Contributor
WhiteColarGamer
Suave, flamboyant, and unrepentant about it. Drawn to deluxe editions, upgraded components and a table that looks as good as it plays.
🎁 2 kudos from readers
164 reviews
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Review Empires: Age of Discovery
Empires: Age of Discovery is a dependable six-player game that becomes much tighter when everyone arrives ready to pay attention. With different nations in play, this session stayed close to the finish.
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Review Railways of Nippon
Railways of Nippon is a tidier stop on the familiar Railways route: built for four players, with a new map and cards, but no grand attempt to reinvent the line. It is useful and pleasantly manageable rather than especially memorable.
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Review The Sands of Time
The Sands of Time has the right ingredients for a civilisation game and makes good use of them, yet somehow leaves the final course a little short.
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Review My Fair Princess
The supplied text contains no observations about My Fair Princess, only an unrelated anecdote about a game room mistaken for student poverty.
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Review 1805: Sea of Glory
1805: Sea of Glory is less a conventional wargame than a demanding simulation of naval pressure in the Napoleonic era. It needs time, reading and a table given over to the cause, but it looks set to reward all three with a deeply asymmetric experience.
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Review Dinosaur Island
Dinosaur Island is a cute, uncomplicated, slightly chunky production euro. It makes a solid way into medium-weight games of this sort, even if it does not yet have much bite.
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Review Agra
Agra is the rare heavy euro that earned an unequivocal 10 from me. It has even displaced The Gallerist as my favourite game in that weight class.
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Review Mi Tierra: New Era
Mi Tierra: New Era is a pleasantly honest answer to the suspiciously neat pitch of a farming euro for six in under an hour. It is easy to enter, but has more weight than that pitch suggests.
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Review Hamburgum
A chance English-language find in Rome turned out to be a carefully built rondel euro about raising cathedrals. It shows its age in places, but its pace is still remarkably good.
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Review Peak Oil
Peak Oil is a light, quick economic game that never stays on the table long enough to become irritating. Its tension fades early, but there is enough easy table pleasure here to make another play welcome.
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Review Gentes
Gentes did not disappoint, though it handed me an almost doubled score deficit without making my mistake obvious. It deserves another play, preferably when my brain has not already clocked off.
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Review DRCongo
DRCongo is a hard, demanding economic game, and getting the rules right only makes its pressure more satisfying. One missing bit of market leverage does not stop it earning a regular place among the games worth revisiting every year.
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Review Heart of Crown
Heart of Crown is an honest Dominion-style deckbuilder: it does not reinvent the genre, but it adds a little complexity and can become properly lively with the right card sets. The manga theme is a welcome extra.
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Review Hull Breach: In Defiance of Dictators
Hull Breach: In Defiance of Dictators makes a slightly awkward first teach feel worthwhile very quickly. The Kickstarter package also feels like money well spent.
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Review Global Mogul
Global Mogul is a light area-control game with a little economy and production folded in, and it deserves better than its reputation suggests. Its bargain-basement production does it no favours, but there is a pleasant short game underneath.
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Review Copycat
Copycat is an overlooked deck- and engine-builder that has all the parts it needs: smooth, cheerful, and satisfying when your little machine starts to work.
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Review The Gallerist
The Gallerist is, for me, Vital’s most cohesive design. Better still, it need not consume the entire afternoon people expect it to.
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Review Star Wars: Rebellion
Star Wars: Rebellion delivered another epic contest, with the Empire bearing down and the Rebellion surviving by the finest margins. It is a large, slow game, and entirely worth the room it demands.
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Review Kansas Pacific
Kansas Pacific is a short, simple Cube Rail game that makes another play sound perfectly reasonable. Its map and colour choices, unfortunately, make getting there harder than it ought to be.
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Review A Feast for Odin
A Feast for Odin looks as though it might requisition the whole room, yet it proves remarkably easy to settle into. The expansion keeps that smoothness intact and adds an action board worth having on the table.
