Contributor
TheTrainSpotter
A mechanisms obsessive. Never reviews a game in isolation — always reaching for what it borrows, what it refines, and which other titles sit next to it on the shelf.
154 reviews
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Review Red Dust Rebellion
Red Dust Rebellion may be the most demanding COIN I have played, and perhaps the best. Its wildly asymmetrical factions look liable to collapse into nonsense; instead, they form an unusually well-balanced whole.
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Review Imperial Borders
Imperial Borders takes Napoleonic warfare and turns it into a cleaner, more symmetrical wargame rather than a historical simulation. We did not complete a full game, but the preparation, demonstrations, and lengthy opening analysis made a persuasive case.
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Review Phoenix New Horizon
A knotty worker-placement euro with engine building, a touch of area majority, and more player friction than the genre usually permits. Perfectly competent, though its turn-order system keeps it short of excellence.
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Review Dune: War for Arrakis
Dune: War for Arrakis is a lavish asymmetric conflict game that takes the broad shape of War of the Ring and makes it fit Dune rather than merely wearing the licence. The base game works well; Spacing Guild makes the experience noticeably better.
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Review World Order
World Order puts multi-use cards, area control and production into an asymmetric superpower game with a notably clean core. It is decision-heavy and, for me, clearly stronger than Hegemony.
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Review Revenant
Mindclash’s Revenant has a straightforward central premise, a theme that lands, and a remarkable talent for turning both into a very dense machine. I enjoyed the play, but even seasoned heavy gamers may find it carrying more machinery than it needs.
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Review Feya's Swamp
Feya's Swamp combines euro-style racing with area control in a magical wetland contested by animal tribes. It is dense, enjoyable and full of viable routes to victory, though its asymmetry could use a little more balancing.
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Review The Druids of Edora
The Druids of Edora is a dense optimisation game that proves far more demanding than its board first suggests. With several rewarding scoring routes and little room for wasted actions, it pays back careful planning.
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Review Sanctuary
Sanctuary distils the Ark Nova flavour into a much more approachable tile-drafting game without making the decisions trivial. It is a very pleasant design; I would still usually choose its larger sibling.
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Review Ayar: Children of the Sun
Ayar: Children of the Sun is Grandon-Lopiano’s third Osprey design after Merv and Sankore, sitting neatly between them in length and complexity. It is a Euro with genuine ideas of its own, and one that earns a second play before its shape becomes clear.
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Review Cross Bronx Expressway
Cross Bronx Expressway compresses the COIN format into a three-player contest between capital, the state, and communities, moving through six distinct moments in the Bronx’s history. It is dense, peculiar, and demanding, but there is considerable depth for players prepared to stay with it.
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Review Quorum
Quorum is a compact drafting and combo game with enough bite to avoid becoming a harmless half-hour filler. It does not have the fuller ambition of Devir’s more substantial small boxes, but it is admirably clear about its own scale.
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Review Beer & Bread
Beer & Bread is a compact production and set-collection game with a properly useful reverse draft at its centre. It does not reinvent the millstone; it does know where the friction belongs.
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Review Lightning Train
Lightning Train welds bag building to pick up and deliver with real pressure and unusually tidy route design. Its rulebook makes a poor first impression; the game itself does not.
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Review Speakeasy
Speakeasy is a tight, multi-layered worker-placement euro in which strategies collide without requiring players to shoot one another. Its initial density conceals a system of lucid logic, hard consequences, and considerable replay value.
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Review Railway Boom
Railway Boom folds cube rails, sequential auctions and a light engine into a brisk, highly replayable railway game. Its rotating scoring targets give each session a different strategic centre of gravity.
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Review Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 3 & 4
Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 3 & 4 take the earlier build-and-explore framework and tighten it into two demanding heavy euros. Episode 3 is the more open, combo-led design; Episode 4 narrows the sandbox slightly in return for even harsher planning pressure.
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Review Bier Pioniere
Bier Pioniere is a tight, medium-weight worker-placement euro with properly connected systems and an ending that refuses to let engine building coast to the finish. It belongs firmly to the classic German school, for better and, occasionally, for older habits.
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Review Thebai
Thebai pairs the rebuilding of the Cadmeia with the threat of seven attackers in a smart, handsomely produced euro. Its stack of mechanisms has real purpose, though the four-player game deserves a reservation.
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Review Pampero
Pampero is a luckless renewable-energy economy game with superb information design and scoring goals that genuinely alter its shape. It needs the right setup, though, and a group that will not casually subsidise one another into a ruined game.
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Review Star Wars: Battle of Hoth
Star Wars: Battle of Hoth puts Memoir ’44’s framework in the one setting that makes its abstractions feel entirely right. In its two-box Epic form, it also gives dice less authority and hand management considerably more.
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Review Tianxia
Tianxia is a knottier Tascini euro, pairing worker placement with invaders who will not politely wait for your engine to mature. Early plays are highly encouraging, though a few buildings may be doing rather too much work.
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Review Storm Raiders
Storm Raiders is an unusually direct pick-up-and-deliver game from the designer associated with Garphill’s rise. It is fairly brisk, but gives route optimisation enough room to matter.
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Review Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei is a brisk, agreeable euro built around an upgradeable rondel and several credible scoring routes. A later session, however, exposed an asymmetric element capable of producing a deeply uncomfortable gap in a game this tight.
