Remember Minesweeper? Ever since I was a little kid, I was the type of person to press every button, look in every file, check every setting. When our school go it’s first Windows 95 computer, my inquisitive nature was rewarded with finding Minesweeper. Now, I’m curious, but dumb, so I just clicked around a bunch and eventually, always, blew up. It wasn’t until I was an early teenager when someone explained to me how the game worked. It wasn’t just a random grid of mines and numbers, it was a puzzle to be solved. Today’s game, Bomb Busters, designed by Hisashi Hayashi and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2024 evokes a lot of the same feelings as classic Minesweeper.
In Bomb Busters, players are a team of bomb disposal experts, trying to collaboratively cut all the wires to disarm the bomb, while avoiding the trigger wire that will spell disaster for everyone around the table should it be cut. At the start of every game, 48 tiles, 4 each of numbers 1 – 12 are face down and shuffled up. Then, a few yellow and red tiles are added to the mix, and the tiles are distributed as evenly as possible amongst all the players and set in ascending order in each player’s tile tray.
On your turn, you choose a tile of your own, then point to a single tile in someone else’s tile try, and declare what number that tile is, matching the tile of your own that you chose. If correct, you both lay the tile down in front of your trays. If wrong, the other player takes an information token and places it in front of the tile you chose, revealing it’s number for someone else to cut on a later turn, and reducing the game timer. If the game timer runs out, or if anyone ever happens to point to the red wire, boom. The game is lost. To win the game, all players need to fully empty their tile trays.
To assist you in your bomb diffusing efforts, each player has a power, and as you cut certain numbers, you unlock tools that you can use to tilt the odds of the game into your favour. These tools can let you swap a tile with someone else, or label two tiles in your tray as “matching” or “not matching”. Choosing who and when to use these tools can be the difference between victory and defeat, or at the very least, if someone is in a situation where they have a 50% chance to cut the red wire, then they can really save the crew from disaster.
Bomb Busters starts with an 8 game introduction. Very slowly introducing mechanics and concepts to players, and then making those concepts a touch harder over the course of several plays. Our group, skipped to the 3rd mission, then the 6th, then the final mission. I’m generally a fan of the learning games, but in the case of Bomb Busters, I think the first few missions were entirely too easy. But if you have players in your group that struggle to learn rules by someone talking at them, it’s a useful way to scaffold their learning. The last training mission is the full game experience, so if you’re the kind of person who does very well with reading a rulebook and understanding from that, you may want to consider skipping right up to that point.
When you first start playing Bomb Busters, each player will have a single information token in front of them. You’ll scratch your head, trying to figure out what your comrades are trying to tell you, and more than likely, you’ll make a blind guess or two, potentially ending the game early (hence the Minesweeper reference in the first paragraph). But after a few plays, things start to click. You start inferring more information from a single guess. Why someone might choose a specific number, figuring out what solutions they’re leading you to, it’s kind of magical in that way.
To assist those of us with stunted memories, there’s a handy board that tracks the numbers in play, and where the yellow and red numbers MIGHT be. As you progress in missions, during the set-up you’ll pull several potential yellow and red tiles, mark them on the board, but only actually put a few of them into the mix, setting the others aside, unseen. The bit of uncertainty when picking wires to cut is delicious, and when you successfully deduce your way around them, the whole table feels like they can read each other’s mind.
Bomb Busters is a friendly family deduction game, one that has you delighting in your shared victories. And the box packs in a ton of content. Beyond the 8 training missions, there are a further 66 missions to flex the system and bend your brain. The first mission after basic training includes a small deck of cards, indicating there is now a series of numbers that must be cut in a specific order.
The presence of all the extra missions reminds me of The Crew, where when you play with the same group of players week after week, the missions give a nice variety to the experience. New challenges to overcome, new twists to disrupt the groove you’ve all figured out for yourselves. I haven’t delved further into the missions yet, but I’m excited to see what tricks they’ve cooked up for those seeking bomb disposal mastery.
The base game, that is to say, the game you play at the end of the last training mission, feels full and complete on its own. A deduction game where you feel accomplished following the trail of crumbs your friends leave for you, instead of taking wild guesses in the dark. The setup is mildly tedious, needing to shuffle and distribute 70 little tiles amongst everyone, but that’s a mild criticism.
Minor setup fuss aside, Bomb Busters delivers a tight, engaging cooperative deduction experience that feels fresh. It’s the kind of game where your group slowly levels up together, learning how to read each other’s choices until the table clicks into a shared wavelength. With dozens of missions and clever twists waiting past the tutorial, there’s far more depth here than the cutesy presentation may suggests. For fans of logical puzzles and tense, thinky co-op moments, this one’s a blast. Hopefully not literally.
My 4-year-old has recently been absolutely smitten with the movie WALL-E lately. A ruined world left barren and destitute, filled to the brim with trash and catastrophic dust storms suddenly whipping up to create a moment of tension. The first sign of life appears as a green shoot poking up from the dust, and that little speck of life is what brings the Axiom and all its inhabitants home from it’s 700 year journey.
Revive, by designers Helge Meissner, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson, and Anna Wermlund, and published by Artipia Games in 2022 seeks to replicate a similar feeling with the cover of their game. An icy, frozen wasteland marked by a pair of yellow flowers poking out of the desolate landscape, representing the earth healing itself. The game itself takes place on a blue board laden with icy blue tiles, with only the very centre of the map being inhabitable.
Each turn, a player has two actions. They can play one of their cards to the top or bottom of their player board, and take the corresponding resources or action on that card, or they can spend their resources to explore, where they flip over icy tiles and recruit new survivors, they can populate, where they leave a population marker that improves their clan ability, or they can build, which improves the technologies on their player board.
I’m trying to keep the actions of the game tied to the theme, but the honest truth is that while Revive has an incredibly distinct art style and presentation, the theme falls apart when trying to tie them to the mechanisms. The reality is that when you start playing Revive, you’ll quickly stop thinking about the theme of rebuilding society after 5,000 years of devastation. Instead, your mind will reduce everything to it’s base elements and abstract rules that make up the gameplay.
And I’m okay with that, because the gameplay is incredibly satisfying. The player board for Revive is incredibly striking. First, it’s huge. Secondly, it’s such an irregular shape with notches carved out of the top, bottom, and right side for you to place your cards, and a small notch on the left for you to stick your clan board. Lastly, the centre is dual layered and dominated by 3 tracks spiralling out with over a dozen things to uncover.
Building the buildings will send the little cylinders on your player board along their designated tracks, pulling discs off your board and earning you machines, which are bonus actions that cost energy to use. The machines can offer you a plethora of goodies, from just straight resources, to beneficial conversions, to discounts on certain actions, and even allowing you to play the bottom half of a card on a top slot.
Speaking of the slots, at the beginning of the game, playing one of your cards for resources will net you only the resources on the cards. But plugging in slot modules will net you extra resources, if the card you play to that slot matches the colours of the slot modules. Some of the cards even allow you to layer further cards on top of the same slot, allowing you to trigger those slot modules again and again. But you can’t JUST play cards, each of the 3 resources has a hard limit of 6, encouraging you to consider timing and tempo as you earn and spend your resources.
The board itself starts the game shrouded in mystery. From a central point, all players fan out, flipping over tiles to earn points, get new cards, and reveal terrain types, which will push the cylinders on your player board when you build next to them. But just because you revealed a terrain tile, doesn’t mean that it’s your terrain. If you decide to leave it for a turn, another player can swoop in and plonk their building down on your newly discovered home. And you’ll really need to ensure other players don’t do that, because building on the juiciest spaces is lucrative and propels your engine further and further, and each hex can only accommodate a single building.
Every time you build a building, you’re establishing for yourself another post from which you can venture outwards. When you explore, build, or populate, you’ll need to pay food to cover the distance. The more you put out onto the board, the easier it is to get around. Each of the corners of the maps is also home to a large scoring tile, which you only get access to if you populate onto it. Speaking of populating, not only does putting your meeples onto the board give you a jumping off point for future actions, it also unlocks more of your tribe’s ability. The base game comes with 6 factions, each with unique quirks and powers. Each of those factions are also double-sided, giving you plenty of asymmetry to explore.
Revive doesn’t have rounds per-se. Instead of a regular turn, you can choose to hibernate. Doing this pulls all the cards from your hibernation state, all the cards you’ve slotted in are then moved to the hibernation state, freeing up the slots to be used again. You pull all the energy off your machines, enabling them to be activated again, and then you get a little bonus depending on how many times you’ve hibernated. The hibernation track also has a built-in end game accelerator, where if you hibernate for the 4th time, you discard one of the artifacts from the game entirely. But in all my games, I think I’ve only seen that happen once.
I’ve talked a lot about what you can do, but I haven’t talked about why you do. At several junctions in Revive, you’ll earn an artifact. Populating the top tier of your tech tracks, getting your 6th disc onto your player board, getting your 10th and 5th cylinder movement on each of the tracks, and earning 15 points all allow you to take an artifact. These strange, alien skull things come in 3 flavours, silver, orange, and purple, and each flavour of artifact one corresponds to an end game victory condition that’s different for every player, as dictated by a hidden card you’ll receive at the start of the game. Perhaps my silver artifacts give me a point for every slot module I’ve earned, while your opponent’s silver artifact nets them a point for every card they’ve obtained throughout the game. The important thing to remember here is that the artifacts are limited, and their score is multiplicative.
Combining the corner victory point tiles with the victory points you’ll earn from the artifacts you collect are how you will claim victory in Revive. Being able to combine or double dip on a scoring criteria, such as a corner tile giving you one point per slot module, and one of your artifact conditions giving you one point for every 2 slot modules per artifact you collect can inform your choices during the game, but it’s important to remain flexible. There are only a small handful of each artifact available, and if someone else is chasing the same artifact you’re chasing, then by the time the game is half over, the artifacts that would benefit you the most, are simply exhausted.
The end of Revive comes up dramatically quickly. The end game trigger is when all the artifacts are exhausted, which, taking an artifact is generally a reward for maxing out one aspect of the game. At the halfway point, one or two players may have claimed a single artifact. But in the last round or two, it’s not uncommon for a chain of actions to result in one player picking up multiple artifacts. You might feel safe when there are 4 artifacts remaining on the board, but the game can come to an end surprisingly quickly.
I think my only real complaint or criticism about Revive is the included ‘campaign’. When you open a new copy of Revive, you’ll be suggested to play this 5 game campaign, which introduces concepts and rules piecemeal over the course of the campaign. It’s unnecessary, slow, and a perfect way to ensure players don’t experience a full game of Revive. In a world where I only have 1 game night per week, and 4 friends all with their own board game collections and new games trickling in all the time, having a watered down first experience as a stepping stone modular tutorial towards a full game is a recipe for a great game getting lost in the shuffle. Perhaps the bigger sin is putting some of the advanced rules that come in during the campaign on cards that I keep forgetting when I’m trying to reference an edge case in the rulebook.
Revive has become one of my favourite medium-heavy euro games of the past few years because it delivers that rare mix of momentum, creativity, and tension that keeps me thinking about it long after the game is over. Even if the theme melts away the moment you start optimizing your gameplay, it does manage to evoke the feeling of moving from scarcity into abundance. Turn by turn, you chip away at this frozen puzzle until suddenly everything starts to hum, and your engine erupts in a cascade of actions you spent an hour patiently setting up. Those moments where you chain machines, chests, cards, and faction abilities into a single, absurdly powerful turn are the reason I keep coming back. It’s clever, it’s crunchy, and it’s endlessly satisfying.
The late 00’s and early 2010’s were a beige time in board games. Lots of board games with shades of brown and themes about trading spices and goods for prestige in the Mediterranean. Let’s not forget all the covers with grumpy men staring either at you, or off into the distance. Rococo, designed by Matthias Cramer, Stefan Malz, and Louis Malz and published by eggertspiele in 2013 decided to buck this trend by having a beige cover with a woman staring at you instead. Oh, also instead of trading spices, you’re trading silks, threads, and laces as you craft ballroom gowns to sell for cash or rent for prestige.
Rococo is a euro game through and through, but a bit of an interesting take on deck building. Each round, you pick up your whole deck of employee cards and choose 3 to put into your hand. These employee tasks allow you to preform one of the six main actions, but not all employees can preform every action. Masters can do everything, apprentices can do most of the actions, excluding only crafting master dresses and hiring new employees. Journeymen are cut off from seeking the Queens Favour, and from making dresses entirely.
To take an action, you must play one card from your hand and then choose one of the six main actions. Taking the queen’s favour earns you 5 Lirve (the currency for Rococo) and you get to go first next round. Visiting the silk market allows you to take silks, or, discard the silk tile for thread and laces. All of which are important for building the dresses. Building dresses is another main action, where you pick one blueprint from the row along the bottom of the board, turn in the required resources, then either sell the dress for cash, or rent it out and place it in the hall in an area majority contest that will net you a small amount of prestige. Each round, there are 4 employee cards available for purchase, and this action can only be taken by a master. When you buy an employee card, they do go right into your hand, so you can use their ability on the round you purchase them. The next action is to depute a worker, which has you send them off to get a small amount of cash equal to their skill level (and removes them from your deck), and the final action is to sponsor a decoration, which just has you trading in a sum of money and placing a disc onto the board.
Most of the employee cards also have a special ability that gets activated after you preform the main action. These can be as pedestrian as earning you a single coin for their labour, while others will net you resources, or allow you to preform a specific main action with a discount. Each player takes a turn playing an employee card, doing one action, then activating the employee bonus, and their turn is over. Once all players run out of cards, the round ends. After 7 rounds, the game ends, and the player with the most prestige points, is the winner.
Rococo does have some really interesting concepts. First, its approach to deck building is novel and full of control. Instead of shuffling your discard and drawing 3 cards, you get to just pick up your whole deck and choose any 3 cards you want. Once used, those employees will sit in the discard until you go through your entire deck, but still, it’s deck building without the luck of the draw.
The other aspect of Rococo that I really enjoyed was the dynamic markets. Both the resource market and the employee market cost money, but the amount of money you need to spend goes down as players buy from those markets. It creates a fascinating tempo consideration. If there’s a juicy employee that you want, is it worth 5 Livre to buy immediately? Or can you wait until someone else buys a different card so you get the employee you want for 3 Livre, or even for free if they’re the last employee available for the round.
All of the markets refresh at the start of each round instead of during gameplay, so it’s not uncommon for a market to run out of options. This creates another timing consideration. Do you take a resource from the market now? If you wait, will there even be anything left the next time your turn comes around?
Everything I’ve talked about so far is in service of the main board, where you’re making and renting dresses to people lining the halls. Each of the 5 halls will give prestige to the player who has the most dresses in that hall, as well as prestige for the dresses themselves. This is where the bulk of your points will come from.
But at the end of the day, Rococo is still a euro game. There’s not a ton of player interaction other than taking a resource from a market first, or sneaking in one last disc into a hall to secure the majority.
I think Rococo shines best at odd player counts, as having an even number of players makes the area majority aspect of the game a bit of a tit-for-tat tug of war instead of something a bit more competitive. At the same time, I don’t think having a lot of players will do the game any favours, as the entire stack of employee cards will be used no matter the player count. With more players, you’ll be stuck reusing your same basic employees again and again, leading me to think the ideal player count is 3.
Rococo is a great mid-weight euro game. It has all the familiar trademarks of other games (resource markets, deck building, recipe fulfillment), but utilizes the mechanics in novel and dynamic ways. The theme of creating dresses in 18th century France is whimsical and unique. It’s not a hard game to play, making it a good choice to play with those who have graduated past gateway games and are on their way to a more meaty affair. It doesn’t break traditions, or reinvent the wheel, making it an easy game to enjoy.
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.
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.
