A kinder, gentler wild west: Old West Empresario

There are a few games in my collection that I would classify as “comfort games” – games I’ve played enough times, and with relatively simple rules, that I don’t need to worry about re-learning the game when I sit down to play. These games tend to be relatively non-confrontational, but not often cooperative, as co-op games tend to ramp up the difficulty to compensate for the lack of a thinking opponent. No, I’m talking about games that are relaxing to play, maybe after a stressful day or on a lazy weekend, competitive but not overly confrontational.

One of my favorites in this category is Old West Empresario, a sadly out-of-print game about building a town in the old west. The western theme appeals to me, but what appeals to me even more is the simple but engaging game play.

Like a surprising number of wild west games, this one is about building a town. The game starts with 12 tiles, representing buildings, in the center of the table. These are in groups of two, with each group numbered one through six (identified by a number tile). The rest of the tiles go in the box lid or a bag, to be drawn randomly throughout the game. Each player starts with a Town Hall and a random tile, which begins the game on its unconstructed side, and also a character with a unique game ability, and three coins. Additionally, the game begins with three sets of two Wanted cards, each of which will reward the first and second player to accomplish particular objectives.

At the start of each game round, the starting player rolls a number of six-sided dice: two for each player plus one extra. These dice are placed next to their corresponding set of tiles in the center of the table. On each player’s turn they choose one of the remaining dice and either take a tile from that die’s set, or use the die to activate their town (more on that in a moment). The die is then discarded, and after each player has taken two turns the last remaining die is used by all players to activate their towns.

When a tile is taken, the player can either discard it to gain three coins, or place it in their town on its unconstructed side – the building it represents will still need to be built. Tiles must be placed adjacent to other tiles. A lot of the game’s strategy is in where you place particular types of buildings, as many of them will give income, end-of-game victory points, or other bonuses based on what buildings they are adjacent to.

But buildings still have to be built, and this is where activating your town comes in. Instead of taking a new tile, a player can use their turn to choose a die and then activate all the constructed buildings in their town that are marked with the number shown on the die. Early on this will be your town hall, which allows you to construct the other buildings that you’ve placed, but eventually you’ll have a range of different options such as gaining townsfolk or coins, collecting extra tiles, or even forcing your opponent to lose a coin with the dreaded Undertakers (which also causes you to lose points at the end of the game if it’s too close to the center of town).

Since you only get to activate the buildings that match the die you’ve chosen, you have to think carefully about which tiles to place in your town. If you end up with a lot of the same number you’ll get to do a lot when that number comes up on a die roll, but if it doesn’t, you won’t be able to do much on your turn. You also have to think about when to choose and place certain tiles, since their neighboring buildings will affect how many points they’re worth a the end of the game. But if you wait too long to grab that tile, one of your opponents might get it first.

The game ends when one player has 15 or more buildings in their town, or when a pre-determined number of townsfolk counters have run out. The townsfolk are a secondary currency used to pay for some game effects, and are also worth victory points. Additionally, the artwork on them is adorable, and eagle-eyed players might just recognize a few of the characters...

Maeve and Dolores from HBO's Westworld.

Townsfolk from Old West Empresario.

The only direct competition is the available dice and tiles each turn, and the Wanted cards which offer extra points to the first and second player who hit specific achievements such as having a certain number or type of buildings in their town. So it’s fairly non-confrontational and puzzle-like, but in a good way Honestly I like it better than similar but more complex games like Carson City, especially when considering its effort-to-entertainment ratio. The amount of decision-making hits that sweet spot where you always feel like you have good options, without descending into the dreaded analysis paralysis.

Sadly the game’s publisher went out of business a few years ago, and I don’t think it made enough of a splash to entice anyone else to pick it up for a reprint. But there seem to be plenty of copies out there, on eBay and in the used games market.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) One of those great “simple but engaging” games that we might not play all that often, but is always a joy when we get it to the table.

Get all the animals living together happily in Harmonies

Harmonies is one of those rare games that lives up to the phrase "deceptively simple." Placing tiles on your board to match the patterns shown on your cards sounds simple enough, but this game uses its theme, the idea that an ecosystem is a balance of interlocking pieces, to give players a bit more to think about when they're selecting and placing their tiles.

A game of Harmonies starts with five sets of three random tiles in the center of the table. Each player has their own small board, a grid made up of hexagonal spaces in either a 5x5 or a 4x7 pattern. There is a spread of four cards with absolutely stunning artwork by Maëva da Silva, depicting a range of animals from penguins to meerkats. Each card shows a specific pattern of tiles needed in order to place a cube representing that animal. The patterns will usually involve placing two or more tiles of different colors (representing terrain such as mountains, grasslands or water), but the cube only occupies one of those tile spaces -- there can only be one cube placed on a tile, but patterns that use the same colors can intersect, neatly demonstrating how different animals share the ecosystem they live in.

Players take turns, first choosing a set of three tiles to place, and then choosing a card from the spread. Each player can only hold a maximum of 4 cards at a time, so you have to be careful to pick cards with patterns that complement what you already have in play. Each card comes with between two and five cubes, to be placed each time the player manages to form that card’s pattern on their board. The more times a player is able to create the card’s tile pattern, the more points the card is worth, and when all the card’s cubes are placed, the card is moved to a separate victory pile, making room for a new card.

There is a lot to think about over the course of the game. You want to choose complimentary animal cards, but that doesn’t necessarily mean cards that use the same types of tiles – you also have to look at which tile in the card’s pattern the animal cube needs to occupy, so you can try to place the most cubes using the fewest tiles.

When choosing tiles, there are five sets of three random tiles to choose from. The catch is that a player must place all three tiles on their board right away, so there is a lot of anticipating where to place the tiles that you don’t need right now so that they’ll be useful on a future turn.

At the end of the game, players score based not only on their animal cards, but also on the type, quantity and patterns of the tiles they’ve played. Mountains score more if they’re connected in a range, and also if the tiles have been stacked to form higher mountains. Trees score based on their height, and rivers based on their length. Players have a lot of options for how they want to play: go for long rivers or high mountains, and seek out animals that will fit in those environments, or look for combinations of animals that can be placed as densely as possible.

Harmonies is very similar to Habitats in theme, look, and game play (although the artwork in Harmonies is definitely nicer), but I think they’re different enough that I won’t mind hanging on to both games. Habitats makes more of a game out of how the tiles are selected, where Harmonies is more about planning for how you play the tiles in order to maximize their position on the board. On balance I find Habitats to be a little more mechanically interesting, but Harmonies is just more delightful in terms of the artwork and overall attractiveness of the components.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Whenever I finish a game of Harmonies I almost always want to play it again. Everything about the game is just pleasing, from the gorgeous artwork to the simple but high-quality wooden tiles.

• Harmonies official website
• Harmonies on BoardGameGeek

Chomp! A game about herding dinosaurs

Why do dinosaurs seem to have such an enduring appeal? I think it’s the idea that, once upon a time, there was a world teeming with thousands of varieties of fantastical, dragon-like creatures, untouched by human mediocrity. And that world wasn’t dreamed up by a novelist or game designer. It was real, at least as far as the reasonably dependable science of paleontology can tell us.

I’m not sure if Chomp, a small box tile laying game published last year by AllPlay, quite captures the majesty of prehistory, but it is a pretty fun little game.

The game consists of 36 double-sided tiles, plus a handful of tokens and a lovely dry-erase board (pen included!) for keeping score. The tiles depict herds of carnivorous or herbivorous dinosaurs in different sizes, lush vegetation, nests, watering holes, and tar pits in various combinations of two, three or four shapes. Sometimes the different elements on a tile are separated by mountains, sometimes not. The idea is to draw and place tiles in order to form larger herds of same sized dinosaurs, making sure they are adjacent to food sources – vegetation for the herbivores and watering holes populated by unwitting prey for the carnivores. But you have to keep an eye out for tar pits, as they are certain doom for your dinosaur herds.

It’s the tile placement that’s particularly interesting in this game. Tiles can be placed overlapping other tiles, as long as the grid is maintained and individual elements are completely covered. This means you can pivot your strategy more easily than in most traditional tile-laying games, perhaps placing a tile that’s good but not ideal in the hopes of covering up some or all of it later in the game. 

On the reverse side of each tile is a bonus scoring condition, granting extra end-of-game points for things like having the most of a particular size of dinosaur, or even having the most uncovered tar pits among your tiles. At the start of each player’s turn there will be three face up and three face down tiles to choose from. Players can choose either on their turn, balancing the need for more layout tiles with the ability to score extra bonus points.

The game goes for eight rounds, after which each player has to check each of their herds to see if they are made extinct by an adjacent tar pit. Remaining herds must then be fed from an adjacent food source, with carnivores eating herbivore herds if no other prey is available. All adjacent dinosaurs of the same size and type, no matter how many, count as one herd. Each herd only requires one adjacent food source, so the challenge is to maximize the tile placement for large herds to take advantage of a single source of food. The bonus tiles provide some guidance for which types of dinosaur herds to go for and how best to try to lay out your tiles.

Any herds who can’t eat are made extinct, after which all the surviving dinosaurs are counted up for points. Larger dinosaurs count for more points than smaller ones, but also take up more space on their tiles and so are theoretically more difficult to place efficiently.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Like most tile-laying games, Chomp has a fun puzzle-like quality to it, and I really like the idea that you can cover up some or all of your previously placed tiles if your strategy is moving in a new direction.

Habitats, a game about good animals making good neighbors

I'm not overly interested in computer or video games, but every once in a while one comes along that catches my interest. In the early 2000s I was quite fond of Zoo Tycoon, a zoo-building game that covered everything from building well-balanced enclosures to managing crowds and balancing income and expenses. My favorite part of the game was building enclosures for the animals; you had to balance different kinds of terrain, topography, and just the right type and amount of trees and bushes to keep the animals happy.

A Zoo Tycoon board game came out last year, but I found it to be a little too fiddly and complicated to be enjoyable. I started looking around for another game that would scratch the same itch. Ark Nova is a great zoo game and includes some of the building element that I enjoyed in the Zoo Tycoon computer game, as do Dinosaur Island and DinoGenics, although they are more focused on cloning dinosaurs and stopping them from eating your park visitors.

I recently stumbled across Habitats, a game from a small publisher based in the Netherlands that has since been reprinted in the United States. And I must say, it is exactly the game I wanted.

In Habitats, you're managing a nature preserve rather than a zoo, so the thematic goal is entirely to create an environment that your animals will be . It's a tile-laying game with one really interesting innovation: the way each player picks up new tiles to play. The game starts with a grid of tiles in the center. Each player has a jeep meeple ("jeeple" just seems too precious) that moves around the grid, one tile at a time. On your turn, you can choose a tile that is ahead or to the left or right of your jeep. After choosing a tile you move your jeep into the tile's space, and then place a new tile in happy withthe space you just vacated. It means that you have a choice of three tiles to pick from each turn, but it also adds a lot of interesting strategic decision-making to the game. There might be a tile you really want that you need to move through a few less desirable tiles to get to, or you might be racing to a particular tile in order to get there ahead of your opponent.

Most of the tiles represent both an animal in search of a suitable habitat, and a type of terrain that adjacent animals might want. Tiles are played in a grid pattern in each player's tableaux. An animal tile will indicate one or more types of terrain, either water, desert, grassland, or forest, that need to be on adjacent tiles in order for that animal to be happy and score points at the end of the game. Other tiles represent watchtowers that score based on the tiles in various patterns around them; tourists that score depending on how your different terrain is grouped; and gates and campsites that earn points depending on how many tiles they are adjacent to.

The game becomes a puzzle-like exercise where you want to place your tiles so that adjacent animals can make use of each other's terrain as much as possible, and multiple animals can benefit from the same groupings of terrain. In addition to scoring your tiles at the end, the game is split up into three "years" composed of a number of turns (depending on the number of players), with two goals for each year that will award additional points to whoever fulfills them most completely. They are things like the most sets of different types of terrain or the longest unbroken line of tiles, and they give you something else to work for as you decide how to place your tiles.

An optional extra, available from the publisher's website, is a set of animal meeples that can be used to indicate when an animal tile has reached the conditions it needs to score points. They are entirely unnecessary (the base game comes with simple tokens for this purpose) but add to the tactile quality of the game and make it look that much more impressive on the table.

It's not a terribly complex game (the rules for the U. S. edition published by Allplay clock in at 4 pages), but it is very engrossing, giving you a lot to think about as you play but also requiring you to think on your feet and not get too attached to any one strategy or tactic. It's not quite Zoo Tycoon, but it definitely fills the same void, and in many ways it's more enjoyable.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) The highest praise I can give a game is that as soon as I'm done playing I want to play again, and that is definitely true with this one.

• Habitats (U. S. version) official website
• Habitats on BoardGameGeek

Buy low and sell high with Vikings on the Volga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exoplanets: teeming with life

Exoplanets is a fairly simple tile placement game in which players score points by placing and advancing life on the planets with the most advantageous location within the solar system. Play consists of drawing tiles that represent new planets and placing them in one of four rows that extend outward from the central "sun." Where a tile is placed helps determine what resources a player gains from placing the tile; each tile gives its own resource, and also gains one from the tile it is placed next to.

Resources are then used to add life to planets. The cost is determined by the type of planet, and these costs can be modified by "space tiles" that players pick up when placing new planets. Additionally, a space tile played in this manner will often affect other nearby planets, either in the same row or the same "orbit," the corresponding position in the other three rows. This is where the game steers away from the standard engine-building and lack of player interaction that is characteristic of most eurogames, as a well-placed space tile can often force a player to change where they're placing their life tokens.

Life tokens are gradually piled up onto a planet until one player has four, at which point they are exchanged for a species token. At this point all the other players' life tokens are removed from that planet, which adds to the games strategy -- will you try to race with the other players to see who can add life more quickly to the easier planets (the ones that require fewer resources to play on), or will you take your time to build on a more difficult planet in order to avoid the competition?

The game ends when the last energy resource is taken from the center of the board, which is normally also when the last empty spot is filled with a planet tile. At that point players score based on how much life they've put into play, with modifiers for placing life on planets with more difficult requirements.

I like this game because it's managed to put together some fairly familiar game mechanics (tile placement, resource collection, area control) in a unique way. I can't point to any other games that it has much in common with. On top of that the rules come with several variants to keep game play from getting stale, and there's an expansion that adds new space tiles, different types of central stars, and a gravity well that allows players to change around the types of energy they have to spend.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A neat game with some unique game mechanics and simple, clear graphic design.

• Exoplanets official website
• Exoplanets on Board Game Geek

Burgle Bros: crime pays, as long as you don't get caught

Burgle Bros. is an entertaining and well-designed game about robbing an office building. Players take on the roles of a colorful cast of criminals (I'm sure they're well-meaning) and work together to find a hidden safe on each of three floors of the building, and then escape to the roof. If anyone is caught by a wandering guard, the whole team loses the game.

Each floor of the building is represented by a 4x4 grid of face down tiles. Players reveal them by moving onto them, or they can play it safe by spending extra movement to peek ahead at an adjacent tile before moving. Movement between tiles is somewhat hampered by wall pieces that are placed between certain tiles (depending on the game setup). The tiles represent different locations in the building, some helpful and some not. Alarms can be tripped, computer rooms can be hacked, but the ultimate goal for each floor is to find two tiles: the safe, and the stairs to the next level.

Once the safe is found, the combination needs to be cracked by rolling dice and matching the numbers to those printed on the tiles in the same row an column as the safe (so even if you get lucky and find the safe and the stairs right away, you still need to explore at least some of the other tiles). The player who opens the safe draws a loot card, which will most likely do something to make movement more difficult, and a tool card, which generally gives a helpful ability.

Lest this all seem too easy, each floor has a wandering guard and a deck of cards that randomly determines his destination. The guard takes the shortest path to his destination tile, then draws another destination and continues moving. If a guard moves onto a player's tile (or vice versa), the player has to discard a stealth token or be caught! Players start the game with three tokens, and once they're gone, if the guard catches you again the whole team loses the game.

It's as much a puzzle as it is a game, with the primary strategy being how to move around the tiles without being caught by the guard. Some tiles set off an alarm when you move on to them, which can be used tactically to change the direction the guard is moving (when an alarm goes off, the guard immediately changes his destination to the tile with the alarm). The characters chosen by the players each have a unique ability as well -- some can move through guards or slow them down.

The graphic design and artwork have a refreshing retro 1960s look, and the "crime caper" theme makes for a nice change from fighting orcs or being driven mad by Lovecraftian horrors.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) You know it's a good cooperative game when after you lose you immediately start talking about what you could have done differently, and then set up to play again.

• Burgle Bros. Official Website
• Burgle Bros. on BoardGameGeek

The ants go marching on in March of the Ants

March of the Ants is not a game that would ordinarily catch my attention, but a good friend of mine did the artwork for the Minions of the Meadow expansion, which prompted me to back the Kickstarter for the expansion and pick up a copy of the base game. Well, that, and the giant centi-meeple...

Nepotism aside, the game is pretty good. It features elements of resource management and area control, with a tile-based board that unfolds gradually as the game progresses. Each player works to expand their colony of ants outward to collect resources while avoiding (or fighting off) the dreaded centipedes. Player turns involve a lot of meaningful decisions and the game gets going right away, avoiding a lot of the slow build-up that is common to resource management games.

The mighty centimeeple...

Cards are played for various effects, but mainly to evolve your particular species of ant by improving its head, thorax and abdomen, which gives you additional in-game abilities and results in an often bizarre Frankenstein-like mix of different ant parts.

The expansion adds several small modules to the game which can be mixed and matched depending on how much more complex players want the game to be. It includes aphids which players can herd to generate more food, parasites which add a bit more "take that" style player interaction, and predators that can be used to further antagonize your opponents, but at the risk of giving them more points if they manage to defeat them.

The game also includes a solo/co-op variant, which increasingly seems to be a must for Kickstarter games.

The graphic design leans towards readability over aesthetics (which is a welcome change from a lot of games from less experienced publishers), and the components are solid and of high quality, with nice bright colors that make everything easy to see and understand.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The game mechanics and structure are extremely solid, but the theme leaves me a little cold, otherwise I would probably play this game more often.

• March of the Ants official website
• March of the Ants on BoardGameGeek

Argo: a xenomorph by any other name

Stop me if this sounds familiar: in the cold, isolated blackness of deep space, a freighter crew wakes up from suspended animation for find that their ship is crawling with bug-like monstrosities bent on their destruction...

If this sounds like a familiar science fiction franchise that starts with the letter "A," you're half right. Argo is a tile-laying game in which players race to be the first to evacuate their crew of astronauts while leaving their opponents to be food for the vicious alien invaders. Sort of.

Game play involves placing tiles to add to the maze of rooms and corridors that all future space stations will no doubt be, and moving your figures around in such a way that you get your pieces to the escape pods and your opponents do not. There are several game elements that make this more interesting than it sounds.

Most tiles can only accommodate one or two player figures, so if you move your piece onto a tile, you bump someone else off, and if this puts them on an overcrowded tile, its piece moves as well, often creating a chain reaction that can allow you to put your pieces in the best positions and your opponents in the worst.

Additionally, many tiles have special abilities that can be activated to make figures move faster, trade places, return to the board after being removed, and so on. The object is to move your pieces to the escape pod tiles and launch them, but each pod can only hold two figures, and the pods are worth more points the longer you wait before evacuating.

Most importantly, some tiles call for an alien creature figure to be added to the board. At the start of each player's turn, that player can move one of the aliens, and if it lands on a player's figure (or if a figure moves onto a tile containing an alien), that piece is removed, and the player who moved the alien earns a point for any figure (other than his or her own) that is devoured.

The catch is that the aliens earn points of their own based on how many astronauts they devour, and if they finish the game with more points than the winning player, then no one wins. The aliens earn more points for devoured pieces than the players do, so the game becomes a bit of a balancing act - you can't let the aliens eat too many of your opponent's pieces.

Each player piece has a unique ability - marines can kill aliens, explorers can move faster, robots can move past aliens without being attacked, and so on. It gives you quite a bit to think about, and the shuffled tiles are the only random element in the game so it's almost all strategy and tactics.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A little too simple to be something that we'll play a lot, but it's a solid mid-weight game with a great theme that doesn't feel painted on.

• Argo official website
• Argo 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

Jarl: a tile by any other name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secrets of the manor: Mystery! Motive for Murder

With its Edward Gorey artwork and PBS branding, Mystery! Motive for Murder is clearly intended to appeal to mystery fans and new gamers, and it's a little self-conscious about its own complexity. It is presented as a series of five games, the first three of which are really "training games" designed to introduce the various elements of the game a little at a time.

Game One introduces the core concept of laying down tiles representing murder suspects in a particular pattern by lining up arrows on the edges of the tiles. Relationships can be either love or hate, and the tiles are then scored depending on their position relative to the victim tile, and the nature of their relationships to the other tiles.

Game Two adds the concept of a second murder victim who enters play midway through the game. Tiles can now be placed, and score points, in relation to either victim. Game Three adds a small number of Motive Cards, which can be played to alter the relationships between the tiles, score bonus points, and other game effects. Each player gets two cards at the beginning of the game, and can play one of them (discarding the other).

Game Four is where the full game comes together. Each player gets to start with a full hand of 3 tiles and 3 cards, and has to choose one action to perform on their turn: either play a tile, play a card, draw the top card or tile from the deck and play it immediately, or draw a tile and a card to add to their hand. Each player only gets three turns before the case is decided, so you have to decide carefully how to spend your turn. At the end of each round, points are given to the players who played the tiles worth the most and second most motive points. A case is played over three rounds, with the points awarded increasing a bit for each round. A full game includes three cases.

Game Five is an advanced game that adds Second Interview tokens that allow players to guess which suspect will be worth the most points at the end of the round and score bonus points if they are correct. It also adds some additional motive cards, and each player plays as a particular detective archetype with a unique game ability.

Playing through the three training games is a little tedious, as they aren't all that interesting on their own. But once you get to the full game it's quite interesting, with a lot to think about as you struggle with a limited number of turns, tiles and cards. The artwork and design is utterly charming, and combined with the game's structure it definitely calls to mind the scene at the end of every mystery story where the detective explains whodunit by eliminating the room full of suspects one by one.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) a nice, light game, but the artwork by Edward Gorey is more of a draw than the actual game play.

• Mystery! Motive for Murder official website
• Mystery! Motive for Murder on BoardGameGeek

Reiner Knizia's Samurai: not conquering any new territory

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

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

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

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

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

• Samurai official website
• Samurai on BoardGameGeek

Pulp fiction: Race to Adventure

I recently had occasion to investigate Spirit of the Century, a role playing game set in an extremely stylized 1930s world that calls to mind larger-than-life characters such as The Shadow or Doc Savage. While ultimately I found the world described in the game to be a little too over the top for my role playing tastes, I did enjoy the two spin-off board games set in the same universe.

Race to Adventure is, as the title implies, a race, with players competing to visit 9 location tiles and return to home base with the stamps to prove it. It get pasts the usual lack of player interaction that is typical of race games in a very novel way.

Each turn, each player selects one item to use, things as mundane as a magnifying glass and as outlandish as a jet pack. Many of the location tiles require use of one of these items in order to gain that tile's stamp, and there is only one of each item available, so strategy revolves around choosing whether to take the item you  know you need, or block the other players by taking the item you know they need.

Additionally, there are only two items that allow movement between: the jet pack and the airplane. As long as someone takes the airplane, every player gets to move once, but if you need to use one of the other items, you're hoping one of the other players will take the airplane so you can still move. conversely, when you take the airplane to use yourself, you're giving  everyone else a free move. It makes for a really interesting dynamic in a game that is otherwise a bit too simple.

The board is made up of tiles, so it's different every time, and an expansion includes suggested tile layouts beyond a basic 3x3 grid. Other expansions add a lost island that sends flying dinosaurs out to cause trouble, and a sinkhole that collapses one of the location tile into a subterranean world with its own unique challenges.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The base game is a bit on the simple side, but the expansions add just enough extra depth to keep it interesting.

• Race to Adventure official website
• Race to Adventure on BoardGameGeek

Zeppelin Attack! switches the focus to the villains of the Spirit of the Century world. It's a small scale deck building game that manages to be quite different from most other deck building games. Where most games of this time attempt to keep player's interest by including hundreds upon hundreds of cards, Zeppelin Attack gets by with a mere 112 and accommodates four players.

Players assemble fleets of zeppelins armed with outlandish weapons, in an attempt to outlast the other players. Launching successful attacks via weapon cards gains you victory points and usually some kind of card advantage, and successfully defending against an attack with a matching defense will usually give you some kind of in-game benefit such as extra card draws.

All cards (attacks, defenses, and operations) have to be played from one of your zeppelins in play, so there is some resource management involved beyond just buying more cards for your deck, and like Race to Adventure, Zeppelin Attack adds a lot more direct player interaction than you normally see in games of this type.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A little to small scale to be really engaging, but a good simple game nonetheless, and the small size of the box means it travels a lot better than most deck building games.

• Zeppelin Attack! official website
• Zeppelin Attack! on BoardGameGeek

Relic Expedition: treasure hunting in style

My decision to buy Relic Expedition was based almost entirely on its graphic design. Normally I try to try out a game, or at least read some reviews, before buying, but in this case an ad included in the box for Lanterns: the Harvest Festival and a quick look at a demo copy at my local game store was all it took.

Granted, the game's 1930s adventure theme is one of my favorites (see Fortune and Glory), but beyond that, I found its typography, iconography, and color palette to be very appealing. Imagine my relief when it turned out to be a pretty good game, too.

Players race to explore the jungle and be the first to leave with the right combination of relics. The jungle is made up of random tiles that are placed as the players move; some tiles reveal relics or villages, while others unleash pits of quicksand or wild animals ranging from panthers that send you back to base camp, to mischievous monkeys that steal random items from your inventory.

Inventory management is a major part of the game. Each player can hold eight items, so early on it's easy to load up with helpful equipment such as machetes to cut through the jungle, bullwhips or vines to swing over quicksand, or bananas to distract those pesky monkeys, but eventually all that equipment has to give way to make room for relics. It calls to mind the greedy explorer who leaves all the food behind so he can smuggle out gold and jewels.

Deciding which relics to pick up is a crucial part of the game's strategy, since each player needs to collect a particular combination. In the base game it's either four of the same color, or four of the same type, but an expansion adds cards which give each player a more specific goal. So as you're wandering the jungle picking up relics, you have to decide which pattern you're going to go for, but also have the flexibility to change based on what you're finding. Every relic you carry means discarding a piece of equipment, which can lead to some agonizing decisions since most of the equipment either lets you move through the jungle more quickly, or avoid the wild animals which are the game's main obstacles.

The animals are easily the game's most charming components, consisting of meeples (wooden pieces in silhouette) of panthers, boars, snakes, and monkeys. Animals are placed on the board when certain jungle tiles come into play, and as part of their turn, each player rolls a die which allows the movement of all the animals of one type. Since the players control where the animals move, anyone who gets too far ahead will usually find themselves stalked by panthers or menaced by snakes.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A delightful, if a bit simple, game with engaging game play and beautifully designed components.

• Relic Expedition official website
• Relic Expedition on BoardGameGeek.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another look at Star Trek: Fleet Captains

I really wish Star Trek: Fleet Captains was a better game than it actually is. It has an incredible amount of potential to be a truly epic game, but is hampered by some clunky, overly complicated game play. A lot of this could be solved by a tiny bit of rules streamlining, but really the game just needs a reference card that clearly summarizes the rules and mechanics, so that players won't be forced to constantly refer to the overwritten and poorly organized rule book.

One of the core mechanics of the game is each player's assembly of a Command Deck of cards. For each faction (Federation, Klingons, Romulans and Dominion) there are 10 mini-decks of 10 cards each, grouped around themes such as "Way of the Warrior" or "Sensor Upgrades," or around particular characters like Captain Kirk or Worf. Each player chooses four of these to shuffle together, giving them a deck of 40 cards that they can use during the game. It's a neat idea in theory, and it adds a bit of CCG-style strategy to the game, but in practice I too often find myself with uninteresting cards that I can't use clogging up my hand. This could be solved by allowing players to further customize their decks by removing cards they don't think they'll use during the game.

An unfortunately under-utilized element of the game is the Encounter Deck, consisting of cards that represent things a starship might encounter while exploring space, such as Abandoned Outposts or Independent traders. Again, this is a wonderful idea that fails a bit in practice, since each unexplored location a ship moves into will only sometimes give up an encounter, and even then, only once per location. We've tried a few different house rules to make encounters happen more often, such as always having an encounter in a newly discovered location, and then checking for additional encounters each time the location is moved into again.

There are also a few superficial issues with the components, such as the unpainted ship miniatures, the poor font choice on the clix dials making them very hard to read, or the flimsiness of the cards and especially the location tiles, but these are easily fixed or ignored. The point is that there are just a few things stopping Fleet Captains from being a magnificent game, and I don't think any of them are insurmountable.

Most of the time I shy away from creating "house rules" or other improvements to commercial board games, my argument being that there are so many games out there that work fine without me needing to change them, so why should I spend my time picking up the game designers' slack? But in this case, the game is so tantalizingly close to being great, and there really isn't another Star Trek game like it...

Read the original review.
Original rating: 3 (out of 5)
New rating (pass or fail): PASS

Another look at Starbase Jeff

We recently had a chance to play Among the Stars, an interesting space station building game that reminded me of a cross between Race for the Galaxy and Starbase Jeff, so much so that it made us wonder whether we need a game that combines the two.

We love Race for the Galaxy, but our original review of Starbase Jeff was a bit lukewarm, which is a little surprising because I've always had a lot of affection for the game. I like the basic "Water Works in space" idea, and I feel that it improves on Water Works by having all the players build on a common pipeline, rather than each building his own and racing to see who can finish first, with the only real player interaction being the occasional "take that!" play of a leaky pipe on your opponent's pipeline, forcing him to spend time and resources fixing it. Among the Stars had a similar lack of direct conflict with the other players, relying on card drafting at the start of each round as the only real way players interact with one another.

In Starbase Jeff, the goal is to earn money, primarily by being the player that closes off the station and wins the pot, but also by building long, unbroken strings of station tiles and forcing your opponents to connect their tiles to them, paying you for the privilege. There are a lot of decisions to be made during the game regarding when and where to play your tiles, in an effort to both build the station to your advantage, and control when the game ends. Each player's randomly shuffled stack of tiles provides just enough chance to keep the game from being predictable.

As I mentioned in my previous review, the only part of the game that is a bit of a let-down is the end game. The game keeps score in a poker-like fashion, with counters representing money being paid into a central pot when tiles are put into play. Playing an end cap pays one from the pot, and the player who eventually closes the station off so that no more tiles can be played wins the entire pot. It's meant to be played over several "hands" like a poker game, with the game ending when one or more players run out of money, or just get tired of playing.

One thing that definitely enhanced our enjoyment of the game was printing out the full color print-and-play edition available at the Cheapass Games website. The color artwork is much nicer than the kind of drab, black and white on colored paper tiles that came with the original edition, and it gives you enough different colors for six players.

Read the original review.
Original rating: 3 (out of 5)
New rating (pass or fail): PASS

All you Zombies

The zombie apocalypse genre has exploded in the past few years. It seems like every hipster from Portland to Brooklyn has a zombie apocalypse survival plan in place, The Walking Dead is a successful show on a mainstream cable network, the novel World War Z was a bestseller, and game store shelves are absolutely choked with zombie board games.

Zombies!!!, first published by Twilight Creations in 2001, has the distinction of being one of the first zombie-themed board games to hit the market, and while it may not be the most complex or nuanced game, it is still one of the more playable.

Game play is refreshingly simple: each player's figure starts in the center of town square, with a handful of life and bullet tokens, and three cards representing special actions. On each turn, a player draws a random tile and places it adjacent to one of the tiles already in play. The nicely illustrated tiles represent the eerily quiet streets of a town in the grip of a zombie apocalypse. Buildings on the tile might contain life tokens, which keep you alive longer, or bullet tokens, which make it easier to shoot zombies. Unfortunately, as each tile is placed, a number of zombie figures are added to it.

Players have to move their figures across the tiles, evading or destroying the hoards of zombies in their path, biding their time until the Helipad tile (randomly shuffled into the bottom half of the tile stack) is placed. The first player to reach the center of the helipad tile is the winner, but they'll have to fight their way through a lot of zombies to get there.

The base game includes 100 plastic zombie figures, and it's not uncommon to run out over the course of a game. Seeing 100 zombies on the board, even if they're only an inch tall, is a pretty terrifying sight. It is in this way that the game really succeeds at recreating the tone of the George Romero zombie films of the 1970s, with hoards of undead making our heroes' plight seem pretty hopeless.

Expansions add standard zombie film tropes such a military base (with glow-in-the-dark "government enhanced" zombies) and a shopping mall, among others, and players can also buy bags of additional zombie figures for those all too frequent times when 100 zombies aren't nearly enough.

Rating 3 (out of 5) A fine game that is true to the source material and really puts you in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but a bit simple to be really engaging.

• Zombies!!! official website
• Zombies!!! on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: November 27, 2014

Tsuro: watch where you're going

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

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

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

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

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

Date played: November 3, 2014