At last year’s SPIEL event in Essen, Germany, I had the chance to try The Warp, a game I followed during its crowdfunding campaign because I was intrigued by its approach to the 4X genre of spacefaring adventure games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate). The campaign, which ended in late 2020, gave me the sense that there would be a real chance at being blown off the map, so the “eXterminate” portion of the 4X mechanic here looked real…and many games in this category do not really follow through on that promise.

I’ve now played The Warp in both three-player and four-player arrangements, and after these plays and a promising demo back in Germany, I know that The Warp does a lot of things well, particularly in the way objective scoring takes place. While it falls a tier below the best 4X and 4X-adjacent games I have played, such as Voidfall, Scythe, Circadians: Chaos Order and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, I think The Warp delivers on many fronts.

The real challenge? Finding it, especially if you live in North America.

“Do You Want to Follow?”

The Warp is a relatively rules-light, 1-4 player area control and hand management experience that can be…

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Over the course of several months, I led a group of six players through the Grand Campaign scenario from Europa Universalis: The Price of Power. For 4-6 hours a day, every other Sunday, we would convene around the gaming table, remind ourselves of where we left off, and get to the business of running the great nations of Europe in the 16th century.

All six players were acquainted with Europa Universalis IV (EUIV), the massive computer game that served as source material for this massive board game. Several of them had put thousands of hours into exploring its nooks and crannies. This isn't, I am told, unusual. EUIV is the type of game that consumes lives. It is one of PC gaming's largest sandboxes. “I mean, it's a Paradox game,” people would say over and over, the developer's name considered enough of an explanation.

The first EU computer game, released back in 2000, was itself adapted from a 1993 board game of the same name. Given that, a modern board game adaptation feels inevitable. It also feels ludicrous. The Price of Power…

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I’ve been on a hunt to play as many games from the purported “4X Family” on BoardGameGeek as possible. Over the last three years, I’ve added quite a few 4X plays to my arsenal, and when an opportunity arose to grab a review copy of Empires of the Void II (2018, Red Raven Games), I scooped one up.

First, let’s talk 4X. This family was created on BGG based on the idea that many large-scale adventure/exploration games feature a bunch of the same elements. First, you’ll eXplore a mostly undiscovered map, featuring a “fog of war” or maybe face-down tiles that need to be touched by a player’s civilization members, a spaceship, etc. to be discovered. Area control elements enter play as players eXpand their presence on the map as it is revealed.

eXploitation takes place as player factions do their best to make use of the map’s natural resources…and in some of the 4X games I’ve tried recently, this is where engine building really shines. Finally, conflict leads to players attempting to eXterminate each other and possibly the locals who currently possess a given territory, as everyone tries to make a land grab for the map’s best spaces. Extermination usually leads to major consequences for the loser of these combat scenarios.

The 4X family of games…

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Here are the scariest words in the English language: “During your turn, you may take any of the following actions, any number of times, in any order and combination you want, as long as you have the resources needed to carry them out.”

This line, on page five of the English rulebook for the 4X-ish deckbuilding skirmish game Monumental (2020, Funforge), frightened me when I read it. In the wrong hands, a player could take a lot of actions on their turn while taking time to consider what they wanted to do on a turn…all while three other players would be waiting for the active player to wrap things up.

And during our very first review play of Monumental—on the fourth turn of the first round!!—a player strung together a series of actions that took maybe six or seven minutes. Not long in the scheme of things, right?

Then the next two players also took turns that ran about five minutes each. That left me waiting for about 15 minutes to take my second turn of the game.

Monumental does quite a few things well. Unfortunately, the game is buried in downtime, which takes away from an experience that should shine at higher player counts but assures that I will never play it again with four players.

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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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There are games with flawed rulebooks. There are games with unfortunate misprints and iconographies that make you second guess yourself and the production. There are even games whose endings seem fraught with inconsistencies that make you wonder if you’ve missed something very important. When a game, rarely, boasts all three, I have no choice but to ask: 

Why do I like The Flow of History as much as I do? 

Get thee a government

The game’s sixty-seven cards are divided into six types and span five Ages. The heart of The Flow of History is the bidding mechanism by which players gain these cards. Players declare their intentions by investing resource tokens on a card and waiting for the investment to clear on a forthcoming turn. Opponents have the option of sniping that investment, though, compensating the investor and instantly claiming the card. This means investments may not be investments at all, but rather deft machinations designed to entice neighbors to act rashly in exchange for compensations and a smug sense of control. 

When an investment succeeds, the goofy iconography kicks in. Potentially, cards have icons in three places: across the bottom, in the center, and under a magnifying glass north of center. Upon acquisition, the icon depicted under…

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I knew it by the end of my single Cycle demo play of Voidfall during SPIEL 2022: Voidfall was going to be great.

The only question I needed to answer, after backing the Galactic Box deluxe edition of the game and playing it 14 times—once for each of the included factions—was whether this was going to be my favorite game of 2023 or not.

I’ve already written 9,840 words about Voidfall, so if you have specific questions about individual parts of my experience, check out the links at the bottom. In this review, I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on my Voidfall experience.

1. Voidfall is the best design Mindclash has ever produced. Although I enjoy two of their other designs quite a bit, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion and Anachrony, Voidfall feels incredibly well balanced, deeper than their other games, and is tied to a core that still excites me so many plays into the experience.
2. In terms of the marriage of gameplay to production, Voidfall is the hands-down winner in this category for 2023. If this were a metric tracked by BGG, it would get a perfect score. As a value proposition, Voidfall has no peer. You could play it 100 times and still not…

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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 ran into another reviewer at SPIEL 2023, and he discussed his meeting with Portal Games about their 2023-2024 lineup.

“I played Imperial Miners during the meeting. Between the teach and playing a full game, it was all done in about 22 minutes.”

Not believing that this was possible—an Imperial Settlers-adjacent game in 20 minutes!!—I made my way to the Portal team to talk shop. Then we dove into the game. We stopped two rounds short of the normal end condition because I botched one of the rules…and that was around the 18-minute mark of our meeting.

Successive plays of Imperial Miners back home yielded similar timing. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get a game to last longer than 30 minutes. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m obsessed with time. I’m a parent who gets limited chances to play a lot of games. As much fun as the act of playing games is, I want maximum fun per minute. One of my favorite gaming highlights from 2021 occurred when I got a group together to play six games in seven hours. All the games were full of rich choices and abundant laughter.

Imperial Miners is fun. It’s not legendary, but it manages both its aspirations and my expectations exceptionally well for a quick tableau builder.

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What is Gaia Project?

Gaia Project is the sequel to the highly successful Terra Mystica. But whereas Terra Mystica had a fantasy theme, Gaia Project takes place in outer space in the far future of the “Terra Mystica universe.” Players try to settle and terraform new worlds, advance their technology, create multi-planet federations, and achieve in- and end-game objectives. The player who accumulates the most Victory Points (VPs) by the end of the sixth-round wins.

[caption id="attachment_284595" align="aligncenter" width="533"] Set up for a 3-player game.[/caption]

Each round of Gaia Project is played in 4 phases. During the Income Phase, players look at their Faction Board, Round Booster tile, tech tiles, and position of their Player Tokens on the Research Board. Wherever they see the palm-up hand symbol they gain those resources. In the Gaia Phase players complete any Gaiaforming operations they may have started the previous turn. The Actions Phase is the heart of the game where players take turns performing one main action. Once a player passes, they turn in their Round Booster tile and take one of the other available tiles. The first player to take the Pass action also takes the first player token. Finally, the Clean-Up Phase resets everything for the next round.

Mechanics and Features

…

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boon (n.): a gift; a benefit enjoyed, blessing, advantage, a thing to be thankful for: sometimes without even the notion of giving, but always with that of something one has no claim to, or that might have been absent.

lake (n.): a large body of water entirely surrounded by land; properly, one sufficiently large to form a geographical feature. Or, in some board games, a syllable of misdirection in the title of a game about traveling along a river.

The thematic arc of Boonlake takes place on a normal sized board featuring a river that apparently travels around the region of Boon Lake (not pictured). Each player operates from their own ranch, a holding tank of production sites, inhabitants, cattle, houses, and settlements with ample room for a dozen modernizations that unleash beefy abilities. The game is a concoction of exploring the map, harvesting goodies, creating a tableau of project cards, and establishing fruitful settlements.

The real game of Boonlake, however, takes place on a small board holding seven action tiles. Each tile is a progression of activity that begins with the current player and radiates out to involve everyone at the table. Once a tile is employed, it is placed at the bottom of the board’s track and pushed up to close the gap. In this way, there…

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Expanding Your Horizons

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (henceforth simply referred to as Eclipse) retools the original space-faring 4X game. For many people in the hobby, the words “space” and “4X” are synonymous with Twilight Imperium, the de facto king of the genre. Rather than aiming for a full day or weekend of politicking and gaming, Eclipse condenses the interstellar 4X experience down to a few hours of tight, fraught conquest.

Each game of Eclipse is fairly simple in structure. Up to six players take control of one of seven different civilizations. These include six distinct civilizations with specific strengths and weaknesses, or the “default” Terran civilization on the back of each species’ board. Each turn, you take one of six actions or pass. Play continues the turn around the table until all players have passed, at which point, the next round begins. At the end of eight rounds, the civilization with the most victory points is declared the winner.

The six actions represent the core paths your civilizations can take to score points. 

Exploring allows you to reveal new tiles in the galaxy and place them in strategic ways to either connect to the larger galaxy or seal yourself off and turtle away, and offers the…

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Imperium: Classics (and its sibling Imperium: Legends) are deck-building civilization-building games with highly asymmetric factions. Read on to see if Imperium constructs a mighty empire, or becomes lost to the annals of time in our review of the Imperium series.

(Note: Imperium: Classics and Imperium: Legends are two versions of the same game, but each with different sets of factions. I will henceforth refer to both collectively as Imperium unless otherwise specified.)

Imperium is a combination deck-building, civilization-building game coming from the design combo of Nigel Buckle and David Turczi. If the name David Turczi sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s well-known for both his complex Euro games like Anachrony, his work on the “T” series (Tekhenu, Tawantinsuyu, etc.) as well as his prolific work in designing solo modes for dozens of other games like Kanban EV, So You’ve Been Eaten, Mosaic: A Story of Civilization, Tiletum and many more.

Although my excitement was high for a seemingly oddball combo of a civ game mixed with a deck-building game, I have to admit that based on Turczi’s design track record, I was more than a little trepidatious going into my first play of Imperium. Ultimately, my love for civilization games, deck-building, and player asymmetry overruled my concerns about complexity. Speaking of complexity, here’s…

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