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

Gravwell's strange attraction

Most board games fall into one of two broad categories: they are either a race, where the goal is to accomplish something before your opponents do, or they are a fight, where the goal is to attack your opponents and defend yourself from their attacks. Player interaction in race games tends to be minimal, with players generally more concerned with reaching their own goals, and their opponents' progress acting as a clock to be beaten.

At its core, Gravwell is a race game, but every move depends on what the other players are doing. Players play movement cards in an effort to be the first to move their space ship along a linear path from the center of the board to the edge. It sounds simple, but it's not.

At the start of each round, players draft from an array of card stacks consisting of one face up and one face down card. Cards represent different elements that the space ships are able to gather on their journey away from the black hole at the center of the board. Most of the cards will move a  player's ship anywhere from 2-10 spaces along the board. The catch, however, is that ships must always move in the direction of the nearest other ship, wherever that may be.

A few cards allow movement away from the nearest ship, and two of them (out of 26 total cards) will move every ship on the board towards the ship of whoever plays the card. Each card is marked with a letter from A to Z. Cards are played face down and revealed simultaneously, then resolved in alphabetical order.

Additionally, there are two non player ships on the board whose positions can affect the direction in which a player ship moves.

There is a lot of backwards and forwards movement, but the game's real strategy is in anticipating what your opponents are going to play, and choosing a play of your own that will allow you to take advantage of what order you play in, and the position of the other ships on the board when you move. Once each round, you can use an Emergency Stop to cancel your movement, if a move would take you too far away from where they want to be, but each round consists of six card plays, so you have to be careful about when to use it.

Gravwell is a terrific game in that its rules are very simple, but there is a lot to think about while playing. You simply can't ignore what your opponents are doing, and you have to manipulate the positions of the other ships on the board in order to move your own closer to victory.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A simple yet engaging game, well deserving of the multiple game design awards it's won.

• Gravwell official website
• Gravwell on BoardGameGeek

Colt Express: the great cardboard train robbery

The train robbery is a standard western trope, from 1903's The Great Train Robbery all the way through to the two spectacular train action sequences in 2013's The Lone Ranger. Joss Whedon even used a train robbery as the centerpiece of the first regular episode of his space western TV series Firefly.

But imagine the chaos if six different bandits all tried to rob the same train at the same time. I don't think that's ever been done before, but it's what happens in Colt Express.

The playing area in Colt Express consists of several train cars loaded with money and jewels, along with an engine that contains a box full of money but also an ornery Marshall who will kick bandits out of any train car he finds them in. Rather than a flat board, the game gives you a charming set of three dimensional train cars which allow players to move their pieces through the interior of the train, and also on the roof.

Players take the roles of individual bandits, each with a unique ability. Play consists of several rounds of playing move cards to a common stack, and then resolving those move cards in the order they were played. Since some cards are played face down, you don't always know what your opponents are doing, and some actions can result in your piece being moved unexpectedly, which can throw off the rest of your moves. The goal of the game is to have the most loot when the game ends after five rounds.

The predetermined moves aspect of the game invites comparisons to Robo Rally, but Colt Express manages to be a lot less frustrating and a lot more charming (I've played with people who hate Robo Rally but really liked Colt Express). I think the fact that you don't have to plan all your moves for the round at once is one reason. When playing your moves, you can react, in a limited fashion, to what your opponents are doing. The limited time frame is another plus; one of the main complaints I often hear about Robo Rally is that it can sometimes take hours to play. A game of Colt Express generally takes 30-45 minutes, and the pace is much faster. There is never a sense of being "stuck" like there often is in Robo Rally.

The playing pieces themselves are delightful, if a bit small for adult hands. The three dimensional train cars are beautifully illustrated, and the game includes pieces of scenery that have no bearing on game play, but can be scattered around the table for decorative effect.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Out of a few recent Robo Rally-like games, this one is a clear favorite, not just for the western theme (always a plus for me) but for the light, fun tone and fast-paced game play.

• Colt Express official website
• Colt Express on BoardGameGeek

VOLT: Robot Battle Arena -- for people who don't like Robo Rally

Robo Rally is a very divisive game: some people really love it, and others just cannot stand it, to the point where they'll get up and leave if it hits the table. Personally I've loved it since I first played it, but I definitely understand why it drives some people crazy, as their carefully constructed movement plans inevitably fall apart over the course of what are often confusing, non-linear turns.

VOLT: Robot Battle Arena appears to be an attempt to capture the intent of Robo Rally (robot races and battles with pre-programmed moves) while eliminating the frustrations, and it largely succeeds.

The game is played  on a simple grid map (the game comes with a few different ones to choose from), and each player uses a hidden player board to plan their three moves for the turn, with choices being to move forward, backward, left, or right, or to shoot in one of nine possible directions. The moves are planned using six-sided dice, but they aren't rolled randomly. Rather, the player chooses what numbered side to place on each move, with the number determining either the distance moved, or the severity of the attack.

The only catch is that you cannot do the exact same maneuver twice in one turn. For example, you can't move a number of squares to the left, fire off a shot, and then move left again. This makes strategic planning a bit more important.

Players earn points by occupying certain board squares at the end of a turn, or by destroying opponents' robots. The game ends when a player has scored five victory points.

An advanced game option adds module tiles that give players special abilities for their robots, as well as a few additional game variants such as team play and a best-of-three multi-game option for longer games.

By eliminating Robo Rally's randomized deck of movement cards, VOLT gives players more deliberate and useful options each turn. The reduced player count (2-4, as opposed to Robo Rally's 2-8) keep the games a little shorter, and the increased emphasis on taking out opposing robots means you have to pay a lot more attention to what your opponents are doing, where in Robo Rally you're just hoping they'll stay out of your way.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) I would give VOLT a 3.5  if we were doing half stars. It's a fun and engaging game that is simple to learn but gives you a lot to think about while playing, but that same simplicity keeps it from being something I want to play often.

• VOLT: Robot Battle Arena official website
• VOLT: Robot Battle Arena on BoardGameGeek.com

Love Letter: elegant in its simplicity

Love Letter is a wonderfully simple game consisting of a mere 16 cards. Each player (up to four) plays from a hand of two cards, with the goal being to either knock all the other players out of the game, or have the highest card when the deck runs out. The cards have different game text, most of them slanted towards figuring out what cards your opponents are holding and getting rid of them. Play continues over several rounds until one player has won four, or everyone is ready to move on to a different game.

The theme involves renaissance-style court intrigue, with different courtiers working to get a love letter to the princess, but the game's popularity has spawned several "fill in the blanks" licensed versions such as Batman and The Hobbit, as well as a slew of home-brew fan creations (I made an Aliens themed version for myself).

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Love Letter is a simple game wothout being overly simplistic, and works great as a quick fill-in game for gamers and non-gamers alike.

• Love Letter official website
• Love Letter on BoardGameGeek

Shadows of Brimstone: a western horror dungeon crawl

It may come as a bit of a surprise that when I first heard about Shadows of Brimstone, I wasn't terribly interested. Sure, I love an adventure game, I love a horror game, and I really love a western game, and this promised to be all three, plus it was coming from Flying Frog Productions, the publisher behind two of my favorite board games (Fortune and Glory and A Touch of Evil). But the setting looked like a rather appalling rip off of Shane Hensley's Deadlands, and at the time I was suffering from Kickstarter exhaustion, and not really interested in backing another expensive game.

I was resigned to ignoring this game, but then a very generous friend gave me a copy for my birthday, freely admitting that his motivations were somewhat selfish: he wanted to play the game, but didn't want to assemble and paint the miniatures (more on that in a moment). It looked like I would be taking a closer look at Shadows of Brimstone after all.

It's definitely a game in the midst of an identity crisis. The mash-up of wild west and unspeakable horror isn't entirely new (see the aforementioned Deadlands and its accompanying card game, Doomtown), but it adds elements of the classic dungeon crawl to the mix, setting the game in an abandoned mine represented by a board of interlocking room and corridor pieces.

More than that, Shadows of Brimstone can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a role playing game, a board game, or a tactical miniatures game, so it tries to be all three, and not entirely successfully.

At its heart, I think Shadows of Brimstone wants to be a "role playing game in a box" like Hero Quest, Descent, or Mansions of Madness. Players take on the roles of archetypical western characters, and go adventuring in the dungeon-like mine which may or may not contain a portal to a Lovecraftian other world, depending on the scenario being played. Unlike Mansions of Madness or Descent, the game avoids the need for a game master to control the villains, instead combining a basic scenario outline with a deck of randomized cards to determine the shape of the board and what monsters are encountered.

An initial, major turn off for me was the "assembly required" nature of the game's miniatures, which come in several pieces on plastic sprues and require several hours of assembly before the game can even be played. I don't mind painting miniatures or even a minor bit of assembly, but this was above and beyond, requiring a professional level of model making that is normally reserved for players of high-end tactical games such as Warhammer.

Perhaps because of the lack of a game master, encounters tend to be very combat-heavy and light on story, and this is where the game is most successful. The simple rules for determining the monsters' actions work well, and the combat system is pretty straightforward, although without a player controlling the monsters, their tactics tend to be of the "move into position and then keep hitting you until you or the monster goes down" variety.

The game's attempts to mix board game and role playing elements are less successful. It has a lot of the things you would expect from an adventure board game, such as cards and counters representing your character's possessions and abilities, but these are strangely incomplete, with no in-game way to track a character's money or experience points other than writing them down, which seems awfully low-tech. The game designers insist that this isn't a problem, but it's very telling that the fan community very quickly stepped in to fill this gap in the game's components, creating a variety of unofficial print-and-play money and experience tokens.

In a similar vein, the game has an abstracted feature that allows players to visit town between dungeon (sorry, "mine") encounters, with the result of their last encounter sometimes even having an effect on the town visit. While in town players can spend their money and experience to buy better equipment and improve their abilities, but there are no cards or tokens to represent these improvements. Players are expected to just write them down on a character sheet.

The problem I have with the game's reliance on a written character sheet is that there are actually very few character creation options available. Players starting a new campaign must choose from one of four different archetypes, and from there they choose one of three option cards, but that's really it. The addition of a character sheet really seems like a cheap way to make up for some conspicuously missing components.

One role playing element I do really like about Shadows of Brimstone is the idea of multiple games being linked as a campaign, with characters gaining experience and abilities as they progress across gradually more involved and difficult scenarios. It's a neat idea that gives the game a more epic scope than other, similar games. I just wish it either had more consistent board game components, or more open-ended role playing game options.

Rating: UNDECIDED. I want to like this game, but it has some weird shortcomings. I really feel like we need to play through a few more games before I give it a rating.

• Shadows of Brimstone official website
• Shadows of Brimstone on BoardGameGeek