Board 8 > I rank every Board Game I played at DTE (Board Games Topic)

(+) Yeah! (+)

I recently returned from Dice Tower East and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I played 18 games (some multiple times), all of which were new to me (besides one minor exception). I figured I'd do rankings + write-ups on those games. Might do some other rankings afterwards if there's interest, but I'll see how this goes first.

Will try to do one ranking a day starting tomorrow.

Also figured this could be a general board game topic as well.

General Info on my Ranking System:

0-3: Various levels of unplayable. I would not play these games unless guilted into it
3-5: Games I generally don't want to play, but could be convinced to try them again in some cases
5-6: Games I don't love but would play once if someone wanted to
6-7: Ok games I would play if someone suggested, but won't suggest myself
7-8: Games that I like but don't love. I would suggest some of these with certain groups (party games mostly)
8-9: Great games that I enjoy. Will suggest these a good amount of time
9-10: Some of the best games of all time. I'm always down to play these games

Hell yeah, we need more board game talk on B8.

I really want to go to Dice Tower West some year soon, but I haven't been able to make it work yet.

Nice, hope to go to one of their cons eventually, but not in the cards this year.

But always excited to read/talk about board games

#18: Wild Realms
My Score: 4.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347587/wild-realms

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This was one of the first games I played at this convention, and I played it in the demo area. I played this 1v1 against the guy giving the demo and honestly I was not impressed.

The goal of the game is the be the first one with four closed habitats (Each player starts with one closed habitat of a different type). A closed habitat requires having the appropriate habitat card (I believe its something like ocean, forest, fire and air), an animal for each of the five symbols of which one is a leader.

The basics behind this game is you are drawing up to 5 animal cards each turn, placing them freely on either a habitat that you have the card for or your bench. You can then use your bench to attack another players habitat if you have a leader on your bench. To attack, the color of the creature has to match the habitat it is attacking, then you can use any abilities the creature has and roll however many dice the card says and if you match the number on any of the creatures in that habitat (To clarify, each creature has a color, a symbol, a number, and possibly an ability) you can choose one to discard.

So I have a few issues with this game. The main one is that attacking generally just feels bad. You are using one of your cards to have a chance at discarding another players cards. At most its a one to one trade which is slightly beneficial because you are likely only attacking with symbols you don't need, but a lot of the time it just whiffs.

My next issue is that the cards are not balanced, some abilities are borderline useless or super situational (I had one that discards all off an opponents fish, but since it only can attack one habitat and he had no fish in that habitat it was basically useless) while others are really strong (There's a rhino that makes an opponent shuffle all but one card in a habitat back into the deck, which is usually 2-3 cards).

I don't particular care for the color mechanic. In a 1v1 both players start with one realm closed, so 1/4th of my cards can't attack from the get-go. You also have to draw each of the three habitat cards you don't start with, which I could easily see being super frustrating if you dont draw one while someone else draws them all from the get go.

There's also a legendary creature mechanic which is fine but you have to draw the card to trigger it, and there was only one drawn in my entire game so it was rare enough to not be a huge factor. And another mechanic called a realm battle where you can have a closed realm attack another and it is basically just dice rolling until someone loses (The guy did say this was largely disliked and they are changing it in the next version so I won't hold it against them).

I will say the art is nice and cool, but the game just had too many things that feel bad. Attacking generally feels bad, not drawing what you need feels bad, not drawing a habitat you need feels bad, drawing a habitat you already have feels bad, being on the receiving end of a super strong card feels bad, being on the receiving end of a situational card that you didn't know about feels bad.

I will say the games not super long so it's not the end of the world, and some of these issues would be lessened with four players (BGG has 2 players as the best for some reason which I can't see how it's true). But honestly I don't really see enough potential even with 4 players for this to be worth playing over something else.

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Likely to Trend*: Slightly Upward
Future: Would likely not play again

(Likely to Trend means basically what I think the game score has potential to go to if I give it another chance. In this case I could see it maybe going up to a 4.5 or even a 5 if I played it with 4 players.)

KommunistKoala posted...

Nice, hope to go to one of their cons eventually, but not in the cards this year.

But always excited to read/talk about board games

If you ever do go to DTE let me know, I plan on trying to go every year for the foreseeable future.

#17 - Alliances (I believe)
My Score: 4.5
BGG Link: Doesn't have one (yet)

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So I actually played this game at the same demo booth as Wild Realms. This game isn't out yet as far as I can tell, and doesn't even have a bgg page yet and is hard to find any info on it whatsoever.

This is a quick card game. I believe it's a two player game only, but i'm not positive. It takes place in the same universe as Wild Realms but is a much different experience. You are drafting three animal cards: you assign one as your leader, one as a fighter and one as a collector. You activate your leader ability and then fight, with the higher number fighter winning, and the losing fighter dyeing, and that player activating their collector ability. You then get up to 2 more cards and pick a final three for scoring.

Sorry for the not great explanation on this one, unfortunately I only played it once for 5 minutes and I have no way to look up the rules.

For quick game simple game, I'm honestly still not sure if I understand all the rules correctly but basically it kind of had the same problems as Wild Realms to me. Cards seem imbalanced and honestly has too much going on. Also the initial fight didn't seem that important to me since you only get to choose three cards at the end anyways and I ended with 5.

It's not a terrible game, and with it being a quick time investment I would potentially try it again, but honestly 2 player 5 minute games is such a weird niche for me that I never see it being brought to the table for me. I don't do a ton of 2 player gaming and if I am it would be something like 7 wonders duel or sky team.

I will say that like Wild Realms, the art is nice.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to Slightly Upward
Future: Would play again if a situation presented itself but I don't see it.

Next Game Hint*: I regret not liking this as much as most other people

*I skipped this for the last one because this game would have been impossible to guess

Also I honestly hate being negative, I only have 1 more negative review, 2 neutrals and after that the rest will all be positive

rough booth apparently

Not familiar at all with either of those games, but they don't sound like the sort of thing I'd be interested in.

#16 - Deep Regrets
My Score: 4.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/397931/deep-regrets
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I played this game with one of my friends and three strangers in the hot games room.

To give context the hot games room is a section where they have some (I think around 25 this year) relatively new games they expect to be popular permanently set up. The idea is you go to a table that's already set up and ready to play, and when you are finished you just set it up for the next group. It's usually very easy to get someone to teach you a game in this room as well. In this case one of the players had played before.

So Deep regrets is a game about fishing in a Cthulhu adjacent world. The theme is very cool, with the fish having a fair vs foul theme. Fair fish are generally normal, while foul fish are weird monstrosities. There are three different depths at, with the deeper you go the greater percentage of foul fish you will see. Each depth has three different shoals and you can see on the back of the card about how big each fish will be to give you an idea of how hard it will be to catch.

The is played over 6 days with each day you rolling your dice and choosing whether to go to sea or to port. Sea is where you will spend most of your time, because that's how you catch fish and fish are victory points at the end of the game. You will likely go to port once or twice though: It lets you sell fish for money which you can use to buy rods (usually effects that help with fishing), reels (more varied effects that help with out being in sea in general), Items (one time use cards) and one-time use dice. You can only purchase each type of item once each day, with everything having a 1, 3 and 5 cost version. Usually the 1 cost is the most efficient but the 5 cost lets you look at multiple cards and choose which one you want. The last thing you can do here is Mount fish, basically multiplying the end game value of a fish (up to 3) but locking it in.

So for fishing itself, at the beginning of each day (you always have a set of 3 starter dice and can buy more in the shop) you roll all your dice and can bring in up to your dice limit into that days pool. (It ranges from 4-8 depending on your madness). You then use your dice to either catch fish (each fish has a value needed, deeper and larger fish are generally higher values) or can use any dice to drop depth (so usually using your 1s or 0s).

Each fish has a catch number, a money value (either victory points or sell price depending on what you use it for) and usually some kind of special effect. There's a few different types of abilities but the most common are on catch or on eat. Eating a fish often gives you benefits, in some cases letting you roll some of the dice you already used and use them again essentially giving you more turns.

The last main point to talk about is regrets. This game has a madness track and where you are on the track depends on how many regret cards you have. There are various ways to get regret cards, such as catching foul fish or selling them, fishing the last fish of a shoal or other players giving them to you. Your regret cards are private, but not the number you have and each regret card has a value from 0-3. Whoever ends the game with the most regret points (combined value of all your regret cards) loses their most valuable prize fish which is a pretty large setback. But the madness track only cares about cards and determines your max dice. It also determines your modifier for fair and foul fish value (sell price and end game points), ranging from -2 to 2. If you have no regret cards fair fish have a bonus and foul have a negative, while having a lot of cards gives you the opposite.

So there's a lot going on here but it actually kind of works together decently. You have to balance when you want to go to port vs go out to sea (if you roll really badly you might want to go to port that day since you'll be able to reroll your dice the next day and dice don't matter at port) The madness track works well and incentives you to lean in one direction. Since you don't have to dive you can catch a lot of smaller fair fish and rack up the +2 bonus on all of them, or go for the deeper foul fish which are worth more individually but you have to burn dice to get down there (but you have a higher max dice to compensate). So there are different strategies.

So for this game unlike the last two I actually do have a decent amount of positives, but now onto the negatives. I will give the caveat that I played this with 5 and from what I can see people generally recommend playing with 3 and I can see why. For one the game simply takes too long at 5 players for what it is.

The main issue however, is with how the regrets work. The game has a total of 60 regret cards which means there is enough for 12 per person in a 5 player game while 13 is needed for the last tier. Now the main problem here is that regret cards are way too easy to get, we probably got about 150 regret cards in our game. But the main sticking point is what happens once you run out of regret cards in the deck? Well you take one from another player (You choose the player but the card is chosen at random). I legitimately went from 14 regret cards down to 2 in a single round. And this completely ruined me since I had foul fish. Instead of players trying to get rid of their high number regret cards and keeping the 0s and 1s so that they didn't have get rid of the prize fish, it basically became a grab as many regrets as you can (with one guy having over half of them). That guy also ended the game with an item card that let him draw like 15 cards and he completely emptied two players of regrets, making almost all of their fish worth -2 each instead of +1 or +2. It was just not fun in a game this long. I think 3 players might mitigate this a lot because there's a lot more cards to go around.

There are also a few minor issues, the main one being the rods, reels, item cards and dink cards (you get dink cards as a consolation prize for failing to catch a fish, or passing early) are not balanced. I'm not talking about one rod working better for your strategy than another which I would be ok with (and a reason to spend more money to get more options) but some are just straight better than others. For example I got a rod that lets me reorder the top 2 fish of a pile every time I fish (which is already better than a lot of the rods), while someone else got a rod that lets them reorder the top 3 every time they fish. There's a rod that gives a discount on large fish vs a rod that gives a discount on every fish. Etc, etc.

The other part of the randomness is the dice. Sure its a dice game so some randomness is involved, but when you buy dice there's also three tiers of dice and you get a random tier. One dice is 0-0-1-2 while one is 2-2-3-3. There are just too many layers of luck built on top of each other here (luck on which dice I get, luck if i get good equipment, luck on what I roll, luck on whether i even want to catch the fish I flip). I personally don't mind the luck on which fish you attempt to catch because there are ways to mitigate this and look at fish before deciding, but I think the extreme variance in shopping is too much.

Overall though while I gave this a 4.5, I still think this game is worth trying if you like the theme (preferable with three players) because its a fun theme as long as you go in with the right expectations and treat it more as a experience than a super competitive game. I could easily see this rising to like a 6-6.5 if I played with three players or they add some expansion to fix some of these things. I do not regret playing it but I wouldn't play it again with 5 players at least

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Likely to Trend: Upward
Future: Would try again if a someone really wanted to with a smaller group (ideally 3).

Next Game Hint: A new game involving cute animals and dancing (of the card variety)

(Also no idea how that ended up so long so sorry about the essay there, I had a lot to say on that game)

all good, very much enjoying these

Long writeups in topics like these are a good thing.

That "layers of luck" problem is one that always aggravates me in games. I have zero problem with luck being a factor in a vacuum, but when you have to get lucky on multiple fronts and/or your luck almost has to synergize, it's just too much for me. I think I also have a deep-seated hatred for Cthulhu board games after too many rounds of Eldritch Horror, so that looks like another one I don't have to pay any attention to.

#15 sounds like it's gotta be Emberleaf. I came extremely close to backing that crowfund and only backed off after some gameplay videos eventually led me to believe it'd be a little too simple for its concept, so I'm interested to see your thoughts. Clearly they can't be too glowing if it's all the way down here.

#15 - Emberleaf
My Score: 6.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/426513/emberleaf
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NBIceman nailed it. If we just got out of the "bad/fundamentally flawed" tier I would call this the "not bad but not fun" tier. These games aren't awful or even bad, but they just don't enough for me to desire to play them.

So the give context I was at the conference for 4 days. One day I was solo, one day with one friend, and two days with two friends. This is one of the games I played in the hot games area with both of my friends and a stranger and we were all new, but a stranger kindly taught us all the rules to the game. I will say out of everyone I played with, this was the only stranger I didn't enjoy playing with. He wasn't awful but he just had a negative attitude about the game after a turn or two and it may have soured my opinion a little bit.

So onto the game. This is a typical points game, whoever has the most points after the game ends wins. A main part of this game is what they refer to as card dancing. If you have played Viscounts of the West Kingdom it has some similarities to that. On your turn you do one of two things: You play a card from your hand and get any lightning effects on that card or you slide all the cards you have down one to the left and resolve all of their slide effects. If they slide off the board you also get their drop effect and the card goes back in your hand.

So playing and sliding cards is done decently and is probably the best of the game. You have a grid of 2 rows and 4 columns (the two right most spaces are locked at the start however). When you play a card you can play it into any available space (not already occupied) and do the lighting bolt effect of the card you just played. Alternatively if the space has an effect on it you can choose to do that effect instead. Some cards don't have a lightning bolt effect at all so you should try to play it on one of the space effect spaces since you aren't giving anything up.

Sliding is basically what it sounds like. You start with the top left, slide it over resolve its effects, then bottom left, then second column top, second column bottom, etc. Note that if any card slides off the board, after you resolve its effect it goes back into your hand and is not considered for everything else happening. There are some symbols on the board as well that may be covered or uncovered depending on where you are in the process but I'll go over that in a bit.

There's some strategy into where you play cards, for example a weak slide effect card you may want to play all the way on the left so you get the card back after one slide, but someone with a strong slide effect you may want to play as far right as possible so you get as many slides as possible. You also have to determine when you want to do slides vs play cards, do you want to load up everything and then get some massive slides or do you want to do a couple of impactful cards and then slide to get them back.

That's pretty much it for the card dancing so lets go over the actions now. I already went over play, slide and drop actions and there is also a triggered action (when A happens get B), and charge actions (I can 1x or 2x a turn spend A to Get B). Every card (I believe) has two actions on it, some have double slide but most usually have two different types. A very common type of Action is "Gather 1 resouce per resource symbol". Resource vs Resource symbol is somewhat confusing and is one of my more minor complaints because its not always clear what its talking about. Basically though what this means is you get one of the resource (I'll use wood as an example) for each wood symbol you have on any card on your board, and any visible symbols on your board (This is what I meant when I said some spaces have symbols).

So you could for example have 8 berry symbols visible and get 8 berries (This isn't super common but also not super hard to do). This leads to my second complaint: resource generation outpaces resource storage. At the beginning of the game you can only store 8 total resources, and you have a way to upgrade it to 12. It was very common for people to max out on resources and it's honestly a lot harder to use it then to get it.

For spending resources, the main way is to build a building which is a second kind of action. There are 6 buildings on your board that all cost honey (the hardest to get resource) and provide some kind of permanent upgrade for you (this is how you unlock more storage, unlock your rightmost column, or just give you permanent symbols such as berries or woods). There are also neutral buildings that anyone can build that are cheaper and don't require honey. When you build a building you place it in your current clearing and move one of your four animal types onto it, and get whatever that animal space gave. There are 4 animal tracks of 5 each, the first of each track lets you draft a card and then you get various effects for the spaces after that. You then score VP for each unique building type connected to it, encouraging you to build a variety of building types in the same area.

So I mentioned how you build in your current clearing. There are I believe 6 clearings on the board and you have a leader meeple that starts on one. Movement is like every other resource, You play a card that says walk, and its usually "Walk 1 per foot symbol". The cost to move along a path is 1 movement + 1 for any monster on that path (most paths have 1 monster, I think 1 path has 2). So it's not very expensive to move a lot, especially if the monster have been killed. Near the end of the game I did one move action and moved halfway around the entire board. There is a bonus for visiting each clearing once to offer a little incentive not to just go to your own clearing and rake in victory points by building in it all by yourself the whole game.

So I mentioned monsters (I think they are actually called banners). Another resource is a sword, similar to the others. they allow you to attack something in a path adjacent to you and give you VP if you beat them (and make it easier to move for everyone. There is also a shared Banner track on the board that you will get to move one row down and get one of the resources on that row. If you are the one who gets it to the bottom of the track you get to take one of the 6 victory tiles (Idk what they are actually called) and refresh the monsters (the monsters are on the green easy side at the start but switch to yellow side after the first refresh).

There are two ways to get these victory tiles, being the one to get to the bottom of the banner track, or being the one to build the last building in a clearing. Once four of these are taken the game ends (after the round finishes so everyone gets an equal number of turns, there is no one more round mechanic).

The last thing to note is there are way to get bonus cards. (Visiting each clearing gives you a bonus card) where you choose one of the 5 face up cards. These can be something like "Have the most markets" or "have at least one building in four different clearings" and are pretty varied

That's the basic gist of all the rules. I will say I don't hate this game, but I just feel like everything doesn't mesh well together. It feels to me like they made the card dancing part and then designed a board to make use of it. I'm going to start with my negatives and I will end on a positive note this time.

As someone who generally enjoys deck builders, I do not consider this a deck builder. There are two reasons for this: you have no actual deck, every card is either on the board or in your hand. And more importantly, you start with 6 cards and can draft a total of 4 more during the game. That's right you will end the game with 10 or fewer cards.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is centered around this. Each player starts with a different deck which kind of almost forces you to go down that path. For example I was very heavy on the wood, and had a ton of wood generation but not many options to get berries. I wouldn't be surprised if its found that some starting decks are just better than others.

The second part of this complaint is drafting a new card doesn't feel great. You get to pick from one of the five on the board and I ran into multiple situations where there was nobody I wanted so I held off on building a building so I didn't have to choose one. I think I was generally happy with 1 of the four guys I drafted, 1 was good, and I don't think I even played the other two I got. It just didn't feel good and I've read a review about someone getting in a stalemate where nobody would take any of the cards on the board. Only drafting 4 cards also doesn't give you a ton of flexibility to adapt. And some cards are super situational (For example there's a card that lets you take a resource off of another players card, but we only saw one card that actually put resources on itself)

Drafting the bonus cards feels similar, sometimes there's nothing up there that helps you, or its too late to make feasible. Early on taking one felt like guessing, late it felt like hoping something was there you already had done. It didn't feel too bad in the middle game cause you can pivot but at points it gave the thing I'm not huge on of "I don't want any of this so let me look at what everyone else has and deny them it' which I feel just slows a game down.

I also don't like how the Victory tiles are handled. Only the last person getting something means nobody wants to do the second to last action so it creates a stalemate unless you get the rare combo that lets you do the thing twice in one turn. For clearings if it was whoever has the most buildings in a clearing or for the banner track whoever has killed the most monsters I think it would be a lot better.

Ambiguity between the resource and the symbol is also another minor complaint. A big case of this was on the animal tracks on the top, we weren't sure if those meant get another resource of the type or it counts as a symbol on your board. I think they should have had a colored border or something around them to make it a lot more clear.

Getting resources vs storage limits and spending them also felt off. It was super easy to generate your primary resource, but generally a lot harder to generate other resources or use them. Storage limit also felt low even after upgraded, I could easily generate 10 resources in a slide action if not more, but only store 12 total.

Moving/Monsters also kind of felt tacked on, I wasn't a huge fan of it but it's not a huge deal. I feel like it should have probably just been move lets you move one space rather than move one space per foot.

Time wise it ran a little long and I think bgg recommends 3 which I think makes sense for this.

Now onto some positives. I like the card dancing concept itself, it has some interesting choices. The upgrades on your board largely feel meaningful, more symbols is great, the spaces on the right column have some great actions (including a Build action space which is imo insanely important) and I like the idea of spaces having unique things when uncovered or when played on.

I like how the 4 animal tracks on the top can be done in any order (still left to right for each track) which gives you some flexibility. For instance if I don't like any card choices I just choose a different track for now and wait. (I don't like how the first of each track is the draft though which means your first building you HAVE to take a card).

Art is great, bonus cards are pretty well done and varied.

Overall it's not a terrible game with some interesting ideas. I'd rather play Viscounts of the West Kingdom, it's "card dancing" is a lot simpler but I think that works in its favor. I would love to see a game implement this style of card dancing again with a better rest of the game to go along with it. Or maybe one that's more pure and literally just about the card dancing with no man board, i.e. a Dominion of card dancing. But as it is its simply a game I wish I liked more, and am not quite sure why it's rated so high on bgg.

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Likely to Trend: Slightly Upward
Future: Would try again if someone wanted to, but won't go out of my way for it

Next Game Hint: This game reminds me of azul in that your competing with the other players for colored tokens. Also it's only two years old and there's already a newer game with the same name as it.

This one ended up even longer lol. One more game until we get to the games I actually liked.

Also note I will likely be unable to do a post most Saturday's so don't expect one tomorrow. I may do a double post Sunday to make up for it but no promises.

dang had hope for Deep Regrets when a friend showed me the kickstarter, we usually play at least 4 if not 5 people so shame it probably falters at higher counts

haven't heard of a single one of these - really fallen off the "scene" :(

KommunistKoala posted...

dang had hope for Deep Regrets when a friend showed me the kickstarter, we usually play at least 4 if not 5 people so shame it probably falters at higher counts

Yea I wouldn't recommend buying it for that player count, maybe trying it once if you could borrow a copy since its still a experience, just go in with appropriate expectations

SeabassDebeste posted...

haven't heard of a single one of these - really fallen off the "scene" :(

I don't think the first two are that well known. I think Deep Regrets and emberleaf are larger releases but they are pretty recent

tag, enjoying the writeups and mini stories about the event. i don't have a regular bg group nowadays, but i'm always on the lookout for good stuff to share with the family or visitors

#16 - Portals (2023)
My Score: 6.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/386168/portals
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So this is the first game on the list that I played outside the demo/hot games area (those two are right next to each outer) and instead in the main open gaming hall. And when I say hall what I mean is that there are tables and tables and tables and nothing else. Each table has a marker with coordinates (ie C5 is the fifth table in the third column. I think it went all the way up to like Z20 or something like that (I never actually checked). Needless to say there are a LOT of tables in this main room.

Anyways this is the first time I'm going to talk about the flags. These are also in every other room including hot games room and such but it's most relevant here. There are two types of flags: a green one which means players wanted/welcome and a yellow flag which means teacher wanted/welcome. In a big room like this it's very important because with 100+ games going on in the room it makes it easy to see what games are still being setup/not already started (and open to new players).

So anyways, I played this on my first day there when I was solo. If I don't have anything planned sometimes I like to wander and just look at games with a flag up and see if its something that interests me. In this case it was an older couple with a game called Portals so I joined them. They were very nice and had some friendly banter where they would rag on each other.

I enjoyed playing with them but unfortunately I didn't enjoy the game itself that much. We actually played it twice, the man was teaching and misremembered a few of the rules but by the end of the first game we had it all figured out and played it correctly the second time.

So portals is a game that reminds me of Azul. Azul is a game that I would consider an objectively good game, just one that I don't enjoy. And this game fits much the same boat. It's a game where you are drafting colored pieces and putting them on a 5x5 board for points, albeit it works quite differently than Azul. It's also like Azul what I would consider (what I've recently come to learn the term is called) an abstract game where there is little to no theme and its purely about the gameplay.

So Portals is a game played over 4 rounds where whoever has the most points at the end of the game is the winner. There are four main components to this game: Elemental Boards which are the five by five grid with different colors on each space of the grid. Key cards which have a number, a 3x3 grid and either 2, 3, or 4 spaces marked (these are color agnostic marks), for instance you could have a card that has a diagonal marked on it (top left, middle, bottom right). Circle of Elements, and Elemental stones which go on the circle of elements. There are 5 colors and an equal number of each color in the bag (with the amount scaling based on player on count).

So with the terminology out of the way the main thing to know is that you have two Elemental Boards and two Circle of Elements that you can use, one between you and the player on your left. And one between you and the player on the right. So you are competing with players on either side of you. Because of this I feel like 3 is a good player count for this, 4 seems useless to me because you will never interact with that fourth player. BGG recommends 2 and I can see why but I wouldn't play this with 2 personally.

So there is 3 phases to a round. First you put 6 random stones on each circle of elements as the and pass the first player marker as the setup phase. Then is the drafting phase. For this starting with first player and going clockwise they can optionally draft a key card from the middle and then mandatorily take a stone from either of your available circles and put it on a marked space on any of your key card. (You put a marker on the circle you took from as well. You can only take 3 from each circle each round). You repeat this until all of the stones have been taken.

The last phase is now starting from the lower numbered key card (Each key card has a number, the ones that need more stones have lower numbers) players then move the the pattern onto one of the two elemental board on either side of them. All of the pieces have to go on the board but if a piece is already where you are trying to place one you just lose it. (So if you have 4 on a card you might only place 3 because one of your squares was taken, but you cant choose to only place 3 by having one of the pieces hang off the edge).

So moving a completed key card onto the board is the only way to score points, and you score points in two different ways. For each stone you place that matches the color of square its put on you score points. Its 1-2-4-6 points so if matching 3 or 4 colors gives you more efficiency but is harder to pull off. The other way to score points is a color adjacency bonus. For each stone you place you score points for each stone of the same color that is adjacent to it (not including ones you are putting down from the same card). This includes both orthogonally and diagonally adjacent stones.

I will say I think this is a very smart game, a lot of it works together well, and you have to really think through your strategy of where you want to try and fit stuff in, whether you think something is going to be filled before you can use it, whether its better to try to match the color on the board or go for adjacency bonuses late in the game. And having to compete with players on both sides, you have to figure out what stones you need are high priority and what are likely to still be there later in the round. It's a lot of strategy and depth for a fairly simple ruleset.

And I think the strategy/depth is both why this game is objectively good and also just why I don't love games like these. While I actually am usually pretty good at games like these, I just don't enjoy having to think this much about things like this. I don't enjoy thinking "Ok I could do this, but that guy can also potentially play there and his key card has a lower number so he would have priority but if I take this stone he might not finish it this round as long as he doesn't prioritize it over his other card which is more valuable for him unless the other guy prioritizes blocking it".

I like thinking in games, but I generally prefer thinking primarily of my own agenda and maybe just briefly considering how other players could mess it up. In this game I feel like my thinking is spent just as much on how other players can mess me up (after about halfway through the game, the beginning when everything is wide open is pretty simple) . This is probably just a me problem, but these games are the worst offenders for giving me analysis paralysis. I hate dragging a game by doing that so I generally just do something and then feel like I'm playing suboptimal which I also don't like.

So yea, I think this game is well designed, it's just not for me. I don't hate it or anything, and I would play it if someone wanted to cause its not a super long game, I just wouldn't look forward to it.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral
Future: Would play if someone wanted to once in a while but would never suggest

Next Game Hint: In this game you play as a Mage where your deck only ever gets smaller

And with that I am through the games that I would be ok with never playing again. From here on out is all games I enjoyed. Theres a pretty good mix and variety so I think everyone will see at least 1-2 games that they might be interested in playing.

Late to the Emberleaf writeup but it's definitely reinforcing the feeling I got where either A) it'll go down to $25 one year and I'll happily pick it up then for the couple of plays I'd be likely to get out of it, or B) it inspires some other game that has all the pieces I originally found interesting in it but does them better.

As far as the hint for the next one... Hmm, nothing's coming to mind immediately. Old King's Crown is an upcoming release that would fit the deck part, but I don't believe it would've been at DTE and you don't play as mages.

#16 - Res Arcana
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/262712/res-arcana
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So at Dice Tower I would say there is four main ways to play games. You can go to the hot games area/demo area and find something setup. You can look for a flag and join a game you may know nothing about. You can setup a game and put your own flag up. Or you can schedule/join a scheduled game before the conference even started. This is one of two games I joined that was scheduled before the conference started because it sounded interesting.

I played this on my first day there with three strangers at I believe 6pm. It's a game where you play as mages trying to...accomplish stuff? I'm not entirely sure on the premise but this is basically a points race ala Dune Imperium. At the end of each round you check to see if any player has earned 10 Victory Points, and if someone has the game is over and whoever has the most wins.

So one of the players was very experienced, and another had talked to some other people about it before and my understanding is the typical game ends in about 5 rounds. An experienced player try's to win in 4, while if it takes 7 something went wrong. A round doesn't take super long, it was probably about 15-20 minutes a round for us with newer players, but I think a whole game would probably take about an hour at most with 4 experienced players.

Anyways onto the game itself. It has a very interesting mechanic where the first thing you do in the game is draft your deck. Drafting is each player draws 4 cards, you choose one and pass the rest to your left, choose one, pass one, etc until you have 4 cards. You then do it one more time passing the opposite direction so you end with 8 total cards. This is similar to a magic draft, but you are only drafting 8 cards and unlike magic you can't slim the fat at the end.

You will also get 2 mage cards to choose 1 from, and some starting resources. There's some random stuff set up in the middle that anyone can purchase (first-come first-serve). There will be a reverse player order taking of magic items (These are one round bonuses that could be getting a resource, letting you rearrange your deck, etc). Each player draws three cards and from there the game begins.

So each round of the game consists of basically three phases: Upkeep Phase, Action Phase, and Victory Check Phase. Upkeep phase is basically just collecting resources for anything you have that gives resources each round, and Victory Check Phase is just checking to see if anyone won. That's all there is to those so I'm going to go into the meat of it now.

The action phase is where the meat of the game is. Each player takes turns doing 1 thing: Playing a card from your hand for it's cost (And it will stay there, will go over this more in a bit). Paying and claiming one of the components in the middle, using an ability on anything you have in front of you that hasn't been tapped (this could be your mage, your magic item, the cards you played from your hand or what you bought from the middle), discarding a card in your hand for some resources or passing.

When a player passes they take the first player token if they are the first to pass, and then swap out their magic item for a different one from the middle (There are 8 total) and draw 1 card.

When you play a card from your hand for it's cost it stays there. Cards will generally have a cost, possibly victory points, possibly a Collect Ability (this is what you get during upkeep each turn) and usually some powers. These could be tapped abilities (once per round, once you do it for the round you can't do anything else with the card this turn) and some cost abilities (ie spend x get y). The game has an interesting mechanic where the y is sometimes placed on the card itself, which can then be retrieved on your next upkeep (I believe this is mainly to prevent infinite combos but it has other impacts too).

So this game is very tight, you are only drawing 1 card a round, when you play a card from your hand it stays on the table so you aren't really cycling through your deck like in dominion but rather cards are a resource in this game like anything else. This is also a game that is hugely about synergies, your goal during the draft is to have some idea of how you want to win this game, hopefully without relying on a singular card because if that card is on the bottom of your deck you might not get it a bit.

I liked this game a good amount, I enjoy the draft aspect, although unlike a magic draft you have no real way of knowing what people are going for. The synergies between your cards, your mage, and the place of powers on the board (one of the things in the center of the board you can go for) can lead to some interesting and unique strategies. There are some interactions between players, i.e I might have a card that gives me 3 x, but every other player gets one x. And I think this game has a good length for what it is.

There are two main issues I see having with this game if I played it a lot. The first is that if you have a bad draft (once you are experienced and know what a bad draft looks like) you are pretty much out of the game. It's not a super long game so it's not the end of the world but it's still not ideal. The other problem is there is simply put not that much stuff in this game. What I mean is that there is only 10 mages, only 40 artifact cards (the cards that make up your deck), the same 8 magic items every game and only 5 double-sided places of power. There is just not enough variety imo for a game like this to where I would want to play it regularly. We actually played this game twice and I was already seeing repeats.

But overall I enjoyed my time with this game, and without those flaws this game would probably get an 8 or maybe even an 8.5. I definitely would like to play it again, maybe a game every year or two. I also know this game has 2 expansions that are both rated higher than the game itself that the one experienced player in our group was pretty positive on and that rate higher on bgg. While I wouldn't mind doing another game or two of just the base, I think my preference would be trying it with some of the expansions mixed in to see how much they add to it.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to slightly positive
Future: Would like to play again, maybe in a year or so. Hopefully with an expansion

Next Game Hint: This is a game based off of a game show that I had never heard of but has over 5 seasons. I also don't watch much tv so take that as you will.

Played Res Arcana twice and both times we just used the first time setup that gives everyone a predetermined deck, and we only picked the mage to start.

I liked it both times but had the same thoughts about problems with future plays. Needs more cards for at least a bit more variety, and getting more experience means easily seeing how far behind you are just from a bad draft or whatever.

Still fun until you hit those points though

KommunistKoala posted...

Played Res Arcana twice and both times we just used the first time setup that gives everyone a predetermined deck, and we only picked the mage to start.

I liked it both times but had the same thoughts about problems with future plays. Needs more cards for at least a bit more variety, and getting more experience means easily seeing how far behind you are just from a bad draft or whatever.

Still fun until you hit those points though

Yea honestly i considered rating it higher (and perhaps should have). It's hard to gauge how much I rate what i've played vs how much I want to play in the future so I try to balance it. I tweak my ratings periodically and this might creep up to a 7.5 even without another playthrough.

I decided to just make the list for this though and not make any changes while I was going through so you are getting my score/placement thoughts as of when I made the list

a lot of people get a ton of replay out of res arcana fwiw. but i also don't love it.

that said, tom lehmann designed race for the galaxy, which at 2p is pretty phenomenal

SeabassDebeste posted...

a lot of people get a ton of replay out of res arcana fwiw. but i also don't love it.

that said, tom lehmann designed race for the galaxy, which at 2p is pretty phenomenal

I'm sure you could replay it a lot, it's just a lot of the appeal for this kind of game is discovery and interesting combos, and I feel like that wouldn't last me that long. The game would still be enjoyable as an optimization game past that point, but that's not why I enjoyed it here.

Race for the galaxy I've only played once but I enjoyed it. I rated it higher than Res Arcana but I won't say where in case I do some more rating in the future (It's not on this list)

I tried Res Arcana ~3 times and extremely loved it, but I don't think any of my board game friends were that crazy about it unfortunately, probably cuz it was rather solitary, and maybe too hard (we usually play much more casual board games). So now I just stare at it longingly on my shelf. uggg I wanna play it more.

I don't think it would bother me at all seeing the same cards over and over, because even in the few games I played, I was falling in love with every card, and every time I recognized one I'd get excited "oh yeah that card!!"

I'm a biiiiig RFTG fan, but I have to admit, Res Arcana was 9000x easier to teach!

yeah definitely more of a Race fan myself

Both res arcana and race for the galaxy are on bga so I could be convinced to play either at some point

#15 - 25 Words or Less (1996)
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/621/25-words-or-less

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So I played this game for maybe 20-30 minutes. I had some time waiting for Res Arcana to start and was just walking around when I saw some people playing this and joined in. I had never heard of the game show before but the guy running the game was actually one of the people that run the actual game show (I believe he was in charge of the electronics) so that was cool. I may have to check out an episode at some point.

Also sorry I was apparently wrong with my hint. The game show was based off this game, and they are making another version of this game based off of the show.

Anyways about the game. This is a fairly simple party game played in teams. In our case we were playing 2v2 for most of the time. One person from each team is picked to give the clues for each round. The two clue givers then get together and draw a clue card. Each clue card has two sides with 5 words listed on each side. They then collectively decide which side they like better (no idea what happens if they disagree). They then start "bidding" on who will give the clues that round.

So when you bid you can start with any number less than or equal to 25 words and you bid downwards. So basically what's happening is "I think I can do it in 20 words", "I think I can do it in 19 words" until one player drops out. The other player is then the clue giver for that round.

Once that is decided you then give the player that many words and 60 seconds on the clock. (The host had an app we used for this, not sure how its normally done). You can then say that many words total to get them to guess all 5 words. You start top and go down, you can pass on a word and come back to it later. If your team successfully guesses all 5 words you get a point, if you run out of time the other team gets a point. I believe you play to 10 points but its a party game so you can kind of just do whatever you want.

Overall its a pretty simple game. It was a fun short experience, something I could see playing with my family. I don't have a ton to say here other than that I enjoyed it and would consider picking it up if I see it cheap enough somewhere.

Also I just want to note that I kind of treat party games like these and heavier games like Res Arcana different in rankings. I would generally rather play Res Arcana for an hour than this for an hour but I would be playing them with different groups of people so I factor that in. My family could play this, they couldn't play Res Arcana.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral
Future: Wouldn't mind playing with my family

Next Game Hint: This is a dexterity game based on a sport. Not my usual cup of tea but my friends wanted to do a tournament they had and it was enjoyable.

sounds barebones but totally up my alley! and i would probably play that for an hour over res arcana!

So I just realized I fucked up the numbering by copy+pasting my basic review structure.

Here is the correct rankings for everything so far

12. 25 words or Less
13. Res Arcana
14. Portals
15. Emberleaf
16. Deep Regrets
17. Alliances
18. Wild Realms

#11 - Table Golf Association
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/356954/table-golf-association

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So at the beginning I mentioned there was one minor exception to all games being new to me and this is it. At last year me and my friend demo'd the game for like 5 minutes at their exhibition booth. We didn't really play it last year but I was already familiar.

This game we played on the last day I was there. I'm not quite sure the arrangement but they had their own side room separate from the main exhibitor hall. They were holding a tournament each day with prizes. How it worked was there was three qualifiers each day (I think it was Thursday, Friday and Saturday) with up to 16 people each.

The three of us joined a qualifier on Saturday. They had four holes set up and we played in groups of 4 rotating around the holes. The top score moves on to the finals later in the day. My friends are pretty into golf (I'll play it occasionally if I'm not busy) so they wanted to play. I actually ended up tying for first in the qualifier (one friend was one behind me and one did awful) with a kid that was probably 12-13. We then did a tiebreaker where you have one shot to get the closest to the hole, he went first and knocked it off the board twice so I won by default. He was fairly upset so I actually felt bad about it.

Anyways I moved on to the finals which was a final three where we played all four holes. The winner was a guy who practiced a lot. He won a big box version of the game. I got second and won the small box version (so my review may be slightly biased) and third place won $50 in credit. (The small box is only worth $55 so second and third were pretty equivalent). My friend then paid to upgrade the small box to the big box pro version (basically the top of the line product with 70 tiles instead of 25 and a better material) and I just gave him the game. So he ended up with the $180 version for $95 with the convention discount they were getting.

Anyways onto what the game actually is. This game is a dexterity game basically mimicking golf. The game has a lot of hexagon tiles that have different terrains printed on them (These are just images, they are all the same texture). You start on the starting square and are trying to get to the hole in as few shots as possible. You do this by flicking your "ball" (It's a metal ball in a round disc) up along the course until you make it into the hole. It's pretty simple right?

Well there is slightly more to it than that. Earlier I said there are different terrains printed on the tiles meant to simulate things like sand, rough, trees etc. These all impact both how you shoot and how far you can shoot. If you are shooting from a fairway you are allowed to shoot up to 7 hexes away. If you ever shoot too far you go back to where you started and effectively lost your stroke. If you go off the board or land in water or a pit you go back to where you started and take a one stroke penalty, effectively losing 2 strokes.

For trees if there is one on the hex you are shooting from or next to it you put a little tree figure on the board and if you touch it while trying to shoot you get a one stroke penalty. Now if you are on rough or sand or some similar bad terrain your max distance actually goes down. I believe for sand you are allowed to only shoot three hexes away, and rough 4. And to simulate it being a harder shot they also make you shoot with your non-dominant hand (sometimes with specific fingers). I don't remember specifically which for which but sometimes you can only shoot with your non-dominant thumb.

So overall its fairly simple but with enough to add some strategy on where your trying to shoot and such, they have little played aids that say how each terrain works. You can also incorporate wind somehow normally (They don't do it for tournaments as it slows it down). I like the hex system for building courses as it gives you a lot of flexibility in how you design them.

I enjoyed my time with it overall, tournament idea is cool, only problem is they had one hole that was way longer than the rest so it was somewhat of a bottleneck. Rules are easy to understand, the only thing that's a little weird is if you shoot it too far and then go off the board I think shooting it too far would take effect so you wouldn't get the stroke penalty which is kind of weird. The trees are actually from their meeple beach expansion so a few things aren't in the base game.

I'm not the biggest dexterity game fan, they are fine but not really why I come to board games. But my friends enjoy it and I don't mind doing it for a bit. I personally think this is kind of expensive for it's normal cost, but at essentially half off it's not a bad deal. Since my friend has it now I'm sure we'll play more, but probably not more than like 2-3 holes at a time due to space constraints. It doesn't take super long to play either as long as someone else sets it up lol.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to slightly positive
Future: Will play at my friend's place if he sets it up

Next Game Hint: I have somehow never played this before, but it's basically battle Yahtzee.

Sounds fun (as long as someone else sets it up), and I'd definitely be excited to play it if someone else bought it, but I just stick to Crokinole for my dexterity needs

Next game I assume is Dice Throne or King of Tokyo, but wouldn't surprise me if there are other less known battle yahtzees

i have to assume KOT because of the "somehow" remark!

That golf game looks super cool! I already have Pitchcar tho and rarely play it...

Every once in a while, I have some temptation to find a dexterity game for my collection, but I think I'm also someone who doesn't really feel like that jives with my usual reasons for enjoying board games. I probably will get a Crokinole board eventually, though.

"Battle Yahtzee" seemed like it was starting to become a genre in itself for a while there, but King of Tokyo does seem like the best bet for the next one.

#10 - Marvel Dice Throne
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/438727/marvel-dice-throne-x-men-iceman-v-psylocke-v-storm

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Dice Throne was right! King of Tokyo would have also fit, but I didn't play it at the convention, and I have played it once before but almost a decade ago at this point.

Anyways yea I have somehow never played Dice Throne before. I'm generally lukewarm on dice game (but craps is the best casino game). But It was set up in the hot games area and my one friend wanted to try it. This was actually the last game I played at the convention as well.

We were joined by a nice fourth who actually owned one of the sets but never had a chance to play it before and wanted to learn how to play. And there was a guy who taught all four of us how to play and had played extensibility before (he's really big into the co-op mode which he largely does solo).

I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Dice Throne so I'll just give a higher level overview. Each player plays as a character with their own board and deck of cards. On their board are various abilities that correspond to rolls (such as 3 of one symbol, 4 different symbols, a small straight, or all 6s for your ultimate). Characters then also have some status effects that they can apply, sometimes have passive effects and a defensive ability.

You take turns being the attacker. On your turn you will draw a card, gain a CP and can play cards from your hand for their CP cost (You can also discard a card for a CP). It has some similarities to Magic in that you have various kinds of cards with different timing windows that determine when you can play them, with some of them being playable on opponents turns. An example that I think every or most characters have is to change a dice to a 6. Some cards are upgrades to your abilities, making them stronger, some are income based. It seems like the decks have like 10-15 cards that are universal and 15-20 cards that are character specific.

Anyways after your first "Main" phase you now roll to attack. We played 2v2 where who you attack is determined by a dice but this is most commonly played 1v1. Anyways you roll your dice, and can reroll some of your dice up to two times, ala Yahtzee. Once you are done rolling you decide what attack your going to do, people can change your dice if they have a card to prevent the attack and if not the attack resolves. Then effects occur depending on the attack, there's different damage types and for some of them the defender can roll their defense ability. And you pretty much do this until someone wins.

I will say I have played this 1v1 after since my friend bought 5 characters. It's definitely better once everyone knows what they are doing and with smaller player counts. I have since upped my rating to 7.5 for this but I'm keeping the list as-is for my DTE Experience.

Overall though I like the game, and I feel like it doesn't take too long for what it is. It seems fairly well balanced and I like the character variety with different playstyles. Not something I want to play for hours on end but I don't mind a game here or there.

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Likely to Trend: positive
Future: My friend bought some characters so we will be playing this in the future
Next Game Hint: A sports game, an auction game, a dice game. All in one package

Definitely a 1v1 game

Though I did get the co-op and had fun doing the tutorial mission with 2. Eager to see if it plays well at 3 or 4 next time I get a chance

#09 - Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game
My Score: 7.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/428717/huddle-the-fantasy-football-game

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So I will preface this but saying I'm not a big sports guy. I've done fantasy football in the past but I don't really enjoy watching sports but didn't mind the stats perspective of it. On my first day at the con while I was walking around checking out the exhibitor area and the demo area (they are right next to each other if I didn't mention this earlier. They put up a wall when the exhibitor area is closed though) I saw this game being demo'd. I though my friends would probably be interested so we went back and tried it out on the third day after they were both there.

The guy demoing it was real chill and went over it and talked a bit about their company. He was the marketing guy who was friends with the developers of the game and was heavily involved which was cool. I don't know if this game is officially out yet, but I believe it's either out real soon or already out.

So onto the game itself. This game is meant to mimic fantasy football of both the draft aspect and the week to week aspect. You determine how long your season is going to be (we did 3 weeks then a finals) and that determines the game length. I think it took us between 30-45 minutes so it's not super long, and I actually think it probably works better with shorter season, probably 3 to maybe 6 weeks at most.

So the first part of the game (and imo the best) is the draft. This game is loosely based off an auction draft but works somewhat differently. You have 9 positions to fill and a certain amount of money for the draft. (I believe its 20 but it might have been 25). You need to fill every position so his recommendation was to put a coin on each position so you didn't accidentally overspend and be stuck. The positions are QB, RB, WR, TE, Flex (RB/WR/TE), K, D/ST and 2 Bench slots. Each card (you are drafting player cards) has a position, a team, a player name and a star rating. The star ratings range from 1-5, with different ranges for each position (kickers cap at 3 for example).

At the start of the draft one person for each position gets flipped. Drafting works in rounds, in each round you must bid at least once, even if you get outbid. There is a minute put on the clock and the draft is realtime. If you want to bid on someone you just have to put your chips there (the chips are colored to each player). So if you are the first to bid on someone you have to put at least 1 chip, next one to bid has to put at least one more than you. There's no order or turns, its a free for all. So what would usually happen is you would immediately see bids on the high star players (for their role, a 3* kicked is still a high star player), then some bids would trickle in for most of the minute and someone may try to snipe a player at the end.

After bidding ends, you go one by one for each player and give it to whoever bid the most and put their chips in the bank, everyone else would get there money back. After everything is resolved you then flip over new players for each position that was bought (the ones that were not bought stay) and begin the next round. You do this until everyone has filled their entire roster.

So there is a surprising amount of depth in the drafting system. Do you want to go big for high star players early or hold back and give more flexibility. Since you have to bid at least once each round getting too many players early could mean you are the first one forced to take that undesirable 2 star TE that has been there the whole time, potentially opening up better options for others. You can also try to sneak in an early low bid on someone you know someone is going to outbid you on to effectively stall. The other thing to note about drafting is that teams matter a little bit. If you have two or more players from a team you get what is effectively a one star bonus to one of the two players (even if one of those players is on the bench). This means a one star kicked may be useless to everyone else but can upgrade your 5* QB to effectively a 6*, even if you just keep the kicker on the bench, adding another layer of strategy here.

So after the draft is the normal season. You carry over any unspent money from the draft, and then get 1 more money for each week in the season (so 3 money for a 3 week season). You also discard all of the unbought players. Each week then starts with a global event and player events. The global event is something that effects everyone, it could be something like teams x and y are on bye so you can't use them this week, or team z gets a bonus this week. We only did a few of these so I'm not sure all of the options but they usually effect some players but not all. Each player also gets their own player event card which typically was something like "this position gets +1 dice this week" or "this position gets -1 dice this week", usually small effects.

The final part of the pre-week is the waiver wire/moving players around. You flip over a new player for each position and people can now bid on them again, similar to during the draft (but only 1 round). This gives players another chance to replace anyone they have on bye (if they don't have someone on their bench that they can move around) and to just generally improve their team. If you buy someone you have to move someone to the free agent pool which anyone is free to take from. People are also free to just rearrange their players as desired. You can also trade if desired.

After everyone has there team set you then get to the weeks game. You pair up with an opponent (we played with 4, it plays up to 6 with one box but you always want an even number. I think you can do 12 with 2 boxes as well). You then compete with probably the weakest part of the game. You roll dice position by position (bench doesn't count). You get one dice for each star of the player, plus any modifiers, including the team bonus (only 1 player on the team gets the bonus, but the other player can be benched). After you've rolled all the players you add up each teams total and the highest score wins.

You do this for all the weeks of the season, rotating opponents each week. At the end you do a championship game between the two players with the best record, tiebreaker is total points scored. You just play a final week, winner takes all. (In case of a tie for the final week you can either do another week or roll the bench as well, whatever you prefer). You can also do a playoffs if desired for larger player counts. You really have the flexibility to do it however you'd like.

So for a game that is fundamentally a dice rolling game I think this game works for what it is. Just like real fantasy football you can gain an advantage in the draft and the midweek, the events keep it interesting so you have to pivot sometimes. I like the variability it offers in setup, for example I think a season where you play each other player once is optimal so it's not too long, but you have options on how you want to set up your season which is a plus.

I'm pretty sure they are using real teams and player names in the game as well. Although they did state that they only have 20 teams in the game (the team synergies were too hard to hit with all 32 players after playtesting). So if you have football fans, even if they aren't huge board gamers, they would probably enjoy this. It's not hard to play, not too long, and not pure luck but has enough luck where anyone could win.

This is also a game that I could see easily benefitting from expansions. It could be something like adding abilities to players, some kind of home field advantage (maybe stadium cards) or anything to spend money on other than just players.

But overall I liked this more than I expected. It's fast, fun and doesn't overstay it's welcome and is something I could play with a crowd usually wouldn't super be interested in. I don't think I want to spend $70 to pick it up but if I saw it cheap enough I would pick it up. Or if someone else owned it I would play. It is luck based so I don't think I'd want to do a super long season or play it a ton, but a short season I think works, as long as I'm not doing it all the time.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to slightly positive
Future: I would play this in the future, if I saw it cheap I might pick it up to play with my friends that are into football but not huge into board games.
Next Game Hint: This game is a co-op where you work together to save something larger than all of you.

Got some football fans in my group (myself included) so I'll definitely keep that one on my sales radar

#08 - Leviathan Wilds
My Score: 7.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/358737/leviathan-wilds

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This is the first game on my list that we actually went and checked out from the library. The library is the Dice Tower's collection of games that I believe they bring to all their conventions. You can check out anything in the library, first come first served. They have over 2000 games in the library, a lot of the games are upgraded with better components. It's a pretty impressive collection and they had a decent sized room that was dedicated to it. Checking a game out is pretty simple, they scan the board games barcode, they scan your badge barcode, and then you can't check out another game until you return it. They also have catalogs to help you find games.

Anyway we checked this game out and this was also the only game I played without any strangers the entire time I was there. I basically read through the rules while my friends grabbed some coffee first thing in the morning on the last day.

So Leviathan Wilds is a co-op game where you are working together to climb and heal these giant leviathans. Each leviathan has its own page in a booklet, similar to the maps in jaws of the lion if you are familiar with that. There are 17 different leviathans in the book and each game seems to take around 45 minutes to an hour. There's also different difficulties to improve replayability.

So each leviathan has its own unique set of 5 cards, you will randomly shuffle them and lay them down left to right with the purple side pointing up. You then flip over the first x cards to the teal side pointing up (to clarify the cards are still face down, there's just colors on the the top and bottom). The x here depends on how enraged the leviathan is, with higher difficulties raising the starting enrage meter.

There's also various spots on each leviathan to put either a teal or purple die with a number on it. These represent the crystals that are corrupting the leviathan that you are trying to heal. So you set these dice on the appropriate spots with the appropriate starting values. You also put some mushrooms on the appropriate spots and the board is setup.

Each player will pick a combination of a character and a class, take the cards for both and shuffle them together to form their deck that is around 10 cards. You do any setup specific to the character or class, set your starting health to the max and starting blight to 0 and draw three cards. Each player will also pick a place to start their climber out of the starting spaces (on the one we did it was just the bottom row. After this the game can begin.

So you win the game by healing (removing) all of the dice off the leviathan. A climber dies when their health meets or crosses their blight and at that point the other climbers have one turn each to try to win otherwise you lose the game. There's no time limit per se, but as the game goes on the leviathan gets more and more enraged meaning you get more and more teal sided cards which are more dangerous and damaging.

So a turn is made up of 4 steps. The first step is to reveal the threat, which means flipping over the leftmost facedown leviathan card keeping the appropriate color on the top. (It doesn't resolve yet). This will let you know what the monster is going to do so you can prepare for it on your turn. There's a couple of different things it can do but typical is an attack focusing on one or more of the climbers (usually the active player).

Do note that an attack has a pattern depending on the card, but its center is where the climber is when the card is flipped, not when its resolved. So you will put a little red circle around the targets spot so you know where the attack is originating even after you move. This means you have a chance to move out of the area it's going to affect. It also seems to discourage grouping so you don't accidentally get another player hit by an attack targeting you.

The second part of a turn is to activate the climber. You will typically have three cards in hand, and each card has an effect on the bottom and a number on the top left. You start your turn by playing one of the cards for it's number on the top left which gives you ap for the turn. You can then spend AP on climbing (moving one space orthogonal), jumping (moving 2 spaces orthogonal or one space diagonal), gliding (moving downwards efficiently), resting, healing or striking a crystal. You can also use your cards in your hand or your characters skills at any relevant time

On the topic of resting, by default you do not get the cards you've played into your discard back into your hand. The only way to get them back is by resting, which requires 2 ap and that you are on a ledge. A ledge is a space with a white line beneath it and are scattered through the map, with the entire bottom seeming to be ledges (so you can't fall off the map). The other important thing about ledges is if you ever start falling for any reason you will stop once you reach a ledge.

Falling is interesting in this game, because it doesn't actually hurt you in any way (you are still effected by the spaces you traveled through while falling however) and can actually be desirable in some cases if you need to get down or need to rest. You can end up falling in three ways: voluntarily letting go, entering an "empty" space where there isn't anything to grab onto, or if your deck is ever completely empty. So it might make sense to try and accomplish whatever you are doing and then just get over a ledge and let yourself fall so you can refill your deck and keep going.

The last action to go over is striking a crystal. Striking a crystal takes AP equal to the amount of damage you want to do it. If a dice has a 4 face you can spend 4 ap on a strike to completely remove it, or if you spend 3 it will just flip to the 1 side. You don't have to do it in one go (and sometimes can't for the higher numbers depending on your class. But if you remember I said there are two different dice colors. Purple dice are just normal, damage them until you remove them. But teal dice are blighted and each time you strike them (regardless of the damage you do) you take one point of blight so it encourages bigger fewer attacks on them.

After the climber has finished their turn, the threat now resolves. Attacks resolve based on the red circle, and other types of effects (such as an event that says the highest climber loses 1 health) resolve taking the current state of the game. You typically want to spread the damage around, or have it go to someone with defensive abilities so there's some strategy in tweaking who will be the person targeted during your turn. Once the fifth card is resolved you advance the enrage meter by 1 and shuffle the 5 cards and place them again, flipping the new appropriate number of cards to the teal side.

The final step is the climber draws back to 3 cards, immediately falling if their deck becomes empty.

Overall I enjoyed this a good bit for what it was. We just played the first leviathan on hard difficulty (the third of four difficulties, the enrage started at one card being enraged from the get go). It was still fairly easy but I think that's just the nature of the first leviathan (It was a giant turtle, I actually think they call it the tutorial). I glanced at a few of the later leviathans and they seemed to be harder to move around on and a lot more empty space so I definitely think the game will be challenging on the highest difficulty on some of the leviathans.

I like the way you pick your class/character combo, it gives some customization without being too much for a shorter game like this. The classes and characters have various stats that give you an idea of what their cards focus on. For example I played a mobility character and I had a lot of cards that gave me extra movement or free jumps. I also think it will let you customize your team for the current leviathan and what you need. Ie you might want more power characters for leviathans with a lot of high number teal crystals, while mobility is good for leviathans with harder to reach crystals, but it also might be that a balance is generally desirable.

I also like the grip system (grip is what they call the cards left in your deck) where you might have more impactful turns using all your cards each turn but you will then need to risk having to find a ledge sooner, or you could go ultra conservative and just play one card a turn but take longer to get stuff done. I like the choices it makes you make. I'm also a fan of dual use cards in general where you have to determine which card you want to use for it's effect vs the amount of AP it gives you.

Overall I enjoyed this and would like to try it again with some later leviathans. I only gave it a 7.5 because I feel like I need to play it a few more times to see how it works on the more real leviathans, if it holds up and has the right level of difficulty I think this would bump up.

I don't personally see myself doing each leviathan more than once so there's limited replay value for more, but 17 is a decent number, especially if I get it for a decent price. I also see there's already an expansion planned so that could help mitigate that as well. I've got this on my list to pick up if I see it for the right price.

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Likely to Trend: neutral to positive
Future: Nice quicker co-op game. Will try to pick it up if I see it cheap enough.
Next Game Hint: This space themed board Rotates.

sounds very interesting!

I jumped on the second chance kickstarter (or whatever they called it) after Shut Up and Sit Down's video. It arrived but I've been visiting family so won't be able to play it for a bit still, very excited for board game shadow of the colossus

I moved this to the next page so the review is together