Star Trek Away Missions: Is it a board game with miniatures or a miniatures game with a board?

First, let’s talk about the miniatures

When the game was first announced, Star Trek: Away Missions came under a bit of criticism over the cartoony style of the miniatures, and I must admit that I initially decided to pass on the game for that reason. Miniatures gamers tend to obsess over scale, with a weird need for all of the miniatures in our collections to be interchangeable or at least consistent – it’s a fairly unreasonable demand that I suspect comes from the same part of the brain that compels some people to collect Funko Pops or Lego minifigures.

However, I was given a chance to take a closer look at the game, first via an OnTableTop.com Let’s Play and later from an open box that the owner of my local game cafe kindly let me paw through. I determined that the game play looked pretty interesting, and the figures were growing on me. The fact that the game definitely plays much more like a board game than a tactical miniatures game (although it has plenty of elements of both, which we’ll get to shortly) helped me to stop comparing the figures to “proper” miniatures, and as it turns out, they have been an absolute joy to paint – you can see some of my efforts on my OnTableTop project blog.

Now let’s talk about the game

There is an emerging category of game that draws heavily on the elements of both miniatures and board games to produce something that is (hopefully) more tactical than your typical board game, but less complicated and labor-intensive than your typical miniatures game. The idea is nothing new, going back at least as far as HeroQuest and Aliens (both published in 1989). Games of this type tend to occupy a sliding scale with “board game with miniatures as playing pieces” at one end and “miniatures with a pre-printed board” at the other, with notable examples including Monolith’s Conan and Mythic Battles, Gale Force Nine’s Firefly Adventures and Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps, and Osprey’s Wildlands and Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter. Star Trek: Away Missions definitely leans towards the board game side of this spectrum, but it does have some tactical elements to it.

The game takes place immediately after the Battle of Wolf 359, the Borg attack on the Federation seen in the Star Trek: the Next Generation fourth season episode “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2.” The premise of the game is that the players are directing crews to investigate and salvage damaged Federation and Borg vessels in the aftermath of the battle. The board is made up of tiles depicting the interior of a Federation ship on one side and a Borg ship on the other – they are functionally the same but it does allow for some variety between games, as certain goals will be in different places depending on which side players decide to use.

Once the board is set up, the players each begin the game with a crew of four or five characters, and two separate decks of cards, one for missions and one for support cards. The mission cards describe requirements that usually involve moving a character with a particular skill to a specific area of the board and then passing a test by rolling dice. Combat may occasionally break out (also resolved using dice), but for the most part it is a mission solving game, which is in keeping with Star Trek’s themes and ideas of non-violent solutions to problems – the best Star Trek stories are about the heroes cleverly avoiding war and combat, and it’s nice to see that reflected in the game.

The game is played over three rounds, during which players move their characters around the board in an attempt to fulfill the requirements of their mission cards. Support cards can be played to help things along, make it an interesting mix of tactical movement and “right place, right time” card play. Three rounds doesn’t seem like a lot, but in practice it’s plenty of time for a satisfying game, and makes for a nice time limit to keep the game from dragging on for too long.

The characters in the base game, as well as those in the six expansion packs that have been released so far, are all organized into pre-made teams with only a very minor amount of customization available. The game attempts to make up for this by making the mission and support card decks customizable. The idea is that after you play a few games you can pick and choose which missions you want to try to attempt with each crew, and which support cards you think will be of the most use. It’s a concept that should be very familiar to players of trading card games such as Magic: the Gathering, but I think it’s one of this game’s few weak links. It requires players to spend time choosing cards before the game even starts – something that is expected in customizable games but seems a little out of place in what is being presented as more of a traditional board game.

All in all, Star Trek: Away Missions is a nice mix of board game and tactical miniatures game, leaning into the strengths of each type of game. And you will end up finding those goofy looking miniatures charming, I promise...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) With its emphasis on mission solving elements rather than combat, this really does seem like the best choice for a Star Trek miniatures game.

• Star Trek: Away Missions official website
• Star Trek: Away Missions on BoardGameGeek

Radlands: the perfectly balanced apocalypse

When it comes down to it, there are three elements that will determine whether or not I enjoy a game. Generally speaking, as long as a game does a good job with any two of the three and doesn't blow it too badly on the third, I'm likely to have a good time with it. Those elements are:

• Game play: the systems and mechanisms the game uses.
• Theme: the genre or story the game is trying to tell, whether it's a pre-existing intellectual property or something created just for the game.
• Component quality: the artwork, writing, and the physical quality of the game pieces.

For example, Leading Edge's Aliens game from 1989 has appallingly bad component quality, but it gets a pass from me because it's a solid game design and it's based on one of my all time favorite movies. Tapestry, on the other hand, has extremely high production value and the game play is terrific, but I couldn't honestly tell you what the theme is even about, and I most likely won't be rushing out to see Tapestry: the movie (although I might if it helps explain the game's setting). Starship Captains is a good example of a game that nails all three elements: great game play, excellent artwork and components (except for those weirdly low-quality cardboard space ships), and a theme that is more Star Trek than Star Trek often is.

All of which brings us to Radlands, from Roxley Games. Roxley is well known for their extremely high production values -- they are one of the very few publishers that uses Kickstarter the way it was meant to be used, as a way to provide funding for a high quality product that they then make available to the general, non-Kickstarter backer public either via traditional retail outlets, or via direct sales on their website.

Radlands is a two player card game set in an 80s-style post-apocalypse, all neon pink and impossibly straight mohawks. Players use their cards to construct a tableau consisting of rows and columns, with the cards in front protecting those behind them, and the final row representing the player's "camps," cards which must be protected at all costs. Destroy all three of your opponent's camps, and you're the winner.

A lot of the game mechanisms will be familiar to anyone who has played a lot of this type of mid-weight adventure card game. Players get a budget of resources (in this case, water) that they can spend to play cards on the table, or use the special abilities of cards that are already in play, all with the goal of destroying your opponent's cards while protecting your own. One feature I particularly like is that cards can also be discarded for a one-time effect, so there are rarely useless cards in your hand. The game effects are limited to a few straightforward options like destroying enemy cards or gaining extra card draws or resources for yourself. It's not terribly complex, but that means it's not terribly complicated, and it still makes for an engaging game.

The theming on the cards is great, and fits with the game play very well. The characters on the cards will be familiar to anyone who is a fan of post-apocalypse action movies, especially the Mad Max series, and the structure of the game really does feel like a desperate final battle such as the one we see at the end of The Road Warrior. The production value is also top-notch. The cards and water tokens are nice and sturdy, the printing is sharp, and the artwork by Dice Throne artist Manny Trembley is done in his signature slick, animation-like style, but roughed up just a little to make it fit the harsher setting.

It's a deceptively simple game that scores high on all three criteria: the theme is entertaining and fits the well-designed game mechanisms, and the components look and feel great. The game comes in a super-deluxe edition with fancy packaging and a bunch of optional extras, but honestly the $25 retail edition is a pretty nice package, especially for the price.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a great little game that feels like a high-octane post-apocalyptic battle.

• Radlands official website
• Radlands on BoardGameGeek

First impression: Doctor Who Nemesis

In Doctor Who: Nemesis, players take on the roles of iconic villains from Doctor Who and attempt to win by succeeding at their nefarious schemes before the other players do. Each villain has their own unique victory condition, and while the game is primarily a race to complete a particular combination of plays first, players can also interfere with the other players by playing hero cards designed to slow them down.

It is primarily a card game, with a small board worker placement element. Each player has their own board with four spaces representing different combinations of actions, mainly drawing and/or playing different types of cards, and a worker pawn that must move to a different space each turn. A lot of the game's decision points rest with which space to move to that will allow the player to play the type of cards they need to play that turn.

From the above description, Doctor Who: Nemesis sounds exactly like the Villainous series of games, which comes in Marvel, Star Wars, and classic Disney flavors. So exactly that it seems lucky for the designers of Doctor Who: Nemesis that the common wisdom is that it isn't possible to copyright game mechanisms. At the very least, comparisons between the games are inevitable.

I will concede that the games are extremely similar (with the caveat that I have only played Star Wars Villainous). The overall game structure is identical, but the card play in Doctor Who: Nemesis is quite different -- it reminds me a lot more of classic collectible card games from the 1990s, specifically Decipher's Star Wars and Star Trek CCGs. Cards in the game represent characters, permanent conditions, and temporary advantages. Character cards play to specific locations, and can be used to block your opponents' ability to use the actions on their board effectively, resulting in battles where the value of each player's characters at a location are totaled and compared, with the loser losing their forces but the winner having had to spend time fighting off the invaders instead of working on the scheme they need to play out in order to win. It adds a lot of player interaction that's missing from Villainous, and makes the game seem a lot less like double solitaire.

Where Doctor Who: Nemesis really improves on Villainous is in how the forces of good are included in the game. In Villainous, each character has a separate deck of hero cards that can be drawn and played by opponents in order to slow down that player. It works, but it's a little disjointed, and doesn't allow for any real strategy as you're drawing two cards, immediately playing one, and discarding the other. In Doctor Who: Nemesis, each player is given two randomly chosen Doctors at the start of the game; each of those Doctors comes with 4 cards that are shuffled in to that player's deck. The Doctor cards can be used to slow down the opponent by blocking their action spaces, and some of them offer alternate victory conditions that either player can work towards. It's a much more elegant solution and works well with the game's theme: it's easy to imagine Daleks and Cybermen competing for universal dominance, only to have the Doctor come along and foil everyone's plans.

The game was fairly easy to learn, with a surprisingly well-organized rule book and consistent graphics and reminders on the cards and boards. The only thing we found a little awkward was the turn structure. On your turn, you choose your action space, then play & move your characters and resolve battles, then do the actions on the space you've chosen. We found it to be a little counterintuitive to choose an action, then do something unrelated before resolving that action.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) All in all we enjoyed the game quite a bit. Yes, it borrows a lot from Villainous, but we thought it was a more interesting game.

• Doctor Who: Nemesis official website
• Doctor Who: Nemesis on BoardGameGeek

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

Marvel Champions: do we need another hero?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Marvel Champions official website
• Marvel Champions on BoardGameGeek 

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to deck-build. Legendary: a James Bond Deck Building Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arctic Scavengers: Scrounging in the snow

I get information about new (and new to me) games from lots of different sources. I spend a lot of time lurking on BoardGameGeek, I subscribe to the Facebook feeds of most of my favorite game publishers, I watch Wil Wheaton's Table Top, and I'm a recent convert to Beasts of War's Weekender show, just to name a few.

I also spend a lot of time browsing the shelves at my local game store (Guardian Games, a huge and well-stocked shop). Occasionally, a game I've never heard of will jump off the shelf at me, and this is how I discovered Arctic Scavengers.

Recent films Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Snowpiercer, and especially Mad Max: Fury Road had rekindled my interest in the post-apocalypse genre, and the artwork on the box for Arctic Scavengers intrigued me. Combine that with my deep love of deck-building games and you have an easy buy.

In the game, players represent groups of survivors scavenging the frozen ruins of a near future earth for food, equipment, medicine, and useful people to add to their pool of resources. As with most deck-building games, each player starts with a deck of cards representing basic resources, and slowly builds them up throughout the game.

There are a lot of interesting strategic choices to be made on an average turn, chief among them being what to have your survivors spend their time doing. You can mind your own business and dig through the junkyard for cards representing run-of-the-mill resources (and sometimes useless junk), but you may want to hold some of your people in reserve to fight over the much better cards in the contested resources pile. You also need to play some of your cards to generate food and medicine, which is used to buy face up cards from the center of the table representing more effective personnel such as thugs, saboteurs and snipers.

The pacing and tone of the game are a little on the somber side, which definitely enhances the theme of post-apocalyptic survivors wandering a frozen wasteland, but player turns go quickly, and the limited number of contested resource cards act as a game timer, so games don't take too long to play.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's not the most high-octane deck-building game out there, but it's simple and self-contained, which makes for a nice change of pace from more complicated games like Legendary.

• Arctic Scavengers official website
• Arctic Scavengers on BoardGameGeek

This may seem familiar: a trio of licensed re-skins

Folding licensed properties into games has been standard practice for about as long as there has been a modern gaming industry, and it generally comes in two types: games created with the licensed property in mind, and games where the property is "painted on" to a pre-existing design. Both types can be wildly inconsistent in terms of quality, from the exceptional (Firefly: the Game) to the surprising (The Lone Ranger Shuffle the Deck Card Game), to the downright appalling (Doctor Who: the Game of Time and Space).

In many cases, a re-skin of a game using a familiar license can make me try a game that I may not have been particularly interested in otherwise, such as with Jarl: the Vikings Tile-Laying Game, a re-skin of The Duke which I only noticed because I'm a fan of the Vikings TV show.

Star Trek Panic falls squarely into this category. I had played Castle Panic once or twice, and while I enjoyed the game play, the cartoon-fantasy theme didn't really interest me so I never bothered picking up a copy of the game. A Star Trek version certainly caught my attention, and the idea of defending the Enterprise from Klingons and Romulans is a lot more interesting to me than defending a castle from orcs and goblins.

To be honest, I don't recall too many details of Castle Panic's game play, so I'm not entirely certain if there have been any major changes or additions for the Star Trek version. I can say that Star Trek Panic is a fun and relatively simple cooperative game. Each player has a hand of cards representing various tactical moves the ship can make, and they must work together to solve a series of missions, each with a specific in-game requirement such as reaching a starbase or evading a giant space amoeba. All the while, pesky Klingon and Romulan ships appear in random spaces on the board and gradually wear down the ship's shields and hull.

The cardboard components are a bit on the cheap side, but are nevertheless well-designed and very effective. The model of the Enterprise at the center of the board trails fire and smoke as it gets progressively more damaged, which does a great job of building tension and is, perhaps ironically, more dramatic than most of the model effects on the  original television show.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Quite a bit lighter, both in tone and complexity, than most of the other Star Trek games in our collection, which makes for a nice change of pace.

• Star Trek Panic official website
• Star Trek Panic on BoardGameGeek.com

Archer: Once You Go Blackmail brings the world of irreverent super-spy Sterling Archer to Love Letter, a game that certainly hasn't been shy about re-skinning itself. This version adds a "hidden identity" card to the mix, and changes several of the traditional Love Letter card effects so that they interact with the hidden identity card in various ways.

 I'm not sure than any version of Love Letter is really better than any other, but it's great that there are so many to choose from. You should be able to find the Love Letter that's right for you.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's still a dirt-simple game, which is part of its charm and makes it ideal for groups of non-gamers, or situations where it might be too loud or distracting to play a more complicated game.

• Archer: Once You Go Blackmail official website
• Archer: Once You Go Blackmail on BoardGameGeek.com

Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China follows the structure of the Marvel Legendary game rather than the more complex scenario-based Encounters series. Players choose a plot and a villain from among those featured in the film, add a few groups of minor villains and henchmen and a selection of the film's well-meaning if barely competent heroes, and try to work together to foil the villain's dastardly plot.
Upper Deck's Legendary series has proven to be a pretty robust game system, with the Aliens and Predator franchises being just as at home in it as the core Marvel property. Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China is no exception; the somewhat ridiculous adventures of Jack Burton and the Pork Chop Express fit right in.

In an effort to reflect the bumbling nature of the Big Trouble heroes, the cards in this version of the game often interact in surprising and not always helpful ways, making the game more random and silly, and quite a bit lighter in tone than the other games in the Legendary series. Originally I was excited about this release because of the possibilities of mixing it up the other Legendary games (Jack Burton vs Predator seemed like a shoo-in), but on playing I find that it holds together so well on its own that I'm reluctant to try add anything to it.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) another great addition to this series that stands so firmly on its own that, if you're familiar with the other Legendary games, you may want to think of this one as a new game that you already know how to play.

• Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China official website
• Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China on BoardGameGeek.com

What took us so long to get into Legendary: A MARVEL Deck Building Game?

I'm not really sure why it took me so long to buy into Legendary: a MARVEL Deck Building Game. I'm a big fan of the superhero genre, and of deck building games in general. It could be that I already had several editions of the DC Comics Deck Building Game, although the two games aren't really very similar. I picked up Legendary Encounters: an ALIEN Deck Building Game on the first day it was released, and it remains one of my favorites. I also bought the Predator edition, and have plans to pick up the forthcoming Firefly and Big Trouble in Little China editions as soon as they are available. Maybe that's what finally got me to pull the trigger on the original Marvel edition.

It's interesting coming to the original Legendary game after playing both Encounters versions. They are recognizably the same game with only minor structural changes. Where Alien and Predator both use scenarios based on the films to structure the cards that players play against, Marvel uses different combinations of super villain masterminds, lower-level villain groups, and plots pulled from decades of comic book storylines.

Legendary's basic approach is a little abstract. Rather than each player taking control of a specific hero or a team of heroes, they instead start with a simple deck of cards representing SHIELD agents. Players then gradually add cards to their decks representing signature moves from a pre-selected group of superhero characters (usually five), so the game isn't so much "I control Wolverine and you control Spider-Man" as it is all of the players orchestrating Wolverine and Spider-Man's battle against the various villains menacing the city.

Plot cards provide all manner of interesting variants on the basic rules, creating different win conditions and sometimes making the villain cards behave in different ways. Each plot is presided over by a Mastermind villain who brings his own henchmen and tactics to the game, and with near-infinite combinations of plots and Masterminds, you can guarantee that no two games will ever be alike.

The Marvel version of Legendary really puts you in the middle of a superhero battle, so much so that it's all the more interesting that the game system seems so well suited to the Alien and Predator franchises too. Best of all, since the core Legendary game is more or less compatible with the Encounters editions, you can have the Avengers try to fight off an invasion of acid-blooded Aliens, or see how Wolverine matches up against the Predator...

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Legendary is a robust game system with a huge amount of replay value, especially if you're brave enough to start mixing and matching the different editions.

• Legendary: A MARVEL Deck Building Game official website
• Legendary: A MARVEL Deck Building Game on BoardGameGeek

Legendary: A Predator Deck Building Game -- it came from another planet for the thrill of deck building

Upper Deck's Legendary series of deck building games is proving to be a pretty versatile game system. My experience with the Marvel superhero version is limited, but it seems to reflect the idea of a big super team battle very well. Legendary Encounters: an Alien Deck Building Game absolutely nails the feel of the Alien franchise, with the different scenarios even allowing for the differences in tone between the four films.

Legendary Encounters: A Predator Deck Building Game is another success for the series. It manages not to be just a simple re-skin of the Alien version, but its own game with a tone that is in line with the first two Predator films. It's really two games in one: players can choose to play a fully cooperative version as the humans in their struggle to survive the Predator's hunting expedition, or they can play a competitive game as Predators, seeing who can hunt the most humans and occasionally getting into duels with each other.

"Instead of complaining, maybe you should help."

The cooperative version is arguably more difficult to win than any of the Alien scenarios. There is a much greater emphasis on teamwork, with many cards that are only effective when played in coordination with the other players. It calls to mind the scene in the first Predator film where Dutch and his crew are setting traps for the Predator, and even naysayer Dillon and prisoner Anna are drafted to help. The idea of military camaraderie is further reinforced by cards that encourage players to draft a variety of different cards rather than focusing only on cards associated with a particular character.

In the competitive version, players get to play as Predators carving a path of destruction through either the jungles of Central America or the streets of Los Angeles. It manages to be recognizably the same game but also completely different. Game play is mainly focused on hunting human characters, beginning with no-name thugs and minions and working your way up to the main characters from the films, with the game ending once someone has defeated either Arnold Schwarzenegger's character from the first film, or Danny Glover's from the second.

Each kill is worth honor points, with bonuses for heavily armed characters or disarming traps. Additionally, several cards allow the players' Predators to duel, swiping away at one another in an attempt to directly knock out the competition. An advanced game variant adds Test cards which award extra points for meeting certain conditions such as healing damage or wiping out multiple humans in a single turn, and Challenge cards that give each player a personal goal to work towards (other than killing everything in sight).

It's clear that the game's developers put a lot of thought into making this game feel uniquely like the Predator films, while at the same time fitting it into the established rules framework of the Legendary series, and I think they succeeded admirably.

The game can be freely mixed with Legendary Encounters: an Alien Deck Building Game, allowing the characters from Predator to jump into the Alien scenarios, and vice versa. It's even easy to mix different scenario elements: imagine a South American jungle crawling with Aliens, or Predators descending on the doomed colony from the second Alien film.

This mix and match is definitely part of the fun of having multiple games with different licensed properties using the same game system. The next two announced games in the series are Firefly and Big Trouble in Little China. Now imagine the Serenity crew stumbling across a derelict ship full of Aliens, or Jack Burton going up against the Predator...

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Another terrific game in the series, it manages to be its own game while fitting seamlessly in with what has gone before.

• Legendary Encounters: a Predator Deck Building Game official website
• Legendary Encounters: a Predator Deck Building Game on BoardGameGeek

Apex Therapod Deck Building Game: not for vegetarians

Apex: Therapod Deck-Building Game is a game about dinosaurs eating other dinosaurs, designed with a very specific audience in mind: solo gamers. It's not exclusively a solitaire game (it can be played with as many as 8), but there is very little direct player interaction, and the game is essentially a race to see who can take down the most fearsome dinosaurs before the inevitable asteroid strike.

That said, it is an immensely enjoyable and challenging game, with mechanics that, while fairly complex, run pretty smoothly and fit the theme extremely well. And the artwork on the cards is fantastic.

Each player chooses a species of carnivorous dinosaur to play, with choices ranging from classic favorites like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor to lesser known beasts such as Sarcosuchus (a giant prehistoric crocodile). Each species plays somewhat differently, with their own strategies, strengths and weaknesses. Like most deck building games, each player starts with a relatively weak deck of cards, in this case eggs, hatchlings, and carcasses. Each player has their own unique Apex deck of stronger versions of their particular dinosaur species, cards which must be purchased over the course of the game.

The game starts with a row of cards called the game trail representing prey, and another representing evolutionary advances. Game play consists of playing out cards to hunt prey from the prey deck, and then spending the points gained to buy better cards for your deck, either general evolutionary advances from the table, or specific apex cards from your apex deck, which are made available by playing egg cards. The goal is to populate your deck with stronger cards, enabling you to hunt larger prey and eventually fight the boss dinosaurs and their minions, that are shuffled into the hunt deck.

At the start of the game, a certain number of boss dinosaurs and their minions are shuffled into the deck of prey, so that they appear randomly throughout the game. When a boss appears, all the other prey scatter (are discarded), and the clash of the titans commences. You have to play a lot of high-value cards over multiple rounds to have a hope of beating a boss, and failure results in trauma cards which are added to your deck and produce negative effects when drawn.

Much like the age of the dinosaurs, Apex has a built-in time limit in the form of a deck of environment cards representing tropical storms, droughts, dinosaur stampedes, and the Asteroid Strike and Extinction cards that signal the end of the game. Players score points based on the amount of prey they have consumed, but no player can win the game unless they've defeated at least one boss monster.

There is a lot going on, but it stops short of being overly complicated. The flow of turns and rounds is pretty smooth once you get accustomed to it. There's a brilliant press-your-luck ambush mechanic that allows you to set aside cards from your hand for later use, but forces you to place an Alert card in your discard pile where it will eventually get reshuffled into your deck. If you draw the Alert before you've played your ambush cards, they are discarded without effect and certain effects on cards in the game trail will trigger. It's a great idea that really translates the idea of an ambush predator coldly observing its prey before striking.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) An extremely well-designed game with a lot of deep, complex, and thematic game play, and gorgeous artwork.

• Apex: Therapod Deck-Building Game official website
• Apex: Therapod Deck-Building Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Revolver: cowboys or Aliens?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Realms: saving the CCG

During the collectible card game boom of the 1990s, I tried quite a few of the different games that hit the market, from mainstream games like Decipher's Star Trek and Star Wars, to some of the more obscure titles like On the Edge and Clive Barker's Imajica. I love the concept of building a customized deck of cards with different abilities that would work in combination, and I also enjoyed the way these games (when designed well) would immerse you in their worlds.

Unfortunately, the CCG business model demands a fairly large financial commitment from its players, and the market, combined with a flailing economy, just couldn't keep up with the sheer number of games that were produced. Additionally, many CCGs would continue to add layers of complexity in order to keep players interested, which usually put up a barrier making it very difficult for new players to get into the game. The CCG boom eventually collapsed under its own weight, with only a handful of games such as Magic and Legend of the Five Rings still being produced today.

Fantasy Flight Games pioneered the Living Card Game format in order to keep their Call of Cthulhu and Game of Thrones CCGs alive, and that has since proved to be a viable format that preserves CCG-style gameplay without the random booster packs. The games are much easier to keep up with in terms of the amount of cards you need to buy, but keeping up with evolving rules and strategy for just one of these games can still be a full-time job.

Enter the deck building game, a sub-genre of card games that is also helping to preserve CCG-style game play, but with the strategic focus on building your deck during the game with what happens to be available, rather than chasing rare cards to build the ultimate card-gaming machine. It's a lighter and much more accessible type of game.

All of which brings us to Star Realms, a science fiction themed deck building game created by a group of professional Magic players. Unlike most deck building games, which tend to involve players racing to achieve a certain number of points or other goal, the object of Star Realms is to knock your opponent out of the game by directly attacking him.

Much like in Magic, each Star Realms player starts with an amount of Authority points, which are whittled away at by opponents' attacking ships. Cards in the game represent ships and bases, with ships making attacks and bases providing defense, as well as other resources. Cards also generate trade, which players use to buy more and better cards for their decks. The universe of the game consists of four spacefaring factions, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Ships and bases from the same faction will often work better in combination, but the factions can be combined as needed.

It's a lot like Magic in a lot of ways, but what makes Star Realms such a great game is its simplicity and accessibility. The rules are incredibly simple, with a loose turn structure and easy to understand game text on the cards, and only a few different card types to keep track of. It's easy to play, easy to teach, but still has a surprising amount of strategic depth, with lots of decisions to be made by players during a game.

Best of all, a base set containing enough cards for two players is only $16 retail, well below the entry point for almost any other game on the market. $5 expansion packs add a few interesting extras like hero characters, event cards that affect all players, gambit cards that give players unique abilities at the start of the game, and even outside threats that make it into a cooperative game, with all the players working together against hordes of pirates or unfathomable space monsters.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Star Realms is very quick to pick up and easy to play, and offers a lot of the strategy and entertainment value of a collectible card game for a fraction of the time and money.

• Star Realms official website
• Star Realms on BoardGameGeek.com

Legendary Encounters: An ALIEN Deck Building Game -- in space, no one can hear you deck build

Back in 1989, Dark Horse Comics published the first issue of Aliens vs. Predator, an idea that seems inevitable now but was pretty radical at the time. It opened up a floodgate of comic book crossovers, with the ubiquitous Aliens and Predators in the thick of it, fighting everyone from Superman and Batman to Judge Dredd and the Terminator, and of course each other.

So it makes a kind of sense that Upper Deck Entertainment would release Legendary Encounters: an Alien Deck Building Game as an expansion to Legendary, their Marvel super hero deck building game, although it should be pointed out that Marvel never jumped on the Aliens/Predator crossover bandwagon in the comics.

Interestingly, Legendary Encounters is a complete, self-contained game which uses some elements from the Marvel game (enough that crossovers are possible) but plays somewhat differently. It's a fully cooperative game, not unlike Arkham Horror, which makes sense given the Alien universe's almost Lovecraftian atmosphere of doom and futility. Players work together against an encounter deck composed of Aliens and other plot complications, depending on what scenario elements the players choose to add.

The game consists of four different three-part scenarios, based on the four Alien films. Each part of each scenario consists of a set of story-specific encounter cards that are added to the deck. In an ingenious bit of game design, the scenario parts can be mixed and matched, so that, for example, you can put together a scenario consisting of the first part of Aliens, the second part of Alien Ressurection, and the thrilling finale of Alien 3. This increases the game's replayability exponentially, as does the fact that for each game, players are also required to shuffle in a random assortment of additional Alien cards.

Another wonderfully theme-appropriate game mechanic is what happens when a player is infected by an Alien embryo. In the films, Alien facehuggers implant embryos in hapless human hosts, who then give grisly, explosive birth, usually at the most inconvenient of times. In the game, if a player is unlucky enough to lose a fight with a facehugger, they shuffle a chestburster card into their deck. When the chestburster makes it to the top of the deck and is drawn, it's all over for that player, leading to some great tension as each card draw is a nerve-wracking experience. There are even a few (but not many) cards a player can play to choke down the little monster and keep fighting a little longer.

The designers seem to really understand the source material, even to the point that each scenario's tone matches the film it's based on. The scenario for the original film is tense and atmospheric, with very limited resources for the players to use in fighting the Alien. The second one is much more action-packed, with an emphasis on equipping the players with weapons and gadgets. The less said about Alien 3 the better, and the Alien Resurrection scenario is as bombastic and over the top as the film.

As if the near-endless scenario combinations weren't enough, the game also includes several optional elements such as secret objectives that can result in one or more of the players being a hidden traitor, and even an Alien player deck, so that a player who has been killed by a chestburster can play as the Aliens. Great stuff.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A terrific, engaging game that is ingeniously designed and very true to its source material. Can't wait to see the Predator edition...

• Legendary Encounters: an Alien Deck Building Game official website
• Legendary Encounters: an Alien Deck Building Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: September 14, 2014

Smash Up: a collectible card game without all the work

The thing I like about Smash Up is that it takes a lot of my favorite elements from collectible card games and distills them down to their most simple. It manages to provide the kind of game play I go to CCGs for, but without the added complications like collecting cards, figuring out combinations and strategies, and building decks. It's a collectible card game without all the homework.

The game consists of a selection of 20-card decks representing common genre tropes such as pirates, zombies, and ninjas, as well as some not-so-common ones like dinosaurs with laser cannons. Each player chooses two decks and shuffles them together to form a single 40-card play deck. Locations called Bases are dealt out to the middle of the table, and the object of the game is to score points by having the most character cards present at each base when it "scores," which it does when a certain number of characters from all players are present.

Each faction has its own gimmick. Zombies play cards from the discard pile, pirates move cards around between the different Bases, robots "self-replicate" by allowing their player to play a bunch of characters each turn, and so on. The strategy comes from figuring out how to make your two factions' abilities work together.

The point of the game is to occupy the Bases while preventing your opponent from doing the same, so it's not about confrontational combat, but rather about strategic placement and manipulation. There are only two card types, Minions and Actions, and on a normal turn a player can play one of each so it's easy to teach new players. Like the best CCGs, Smash Up presents a simple framework of rules and then gives the players cards which allow them to break those rules, in this case by playing extra cards, moving minions between the different Bases, playing from the discard pile, and so on.

At the same time, Smash Up avoids the barriers that stop most people from playing collectible card games. There's no collecting involved; the base set contains enough cards for four players, and each expansion is self-contained, with four 20-card decks and complete rules for two players. Choosing your two factions is the only deck-building involved, but that simple choice offers a surprising amount of strategic decision making, as the different factions work together in surprising ways, so a zombie pirate deck is going to play quite a bit differently from a zombie wizard deck.

Smash Up manages to offer the complex strategy of a collectible card game while at the same time being very easy to pick up and play without any prep time. It's a breeze to teach new players, and the slick artwork will help hold their attention.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) With all the different card combinations, we could easily play this very accessible game all afternoon.

• Smash Up official website
• Smash Up on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: August 5, 2014

The Resident Evil Deck Building Game: monster killing unplugged

I had never played any of the Resident Evil video games, or seen any of the movies, before I played the Resident Evil Deck Building Game. I hadn't played Dominion or and of the other deck building games on the market either, so I like to think I was able to approach it without any expectations or preconceived notions, either about the theme or the type of game it is.

A deck building game, for those of you who may not be familiar, is an offshoot of the collectible card game, but rather than building a deck ahead of time and bringing it to the table, players build their customized decks over the course of the game, starting with a small number of basic cards and adding more specific cards from the available stacks laid out on the table.

In Resident Evil, these cards represent weapons, ammunition, and actions that players will use while facing down hoards of rampaging monsters in a creepy old mansion. Each player plays as one of the characters from the video game, with one or two unique abilities that come into play after they've killed a certain number of monsters. On a player's turn, he or she can play any number of weapon and ammunition cards, buy one new card from the stacks at the center of the table (using gold values on the ammo and other cards), play one action card (although many actions allow the player to play additional actions) and explore the mansion once.

Exploring the mansion is the meat of the game. The mansion deck consists of  around thirty monsters of varying strength, plus one boss monster whose defeat ends the game. In a normal turn, a player can explore the mansion once, which consists of first playing as many weapons as possible from a hand of five cards. Each weapon has an ammo requirement that must be met by playing ammo cards in order for the weapon to be functional. Action cards will often provide additional card draws that can be played, as well as more ammo and bonuses to the amount of damage each weapon does.

One the player is armed to the teeth, the top card of the mansion deck is flipped over, revealing a monster that must be fought. Each monster has a health and a damage value; if the player's combined weapons do enough damage to wipe out the monster's health, the monster is killed and added to the player's stack of decorations, with more powerful monsters naturally being worth more points. Otherwise, the monster inflicts its damage on the player and their turn ends. After a certain amount of damage the player is killed, but they come back on their next turn with a reduction in health but no other ill effects.

Eventually, the boss monster will be drawn from the mansion deck. It is usually substantially more powerful than the other monsters, so as the mansion deck starts to dwindle in size, players are a bit more cautious about exploring, but at the same time, they should have more and better weapons and actions in their decks by then, making them more likely to be able to take down the boss.

When the boss monster is defeated, the game ends and players add up their decoration points to determine the winner.

I like the strategy involved in choosing what cards to add to your deck, and the added challenge of doing it on the fly as you play makes it more spontaneous than the often more deliberate and devious collectible card games. However, the random nature of the mansion deck leads to wildly inconsistent game times, with some games ending in 30 minutes and others taking several hours.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The game's fast pace and quick turns are somewhat undermined by its often lengthy play time.

Unfortunately this game is currently out of print, and it doesn't appear that the publisher has any plans for it.

• Resident Evil Deck Building Game on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: July 16, 2014

Deep space: Race for the Galaxy

It should be pretty obvious by now that we love collectible card games. Most good CCGs offer a sheer depth of theme and strategy that is far beyond most "stand-alone" card games or even board games. The collectible aspect of these games can make them difficult to get into, even in the case of the not-so-collectible options such as Fantasy Flight's Living Card Games (Call of Cthulhu, Lord of the Rings) or the soon to be released Doomtown Reloaded. And if you play the more obscure CCGs like we do, is often difficult to find other players who are willing to put the time and money into buying cards and building decks. We even find it exhausting from time to time.

That's why Race for the Galaxy is one of our all-time favorite games. It has a lot of the strategic depth of a CCG, but it's a boxed game with only a few expansions, and players all draw from the same deck so there's no deck building, making it much easier to just sit down and play.

The game has an epic science fiction theme, with game play consisting of playing cards that represent discovered worlds and technological, social and political developments, and then using these resources in clever combinations.

Race for the Galaxy is a game about getting cards into play, and it has several intriguing mechanics for doing so. A game round is divided up into five phases where different things happen: a card-drawing phase, phases for playing developments or worlds, a resource-spending phase, and a resource-generating phase. In addition to his normal hand of cards, each player has a stack of cards representing each of these game phases. At the start of the game round, each player chooses which phase he wants to be able to play in by choosing one of these cards and playing it face down on the table. All players reveal their choices at the same time, and the cards revealed dictate which phases will be played that round. If no one reveals the card for a particular phase, that phase doesn't get played that round, so a big part of the strategy is in trying to determine what your opponents want to do each round.

Additionally, the game deals with the idea of card cost in an interesting way. Every development and world has a cost to put it into play, and that cost is paid by discarding cards from your hand. So if you want to play a world with a cost of 4, you have to discard four cards from your hand, which can lead to some agonizing decisions as you choose which cards you don't think you'll want to put into play later.

Many worlds generate resources which can be spent to draw additional cards into your hand, but spending these resources can only be done in a particular phase of the game, and resources can only be regenerated in another phase. This leads to a lot of strategic decision making as players try to balance which phases they will play in each round.

To add to the game's strategy options, some worlds can only be put into play via military conquest. These worlds have a military cost, which must be matched by the total military value provided by your other worlds and developments. All the worlds in the game are either military or non-military, so you have to decide which path to follow fairly early in the game.

Each development and world is worth a certain amount of victory points at the end of the game. There are many developments that give bonus points if your cards in play follow a particular theme, such as exploring alien ruins or developing worlds that provide a certain type of resource. Additionally, many cards offer the opportunity to generate bonus points throughout the game. The game ends when any player has put 12 cards into play, at which time points are added up to determine the winner.

Expansions have added new cards and new options to the game. The Coming Storm adds Goals which award bonus points for being the first player to put certain cards into play, or having the most of a certain type. The Rebel vs Imperium expansion adds some limited conflict between players, allowing them to attack and take over each other's worlds, And The Brink of War adds prestige as a second point and payment system. The most recent, Alien Artifacts, adds a strange and somewhat out of place sub-game involving the exploration of a maze-like alien structure that plays almost like a separate board game.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Race for the Galaxy offers all the deep strategy and complexity of a collectible card game, without all the extra work of collecting cards and building decks.

• Race for the Galaxy official website
• Race for the Galaxy on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: June 29, 2014

Pirates of the Spanish Main: assemble your fleet

Pirates of the Spanish Main (later re-branded as Pirates of the Cursed Seas) is a very, very clever game, almost ridiculously so. A sailing ship miniatures combat game with simple punch-out-and-assemble models printed on credit card plastic was ingenious enough, but using the random booster pack delivery system that the game buying public had become accustomed to by 2004 (when the game was released) was a stroke of brilliance.

Even better, each and every $4 booster pack contained 2 ships, a card of punch-out treasure coins, the complete rules, and even a tiny six-sided die, making it possible to try the game out with the contents of a single booster pack. The card edges even doubled as a measuring tool for ship movement and cannon ranges.

Delivery system aside, the game itself is great. Players assemble a fleet of ships to a pre-determined point value. Each ship has its own unique abilities, and can be further customized with captain and crew pieces. Initially the pool of ships and crew consisted of Pirates, English and Spanish, with French and Americans added later, followed by smaller regional factions such as the Barbary Corsairs of North Africa, the Jade Rebellion from the South China Seas, and even a small group of Vikings from the icy waters of the north. Later still, the game added a supernatural element with the Cursed, a group of ghost ships and sea monsters.

Several islands (three per player) are placed on the playing surface, and each player contributes a number of treasure coins that are randomized and divided among the islands, face down. Most coins have a gold value (anywhere from 1 to 7, and there are even some decoy 0 value coins), but some are unique treasures such as Shipping Charts, Letters of Marque or even unhelpful things like Cannibals. The goal of the game is to sail your ships to the islands, collect the treasure, and return it safely to your home island. The game ends when all the treasure has been collected, and the player with the most gold wins.

But of course it's not that simple. As was often the case on the high seas, ships can attack one another, conduct boarding raids, and even salvage derelict ships. Each ship model has a number of masts (depending on the size of the ship), which serve as both a damage tracker and a source of offensive capability. Each mast is printed with either a white or red die showing a number between 1 and 5, indicating how effective its cannons are and how far they can shoot. As ships get hit, they lose masts, and as a result they lose cannons. When a ship loses all its masts it is derelict and can be commandeered by an opponent's ship. Alternatively, if a derelict gets shot one last time, it sinks.

Another way ships can interact is by ramming into one another. When one ship rams another it has a chance of taking a mast from its target, and after the ram is complete, either ship can initiate a boarding action, with the winner choosing to either kill a crew piece (and possibly taking away a special power or advantage) or take a treasure coin if there are any aboard.

There are many options for strategy and play styles. You can go for speed and stealth, equipping your ships with helmsmen so they can move faster, with an eye towards gathering as much treasure from the islands as you can and staying out of the range of your opponent's ships. Or, you can play a more aggressive game, adding captains and cannoneers to your ships to make them more effective in combat. A cast of unique characters will give the ships they're on all sorts of interesting extra abilities; anything from cancelling the special abilities of nearby ships to allowing sunken ships to return to the game.

Later expansion sets added a supernatural element including ghost ships that can move through other ships, and giant squids that can travel safely underwater and spring up to engulf other ships. Still later a steampunk element was added, equipping ships with flame-blasting cannons, mechanical hoists, turbine engines and giant spikes that can spring out from the sides of a ship, impaling anything in their path.

Pirates really hits all my gaming buttons: collectible but not prohibitively expensive, a rich, immersive world, amazing components, and an incredible depth of strategy, both in finding the right combination of ships and crew to bring to the table, and maneuvering them once the game's begun.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) An absolutely ingenious game, and there really isn't anything else like it.

• Pirates of the Spanish Main on BoardGameGeek.com
• Pirates forum on MiniatureTrading.com

Date played: June 8, 2014