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

A short review of a short game: Caesar!

You could be forgiven for thinking that Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes is just an ancient Roman re-skin of designer Paolo Mori's Blitzkrieg! And it is, sort of. But not really. Caesar! is a very similar game, both in terms of the game play and the look and design. It's obviously meant to be part of a series that includes Blitzkrieg!, but the designer took the opportunity to change up a few things.

Where the game play in Blitzkrieg! is divided up into different theatres of war, Caesar! is more of a traditional area control game (a little bit like Risk). Players start with a bag of tiles, but this time they are divided between different symbols: swords, shields and spears, plus a laurel that acts as a wild card. Additionally, each tile features two numbers with a line between them. The board is a map of the Mediterranean sea and the surrounding area; tiles are placed on the borders between provinces, with the two numbers providing an amount of influence on either side of the border. Some are evenly distributed (2|2 or 3|3) but others are wildly different (0|6), requiring the player to make a decision about which provinces they want to concentrate their influence in.

Once a province's border spaces are full, the player who played the last tile there gains a one-time bonus such as drawing an extra tile, or getting an extra turn. The player who has the most influence in the province gets to place one of their control markers there. That player also gets to place a control marker on the border between that province and any neighboring provinces that they also control. The goal of the game is to be the first to place all 12 of your control markers, so the faster you play them out the better.

The strategy in Caesar! is very similar to Blitzkrieg!, with the main decision point being where to play your tile and when, keeping in mind that if you leave your opponent an opening to close off a province they will get the bonus, even if you get to place your control marker, which could give them the advantage they need.

The game includes two mini-expansions that add new tiles and province bonuses, and also a variant that rewards players for controlling key border spaces. No giant lizards this time though...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) If I did half-stars this would be 4.5 out of 5, simply because while the games are very similar I like the game dynamics in this one just a little bit better.

• Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes official website
• Caesar! Seize Rome on 20 Minutes on BoardGameGeek

A short review of a short game: Blitzkrieg!

Blitzkrieg! World War Two in 20 Minutes is a great little two-player board game. The short play time, bright colors, clear graphic design, small table footprint, and minimal text make it a solid choice to play at a pub or coffee shop, or even over a lunch break at work.

Each player starts with a bag full of tokens representing air, ground and sea forces, with a separate pile of tokens next to the board for more powerful units and technological advancements that can be gained during the game. The board is divided up into the different theatres of war, each with spaces to place tokens, and a scoring track that moves back and forth based on which player has placed the highest value units in that theatre. Some spaces give bonuses when a token is placed, such as drawing extra tiles or gaining the aforementioned advanced units and tech.

Players start by drawing three tiles, which are placed behind a screen so the other player can't see them. They then take turns placing tiles on the board and drawing new ones, the idea being to score points by filling up rows of tiles in the different theatres. Most of the strategy is in deciding when and where to place your tiles -- you might need to take advantage of a certain space's bonus, but filling up a row gives points to the player who is furthest along on that theatre's scoring track, so you don't want to leave good openings for your opponent. It's very chess-like; you constantly feel like you are making sacrifices in one area in order to gain ground in another.

The current edition of the game includes a variant that assumes an alternate reality where Germany and Japan won the war and are now fighting over the United States. It uses a new board (cleverly printed on the back side of the main board) with the theatres of war replaced by major U. S. cities. Rather than just being a re-skin of the main game, this one plays a little differently. The game starts with four cities available to place tiles in, and as each city's tile row fills up, the player who finished it gets to pick the next active city from nearby options. The German player gets the same set of tiles from the main game, but the Japanese have their own set, which includes a secret weapon in the form of a certain larger-than-life reptile...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Blitzkrieg! is a well-designed game that really shows what you can do with minimal components and clear, simple design.

• Blitzkrieg: World War Two in 20 Minutes official website
• Blitzkrieg: World War Two in 20 Minutes on BoardGameGeek

All roads lead to Gangs of Rome

I'm always on the lookout for games that try to solve the "everybody move to the center and fight" problem, and the even worse "everybody hide behind something and shoot for the rest of the game" problem. When I first heard about Gangs of Rome, it sounded like it focused on dynamic movement rather than just getting into an advantageous spot. But the real draw was the way the game incorporated non-player characters in the form of the mobs that wander the streets, and also the incola, individual characters who do things like fling scorpions at your fighters. Additionally, I liked that the setting isn't about military battles but rather on back alley skirmishes.

I bought some figures and terrain, played a few games, and found the game to be fun but a little fiddly, with a lot of small counters cluttering the table. I got distracted by other games, then heard that they were working on a second edition so I put Gangs of Rome on pause until the new version came out.

After playing with the new rules, I have to say they are a vast improvement. The designers have eliminated all the fiddly stuff but kept the things that make the game interesting: dynamic movement and an environment crowded with non-player characters who have a meaningful effect on the game. The revised rules use an interesting action economy system that is quite different from the usual "each model can do one or two actions" that is standard for most miniatures games. In Gangs of Rome, when a fighter activates they can choose to do between one and four actions. The player has to declare what the actions will be, using tokens to mark them on the board. For example, a player might declare "Marcus will move to this spot, then climb the scaffolding, then move into base contact with Rufus, then make a melee attack against Rufus." That player then rolls to see how many of the actions can be resolved. If any planned actions go unresolved, the fighter accumulates stress, which reduces his ability to act until it is cleared.

Combat is nice an simple with opposed rolls and very little on-the-spot math, making battles between fighters quick and decisive. But the real innovation in Gangs of Rome is in the way the game simulates the crowded city streets, via the mobs and the incola.

Mobs are large bases of five figures each. A standard game uses between three and six, placed around the board at the start of the game. The mobs make two important contributions to game play. First, if a player's gang fighter makes an attack within view of the crowd, there is a chance they will react, either by being scared (moving away from the action), or by getting angry, in which case they will move towards and attack the nearest player-controlled miniature. It forces you to be careful about when and where you attack your opponent, and reinforces the idea that this is a living, breathing city rather than an empty battlefield.

The second feature of the mob involves the ability for player figures to blend in with the crowd. If a player's miniature is in contact with a mob base, they can temporarily remove themselves from the board, reappearing on the following turn in contact with the same or a different mob base. It can be used as a sneaky way to hide and also move around the board undetected, and is another way the game makes the environment seem alive.

At various points during their turns, players can be given the opportunity to move a mob, or force a reaction, rolling to see if the mob is scared or angry and possibly getting them to attack an opponent's character. This is a change from the game's first edition, where the mobs moved in random directions and often had no real effect on game play. This way, players can attempt to use the mobs defensively or offensively -- it makes them seem more like part of the game.

The incola (citizens of Rome) add another level of interest to the game's environment. These are individual non-player characters who wander the board in a similar manner to the mobs with different effects ranging from calming down angry mobs to stealing player characters' weapons. My personal favorite is Rufinus the scorpion thrower, who flings scorpions at anyone who passes near, inciting mobs and inconveniencing player characters.

Gangs of Rome is the only miniatures game I've played where I feel like the environment is a critical part of the game. It's an impressive feat of game design, given that the enviroment is a living, breathing city crowded with colorful characters outside the players' direct control.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) This is one of the most truly immersive miniatures games on the market today.

See my battle report at OnTableTop.com for a detailed view of the game. 

• Gangs of Rome official website 
• Gangs of Rome Facebook group 

Pan Am: an unlikely theme for a board game, but it works

Funko Games' design team, who work under the collective name Prospero Hall, are very good at creating games based on media properties that tend to be a little on the simple side, but are always well thought out and true to their source material. A quick look at their website shows a catalog that runs the gamut from Star Wars and Jurassic Park games to some that seem less obvious like The Rocketeer, Hitchcock's Rear Window, or 1970s dystopian classic The Warriors. But Pan Am the Game? Really? A board game based on an admittedly glamorous but long defunct airline seems a little obscure, even for Prospero Hall. There was a short lived TV series in 2011 starring Christina Ricci and Margot Robbie, but the game isn't based on that, it's just about the airline.

The first thing that is striking about the game is the board itself. It presents what appears to be an odd, distorted world map until you realize that the map is centered on the North Pole -- many intercontinental flights take a northern route as, due to the curvature of the Earth, it's often the shortest distance. And there's that attention to theme that Prospero Hall is so known for.

Something else Prospero Hall is known for is excellent graphic design, and that is certainly evident here as well. The board, along with all the components, are done in a classy early 1950s style that looks great without sacrificing readability.

Pan Am is a worker placement game with a little bit of bidding thrown in for good measure. Like most worker placement games, it follows a standard structure of placing workers to get different resources and eventually trading them in in different combinations to score points. In Pan Am, players represent small fly-by-night airlines who want to establish exclusive air routes between cities with an eye towards eventually selling their routes to Pan Am (a non-player entity controlled by the game), and then using the money to buy Pan Am stock. 

On their turn, a player's options are to build airports, collect destination cards representing the cities on the board, buy newer, larger airplanes, establish routes between cities, or draw directive cards that offer various bonuses and other advantages. Each of these actions is represented by a space on the board, but unlike most worker placement games, if a player has one of their workers on the space you want, you have the option to outbid them. You can opt to pay more to use the space, which gives the other player their worker back to either place in another space, or bid higher (up to a maximum amount). Once each player has placed all their workers, all the actions are resolved one by one.

Routes are established using a combination of airports and/or destination cards. In order to claim a route, the player must secure landing rights in each city by either having an airport there, holding a card that matches the city, or discarding either one card from the city's region or two matching cards from another region. Then they need to have a plane large enough to fly the distance between the cities. Maintaining airports and flight routes will give the player a little bit of income each round, but the real gravy is in selling your routes to Pan Am.

At the end of each round, a die is rolled that determines which routes Pan Am wants to buy. Routes are marked on the map starting in Miami (where Pan Am was founded) and spread out in three different directions -- the die roll tells you which direction they're buying in each round. There is also a "wild" die result that will allow players to sell any of their routes to Pan Am, which is the only way to sell the longest and most lucrative routes.

After Pan Am does their buying each round, players must decide how much Pan Am stock to buy vs how much cash to keep on hand for the following round. The stock price will fluctuate up or down throughout the game, so buying as much as you can when it seems to be low can be important. After seven rounds, whoever has the most Pan Am stock is the winner.

In most games like this, the point is to build up an engine that will allow you to process the games resources and turn them into victory points in as efficient a manner as possible. The thing that makes Pan Am interesting is that this game is all about taking advantage of opportunities by trying to anticipate what routes Pan Am is going to want to buy, and claiming those before your opponents do. It forces a very different mindset and makes you pay a little more attention to what your opponents are doing than you normally would in a game that isn't about direct conflict.

Unlike the other Prospero Hall games I've played, I can't really judge this one on how closely it adheres to the property it's based on -- it's not a film or TV show so I don't know what the story is or who the characters are. But it does have a well-developed, pleasing aesthetic and game play that definitely calls to mind the "golden age of air travel." The theme could have been more generic rather than calling out a real world airline, but Pan Am does lend it a shorthand for vintage, glamorous air travel, and the blue logo on the box is one that most people over a certain age will recognize.

Unfortunately, it appears that Funko has recently sold Prospero Hall to family games giant Goliath, who laid off the majority of the studio's designers. However, some of the displaced creatives are bouncing back by founding a new design collective, Tempest Workshop. It will be interesting to see what they do next...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Early 20th century air travel is as good a theme as any, and the gorgeous retro design and streamlined game play make for a fun, accessible game.

• Pan Am official website
• Pan Am on BoardGameGeek

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

An underrated gem: Iki, a game of Edo artisans

Iki is a beautiful, lavishly designed game about wandering through a marketplace in historical Edo-era Japan, with an interesting spin on the tried-and-true worker placement mechanism. Normally in worker placement games, players start with a handful of workers and they compete to place them on the board in the spaces that will benefit them the most, usually by giving them a resource they need in order to buy assets that will in turn generate victory points. Iki more or less does that too, but in this case, players are only placing one worker on a turn.

Each player has two primary game pieces: an Oyakata and an Ikizama. Rather than being picked up and placed somehere new each turn (as with most worker placement games), the Oyakata remains on the board moving in a linear loop from turn to turn. Each space offers actions such as buying or selling rice and wood, buying fish, or building up firefighting ability (apparently fires were a huge problem in the crowded marketplaces of old), which among other things determines who goes first each round. Additionally, players will place cards on the representing artisans who add additional options to the space where they are placed. So the position of a player's Oyakata is important, and controlling how far it moves each turn is critical.

The Ikizama behaves more like a traditional worker placement piece. At the start of each round, players place their Ikizama piece on one of five possible spaces. These spaces determine how far that player's Oyakata will move on this round, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 spaces, with a fifth choice that allows the Oyakata to move anywhere from 1 to 4 spaces. These numbers indicate exactly how far that player will move their Oyakata, and only one player may place their Ikizama on each space -- this is where we see the normal worker placement competition. The fifth space allows a player to move their Oyakata anywhere from one to four spaces, but at the cost of forfeiting part of their turn -- they won't be able to place a new artisan card. Players can collect Sandal tokens from various sources that can be spent to add to their Oyakata's movement, which allows for a little wiggle room.

It's an interesting combination of elements because it gives the player different things to think about when planning their turn: how far do I need to move to accomplish the task I want to for this turn, and how can I make the most of my turn if I can't get to the market space I wanted? These are common conundrums in worker placement games, but Iki offers some different mechanisms for getting there, and as a result the game feels a little fresher than more traditional fare like Lords of Waterdeep or DinoGenics.

Players score victory points by collecting sets of retired artisans, which points to another interesting element of the game. Each round, players have the option to hire artisans, strategically placing them to make board spaces more useful to land on. These artisan cards also provide resources to their owners during an income phase that happens once every three turns. Each time an opponent uses one of your artisans, they gain experience which changes the income they give but also gets them closer to retirement -- after a certain amount of experience, the artisan card leaves the board for its owner's player area, where it continues to generate income and also contributes towards victory points based on the number of different types of artisan cards a player collects.

In addition to collecting retirees, players can score bonus points by purchasing fish, pipes and tobacco (an oddly specific collection of cultural items) and also by spending resources to add building cards to the board. Buildings take up artisan spaces, but instead of offering an action they generally give end-of-game bonus points, so they're a trade-off but give players something to work towards. As if that weren't enough to keep track of, buildings and artisans are vulnerable to the dreaded fire, which is the game's way of occasionally clearing the board to keep things from getting stale.

At three points throughout the game, a fire starts in a random corner of the board, removing building and artisan cards unless the card's owner has sufficiently built up their firefighting ability, which they do mainly by playing artisan cards to the board and by visiting certain board spaces. A player's firefighting number also determines where they go in the turn order each round, so they have extra incentive to keep this number moving forward over the course of the game.

Akebono, an expansion that appears to have been unfortunately underprinted and is a little difficult to find, adds a riverfront where players can build boats that act similarly to the artisan cards, providing resources to any player that cares to use them and letting their owners rack up a "trade score" that provides bonuses at various points in the game. It also adds a board to better keep track of which artisans and buildings are available.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Like the best games of this type, Iki combines a few different game mechanisms, gives them a new spin, and straddles that fine like between complex and complicated.

• Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans official website
• Iki: A Game of Edo Artisans on boardgamegeek

Unmatched: Now that's an epic duel

“A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.” -- Bruce Lee

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one tabletop game that lets you determine the winner in a fight between Bruce Lee and a tyrannosaurus rex. That game is Unmatched, and it deserves your respect.

Unmatched began its life as a Star Wars game called Epic Duels, published in 2002 by Milton Bradley and sold primarily in the toy store market. As a grid-based tactical combat game, Epic Duels was quite a bit more interesting than the usual toy store fare of the time, with players invited to imagine match-ups between characters from across the Star Wars timeline (as it existed in 2002, anyway), and realize those battles with a unique game system using miniatures, dice and cards. It was an interesting little game, especially by the standards of the time, but its nature as a piece of mass market movie tie-in merchandise meant that it didn't stay in print for long.

Robin Hood fights off a pack of hungry velociraptors

Fast forward to 2019. The core structure of Epic Duels has been revised, refined, and freed from the chains of the Star Wars license. Each player takes control of a character drawn from a wide range of mythology, literature, and popular culture, featuring everything from the aforementioned Bruce Lee to King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, and even a selection from the more obscure side of the Marvel comics universe such as Moon Knight and Ghost Rider. The game then uses miniature movement and card play to imagine a duel between whatever unlikely combination of characters have been chosen.

Most games of this type such as Heroclix or Firefly Adventures use a reasonably large board or map printed with a grid to determine movement and distance. Unmatched instead employs a small board illustrated with a series of connected, color-coded circles to establish each character's position. Miniatures can move along the connections between circles, and the circle's color indicates areas where ranged attacks can be made, eliminating the pesky line-of-sight arguments that are the bane of most miniatures games' existence.

Character actions are determined by a deck of cards, unique to each character. Cards represent attacks, defenses and special abilities that can be employed throughout the game. When combat ensues, the attacker plays an attack card with a numerical value face down on the table, then the defender plays a defense card, also face down. Both cards are revealed simultaneously, and the defender takes damage equal to the difference between attack and defense. Most of the cards have an effect that takes place either before or after the attack, which spices up the game and gives players a lot of tactical options to consider, both when attacking and defending. Damage is tracked using a simple dial. It's a wonderfully elegant system that handles attack and damage in one play, and eliminates the egregious "luck factor" of dice rolling.

Apart from the simple yet elegant game play, each Unmatched set is a class act from start to finish. The game is sold in stand-alone sets of 2, 3 or 4 characters, which allows players to try out the game with minimal investment, and also to stick to only the characters that they find interesting. Are you a Marvel fan with no interest in Little Red Riding Hood or Bigfoot? No problem, Unmatched has you covered. The boxes all come with a high quality plastic tray for all the components (a rarity these days), and while the cards are plenty durable, the trays will even accomodate sleeved cards. The miniatures don't come pre-painted, but they do come with a wash applied that brings out the details of the figure, and also a colored ring for the base that makes it easy to tell each player's characters apart.

The artwork on the cards is all original (even for the characters from licensed properties) and consistently excellent, and the graphic design is slick, contemporary and (most importantly) easy to read. The rulebook is well organized (also a rarity these days), but honestly, once you have the basics down you will rarely need to look at the rules -- the game design really is that good.

Ghost Rider artwork from the "Marvel: Redemption Row" set.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Not just a great dueling game, but a great card game and a great miniatures game all rolled into one.

• Unmatched official website
• Unmatched 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

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: it makes sense if you've read the book...

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: a Board Game of English Magic probably seems like a really weird title for a game, at least until it's explained that it's based on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke's novel about high society wizards operating in early 19th century England. It may sound like a good idea for a game, but despite a 2015 BBC television adaptation, the novel remains relatively obscure.

Broadly speaking there are two main components to a game: theme and mechanics. Both carry a lot of weight, and a great theme can prop up a mediocre game design (see Grimslingers) just as easily as a good game design can transcend a less interesting theme (see the Resident Evil Deck Building Game or the surprisingly good Spartacus board game, soon to be reprinted without its original TV show decor).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell errs on the side of theme over mechanics, and any fan of the book who enjoys mid-weight board games will probably like this one. It does a good job of referencing the novel's strange blend of supernatural menace and powdered-wig high society, and presents a game design that fits that theme very well, rather than feeling tacked on after the fact like games based on licensed properties so often do.

Each player plays either the titular Jonathan Strange or Mr Norrell, or as one of two secondary characters from the book. The goal of the game is to accumulate enough magicianship to be able to confront "the gentleman with the thistledown hair" (the novel's main villain) before the game ends. This is done by accomplishing feats of magic in the form of playing out cards from your hand that add tokens of different types to the cards on the table in front of you. The catch is that only certain symbols can be played out each turn, so the game becomes an interesting combination of thinking several turns ahead but also madly scrambling to get enough magicianship points to beat the villain and win the game.

Game play is complicated by two additional types of card plays: "invitations," representing social events such as parties and concerts, and "introductions," meeting famous characters of the age such as Lord Wellington. Both types of cards can only be played at certain locations, requiring moving around a board depicting London and Europe of the early 1800s. Invitations are played to draw additional cards (either introductions or additional feats of magic to work on), and Introductions move you along a Prestige track, eventually unlocking powerful game play advantages.

The game as written does have one major issue: it is very difficult to win, so much so that the designers admitted that they made a last-minute change to the game design without playtesting it thoroughly, and have since released a simple variant (described here) to re-balance the game. A rookie game design mistake that should never have happened, but at least the designers have recognized the error and taken steps to correct it.

The game mechanics fit the theme well, and I suspect that the designers (Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello of War of the Ring fame) are fans of the book, or are at least very familiar with it. Unfortunately this doesn't necessarily work to the game's advantage, as for the most part the references to the novel assume that the players have read it. I don't think the game does enough to explain the setting and characters for those who haven't, and the game play isn't really remarkable enough to sustain interest in the game on its own.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) if you've read the novel, but probably only a 2 (out of 5) if you haven't. But it's a great book, so go read it and then play the game afterwards...

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Board Game of English Magic official website
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Board Game of English Magic on BoardGameGeek

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

Architects of the West Kingdom: idle meeples are the devil's tool

There are a ridiculous number of worker placement games out there, so it's unusual when one comes along that has something innovative about it.

Most worker placement games follow the same basic pattern: players are given a number of workers (usually four or five) and take turns placing them on spots on the board that give the player game advantages or resources. Once every player has placed all their workers, the board is cleared, the workers are reclaimed, and a new round of placement begins.

Architects of the West Kingdom, designed by Shem Phillips (of Raiders of the North Sea fame) does things a little differently. While unmistakably a worker placement game, with a lot of the same game elements (placing workers to achieve game effects), Architects does away with the round structure, instead making reclaiming workers one of the available actions in the game.

It may seem like a small thing, but its a huge shift in the way worker placement games are played. In addition to the normal concerns of gathering resources and spending them to put building cards into play, players must now look at their available pool of workers, and when it's the best time to either reclaim their workers from the board, or from the prison space where they can sometimes end up.

The prison space helps the players cultivate a sense of urgency. Various game effects will send your workers to prison, and at certain points during the game, whoever has the most imprisoned workers has to take a debt card, which causes point loss if it isn't paid off by the end of the game.

This brings us to the other interesting thing about Architects: the idea of virtue. The game board includes a virtue track that players will move up and down on, depending on their actions during the game. Being low on the virtue track has certain advantages (such as not having to pay taxes, which makes a lot of the in-game purchases cheaper), but also causes a loss of points at the end of the game. So manipulating your position on the track to your best advantages adds another strategic layer of the game.

It's a terrific game with a lot going on in spite of the relatively simple rules, with several different paths to victory and quite a bit more interaction between players than you normally see in games of this type.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Shem Phillips knocks it out of the park again. Anyone who likes worker placement games should love this one.

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

Pandemic: Fall of Rome -- a disease of invaders

Pandemic has taken Settlers of Catan's place as the foremost gateway into hobby gaming, and with its simple yet challenging design, engaging cooperative theme, and deep market penetration, it's earned it. In an effort to get the game to even more tables, Pandemic's publisher has re-skinned the game in a plethora of different flavors, changing the threat to a flood in Rising Tide or Lovecraftian horrors in Pandemic Cthulhu.

We've only played Pandemic once or twice, and never got around to buying a copy for our game library, so we decided to pick up the Fall of Rome version, which replaces spreading disease vectors with invading armies of barbarians intent on sacking ancient Rome. Since we have little experience with the original Pandemic we can't really compare the two, but that might be better as we can look at this version of the game on its own merits.

It's easy to see why Pandemic has been such a successful game. The rules are simple but allow for a good amount of meaningful decision making, and watching the board fill up with counters representing the barbarian hordes gives the game a great sense of drama. Players can command Roman legions to fight off the barbarians, but the real strategy is in collecting sets of cards that can be turned in to make peace with individual barbarian tribes. This doesn't stop them from attacking, but it makes it possible to convert barbarians into Roman soldiers to help fight off their former allies.

Players are also given a handful of special cards that offer great advantages in the game, but at a price. Each time one of these cards is spent for its more powerful effect, it moves the decline marker closer to the eventual collapse of Roman society from within, which gives the game another clock to race against.

The engaging game play is coupled with some terrific artwork that helps sell the idea that these are cultured Roman citizens fighting off invading armies and their own decline, rather than just colored cubes on a piece of cardboard.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A robust and well-designed game that we will play often, and it's usually an easy sell to our non-gamer friends and family too.

• Pandemic: Fall of Rome official website
• Pandemic: Fall of Rome on BoardGameGeek

You can't win them all: 7 Wonders Duel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cowboys: Way of the Gun -- thrilling days of yesteryear

Perhaps appropriately, Cowboys: Way of the Gun is a game out of time. It was first published in 2007, but it has the look and feel of a game from the early 1980s, right down to the "bookshelf format" game box and a design sensibility that definitely favors function over form. It reminds me a lot of the 1989 Aliens board game, which is an excellent game design let down by weak production values.

Mechanically, Cowboys is a very well-designed small scale skirmish game that avoids a lot of the convoluted rules that seem to plague most games of this type. It plays on a grid for easy movement, and has simple game mechanics for establishing range and line of sight. Since it is played on pre-printed boards, the rules for moving and shooting through terrain are also very straightforward. It's a very fast-paced game, with the average scenario taking around 30 minutes to play.

"Move and shoot" games can get stale easily, and like several others such as 7TV and Alien vs. Predator: the Hunt Begins, this one uses a deck of event cards to give players a way to introduce some tactical decisions and unpredictability to the game. This game's event deck also functions as a standard poker deck, which allows it to be used as a random number generator for things like initiative. It might have been interesting to take this a step further and replace the dice with card draws to determine whether or not an attack is successful.

The real meat of the game is in its scenario book, which details 26 simple game setups that recreate famous gunfights both historical and fictional, from the shootout at the OK Corral to the three way standoff at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The scenarios in the book escalate slowly, starting with one-on-one "shootout at high noon" games before eventually moving on to more complex setups with victory conditions beyond simply killing all of the other side's cowboys.

Unfortunately the game falls seriously flat on its outdated production values. It uses cardboard standups and tokens in lieu of miniatures, which in itself wouldn't be a problem, but the artwork on the game pieces is very bland. The same holds true for the game's various boards depicting sections of wilderness or classic western buildings like saloons and banks, which is a pity because they are otherwise of pretty high quality, printed on nice sturdy cardboard.

"The fight's commenced! Get to fightin' or get away!"

That said, the game's simple rules make for some cinematic action that inspires the imagination. In one game, I had to have Wild Bill Hickok run into a general store to reload his weapon, then come crashing through the store's window into the street to get a shot at his opponent. In another, recreating the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, I was stuck with one character (Ike Clanton) who didn't have a weapon, so I had him run around getting in the way of my opponent's line of sight, much like the "get to fighting or get away" scene from the 1992 Tombstone movie.

It shouldn't be too difficult to find some gunfighter miniatures (in fact, I have tons of them) and maybe even find some western town maps with better artwork, which is all it would take to make this a truly great game.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The biggest problem with this game's weak production value is that it's a hard sell to get others to play, especially if they're not particularly interested in the historical west.

• Cowboys: Way of the Gun official website
• Cowboys: Way of the Gun on BoardGameGeek

Viking roundup, part 5: Shipwrights of the North Sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viking roundup, part 4: Explorers of the North Sea

Setting a series of games in the same world is a great marketing tool for games publishers. If done well, it allows them to present a consistently branded series and encourages gamers to at least take a look all the games in the series, when normally they might not notice three separate games with little or nothing in common.

A more cynical view would be that this marketing strategy is at best a way to re-use artwork across multiple games, and at worst, trick consumers into buying games they might not normally be interested in. I'm happy to say that this was not the case with Explorers of the North Sea, part of designer Shem Phillips' North Sea trilogy of games.

Obviously the look of the game is very similar to Raiders of the North Sea, but that's not a problem at all - both games feature superb graphic design and illustration. The games are thematically linked, but feature different stages in the life-cycle of the viking culture. Where Raiders is about preparing and executing raids on settlements, Explorers covers setting off into the unknown, establishing outposts, and bringing back livestock, with raiding being a relatively small part of the game and only one of may paths to victory.

The game board is composed of tiles that are placed one by one over the course of the game, forming waterways and islands of various sizes. Each tile features elements in support of one of the game's various ways to earn points: livestock to be brought back to the starting tile, non-player ships to be attacked, settlements to raid, and empty space to build outposts on. Placing tiles involves a fair amount of strategy all on its own: you can create small islands that are easy to control and navigate around, or large ones with space for multiple outposts that earn a lot of points at the end of the game.

Direct player interaction is fairly minimal, which might frustrate players who like a lot of interaction but is great for those who prefer less confrontational games. Each player starts the game with a leader character with a unique way to get extra points, which helps guide your strategy and makes the game a race to see who can best take advantage of their leader's ability by the time the game ends.

Explorers isn't quite as interesting as Raiders, but it's still pretty fun and quite a bit simpler. That, combined with its less competitive nature makes it a great game for new gamers, while still having enough going on to keep more experienced players interested.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great addition to the North Sea series and a good gateway game to get new people interested in board games.

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