Final judgment on the Judge Dredd Miniatures Game

I’m a huge fan of the Judge Dredd universe (well, maybe not the Stallone film) and I love miniature skirmish games, so I I really want to like this one.

The miniatures themselves are great. The resin material Warlord Games uses strikes just the right balance between flexible and durable, and it holds a high level of detail. In the five years since the game’s initial release, Warlord have expanded the range of figures to include a pretty good cross section of characters and vehicles from the Judge Dredd comics.

The game’s presentation is excellent. The rule book is beautifully designed, full color with a ton of artwork. The starter set comes with great looking plastic tokens rather than cardboard, plus a full color double-sided 3 foot by 3 foot map to play on. If you don’t believe me, check out OnTableTop’s unboxing videoOnTableTop’s unboxing video, it went a long way towards convincing me to buy the game.

My history with this game has been a little...conflicted. My normal pattern with miniatures games is that I get interested in a game, buy the rules and enough miniatures to try it out, and then if I like it I buy more miniatures and then either play again, or forget about the game for a year or more. That’s what happened here: I bought the Judge Dredd starter set in 2021, played several times over a period of about three months, and never played again. I seem to recall enjoying the first few games but then changing my mind, finding the last few games a little tedious and unsatisfying. So I decided to get the game and miniatures out of mothballs to make a final assessment on whether I want to continue with it or not.

The rule book, while beautiful to look at, is often vague and hard to follow. It was clearly written by someone who absolutely loves the source material, perhaps too much so. The rules are frequently bogged down in colorful descriptions of the setting and characters, what miniature gamers refer to as “fluff,” and while this sets the stage for the game, it also means that you can often find yourself wading through paragraphs of irrelevant background when trying to find a rule or clarification. It was enough of a problem that I went so far as to create a rules summary sheet to help with finding basic rules during play.

Unfortunately, my memory of the game play being a little tedious turned out to be more or less correct. The core of every skirmish game is combat between characters, so a good game needs a good system to resolve that combat. The vast majority do this via dice rolls: when my character attacks, I roll the dice, applying modifiers based on the abilities of the characters involved, and often the surrounding terrain. This can be a roll against a static target number, but in most games it’s an opposed roll, with my opponent and I both rolling the dice to see whether the attack hits or is successfully defended against.

In Judge Dredd, landing a blow is a multi-step process. First the attacker rolls, then compares the result to the target’s Cool rating to see if the target is pinned or not. Then the target rolls to see if they can dodge the attack. Then, if the target doesn’t dodge, the attacker rolls again to see how much damage is done, followed by the target rolling again to see how much of that damage they get to avoid. One attack, four rolls. Four chances to fail.

The target of the attack can come away unscathed, or pinned, and/or stunned or injured. If they’re pinned, they have to roll on their turn to see if they lose one of their two actions or not. If they’re stunned or injured, all of the six statistics that determine how far they can move and how many dice they get to roll in different situations are reduced.

Whew.

I don’t mind a complicated game if the payoff is worth it. In this case that would be an exciting story unfolding on the table, but that’s not what happened in here. Instead, the combat just seemed like a slog, and there wasn’t much else going on in the game. We played two games in a row this time around; the first game ended somewhat abruptly so we decided on a second game with more characters on each side, but towards the end we were both feeling like the game was dragging on, which brings us to my second issue with this game.

At its most basic level, a skirmish game will often come down to “everyone move to the center of the board and fight.” This can be fun, but the novelty of straight up combat wears off quickly. The best games get around this by using scenarios that introduce alternate objectives or win conditions that give players more to do than just pound the hell out of each other. It can be something entirely mechanical like controlling different geographical points on the board (Star Wars Shatterpoint does this very well), or something more story based like rescuing a captive or searching for a treasure.

The Judge Dredd rule book includes three simple scenarios, designed to introduce the game to new players using only the miniatures included in the box. Beyond that are six more that are meant to be the core of the game, offering different setups and objectives to give the game some variety. Unfortunately, these scenarios (at least the two we played, “Ambush” and “Heist”) don’t seem very well thought out. While they offer some interesting ways to start the game by starting one side in the middle rather than each side on opposite edges, the objectives for each player were uneven, making the game too easy for one player, to difficult for the other, and not much fun for either. Our first game ended really abruptly, and the other went on for so long that we called it without finishing.

The game uses cards as a way to inject variety and flavor into the game. Each player starts with a handful of “Big Meg” cards that introduce an unpredictable game effect such as a bystander stumbling into the path of the battle or a circumstance giving a free move or other action. These were sometimes fun but more often than not just annoying and egregious. In the end they didn’t make the game any better.

With the game not really working for me as-is, I am left with a few options. I could just give up on the game all together, but the miniatures are great and I love the Judge Dredd setting – I keep trying to come up with excuses to buy more of the figures even though I don’t like the game. I could try to house rule the game to get rid of its more tedious aspects. That seems like a lot of work, especially when there are so many great miniatures games out there that work fine right out of the box, but it would allow me to keep using the game’s great counters and dice. On the other hand, there are several “miniatures agnostic” games such as 7TV that allow you to use whatever miniatures you want – that seems more like the right direction to head in if I want to keep gaming in Dredd’s world. 

Rating: 2 (out of 5) The game isn’t as much fun as it should be, but the fact that I can find a use for the figures without the rest of the game keeps it from being a total loss.

• Judge Dredd Miniatures Game official website
• Judge Dredd Miniatures Game on BoardGameGeek

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.

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

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: 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 Mechs is a 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

13 Days: the Cuban Missile Crisis is a pint-sized Twilight Struggle

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

CIA: Collect it All -- We need more information

The story behind CIA: Collect it All is a fascinating one. Last year several games designed by the CIA for use as training simulations were declassified by the U. S. government. Since they were designed by a government employee in the course of his work they are automatically in the public domain in the U. S., so an enterprising game publisher got to work designing a commercial version which was funded using Kickstarter and delivered to backers in December of 2018.

The game uses cards to represent intelligence collection techniques such as media analysis, satellite imaging, and data hacking. Players use those cards to solve global crises like foreign missile testing or election interference, by matching the correct types of intelligence to the crises they will be effective against. Opponents can interfere by playing "reality check" cards which represent the idea that nothing ever goes as planned.

As a training tool, an important part of the game was the inclusion of "manager challenge" cards, which forced the CIA trainees to justify the plays they made, explaining how, for example, "document and media exploitation" would be effective against "European crime and corruption" in the real world. These are included in the game as an optional variant, but the rules suggest only using them if all the players have a "firm understanding of intelligence techniques."

In theory the idea of this game is very compelling, but without the manager challenge cards, it's really just a symbol matching game, with each player trying to match the symbols on their collection cards to the ones on the crisis cards. It might have worked a lot better if there were more background information on the cards, to give players more information they could use to at least bluff their way through a manager challenge. I think the designers really missed an opportunity to create a game that would be informational and intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) not a terrible game but a huge missed opportunity.

• CIA: Collect it All official website
• CIA: Collect it All on BoardGameGeek

Tortuga 1667: a pirate's life, maybe not for me

We've had Tortuga 1667 for nearly a year, and we've only played it twice. That's not entirely uncommon given how many games we have, but I find myself wondering why we haven't gotten it to the table more often.

A big part of it is that Tortuga 1667 wants to be a social deduction game, a genre of game that generally requires a large number of players to be interesting, and most of our non-RPG gaming tends to be done in groups of 2-4 players. Plus I don't really like social deduction games. I find them to be too abstract and lacking in interesting game mechanics or compelling adventure, the two things I tend to look for in a game.

So how did we end up with this game in the first place? Well, it is absolutely beautiful too look at, and it was offered as an add-on in Facade Games' Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876. Plus the player official player count is 2-9, so we figured we might be able to make it work for smaller groups.

At the start of the game, each player is given a secret affiliation, either French or English. The game then involves jockeying for the positions on the board that allow you to either move the other players around, or allocate treasure chests to one side or the other. The trick is that you don't know which players are on your side, and every part of the game relies on anticipating whether or not you think the other players will help or hinder you.

For example, a player in the Captain position can call for an attack, which adds more treasure to his ship. But the attack is resolved by each whose pawn is currently on that ship secretly playing a card that will either help or hinder the attack, so an attack will only be successful if the majority of players on the ship think the Captain is on their side.

In our games we found that, due to this voting mechanic, it was very difficult for a player to actually accomplish anything on their turn. Attacks would get voted down, treasure would get moved back and forth, and the social deduction part of the game wasn't very interesting, and more aggravating than fun.

It's possible that this game just needs more players than we normally have on hand (we played one game with 3 and one with 5), but honestly, if we ever have a table of 6 or more players we're more likely to play a meatier game like Battlestar Galactica, which makes more interesting use of the "secret betrayer" idea, or Dune, which allows players to decide how much "shifting alliances" they want in the game.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) This game just isn't compelling enough at low player counts, and not worth the effort of getting a large group together.

• Tortuga 1667 official website
• Tortuga 1667 on BoardGameGeek

You can't win them all: Planet of the Apes

I like cooperative games, I love adventure games, and I'm a huge fan of the Planet of the Apes, movies, so this game should have been a shoe-in for me. Unfortunately, despite some really nice production value and a very well-considered application of theme, this game just isn't very interesting to play.

The game plays like a combination of Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings board game with some Yahtzee thrown in. Players are confronted with of a row of cards based on the prominent events of the film, each requiring a particular combination of dice rolls in order to pass. A player's turn involves rolling dice in the hopes of getting the right combination, with a bit of card play to change dice facings. Success moves the marker representing Charlton Heston's Taylor along a path which serves as a timer, with an ape marker moving along the same path. If the ape makes it to the end before Taylor does, the players lose.

It's a simple enough game, but it relies on a lot of luck to get the dice rolls and the have the cards you need to progress, so it can be frustrating when you lose on what amounts to a bad roll or draw. In the end, this game is really just about rolling dice, with very little in the way of meaningful or interesting decisions to make.

The Planet of the Apes theme is nicely applied, with the cards calling back to iconic scenes from the film, and the idea of having players take on different aspects of Taylor's psyche rather than separate characters is an interesting solution to the problem of the story really only having one main character.

It's really too bad the game isn't better.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) The great use of theme actually makes this otherwise dull game all the more frustrating.

What we'll play instead: Lord of the Rings: the Board Game and Elder Sign are both similar and a lot more fun. Doctor Who: Time of the Daleks is another very similar game that uses its theme well and offers more interesting and immersive game play.

• Planet of the Apes official website
• Planet of the Apes on BoardGameGeek

You can't win them all: 7 Wonders Duel

It's surprisingly rare that we buy a game that turns out to be a dud. We're usually pretty good at spotting games that will and won't appeal to us, and I generally read reviews and where possible try games out before purchasing. We've also gotten fairly lucky with impulse buys that turned out to be great games, but that isn't always the case.

I really like 7 Wonders but I've always held off on adding a copy to our collection because of the relatively large player count required to make the game interesting. 7 Wonders: Duel seemed like a perfect solution: a two-player version of the game, and in fairness, it does do a good job of approximating the full game's aesthetic and core mechanics.

The problem is, the whole point of 7 Wonders is that it is a card drafting game, where you start with a hand of cards, keep one, and pass the rest along. There are two basic approaches to drafting: either take the cards you need, or take the cards you don't want your opponents to have. 7 Wonders: Duels approximates the draft using a tableau of cards with rows that overlap one another. Players draft cards from the tableau, with the catch being that you can't draft a card if there's another card on top of it.

This leads to a lot of "take that" style play where you uncover a card you need only to have your opponent draft it, and unlike in the full multiplayer 7 Wonders, you know who is taking your cards. It makes the game just a little bit too frustrating and adversarial, which is too bad because the engine-building part of the game is interesting, and the illustration and graphic design are top-notch.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Although I do like the game design, I think the game play is just a little bit too adversarial for a two player game that doesn't actually focus on combat.

What we'll play instead: Race for the Galaxy is a similar tableau-building card game that works great for two players and doesn't seem quite as confrontational.

• 7 Wonders: Duel official website
• 7 Wonders: Duel on BoardGameGeek

Follow the clues in Deadline

When I picked up Deadline, I was hoping for a mystery-solving game somewhere in between 221B Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

While not quite as simple as Clue, Baker Street spends too much of a player's turn on uninspired game mechanics: roll to move, then read the clue for the location you find yourself in (if you're not stuck in the game's too-long spaces between locations), which is frequently a misleading word-puzzle that has no relation to the story being told. Consulting Detective, on the other hand, offers a much more intense, story-rich experience, but is extremely light on game mechanics, so much so that playing it feels more like a collective Choose Your Own Adventure than a board game.

Deadline is indeed somewhere in between the two, but in this case that didn't turn out to be nearly as interesting as I'd hoped.

The game features 12 separate cases, with clues provided via a sealed pack of cards, one for each case. Each case starts with a few clues revealed, and each clue card depicts a series of icons, 1930s gumshoe staples such as a pack of cigarettes, a glass of whiskey, a bundle of money, and so on.

Players play cooperatively, each with their own hand of cards drawn from a common deck of lead and plot twist cards. Leads, which compose the majority of the deck, feature the same icons in various combinations. Game play involves players taking turns playing down cards in an effort to match all the icons shown on the clue they're working on: once they do, the clue card is turned over, revealing information which may or may not point to the mystery's solution, and also indicating new clue cards which may be added to those available to be worked on.

The catch (and there's always a catch) is that new leads can only be played by overlapping the symbols at the bottom of the cards, and players aren't allowed to talk specifically about the cards they have in their hands, so you can't stop a player from overlapping a particular icon, even if you have a better play in your hand. Once a player can't play any more lead cards, they have to play a plot twist if they have one, which is usually a negative effect. Too many failures mean that clues start getting removed from the case. Play continues until the clues run out.

The first card played can be any card, but the second must have at least one overlapping icon. Blanks are wild and can cover or be covered by any icon.

This next card can be played on either end of the chain, overlapping the hat on the left or the cigarette and the gun on the right, depending on what icons the players need to solve the current clue.

This card isn't playable to the chain at all, since it isn't possible to match all three symbols, or play on either end of the chain.

It's a weird game system that doesn't really feel connected to the story, and isn't particularly interesting or satisfying on its own. Plus, you still have to interpret the clues correctly in order to solve the mystery, which frequently comes down to the players' best guess. And the cases (at least the ones we've played so far) aren't very compelling stories either.

In short, Deadline's game mechanics don't really mesh with the storylines at all, you end up with the worst parts of Baker Street and Consulting Detective:  a mystery that the players have to solve using as few clues as possible, and a largely unrelated and uninteresting symbol-matching card game.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Not a terrible game by any means, just not a very interesting or compelling one.

• Deadline official website
• Deadline on BoardGameGeek

1/12/2023 Note: on a much later reviewing I've noticed that in the final example above, the card in question could actually be played to the right end of the chain (the cigarette pack icon). Still a mediocre game though...

Alien vs. Predator: the Hunt Begins...for a better set of rules

Alien vs Predator: the Hunt Begins by Prodos Games began life as a very troubled Kickstarter campaign, followed by a high-priced retail boxed set, and despite being a massive fan of the Alien and Predator franchises, this kept me from showing much interest in the game. However, the release of a much more reasonably priced second edition, combined with my interest in the emerging category of skirmish/board game hybrids such as Conan and Mythic Battles, prompted me to take another look.

The components are, for the most part, very high quality. The miniatures look great, and the game's three factions are cast in different colors so you can start playing right away without struggling to tell who is who. The interlocking tiles that make up the board are quite nice too, with artwork that evokes the industrial look of the first two Alien films. The cards and counters leave a bit to be desired, but more on that later.

I wish I could say that the game lives up to the quality of its components, but unfortunately it is marred by convoluted rules, as well as some ill-considered graphic design that makes the rules, cards and tokens very difficult to read.

The basic structure of the game isn't bad at all. The board is constructed from the tiles based on the scenario being played, and as I already mentioned, it all looks great on the table. Players take control of either a large group of Aliens, a small group of human Marines, or 1-2 Predators, and from there it's a pretty straightforward move-and-shoot tactical game. However, the rules governing the moving and shooting are very obtuse and difficult to follow, with tons of modifiers and exceptions to keep track of.

One feature of the rules that seems like an interesting idea in theory is the use of what the game calls "ping" tokens. The idea is that at the start of the game, players don't know anything about their opponent's forces, so figures are represented by face-down tokens until the move into view of another player's team, at which time the token is revealed and replaced with a miniature. This semi-hidden movement seems quite thematic, evoking the tension-filled motion tracker scenes in the Alien films, but in practice it means that you're playing a fair amount of the game with flat cardboard disks instead of awesome-looking miniatures.

The stat cards for the figures are another problem, with very small white-on-black text that is impossible to read, and a system of symbols that is too involved to memorize, prompting constant referral to the rule book just to translate what's on your card.

A game element  that I do quite like is the addition of a deck of strategy cards for each player, themed for each faction. Cards such as Cloaking Field for the Predators, Covering Fire for the marines, and Acid Blood Splash for the Aliens allow players to introduce unpredictable elements into the game. There is also a deck of environmental cards that are drawn at the end of each round, creating effects that all players must work around. 7TV does something similar with its Gadget and Countdown decks.

Ultimately, I am a narrative gamer: what I want out of a miniatures game is a conduit into whatever world the game takes place in. The rules are there to provide a structure for that, and then get out of the way. The complicated rules system for AVP: The Hunt Begins seems aimed at tournament-level play, where being able to manipulate the rules to your advantage is more important than enjoying the theme and setting.

The miniatures and tiles are so good, though, that I'm really interested in finding another rules system I can use them for. There's a fan-created set of cards for 7TV detailing the Aliens, Predators and Marines, and a thread on BoardGameGeek dedicated to expanding the rules for the excellent Aliens board game published by Leading Edge Games in 1989. I've even thought of adapting the Aliens Predator CCG to include miniatures and more tactical movement.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) I'm reluctant to give this game a rating at all since the tactile components are so out of line with the game itself, but ultimately it fails to deliver a satisfying game experience.

• Aliens vs. Predator: the Hunt Begins official website
• Aliens vs. Predator: the Hunt Begins (Second Edition) on BoardGameGeek

Viking roundup, part 5: Shipwrights of the North Sea

Shipwrights of the North Sea is easily the most cutthroat entry in the North Sea series of games, which is strange because you would think a game about building ships would be less confrontational than one about claiming territory (Explorers) or raiding settlements (Raiders).

It's a card drafting game like 7 Wonders, a format that has a bit of a "screw your neighbor" element built into it. The goal of the game is to build ships, for which you need resources and specific workers. You get those by drafting - starting with a hand of cards, keeping one, and passing the rest to the next player.

The artisan cards are particularly difficult to get in the right combinations, and it's easy for your opponents to see what you need and try not to let you have it. That's only somewhat effective in a card drafting game, but there are also several plays available in the game that let you steal or discard other players' workers, preventing them from building the ships they need to win the game.

Once you start building a ship (you can have two in play at a time) you're stuck with it until you get the resources needed to build it, and there's only one card that you can play to abandon a ship if you're just not getting the cards you need to build it. This leads to frequent turns where a player can't do anything significant, which is frustrating and (to me, anyway) a sign of a poor game design.

It's disappointing because the other games in the series are very enjoyable, and this one looks just as good, with great artwork and components.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) The weakest entry in the otherwise excellent North Sea series.

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

Return to Lucky Mansion, this time without the mansion: Get Lucky, the Kill Doctor Lucky Card Game

Taken on its own merits, Get Lucky: the Kill Doctor Lucky Card Game is quite amusing. Players take turns trying to kill Doctor Lucky by attaching motive, opportunity and weapon cards to characters, and then manipulating the position of those characters in order to make repeated attempts on the life of poor Doctor Lucky, whose presence in the game is represented by a pawn that moves between the characters. It is up to the other players to foil the murder attempts by spending cards from their hands, which are valuable and finite resources.

The cards are peppered with the usual great graphic design and biting humor that we've come to expect from James Ernest's Cheapass Games, and they are further enhanced by a series of word puzzles that have no direct bearing on the game, but give players something to talk and think about while playing, which enhances the 1920s drawing room flavor of the game.

The game does a good job of being a card game version of Kill Doctor Lucky -- perhaps too good. The game play, flavor and overall experience of playing both games is so similar that I can see little reason to choose one over the other, and I can't even say which is the better game. When looking at both games, Get Lucky doesn't really seem like its own game so much as it feels like a variant of Kill Doctor Lucky where you play without the board.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) if you don't already have Kill Doctor Lucky, 2 (out of 5) if you do, or if you just prefer board games to card games for whatever reason. They really are so similar that I don't see much point in having both games.

• Get Lucky official website
• Get Lucky on BoardGameGeek

Helionox: rushing toward the last sunset

I picked up Helionox: the Last Sunset some time ago on a whim. The artwork on the cover reminded me of one of my favorite current comic book series (the excellent East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta), the science fiction theme is one I enjoy, and it came from the publisher of Spurs, a game I enjoy quite a bit. Additionally, the price was under $25, which is a good way to get me to try a new game without too much "should I buy it or not" agonizing.

We played it a couple of times and enjoyed it, but then it went in the "small games" cabinet and we pretty much forgot about it. Clearly the game play wasn't quite compelling enough to make us want to keep playing, but at the same time, the box is small enough that it escaped the last few recent game purges.

Just recently I had occasion to take another look at Helionox - it was next on the list of games to review that I'm woefully behind on, and the creator had launched a Kickstarter for a deluxe edition and expansion of the game.

At its core, Helionox is a game about averting disasters. The playing field consists of five locations representing planets of the solar system, and players get extra abilities in the game depending on where their spaceship token is currently located. Each turn an event card is drawn that details a crisis befalling one of those systems, and if the crisis isn't dealt with in two turns or less, the location's extra ability is neutralized. Players earn points by overcoming event cards, and the game ends when the deck of event cards runs out.

The game uses standard deck building game mechanics, with players starting with a deck of relatively weak cards and using their resources to buy better cards for their deck. I like the relatively non-competitive theme of averting disasters rather than just attacking the other player, and I like the idea of moving between different locations for different game effects, but the problem I have with this game is that the event cards run out (ending the game) before I feel like I've had a chance to build up a deck of interesting cards to play with.

We had a similar problem with Eldritch Horror, which is one of the reasons we eventually removed that game from our collection. The game presents an interesting world, but the time limit and often abrupt game end means that you never really get a chance to explore that world.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Really not a bad game, but the short built-in time limit makes it less fun than other deck building games such as Legendary or Star Realms.

• Helionox: the Last Sunset official website
• Helionox: the Last Sunset on BoardGameGeek

Alien vs. Predator: this time it's Battle Yahtzee

Fill-in-the-blanks licensed versions of games like Monopoly or Clue are tie-in products first and games second, and Battle Yahtzee: Alien vs. Predator is no exception. If you're a fan of Yahtzee and the Aliens vs Predator franchise you'll probably enjoy the game, but it's not going to change your mind about either.

That said, the game does add some interesting elements to the game in deference to the confrontational nature of the AvP license. Rather than just trying to score more points than your opponents before the game ends, Battle Yahtzee allows you to use some of your rolled combos to attack your opponents and take away some of their points. It also adds a "battle chance" die that you can roll on your turn, that will either add or subtract from your score depending on how it rolls. Additionally, each player gets to play as a character, either the Alien, Predator, Marine, or Scientist, each with a unique once-per-game special ability.

The additional rules don't really make the game that much more complicated, and it is still recognizably Yahtzee. Players can easily use the included dice and score pads to play by the standard Yahtzee rules, which are included on the rules sheet.

The components are slick and nicely designed, but the dice are a little hard to read, and the included score board is too small for its score tracking pieces, so the board tends to get crowded when player scores are close, and the pieces can get bumped easily.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Not bad if you already like Yahtzee, but there are a lot of more compelling AvP games out there. AvP Clue looks interesting though...

• Battle Yahtzee: Alien vs Predator on BoardGameGeek

Table for two: a trio of two-player games

As a gaming couple, we are always on the lookout for good two-player games. Granted, many multiplayer games work perfectly well with two, but more often than not they are designed with a larger group of players in mind.

We recently picked up a few new two-player games:

Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion is for the most part a re-skin of Cold War: CIA vs. KGB, and an entry into an emerging sub-category of games based on popular licensed properties and marketed more for their status as tie-in merchandise than for their game play. That's not necessarily a criticism, as it's easy to see that Star Wars is a much easier sell than 1960s global intrigue.

The game makes the transition from cold war to star war fairly easily, with a few minor changes and additions. Each round, an event card is played to the center of the table, representing an event from the original trilogy of Star Wars films such as "Duel on Cloud City" or "Locate the Rebel Base." Players secretly choose a strategy card to use for that round, which either gives them a boost towards winning the event, or an advantage in the following round. Players then attempt to score points for these events by playing cards that add up to a pre-determined value without going over.

Each player plays from their own deck of cards, which includes either the heroes or the villains of the Star Wars saga. These character cards have unique abilities that can be used when they are in play, and their value towards the total required to win the event is different depending on whether they have used their ability or not. Whether or not to use a character ability (and change your total) becomes one of the main strategic decisions in the game. Influence tokens, which are awarded upon winning an event and can be spent to re-use a card's ability, are another component that feeds the game's strategy and makes it different from Cold War.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Not quite as simple and elegant as Cold War, but the Star Wars theme will most likely have a much wider appeal.

• Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion official website
• Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion on BoardGameGeek

I'm a huge fan of Jurassic Park, Primeval, and all things dinosaur, so Raptor was a pretty easy sell for me. It's a two-player tactical movement game in which one player controls a team of scientists trying to gather baby velociraptors for study, and the other player controls the raptors and their outraged mother.

The board is made up of 6 square tiles, each with a 9x9 grid of spaces, plus two 1x3 end tiles on each side. Each tile has a different pattern of empty spaces and obstacles, so the board will be different for each game. The game starts with the mother and 5 baby raptor figures on the board, one on each tile, and four scientist figures, two on either end of the board.

Each player has a deck of 9 cards, each with a number from 1 to 9 and an action that player can perform. Players start with a hand of 3 cards, from which they simultaneously choose and reveal one card, comparing the two. The player with the lower number performs the action listed on the card, which are things like hide in the jungle or scare the humans for the raptor player, and reinforcements or move by jeep for the scientist player. The player with the higher number gets a number of action points to spend equal to the difference between the two cards. Action points are spent to move and attack.

Not knowing for sure what you're going to be able to do each round is the key feature of the game, and strategy consists of trying to anticipate what your opponent is going to do based on the figures' placement on the board. It's got a nice balance of randomness and strategic decision making, with simple, intuitive rules.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A nice mix of tactical movement and card-playing, and I love the dinosaurs vs. humans theme.

• Raptor official website
• Raptor on BoardGameGeek

Longhorn is another game we picked up on impulse based mainly on the genre. In this case, the wild west theme is largely tacked on, and the game itself is pretty abstract.

The board consists of 9 tiles, each with an effect and a random number of cows of different colors on it. There is a single pawn which represents both players. On each player's turn, that player takes all the cows of one color from the tile he is on, and then moves the pawn a number of spaces equal to the number of cows taken. Then it's the other player's turn to take cows an move the pawn. If a player takes the last cow from a tile, that tile's effect is resolved, with different effects including things like taking cows from adjacent spaces or the other player, getting extra points at the end of the game, or having to put cows you've taken back on the board.

It sounds simple, but as usual there is a bit more to it. The pawn can never be moved to an empty tile, and if there are no populated tiles to move to, the game ends. Cows are worth points based on the number of cows of that color still on the board at the end of the game, which means there is quite a bit of strategy involved in deciding which cows to take, and where to move the pawn so that your opponent's choices are limited.

It is interesting to note that Raptor and Longhorn are both by the same designer, Bruno Cathala (Raptor was co-designed by Bruno Faidutti).

Rating: 2 (out of 5) It's almost more of a puzzle than a game, and its one of the few games that we strongly disagree on; I think it's okay, but Katherine finds it really uninteresting.

• Longhorn official website
• Longhorn on BoardGameGeek

Check out some of the other two player games we've reviewed.

Chew: Cases of the FDA -- missing the point

Games based on pre-existing properties such as movies, TV shows, or books can be a mixed bag to say the least. More often than not, the point of a licensed game is to cash in on the popularity it's based on, which tends to result in a lot of mediocre games with "pasted on" themes, such as Doctor Who: the Game of Time and Space or Game of Thrones: Westeros Intrigue. However, occasionally a licensed property will fall into the hands of a game publisher who understands and cares about the material, and you get Firefly: the Game or the Star Trek Customizable Card Game.

Chew: Cases of the FDA, a card game based on the comic book by John Layman and Rob Guillory, falls somewhere in the middle, but it leans more towards the "pasted on theme" end of the spectrum.

The comic book is quite brilliant. It's about a world where chicken has been declared illegal, the FDA operates like the FBI or DEA, and there are numerous characters with food-related supernatural powers, such as the main character, Tony Chu, an FDA agent who can tell the history of any object by eating it.

The designers of the game chose to focus on the criminal investigation aspect of the comic, which is by far the least interesting thing about the story. Players start with a crime card and a suspect card, and throughout the game they are required to play a number of clue cards between the two by matching color patterns on the edges of the cards. Players also have a hand of investigation cards which can be played for fairly standard game effects such as drawing extra cards or stealing them from your opponents.

It's not a bad game, it just doesn't reflect any of the outrageous humor or bizarre plot elements that make the comic book great. Other than images from the comics on the cards, and an ill-conceived optional variant that requires players to take a drink or eat something unpleasant as a payment for playing certain cards, it could just as easily be a generic crime investigation game.

The most amusing thing about the game is the bag of miniature Chogs (frog-chicken hybrids that feature prominently in the comic) that are used as currency.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) An unremarkable, overpackaged game, and a missed opportunity to do something fun with a unique property.

• Chew: Cases of the FDA official website
• Chew: Cases of the FDA on BoardGameGeek

Revolver: cowboys or Aliens?

Revolver is kind of a strange game, but perhaps a little bit less so if you know how it started out.

It's a two-player card game set in the wild west, with each player using a separate deck. One player is the fearsome Colty gang, who have just robbed the bank at Repentance Springs and must now escape to the Mexican border, pursued by Colonel MacReady and his horde of lawmen and bounty hunters. It seems like a pretty straightforward plot for a western, but once you set up the game and start playing, you begin to notice a few peculiarities.

The game begins with four location cards in the center of the table. The outlaw player has spend a certain number of rounds at each location, fighting off lawmen before moving on to the next location in the line. If the outlaw player makes it to the fourth and final location with at least one or two of his characters intact, he wins.

The outlaw player starts with 16 character cards in play, each representing a distinct member of the Colty Gang. Some of them have particular game text and/or a negative effect if that character dies, but many of them appear to be nothing but cannon fodder. The cards in the outlaw player's deck represent weapons and actions, most of which contribute firepower to the battle raging at whatever location is active.

The lawman player doesn't start with any characters in play, and in fact only has a few unique characters, with most of his deck made up of generic deputies, scouts and hired guns, who directly contribute firepower to the current battle (unlike the outlaw characters, who must play weapon cards).

At the end of each round, if the lawman player has more firepower in play than the outlaw player, one of the outlaw characters is killed and taken out of play. Each round that the lawmen fail to kill at least one of the outlaws, the outlaw player gets to remove a token from the "Mexican Border" card that is off to the side, and can win the game early by removing all the tokens from this card.

The game has a weird flow to it that doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are aware that it was originally an unlicensed, fan-produced game based on the second movie in the Alien series. It was re-themed as a western game when the designer decided he wanted to publish the game without paying for the Aliens license.

Now it all makes sense. The 16 outlaws are the human Colonial Marines, along with Ripley, Newt and Burke, being picked off one by one as they move through the different areas of the doomed colony, trying to escape from hordes of nameless, faceless Aliens, who have been replaced with nameless, faceless deputies and bounty hunters.

I must admit that I haven't played the Aliens version of this game, but it's obvious that the structure of the game is based solidly on the film, and it's easy to look at the Revolver characters and guess their Aliens counterparts. I suspect that this is a case where the game play suits the theme too well, to the point that changing the theme diminishes the game. All the game elements make sense when married to the Aliens story, and I can see the Aliens version doing a decent job of putting you in the action of the movie and making you care about characters you're familiar with.

Unfortunately, Revolver doesn't do a particularly good job of telling its own story, so you're left with ill-fitting game mechanics and a game about characters and situations you aren't given any reason to care about.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) The game play doesn't fit the theme, and doesn't hold up particularly well on its own.

• Revolver official website
• Revolver on BoardGameGeek
• Aliens: This Time It's War on BoardGameGeek

Wings of War: flying around in circles

Wings of War was a great game until Star Wars: X-Wing came along.

The game's unique card-based movement and diceless combat made for a welcome change from the "roll dice to hit a target number, move on a grid or along a tape measure" sameness of most other tabletop miniatures games. The pre-painted airplane miniatures were top-notch, but it was nice that the game could be played without them, using cards to represent the planes and making it easy for people who wanted to try the game out without spending a lot of money.

The genre made for a nice change too, with World War I biplanes replacing the elves, orcs and superheroes that still tend to dominate tabletop gaming.

Players control their planes via cards representing different maneuvers. Each type of plane has its own deck of maneuver cards, representing differences in handling and performance. Moves are plotted out three cards at a time, with an opportunity to fire at enemy planes after each card is resolved. Firing is a simple matter of checking to see if an enemy is in range; if so, the opposing player draws from a deck of damage cards that indicate numerical damage points (often zero points for a miss), as well as special effects such as injured pilots, damaged engines, and the dreaded explosion that will knock a plane right out of the sky.

It's an elegant and relatively simple game that does a great job of reflecting its theme. However, it does have one major drawback.

There is a fair amount of stuff to keep track of for each plane, enough that it's fairly clear that the game was designed for each player to control a single plane, or two at the most. This means that unless you have a fair amount of players (at least two or three for each side), your game is going to be a dogfight between two solitary planes. While this might sound fine in theory, in practice it tends to turn into a lot of flying around in circles, trying to anticipate where your opponent's plane will be so you can take a shot at it.

The game attempts to make up for this by providing a series of scenarios, offering specific goals for the players to meet in order to win, such as destroying a barrage balloon or flying over a trench formation with a spy camera. These can be interesting, but usually one side's goal is to destroy the other side's plane, so you are still left with a somewhat tedious end game.

We tried the WWII version without the miniatures, using just the cards from one of the starter sets. The flow of the game has been changed to reflect the much faster speeds WWII jet fighters were capable of, but our end game was still much the same as with the WWI version, with our planes flying in circles, never quite able to get in a good shot.

Since the starfighter battle scenes in the original Star Wars film were inspired by old war films, it's appropriate that the developers of Star Wars: X-Wing clearly used Wings of War as a base. They replaced the maneuver cards with dials and templates in order to make it easier for each player to control a group of fighters, and added customization cards to allow players to come up with unique combinations of ships, pilots and enhancements such as co-pilots or extra weapons.

X-Wing keeps what works about Wings of War, gets rid of what doesn't, and as a result it is a much more playable game. But every once in a while I do get nostalgic for the simplicity of two biplanes flying in circles, each one trying desperately to line up a shot on the other.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Wings of War really is a pretty good game in its own right, but it just suffers a little too much when compared to X-Wing.

• Wings of Glory (the current version of Wings of War) official website
• Wings of War on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: November 11, 2014