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.

Going to war with Undaunted: Normandy

There's no denying that we're in the middle of a major renaissance for table top games. There have never been more titles available, the standard of quality has never been so high, and the hobby is more mainstream than it has ever been. With the vast proliferation of games currently hitting the market, game designers are forced to think more creatively in order to have their game stand out. One way to do that is by combining different game mechanisms.

Undaunted: Normandy features one of the more unlikely combos, mixing deck building (a relatively modern and extremely popular game type) with old-school counters-and-maps wargaming.

Wargaming has a long and storied history that I won't even attempt to go into here. These types of games have always emphasized accuracy and detail over aesthetics and accessibility, and only a few (such as Twilight Struggle) have managed to get much attention in the wider world of gaming, outside of their dedicated player base. Undaunted: Normandy attempts to rectify that by updating the classic wargame with elegant, streamlined rules, simple but well-designed components, and much nicer artwork.

The game is scenario based, running through a series of historical World War 2 battles each with its own board setup and asymmetrical victory conditions. The board is composed of tiles representing different terrain types such as forests, rivers, and open fields. These tiles are easily rearranged to depict a wide variety of different European battlefields. Each player starts the game with different types of units such as infantry or commanders, each with different abilities. Attacking opposing units is done by rolling dice, with the tiles providing a target number based on distance and cover. It's a very elegant system that is easy to remember during play, requiring very little (if any) looking up of complicated rules.

The real brilliance of the game, however, is the way it incorporates the deck-building mechanism. In most deck building games, players begin with a rudimentary deck of basic cards, and then add better cards to their deck as the game progresses. The same is true here, with the cards representing the different units on the board. Cards are played to move and attack with those units, and also used to keep track of how much damage a unit has taken. When one of your units on the board is hit by an attack, you take one of that unit's cards out of the deck and placing it out of play. You can mitigate damage by adding more of that unit's cards (purchasing them from a supply row, a common feature of most deck building games), but eventually you will run out of a specific unit's cards, and when you do, that unit is destroyed.

Additionally, the game uses "Fog of War" cards to track the unpredictability of warfare. These are essentially blank cards that players are forced to add to their decks at various points during the game, with each one decreasing your chances of drawing the unit card you need during your turn.

The deck building element is elegantly incorporated and solves a lot of problems with battlefield simulation games such as keeping track of damage, limiting how often a particular unit can act, and determining when reinforcements are available. Combined with the location tiles that keep track of often difficult game elements like cover, range, and line of sight, we have a wargame that is intuitive and easy to play.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It may not offer a pinpoint-accurate combat simuation, but Undaunted: Normandy gives us a modern, accessible WWII battle game, ingeniously combining deck building with an updated move-and-attack wargame.

• Undaunted: Normandy official website
• Undaunted: Normandy on BoardGameGeek

First impression: Doctor Who Nemesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game: good enough for now

I love deck building games. These card games that usually involve each player starting with a basic deck of cards that they use to purchase newer, better cards towards an eventual goal of defeating a villain (or the other players) or just accumulating victory points. The format gives me a lot of what I like about trading card games, but without the massive investment of time, energy and money, and has become so ubiquitous as a game mechanism that it has become just one of many design elements in recent (and immensely popular) board games such as Dune: Imperium, and Lost Ruins of Arnak.

Like most people who were children in the 1970s, I love Star Wars. Although the franchise has seen its share of ups and downs over the years, I have enough nostalgic affection for it that I'm prepared to forgive its occasional excesses, and I think its current owners have started to figure out what works and what doesn't, and it's still pretty spectacular when they get it right.

So imagine my relief when Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game turned out to be a pretty good, if not fantastic, game.

The game's theme has invited a lot of comparisons to Star Realms, but honestly both games borrow their core mechanisms from games like Legendary: cards generate one or more different currencies (in this case, resources, attack, or Force) which are then used to attack your opponent or purchase from a center row of available cards. The game adds two new elements to the deck building game formula: a tug-of-war Force track, and the ability to attack unpurchased cards in the center row.

The Force track is a simple board with several spaces and a marker. When players play cards that generate Force, the marker moves towards their side of the board, and their turn starts with it all the way at their end, they get an extra resource to spend. There are also a handful of cards that have additional abilities if the marker is on one side of the board or the other. It's a game element that's not all that developed, but given the absence of major force-wielding characters like Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi from the game, I suspect this will be further developed in an expansion.

Normally in deck building games, players purchase new cards from a common pool or row of available cards, but how do you address that in a world as unambiguously black-and-white as Star Wars? It doesn't really work to have Han Solo working with a squad of stormtroopers, or Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin suddenly resolving their differences and teaming up. The game solves this problem by having all the cards marked as Empire, Rebellion, or neutral. Anyone can buy neutral cards, but rather than the Rebel player being able to buy Imperial cards, or having them just sit there in the row taking up space, each player can attack their opponent's cards, giving them a short term reward and freeing up space for (hopefully) one of their own cards to become available.

The ultimate goal of the game is to destroy your opponent's bases, anywhere between 3 and 5 depending on the desired length of game. Different bases have different in-game abilities, and players can defend their bases by putting capital ships into play -- these horizontally formatted cards stay in play from turn to turn (unusual for a game of this type) and soak up damage directed at their players' bases along with supplying other resources and abilities.

Thematically the game sticks to content from the original Star Wars trilogy and Rogue One, which is set at the same time. In addition to the aforementioned Force-users, the franchise's droid characters such as R2-D2, C-3PO and K2-SO are missing from the game, which makes me think they've been held back for a possible expansion that would introduce additional mechanisms, which would be a good idea -- while the game is perfectly entertaining and playable as-is, it is a little on the simple side and could eventually benefit from some added content to keep players interested.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A game that is perfectly entertaining, especially if you're a Star Wars fan, but lacking the depth of more involved deck building games like Legendary.

• Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game official website
• Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game on BoardGameGeek

Ark Nova: the race to build a better zoo

Ark Nova is an extremely well-designed game that elegantly combines several different game mechanisms and successfully straddles the line between being complex and being just complicated. The zookeeping theme stresses the importance of balancing research and conservation with commercial appeal, and the game has the potential to be a great gateway game à la Settlers of Catan or Pandemic...except that it's saddled with a somewhat high price tag and an overwritten, poorly organized rule book, making the game a little difficult to learn for all but the most experienced tabletop gamers. But it's an excellent game otherwise, well worth it if you can make it through your first few games.

The core mechanism is relatively straightforward. You have a row of 5 cards in front of you, each occupying a space numbered one through 5 and representing an action you can take in the game: build structures such as animal enclosures or kiosks, play animal cards from your hand, use worker placement to claim partnerships with zoos and universities or contribute to conservation efforts, play sponsor cards for immediate or ongoing benefits, or draw cards from the deck. The position of the action card in the row determines how effective it is, and once you've used an action it moves back to the "1" position, causing all the other action cards to move up one spot. Right away you have a wealth of meaningful, strategic choices to make: do you take the lesser action now, or wait until its card has moved and you'll get more out of it? If you need an action to move up in the row, you need to play the actions that are in front of it, even if they don't benefit you right now. The interplay of the different actions and positions is fascinating.

Along the way, certain actions will cause a charming little coffee cup marker to move along what is called the break track. When it gets to the end, an end of round reset occurs, where players retrieve their spent workers, gain income from their zoo's appeal value,  refill their hands of cards, and reset the row of available cards to draw. A key part of the game is the attempt to control when this happens, or at the very least to position yourself so that you're ready to take advantage when it does.

The point of building enclosures, placing animals, supporting conservation efforts, and soliciting sponsors is, of course, to earn the victory points you need to win the game. Players need to make progress along three tracks: appeal, conservation, and reputation. Appeal represents how exciting your zoo is, and determines how much money you get to spend (mainly on building structures for your zoo). Conservation measures how much your efforts are supporting animal preservation; moving along this track gives you access to bonuses such as extra workers and better versions of your action cards. Reputation shows your standing in the scientific community, with more gameplay benefits and also access to a wider range of animal cards. Creating synergy with what animals and structures you place, how you lay out your zoo, what partnerships you go after and what conservation projects you support will gain you points on the various tracks, but there's a catch...

The conservation and appeal points are on the opposite ends of a single track, and the trick to getting a good score is to make sure your conservation keeps up with your appeal. The game ends once a player's markers pass each other (meaning that their conservation and appeal values are roughly equal). After this point, all the other players get one final turn, a mad scramble to finish whatever they are trying to do to maximize their scores, and if they find that they've spent too much game time on increasing their appeal and not enough on conservation, they risk ending up with a low (possibly even a negative) score.

It seems like a lot, and as I mentioned, the rule book doesn't explain it very well, but it really is a smooth system of interlocking game mechanisms, and once you've played a few times everything does kind of lock into place. The best thing to keep in mind while playing is that while it looks like an engine-building game, where you're trying to get just the right combination of elements into play, it's actually a race to see who can get their conservation value to pass their appeal value first. So it's best not to focus on waiting for that perfect card, but rather to just do the best you can with what you have in front of you at the moment.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A really good game that stops just short of being a great one.

• Ark Nova official website
• Ark Nova on BoardGameGeek

Batman Miniature Game: Gotham's tiny reckoning

I won't lie to you, the Batman Miniature Game by Knight Models is not an easy game to get into if you're a North American gamer. The publisher is based in Spain, and has a reputation for being difficult to work with, so you don't see it on many store shelves, or even in many US-based online stores. On top of that, the game is currently in its third edition, with some pretty drastic rules changes between editions, and the game's introductory set is frequently out of print and usually pretty expensive, and the current version of the game relies on the use of a smartphone app that is buggy and incomplete. Now pile on the usual barriers to entry for tabletop miniatures games such as the time it takes to assemble and paint the miniatures and terrain, and it starts to seem like the bridges into Gotham City are barricaded, just as they were in 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.

The game's rulebook can be downloaded for free from their website, as can all of the cards you need to play (which will also allow you to bypass the aforementioned app), so as long as you have a robust printer and are able to get your hands on some miniatures and terrain, you can play the game, but it's an awful lot of DIY work in this age of self-contained, pre-packaged games like Conan or Mythic Battles: Pantheon.

But, once you get past all that, there is a really interesting game here.

Like most games of this type, each player assembles a force of 7-10 characters. In this case each team consists of a hero, a sidekick, a handful of henchmen such as thugs or policemen, and possibly one or two free agents to round everything out. Forces are generally limited to a particular faction, so Batman can't team up with the Joker, but there are a few neutral characters such as Catwoman who can join anyone's team.

The game is played out over 4 rounds, which doesn't seem like much, but there is quite a bit each character can do on their turn, so the time goes by quickly and the game usually feels finished by the end of round four. At the start of each round, each player chooses four of their characters to assign Audacity markers to. Characters without those markers will only get one action during the round (usually either a move or an attack), but those with Audacity will get three actions: one move, one attack, and one special action, which usually represents a character's unique ability, such as Batman using his grappling hook or Harley Quinn distracting her opponents with clownish antics.

The real meat of the game, and the thing that makes it more than just the usual slugfest, is the Objectives system, enacted in the game by Objective cards in a player's hand, and Suspect tokens on the board. Each player starts the game with a deck of 20 cards which form their objective deck. These cards are what adds story elements to the game, representing goals and maneuvers such as gathering evidence, stealing loot, taking or rescuing hostages, or (especially in the Joker's case) generally causing chaos.

Objective cards frequently interact with Suspect tokens, which represent civilians, loot, bombs, or anything that needs to have a physical presence on the board. During their turn a character can forego an attack to instead interact with a Suspect token, either placing one on the board, removing one of the opponent's, or moving them into strategic positions.

Objective cards are also the way each player scores points in the game, often making combat with the other player's miniatures secondary to fulfilling the conditions a card might call for. A lot of miniatures games have tried to add card-based mechanisms as a way to spice things up, but this is the most integrated and interesting system I've ever seen. The cards are an integral part of the game rather than a tacked-on extra.

My only major complaint about the game (other than how difficult to find and expensive the miniatures are) is that characters tend to have far too many special abilities. This might seem obvious for a super hero game, but I often find it difficult to keep track of the large number of game effects and when they're supposed to resolve, and sometimes trying to figure out how different abilities interact with each other can lead to some head-scratching moments.

While it is pretty complicated and tends to take a long time to play (we've had games go on for five or more hours), the game really does feel like a Batman story unfolding on the table.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) I'm marking it down a point due to the fairly unreasonable barriers to entry, but the game play itself is a solid 4 out of 5.

• Batman Miniature Game official website
• Batman Miniature Game on BoardGameGeek (not very active)
• Batman Miniature Game Facebook group