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 Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India, 1290-1398
Vijayanagara takes the familiar COIN framework and bends it into a focused, strictly three-player conflict. You need not care about the setting to appreciate how well the game has been arranged.
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Review Salton Sea
Salton Sea packs a luck-free economic game into Devir’s small-box format, built around one notably clever premise: money is also your action supply. It is perhaps a little too tidy for its own good, but remains an accessible, satisfyingly demanding design.
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Review Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa
Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa is a serious contender for my eurogame of the year: dense, highly integrated, and satisfyingly demanding without turning the table into an AP strike.
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Review Boonlake: Artifacts
Artifacts does not rebuild Boonlake; it adds exploration and asymmetric tools where the design needed a little more pressure. It also has the good manners to make the game shorter.
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Review Prussian Rails
Prussian Rails is an honest little railway game with shares and enough actual game to earn its place. It does not reach Iberian Rails, but its brief running time and basement price make it an easy recommendation for the railway-curious.
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Review Fighters of the Pacific
Fighters of the Pacific is a resolutely abstract, zero-luck game of mass air combat in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. It is not selling simulation; it is selling clean decisions on hexes, and it does so rather well.
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Review 1930: The Golden Age of Airlines
1930: The Golden Age of Airlines is a fresh economic game with a pleasing sense of development and the contained density one expects from a Rio Grande title. At four players, though, its final turn can undo several hours of careful work.
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Review 21Moon
21Moon is a modern 18XX with pace, a handsome production, and several ideas that properly belong together. Its rulebook is the weak link: too spare, too short on examples, and occasionally unclear in its English.
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Review Great Western Trail: New Zealand
Great Western Trail: New Zealand first looked like a notch below Argentina, then a later play changed the order completely. It is the heaviest entry in the line and, for me now, its strongest.
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Review Dune: Imperium – Uprising
Dune: Imperium – Uprising stands alone while still speaking directly to the original Imperium, with gentler intrigue and fewer wild spikes. On first acquaintance, it is an excellent game with a distinctly different balance.
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Review Fractal
Fractal is a 4X that plainly understands the problems it is trying to solve in TI, Eclipse, and their relatives. Its first plays are exhausting for the wrong reasons, but the design underneath is unusually streamlined and rich.
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Review Evacuation
Evacuation feels like a return to form for Vladimir: a demanding euro with a coherent logic, difficult pacing decisions, and no easy place to settle. Its many endgame and setup options make it less definitive as a package, but not less compelling.
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Review Pirates of Maracaibo
Pirates of Maracaibo condenses Maracaibo into a quicker, lighter card-driven form. Its routes to points are not equally convincing, but the two expansions turn it into a notably more complete package.
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Review Revive
Revive is a fresh, generous engine builder: exploration, buildings standing in for workers, cards, and asymmetry that is not equally well behaved across the board. There is a great deal to enjoy here, though the base game’s balance deserves a raised eyebrow.
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Review Amritsar: The Golden Temple
Amritsar: The Golden Temple is a dense, tight medium-weight euro that combines familiar mechanisms into a system with a character of its own. Its rulebook and visual presentation make a poor first impression; the design underneath earns the effort.
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Review Shikoku 1889
Shikoku 1889 compresses the full 1830 threat of bankruptcy into a more manageable evening. It is tight, variable and carefully made, although one private company pulls rather too hard on the rest of the system.
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Review Heat: Pedal to the Metal
Heat: Pedal to the Metal is a competent introductory racing game, but its heavy dependence on the draw and its frequently obvious hand decisions left me unconvinced.
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Review Lewis & Clark: The Expedition
Lewis & Clark: The Expedition is a deck- and engine-builder whose mechanisms still feel unusually fresh, with a satisfyingly tight five-player game. Its expedition across the American interior demands planning, clever timing, and a healthy awareness of what the next player can steal from you.
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Review 3 Ring Circus
3 Ring Circus packs tableau building, area majority and a race for position into a compact euro with meaningful decisions and a pleasingly grounded theme. The card draw brings a little more variance than ideal, but later plays show a design with more bite than its friendly length suggests.
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Review The White Castle
The White Castle is a tight euro engine builder that invents little but assembles familiar parts with impressive economy. It is brisk, balanced and satisfyingly demanding without overstaying its welcome.
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Review Black Friday
Black Friday takes an older design with a middling reception and fixes its pacing with small but decisive revisions. The result is a taut stock-market game, and probably the best straightforward option after Rolling Stock for players who do not want an evening-long ordeal.
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Review Pilgrim
Pilgrim welds 18xx-style route building, engine building and a Trajan-like mancala mechanism into an unlikely but coherent economic puzzle. It is inventive and demanding, though its relentless scarcity can turn tension into labour.
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Review Great Western Trail: Argentina
Great Western Trail: Argentina remixes the familiar GWT framework into something denser, more open and more race-conscious. It is an excellent reworking, though I still find the original’s restraint more appealing.
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Review Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 1 & 2
Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 1 & 2 uses a remarkably small campaign overlay to turn a solid dice-drafting game into a much denser strategic project. The result is excellent, though it asks for stamina commensurate with its ambition.
