Do we need another hero?

As an avid player of Legendary, I wasn't all that interested when Fantasy Flight Games announced that they would be publishing Marvel Champions, the latest in their line of Living Card Games that has included Call of Cthulhu and Lord of the Rings. As it is I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of the available content for Legendary, so why would I need more than one Marvel super hero card game? And besides, I really don't have time for another game where you have to build decks.

However, as I started to find out more about the game, I got more interested. It looked like the structure would be similar to FFG's Lord of the Rings: the Card Game, but refined and streamlined, and the deck building could be reduced to simply choosing a hero and what the game calls an "aspect," a theme such as aggression, protection, leadership, or justice. I was intrigued enough to give it a try.

The game's similarities to Lord of the Rings are very apparent, with the focus on narrative and the primary player decision being whether to spend your turn fighting adversaries or progressing the story (in this case, thwarting the main villain's evil scheme). It's cooperative, with each player taking on the role of a hero and teaming up to foil one of a variety of villains whose actions are controlled by the game. The cards are divided into allies & support cards that stay in play and events that have a one-time effect, and there's even one card, Nick Fury, that is clearly a direct translation of the Gandalf card from Lord of the Rings. 

Despite the similarities, however, Marvel Champions has enough unique elements to make it more than a simple re-skin. The game uses an ingenious system to reflect the classic "secret identity" trope: your deck is built around a single character with a double-sided card: hero on one side, and civilian identity on the other. Many cards will only work with one side or the other, with attacks and other proactive actions associated with the hero side, and recovery and support actions with the civilian side. The way the villains behave also depends on which identity is active -- if you're in heroic mode they'll attack you, but if you're hiding out in your civvies they'll work on progressing their evil scheme, which if completed will cause the heroes to lose the game.

In addition to the main villain and his assorted thugs, each hero brings their own set of cards representing their arch-enemy and personal obligations, which may be shuffled into the villain deck at various points during the game, which really adds to the sense of story.

So how is it different from Legendary? Well, apart from being a somewhat different style of game (Legendary is a deck building game where players build a deck during the game, while in Marvel Champions players begin the game with a deck representing their chosen hero), the sense of story is more developed and personalized in Marvel Champions. In Legendary, players choose five heroes at the start of the game, and then spend the game buying cards associated with those heroes, looking for useful combinations of cards but not necessarily focusing on a single character -- the sense is that the players are unseen tacticians guiding the action. In Marvel Champions, you are playing as a particular character such as Spider-Man or Captain Marvel, using their unique allies and abilities to foil the villain. I enjoy both games for different reasons, and don't see a reason to choose one or the other.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a unique and compelling game that plays well right out of the box but also supports a level of expansion and customization that should keep most collectible card game players happy.

• Marvel Champions official website
• Marvel Champions on BoardGameGeek 

Miniatures on a board game budget

I love miniatures games. I enjoy the strategic and tactical thinking involved, but even more, I love the tactile nature of moving the figures themselves around in an environment, whether it's fully realized three dimensional terrain or just a printed map.

I also love a wide variety of different genres and intellectual properties, so unfortunately the work and investment that most miniatures games require means I can't play in every world I want to. That's why I'm especially intrigued by miniature/board game hybrids such as Monolith's Conan, with their potential for the depth of a miniatures game contained in a much more manageable (and affordable) box.

This is what drew me to Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter. I'm a big fan of  2000 AD (the weekly comic book that Judge Dredd appears in), but not quite willing to commit to a full fledged Dredd miniatures game, although the new one from Warlord Games has some great looking figures. As a self-contained boxed game, Helter Skelter looked like a great alternative.

The game takes some inspiration from an old Judge Dredd comic book story for it's background: holes have been opening in the fabric of reality, allowing characters from other dimensions to converge on Judge Dredd's Mega-City One. It's a clever idea that allows the game to include four player factions, each based on a different cast of characters from 2000 AD comics.

The game design is terrific. It uses a printed board with irregular areas marked out to handle movement, rather than using a grid or needing a tape measure. The board artwork is functional, clearly indicating important concepts such as cover and line of sight, and it's also beautifully designed and gorgeous to look at. The miniatures, while not fully pre-painted, come with a wash applied, so it's easier to see the figure details, and colored rings for the bases making it clear which figures belong to which faction.

At the start of the game each player is given 10 location cards that match up to the numbered spaces on the board. Five of these are secretly chosen and assigned to the player's five characters, to determine where on the board they will enter play. The other five cards are given to an opponent, and determine where they place their five "shards of reality," colored tokens that can be collected for victory points. 

Movement and combat are handled using cards. Each player uses a deck of cards unique to their chosen faction, with cards representing actions their different characters can take such as moving, attacking, or defending. The bulk of the game is managing your cards so you can move your figures to where they need to be, make effective attacks against opposing characters, pick up shards of reality tokens, and still have cards left to defend with when it's your opponent's turn. Collecting a shard of reality or eliminating an opponent's character are each worth one point, and the first player to get to five points wins.

It's a great rules system, providing all the core elements that a miniatures game needs without getting bogged down in the complicated exceptions and situational rules that can plague games like Heroclix or X-Wing. But there's one thing missing: a sense of narrative, an interesting story that unfolds on the tabletop. Most games of this type (such as Monolith's Conan or Leading Edge's Aliens) have this firmly ingrained by being scenario driven, and that's something that's missing here.

Sure, Helter Skelter provides a back story that explains why the different groups of characters are there and what they're doing, but there really isn't much story once the game starts. Collecting a shard of reality or eliminating an opponent's character are each worth one point, and the first player to get to five points wins. There aren't any additional scenarios offering different victory conditions, so most games tend to be pretty similar, with the only variety being which faction each player is using and which of the two boards they're playing on.

The lack of story certainly isn't a deal-breaker. The extremely elegant design and excellent graphics go a long way towards making up for it, and it's something that could easily be added by official expansions or even house rules. I certainly hope so; a game design this good deserves some more depth.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great design and beautiful production that's a bit let down by a lack of variety and replayability.

• Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter official website
• Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter on BoardGameGeek

Die Hard, but not any harder

There are a lot of possibilities for a game designer when presented with the challenge of creating a game based on a pre-existing property such as a book, film or TV series. The easiest option (and the one we see the most) is to re-skin an existing game, such as with all the licensed versions of Clue, Risk, and especially Monopoly. This is an easy way to get a tie-in product out there, but it's rarely very satisfying when assessing whether or not the result is a good game. Of course, there are exceptions; Legendary has proven itself to be a very resilient game system, supporting multiple licensed properties such as Marvel Comics, Alien, and James Bond while making each property seem a perfect fit, and I will go to my grave defending The Lone Ranger Shuffle the Deck Card Game as one of the best fits between a licensed property and a pre-existing game system ever.

The design choice that should render much better results is when a game scratch built to fit a particular theme, but while this approach occasionally gives us an amazing game like Firefly, it all to often results in something that is too focused on the nuances of the property it's trying to simulate, to the point that the end result is a game that, while successfully evoking whatever film or TV series it's based on, doesn't actually come together very well as a playable game.

This is definitely the case with Die Hard: the Nakatomi Heist Board Game. According to the designers, the intent of the game was evoke the experience of watching the movie, and it definitely does that. If you're a fan, the game will certainly call to mind most of the film's iconic moments such as John McClane running across broken glass or Hans Gruber plunging to his death.

The game is played out over three acts, with one player acting as McClane and the rest as the thieves (remember, they're only pretending to be terrorists). The McClane player has to use cards and dice rolls to move through Nakatomi Tower completing various objectives starting with finding a gun and a radio, and finishing with pushing Gruber out of the window. The thief players have to work together to slow him down, while at the same time playing cards in the right combination to open the vault and win the game.

In many ways it's similar to Leading Edge's Aliens board game, which asks players to recreate the action from the film, but sets them the challenge of doing better than the characters did in the film (according to the game's victory conditions, they lost). It also allows for several "what if" scenarios outside of what we see in the film.

Die Hard uses cards, dice and playing pieces to provide a framework that lets players re-enact the film, and then asks them to do just that. And this is the problem. While the game mechanics are reasonably entertaining for a lightweight tactical move-and-shoot game, the players are given objectives based on what happens in the movie, and the only way to accomplish them is to do what the characters did in the movie. There's no flexibility to try different strategies, and there are no alternative ways to win. The game forces the players to use their random card draws and dice rolls to recreate the film, which means it plays the same way every time.

With little to no replay value it's not likely that we will play this game very often, but I'm thinking we might lean into the old "is Die Hard a Christmas movie" debate by storing it with our holiday decorations and playing it once a year on Christmas eve...

Rating: 2 (out of 5) More of a simulation than a game, giving players the tools to recreate the movie but no flexibility to do anything beyond that.

• Die Hard: the Nakatomi Heist Board Game official website
• Die Hard: the Nakatomi Heist Board Game on BoardGameGeek

Roll west, young man...

"Roll and write" is an emerging style of game that seeks to reduce production costs by eschewing cards, tiles and tokens in favor of players simply marking changes to the game state on a piece of paper with a pencil or pen. This allows these games to be sold at a much lower price point, which can only be an asset in the increasingly crowded board game market.

Actually, roll and write games have been around for many years, with Yahtzee usually pointed to as the first commercial example. But the genre has exploded in recent years, either as a way for game publishers to increase their visibility in stores by putting out simplified versions of games like Settlers of Catan or Patchwork, but just as often with off-the-wall ideas that might not support a $60 board game.

We picked up Rolled West on a whim, having not played any roll and write games (other than Yahtzee), and also having not played Gold West, the full board game it's based on,. So we should be able to judge the game on its own merits without comparison to its parent game or other games in the same genre.

Each player is given a dry-erase board showing what initially looks like a dizzying array of icons. But once you play a few times it's pretty straightforward. The icons represent banked resources, boom town buildings, shipment routes, and mining contracts and claims. On his or her turn, the acting player rolls 4 dice showing symbols that equate to copper, silver, gold, and wood. The player chooses one of these to represent the terrain for the turn, and the other three are resources that can either be spent or banked for use on a future turn.

Players spend combinations of resources on the aforementioned buildings, routes, contracts and claim, with an eye towards maximizing their points at the end of the game. There are a lot of options, so clever players will quickly identify a particular strategy, such as staking claims and building mining camps, developing shipping routes, or saving up resources to buy expensive but lucrative contracts, and then staying with that strategy over the course of the game's six turns. Trying to do a little of everything, or changing strategies mid-game, can be disastrous, as the points tend to rack up the farther along you go on a single track, such as staking claims in the woods or developing a shipping line for silver ore.

Boom town buildings confer bonus points based on the other things you've developed in the game, which can be tricky since you don't want to invest in a particular building before you've figured out what your strategy is. At the same time, as soon as one player buys a building it is no longer available to the other players (the corresponding icon is crossed off on their board), so you don't want to wait too long either.

Players also have the option to bank one resource each turn for future use. Banking resources is really the only way to save up for high value contracts that generally require four or five resources but are worth a lot of points at the end of the game, Additionally, in between each of a player's turns they can bank one of the resources rolled by another player. This doesn't prevent the other player from using it, it just allows you to use it also. This is one of the more interesting decision points in the game, since it can only be done once between each turn -- you're always running the risk of banking a resource, only to have someone else roll a more useful one before your turn comes around again.

As you can see, there is a lot going on here, especially for a game that consists of four dice and what amounts to a 4x6 card for each player. My only complaint about the game is that the iconography on the player cards can be a bit difficult to remember, causing frequent referral to the rules to answer "what does this mean again?" questions. It might have been better to make the player boards larger and include gameplay reminders and tips.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's got a huge amount of depth for such a simple game, and yet it can still be played in 30 minutes or so.

• Rolled West on BoardGameGeek
• Weirdly, there is no mention of this game on the publisher's website

May the dice be with you

When Fantasy Flight Games first released Star Wars: Destiny in 2016, I wasn't particularly interested. It appeared to be a collectible dice game similar to Marvel Dice Masters, which I had stopped playing and sold the year before. I thought Dice Masters was a fun game, but the customizable aspect (building a "deck" based on powerful or interesting dice combinations) was failing to hold my interest, while at the same time making the game difficult to play right out of the box.

However, after seeing The Rise of Skywalker in December and really enjoying it, I found myself wanting to play a game with content from the most recent Star Wars trilogy, which neither of our go-to Star Wars games (Rebellion and Outer Rim) has. Combine that with a bargain priced two-player into set and I was willing to give Star Wars: Destiny another look.

As it turns out, Destiny is a fun, simple game that isn't really anything like Dice Masters. It uses a combination of cards and dice for a straightforward dueling game that manages to remind me of everything I like about collectible card games, while doing away with some of the pitfalls of the format.

Where Dice Masters was a dice game that emulated the structure of a dueling CCG, Destiny is a card game that also uses dice. As such, deck construction is a lot more interesting, while at the same time being simpler than the complex CCGs of old thanks to a lower card count (30 cards per deck rather than the usual 50 or 60 cards) and the fact that your primary cards start the game in play, so the rest of the deck consists of support cards built around two or three main characters.

The goal of the game is to eliminate all of your opponent's characters by inflicting damage on them, while at the same time keeping your own characters safe. Roughly one third of your deck's cards will add dice to the pool started by your main characters; dice are rolled at the start of each turn and used mainly to make attacks and generate resources that are used to pay for additional card plays. The rest of the cards in your deck are played for various game effects, which balances the game between card plays and dice rolling.

A few weeks after we started playing, the publisher announced that the game would be ending, which we're not seeing as the bad news you might think it is. Really, it eliminates one of the primary down sides to collectible games: the expense of buying random expansion packs and keeping up with a steady flow of new product. Since the game is "over," we've been able to get product at very low prices, allowing us to build up a decent collection of cards and dice quickly, which keeps the collecting and deck-building aspect of the game enjoyable.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) This will be a good game to pull out when we're in the mood for Star Wars without wanting to dive in to a more complicated game like Rebellion or X-Wing.

• Star Wars: Destiny official website
• Star Wars: Destiny on BoardGameGeek

Come back to Arrakis

The long-awaited reprint of the Avalon Hill Dune board game finally hit store shelves back in November, and honestly it's everything I had hoped it would be: the same game, but with updated graphic design and streamlined, easier-to-understand rules that don't read like a calculus textbook. It's a huge improvement on what was already a great game.

The changes to the actual game play are minimal enough that my review of the original game should still serve as a good description. What remains to be seen is whether or not a 40 year old game design can hold its own in the current (and much more mainstream) board game market. To be fair, new publisher Gale Force 9 have given it every chance, with nice, crisp graphics, a plethora of "how to play" videos on YouTube, a relatively low price point, and wide availability at mainstream retailers such as Barnes & Noble.

The improved production value and availability should help, but the game's biggest problem remains: it was designed for six players, and while it can play with fewer, the shifting alliances are what makes it interesting, and this aspect doesn't come off nearly as well with fewer players. And even with board gaming's popularity at an all time high, it can still be challenging to get six players together who want to spend 3-4 hours playing a game based on a 50 year old book, even if it was a science fiction masterpiece.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great game made even better, but the main barrier to playing it regularly remains.

• Dune official website
• Dune on BoardGameGeek

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to deck-build...

Legendary: A James Bond Deck Building Game is more proof of how robust the Legendary game system is. Originally designed as a Marvel superhero game, Legendary has gone on to embrace franchises as diverse as Alien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even Big Trouble in Little China. Each new version has added something new to the game's simple deck building mechanics. For the most part these additions have integrated with the core game pretty seamlessly, while at the same time making each version of Legendary seem unique to its particular franchise. With its outlandish villains and often preposterous gadgets, the James Bond franchise isn't that far off from superhero adventure anyway, so it's definitely a good fit, requiring minimal changes to the game's structure.

New to the game the concept of Missions, a new card type that goes into the villain deck. While normal villains have to be defeated by playing cards with Attack value, missions work a little differently, offering alternative ways to defeat them such as using recruit points. Each mission set also includes an "inevitable mission" that starts the game on the bottom of the villain deck, acting as a timer to determine when the game ends and giving the last few turns a bit more excitement and drama.

The James Bond edition also brings a few new keywords and accompanying game mechanics to the game. Chase cards move more quickly through the play area, giving players less time to defeat them, and Squeeze, a keyword created specifically for Famke Janssen's absurdly over-the-top character from Goldeneye, reduces the number of cards available to recruit. Several cards taken from Casino Royale require the player to create a sort of poker hand using their cards' various symbols and values

The game play sticks to the core Legendary structure rather than the Encounters variant used by the majority of the non-Marvel versions, but it does group the encounter cards by film, with cards from Goldfinger, The Man With the Golden Gun, GoldenEye, and Casino Royale. This allows players to play out the events from these four films, but it also means that a ton of content from the other 20 films in the series (including Timothy Dalton's version of the title character, my personal favorite) is entirely missing. Hopefully expansions are coming.

This edition avoids the inconsistent artwork that is the Legendary series' only shortcoming by using stills from the movies, something they seem to be moving towards with their games licensed from film and TV properties. This makes for a better looking game, but also makes it a bit more jarring if you plan to try combining this set with any of the other Legendary games (which should otherwise be possible, at least theoretically).

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A solid entry in the Legendary series that stands on its own if you're just looking for a good James Bond game.

• Legendary: a James Bond Deck Building Game official website
• Legendary: a James Bond Deck Building Game on BoardGameGeek

Complexity escalation

New Zealand designer/publisher Shem Phillips has made a career out of creating a series of worker placement games that manage to be both familiar and different. With each game he comes up with a new take on the genre, whether it's Raiders of the North Sea's focus on using a combination of empty and occupied spaces, or Architects of the West Kingdom's lack of a traditional round structure. However, clever as he is, his games are beginning to fall victim to what's known in collectible games as power creep.

In collectible games such as Magic: the Gathering or Heroclix, the business model relies on enticing players to keep buying more product, rather than them buying just a single game. In an effort to keep players interested (and buying), the designers of such games have in the past felt compelled to make new cards more powerful and complicated. This may have proved effective in the short term (at least, it did in the heady CCG days of the 1990s and early 2000s), but in the long term the added levels of complexity usually end up creating a barrier to new players that's far more detrimental than having older players get bored and move on.

Board games that have followed a similar model of using frequent expansions to sustain interest from an existing player base have fallen victim to a similar problem, where the crushing weight of increasingly complicated expansions makes the games unplayable (I'm looking at you, Arkham Horror). This isn't the exact problem with Shem Phillips' games, but it is similar, as he appears to be increasingly relying on his existing fan base (via Kickstarter) as the main audience for his new games, and so he feels the need to ramp up the scale on each new game.

All of which brings us to Paladins of the West Kingdom, the second in the West Kingdom series and the fifth in Phillips' overall series of medieval-themed games. Like his others, this one starts with a basic worker placement mechanic, and then builds on it with an unusual series of innovations. Rather than giving each player a finite set of workers, Paladins instead has different types of workers (warriors, priests, laborers, and so on), and players draft different combinations of them at the beginning of every turn. Game play then involves choosing from a dizzying array of options, so many that a key component of the game's strategy is to decide what you're going to do and stick to it -- the worst thing a player can do in this game is try to do a little of everything, because the scoring system is focused on doing a lot of the same thing.

It's an interesting game with a lot of options, and it's different from any of Phillips' other games while still being familiar thanks to the consistent illustration and graphic design across the whole series. And that's really kind of the problem. In his rush to avoid repeating himself, he's created a game with just a little too much going on. There is a lot to keep track of in this game, from building garrisons to sending out missionaries to hiring townsfolk (with two different options for each) to choosing whether to fight outsiders for a one-time benefit, or convert them for an extra end-game victory point condition. It's just a little too much, especially when compared to the other games from this designer.

We play (and enjoy) Raiders of the North Sea and Architects of the West Kingdom quite a bit, and we find that both games (even Raiders with two expansions) offer just as much depth and entertainment value, with a much lower level of complexity. In short, they're just as fun but a lot easier to play.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) an interesting game design, but a little too complicated when compared to this designer's other games.

• Paladins of the West Kingdom official website
• Paladins of the West Kingdom on BoardGameGeek

Predictable results

We've all been there: I was $10 away from free shipping on an online order, so I bought Doctor Who: Dalek Dice on a whim.

Expectations should be low for a $12 dice game, especially one based on a popular licensed property from a publisher with a somewhat spotty track record for this particular IP -- Cubicle 7's Doctor Who role playing game is terrific, but their Doctor Who: the Card Game didn't really utilize the license well, and their Time Clash game died right out of the gate.

On the other hand, Dalek Dice was designed by Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello, the team that has done such a great job with other games based on licensed properties such as the epic War of the Ring and the more recent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I suppose I was holding out hope that they would come up with something more interesting than the usual press-your-luck dice game.

What they delivered was...the usual press-your-luck dice game. Nothing clever, no unique Doctor Who twist. Just a game that's boring even in comparison to other dice games like Dino Hunt Dice or Age of War. Not too surprising I suppose, but still a little disappointing.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) We will probably never play this game again, especially since we have similar alternatives that are much better games.

• Dalek Dice official website
• Dalek Dice on BoardGameGeek

You, too, can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs

Star Wars: Outer Rim turned out to be our most played game of 2019, which took us completely by surprise because it didn't even come out until October of last year, and we hadn't really been planning on getting it at all. A friend bought it and brought it over for us to try, and we were instantly hooked, buying our own copy a few days later.

Not only did we play it 11 times in less than three months, but we've found that it's a big hit among most of our gaming friends. The Star Wars theme is a pretty easy sell, but on top of that it's a really engaging and accessible game, without the direct confrontation in most Star Wars games like X-Wing or Rebellion.

Each player chooses a ship captain to play as, with choices ranging from well-known stalwarts like Han Solo or Boba Fett to more obscure characters like Dr. Aphra from the comic books or Ketsu Onyo from the Star Wars Rebels animated television show. The time frame that the game takes place in is intentionally vague, but is roughly between the prequel trilogy and the originals, a little after the time of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Characters start with a choice of generic ship and a starting mission or bounty, and the goal from there is to achieve fame points by travelling between planets, delivering cargo, catching bounties, and eventually upgrading to a better ship. Each character also has a unique personal goal they can try to complete to gain extra points and unlock additional special abilities.

What's great about the game is how open-ended it is. Players have numerous options when visiting a planet and can do anything from hiring contacts to having random encounters after they've delivered their cargo, turned in their bounty, or completed whatever errand they've been hired to run. Success or failure is determined by a simple dice roll system, with rolls modified by the various skills and abilities of the player's captain and crew.

It's a "pick up and deliver" game similar to Firefly or Wasteland Express Delivery Service, but where Firefly strains under the weight of its expansions, Outer Rim gives a similarly epic play experience in half the time and taking up a fraction of the table space.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A terrific adventure game that avoids the epic good vs. evil battles of Star Wars in favor of exploring its rich, textured setting.

• Star Wars: Outer Rim official website
• Star Wars: Outer Rim on BoardGameGeek

It makes sense if you've read the book...

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: a Board Game of English Magic probably seems like a really weird title for a game, at least until it's explained that it's based on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke's novel about high society wizards operating in early 19th century England. It may sound like a good idea for a game, but despite a 2015 BBC television adaptation, the novel remains relatively obscure.

Broadly speaking there are two main components to a game: theme and mechanics. Both carry a lot of weight, and a great theme can prop up a mediocre game design (see Grimslingers) just as easily as a good game design can transcend a less interesting theme (see the Resident Evil Deck Building Game or the surprisingly good Spartacus board game, soon to be reprinted without its original TV show decor).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell errs on the side of theme over mechanics, and any fan of the book who enjoys mid-weight board games will probably like this one. It does a good job of referencing the novel's strange blend of supernatural menace and powdered-wig high society, and presents a game design that fits that theme very well, rather than feeling tacked on after the fact like games based on licensed properties so often do.

Each player plays either the titular Jonathan Strange or Mr Norrell, or as one of two secondary characters from the book. The goal of the game is to accumulate enough magicianship to be able to confront "the gentleman with the thistledown hair" (the novel's main villain) before the game ends. This is done by accomplishing feats of magic in the form of playing out cards from your hand that add tokens of different types to the cards on the table in front of you. The catch is that only certain symbols can be played out each turn, so the game becomes an interesting combination of thinking several turns ahead but also madly scrambling to get enough magicianship points to beat the villain and win the game.

Game play is complicated by two additional types of card plays: "invitations," representing social events such as parties and concerts, and "introductions," meeting famous characters of the age such as Lord Wellington. Both types of cards can only be played at certain locations, requiring moving around a board depicting London and Europe of the early 1800s. Invitations are played to draw additional cards (either introductions or additional feats of magic to work on), and Introductions move you along a Prestige track, eventually unlocking powerful game play advantages.

The game as written does have one major issue: it is very difficult to win, so much so that the designers admitted that they made a last-minute change to the game design without playtesting it thoroughly, and have since released a simple variant (described here) to re-balance the game. A rookie game design mistake that should never have happened, but at least the designers have recognized the error and taken steps to correct it.

The game mechanics fit the theme well, and I suspect that the designers (Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello of War of the Ring fame) are fans of the book, or are at least very familiar with it. Unfortunately this doesn't necessarily work to the game's advantage, as for the most part the references to the novel assume that the players have read it. I don't think the game does enough to explain the setting and characters for those who haven't, and the game play isn't really remarkable enough to sustain interest in the game on its own.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) if you've read the novel, but probably only a 2 (out of 5) if you haven't. But it's a great book, so go read it and then play the game afterwards...

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Board Game of English Magic official website
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Board Game of English Magic on BoardGameGeek

Tiny epic disappointment

I've enjoyed most of the games I've played in the Tiny Epic series, with Tiny Epic Western being my favorite (go figure) and Tiny Epic Galaxies coming in a close second. Not all of the Tiny Epics have appealed to me, however: their core line of fantasy games has a cartoony style that doesn't appeal to me, and Tiny Epic Zombies, while a decent game, fell victim to the general burnout that makes me hyper-critical of any and all zombie games.

Having grown up with Battletech as my first combat/skirmish game, I had high hopes for Tiny Epic Mechs, so I backed the Kickstarter campaign for it without really looking at it in too much detail. I was seduced by the publisher's ITEMeeple system that features little plastic weapons and armor that attach to an otherwise standard-looking meeple, a set-up that they've used in some of their other games to varying effect.

Alas, backing a Kickstarter game without knowing anything about the game play is usually a recipe for disappointment. It turns out that Tiny Epic Mechs is definitely not the arena combat game I was hoping for, but rather a programmed movement game similar to Robo Rally or Colt Express, although its small scale makes it much less chaotic than either of those games. Unfortunately, in this case "less chaotic" also means "less interesting."

The game is played in a series of six rounds. Each round, players secretly program 4 moves from their hand of eight cards, and right away this is problematic and awkward. Each move card has an arrow that needs to be pointing in the direction you want your playing piece to move, which means the orientation at which the cards are placed is critical. You ca't just play your secret moves face down, as turning them over might change the orientation of the card. Cards need to be played with another card covering them, which makes planning your four moves awkward an difficult unless you're playing solo (which the game does support).

Resources and points are gained by controlling areas, which means the mech combat in this supposed mech combat is secondary. You will often find yourself needing to run around taking control of tiles in order to catch up on points and gain the resources you need to upgrade your weapons and armor, and a few well-placed moves by your opponents can lock you out of being able to do anything effective.

Your playing piece starts out unarmored, with a single weapon. Over the course of the game you need to "power up" into armor and upgrade to better weapons, and this is where the ITEMeeple plastic bits come in. Each weapon you equip slots into your meeple, which in turn fits into a clever little suit of power armor, showing exactly what your warrior is armed with, which should be really clever. However, the game also uses cards to represent your weapons and armor, even down to the placement of the cards showing where the weapons are equipped, which renders the plastic bits superfluous and unnecessary as anything other than decoration. The whole thing seems really gimmicky.

Lastly we come to the actual combat system, for those rare occasions when two mechs actually fight each other. The game uses a variation of rock-paper-scissors, where if you follow an opponent's attack with one that "counters" it, your attack will be more effective. It sounds neat in theory, but the rules use some counter intuitive verbiage that makes it difficult to teach, and it's a little to fiddly for a game this simple.

At the end of the day, Tiny Epic Mechs is a programmed movement game that wants to be an arena combat game, and it ends up being mediocre at both.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) A disappointing entry in the Tiny Epic series that manages to feel over-engineered and too simple at the same time.

• Tiny Epic Mechs official website
• Tiny Epic Mechs on BoardGameGeek

The same only smaller

I'm not sure what I was expecting from 13 Days: the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. I had heard that it was similar to Twilight Struggle, but I wasn't prepared for how similar it is -- the two games are virtually identical in their game play. They both use the same core mechanic of cards being allied to one side or the other, and being played either to place tokens on the board, or for an in-game effect. They both use a scoring system based on the number of locations each player controls in a particular region. They even both have the same theme: the Cold War between the United States and Russia that lasted from roughly 1945 to 1990.

The only thing different about 13 Days is the scale, both thematically and mechanically. Where Twilight Struggle covers the entire cold war and can take 3 hours or more to play, 13 Days focuses in on a particular event (the Cuban Missile Crisis), and plays in 30-45 minutes. The production value is a little bit higher, with better graphic design and nicer components (wooden cubes instead of cardboard counters), but with games taking less than an hour to play, 13 Days feels rushed and anticlimactic, with no time to really soak up the theme.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) 13 Days is in every way a shorter, lighter version of Twilight Struggle, a game that doesn't need to be shorter or lighter.

• 13 Days: the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 on Boardgamegeek

Complex but not complicated

To me, the best games are the ones with rules that provide a structure for making moves towards victory, then get out of the way and let you play. I don't like games where an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules gives an advantage, and I can't stand games where it's possible to win on a technicality. The advantage should come with the ability to understand the consequences of making a particular play, like thinking several moves ahead in chess.

Twilight Struggle is a good game for that reason. It gives players a relatively simple set of options on their turn, primarily by playing cards for one of two purposes: either to spread their influence on the board, or to enact a more specific game effect that targets a particular location or gives some other in-game advantage. Simple options, but a lot to think about and try to plan for.

In Twilight Struggle, two players vie for control of the world during the Cold War of 1945-1989. The board represents a map of the world, with players placing competing levels on influence in the various countries depicted with an eye towards controlling particular regions. Scoring cards are played at various points in the game, so the goal is to set up your influence to take advantage of the scoring cards you have, but also to anticipate what your opponent is trying to do based on where they are placing their influence.

Another option each turn is to spend cards to progress with the Space Race. Achieving space-based advances does give an advantage, especially to whichever player gets to each milestone first, so (much like in the real world at the time) it's something that can't just be ignored. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but in all of our plays we've found the space race to be an annoying distraction due to the amount of time a player needs to spend on it and the random, hard to predict results. I wonder if the military commanders of the time felt the same way?

There is also a Military Operations track which requires both players to engage in roughly the same amount of aggressive military action each turn, an interesting balancing mechanic that slyly represents the sabre-rattling and chest-thumping that often occurs between world powers. However, too much military action will advance the DefCon marker, and if it gets pushed too far nuclear war breaks out and the game immediately ends. This is where the real brilliance of this game lies, and where it perfectly reflects the world it takes place in, as the two players constantly need to look at how far they can push things without going too far.

Like the best strategy games, Twilight Struggle gives you a lot to think about during play, without bogging you down in complicated rules that need to constantly be referred to. The strategy and maneuvering

It's a great game design for what it is trying to do, and you could even argue that it's educational, sparking the imagination about this unique period in world history. Unfortunately the game's presentation is more textbook than Hollywood blockbuster, and the game's graphic design is very...utilitarian, which is what I think has held this game back from gaining a wider spotlight. On the other hand, it has been in print continuously for 15 years, so I suppose it's finding its audience.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's a 2-player game that takes a while to play so it doesn't come out that often, but we always enjoy it in spite of its somewhat dry presentation.

• Twilight Struggle official website
• Twilight Struggle on BoardGameGeek