Call it what you want, it's Star Wars Pandemic

Pandemic took the board gaming world by storm when it came out in 2008, quickly unseating Settlers of Catan as the go-to game for bringing new players into the hobby. Its success is down to several factors: it's an enjoyable, well-designed game, the theme is relatable and not too nerdy (no wizards, space ships or tentacle monsters), and the cooperative nature of the game opened it up to a whole new group of players who may have been traumatized by too many overly competitive games of Monopoly when they were children. Additionally, 2008 was the start of a board gaming renaissance that saw board games move out of the toy and hobby stores to become a mainstream product with wide market visibility. You can now buy Pandemic at my local grocery store.

Re-skins with different themes were a logical way to expand the game's appeal, and although it hasn't got anywhere near as ridiculous as all the tie-in versions of Clue or Monopoly, a Star Wars edition of Pandemic was probably inevitable. What's weird is that it isn't called Star Wars Pandemic or Pandemic: Star Wars. It's just Star Wars: The Clone Wars, with a surprisingly small "Pandemic System" logo in a bottom corner of the box.

Other than the Fall of Rome version I haven't played much Pandemic -- the theme just never particularly appealed to me. I can't really talk too much about how Star Wars: The Clone Wars is different, but I can say that it is definitely, recognizably Pandemic. The world map has been replaced by a map of the Star Wars galaxy (although probably not a particularly accurate one), players play Jedi Knights rather than aid workers, and the diseases are now armies of battle droids. The way the cards work is a little different too, with a mission system replacing the set collection from the original game.

When setting up a game of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, players choose a boss villain to play against, either Darth Maul, Count Dooku, General Grievous or Asajj Ventress. Each boss comes with their own unique deck of 6 cards that dictate how they will behave in the game, so players will need to adjust their strategies depending on which villain they are facing.

A deck of location cards determines where groups of battle droids will appear throughout the game. If a planet would ever have more than three, it instead gets a blockade ship that must be destroyed before any battle droids. Additionally the threat meter advances by one -- if the meter ever goes past six, the players lose the game, so managing the number of battle droids is critical.

The main innovation over regular Pandemic is the addition of missions that the players need to work together to accomplish in order to win the game. Each game starts with a certain number of mission cards based on the desired difficulty level, anywhere from three to six or more, with two missions revealed at a time. Missions generally involve going to a particular planet with a lot of a certain kind of resource, either clone troopers or ships. Once the required number have been completed, the boss villain shifts into finale mode, giving the players one final objective in order to win.

The game evokes its theme very well, with Jedi Knights fighting off armies of battle droids as they swarm across the galaxy. If I wasn't already familiar with the basics of Pandemic I would think it had been designed specifically as a Clone Wars game. The missions help with this feeling -- episodes of the Clone Wars television series were often about the heroes trying to achieve some objective while the war rages in the background, and that's just the feeling you get as you try to mitigate the swarming droids while trying to get your missions done.

It's a good Star Wars game, and a good version of Pandemic. Like most cooperative games it can fall victim to the "bossypants" syndrome, where the player with the most experience (or the most aggressive personality) tells everyone else what to do rather than letting them decide for themselves. But, just like the original Pandemic, the game play is easy to understand, with a fair amount of strategic depth and meaningful decision making -- it should be a great game for Star Wars fans who might not be dedicated board gamers...yet.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great use of both the Star Wars theme and the Pandemic game mechanisms.

• Star Wars: The Clone Wars official website
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars on BoardGameGeek

A short review of a short game: Dogfight!

Dogfight! Rule the Skies in 20 Minutes is the third entry in the 20 Minutes series originally published by PSC Games (and recently taken over by Floodgate Games). This time it's a different designer, so while the graphic design is consistent with Blitzkrieg! and Caesar!, the game play is entirely new but does retain some of the other games' basic elements, such as drawing tokens from a bag.

I used to play quite a bit of Wings of War, and my main complaint with it was that too much of the game was spent flying around in circles trying to get a shot on your opponent's plane. In Dogfight!, that's the entire game, but in a good way. Dogfight! distills World War One air combat down to its simplest form: the board depicts a simple loop of 8 spaces, plus two extra spots for a special maneuver. Players start their plane meeples on opposite sides of the loop, simultaneously revealing tiles that show a distance and a number of shots. Both players move their planes, then if one is behind and within 3 spaces of the other, they shoot.

It sounds simple, and at its most basic level it is. A special "loop" maneuver makes use of the two extra spaces on the board to allow the plane that's in front to attempt to loop around and get behind its opponent. An alternate board adds the concept of elevation in a very simple way, with different colored spaces restricting when a plane might be too high or too low to make a shot.

Additionally, the game includes ten different planes with different abilities, so once players have mastered the basics (which should only take a game or two) they can try adjusting their strategies based on their new plane's capabilities and drawbacks. Finally, the game introduces several scenarios that provide different win conditions beyond simply shooting down the other plane.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) While not quite a 5, Dogfight! is a little more involved than the other two 20 Minutes games while keeping the simplicity that sets this series apart.

• Dogfight! Rule the Skies in 20 Minutes official website
• Dogfight! Rule the Skies in 20 Minutes 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy low and sell high with Vikings on the Volga

Vikings on the Volga is a very simple game from the designer of Leaving Earth. This comes as a bit of a surprise, as Leaving Earth is by far one of the most complex games in our collection. The themes are broadly similar; both games are about planning a voyage in the most efficient way possible. But where Leaving Earth is a very complicated yet oddly compelling game about weight-to-thrust ratios, fuel consumption, and making certain you have enough food for the return voyage, Vikings on the Volga is a much simpler game about delivering the right commodities to the right city at the right time, and avoiding the dreaded Golden Horde.

The board is pieced together randomly out of very nice wooden tiles representing the Volga river and the cities that sit on it, as well as empty overland spaces that ships can travel over if they're willing to take extra time to do it. Each city has a corresponding pass that players can invest in; be the first to buy the pass for a particular city and all the other players have to pay you each time they want to enter or pass through it.

The game revolves around three different trade goods (amber, fish, and furs), each of which can be purchased in one city. There will be a number of public contract cards in play that determine which cities will buy which goods, and the price they sell for is determined by the number of cities that have been burned down by the Golden Horde (more on that in a moment). The bulk of the game is spent buying goods in one place and then selling them in another, hopefully along the shortest route possible.

While all this buying, moving, and selling is going on, there are two non-player pieces that move around the board: the aforementioned Golden Horde, and the Price of Kiev. Any player can give up their turn to move either the Horde or the Prince. If the Horde moves into a city, they burn it down, which will prevent buying or selling there. Also, when there are 5 burned cities in play, the game ends. If the Prince moves into a city, he puts the fire out, so moving the Horde and the Prince to help yourself and slow down your opponent is a key tactical move in the game.

It's a pretty basic pick up and deliver game, but the variable tile setup and the way the Horde and the Prince affect the game makes it a little more interesting. The graphic design is unusual but excellent, with understated colors, bold text that's easy to read, and lovely wooden tiles and player pieces that are much nicer than the punched cardboard you would normally expect from a game like this.

Rating: 3 out of 5. Gameplay alone is fairly mediocre, but the surprising production value is enough to make this game a little more noteworthy.

• Vikings on the Volga official website*
• Vikings on the Volga on BoardGameGeek

*Note: this game is made by a very small publisher who appear to print to order and do all the manufacturing in-house, so orders can take several months to be filled. I can't recommend ordering direct from the publisher unless you are extremely patient.

Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game: good enough for now

I love deck building games. These card games that usually involve each player starting with a basic deck of cards that they use to purchase newer, better cards towards an eventual goal of defeating a villain (or the other players) or just accumulating victory points. The format gives me a lot of what I like about trading card games, but without the massive investment of time, energy and money, and has become so ubiquitous as a game mechanism that it has become just one of many design elements in recent (and immensely popular) board games such as Dune: Imperium, and Lost Ruins of Arnak.

Like most people who were children in the 1970s, I love Star Wars. Although the franchise has seen its share of ups and downs over the years, I have enough nostalgic affection for it that I'm prepared to forgive its occasional excesses, and I think its current owners have started to figure out what works and what doesn't, and it's still pretty spectacular when they get it right.

So imagine my relief when Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game turned out to be a pretty good, if not fantastic, game.

The game's theme has invited a lot of comparisons to Star Realms, but honestly both games borrow their core mechanisms from games like Legendary: cards generate one or more different currencies (in this case, resources, attack, or Force) which are then used to attack your opponent or purchase from a center row of available cards. The game adds two new elements to the deck building game formula: a tug-of-war Force track, and the ability to attack unpurchased cards in the center row.

The Force track is a simple board with several spaces and a marker. When players play cards that generate Force, the marker moves towards their side of the board, and their turn starts with it all the way at their end, they get an extra resource to spend. There are also a handful of cards that have additional abilities if the marker is on one side of the board or the other. It's a game element that's not all that developed, but given the absence of major force-wielding characters like Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi from the game, I suspect this will be further developed in an expansion.

Normally in deck building games, players purchase new cards from a common pool or row of available cards, but how do you address that in a world as unambiguously black-and-white as Star Wars? It doesn't really work to have Han Solo working with a squad of stormtroopers, or Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin suddenly resolving their differences and teaming up. The game solves this problem by having all the cards marked as Empire, Rebellion, or neutral. Anyone can buy neutral cards, but rather than the Rebel player being able to buy Imperial cards, or having them just sit there in the row taking up space, each player can attack their opponent's cards, giving them a short term reward and freeing up space for (hopefully) one of their own cards to become available.

The ultimate goal of the game is to destroy your opponent's bases, anywhere between 3 and 5 depending on the desired length of game. Different bases have different in-game abilities, and players can defend their bases by putting capital ships into play -- these horizontally formatted cards stay in play from turn to turn (unusual for a game of this type) and soak up damage directed at their players' bases along with supplying other resources and abilities.

Thematically the game sticks to content from the original Star Wars trilogy and Rogue One, which is set at the same time. In addition to the aforementioned Force-users, the franchise's droid characters such as R2-D2, C-3PO and K2-SO are missing from the game, which makes me think they've been held back for a possible expansion that would introduce additional mechanisms, which would be a good idea -- while the game is perfectly entertaining and playable as-is, it is a little on the simple side and could eventually benefit from some added content to keep players interested.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A game that is perfectly entertaining, especially if you're a Star Wars fan, but lacking the depth of more involved deck building games like Legendary.

• Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game official website
• Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game on BoardGameGeek

Detective: finally a great mystery game

I've been on the hunt for a mystery solving game that's not as random and egregious as 211B Baker Street but with more game to it than Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, which is very story-driven but feels more like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure than a board game. A few years ago I thought I might have found it with Deadline, but that turned out to be a little too "gamey," offering up the worst of both worlds.

Several years later, my patience has finally paid off with Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, a game that combines just the right amount of compelling storytelling and light but effective game mechanisms.

The core game consists of five linked cases in which a stolen watch blossoms into a multigenerational murder mystery. Players work cooperatively, with a relatively small pool of resources that must be stretched to the limit in order to read as many clues as possible. However, some clues can lead up irrelevant blind alleys, so the players need to be analytical and careful about where they let the investigation take them.

The main game mechanism is a small board that tracks the hours of the day, the total number of days spent on the case, and the various locations that the players will need to move between in order to chase down clues. Time is an important resource in the game: following up on clues takes time, and so does moving between locations. Players can go into overtime, but it will negatively impact their final score.

Most of the clues are read via cards, but the game also has an online element, a website that players must use to log forensic evidence and answer a series of final questions about the case once all the available time has been used up. Additionally, the cases in the core game include clues that require players to look up background information and maps of the area where the story takes place. Normally I don't really like board games with a digital component (if I want to play a computer game then I'll play a computer game), but in this case it's not too obtrusive and can actually improve the immersion, as it's easy to imagine actual detectives using online resources to help solve their cases.

Of course, the fact that the game is intensively story driven means that there is little replay value (unless you have a very bad memory), but honestly I think the experience of solving the five cases is well worth the cost of the core box. The core game is a little intense as a starting point, but the publishers have since released a lighter introductory set (Detective Season One) and there are several additional cases available to add value to the game, as well as a few reskins: Vienna Connection (set during the cold war) plus Dune and Batman themed versions.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a great mystery solver with a deep story and just the right amount of game.

• Detective: a Modern Crime Board Game official website
• Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game on BoardGameGeek

Die Hard, but not any harder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roll West, young man...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Wars Destiny: may the dice be with you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paladins of the West Kingdom: complexity escalation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who: Dalek Dice yields predictable results

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

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

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

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

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

• Dalek Dice official website
• Dalek Dice on BoardGameGeek

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

Twilight Struggle stays on the right side of the line between complex and complicated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Twilight Struggle official website
• Twilight Struggle on BoardGameGeek

Roll Player: character developments

When you say it out loud, a whole board game about creating a D&D style fantasy character sounds silly. But how different is it from games where you're trying to build a western town, an expedition journal, or a space empire? And besides, there are many that would argue that building and developing your character is the most compelling part of playing Dungeons & Dragons, or indeed almost any role playing game.

Roll Player had intrigued me for some time, but it's done by a small publisher who primarily uses Kickstarter so availability has been spotty since it came out in 2016. I finally got a chance to play it at a convention earlier this year, and was instantly hooked, so much so that I bought a copy right then and there.

The game features a game board for each player denoting one of the standard fantasy races such as elf, dwarf, or halfling, plus a few more esoteric choices like minotaur or cat person. From there players are dealt a random set of character class cards from which they choose their profession, a backstory, and an alignment.

Game play revolves around randomly choosing 6-sided dice from a bag, rolling them, and then taking turns choosing which ones to add to the different statistics on your character sheet. The number rolled on the dice is important, but so is the color -- your profession tells you what range of numbers you want, and your back story (as well as other factors) tell you what color and where on the sheet you want to place them.

After dice are chosen, players choose from a row of equipment cards which further enhance their characters, with specific equipment and skills being more or less suited to specific types of characters. Among the choices are skill cards that adjust your character's alignment (their moral compass) when used, as well as trait cards that give a point bonus at the end of the game.

These two phases are repeated 12 times, at which time all the players will have a full player board. Points are awarded based on how well optimized the character is, with bonus points for placing the the right colors of dice in the right places on your sheet, acquiring equipment and traits best suited to your character, and getting your alignment marker placed in a way that suits your alignment card.

It's a well-designed engine-building game, and I find it a bit more compelling than empire-building games like Race for the Galaxy because I'm building and individual character and equipping him (or her) for adventure, rather than a more abstract empire of planets and starships. An expansion adds the ability to fight minor monsters, building up experience in order to face off against a big bad at the end of the game, but honestly I find that addition a little distracting; I would rather just spend time building my character.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a terrific game that's compelling but reasonably simple to play and not overly competitive, making it a great choice for a casual game night.

• Roll Player official website
• Roll Player 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

Marvel Strike Teams: a superhero dungeon crawl

On first glance, Marvel Strike Teams looks like another variant in Wizkids' Heroclix line of games. It has many similarities, both thematic and mechanical, but a number of differences that make it an interesting game in its own right.

Like Heroclix, Marvel Strike Teams is a tactical superhero battle game. It uses a grid system for movement and range, and characters find their powers and abilities decreasing in effectiveness as they take on damage, which is a hallmark of the Heroclix system.

Unlike Heroclix, Strike Teams is a one vs. many style game, with one player taking on the role of a supervillain and his minions, and the others each controlling a single hero and working cooperatively to foil the villain's dastardly plans. It's also much more mission oriented, with victory centered on accomplishing certain in-game goals (such as rescuing hostages or finding macguffins rather than just trying to obliterate your opponent's forces. In spite of the superhero theme, the game structure is that of a classic "dungeon crawl," with heroes creeping through rooms and corridors in search of treasure and a quick exit.

The game is designed to be played campaign style over multiple game sessions, with both the heroes and the villains gaining experience and improving their abilities between games, another thing that sets it apart from the one-off battles of Heroclix and makes it seem more like a D&D-style dungeon crawler.

But the really innovative thing about Strike Teams is that it uses a diceless system for combat. Players instead use resource management and damage control to accomplish their side's goals during the game.

Each round, characters are given a certain number of action points, which can be spent to move, heal damage, use special powers, and most importantly, attack and defend. Action points can be saved up from round to round (up to a pre-set maximum), so game play is a balancing act between moving, attacking, and saving aside points to defend your character against attacks.

It's very different from most battle games (including Heroclix), which use random dice rolls to determine the outcome of combat. Sure, most of those games will include game mechanics to mitigate the randomness such as rerolls, bonuses, and extra dice, but there is always the chance that an attack will go badly due to random chance that is outside the player's control.

Monolith's Conan game is probably a closer comparison in terms of the level of strategic resource management and focus on scenario goals over outright fighting, but even it uses dice to resolve combat.

With only a handful of characters to choose from in the base game an one small expansion, Strike Teams lacks the epic scope of what Heroclix can offer with its thousands of different figures over multiple franchises. It's a pity there aren't more expansions planned for Strike Teams, because mechanically it's a much more interesting game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A terrific alternative to battle games like Heroclix, but unfortunately its lack of commercial success will limit this game to only a handful of characters and limited replayability.

• Marvel Strike Teams official website
• Marvel Strike Teams 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