For one reason or another, I played a lot of racing-related games in 2025. These games could be about actually racing, or about betting on races. Not every game reviewed here was released in 2025, just something I played this year. I'll have the 3 games that podiumed at the bottom of the list to keep the suspense alive. Without further ado, let's pull the starting gun on this rundown.

11. Magical Athlete

I had not played the original Z-Man version of this game, but have often heard it nostagically referenced as a fun game. I was quite excited when CMKY announced the re-release of this game. On paper, this seemed like a great casual game I could take to public game nights: a silly asymmetric racing game with light rules and a short playtime. What fun!

However, the actual experience of playing was anything but that. The game itself, to put it frankly, is just a roll-and-move with no meat on the bones. The asymmetric characters are wildly unbalanced (not necessarily in their strength, but how “fun” they are to play), and it truly feels like you're just watching the game play itself. The closest experience I can equate Magical Athelete to is Snakes & Ladders, another game where you roll dice, move your figure, and have no other real other influence on the game.

10. Dirt & Dust

What a strange game. Calling it a racing game is almost miscasting it cause despite the theme it doesn't really feel like racing at all. One would think that an indespensible hallmark of a racing game is the competition between yourself and the other racers, yet Dirt & Dust makes racing feel like such a solitary activity. Make no mistake, this is a multiplayer solitaire game and at no point did the other players around the table playing with me feel like they were a part of my game.

I actually do think that if the game was themed differently, I would've held it in higher regard as it's an interesting puzzle game. However, the game being marketed as it is compared to how the game actually plays left me feeling disappointed. That said, I can see someone who plays a lot of solo games loving this game.

9. WIN

Unfortunately for WIN, it's a game that doesn't manage to get out from the shadow casted by its bigger brother, Long Shot: The Dice Game (who's further down this list). Mechanically, the game is good fun, especially for a tiny box game. For people that are looking for a quick little game that plays well as a travel game, this is a solid choice.

However, in almost all other situations, I'd rather play Long Shot over this game as it's just a fundamentally more interesting game.

8. Flamme Rouge

A nice twist on regular racing games where you control two bikers instead of just one, but only your first biker across the finish line determines your placement. Each of your two bikers have their own unique decks which they play from, and the decks feature different values. Interplay between players, as well as between your own two bikers, is quite an important aspect of this game as racers can slipstream behind each other which contributes greatly to how well you do overall.

The gameplay feels realistic, and I really appreciate the ease of play as the rules are quite intuitive. At its core, the game is fun, but a little forgettable as it's not all too exciting. I've heard the Peloton expansion adds a lot to the gameplay, but having not played it with the expansion, I can only review the base game.

7. Camel Up

The classic. Instead of playing as the racers, players instead play as gamblers betting on the outcome of a camel race. The game entertains a high player count very easily, while also being very easy to teach. Actions are simple, and the limited number of choices players can make on their turn prevents analysis paralysis. In particular, the 2nd edition of the game adds two wild camels that run backwards to add a tiny bit of chaos during the game.

The only real negative I have to say about Camel Up is that the gameplay is inconsistently fun. I've had amazing games, where the winner comes down to the wire after flip-flopping dozens of times. But I've also had very anticlimactic games where one camel just consistently rolls a little bit better while the others lag behind. Because there are betting odds for riskier but higher payouts, there's just no suspense when one camel is the surefire winner (or loser). A few years back, Camel Up would've undoubtedly ranked higher up but it's since been eclipsed by newer games.

6. Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Certainly one of the best sellers in the past few years, Heat plays very well at its higher player counts, which is a big positive for racing games. While it's easy to table, I find the replayability of the game to be quite low as the Heat mechanic and cardplay are quite one-note and not particularly strategically interesting.

It's important to note that this ranking is for the “advanced” version of the game along with the Heavy Rain and Tunnel Vision expansions. The expansions do add a good bit of replayability, but also add fiddliness to the game, but it's well worth it to keep the game interesting. Just the base game would undeniably be ranked lower on the list as the base game in its simplest form gets played out quite quickly.

5. Cubitos

A bit of an unique game. It's a pool-building game involving dice where the players spend their dice rolls to purchase additional dice from a selection of sentitent dice creatures that give you additional abilities. The push-your-luck element of the game is well-balanced by the creature powers, so it never feels like blind luck despite the game being all about rolling a mountain of dice.

The reason it's not ranked higher though, is because the pacing of the game is a little weird. While the game is not an engine-building game, the nature of how players acquire dice via the pool-building makes the game almost “engine-builder-like”. This means that the gameplay starts off quite slow as players don't have a lot of dice, but ends too quickly towards the end when players have a lot more dice. I love the customizability of your “racer”, but it never feels like you can reach your “grand design” before the race abruptly ends.

4. Long Shot: the Dice Game

Long Shot: the Dice Game is a great racing game that I find being a natural next step from Camel Up. The games offers a bit more decision-making than Camel Up and the game focuses more on the sidebets rather than just straight up which horse wins or loses. In particular, I've found this game lands really well with euro gamers who find the roll-and-write format familiar and not “just luck”.

Granted, this game is a roll-and-write with a racing theme, not just a “racing game” in and of itself. However, the truth of the format is that, like real horse racing, you have no real input on the outcome anyway. Therefore, the idea that the gameplay doesn't just focus on the horses but the going-ons at the racetrack makes a lot of sense as well.

3. Steampunk Rally

A bit of a departure from the other games, Steampunk Rally is a more complex tableau-building and dice management game that's built around the theme of a race in a very “Wacky Races” sort of way. You cobble together your car from pieces you find along the way and try to build an engine whereby you can use and recycle dice effiiciently to get past jumps, hazards, and each other on a track.

As far as racing games go, this is basically my go-to if I want to play a racing game with some meat on it. There's no betting, it's simply a dice manipulation game that both rewards creative and opportunistic uses of the machines you get. Additionally, it plays high-player counts very well. Because much of the game is simultaneous. Each round starts with a card draft, which goes pretty quickly, and then the subsequent round can be mostly played simultaneously which means that playtime doesn't increase substantially at 5+ players.

2. The Fog: Escape From Paradise

This is another twist on a racing game where players are Gods randomly picking their favorite survivors on an island to help them run away from a deadly fog. It's a bit of a puzzle game, as the survivors are trying to get one of the few precious spots on escape boats while they're dodging obstacles and each other.

First impressions of this game is that the theme, while not brand new, isn't seen all too often (compared to something like trading in the Mediterranean) and thus has some natural appeal. Additionally, the rules are pretty straightforward and intutitive, making the game relatively easy to teach. It pretty easy to understand the concept of running forward, pushing other people back, and not trying to run into a tree. The random nature of the game along with the survivor drafting keeps the game replayable and interesting over time as there's no “fixed strategy”.

One thing to be aware of is that this is a game where technically, given enough time, you can always math out the “best” move, which runs a bit contrary to the theme of a murder-fog chasing you. However, in the edition I purchased, the game with two sand-timers which I think are great to force people to take faster turns. After all, making mistakes is half the fun of a game like this which fully addresses this issue.

1. Hot Streak

This is the surprise standout game this year for me. Once again, players are gamblers instead of the racers themselves and you're betting on the outcome of a mascot race.

In a way, this game is exactly what I wished Magical Athlete to be — plus, it's crazy that both these two games are coming from the same publisher in the same year. Instead of asymmetry through racer powers, the asymmetry comes from the deck of cards that determine the racer's movement. You do not play with all the cards in each race, so the different mascots have different “winning potential” in each race.

What really appealed to me about Hot Streak is that the randomness is input randomness. Once the original cards are dealt, the only source of randomness afterwards is the order they appear in. Additionally, players all have the ability to manipulate the input (cards) as players get the ability to choose what cards go into the deck, and which cards stay out in each round, all without the other players' knowing. This means that the “winning potential” of each mascot changes each round based on hidden player input, so there's never a guarantee that a mascot that won last round will also win this one. But on the flip side, players only get a very limited slice of information, so there's still the chaos and unexpected upsets that makes these kinds of games fun.

The theme is hilarious, the box/packaging design is genius, and the table presence is undeniable. It's a game with simple rules that accomodate a high (7-8) player count which makes it easy to bring out. All that combined is why Hot Streak takes the gold for me between all the racing games I've played this year.

If you're starting your journey into the vast world of modern board games — if you've checked out games on BGG or asked about them on r/boardgames on Reddit — then chances are you've ran into the “standard” 5-point scale that so many people use when describing games. It's a great metric to use when comparing games to each other — certainly a 4/5 is more complex than a 2/5, but is it twice as complex? Unfortunately, the numbers don't really capture the difference between them for those unfamiliar with the system.

Here, we'll go over some of the common terminology you often see in discussions and for each broad category, I'll try to give an example of what it feels like to play a game in each weight-class.

Understanding the Scale

• The complexity (or weight of a game) ranges from 1 to 5.
• A game gains weight from 3 main sources:
  1. Difficulty in learning. Simply put, a game might be hard for the average to pick-up and learn, even if it's not difficult to play. For instance, the card game Bridge isn't particularly hard to play once you know the rules, but if you're not familiar with trick-taking games, it can certainly seem like a lot to learn.
  2. Difficulty in interpretation. Playing a game isn't just about taking random actions from a list of legal moves, but being to understand the current “state” of the game and the consequences of your actions. Oftentimes, games that are hard to interpret are known as dense. Generally speaking, the lower the density of a game, the easier it is to analyze.
  3. Difficulty in execution (playing well). This is often called the depth of the game (see Terminology below). While depth is often associated with games that have lots of rules and mechanics, the two don't always go hand-in-hand. Chess, for example, has very few rules and mechanics yet features a ton of depth.
• Weight increases in an exponential manner. An easy rule of hand is that each major jump (from 1 to 2, or 2 to 3, etc.) approximately means the game is twice as complex. So a 4-rating game isn't twice as complex as as 2-rating game, but more likely 4x as complex.
• Weight is a bell-curve, and a pretty spiky one at that that. If we assume the curve to be centered around 3 out of 5, then there are significantly more games in the 2.5 to 3.5 weight range than there are above a 3.5 or below 2.5.
• Things that SHOULD NOT be conflated with the weight of a game:
  1. Playtime. Just because a game takes longer to play does not mean it's a heavier or more complex game. The game of Dreidel has super simple rules, but can take a shockingly long time to play.
  2. Enjoyability. Heavy games are not necessarily better games and they should not be considered the zenith of board gaming. Some, in fact most, people just have no interest in a super heavy game, and that's fine. There are plenty of enjoyable games in each weight-class and they shouldn't be considered a “lesser” game just because they're lighter.

Games Up the Scale

Here, we'll define common terms used to classify games in certain weight ranges. We'll also try to illustrate what it feels like to play a turn of a game in each of these weight-classes. Don't fret if you're not familiar with the rules of the games I use as examples; they're not important. The purpose here is to get a sense of what the average turn feels like from the player's perspective.

Family Games – All “Family Games” are a subset of “Gateway Games”. They share the same ease-of-play, but often are even simpler to accomodate children. Typically weighted to be in the 1.0-1.5 range.

Game Example: Karuba Weight: 1.45 Example turn:

I need to place square tiles on the grid of my board so the paths on the tiles connect my Explorer to Gems on the board as well as temples with treasure. I now have to place a new tile on my board and there are three spots I can put the tile. Spot 1 needs a path that makes a left turn, but this tile only has a straight path, so I can't place it there. The Spots 2 and 3 would both work, but the Spot 3 also lets my Explorer collect a Gem, so I choose Spot 3 over Spot 2.

Gateway Games – These are games most often used to introduce new players to the world of board games. Gateway games tend to share a couple common features:

• weighted to be in the 1.5 to 2.5 range,
• usually focus on only 1 or 2 primary mechanics,
• player actions are limited in number and consequences are straight-forward,
• and game expects no pre-existing experience so they're easy-to-learn.

Light Game – Usually used interchangably with “Gateway Games”.

Game Example: Sagrada Weight: 1.92 Example turn:

I'm placing different colored dice in a grid to build a stained-glass window. Some spots on the grid require a specific color die, while other spots require a specific numbered die. It is now my turn and I have a randomly rolled pool of 5 dice to choose from though there are two I really want, a Red-6 and a Green-2.

I would really like the Red-6 die as that would get me 6 points; however, there is a spot on my grid that requires a green die that would also give me more available spaces in the future. Additionally, last round there were a lot of green dice that were rolled, which means that there will be fewer green dice available in the future, so if I don't get this green dice now, I might not get another chance to get a green die until much later.

Therefore, I'll forego the points and take the Green-2 to ensure I don't run out spaces for my next few turns. Since there are lots of red dice still left in the game, I'll have plenty of chances to score points for red dice in the future.

Light-Mid / Mid-weight / Mid-heavy Games – Because so many games exist in-between 2.5-3.5, “Mid-weight” games often straddle a line between their lighter and heavier counterparts. While what is “mid-weight” is entirely subjective, we can approximate the distinction in thirds:

• light-mid: 2.4 to 2.8
• mid-weight: 2.8 to 3.2
• mid-heavy: 3.2 to 3.6

Light-Mid Example: Pandemic Weight: 2.41 Example turn:

I'm working with all the other players to help control the outbreak of 4 different diseases. Every player has a character that has a special ability; my character's ability allows me to travel faster than my teammates. The player immediately after me has the ability to treat diseases more efficiently.

It is now my turn and I can perform 4 actions. On the previous turn, an outbreak just occurred in the city of Seoul and is pretty serious. Should that city have another outbreak soon, we may lose the game. However, my teammate who is good at treating diseases is far away from Seoul while I can reach it easily. So I want to use two of my actions to (1) travel to Seoul and (2) set up a Research Station so my teammate can get here quickly on their turn.

For my third action, I can play it safe and treat diseases at Seoul while I'm already here so we're no longer in danger of losing the game. Alternatively, I can be risky and try to reach another player and share cards with them so we can expedite the process of curing (permanently removing) one of the diseases. Because this is a cooperative game, I'll discuss with my team which action is the most beneficial depending on the cards we each have.

Midweight Example: Concordia Weight: 3.01 Example turn:

This is a game where every player plays as a merchant travelling around ancient Rome trading resources and money in an attempt to get the most points. To do so, I have a deck of cards that determines what actions I may take; I can also buy additional cards during this game to either increase the number of available actions or give me more opportunities to score points at the end of the game.

It is currently my turn and I need to choose an action to take. The resource I most desire at the moment is Wine, and there is a province close by I can reach to buy Wine. I can see there is another player who also needs Wine and is in close competition with me to reach the province. Whichever one of us gets to the province first gets to build a House at a significantly lower cost.

However, there are also two cards currently on the market that fits very well into my strategy: a Farmer card that produces Grain, and an Architect card that allows me to move my Colonists. Since I currently have a lot of Houses in regions that produce Grain, the Farmer card would let me produce Grain more often. On the other hand, because most of my Colonists are currently sitting idle in Rome, the Architect would let me move them more often allowing me to build my trade networks quicker.

Looking at the board, I can see that nobody else really has Grain houses, so it's unlikely anyone wants the Farmer card immediately, though plenty of other players also have Colonists stuck in Rome. Because I'm tight on money and cannot afford another House if I don't get there first, I'll forego the Architect card and move this round knowing there's a high liklihood I'll still get a chance to get the Farmer card next turn.

Mid-Heavy Example: Troyes Weight: 3.46 Example turn:

This is a game where players allocate Workers into houses — white, red, and yellow — to get dice which are then spent on taking actions. Dice come in 3 colors — white, red, and yellow — which correspond directly to white, red, and yellow actions. At the start of every round, players need to contribute dice towards fighting off Maurauders. Players can also accrue Influence throughout the game, which they spend on bonus things such as rerolls or more Workers.

It is halfway through the 2nd round and it is now my turn. I have a White-5 (W5) die, and two Yellow dice, a 1 (Y1) and a 2 (Y2).

My W5 is a pretty high roll and I can invest that W5 into training of one of my Workers into a Craftsman which will give me an additional Action option for the rest of the game. However, I can see that another player has a W5 and a W4 that they're most likely going to use, so I can potentially save my W5 and let them buy it from me. Since I'm short on money already, letting them buy that dice will give me some much needed cash for the next couple of turns. Then, I can train a Craftsman relatively easily in a future turn. Therefore, I'll leave my W5 for someone else to purchase.

There isn't a lot I can do with my Yellow dice since I rolled low numbers, and I don't have a lot of money to spend so it would be expensive to buy another player's Yellow die to use in conjunction with my own. It is also unlikely that someone else will want to buy these dice since they're low numbers. I do have a bit of Influence from my last turn that I could spend to reroll my Yellows, but I could also save that Influence for a Worker. I'll see if there's a better action I can take since there's a high likelihood I'll still both Yellows next turn.

I will be the “Start Player” next round which means that I will be the one that has to deal with the worst Maurauder. Because Red dice are extra effective at dealing with Maurauders, I would like to make sure I have at least one worker allocated to getting me a Red die. I currently do not have any Red dice, and I need to spend a Red die to allocate a Worker to the R-House so I can guarantee myself a Red die next turn. This will also allow me to displace one of my opponents Workers, so they won't have as many Red dice next round.

Luckily for me, the player following me has three Red dice! They will definitely want to use all three on their turn because there's a rewarding R-Action on the board, so I won't have a chance to buy their dice on my next turn. So, if I spend my money right now to buy just one of their Red die, and spend my Influence on a new Worker, I can use that Red die to allocate my new Worker to the R-House. Not only does this benefit me, but it also simultaneously weakens their upcoming turn, which makes this my best move.

Heavy Games – Most games >3.5 can be considered “heavy games”. In many ways, they can be considered the exact opposite of “Gateway Games” as they:

• almost always combines lots of different mechanics together,
• player actions are either numerous (A, B, C...), or are multi-layered (A triggers B which triggers C...),
• consequences of actions aren't easily deduced, sometimes only having pronounced effects much later in the game,
• and games expect players to have a pre-existing understanding and experience with many mechanics.

Game Example: Terra Mystica Weight: 3.97 Example Turn:

Each players plays as a different mystical race of people attempting to claim territory, build Structures, and get Victory Points (VPs).

• Some territories match your color — which you can claim for free — while others match colors of other players, which you need to Terraform (into your own color) to claim.
• Structures are buildings you place on claimed territory that do a variety of things. When other people build Structures next to your territories, you get Power, a resource you can spend on Special Actions (SpA). Structures are also upgradeable into new types of buildings.
• VPs are rewarded for upgrading your civilization, acquiring territories, meeting an ever-changing list of objectives, chartering Towns by clustering your own Structures next to each other, and currying favor with any of the local Cults.

We are halfway through the game and it is my turn. There are multiple things I want to keep track of.

• First, the current objective gives me points for building “Strongholds”, a particular kind of Structure.
• Second, I'm in close competition with other players on two of the Cults. I'm currently in the lead on the Fire Cult, but a close 2nd on the Water Cult.
• Third, there are Cult bonuses at the end of this round for reaching a milestone within a specific Cult. For this round, I need to move up 1 step in the Fire Cult to reach the milestone. Not to mention there's also bonus VPs at the end of the game for having the most favor in any Cult.
• Fourth, I want to keep an eye on the territories to make sure I don't get boxed in by other players. Because I claimed most of my territories close to other players, I'm often in direct competition with them for the best spots. However, it wasn't all bad since being close to other players allowed me to gather a lot of Power.
• Fifth, Power can be used for special actions for bonus resources. The caveat is that each special action can only be used by one person each round.

Because the current objective is to build Strongholds, I want to focus on that since it gives me points this round and lets me unlock my race's special ability, which is a strong upgrade for me. To build a Stronghold, I need to do a series of upgrades going from Dwelling > Trading Post > Stronghold. Therefore, I'll have to first build a Dwelling in a territory I can claim. Unfortunately, there are no territories easily accessible to me in my color, so I'll need to Terraform another color into my own. To Terraform a territory, I need a special resource called Shovels.

There are two possible territories for me to Terraform, one costing only 1 Shovel, but the other costing 2 Shovels. I really want to Terraform the 2 Shovel territory in particular since that would allow me to charter a Town for bonus points. There are two ways for me to get 2 Shovels, either by spending 6 Workers or 6 Power. Unfortunately, if I spend 6 Workers this round, I do not have enough Workers to upgrade a Dwelling up to a Stronghold. I can upgrade an existing Trading Post, but it won't be in the right location for me charter a Town. Therefore, my only option to get both a Stronghold and a Town this round is to use the 6 Power SpA for 2 Shovels or the 4 Power SpA for 2 additional Workers.

On the other hand, Power is hard to gain and can also be exchanged for a Priest which allows me to move up on the Cult track. I do not have enough Power for both 2 Shovels and a Priest, but I do have enough Power for a Priest and 2 Workers. If I wanted to get both a Priest and 2 Workers, that means I would have to spend two turns this round to use both SpA. Additionally, if I do get a Priest, I need to decide whether I want to use it on the Fire Cult or Water Cult. Moving up on the Fire Cult would mean I get the Cult bonus at the end of this round. However, moving up the Water Cult would allow me to pass the current leader of that Cult, giving me a good chance to get points at the end of the game.

Therefore, for me to decide how to proceed, I'll need to look around the table and see how likely it is that someone else will try to Terraform the same spot I'm going for. Similarly, I'll need to see if anyone else has the Power and/or desire to use the SpA I want to determine if I can take my time spending two turns on two separate SpA, or if I need to quickly snatch up the 2 Shovel SpA before anyone else. Finally, in the highly likely event I cannot get everything I want this turn, I'll need to decide if it's more worthwhile to aim for the Stronghold or the Cult bonuses.

Very Heavy Games – Once again, not a very creative name. Amongst heavy games, there are a subset of games that are challenging even for very experienced gamers. Typically, these games exist in the 4.0+ range.

An example turn in the very heavy category might be a bit too long to explore in this article, though if you're exploring games in that weight range you probably already have an idea of what to expect.

As the 2010s came to a close and people rolled out their “Top X Games of the Decade” lists, the last 10 years in review seemed to be curiously packed with euros and thematic dungeon-crawlers. Abstract games were unfortunately underrepresented across the board, despite all the innovation and forward leaps the genre has made. So to square the circle (in no particular order), here are 8 games you may have missed over the last decade.

Santorini

Yes, yes; while technically the game has been in constant development over the last 30 years, 2016 saw the first commerical release of this game and it did not disappoint. Santorini is a quintessential grid-movement game where players compete to be first to have a figure stand atop a fully built building. The basic rules are a few inches long but the gameplay is miles deep. More important however, is that Santorini shows us what a little layer of thematic paint can do. The life-like buildings and their trademark blue domes is a visual treat and the introduction of dozens of variable player-powers — in the form of chibi members of the Greek Pantheon — gives the game an incredible amount of replayability.

Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends

Who said that abstracts have to be black and white pawns capturing each other? Tash-Kalar at its core is a pattern building game; place markers on the board to match patterns to summon your warriors into the arena. The theme of the game only manifests itself in the form of the faction decks. Each faction gets a unique deck with their own unique warriors and abilities — a nice flourish on top of a well-designed core. What really makes Tash-Kalar stand out though is that it showcases a strength that is unique to abstract games: multiple game modes on the same set of mechanics. By slightly changing the scoring objective, you can go from a free-for-all deathmatch to a race to fulfill quests to a team-based melee. What other game lets you do all that?

Tak

The subtitle for Tak calls it “A Beautiful Game” and it only takes one play to see it really is. The goal is simple: create an unbroken path from any one side of the board to the opposite side. Simple enough, right? Traditionally, abstract games that take place on a grid board have a heavy emphasis on methodically squeezing a pound out of each penny's worth of advantage you get. These games don't reward, or even sport a design that allows for, the making of “big plays”. Not Tak though. Due to the game's use of piece stacking, the game constantly puts itself in a position where that one “big” move is right around the corner.

There's even a free version of Tak online.

SHŌBU

This one came late in the decade, but managed to squeeze in under the deadline. SHŌBU for me sits on my self in a very similar spot to YINSH, one of my all-time favorite abstracts, in that it's an easy to teach abstract with deep gameplay and players always want to play a second game after losing the first time. I personally love how consistent this game is at producing the same reactions from people new to board game and abstracts. After rules explaination, they always ask “where's the game in that?”, and the first time they want to make a game-winning aggressive move but can't pull off the required passive move is when the game really clicks for them.

Barony

It's easy to think that abstracts are all 1-vs.-1 games since that's the niche so many of them occupy, but Barony does a stellar job at showing that a 4-player abstract can be just as competitive, thinky, and brutal as the others. If anything, this game plays better at 4 players than at 2! The core mechanics are quite simple and there is no hidden information, making the game a straightforward game of seeing who can most efficiently build their dominion and be the most prepared for when players inevitably clash into one another.

Slither

One of the most appealing parts of abstract games for me is often how easy it is to hack together the pieces for a game as long as players know the rules. If you have a Go set at home, then you already have all of the pieces you need to play Slither! The game plays like Tak with gravitas. Players try to connect designated opposite sides of the board with their stones while also simultaneously needing to block their opponents from doing the same. Not only is the game easy to teach (under a minute!), it is also incredibly easy to scale for all skill levels — simply make the board smaller/bigger for an easier/harder game.

Bosk

Not all abstracts are completely themeless! Bosk is a beautiful game with great table presence for up to 4 players. The design is ingenious: it's an area-control game, played in two parts on the same map with different scoring per part. In part one, players plant trees on a grid to try and claim dominance over the paths on a park while in part two, players drop leaves from the trees they planted in pt. 1 in order to claim majorities over sections of the park. The game plays very quickly (though it can lead to a bit of AP) and the gameplay is deep and deliberate since not only do your actions have importance for the current round, but it can have more unintended consequences down the road as well.

passtally

passtally comes to us from a Japanese designer, who specializes in these fondant coated games with lots of player interaction. In passtally, players are trying to build routes to connect their markers on the sides of the board while simultaneously trying to break the paths of others. As the tiles stack on each other, the amount of points they give also grows, so the game is very much about trying to gain control to high-traffic areas of the map while attempting to zone opponents out of them. The game's bright color scheme hides how mean of a game it is, particularly at high player counts when competition for the highest scoring routes can get quite fierce.

If you've ever played Garphill's other game in the West Kingdom series, Architects, setting up Paladins should immediately ring some bells. Paladins takes many of those mechanics and tucks them into an engine builder. The theme does a great job of covering up the gears and pistons, but make no mistake, Paladins is strictly an engine-builder. Personally, engine-builders have always been hit-or-miss affairs since flaws that would otherwise be small blemishes in other games are largely magnified due to the exponential nature of engines. Unfortunately for Paladins, it lands squarely in the middle of the range — the well-done bits are balanced out by some noticeable flaws — and nothing in the design really leverages it past “just okay”.

This isn't to say there's nothing memorable about the game; true to its namesake, the Paladins mechanic of “draw 3, play 1, prep 1, and shelve 1” is very well done and reminiscent of how Torres handles its Action Cards. In terms of spicing up a generic engine-builder, this hits it right on the nose — the mechanic is impactful, isn't fiddly, and doesn't require its own long set of rules to work. Furthermore, the drafting of Tavern Cards is a nice way to throw some opportunities for tactical decision-making into the mix. And finally, the Faith, Influence, and Strength Attribute is a well-handled dampener on the game's pacing and combos well with the Paladins (as they grant temporary boosts to Attributes) to create interesting situations. All three of these mechanics are impactful whilst feeling organic to the design.

To understand why the next point is a negative, it's important to compare when randomization occurs in a game. “Input randomization,” such as the revelation of new Townsfolk at the start of a round, is perfectly acceptable as the primary purpose is to supply constraints to the player. “Output randomization”, whereby the rewards of an Action are random, are much more situational in effectiveness — everything is peachy when things go well, but when they don't, the negative consequences feel extra punishing. This is why we have the concept of “dice mitigation” as a core mechanic in games and why things such as dice combat (without mitigation) is frowned upon. In the case for Paladins, not only are both the Fortifications and Suspicion Cards random, there is also zero mitigation for them. And the implications are non-trivial, as getting Labourer rewards from Fortifications early-game (which means extra Actions) is a lot more rewarding than, say, a fixed numbers of points. Similarly, pulling some extra Tax Money from a Suspicion Card in the first couple rounds is a significant boon to your action economy and getting your engine started up sooner.

On the topic of revving up your engine, the actual engine-building of the game feels pretty static. Generally speaking with any worker-allocation game, more workers = more actions = more points. Therefore, anything that can consistently give you more workers will inevitably become the crux of your engine. I try not to stray into topics regarding strategy in these articles to avoid accidentally “spoiling” a game, so I'll push some of the finer details into an Addendum [1] at the bottom of the article, but I'll cap this section by saying that once you realize which Paladins/Actions build the engines and which run the engines, the decision-space from turn to turn isn't as large as it originally seems.

There also exists in the game an inkling of a feeling of minor imbalance between some of the rewards. These imbalances aren't just some small side-effect either, but manifest themselves in critical mechanics. Whether it's the King's Favours or main board rewards, specific examples of which I've added to Addendum parts [2] and [3], some rewards are actually rewards while the rest often feel like consolation prizes. I did want to note that none of the imbalances are game-breaking, some of which even feel like they were intended by design, but it does surprise me that playtesters either missed or greenlit them. Theoretically, the game does present trade-offs as taking a Favour/reward means losing out on another card/reward elsewhere; but, the scales are usually tilted enough that the decision is a no-brainer.

Finally, one thing that was quickly apparent was just how solitaire of an experience this game tends to be. Besides taking a Favour or Townsfolk someone else wanted, there isn't much else in terms of player-interaction. There was some potential in the Taxes and Inquisition mechanic, but due to the fact that Taxes refill after an Inquisition and the relative ease of getting rid of or flipping Debt, it's not impactful enough to consider it a significant source of interaction. Granted, this might be a positive in someone else's books if they prefer multiplayer-solitaire types of games which is why I've included it last as a subjective negative.

It's a shame that the coolest part of the game, the Paladins just isn't enough pizzazz to overcome the otherwise fairly average gameplay to make me really yearn for another session. Its 3.61/5 weight (at time of writing) on BGG is certainly a bit exaggerated and I'd probably say that Paladins is probably best served as a gateway to engine-building for people familiar with worker-placements, but not yet fully ready to leave the comforts of meeples behind.

Strategic Addendum

[1] In Paladins, there's a lot of doodads that run on top of your engine, but the actual engine of the game is really only built by two mechanics: Townsfolk, by virtue of giving you more workers, and Workshops, by virtue of lowering worker costs. During the early game, many of the card slots are free or cost a low amount of Provisions or coins, so the Paladins that mitigate Provisions costs aren't nearly as useful. Therefore, it only makes sense that the Paladins that grant boosts for the Recruit or Develop actions should be played ASAP as those are the ones that kickstart your engine.

[2] In the King's Favour cards, Favours that give you workers are consistently picked more often as more workers = more actions. One Favour in particular, allowing the trading of one white worker for 3 colored workers, we've seen to be particularly powerful as not only is it net +2 on workers, it also returns the more coveted colored Labourers. Yes, taking a Favour might mean losing out on another card, but given that both Townsfolk and Outsiders have a lot of redundancy in rewards, it's hard to make a case to take one of those instead of the unique Favour rewards.

[3] The primary purpose of the Paladins is to alleviate a cost dampener around a particular action, so it only makes sense to cash in the “discount” as much as possible on the one turn you have it. Therefore, the Pray reward is by far the most valuable of all the main board rewards by virtue of it allowing you to trigger a juicy Paladin's effect more than once. Following Pray, any reward that gives Labourers is the second most valuable as more workers = more actions = more chances to score points.

In Lignum, players play as the proprietors of lumber mills in the same forest competing to see who can turn the largest profit over the course of two years. It's a euro game without being a worker-placement game, a category of games which doesn't see as many releases or “hits” as its worker-placement counterparts. More-so than most other games, Lignum is a game that's largely about planning for the future. Throughout the course of the game, players are actually given an incredible amount of foresight into what will happen 2 or 3 turns from their current position, and the game rewards players who chart their path carefully. The 2nd Edition of the game, which is what this article will be talking about, adds two mini-expansions as well. The Joiners, which I think are an essential add-on, and the Buildings, which are a bit gimmicky, but fun.

One of the things that stood out to me after a couple plays is how the game cleverly creates tension in places where tension doesn't usually appear. That leapfrog down the trail to collect resources? Not something you see often. Scarcity of resources is certainly present in all optimization games, but the single-pass down the trail creates an interesting scenario where everybody misses out on something. There's only so many Equipment or Craftwork tiles per season such that if you rush past an available one, there's no guarantee you can even get one later down the line.

So, do you rush for that Craftwork for a Hut's bonus actions, or do you stay back and try to collect Food? This sort of give-and-take works really well with the change-up of player order mid-way through the season since whoever reaches the end of the trail first will be the first to cut wood. The competition for sending the first lumberjacks into prime clearings is stiff and vitally important, particularly in cases where players find themselves bidding for the same few trees. Dilly-dally in the forest for too long picking up Equipment and you may find all the good wood gone by the time you're ready to go.

A second, well-done, design element is the fact that the game never says “this is the way you have to do this”. Players always have options when choosing how to conduct their actions. For instance, when transporting Wood from one's Log Pile to the Sawmill, no one option is definitively better than the others. Even the Sled, the Winter only transport, is useful if players find themselves with a surplus of Food. Likewise, the game doesn't make selling unmilled wood an inferior choice. Depending on the Winter requirements, it's sometimes more profitable in terms of actions to simply age and sell unmilled wood. In regards to bonuses, are Hut actions significantly better than a big boost of liquid money by selling the Craftworks? Not always. It's this ambiguity in “what's better, what isn't” that makes the game worth multiple replays and makes each game different than the last.

Of course every coin has two sides, and some of the mechanics that make this game great to me are negatives in others' books. One valid criticism I've gotten is that the economy in this game is particularly unforgiving, and it's hard to recover if you happen to find yourself out of funds. This extends to things like the winter Food requirements because loans are very punishing to get, so much so that I've never seen anyone win a game if they've taken 2 loans. The \$16 payback requirement is just way too high for the \$8 gain. This issue is greatly remedied with the Joiners mini-expansion, as they provide you some passive income, \$1 per Joiner per season. These guys make loans more viable as a strategy, as well as loosens up the wallet a bit during the first year where players have the most problems with tight purse-strings.

The second: the Placement cards that determine where new Wood grows are random. In the rules, there is a non-random version, where the Placement cards for the next round are laid out the round before, but I personally prefer the surprise reveal as the bidding for who gets to cut which Clearing of wood leads to some interesting “races” down the forest path. The more irksome oversight is that every Task, which are end-game contracts, requires Hardwood. Each player is only guaranteed 2 pieces of Hardwood (as a free Log at the start of Winter), which can exacerbate the random Placement issue if very few Hardwood cards are flipped. Currently, Hardwood applies a bottleneck to one of the major scoring mechanics of the game and by replacing some of the Hardwood for another “difficult” Wood to acquire, like +2 Softwood, it would both alleviate the bottleneck while also introducing some more strategic flexibility.

However, one common “flaw” I've heard, particularly from first timers, is that the winner is the one who “got lucky because nobody took what they wanted”. That isn't an issue on account of the game, but more an issue regarding player expectations. In their mind, if they manage to just grab every X and buy Y workers they can pull off this big combo for a whole bunch of points. So many modern euros set people up with these big grand combos that it's unexpected when you can't pull off 50% of your total points in a single round. In Lignum, nobody gets everything they want and it's very much a game about making do with what you can get. If you don't have a plan B going into the forest, you're inevitably going to be caught in a bad position.

Surprisingly, for a game with complex mechanics, there's actually very few moving components. What lends the game its weight is that the few moving parts do matter, a lot. The Planned Work and Tasks aren't just flashy bonuses or end-game goals, they dictate your entire strategy; Winter requirements for Food and Firewood isn't some minor nuisance you can hand-wave away, but overarching threats with significant penalties. It's refreshing to have a system where you can pinpoint one particular decision and definitively say, “yeah, that was good” or “no, that was a mistake”.

In Pipeline, players play as refineries in the oil refining business with your primary focuses on building out your refinery so you can efficiently refine crude oil. The higher-grade oil can then be sold or used for contracts to buy a plethora of things. Definitely a slightly different theme than trading in the Mediterranean or mercantilism in space, but not so far that one cannot draw the appropriate parallels. The game itself is very much an action-optimization game. Every player has the same number of turns, so it's up to them on how to make each turn the most impactful for them and their refinery.

Perhaps a bit more-so than other action-optimization games, Pipeline features a markedly tight economy where money is never where you need it and you can never really afford to buy everything you want. This is immediately obvious as players will begin running into money issues starting from the 2nd turn. While not a full engine-builder such as Terraforming Mars, Pipeline does have some baked in engine-like mechanics. Certainly, the pipe tableau each player constructs, as well as the Machines that allow automated running of your pipes, has a very engine-like feel to it. Combined with the presence of a fairly impactful and rationed upgrade system and a lack of any hidden information, Pipeline is in every respects a pretty brutal game.

Of course, I don't say that in a negative sense; you don't really jump into these sorts of games without some expectation of demanding gameplay. What makes Pipeline's tight restrictions acceptable is:

1. player decisions are driven mostly by player-interaction
2. the game rolls along fairly quickly once players get started.

One of the overlooked design positives of Pipeline is that it manages to achieve a scalable economy game without the use of dummy-players or variable costs. This is achieved by having an environment where scarcity is largely player defined, and not artificially instated (e.g., crude oil isn't scarce because the game refuses to supply players with any, but because they might've been all bought by other players). Not only does this require players to be more tactical in their strategies and considerations, high player-interaction also prevents the game from feeling scripted.

Point number two, Pipeline balances its thinky elements with simple core mechanics. Besides the pipe-building itself, which invariably trips people up the first time around, the basic actions of either buying, selling, or running pipes is easy to grasp for any player with euro-game experience. A common pitfall in a game like this is overloading a player with choices for their turns which ends up inflating the game time. Whether by coincidence or design, the lack of budget everyone experiences really cuts down on a player's possible actions, thus forcing players to focus on short-term objectives rather than getting tied up trying to plan too far ahead.

When you put all this together, what Pipeline ends up being is a fairly snappy optimization puzzle. It's not super mean the way Food Chain Magnate is — there's not really any blocking or purposeful sabotage of other players' plans — but that isn't to say it's a multiplayer-solitaire game. Anything you do on the board has indirect consequences for others, so everyone is constantly required to maneuver around each other's actions. It's very reminiscent of another fantastic game, Tzolk'in, where the game design expertly has players stumbling over each other while they face the common antagonist that is time. The system in Pipeline is surprisingly elegant in this regards; with a single small change to one of the mechanics, such as the difficulty of refining a particular type of oil or what upgrades are available for purchase, the experience can be totally different from one game to the next.

With its many positive points, there are some common critiques of the game. Ironically, in the same way Pipeline shares many positives with Tzolk'in, it also carried over its biggest negative as well: a lack of catch-up mechanisms. The game constantly pushes forward with no turns to “rest”, so if you make a few poor decisions early on, it's tough to find the necessary respite to compensate for it. If you find yourself in a bad position, it's possible to climb out and avoid a downward spiral, but the odds of you catching back up to the leader is slim.

Second, scoring for this game tends to be a bit obtuse as so much of it concentrates on the end-game. The fact that the majority of the scoring is tucked away till after the game often leaves first-timers with a shock when it comes to tallying up their Refinery's total worth. While the variable end-game Scoring Cards do give the game an interesting amount of replayability and variety, it can also have the opposite effect of just creating some really dull games as well. For instance, if you get two colored pipe-scoring cards, in addition to the permanent pipe scoring cardboard “card”, the motif of refining and selling oil suddenly becomes an afterthought to just laying pipe tiles.

Overall, the negatives are minor compared to the rest of the game, and they can all be compensated for by being familiar with the game. To be upfront, I don't think this is a game for everyone — it's definitely a love-it-or-hate-it game. There are going to be people who are put off by how unapologetically tight the game expects players to be for “good” play, but for those who enjoy the grind, Pipeline has a lot to offer them. Personally, I'm also excited to see where else the game can go as there is definitely space in the current game for some small modular extras. Furthermore, I do know there is a community sourced fan-made solo version, and I do hope an official version will stem out of that project as well.

From the team that brought us Troyes comes their newest and arguably one of the hottest releases at GenCon 2019: Black Angel. Troyes itself is a very well received game, and many people expected to see Black Angel as Troyes in space. Certainly, the core mechanic of dice and buying dice carry over from one to the other. When I first drafted this article, it was originally meant to be a comparison between the two, but as I got further along, it became apparent that viewing this game from within the shadow of Troyes is not the correct way to experience Black Angel. In fact, I believe much of the game's early detractors possessed those opinions because they jumped into this game expecting Troyes 2.0. They saw similar dice mechanics and thought everything else would also be the same. Needless to say, if you try to apply your winning Troyes strategies to Black Angel, they're going to fall flat.

So if we look at Black Angel in its own right, what makes it special? What stood out most to me is that the game provides a pretty flexible but interconnected framework that allows the players to pilot the gameplay. Just from a design perspective, whether intentional or not, I find that Black Angel is turning the clock backwards on some emerging anti-patterns that more and more games employ. Specifically, the fact that instead of the game telling you what to focus on, the players' decisions determine what's important or not. While other games, such as its older sibling Troyes, shovel events between each round onto the plate and dictate your attention to be here or to be there, Black Angel is completely comfortable with letting you make the journey to Spes as eventful as you want it to be. Pacing is dictated almost entirely on player decisions and how they choose to interact with Ravagers, Debris, the dice, and their individual Missions.

Following the idea of player driven objectives, scoring opportunities in Black Angel are dependent on which missions players choose to pursue. Some criticism I've heard from playgroups coming out of GenCon was that the game was “too opaque”; but really, opaque here isn't a fair word to use as there's never any doubt as to how you get points, it's just that the avenues to scoring aren't predefined for you. There isn't a yellow brick road for you to follow with a guaranteed cash out at the end. For people who are used to worker-placements with clearly defined “X → Y → Points” tracks, expect to take some time to get used to the fact that you have to make your own scoring conditions, or work off of other people's scoring conditions. Some reviews online complain about “weak” engine-building, which in my mind is a huge positive. The game is almost strictly designed to disallow convenient engines; you don't just get to go back and forth on the same 2 spaces running the same “get resource → trade resource for points” loop ad infinitum.

Another trend that Black Angel is bucking is the idea that a big scoring turn/end-game scoring is more valuable than steady progress. More and more these days, I see games where the gameplay is an hour of specializing and hoarding resources and the actual scoring happens in the last turn (or in the endgame) where players turn in everything for 30 bajillion points. Black Angel is not that kind of game. Everyone's advantage regarding one thing or another is constantly waxing and waning as the game progresses and the winner of the game isn't the one who specialized the hardest or the one who found the magic combo that exponentially generates points, but the player who played to their advantage the most often. Much like money in Brass, your leftover stuff isn't worth anything at the end of the game so hoarding produces no rewards.

An additional positive side effect of not being an engine/combo-focused game is that the game does not drag on at higher player counts. Because the game is focused on setting up big plays, the game has to run longer to give everyone a chance to build their tableau. The most regrettable thing about this design is that the playtime makes the game at max/high player-counts way too long. One game that comes to mind is Underwater Cities, an excellent game at 2-players and a fate worse than death at 4. Since Black Angel isn't beholden to this requirement, 4-player games go just as quickly, if not slightly faster, than 3 player games.

There are, of course, still some legitimate complaints about the game. The randomness of the tech tiles is certainly a valid issue. Being able to effectively use tech tiles as “mini-actions” between turns is quite powerful, but it's entirely possible to just get a smattering of tech that don't quite coordinate. Furthermore, as you cannot roll out new tech and purchase tech on the same turn, you're reliant on the players before you to put tech out and not get them snatched up before it rotates back to you. The other common negative I've heard is that the game ends a bit suddenly — once you reach Spes, get an extra turn, and that's it. Thematically, it makes sense, but the lack of anything special in the end game, besides the black tile scoring which isn't usually a huge swing, can feel a bit anti-climactic.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on the double-edged sword that's the narrative of the game. One trend I've been seeing a lot of recently is that games want to be exciting — which certainly isn't a bad goal; but the only want to consistently make a game exciting is to make the game more scripted — which can hurt replayability. As mentioned earlier, the pacing of this game is almost entirely left up to the players which means that you can certainly get uneventful games where everything is basically business as usual. However, that makes the games where something unexpected happens that much more memorable. Even for a game that's only been out for a month and half (at time of writing), I already have a handful of interesting anecdotes from “non-standard” experiences. In the same way as Root, one of my most played games, Black Angel is a game where the after-game discussion is just as interesting as the gameplay itself.

Taking a small departure from the usual deep dives, these are some games people acquired during GenCon that I had the fortune of playing. These are strictly first impressions, and I should note that demos, partial plays, or any games where I was a spectator but not actually participating are not included in this article as I felt that would be unfair. A couple of these were released before GenCon, but if they were a “featured” game at any stands, I've considered that fair game for this article. Alright, on with the content!

Point Salad

Point Salad is a set collection game. On your turn, you can either pick up a new “recipe”, instructions on a combination of vegetables that will score or lose you points, or two vegetables from a common market to fulfill your existing recipes. The special thing here is that recipes not picked will be flipped over to replace vegetables in the market, therefore permanently removing that recipe from the game.

Honestly, this game was a pleasant surprise. Most of the descriptions of this game would've put this game in the “meh” category for me, but the fast paced tactical nature of this game really stuck with me. One of things that irks me about light-weight set collection games is that the strategy is oft not deep enough. It only takes one or two plays for experienced gamers to deduce optimal combos or strategies. Instead of trying to solve that problem, Point Salad pretty much throws the book at it and is almost entirely tactical. Cards fly off the deck and market so quickly that it's impossible for anyone to have much of a long-term strategy. That “skin-of-your-teeth” playstyle lends itself well to replayability, a trait I highly value for filler games. I will qualify my statements in that I had 5 players in my games of Point Salad. I can certainly see the possibility of a slower paced game at 2 or 3 player counts, but I can't speak on that.

Q.E.

Q.E. is an auction game where player play as the central banks of four terribly ran countries. Player can bid (and print) unlimited amounts of money to secure assets for their nation, which are worth points at the end of the game. However, the country that printed the most money will see their economy collapse and automatically lose the game. It's a bit of a high-stakes game of chicken, except that everyone is gunning for second place.

The description on this one felt a lot like a sibling of Ponzi Scheme and slightly The Estates, two games I really enjoyed. The core bidding mechanic definitely feels similar in the sense that you're bidding directly for points (as opposed to actions or picking order like in Amun-Re), though it's definitely a lighter game rules wise. The “twist” that the player who bid the most overall money loses is definitely the spice in this game. However, the particular issue with the “most X automatically loses” style of game is that balance requires everyone at the table to be playing well. All it takes is for one player to bid an insane amount of money for the game to spiral into a bit of a debacle. This wasn't so much of an issue for my group and me, but I can see it being negative point in some peoples' books.

On Tour

In On Tour, players try to create a tour schedule for their band leading through the most states as possible. Players roll dice, and attempt to link adjacent states up according to the dice rolls. The player with the longest tour collects the most profit and wins.

I'm not going to say that On Tour was a bad game, but it certainly felt a bit too light for my tastes. The core gameplay was a bit too light and felt a bit too random. Certainly, there are groups for which this game would be perfect; it's simple to teach and playtime is short and I cannot argue that the artwork is attractive. However, one definite negative I will put upon On Tour is that the game is a bit overproduced making the price a bit higher than I could justify for a game such as this.

Pipeline

Pipeline is a game where players try to run the most profitable oil refineries by efficiently purifying crude oil into higher grade oil to satisfy market contracts. The game features a fairly unique central mechanic revolving around the actual building of one's refinery pipelines via interconnecting tiles. Pipeline was released before GenCon, but Capstone was showing this one off, so I've included it here.

Regardless with whom I played Pipeline with, everyone had the same general reaction that this game is tight. The name of the game is efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. In that sense, it feels very much like a higher-level game of Food Chain Magnate whereby optimization, particularly in the early game, is paramount to late-game success. In a similar vein to FCM, Pipeline does not have a catch-up mechanism in the brutal world of oil contracts. This is definitely a game I'm hoping to explore further in a full deep-dive, but generally speaking, I enjoyed it. My only niggle with the game is that too much of the scoring takes place in the end-game than during gameplay — you'll end the game with maybe \$300, then proceed to get \$1400 in end-game rewards — which ultimately can make the game feel a little unrewarding.

Hellboy: The Board Game

Play as Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and other BPRD characters to investigate mysteries and beat up frogs. The gameplay doesn't deviate too much from most dungeon crawlers: explore rooms, roll dice for skill checks, do this and that, and fight a boss. I will preface this and say I'm playing a Kickstarter copy of this game, so your retail experience might be different.

Pretty much the exact opposite of Bosk, Hellboy is as ameri-trashy as they come. The game is super heavy on theme and actually does a really good job of making the characters feel different. The game comes pre-packaged with a bunch of scenarios, and has a “scenario generator” deck to create random scenarios for increased replayability. Overall, the game doesn't do anything I've never seen before, and actually plays a lot like the Arkham Horror LCG, just without all the cards. The one design choice I wasn't a big fan of was that the boss fights were actually the least interesting parts of the missions. Ironically, missions are pretty varied but once you get to the boss fights, the only way to beat them is just raw damage. The lack of a “mission conclusion” text also feels a bit anti-thematic; the missions just... end... after the boss is defeated — no resolution is really given which is a little unsatisfying.

Bosk

If you love trees and parks, Bosk is going to be right up your alley. This is an abstract game in two parts: part one involves players placing their seedlings during springtime in prime spots in a park to generate the most visitors; part two involves dropping leaves in the wind from the (now grown) trees to cover the most ground during autumn.

This one is a bit of a sleeper hit with me — prior to GenCon, I've heard almost nothing about this game — but if there's one thing I love, it's minimally thematic abstracts. The gameplay is surprisingly crunchy, particularly in player counts above 2, and reminds me a bit of Barony in it's playstyle to hem other players in. Don't be fooled by its light-hearted art style though, this game is definitely mean, and the complete lack of chance in the game makes it completely skill-dependent game. The game is presented well and is not overproduced or overpackaged for its content — a welcome sight to see in today's board game landscape where even the smallest of games needs minis sculpted out of ivory and a box big enough to fit a beluga.

Mental Blocks

Mental Blocks is a cooperative game where players try to build a 3D structure, but each player only has a different single 2D side view. The challenge is to share enough information, which being bound by certain secret rules, to accurately create the intended 3D design. An extra challenge can be thrown in with a traitor mechanic if you want to spice the game up a bit.

I'm surprised this game took this long to be created. It's such a simple mechanic, but plays so well. It feels a bit like Magic Maze in that everyone is trying to solve the same puzzle, but the game constantly makes you frustrated at one another. This is 100% a party game, so it should be approached as such, but I personally had a blast playing this. One bonus point to this game is that it's apparently color-blind friendly, as party games should be inclusive, though I can't really test this myself.

Quodd Heroes

This is a scenario game where players play sentient cubes of material, typically elements of some sort. The gimmick here is that each face of your player cube acts differently, depending on which side is facing up, making not only the location of your cube important, but also the orientation. Admittedly, this game was “released” wayyyyy before 2019 as a Kickstarter project 2 years ago, but it only just shipped recently.

Quodd Heroes is a labor of love and the game really shows it. The core mechanic of making your character orientation is certainly unique; everyone who I've talked to, without fail, mentions that as being the most memorable part of the game. Unlike a lot of other scenario games with a singular style of gameplay, Quodd Heroes definitely has a full variety of scenarios and flexible enough mechanics for players to effectively create their own should they choose to do so. I had the pleasure of meeting the designer, Ryan Iler, I think 2 years ago at GenCon 2017 and he effectively demoed the game to my group by creating a scenario (albeit a bit unbalanced) on the spot. The artwork and production quality on this game is top-notch and worth taking a look at.

Terror Below

The title might have “Terror” in it, but Terror Below is a good mish-mash of pick-up-and-deliver mechanics with a monster theme very reminiscent of Dune's Sandworms. Players race against each other to try and deliver eggs while also scavenging for items and avoiding the worms terrorizing the people above.

I sat down for this game expecting a much different tone than the one I got, though I can't say I'm disappointed. The game is a lot more improvisational than I expected and was an overall enjoyable pick-up-and-deliver game with a good spice. As with most Renegade games, the production quality is great and well thought out. The only concern I had was with regards to the rulebook: certain conditions or scenarios aren't always explained and you occasionally need to resort to the BGG forums to try and find answers.

There's a couple other games that I'd like to get a few more plays in before going into a deeper look at. First and foremost is Black Angel, which I don't feel I've adequately explored to put any opinions down quite yet. Also on that list is Lockup, Abomination, Pipeline, and City of Big Shoulders, so be on the lookout for those articles whenever I write them.

For the purposes of keeping this article more focused on the differences between Brass Lancashire (LAN) and Brass Birmingham (BIR), we'll be focusing less on the actual rules, and more on how certain rules changes affect gameplay. Moving forward, I'll be assuming you, the reader, are familiar with at least the rules of Lancashire; if you're new to both games, it might behoove you to take a brief look through the rulebook (of either game).

At the center of both games is the same set of player actions:

• Build an industry building
• Build a connection
• Develop (upgrade) an industry
• Sell your produced goods
• Take a loan

With the exception of some very small side rules, these 5 actions are pretty much the exact same mechanically. Instead of spending two cards as a wild in LAN, we mix it up a bit in BIR with the introduction of wild cards along with a new action, Scout, to procure these wilds.

Besides the change in the map due to a different locale, there's a shakeup in our available industries:

• Shipyards in LAN have been replaced with Pottery Factories in BIR
• Ports and the Foreign Market from LAN are no longer in BIR
• BIR features a brand new Industry, Manufactured Goods, that function similarly to Cotton Mills
• BIR features a new resource, Beer, produced by a new industry, Breweries.

In terms of mechanical differences, those are pretty much all the big things, so let's take a look at how these changes affect gameplay. With these, I'll go through the differences first, then a bit on how they change the actions during the course of a game, and finally touch on how they affect the overall feel of the game towards the end of the article.

A small change regarding the industry tiles in BIR is the network value of flipped tiles. In LAN all flipped industries were worth a single point on the rails/canals, but in BIR certain tiles are worth 2 points or even no points. Though it's certainly not a giant difference, the extra point here and there adds up over the course of the game making canal/rail scoring much more potent in BIR. In LAN, network scoring can be a big sweetener to a player's final score, but in BIR, it's entirely possible for the networks to be on equal footing to flipped industries in terms of points.

Next up, there are two board changes. BIR features an extended coal market, with maximum cost per coal now going up to £8 instead of £5 (the iron market is unchanged). The second board change is the removal of the Ports and Foreign Market in BIR, which in turn signifies a big change in terms of how market demand works in the game. In LAN, demand was a limited thing; once the foreign market was satisfied and no more ports were available, you simply couldn't sell your cotton. In BIR, the cities (which now buy your goods) have unlimited demand — as long as you can sell it, the cities will buy it. The shakeup in BIR is that during setup, the cities draw demand tiles that determine what goods they're willing to buy; importantly, some of these tiles can be blank which means that a city with all blank tiles will have no demand at all for the entire game.

We also have a new resource, Beer, that's making quite a grand entrance. Nearly all “consumer industry” tiles (cotton, manufactured goods, pottery) cannot be sold unless one or two beers are consumed. This makes Breweries a critical bottleneck in BIR when it comes to scoring consumer goods; further exacerbating the demand of Beer is the new requirement that double-rail actions now cost an additional beer on top of its original cost of £15 and 2 coal. Perhaps as a way to curtail the scoring potential of rails, the new beer requirement makes the act of playing two rails quite costly — if not in actual money cost then in opportunity cost.

In fact, BIR in general sees a lot less network development. In LAN, the consistent need to connect to more and more Ports to flip your Cotton meant that networks to seek out additional Ports were naturally occurring. However, since cities in BIR have infinite demand, once a single network has been established, the need to create more networks to flip goods isn't as pressing. Granted, a player may still need to set down rails to seek out Breweries, though unlike Ports, which require a connection, Breweries have the convenient ability to teleport their Beer to the Brewery's owner.

All these bits tie into the central mechanic of the game, of course: the card play. Simply put, the card luck in BIR is much more important and prevalent. There are 4 reasons for this increase in card luck:

1. More variety. BIR has more Industries and more Locations than LAN, but the same number of turns in the game. This means there are fewer cards per Industry/Location in the deck, which in turn means fewer copies of identical cards in the deck means lower odds of you drawing any specific card.
2. Greater “waste”. In LAN, the only Industry card that would be often “wasted” (i.e., not even considered to be used for its depicted Industry) would be a Shipyard. BIR features multiple “paths to victory” in the form of the different “consumer industries”, but realistically, players can really only pursue one, and dabble in a second. This means that any “consumer industries” that aren't being actively pursed becomes “waste”. Furthermore, the greater supply of coal previously mentioned also slightly degrades the importance of the Coal Industry cards.
3. Less accessible Industries. This is a direct result of fewer networks being built in BIR. Since the requirement for Industry cards is that they must be used within a player's own network, smaller personal Networks means fewer candidates for Industry cards means even more card “waste”. This is doubly true during the Canal Era when players can only place one tile per Location.
4. Undesirable Locations. If a city gets a double-blank for industries, entire sections of the map get deprioritized in importance. This is highlighted in the case of a 3 player game since Nottingham isn't in play; if Warrington draws a double-blank, the north half of the map instantly becomes filler space as opposed to prime real estate.

The net result of the points is that it's much harder to draw a usable card. Credit where credit is due, BIR does have a built-in mitigation for this when you Scout for wild cards but it's only a solution for the symptoms, not the root cause.

An interesting side effect to this is that the discard-a-card mechanic feels toothless in BIR. While playing LAN, it's not uncommon for players to hem and haw over which cards to discard to do Loan or Network actions since it's easy to find inherent value in the majority of card draws. On the other hand, selecting cards to discard is a much less arduous task in BIR since having 2 or 3 “worthless” cards in your hand happens quite often.

Now that we have the parts, what does that mean for the sum? Firstly, it's important to know what made LAN really stand out as a game. Underneath all the theme, LAN was largely a game revolving around opportunism and forced cooperation. You don't have to work with other people, but you'll just be less efficient than the people who are doing so. In fact, a common pitfall for new players of LAN is to focus too heavily on income with the “I'll do it all myself” mentality. There's an ever-present need to negotiate turns to try and get the slightly longer side of a shrinking stick, which makes LAN a very interactive game; not just tactical in the sense you have to change up your strategy due to other people's actions, but truly interactive in the sense that you play an active role in other people's turns.

On the other hand, BIR is a more about optimizing actions with the cooperation aspect of the game taking a significant backseat. First and foremost, the threat of someone overbuilding your industries isn't as much a concern in BIR as it is in LAN. Due to the larger coal market, I've never had a single overbuilding of coal in any of my BIR games, regardless of player count. Though there have been times with coal “shortages” due to the high cost of coal, we've never actually ran out before. This decrease in need to “share” resources naturally means players tend to be more self-focused during the game. I don't need to cooperate with you either because I can just buy the Coal I need (albeit at a higher price). Alternatively, I can't cooperate with you because you're not willing to “sell” your valuable (and often in short supply of) Beer. Each player's reliance on being self-sufficient for their industries (i.e., being able to buy or build what others won't make for them) thus makes income a much bigger deal in BIR than it was in LAN.

I believe BIR's changes in gameplay is attractive for a particular subset of board gamers. For those with lots of experience in resource conversion games, BIR is a much more relatable game; the innate flow of “I make buildings → I sell buildings → I get more money to make more buildings” is familiar territory for most euro gamers. However, that familiarity also comes with the same pitfalls, namely, the game feeling “samey” between plays. As with most resource converters, once the players figure out the optimal paths to victory, it becomes a race to see who can get their set-up in place first. The intricate mechanics do a good job of covering this up on the initial few plays, but astute players won't take long to see hints of those optimal paths.

Personally, I've found that in BIR, I'm often thinking about “what am I doing” as opposed to LAN where it's “what are other players doing”. People can play Secret Hitler 100 times and not feel burnt out on the game because it is so driven on interaction that it's easy for each game to feel fresh. Even if you swapped out one player for another with the exact same skill level, their differences in personality makes it a whole different experience. In the same way, LAN benefits from having the innate depth that comes with a more player-interaction driven design. While the question of which design is better is up for debate, the question of which has greater replayability is firmly settled on Lancashire.

It's been over 2 years since the release of Railroad Revolution (RR) and the game, even today, leaves an interesting and memorable mark on the subject of board game design. Certainly, no one disputes that balancing an interaction-heavy board game is a difficult task and even the greats among us (ask Uwe and his Roofing Company) are liable to slip up once or twice. Fortunately, most of these errors are mere footnotes, either a happenstance situation of the stars aligning to produce a perfect combo of actions (as in the case of the aforementioned Roofing Company), or a concerted data-mining effort over thousands of games that no individual would ever be expected to achieve through regular playtime (as in the case of games such as Through the Ages). However, Railroad Revolution's Western Union (WU) strategy stands out because it wasn't some minor imbalance on a one-in-a-million fluke, but a clearly superior tactic that one could consistently exploit via a core mechanic of the game.

Some light context on the game, for those of us who haven't played it: RR is a route building game that has players emulating railroad tycoons in 19th century America. The core gameplay mechanic is a fairly straightforward worker placement. Players take turns choosing which of 4 actions they'd like to pursue: build train stations, build railroads, build WU offices, or liquidate assets. Over the course of the game, the players are expected to be gunning for a variety of lucrative milestones as well as increasing a scoring multiplier for their assets. For all intents and purposes, the train stations, railroads, and milestones all seem pretty well balanced. The cost of completing a task scales proportionally with the rewards one gets and by itself, seems like a good enough design.

The problem arose, however, once the WU got thrown into the mix. According to the designers themselves, the WU track was meant to be an easier to understand method of playing the game, with more transparent scoring and goals. One could also see the original intention of the WU offices as a sort of catch-up mechanic for players who had the misfortune of falling behind on the rails. Whatever the intent of the WU, the execution presented some major flaws.

First and foremost was the pricing of the WU. While stations and rails cost a couple hundred dollars to build, WU offices were free. Furthermore, not only did the WU offices not cost you anything to construct, but they often came with bonus money and shares of stock (which you can sell). Simply put, the WU offices gave out free money. In and of itself, a dole in a game isn't a design flaw. Excellent games like Marco Polo and Troyes all feature some sort of simple “get free money” action, and even games like Tzolk'in added a “quick action” for free resources in its expansion. Notably however, these actions were considerably worse than the regular actions (in the case of Marco Polo and Troyes), or players were limited in the number of times they could use said action (in the case of Tzolk'in). These limitations served to clearly signify that these no-cost actions were meant for catch-up only.

As you can guess, this was not the case when it came to the WU offices. Not only did WU offices provide players points, the rewards the players got were also equivalent in value as the rewards they got from building stations and rails. In fact, nothing that the players could do via trains and rails was unachievable via the WU. It didn't take long for savvy players to ask themselves, “why pay for the reward when I get something similar for free?” To compound the issue the WU offices were actually designed to be a strategic part of the game, as evidenced by the players' ability to increase the scoring multiplier for their offices.

Given an aerial view of the situation, the situation probably didn't seem that bad. If players were given ample time to pursue their rails and reach milestones, it's true that they could score much higher than WU offices alone would allow. However, the WU offices themselves were designed to be a “rushing” mechanic that would allow someone to close out the game ASAP. Typically, these “rushing” mechanics are a popular device used in engine-builders to force the game to end before someone can get their super strong engine fully up-and-running. In the context of RR, what this meant was that pursuing the powerful WU offices also doubled as forcing a faster game, preventing people from being able to achieve the lucrative milestones.

Credit where credit is due, the designers have tried to tackle the issue, primarily by increasing the costs surrounding the WU offices's scoring. Instead of paying 50-50-100 to increase the scoring multiplies, the errata had players pay 10x the amount, 500-500-1000. Unfortunately, the fix didn't deter people from pursuing the strategy at all. To put practice to theory, a tournament for RR at the German Board Game Championship confirmed that the top scores for every game still followed the same strategy.

Why would that be? To take a look at the real problem here, it's important to note that cost was never the issue in the first place. The reason the WU strategy was so strong was because it was fast and consistent. Not only did the WU offices have the lowest opportunity cost (since the player could reap the same rewards), the WU was also the quickest way to end the game, therefore disrupting players from building strong worker-engines. Raising the prices slowed the game down, but it served to delay the symptoms, not alleviate the problem. Unfortunately for RR, the issue is not one a simple rejiggering of numbers will be able to fix, and will perhaps require a much larger overhaul to truly balance the WU without just neutering it completely. If nothing else however, the incident serves as an interesting anecdote in board game history and an effective case study in what to look out for when balancing opportunity costs.