Reviews

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.

People Power is an unusually approachable, compact entry in the COIN series that retains both pressure and historical weight. Its three-sided contest is legible, tense, and given real depth by its extra systems.

Border Reivers is a very simple, solemn-faced cattle-rustling game that finds its pleasure in a noisy table. It works well with four; with six, the raids should properly get out of hand.

Trepanation is a compact worker-placement game with an honestly macabre theme and a hint of Trickerion’s stagecraft, without anything like that game’s weight. It is a welcome, well-priced addition to DLP’s lighter range.

Wayfarers of the South Tigris gives Garphill’s new trilogy a dense, satisfying opening built around tableau building and competing lines of progress. A return visit also made its low player interaction impossible to ignore.

An unusually reverent eurogame that finds mechanisms worthy of its very odd premise. As its designer’s first game, it stands among the year’s stronger releases.

Solar 175 got me with its theme and its promise of a legacy campaign, despite the publisher’s patchy record. Two scenarios in, I am still curious rather than convinced.

For Glory is an honest, easy-to-teach gladiator deck-builder that knows when to stop shuffling cards and let the arena do the talking. The base game makes a sharper two-player contest; the expansion turns the whole table into a cheerful mess.

Union Stockyards is a luck-free economic game about turning the family firm into a slaughterhouse empire. It is not trying to redraw the map of the hobby, but it makes for a pleasingly smooth evening at the table — and yes, there is bacon.

Nemesis: Lockdown is smoother than the original and less likely to kill you before the evening has found its feet. It still has the larks, but its scaling and the Visitors leave it a step behind the first Nemesis.

Marrakesh is, for me, Stefan Feld’s most complete design of this period: a dense, generous point salad whose systems genuinely pull on one another.

A faithful, flavour-soaked version of Darkest Dungeon that makes combat feel rather gentler than it should. Its real enemy is the campaign’s punishing amount of setup and packing away.

Trinidad is an unusual, substantial euro city-builder with several clever ideas, but the finished shape does not quite earn all that invention. Its scoring seems to pull the game in the wrong direction.

La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War is a dense 2v2 area-control design with hidden orders, asymmetric forces and enough mechanical character to stand apart. It is not light, but its complexity is doing real work.

Clank!: Catacombs is a light, breezy deck-builder that gives the game a proper board on which things can happen. It looks like the clearest starting point for newcomers to the series, though veterans may not find a pressing reason to add it to the shelf.

Captain's Sea is a carefully grounded Age of Sail dueller that favours seamanship over procedural clutter. It has more depth than Flying Colors’ duelling rules, though it is chiefly for genre veterans who have worn those rules smooth.

Scarface 1920 is a lavish gangster sandbox that hides far more Ameritrash chaos beneath its engine-building costume than you might expect. It has some rough edges and an abrupt finish, but the right table can get a great evening out of it.

Mage Wars Arena came back to the table after a long absence and promptly reminded me why I still love it, excesses and all. Give the decks a little care and its duels still have real teeth.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory makes players defend class interests, push policy, and watch one another carefully. It is a very respectable game, though card draw can leave a carefully planned strategy waiting for its tools.

Looney Tunes Mayhem has pre-painted miniatures that make an immediate case for themselves, wrapped around an arena game with no settled identity. It is brief and occasionally serviceable, but forgettable in play and badly undermined once expansions enter the picture.

Excavation Earth pairs action programming with market manipulation in an honest, burny game that seems to have slipped under more tables than it deserved to. It never quite finds a blazing finish, but it gives you good reasons to come back.

Cape May is a light action-selection and area-majority game in which property development sits alongside photographing rare birds, and somehow the odd pairing holds together. It is well produced and nicely balanced, though it never became a game our regular group would ask for.

Aeroplanes: Aviation Ascendant may be the least imposing game in its trilogy, but it remains an unfairly overlooked aviation game that handles five players remarkably well.

Sabika is a tight, brain-burning multi-rondel Euro with enough coherence and character to rise above guilty-pleasure status. It does not reinvent the wheel; it puts several wheels on the same chassis and gives each one a job.