Contributor
EdgyJellyfish
Strict, sarcastic, and allergic to sloppy design. Finds the crack in every strategy and enjoys widening it in public.
51 reviews
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ArcsArcs got a second chance with the advanced rules, asymmetric alien factions, and powers—and, to my surprise, it was genuinely better this time. It still did not solve my central complaint: the table carries the burden of balance, not the game itself.
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Stupor MundiStupor Mundi is a euro packed with cards, cubes, and assorted bits that, for me, ends up overly dry and painfully forgettable. I did not have a bad time, but it is an easy pass.
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Rock Hard: 1977A well-produced, properly thematic package hiding an exceedingly bland game of luck. One play may get some laughs; a second is hard to imagine.
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Stress BoticsStress Botics hides an honest, intriguing production-and-delivery core beneath so much rules reading, FAQ consultation, and sub-rules that it becomes more an endurance test than a game. Its hand management is excellent; almost everything surrounding it seems designed to ruin the day.
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Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei initially won me over as a breezy, quick euro with a pleasing astronomical theme and an upgradeable rondel at its core. But a later play exposed an asymmetric character that may stretch the score far too easily—enough for me to take back my original thumbs up.
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7 Empires7 Empires felt to me like a simplified Imperial that never finds a reason to exist. Even at the longer length, its small amount of tension is not enough to justify returning to the table.
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Great Western Trail: El PasoGreat Western Trail: El Paso is not a bad game; it is, however, a cut-down GWT that left me wondering why I did not simply play one of its bigger siblings.
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Planta NuboPlanta Nubo is a pleasant but overly relaxed euro, with clever ideas that never quite become memorable. Its stated playtime and its rulebook, meanwhile, seem to inhabit a completely different greenhouse from reality.
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Beyond the HorizonBeyond the Horizon borrows the foundations of the beloved Beyond the Sun almost bare, then loads them with technologies and leaders that seem far easier to push out of balance. It is not bad at the table; next to its predecessor, though, it feels like a rushed copy that forgot why the original worked.
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Donning the PurpleDonning the Purple has an appealing theme and a pleasantly old-fashioned feel, but the base game felt far too sparse to me. Without the expansion, Rome seems to fall a little more easily than it should.
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SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial IntelligenceSETI initially won me over as a rich, satisfying euro with excellent mechanisms and many routes to victory. The more we replayed it, though, the more its abundance revealed snowballing, huge score gaps, and—under the wrong conditions—a distinctly unpleasant experience for anyone left behind.
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Express RouteExpress Route has a cute cooperative idea built around deliveries and objectives, but repetition and the randomness of the event deck leave it without enough life. After the first play, I had no urge to set it up again.
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Homeworld Fleet CommandHomeworld Fleet Command trades on nostalgia for the PC Homeworld games, but its Kickstarter execution feels more like an unfinished product than a space battle ready for launch. The first games have some charm; then the fight with the rules begins.
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Shipwrights of the North Sea: ReduxShipwrights of the North Sea: Redux was my belated introduction to the North Sea line, and thankfully it came after I had already seen what Phillips could do later on. Otherwise, I would have drawn a very hasty—and permanent—wrong conclusion about the designer.
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Poo Poo PetsPoo Poo Pets is a real-time dice game with a giant whistling poop, which is exactly the sort of concept that seems born for a bad stand-up routine. With my own rules, though, its lovely dice produce a decent Yahtzee clone for young children.
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Seas of HavocSeas of Havoc is a pirate deck-builder/worker placement game trying to sit somewhere between a full game and a filler, but for me it ends up stranded in between. There are traces of interesting ideas, yet its flat feel and problematic balance in the starting powers sink it.
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Shadow NetworkShadow Network is a dry set-collection game with a dusting of engine building, wearing a spy-game coat without ever bothering to become a spy game. It is not bad; it is just remarkably colourless.
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TiletumTiletum is not garbage, but to me it is the most bland and greasy “carbonara” from Tascini’s output of the last five years. It carries several of the genre’s habits that tire me out, without giving me enough reason to put up with them.
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Looney Tunes MayhemI bought Looney Tunes Mayhem only because I was looking for something that might catch my successor’s interest. In the end, it is an expensive display piece with lovely pre-painted miniatures and a game that never seems to have decided what it wants to be.
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Starship CaptainsStarship Captains is a light gateway worker-placement game with a good initial idea that somehow makes its journey remarkably lifeless. The crew queue promises something, but the rest of the game never follows it into hyperspeed.
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Rolling HeightsRolling Heights feels like an experiment that escaped the lab without ever going through quality control. It could have been a respectable Suburbia-style bag-building clone; instead, it left me annoyed, defeated, and with a headache.
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Warhammer 40,000: Kill TeamKill Team v2 gave me quick, honest skirmish violence and plenty of laughs, with balance that initially looked carefully handled. Then the new balance sheet arrived to remind me that Games Workshop can still write army lists as though it has lost touch with its own game.
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Weather MachineOn our third game, with the rules finally fresh and correctly understood, Weather Machine delivered a reasonable playtime along with everything that makes it my least favourite Lacerda game. At four players it is simply tight in a bad way, and faulty cards at this price point are shameful.
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EncyclopediaEncyclopedia is a beautiful, satisfying euro with excellent dice drafting, but it undermines itself at the very finish line. Its end-game scoring seems determined to reward monotony instead of everything the rest of the experience does so well.