General Orders: World War II gets wargaming down to the bare essentials

General Orders: World War II, by Undaunted creators David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, is an interesting game that abstracts two of the most iconic types of battles from that war to the point that it doesn't really matter which side is which. Players merely choose to play as either yellow or blue and start on opposite sides of the board, which the game even declines to name as a particular theatre of war, instead calling them either "alpine" or "island," depending on which game mode you choose to play.

The game is a mix of worker placement and area control, with a bit of card play thrown in for good measure. The boards are divided up into hexes, with the path to victory being to deploy and move armies in an advance towards the center of the board. The game ends after four rounds, with players scoring points based on which map hexes their armies occupy, but it can also end early if a player manages to occupy their opponent's headquarters space on the opposite side of the board.

Each hex has one or two worker placement spaces. Most of them are used to move armies into the hex, with a few offering different options like landing paratroopers or firing artillery into nearby spaces. The hexes in the middle of the board offer in-game bonuses for occupying them such as gaining extra troops, extending the range of artillery, or drawing cards. If a player moves into a hex occupied by the opponent's troops, the conflict is played out with a simple dice roll followed by an attrition mechanic that removes an even number of each player's troops until only one player's troops remain.

The game uses cards to add a little extra uncertainty to the combat, with cards providing advantages such as extra dice, rerolls, troop reinforcements, and even extra turns.

The alpine board is the basic game, with each side using paratroopers and artillery to fight over a village surrounded by mountains. The island board represents a beach assault adding planes that can drop bombs on locations and help control the areas they're flying over. Even with that added bit of complexity, the game manages to be wonderfully simple, distilling a war game down to being about as simple as it can be while still being engaging for the players. And, like all of Osprey's board game offerings, the graphic design, illustration, and component quality are all top-notch.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a neat little game that strips out unnecessary historical detail in favor of getting down to the mechanics of combat in two of the most prevalent types of World War II battles.

• General Orders: World War II official website
• General Orders: World War II on BoardGameGeek

Sabacc: a brief history of Star Wars poker

The idea that they play some version of poker in the Star Wars universe is first hinted at in The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo responds "you lost her to me, fair and square" when Lando Calrissian asks after the Millennium Falcon. Sabacc was first given a name and described in detail by author L. Neil Smith in the novel Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, first published as a tie-in to the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983.

The game that Smith describes in his book is a complicated affair involving electronic cards that change their suit and value at random intervals. It seems to play like a cross between stud poker and blackjack, with a slew of arbitrary face cards that sound like they're from a tarot deck. It reads like an attempt to describe something exotic and otherworldly, the card game equivalent of the holographic chess game seen in the original Star Wars.

The first attempt at a playable version of Sabacc came via the Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by West End Games in the 1990s. The adventure module Crisis on Cloud City called for a Sabacc game, so the publisher took the opportunity to include cards and rules to allow the roleplayers to actually play the game. I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy (copies of the module routinely sell for $200+ on eBay and rarely include the Sabacc cards) so I don't know how the game plays, but I suspect it leans towards being accurate to what is described in the book, rather than an actual playable game.

The game's prominent appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story meant that some kind of commercial Sabacc game was inevitable, and this came in the form of the imaginatively titled Star Wars Han Solo Card Game which was later reimplemented as the souvenir Sabacc deck available at Disney's theme parks (also known as the "Corellian Spike" variant). Both versions attempt to take what we see in the film and reproduce it as a playable game. The film tries to approximate the game described in Smith's book, but does away with the electronic cards in favor of something more low-tech that will be easier to explain to the audience. Instead we have a more recognizable poker-like game played with normal printed cards, and dice to represent the random changes to the cards.

The problem in both cases is, this version of Sabacc has been "designed" by writers who need to tell a story -- the details are revealed through props and dialogue. It doesn't have to be playable or consistent, since it's not a real game that the audience will be familiar with. The commercially released Sabacc games are meant to be souvenirs first and playable games a distant second, so they are much more concerned with reproducing what we see in the film. As a result the game is pretty much unplayable, relying on a complicated and arbitrary hierarchy of hands to be "similar but different" to terrestrial poker.

When the (now sadly closed) Galactic Starcruiser attraction opened at Disney World, one of the obvious activities for guests was a Sabacc tournament. But the game would need a major overhaul if it was going to be played and enjoyed, and it received that in the form of Sabacc: Coruscant Shift, a variation of the game that was available exclusively at the Starcruiser but is now fairly easy to find on eBay or Etsy.

Coruscant Shift drops the original Sabacc's complicated hands in favor of a simple blackjack-like game. The deck consists of 3 suits of 20 cards each, numbered 1-10 and negative 1-10, plus two 0 cards that count as all three suits. Also included are two six sided dice, one with the suits on the faces and the other with different values: -10, -5, 0, 0, 5 and 10. 

The game starts with each player dealt five cards. After the cards are dealt, the dice are rolled to determine what the target value for the hand is, and what suit will be the tiebreaker. Players must then choose what cards they want to keep, playing them face down in front of them. They may then exchange their remaining cards for new ones, just like in draw poker. But here's where the game diverges: any or all of the new cards may be added to the player's existing hand, but none of the previously retained cards may be taken away. Once each player decides whether to add any of their new cards to their hand or not, they reveal their hands. Whoever's hand of positive and negative cards added together is closest to the target value wins the hand, with ties broken by the player with the most cards of the suit indicated on the die roll.

The rules included with the official Coruscant Shift deck don't include any rules for betting. In the Sabacc tournaments at the Galactic Starcruiser, each player started the game with 10 credits, and there was an ante and then a round of betting after the first two cards were dealt and then another before the final hands are revealed.

It's an excellent compromise. While it doesn't exactly reflect the game as described in the books or seen in the film, it's fairly close and is actually a playable and enjoyable game that will feel familiar to poker players but still seems like it could be from a galaxy far, far away.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a great, easy poker-like game that puts you in the Star Wars universe -- it's easy to imagine playing this on Cloud City or at the Canto Bight casino.

• Sabacc: Coruscant Shift on BoardGameGeek

Deadwood 1876: small things come in good packages

I was drawn to the Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876 by its terrific artwork and simple, elegant graphic design, so let's talk about that first.

It is a great looking game. It comes packaged (like all of the games in the "dark city" series from Facade Games) in a box designed to look like an old leather bound book with a magnetic lid. All the game components other than the cards are made of wood (no plastic) and beautifully designed, especially the three engraved discs that represent the locations in the game. The artwork on the cards is very well-rendered, in a style that is just cartoony enough to be expressive but without looking silly.

The game's design is also very minimal, which appeals to me as a respite from the current trend towards overproduced Kickstarter games with hundreds of plastic miniatures and overdone, hard to read boards and rulebooks. Finally something simple and (hopefully) easy to play.

Or is it?

The rules and mechanics of the game are simple enough. The game consists of Safe cards, Deadwood cards, and three locations at the center of the table. Each player starts with two face down safe cards in front of them, and there is a stack of three more in the center; Safe cards consist mainly of gold in various denominations, with a few guns and other items sprinkled in.

Players also start with a hand of Deadwood cards that represent items used to perform actions: guns for fighting, horses for movement, and various bits of leatherwork such as hats and holsters for manipulating the cards in various ways. Player pawns are randomly distributed among the three locations (more on this in a moment).

The goal of the game is to be in the location whose occupants collectively have the most gold (depicted on their face down Safe cards) at the end of the game. Once the winning location has been determined, the occupants of that location use their remaining weapon cards to fight it out to see who the final winner is.

Play consists of each player playing one Deadwood card from their hand. A card can be played as a weapon to attack another player, in order to either take one of their safes, or to switch places with another player's pawn or force them to leave your location. Weapons have variable strengths but use dice to determine the outcome of combat, so a lower card isn't necessarily a lost cause. Or, it can be played for another effect such as moving between locations (if there's room, each location is limited to a certain number of player pawns), peeking at face down Safe cards, or drawing extra Deadwood cards from the deck.

After each player has had a turn to play a card, there is a heist round, where players use weapon cards to fight it out for one of the safes in the middle of the table. Then another round of play begins, and so on, until all the safes in the center have been claimed. At that point there is one final round, and then the winning location is determined and the final showdown happens.

It sounds like there's a lot going on, and there is, but there is one critical problem. A key strategy to the game is figuring out who has the high value safes, so you can either steal them or make sure you're at the location with the most gold at the end. It's supposed to be a "game of shifting alliances" where you side with the others in your location to make sure you collectively have the most gold, and then backstab them in the final showdown. The problem is that with only four turns per player before the final showdown, you just don't have enough time for the amount of social deduction or level of strategy that the game calls for.

Because of the amount of bluffing and secret information involved, the game relies on all the players having a roughly equal understanding of the rules and especially the strategy, which makes it very difficult to teach. This is a major problem for a game that, like any "shifting alliances" game, needs a large number of players to be interesting.

On the other hand, I think there is a fun game here somewhere, and the gorgeous design and components make me want to keep trying to make it work.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Too much social deduction for a board game, or perhaps too much structure for a social deduction game, but the game is beautiful to look at.

• Deadwood 1876 official website
• Deadwood 1876 on Board Game Geek

Yamataï: Not just another pretty game

A good board game should be a perfect marriage of game design and graphics. You could argue that the game design is more important, but in today's world where desktop publishing makes graphic design and layout relatively easy, there is no excuse to skimp on the graphics (I'm looking at you, The Expanse Board Game). At the same time, great artwork and graphics will only take you so far before the reality of a mediocre game design starts showing through (Grimslingers, for example).

Often a game will rely on excellence in one of these areas to make up for shortcomings in the other, but that is not the case with Yamataï, a terrific board game graced with some truly gorgeous artwork. I will admit that the artwork is what immediately caught my attention, but there is a good, solid game underneath, with an interesting combination of resource management, drafting, and board placement elements.

The board depicts a densely packed collection of islands, upon which players must build structures such as palaces and trading posts, strategically placing them to best advantage. Placing the structures involves moving ships of various colors into position around the island you want to build on -- each structure requires a particular combination of ships to be adjacent. At the same time, your opponents are trying to build their own structures, moving ships around or worse, building on an island you were planning on using on a future turn.

The game's complexity is heightened with a drafting mechanic. At the start of each round, players choose from a selection of tiles that give you different ships to use on your turn as well as a special ability such as rearranging ships on the board, blocking particular islands to prevent others from building there, or allowing structures to be built with fewer resources. There are ten different tiles, but only five available on any given round, so players can't repeat the same moves over and over. These tiles also tell the players what order they'll go in on the following round -- generally the better your tile is, the closer to the back of the line you'll be on your next turn.

Additionally, there are specialists that can be hired (payed for with the game's currency) that give more specific special abilities tailored to particular strategies, usually offering different ways to gain more currency to spend, or more points for scoring at the game's end.

The game play is interesting, with a lot of decisions to make, and even though there isn't much direct conflict between players, there are still a lot of reasons to keep an eye on what the other players are doing, which eliminates tuning out when it's not your turn.

And did I mention that the artwork is gorgeous?

The game play is fairly abstract and there isn't much in the way of a story, so the Asian theme is largely painted on -- it could just as easily be set in the wild west or ancient Greece. The artwork, design, and components are there to hold the players' attention in the place of an immersive story or setting, and it does its job extremely well.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A great game design without being too complicated, with fantastic artwork and graphics.

• Yamataï official website
• Yamataï on BoardGameGeek

Viking roundup, part 3: Hnefatafl

We picked up Hnefatafl (the Viking Game) at the British Museum in London, and as such it's more of a souvenir of our trip than a game we plan to play regularly. That said, it is actually a pretty engaging game, sort of an asymmetrical version of chess with fewer rules and (in my opinion) slightly more interesting strategy.

The defending player gets 12 pieces plus a king. These pieces start in the center of the board, and the goal is for the king to reach one of the corner squares. Meanwhile, the attacking player gets 24 pieces that start along the 4 edges of the board. Any piece other than the king can be captured by sandwiching it between two opposing pieces, or between a piece and a corner space; the king can only be taken if he's closed in on all 4 sides.

Our experience playing the game is that it's substantially weighted in favor of the attacker, but still pretty challenging for both sides. It's possible for the attacker to effectively block the corner squares, but it's also pretty difficult for him to keep his blockers in place, since he also needs to use his pieces to chase the king around the board and (hopefully) capture him.

The attack and defense game play isn't particularly viking themed, but Hnefatafl is purported to be a game that was actually played in Scandinavia during the viking era. If nothing else, it can clearly be seen being played on the History Channel's excellent Vikings TV show.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) We don't spend that much time playing abstract strategy games, but this one is more interesting than a lot of them.

• Hnefatafl on BoardGameGeek

Stratego: a battlefield classic

Even though I probably only played Stratego once or twice as a child, I've always had a weird fascination with it, and I've spent several years hunting down the collector's wooden box edition that Milton Bradley put out in 2002. For years it seemed to be the only one that wasn't readily available, but I did eventually find one at my friendly local game shop (Guardian Games in Portland, Oregon), which carries a substantial selection of used games.

Now, having played the game a few times as an adult with a wealth of gaming experience, I still find it weirdly fascinating.

For those who aren't familiar with the game, Stratego gives each player an assortment of pieces of different ranks, ranging from humble scouts to the powerful Marshall, plus a handful of bombs, a devious Spy, and one flag. The goal of the game is to capture your opponent's flag. Pieces are arranged on the board with blank faces towards the opponent, so he doesn't know which pieces are where until he starts sending his own pieces out. When a piece enters the same square as another piece, the one with the lower rank is eliminated, with a few exceptions: a bomb will eliminate any piece (along with itself) unless that piece is a Miner, and a Spy will eliminate an opposing Marshall (the highest ranked piece) if it is the attacker. Bombs and Flags can't move, and Scouts are the only pieces that can move more than one square at a time.

At least half of the game's strategy is in the setup, figuring out where to place your various pieces at the start of the game. Will you put all your Scouts at the front and run them at the opponent's front line right away? Or will you fill your front row with bombs to take out your opponent's first attackers? Or maybe it will be better to surround your flag with bombs, but what if that's what your opponent is expecting you to do, and he manages to clear the way for his Miners to easily defuse your bombs?

The rest of the game is a series of decisions involving what pieces to sacrifice in order to learn which pieces your opponent has where, and a struggle to remember the position of those pieces once revealed. It's a bit of a guessing game, but it's really more about choosing what pieces to send into enemy territory and when, and where to position your flag so that it remains protected.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Stratego doesn't quite have the timeless elegance of chess, but nevertheless it's an engaging game that's a classic for good reason.

• Stratego on BoardGameGeek

Modern Art: not quite so masterly

Reiner Knizia's Modern Art is fairly typical for the prolific game designer, with a fairly simple game mechanic, clever scoring system, and a theme that is tacked-on but still makes sense. It's generally a fun game, especially if you're playing with non-gamers who might be turned off by complex game play or a preponderance of elves and goblins.

Where it falls down is on the artwork, which, while clearly intended to poke fun at the 1960s pop-art movement, is also very hard to look at. So it was nice to see the game re-skinned as Masters Gallery, using classic (and copyright-free) paintings by such masters as Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Vermeer.

Players play cards representing masterpieces by the five different artists in the game. At the end of each round, the artist with the most cards in play is worth the most points, and players score based on how many cards by that artists they played during the round. Strategy involves attempting to manipulate the "market" by recognizing as early as possible which artists are going to be worth the most points that round, and trying to play cards by those artists.

The game play actually makes more sense in a game about up-and-coming artists than it does in a game about established masters, but at least you get to look at better artwork while you're playing. Except...the design of the cards is such that a heavy border takes up almost half of the available space on each card, so the actual artwork is very small. The brightly colored borders aren't doing the works of art any favors either.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The clunky graphic design isn't quite enough to kill the game, but it is a pity that, in a game about amazing works of art, the art itself doesn't take center stage like it should.

• Masters Gallery official website
• Masters Gallery on BoardGameGeek

4theBirds: What the flock?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that 4theBirds! was designed by a good friend of mine.

4theBirds is an abstract game similar to Pente or Connect Four, in which players attempt to place their pieces on the board in a specific pattern, either four in a row or in a square. There are, of course, numerous catches: not all of the spaces are connected to each other, players can displace some (but not all) of their opponent's pieces, and there are non-player pieces that can be added to the board, affecting player pieces in various ways.

The game's theme is a simple one of various birds jockeying for position in a tree. The tree is represented by the game board, a somewhat dizzying grid of numbered spaces, some connected by "branches" and others not. Each turn, a player rolls two dice to determine his choice of  two different spaces into which he may place one of his birds. Once he's rolled, he can choose to either place a bird on the board, or play one of six cards that do things such as move other birds around, place new non-player birds (Hawks and Crows), or re-roll the dice.

The game establishes a "pecking order" which allows each player to displace the birds of the player to his left, which makes for some interesting choices as players attempt to get their four birds in a row while at the same time pushing other birds out of the way and disrupting the other players' bird placements.

The aforementioned Hawks and Crows add a bit more chaos to the mix: the Hawks play on certain spots in between regular spaces, and cause all the nearby birds to scatter to other spaces, which in turn can cause further displacement. Crows play on regular spaces but are at the top of the pecking order, so they can displace all the player birds and get in the way of further placements. All it takes is a well placed Hawk or Crow and suddenly your careful plan is scattered like, well, like a bunch of birds.

It's a very simple game, but fun, with just the right amount of strategy set off by random chaos. And the colorful graphic design is a joy to look at.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A little too simple for us to want to play all that often, but great for when we want a lighter, shorter game to play.

• 4theBirds! official website
• 4theBirds! 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

Jarl: a tile by any other name

Jarl: the Vikings Tile-Laying Game is a re-skin of The Duke, a tile based combat game with an abstract medieval theme. You could be forgiven for assuming that the Vikings theme has been tacked on in order to make an easy piece of tie-in merchandise; in spite of the photo of Travis Fimmel as Ragnar Lothbrok on the box cover, the game has very little connection to the History Channel television show. Or does it?

Theme aside, it's a very ingenious game system which can perhaps best be described as "chess with more variables." It is played on a grid, and the object is to protect your Jarl (king) from being captured by your opponent.

The playing pieces are tiles etched with a simple diagram describing what moves that tile can make relative to its current position. Some pieces can jump over others, some can attack from afar without moving, some can move other pieces or prevent them from being captured. But here's the catch: after a piece moves, it must be flipped over to its opposite side, which has a different set of possible moves.

So a huge part of the strategy is keeping track of how a piece's new position on the board, combined with its new set of moves, will affect the game.

Unlike chess, where you start with all of your pieces and watch them gradually get whittled away, here you start the game with just three pieces on the board and the rest in a bag. On any turn you can forego moving a piece to instead place a new one, randomly drawn from the bag, which must be placed adjacent to your Jarl. Each turn is a decision whether to use what you have on the board, or call for reinforcements.

The Jarl is no slouch when it comes to defending itself and capturing opposing pieces, and it can't be cornered as easily as the king in chess. This, combined with the fact that the pieces have such dynamic and varied movements, makes for an energetic and vital game that really reminds me of the battle scenes on the Vikings television show. As a fan of the show who probably wouldn't have given the game a second look otherwise, it's a smart bit of licensing.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a deceptively simple game that is very compelling and gives players a lot to think and strategize about, and the fact that it reminds me of a favorite television show is a nice bonus.

• Jarl: the Vikings Tile-Laying Game official website
• Jarl: the Vikings Tile-Laying Game on BoardGameGeek

Reiner Knizia's Samurai: not conquering any new territory

Samurai is a pretty typical example of a Reiner Knizia game. The game play is abstract and deceptively simple, featuring a complex scoring system that is more than simply adding up points, and the theme is, for the most part, a tacked on afterthought. That said, the game still manages to be fairly engaging.

The game board, which scales based on the number of players, represents the islands of Japan. Cities and villages are marked out on the board, and at the start of the game their spaces are filled with tokens representing religion, commerce and military. Each player has a collection of tiles of varying values and symbols that correspond to the tokens on the board. Players take turns placing on the board, and as soon as a city or village is surrounded by tiles, the player whose surrounding tiles add up to the highest value claims the token or tokens that match their tiles' symbol. Some tiles have special abilities, such as allowing placement of an additional tile, or moving a tile that's already on the board.

As usual with a Reiner Knizia game, there is a little more to it than that. While the primary strategy lies in placing your tiles in such a way that you control when a village gets surrounded, you also need to think about which tokens you're claiming. The final scoring depends on how many of each type of token each player has collected, so you have to make decisions on which tokens you are trying to collect, based on what you have and what your opponents have taken.

The beautiful graphic design in the new edition published by Fantasy Flight Games helps to make up for the fairly inconsequential feudal Japan theme. In any case, there's enough going on to keep the game interesting, if similar to many of Knizia's other games such as Through the Desert and even Ingenious.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A pretty good game when taken on its own merits, but it is very similar to a lot of other games from the same designer.

• Samurai official website
• Samurai 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.

Lanterns: the Harvest Festival -- an oddly relaxing riot of color

Lanterns: the Harvest Festival is a simple, relaxing game in which players collect lantern cards of different colors by playing tiles, and trade different sets of lantern cards in for points. The playing pieces are lovely to look at, contributing to the serene nature of the game.

Tiles have a color on each side, and are played adjacent to one another in a common grid. You can play a tile anywhere, but if you match a colored side of your tile to one already in play, you get a lantern card of that color. In addition, you get a card for whatever colored tile side is facing you, and your opponents get a card for the colored edge, so a major aspect of the game play is paying attention to what cards you are giving your opponents, and trying not to give them anything too useful.

Some tiles have illustrated platforms in their center, and if you play a tile with a matching color adjacent to a tile with a platform, you get a favor token. These can be spent to trade a lantern card for one of another color, which is an important ability when you're trying to put sets of cards together to earn points.

Lantern cards are traded in for points in one of three possible combinations: four of the same color, 3 different pairs of the same color, or one each of seven different colors. Points are represented by tokens whose value gradually decreases as they are claimed, so the first player to cash in a set of four gets more points for it than the second player to do so, and so on.

Play proceeds until all the tiles have run out, after which players get one final turn to cash in their lanterns before the scores are added up.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a light, pleasant game that's good for an evening with non-gamers, or when you're not up for something more complicated.

Lanterns: the Harvest Festival official website
Lanterns: the Harvest Festival on BoardGameGeek

Gravwell's strange attraction

Most board games fall into one of two broad categories: they are either a race, where the goal is to accomplish something before your opponents do, or they are a fight, where the goal is to attack your opponents and defend yourself from their attacks. Player interaction in race games tends to be minimal, with players generally more concerned with reaching their own goals, and their opponents' progress acting as a clock to be beaten.

At its core, Gravwell is a race game, but every move depends on what the other players are doing. Players play movement cards in an effort to be the first to move their space ship along a linear path from the center of the board to the edge. It sounds simple, but it's not.

At the start of each round, players draft from an array of card stacks consisting of one face up and one face down card. Cards represent different elements that the space ships are able to gather on their journey away from the black hole at the center of the board. Most of the cards will move a  player's ship anywhere from 2-10 spaces along the board. The catch, however, is that ships must always move in the direction of the nearest other ship, wherever that may be.

A few cards allow movement away from the nearest ship, and two of them (out of 26 total cards) will move every ship on the board towards the ship of whoever plays the card. Each card is marked with a letter from A to Z. Cards are played face down and revealed simultaneously, then resolved in alphabetical order.

Additionally, there are two non player ships on the board whose positions can affect the direction in which a player ship moves.

There is a lot of backwards and forwards movement, but the game's real strategy is in anticipating what your opponents are going to play, and choosing a play of your own that will allow you to take advantage of what order you play in, and the position of the other ships on the board when you move. Once each round, you can use an Emergency Stop to cancel your movement, if a move would take you too far away from where they want to be, but each round consists of six card plays, so you have to be careful about when to use it.

Gravwell is a terrific game in that its rules are very simple, but there is a lot to think about while playing. You simply can't ignore what your opponents are doing, and you have to manipulate the positions of the other ships on the board in order to move your own closer to victory.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A simple yet engaging game, well deserving of the multiple game design awards it's won.

• Gravwell official website
• Gravwell on BoardGameGeek

Splendor-ific

Splendor is not generally the kind of game that attracts our attention, but I couldn't help noticing the number of "best of the year" lists it appeared on. I looked into it a bit more, and it still didn't look overly interesting to me, and I had no interest in trying it out. But then fate intervened in the form of a copy of the game being given to Katherine as a birthday gift.

We played it at her birthday party (who can resist a brand new game?), and again a few days later, but then we put it on the shelf and promptly forgot all about it. We definitely didn't dislike the game, but, as I said, it's just not the kind of game that normally attracts our attention.

When it came time to write this review, we finally got it out to play again, and I honestly wasn't sure what to expect. My memories of having played it several months ago were hazy at best; I didn't recall disliking it, bit I didn't recall liking it overmuch, either. Imagine our surprise, then, when we wound up playing for several hours.

We do like the odd abstract game like Ingenious or Set (well, Katherine likes Set), but for the most part, the games we play tend to be fairly literal, with players playing characters coming into conflict with plots and villains, and often complicated rules intended to allow for a fair representation of the various actions a character in a story might need to perform. Splendor makes for a nice break from that, with deceptively simple rules but a lot to think about during the game.

Put simply, the game is about manipulating resources in the form of jewels of different colors. The game starts with three rows of four cards, each depicting a cost in jewels, and a resource in jewels that the card provides every turn once it's been purchased. A limited supply of poker chips, representing the different jewel colors, is off to the side, along with some yellow chips that can be used as any color.

Each turn, a player can either: take two poker chips of the same color, or three of different colors; reserve a card by picking it up (that player also gets one of the yellow chips); or purchase a card, either from the table or one he's reserved, using a combination of jewels on cards he's already purchased and on poker chips he's picked up on previous turns.

Cards that are reserved or purchased are replaced from one of three decks (one for each row), so there are always 12 cards to choose from. Cards in the first row tend to be easier to buy, while cards in the upper rows are more expensive but are usually worth more points at the end of the game.

In addition to scoring points by buying cards, there are a number of tiles put into play at the start of the game, representing nobles who will award points to the first player who buys whatever combination of cards is depicted on the tile (i.e. four red and four black cards, or three each of several different colors). The game goes on until someone reaches 15 points, at which point everyone gets one last turn to try to catch up with the winner.

The secret to the game's strength is in the number of choices it gives players to think about on their turn. If I take chips from the supply, the colors I take might give my opponents a clue as to what card I'm trying to buy, in which case they might try to get it before I get a chance to. If I focus all my attention on getting the noble tiles, I risk overpaying for cards by using chips too often, rather than relying on purchasing cheaper cards to provide a good base of resources.

We found in playing that each turn we spent a lot of time thinking about what to do, going over the different options and possible consequences, but we spent almost no time referring to the rules.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's not a game that we'll spend a ton of time playing, and it doesn't fire up our imaginations the way games like Arkham Horror or a good CCG do, but Splendor is very engaging and makes for a welcome break from the more complicated games we tend to favor.

• Splendor official website
• Splendor on BoardGameGeek

Tsuro: watch where you're going

Tsuro is a fairly simple tile laying game that plays kind of like a more relaxed, zen version of Robo Rally. The game accommodates anywhere from 2 to 8 players, all of whom start with a piece on the edge of the board. Players take turns playing tiles which depict various paths that their pieces move along, all in an effort to avoid moving off the board or crashing into another player's piece.

The combination of simple game play and beautifully designed components make this a great game for non-gamers. It's very easy to teach (play your tile, move your piece, draw a new tile), and the simplicity and short play time makes it a game that children and families can play, along with more experienced gamers. We find that it also makes a good warm-up game when waiting for people to arrive for game nights.

For those players who would like a bit more complexity, there is Tsuro of the Seas, which casts the players in the roles of ship captains trying to keep their boats afloat. We haven't played it, but it appears to use the core game mechanics of Tsuro with a slightly larger board and the addition of tiles representing sea monsters that move in random directions, wiping out everything in their path.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great game that is more engaging than its simplicity might suggest.

• Tsuro official website
• Tsuro on BoardGameGeek.com
• Watch Wil Wheaton play Tsuro on Table Top

Date played: November 3, 2014

Starship Duel: shooting in the dark

With a few exceptions, space combat as depicted in the various Star Trek television series and films has never been what I would describe as "action-packed." That isn't to say that it isn't dramatic: in my opinion, the original series episode "Balance of Terror" is one of the best space battles ever put on film, and the battle in the Mutara Nebula between Kirk and Khan in Star Trek II is a very close second.

Those battles take their cues from World War II submarine movies, slowly building tension rather than going for fast movement and explosions. While this makes for excellent drama, it may not necessarily translate into interesting gaming.

Starship Duel, designed by Heroclix mastermind Jordan Weisman and published by FASA in 1984, attempts to recreate the dramatic tension seen in the space battles from Star Trek II and III. To its credit, the game tries to do something different, foregoing the traditional board with miniatures or counters representing the ships in favor of a wheel that shows the other ship's position and heading relative to yours, with no accounting for distance.

Game play involves trying to anticipate the direction your opponent is going to move. Your ship has a limited amount of power, so you have to decide which side of your ship to charge the weapons and shields on, hoping that your opponent's ship will end up in the right position, and ideally that you'll catch him from a side that he hasn't charged his shields on.

On paper, it sounds very much like space combat the way it was depicted in Star Trek at the time, with ships floundering in the dark and never seeming to have enough power to fight effectively. In practice, however, it can be frustrating. It is often difficult to visualize the position of the ships, and in the end it's mainly a guessing game, as you try to put power into the weapons and shields that you hope will be facing your opponent.

It was an interesting idea that just didn't translate into a playable game, and FASA quickly abandoned it in favor of the more traditional Starship Tactical Combat Simulator.

Rating: 1 (out of 5) While we applaud the effort to try something different, we found this game to be frustrating and difficult to play.

• Starship Duel on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: October 26, 2014

Three card games that start with the letter S: Serpent Stones, Set, and Seven card Samurai

Serpent Stones is a card game, but it really has more in common with chess or Stratego: it is primarily a game about making strategic moves with pieces on a board in order to outmaneuver your opponent. The game is played on a staggered grid, and players must place their warrior cards one at a time to form an unbroken line from their side of the board to their opponent's, while at the same time protecting their own side of the board from their opponent's advances.

In addition to warrior cards which are played to the board, there are also strike cards which allow players to either destroy or capture adjacent opposing warriors. Destroyed warriors are removed from the board to clear a path for new cards to be played, and captured warriors are turned around so that they join the capturing player's line of warriors.

There are also tactical cards that can be played for various advantages such as drawing an extra card, forcing an opponent to discard, or setting a card aside to be played along with a second card on the next turn.

The Warrior cards are divided between eagles and jaguars, which has no bearing on the basic game but comes into play in two different advanced variants. In one, each player assumes control of either the House of Eagles or the House of Jaguars. Players can still play warriors from either house, but attack cards can only destroy warriors of the opposing house, and capture cards can only be played on warriors that match the player's house, regardless of who currently controls the card.

The other variant moves this idea to the individual warrior cards, so that while players aren't affiliated with a particular house, they can only play strikes on opposing adjacent warriors that are different from theirs, and only play strikes on opposing warriors that are the same. For example, if your eagle warrior is adjacent to my jaguar warrior, I can play a strike but not a capture, but if your jaguar is adjacent to my jaguar, I can play a capture card but not a strike.

The game's Aztec theme is interesting but largely decorative, and has no real bearing on game play. Normally I don't particularly like games that are this abstract, but Serpent Stones is pretty engaging, especially with the two different advanced variants to keep the game play from getting stale.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A solid two player game which is easy to pick up and play, but engaging enough to hold your interest.

• Serpent Stones official website
• Serpent Stones on BoardGameGeek.com

Set is unapologetically abstract. Billed as "the family game of visual perception," it has always seemed to me to have more in common with a perception or acuity test than a game. It consists of a deck of 81 cards printed with different abstract symbols that relate to one another in different ways. 12 cards are played out face up on the table, and the goal is to be the first player to spot a "set" of three cards.

A set is three cards whose symbols have exactly one element in common, and no more. As soon as a player spots a set they take the three cards, which are then replaced from the deck. If all players agree that no sets can be made from the cards on the table, three more are dealt. The game ends when either the deck runs out, or all the players agree that no more sets can be made from the available cards, at which point the player who claimed the most sets is the winner.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) There are no turns or strategy, it's just a contest to see who has the fastest pattern recognition, which to my mind means it's barely a game at all.

• Set official website
• Set on BoardGameGeek.com

We're both fans of Japanese samurai films (especially the ones by Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune), and at some point not too long ago, we realized that we didn't own any samurai-themed games. We weren't really interested in a huge, Risk-style area control game, which is what most games set in feudal Japan seem to be, and while I am intrigued by Samurai Sword (the samurai version of Bang!), we have enough trouble getting enough people together to play Bang!, so we didn't want another game with the same problem.

So we picked up Seven Card Samurai. The box had some nice graphic design to it, and described a game about using Samurai to defend rice supplies from bandits and ninjas. Unfortunately, what it contained was essentially a variation on rummy, with the same few pieces of unappealing artwork repeated in different colors across the cards.

Each player starts with a certain amount of rice bushels, represented by, admittedly, some very nice tokens. The idea is to play down samurai cards to defend your rice, while at the same time playing bandits to steal your opponent's rice. Additionally, you want to play your samurai in matching colors. The game ends when a player has seven samurai on the table, at which time each player is awarded points based on the number of samurai cards in each color set, as well as the amount of rice they've managed to hold on to or steal from the other players.

It's not a bad game per se (especially if you like rummy), but the artwork on the oversized cards is not very good, and the samurai theme is entirely irrelevant to the game play, as proven by the publisher's recent release of what appears to be the same game with a zombie theme.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) Not an awful game by any means, but there are much more interesting rummy variants out there, such as Mystery Rummy, and Shitenno and Tokaido are much better games about feudal Japan.

• Seven Card Samurai official website
• Seven Card Samurai on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: July 5, 2014

An ingenious solution

It should be readily apparent that we love playing games, and we're not going to stop just because we're travelling. However, traditional travel games don't really hold much appeal for us, and you can't really play Arkham Horror on your airplane tray tables (not even in first class). The solution for us is the unfortunately out of print travel edition of Reiner Knizia's Ingenious, a clever little tile laying game with Knizia's usual flair for creative mathematics and unusual score-keeping.

The game consists of a bag of double-hexagonal tiles, each printed with two colored symbols. The object of the game is to lay your tiles on the board in such a way that they create unbroken rows of the same color. When you place a new tile, you score points in each color based on the rows of that color that radiate out from the tile you placed. But, as usual with a Reiner Knizia game, there's a catch: at the end of the game, the color with your lowest score is the only one that counts, so you have to be careful to build up all your scores as evenly as possible.

It's great fun for two players, and it travels well, packed in a box not much larger than a paperback book, and taking up very little in the way of table space. In the travel edition, the tiles even lock to the board so you don't have to worry about them sliding around. You could probably even play this game in a car, as long as neither of you is driving...

Ingenious Challenges is a follow up to Ingenious which presents three different games based on the same idea of color matching and managing your score in the different colors as evenly as possible. It includes a Card Challenge, a Dice Challenge, and a Tile Challenge: all use the same colored symbols and a variation on the same scoring system, but they are subtly different enough that they don't seem like the same game with dice instead of cards or tiles.

Ingenious Challenges is also a great travel game, but for a different reason. Its relatively easy rules, bright colors, and complete lack of elves, space marines or Cthuloid monsters make it a nice game to play with the non-gamer friends and family you may be travelling to visit. And it comes in a very small box.

Rating: Ingenious 4 (out of 5), Ingenious Challenges 3 (out of 5) Both are great games, but the original is a bit more elegant.

• Ingenious official website
• Ingenious Travel Edition on BoardGameGeek.com
• Ingenious Challenges official website
• Ingenious Challenges on BoardGameGeek.com

Dates played: February 18 and March 8, 2014

Playing with pyramids

Although I find most traditional, "according to Hoyle" card games other than poker a bit too simple to be really interesting, I do like the idea that there are hundreds of games you can play with just a regular deck of cards. This is what caught my attention about Looney Pyramids (also known as Icehouse Pieces), a set of plastic, pyramid-shaped game pieces with which dozens of different games can be played.

The first game we decided to play, Martian Backgammon, is a two-player game played on an imagined board divided into a 5x5 grid. Each player starts with 15 pyramid pieces, five each of three different sizes, all the same color, stacked in groups of three with the smaller pieces on the top, then the middle pieces, and the larger ones on the bottom so that you end up with a tree-like shape.

The object of the game is to move all of your pieces across the board in a pattern that forces them to move through two full rows of spaces. Your turn consists of rolling two dice, and moving pieces the number shown on each die separately; for example, if you roll a five and a four, you can move one piece up to five spaces and another piece up to four spaces. As pieces move, they can be stacked on top of the same size or larger pieces of the same color, but not on top of smaller ones. They can also end their move on empty spaces, but that is dangerous because if a piece lands on a single opponent's piece, the opponent's piece goes to the back row and has to restart its journey across the board.

The game is very abstract but surprisingly engaging, with a lot of movement and strategy choices as you try to set up the safest path across the board for your pieces and also slow your opponent down by sending their pieces back to the starting row.

The next game we played was Volcano, which is the game I remember most enjoying when we originally bought these pieces. It's another abstract movement game, but rather than each player starting with and moving their own pieces, the board (again a 5x5 grid) is populated by several nests of pieces in 5 different colors, plus 5 distinct "caps," small pieces of a sixth color that sit on top of the others.

Over the course of the game, players move the caps, which cause the pieces underneath to spread out in a specific pattern. If any of those pieces land on a piece of the same size, they are captured by the player. Captured pieces are worth more at the end of the game if they are in matching sets by color, so part of the strategy is in which pieces you capture and which ones you leave for your opponent.

The third game we tried was Gnostica, a game played with pyramid pieces and a deck of Tarot cards (we used the terrific 8-Bit Tarot by Portland artist Indigo Kelleigh). At the start of the game, nine cards are laid out in a 3x3 grid to create a board. Players start with a hand of six cards, and one piece on the board. Orientation of the pieces is important, as they affect either the card they are pointed at, or the one they are placed on if the piece is set upright, pointed upwards.

Each turn a player can either activate the ability of a card his piece is either on or pointed at, add a new card to the board, or discard a card to use its ability once. The abilities depend on what suit the card is: Cups allow you to place new pieces on the board, Coins allow you to grow your pieces to a larger size, Swords allow you to attack other pieces, and Wands allow you to move your pieces on the board. The Major Arcana cards each have their own special ability, usually a combination of two of the suits.

The object of the game is to score nine points by occupying cards on the board. The game ends when a player thinks they will have the nine points on their next turn - they declare their intention to win, and then the other players each get one turn to try to stop them from winning by taking occupied cards away from them. If the player who declared doesn't have nine points at the end of their next turn, they are eliminated from the game.

We found Gnostica to be the least interesting of the three, although it's possible that it just isn't balanced well for two players. With two, we found the game endings to be too abrupt as either the winning player would have an unassailable position, or they could easily have a few points taken away from them, allowing the other player to win by default.

Rating: Martian Backgammon and Volcano 3 (out of 5), Gnostica 2 (out of 5) The two movement games were definitely the more interesting, with a lot of strategic choices. However, we found them to be very unsocial, as we tended to concentrate on figuring out our moves in silence rather than chatting about the game as we normally do.

• Looney Pyramids official website
• Icehouse Pieces page on BoardGameGeek.com

Dates played: February 17 and March 8, 2014