Contributor
TheCuttlefish
Cares about the box, the insert and the rulebook as much as the game. Has a particular weakness for tidy rules and gleeful take-that.
🎁 2 kudos from readers
238 reviews
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Review Illumination
Illumination is an odd, richly themed two-player brain-burner about monks competing over illuminated manuscripts. Its ideas are excellent, but keeping hold of them all can be tiring.
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Review Plunderbund
Plunderbund looks like a lukewarm deck-builder at first, then turns into a brisk little commercial brawl once the table understands it. With almost no downtime, it suits a large, relaxed group very well.
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Review Virgin Queen
Virgin Queen made for an exhausting, deeply satisfying Europe of pirates, marriages, faith and rebellion, where every turn rewrote someone’s plan. Nobody stayed safe for long, least of all on the final card.
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Review Galactic Era
Galactic Era is a lean, luck-free 4X space game whose tension comes from hidden fleets and the fights they suddenly reveal. It does not reinvent the genre, but with six players it delivers a brisk and pleasantly rowdy galactic scrap.
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Review Messina 1347
My second visit to Messina 1347, this time with four players, ran much more smoothly. Once the table learns the map, the game starts showing where it can bite.
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Review Ankh: Gods of Egypt
Ankh: Gods of Egypt is a straightforward, thematic area-control game with a splendid table presence and enough reversals to keep the endgame alive. It is pricey, but its merging-gods catch-up mechanism is a genuinely clever idea.
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Review Titans of Industry
Titans of Industry is a lean production game that seems to have been marked down for refusing to dress itself up as something more elaborate. It keeps six players involved and lets them make useful business out of one another’s infrastructure.
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Review Tinners' Trail (Second Edition)
Tinners' Trail (Second Edition) gives an older game a handsome, thoughtful return, with a smooth and approachable flow plus plenty of player friction. Its mineral pricing still shows the age of the design, but the table experience remains a strong one.
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Review Ore: The Mining Game
Ore: The Mining Game has a sound mining system and a worthwhile market to meddle with, but it never quite supplies the momentum needed for a full game. It does, however, handle five players well, which is no small thing.
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Review Unfathomable
Unfathomable is a polished, slightly tidier Galactica-like full of cards, pressure and a strong table presence—until the hidden allegiance stops being much of a secret. It exceeded my expectations, while remaining Galactica at heart.
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Review Star Scrappers: Orbital
Star Scrappers: Orbital is a brisk, punchy card game of station-building and interference, happy to fit inside an hour. It is not trying to be a grand space epic, which is part of its charm.
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Review Cosmic Frog
Cosmic Frog makes you an immortal, two-mile-tall frog harvesting pieces of a dead world and punching other immortal frogs for them. It sounds like a joke, then turns out to be a loud, happily hostile game with more structure than its premise has any right to promise.
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Review The Conquistadors: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas 1518-1548
The Conquistadors: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas 1518-1548 is a hard-edged sandbox of Spanish expeditions, loot, betrayal and historical brutality. Its central design has real pull; its development keeps putting obstacles in its own way.
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Review Successors (Fourth Edition)
Successors (Fourth Edition) is a lavishly produced heavy CDG about Alexander’s successors, full of battles, cards, and very poor intentions. It needs time, a regular group, and patience with a rulebook that teaches better than it retrieves.
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Review Trickerion: Legends of Illusion
Trickerion with every expansion in play produced a strong, chaotic evening of magic and reversals. Academy, however, can let the race lock up far too early.
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Review Dune: Imperium
Dune: Imperium improves once everyone at the table knows its tricks and still cannot quite avoid them. Familiarity does not make it gentler; it gives the game sharper teeth.
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Review Tigris & Euphrates
Tigris & Euphrates is the sort of game that leaves the table louder than it found it, and everyone more willing to set it up again. Bring four people who can take a fight and return one gladly.
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Review Dominant Species: Marine
Dominant Species: Marine keeps the tension of its predecessor while making the whole affair more fluid and easier to approach. It still takes its time, but its player interaction and capacity for wildly different games earn that time back.
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Review Pax Viking
Pax Viking is the Pax for people who have approached the series with suspicion: clearer on the way in, and full of conflict and diplomacy once the table gets moving. With the standard saga deck, it is already a very strong experience.
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Review Destinies
Destinies is a board game and app hybrid which, despite its tiny miniatures and mandatory screen, delivers a brisk adventure race that works particularly well with two. Its stories can be rigid and it will not live forever on the shelf, but its central idea feels properly fresh.
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Review Caverna: Cave vs Cave
Caverna: Cave vs Cave is a tidy little worker-placement game: easy to pack, easy to teach, and pleasant with a newer player. It is also so basic that it struggles to leave much behind once the table is cleared.
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Review Lorenzo il Magnifico
Lorenzo il Magnifico is a tight euro whose base game left me impressed rather than smitten, while the full package has considerably more bite. With the expansions it moves decisively up a tier, though Pazzi Conspiracy deserves a warning label.
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Review Captains of the Gulf
Captains of the Gulf is a decent fishing game with a clever way of replenishing the sea, held back by a dry, restrictive rondel and a rulebook that deserts you at the awkward bits. I would happily play it a few times; I would not build a shrine to it.
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Review Imperium: Legends
Imperium: Legends is beautifully produced and clearly built around ambitious asymmetry, but my first two plays mostly showed how much depends on the civilisations in the game and the players behind them.
