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

Shipwrights of the North Sea Redux: you build your ships, I'll build mine

I am a big fan of Shem Phillips' series of medieval worker placement games. Raiders of the North Sea was the first one I played, and is still my favorite, but I like all of them well enough...except for what I thought was the one weak link in the series: Shipwrights of the North Sea. Compared to the other North Sea games, it had a lot of mean spirited "take-that" style game play which I didn't enjoy -- it was an engine-building game where too much of the strategy involved tearing down your opponent's engine rather than building your own.

It came as a bit of a surprise that the designer felt the same way:

"The original had a lot of take-that, and hate-drafting. It had no rounds (which meant it could really drag on with 4-5 players). The drafting was also flawed in a lot of ways. You could often end up with a handful of cards you couldn't use. It was a very tight, and unforgiving game."

-- Shem Phillips, on the Shipwrights of the North Sea Redux Kickstarter campaign page

I was delighted to hear that a redesign was on the way, although the designer contends that this isn't a redesign or "second edition," but an entirely new game that shares some thematic elements with the original. For the most part I agree, but since it was designed to address and eliminate the shortcomings of the original game, it will be impossible to review it without comparing the two.

The core of the game is the same as in the original: players start each round by drafting cards which represent ships, buildings and craftspeople. For those who might be unfamiliar, card drafting is a game mechanism designed to add tactical depth to what otherwise would be a random selection of cards. Each player starts with a hand of cards, chooses one to keep, and then passes the rest to the player on their left or right. They then choose a card from the new ones they've been given and pass the rest on. This continues until all the cards have been distributed. Players should now have a more tactically chosen hand of cards, and especially sharp-minded players will also have a sense of what cards their opponents are holding.

Once drafting is complete, players can play their cards for a variety of temporary or permanent effects. One of the most negative play experiences you can have in any game is feeling like you can't do anything on your turn. Shipwrights Redux alleviates this problem by giving each card multiple uses, so it's easier to mitigate your circumstances if you don't have what you need in your hand.

Building cards are played to the table and make up the game's worker placement element. Each player begins the game with 3 worker meeples and can gain more through card plays. Some cards require the player to discard a worker in order to gain specific resources, but the other main use for them is in conjunction with the building cards, which provide a repeatable way to gain resources over multiple rounds. However, unlike most worker placement games, workers are discarded at the end of each round so you'll need to watch for cards that allow you to gain more workers.

The main thing you are trying to do is to build ships, which happens by first playing the ship card to your player board, and then accumulating and spending the resources needed, which include particular types of craftspeople as well as the usual wood, cloth, iron, gold and money. Another major new element that Redux adds to the game is a progress track. In addition to scoring victory points, building ships allows you to move forward on one or more of three tracks that represent military strength, trade, and renown. Passing certain milestones on these tracks will give you advantages such as more resources from raiding or extra income at the end of each round. It's a clever way to reward players during the game rather than just at the end.

Once players have finished their actions for the turn there is an income phase where players gain resources depending on what permanent cards they've played. In addition, the player who is farthest along on each progress track gains a hero card that gives them an advantage in the following turn. A new round then begins, with players drafting five new cards. The game ends after five rounds.

It is a more engaging and entertaining game that the original Shipwrights, and it feels more in line with the other two North Sea games, and with the rest of Phillips' medieval series (which also includes the West Kingdom and South Tigris series). However, in attempting to mitigate the original game's issues with being too confrontational, it is possible that Redux has gone too far in the opposite direction. Other than the card drafting phase, there is no direct interaction with the other players and very little you can do to affect what they are doing. The game is primarily a race to see who can get the most ships built within the five-round time frame. The main action phase is even meant to be played simultaneously, meaning that players just make all their plays rather than taking turns, which exacerbates the feeling of it being multiple solitaire -- there isn't any reason to pay attention to what your opponents are doing.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Overall, Shipwrights Redux is a big improvement on the original, but it seems to have gone from having too much confrontation to not having enough. It's still the weakest of the North Sea game series.

• Shipwrights of the North Sea Redux official website
• Shipwrights of the North Sea Redux on BoardGameGeek

Here we go again: Star Wars Unlimited

I've played a lot of different collectible card games over the past 30 years. I didn't get into Magic: the Gathering when it first came out, but I did play Decipher's Star Trek and Star Wars CCGs pretty heavily throughout the 1990s and early 2000s (I still play Star Trek regularly today), and I've at least tried a fairly large number of others, including On the Edge, Doomtown, Highlander, Aliens vs. Predator, Judge Dredd, Legend of the Five Rings, Shadowfist, Dune, and more others than I can count or remember. Magic finally got my attention when they started adding properties I know like Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and Doctor Who to the game. I even played Decipher's other two Star Wars CCGs, Young Jedi and Jedi Knights, and the short-lived Star Wars game that Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast did in 2002.

I like the format a lot. I like building customized decks from a collection of cards and then playing them against a variety of opposing decks. While I was perfectly happy with "living card games" like Lord of the Rings or Marvel Champions that did away with randomized booster packs in favor of fixed sets of cards, I never really minded the collectible aspect of this type of games. There's something exciting about ripping open a pack and seeing what you got, especially if it's a new game with unfamiliar cards.

After pioneering the non-collectible living card game format, Fantasy Flight Games has decided to re-enter the collectible card game market with Star Wars Unlimited. Unlike their earlier Star Wars: the Card Game, Unlimited will come in random booster packs supported by a two-player starter set. In advance of the game's March 8 release, FFG has offered a pre-release pack consisting of six random boosters, two fixed foil cards, counters, and a quickstart rulebook. The product is meant for a single player to use in an organized tournament event, but we were able to just about squeeze two 30-card decks out of the contents so we could try the game out.

The game is wonderfully simple. Each player chooses a leader and a base, and build the rest of the deck around the colored icons those characters provide. You can include any card you want in your deck, but cards with icons that don't match your leader or base will cost you more to put into play. It's a great bit of game design for this type of game -- you have incentive to focus on cards that match your leader and base, but if you really want to throw in a favorite character or starship that wouldn't otherwise fit, you can, and you can even mix light side and dark side characters in a way that no previous Star Wars game has allowed. In theory, any stack of cards can be a functioning deck, which makes organized play using sealed boosters a lot easier and more fun.

Unlike Magic, which requires matching land cards in order to get other cards into play, Star Wars Unlimited allows players to use any face-down card as a resource. This eliminates one of the major frustrations that can happen when playing Magic or other resource-based games -- sometimes you just can't play anything. Star Wars Unlimited's approach means that you never have a useless card in your hand, as you can always play it face down as a resource.

The structure of the game is very straightforward. Once you get your units into play, you use them to attack and eventually destroy your opponent's base. Since they're trying to do the same to you, each turn starts with a decision about whether or not to keep whittling away at their base, or take out your opponent's units so they can't attack you. It's pretty similar to Magic, but without that game's 30 years of keywords, rules additions, and edge cases weighting it down.

Another nice element to the game is the artwork. I'm never sure about using artwork for games based on films or television shows -- why not just use screen captures, especially for something like Star Wars that has a lot of high end visuals to work with? The use of artwork allows them to use elements from across the franchise's 47-year history of live action and animation and have it all look consistent, and it also makes it easy to accommodate characters and scenes that we never saw in any of the films.

If the pre-release pack is any indication, Star Wars Unlimited is off to a great start, but it remains to be seen whether it can flourish in a market that has seen several booms and busts over the years, and is currently dominated by a small number of games. Hopefully it will, as this first set of cards barely scratches the surface of the extensive, one might even say Unlimited, Star Wars universe.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It lacks the depth of some of the earlier CCGs, but that isn't necessarily a disadvantage as the game's simplicity should make it a lot more accessible to new and casual players.

• Star Wars Unlimited official website
• Star Wars Unlimited on BoardGameGeek

More monsters please: Free League’s Dragonbane Bestiary

 The Dragonbane core set includes an entire multipart campaign, much more adventure content than many roleplaying games offer right out of the gate. But what is a voracious gaming group to do once they’ve played through the campaign? The game has been a success so further published adventures seem more than likely, but for now, the Dragonbane Bestiary provides not only a ton of suggestions for encounters with the monsters detailed within, but the potential to adapt adventures from any number of other games – all you really need is substitute monsters.

One of Dragonbane’s greatest features is the system that it uses to handle monsters. Rather than a block of statistics that require already overworked gamemasters to run them as though they were player characters, Dragonbane instead gives minimal information on movement and defense, and a random table of possible attacks and other options – interesting, descriptive things for the monster to do on its turn. It’s a great system that makes things easy for the gamemaster, but if an encounter you have in mind requires a new monster, it will require some heavy lifting to create a new table of actions.

The core rules detail a handful of basic fantasy creatures, a selection that is rounded out nicely by the Bestiary. which adds over 50 new creatures to the mix, and includes most of the monsters from the core rules in order to be a one-stop guide. Each monster entry includes an adventure seed describing a scenario where the players might encounter the monster, which the gamemaster can incorporate into an existing adventure or flesh out into a full-fledged encounter.

Dragonbane already has a wide variety of species for players to choose from for their characters, from the routine elves, dwarves and halflings to the more unusual Wolfkin and Mallard (yes, you can play a duck). The Bestiary adds many of the more humanoid monsters such as goblins or ogres as playable characters. It’s a simple addition, often no more than an extra paragraph per entry, that adds a ton of value to the book.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A great resource for Dragonbane players and gamemasters, offering more than you usually get from a monster manual.

• Dragonbane Bestiary official website

Leaping and evading in Star Wars: Shatterpoint

Over the past 10 years or so there have been several new Star Wars miniature games, but for the most part I've avoided them, owing to what I must admit is a cognitive bias known as the "sunken cost fallacy." I invested heavily in, and have a large collection of, the pre-painted collectible Star Wars Miniatures Game published by Wizards of the Coast between 2005 and 2010, and was irrationally resentful of any new game that dared to suggest I should have to buy new versions of miniatures I already had. As a result I avoided getting into Imperial Assault or Star Wars: Legion (X-Wing wasn't a problem because I never bought into the WotC starship game).

So when Star Wars: Shatterpoint was announced, I didn't really pay much attention. At least, not right away. A few weeks into the release I started seeing images of the miniatures, which are gorgeous but done at a much larger scale than any of the other miniatures games I play, except for maybe Knight Models' Batman. Most of the terrain I already have would be too small, and I wouldn't be able to mix and match them with any of my older Star Wars miniatures. But wait! The core set for Shatterpoint comes with its own set of great looking plastic terrain! I started looking into the rules, and it looked like the game played differently from any other games I have. And those large miniatures were growing on me...

All my objections to the game seemed to be melting away, so I bought the core set and a few expansion packs, and sat down to start assembling and painting. Normally I don't really like putting together miniatures -- like most people I can't seem to open a tube of superglue without getting it all over my fingers, and assembling gaming models is usually an exercise in patience, small motor skills, and figuring things out without the benefit of instructions. Not so much with the Shatterpoint models. I actually found myself enjoying the assembly process, no doubt thanks to the larger size and especially the helpful step-by-step assembly guides.

I don't mind assembling terrain, but normally I don't really enjoy painting it. Again, the Shatterpoint pieces defied expectation by providing a nice surface with a lot of interesting details for the paintbrush to pick out. Even if I never got the game to the table, I was having a lot of fun with the model kit aspect of it all.

The Shatterpoint rules are...interesting. It was clearly designed to be a competitive tournament game. The rules are written in a bizarre legalese that understandably wants to be consistent and clear but often ends up explaining the simplest concepts in the most complicated way possible. However, there is a good game design in there, and after a few games we did manage to find it.

Most skirmish-level miniatures games (games where each side usually has between 5 and maybe 15 models that represent individual characters) tend to follow a familiar pattern of "everybody run to the middle and fight" -- players spend the first few turns moving their models into position, and the rest of the game rolling dice to see if they can hit each other. Additionally, most games tend to focus on eliminating your opponent's models as the primary path to victory, which makes sense but at the same time can be demoralizing once you start losing, as you watch your forces slowly dwindle away.

Shatterpoint gets away from both of these clichés by using area control as its primary focus. Rather than eliminating your opponent's pieces, the goal of the game is to gather your models around Objective tokens which are placed on the board in a simple grid pattern. Controlling an objective at the end of your turn gains you momentum, in the form of a marker which moves back and forth along a track like a tug-of-war. If you move the marker close enough to your end of the track, you win that struggle and the momentum tracker resets. If you win two out of three struggles, you win the game.

The trick is that as each new struggle begins, the objectives you need to control move, and after the first struggle their position randomly changes every turn. You can predict where they might be, but you can't know for sure where your models need to be at any given time. The game encourages a lot more movement than you normally see in skirmish games, and this is reinforced by the terrain that comes with the game -- it takes the form of small buildings and gantries that create a multi-level playing field that forces a lot of interesting tactical choices and looks great on the table.

The game's combat resolution system supports the idea of fluid action as well. Like most of Asmodee's Star Wars games, Shatterpoint uses proprietary dice -- the attacker rolls, looking for a number of "hit" results, and the defender rolls, looking for results that will cancel the hits. It's a very common system that many skirmish games use, but Shatterpoint adds what on first glance looks like a flowchart. For each successful "hit," the attacker is given a choice of results that can include damage to the opposing model, but also more dynamic results like pushing the target away or allowing the attacker to move or reposition. It makes combat more interesting, and further supports the idea that the game is about movement and position more than it is about inflicting damage on the enemy.

Shatterpoint does a great job of emulating the high-energy action of the Clone Wars animated series, no mean feat for a turn-based strategy game. Players who are used to more traditional skirmish games will need to adjust their expectations (and their tactics) a bit, but if they can, they'll find a unique and refreshing game.

Rating 5 (out of 5) From assembling and painting the models to actually playing the game, Shatterpoint has been a joy from start to finish.

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

An underrated gem: Iki, a game of Edo artisans

Iki is a beautiful, lavishly designed game about wandering through a marketplace in historical Edo-era Japan, with an interesting spin on the tried-and-true worker placement mechanism. Normally in worker placement games, players start with a handful of workers and they compete to place them on the board in the spaces that will benefit them the most, usually by giving them a resource they need in order to buy assets that will in turn generate victory points. Iki more or less does that too, but in this case, players are only placing one worker on a turn.

Each player has two primary game pieces: an Oyakata and an Ikizama. Rather than being picked up and placed somehere new each turn (as with most worker placement games), the Oyakata remains on the board moving in a linear loop from turn to turn. Each space offers actions such as buying or selling rice and wood, buying fish, or building up firefighting ability (apparently fires were a huge problem in the crowded marketplaces of old), which among other things determines who goes first each round. Additionally, players will place cards on the representing artisans who add additional options to the space where they are placed. So the position of a player's Oyakata is important, and controlling how far it moves each turn is critical.

The Ikizama behaves more like a traditional worker placement piece. At the start of each round, players place their Ikizama piece on one of five possible spaces. These spaces determine how far that player's Oyakata will move on this round, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 spaces, with a fifth choice that allows the Oyakata to move anywhere from 1 to 4 spaces. These numbers indicate exactly how far that player will move their Oyakata, and only one player may place their Ikizama on each space -- this is where we see the normal worker placement competition. The fifth space allows a player to move their Oyakata anywhere from one to four spaces, but at the cost of forfeiting part of their turn -- they won't be able to place a new artisan card. Players can collect Sandal tokens from various sources that can be spent to add to their Oyakata's movement, which allows for a little wiggle room.

It's an interesting combination of elements because it gives the player different things to think about when planning their turn: how far do I need to move to accomplish the task I want to for this turn, and how can I make the most of my turn if I can't get to the market space I wanted? These are common conundrums in worker placement games, but Iki offers some different mechanisms for getting there, and as a result the game feels a little fresher than more traditional fare like Lords of Waterdeep or DinoGenics.

Players score victory points by collecting sets of retired artisans, which points to another interesting element of the game. Each round, players have the option to hire artisans, strategically placing them to make board spaces more useful to land on. These artisan cards also provide resources to their owners during an income phase that happens once every three turns. Each time an opponent uses one of your artisans, they gain experience which changes the income they give but also gets them closer to retirement -- after a certain amount of experience, the artisan card leaves the board for its owner's player area, where it continues to generate income and also contributes towards victory points based on the number of different types of artisan cards a player collects.

In addition to collecting retirees, players can score bonus points by purchasing fish, pipes and tobacco (an oddly specific collection of cultural items) and also by spending resources to add building cards to the board. Buildings take up artisan spaces, but instead of offering an action they generally give end-of-game bonus points, so they're a trade-off but give players something to work towards. As if that weren't enough to keep track of, buildings and artisans are vulnerable to the dreaded fire, which is the game's way of occasionally clearing the board to keep things from getting stale.

At three points throughout the game, a fire starts in a random corner of the board, removing building and artisan cards unless the card's owner has sufficiently built up their firefighting ability, which they do mainly by playing artisan cards to the board and by visiting certain board spaces. A player's firefighting number also determines where they go in the turn order each round, so they have extra incentive to keep this number moving forward over the course of the game.

Akebono, an expansion that appears to have been unfortunately underprinted and is a little difficult to find, adds a riverfront where players can build boats that act similarly to the artisan cards, providing resources to any player that cares to use them and letting their owners rack up a "trade score" that provides bonuses at various points in the game. It also adds a board to better keep track of which artisans and buildings are available.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Like the best games of this type, Iki combines a few different game mechanisms, gives them a new spin, and straddles that fine like between complex and complicated.

• Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans official website
• Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans on boardgamegeek

Old school roleplaying with a modern sensibility: Dragonbane

Thanks to the very successful relaunch of Dungeons and Dragons in 2000, and the even more successful re-relaunch of 5th Edition in 2014, we are in the middle of a roleplaying renaissance. There are more, and better, roleplaying games on the market now than there have ever been, and the discerning roleplayer is overwhelmingly spoiled for choice – our roleplaying group is only half joking when we say that we’re scheduled out to 2026 or later with all the games we want to try.

Dragonbane is a “re-imagining” of Drakar och Demoner, a Swedish roleplaying game that was in turn based on Worlds of Wonder, an early rival to Dungeons and Dragons originally published by Chaosium (of Call of Cthulhu fame) in 1982. Drakar och Demoner ran through several editions before eventually landing at Fria Ligan (AKA Free League Publishing) who successfully crowdfunded a new edition, dubbed Dragonbane for the English language market, that had been redesigned from the ground up, combining the basic rules system from the original game with several new innovations pulled from their stable of well-received games.

The Dragonbane boxed set is an incredible value, with a complete rulebook and an 11-chapter adventure book, both lavishly illustrated by noted Swedish artist Johan Egerkrans, along with a poster-sized map of the game’s setting, a smaller gridded map and cardboard standees for playing out battles, character sheets, dice, cards to randomize treasure and improvised weapons, and even a solo adventure to help teach the game system. It’s a great introductory set for anyone new to roleplaying, but there’s plenty to interest experienced roleplayers too.

The game system is smooth and easy to play, without a lot of the superfluous rules and options that can lead to analysis paralysis in other games. Each character gets one action and one move on their turn – the action can be used to attack, defend, or do something else that requires a skill roll like picking a lock or looting a corpse for its valuables. Skill rolls (including attack rolls) are made by rolling under a target skill number, with no pesky adding up of bonuses to slow down play.

One of my favorite innovations is the way monsters are handled in the game. Most modern roleplaying games have the gamemaster running monsters as if they were player characters, with a complete set of statistics and options, but I’ve never liked this approach. It adds unnecessary detail and complication where the only thing that should matter is how the monster’s presence affects the players and their story. Dragonbane borrows its monster concept from other Free League games such as Forbidden Lands and Alien – each monster has some very basic information like movement and defense, and a randomized table detailing different things the monster might do on its turn. It’s a great approach that makes running the game a lot easier and more fun.

Probably the best value in the Dragonbane core set is the Adventure book. Most roleplaying game rule books give you a single introductory adventure (if you’re lucky), so unless the publisher follows up with additional adventure modules (or you have the creative energy to write your own adventures), you’re out of material after a game or two. Dragonbane gives you an entire multipart campaign with eleven fully developed locations to explore in a linked story that builds to an epic conclusion.

That brings up one other element about Dragonbane that I find especially appealing: rather than inserting the players into complicated plots and drama, the adventures are primarily based on exploring locations, mainly underground tunnel systems that might feel familiar to old school Dungeons and Dragons players. But there are still plenty of interesting characters and plot twists to satisfy players who like a more story-driven approach to their roleplaying.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) The combination of gorgeous visuals and solid game play, plus the large number of fully developed adventures in the core set, makes Dragonbane an incredible value for new or experienced roleplayers.

• Dragonbane official website

Maybe just a short walk: Tokaido Duo

Tokaido is one of our favorite games. We've found it to be especially good for engaging our non-gamer friends and relatives, thanks to the uncomplicated game play and stunning graphics. This is great, but honestly, we don't have very many non-gamer friends. The vast majority of our board gaming time is spent with just the two of us, and Tokaido (like most worker-placement games) is a much better game with three or more players, to the point that if you play it with only two you have to use a third "dummy" player to maintain the competition for optimal spaces on the board.

The dummy player is fine, and it doesn't interfere with our enjoyment of the game, but what if there were a version of Tokaido that was designed for two players? Enter Tokaido Duo, the game we didn't know we needed.

Having recently played Tokaido's sequel game Namiji and rejected it for being too similar to Tokaido, we were naturally a little wary of introducing yet another variation on the theme. But in this case, we found the game to be different enough from the original to keep us interested. It has too many small parts to be Travel Tokaido, but it is a version that works well for two players and can be played in a shorter period of time and on a smaller table.

Rather than each player choosing a single character with a unique ability, Tokaido Duo gives each player the same three characters: an Artist, a Pilgrim, and a Merchant, each of whom uses a different part of the board. The Pilgrims travel around the perimeter of the board, which works in much the same way as in the original game, with each space offering a particular benefit that usually racks up points exponentially, so the more often you move your Pilgrim to the same type of space, the better. The Merchants travel the paths between mountain villages, where they buy items, and coastal towns, where they sell them, with each town only interested in a specific item.

The paths between the mountain villages and the coastal towns also form the borders to the different areas of the board where each player can move their Artist. The more other character pawns there are in spaces next to the area the Artist ends up in, the better, introducing a more tactical level of movement than the more single-minded race of the original game.

Who gets to move when is determined by three dice, one for each type of character. At the start of a round, one player rolls the dice and chooses one, indicating which character moves and how many spaces. Then the other player chooses one, and so on. After the third dice is chosen, the other player rolls them and chooses one, becoming the first player. The game ends when any of the characters of either player complete their task: either the Artist gives away all their paintings, the Merchant fills their board with gold, or the Pilgrim visits a temple or garden a certain number of times. This adds another layer of strategy to the game, as players will want to try to manipulate things so that the game ends when it is to their best advantage.

Even though it's meant to be a two-player version of a game that we already have, Tokaido Duo feels like a new game, and will be great for those times when we don't have enough players, enough time, or enough space on the table for the full version.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Tokaido Duo has all the flavor of the original game but provides a different set of interesting game play challenges.

• Tokaido Duo official website
• Tokaido Duo on BoardGameGeek