Have you ever walked through a jungle and thought to yourself, “I love how colourful this place is! The vibrant green, red, purple, and blue ferns?” and “Wouldn’t this bright yellow fern look lovely if it had an equally yellow parrot on it?” No? Me either. Rainforest, by Johannes Goupy and published by Funnyfox, uses the rainforest name and aesthetic, but the mechanics of the game are completely separated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, no one is arguing that Cascadia or Wingspan’s themes ties into their mechanics, and those games have won piles of awards.
According to the Board Game Geek description, In Rainforest, your aim is to create a jungle environment that offers a rich variety of vegetation, which will allow you to reintroduce and protect the region’s iconic species: Monkeys, frogs, butterflies, and parrots. The gameplay is simple enough and features a double draft much like Cascadia or Verdant. On each turn, you’ll draft a tile from the central board (the tiles are separated by colour), and take a set of animal tokens from below the tile that you just took. The animal tokens you take must share an attribute, either all the animals of a single colour, or all the tokens of a single animal. Then, you can place your animals on your rainforest tiles and, if completed, place into your tableau.
Each tile is worth a certain amount of victory points on their own, but you can increase the number of points that tile is worth by placing your special totem animal onto that tile. One extra point for each of your totem animal that makes it onto the tile.
Some tiles will require specific animals, and specific colours, but the real restriction comes when you place the completed jungle tiles into your tableau. They must be placed into a 3 x 3 grid, and starting from the bottom left and moving across. This becomes incredibly important as if you can have multiple tiles of the same colour touching each other, you’ll earn a multiplier token called a protected area bonus, which you place on a tile that multiplies the points of that tile. These multiplier tokes are quite limited, making them incredibly valuable.
The game comes to an end once someone places their 9th tile, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Rainforest is a tile selection and action efficiency game. To do well, you need both your tile selections and animal token picks to be working at the same time. On your turn you do have the option to return a tile to the bottom of the stack to only take the animal tiles, but considering the game is a bit of a race, doing so is really not ideal. You need to be first to the protected area tokens, and you want to be the first one to complete your 9 tile tableau, but doing so cheaply can actually cost you the game. If someone has a 4 point tile, with 2 of their totem animal on it, with a triple score bonus, that single tile could be worth more than your entire tableau.
At 4 players, Rainforest feels tight. The tiles and animals shift dramatically between each of your turns, making forward planning difficult. At the same time, forward planning is required, as you can’t adjust where the tiles go when they’re placed into your tableau. You can only hold 2 animals on your board, and situations will arise where you’ll need to discard an animal lest you complete the wrong tile first and ruin your chance for a protected area token. At 2 players, it’s much more open. You need to specifically target your opponents’ strategy to step on their toes.
I do like drafting games, and Rainforest delivers on that front. There are some tough choices you need to make as a player here. Do you bide your time building up your perfect tiles, or blaze forth and try to end the game before other players manage to recruit their army of butterflies? The tiles of Rainforest are bright and attractive, but incongruent with each other. That said, its attractiveness and ease of play makes it a perfect game to play with those who may not have expressed an interest in board games before, especially if they have a particular affinity for one of the featured animals.
Rainforest was quick to play and attractive to look at, but I don’t feel that it has the replayability that I’m looking for. The scoring is the same every game, with the only thing changing are the order of the tiles and which animal tokens get associated with each tile. Perhaps I’m spoiled by games like Cascadia, and it’s myriad of scoring opportunities, but Rainforest sits in a crowded market, and it’s a game-eat-game jungle out there.
I’ve never made anything that’s been massively popular, and as a by product, I’ve never had to follow up a massively popular project. I have sympathy for those who have, like Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch, both of whom are authors who created excellent and popular book series, that have been dormant for a decade. I get it, suddenly, there are a lot of eyeballs on your work, and anything you do will be compared to your previous projects, and probably unfairly just because it doesn’t live up to the image that’s been conjured up in the mind of the fandom.
I sometimes wonder if Renier Knizia suffers from this. But before I even have a moment to speculate, another one of his game designs is announced to the world. My City: Roll & Build is the 2022 follow up to 2020’s My City, both published by KOSMOS. My City: Roll & Build takes the essence of My City and reduces it down to a much smaller package, and one that feels much more replayable.
In My City: Roll & Build, 1 to 6 players will create 12 unique cities by rolling dice and marking off the resultant shapes on their terrain sheet. The two blue dice contain a number of squares on each side, and every side has a little semicircle. Press the two semicircles together to reveal the shape you must plop into your city. Unlike My City however, you’re free to flip and rotate the shape of the building to your heart’s content; you’ll never be cursing that you got the wrong L shape, like I did in every game. The white dice, on the other hand, dictates the texture of the city which is important for scoring purposes. Like My City, each chapter of the game introduces a main mechanic, and every episode of the chapter builds upon and twists that mechanic.
Also like the parent game, everyone is given the exact same tools and situations. Everyone will draw the same shape at the same time, but it’s the decisions that each person makes that will spiral off into interesting and unique boards. There’s nearly no interactions between the players, and the ones that do exist are just “whoever can cover these spaces first gets an extra 5 points”. Which leads me nicely into the scoring, every individual game has slightly different scoring opportunities. In the first game, the only thing you really care about is covering rocks and empty spaces while not covering your trees. Throughout the campaign, you’ll be trying to cover plains tiles, gold ore, ensure churches are touching all 3 types of buildings, surround wells and bandits, and more! Every game you play will earn you a score, and your final score is assessed at the end by a table of results.
I’m generally not a fan of “score attack” types of games, and this is no different. I don’t really care about trying to break that 300 point threshold, and when I play against other players, I struggle to really care about who wins or loses each individual game. With no interaction, the competition feels hollow, but that’s okay. My City: Roll & Build doesn’t have to be a fiercely competitive game. I found a lot of joy just in just drawing my little buildings on my pads of paper. Overcoming the puzzle of how to jam as many pieces onto my board at a time.
Part of my apathy toward the scoring is that there can be large swings from play to play. Breaking past that 300 point upper threshold could be simple if you roll a lot of small buildings. Meanwhile, a string of bad luck can see half a dozen large C shapes that don’t work together and can cost you a whole games worth of points. It’s marginally better when you’re comparing your score against people who played the exact same game that you did, but trying to get a high score feels too luck dependant for me to invest my time into it. You can’t plan for a specific shape to enter into your city like you could in My City. Here, you’re at the whim of the dice rolls.,
My City: Roll & Build is a charming, calming little dice game that you can take anywhere. You don’t need to play through an entire 12 game campaign with the same group, playing a single chapter in 35 minutes is absolutely adequate to give a satisfying gameplay experience. It’s the kind of game that I’d play on the train, or plane with friends or intrested strangers. The moment to moment decisions of drawing buildings, and the elation when the perfect building gets rolled feels great. While I still prefer the larger My City experience as it felt more tense with the tile placement restrictions, and the tactile nature of tiles is more satisfying for me, there’s space for My City: Roll & Build to exist on nearly any shelf.
Lucky Duck Games has announced that they’re bringing a special edition of Splotter’s hit game,Food Chain Magnate, to Gamefound on November 14th, targeting a late 2024 delivery.
Lucky Duck Games reports that the gameplay will be untouched and that this special edition features a complete visual overhaul for both the base game originally released in 2015, and the Ketchup Mechanisim & Other Ideas expansion that was released in 2019. In addition to new visuals, the project will bring plastic minis for the restaurants and houses, screen printed tokens, and a storage solution for the entire game. While they’re looking to maintain the original box dimensions of 31cm x 22cm, the new box will be significantly deeper. Lucky Duck Games has also promised that this will be a one-off print run with no retail release.
Victor Maristane is credited as the artist creating the new illustrations, and they’re collaborating with Matt Paquette & Co. which includes more artists and graphic designers.
Original designers and publishers, Splotter, has commented that they’ve known Scott Morris at Lucky Duck Games for years, which lead them to accept Lucky Duck Games proposal of making this new edition with completely overhauled graphics. Lucky Duck Games has taken on all the risk and work of this project, with Splotter only giving them their blessing, along with a few conditions, such as an English only requirement, no gameplay changes, and that there will only be a single print run. Splotter has also commented that they have deliberately stayed away from the design process of this edition to ensure that their aesthetic preferences aren’t influencing the Lucky Duck team.
Splotter will continue to produce and sell the original version of the game, and all non-English editions will be based on the original graphic design.
Legacy games get a bad rap around my table. I’ve started more than half a dozen and completed only 2. It seems my thirst for discovery goes beyond incremental rule changes and I find it burdensome to feel the obligation to play a game, rather than picking it because it’s the game that I want to play. And yet, I still feel compelled to embark on these endeavors. Lured in by the promise of changing gameplay, an immersive story, and long term ramifications, I keep coming back to these legacy games hoping to find the one that shows me what I’ve been missing all this time.
My City by Reiner Knizia and published by KOSMOS is a 2 – 4 player tile laying legacy game that takes place over 24 games, broken into 8 chapters. Each chapter of the game introduces a new mechanic or a new major rule change, and each of the games within that chapter slowly increase the complexity or add wrinkles for you to contend with. It’s a little intimidating at first, hearing that you’ll have to play this game 24 times to see it through to the end, but each game only lasts between 15 and 30 minutes, making it simple to plow through 3 games in a single sitting, if you have the stomach for ever-changing rule-sets.
The gameplay of My City is smooth as butter. A card is flipped over, and all players need to place the tile that’s depicted on that card. Your first building needs to be adjacent to the river, and every subsequent tile must be adjacent to another building tile. The pieces range from little 2 square tiles, all the way up to pentominoes, 5 sided giant C shapes that you’ll struggle to fit into your commune. You can choose to pass, and give up a point, if the tile doesn’t fit, or if you simply don’t like the cut of that tile’s jib. You do lose a point for doing so, however.
So what’s the point of placing tiles? Well, your player board is littered with trees, rocks, and empty plains. You’ll try to cover all the rocks and empty tiles, while keeping your beautiful foliage intact. At the end of the first game, you’ll earn 2 points for every tree still standing, and lose 2 points for every rock marring your landscape, and 1 point for wasted, empty spaces.
As the campaign goes on, more and more scoring rules are folded in. You start scoring a point for your largest contiguous group of same coloured buildings, 4 points for 4 different buildings surrounding a well, unpassable churches that offer 3 points if it’s adjacent to all 3 colours. Thankfully, mercifully, it isn’t all rise. There reaches a point whereas new rules come in, old rules start to get pushed out. This helps reduce the cognitive load on players, as they try to remember the dozen different ways the game is offering points to you.
After each play, the winners are generally awarded something that will make their life harder, like more stones they need to sticker onto their board, while the lowest scoring players get a boon, like a tree that makes your board inherently more valuable, assuming you don’t bulldoze that bonus coniferous to make way for the blooming blue district that’s up and coming.
You’ll also earn mysterious little circles that you mark off along the top of your board. I don’t think it was spelled out during the start of the game, but the player who accumulates the most of these circles will be the victor of the whole campaign.
Playing My City is a fast and pleasant affair. Some chapters have players racing to cover two spots first, but beyond that, there’s nothing stopping you from just enjoying your own little game and comparing the scores at the end. You’ll curse the fact that you have the wrong Z or L shaped tile, no matter which one you’re trying to place. You’ll wish they were reversible as you place the tiles, making awkward shapes on your board. In the same vein, when the perfect piece gets flipped, and that tile slides in like a glove, connecting all the buildings of the same colour, it’s majestic. The rule changes keep the game feeling fresh and offer new wrinkles that flex the system in ways it might not expect.
I honestly thought my family would love this game. I picked up a brand-new copy, brought it out at Christmas with my wife and my mom, and going into the third game they both were annoyed that the rules kept changing. “Why can’t we play the same game?” they asked, apparently not understanding the whole point of a legacy game is for things to change from play to play.
My regular game group, on the other hand, played through this whole campaign, using the games are lovely little end caps of our evenings. After a much heavier game had wrapped, we cooled off with a game or two of My City, and it was the perfect way to experience this charming game. I don’t know if there’s a way to become good or skilled at My City, and I couldn’t tell you why I won some games and lost others, but it’s just plain enjoyable to fit little cardboard tiles together, like a jigsaw. When we got to the final game, I felt the whole experience ended with a sigh or a whimper, rather than a bombastic finale. It just, ended. The player who accumulated the most circles won, and we knew who that was going to be by the time chapter 5 concluded. There were no dramatic upsets, no surprise twists, just, the end.
My City offers an eternal variant, where you use the reverse side of the board for one-off games. It’s the mode I use with my family, but that mode would never be my first choice. In that same breath, I recognize that I can’t start a 24 game campaign with everyone who sits down at my table.
While the ending of the campaign left me wanting more, I remain charmed by My City. If you like polyomino tile laying games, My City is a no-brainer.
We call this one ‘Big Plus-y”. You always need to leave room in your city for Big Plus-y.
Kites, designed by Kevin Hamano and published by Floodgate Games, is a real time cooperative card game about keeping your kites in the sky, or rather, sand in the timers. Honestly, if a game has a real-time component, I’m instantly down to give it a shot, I love the pressure and delight in the stress that comes from having a real-time aspect. Also, it’s a great way to ensure a game moves at a decent clip. As a gamer who tends to act first and think later, it’s great for me.
How to Play
The game begins with the 5 coloured timers on their side. Everyone gets a hand of cards (6 cards each for 2 players, 4 cards each for 4 players, etc.) and play begins with the starting player flipping over the white timer to launch the game. From this point on, if any timer ever runs out of sand, the players collectively lose.
Each card has one or two colours on it. When you play a card, you must flip over the colours depicted on the card, then draw a new card. If the card you played only has one colour on it, you can choose to flip the white timer instead of the colour that was depicted on the card, which is important because no cards have white on them. When players exhaust the entire deck, the white timer becomes ‘locked’, it can no longer be flipped. If players manage to play all the cards from their hands before any timer runs out, then you’ve won!
It’s worth mentioning that if a timer runs out, players haven’t “lost”, but they can check how many cards are left in the deck and their hands, and call it their score, with the best score being 0. Personally, I don’t bother with counting cards at the end, Kites is a win or lose game for us.
Review
I love games that can be explained how to play in just two paragraphs. “Play cards, flip timers” is all players really need to know to get started playing Kites.
There are some advanced cards to challenge players once they clear the challenge of the base game, but we’ll leave those aside for now. The production of Kites is really simple and lovely. The cards feature lush illustrations of whimsical kites by the ever talented Beth Sobel. The cards feel like high quality card stock, and the final component is the timers, which are absolutely functional, if a bit prone to toppling over during the frenzied gameplay. I’m not sure if making the flared bases would have made them harder to top over, and keeping them slim was a deliberate design decision, but when playing with 4 players, it was a challenge to have the timers arranged in a way that each player could flip any of their timers without bowling over two other times at the same time. Maybe we have clumsy ham hands, but it was a component challenge we ran into.
It’s real hard to take photos of real-time games
The gameplay of Kites is straightforward, elegant, exciting, and kinetic. You’ll be anxiously looking at the red timer getting close to empty, play a card to flip it, then the next player will play a purple and red card. The anguish and stress that comes from trying to quickly parse what options your cards afford you, and which of the timers needs flipping, all while those timers are constantly draining, is simply delicious. Communication a short and to the point, you can’t have a calm and calculated discussion, detailing who has which cards and how best to approach the puzzle, because time is running out and every time a timer flips, everyone needs to reassess the situations.
At lower player counts, we found Kites to be quite easy. With 5 cards in each player’s hands, we had plenty of options each turn, and could even claim ownership over whole timers. “I’ve got red and blue”, letting the other player know that they can ignore those timers and focus on the remaining timers. With just two players, play feels even faster, as by the time you’ve finished flipping your timers and have drawn your next card, the next player is already halfway through flipping their timers, and the heat is right back onto you.
The final wrinkle in the basic game is the ‘grand finale’, where, when the deck runs out, the white timer can no longer be flipped. Players need to play out their hands to complete the game. This forces players to be aware of the deck running out, and when exactly should they flip that white timer. It’s not a major pain, but it’s one that caused a few ‘losses’ in my plays.
I’m not sure how much staying power Kites has, I imagine once your group figures out the ‘flow’, it’ll move from exciting to just an exercise in flipping timers. But this is where the challenge cards come in. The airplane halts communication for a round, the storm forces one player to flip every timer, and the crossed lines have players give one card to their left and one to their right. These challenge cards inject even more unpredictability and chaos into the game, which is an element of real-time games that I absolutely love. These challenge cards are not necessary to enjoy Kites, but they are a nice addition once you’ve mastered the basic game.
I think it’s clear just how much I enjoyed playing Kites. It’s frantic, a little chaotic, but if you can control your panic and find the flow, then the game just sings. The losses never sting, but the victories will have you cheering and shouting with joy. It’s fast, easy to pick up and play, the rules take 30 seconds to explain, allowing for players to leap in and out at gatherings. Kites feels thrilling and immersive, if a little crazy at times. It’s been a major hit for me, and it’s exactly the kind of game I would take on vacation to bust out at every family gathering.
Beast is a hidden movement game, designed by Aron Midhall, Elon Midhall, and Assar Pettersson, and published by Studio Midhall. As many Kickstarter darlings are, it’s an absolutely gorgeous production. The box art depicts a massive hydra before a lone warrior, weapon drawn. The scene promises an epic encounter with a mystical beast, a foe that needs to be overcome in the depths of the forest. The characters are lovely acrylic standees, and the board is littered with gold highlighted screen printed critter meeples (sheep, boars, and bears). The art on the cards is dark and mysterious, and each beast feels like it has an entire mythos behind them. A fable, passed down in whispers around campfires from generation to generation, which is exactly the feeling you want from this game.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is plodding at best. Beast is all about a hidden movement dance. You’ve got these hunters, dreaming of glory, and a beast, sneaking around like a Predator. In its mind, you’re already dead, you just haven’t realized it yet. But wait, it’s not all excitement and epic clashes. You know that feeling when you’re stuck in traffic, and it’s like the universe is conspiring against your progress? That’s how Beast makes me feel. It’s slower than a molasses, drafting cards and deciding on which top and bottom actions to use takes longer than trying to start a fire with nothing but a stick and string. You saw it work in a movie once, right?
Beast should be simple and straightforward. Players draft a hand of action cards, add them to their hand of personal cards, then, on their turn, play one or two cards and execute the actions on the cards. But Hunters need to confer with each other on what each player can do, and what they think the beast can do, all while be beast player sits by, smirking, or, bored out of their skull waiting for their turn to do anything. Then, when all the hunters have finally executed their turns, it’s finally the beast players turn to make the table wait while they consider every possibility. After every beast turn, the hunters need to re-confer with each other, as each action they take is precious. There’s a lot of time just spent considering everything that you as a player can do, and trying to guess at what your partners and opponents can accomplish on their turns.
The dance between the beast and the hunters is exciting at first. As the beast slinks in the shadows, circling its prey, the hunters take their first tentative steps out of their villages, moving in the direction they think the beast has moved to. Very quickly, it becomes clear that this dance is actually a frustrating game of cat and mouse. Each of the hunters can move one or maybe two steps with each of their cards, while the beast seems to get 2 to 4 movement on average. On the face of it, that doesn’t seem that bad, but at the end of the day, the hunters can move 10ish spaces between them, while the beast player can move like 12 spaces all on their own. Ideally, the hunters are spread out to cover more ground, but this leaves at least one hunter removed from the action, taking an entire day to cross the map only to have the beast slip by them going in the other direction.
I was endlessly frustrated by the hide and seek mechanics. There were scenarios where I had 100% logically deduced where the beast was, and was standing on that same spot, and had attack cards in my hand, but because I didn’t hold a card with the ‘seek’ keyword in my hand, I couldn’t reveal the beast to attack it. In contrast to that, the only thing the Beast needs to do to attack is to play one of those attack cards. Doing so, reveals their location, but to become hidden again, all they have to do is simply move again. It feels unfair for the hunters to require a keyword to find the beast when the beast doesn’t need a keyword to hide again. Coupled with my criticism above where the beast generally has so much more movement options than the players, it makes for a slippery and frustrating experience.
Beast gives both the hunters and the beast player plenty of tools to cut their own path. For every strategy, there’s a counter. For every boon one side gets, there’s a way for the other side to mitigate it. For the beast, it’s not terribly difficult to accrue enough grudge to be fully evolved and have all their skills unlocked by the final night. With all of your skills at your disposal, the beast is exponentially stronger than it was at the start of the game. The hunters, on the other hand, struggle to gain enough grudges to unlock any of their abilities. Add to that, the grudges are used to activate most of the items that are needed to counter the beastly talents. And yes, many of the beastly talents also cost grudges, but the Beast has so many more options to earn grudges over the course of a single day. The opportunity cost for using a grudge for the hunters is significantly higher doing similar things as the beast player.
I found the asymmetry of the beast and the hunters to be odd and frustrating. The beast gets grudges for killing the critters on the board, but the humans don’t get grudges for hitting the beast or killing its summons. If the beast kills one of the players, the beast gets to take one of their cards, and that player has to sit out for the rest of the round, but if the players hit the beast, then hitting the beast is the reward in itself. A lot of “I can do this, but you can’t” when explaining the rules continued to sow discord in my heart.
Speaking of dying, while there isn’t true player elimination in Beast, it’s possible for players to be knocked out of a whole day. In our most recent game, Bigfoot died on the third day, and was forced to just sit, and spectate. Maybe they can make suggestions for what the remaining two hunters should do, but still. Relegated to the sidelines, no agency of their own. Defeated hunters do recover at the dawn of the next day, but when each day takes at least 30 – 45 minutes to play through, that’s a lot of time to wait around with nothing to do.
One time, near the end of a round, I played the last card of my hand, and ended my turn on a town. Then the beast moved two spaces with their last card, ending their turn on my spot, revealing themselves, but with no one with any cards remaining, the round came to an end. As an upgrade, the beast spent their grudges to improve their damage, and then in the following day, the beast (who always gets the first action), used their first action to attack me, and consumed one of their ancient power to increase their attack, dealing a whopping 3 damage to me, knocking me out for the entirety of the final day. Not only did the beast get to steal one of my cards as a reward for killing me, but now the beast had 6 less hunter actions to worry about. I honestly stepped away from the table at that point, as I was done and out for the rest of the game. I had no investment to watch the song and dance of the beast and the remaining two hunters for the next hour. When a game has players disengaged and walking away from the table, that’s trouble.
I understand why all of these aspects exist, and for those who love the game, I fully understand why. For every complaint about a mechanic I have, there’s a good reason for that mechanic to exist. There’s always a strategy that I could pursue to face my struggles, and these problems I have with Beast will probably fade away with experience. I appreciate games that reward repeat plays, but I really struggle when my first impression of a game is so sour. It’s got such potential buried under layers of frustration, an the uneven playing field is rife with leaving first time players with a bad impression. For those who love Beast, I’m so glad you found your joy, but personally, it’s a game that I’m moving on from, and won’t be looking back.
