No Mr. Bond, I expect you to deck-build...

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

The same only smaller

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

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

Spy world

There are good reasons why the Cold War (the period between the end of WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) is such a compelling genre for stories and games. The massive distrust between America and Russia combined with a fear of all-out war, plus the rapidly advancing but still largely analog stealth and surveillance technology made it a unique time in world history, both thrilling and terrifying.

Covert, designed by Kane Klenko and published by Renegade Game Studios, does a good job of evoking the cold war with what on first glance seems to be a disparate group of game mechanics. The goal of the game is to collect sets of cards representing spy gear like listening devices, travel documents and hidden escape kits, and then turn those cards in for points, but as usual there's a bit more to it than that. The sets players are going for are determined by mission cards that will sometimes also include the need to have a pawn in a particular spot on the board.

Movement around the board is also one of the principal ways of gaining more cards, either by having a pawn in a certain part of the board when it's time to draw cards, or by following other players around and collecting clue tokens that they leave behind as the move from city to city on a board representing Europe during the Cold War.

But that's not even the most interesting part of the game. Player actions are determined by a dice placement system where at the start of each round, each player rolls 5 dice and uses them to determine what of 6 possible actions they'll be able to do that turn. The first player to choose a particular action can do so freely by placing a die showing any number on that part of the board, but the next player who wants to be able to do the same action has to place a die that comes either before or after the dice that are always there. For example, if your opponent plays a 2 on the "draw a card" action, you have to play either a 1 or a 3 in order to also do that action.

If the numbers just aren't cooperating and there's nowhere on the board you can play, you can spend a die to draw a random token that gives you a one-time special ability, such as being able to switch the number on a die or play two in a row. You can also just end your turn early, which guarantees that you'll get to go first on the next turn.

On top of all that, there's a code-breaking phase consisting of two rows of random numbers, and a deck of equipment cards with 3-digit codes on them. If you can manipulate the numbers so that any 3 of them match the code on your card, you can either use that card as part of a set of equipment (the main way of scoring points), or cash it in for bonus points at the end of the game.

Covert is be complex without being complicated, and it manages to make all of its different abstract game mechanics work together well, and also feel like they're intrinsic to the theme. When I play this game I really feel like I'm getting a sense of what it must have been like for those Cold War spymasters, managing tons of moving parts, manipulating events to work out in their favor, and taking advantage of situations they might not have control over.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A very entertaining game that combines theme and mechanics well.

• Covert official website
• Covert on BoardGameGeek