Brotherwise Games provided a review copy of their new Super Mario Kart-style racing game, Dungeon Kart, so I was fired up to get this to the table. That’s because my eight-year-old son is a Super Mario Kart video game junkie. Dungeon Kart, set in the Boss Monster world of quick-playing card games from Brotherwise, looked like a perfect fit for him.

After completing a two-player set up for a father-son game night, we started and my son immediately showed concerns about the gameplay. He wanted to drive his kart as fast as possible, but the game only allows players to slowly ramp up their speed to keep drivers in check. In a two-player game, there were fewer chances to “bump” an opponent out of the way and—ideally—into a hazard or a wall to mess with their plans. (My son was really hoping to mess with my plans.)

By the time our first game wrapped up, he crossed the finish line first and won the game. Despite an obvious opportunity to share his potential love of the game—because, as we all know, winner’s bias is real—I could tell he was not interested in a second play.

“What did you think, buddy?” I offered, as he began to bolt upstairs to play with his army toys.

“It was OK. It’s…

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The year is 2013. It’s October or November, skirting the edge of winter in Connecticut. The time is approximately 11:24 pm. I’ve just come back from a game night at my friend Namita’s apartment, where I played Pandemic for the first time. I’m sitting in my garden apartment, perched on the bamboo-and-denim sofa I found a few months earlier at a local thrift store. I hold a Playstation 3 controller in my hands, having decided to knock out one level of Shadow of the Colossus before bed. There is a three-quarters eaten bowl of Annie’s White Cheddar on the table in front of me. It won’t be there for long.

A knock at the door.

Unexpected. I don’t know many people in the area, and I certainly don’t know anyone who would be out and about at this hour. Save for the glow of the TV, all of my lights are off. The blinds are drawn. I briefly consider pretending I am asleep.

Another knock.

I get up slowly and raise a single slat to peek outside, where I see two severe-looking individuals in suits.

A third and final knock.

Worried about a noise complaint, I open the apartment door.

“Andrew Lynch,” one of them says, more a statement than a question.

“Yes?”

“We need you to come with…

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A great game does not require much to be great. I don’t mean they’re easy to design; designing and publishing a great game is basically impossible. What I mean to say is, they don’t require much in the way of rules, or components. CMYK seems to have made the idea a great game does not require much their mission statement. Again and again, the publisher of The Fuzzies, Wavelength, and Lacuna dips into a well that’s light on rules and heavy on experience. Their best games take the most direct route possible, boiling down the idea of a modern board game until you’re left with nothing but the simple syrup.

Consider Wilmot’s Warehouse, their newest release, which has rules so simple that I could teach them to you from scratch in less than a minute. Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg, and David King have designed a memory game, which I didn’t realize we as a culture still made, and a cooperative one at that. Players take turns adding a total of 35 tiles facedown to a grid, with the ultimate goal of memorizing where all of those tiles are. That’s easier than you might think.

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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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Last fall, my friend and colleague Tom Franklin reviewed the 1997 abstract Quoridor, published by Gigamic. (BGG indicates that Quoridor is based on an older game called Pinko Pallino that has a slightly larger map and different rules.)

I hadn’t played Quoridor before, so I was intrigued by Tom’s review. My experience with abstracts is limited but I have really enjoyed games like SHŌBU and Qawale.

Moving pawns around a small board, with quick play times and easy-to-teach rules, generally works for me, even if I don’t buy abstracts very often. When I went to the Festival International des Jeux recently, my friend Rawan at Gigamic passed me a new game that was a bit of a surprise: Quoridor, but with a major twist.

That twist is front-and-center on the new edition of the box: Pac-Man! Yes, the Pac-Man you remember from your local arcade back in the early 1980s, if you are a person of a certain age. (I am that person.) What, then, does Pac-Man have to do with Quoridor?

Money. Let’s face it—a game called Quoridor might sell well, but a game titled Quoridor Pac-Man is probably going to sell a lot better.

Quoridor’s reskin is still Quoridor, and…

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Dear old Grandpa. He’s gone to his reward, leaving us his farm in Stardew Valley. We won’t have long to mourn his passing, though. He’s only given us a year to fulfill four goals and restore the Community Center. It will be a busy four seasons, spent making friends and collecting all the resources we need, all while contending with the evil Joja Corporation.

Knowledge of the video game is not necessary to play or enjoy Stardew Valley The Board Game (known here as SV: B as opposed to the video game, SV: V). The rules, objectives, and gameplay are complete without any previous knowledge. I will say, however, that my first play of the game was made more enjoyable by the one person in the group who had played SV: V. Her running commentary on the objectives, resources, and especially the characters, helped make for a fun evening.

I’ll discuss some differences between the cardboard and video versions of the game at the end of this review.

[caption id="attachment_293787" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Stardew Valley: The Board Game[/caption]

In keeping with the non-confrontational aspects of the video game, SV: B is a cooperative game. To win, players will need to work cooperatively to meet the conditions on all four…

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Guilty Gear is widely considered one of the great 2D fighting franchises in video game history. Though the series has never achieved the cultural prominence of Street Fighter or Tekken, it has long been lauded for its exacting, technical gameplay and its visual flair.

In 2023, Level 99 Games announced that they were adapting Guilty Gear: Strive, the most recent installment, into a two-person card game with the imaginative title Guilty Gear: Strive - The Board Game. It’s a sensible marriage. Much as Guilty Gear is a long-running cult success, Level 99’s Exceed Fighting System has been beloved by a certain type of board game enthusiast for most of the last decade, and it has adapted video games before. There are decks available for both Shovel Knight and Dead Cells.

Neither of those adaptations approached the scale of this this massive box. Guilty Gear: Strive - The Board Game comes with 20 different characters, each with their own unique deck. I cannot easily convey the sense of scale here to you. Pictures don't do it justice. This thing makes my copy of Blood on the Clocktower look pint-sized.

Heaven

The first step of…

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Age of Wonders: Planetfall (2022, Arcane Wonders) is a board game based on the video game of the same name. The video game (available on PC and all major consoles) is a 4X-style civilization game; as a part of the Age of Wonders series, Planetfall is the space exploration version of that video game family. I’m told the scale is grand—I have not played the video game—and Planetfall does things that all the great “civ” games do in letting players lead empires into space combat, conduct diplomacy with other species, customize leaders and units, and do a whole bunch of other things that strike me as being epic.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall (the board game) is so incredibly stripped down that it must be applauded for its simplicity. The tabletop version of Planetfall is a 20-to-40-minute card drafting game with Euro-style milestone scoring and small bonuses for each playable faction if they draft certain types of cards.

“The cover looks pretty epic,” my wife joked before our first two-player game. And, the cover DOES look pretty epic—the cover seems to portray a game that looks like it’s going to be Mass Effect for tabletop.

It isn’t that, but I think Planetfall nails what it is trying to achieve. I’m not sure that’s a game you will be…

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When a game wins a major tabletop award before you review it, you don’t really have much ground to stand on.

The world already agrees that Dorfromantik: The Board Game (2022, Pegasus Spiele) is at least a very good game, because it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres over the summer.

While there’s always commentary on the games that win this award (in part because there’s always a debate on the shifting sands around the weight of games in this category), time is usually kind to the winners. If you look at the list of winners since CATAN won in 1995, almost every single one is still being celebrated today. This year alone, I’ve been at game nights where we played Just One, Codenames, Pictures, Dominion, Hanabi, Azul, and Kingdomino. Many of these made repeat appearances.

Those are all amazing games. Dorfromantik: The Board Game is no different. That’s because it combines an incredibly simple teach and infinite replayability in a package that can be played solo, multiplayer, campaign-style, and/or as a high-score challenge.

I get it now. Dorfromantik is really good.

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Dorfromantik is a cooperative tile-laying game for 1-6 players, although given the ruleset, I decided to just…

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There are now two expansions for the streamlined 4X game, Northgard: Uncharted Lands, Wilderness and Warchiefs. In this review, I’ll be looking at the Wilderness expansion. (Click here for my review of the Warchiefs expansion.)

In Northgard: Uncharted Lands, (shortened to Northgard for this review) players will add tiles to explore the landscape, add warriors to their clan, move into new territories, and battle rival clans to conquer lands and claim resources for their own. If you’re new to Northgard, I suggest reading my review of the original game, as I won’t be going over the base came components or gameplay in this expansion review.

[caption id="attachment_287555" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The long, narrow Wilderness Expansion box[/caption]

The Wilderness expansion adds eight new Creatures and eleven new tiles—tiles that might spawn specific (very nasty) Creatures. If you play Northgard with the Creatures, this may be the expansion for you.

To reiterate one thing I mentioned in my review of the base game, playing without the Creatures turns Northgard into a race to be the first to build three large buildings in enclosed territories. While this type of race game may appeal to some people, for me, it only increases the luck of the draw with players adding…

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Wouldn’t it be great to find a game that takes many of the best parts of a game you already enjoy, makes it a bit shorter, keeps most of the fancy production elements AND still offers a rich decision space?

Lately, it seems like almost every game I loved from five years ago has tried to find that space. Heck, in the last year alone, I’ve seen or played versions of Terra Mystica, Terraforming Mars, Twilight Imperium, Spirit Island, Scythe, Orléans, and Everdell that aimed to be a more streamlined version of the base game.

This year, I’m intentionally driving hard into the past. Why look at so many new games, when there are THOUSANDS of great games from just a few years ago? I recently reviewed Age of Steam, a 21-year-old design. I like Age of Steam quite a bit, but its complexity plus its length at lower player counts are a minor turnoff.

I didn’t even know about Railways of the World (2005, Eagle-Gryphon Games) until the publisher sent a copy for review. Railways, designed by Martin Wallace (Brass: Lancashire) and Glenn Drover (Mosaic: A Story of Civilization), was updated with a 10th anniversary edition in 2015. This newer edition includes maps for the Eastern US…

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I would probably get a good amount of mileage out of talking to a therapist about why I don’t like hidden movement games.

“Hidden movement games?”, Dr. Weschler asks through an unintended sigh.

“We don’t have to talk about this,” I say.

She looks over her glasses. “Clearly we do.”

“One player moves around the board in secret, unseen, while everyone else is trying to find them.”

“Unseen? Do the other players have their eyes closed, or…”

“Usually you have a miniature version of the board and a dry erase marker, maybe a chart. Some sort of log of your movement. Everyone else is out on the board like normal.”

There’s an uncomfortable pause. Dr. Weschler waits. I center my glass of orange juice on the coaster before continuing.

“The hidden player has some sort of goal to accomplish. In Sniper Elite, for example–”

“Oh! I think my daughter has played that,” she interjects. The briefest of shadows crosses her face. “It’s terribly violent, isn’t it?”

“The video game is pretty violent, yeah. Fortunately, it’s hard to carry that sort of thing over to a board game. Fewer cut scenes. I suppose there could be a deck of cards you…

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