The games that burn twice as bright

"I've played...questionable games."

"Also extraordinary games. But maybe it's time for some new ones..."

I love buying new games. There is something magical about peeling off the shrink wrap, punching out the tokens, and wading through a new rulebook (to say nothing of the dopamine-like effects of new game smell). Of course, with a limited amount of space and an even more limited amount of time, if I'm going to continue buying new games that means I have to get rid of old ones. It should be easy enough to figure out what games I'm not playing any more, especially since I track and rate everything I play on BoardGameGeek.

Invariably when I comb through the shelves looking at games I've done lukewarm reviews of, I get a sort of reverse Marie Kondo thing where the low rated games spark joy in the form of "I might want to play that again one day." Even stranger, I sometimes find that high rated games are greeted with indifference, or worse, an enthusiastic "I'm tired of this game, it does not spark joy. Let's get rid of it."

A recent example of this phenomena was Roll Player. This was a game that I played at a convention and enjoyed enough to immediately buy a copy. I continued to play and enjoy it, even chasing down the two expansions and a host of promo cards, surely a sign of a high level of enthusiasm. But according to my BGG stats I haven't played it since January of 2021, and looking at it on the shelf I honestly have no desire to. Why is that, I wonder?

Roll Player isn't the only victim of my fickleness. I've had similar reactions to Jarl: the Vikings Tile-Laying Game (even while in the midst of rewatching Vikings), and Mansions of Madness. The decision to part with Mansions of Madness is particularly puzzling as it's the sort of pseudo-roleplaying game I tend to enjoy, and I had a significant sunken cost -- not only did I buy all the expansions, I spent considerably time painting all the miniatures. But part with it I did, and gladly.

When considering these and other 5-star games that I've since let go of, I could trot out all kinds of justifications for not wanting to play them (or have them in my collection) any more, but that's not the question I want to answer. What's really got me baffled is why I would get rid of 5-star reviewed games while keeping 3-star ones like Jurassic Park Danger or Paladins of the West Kingdom.

I think it comes down to the excitement of the new. A game comes along that does something differently, which is fun for a while, but on repeated plays you find that it just does that same new thing over and over, which soon stops being exciting. It's a good argument for spending a little time with a new game rather than reviewing it after one or two plays. At the same time, I sometimes find that I would like to give a game a better review after playing it more.

Or maybe it's just that they can't all be 5-star games. We need the less compelling filler games to keep from burning out on the ones that are truly great. We also need something to bring out when our non-gamer friends and family come for a visit...

In defense of the classics: Star Wars Clue

Re-skinning classic games with modern intellectual property is nothing new, just ask anyone who's ever owned a Charlie Brown chess set or a deck of novelty playing cards. Games publisher USAopoly has built up a healthy cottage industry out of grafting a dizzying array of film and television properties onto board game mainstays like Monopoly, Risk and Clue. While there is no help for Monopoly (it's a terrible game and always will be), occasionally the designers of a reskinned game will add elements in order to make the game more in line with the I.P. they're using. Sometimes this can work to the game's benefit; for example, Doctor Who Risk adds a much needed time limit to a game that can take all day to play, but really shouldn't.

Having not played the original Clue in many years (although I am a huge fan of the 1985 film, which is a work of genius), I picked up Star Wars Clue entirely due to the very impressive looking two-level board. In my defense, it was a spur of the moment decision, and besides, everything is better with Star Wars, right?

The three dimensional board is every bit as impressive as it looks on the box. The graphics are great, and some effort was made to make it look like the interior of the Death Star from the original Star Wars, rather than just slapping on stills from the film. The back side even looks like the death star exterior, but does reveal a problem: the board has a back side, which means whatever unlucky player gets that seat is going to be standing up a lot during the game. Even then, it's a little difficult to see the lower level of the board unless you're sitting right in front of it.

The playing pieces are miniatures of the principal Star Wars heroes, and they're as good as cheap molded plastic can possibly be. The colors are distinct and you can tell which character is which, and that's all you really need from a board game piece, although the miniature painter in me can't help wondering what they'd look like with a spot of paint.

"It was R2-D2, in the docking bay, with the lightsaber."

Well no, not exactly. Recognizing that a traditional whodunnit isn't on brand for Star Wars, the game instead asks players to figure out what room the Death Star plans are in, what planet it will destroy next, and what space ship the heroes will escape on. It's not a bad rationale, but it does remove the element of player pieces getting dragged around the board when they're accused, and it eliminates the murder weapons which were the most visually striking thing about the original game, even if they don't really serve a clear purpose. The planets and ships are represented by cardboard counters that are placed in the room when a player makes a guess, and element we found a little cumbersome but also helpful for remembering what guess had just been made.

One thing I remember not particularly liking about the original Clue is that sometimes you don't roll high enough to move to the room you want to move to, and you get stuck in the hallway with nothing to do. Star Wars Clue attempts to alleviate this, and perhaps make the game feel more like the escape from the Death Star, with a new deck of cards that must be drawn from any time a player ends their turn in the hallway. There are four possible cards that can be drawn: an all clear, which lets the player move to any room on their current level; a "stormtrooper ahead" that gives an additional dice roll for movement, with the caveat that if the player doesn't make it into a room they move to the Trash Compactor; a comlink that allows an extra guess to be directed at a single player; and finally, the dreaded "you are caught" card...

This card has been the subject of nearly all the criticism of this version of the game. When drawn, the player moves directly to the Detention Block and ends their turn. They are stuck there until another player moves into the room to rescue them, at which time the prisoner must show the rescuer one of their Clue cards. If all players wind up as prisoners, the game ends immediately. On paper it sounds like a fun way to spice up the game, but in practice we found it to be pretty tedious, even after house ruling that the prisoner only had to stay in the Detention Block for one full turn.

Even with these additions, the game is recognizably Clue, to the point that our winner was the player who had played the original a lot as a kid and had developed tried and true strategies for winning. We played with a group of Star Wars fans, but at the game's end we concluded that we had enjoyed the Clue part of the game, but the Star Wars elements got in the way more than they helped. When one player asked "so, it this a keeper?" my response was that I would be more likely to buy a copy of the regular edition of Clue.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) It turns out that not everything is better with Star Wars.

Lacorsa: a racing game that's elegant in its simplicity

When I was a kid I was always fascinated by the cribbage board that seemed to be a fixture in suburban homes of the 1970s. To this day I have no idea how to play cribbage, but I think it was the tactile nature of the cribbage board and its little pegs that intrigued me. Plus it was made out of wood, not the ubiquitous plastic that it seems like everything was made of.

Marketing photos of Lacorsa, a small publisher racing game that advertised heavily on social media after a successful 2018 Kickstarter, gave me a similar feeling. I'm not overly interested in race cars or racing, but the elegant wooden track and simple silhouetted 1960s-style race car miniatures looked great and the game play sounded really interesting.

A game of Lacorsa starts with a row of cars on a straight wooden track. The goal is not to move to the end of the track à la Snakes and Ladders or any number of back-of-the-cereal-box games, but rather more simply to move to the head of the line. The idea is that a race isn't so much about who gets to the end first so much as it is about who is in front when the race is over. With this in mind, players challenge each other with numbered cards from their hands, with the winner of each challenge moving ahead of the loser and then challenging the next car in line. Or, if there is an empty space ahead, the player can use an extend card to put some distance between their car and the one behind.

In actuality, the game starts a bit before the simple but elegant cars line up on the simple but elegant track. The game comes with six suits of 13 cards numbered one through twelve, plus a special redline card (more on that later). The deck is made up of one suit per car in the race; the cards are then shuffled and dealt out, 13 to each player. The game then starts with a qualifying round where each player chooses one card to play face down. All are revealed simultaneously, and the player with the lowest card starts their car at the end of the track, then the next lowest, and so on until everyone's car is on the track. Then the race starts.

Each "lap" of the race starts with the player whose car is in last place. That player challenges the car directly in front of theirs: both players choose a card and then place all their cards face down in front of them, with the chosen card on top. Cards are revealed simultaneously and if the challenger's card is higher, their car changes place with the loser, moving closer to the front.

The redline is a special card that adds +2 to the value of another card, and is the reason cards are played the way they are, in a face down stack. If a player reveals a redline card, they then also reveal the next card in the stack (also chosen by that player). Playing the cards from the stack hides the fact that a second card will also be played.

After a successful challenge, that player then challenges the next car in front of theirs, or, if there is an empty space, they play an extend card (if they have one) to move forward. One of the three extend cards in each suit is a special draft extend that can't be played by the car in the front, cleverly reflecting technique of using the slipstream from the car in front of you to reduce drag on your car (something I had never heard of until playing this game, who says gaming isn't educational?).

After two challenges or an extend, that player's turn is over and the next player in line does the same. The lap is complete once the car in front has had a turn to either extend or discard a card if they cannot. The game ends when one player runs out of cards.

Lacorsa is exactly what a racing game should be: fast paced and exciting. The only time it slows down is if you need an extend card to move forward and you don't have one -- this can be a little frustrating, especially if your car is in the lead, but is mitigated by the optional going wide rule that allows you to risk moving backward for a chance at an extend by rolling a die. There are a few other interesting variant rules that can be introduced into the game gradually. Some, like the going wide rule, are pretty essential, but others risk taking away some of the game's simple elegance.

If you want to make it even more portable than it already is, Lacorsa comes with an extra set of cards as an alternate way to represent the race cars. This would allow the game to be played strictly using cards, placing them in a row with spaces in between to mark their positions.

All in all Lacorsa is a wonderful little game that plays quickly and is easy to understand and teach. If it were more widely available it might make a good gateway game; as it is it's a great filler to play in between longer games on game night, or even a good way to get non-gamer friends and relatives to sit down for a game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A fantastic game that looks great and doesn't take long but is very satisfying to play.

• Lacorsa official website
• Lacorsa on BoardGameGeek

Pan Am: an unlikely theme for a board game, but it works

Funko Games' design team, who work under the collective name Prospero Hall, are very good at creating games based on media properties that tend to be a little on the simple side, but are always well thought out and true to their source material. A quick look at their website shows a catalog that runs the gamut from Star Wars and Jurassic Park games to some that seem less obvious like The Rocketeer, Hitchcock's Rear Window, or 1970s dystopian classic The Warriors. But Pan Am the Game? Really? A board game based on an admittedly glamorous but long defunct airline seems a little obscure, even for Prospero Hall. There was a short lived TV series in 2011 starring Christina Ricci and Margot Robbie, but the game isn't based on that, it's just about the airline.

The first thing that is striking about the game is the board itself. It presents what appears to be an odd, distorted world map until you realize that the map is centered on the North Pole -- many intercontinental flights take a northern route as, due to the curvature of the Earth, it's often the shortest distance. And there's that attention to theme that Prospero Hall is so known for.

Something else Prospero Hall is known for is excellent graphic design, and that is certainly evident here as well. The board, along with all the components, are done in a classy early 1950s style that looks great without sacrificing readability.

Pan Am is a worker placement game with a little bit of bidding thrown in for good measure. Like most worker placement games, it follows a standard structure of placing workers to get different resources and eventually trading them in in different combinations to score points. In Pan Am, players represent small fly-by-night airlines who want to establish exclusive air routes between cities with an eye towards eventually selling their routes to Pan Am (a non-player entity controlled by the game), and then using the money to buy Pan Am stock. 

On their turn, a player's options are to build airports, collect destination cards representing the cities on the board, buy newer, larger airplanes, establish routes between cities, or draw directive cards that offer various bonuses and other advantages. Each of these actions is represented by a space on the board, but unlike most worker placement games, if a player has one of their workers on the space you want, you have the option to outbid them. You can opt to pay more to use the space, which gives the other player their worker back to either place in another space, or bid higher (up to a maximum amount). Once each player has placed all their workers, all the actions are resolved one by one.

Routes are established using a combination of airports and/or destination cards. In order to claim a route, the player must secure landing rights in each city by either having an airport there, holding a card that matches the city, or discarding either one card from the city's region or two matching cards from another region. Then they need to have a plane large enough to fly the distance between the cities. Maintaining airports and flight routes will give the player a little bit of income each round, but the real gravy is in selling your routes to Pan Am.

At the end of each round, a die is rolled that determines which routes Pan Am wants to buy. Routes are marked on the map starting in Miami (where Pan Am was founded) and spread out in three different directions -- the die roll tells you which direction they're buying in each round. There is also a "wild" die result that will allow players to sell any of their routes to Pan Am, which is the only way to sell the longest and most lucrative routes.

After Pan Am does their buying each round, players must decide how much Pan Am stock to buy vs how much cash to keep on hand for the following round. The stock price will fluctuate up or down throughout the game, so buying as much as you can when it seems to be low can be important. After seven rounds, whoever has the most Pan Am stock is the winner.

In most games like this, the point is to build up an engine that will allow you to process the games resources and turn them into victory points in as efficient a manner as possible. The thing that makes Pan Am interesting is that this game is all about taking advantage of opportunities by trying to anticipate what routes Pan Am is going to want to buy, and claiming those before your opponents do. It forces a very different mindset and makes you pay a little more attention to what your opponents are doing than you normally would in a game that isn't about direct conflict.

Unlike the other Prospero Hall games I've played, I can't really judge this one on how closely it adheres to the property it's based on -- it's not a film or TV show so I don't know what the story is or who the characters are. But it does have a well-developed, pleasing aesthetic and game play that definitely calls to mind the "golden age of air travel." The theme could have been more generic rather than calling out a real world airline, but Pan Am does lend it a shorthand for vintage, glamorous air travel, and the blue logo on the box is one that most people over a certain age will recognize.

Unfortunately, it appears that Funko has recently sold Prospero Hall to family games giant Goliath, who laid off the majority of the studio's designers. However, some of the displaced creatives are bouncing back by founding a new design collective, Tempest Workshop. It will be interesting to see what they do next...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Early 20th century air travel is as good a theme as any, and the gorgeous retro design and streamlined game play make for a fun, accessible game.

• Pan Am official website
• Pan Am on BoardGameGeek

Star Trek Away Missions: Is it a board game with miniatures or a miniatures game with a board?

First, let’s talk about the miniatures

When the game was first announced, Star Trek: Away Missions came under a bit of criticism over the cartoony style of the miniatures, and I must admit that I initially decided to pass on the game for that reason. Miniatures gamers tend to obsess over scale, with a weird need for all of the miniatures in our collections to be interchangeable or at least consistent – it’s a fairly unreasonable demand that I suspect comes from the same part of the brain that compels some people to collect Funko Pops or Lego minifigures.

However, I was given a chance to take a closer look at the game, first via an OnTableTop.com Let’s Play and later from an open box that the owner of my local game cafe kindly let me paw through. I determined that the game play looked pretty interesting, and the figures were growing on me. The fact that the game definitely plays much more like a board game than a tactical miniatures game (although it has plenty of elements of both, which we’ll get to shortly) helped me to stop comparing the figures to “proper” miniatures, and as it turns out, they have been an absolute joy to paint – you can see some of my efforts on my OnTableTop project blog.

Now let’s talk about the game

There is an emerging category of game that draws heavily on the elements of both miniatures and board games to produce something that is (hopefully) more tactical than your typical board game, but less complicated and labor-intensive than your typical miniatures game. The idea is nothing new, going back at least as far as HeroQuest and Aliens (both published in 1989). Games of this type tend to occupy a sliding scale with “board game with miniatures as playing pieces” at one end and “miniatures with a pre-printed board” at the other, with notable examples including Monolith’s Conan and Mythic Battles, Gale Force Nine’s Firefly Adventures and Aliens: Another GloriousDay in the Corps, and Osprey’s Wildlands and Judge Dredd: HelterSkelter. Star Trek: Away Missions definitely leans towards the board game side of this spectrum, but it does have some tactical elements to it.

The game takes place immediately after the Battle of Wolf 359, the Borg attack on the Federation seen in the Star Trek: the Next Generation fourth season episode “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2.” The premise of the game is that the players are directing crews to investigate and salvage damaged Federation and Borg vessels in the aftermath of the battle. The board is made up of tiles depicting the interior of a Federation ship on one side and a Borg ship on the other – they are functionally the same but it does allow for some variety between games, as certain goals will be in different places depending on which side players decide to use.

Once the board is set up, the players each begin the game with a crew of four or five characters, and two separate decks of cards, one for missions and one for support cards. The mission cards describe requirements that usually involve moving a character with a particular skill to a specific area of the board and then passing a test by rolling dice. Combat may occasionally break out (also resolved using dice), but for the most part it is a mission solving game, which is in keeping with Star Trek’s themes and ideas of non-violent solutions to problems – the best Star Trek stories are about the heroes cleverly avoiding war and combat, and it’s nice to see that reflected in the game.

The game is played over three rounds, during which players move their characters around the board in an attempt to fulfill the requirements of their mission cards. Support cards can be played to help things along, make it an interesting mix of tactical movement and “right place, right time” card play. Three rounds doesn’t seem like a lot, but in practice it’s plenty of time for a satisfying game, and makes for a nice time limit to keep the game from dragging on for too long.

The characters in the base game, as well as those in the six expansion packs that have been released so far, are all organized into pre-made teams with only a very minor amount of customization available. The game attempts to make up for this by making the mission and support card decks customizable. The idea is that after you play a few games you can pick and choose which missions you want to try to attempt with each crew, and which support cards you think will be of the most use. It’s a concept that should be very familiar to players of trading card games such as Magic: the Gathering, but I think it’s one of this game’s few weak links. It requires players to spend time choosing cards before the game even starts – something that is expected in customizable games but seems a little out of place in what is being presented as more of a traditional board game.

All in all, Star Trek: Away Missions is a nice mix of board game and tactical miniatures game, leaning into the strengths of each type of game. And you will end up finding those goofy looking miniatures charming, I promise...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) With its emphasis on mission solving elements rather than combat, this really does seem like the best choice for a Star Trek miniatures game.

• Star Trek: AwayMissions official website
• Star Trek: AwayMissions on BoardGameGeek

Radlands: the perfectly balanced apocalypse

When it comes down to it, there are three elements that will determine whether or not I enjoy a game. Generally speaking, as long as a game does a good job with any two of the three and doesn't blow it too badly on the third, I'm likely to have a good time with it. Those elements are:

• Game play: the systems and mechanisms the game uses.
• Theme: the genre or story the game is trying to tell, whether it's a pre-existing intellectual property or something created just for the game.
• Component quality: the artwork, writing, and the physical quality of the game pieces.

For example, Leading Edge's Aliens game from 1989 has appallingly bad component quality, but it gets a pass from me because it's a solid game design and it's based on one of my all time favorite movies. Tapestry, on the other hand, has extremely high production value and the game play is terrific, but I couldn't honestly tell you what the theme is even about, and I most likely won't be rushing out to see Tapestry: the movie (although I might if it helps explain the game's setting). Starship Captains is a good example of a game that nails all three elements: great game play, excellent artwork and components (except for those weirdly low-quality) cardboard space ships, and a theme that is more Star Trek than Star Trek often is.

All of which brings us to Radlands, from Roxley Games. Roxley is well known for their extremely high production values -- they are one of the very few publishers that uses Kickstarter the way it was meant to be used, as a way to provide funding for a high quality product that they then make available to the general, non-Kickstarter backer public either via traditional retail outlets, or via direct sales on their website.

Radlands is a two player card game set in an 80s-style post-apocalypse, all neon pink and impossibly straight mohawks. Players use their cards to construct a tableau consisting of rows and columns, with the cards in front protecting those behind them, and the final row representing the player's "camps," cards which must be protected at all costs. Destroy all three of your opponent's camps, and you're the winner.

A lot of the game mechanisms will be familiar to anyone who has played a lot of this type of mid-weight adventure card game. Players get a budget of resources (in this case, water) that they can spend to play cards on the table, or use the special abilities of cards that are already in play, all with the goal of destroying your opponent's cards while protecting your own. One feature I particularly like is that cards can also be discarded for a one-time effect, so there are rarely useless cards in your hand. The game effects are limited to a few straightforward options like destroying enemy cards or gaining extra card draws or resources for yourself. It's not terribly complex, but that means it's not terribly complicated, and it still makes for an engaging game.

The theming on the cards is great, and fits with the game play very well. The characters on the cards will be familiar to anyone who is a fan of post-apocalypse action movies, especially the Mad Max series, and the structure of the game really does feel like a desperate final battle such as the one we see at the end of The Road Warrior. The production value is also top-notch. The cards and water tokens are nice and sturdy, the printing is sharp, and the artwork by Dice Throne artist Manny Trembley is done in his signature slick, animation-like style, but roughed up just a little to make it fit the harsher setting.

It's a deceptively simple game that scores high on all three criteria: the theme is entertaining and fits the well-designed game mechanisms, and the components look and feel great. The game comes in a super-deluxe edition with fancy packaging and a bunch of optional extras, but honestly the $25 retail edition is a pretty nice package, especially for the price.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a great little game that feels like a high-octane post-apocalyptic battle.

• Radlands official website
• Radlands on BoardGameGeek