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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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Sail is a two-player cooperative trick-taking game, a family of design I haven’t seen since 2020’s fair-to-middling The Fox in the Forest Duet. The goal is simple, in theory: get your ship from one end of the board to the other by playing cards that combine well with your partner's. All the while, you have to avoid taking damage from the monstrous kraken, who wants nothing more than to see your magnificent vessel rendered a wreck on the ocean floor.

The mechanism for steering your ship is must-follow trick-taking. At the beginning of each round, once cards are dealt out, each player passes a card to the other. Each card bears an action icon. Pair well the cards you and your partner play, and you’ll get a beneficial action. The possible action combinations are spelled out on the provided player guides, and while they’re quick to pick up, I won’t break them all down here. It’s good to pair helms, which move the boat one space forward diagonally, listing in the direction of the player who took the trick. It’s also critical to pair cannons with kraken tentacles, since that removes potentially damaging cards from the deck.

The kraken…

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“Wait, you have NOT played Disney Villainous?”

A surprising number of interactions over the last few years at a game night here or an event at a gaming cafe there have ended with this statement, as if I’ve been living in a board game cave for the last five years. (A cave without Disney Villainous, apparently.)

And, I get it…Disney Villainous (2018, Ravensburger) is popular for a reason. The concept is brilliant—players take on the roles of the evil characters from a number of Disney’s classic films, taking actions to complete a unique win condition while other players get the chance to play “Fate” cards from an opponent’s personal Fate deck, messing with their plans. The best part: each villain’s Fate deck is made up of heroes and items from that villain’s movie, such as Robin Hood for the Prince John Fate deck.

The game is considered a classic, and it’s doing well enough in sales to have spawned a boatload of expansions. But the original isn’t perfect—the main issue I always heard from other players is that it’s a game that takes a little too long to play.

Ravensburger has tweaked some of the original format for a new title, Disney Villainous: Introduction to Evil. It’s only available at Target, and like other Target exclusives such as…

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Look, I’m an easy sell. I’m a sucker for novelty. Tell me you’ve got a legacy game for children, and I’m going to be curious. Legacy games generally cater to adults, which makes sense. They require paying attention to the same thing for an extended period of time. This is not a strength for which children are celebrated. More importantly, the stories are usually only suggested through fragments of information, rather than fleshed out like a storybook.

[caption id="attachment_288322" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The boat during setup.[/caption]

Along Came Pepe

Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy! aims to change all that. Over the course of twenty-five episodes, you follow the adventures of the good capt’n and his anthropomorphic crew, helping them track down seven magic treasures in their quest to stop the evil Captain Goldtooth.

The game itself is a straightforward sliding puzzle. Working together, players move the various crew members of the Melody to their stations. Passing Capt’n Pepe from player to player, the active player moves one crew member one space. That’s it. You keep going until all the crew members are where…

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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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Sewage Treatment Games – gotta love that name – provided Meeple Mountain with a prototype copy of Articles of War:  Privateer, or AoWP for short.  The game is planned for release later this year, and according to the publisher, is going to be the first in the Articles of War series.  In AoWP, each player commands 2 or 3 ships and attempts to win the most loot by sinking other players’ ships.  They can also try to board and capture other ships and add them to their fleet.

What is, or was, a privateer?  A privateer was a privately owned vessel given a commission, commonly known as a Letter of Marque, by their government to raid merchant vessels of enemy combatants.  Although the practice of authorizing privately owned ships to prey on enemy ships dates to at least the 13th century, the term privateer – which applies equally to the ship and its crew – did not come into use until the mid-17th century.  Sir Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh are perhaps the most well-known privateers in history, if not the most successful.  The 1856 Declaration of Paris effectively abolished privateering by European powers, although Prussia did flirt with it briefly during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

[caption id="attachment_272889" align="alignright" width="300"] Box…

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Welcome, my friends, to the most player count-dependent review I have penned since my critique of Crescent Moon last year.

That’s because I’m going to talk about two games here: Ahoy (2022, Leder Games) with two players, and Ahoy with three or four players.

As I mentioned in my first take of Ahoy a few months ago, I can’t recommend Ahoy at its full player count. But I can recommend Ahoy as a fun two-player experience, particularly if you’ve got a roommate, partner, or game buddy willing to take the plunge to explore the strategic tête-à-tête available to those willing to duel with the asymmetric factions that are playing the area control portion of Ahoy.

Ahoy at Two Players: Yes

Ahoy, at two players, is an area control contest between the Mollusk Union and the Bluefin Squadron only. (You can’t use the additional factions, the smugglers, at this lower player count.) The Union and the Squadron—the latter was referred to as “The Sharks” in my experiences with other players—don’t appear to like each other. Both of these factions have unique traits that they bring to the game’s world.

Regardless of player count, the goal of Ahoy is to have the most Fame points by the end…

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I wouldn’t make a good pirate.

Pirates are known for many things, like robbing, killing, and pillaging. Do you know what else pirates are good at? Understanding the value of money. I clearly don’t, since I spent CA$100 on Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, and $20 of that portion going towards shipping and handling because being Canadian isn’t cheap. Then again, you are reading this from a guy who spends thousands of dollars every few years to get new computer hardware to play video games. I wouldn't be surprised if my computer has enough power to fight God at this point.

First, the game. What’s it’s about? You are pirates of the airborne kind. Like your sea counterparts, you want to have the best retirement plan and that means money. You will attend three voyages with each voyage lasting a fixed number of days. Each day will have a random set of Loot tiles, and you will know all of the Loot tiles in advance.

Any Loot worth taking will attract the attention of a crew, and each Voyage starts by drawing six crew members out of a deck of forty cards with one tiny little twist: Everyone draws the same cards. So you are aware of everyone’s tools, and they are aware of yours.

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The physical board game version of Maracaibo was released in 2019. Designed by Alexander Pfister (Great Western Trail, Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King, Mombasa) and published by Capstone Games, Maracaibo is by many measures an instant classic. It’s already in the BGG top 50 ranked games overall and it has spawned an expansion which was released last year (Maracaibo: The Uprising). I own a physical copy of the base game and every time I play Maracaibo, I love the mix of things going on.

But as much as I love Maracaibo, I will probably not play it in person more than 3-5 times in any given year. “The Cult of the New” means that recent classics struggle to push through when the hot new crowdfunded prize you waited 22 months to get into your hands arrives at your doorstep.

For many of my games, an app for my tablet has been the best way for me to experience these great games when I’m traveling, or burning time while waiting for a Zoom meeting to start, or when I want to wind down before going to bed. Or, COVID. Thanks to Spiralburst Studios, we now have Maracaibo Digital, which is just like Maracaibo’s physical version, as long as you are playing the solo campaign.

[caption id="attachment_245755"…

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Unboxing Villainous is one of the best board gaming experiences I have ever had. It was an impulse buy, picked up on the assumption that my roommates would be drawn in by the premise, and it worked. I’ve never had to put less effort into getting a full table of players. Even the non-gamers in the apartment were excited to take on the role of a Disney villain, plotting and scheming their way to victory.

That excitement only grew as I lay out the components. The player figures, chunky translucent totems that capture the essence of each character in gorgeous abstract forms, elicited paroxysms of joy. Oohs and aahs greeted Maleficent, Jafar, Ursula, Captain Hook, The Queen of Hearts, and even Prince John. The card art is lush and richly printed, and even the backs of the player decks are decorated with elegant and individualized line drawings. In no time at all, people were scrambling to lay claim to their favorite character.

[caption id="attachment_220746" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Ursula, Prince John, Maleficent, Jafar, Captain Hook, and the Queen of Hearts[/caption]

How to Play

Villainous is quick to teach, thanks to the straightforward mechanics. During setup, players receive two villain-specific decks and a board that is divided into four locations, each with a…

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