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Uk'otoa Overview

Uk'otoa, a monstrous beast of the sea, has obliterated your ship leaving all its sailors in a mad scramble to survive atop the floating wreckage. You will be affiliated with two factions, and if sailors of your faction(s) are the only sailors remaining, you win the game. In this semi-cooperative game, each player is sharing factions with their neighbors, but eventually there will be some level of mutiny amongst the group. It's only a matter of time.

The opening of the game consists of two preparatory phases. First, players will place the individual ship hexes to form the play area, with the main requirement being that each subsequent tile must point to the previously placed tile. This creates a variable board each time, although the recommended starting arrangement seems to balance the game well…

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About two years ago, I stared at the copy of Maracaibo (2019, Capstone Games) sitting on my shelf.

The game looked back at me. “You keep looking at me like you love me, but we used to spend so much more time together.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The problem isn’t totally on you, and I don’t think the problem is me, either. The problem is that as much as I love you, you take a while to set up, you take a while to teach, and every time I have to explain how combat works and where cubes go on the map and how all that affects the end-game scoring mechanics, I pivot to another game. Plus, all that usually takes two, maybe three hours, to play…I just think it’s best that I find another home for you.”

With that, I gifted Maracaibo to a guy in my review crew. I got the Maracaibo app (which, sadly, still doesn’t support play against AI opponents outside of the solo game) then basically stopped playing the game until it appeared on Board Game Arena a few months ago.

But recently, something at the Bell household changed.

Near the end of my time at Gen Con 2024, I stopped by the Capstone booth to chat with the team…

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One of my crotchety opinions is that, like racing, the concept of “adventuring” doesn’t often translate well to board games. The latter function as systems that often help us think about other systems, and adventure isn’t really a system, at least, it’s not a feeling or an idea that can be easily transmogrified.

The gold standard for adventure games, in my book, is Mario Papini’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, a game where you wander around Italy collecting books to create a language. While this isn’t exactly swashbuckling, it captures how hard it was to just move around in the early modern era. Crossing an ocean? Forget about it. Every decision in DVE is built around a simple question: you can do it, but do you have the horses? Tension, consequences, and stakes–that’s what an adventure needs.

[caption id="attachment_302375" align="aligncenter" width="768"] A fun cast of player characters.[/caption]

Like DVE, The forthcoming Ultimate Voyage (Final Quest of the Treasure Fleet) is a resource management eurogame that’s got its hiking boots on. Ultimate Voyage continues the trend of not exactly being a game that feels like adventuring, but it does have some novel mechanisms that blend together in new and interesting ways. As far as mapping new horizons for the genre, it makes some interesting,…

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On the heels of reviewing my now-favorite Vladimír Suchý game, Evacuation (2023, Delicious Games), I decided to rip the shrink off the other Suchý game I picked up at SPIEL last year, Shipyard (2nd Edition). (I’ve been excited about this one for a while now.)

Shipyard is a dinosaur to a modern gamer, as it was first released in 2009. To some of my friends, the original game is a classic, but those friends have never been kind enough to introduce me. When I had the chance to grab the updated version, I jumped because I needed to know—does the original still work, fifteen years later?

The answer? It depends on how long you can stomach the wait to score points.

Ahh, the 1870s

Shipyard is a 1-4 player rondel and tile drafting game that situates players as shipbuilders in the 1870s. Over a series of rounds, players will take turns until a countdown timer expires, giving each player one final turn to finish building ships and send them on a test voyage—known as a  “shakedown cruise”—to impress local officials.

Each turn after the first turn of the game looks the same. Each player has a cube (or cubes, in a two-player game) on one…

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The question on everyone’s mind is, of course: do penguins really eat stones? And the answer is yes. Stones lend weight and digestive help to our tuxedoed friends. It’s a good thing too, because otherwise Deep Dive would be little more than a box of lies. 

Deep Dive is a cute little press-your-luck penguin game born of collaborations. The design team includes Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich, whose collective work on Point Salad has been widely celebrated. The publication team includes Flatout Games and AEG (who last year took home a Spiel des Jahres award for Cascadia). For a small box, family weight game that takes less than 20 minutes to play, this thing sure brought a lot of high-caliber cooks to the kitchen!

That should land Deep Dive in the category of a sure thing. 

Don’t stop me now!

The setup for Deep Dive involves flipping several dozen tiles face down, a process that will take only slightly less time than the game itself. There are five shades of blue backs representing five depths. On the flipside, the tiles bear images of food, stones, bubbles or predators. 

Players slide one of their penguin meeples to the first depth and choose: either take…

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My last experience with a title from Johannes Goupy (co-designed with Bruno Cathala) was Orichalcum, the 2022 race off a cliff from Pandasaurus Games. But Théo Rivière, via his relationship with the Kaedama design group, has a less chaotic reputation in our house with a game like Draftosaurus. Together, the two released Rauha earlier this year. Their latest, Nautilus Island, puts players aboard a beached submarine to scavenge the goods—and neatly organize them—better than the other castaways on the island so as to win the right to take off in Captain Nemo’s leftovers.

Substance

The central board in Nautilus Island depicts a submarine (before you cover it with cards and nearly forget it’s a submarine). From left to right, there are columns of 1–1–2–2–3–3 stacks of cards, with notation as to whether they lay face-up or face-down. Player count determines the number of stacks in play. Players will loot these stacks of eight, creating collections in front of them until one stack dwindles to nothing, revealing the sub once again and triggering the endgame.

On each turn, players move their castaway meeple to the edge (let’s say the top) of one of the columns, deciding either to collect the top card of each…

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It’s not everyday that I feel I know everything there is to know about a game in the time it takes for the pizza to arrive at my table, but that is the case for Reiner Knizia’s Viking See-Saw. Even less common is believing a game has revealed all of its secrets in fifteen minutes and still being wholly pleased with it.

Viking See-Saw is a dexterity stacking game that takes place on a miniature, purple dry-docked boat with a play-convenient fulcrum right at the center. A lone flag extends to the sky from the center to get in everyone’s way. On each side of the flag, three small rectangular cubes—crates—rest in their recessed space, while one additional crate sits on the low side. 

Players receive a hair-tie to corral a collection of metal cubes (brass and aluminum), ball bearings (plastic and steel), a meeple, and an awkward plastic gem. As a turn, players must add one object to the high side of the ship without tipping the boat or dislodging previously placed items. 

Tipping the boat means taking a chest from the center, which serves as the game’s timer. Objects knocked to the table are taken by the offender as a penalty, since the way to win is…

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I have to be more intentional about how I use the word “pleasant” in my criticism. I often say it as a backhanded compliment. I suspect most people do. When I say Sirens is “pleasant,” I mean that it is fine. Nothing stands out, for better or for worse. The game is a smooth, featureless orb.

This is a profound disservice to “pleasant,” a wonderful word that I and others have unintentionally bled of all significance. “Pleasant” does not indicate an absence of any discernible feeling. It is not net-neutral. “Pleasant” is actively happy. It’s a walk in a park, or the feeling of a nice breeze. The little moments that remind you you’re here. “Pleasant” isn’t the euphoria of a great concert, something that burns short and bright. Pleasant is a slow burn, happiness sustainably sourced.

North Shore and Seven Years Ago

Beacon Patrol is a tile layer firmly in the tradition of Carcassonne, though it is noteworthy that Beacon Patrol is cooperative rather than competitive. You play as a group of patrol boats in the North Sea. Every turn, you attempt to place three tiles out on the board. There are two restrictions. The first is that you must place the tile adjacent to your boat, which moves onto each new tile you place.…

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At a recent game night, we needed something that could play five or six people; we had five people and we were expecting a sixth, so the usual debate resurfaced: do we play one game, or split into two groups?

Ultimately, our sixth player didn’t arrive so we bandied a number of five-player titles around that could be played in under two hours. Usually, this is known by some of my friends as “Dead Man’s Land” because it can be hard to find a game that plays relatively quickly with so many players, and not all games that play up to five people play well at their max player count.

When the smoke cleared, the host pulled out his copy of Concordia (2013, Rio Grande Games). All of us had played recently enough that we remembered the rules, so save for a few refreshers on the scoring mechanics, everyone knew what they were doing.

A funny thing happened at the end of this particular play of Concordia: a number of us looked at each other and said the same thing:

“Why don’t we play this game more often?”

Rome!

Concordia is a 2-6 player hand management game which, as of this writing, sits in the BGG top…

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Far from the confusion of the typical “chicken or the egg” argument, I know exactly which came first: I sought out the board game before the novel. Then again, I did seek out the board game because I wanted to read the novel. And I did finish the novel before I started the board game. But it was all because of the—

Nevermind. The point is that I wanted to go all in on the solo tabletop adventure at hand. Until recently, I had never read Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. I was familiar with the 1954 Disney classic featuring James Mason as Nemo. At the age of eight I remember enjoying the ride at Disney World. But I can’t say I had ever put myself in the Captain’s shoes. I was probably confused. Both Disney efforts keep Sea as singular in their titles, which makes it sound as if a submarine descended nearly 70,000 miles into the earth—which has a diameter of around 8,000 miles. So I picked up the book to get the story straight and prepare for the game.

[caption id="attachment_276565" align="alignnone" width="1001"] No one writes a good 17-word subtitle anymore...[/caption]

Nemo’s War wins its first battle by getting the name right on the box cover. It…

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Sometimes you just want to play a cooperative kids’ game with chunky plastic bits and illustrations that appear to be lifted directly from a PBS animated series. Preferably, you’d like said game to be crafted by a credible designer…and his son.

Thankfully, when such a mood befalls you, Kraken Attack! awaits you with open arms—eight of them, to be exact.

In 2020, French publishing house LOKI dropped this delightful pirate adventure on the world with far too little fanfare. Design credits belong, in order, to Esteban and Antoine Bauza. At the time of release, I believe (based on the release date of his promo card for 7 Wonders: Leaders) the younger Bauza would have been shy of ten years old, but his top billing makes me smile.

In Kraken Attack! the fearsome Kraken Tootone is ravaging the seven seas and your ship of skilled pirates is fixin’ to teach the tentacled beast a lesson before its pouncing persistence brings disaster. Let’s take a peek.

Kraken up

The central board of Kraken Attack! features a ship divided into four quadrants, each of which is guarded by two portions of the ship’s walls. Throughout the game, eight tentacles move back and forth in each of four rows to the ship’s left and right. As these tentacles approach the ship, they…

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Darwin’s Journey, On the Origin of Species (the game), Darwin’s Choice, Darwinauts... Charles Darwin—world-renowned naturalist, botanist, geologist, author of On the Origin of Species—is a hot commodity in board gaming these days. It’s no wonder either. Darwin's journey on the HMS Beagle, exploring distant lands, chronicling what he’s seeing, and ultimately postulating the theory of evolution by natural selection are all aspects of the Darwin phenomenon that are easily gamified. And these games tend to fall squarely into one of two categories: vaguely historical re-enactments of Darwin’s journey or games that are more about evolution than they are about Darwin himself.

In the Footsteps of Darwin isn’t about either of those things. It’s a game that imagines what comes after. The year is 1856 and Charles Darwin’s adventuring days are long behind. His seminal work On the Origin of Species is still a work in progress. It’s been 20 years since the Beagle’s voyage across the lower half of the globe drew to a close, and Darwin’s eye has turned to the upper half. Not fully satisfied that he's gathered enough evidence to support his theory, he’s tapped a new generation of explorers to gather data about these distant lands for him.

Specifically, he’s chosen you.

The HMS Beagle Sails Again!

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a tile…

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