to get them a few turns in, so you have an easier time filling the most lucrative columns. That push and pull of short term planning is delightful in this lightning quick game. And if whatever choice you make doesn’t pan out, just throw all the glass back in the bag and play it again!
I played the retail edition of River Valley Glassworks, which was a perfectly reasonable production. The glass pieces were lovely to look at, if a tad small. The river tiles were colourful and fit together perfectly, and each of the animal entrepreneurships you play as are full of character and are fun to look at. I did see some pictures of the deluxe version of this game, and while it looks absolutely gorgeous, with its neoprene mat for the river, dual layered player boards, and animal meeples, I don’t think any of those deluxe components really add anything to the game, especially considering how simple and lovely the gameplay is. Personally, I don’t like an overwrought production, and the retail edition fits the vibes perfectly.
River Valley Glassworks is quick, cozy, and approachable, but still gives you meaningful decisions and a puzzle that lingers in your head afterwards. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, it looks great on the table, and it’s the sort of game I can play back-to-back without blinking. It’s also great to play asynchronously on BGA, if you’re so inclined, as it’s always easy to parse the board state. If you’re in the market for a half-hour filler with charm to spare and just enough bite to keep you engaged, this is one river worth diving into.
I’ve been a fan of Level 99 Games for a while now. From Millennium Blades toBullet❤️, and all of its expansions, I really dig how unique every game of theirs I’ve played has been. So when I saw Argent: The Consortium in a math trade earlier this year, I hopped on it, and was delighted to receive it. While I am a big fan of the early 90’s anime and video game theme from Millennium Blades, and adore the anime aesthetic that all of Level 99 Games, my friends in my game group are less enthusiastic, which is one of the reasons it took so long for me to get Argent: The Consortium to my table.
The other reason it took so long for Argent to come out, is that it looks incredibly dense. Twice I opened the rulebook, started reading the rules, and immediately felt too tired and packed the game away again. I don’t know what it is about Argent, but the rulebook does not feel welcoming.
For our first game, we stuck with the “recommended beginner’s setup,” since it was our first go, but even with training wheels on, Argent: The Consortium showed off its teeth.
A 3 player game has 8 locations for you to put your workers, with each of those locations having between 3 and 5 spots. On your turn, you can take a fast action if you wish, then take one main action, which can consist of placing a mage on a spot, casting a spell, or using a supporter or treasure. If you don’t want to do any of those, there are also some bell tower cards you can take instead, which act as the timer for the round. The moment the last bell tower card is taken, the round ends.
On the surface, Argent is just a worker placement game. You put your mages (workers) out on various locations to gather resources, gain spells, or position yourself for the endgame scoring. Pretty standard stuff. Except, there’s a lot of interaction, and not even just the standard worker placement of interaction that comes from taking the spot that someone else really wanted. Argent: The Consortium has a lot of direct player interaction as players cast spells to blast opposing mages off the board, and even some that let you shift your opponents workers around after they’ve been placed. That one twist, being able to knock, vanquish, or blast someone else’s carefully placed worker, isn’t just cute. It’s the heartbeat of the whole design. The worker placement here isn’t just about action efficiency; it’s about tempo, timing, and disruption.
There are 5 different types of mages you can recruit, each with its own ability. The red mages can wound other mages, kicking them out and taking their spot, and sending them to the infirmary, giving its owner a paltry benefit. The green mages are immune to wounds, the purple mages can be placed as a fast action, the black mages can be placed after you cast a non-fast spell, and so on. Each of these effects seem pretty simple on their own, but when your turn comes around, you’ll find yourself going down a flowchart in your head of which worker to place first. Perhaps you place a defensive one down to lock the spot you need the most, or you hold back your offensive mages so you can punish one of your foolhardy opponents. Not only picking a location is a tough choice, but trying to figure out which worker to use compounds that decision.
The goal of the game, is to accrue the most votes of the Consortium, a group of administrators, each valuing something different. 2 are open information to the whole table, but the other 10 are face down. While each player does get to peek at one each at the start, you’ll be blind as to what resource the other 9 each value. At the end of the game, each of those cards are flipped up, and whomever has the most of whatever criteria they ask for, wins their vote. The player with the most votes, wins the whole game.
Of course, there are ways to earn more marks, letting you peek at more cards. Knowledge is power, and focusing your efforts into the actions that will ultimately earn you a vote is the way to win the game. Sometimes you can glean from your opponents as they stockpile a specific resource, what they might know, but you can’t always be sure. And even if you do follow them, now they have a head start on you.
Argent: The Consortium is flush with variability, even in just the base game. 18 council votes mix up the end game, 6 double-sided player boards, each with their own player ability. 30 spell cards vary the abilities you can accrue, 15 double-sided university tiles ensure the actions you take are different in every game. But with all this variability, comes table bloat. As you can see in the pictures, it’s a massive table hog. The board is just a modular cluster of cardboard tiles, but each player needs to have room for their player board, and room off to the side to hold their spells, vault cards, and supporters. Argent has an almost comical abundance of “stuff”, and that’s not even counting any of the content that comes in the expansions.
Which kind of brings me to my main thought of this review. Argent: The Consortium is just a worker placement game. There’s no flashy gimmicks or crazy twists to the mechanism. It’s not mixing other mechanics to make a game that feels wholly unique. There’s no flash or pizzazz, and it isn’t the kind of game that stands out on a table that makes people stop and ask “what’s THAT game!?”. But this game obviously has legs. It has replayability out the ying-yang, and that’s something that a lot of modern games seem to lack. If you’re tired of modern games dazzling you with their fancy pants productions and really exciting and interesting first play, but lack of replayability, well then I hold up Argent as the solution to those woes.
Is Argent: The Consortium perfect? No. A few things may rub players the wrong way. For one, despite all the flashy magic theming, Argent is still fundamentally a Euro about collecting and converting resources. If you came here for wild spell-slinging battles, you’ll find yourself instead managing mana crystals and counting up influence points. For another, some people will find the overabundance of options paralyzing. On your turn, you may have up to 20 options to choose from. Some will balk at how mean and interactive it can be, since one well-timed action can completely upend your plans. All those paralyzing options mean that the game can feel slow to play, especially with new or AP prone players.
But at it’s best, Argent is a dazzling mess of interaction and tension. It’s a Euro with resource management at its core, yet it smuggles in drama and intrigue that most Euros can only dream about. Every game feels distinct, every set up is a whole new puzzle. It’s the kind of game where you might feel like you’re dead last, but in a dramatic reveal at the end, scrape together just enough votes to edge out the victory.
Argent: The Consortium is a gem. It’s one of the most interesting, interactive, and clever worker placement games I’ve played in a very long time. It’s not the easiest thing to get on the table or convince normies to play, but it’s worth the effort every time. If you love worker placement, love interactive games, and don’t mind a bit of magical cruelty, Argent: The Consortium, despite being 10 years old, might end up being your new favourite too.
The way my game group operates, is that we rotate hosting between each member. Whoever’s turn it is to host, gets to pick the game(s) we play that evening. Sometimes we finish our game a bit early, so the host gets to break out one of their smaller games to cap off the evening. Such was the case the other day when Blokus 3D hit the table.
We had just been handed a crushing defeat in the final mission of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth: Shadowed Paths expansion, which meant our campaign had finally come to a close. As some kind of detox from the heavily thematic combat oriented game, the colourful blocks called to Bigfoot, who plopped it onto the table.
Blokus 3D (otherwise known as Rumis) is a three-dimensional abstract strategy game. All players receive the same pieces, then take turns placing piece after piece, trying to be the player who comes out on top. Literally. The victor is the player who has the most blocks of their colour when viewing the final structure from above.
The game starts with a template being placed down on the plastic lazy susan creating a form for the structure that you’re going to build. The structure also goes up in steps, where the first row can only be one block high, while the second row can be up to 2 blocks high, and so on until you reach 6 blocks. The only other placement restriction is that the block you place must touch another block of your own colour (which is the opposite of regular Blokus rules, where your blocks cannot touch other blocks of your colour). Beyond that, players just alternate taking turns until someone runs out of blocks or no players are able to play anymore.
The lazy susan is a nice touch, as there will be times when the structure has created a cliff, or your only spot to place is now from a single square poking out the back of the structure. The play area on that lazy susan has ridges, so the blocks don’t go flying off the base when you rotate it, but that same consideration does not extend to the blocks themselves. An errant sneeze could send your whole game scattered across the table. Not that I would know….
A big part of Blokus 3D is placing your blocks in such a way that it benefits you, but also doesn’t let your opponents completely hem you in. in a higher player count game, a poor placement and cutthroat opponents can see a player eliminated after a single block placement. I appreciate the depth in this thought, the short term gain of getting a lot of blocks on the top-most layer, but not working towards the later game of having more placement options.
It’s quite nice having a three-dimensional positional abstract game. There’s no randomness, no luck involved in Blokus 3D, just skill and strategy. It’s a spatial puzzle that tickles the brain in a delightful way, and a game that made me instantly want to play it again and again. It helps that games are so short, with only, like, 12 pieces allocated per player. At 2 players, it’s a knife fight in a phone booth as you try desperately to avoid giving your opponent a leg up, and at higher player counts it’s more tactical. Rewarding you for having multiple options each turn, and snapping the perfect spots when the time is ripe.
I enjoyed Blokus 3D more than it’s 2D cousin, but I have always enjoyed spatial puzzles, and the inclusion of the 3rd dimension feels new and exciting to me. I wish the blocks weren’t quite so slick, so I could play this with my kids and not worry about their non-dextrous fingers knocking the whole game over, but as it stands, it’s a great cerebral puzzle to bust out at the end of the night when you really feel like crushing your opponents and punishing them for their lack of forethought.
I just looked at my usual online game stores, and it looks like Blokus 3D is hard to find. But hey, maybe this can be the grail game that gets you into thrift stores and yard sales.
If you ask “What is the best Final Fantasy game?”, or read any Final Fantasy games tier-list or top list, you’ll find Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII most often cited as the best Final Fantasy games every. Alongside those two, manywill cite Final Fantasy Tactics as their favourite game of all time, let alone of the Final Fantasy franchise. The cult following that adores Final Fantasy Tactics is strong and pervasive.
I originally played Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions on the PSP back in 2009. At that time, I was already a pretty big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance, the Gameboy Advance follow-up, so I figured I was in for a good time. Unbeknownst to me, is there are a couple point in the game where you are required to do a couple of battles back to back, with no opportunity to respec your team between those battles. One of those fights has the main character fighting all on his own. I stupidly only had one save file throughout the game, and soft locked my progress, as I had set Ramza into a weaker job temporarily so I could unlock a better job in a few fights. At that point I put the game down, and never came back.
Until now! Final Fantasy Tactics recently got a new remaster in the form of the Ivalice Chronicles, with an updated UI, voice acting, auto save, multiple difficulty levels, fast-forward, better camera control, enhanced, smoothed out graphics, and the ability to return to the world map at any point (thank goodness). Unfortunately, I’m too cheap to buy new games, so I decided to load up my PSP emulator and start a play through of the 2007 remaster, The War of the Lions
Gameplay
If you’ve played an SRPG or “tactics” game before, things should be familiar to you. Final Fantasy Tactics puts you in control of a small squad of 4 – 5 units. These units face off against other squads of similiar size on a grid based battlefield, and through any tactical advantage you can muster (or via sheer overwhelming force), you hope to be the one left standing at the end of the day.
Each unit has a job, giving them special abilities to use during combat. Starting as a Squire or Chemist, most characters will just walk around the map and bop enemies on their heads. As you do that, that character will earn EXP to level up and get stronger, and JP, or Job Points, which they can use to learn new skills. As you level up a job, you’ll unlock new jobs. Some make sense, like getting to a level 2 Squire unlocks the Knight job. Knights can equip swords, shields, and heavy armor for beefy HP bonuses, and their abilities all focus around breaking your opponent’s equipment or skills. Chemists, on the other hand, level up to White and Black mages, which in turn unlock Summoners, Time Mages, Mystics, and the powerful Arithmetician.
When a character changes job, they gain the inherent abilities of the job they’re currently using, like the Knight being able to equip heavy armor, or the Archer being able to use bows. As you spend JP to learn skills, you can apply them to your character, even after their job has changed. Further to that, every character has two action ability slots. One is automatically used by the job you have, like Black Magic for a Black Mage. But that second action slot can be filled by any job that character has previously dabbled in. In my case, my Black Mage also has extensive experience as a white mage, giving them great offensive and defensive versatility.
Menus over menus
This system is wonderfully open, allowing you to mix and match jobs and skills to create units that feel truely unique and distinct from one another. You’ll mourn when a character goes down, suddenly feeling the loss of the abilities they were offering your team. You’ll struggle to decide if you should keep an extra character with items so they can use a phoenix down when your main healer falls, or, if you are willing to let go of the skill that increases your chance to hit in favour of being able to hold two swords at once. These trade-offs will have buried in the menus inbetween every battle, constantly tweaking your units to shore up and weaknesses that were discovered in the last battle.
The core gameplay loop of engaging in battles, earning JP, spending JP on skills, tweaking jobs and abilities, and then using those new skills in another battle, is utterly addicting. Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions has stolen a few hours of sleep from me as I push my bedtime into the wee hours of the morning, saying “Just one more battle. I’ve almost unlocked the Ninja, then I’ll go to sleep…”
The downsides of the battles, however, is that they can be long and unfair. More than once I’ve had my whole party wiped out by a random battle, only to reload a save, try again, and steam roll the competition. A well-timed block, the opponents choosing to pile onto your healer, or any number of other factors can cause a snowball effect that makes a map nearly impossible. One time my white mage missed reviving Ramza 4 times in a row (it had a 64% chance to hit), then he disappeared from the battlefield, triggering a game over.
Pictured above: Tactical Advantage
Reloading and bashing your head against a brick wall seems to be a core feature of Final Fantasy Tactics. There are a couple of battles near the end of chapter 3 that, even after grinding, took several attempts and a string of good luck to complete. There was one mission where you had to protect an AI controlled character, and literally before any of my characters had a chance to move, she was KO’d by the 3 opposing assassins. I ended up re-speccing my team to be thieves with high speed so they’d be able to move sooner, then just threw them into the line of fire and hoped the opposing AI opponents would take the bait.
In these situations, you’re almost railroaded into having a specific team composition or loadout. This feels like the anthesis of the open-ended team building that the entire game is built around. If you wanted Ramza to be a support character or a spell caster, there’s a boss battle that forces him into a one on one duel. Even if you’re prepared for the fight, the opponent will KO you in 2 hits, forcing you to change your character into one that is specifically built to counter that fight.
Some of these fights will teach you an imporant lesson in having multiple save slots, as there are several battles in the second half off the game that take place right after the other, and if you find yourself unable to progress, without having a backup save, you’ll be softlocked within that battle screen, as a failure will kick you back out to the title screen to either continue from a save, or, start a whole new game.
Story
The story of Final Fantasy Tactics is one of intrigue, plots, villainy, and backstabbing. Ramza is the youngest of a prestigious house, and after a series of unfortunate decisions by those in power, he is thrust into a world embroiled in war. The Black and White lions fight for power and control over the crown, while the church manipulates both sides from the shadows, hoping to capitalize on the chaos. There are dozens of characters, allegiances are ever shifting, and there’s an undercurrent of class struggle that’s particularly present in the first quarter of the game. Ramza, after seeing the callousness of the ruling class, takes a step back and instead fights for justice and peace.
I’m going to start folding in Delita’s insults into my everyday vocabulary
The last act of the game devolves into a supernatural mystery of characters fighting over the Zodiac stones, which transform the holder into monsters of terrible power, which Ramza is quick to put down, and gets labelled as a heritc in the process. The story culminates with the kidnapping of Ramza’s sister to be the host for the resurrection of Ultima, which, again, Ramza is tasked with preventing the coming of the other worldly horror.
What’s interesting about the story of Final Fantasy Tactics, is that Ramza doesn’t come out a hero in the end. He does manage to save is sister and prevent the demons from ruling the world, but very few even know of their existence, and even less know of Ramza’s involvement with stopping the plot. Instead, after the credits, he and Alma take to the road to live out the rest of their lives in quiet peace.
Presentation
I played the PSP War of the Lions remake, which includes a number of upgrades from the original. The animated cutscenes are beautiful and have good voice acting. The localization mostly makes sense, with some really great dialogue that sets the tone for the game. The curses and insults mixed in with the complex political intrigue remind me of reading some really good fantasy novels, instead of the simple childlike dialogue that most JRPGs treat their players to.
Samantha is my mage, Turstin is my knight, but is my archer Alison or Ayleth?
The user interface, on the other hand, could use some work. In Final Fantasy Tactics, the order in which the units will take their next turn is vitally important. But to see the order of your turn, you need to back out of your action menu, press triangle, and select order list, where you’re given a list of names. Hopefully you’ve memorized the names of your units, but the opposing team is basically a guessing game. You can click on each of the names in red and see which one is going to move next, but it’s a pain to do. The character portraits do have a little indicator when you move the cursor over them, giving a rough indication of what order that character is going to go it, but it’s a right pain when you’re trying to figure out which spell to cast and if the charging time will run out before your target takes their next move.
While I generally really enjoy the isometric view of most Tactics games, the camera in Final Fantasy Tactics was constantly giving me trouble. Some maps play with elevation and will have your units fighting in a narrow alleyway. But this makes it impossible to see all the units. More than once I found myself spinning the map around and around, only catching glimpses of units hiding in the corners, and I had to hunt with the cursor to find them. Even worse would be when an enemy mage would start to cast a spell behind a wall that I couldn’t see who or where they were casting. I do like the 3D environments, they do create some interesting battlefields, but the implementation of them leaves much to be desired.
There’s a lot of action going on behind those walls
I spoke before about being buried in menus, and I wasn’t kidding. Every time you want to check on the equipment or abilities of your units, you’ll be going 4 menus deep. While I really loved the job system and customizing my characters, the menu system was clunky and unintuitive. Swapping between characters wasn’t always possible, sometimes you need to back out to the second layer of menus so you could drill down deeper on the next character. Even in the middle of combat, you’ll be selecting which of your action skills to use, then which action, then which target, and if you want to target the unit or the tile, filling the whole screen with cascading menus. This was less onerous, but it is ugly.
I will say that I’ve been looking at screenshots of The Ivalice Chronicles remake with some significant envy. The newest remaster looks pretty great, has full voice acting, the graphics and UI is cleaned up, and actually looks like they address all of my issues from War of the Lions
Final Thoughts
As with most of the Final Fantasy games I’ve been playing for the first time, I asked myself, “Is this worth playing in 2025?” For Final Fantasy Tactics, the answer is a resounding yes. The job system remains endlessly satisfying, so much so that I’d happily start a new run right now if Final Fantasy VIII weren’t already looming on my backlog. The War of the Lions remaster still holds up beautifully, thanks to its excellent writing and deep, rewarding mechanics. And if you have access to The Ivalice Chronicles remake, it looks to be the definitive way to experience this classic.
That said, Final Fantasy Tactics isn’t flawless. The clunky menus, uneven difficulty, and occasional cheap battles can test your patience. But even with its rough edges, it’s an easy game to recommend. I’m glad I finally returned to it after all these years, older, more patient, and better able to appreciate its ambition. If I’d played this as a teenager, I probably would have been obsessed. As it stands now, I can at least recognize Final Fantasy Tactics for what it is: a landmark in tactical RPG design that commands respect, even decades later.
A copy of Super Dice Battle was provided by the designer for the purposes of review
Super Smash Bros is a pretty integral part of my teenage years. Many hours were consumed duking it among my friends, be it on the N64, GameCube, or Wii. So when Super Battle Dice was pitched as an homage to Super Smash Bros, I was instantly intrigued. For what it’s worth, I’ve always been a Link main, and I’ve never been a “Final Destination, no items” type of player. I revel in the chaos the items bring.
If I’m being honest, 90% of the reason I keep the items on is specifically for the Home Run Bat. Hearing that sound when the bat cracks the opposing players, it makes my toes curl with joy.
-AHEM-, I’ve gotten off-topic. In Super Dice Battle, players take control of one of the four asymmetric characters, and engage in real time combo building. Using D8’s, you roll your dice, then you can commit one of those die results to one of your combos. Then, keep rolling your dice! When someone completes an attack combo, they shout out “COMBO!” to stop everyone else from rolling. They designate a target, roll the Combo dice to determine damage, the target has a chance to resolve a defense combo, if they have one queued up, then, play continues.
Super Dice Battle offers two victory conditions. Either, the first player to KO 3 other players, wins the duel. Or, in a stock battle, the last player standing, is the overall winner. And for those of you who abhor real time games (I don’t get it, but you do you), there is a slow mode where instead of rolling all your dice as fast as you can, players roll once, all commit together, then roll again once everyone is ready.
With games taking 5 to 10 minutes per brawl, Super Dice Battle is an easy game to play back to back. The frantic dice rolling has all players constantly engaged, and the tension grows with each passing second as the dice clatter over and over. You’ll see your opponent’s dice pools getting smaller and smaller as they assign the dice to their combos, until they’re rolling one die over and over again, trying to get a specific result.
Which is perhaps one of the main frustrations with Super Dice Battle. Your dice pool is limited to 4 dice. Most of the light combos only require two dice, with a third being used to augment the combo a little. Heavy combos require 3 dice, while the support and defense combos need 1 or 2 dice each. You can work towards building multiple combos at once, or socking away one of your dice on your defense skill, but you’ll find yourself stuck rolling one die over and over, trying to get a specific result.
But you don’t have to live so cautiously. Neglect your defenses and focus all your attention on the heavy attack combo to really sock it to your opponents. After all, no risk no reward, right?
However you choose to fight, the first person to complete an offensive combo shouts “COMBO!” and grabs the combo die, a large white die with a bunch of pips. Everyone has a moment to breathe while they commit their final roll, and then the attacking player designates their target, and rolls the combo die to determine how much damage they’re dishing out to their opponent. If your target has a defensive combo, they can trigger that, but once damage has been dealt, you make sure the target hasn’t exceeded its damage threshold, and the game continues.
The combo dice can range anywhere from devastating to ineffectual, depending on the result you roll and the combo you chose. Some combos will add damage for the spiked pips, while others, won’t.
Super dice battle seeks to emulate a real time fighting game using dice, but it feels like it’s running up against the limitations of the medium. It’s not uncommon for multiple players to have a defensive combo, then just take pot shots at each other until something changes. Sometimes in a larger player count game, there would be a cascade effect. One player would attack another, then before that player could reset their defensive combo, the other two would pile on, as it was the most efficient use of their dice. The restrictive dice pool ensures players can’t have all their combos filled at the same time, but it also results in players rolling a single die over and over and over, trying to hit a specific result.
I always recommend playing the real-time mode, as the turn based mode feels wrong for a game seeking to emulate a frantic brawl. On the subject of the frantic brawl, the COMBO call, which initiates the damage step, feels like a jarring halt. You go from rolling and evaluating as quickly as possible, to a still moment where you evaluate all your opponents situations, and then select your target based on a carefully calculated decision. The frantic feeling is lost at this moment, but thankfully everyone is back to rolling again soon enough. The asymmetric player abilities are both a boon and a bane. I love changing my characters and how different each one feels to pilot. But having wildly different abilities slows down that damage step as players squint to read what each other player can do, or how they can react or counter the incoming attack. The rulebook does tease more characters coming in the future, so look forward to that!
Part of me wishes there was more to Super Dice Battle. For a game seeking to emulate Smash Bros, I’d love it if there were some environmental obstacles to overcome, or items to give specific combos a bit of extra punch. But for every element you try to add, the bloat and complexity increases exponentially, and I’m not sure if it would result in a better game at the end of the day.
Super Dice Battle does manage to capture some of that chaotic, competitive energy that made late-night Smash sessions so memorable. But it also occasionally manages to get in its own way. The small dice pools and abrupt pauses can undercut the momentum it’s trying to build. Still, for a quick, rowdy filler that thrives on tension, Super Dice Battle manages to deliver plenty of rambunctious fun, provided you don’t mind a bit of die-rolling repetition in your game.
Those first 6 words of the rulebook set the stage for Last Will, designed by Vladamir Suchy and published by CGE in 2011. Taking the plot of 1985’s Bewsters Millions, your uncle, who has amassed a great fortune, realized on his deathbed that he never got to enjoy the fruits of his effort. So he’s provided each of his descendants a small sum, and challenged each one to live lavishly, as whomever is the best at spending money will inherit the rest of his fortune, and win the game.
All players start with the same amount of money, and each round, take turns choosing which initiative they want to claim. The earlier in turn order you want to go, the less cards, errand boys, and actions you’ll have to spend. But in a game about being the most efficient at blowing your cash, going first and getting the perfect card can be worth having less actions.
The cards you draw can be anything from companions and staff, whom you’ll want to accompany you on your events so you can rack up a bigger bill, to real estate that costs a fortune to maintain, or, can fall into disrepair forcing you to sell it at a loss, to one time events, to persistent events that you’ll be able to use round after round to drain your bank account.
The errands to choose from mostly consist of cards, including the more powerful event cards that are not in the regular decks, but also allows you to put your thumb on the scale of the real estate market, making some types of real estate more expensive to buy in a round, while making others less desirable, so they’ll sell for even less than their already bottoming price.
Beyond the errand boys, your player board and cards have will have a bunch of scarlet badges market with an A, to indicate that doing something costs you an action. Buying and selling houses, activating events, and hiring staff all take time, and therefore, cost an action. Again, the winner is the player who runs out of money first and declares bankruptcy. An important aspect to Last Will is that you cannot declare bankruptcy if you own an asset. While maintaining those houses may have been a great way to drain your cash reserves, you’ll need to sell the house and drain the proceeds from the sale if you want to claim victory here.
Last Will has a sense of levity that permeates the entire production. The art on the cards is whimsical and absurd. How much extra do you think you’d have to spend to bring your horse to the theatre? Well, in Last Will, the answer is £3. That sense of levity can fool players into a false sense of security, there are plenty of difficult decisions you’ll need to make in respect to timing and giving up actions to go earlier in the round.
The reverse scoring method also sounds simple, but it surprisingly breaks your brain in different ways. After hundreds of euro games, I’m conditioned to try and achieve the most amount of actions for the least amount of money. This was most confusing in the real estate market, when I couldn’t figure out if I wanted Farms to be more or less valuable for the round in which I wanted to offload my real estate investments.
There’s a fascinating pivot point in Last Will. The best way to lose money is via real estate, either by letting it depreciate round after round, or just by paying the obscene upkeep. But the houses that drain the most of your money also retain their value, and when you run out of cash, but still have a house, you can find yourself in a weird pinch. You don’t have the money to do anything, but you’re still a ways away from being bankrupt, and selling that house may mean dismantling your cash reduction engine, giving players who haven’t invested in real estate a chance to catch up.
Last Will‘s action selection mechanism looks fairly simple, considering the games that Vladimir Suchy has designed, but it’s finely tuned and considered. Every space on the row is a trade-off in some way. It’s finely balanced and a tight decision at the start of each round. Suchy is flexing his design muscle here and it shows.
I struggle to find criticisms for Last Will. The production is modest, I suppose. There’s no fancy components or action selection wheels with cubes falling through holes like in Shipyardor Praga Caput Regni, but those things aren’t needed here. The charm of Last Will is in the premise, the tight action economy and the inversion of everything I’ve been taught to expect from a Euro game over the last 10 years. It’s funny, clever, and surprisingly thinky, and just a joy to play. For me, it’s an easy recommendation.
