I dumped the components for the new tableau-building game from Cranio Creations, MESOS, onto my table, and one of my review crew members noticed something.

“Man, there are a lot of victory point tokens here,” Wil said. “But do all of them have a negative and positive side? That -20 token doesn’t look good.”

I had to admit that I was scared, too. I had already watched a quick teach video and was prepared to teach the game, but I didn’t know what was going to happen during our play. I was a little worried that scores could dive deep into negative score territory, and then we started the game and found out I was right.

MESOS, designed by Yaniv Kahana (Sea Dragons) and Simone Luciani (yes, that Luciani), with thoughtful artwork featuring tribal communities by Kerri Aitken (Tichu), looks like a pleasant card drafting tableau builder…think something like the weight class of a game like Everdell. Then something happens: every time a player has to decide which position on the drafting track to select, they pause and realize that one wrong move might lead them down a path towards a bucket of negative points.

Family-friendly, MESOS is not. Nor is it for the weak, or anyone who despises getting blown off the table. I’ve seen moments…

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Doggerland is a reminder why certain types of game mechanics stick around—because they work. While this game is not going to blow your socks off with a completely new style of play and unusual mechanics, what it has is certainly enjoyable.

In the game, you’re at the end of the last ice age, around 15,000 years ago, in an area that is now submerged in the good ol’ English Channel. You’ve got a tribe to manage: you’ll need to feed them, hunt game, and make cave paintings. The setting is similar to Endless Winter: Paleoamericans, a game that I reviewed a while back, and if you’re familiar with the “get food to feed your people” style of game, you’ll find a lot familiar here.

Doggerland takes place in 5 phases. The first player walks each player through these phases on their player board, and each one of them is designed to be executed with surgical precision. First, you “program” which is the game’s terminology, and is a bit of a stretch. You’re really just placing your tribe members as workers around on various action spaces, paying a small upfront cost in some cases, nothing in others. You don’t execute the actions until phase 3, hence the programming, but a…

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What is Dominant Species?

Dominant Species (DS) is a game of adaptation and survival in the face of an encroaching ice age. Players take on the role of 1 of 6 major animal classes: mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, arachnids, and insects. They select and execute actions to improve their animals’ chances of survival and dominance over other species. The player who accumulates the most victory points (VPs) when the ice age reaches its zenith wins and is crowned the dominant species.

[caption id="attachment_286319" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Setup for a 3-player game[/caption]

Each game turn is divided into 3 phases. The first of these is the Planning Phase, where players take turns placing an Action Pawn (AP) on an empty action space on the board’s Action Display. In the Execution Phase, starting from the top action and working down and left-to-right, players take actions removing their APs as they do so. Finally, during the Reset Phase, players check if any species has gone extinct, determine which player has the greatest survival, and then prepare the board for the next turn.

The playing area consists of hexagonal spaces on which players can place Wanderlust Tiles depicting different types of terrain. During the game, players will place their species cubes onto these tiles, as well…

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“Gosh, this feels like that game where, you know…you know?”

After my first play of Vaalbara (2023, Studio H), I was struggling to use my words. But, it wasn’t just me who had this problem—no, it was the same issue my friend Gideon was having while we were trying to place the game against others we had recently played.

Vaalbara is beautiful. The box cover and the cards, featuring artwork from the duo of Felix Donadio and Alexandre Reynaud, are fantastic. The cards feel great in the hands and there’s a really short set of instructions; paired with a small box and straightforward teach, the entire package screams “tidy.”

I wish it screamed “all-time classic”, but such is the state of the gaming world. Vaalbara is entertaining, but the lack of innovation makes Vaalbara a tough call.

I’m Thinking About Using the #8 Card

Vaalbara is a nine-round game of conquest between 2-5 players serving as clan leaders looking to expand their territory. Using a sort-of secret scoring system and a deck of 12 identical character cards, players must outscore the competition to achieve victory.

Each deck of cards features the same 12 characters—drawn with the same 12 pictures, so each clan looks the same save for the…

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From the 1870s to the 1890s, a couple fellows named Marsh and Cope took paleontology battles to a whole new level. You know how it goes. First Cope assembles a skeleton backwards placing the head on the tail (been there, done that) and is humiliated by Marsh. Then Marsh pays off the field crew to send the good fossils his way and all heck breaks loose between the two.

But the “Bone Wars,” as they came to be known, were as fruitful as they were dirty. More than 130 species were discovered by the two rivals—a frantic pace of exploration indeed. If you’re like me, you’ve long waited to take part in such a battle all your own, only with the dinosaur heads mostly on the proper end. Well, the wait is over.

Holotype: Mesozoic North America is the first title from publisher Brexwerx games and designers Brett Harrison and Lex Terenchin. Players take up the role of Paleontologists competing (peacefully, I trust) to publish their way to the peaks of academia—or perhaps the high deserts of academia would be more favorable in this case.

What do you call a paleontologist who naps on the job?

What makes Holotype fascinating as a worker placement game is the hierarchy of worker meeples. Each player begins the game with a…

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I’ve overheard several people describe Endless Winter: Paleoamericans (EW) as a collection of minigames, or a series of different mechanisms bolted together. I think quite the opposite. It is a quintessentially modern hobbyist game that has clearly seen meticulous development and playtesting, and a game where there are many pathways to victory. It is one of the cleaner designs I’ve played in recent memory—in fact, I find it a bit too clean, a bit too smooth. 

The premise of EW is that you’re managing a tribe of cave people (I’m no scientist, but this game has no pretensions towards any kind of historical or scientific fidelity), and you wanna grow that tribe, build camps, and probably lay down some big flat megalith stones. 

[caption id="attachment_266131" align="aligncenter" width="768"] A two-player contest.[/caption]

It’s easy to see why people would describe the game as a mishmash of mechanisms. There’s a shared random hex tile board where you place camps to try and capitalize on scoring opportunities; a separate board where you build a little stacking tile puzzle; a market for buying fancy power cards; a market for adding people to your deck; a set collection puzzle with animal cards; deckbuilding; worker placement; and, TWO tracks. It’s basically the greatest hits of eurogames from the past…

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If you’re on our site, then you probably know the brand: CATAN Studio, the world of CATAN, all the CATAN board games…at this point, CATAN is synonymous with “the hobby.”

So, let’s not get bogged down in what CATAN is, or what it stands for in our space. CATAN: Dawn of Humankind (2022, CATAN Studio) is the newest addition and is a reimplementation of 2002’s Settlers of the Stone Age.

This new version has created two questions that I still can’t answer:

1. Why the game’s title places CATAN in all capital letters, and more importantly,
2. What is the market for CATAN: Dawn of Humankind (CATAN DoH)?

It’s the market for this game that will be the focus of our article. By the end, I think I have a guess, but I welcome your insights!

It’s All About the Flint

CATAN DoH is definitely a CATAN game. The first player to earn 10 points wins. There are hexes, resources, towns, and two dice. Settling on hexes that have higher chances of producing is still a good thing, and rolling a seven is still a bad thing, especially if you want to get resources or you don’t have anyone to rob. There’s still a robber, too. This time…

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Yes, Oceans: Legends of the Deep has flying whales.

No, they aren’t some secret branch of evolution that the government has kept hidden from you.

Yes, they are entirely fictional, fantastical and kinda funny.

Here’s the thing though: Legends of the Deep also features Ahuizotl. The rulebook and some internet searching tell me that Ahuizotl were a water dog from Aztec mythology that lured people to the water’s edge with the sound of a baby crying, grabbing them with a hand at the end of their tail to feast on their eyes, nails and teeth. Alex Shiga’s illustration of them is about as creepy as all that sounds.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of the Ahuizotl before. I’d also never heard of the Finnish sea monster Iku-Turso, the Hawaiian guardian shark Ka’ahupāhau, the West African orisha spirit Olokun, or the Japanese yōkai Umibōzu. In fact, of the 17 myths and deities included in the expansion (along with seven entirely fictional entities), I knew of a grand total of three.

Much like the base game, then, Legends of the Deep is largely educational, with a few frivolous fabrications chucked in for fun.

It’s a shame that most people initially focussed on those damn flying whales…

Magical Myth-ery…

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I remember first hearing about Oceans and being a bit chuffed off.

I’m an admirer of the Evolution series, interested in board games with depth and am part-seal myself so you’d think I would have dived straight into Oceans.

But with Evolution: Climate having only just been delivered to Kickstarter backers in late 2016 and Evolution: The Oceans (as it was then) announced in early 2017, it felt as if publisher North Star Games were abandoning Climate before its pledge manager had even cooled. The result was that I viewed the Oceans Kickstarter campaign with bitterness, failing to see Oceans as anything but a cynical attempt to get fans to fork out for another entire game based on the same underlying system.

Shows what I know.

Oceans is, for me, the pinnacle of all branches of the Evolution board game tree.

Setting the Ocean Colour Scene

As with all games in the Evolution series, the goal of Oceans is to create animals that out-compete your opponents’ animals for limited food supplies. Through clever card play you create new species, give your species colourful traits to help them vie for food, and influence the availability of food resources.

However, Oceans deviates from its forebears in some interesting ways, creating an experience…

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I love Othello. I’ve played it my entire life, mostly on the same set that even now is sitting in the downstairs closet of my mother’s house. It's an area control game played with flippable chips. The goal is to trap one or more of your opponent’s pieces between two of your own, so you can flip them to your color. When the game ends, the player with the most tokens on the board is the winner.

Othello may have been created in 1983, but to me it feels like chess, backgammon, or checkers. It has the gestalt of a game that was played on hot summer days in a Constantinople marketplace. Othello has always been there.

This is the first time I've thought about Othello critically, and it’s apparent how influential the game has been in laying the foundations for nearly all of my gaming preferences. It’s a highly interactive zero-luck two player area control game with perfect information and simple rules that can be taught and internalized with minimal effort. If you wanted a shortcut to describing my favorite games, you could do worse.

Something about Great…

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Buy Prehistories on Amazon

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