It’s pretty rare that I learn a game digitally. I find it so much harder to learn a game by watching videos on YouTube then starting a game on a website like Boardgamearena.com or Yucata.de and just seeing how it goes over a couple of days. I end up acting like those old point-and-click adventure games, where I just click anything that’s available to click and hope to stumble onto the answer. Generally, reading the rules gives me a framework of how to play, but I find it quite difficult to conceptualize or strategize until I’ve played a game through at least once.
Vikings is a game that I played a dozen times on Yucata.de before picking up the physical edition. The online implementation is great, but like most of us who are ‘in the board game hobby’, given the choice between playing games in a web browser and playing a game in the table, we’ll take the table every time. And I’m glad I did, Vikings by Michael Kiesling is a gem of a game.
How to Play
To play Vikings, each round 12 tiles are laid out around the central spinning wheel. Any boat tiles are placed at the highest available number and any island tile is placed at the lowest available number. Then 12 Vikings are pulled from the bag and sorted into their colours and placed next to each tile. Blue Vikings go among the lowest number, then yellows, greens, reds, blacks and finally greys Vikings are placed at the highest number. At the beginning of the game you’re given coins depending on the number of players and a single island start tile.
On your turn you need to buy a tile and Viking pair, and place the tile into your tableau. The amount you pay for a tile and Viking combo is dictated by the wheel in the centre of the table, from 11 gold all the way down to 0 gold. You can only take the 0 cost tile if the Viking next to that island is the only one of its colour available.
After buying an island and Viking, you need to place the island into your tableau. If you manage to place the island tile in the same colour row as your Viking, you can place the Viking right onto that piece of land, otherwise your Viking has to sit at the top of the board until a boatswain ferries it onto an empty tile. It’s also important to note that the island tiles come in three varieties, start, middle, and end. If you have a start tile in your tableau, then you can put a middle or end tile against it, but you can’t put two start tiles adjacent to each other.
When someone does manage to take the free tile, the price wheel rotates clockwise until the 0 spot is lined up with the next available Viking, thereby making everything else cheaper. If you choose to buy the most expensive tile available, you’ll also get a special tile that offers some significant benefits.
If the tile you take happens to have an invading boat instead of a piece of island, the Viking defaults to sitting on the beach at the top of your board, and the boat is placed along the top row on your tableau. Any boat along the top of your tableau will negate some of your Vikings in that column, rendering them useless.
When I’m teaching Vikings, I feel a bit like I’m teaching Galaxy Trucker. “These blue Vikings are fishermen, they feed 5 Vikings in your commune. You want as many of these as possible. The yellow Vikings are gold smiths, they earn you 3 gold each. You want as many of these as possible. The red Vikings are nobles, they give you two points per red Viking. You want as many of them as possible!” Every Viking has their role, and the left side of the player board will remind of as to what each one does.
Review
Vikings by Michael Kiesling defies expectations. When you hear Vikings, you’ll think exploration, pillaging, and mayhem. In this box you’ll instead find a fast economic game about fiscal responsibility and real estate management. In fact, the only thing that really makes Vikings feel like a Viking game, is the meeples with the horned helmets.
You have a limited amount of money to spend on getting Vikings and limited ways to generate more gold. You need to deal with Vikings of the wrong colour associated with exactly the tile you need so you’ll need to make do. Sometimes in a round there will only be one or two of the coveted starting tiles, forcing you need to balance picking other Vikings and hoping the price for that one tile drops a bit, but not too low that one of your opponents leaps out and takes before you.
The game comes with a couple optional variants, such as bidding for turn order, and advanced tiles that offer a benefit if you buy the most expensive tile available. I rarely use the bidding for turn order option, but I never play without the advanced tiles. They don’t add much to the rules or complexity, but they offer rewards for doing something unexpected, like buying the most expensive tile on the board. Sometimes the cheaper tiles aren’t that appealing it’s really nice to have a reward for spending a bit of coin on the more expensive tiles.
If you run out of money you can opt to use victory points to make up the difference at a rate of 1 to 1. You are never forced to trade points for gold, but if you can if you want. You better make sure that doing so worth your while, as at the end of the game the conversion back from gold to victory points is 5 gold to 1 point.
Vikings plays well at all player counts, but it does feel weird to play several 4 player games, then switch to a two player game. The number of Vikings and islands don’t change, so you just end up accumulating twice as many as you normally would have. It’s full of decisions and trade-offs that make each game feel different and intresting.
Vikings doesn’t coddle you with a catch up mechanism. If you start falling behind you are liable to stay behind. While there’s no way to directly interact with someone, a keen eye can deny someone a crucial component to their community. Thankfully, Vikings doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. With a bright colour pallet and unique spinner in the middle of the table and a 45-60 minute playtime, it’s easy to see why Vikings has is my most played Michael Keisling game. It’s a solid design and it keeps coming back out for more.
A prototype of Draft & Write Records was provided by the publisher for review purposes
Introduction
A great shame in my life is that I never grew up appreciating music. I lived in a very small town and the extent of my exposure to music were some old country cassettes and a bunch of recorders stuffed into the school’s storage. As a teenager I got my hands a few CD’s, like Sum 41’s All Killer No Filler, Green Day’s American Idiot, and The Killers Hot Fuss. I listened to these 3 CDs on repeat on my Sony Discman, but getting new or varied albums was quite a challenge. The closest town with a ‘music’ store was 4 hours away, and at the time, buying new albums was directly competing with my desire to buy books and video games.
As an adult, living in the world of streaming, I spend most of my time listening to Pokémon Lo-Fi remixes while I work, or to the local alt-rock radio station during my morning commute. Unfortunately, music is just background noise in my life, it’s never the focus.
What I’m trying to say here, is that I have no special affinity for musically themed games. But enough about my music history (or great lack thereof), let’s talk about Draft & Write Records by Inside Up Games!
How to Play
In Draft & Write Records players will embark on a weeks long quest to become the most popular band in all the land, or, the most popular band at your table. Each round of the game is structured after a week. On the first day of the week phase, 5 cards are dealt out to each player. Each player simultaneously selects one of the cards to keep, and passes the rest to their neighbour. All players reveal their card simultaneously, taking the associated action depicted on the card.
Players repeat this three more times, until they’ve played 4 cards total. The fifth card is tossed into a common discard pile, then the weekend arrives. During the weekend, all players evaluate the common goals. If anyone achieved them, they record the score on their sheet, and the goal is discarded. After all goals have been evaluated, the goal line is refreshed, and the game continues with a whole new week.
There are 5 different actions depicted on the cards, each action corresponds to a specific section of your player sheet. The centre is building your band, which has you playing musicians, production staff, and backstage staff. Each band member has a point value, and 4 attributes. You record the points and the attributes in a single section. Should an attribute match with an adjacent band member, you create a harmony, allowing you to cross off a section on the harmony track (which can net you bonus actions and victory points.
The Agenda cards refer to a 4 by 4 grid of symbols in the top right corner. You’ll need 4 symbols in a row or column to unlock the bonuses on both sides of the line. The asset cards allow you to cross off matching icons on the asset section, and you’ll earn the bonuses if you manage to cross off the asset on both sides of the bonus.
The releases and the tours sections of the board aren’t actions represented on cards. The only way you can progress in those spaces is by unlocking the associated bonus peppered throughout the board. If you are ever in a situation where you cannot play a card, or you choose not to play a card, you must take a ‘fail’, which will deliver negative points. Too many fails will end the game for everyone.
The game is over if someone fills their fail track, fills their goal track, or, completely fills their band section. The points are tallied, and the player with the highest score is the winner!
Review
Draft & Write Records is coming to Kickstarter on September 27th. As always with anything that gets produced via a crowdfunding campaign, everything is subject to change.
As I alluded to above, I have no affinity for the theme; music has never been a big part of my life. I’ve made a few feeble attempts at learning some instruments, but it’s not a skill I’ve developed.
In Draft & Write Records players are drafting actions to use to fill out their player board. At first glance the board looks big, colourful, and busy, difficult to intuit how all the sections work together. Learning the game from the rulebook was straightforward and clear. Each section of your player sheet operates independently and the rule book walks through them one at a time.
Every round (or week) starts with 5 cards. On your turn, you pick one card, and pass the rest along. All players reveal their choices simultaneously, and take the action listed on the card they chose. After 4 actions, the 5th card is tossed into a central discard pile, and the goals are evaluated.
Front and centre of the board is the band lineup, featuring a lead singer, 4 musicians, 3 production crew, and 4 backstage staff. Each band member has 4 traits and a point value. If you can arrange your band members in a such a way that the traits alight, you’ll create a harmony, which lets you cross off a matching colour along the bottom of your sheet. This track is worth a fair amount of points, and helps lead to record deals.
Along the right side of the board are two different grids. In the top grid (your band’s agenda) you need to cross off 4 icons in a row to earn the bonuses on either end of the row. On the bottom right is a tablet depicting your bands assets, with a series of bonuses surrounded by icons. If you manage to cross off both the icons surrounding a bonus icon, you earn that bonus.
The joy of the ‘roll and write’ or ‘flip and write’, or now, the ‘draft and write’ genre of games is the ability to earn cascading bonuses. It feels so good when you take your single card, add a musician to your band list, cross off a harmony along the bottom, which gives you a free action in your agenda, which completes a row and a diagonal, gives you a record deal, a tour, and two more harmony dots you can fill in, which can cascade into more bonuses.
Of course, a turn like that can only really happen once per game and requires a lot of set up. Slowly building up your tableau in preparation for this moment can feel painful, but Draft & Write Records is pretty good at doling out little bits of bonuses as you work towards the big combo that will rocket your band into stardom.
It’s important to promote yourself on the radio!
The player deck can be absolutely massive if playing with the full complement of 6 players. You’ll only see 5 cards at a time, and your neighbours can’t affect your game, except for hate-drafting away the exact card you need. Personally, I didn’t feel compelled to scope out my competition’s sheets, or take a card that was of little benefit to me just to keep it out of the hands of my opponent. Most of your game will be spent just looking at your own sheet and trying to maximize your score.
In between each week is a goal evaluation phase. In the centre of the table are 4 goals that all players evaluate to try and earn points. They range from piddly 4 point goals like “Collect 2 piano symbols” all the way up to 24 point diamond goals requiring you hire 6x 1 point crew members. The goals deck is hefty, with 66 different goals in the version I played, which is great for variability and can lead players down lucrative paths they might not have considered before. Many of the goals also offer extra bonuses when they’re achieved, again, potentially triggering cascading bonuses and bringing a smile to my face.
Draft & Write Records feels much bigger and slower to play than many of the other “X and write” games I’ve played in the past, like Railroad Ink, or Cartographers. I enjoy the drafting element as it gives each player a different game to play. Maybe I’ll focus on building out my assets and harmonies more, while another player prioritizes going on tours. I like that our games will be different, and it’s not just giving every player the same choices and seeing who does best with them.
In the end, Draft & Write Records is a fun game to play and achieving the cascading combos triggers a dopamine release that I find incredibly satisfying. If you’re a fan of the “X and write” genre, Draft & Write Records is worth trying, doubly so if you have any affinity for the theme.
Mechanics: Cooperative, Dice Rolling Combat, Variable Player Powers
Players: 1 to 5
A prototype copy of the game was provided for review purposes
How to Play
Familiars and Foes is a 1 to 5 player cooperative boss battling game where you play as an elemental fox familiar on a quest to save the good witches and wizards of Joralee. A game of Familiars and Foes lasts for 4 waves, and pits players against a variety of enemy monsters.
To begin the game, all players chose an asymmetric familiar, and their corresponding spell cards. One will be the basic spells that you can use right from the start of the game, and the other will be the advanced spells that need to be unlocked by completing a variety of basic actions. The back of the rule book has a chart that seeds the board with a number of foes based on your player count, and chosen difficulty level.
To begin a round of Familiars and Foes, players first draw the witch or wizard they’re rescuing. If the element of the sorcerer matches one of the familiars, great! They have access to an extra special power during this wave. If the mage in distress doesn’t have a matching familiar in play, they’re simply discarded.
The foes for the wave are set into their slots, with their health dependent on the number of players at the table. The turn order is set, and the game begins. Players on their turn can either preform a physical attack, cast a spell, or play their artifact.
Physical attacks tables are listed on each player’s sheet, with a varying threshold for successes and failures for each character. One character would hurt themselves if you rolled 6 or under, but would do 4 damage if the die exceeded 16. Another character had easier thresholds, but lower rewards.
Each character has their own set of spells, although the basic spells are all pretty similar. On your turn if you chose to play a spell you simply select which one you’d like to cast, pay the required mana, and roll the die, hoping to earn a success by exceeding the threshold, which is different for each spell. Again, higher risks mean higher rewards. If you manage to land a hit using a basic attack, each other player at the table had the opportunity to pile on, using the Ballyhoo mechanic. They pay a single magic point, then flip a coin. Heads, they deal two damage. Tails, they take one damage. If the Ballyhoo succeeds, the next player can pile on too. The Ballyhoo either continues until all players have piled on, or someone fails the coin flip.
At the beginning of the game, each familiar draws an artifact card that offers a powerful onetime bonus. On your turn, you can choose to use your artifact, but then it’s gone for the rest of the game. Each player also has a special ability that they can use 3 times during the game. Again, once those charges are gone, so is the ability.
Play continues from character to character as dictated by the turn order tracker, until it finally reaches the enemy. All the foes that are still alive at this point roll a die, and act according to their table.
Once all the foes are defeated, players restore their magic points to full health, and proceed with the next wave. Finish 4 waves and you’ve won! If all players have their health points reduced to 0, the Familiars have failed.
Review
I was not prepared for how adorable Familiars and Foes was. This game exudes charm and character. I absolutely adore the art all over everything. The Familiars are cute, and I desperately want their pushes to adorn my shelves, the enemies are charming and clever, and the little artist flourishes left me absolutely charmed. Even the Familiars’ Familiars, the frogs, are adorable. I’ll say it loud and proud right now, I would die for Spike.
The copy I got to play is a prototype copy, and the designers assure me that every component that I had my hands on will be upgraded during the course of their crowdfunding campaign. Everything physical was fine, but I am looking forward to higher quality card stock. The tarot sized cards I got were a little bowed during my first play, which is only slightly disappointing. All the cards sit on the table for the entire game, meaning the bending isn’t a big deal, but it’s a minor annoyance with the physical production.
That being said, I love the large cards. It makes it easy to read the text from across the table, and gives the artist lots of room to display their charming foes. Seriously, Familiars and Foes art direction has absolutely charmed me. The heroes, the villains, everything is a joy to look at.
The gameplay is fast and simple, which is good for a game you plan on playing with your family. On your turn you choose to either do a physical attack, or cast a spell, then roll the die to determine if you were successful or not. In some cases, a low roll would see you suffering self-damage, while high rolls would deal critical hits.
The spells each character can cast are listed on their player sheet, and generally ask players how much risk they’re willing to take on, in return for how much damage they want to deal to the foe. The choices are straightforward and simple. Once you’ve made your choice, you roll the die and let fate decide if you made the right choice or not. There are precious few chances to re-roll a bad result, meaning sometimes the game might be a cakewalk, while other times you’ll find yourself getting crippled by the first Foe.
I’ve often talked about how I like progression in games, how I want to get stronger as the game goes on instead of trying to just survive a series of attritional battles. In this regard, I wish there were ways to earn more artifacts during the gameplay instead of only having one at the beginning. That said, I do enjoy the achievement system that unlocks your stronger spells. It’s also a helpful teaching tool, reducing the number of actions each player needs to consider at the start of the turn, and gives players a reason to try all their basic actions first, before giving them the real juicy attacks. I also appreciate that each witch or wizard you manage to rescue offers a boon to their corresponding familiar, potentially giving you a game-saving benefit.
I’m a fan of the Rougelike genre. Rogue Legacy, Enter the Gungeon, Wizard of Legend, and Slay the Spire are some of my favourite video games. Familiars and Foes has aspects that remind me of those rougelike games. Each time you set the game up, you’ll be in for a different combination of monsters and different artifacts that can drastically change how you will approach the wave. I really enjoy this variability, and I am looking forward to seeing more foes, more artifacts, and more familiars, hopefully in the form of stretch goals or future expansions. I would like to see the asymmetry in the characters expanded on even further, or having different ‘advance spell builds’ available for each Familiar to increase the replayability.
I enjoyed Familiars and Foes more than I expected. The charming art captured my heart and helped build a narrative in my head. The game-play is simplistic; choose an attack and roll a die to see if you hit, but I’m okay with that. I’m sure this would be a hit with my 6-year-old niece, even if she needs an adult to help her manage the game system. The cute art draws her in, the simple rule set doesn’t scare her away, and the pure joy that comes from rolling the die and scoring that critical hit is unparalleled. Familiars and Foes is a great cooperative game to introduce younger members of the family to the joy of board games.
Game Length: Physically, 30 – 45 minutes. On Board Game Arena, 10 minutes
Mechanics: card drafting, tableu building
Release Year: 2007
Designer: Thomas Lehmann
Artist: Martin Hoffmann, Claus Stephan, Mirko Suzuki
Introduction
I like playing Super Smash Brothers, I always have. I’ve played every iteration, and it’s one of the few straight-up fighting games that I actually enjoy (sidebar, I recently borrowed Pokken Tournament from the library only to be reminded how much I don’t like fighting games). My enthusiasm for Smash Bros has led me to exist in a very weird state. I can crush all of my friends, no competition, but I’m not good enough for the competitive scene. The few times I’ve dabbled in tournaments, I’ve gotten eliminated almost immediately. This is the state I find myself with Tom Lehmann’s Race for the Galaxy, I feel like I have an advantage over my friends, simply for having played it over 100 times, but when I approach other enthusiasts, I’m still a beginner, comparatively.
How to Play
Race for the Galaxy is a fast tableau builder. The entire game is managed via cards, with the only cardboard components being score chips. Race for the Galaxy begins with each player getting a starting world and a hand of cards. In your other hand, you’ll have cards depicting each of the actions that are available to you. At the start of the game, each player simultaneously picks one of the action cards and places it face down. Once all players have selected their action, the cards are turned face up.
Now, here’s the trick of the game. Only the actions selected will be available this round, and the action you selected will be taken by everyone else (you’ll get a small benefit for choosing that action). Actions are always taken in the following order
Explore – Draw cards from the deck
Develop – Play development (diamond) cards from your hand, discarding cards equal to it’s cost
Settle – Settle a planet (circle cards) from your hand, discarding cards equal to it’s cost
Trade & Consume – Discard one of the goods on one of your planets to draw cards, then use other planets consume powers, generally discarding a good to earn points or to draw more cards
Produce – Place one card face down on each of your planets that can produce a good. These are used during the Trade & Consume phase.
Once you’ve gone through all the actions that will be taken this round, you pick up your action cards and start again. The game ends when someone has played their 12th card in front of them, or, when the supply of victory points has been exhausted. The player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
To preface this review, I have only experienced the base game of Race for the Galaxy. My opinion is free from any expansions, which may or may not be sacrilege, depending on who you’re talking to.
I don’t often do this, but let’s start with the negatives. First, the art. The art in Race for the Galaxy is reminiscent of those old paperback sci-fi books that used to clutter my shelves, and it can serve as both a high or a low point, depending on your nostalgia. Many cards will look dark, boring, generic, or confusing, offering only a sliver of a story. The Glactic Federation is a yellow dome against a bloe background, and the Trade League is just two faceless people talking. For some, this style will hearken back to a by-gone era of science fiction, but for others, it comes across as dated and unattractive.
The other most common complaint is the heavy use of iconography. Personally, I find the icons incredibly apt at conveying information, but only because I’ve learned the language. Once the icons and card layout clicks with a player, Race for the Galaxy is a joy to play. You can understand what each card in your hand does with just a glance along the left side of the card, allowing you to quickly parse the information. Nothing feels obfuscated once you understand how to read Race for the Galaxy.
The goal of the game is to build an engine that can generate cards that will allow you to place more planets and developments into your tableau. Points are earned passively as you play planets and developments, and further points can be earned by consuming the goods of your planet’s produce. Some games will have a player rushing to get their 12 cards laid down to end the game, hoping their quantity of cards will overcome the quality cards the other players managed to get onto the table. Other games will see a player just consuming and producing ad nauseam until the supply of victory points are exhausted, which also triggers the end of the game. No matter which way you play, once you have your engine set up, it’s fun to see it run and produce a volume of cards and points that feels ludicrous compared to what you could do at the end of the game.
Each round of Race for the Galaxy is straightforward and quick. Once all players have selected just one action card, they’re revealed, and players move through the actions in order together. Any actions that were not picked are not taken, and once the final action is completed, players just pick up their action cards and choose what’s going to happen in the next round. It’s such a simple system, but it creates an amazing amount of tension. You’ll worry and fret over what other players will play, should you play your settle action so you can place a world? But if Bigfoot plays the settle action, you can play your world down anyway, so maybe you should choose to produce. But if Bigfoot doesn’t play Settle, you won’t have any worlds to produce! What to do?!
In a two player game, both players get to choose 2 actions per round, which I find absolutely wonderful. It gives you more control over the game, but still keeps the tension of trying to correctly assess what your opponent will be trying to do on their turn, so you can optimize and get the maximum benefit from their actions.
Race for the Galaxy is such a good tableau/engine builder, that it sours me on other experiences. I have a hard time playing Terraforming Mars, Wingspan, or Ark Nova because I would rather play this. In each of those games, your ability to draw and search for cards is sincerely limited. You’re at the whim of each game’s massive deck to deliver the prerequisites that you’ll need to get your engine going. Race for the Galaxy allows you to both search the deck with great speed, and has very few prerequisites that really require other cards, meaning that you’ll rarely be blaming the deck should you fail to get your engine going.
Just to drive the point home, in my last game of Terraforming Mars, I chose the starting corporation that gives a benefit to playing Jovian cards, as I had one Jovian card in my hand. I figured I’d dial in on that strategy, play the most Jovian cards possible to maximize the benefit from my corporation. Then, I didn’t draw a single Jovian card for the rest of the game. I had a similar issue in Ark Nova, where I played a card that would benefit me for every gorilla tag I played, then proceeded to not see a single card with that tag for the rest of the game. In both those examples, my ability to draw more cards was fairly limited, and I was locked into a two-hour game with an engine that wouldn’t turn over.
In Race for the Galaxy, I can draw 6 cards every turn if I want to, and still benefit from the actions other players take. There’s only 4 types of goods exist, so finding both a planet to produce a certain good, and a card that will consume that good is not difficult. And in the very worst cases, the game ends after 20 minutes. If you’re having a bad time, at least it’ll be over quickly.
Race for the Galaxy is a game that rewards multiple plays. Understanding and internalizing each of the actions and how to flow from building to producing to consuming to settling, and being able to accurately predict what your opponents are going to do and leverage their actions in addition to your own, makes this a fantastic game that pulls me back again and again. I do admit that I have a hard time justifying actually buying a copy of Race for the Galaxy when the version on Board Game Arena is freely available. No need to shuffle, no accidentally misplaying cards, and a plethora of people to play with makes it a fantastic way to play this clever card game. And, it even has tooltips, allowing you to hover over the cards to see exactly what they do, removing the need to learn the iconography up front. If you do learn that iconography, then games can be completed within 10 minutes, making this one of the fastest and deepest experiences on the site.
I adore Race for the Galaxy. It’s a fast, tense, excellent engine building game that offers a pure experience with lots of choices and strategies. Players have room to pivot, should a strategy not pan out, and when you can correctly identify the action your opponents will play and being able to capitalize those actions, the feeling of satisfaction is hard to beat. It’s eminently replayable, as evidenced by my 150 plays of the base game alone. I know some people swear by certain expansions, and maybe one day I’ll get into them. But for now, I’m just having too much fun with the experience that comes in the base box.
Artist: Collateral Damage Studios, Sebastian Koziner, Usanekorin, and Davy Wagnarok
Release Year: 2021
Mechanics: Pattern Matching, Push Your Luck
Players: 1-4
Introduction
I’ve been playing hobby board games since about 2015. I started recording my game-plays around 2018, and in the 4 years since I started logging, I’ve played 399 different games, and recorded 1,747 total plays. I recall when I first started playing games, every new game was exciting and amazing and would leave me frothing at the mouth wanting more. I voraciously consumed new games, and dove into the deep end to discover the world of hobby board games. At some point, something changed inside me. I lost the childlike glee and excitement that came with every new game. I stopped being wowed by each gimmick, as I had seen them all before. Sure, new games would mix mechanics in cool and interesting ways, but it wasn’t something wholly new. I still absolutely love playing new games, but it’s different now; I’m slightly jaded and worn. This is probably why I’m so excited that Bullet❤️ is now in my life.
How to play
Bullet❤️ is a puzzle-y, push your luck, pattern matching game for 1 – 4 players, designed by Joshua Van Laningham and published by Level 99 Games.
In Bullet❤️ each player takes control of one of the 8 very asymmetric heroines and tries to outlast their opponents. The game revolves around pulling tokens (called bullets) from your bag, placing them into your player board, and manipulating them to match patterns on your cards, so you can clear them from your board, and send them along to your opponent. The push-your-luck aspect comes into play as you pull bullets from your bag. Each bullet has a colour and a number, the colour indicates which column the bullet goes into, and the number indicates the number of empty spaces down it will go, skipping over any full spots. Should the bullet hit the very bottom row, BANG! You’re hit. Lose all your life and you’re out. The last player standing wins.
This is the setup for the solo game, but the multiplayer is basically this for each player.
Each round starts with a 3-minute timer. While the timer is running, players can draw bullets from their bag and place them on their board, manipulate the bullets by using their character specific powers (which cost action points or AP), and can clear the bullets off their board by using their pattern cards. When the timer ends, if players still have bullets in their bag, they must draw the tokens and place them on their board, no longer able to use their pattern cards or special actions.
Each round 4 special ability tiles will be laid out, these tiles will give you a small power, such as swapping two bullet locations, or allowing you to draw a new pattern, or just giving you one action point. As players empty their bag and declare themselves done, they get to take one of those tiles. Once everyone has finished, players take bullets from the centre bag equal to the current round’s intensity, and any bullets they received from their opponents and put them all into their bag, and the whole thing starts over again until only one heroine rises above the rest.
Review
A little over a year ago, I wrote about Bullet❤️and my experience playing primarily solo and on Tabletop Simulator. In this post, I’m going to focus on the multiplayer game.
I really didn’t think it would take this long to get Bullet❤️ into my hands, and in the ensuing year there’s been another core set published, called Bullet⭐ that contains 8 new characters that you can combine with the first set. Other than the new characters, Bullet⭐ is identical to Bullet❤️. There is also an expansion, Bullet🍊 that adds 4 more characters from the Orange_Juice series of games. It makes me quite happy to see Level 99 games supporting this product by releasing more and more characters.
In Bullet❤️ each character is unique, forcing you to approach the puzzle of the game from a new perspective every time you swap characters. I really enjoy the variability and discovery that comes from pulling a new character. Young-Ja Kim focuses on pushing the bullets off the edges of her board, while Adelheid Beckenbauer can flip bullets over to make them act as any colour. Senka Kasun has two crosshair tokens that sit on her board, and each of her cards will trigger on both of the cross-hairs simultaneously, and Ling-Ling Xiao has you adding up the numbers of the bullets in her patterns and the sum will dictate how many bullets you can clear and from where. Exploring these characters and discovering their quirks is a large part of what excites me every time I open the box.
By the time I got some friends around the table to play Bullet❤️ with me, I had already clocked in 40 plays of the solo mode. I knew I loved the game, and I had spoken really highly of it before they all came over to play. My expectations were high, I was very excited to share this experience with my friends.
The way you play the game in solo vs multiplayer is very similar, you pull bullets from your current, place them into your sight, and use your powers to manipulate the bullets in your sight and use the cards to clear them from your board. Instead of sending bullets to a boss, you’ll just pass them to your left, placing them in your opponents ‘incoming’. This gameplay is exciting and emotional, you need to quickly calculate risks when pulling bullets from the bag hoping against hope that there isn’t a level 4 pink bullet with your name on it.
The big difference between the Boss mode and multiplayer mode is the presence of a 3-minute round timer. Each round, the timer is sent, and play goes as per normal. Once that 3-minute timer goes off, all players are to stop using their actions and patterns. If a player still has bullets in their current, they’re to just continue pulling their bullets from their bag until the bag is empty.
I’ve tried playing both with and without the timer, and I have to say, the timer is necessary. Without it, one player can grind to a halt as they assess and reassess their board, struggling to commit to the risk of taking another bullet tile, or coming to grips of a slightly inefficient move. The timer adds tension, and on some level, forces players to make mistakes.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math
Gameplay encouraging mistakes isn’t a bad thing. It creates interesting situations. Kind of like when playing Tetris, getting the perfect block every time is boring, but when a mistake happens, you now have a short term goal of fixing that mistake while still trying to survive the larger game. Mistakes also give players something to work towards, knowing where you went wrong and striving to do better next time is a great way to build replayability.
One thing I didn’t expect was just how little player interaction is in Bullet❤️. Other than sending your cleared bullets to your neighbour, and grabbing one of the available extra benefits at the end of the round, you almost don’t even notice the other players at the table. During the 3-minute round you are so focused on pulling your bullets and arrange things in your current and trying to clear everything so quickly, that when the round ends, it feels like you’re coming up for air. Only at that moment do finally look around at your opponents to see what they are doing, and remark on how many bullets one player managed to clear, then just set up for the next round. During the actual gameplay, it feels isolating. Each player is just doing their own thing and trying to be the last one standing when the dust settles
This is fairly disappointing, it begs the question, why play together if we’re not ‘playing together’? It also makes it difficult for new players to ask questions, or for other players to catch rule mistakes. Just to drive a final nail into the coffin, when players are eliminated, they have to wait for everyone else to finish.
Thankfully, Bullet❤️ is a fast game. Games are on average somewhere between 5 and 7 rounds total, with most players starting to get eliminated around round 4. Another benefit to the 3-minute timer, when a player is eliminated, they aren’t sitting on the sidelines for very long. For some, player elimination is a cardinal sin, but considering the game only lasts for 20 minutes, it’s palatable.
As I said before, I absolutely love the puzzle of Bullet❤️. I enjoy the push-your-luck aspect of pulling bullets from your bag and slotting them into your current. I like the cerebral challenge of moving the bullets in the most efficient way to take full advantage of your pattern. And I really enjoy, at the end of a round, seeing the huge pile of tokens I’m sending to my friend. That said, the solo mode turns the puzzle up a notch by giving you a boss pattern you need to complete lest bad things happen in-between rounds. The puzzle aspect is the part that I enjoy the most, making the solo mode the definitive way for me to play
I’ve remarked earlier about how new games haven’t been exciting me lately. How all new games feel like iterative changes on previous games, and how none have been leaving a lasting impression. Bullet❤️ has left an impression, it has a spark that lit a fire in my soul. It’s the first game I’ve rated a 10 on BGG since 2016. I have so much fun with Bullet❤️ and I continue to come back to it. With it’s incredibly fast playing and satisfying gameplay, it’s already the board game that I have the most plays logged (although 10 of those plays were me as Muriel losing to 3 – That Which Points over and over again. What an incredibly difficult boss!). I will never turn down a game of Bullet❤️, and I’ll continue to sing its praises, even if the lack of player interaction left me slightly disappointed after my multiplayer plays.
Viticulture has the privilege of being a top 10 game for one of my most frequent gaming partners (698 individual plays recorded with this person), so when his birthday rolled around this year, we had the opportunity to surprise him with a new expansion to one of his favourite games and pick up the Wine Crate storage solution all at the same time, we just couldn’t say no.
We knew precious little of the expansion, other than it turns the classic Viticulture gameplay into a cooperative experience, which is intriguing in it’s own right.
How to Play
For the purposes of this section, I’ll assume you already know how to play the base game of Viticulture, and it’s worth saying that you’ll need to have the base game to play with this expansion. Viticulture World changes a lot around, but leaves the core of the game intact. You’re still placing your workers on actions spaces to harvest grapes, turning those grapes into wine, and fulfilling wine orders. You’re still building structures on your farm to allow you to access higher quality grapes, store higher quality wines, and collecting and playing visitor cards.
Viticulture World turns Viticulture on it’s head by making the game cooperative (duh, it’s right in the title of the expansion). This means every player needs to earn 25 victory points by the end of the 6th year, and collectively earn 10 influence points. The spaces on the Viticulture World board have been tweaked slightly, and don’t offer rewards simply for being the first person to take a specific action. Instead, there’s only 1 worker spot per action space (or 2 spots if you have 4 – 6 players). During the summer season you can put a worker into the develop action, which will either put an oval tile over the worker placement section of an action spot, allowing any number of workers to take that action and offer a small benefit, or, take a rectangular tile and massively increase the ability of a specific action.
Another change is that all players start the game with 5 workers. Two summer workers with yellow hats, two winter workers with blue hats, and a single grande worker. During the winter season you can spend money to train your workers, popping off their caps which allows them to be placed in either season. You aren’t able to gain any more workers beyond this initial 5 however, but having 5 workers right from the start helps speed up the early parts of the game.
The influence points are tracked along the bottom of the board, and can be bought during the winter for an eye-watering 8 coins each. Each player can also earn one influence point by earning 30 points during the game. Most of the influence points will come from the event cards. Each year a new event is revealed, which may offer a boon or bane, and will generally offer an influence point if a certain threshold is reached during the year.
At the end of the 6th year, if all players have earned 25 victory points and 10 influence points, they win! If not, better luck next time.
All the cool kids have hats now
Review
Viticulture World has me mulling over the definition of Cooperation vs. Collaboration. In cooperative games, all the players are working towards a shared goal. Cooperative games like Burgle Bros has all players trying to break open the 3 safes. Pandemic has all players trying to cure all 4 diseases, and Robinson Crusoe has all players just trying to survive the onslaught of the elements. In all of these games, it doesn’t matter who achieves the objective, just that the objective is achieved. The Rook in Burgle Bros can crack all 3 safes, while The Raven distracts the guard for the whole game. The Medic in Pandemic doesn’t need to discover a single cure, as long as all the cures are discovered before one of the loss objectives are realized.
Viticulture World has every player trying to build their own little farm and achieve the same 25 victory points. There’s little other players can do to throw points at a failing player, other than trading them the resources they need and ensuring they stay out of that player’s way. As I said in my previous Viticulture review, this is an action efficiency game, the best players can hope to do is help that player be efficient with their actions. Viticulture World doesn’t feel like those other cooperative games, but feels like a collaboration. Each player is building their own little farm and trying to earn the same 25 victory points. It doesn’t matter if Bigfoot massively exceeds that threshold if Bear doesn’t reach it at all.
By making the game collaborative, Viticulture World feels different from all those cooperative games. Suddenly I can’t really specialize myself or focus on one aspect of the puzzle. I need to be earning those victory points and not fall behind. I’m lucky in that my regular gaming group mesh super well together. There are no egos, there’s no one demanding that they’re the player who ‘gets the glory’ and we’re all willing to talk and discuss actions we should each do. At the same time, we all trust each other to make the right choices that will lead us to victory.
I’ve read a few accounts of people calling Viticulture World super hard; playing 8 times and only winning the introductory scenario. I can see the game being easier with 4 and more players, considering the number of action spots available on the board doubles. All the players are drawing cards, and the opportunities to trade between each other are plentiful and important. Adding more players, or removing one, would clog up the action spots. At the same time, a player who gets an early lead in points can use some of their later actions to earn influence points while the rest of the group catches up. 4 players seems to be a sweet-spot for this game.
Viticulture World comes with 8 scenarios. Each scenario introduces different mechanics into the game, and each scenario contains 8 or so event cards that can be shuffled to randomize the order they come out in. These event cards are what turn Viticulture World from a puzzle that can be solved, to a game that is played with. Suddenly, your perfect plan of planting grapes is scrapped because a nasty case of phylloxera has made planting grapes more expensive than you can afford. The need to pivot creates interesting decision moments and keeps players from simply doing the same thing over and over again. Some scenarios will nudge players down strategies they may never have considered. In one of my games, I fulfilled only a single wine order (for 6 points). My other 19 points all came from visitor cards, buildings, trading resources, and giving tours. In that particular game, I was far and away the leader in points! Something I never would have expected to work.
My biggest complaint about the base Viticulture game is that luck can play such a strong role in how you preform. If I use an action to draw grape cards, but both cards require a structure I don’t have, I can either spend actions raising money and building the necessary structures to plant those grapes, or I can try to draw again, hoping against hope that I happen to draw the cards that will fit my farm. By turning the game cooperative, that complaint is thrown out the window. If I draw grape cards that I just can’t use, I can coordinate with one of my fellow players and hand off these grape cards to someone who can plant them, and vice versa. Now, there is still luck involved, a game can be trivial or incredibly difficult depending on the order the progress tokens come out. We had one game where the year’s event gave everyone a discount on building structures, and the innovation tile for building structures came out, allowing everyone to build much more structures early in the game than is usually possible. This saved us countless turns and a boatload of money, allowing us to sail to victory.
I did have one experience where I had managed to earn 20 points within the first 4 years of the game. With two whole rounds to go, and knowing that I would get enough points from other players actions, we chose as a group for me to give tours to generate money, then buy the last four influence points we needed. By the end of the game, one player managed to get 30 victory points, earning us an influence point, and we earned another influence point from the final year’s event card, making my whole last year pretty pointless. It begs the question, if you finish your objective early, what should you do? Pass early to stay out of the way? That’s neither interesting nor engaging.
My goals are to train workers and build buildings. Who says a vineyard needs to produce wine?
Luckily, when it comes to cooperative games, I feel invested in other players turns. I can engage in discussion with my friends as we come up with a plan to get the struggling farmer over the 25 point threshold. It doesn’t matter to me that MY game was finished an hour before everyone else, I derive joy from sitting around the table with my friends and coming up with plans to solve the puzzle before us. It also gives me ample opportunity to heckle anyone who happens to have less victory points than I do, which is one of my favourite things about board games.
I quite enjoyed the competitive game, but I really love this cooperative expansion. It actually feels weird to call this an expansion, as this experience elicits a very different feeling from the base Viticulture game. I like the different mechanics hidden in each of the scenarios, giving each game a unique feel. Viticulture is a great game on its own, and adding in this expansion increases the ways you can engage with this excellent system. With this expansion, Viticulture now fills a rare niche of a great Euro game that can be played from 1 to 6 players, competitively and cooperatively. Viticulture World is a high recommendation from me, especially if you already own the base game.
