Contributor
EdgyJellyfish
Strict, sarcastic, and allergic to sloppy design. Finds the crack in every strategy and enjoys widening it in public.
76 reviews
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Review Rolling Heights
Rolling Heights aims for a Suburbia-like city builder with bag building, but turns its central novelty into a chore and its table presence into an eye test.
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Review Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team
Kill Team v2 is a lean, affordable skirmish game with proper scraps and a substantial campaign library for anyone able to use it. Its faction balance, however, is liable to wander off before the game begins.
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Review Weather Machine
Even once the rules are settled, Weather Machine is the Lacerda game I like least. Its running time is reasonable; its setup material and balance are not.
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Review Findorff
Findorff has a genuinely interesting tableau-building and action-selection core, then gives it a finish so determined not to become a point salad that it goes oddly flat. It is not a bad game; it is a missed opportunity that moves briskly and stops just short of becoming substantial.
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Review Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia is a beautifully made game with a remarkably controlled dice-drafting core. Then the final scoring arrives and pays monochrome play with the confidence of an accounting error.
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Review Plutocracy
Plutocracy has a superb hook and an inviting bundle of systems, but it resolves into optimisation with one meaningful route. In the fixed/balanced setup, turn order appears to have done most of the winning for you.
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Review Connecting Flights
Connecting Flights has the right sales pitch for an airline-game enthusiast: auctions, route building and planes. It then flattens those promising ingredients into a wearying experience with very little at stake.
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Review Brazil: Imperial
Brazil: Imperial is a streamlined 4X with several clever ideas, but a corrected second play confirmed that they never become a finished design. It may be better than Scythe; that remains a fairly modest distinction.
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Review My Father's Work
My Father's Work is an ambitious, thematic app-driven worker-placement game with production values turned well past sensible. There is plenty of game here, but its story and scenario knowledge do not integrate as neatly as the presentation promises.
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Review Bitoku
Bitoku is an ambitious, overstuffed euro with a genuinely clever core, but it does not feel as polished as its reputation suggests. I had a good time with it; I simply expected more.
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Review Founders of Teotihuacan
Founders of Teotihuacan is an unusually light, brisk Board & Dice release with a few sound ideas and not quite enough substance to distinguish itself. Its action-selection system does the rescuing; much of the rest feels like a draft that escaped before revision.
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Review Zapotec
Zapotec is a tightly constructed light-medium pyramid builder with a satisfying escalation, but its opening is rather too willing to punish one false step. It is good, brisk, and worth recommending, with a real reservation about replayability.
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Review SYNDICATE: An Interplanetary Conquest Board Game
SYNDICATE: An Interplanetary Conquest Board Game has ambitious ideas and production values that suggest competence. Then the cards, dice, and imbalance begin taking turns dismantling it.
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Review Kemet: Blood and Sand
Kemet: Blood and Sand gave me a game that seemed decided before it had properly begun. White magic dominated so comfortably that I saw no reason to go back for a second helping.
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Review Khôra: Rise of an Empire
Khôra: Rise of an Empire is a pleasant, light civilisation race, much closer to a friendly game in weight and length than Iello’s “expert” label suggests. Its trouble is that military development is not merely a route to explore; it looks suspiciously like the route to take.
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Review Anno 1800: The Board Game
Anno 1800: The Board Game moves briskly and becomes clear soon enough, but its beloved setting conceals a dry, repetitive management exercise. The sensible price is welcome; it is not a reason to get excited.
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Review Star Scrappers: Cave-in
Star Scrappers: Cave-in has a serviceable card-based set-collection idea, but it feels like a design released well before it was ready. A little novelty cannot rescue its unfinished air.
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Review Apogee
Apogee dresses itself as a space race of engineers, tight funding and rocket launches, then asks everyone to wait for the card that ends it. Its Kickstarter extras have received more attention than the game beneath them.
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Review Factory 42
Factory 42 contains a fiercely competitive worker-placement game, then lets its production quality kneecap it. The Bureaucracy Tower creates exactly the right kind of chaos; the production cards create a headache.
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Review Endeavor: Age of Expansion
Endeavor remains an excellent game, but Age of Expansion solves a problem the base game never had. The new buildings add variety, then flood the table with enough disks to loosen the tension that made it work.
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Review After the Empire
After the Empire has an appealing worker-placement/tower-defence pitch and a manageable running time, but its rules showed us several versions of the game. None was entirely reassuring.
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Review Small Railroad Empires
Small Railroad Empires borrows the approachability of introductory cube rails and leaves behind the decisions that make them worth playing. A session may be brief; the disappointment has better endurance.
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Review SpaceCorp: Ventures
Ventures refreshes SpaceCorp with 16 asymmetric companies and a substantially better solo mode, then lets balance fend for itself. It is a respectable expansion; it simply is not the one that fixes the game’s more obvious needs.
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Review Star Trek: Conflick in the Neutral Zone
Star Trek: Conflick in the Neutral Zone tries to wrap a space carrom game in rules and Star Trek dressing. It cannot even manage the modest achievement of being a laugh.
