From Wikipedia: “In the early 6th century Judah rebelled against Babylon and was destroyed (586 BCE). The royal court and the priests, prophets and scribes were taken into captivity in Babylon. There the exiles blamed their fate on disobedience to God and looked forward to a future when a penitent and purified people would be allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.”

Decades later, this future they looked forward to came to pass.

The game Ezra and Nehemiah chronicles the challenges that the noted priest and scribe, Ezra, and cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes of Persia, Nehemiah, faced as they worked to restore the city of Jerusalem to its former glory and bring the word of the gospel to the people therein. In the game, players will be using their hand of cards and the workers at their disposal to clear away the rubble of the destroyed city, rebuild the walls and the temple, and teach the Torah to the people.

It is worth noting here that, while Ezra and Nehemiah is inspired by biblical events and takes place in the setting of the story, it is not a religious game. It is a meaty, thinky eurogame with a lot of moving parts and interconnected systems. The aim of the game is to earn the most points by…

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“Yes, but which sylLAble receives the emPHAsis?” I asked. “Is it P’RAM-i-dice, like Paradise with an extra half-beat? PY-ram-i-dice, which begs pronouncing the first syllable as if I were Archimedes? Pyramid-ICE, as if it were a beverage? Or maybe emphasizing every syllable—PIE-RAM-EYE-DICE!”

I guess it’s a good thing when a game offers that sort of conversation before the teach, a conversation that inevitably ends with allowing the eventual winner to select the pronunciation that will live in perpetuity.

Pyramidice is a dice rolling pyramid builder from Ares Games and the mind of Luigi Ferrini, who had a semi-hit a decade back with Stronghold’s The Golden Ages. Rather than building a civilization, players are marking their civilization with pyramids on behalf of the Pharaoh while seeking the favor of the gods—and the occasional sacred cat.

Building blocks

Pyramidice is, in many ways, a procedural affair—add a stone die to the quarry, roll a number of dice determined by available workers, then choose from a list of possibilities until the dice are spent. You might reroll, attain a god card, send a stone die to a pyramid, carry out a god action, discard a die to refresh a card, or discard two dice for a point. As needed, you’ll discard cats to modify dice.

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When the folks at NorthStar Game Studio call, I always answer.

That’s because NorthStar published one of my ten favorite games of 2023, Inheritors, and they also delivered my second-favorite solo game of 2023, Eila and Something Shiny. Both games were designed by Jeffrey CCH, so when NorthStar offered a review copy of their upcoming Gen Con release, Sacred Valley, I jumped at the chance to cover it.

The game arrived quickly, and after opening the box I was greeted by a rulebook printed in a very large typeface, making it very “old man friendly” because my eyesight gets a little worse every year. One pass of the rules and I was golden, and after my first play with the kids, one thing became clear right away—Sacred Valley is family-weight gold. The simple ruleset and limited actions made the game instantly accessible, and my 10-year-old commented that they would play Sacred Valley again right away “if we didn’t need to eat dinner right now.”

So, my kids love Sacred Valley. What did I think of the game? Read on.

There Are Only Four Actions

When you can teach a game from the back of a player screen, you know the teach is gonna be quick.

…

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Nearly two years ago, I sang the praises of 7 Wonders: Architects as worthy of a place in the Wonder-verse alongside its more mature colleagues, 7 Wonders and 7 Wonders: Duel. I spoke of speed and charm as if it were destined to be a staple family game. 

I still believe all of those things. In fact, 7 Wonders: Architects has remained a steady play in our family and is one of our most-played titles overall. The younger kiddos still adore it (now six and eleven years old), and the teenagers still join us for the experience. 

After demonstrating whole weeks of patience following the release, we grabbed a copy of 7 Wonders: Architects – Medals, the first expansion, from an out-of-town FLGS and brought it to the vacation table. What a great decision. 

Wonder me this…

Medals brings two new Wonders to the table—the Roman Colosseum and the ancient city of Ur. The Colosseum twice allows for the theft of a single card from another player—as tribute—only to then provide a free card from the center as benevolent compensation. Ur brings the game’s beloved Kitty home to roost along with a free card. These mid-game triggers fit the game like a glove without feeling contrived.

More significantly, the titular Medals are a stack of stickered…

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Clash of Galliformes is a bit of a throwback to when area control games contented themselves with being dumb and proud of it. As a dumbo, I appreciate this. I do not demand intricate combat systems with convoluted rules about order of battle, troop deployment, terrain. I’m not here to be a grognard, dammit, I’m a lord of the giant sage grouse kingdom, and I demand blood, not rules overhead!

[caption id="attachment_302380" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Blood for the bird god![/caption]

I don’t like “animals” or “nature” as a setting for a game. Sorry, Dominant Species, I’d rather play as a man than as a bug. Now, if you cast me as a group of humans who have co-evolved with gigantic landfowl and ride them around like horses, now I’m interested. Thomas, the great Quail-lord. I suppose birds are the exception to my no-animals rule.

Them’s fightin’ birds

Anyway, Clash of Galliformes is an area control euro-puzzle hybrid game where you build bird soldiers, march them around a point-to-point map, take over sites, build outposts on them, and try to level up your bird board to get better powers. At the start, you have a single minion, but you expand to develop greater resource production capacity, and you start collecting chits.

The almighty…

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When was the last time you opened a game and were impressed with the components, like really blown away. Voidfall perhaps? Gloomhaven? Just about any game from Eagle-Gryphon games these days? So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened World Wonders, from Arcane Wonders–a $50 game with oodles of production value (at least in my opinion). Over 20 incredible wooden “wonders” (called monuments in the game, but each different and each with an impressive level of detail), dozens of cardboard tiles, a well designed and thought out insert, and an excellent rulebook–really one of the best I’ve read in quite some time.

But how does it play?

World Wonders Overview

In World Wonders, 1-5 players attempt to raise up their city / civilization, increasing their population, gathering resources, and most importantly…building monuments. The game ends after the tenth round, or when one player raises their population to twelve, although in my experience these two things usually happen very close together.

World Wonders is packed full of things you can do on your turn, which means that there’s always something useful to accomplish. Each player starts the game with 7 coins, and 0 each population, wheat, pottery, and engineering, marking them on their personal player board. Over…

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Two of my friends love Innovation. They play it constantly. Both backed the new edition while it was on crowdfunding, and every time I receive a review copy in the mail, they vibrate with the possibility that it might be Innovation Ultimate.

I sat down with one of them to give Aegean Sea a crack, since Carl Chudyk designs are often a bear to learn. It’s not that his games are all that complicated; the issue is that they are deeply uninterested in any notion of “intuitive.” That isn’t intended as a criticism. He’s a unique designer, and his idiosyncrasies are what make him distinct, but it is a barrier to entry. Anyone who’s ever tried to teach Mottainai knows.

Even with experience, we found ourselves struggling. On top of the unintuitive rules, there are no labels anywhere for the various and numerous tucked cards. Chudyk loves a tucked card, and in all of his other designs, the locations in which those cards get tucked. Not so here. What’s more, this is Chudyk’s first asymmetrical design.

There are five groups in the game—Athens, Crete, Ephesus, Rhodes, and Sparta—and each plays differently. Not like Root, not in mechanically distinct ways, but…

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During an interview on the podcast 5 Games for Doomsday, designer Mark Herman discussed two different approaches to historical board games. He said that games can work like simulations, recreating the events more or less as they happened, or they can work to put you in the headspace of that moment. To illustrate his point, he used one of his own games.

In Empire of the Sun, which depicts the Pacific Theater during World War II, neither player knows if the atomic bomb will come into play. It’s possible to go an entire game without seeing it. Why does that matter? In real life, neither Japan nor the vast majority of the U.S. military knew about the bomb, until suddenly they did. If either party had, they would have made different decisions.

 If Harry Truman knew about the bomb before he did, the United States Military and other allies wouldn’t have planned an invasion of the Japanese mainland. If Japan knew the United States had the capacity to instantly end the lives of some 80,000 people in Hiroshima, to say nothing of people who died later from hunger, injuries, or radiation sickness, they may well have surrendered earlier, or never entered the conflict in the first place. To play knowing that the atomic bomb is coming is to fundamentally…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2011’s Trajan, his 15th game.

2011 was a busy, and career defining, year for Stefan Feld. Earlier that year, he’d released Strasbourg. Even earlier than that, the unassuming The Castles of Burgundy had appeared on the boardgaming scene, completely unaware of the mark in history it was going to make. If Feld had been flying under the radar, he certainly wasn’t anymore. The Castles of Burgundy took the world by storm, placing Stefan Feld squarely in the spotlight. It was a game that marked him as a designer to watch out for. And Trajan only served to solidify that status, proving that it is possible to catch lightning in a bottle a second time.

Overview

Using Ancient Rome as a backdrop, Trajan is a game that challenges players to maximize what little time they…

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If you have a chance to review any of my previous content, you’ll see a lot of glowing words attached to the reviews of games designed or co-designed by Simone Luciani.

To me, Luciani is gaming royalty. Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar are some of the best games I have ever played. Luciani’s “T” game release with Daniele Tascini, Tiletum, was my pick for the best game of 2022.

With all of that in mind, there was never a doubt that I would play Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods (2023, Cranio Creations), a co-design with Danilo Sabia. Sabia and Luciani also designed Rats of Wistar, which will soon make its way to gamers in the US.

I’m not going to lie to you: Anunnaki didn’t hit it out of the park, to use a baseball reference. It’s not that the game is bad—in fact, it is occasionally interesting, particularly with its action selection mechanism—but it is very likely that my standards for Luciani games have gotten too high. Grand Austria Hotel is the best Euro-style game I have ever played; as a film buff, when you love a film director and that director puts out middling fare, you…

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I love tableau building games.

Certainly, I love the classics, particularly Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, and Terraforming Mars. Ark Nova is nearly at the top of BGG’s game rankings for the same reason. Any time I can play a game where I can collect a bunch of cards to then play them to the table and trigger a bunch of powers, one-time effects, and end-game scoring bonuses based on set collection, I’m going to play it to see if I like it.

Ancient Knowledge (2023, IELLO) does a lot of things well. This new tableau builder, designed by Rémi Mathieu, keeps things so simple that the game can be taught using only its double-sided, poker card-sized player aid. But with nearly 200 different cards that can be built, Ancient Knowledge has a great variety in its cardplay and its system provides a few ways to win for creative players.

Across three plays (two at three players, one at two players), Ancient Knowledge has proved to be very entertaining. I just wish I didn’t have to house-rule the ending condition.

Goblets Are Gold

Ancient Knowledge is a hand management, card drafting tableau builder for 2-4 players. The game comes with individual and team competitive…

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