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 Reykholt
Reykholt is a brisk, bare-bones Uwe Rosenberg worker-placement game of vegetables, tourists, and special cards that are either inert or excessive. It survives one play; it struggles to make a case for more.
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Review Raccoon Tycoon: The Fat Cat Expansion
Raccoon Tycoon: The Fat Cat Expansion makes an already light economic game look more deluxe, without addressing its weak spots. Some added buildings simply give the existing balance problems more room to breathe.
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Review Tapestry
Tapestry is lavishly produced, remarkably easy to teach, and brisk enough to keep early plays engaging. Its base-game civilisations are so poorly balanced, however, that the contest can collapse into an exercise in irritation.
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Review Pulp Invasion
Pulp Invasion delivers the pulp look and atmosphere it promised, but its solo game does not do enough with them. The X1 expansion gives it a more interesting second life for two, with one player happily in the deep end and the other causing trouble from the shore.
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Review Roll Player
Roll Player has a clever fantasy-RPG premise and artwork that does its job, but at three players it felt far too willing to let luck settle the matter. One slightly broken trait bought early turned an hour of play into a long confirmation of an old result.
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Review Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra Incognita
Terra Incognita brings some genuinely smart ideas to Civilization: A New Dawn, but it cannot escape the limits of the underlying design. It is an expansion for people who already love the game, not the repair job its critics were waiting for.
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Review Scythe
Scythe is still striking on the table and brisk enough in motion, but beneath that polished surface its tempo feels broken and too many choices lack a convincing reason to exist. Adding almost all the material does not improve the game; it merely enlarges the disappointment.
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Review Robotech: Force of Arms
Robotech: Force of Arms is a quick two-player filler with a pleasingly spare framework and a fatal commitment to symmetry. It works as a way into the series, not as a reason to linger here.
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Review Rolling Stock
The first-edition All-Aboard full setup, with its purple companies, makes the complaint about the 2038 companies impossible to dismiss. Even so, Rolling Stock remains an exceptional economic sandbox.
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Review Fallout Shelter: The Board Game
Fallout Shelter: The Board Game is a fair translation of the mobile game, including its weary repetition. Its worker-placement core is sound, but the rest feels conspicuously unfinished.
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Review Dark Venture
Dark Venture has hard PvP and plenty of recurring combat, which is more than can be said for its ability to stay out of its own paperwork. It wants to be a fantasy adventure; too often, it makes you administer one.
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Review Brexit: The Real Deal
Brexit: The Real Deal knows it should not be treated as serious political simulation. Unfortunately, that is also its only joke.
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Review Ecos: First Continent
Ecos: First Continent gives bingo an engine-building shell, with worthwhile drafting and almost no downtime, but an experience gap that can leave newer players merely turning cards while someone else runs away with it.
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Review Teotihuacan: Late Preclassic Period
Teotihuacan: Late Preclassic Period offers committed Teotihuacan players more material to work through. With modules 1 and 3, though, it feels less like refinement and more like removing the guardrails.
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Review Hansa Teutonica
Hansa Teutonica is a tightly engineered worker-placement and engine-building game with very little downtime. Its opening feels overly prescribed, however, and its displacement system can hand an unfair lead to two players willing to assist one another.
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Review La Stanza
La Stanza is well produced, brisk, and free of downtime, but its decisions are left at the mercy of unforgiving randomness. It feels like a poor Newton imitation with little reason to return.
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Review Continental Divide
Continental Divide wants to make Cube Rails feel more serious and weighty across its east-west frame. For me, that weight mostly arrives as dry friction.
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Review Wingspan
Wingspan is light, quick, and pleasantly undemanding: an engine builder for a table that does not want homework. The European birds add clever powers, but their extra variety also adds more chaos than the design can comfortably hold.
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Review Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea
I expected Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea to be a light GMT civ/area-control game. What I found did not justify the paper it occupies.
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Review Barrage
Barrage is a properly hostile worker-placement game, with a shared map that lets players deny each other exactly what they need. A later play exposed balance and scaling problems that made its aggression feel less like design and more like circumstance.
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Review Labyrinth: The Awakening, 2010 – ?
After a fair number of plays, the original Labyrinth remains the stronger game for me. The Awakening changes the experience substantially, but its awakening tokens can swing matters far too hard on the right draw.
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Review Petrichor
Petrichor has a few interesting, inventive ideas, but the design leaks badly. The tension it creates is not productive; it is simply draining.
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Review Fleet
Fleet still comes out now and then, but a return to Warhammer 40,000’s eighth edition left a very particular aftertaste: plenty of aroma, no bread.
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Review Pax Renaissance
Pax Renaissance has the teeth and spite for a properly memorable card game, but its rules burden and questionable balance make reaching that point a chore. There is a terrific dirty fight in here; the game simply declines to make it easy to find.
