Bullet♥︎ exploded into into my life from seemingly nowhere and consumed my soul for nearly 3 weeks. I was drawn in by the promise of fast paced shoot-em-up (SHMUP) action and a gorgeous anime aesthetic. What I got instead was a compelling puzzle game where the player manipulates sliding discs to match patterns while learning how to best use each heroine’s abilities to defeat the multitude of bosses.
Adelheid, one of the eight playable heroines
Bullet♥︎ is a game that offers numerous play modes. You can play the head-to-head mode, which is designed for multiple players to battle to the death; the score attack mode that lets players see how long they can survive when their neighbours aren’t trying to kill them; or you can explore the co-op/solo option, the boss battle mode. Bullet♥︎ is designed so that players learn the head-to-head mode rules first, as that forms the foundation for the rest of the play styles.Bullet♥︎’s head-to-head mode begins with a real-time 3 minute timer dictating when a round ends. During each round players put a certain number of discs (called bullets) into their own bags and start the timer. As soon as the timer starts ticking, they’re free to furiously pull bullets out of their bags, one at a time, and place them on their board (players’ boards are referred to as their ‘sight’) according to the colour and number depicted on the bullet.
Each bullet colour has its own lane, and the number on the disc tells you how many spaces down your board the bullet must be placed, skipping over any spots that already have a bullet occupying them. Players can be as quick or slow as they want when pulling bullets out of their bag, and can spend energy freely to use their heroine’s skills to manipulate the bullets that are already in their sight. The goal is to utilize pattern cards to remove bullets from their board and send them off to an opponent. However, if the timer runs out and they still have bullets remaining in their bag, the bullets must be drawn and placed in the sight with no opportunity to manipulate or clear them. If a bullet ever hits the bottom row of the sight, the player loses 1 hit point, and if they run out of hit points, they’re out of the game.
Three of Mariel’s patterns. Each character has up to 10 different patterns.
At the end of a round, every bullet players have managed to clear from their sights gets put into the bag of the player to their left. As as the rounds proceed, more and more bullets get added to everyone’s bag from the supply. The game continues until there is only one player left standing. While this is supposed to feel like a victory, proving your superiority over your friends, in reality it feels like the winner is just the person who was able to tread water the longest. The head-to-head mode helped me to learn the fundamental rules of Bullet♥︎, but I’ve spend the vast majority of my time with this game in the solo or co-op mode, the boss battle!
The Intensity track adds bullets to every players bag at the start of each round
Every character in Bullet♥︎ has a boss mode that presents you with a wildly different challenge to overcome. The boss battle mode plays very similarly to the head-to-head mode, except all of the bullets coming into your bag are dictated by the current level of the boss, and how far you’ve broken down their shields. As you continue to send bullets and break the boss’ shields, the number of bullets that will get added to your bag each turn usually increases.
In addition to the multitude of bullets that you have to deal with, the boss has a pattern of their own that you must match in the end of the round, or suffer their penalty. In the case of Adelheid, your bullets are turned upside-down, which can make them difficult to use in your patterns. If you happen to break one of Adelheid’s shields while you have face-down bullets, the face-down bullets will automatically hit you.
Adelheid, how could you turn against us? We trusted you!
Each character and boss is wildly asymmetric in nature, to a degree that I didn’t think was possible when I first learned the Bullet♥︎ system. Playing different characters can feel like an entirely different game because the ways they interact with their boards is so diverse. To compound on that, every boss presents you with a fully different challenge, which drastically increases the replayability. Some bosses are a cakewalk to defeat when using a specific character, but feel completely insurmountable when using the other characters. It’s incredibly fun to explore each of the characters and change your strategies depending how they play off each of the bosses.
The boss battle mode does away with the real time aspect. This allows you to slow down and puzzle out exactly how you want to approach each wave of bullets as they enter your sight. I understand why you wouldn’t want to use a timer during this mode, considering the additional cognitive load of running the AI and ensuring that you’re not going to trigger an effect that will deal 4 damage to you in a single move. However, it does remove the action-packed, fasted paced nature the game promised to emulate.
I love Bullet♥︎, and whole-heartedly recommend playing it. I’ll be the first to admit my biases; I love the anime asthetic, I’m an avid gamer (even if SHMUPs aren’t my genre of choice), and I love puzzle games. Bullet♥︎ checks each one of those boxes. The publisher, Level 99 Games, has also released a soundtrack of 3 minute long character themes that you can listen to via Spotify while you play the game, which is a wonderful addition to the experience.
One of the major downsides of me playing Bullet♥︎ 40+ times over the last month is that when I return to in-person gaming and I introduce my friends to this game, I’m sure I’ll wipe the floor with them. There isn’t anything to assist new players against veterans, other than making the veteran use a character they’re unfamiliar with, but who knows if even that will be enough slow me down. I did have some success when introducing this game to a new player by playing 3 co-op rounds of the boss battle mode first, and then moving into the head-to-head battle. This way the other player has SOME familiarity with the system. Still, it’s hard to close the gulf separating our experience levels when I have dozens of plays under my belt.
The entirety of my experience with this game has been via Tabletop Simulator, which also gave me access to Bullet🍊, a 4 character expansion to the game, based off Orange_Juice games (Sora, Flying Red Barrel,SUGURI, and QP Shooting – Dangerous!!). This expansion adds even more asymmetric heroines and bosses to face off against, further expanding the matrix of play options available, and offering even more different ways to interact with this system.
While it does feel weird to recommend a physical product while having never put my own hands on it, the digital implementation allowed me to fall in love with the challenge presented within the box. As soon as this game lands in my FLGS, I know I’ll be picking it up.
3 – That Which Points was a tough nut to crack. Oh my elation when I finally knocked her ass to the curb
All above images ofBullet♥︎are screenshots of the Tabletop Simulator mod.
Welcome to part two in my Top 100 games series, going through the next 10 games in my list! I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes time to pick a game, the games listed here aren’t necessarily at the forefront of my mind (almost as if there were at least 80 other games ahead of them), but I can tell you that if any of these games get suggested, I am down to play and know that I’ll have a great time doing so.
90 – Colt Express
Colt Express designed by Christophe Raimbault is a hand management, action programming game about being the best thief amongst a colourful cast of scoundrels. In Colt Express everyone plays cards one at a time that represent the actions they will perform and the order they will be performed. Each round is dictated by a round-card that tells all players how many actions can be queued up, and whether those actions are public or secret. If the actions are public, the card is placed face-up, while secret actions are denoted by face-down cards.
Your goal is to accrue the most wealth by scooping it up from the floor, shooting your opponents, and swinging fists in hopes to make people drop their hastily gathered loot. Other actions include shooting at your opponents (or getting shot by stray bullets), leaping up and down the train cars, and controlling the Marshall, who also shoots at anyone who gets too close.
What makes Colt Express fun is the chaos that ensues from needing to pre-plan and program all of your moves for the round, then having something unexpected throw all of your hopes and desires out the damn window. The whole table hoots with laughter they watch characters bumble about the train. You will hold your head in your hands with disbelief as your character moves unexpectedly to an empty train car, then punches the air, tries to pick up loot that isn’t there, and finally shoots their gun at nothing.
Broom Service by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister is a pick up and deliver game about witches delivering potions. In Broom Service, everyone has a handful of cards that dictate the actions that are available to them. Each card has a stronger “Brave” action and a weaker “Cowardly” action. The actions on a card are usually very similar, but the brave action is much stronger.
So why would anyone ever choose the cowardly action? Excellent question reader! At the beginning of a round, each player picks 4 of their 10 cards and that forms their ‘hand’. The first player will play one of their action cards and choose to play either the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Then, every other player in turn order will either pass, or play the same action card from their hand and also choose to play the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Anyone who chooses the cowardly action can simply perform that weaker action. Any players who chose to be brave need to wait until everyone has had a chance to play or pass. If any subsequent players choose to be brave, then all previous brave players don’t get to do anything for this action!
The tension of desiring to do the brave action, but fearing the following players snatching it away from you is genius. I love the theme of witches trying to deliver their potions around the world, and the art evokes memories of classic fairytale story books.
88 – Seasons
I’ve often tried to sell Seasons to my friends as a light version of Magic: The Gathering. In Seasons you play as sorcerers competing in the legendary tournament of 12 seasons with the winner being crowned archmage of the kingdom of Xidit. The game begins with a draft phase, where you swap hands with your opponent picking a card to keep and passing the rest until you have 9 cards in your hand. You then must separate those 9 cards into 3 stacks of 3. You’ll draw these cards into your hand at the start of each year.
On every turn, the die that correspond with the current season are rolled and each player gets to take one into their play area, gaining the benefits shown on the face. The remaining die progresses the time track forward, perhaps hurtling you into a new season.
I’ll be upfront; while I’ve played this game 16 times, every single play has been on Board Game Arena. The system takes care of all the bookkeeping like tracking your energy intake, your tableau limits, and your crystal counts. I could see how playing this game on the table would be a little onerous, but damn is this game worth playing, and worth playing repeatedly. The art is cute and charming, and players are constantly forced to make decisions on how best to play their cards. Each season has their own set of dice that dictate the types and amount of resources that will be available to players. for example, If the game is currently in the summer season, water energy may be in short supply, but fire will be plentiful. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the luck and restrictions, but they are not without their own penalties.
Seasons is best played with 2 players, and only gets better and better as you and your opponent reply it, learning how best to manipulate the system to amass the most crystals, and claim your crown as Archduke.
87 – Underwater Cities
Underwater Cities by Vladimir Suchy takes players into the depths of the ocean and tasks them with creating the best underwater metropolis possible. Kind of. The theme here has a tendency to melt away as your brain spins, trying to maximize your actions to maximize your productions and end game victory points.
UnderwaterCities utilizes a unique worker placement system that uses cards from the players hands. On your turn you can take any of the open colour-coded actions along the edge of the game board. At the same time you play a card from your hand. If the colour of the action and the card match, you can do both actions. If they don’t, you only get to do the action on the board.
This game is an exercise in loss aversion. I’ve found myself delaying taking a critical action simply because I didn’t have a properly coloured card to play along side it and refused to do something that felt inefficient. Underwater Cities also has an excellent arc to its gameplay, with the first few rounds making players feel starved for resources, then growing their engines until suddenly you find yourself placing several costly building on a single turn.
I recall when this game was released a few people compared it to extremely highly rated (by other people) Terraforming Mars. Personally, I don’t see the comparison, Underwater Cities is much more complex (and the better game in my opinion), but the games play significantly differently and don’t evoke the same feelings in players.
Underwater Cities is available to play on Yucata.de
86 – Calico
Calico by Kevin Russ is a tile placement game about matching patterns and colours to satisfy the whims and desires of cats. Each player takes turns placing a tile from their hand, then pulling one from an offer. Each player has their own board with 3 objectives that can be satisfied by patterns, colours, or both. You also get additional points if you can connect three tiles of the same colour you also get a button that’s worth points. Everyone knows kittens love quilts with buttons
Don’t be fooled by Calico’s adorable aesthetic. The actual game contains an intense cerebral workout. You only have two tiles in your hand and 3 in the supply that you can take from to refill your hand after you place one tile. Within these limitations, you’re tasked with trying to place tiles that contain 6 different patterns and 6 different colours in ways that connect like patterns and colours, while also satisfying the objectives on the board which require multiple different sets of colours and patterns. It does not take long before everyone at the table has their head in their hands and the only thing keeping the table from being flipped is the adorable kitten artwork dotting this game.
85 – Automobiles
Automobiles by David Short is one of my favourite racing games (being so far down the list is pretty telling on how I feel about racing games in general (But if you break it down, aren’t all games a race in the end? (No, shut up))).
I’ve written in depth about Automobiles before, so I won’t rehash words I’ve already written. For those who don’t know, Automobiles begins with two trays of cubes. One tray hold white, black, and various shades of grey cubes, representing the various gears of your car, which correspond to spots on the game board. The coloured cubes have special abilities that are set at the beginning of the game when you draw a card for each colour (the game has 4 cards of each colour, offering a wide variety of powers to choose from). From those trays of cubes each player seeds their own bag with a standard set of white and grey cubes, and a chosen selection of coloured cubes. Then they’re off to the races!
There aren’t a lot of bag building games, and theoretically, this could also work as a deck builder; the bag and cubes don’t do anything that cards couldn’t do also. Having the bag of cubes click and clatter as your swish your knuckles around, searching for a cube is satisfying. When you and your opponents are pulling around the final turn and you desperately need a specific cube THAT YOU KNOW YOU HAVE IN THE BAG SOMEWHERE really gets your heart pounding in your chest.
Also, it’s fun to make the vroom noises with your mouth as you move your little car around the track. Automobiles is available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata.
84 – When I Dream
I love when a party game makes me question if my friends are insane or not. When I Dream by Chris Darsaklis has one player close their eyes and everyone else offer one word clues to try and lead them toward a word as dictated by a card. The guesser gets one guess, then the word card gets moved to either the correct or incorrect pile, then the game presses on with a new word card drawn.
After a couple of minutes the guesser is then asked to recount their dream, trying to name all the elements they can remember. If they’re able to name all the words that were in the ‘correct’ pile, they get a bonus two points.
What makes this game excellent is each of the players also have a role. Some are encouraged to try to get as many words correct as possible, while others are trying to lead the guesser astray. Others yet are trying to achieve a balance between the correct and incorrect cards. The inclusion of asking the guesser to recount their dream is a fun exercise that looks easy until you find yourself in the hot seat and the only word you can remember for the life of you is “spaghetti”.
83 – Evolution
Evolution, designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, is a hand management game about survival of the fittest. In Evolution you are tasked with growing creatures’ populations and body sizes, and assigning traits that will help them not only survive, but thrive.
The gameplay loop begins with a bunch of small herbivores, happily eating from a well stocked feeding hole. As a turn or two passes, the herbivores grow larger and get more efficient at eating. Eventually one creature gets a taste for blood and turns into a carnivore, feasting upon its neighbours. Very quickly defenses are raised; some animals learn to climb, other have defensive herding, and other develop a hard shell.
Evolution Is a brilliant game that has each player double guessing what their neighbours will do. With every creature you control having access to different traits, and some traits working off neighbouring creatures, you can have fun building an impenetrable wall, or you can have fun trying to tear down the other players’ walls. Only the fittest will survive.
82 – Everdell
Everdell is so hot right now. Released in 2018 and with 3 successful Kickstarters funding a myriad of expansions, Everdell has climbed the Boardgamegeek ranking and at the time of writing this, sits as the 31st best board game of all time.
Everdell is a light worker placement tableau building game set in a fantasy forest. As you play your workers and bring cards into your tableau, you’ll slowly start to see an engine form. It’s easy to play, has absolutely gorgeous artwork, and a family friendly andromorphic animal theme. It’s easy enough to play with your family, while maintaining enough complexity to keep adults involved. I don’t really want to use the term “gateway game”, but this gorgeous game is a perfect ambassador to show people how beautiful and interesting board games can be.
I’ve enjoyed my plays of this game a lot, and if the opportunity to play it more arose, I have no doubts that Everdell could climb higher in my rankings. As of this moment, it has settled at #82.
81 – Century: Spice Road
It seems for every game that has new and interesting mechanics, another one is just about trading cubes for other cubes to trade into points. Century: Spice Road is in the latter, but does so in a fast and satisfying way. In Century: Spice Road you take action cards into your hand, then play the cards to manipulate your cubes. Some cards will simply gain you more cubes, others will let you trade in specific recipes, while other others will allow you to upgrade some cubes higher along the value chain. The other action you can take is to sell a specific combination of spice cubes to acquire a point card, which are necessary to win the game.
Century: Spice Road does restrict players to only being able to hold 10 cubes at a time, so you feel an ebb and flow of resources as you build your wealth, then drain your coffers to nab a particularly high scoring card. The game often begins with people taking card after card from the row, but soon enough each player should have a small engine they can exploit to increase the number and value of their spice cubes until, finally, one person is labeled “The Spiciest Trader”
The Century series of games have the added benefit of being able to be combined with the other games in the series to enhance each other. I’ve played each of the games in the Century series, and while each one stands on it’s own as a good game, I firmly believe that Century: Spice Road stands taller than the rest.
When asked about my hobbies, one of the first activities that I choose as the activity to define myself is that I’m an avid reader. This is why in my home my bookshelves have 9 compartments dedicated to books and only 3 to board games. I’ve always been a voracious reader, going back to my elementary school days. I would get irrationally excited when the Scholastic Book Club pamphlets would come out and I would excitedly circle all the books that I wanted (Come to think of it, it would have been less work to cross off the books I didn’t want). Unfortunately I grew up in a very small town in northern Manitoba, which meant that the newest books in the libraries were on average a decade old. I was also the child of a single mother who was raising three kids and did not have a lot of room in the household budget for brand new books.
Regardless, I spent the vast majority of my free time in the school library, reading through most of the fiction section. It’s there that I got to experience some fantastic stories that I would have otherwise passed on. I will never forget pulling a unassuming brown covered book off the shelf, and reading Lamb by Christopher Moore for the first time, not knowing what a wild ride I was in for.
I was incredibly lucky to have some great teachers who invested in my love of reading. My IT teacher introduced me to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels with Guards Guards!, and I now have an entire shelf dedicated to Pratchett. Another teacher introduced me to his personal Dragonlance Chronicles collection, thereby ensuring I would never get a date throughout my high school career.
When it comes to my board game preferences, I absolutely have a proclivity toward deck building games. There’s something about the mechanic of building a deck of cards over the course of a game that just makes me smile. I love starting with a small pool of cards and adding cards one at a time, while culling cards that don’t fit my vision, until the result is a deck that’s finely tuned, completely unrecognizable from the deck I started out with, and ready to destroy my opponents.
Paperback marries my two loves, and also tickles the fancy of the woman I married. A deck builder with a book theme, every card in your deck is a letter and to get points and currency, you need to use your letters to make words which allows you to buy more powerful letters to make bigger words! The catch is that in order to gain victory points, you need to buy wild cards that award you no currency. You must balance buying cards that make your deck more powerful and cards that will win you the game.
I recall Paperback being pitched to me as a “Scrabble, but deck building,” which sparked my curiosity and intrigue just right. You see, when my wife and I first started dating, we were long distance. We would spend hours on Skype playing Scrabble online, and listening to a playlist that we created together. Scrabble became a pretty integral part of our relationship early on, so hearing about a game promising to mix that with the deck builder genre using a theme about writing books made me wonder… Was Paperback designed directly for me?
How Paperback Plays
Paperback plays like most other deckbuilding games. You begin the game with a deck of 10 cards and draw 5 cards per turn. Over time you’ll buy cards to put into your discard, and if you ever need to draw cards but your deck is empty, just shuffle the discard to form your new deck.
Each card has a letter, a special ability, and a value, letting you know how many ‘cents’ you’ll earn if you include that letter in your word. Each turn you can play the cards from your hand to form a word. You don’t have to use all the cards in your hand, but any that go unused will end up in the discard pile. Once your word is formed (assuming no one calls you out for trying to pass off Realy as a proper word), you add up the cents earned from each letter, then purchase cards from the card row to add to your discard. All the cards from your word and your hand go into your discard pile, and you draw a new hand for the following turn.
The letters you can buy from the card row increase in cost as well as in value. You’ll soon find yourself buying an M that gives you 3 cents when you play it, or an R that lets you draw extra cards next turn, or an S that gives you extra cents when it’s the last card in the word. Very quickly you’ll find yourself within reach of the the 7, 8, and 9 cent cards that were impossible to obtain when the game first began.
The other type of card that you can purchase is wild cards. These cards do not give you any cents when they’re a part of your word, but being wild, they’re very useful to have in your hand, offering necessary flexibility. While these cards don’t offer much value during the game, every wild card is worth victory points at the end of the game. Each game has a turning point; usually around 75% of the way through a game your deck has enough really good cards that you don’t feel the need to add any more letter cards, and you can start focusing on those wild cards. In our experience, once one person starts buying wilds, everyone should follow along quickly, or they’ll find themselves with a deck full of letters, but no victory points to contest for the title of best novel writer.
The stacks of wild cards also function as the endgame trigger; once two of the four piles of wild cards are claimed, the game ends. At that point you break your deck apart, count all the victory points you have earned on each of your wild cards, and the player with the highest score is the winner.
Compared to Scrabble
I’ve played a lot of Scrabble, and talked about Scrabble to a lot of people who are into hobby board games. The most common complaints I hear are that turns take too long as people hold their head in their hands trying to find a really good word and a valid spot to place their word once they’ve finally identified it. The other major complaint I hear frequently (out of my own mouth because my wife is the worst for this) is that as you get better and better at Scrabble, the game becomes less and less about playing great words, and more about playing small words that score well while controlling your opponent’s access to the double and triple word score spots. Scrabble devolves from a word game into a game almost entirely about area control and getting a mix of letters that can go in many high scoring places.
Paperback does a excellent job of sidestepping the complaints that plague Scrabble. By removing the need to chain off other words on a board, each player needs only to focus on the letters in their hand. It’s often much easier to see a word that uses all, or at least most of your cards and that’s the best word you can possibly make. The flipside to this is you are now at the mercy of your deck. If you draw a bad hand of cards (such as Q, K, J, X, C and no wilds), you’ll just have to discard your hand and wait for your next turn. You can’t even play a tiny word for one or two cents because any unspent currency is lost at the end of your turn.
Conclusion
Paperback doesn’t try to improve upon the deck building genre, nor does it need to. If you’ve played Dominion then Paperback‘seconomy and mechanic of points cards clogging up your deck will immediately feel familiar. By taking the tried and true formula of deck building and applying a word-building theme, designer Tim Fowers has created an approachable gateway for fans of word games everywhere.
Paperback is a game that my wife and I have played a lot. We have played the physical game at least 19 times together, and when the Android app was released we instantly bought it and spent many a night playing against each other while lying in bed before going to sleep. We’d have games going during our work days, each of us stealing a few minutes here and there to play a turn. It is a super fun game, and it takes a long time before repeatedly playing it gets old.
I have a type. It’s Tim Fowers
Honestly, once the app came out, the tabletop version really stopped hitting the table. The setup for the game is a bit much, even with the well divided box. Eight separate piles that form the store, plus 4 more piles for the victory point cards, everyone gets a starter deck and common cards need to be arranged; it’s not difficult to set up, but it is absolutely easier to just press a button on the phone and start playing. It is also handy that the app will dictate which words can and cannot be used. The app does lack the attack cards that inject a bit of player interaction into the game, but my wife and I often choose not to play those cards. For us, the joy comes from building each other up and trying to see who can stand tallest, not who is better at knocking the other to their knees.
Since the app came to our phones, Paperback has physically hit the table 3 times. I have felt slightly burned out on it because we have played it so frequently, but I still get a sense of glee when I open the box and hand each player a deck of fairly well-worn cards. I hadn’t actually noticed how worn my cards had become until I received the Paperback Unabridged expansion along with my Kickstarter copy of Hardback. Once the expansion content was slotted into the original Paperback box, I was taken aback by how pristine the new cards looked and how tattered by comparison my old cards were. Personally, I believe well-loved cards are a sign of a great game.
Can you tell which cards were added later?
For me, Paperback is my favourite word game, narrowly edging out it’s pre-quill, Hardback. I love the deck building and the trade-off of buying wild cards that clog up the deck but provide the points you need to win the game. I’ve introduced Paperback to a lot of people, and it’s never failed to impress. So many people have played Scrabble that a word game is almost second nature, and the twist of deck building always excites, especially if it’s a mechanic that they haven’t seen before. Because it has such an appeal for people who aren’t into designer board games, it’s the perfect game to use to introduce your bibliophile friends to this wonderful hobby.
Artist: Gavan Brown, Scott Carmichael, Lina Cossette, David Forest
It Always Goes Back to Games With Me
I have a confession to make. I love games. I know, shocker. I’ll wait as you all pick up your collective jaws off the floor. One of the things I love most is discovery. I’m always searching for a new game to play, a new experience to …experience. It doesn’t matter that I have half-finished games on my Nintendo Switch, or 300+ games that I’ve barely touched in my Steam library (30 minutes or less played time); I’m always looking forward to starting a new game.
In addition to the thirst for discovery, I’m also super cheap. This combination of insatiability and thriftiness leads me to some interesting places. I’ve played many Flash (RIP) games you can play for ‘free’ in your web browser. A long time ago I played a game called Motherload. The goal of the game was to dig and dig and dig until you found the centre of the planet.
Imagine my surprise when I gathered with my family in Saskatoon and my cousin pulled out a small square board game box titled “Super Motherload”. The connection to the Flash game didn’t connect at first, but once we set up the game and began playing, the memories came back.
The Mechanics of Digging through Mars
Super Motherload is a light deck builder about digging into Mars and collecting valuable minerals to purchase better pilots, all in a race to accrue the most prestigious mining company? I’ll admit the goal of the game doesn’t quite match the theme, gathering a surplus of minerals that will languish in your vaults. The winner isn’t necessarily the player who earned the most money (but it helps), but the player who accrues the most victory points at the end of the game.
Each player deck has unique art, and has slightly asymmetric powers
Super Motherload does it’s very best to emulate the experience of a side scrolling (or in this case a vertical scrolling) video game. The first two double sided Mars boards are placed on the board and each player gets a unique starter deck, each one slightly varying from the other. Each player starts with a 7-card base deck, plus 16 more cards laid in groups of 4 in front of them, forming a personal shop. As the game progresses, players may purchase cards from their shop to add to their deck. The last person who dug a hole gets to take the first turn, and the game is underway. A turn consists of 2 actions. You may draw 2 cards, play cards of the same colour for their drills, or cause an explosion by playing a bomb token and a red card. You may perform the same action twice in a row.
As you chew through the dirt you’ll inevitably uncover minerals that you can use to purchase more cards from your shop. If you meet or exceed the value of the card, you remove all minerals you’ve allocated to that card and place it into your discard (and get a one time bonus for buying the card). Be warned that the economy on Mars isn’t like Earth – if you overpay, too bad so sad.
Various obstacles will prevent you from beelining to the core of the planet. For instance, rocks and metal plates require you to use different tools to progress. Metal plates can only be dug though using drills of the matching colour, and rocks must be bombed. You do still get the minerals if you bomb through them, though, because on Mars there are special bombs that only destroy worthless rocks, leaving the valuable stones untouched for your capitalist needs (the theme is falling apart again).
One of the best features of Super Motherload is that you can always dig starting from any of the tunnel pieces that have already been placed on the board. As you go further down into Mars, the quality and quantity of goods begins to increase. This causes every player to take as much as they can on their turn, while trying not to give the next player immediate access to whatever treasures lie beyond your current reach. I love the trade off – biding your time and building up your hand while waiting for someone to make a move that allows you to strike out at a particularly rich ore vein. Your tunnel may then be used by someone else to reach even further and gather more resources. This cycle is incredibly satisfying and is what keeps me bringing this game back to the table for more.
As the game progresses, diggers will come across artifact tokens (pictured above). Each token has a hidden bonus on the back that players can choose to use at their discretion. If all the artifact spaces are uncovered on a board, the top board is removed from play and a new board is placed at the bottom, introducing a whole new realm full of valuable goodies and mounds of dirt just waiting for your drills to penetrate it (ahem) recover the goods.
The majority of victory points will come from buying the increasingly expensive pilot cards in your personal shop, which consists of four different decks. Each deck has pilots who are trained for different specialities. For instance, the red deck pilots specialize in bombing. As you purchase pilot cards, the following card in the deck is more expensive, but it is worth an increasing number of victory points. The challenge is to balance buying pilots of different specialties while accruing the most victory points.
To make matters more interesting, Super Motherload also has Major and Minor achievements that may influence how you play each turn. The Major achievements are earned by fulfilling the ‘recipe’ of having purchased the required number and type of cards from your personal shop. Only the first player who satisfies the requirement of each achievement can claim it, and once the major achievements have been claimed, they’re gone from the game.
The minor achievements are a little more fun, asking you to accomplish seemingly random tasks, such as drilling 4 spaces in a single action, or simply having three bomb tokens in your supply. Chasing these goals may have you putting your long term plans on hold, but I’ve seen players earn enough points to swing the whole game by just earning enough minor achievements. Once a player collects a minor achievement, a new minor achievement card is drawn. Once again, you have a choice – do you use your turn to further your progress on a major achievement, or do you take a detour to collect a minor achievement? You may only collect one achievement per turn.
The game ends after the final artifact is obtained on the 4th board. As the communal tunnel inches ever closer to the final artifact, each player scrambles to scratch out their final few points without giving anyone else the opportunity to end the game. When that last artifact is claimed, the game ends immediately, irrespective of who was the first player. All the points on the player cards and any major and minor achievements are added together, along with any points that may be on some of the artifacts. The player with the highest score has created the best intergalactic mining company. I think? I told you, the theme gets thinner and thinner the more I think about it. My solution? Don’t think, just play!
Final Thoughts
Super Motherload offers a a unique spin on the deck building genre. By not requiring players to discard unused cards and draw a whole new hand each turn evokes a feeling of momentum. You can build up steam, gathering a handful of cards then blast off, reaching that high value gem that everyone thought was out of reach. If you have a big turn, spending all your cards digging massive new tunnels, you’ll find your next turn lighter as you recuperate from the aggressive activity. That’s not a bad thing however, I feel it evokes the feeling of someone who rushed out too far, too fast, and broke their little digging machine. The players who take their time, making slower moves never hit a big payday, but are never left out in the cold.
While most deck building games reward players who focus their decks to a specific synergy (Hardback, Star Realms), building a slim, uber functional deck is not the core of the game here. The crux of Super Motherload revolves around the spacial element of burrowing for resources on the board, seeing the best time to lay down 4 drills to just barely get that extra valuable gem, and racing for the low hanging fruit of the easy to achieve achievements. The double sided boards offer a nice variety of obstacles, and if you’re desperate for more, fans have posted some of their own creations.
What does add to the replayability is the asymetric nature of each player deck. Each deck’s purchasable pilots are unique and exciting to play repeatedly, mastering the different combos each one offers. It’s refreshing to swap to a different deck to try a different strategy. Each deck is unique enough to add it’s own flavour to the game, but not so wildly different that you’re railroaded into a specific strategy that may or may not pair well with the minor achievements.
Now this is a well sized box
I do wish Super Motherload had a expansion. More map tiles, more asymmetric player decks, different minerals and so on. Nothing that changes the game drastically (I’m looking at you, Isle of Skye), as the core gameplay of Super Motherload is absolutely fantastic. I just want more of it.
I think that’s probably the highest praise I could give a game. I simply crave more of it. Honestly, owning Super Motherload turns you into missionary; it’s the kind of game that you want to introduce to everyone, especially those who love deck builders, as it has the deck building elements that you love from other games, but a very satisfying board element to go along with it
Alan Moon is a prolific game designer. With a game like Ticket to Ride under his belt and selling millions I’m sure he could retire to a comfortable life and never need to design another game again. But when Board Game Design is your passion, I’m sure you can’t help but create games.
Here we are with another one of his games about traveling. In 10 Days in Europe, you collect tiles and place them into a timeline as you attempt to contiguous a trip across the continent spanning 10 days. The hook that turns this activity into a game is that once the tiles are in your holder you can’t swap them around. You can only replace a tile with one picked up from one of the three discard piles (or drawn blindly from the top of the deck).
In 10 Days in Europe you can always travel by walking to two neighbouring countries that are next to each other and share a border. You can fly between two countries as long as they’re the same colour as the plane you’re using, and you can travel to any country by sea, as long as they have a shore on the indicated Ocean or Sea
Other games in the 10 days series have other types of transportations. Asia has trains,USA and Africa have cars, but the core game remains the same between them all. Manipulate your hand of tiles until you have a cohesive 10 day trip across the continent.
The game starts with the board (which is literally just a map) and all the tiles splayed around the table. Each player picks up tiles one at a time and places them into their card holder. Depending on the order that you draw your tiles, this can set a player up for a easy game, or it can telegraph to a player that they’ll need to replace all 10 of their tiles before their game is over. In theory you could win right off the bat, but I’ve never seen it happen.
Once the game is underway, one of two things seems to happen to each player. Either they put themselves into a situation where they need a specific country (most countries only have one tile in the deck), or they hold their head in their hands waiting for someone to end the game so they can pitch the tiles they’re currently holding into the ocean.
10 Days in Europe is the kind of game that gets played back to back often. Games are almost always over within 15 minutes, and to reset the game all you need to do is throw the tiles back into the centre, give it a stir and begin again.
I don’t know how I feel about the board basically just being a map of Europe. I say that I’m bringing a board game, but really, 10 days is a card game with a cardboard map.The map does tell you what colours the countries are and which shores belong to which oceans, which is key information in the game. But it still feels more like a card game than a board game. This can also be a great learning experience if you aren’t familiar with a continent as learning the where in the world the U.A.E and Boliva are can make you look worldly and traveled when asked to point them out on a map.
10 Days is the perfect game to bring to the in-laws for Thanksgiving as it’s dead simple to play and is over quickly, allowing players who feel like they’ve lost to reset and start again from the beginning. There is a lot of luck in the game but I will counter that by saying there is a element of strategy involved, otherwise my wife wouldn’t have a 70% win rate over her 20 plays.
I do also appreciate the box size. The insert keeps everything in its place, even when it’s stored vertically, and if you took the insert out, you’d only have enough empty space for a banana.
Mechanics: Push your luck, Dice Rolling, Area Movement
Release Year: 2017
Designer: Scott Almes
Artist: Miguel Coimbra, Adam P. McIver
Intro – In where I try to not talk about The Legend of Zelda
If you walk around my living space, one thing will become apparent very quickly. I love video games. I have knick-knacks and memorabilia adorning my shelves, giving brief glimpses into my nerdiness. The franchise represented most prominently is The Legend of Zelda, as the Zelda games are amongst my most favourite video games ever. Most games I wait to pick up on a sale or second hand as the price of buying new is a pill that I have a hard time swallowing. The exception to that rule is a new Legend of Zelda game. If you doubt me, ask me about the time my wife woke at 6am with me frantically hitting the refresh page on Best Buys website the day the Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild were launching their pre-orders (spoilers – she wasn’t pleased).
I can hardly be blamed for my obsession however. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of my most played video games. Back in 1995 when I could barely hold a controller, my mother and I explored Hyrule together. I vividly recall running through the green fields, sword thrust forth to parry any foes, getting the guards called on me in Kakariko village, and my tiny mind being blown wide open when the Dark World was introduced.
When Gamelyn Games launched their Tiny Epic Quest kickstarter in November of 2016, I was immediately enthralled with the aesthetic of the game. While the art assets were vaguely generic fantasy, the items looked like they were ripped straight out of The Legend of Zelda. I backed that project immediately without a further thought. Come Summer of 2017 when the game was delivered, I delighted in the ITEMeeples and the tiny items arranged on the item rack. Aesthetically, I was already in love.
Nostalgia always knows how to get me to open my wallet
Components and Play Space – Hope your table is epic, not tiny
Like all of the Tiny Epic games, they boast a large game experience, crammed down into a tiny box. Foolishly, at the time I also thought that meant the play space would be small, perhaps I could play this game on my coffee table. Not the case here, as the components sprawl out, demanding nearly as much space as you’re willing to give to it.
Setup for a solo game
The art on the cards is bright and colourful, full of the promise of adventures to come. The ITEMeeples are cute too, made of plastic and slightly larger than your standard meeple. I never thought of myself as a meeple connoisseur, but I found myself wishing they were made of wood instead of the cheaper feeling plastic (not that your wooden meeples is a ‘deluxe’ component).
The items that go into the ITEMeeple’s ‘hands’ are absolutely tiny, making some of the more delicate ones difficult to manipulate (I’m looking at you, Bow and Arrow). Luckily you won’t need to manipulate them too often, as once they’re acquired, you stick em in someone’s hand and then there’s rarely a reason to move it.
My wife tells me size doesn’t matter.
Gameplay – A Gamblers Journey
A game of Tiny Epic Quest is played over 5 rounds. In each round players are trying to accomplish tasks to accrue the most victory points. It’s all the normal, heroic acts you accomplish during the dead of night that get you victory points (sounds sketchy). How many spells you can master, how many quests you can accomplish, and how many goblins you can smack into the ground will all affect your heroic rating and win you the game (also bonus points for pillaging the Legendary Items).
During the day phase, one player you will choose a method of travel, then move one of your meeples according to the card. A raft lets you sail up the perfectly vertical and parallel rivers, a Horse can take you as far east or west as you’d like (you all know of horses natural aversion to north and south movement), the griffon can take you diagonal, and the travel by boot option can take you one step in any direction. Once you’ve made your move then everyone else gets to make a movement of their own, following the same card. No matter how many players are at the table, this phase of the game has 4 turns, meaning one of the movement types will go unused.
And no, you can’t put your horse on the raft. We tried that once, it didn’t go well.
Once the Day phase ends, night descends. During the night each player decides if they want to adventure, or rest. Every player who chooses adventure is IN. The lead player rolls the 5 custom die, and then the die results are resolved.
First, the goblin heads represent the total damage inflicted. Each player takes 1 damage each clockwise around the table until all the hits have been distributed. If there are more goblin heads than players, it overlaps, hitting the lead player again and continuing on.
Then power is gained based on any power symbols, and where the mushroom marker is. Then the mushroom marker moves down its track based on the number of mushrooms that have been rolled. If the mushroom is at the end of its track, it just deals damage in the same way as the goblins.
Once those are out of the way, all players can use the torches, scrolls, or punches to complete their objectives. Torches and scrolls advance your adventurers along their track, inching them closer to acquiring their treasure, while the punch symbol lets you pummel into the sleeping goblin who had the misfortune of being on your space
The one time you didn’t need any goblin punches…
After all the die have been used, the active player passes the die to the next player who now has to choose to adventure, or to rest. Should they choose adventure, all players are dragged along, like lackeys in a gang.
The dice rolling is the crux of the push your luck mechanic that is the core of Tiny Epic Quests gameplay. Sometimes you’ll find your meeple on a dungeon that requires torches and all you roll are scrolls. You’ll sit in anguish as your friends march up their tracks, pilfering the treasures, equipping their new items that bestow special abilities to the meeple that holds it, while you grumble that yet another torch has been rolled. There is a bit of mitigation in the form of Power. You can always spend 2 power to gain an extra Scroll or Torch for a meeple, or to block a hit from a goblin.
Two of my adventurers finished their quest. The third one had to sleep in a cave.
As the players turns go on, health will begin to dwindle and the risk of death will loom ever closer. The Mushroom track I mentioned earlier will pass thresholds that will make the game riskier, like increasing the amount of damage goblins do, or removing the ability to recover power via die rolls, eventually causing extra damage if there is no space left on the mushroom track. The benefits of the mushroom track going up is the higher it is, the more potent the magic is in the night and allows you to learn even greater dark magics (with only 5 turns and 10 levels of magic to learn, you’re expected to skip a couple lessons).
Should you fail in your quest of murder, thievery, or sorcery and become exhausted, all of your meeples are returned home, health and power restored, but empty handed. You only get to keep the spoils of your exploits if you choose to stop during the night phase, returning to camp before your metaphorical parents catch you out on a school night.
Crafting the legendary weapons requires finished two specific dungeons in order. Hopefully you’ll have some overlap with the other quests
Tiny Epic Quest bills itself as a push your luck game, and it absolutely is. Some bad dice rolls can throw the entire experience for you. In my plays, I’ve found the luck factor is much lower in lower player counts. You may be taking more damage, there are more opportunities to rest. In a 4 player game you may find yourself with only 2 health left, your goblin punching meeple has won their combat, the spell learning meeple has finished studying, but your dungeon crawling meeple is only two torches away from grabbing that precious loot. If you choose to roll, you may be committing to 4 rounds of die rolls, and should you accomplish what you needed during your rounds, you’ll sit in terror as the other three chuck those misery cubes and flinch as somehow the player before you rolled a full round of goblins, pummeling you right back to the start.
I understand that is the draw of push your luck games, trying to get as far as you can and if you go bust then you’re kicked back to the beginning. I love Can’t Stop, but the salient difference is Can’t Stop takes 10 minutes to play, while this goes on for an hour or more! And the cascading failure of missing out on a whole round of adventure, when your friends may now have gear that makes their subsequent heists easier is a rough feeling.
Final Thoughts – Are we the Baddies?
Is it wrong to complain about luck in a push your luck game? Maybe. While I did enjoy my play of Tiny Epic Quest, most of that enjoyment came from the aesthetics. Seeing my ITEMeeple run around the map with a bomb and a rupee filled my heart with joy. I recently gave the solo mode a try, and barely managed to achieve the lowest score acceptable, 40 points to be a peasant. Because you only have 3 meeples and 5 rounds, you’re expected to complete a quest with 2 of your meeples, if not all 3. The scores ramp up the more you achieve of each objective (beating 3 goblins is 3 pts, while beating 10 is 30). Achieving 15 tasks is about the best you can hope for, and it’s not THAT hard to accomplish, but if you fail early quests it can leave you feeling like it’s impossible to catch up. Looking at amigoodat.games, the average winning score is in the low 30’s. With no catch up mechanic to speak of, The winner will more often be the player who got the best loot the earliest.
All that said, I am keeping this game, and would pull it out of I knew someone was a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda. The aesthetic is strong enough to keep the box on my shelf (and it helps that the box is tiny, getting rid of it wouldn’t free up much space on my overflowing shelves). Also, I don’t have very many push your luck games, so it’s a small niche that’s being filled.
I begun this review with the fresh innocence of a Kokri boy waking up to the cries of a fairy, ready to go on a quest to save the Kingdom. I’ve come to realize that while this is indeed a epic quest, we just might be the bad guys. After all, we’re tearing across the kingdom by day, and wreaking havoc over the night, punching sleeping goblins, casting demonic spells, and stealing treasures. At the end of the game, we’re not coming home to a waiting princess, we’re going to face trial for the crimes we’ve committed! If the authorities found me with standing in a magic circle with a sword in one hand and a bomb in the other, I don’t think they’ll give me the benefit of the doubt.
