Reviews

I expected Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea to be a light GMT civ/area-control game. What I found did not justify the paper it occupies.

Trajan had been waiting on the shelf for far too long, only to prove much more compelling than I had given it credit for. Its altered rondel holds together a dense, handsome tangle of scoring decisions with remarkable poise.

Barrage is a properly hostile worker-placement game, with a shared map that lets players deny each other exactly what they need. A later play exposed balance and scaling problems that made its aggression feel less like design and more like circumstance.

East Indiaman is a tight, quick, slightly odd game that takes some patience before it reveals itself. Its rulebook is not helping, and five players make the table feel rather cramped.

Impulse is a demanding, chaotic card game for people who enjoy losing their footing a little. It will not win over every table, but it has plenty to offer the right one.

Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders is a dense economic game that looks substantially more balanced once the full company set is in play and the rules are applied correctly. It is unforgiving in the manner of an 18XX, which here feels like a design choice rather than a flaw.

Towers of Am'harb turns the old Towers of Hanoi puzzle into a dark little contest over cultists and scoring altars. It begins gently, then tightens its grip at precisely the right time.

Shadow Rivals wears its Smash Up ancestry openly, then adds more strategy and arithmetic to the family resemblance. Its thieves, loot, roses and aggressively kawaii art are a rather different proposition.

Black Angel takes some patience to get moving, and it very much wants exactly three players. At that count, it becomes a tough, cerebral engine builder with real endgame risk and scoring that has to be earned.

Even a slightly uneven third game showed why Colonial Twilight deserves an unqualified recommendation. Its tension survives a mismatch in experience remarkably well.

After a fair number of plays, the original Labyrinth remains the stronger game for me. The Awakening changes the experience substantially, but its awakening tokens can swing matters far too hard on the right draw.

Greed Incorporated is not one of Splotter’s major triumphs, but it is a solid economic game of negotiation and auctions. The real energy comes from players getting in one another’s way; the ending is less satisfying.

QE is a very simple economic party game that does not chase depth, but knows exactly how to make the right group enjoy itself. It is the sort of game that earns its place in a collection.

Doors and Corners initially looks like an expensive box of very little. On the table, it proves to be the expansion The Expanse should have had from the start.

Pulsar 2849 has a genuinely fresh way of distributing its dice, but builds around it a rather solitary and demanding planning exercise.

Dice Forge is a brisk, welcoming dice game that makes rather more ceremony of its central trick than it needs to. Its changing setups and excellent insert still make it a very good family-table or holiday-bag choice.

Edge of Darkness takes Mystic Vale’s card crafting and places it in a far more variable, scenario-driven frame. It is worth investigating, but it demands shelf space, table time, and a trial game before a purchase.

Born to Serve is a brisk little area-control game about unemployed superheroes competing for waiting jobs, with a joke that lands and production that makes the small box feel special. It does not reinvent anything, but it knows when to leave the table.

Railroad Revolution sat unopened because I had mistaken it for another game; once it reached the table, it quickly proved itself a brisk, approachable optimisation game. It is not Nippon or Madeira, and it does not need to be.

The Godfather: Corleone's Empire is a surprisingly tight area-control game: quick, thematic, and just nasty enough to keep everyone alert. It does not reinvent anything, but it knows exactly when to run you over with it.

Xenon Profiteer is a neat little card game with a small engine-building core. It will not linger in the mind, but it fills half an hour pleasantly and asks very little in return.

Photodump is a lean, quick dice-driven engine builder, and Shy Pluto is what lets it properly settle in. It asks for no advanced degree, but the ten-game campaign gives its neat little systems a welcome sense of consequence.

Scorpius Freighter is a noticeably weightier AEG game, but it does not make the climb forbidding. It is a sensible bridge between gateway fare and something that asks for more thought.

War Chest is the unexpected abstract war-game hit: simple to begin, difficult to master, and superb as a brisk game of confrontation. A later session did clarify one thing, though: it is at its best as a straight two-player duel.