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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PlutocracyPlutocracy is tempting crowdfunding bait, with a great theme and mechanisms that sound excellent. On the table, though, it becomes a dry optimisation exercise with an almost predetermined path to victory.
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Connecting FlightsAuctions, route building, and airplanes were enough to send me to Kickstarter. Connecting Flights, however, turns those ingredients into an exhausting, flat experience with no real reason to play early.
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Brazil: ImperialBrazil: Imperial has a brisk flow and several genuinely good ideas, but it feels like a game that left development before deciding exactly what it wanted to be. A second play corrected a scoring mistake, not the sense of an unfinished whole.
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SYNDICATE: An Interplanetary Conquest Board GameSYNDICATE looks like an ambitious interplanetary conquest game on paper and on the table. Once play begins, though, its ambition feels like it launched without a landing system.
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Kemet: Blood and SandKemet: Blood and Sand arrived as the supposedly superior version of a game I had barely encountered before. One play was enough to leave me feeling that the setup had already written the ending.
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Star Scrappers: Cave-inStar Scrappers: Cave-in initially looked like a clever, fresh variation on the Orbital formula. Once it finally came off the shelf, it proved that a good idea alone cannot save a game that feels unfinished.
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ApogeeApogee promises a space race with engineers, tight money, and launches. In practice, for me, it is an hour of preparation until someone draws the card that ends the game.
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Endeavor: Age of ExpansionEndeavor remains excellent, but Age of Expansion felt like an expansion desperately looking for a reason to exist. It adds variety, yet stretches out the very tight economy that makes the base game so good.
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Small Railroad EmpiresSmall Railroad Empires is a flat, borrowed railway game that wants to be simple and brainy, yet ends up with neither personality nor meaningful decisions. Its close scores do not rescue an experience that often feels decided by setup and random tiles.
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Star Trek: Conflick in the Neutral ZoneConflick in the Neutral Zone tries to dress up a space carrom game with Star Trek and rules, but fails to provide even the laughs one expects from a bad dexterity game.
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The Battle of Armageddon: Deluxe EditionA bizarre, over-the-top alt-history Apocalypse wargame full of nukes, brute-force cards, and six factions tearing into one another. Its premise is charming precisely because it is absurd, but its balance seems to have vanished somewhere alongside the seventh seal.
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ReykholtReykholt feels like a dry, half-baked prototype that escaped Uwe Rosenberg’s workshop. It is tolerable because it ends quickly, but it is hard to see why I would want to come back to it.
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Raccoon Tycoon: The Fat Cat ExpansionThe Fat Cat Expansion makes Raccoon Tycoon look more deluxe on the table, but it does not fix the places where the base game already creaks. It remains a pleasant, light economic experience—there are simply much better choices when I want real depth.
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TapestryTapestry initially won me over with its production and teachability, then lost me spectacularly on the balance of its civilizations. It is a pleasant, simple game that turns its asymmetry into an exercise in irritation.
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Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra IncognitaTerra Incognita brings a few genuinely clever ideas to Civilization: A New Dawn, but it cannot pull the base game out of its abstract, broken mediocrity. It is an expansion that fans of New Dawn will enjoy; the rest of us should not expect a miracle.
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ScytheI returned to Scythe with nearly all of its material on the table and found the exact same elegant disappointment. It is gorgeous and brisk, but its pacing still feels broken and several of its choices still seem senseless.
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Robotech: Force of ArmsRobotech: Force of Arms is a spare two-player filler built around hidden card placement, but it drowns in its total symmetry. Two games, two 8–8 draws, and no desire whatsoever to give it a third chance.
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Fallout Shelter: The Board GameFallout Shelter: The Board Game faithfully brings the mobile game to the table, including its boredom and repetition. Its worker-placement core works, but everything around it feels like it left the Vault before construction was finished.
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Dark VentureDark Venture tries to fit a large fantasy RPG adventure into a card-based package, but ends up demanding more bookkeeping than adventure. Its brutal PvP has some bite, yet chaotic scoring and management keep it far from an easy recommendation.
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Brexit: The Real DealBrexit: The Real Deal has a box that promises a joke, but the joke runs out before you even open it. What remains is, without any sugar-coating, utter rubbish.
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Ecos: First ContinentA bingo-based engine builder with almost no downtime and an opening dose of drafting, but one that ends up more uneven and repetitive than it is worth for me.
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Hansa TeutonicaHansa Teutonica has tightly connected systems and very little downtime, but my first play felt more like an assembly line than an open game. And when the leaders can conveniently help one another, balance appears to take the night off.
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La StanzaLa Stanza was an instant blind buy for me because of its designers, but it ended up being a disappointing, overly random experience. Short and quick, yes; a good game, no.
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Ancient Civilizations of the Inner SeaI was eagerly expecting a light civ-area-control game from GMT. Instead, my first encounter was so disappointing that I can find no reason to give it a second look.