A copy of Wingspan: Oceania was provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes.
Wingspan has become a titan in the board game world. It’s by far Stonemaier Games’ most well-known and widely played title, earning recognition even from people outside the hobby, though many still refer to just as “that bird game.”
The base game of Wingspan focused on birds from North America, but the expansions have gradually introduced avian species from other corners of the globe. Wingspan: Oceania brings us the birds of Australia and New Zealand, with nearly 100 new bird cards, fresh player boards, new dice, and most impactfully, introducing a brand-new resource: nectar.
Nectar is the biggest change in Oceania, and it fundamentally changes how you play. Acting as a wild resource, nectar gives players far more flexibility in paying for bird cards and activating abilities. It’s incredibly useful. So useful, in fact, that it comes with a small catch: nectar spoils between rounds if unused. That said, it’s rarely a hindrance. Most players quickly learn to burn nectar before any other resource. Its wild versatility more than makes up for the spoilage.
What’s more, many of the bird powers in Oceania are designed to share the love. Many abilities now provide resources or cards or some other benefit to all players, with the acting player getting slightly more of the reward. This small shift encourages more positive player interaction, a rising tide lifts all ships kind of situation, perfectly in keeping with Wingspan’s gentle and inclusive tone.
The new player boards offer subtle but impactful improvements. In the forest row, you can now spend a resource to reroll the birdfeeder. In the wetlands, you can spend a resource to refresh the bird tray. These changes directly address my long-standing complaints about stagnation in the base game, especially when unhelpful cards or dice sit unused for entire rounds. These tweaks breathe new life into familiar systems.
I reviewed Wingspan over three years ago. While I admired its beauty and accessibility, I also noted some personal gripes: a very slow opening round, a hefty dose of luck, and minimal player interaction that sometimes made it hard to stay engaged when it wasn’t my turn. But here’s the thing: even with those reservations, Wingspan kept returning to our table. It’s one of my partner’s all-time favorite games, and whenever we have friends over, especially people new to the hobby, it’s the game that gets suggested. Again and again. And the fact that it continues to hit the table, speaks volumes to its quality.
As a reviewer, I rarely revisit games after I’ve covered them. The constant influx of new titles pulls my attention elsewhere. But Wingspan: Oceania brought me back. And more than that, it made Wingspan feel fresh again.
Wingspan: Oceania is an expansion that doesn’t just add more, it adds better. The new bird cards are lively and fun, their powers promote inclusive interaction, the nectar system smooths out some early-game struggles, and the updated player boards address longstanding pain points. It enhances the base game in every meaningful way.
In fact, I doubt I’ll ever play Wingspan without it again.
An essential expansion that transforms a good game into a great one. If you own Wingspan, Oceania is a must.
Disclaimer: A copy of Between Two Castles: Essential Edition has been provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes
In a lot of other media types, mash-ups and crossover events are some of the most exciting moments. In comic books, having Spider-Man appear alongside the X-Men had fans frothing, heck, Deadpool & Wolverine was the second highest grossing movie of 2024. In music, mashups were exciting, combining the best and iconic moments from several songs into one banging track. While board games have had some iterative designers, such as Uwe Rosenburg with Agricola and Caverna, or taking an existing game and putting a new spin on it, a la The Crew and The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, there really haven’t been a lot of direct mashups.
Stonemaier Games already has a pedigree of inviting collaborators to use their games to build something bigger and better, like taking the Wingspan game by Elizabeth Hargrave, and spinning off the more complex Wyrmspan by Connie Vogelmann and the less complex Finspan by designers David Gordon and Michael O’Connell, but again, these are iterative designs. New games standing on the shoulders of giants, borrowing core mechanisms, but introducing new ideas.
In 2018, Stonemaier games released a true mashup. Designers Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset took their game, Between Two Cities, and smashed it into Castles of Mad King Ludwig by Ted Alspach. If you’ve never played either of those two games, let’s talk briefly about how Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays.
Sitting between each player, lays a castle. Each round, you’ll pick nine tiles into your hand. You’ll choose two to keep, and place the rest face down next to your neighbour. When everyone has made their pick, everyone reveals the tiles they kept. Then, you place one of the tiles they kept into each of the castles on either side of you. Each of your opponents will do the same. You’re collaborating with your neighbours, trying to build both of your castles to be the best they can be, as the castle of yours that scores the lowest will represent your individual score at the end of the game. Once you’ve placed a tile into both castles, you’ll pick up the seven tiles your opponent left you, pick two again, and on and on the game plays until you’ve completed two whole rounds. Then, you’ll score each of your castles and declare a player the winner.
If you have played Between Two Cities, you might be thinking “That’s exactly how Between Two Cities plays, where’s does Castles of Mad King Ludwig come into the picture?”. Well, how each tile scores is lifted directly from CoMKL. Each tile is a room, from activity rooms, to dining halls, to outdoor gardens. Each type of room has a different scoring objective, such as being adjacent to other rooms of specific types, or earning points for all the tiles of a type in a single row or column. In addition, when you get 3 rooms of a single type into your castle, you earn a bonus based on that room type. If you’ve played Castles of Mad King Ludwig, all that will sound very familiar.
Now we understand how each parent game donated its traits into Between Two Castles, I’ll briefly touch on what separates the 2025 Essential Edition from the 2018 original. And the answer is functionally nothing. The Essential Edition contains the original base game, the Stories and Soirees expansion, plus the two promo tiles that have been released. But if you were just looking at the player aids and the rulebook, you’d never know that the secret rooms or the ballrooms were originally expansion content.
Now, I said above that Between Two Castles feels cooperative or collaborative, and it does. You are working with your two neighbours to build the best castle possible, because your individual final score is equal to the lower score of your two castles. But it’s still a competitive game, there is only be one winner at the end of the night. But the friendly nature of the game ensures that no one has bad feelings during gameplay, except for the pangs of jealousy as you watch your partner to your left confer with the person to their left as they decide which of the two tiles they drafted are going to go into your shared castle.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition plays up to 8 players seamlessly. Much like how 7 Wonders scales up in player count so easily, each round you’re only really interacting with two other people. Your hands of tiles will flow around the table, and much of the thinking time and decisions happen simultaneously. There aren’t many games I’m willing to play at 7 or 8 players outside of party games, but I’d consider this a contender against 7 Wonders if I know that everyone at the table has some experience in the board game hobby.
All the rooms score differently, and you earn a different bonus when you get 3 or 5 rooms of the same type in your castle, which can spiral out the number of choices you need to make. Teaching Between Two Castles is kind of a pain, as by the time you’ve explained the 9th room type, no one really remembers what the first types of rooms do anymore. Thankfully, the game comes with 8 player aids which do a fantastic job of reminding you of the important information, once you have the context of the rules in your head.
Ever since I first laid hands on Wingspans rulebook, with it’s wonderfully luxurious linen finish, Stonemaier Games production quality has been second to none in my eyes, and that remains true here. The rulebook is big and clear with helpful examples, the tiles are thick and beautifully illustrated, although some of the iconography on the tiles is a bit small. The GameTrayz contains the game beautifully, and makes it a breeze to ‘setup’. You literally plop the trayz onto the table, and tell everyone to grab a stack of tiles. Bang, you’re already into the game. For ease of access, Stonemaier games earns top marks.
I had played Between Two Cities once before, and thought it was pretty fun. I am a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, so I was excited to experience this mashup. What I found was a fun, easy to teach game that felt friendly and collaborative. Everyone was working with their partners well, conspiring to maximize the points on both their castles. The tile drafting created some interesting decisions as you can pick tiles, knowing what your partner is going to get next round, and just hope that they (literally) pick up what you put down. Between Two Castles has the satisfaction that comes from building and pulling off a plan with a partner that makes cooperative games so popular, while also giving providing one player the satisfaction of victory over your opponents.
Many of the scoring objectives are going to pull you and your partner in opposite directions. Maybe you’ll be wanting to place a specific tile because it’ll score 4 points for the orange tiles in a column, while your partner will want to pick a specific colour tile to gain the bonus for having 3 rooms of a single type. When you start triggering those bonuses, the game really starts to sing. The downside is that some of the bonuses can make for some much longer turns as players take time mathing out how to maximize their points, between drawing new tiles, or cards and placing everything perfectly. A slight frustration when they spend 10 minutes debating where to put something, and the difference between the two options is a single point.
Onto the question that needs answering. Is Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig greater than the sum of its parts? For my money, no. As a big fan of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I’m left feeling sad that the bidding mechanic and whimsical and wacky castle designs were stripped away. But there is no denying that Between Two Castles is the more accessible option. It’s cooperative drafting, fun scoring style, seamless scalability, and polished production make it a fantastic choice.
Between Two Castles: Essential Edition is a wonderful game. If you have larger player counts, it’s an obvious pick, as it scales from 3 to 8 players perfectly. It’s fast, unlike many other games that can support that many players, it’s gorgeous, even if the iconography is a bit small. There are two solo modes and a 2 player variant, the expansion content is folded in so seamlessly that you’d be left wondering what’s different between the essential edition and the base game. The puzzle tickles my brain just right, and while it doesn’t surpass the heights of the original Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Between Two Castles offers a unique and interesting spin on the scoring mechanics from CoMKL. This game is well worth a spot on my shelf.
How many times have you almost been in a fight? How many times have you talked a big game only to realize, yeah, it’s probably smarter to sit back and let someone else take the hits? Scythe is all about that moment; the tension before the clash, the slow buildup where everyone is flexing just enough power to scare off rivals. Despite the war machines that are front and centre in players hands, Scythe isn’t just about throwing punches. It’s a game about power, efficiency, and a dance of anticipation where actual combat is rare, but impactful.
Scythe is a beautiful game. It was the first time I had ever seen a dual layered player board, something that just seems so obvious and prolific in today’s world. Each faction has four mechs plus a hero and animal companion, represented with unique sculpts. The world building and art by Jakub Rozalski draws on 1920 era industrial revolution motifs, with hulking behemoths in the background. It’s immediately arresting and sets up an atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re on the doorstep of a great conflict.
The gameplay hinges on a unique action-selection system. Each player gets a personal action board with four sections, each section links a pair of actions. On your turn, you choose a quadrant, pay any visible costs, and carry out the top action. Then, if you can, you also pay for the bottom action for an extra benefit. Turns are quick and efficient, hopping from one player to the next until someone manages to place their sixth achievement star, and immediately end the game.
Scythe‘s top row actions are deceptively straightforward. Move, produce, trade, and bolster. Moving lets you expand your influence across the map, dragging along your loyal workers to work the fields. Producing generates resources based on your where and how many workers you have on a location. Bolstering raises your strength or gives you power cards, and trading lets you spawn any two resources for a coin. But it’s the bottom row actions and being able to exploit the timing is where the strategic depth really lies. Each bottom action costs resources, and different player boards mix up which actions and benefits are linked together, making every faction’s strategy feel unique.
These bottom actions are what really get your engine running. Upgrading moves a cube from the top row to the bottom, making a main action better and making a bottom action cheaper. Enlisting gives you benefits when your neighbours take specific bottom row actions, deploying drops those hulking mechs onto the table, plus unlocking asymmetric abilities for all your plastic figures, and building creates structures that produce persistent benefits, not to mention may be worth points at the end of the game.
All of these actions build towards earning coins, which are the measure of victory in Scythe. Though you might not notice it at first, coins are critical. And everything you do in the game, from piles of resources you’ve amassed, to all the territory you control, converts into coins based on your popularity at the end fo the game. Placing six stars ends the game, but it’s not a strict “race.” players who are beloved by the populace will get far more coins from the same accomplishments, turning what may seem like a run away leader game into a narrowly close end result.
Scythe isn’t a typical war game. It’s more a cold war game, a palpable tension where strength is a resource, just as important as oil or food. Combat is rare in this game, and its real benefit is really limited by a star cap, so strong players aren’t encouraged to just beat down on weaker players indefinitely. When combat does finally occur, it’s a high-stakes gamble. Each player commits strength and power cards secretly, then both strengths are revealed simultaneously. The winner takes control of the contested hex, and gets to place a star, if they haven’t hit that cap. Both players lose all the strength and cards they committed to the fight, however. One time, I made the mistake of going all-in against Clare, only for him to one-up me with a power card, leaving his sum a single point above mine. With my strength utterly depleted, the other players descended on my mechs, pummelling me for easy stars, and leaving me destitute and licking my wounds at home base.
Scythe manages to build a sense of threat. As players expand and build themselves up on the power track, they’re hesitant to get into fights. Many games see a couple of players pushing toward the top of the strength track, throwing fights to conserve their power. But once they max it out, suddenly they have all this strength to burn.
As much as I’ve talked about warfare, winning Scythe isn’t about being the strongest. Victory comes from resource management and having efficient productions, being able to optimize every turn. Every action has a milestone to earn at its end, whether it’s enlisting, upgrading, or building structures and mechs. Like many action efficiency games, the more you play, the more you see the nuances. It was only on my third or fourth game that I really started to understand how to link actions into something that resembled efficiency. After every game, I’d find myself mulling over every decision and thinking about how I could have shaved off a few turns here, or accelerated my engine just a bit faster. It’s the kind of system that digs into your brain and stays there, whispering, “next time…”
Scythe is a special package. It offers a unique blend of cold war tension and engine building bliss. It’s not for everyone, as evidenced by half my game group ‘being done with it’ after 15 plays. But my other friend and I are 20 plays deep, and are looking to embark on some of the fan made campaigns soon. There is so much game to plumb here, from the faction’s starting positions to which action board pair best with each faction, to even just learning how to use each faction abilities themselves! Learning when to push forward and when to back off, there is a tonne of nuance here. Scythe is a masterpiece in my opinion, and a game that I would happily play, any time, anywhere.
Pendulum, by Travis P Jones, and published by Stonemaier Games in 2020, is a real time worker placement game. It was lauded in that it was the highest-rated prototype ever during a Stonemaier Games Design Day. Now, I don’t know what the scoring rubric is for one of those Design Days, but I’m a pretty big fan of Stonemaier Games prior products, like Viticulture and Scythe, and, I absolutely adore real-time games, so this should be a hit for me, right? Let’s find out!
How to Play
I’ll be upfront, teaching how to play Pendulum is a bit of a bear. As with any real-time game, all players need to know how to play the game from the outset. It’s quite difficult to stop and ask questions, lest that player and the rules teacher fall further behind. To compound on this problem, players who don’t want to fall behind may accidentally make a rules error that no one else catches. Because of the time pressure, each player is focused on what they want to do and less on what their opponents are doing. It’s for this reason, the rule book suggests playing the first round of the game in the “untimed mode”.
But I don’t listen to rule books. I throw my friends into the deep end. So here’s how the game plays. The main board has 3 sections: purple, green, and black, each section has two rows of actions. The rows are identical to each other, which makes the board look scarier than it actually is. Each row of actions consists of a golden framed top box and an arrow pointing down to a box immediately below it, with icons representing the benefit you get for going to that space. Many of the arrows will also have icons, representing the cost you need to pay when your workers flow from the top box to the bottom. Workers are always placed into the top box, and when appropriate, may be moved down into the bottom box to reap their rewards.
But when is appropriate? I’m glad you asked. Next to each row of actions is a timer that matches the colour of the section. You can place or remove workers from a row where there is no timer, but you cannot slide workers from the top box to the bottom box. When the timer runs out, anyone may flip the timer from one row to the other. Now those workers are ‘locked’, you cannot place or remove workers from a row where a timer exists. You can activate workers that are on a row with a timer, however, sliding them from their gilded top box into the bottom box and collect the benefits. But then there they must stay until the timer flips away to the other row.
The rounds are tracked by the purple timer. After the purple timer has been flipped for the third time, a counsel is called. No more timers may be flipped, but players are allowed to finish off the existing actions. Once all players are done, you proceed with the counsel phase.
In the counsel phase, players compare the number of votes they acquired over the course of the real-time round. The player with the most goes at the top of the privilege track, then discards all the votes they had gained over the round. Each player collects the rewards associated with their spot on the privilege track, which always includes a reward card offering either a one time benefit, or, a new card that goes into your hand. The board is reset, players discard provinces if they have more than 2 in any column, the council rewards board is cleared and refreshed, as are the province cards, and the achievement card. The purple timer tokens are placed back on the board, and flip all 3 timers to start the next round. After 4 rounds, the game is over!
The goal of Pendulum is to earn points in 3 different flavours (well, 4, but the silver one only has to be done once, so calm down). Each player has their own score track along the top of their board, and a single plastic piece in each row. As you accumulate points, you move the appropriate colour token along its track. You can only win if you’ve managed to get all of your point tokens into the brown square in the top right corner of your player board. If multiple players have achieved this feat, then you count up the total number of points to crown the Timeless Ruler
Review
So, other than knowing it was a Stonemaier Games product that featured a real time real-time element, I knew nothing going into this game. The front page of the rulebook sets the theme of Pendulum. “When the gods first created the world, they gave it no order. This was the Time of Chaos.” Then, one man caught the affection of the god of time and was granted a sliver of his power and became the Timeless King. Then POOF, the Timeless King vanished, leaving the nobles to vie for the title, leading us into the game of Pendulum. I know there’s a story here, but honestly, I don’t really care about it. I read it once, then moved straight into the mechanics. Unlike other games like Food Chain Magnate where the theme and the gameplay are so intrinsically linked, this is just kind of, colour on a cake.
The Pendulum board is incredibly intimidating to start with, but it becomes clear once the game starts to tick. You place your meeple in a square where the timer is not, then slide it down to collect the resources when the timer flips and ‘locks’ the meeple in that row. Like in another Stonemaier game, Viticulture, most of your workers are small, basic, and afraid of crowds, while your other worker is taller, spikier, and unrestricted in where they want to go. Most of the actions revolve around earning goods, which you can spend on various things, some of which will earn you points. Like most worker placement games, you generally can’t place your worker in the same spot as another worker, unless you’re placing the grande worker.
Smartly, each player has their own bank of resources. When you acquire and spend resources from your player board, you just push them off to the side. This is incredibly important as you won’t be constantly reaching back and forth for a central bank of goods, you’ll instead only be slapping hands when you and a neighbour want to place their basic meeple in the same location on the board. Unlike other real-time games, such as Galaxy Trucker, you can’t really hinder someone else by placing certain shared resources far away from them on the table.
It’s especially important because each of the 5 rounds of the game lasts around 9 minutes. In those 9 minutes there’s plenty of frenetic action on the board with meeples sliding down certain actions and getting picked up and relocated and timers flipping from one row to another. There’s definitely energy in Pendulum, no doubt about that.
The first round is always the hardest in any engine building game. You’ll spend several actions putting your meeples to work to earn a single resource. As the game progresses, you’ll start to solve those bottlenecks. By claiming provinces, you can reap more resources that you can then feed back into your engine to produce the goods you need. It feels great when you no longer need to use the bottom actions, but are actually generating a surplus of resources and your point markers start to crawl along the top of your board.
Speaking of those point markers, with so many cubes coming on and off your mat, it’s tough to not jostle your board and send your point markers askew. It’s one of the few production complaints that I have, I wish the player board was dual layered, or, that each of the player’s score track was a separate board. More than once in a rush to clear cubes off my board, I pulled the card stock roughly, losing time with the need to reset my markers.
A common complaint in real-time games has to do with cheating and not being able to review your neighbours work. In Pendulum, you can see where their workers are on the board at all time, but you kind of have to trust they’re spending their resources appropriately. If that’s an aspect of games that bothers you, nothing in Pendulum will change your mind.
Playing Pendulum gave heart a stutter in the best way. Not that it was particularly chaotic or stressful, but the feeling of making multiple computations at a rapid pace in real time is not for everyone. I love that feeling, it gives me such joy to keep all the plates spinning, and it makes my actions feel like they have consequence. It’s actually impressive just how good the real-time worker placement feels! The quick-thinking trade-off of locking your worker away to get multiple goods, or really pumping the shorter actions, the realization that your red score marker has capped out, while your blue score marker is still sitting way at the bottom, forcing you to pivot your strategy is simply delicious.
I really don’t know how often I’ll be going back to Pendulum. Other than knocking the point markers askew, I enjoyed my time with the game, but I also don’t feel like there’s much more to explore. Other than some slightly asymmetric player powers, there doesn’t feel to be much more to discover in Pendulum. Sure, I could challenge myself to complete a game with each character, or set my own goals, like finishing the game with the highest score possible. My main group feels similarly, now that we’ve experienced the game, I don’t think many will be requesting to play it again (especially when Bear has quite an aversion to real time games). If anyone were to express an iota of interest, I wouldn’t hesitate to bring Pendulum back to the table.
