Reviews

Furnace packs an unusual auction economy and production chains into four brisk rounds. Its central idea is excellent, provided the promo cards stay out of the deck.

The Belgian Beers Race turns a three-day Belgian beer tour into a cheerful little chase. It is not a tightly engineered euro, but it has enough care and personality to earn a place on a trip with the right group.

Cosmic Frog makes you an immortal, two-mile-tall frog harvesting pieces of a dead world and punching other immortal frogs for them. It sounds like a joke, then turns out to be a loud, happily hostile game with more structure than its premise has any right to promise.

After the Empire has an appealing worker-placement/tower-defence pitch and a manageable running time, but its rules showed us several versions of the game. None was entirely reassuring.

The Conquistadors: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas 1518-1548 is a hard-edged sandbox of Spanish expeditions, loot, betrayal and historical brutality. Its central design has real pull; its development keeps putting obstacles in its own way.

Florenza: X Anniversary Edition is an older worker-placement and resource-management design with a tight economy and real room for optimisation. Its fixed market limits variety, but gives repeat groups a satisfying set of pressures to learn and exploit.

Successors (Fourth Edition) is a lavishly produced heavy CDG about Alexander’s successors, full of battles, cards, and very poor intentions. It needs time, a regular group, and patience with a rulebook that teaches better than it retrieves.

Trickerion with every expansion in play produced a strong, chaotic evening of magic and reversals. Academy, however, can let the race lock up far too early.

Dune: Imperium improves once everyone at the table knows its tricks and still cannot quite avoid them. Familiarity does not make it gentler; it gives the game sharper teeth.

Tigris & Euphrates is the sort of game that leaves the table louder than it found it, and everyone more willing to set it up again. Bring four people who can take a fight and return one gladly.

Cogs and Commissars is a troll game powered by puns and communist fury. It gets laughs from its cards, but can spend too long circling the finish line.

Dominant Species: Marine keeps the tension of its predecessor while making the whole affair more fluid and easier to approach. It still takes its time, but its player interaction and capacity for wildly different games earn that time back.

Small Railroad Empires borrows the approachability of introductory cube rails and leaves behind the decisions that make them worth playing. A session may be brief; the disappointment has better endurance.

Dale of Merchants is a clever, light deck-builder with more depth than its quick explanation suggests. It now sits just behind Trains among my favourite games of this kind.

Versailles 1919 takes the broad frame of Churchill and turns it into a proper negotiation game with a cleaner model of diplomacy. It is much lighter than its box suggests, properly sharp at a full table, and let down chiefly by its ending.

Pax Viking is the Pax for people who have approached the series with suspicion: clearer on the way in, and full of conflict and diplomacy once the table gets moving. With the standard saga deck, it is already a very strong experience.

1960: The Making of the President is a lighter, brisker cousin to Twillight Struggle, with a handsome new edition and a couple of worthwhile ideas of its own. But when there is time for the bigger political contest, Imperial Struggle is still the clearer choice.

Destinies is a board game and app hybrid which, despite its tiny miniatures and mandatory screen, delivers a brisk adventure race that works particularly well with two. Its stories can be rigid and it will not live forever on the shelf, but its central idea feels properly fresh.

Caverna: Cave vs Cave is a tidy little worker-placement game: easy to pack, easy to teach, and pleasant with a newer player. It is also so basic that it struggles to leave much behind once the table is cleared.

Lorenzo il Magnifico is a tight euro whose base game left me impressed rather than smitten, while the full package has considerably more bite. With the expansions it moves decisively up a tier, though Pazzi Conspiracy deserves a warning label.

Catapult Feud is not really about its serious card-and-rounds mode; it is about small castles, flying shots, and the immediate demand for another go. Give the forts enough room and it becomes a safe, gloriously silly little siege.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Rivals Expandable Card Game carries a great deal of Jyhad/VtES DNA into a lighter, more approachable box. That may be an excellent entry point for newcomers, though veterans may find that the simplification removes the part they came for.

Ventures refreshes SpaceCorp with 16 asymmetric companies and a substantially better solo mode, then lets balance fend for itself. It is a respectable expansion; it simply is not the one that fixes the game’s more obvious needs.

Praga Caput Regni is a substantial, beautifully made euro that earns its reputation with disarming ease. It has a lot going on, yet it keeps moving even when not everyone at the table knows it already.