Category: Board Games

Mega Spring Meltdown 2024

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and various parts of my body on are strike. Must be spring! Green Mountain Gamers Mega Spring Meltdown event was this past weekend, and so I made the arduous trip up to Lebanon, NH to take part.

As always, I’ll be talking about what I played, and a bit of what I saw. One small thing though first, if you like these write ups, follow me on Twitter and help me change the ratio of human beings to porn bots that follow me for the better.

The Event

Like other Green Mountain Gamers-hosted events, this was a relatively small event. It’s just a bunch of folks in a big room playing games. There are some small raffles, and a few “Play to Win” games, but that’s about it. It’s a nice cozy affair with no real lines or waiting, just games, chatting, and occasionally folks stepping out to get food.

The Games

I got through a pretty decent number of games, given that I showed up about four hours after the event had started. The first one was Parfum, a dice and action drafting game about creating perfume. It was fine, but I got a bit of a runaway lead early on, which did spoil some of the tension going into the latter half of the game. I like the systems, but do wish there was a bit more to do with them.

Parfum was followed up by another dice drafting game: Dice Miner! I generally like Dice Miner, and some day I’ll actually finish my write up on it. But the long and short of it is that I enjoy it, but do wish it had more types of dice to draft. That said, I was glad to show it to a few folks who hadn’t played it before.

What followed were the first of several games of Mottainai that I played throughout the day. Mottainai is very interesting and could be considered a follow up to Glory To Rome. It definitely will receive its own writeup at some point, but perhaps the most interesting about it is how alien it plays. I found I had a lot of success “looking for lethal” as it were, instead of trying to build out a large strategy.

I followed Mottainai with two games that require significantly less long term planning: Trio and Ghost Blitz. Trio is what you would get if someone looked Go Fish, and said, “Okay, but what if we made it good, and fun.” It’s a clever little game about memorization and deduction, and I’ve found that it’s light enough to play with non-gamers.

Ghost Blitz on the other hand is a genre of game I’ve traditionally been quite bad at: quick matching reaction speed. It’s simple enough to explain quickly, so here’s how it works. There are five objects, each a different color, and a deck of cards. Each card has two of the five objects on it, not necessarily the correct color. Whenever a card is flipped up, you need to grab the correctly colored object on the card, or if that doesn’t exist, grab the object not described in any way on the card (e.g. neither its shape nor its color pictured).

I did better at it than I usually do at these sorts of things.

Then there were a few more games of Mottainai, all of which I won fairly quickly, then the last “big” game of the day: Life of the Amazonia.

Life of the Amazonia is a sort of “not a city” builder where you acquire terrain tiles, and place animals on them to score points, doing both of the above via a bag-builder. It’s like a deck-builder, but instead of adding cards to a deck, you add tokens to a bag. It does have one really interesting quirk: you can’t split resource tiles. This had some really interesting effects around which tokens were the best to actually get.

Did I win? No. But was I close? Also no.

Would I have done better if all the rules for scoring points were explained to me before the game started? Probably not, but it’s a convenient crutch to place the blame on for my failure, so let’s go with that.

With that, it was time to clean up, and get out. Big thanks to Green Mountain Gamers for putting these events on, Resonym for prizes, and special shout out to the people who played a single game of Twilight Emperium for 9 hours.

Skulls of Sedlec

Work has been incredibly busy lately. As such, this review, much like Skulls of Sedlec, is going to be incredibly compact.

Skulls of Sedlec is an 18-card pattern building, open drafting, and set collection game. Two of those three phrases I didn’t know until I went and looked them up on Board Game Geek, and I somewhat disagree with the third. It also has 12 expansions of which I will be reviewing zero. After all, the point of a Button Shy game is to make a micro-game that fits into a wallet, not one that you can go band for band with.

The full rules for Skulls of Sedlec are less than a page long, so I’m not going to spend too much time on the rules. The short version is that cards are divided up into piles, and on each player’s turn, that player takes one of three actions. You can:

  1. Flip two cards in piles face up, then take one of them into your hand
  2. Take a single face-up card from a pile into your hand
  3. Put a single card from your hand into a stack/tableau.

Board Game Geek calls this game a set collection game, but I disagree. After all, most cards don’t score based on being part of a set. Instead, they score based on their relation to other cards in the pyramid. Some, like the lovers do need to be in a set to score, but many like royals or clergy have their own unique scoring rules.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Skulls of Sedlec. It’s a very compact game, and I’m not sure I’d get more than 2-3 more plays out of it. But it’s quick enough that I feel I could teach it pretty easily, even to non-board gamers. I’ve seen a fair number of people note that they didn’t consider it worth playing without the expansions, but I found it quite enjoyable, even as a standalone.

Green Mountain Gamers – Winter Weirdness

It’s time for another event writeup! This time it was Winter Weirdness, one of the board game days put on Green Mountain Gamers (if you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and looking for stuff to do, maybe click that link). As always, I’ll be quickly recapping the day, what I played, and what I thought about it.

Morning

After arriving, we started out with a quick game of Tiger and Dragon. I’ve written a ton about Tiger and Dragon already, and it was my favorite board game of last year, so there’s not too much to recap there.

After that icebreaker, we cracked open a friend’s copy of Parks that he found at a yard sale for $5. This turned out to be an incredible deal, because Parks is great. It’s amazingly well produced, with beautiful tokens and art. But more importantly, it’s actually fun. The main mechanism is moving down an action track that you can’t go back on, while trying to get enough resources to visit parks and score points. I might do a bigger writeup on this game at some point, but I really enjoyed playing Parks.

I then played Glory to Rome. It’s still very good, and we used one of the expansions, perhaps incorrectly, but we used it nonetheless. This was probably my fifth or so game of Glory to Rome, and I really felt like it was starting to click, or at least starting to click enough that my engine turned on and outscored everyone else to win.

Witness the power of a ton of docks.

After that it was time for…

Lunch

Someone mentioned that there was a very good grilled cheese sandwich place nearby, so we went over there. The Meltdown did have very good sandwiches, with a caveat.

When I think grilled cheese, I think buying them from a really sketchy guy in a parking lot at 1:00 AM in college for like 8 bucks, because he’s the only source of food in a billion miles. That is my expected grilled cheese experience.

And while I have no meaningful thoughts on food itself (this is game blog, not a food blog) I do think paying a net of $25 for a single grilled cheese sandwich with fries is bit… much.

Great food, would probably pack a sandwich next time.

Afternoon

Heading back to the event, I cracked open a copy of Epic: Guardians of Gowana that I’d picked up recently, and played of game that. Despite taking almost of my life in damage on turn 1, I was pleasantly surprised by Epic. It’s a cool little expandable card game, with a neat resource mechanic where all cards cost either 1 or 0 gold to play, and each player gets a max of one gold each turn. It worked much better than I was expecting.

Then I joined some other folks for a game of Everdell. For various reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself, I’m unlikely to ever purchase, or have any friends who own a copy of Everdell unless I somehow manage to get it secondhand. That said, I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve played it before, so I wanted to give it a second shot. Everdell is a cute little tableau builder/worker placement game, and I had a good enough time that I’d probably want to give it yet another shot.

After that, I managed to get in a game of Space Lion, one of the games I’d brought to the event. I got my copy at PAX, and I’ve been trying grind out some more games before I do a secondary writeup on it. I did write about it pre-Kickstarter, but now that I’ve got a full copy, the game has been changed quite a bit. There’s a bunch of improvements to graphic design, along with some structural changes that make for a better play experience, but do remove some elements I liked from the… hmm. Prototype version? Beta? Not quite sure what to call it.

Finally, with it getting late, and the friend I got a ride with showing no signs of finishing up his game of Ark Nova, I sat down to play Three Sisters. Well, I planned to, but unfortunately we didn’t quite have time to finish the game out. I’ll try to get a full game in at some point, but I liked what I did play.

Wrap-Up

Overall, great time. There are two more events coming up, and I’m currently planning to be at both of them. Hopefully if you’re in the Vermont or New hampshire area, I’ll see you there, and if not, well, I’m planning to be at Granite Game Summit, PAX East and PAX Unplugged this year as well.

The Backlog Cleanout

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, and what better time for a bit of cleaning? Specifically, cleaning out the backlog of all the games I played, didn’t write about, and now too much time has elapsed for me to give a fresh review. For each of these games, I’ll be giving my general impressions, and talking a little bit about why I didn’t actually get around to doing a full writeup. I’ll also go in semi-chronological order, so let’s get to it, starting with one of this years indie darlings:

Pizza Tower is a side scrolling platformer that I think is supposed to be in the vein of the old Warioland platformers. I say “I think” because I’ve never played one of those games. My lack of familiarity with the genre is what prevented me from doing a writeup of any sort.

See, I usually like to talk about games in the context of other games, their inspirations, and what they do better than their predecessors. But everything about Pizza Tower is incredibly alien to me. It has an art style that I think is supposed evoke Courage the Cowardly Dog. It has an extremely fast pace, and is very focused on speed and collectable items for points. It was a really difference experience from other games I’ve played.

And frankly, given that the game has an overwhelmingly positive rating with 44,000 reviews right now, I’m not sure I have much to add. I thought Pizza Tower was weird, but good. It also has my favorite game soundtrack of the year, because it just goes wayyyy harder than it has to.

I’m honestly surprised that I never got around to writing about Inkbound. It was one of my games to watch from February last year. And then I bought it, and played 40 hours, and never did a writeup.

Inkbound is a lot of things. It’s a roguelike. It has good multiplayer. It’s an isometric turn-based battler. And it’s really fun. So why didn’t I do a writeup?

Part of that is that I’m conflicted on how I feel about Inkbound’s structure. My internal conflict isn’t helped by the fact that the game itself is in a state a flux. If I’d written a full review earlier, I would probably have complained about the game’s microtransaction store, which has now been completely removed. I would have also probably praised the game’s dual movement/action resource system, where both moving around and performing attacks pulls from a single resource pool. That system has also been replaced.

I may do a writeup on the game in the future. I love the game for its mechanics, and I’m mildly frustrated by it for other reasons. But there’s been so much more added, and so many changes since I logged my 40 hours. At this point even if I sat down today and wrote something, it wouldn’t be indicative of the game’s current state.

Before I say anything about APICO, I think it’s worth noting that I paid approximately $9 for it and bunch of other games on an itch bundle, and not the $20 it currently costs.

APICO is another multiplayer game that I mostly played with friends, and as such, there were quite a few systems I never actually engaged with. It’s trying to be a comfy pixel world game where you breed bees, and gather honey. I think it’s supposed to feel small and cozy.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d like to respond to that design goal with the following screenshot:

Not pictured: my other friends running around desperately trying to keep our system functioning.

Instead of the comfy sim, APICO turned into something closer to Satisfactory. We attempted to hyper optimize production and throughput, which is why I had 12 interactable item windows open at once. As you might expect, it did end up feeling rather grindy.

I don’t really like or dislike APICO a huge amount. It was amusing to play with folks, but some of that was the chaotic dichotomy between the game’s cute pixel art, and our frenzied thrashing to keep our honey cola soft drink production up.

I probably would have gotten around to doing a writeup on PlateUp if I’d played more than 4 hours of it. It’s a multiplayer food production game in the vein of Overcooked. But it trades specific levels out for a roguelike set of upgrades and runs.

That said, I only played 4 hours of it because that’s how long it took for there to be a conflict between my friends, and then we never returned it to it. And I have no desire to play a game like PlateUp by myself.

End result? I dropped it much earlier than I would have otherwise, and I’m also now realizing it might have been a waste of $20. Oh well.

Dragon Castle was one of three games with “dragon” in the name that I played in a one week span, the other two being Tiger and Dragon, which I loved, and Dragonwood, which I hated. Being the awkward middle child of the trio, compounded with the fact that I only played it once, meant that I never really got around to talking about Dragon Castle.

It’s a perfectly functional sort of tile drafting/placement/set collection game. I enjoyed it. But I didn’t play it enough, and it didn’t leave a strong enough impression for me to really be like “Oh, I love this, I must speak about it more.”

But hey, you know what game did leave a strong impression? Aegean Sea. It was first game I’ve ever played where 3 turns in, everyone at the table decided that they would rather play something else, and unanimously sort of just rage quit.

Rage quitting a board game might not sound like much coming from me, the poster child for ADHD medication. That said, I was playing with a professional game designer with multiple published games, and someone who just tracks how many victory points everyone else at the table has in games like Feast for Odin. In their head.

Goodbye Aegean Sea. You will not be missed. (Which is weird because I like other Carl Chudyk designs)

I’ve described Farlight 84 as Wish.com Fortnite. It’s a battle royale shooter, and outside of the cool vehicles, it doesn’t have a single piece of personality.

If AI ever does get around to generating games, this is the sort of thing that it will make. A generic mobile shooter stuffed with microtransactions and lootboxes. Characters that feel like they were designed by combining a list of demographics and fetishes, and making sure there was something for everyone.

Farlight 84 is polished gravel. Functional, technically effective, and displaying all the heart of the Grinch at the start of the book.

So I’d like to admit something. I couldn’t stand Mario Bros Wonder. I don’t understand how this game was even in consideration for game of the year.

Here’s the thing: I’m usually not in the position of not liking a game everyone else loves. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. The best example I can think of for this is Cult of the Lamb. And I think something similar happened here.

I found Wonder to be almost entirely spectacle at the cost of interesting mechanical innovations. And before you stab me, yes, I do mean the wonder flowers. The thing about the wonder flowers is that while what they do is new for Mario, it’s not new for games or even platformers. And I don’t even think Mario does it best. Mechanics like being chased by your shadow have been done in Celeste, and other 3D Mario games. Singing piranha plants are fun, but this demo level from Billie Bust Up feels like it executes the idea much better.

Anyway, I didn’t do a full writeup on Wonder because I think it suffers from the same problem as Cult of the Lamb. Because I play a lot of games, I’ve seen these perfectly fine mechanics done better elsewhere, even though they are executed here with in a very polished way.

But yeah, I felt robbed of $60 after playing this.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Full Demos

There’s not enough time to play a full demo of everything at PAX. I think if the show was set up to let you do that, it would probably be one or two months long. I’m not sure I could take that long off work.

That said, I did play a bunch of full demos! So, in no particular order, here are a bunch of things I played that you might not have heard of.

(Okay, in no particular order except Pack The Essentials, which is first because it’s pretty great.)

Pack The Essentials

There’s a lot to unpack about Pack The Essentials. The short version is that I really liked playing this, and I’m excited to see a full release. And while I did play it in the Unpub hall, it already has a publisher: Whacky Wizard games, a new spin off of Wise Wizard games.

Pack the Essentials is a tile drafting and placement game. Players take turns drafting tetromino-like tiles, and placing them onto a personal board. It’s a bit point salad, and your goal is to get the most victory points. You get points for a variety of things, from building chains of certain colored tiles, to surrounding other types of tiles, to using a secondary resource to flip the tiles into cats. Yes, your stuff turns into cats.

Prototype art!

Pack The Essentials was one of my favorite things at the show, and I’m excited to see the full version.

Author Note: If you’re wondering why the board looks completely different from the splash image, that’s because I was playing a prototype version which doesn’t have finalized art. The gameplay was still great.

Crystallo

I am putting Crystallo on this list mostly out of a combined sense of spite, and grudging respect. I did in fact play an entire game of Crystallo, and I actually won, admittedly on easy mode. But let’s back up for a moment.

Crystallo is a single player set placement game. In fact, you could call it a Set-like game, in that it takes the primary mechanic from Set. I don’t think that’s an unfair observation, since the person demoing it to me referenced Set when explaining Crystallo.

It’s a bit easier to see than to explain, so here’s a quick image of my finished Crystallo board.

Did this image help? I hope it did, because it’s eating a non-zero portion of the 10 gigs I have to host this site. A picture might be worth a 1,000 words, but it takes up the memory of like 400,000 words.

Crystallo effectively has two rounds. In the first round you build out a map of cards, one card at a time. You’re trying to surround specific colored emblems. Each time you do so, you complete a set, and you’re trying to complete enough sets to win. In the second part of the game, you try to get one more match of kind each, using all your remaining cards, plus an additional 9.

The thing about Crystallo is that it was not particularly “fun” for me. In fact, the main emotion I remember feeling was immense stress, and mild frustration. There was a palpable sense of relief after I finished, because apparently when a game frustrates me to no end, my response is to sit down and finish the entire thing instead of going and doing something else.

I should work on expanding that skill set to the rest of my life.

Anyway, I do respect Crystallo, but it’s absolutely not a game for me.

Canosa

One of my personal “classic” board games, which is to say a game that I remember from my childhood is Quoridor. Fairly simple rules, but what felt like a complex game to play.

Canosa gave me a very similar vibe. It’s probably easiest to describe it in terms of something like Chess, but that’s still inaccurate. There are two types of pieces: Sailors and Sirens. Each player has one Siren, and your goal is to move four sailors to your own island. The catch is that you don’t own Sailors. Instead, their ownership changes. Sailors and Sirens have colored rings on them corresponding to the player, and there’s a set of mechanics for moving those rings on and off. Which ring is the highest on the sailor determines which player controls it.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the retail edition has the beautiful wooden pieces, but I can still dream.

Playing it feels very similar to playing something like Quoridor, Connect Four, or Chess to me. The main skill you need to succeed is the ability to look ahead and figure out what your opponent is going to do. But that’s hard enough that it’s fairly easy to missing an option or fail to spot a solution.

I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate a game like Canosa after one play. But I would play more of it! Just preferably not against the game’s creator again, because getting butchered isn’t exactly the best experience. But I would play more.

Skyrockets

Skyrockets is thematically a game about fireworks. Mechanically, it’s a real time sand timer management game. Players have hands of cards with two colors on them, take turns playing cards. Whenever anyone plays a card, you flip the two sand timers that match the card’s colors.

You win by flipping the largest sand timer several times, but you can only flip it after it runs out. Meanwhile, you have to keep all the other sand timers from ever running out. It’s a fairly simple concept, but worked pretty well.

On the whole, Sky Rockets felt like a lightweight game I’d bring to a family gathering, or maybe play as a quick thing at a larger event. It’s not uninteresting, but it also didn’t sell me on itself quite enough for me to grab a copy on the spot.

Shape Invaders

Shape Invaders is a tabletop game, in that it takes up an entire friggin tabletop. It’s a physical dexterity game for two players. Each player has a set of slim plastic pieces that they set up on their side of the table. Then they take turns flicking pieces and trying to knock the other player’s mothership off the board.

It’s actually quite fun, and I really liked it. It also has a sort of comeback mechanic that works really well. Each player has a set of pieces that can’t be flicked, called shields. Whenever your mothership would be knocked off the board, you remove a shield and place the mothership where the shield was. It’s much better than a flat life system, since it’s possible to go after shields early.

Dungeon Drop

Dungeon Drop is another “most of a table” game that has some physical dexterity elements. I’ll be honest, I did not enjoy Dungeon Drop at all. Here’s how the game works.

You start by dropping a large number of small plastic cubes into an enclosed area. On your turn, you drop more cubes in, then select a set of cubes encapsulated by other specific cubes to pick up. There’s more to it than that, and there are some special powers that involve flicking cubes, or different cubes being worth different amounts, but it just wasn’t very interesting.

Most of the game is just spent looking for good patterns on your turn, and hoping no one else spots them. There just wasn’t very much I found interesting about it.