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?
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.
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.
Let me preface this by saying I usually steer well clear of the entire horror genre. As a kid I watched the classics, and read my fair share of Goosebumps books, but in my teen years movies like Saw and Hostel absolutely sent me running from the whole vibe. So when I say I devoured The September House in two sittings and loved every psychologically unsettling moment of it? That should carry some weight.
Here’s the premise: Margaret and her husband buy a suspiciously affordable, beautiful Victorian house in the woods. Shortly after taking ownership, they realize it’s haunted. Oh bother. Except this is no slow-build ghost story. The house goes full Exorcist every September. Walls gush blood, ghosts appear, each of them more broken and gruesome than the last. Something unspeakable lives in the basement. Hal (the husband) nopes out after four years. Margaret stays. Margaret stays.
This is where The September House hooked me. Margaret isn’t your typical horror heroine. She’s older. Reserved. Gripping to her routine and rules like it’s a life raft. She’s flexible. She doesn’t scream when the walls bleed, she rolls up her sleeves and cleans the mess. I found her fascinating. Funny, even. She reacts to supernatural carnage the same way a tired parent reacts to a toddler’s tantrum: with quiet, unflappable endurance and a mildly exasperated expletive.
The horror of The September House isn’t just spectral. It’s deeply psychological. Margret’s 30-year-old daughter Katherine discovers that her father has left Margret, and is now refusing to answer her phone calls, she descends upon the house in the middle of September. Margret tries her best to reason with the poltergeists (called Pranksters), and shield her daughter from the supernatural horrors, going as far as to slip Katherine sleeping pills so she won’t hear the ethereal howling that happens every night. The September House becomes more about the lies we tell to keep our own sense of safety intact. About what we’re willing to ignore, to normalize, cope with, and even to cover up, if it means holding on to a version of life that feels bearable.
I laughed. A lot. Not because it’s slapstick or silly, but because the dark comedy is interwoven brilliantly. Margaret’s narration is deadpan, bored, and describes the events as utterly mundane, even when she’s casually dealing with flies coming out of a 90-year-old priest (Well that’s never happened before), or that one pesky prankster who bites if you get too close (You just need to respect his personal space).
But then, slowly, You’re starting to pull back the layers. The real horror creeps up on you, not through cheap jump scares, but through slow, dawning realization. You start to ask yourself: Wait, what actually happened here? What has Margaret been dealing with all this time? Why is she so good at following these rules? Are her descriptions actually happening, or is this all happening in her head? An elaborate story she’s conjured up to cope with something real and horrific?
Would I call it horror? Absolutely, the final act cements it. There are certainly memorably grotesque moments. But it’s also a fascinating subversion of the genre. It’s more of a psychological thriller with a horror coat of paint. I’m so glad I gave The September House a shot and didn’t let my horror aversion stop me. This book is going to stick with me for a while, not because of the blood on the walls, but because of the way it used psychology to show who the real terrors are.
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.
