Reviews

Village Rails is an honest, quick railway filler from Osprey: light on its feet, but dense enough to keep a train-game mind properly occupied.

Charioteer is an easy, brisk chariot race with just enough thought to keep an end-of-night table engaged. Its small scale suits that role well, though it feels rather slight for a GMT game at its price.

Findorff has a genuinely interesting tableau-building and action-selection core, then gives it a finish so determined not to become a point salad that it goes oddly flat. It is not a bad game; it is a missed opportunity that moves briskly and stops just short of becoming substantial.

Terracotta Army is a carefully made medium-weight euro, combining worker placement with a light rondel rhythm and little wasted motion. It is not essential collection material, but it is a thoroughly respectable recommendation.

Resurgence dresses a tough medium-weight euro in the ruins of Moscow, and thankfully the theme is doing more than decorating the box. It is a polished, slightly unusual production with an economy that keeps everyone under pressure.

Marvel: Crisis Protocol is a brisk, showy skirmish full of proper Marvel fan service, with enough variety to keep drawing you back. It is not trying to model every hero’s power level perfectly; it is trying to make a good fight happen on the table.

Rise has a clean action-selection core and a ten-track race with enough interdependence to make its promise immediately legible. It just reaches the finish line feeling as though one final design pass went missing.

Encyclopedia is a beautifully made game with a remarkably controlled dice-drafting core. Then the final scoring arrives and pays monochrome play with the confidence of an accounting error.

The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas is not merely more Food Chain Magnate; it is eleven ways of rearranging an already ruthless system. There is immense distance to travel here, provided the modules are curated rather than poured in wholesale.

Minecraft: Heroes of the Village is a solidly made, very simple set-collection game that can get a five-year-old to the table. Older children may find that the suspense runs out rather quickly.

Peak Oil: Profiteer is the welcome exception from a publisher that had not quite won me over before. It is short, direct and properly nasty once the table fills up.

Verdant moves Cascadia’s familiar drafting frame into a house of plants, rooms and ornaments. It is polished and has some bite, but feels rather too safe as the team’s next design.

Dirty Money has a cracking premise—laundering cash through art and property—but leaves that premise doing most of the heavy lifting. It is pleasant for a game and good for a few laughs, yet it does not make much of a case for coming back.

By its fifth and sixth play, Carnegie’s base game is still producing fresh department combinations and strategic lines. One opening looks suspiciously strong, but it deserves testing rather than a verdict.

Plutocracy has a superb hook and an inviting bundle of systems, but it resolves into optimisation with one meaningful route. In the fixed/balanced setup, turn order appears to have done most of the winning for you.

The Hunters A.D. 2114 builds an unusually convincing campaign around strong writing, meaningful pressure and a sprawling tactical infrastructure. Its combat and crafting eventually lose some lustre, and it is badly served by a two-character setup.

Maracaibo’s expansion brings a few worthwhile refinements, but little that materially changes the familiar equation. The base game remains very good; it may simply breathe better with three than with four.

A minimalist civilisation filler that gets thought, noise, and a lively group into half an hour. It seems happiest with three or four players, where the table has something to push against.

D.E.I.: Divide et Impera looks like a properly complete area-conflict game: carefully produced, easy on the eye, and happily free of dice. It is not reinventing anything, but it appears to know exactly what sort of fight it wants to offer.

Lawyer Up is an interesting two-player companion that improves once the first game is out of the way. In Case 00, repeat plays give the card pool and witness order enough context to make the contest properly tense.

Hidden Leaders is a quick hidden-alliance game that turns gleefully loose at six players. Its ending still does not quite work for me, but later plays made its audience impossible to miss.

Brides & Bribes is an old-fashioned, cheerfully ruthless climb through Genoese society, where marriage is simply the tidier form of attack. It is a little fussy in the hands, but a useful thing to keep ready when five people turn up.

Heaven & Ale is a stern, honest semi-rondel whose balance only becomes clear with repeat plays. As familiarity grows, its choices sharpen and its blocking starts to matter.

War of the Triple Alliance makes a grim South American conflict approachable, with asymmetric sides and manoeuvre rather than dice at its centre. It is not trying to be the deepest wargame in the cupboard, and that is rather the point.