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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Disclaimer: The author of this review participated in playtesting of this design in mid-2022.

I don’t like combos. They have become a substitute for great game design. Can’t think of anything interesting to do? Slap some combos on there. Suddenly everyone is too busy saying “Weeeeeee!” to notice that this rollercoaster doesn’t actually do much. The last decade or so of The Hobby™ would indicate that I am in the minority on this, but I’m comfortable with that. Everyone should have at least one deeply-held harmless opinion that’s open to persecution. It’s good for you.

When I talk about “combos” in this instance, I don’t mean an immediate bonus. “Oh, and I get an extra wheat because I have the thresher.” No. I’m talking about a single action with the potential to turn into a cascading series of subsequent actions. “If I place this token here, then I can put that token there, which means that I can now move this marker up that track, which lets me put another token over here, which means I can,” and so on. Combos are deeply, primitively satisfying. I understand entirely why they are so popular. I myself enjoy them, even if I don’t like them. There is a difference.

To me, combos feel like a substitute for good decisions. I don’t…

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El Grande is back. Hosanna.

For those who are unfamiliar, El Grande, The Big itself, is one of the great canonical games in our hobby. Every podcast, list, and forum that extends beyond the Cult of the New considers it one of the greatest games ever published. That’s for good reason. El Grande is, in fact, a masterpiece.

Great. Review’s done, then. Wrap this up. I’m going to go grab a sandwich.

Le Grand

El Grande is an area-majority game in which players aim to accumulate political power throughout Spain. There are nine rounds, each of which follows the same pattern: players bid for turn order, then choose one of the five action cards available for that round while placing some of their caballeros out onto the board. Every three rounds, players score the board. A big part of the beauty and brilliance of the design is in the way those two—2!—decisions are woven together.

Bidding is, on the face of it, simple. Each player starts the game with 13 cards, numbered from 1-13. The higher the card you bid with each round, the earlier in that round you’ll…

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When Dominion came on the market in 2008 and invented the deck builder, several publishers tried to capture the same lightning in a bottle with the mechanic. Some did reasonably well (e.g., Legendary) while others seemed to miss the point (e.g., Heroes of Metro City). The sheer number of poorly designed deck builders tended to poison the well for this mechanic—I see the term deck builder in a game’s description and my initial thoughts tend toward the negative.

In early 2020, Lycan Studio, Peter Hornyak, and Zoltán Simon ran a Kickstarter for a deck builder called Ausonia. The first thing that struck me was the gorgeous artwork. I checked it out and was drawn in by the magical 17th century Italian theme (the game takes place after an event called the Witchplague). I was hooked! I pledged at one of the upper levels to ensure that I would receive copies of the two expansions. Then I waited.

When my copy arrived, I got this to the table almost immediately. This game was well worth the wait.

[caption id="attachment_297261" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A tiny box. A giant game.[/caption]

Gameplay

Briefly, this is a deck builder: you start with a small deck of basic cards and your hand is a smaller selection of…

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Games should be more restrictive about player count. I sympathize with publishers and recognize the act of commercial suicide that is a game requiring an exact player count. Look what happened to Deal with the Devil. Granted, I don’t think the restrictive player count had anything to do with that game’s disappearance. If anything, the requirement of exactly four players got Deal more attention than it would have otherwise gotten. It would have helped if the game were any good.

Alas, it wasn’t, and Deal with the Devil immediately faded from public awareness. For a brief, glimmering moment, I knew hope that the buzz around Deal might lead us all a little closer to the light, towards an age of radically honest player counts. You can tell me Votes for Women is for 2-4, but we both know it’s a two-person affair. You can slap a 2-4 on the side of Flamme Rouge, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game needs at least three.

All of this is to say that The Princes of Florence is a five-player game, and only a five-player game. The box says 1-5, and you can technically play it at any of those counts, but you only experience The Princes of Florence properly when you play it at five. Any…

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Admittedly, my tastes bend toward austere-looking games with a brown color palette, so I’m naturally predisposed to like a game that features tan, olive, brown, beige, ochre, and a smattering of puce. That said, this sucker has quite a lot going on under the hood.

This game is a reimplementation of one of the earliest published designs of Acchittocca (the design team of Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto, and Antonio Tinto–collectively responsible for Alma Mater, Egizia: Shifting Sands, and several other games in loose collaboration), Leonardo da Vinci. Codex Leicester has one more designer thrown in the mix for good measure, Changhyun Baek.

I haven’t played the original game, so you won’t find any comparing and contrasting here, though there are significant differences between this version of the game and the original, or at least that’s the sense I get from reading the original game’s rules.

But here’s a thousand-foot summary. Codex Leicester is a worker placement game with a high degree of interaction. Players start with a single workshop, which can be upgraded with various bits and bobs to make it more powerful, and they can also add a second workshop as the game moves forward.

[caption id="attachment_287152" align="alignnone" width="1125"] Workshops in action.[/caption]

What do you do…

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I have already written about Spirit Island, designer R. Eric Reuss’s masterful cooperative game. It’s one of my favorites, a densely layered puzzle that rewards repetition. Since publication in 2017, the game has received one substantial expansion, Branch and Claw, and one absolutely gargantuan expansion, Jagged Earth.

Between those three boxes, you have enough gaming content to last you a lifetime. I own all of it, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Nonetheless, ours is not a species known for being content, and so I was filled with glee when publisher Greater Than Games announced last fall that they would be releasing Horizons of Spirit Island. More content good.

More intriguing still: it was announced as a Target exclusive. If ever you’ve needed a sign that board games have broken into the mainstream, this is it.

Smaller, Cheaper, Easier

I will keep this rules summary pretty pared down. If you are new to Spirit Island and you find yourself looking for a more detailed comprehensive summary, you should take a look at my previous review. 

Spirit Island is a cooperative game in which players work together to dispel invading colonists by destroying their settlements and filling them with fear. You spread presence around the island while playing…

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I was strolling PAX Unplugged’s 2021 event, and while I was chatting with Dan DiLorenzo at R&R Games about Witchstone, we walked around his booth.

Dan walked into one edge of the booth and pointed at a title. “Trust me, this one always does great. I still play it, even today,” Dan shared as he showed me a copy of Rajas of the Ganges. “I don’t even use all of the expansions; the base game is just a classic.”

Rajas of the Ganges was released all the way back in 2017 but is still the kind of delightful, non-confrontational Euro that I can get my wife to play, and it scales well at all player counts by providing the snappy turns and non-existent round clean-up I love. AND it has great-looking dice! Now I see why Rajas of the Ganges is so reliable.

Worker Placement? Check

Rajas of the Ganges—which we’ll just call Rajas for this review—was designed by Inka & Markus Brand, the brains behind such well-regarded classics such as Village and Recto Verso as well as the Exit: The Game (I have a particular fondness for Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Hunt for the Golden Book) series. Like these escape…

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That was laid on with a trowel

It was a fleeting moment, little more, in which I contemplated setting out to write a fair review with poetry. But when I realized that I lacked the skill and patience needed, I forsook the whole endeavor in the middle of a line. Who writes in iambs and pentameter today? In rhyme or blank, the business is but lost, forever damned to high school English class.

But man, that Shakespeare fellow had a gift. I guess you don’t receive a nickname like the Bard without a talent worth the moniker. And while our time is better spent before the poetry and plays that brought him fame, a goodly set of games exist that try to aptly celebrate his name and work.

The board game trade that opened up the gates and set me on a path where I would learn to curate my collection introduced Hervé Rigal’s Shakespeare into my life. Ystari Games in 2015 gave the world a taste of theater and bent the Globe’s unrivaled playwright so to match Elizabethan times with modern ways.

And thus an invitation I extend that you might better know a favorite game.

Be not afraid of greatness

Shakespeare invites players to spend six days putting together a production worthy of the Queen by…

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After getting in more plays of my top game from last year, Tiletum, I wanted to revisit some of the other games I own from designer Simone Luciani. After doing a quick browse of the shelf, I pulled out a game that I always enjoy playing that I was pretty sure to be a Luciani design.

It turns out that Coimbra (2018, eggertspiele) is not actually a Luciani design. But it is from “The Italians”, which is my catch-all name for the design collective of Luciani and a few other Italian tabletop luminaries, including Flaminia Brasini and Virginio Gigli. Brasini and Gigli are the actual designers of Coimbra, and these two also had their hands all over Golem, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Alma Mater, and/or Grand Austria Hotel and the Let’s Waltz! expansion. (The artwork of Chris Quilliams from Coimbra and Alma Mater is essentially the same, adding to the confusion.)

This means I had no choice but to love Coimbra. I’ve played Coimbra a few times but the plays have been spread out over many years. After getting this back to the table in recent weeks, it’s been fun to remember why I enjoy the game so much, and why the game needs a boost in one key area.

Coimbra Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards 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 that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2013’s Rialto, his 17th game.

Rialto is an area control game that is governed by an open drafting mechanic. The game is played over the course of six rounds, which are divided into a number of different steps. Central to the game is a deck of cards featuring cards corresponding to these steps. Each step serves a different function within the game such as jockeying for turn order position, adding councilmen to the city’s districts, and influencing the overall point value of the districts.

At the start of a round, several sets of randomly drawn cards are created and players take turns choosing one of these sets to take control of for the remainder of the round. Then the round is played out, step by step. As each step is played, the players will take…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards 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 that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2013’s Bruges, his 18th game.

In the Feldiverse, Bruges holds a couple of important distinctions. For starters, it’s Feld’s very first game to feature multi-use cards (and arguably one of the best games in existence to have ever done so). Secondly, it was the first game selected to be overhauled for the much lauded Stefan Feld City Collection from Queen Games. What us old-timers know as Bruges, future generations will know as Hamburg.

Overview

In Bruges, players take on the roles of merchants who work to maintain their relationships with those in power in the titular city while competing against one another for influence, power, and status. This is accomplished through the aforementioned multi-use cards. On a player’s turn, they will have a hand of cards that they can discard to build canals, gain…

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“Did you like Tekhenu?”

I was sitting at Gen Con 2022 with Ola Sklodowska, Head of Marketing from Board&Dice. We were walking through the set up for their new game, Tiletum.

Even though we were wearing masks, I could tell my response surprised her:

“No,” I responded. “I didn’t like Tekhenu. But I’ve enjoyed most of the other games I’ve played from Board&Dice, and the designers on the cover of this one tell me I really want to know about Tiletum.”

The designers of Tiletum are Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini. The latter is the co-designer of some of the most celebrated strategy games of the last 10 years, including the “T” games (heavy strategy endeavors, all of which start with the letter T): T’zolkin: The Mayan Calendar, Teotihuacan: City of Gods, The Voyages of Marco Polo, and Tekhenu.

But Luciani was the reason I was sitting at the demo table. Luciani has co-designed some of the best games I have ever played: Grand Austria Hotel (and the Let’s Waltz! expansion), Golem, and Lorenzo il Magnifico. In the case of two of these games—Grand Austria Hotel and Lorenzo il Magnifico—they hit the sweet spot for me: lots of interesting choices, medium weight games that I can play with casual or experienced gamers, efficiency…

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