Archive for the 'Board Game Review' Category

Campaign Manager 2008 is a card-driven game recreating the Presidential Election between Obama and McCain.  The designers of the game are well-known for Twilight Struggle and 1960: Making of the President – both are card driven strategy games and Twilight Struggle is ranked the number 3 best board game of all – so the game was highly anticipated.

The game primarily consists of 45 cards for each player, a deck of Breaking News cards, a mini-board for each state.  Players aim to win the electoral votes of each state and be the first player to gain 270+ votes.  During the game, 4 states boards are laid between the players which are the ones the players are currently campaigning (fighting) over to win.  Each state has a track showing whether economy or defence is currently the important issue to its voters, and each state has two demographic groups printed on them with a marker showing which is currently the most influential group in that state. Read the rest of this entry »

This post reviews “The Lurker at the Threshold”, an expansion for Arkham Horror, and not the full game.  If you don’t know Arkham Horror, it’s an excellent horror game based on H P Lovecraft’s 1920’s setting where the players travel around the town of Arkham (and often into weird dimensions too), having unusual encounters as they work together to stop the Great Old One awaking from its slumber (which will likely spell doom for mankind).  During the game, players try to increase their abilities to keep the menacing goings-on in check and their bodies and their sanity intact.

Lurker in the Threshold is a small expansion so consists of new cards, tokens and game mechanics and no new board.  We played with just the basic game and the Lurker expansion.  I always like to play new expansions on their own with the basic game the first time so it’s possible to really see what they’re like.

Dark Pacts with the Lurker – One of the three new game mechanics in this expansion is ‘The Lurker’ itself who is a Herald.  Heralds are powerful supernatural entities preparing the way for the Great Old One – they are monster characters who affect the gameplay and makes things harder for the players while the Great Old One slumbers.

The Lurker itself awaits the players in between the dimensions and tempts them with deals (called ‘Dark Pacts’) that will give them power.  Of course, there’s always going to be a price to pay at a later stage.  A player can choose to take a Dark Pact at the start of their turn or they can take one to make a spell succeed without sanity cost.  Read the rest of this entry »

For $ale is a fast and light auction game for 3 to 6 players with an excellent difference.

The game primarily consists of two decks of cards: One deck of properties and the other of cheques.  Each property card has a value ranging from 1 to 30 and the higher the value the nicer the property pictured on the card, i.e. the value 1 card shows a cardboard box, value 10 shows a basic log cabin, value 29 is a castle.  Each cheque card has a value ranging from zero to $15,000.  In addition, there are some cardboard tokens which are cash and each player starts with $18,00.

The game is made up of two halves.  First, the players bid for the properties using their cash.  Each round a number of cards equal to the number of players cards are laid out face-up in the middle of the table.  Going clockwise, players bid by either increasing the previous bid or passing.  If a player passes, they take the lowest value property card and pay half of their bid to the bank.  The last player left in each round wins the highest value card but must pay the full amount of their bid to the bank. Read the rest of this entry »

Liberté was released in 2001 and Valley Games are publishing a new version of the game in 2010.   This review is of the 2001 version by Warfrog Games and not of the new version by Valley Games – I’m not sure what differences there may be (if any) but I know the boards look very similar.  I bought Liberté about 8 years ago and had never played it until a week of two ago.  When I bought it, it seemed too complex for the main gaming group I had at that time and other games always took priority.  However, the news of its re-release made me re-visit the game and it wasn’t seem as complex to me now having played so many other games.

Set during the French Revolution, players play cards to place blocks on a map of France.  The coloured blocks represent the support for the three political groups in the area where they are located – the nicely-thematic red, white and blue blocks represent the radicals, the royalists and the moderates respectively.  The map is divided into 6 coloured regions each containing several areas.

Each turn, a player can either play a card from their hand, or take a card from the 3 face-up or a face-down card from the draw pile.  Players don’t represent any one party – instead, the card played determines which colour block(s) can be placed into which region’s areas.  When a player places blocks, they put a  marker on the top of the stack showing they added them.  Read the rest of this entry »

Traders of Carthage is essentially a card game but does include a board.  Each of the cards shows one of 4 different commodities (red, blue, yellow and green) and has a coin value from 1 to 5 on it.  Next to the board are two rows of face-up cards – one is the Market (these cards can be bought or taken) and one is the Field (which are cards that will soon be moved to the Market).  The board depicts a trade route passing through 6 Mediterranean cities along which 4 ships – one for each commodity – will travel.

On their turn a player can carry out one action:

Get coins: The player can add any 1 card from the Market to their hand (excluding any card with another player’s reserved marker on it).
Reserve a card: Each player can place their reserve marker on any unreserved card in the Market or the Field.  It can only be retrieved by taking the reserved card (Get coins), or by buying the cards (Buy goods).
Buy goods: A player can spend coins (the cards in their hand) to buy the cards in the market; however, the player must buy ALL of the goods cards in the market or none at all.  Purchases must include any good in the Market that the player has reserved, but exclude any goods reserved by other players.  Any goods bought are placed face-up in front of the player – these are the player’s shipment.  After a purchase, the ships matching the colours of the cards bought are moved along the trade route (1 space if one card of that colour was bought, 2 spaces if more than one was bought).

Read the rest of this entry »

Egizia was a game on my list to check out at Essen in 2009.  I would even have taken a punt and bought it without playing it first but the text on the cards was in German.  So, I played it soon as I had a chance a couple of weeks ago when the English language version was released.

Set in Ancient Egypt, players try to gain as many victory points (VPs) as possible over 5 rounds.  Each player has 8 ships and, in turn order (the player with fewest VPs goes first), players place their ships one at a time on spaces along the Nile following two important rules: first, only one ship can be placed on each space and, second, a player can not place a new ship upstream of any of their ships that they have already placed.

There are two main types of spaces along the Nile.  On one side are fixed spaces that offer the same benefits every round (improving construction crews, changing the weather and improving the player’s stone/grain markets – all explained later) plus there are 3 sets of building spaces where the player needs to have a ship if they want an opportunity to build monuments later in the round.  On the other side of the Nile, there are spaces whose benefits are determined by cards placed on each space at the start of each round (which increase as the game progresses).  The cards offer benefits that can be permanent, immediate use, or held for later use.  These benefits range from the simple (extra quarries or fields, one-off food bonuses, temporary construction crew strength boosts, bonus VPs, etc.) to more unusual abilities (place a ship on a space already occupied by another player, place two ships in a row, keep 2 Sphinx cards (explained later), take an unclaimed card at the end of the round, etc.) Read the rest of this entry »

Power Struggle had a lot of great feedback at Spiel 09 in Essen.  It hadn’t been on my radar before that at all and, unfortunately, I didn’t get to play it.  Now I have I can see why it was so well received.  (It’s quite a complex game to explain so excuse the longer-than-normal review).

The game is based on creating departments in a company and having dominance over the business to win the game before anyone else does.  It may not sound very inspiring but is a lot more interesting than it may sound.  The setting is good Eurogame stuff and it’s a theme that lends itself well to the gameplay, especially as there is a touch of humour too. Read the rest of this entry »

(The English version of this game has been released by FantasyFlight Games with the name Dragonheart.)

When a game is talked about as having a lot in common with Lost Cities, it’s a game that knows how to get my interest.  Lost Cities is a great 2-player game as there’s more depth than first expected and is one of the games my girlfriend really enjoys too.  However, this kind of comparison does give Drachenherz a lot to live up to.

Drachenherz is a simple, 2-player game.  The board shows a very nice painting of a scene where a dragon dominates the sky whilst an archer takes aim, a princess waits to strike and a troll lurks ready to grab the princess, and so on.  Each of the characters has one or more outlines around them to show where cards are placed and there are some arrows from one card location to another. Read the rest of this entry »

Rattus is by the same designers who created Oregon, one of my favourite board games.  For me, Oregon has a great mix of strategy and planning without being heavy – plenty to think about, a good amount of control, but relatively light so most people can enjoy it.  So, I was really pleased when I heard they had created a new game.

Rattus is themed around the Black Death, the plague that wiped out 1/3 of the European population from 1348-1350.  In essence, players take turns placing their population (coloured cubes) onto the European map and, as you may expect, population pieces get removed as the plague sweeps from area to area.  The winner is the player with the most population left at the end of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Qwirkle reminded me of Ingenious (also called Einfach Genial and Mensa).  Not a bad thing at all as I really like Ingenious and am playing it on my iPhone these days too.  Qwirkle’s gameplay is different to Ingenious but also has a really good thinking element to it.

The game consists of 108 square tiles which each show a coloured symbol.  There are 36 different combinations of the 6 different symbols and 6 different colours, and there are 3 of every different colour/symbol combination.

Each player takes 6 random tiles from the bag. On their turn, they place any number of tiles in a straight line (like Scrabble) so long as they obey a single rule: the tiles in any line placed (or formed by adding to other lines) must either be of unique shape but matching colour, or unique colour but matching shape.  Read the rest of this entry »