Reviews

Plunderbund looks like a lukewarm deck-builder at first, then turns into a brisk little commercial brawl once the table understands it. With almost no downtime, it suits a large, relaxed group very well.

Virgin Queen made for an exhausting, deeply satisfying Europe of pirates, marriages, faith and rebellion, where every turn rewrote someone’s plan. Nobody stayed safe for long, least of all on the final card.

Expedition Leaders does not feel like extra material piled onto Lost Ruins of Arnak. It feels like a remarkably natural extension for anyone already taken with the base game.

War Room is a huge Second World War game that does not hand out easy blitz victories. Give it the room, time and committed group it demands, and its tension more than justifies the footprint.

Galactic Era is a lean, luck-free 4X space game whose tension comes from hidden fleets and the fights they suddenly reveal. It does not reinvent the genre, but with six players it delivers a brisk and pleasantly rowdy galactic scrap.

My second visit to Messina 1347, this time with four players, ran much more smoothly. Once the table learns the map, the game starts showing where it can bite.

Ankh: Gods of Egypt is a straightforward, thematic area-control game with a splendid table presence and enough reversals to keep the endgame alive. It is pricey, but its merging-gods catch-up mechanism is a genuinely clever idea.

Titans of Industry is a lean production game that seems to have been marked down for refusing to dress itself up as something more elaborate. It keeps six players involved and lets them make useful business out of one another’s infrastructure.

Dwellings of Eldervale pairs lavish production with an unusually smooth area-control game. It is painfully expensive, but it makes a persuasive case for itself every time it reaches the table.

Anno 1800: The Board Game moves briskly and becomes clear soon enough, but its beloved setting conceals a dry, repetitive management exercise. The sensible price is welcome; it is not a reason to get excited.

Euthia: Torment of Resurrection is a lavish fantasy sandbox that needs table space, patience, and a group willing to learn it properly. Give it that commitment and it repays the effort with properly substantial adventure gaming.

Tinners' Trail (Second Edition) gives an older game a handsome, thoughtful return, with a smooth and approachable flow plus plenty of player friction. Its mineral pricing still shows the age of the design, but the table experience remains a strong one.

Boonlake is a generous, mostly solitary euro that runs a little longer than it ought to, yet repays the time with steady, unhurried tension. Its density becomes far more welcoming once the game has had a chance to settle in.

Ore: The Mining Game has a sound mining system and a worthwhile market to meddle with, but it never quite supplies the momentum needed for a full game. It does, however, handle five players well, which is no small thing.

Squaring Circleville is a spare, abstract urban euro built around a rondel and a relentless pace. It avoids the clutter of newer designs, yet still produces the kind of tense race that makes a Spielworxx title worth the table space.

EPIC Napoleonics gives Commands & Colors: Napoleonics the scale it has always seemed to be reaching for. With the action & tactics decks from Field Marshals and Tacticians, the battle becomes fuller and more tactically consequential.

Unfathomable is a polished, slightly tidier Galactica-like full of cards, pressure and a strong table presence—until the hidden allegiance stops being much of a secret. It exceeded my expectations, while remaining Galactica at heart.

Star Scrappers: Orbital is a brisk, punchy card game of station-building and interference, happy to fit inside an hour. It is not trying to be a grand space epic, which is part of its charm.

Star Scrappers: Cave-in has a serviceable card-based set-collection idea, but it feels like a design released well before it was ready. A little novelty cannot rescue its unfinished air.

Apogee dresses itself as a space race of engineers, tight funding and rocket launches, then asks everyone to wait for the card that ends it. Its Kickstarter extras have received more attention than the game beneath them.

Factory 42 contains a fiercely competitive worker-placement game, then lets its production quality kneecap it. The Bureaucracy Tower creates exactly the right kind of chaos; the production cards create a headache.

Endeavor remains an excellent game, but Age of Expansion solves a problem the base game never had. The new buildings add variety, then flood the table with enough disks to loosen the tension that made it work.

Maglev Metro marries pick-and-deliver, network building and action programming in a notably approachable package. It lacks the polish of Suburbia and the depth of Tramways, yet the base game remains worth investigating.

Le Havre returns to the table with the satisfying weight of a game that still asks you to think ahead. It is not flawless, but its tempo remains wonderfully alive.