For those of you keeping track, it’s been nearly 3 months since I reviewed Final Fantasy VII. I promise, I started Final Fantasy VIII immediately after, but I’ll be really honest. I found it to be so unfun that I struggle to play it. Every time I turn the game on to keep progressing, I get into a single battle, roll my eyes and shut it down again. So instead of progressing on the main story, today’s post is another adventure into one of the spin-off games, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy. Specifically Final Bar Line, the most entry in the series.
Theatrhythm is a rhythm game set to the music of the Final Fantasy universe. When you first launch the game, you’re given a key, and a carousel of the main line titles, along with a choice selection of some of the more popular spin-off games. Your key will unlock one game, along with a few chibi representations of party members from that specific title.
You’re tasked with building a party to take into each one of these rhythm game missions, and the characters are largely separated into different types. Attack type, defense type, support, summoner, and so on. As they go on missions, they level up and unlock new skills.
But wait, you might be asking. Why are you getting levels and skills in a rhythm game? That’s a great question, and one that is never really answered. Each game presents you with a linier path of songs, starting from the beginning of the game, and progressing through the major plot beats. Each level has various dots scrolling from left to right, and all you need to do when the dot hits the right side of the screen is press a button. Literally, any button will suffice. You can choose to use the shoulder buttons, the face buttons, d-pad, anything. If two buttons hit the right side bar at one time, you’ll need to hit two buttons. There’s also green lines, when make you hold a button for a while, and if that green line slants up or down, you’ll need to hold the joystick in that direction to satisfy the note. There’s also arrows mixed in with the buttons, asking you to press one of the joysticks in that direction.
And that’s the entirety of the gameplay. But literally behind the rhythm game aspect, your party of characters is walking in the background from right to left, letting the scenery scroll by, and occasionally encountering monsters. Your party will automatically battle the baddies they encounter, and should they defeat them, they’ll just keep on walking to the left until the song ends. After a couple songs, you’re rewarded with another key, so you can unlock another game’s music, and if you manage to complete all the songs for a game, you’ll be able to add that games antagonist to your party, just for kicks.
To encourage you to build your party out a little bit, each song has a mission for you to accomplish, and most of them have to do with the party defeating a certain number of baddies, or using certain types of skills. It can be quite difficult to nearly impossible to defeat enough enemies when you first start the game, meaning you’ll likely need to return once your party has levelled up enough to lay the smack down on the enemies. That said, some characters synergize with each other incredibly well to really ratchet up the damage they’re able to output, making previously impossible challenges an utter breeze.
I find the RPG elements of Theatrhythm to be banal and superfluous. It literally does not matter how you build out your party, or if they fail to accomplish whatever the goal of the song is. The only thing that matters is that you hit enough notes to complete the song. I will concede that some of the characters trade defense for attack, and if you stack too many of those characters together, then missing just a handful of notes is enough to make you fail the song.
The rhythm game itself is simple and generally relaxing. The music of the Final Fantasy franchise is beautiful, and it’s actually been really lovely to revisit the past 7 games I’ve played in this way. The musical themes stirring up the memories of my adventures was more nostalgic that I originally expected. Some of the songs really ratchet up the difficulty, putting this game into the “easy to play, difficult to master” territory. Thankfully, each song has several difficulty levels, letting you push yourself on the easier songs, and pull back on the more devilish ones.
I use the term ‘master’, loosely. Theatrhythm is very forgiving, with generally wide range for accepting a button input, to the directional arrows just needing to be within the correct 90 degree arc. Add this to the dual stick and any button approach, and sometimes just spamming things at the right general direction is enough to get you through a difficult spot.
I was surprised at just how many songs were packed into this game. Every main title has at least 10 songs to deliver, and Final Fantasy XI shows up with a whopping 44 songs. With the DLC added, there’s over 400 songs to play through, although some of the most popular songs end up repeated and remixed several times (looking at you, Battle on the Big Bridge).
Theatrhythm ends up being a wonderful and charming celebration of Final Fantasy music, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Although the RPG elements are pointless, they do provide a fun little background for my daughter to watch while I focus on the dots flying across the screen.
If you’re being picky, you’ll start to notice that not all note tracks are particularly well-matched to each song. Some dots will fly by and ask for button presses off-beat, but it’s hard to really complain too much when all of the music is just so good. As a celebration of Final Fantasy’s 35th anniversary, Theatrhythm absolutely succeeds in being a big package of fan service to long-time fans. I don’t think the gameplay is engaging enough to make you want to sink hundreds of hours into it, nor will you be organizing multiplayer Theatrhythm parties any time soon, like you used to do with your favourite rhythm games. But if you’re a Final Fantasy fan, I think you’ll find yourself surprisingly touched when the themes of your favourite games come on, and the caricatures of the heroes you’ve spent dozens of hours with bob across the screen. Just don’t show up expecting deep, satisfying RPG gameplay, you won’t find it here.
I’m not really an expansion kind of guy. In general, when given the choice between buying an expansion to a game I already know, or buying a whole new game, I’m going to pick buying a new game almost every time. Yes, I realize expansions are usually cheaper, and there is something lovely about injecting a bit of new into something you and your group are already familiar with, but still. I own very few expansions.
In 2023 I reviewed Akropolis, the tile laying game designed by Jules Messaud and published by Gigamic. I was absolutely smitten with it then, to the point that it landed as number 36 on my top 100 games list, the last time I made that list. Akropolis: Athena is the small box expansion that adds just a few tiles, but can absolutely bend the game if you let it. Let me explain.
Akropolis: Athena basically consists of a deck of goal cards, and a bunch of single hex tiles. That’s right, single hexes. At the start of the game you lay out 4 goal cards, and below each goal card, lay out 4 hexes for a total of 16 single hexes. During the game if you manage to achieve one of the goal cards, you get to take one of the single hexes from that goal card, and place it into your city. You can only achieve each goal once, so you also take a piece of an Athena statue to remind yourself you’ve already completed that objective. If you manage to complete the whole statue, the leftover stone at the end of the game is now worth 5 instead of the usual 1.
What makes Akropolis: Athena special, is that the goal cards are often pulling you in different directions. They offer objectives that by themselves offer no strategic benefit, but those single hex tiles can be game changing. I can’t tell you how often I play a tile laying game, and want to snap a piece in half (looking at you, My Island), or cursing the orientation of a polyomino tile (The Z tile is always facing the wrong direction in My City). Akropolis: Athena gives you the satisfaction of a single hex, allowing it to just drop into the perfect place in your city to make everything feel whole again.
And these single tiles can be really powerful. They may give you stars to improve the score of a certain colour in your city, and many of them are actually split in half, giving you the power of two districts on a single tile. This can allow you to bridge the gap between blue districts while strategically keeping the yellow half away from another yellow tile, or, it can be useless as the spot where you need the tile to go just doesn’t work for the colours that are surrounding it.
Depending on what set of goals you have, it’s entirely possible that no one manages to complete all 4 in a single game. They do ask you to do some odd things, which you often won’t accidentally stumble into doing on your own. Like having a straight line of red tiles, or putting a green tile next to a green star. You might luck into it, but you’ll more than likely need to make a concerted effort to achieve the goals.
The payoff for managing to complete all 4 goals can be almost game breaking. In one of my plays, I managed to complete all 4 objectives, and then hoard 15 pieces of stone for a bonus 75 points. Considering that in the base game, an average score is 114, it’s a pretty lucrative path to take. But if chasing that stone dragon takes up entirely too much of your time, and your opponents’ manage to collect everything they’ve ever wanted, then Athena on her own is unlikely to save your game.
What I’m trying to say is that it is possible to ignore this expansion completely and still come out the victor. Especially if the players overcommit to completing the objectives and don’t properly capitalize on the benefits Athena brings. For some people, if an expansion can be ignored, they ask why have it at all? I have to say that I really appreciate this expansion. Having the goals shift every game keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. Now you can’t just rely on hording the green tiles to carry you to victory every single game. Because the Athena tiles do shift the balance of the stars, perhaps in one game the purples just have that little bit higher chance to be even more powerful than the other colours. I also really appreciate having something extra to shoot for, especially when the market is bare and none of the tiles available to be are useful.
Akropolis: Athena hits a pretty great balance between being powerful and exciting, but not overwhelmingly so, in that if you ignore the expansion bits, you have no hope to compete. At the very least it adds variety to the strategy of Akropolis. Athena definitely improves Akropolis, and I feel comfortable in teaching the expansion to new players right from the start. I think my only main complaint is that I can’t fit the expansion into the base box without tossing the entire insert away and just letting everything be loose in there. But even with that gripe, If you enjoy Akropolis and want a small expansion that meaningfully refreshes the puzzle without complicating it, Athena is a must-have.
I like mushrooms, but only in the context of the kitchen. Some tasty morels, lobsters, and oyster mushrooms will always get me excited. I do find mushrooms kind of fascinating, how fast they can grow, how different they can all be, but their poisonous nature has always made me rather just get my mushrooms from a store instead of trying to venture out and pick my own. The last thing I need is to get a hospital visit because I mis-identified the gills of a chanterelle or something.
Undergrove is designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, and published by AEG in 2024. In Undergrove, players are Douglas-fir trees, and are tasked with trading resources with the mushrooms that dot the forest floor. Your actions involve trading Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium with the mushrooms, to get special benefits or to just get more resources than you’re generally putting out. The core of the game is to use the Carbon to activate the mushrooms, then absorb that carbon through your roots to grow a mighty evergreen.
The care and interest of the mycology science shouldn’t be a surprise. Elizabeth Hargrave is the president of her local hobbyist mushroom club, the Mycological Society of Washington, DC, and she and Mark Wootton had many conversations with entomologists and PhD students to discuss how the science works. Sure, Undergrove abstracts some concepts, and the giant mushroom tiles may indicate the outsized abundance of the mushrooms in a real forest, but hey. It’s a board game, it’s often more important to be fun than correct.
The mycology theme is wonderful, and the production is utterly gorgeous. I have the Kickstarter edition with all the wooden pieces, including the amazing painted wooden tiles. The screen printed wooden pieces are all beautiful, and there are snug little circles cut out of the corners for your player pieces to sit. The art on the tiles by Beth Sobel is fantastic, colourful, and beautiful. Building out a large tableau of mushrooms is a sight to behold! There are sturdy tuck boxes for every resource and for every player’s pieces, making the inside of the main box a tidy affair. AEG absolutely knocked this production out of the park.
So the science is good. The art is great, and the production is fantastic. How’s the gameplay? Well, here’s where my notes turn a bit sour. Undergrove is a tight resource management game. Activating most of the mushrooms on the board require you to at least spend 1 carbon, and often will have you flip a mushroom activation disc (so you can’t just juice the same tile over and over again). The only way to get carbon is to take the photosynthesis action, which provides you with 2 carbon as a base. Then, you may choose to throw away any nitrogen you’ve accumulated for more carbon. The economy is already tight, it feels punishing to be jettisoning your nitrogen in exchange for carbon that you’ll spend to get a surplus of nitrogen so you can do other actions.
Spending the carbon onto the mushrooms feeds really nicely into how you score points and win the game. The absorb action lets you take a carbon from a tile and move it onto your seedling. Once a seedling has absorbed 3 carbon, it blossoms into a full tree, unlocking the ability for that tree to score all four of its roots. But fret not, if the game comes to an end and some of your seedlings have one or two carbon on them, they can score one or two of their roots. Speaking of game end, there is a carbon track. Anytime a player absorbs any amount of carbon, they move one step up that track, collecting bonuses as they do so. Once someone has reached the end of that track, everyone gets one final action and the player with the most points, wins.
One of the challenges with that carbon track is that the pace of the game is solely controlled by the players. If no one is absorbing carbon, you’ll all just be having a merry time spreading your seeds and roots, building an impressive forest floor, and maximizing each one of their seedling investments, only to realize that the end of the game is still an hour away. Conversely, a player with a singular focus can rush the game to an end, rendering your efforts in building any semblance of an engine moot. I suppose it depends on what you want out of your mushroom game. Is the player who plays lean and fast the one to win, or can a player build strong enough to put up a fight?
A small anecdote. Bear, Otter, and I played this one together. Bear was having an absolute blast chaining actions together to squeeze out one more resource, hitting the public objectives where possible, and getting out nearly all of their seedlings and roots. But completely failed to absorb carbon, so when Otter and I completed the carbon track on the same turn, his score was half of ours, despite his far superior forest structure.
The other things you can do on your turn include spending carbon and phosphorus to throw your seeds to the wind and settle your seedlings elsewhere on the tableau. Similarly, you can spend a carbon and two potassium to sprout two roots on any of your seedlings. The roots play an important role for your trees (no duh), as the roots are what give you access to any of the abilities or actions the mushrooms provide.
I feel like Undergrove is supposed to be an engine building game. It has all the hallmarks for it. But in play, it’s really not. Many players will get excited at the chance to put down new mushrooms, to add to the board, but putting mushrooms down doesn’t get you anything. Sure, you can control the location of it, which may slightly benefit you more than others, but it’s not like putting down a mushroom gives you ownership or a strong benefit. You’re not really building and engine in Undergrove, you’re claiming slightly more efficient action spots, then choosing which one you want to use on your turn. Because of that, Undergrove’s gameplay arc feels flat. From about the 5th turn until the end of the game, not a whole lot really changes, robbing players a real sense of progression that other, perhaps bird themed games, have.
Undergrove left me in a curious state. I love its celebration of fungi and nature, the obvious reverence for real science, and the sheer beauty of its production. Sitting around a table filled with colourful mushrooms and tidy wooden trees is genuinely delightful. But once the novelty and aesthetic glow fade, the gameplay settles into a low, pleasant rhythm. Pleasant, but rarely stirring. Its tight economy and player-driven pacing create interesting decisions, yet the lack of meaningful progression makes those choices feel more iterative than transformative. If you’re looking for a contemplative, tactical puzzle wrapped in a stunning package, Undergrove is right up your alley, but if you’re hoping to build a powerful engine, then this isn’t the mushroom you’re looking for.
Generally, I prefer to play games in person before I start playing them on Board Game Arena. For one thing, I’m much more likely to actually sit down and learn the rules, rather than rely on click-and-pray and letting the computer manage all the rules. But for River Valley Glassworks, designed by Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, and Matt Riddle, with art by Andrew Bosley, and published by AllPlay in 2024 after a successful crowdfunding campaign, I was drawn into a tournament and ended up playing 5 games back to back.
The others in my online game group, refuse to play a game on BGA before they’ve played it on the table, so when I visited a local board game café with Otter, and saw River Valley Glassworks on the shelf, I knew it would be a great opportunity to teach him, and get some more online games played.
River Valley Glassworks is a game about collecting glass. The main board is a series of tiles forming a river, ending at a small pool. Each river tile has a number of rocks, indicating how many glass pieces get placed onto that tile, and a shape. On your turn, you take one of the glass pieces from your satchel, and place it on a river tile that matches the shape of the glass that you’re placing, and then take all the glass from one of the adjacent tiles. You take the tile, put it at the end of the river, refill it with glass based on its stones, and place the glass you collected into your player board.
Your player board consists of 5 rows, with 7 columns each. You can choose the order in which you place your glass, but if you already have glass of the same colour, then that glass has to go onto that column. Should you exceed 5 pieces, the extra goes into the overflow. Glass in the overflow will cost you 3 points at the end of the game, which comes up surpisingly fast. the first person to reach or exceed 16 pieces of glass triggers the end game, which has all players complete the same number of turns, then take one final turn, and then you move into end game scoring.
For end game scoring, you simply count each of your rows from left to right until you reach the first empty spot, then you score your two tallest columns. If multiple columns are of equal height, you score the lower value one. Subtract your overflow, and that’s the entire game!
River Valley Glassworks plays lightning fast on the table with two players. Averaging 10 minutes per play, I couldn’t believe how quickly the game came to a screaming end, which makes this game perfect for starting the night off, or a tidy night cap before everyone heads home.
The gameplay is smooth as silk, with the only real decision you need to make is which piece of glass you want to put down, and which of the two adjacent river tiles you want to take from. Once you have the glass in your hand, it simply flops onto your playerboard into the appropriate spots (unless you have two new colours being added to your board, then you choose which order to add them in, but I digress). There is the decision of when to take glass from the lake to replenish your options, but that only really comes up once or twice in the game. Although I have been sincerely tempted before to take the lake glass ‘early’, forcing one into the overflow before. The loss aversion I hold refused to let me do it, however, even if it would had given me the tactical advantage in the moment.
There are 8 different colours of glass, but only 7 columns on your board. It is an interesting challenge to consider if you want to get the common colours early so you can build fuller rows, or if you hold out to get them a few turns in, so you have an easier time filling the most lucrative columns. That push and pull of short term planning is delightful in this lightning quick game. And if whatever choice you make doesn’t pan out, just throw all the glass back in the bag and play it again!
I played the retail edition of River Valley Glassworks, which was a perfectly reasonable production. The glass pieces were lovely to look at, if a tad small. The river tiles were colourful and fit together perfectly, and each of the animal entrepreneurships you play as are full of character and are fun to look at. I did see some pictures of the deluxe version of this game, and while it looks absolutely gorgeous, with its neoprene mat for the river, dual layered player boards, and animal meeples, I don’t think any of those deluxe components really add anything to the game, especially considering how simple and lovely the gameplay is. Personally, I don’t like an overwrought production, and the retail edition fits the vibes perfectly.
River Valley Glassworks is quick, cozy, and approachable, but still gives you meaningful decisions and a puzzle that lingers in your head afterwards. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, it looks great on the table, and it’s the sort of game I can play back-to-back without blinking. It’s also great to play asynchronously on BGA, if you’re so inclined, as it’s always easy to parse the board state. If you’re in the market for a half-hour filler with charm to spare and just enough bite to keep you engaged, this is one river worth diving into.
I’ve been a fan of Level 99 Games for a while now. From Millennium Blades toBullet❤️, and all of its expansions, I really dig how unique every game of theirs I’ve played has been. So when I saw Argent: The Consortium in a math trade earlier this year, I hopped on it, and was delighted to receive it. While I am a big fan of the early 90’s anime and video game theme from Millennium Blades, and adore the anime aesthetic that all of Level 99 Games, my friends in my game group are less enthusiastic, which is one of the reasons it took so long for me to get Argent: The Consortium to my table.
The other reason it took so long for Argent to come out, is that it looks incredibly dense. Twice I opened the rulebook, started reading the rules, and immediately felt too tired and packed the game away again. I don’t know what it is about Argent, but the rulebook does not feel welcoming.
For our first game, we stuck with the “recommended beginner’s setup,” since it was our first go, but even with training wheels on, Argent: The Consortium showed off its teeth.
A 3 player game has 8 locations for you to put your workers, with each of those locations having between 3 and 5 spots. On your turn, you can take a fast action if you wish, then take one main action, which can consist of placing a mage on a spot, casting a spell, or using a supporter or treasure. If you don’t want to do any of those, there are also some bell tower cards you can take instead, which act as the timer for the round. The moment the last bell tower card is taken, the round ends.
On the surface, Argent is just a worker placement game. You put your mages (workers) out on various locations to gather resources, gain spells, or position yourself for the endgame scoring. Pretty standard stuff. Except, there’s a lot of interaction, and not even just the standard worker placement of interaction that comes from taking the spot that someone else really wanted. Argent: The Consortium has a lot of direct player interaction as players cast spells to blast opposing mages off the board, and even some that let you shift your opponents workers around after they’ve been placed. That one twist, being able to knock, vanquish, or blast someone else’s carefully placed worker, isn’t just cute. It’s the heartbeat of the whole design. The worker placement here isn’t just about action efficiency; it’s about tempo, timing, and disruption.
There are 5 different types of mages you can recruit, each with its own ability. The red mages can wound other mages, kicking them out and taking their spot, and sending them to the infirmary, giving its owner a paltry benefit. The green mages are immune to wounds, the purple mages can be placed as a fast action, the black mages can be placed after you cast a non-fast spell, and so on. Each of these effects seem pretty simple on their own, but when your turn comes around, you’ll find yourself going down a flowchart in your head of which worker to place first. Perhaps you place a defensive one down to lock the spot you need the most, or you hold back your offensive mages so you can punish one of your foolhardy opponents. Not only picking a location is a tough choice, but trying to figure out which worker to use compounds that decision.
The goal of the game, is to accrue the most votes of the Consortium, a group of administrators, each valuing something different. 2 are open information to the whole table, but the other 10 are face down. While each player does get to peek at one each at the start, you’ll be blind as to what resource the other 9 each value. At the end of the game, each of those cards are flipped up, and whomever has the most of whatever criteria they ask for, wins their vote. The player with the most votes, wins the whole game.
Of course, there are ways to earn more marks, letting you peek at more cards. Knowledge is power, and focusing your efforts into the actions that will ultimately earn you a vote is the way to win the game. Sometimes you can glean from your opponents as they stockpile a specific resource, what they might know, but you can’t always be sure. And even if you do follow them, now they have a head start on you.
Argent: The Consortium is flush with variability, even in just the base game. 18 council votes mix up the end game, 6 double-sided player boards, each with their own player ability. 30 spell cards vary the abilities you can accrue, 15 double-sided university tiles ensure the actions you take are different in every game. But with all this variability, comes table bloat. As you can see in the pictures, it’s a massive table hog. The board is just a modular cluster of cardboard tiles, but each player needs to have room for their player board, and room off to the side to hold their spells, vault cards, and supporters. Argent has an almost comical abundance of “stuff”, and that’s not even counting any of the content that comes in the expansions.
Which kind of brings me to my main thought of this review. Argent: The Consortium is just a worker placement game. There’s no flashy gimmicks or crazy twists to the mechanism. It’s not mixing other mechanics to make a game that feels wholly unique. There’s no flash or pizzazz, and it isn’t the kind of game that stands out on a table that makes people stop and ask “what’s THAT game!?”. But this game obviously has legs. It has replayability out the ying-yang, and that’s something that a lot of modern games seem to lack. If you’re tired of modern games dazzling you with their fancy pants productions and really exciting and interesting first play, but lack of replayability, well then I hold up Argent as the solution to those woes.
Is Argent: The Consortium perfect? No. A few things may rub players the wrong way. For one, despite all the flashy magic theming, Argent is still fundamentally a Euro about collecting and converting resources. If you came here for wild spell-slinging battles, you’ll find yourself instead managing mana crystals and counting up influence points. For another, some people will find the overabundance of options paralyzing. On your turn, you may have up to 20 options to choose from. Some will balk at how mean and interactive it can be, since one well-timed action can completely upend your plans. All those paralyzing options mean that the game can feel slow to play, especially with new or AP prone players.
But at it’s best, Argent is a dazzling mess of interaction and tension. It’s a Euro with resource management at its core, yet it smuggles in drama and intrigue that most Euros can only dream about. Every game feels distinct, every set up is a whole new puzzle. It’s the kind of game where you might feel like you’re dead last, but in a dramatic reveal at the end, scrape together just enough votes to edge out the victory.
Argent: The Consortium is a gem. It’s one of the most interesting, interactive, and clever worker placement games I’ve played in a very long time. It’s not the easiest thing to get on the table or convince normies to play, but it’s worth the effort every time. If you love worker placement, love interactive games, and don’t mind a bit of magical cruelty, Argent: The Consortium, despite being 10 years old, might end up being your new favourite too.
The way my game group operates, is that we rotate hosting between each member. Whoever’s turn it is to host, gets to pick the game(s) we play that evening. Sometimes we finish our game a bit early, so the host gets to break out one of their smaller games to cap off the evening. Such was the case the other day when Blokus 3D hit the table.
We had just been handed a crushing defeat in the final mission of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth: Shadowed Paths expansion, which meant our campaign had finally come to a close. As some kind of detox from the heavily thematic combat oriented game, the colourful blocks called to Bigfoot, who plopped it onto the table.
Blokus 3D (otherwise known as Rumis) is a three-dimensional abstract strategy game. All players receive the same pieces, then take turns placing piece after piece, trying to be the player who comes out on top. Literally. The victor is the player who has the most blocks of their colour when viewing the final structure from above.
The game starts with a template being placed down on the plastic lazy susan creating a form for the structure that you’re going to build. The structure also goes up in steps, where the first row can only be one block high, while the second row can be up to 2 blocks high, and so on until you reach 6 blocks. The only other placement restriction is that the block you place must touch another block of your own colour (which is the opposite of regular Blokus rules, where your blocks cannot touch other blocks of your colour). Beyond that, players just alternate taking turns until someone runs out of blocks or no players are able to play anymore.
The lazy susan is a nice touch, as there will be times when the structure has created a cliff, or your only spot to place is now from a single square poking out the back of the structure. The play area on that lazy susan has ridges, so the blocks don’t go flying off the base when you rotate it, but that same consideration does not extend to the blocks themselves. An errant sneeze could send your whole game scattered across the table. Not that I would know….
A big part of Blokus 3D is placing your blocks in such a way that it benefits you, but also doesn’t let your opponents completely hem you in. in a higher player count game, a poor placement and cutthroat opponents can see a player eliminated after a single block placement. I appreciate the depth in this thought, the short term gain of getting a lot of blocks on the top-most layer, but not working towards the later game of having more placement options.
It’s quite nice having a three-dimensional positional abstract game. There’s no randomness, no luck involved in Blokus 3D, just skill and strategy. It’s a spatial puzzle that tickles the brain in a delightful way, and a game that made me instantly want to play it again and again. It helps that games are so short, with only, like, 12 pieces allocated per player. At 2 players, it’s a knife fight in a phone booth as you try desperately to avoid giving your opponent a leg up, and at higher player counts it’s more tactical. Rewarding you for having multiple options each turn, and snapping the perfect spots when the time is ripe.
I enjoyed Blokus 3D more than it’s 2D cousin, but I have always enjoyed spatial puzzles, and the inclusion of the 3rd dimension feels new and exciting to me. I wish the blocks weren’t quite so slick, so I could play this with my kids and not worry about their non-dextrous fingers knocking the whole game over, but as it stands, it’s a great cerebral puzzle to bust out at the end of the night when you really feel like crushing your opponents and punishing them for their lack of forethought.
I just looked at my usual online game stores, and it looks like Blokus 3D is hard to find. But hey, maybe this can be the grail game that gets you into thrift stores and yard sales.
