Reviews

Brass: Birmingham gives an old favourite the production it always deserved. It is a handsome, weighty railway game, and calling it Ticket to Ride for Serious Children is meant as high praise.

Two full plays are enough to show that Lisboa is not random point-salad sprawl, but a game with flow and real strategic shape. It needs time to become familiar, then pays that time back.

Lowlands never made for a bad evening, but its welcome wore out far sooner than I expected.

Conquest of Paradise is a light, interesting GMT mini-4X with a strong theme and a fifteen-minute teach. Its relaxed nature, though, means the players must be willing to do the policing themselves.

Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain is every bit as weighty as its reputation suggests, but the effort pays off in a deeply engaging and enjoyable game.

Concordia: Gallia / Corsica keeps Concordia firmly in our regular rotation, with Gallia offering a taut, satisfying five-player board.

Imperial 2030 produced another epic, close and entirely merciless game. Alliances are not a safety net here; they are the knife handed to the player beside you.

Empires: Age of Discovery is a dependable six-player game that becomes much tighter when everyone arrives ready to pay attention. With different nations in play, this session stayed close to the finish.

On my sixth play, Arkwright remains perhaps the best economic game I own, though it certainly charges for the privilege in stamina. It turns a shared market into a proper battlefield, and a one-point finish makes every calculation feel earned.

Power Struggle is a brisk, noisy blend of area control and negotiation for five players, with tightly joined systems and a scoring structure that does not quite keep pace.

Petrichor has a few interesting, inventive ideas, but the design leaks badly. The tension it creates is not productive; it is simply draining.

The Flow of History is a compact card-driven civilisation game with a clever economic model and virtually no waiting around. It never quite became exciting for me, but it delivers neatly on its promise as a civ snack.

Railways of Nippon is a tidier stop on the familiar Railways route: built for four players, with a new map and cards, but no grand attempt to reinvent the line. It is useful and pleasantly manageable rather than especially memorable.

Fleet still comes out now and then, but a return to Warhammer 40,000’s eighth edition left a very particular aftertaste: plenty of aroma, no bread.

Feudum is a dense, psychedelic heavy euro that keeps the table moving with almost no downtime. It has a little too much procedural clutter, though, and some balance questions linger.

The Sands of Time has the right ingredients for a civilisation game and makes good use of them, yet somehow leaves the final course a little short.

The supplied text contains no observations about My Fair Princess, only an unrelated anecdote about a game room mistaken for student poverty.

Corporate America looks like a throwaway joke game until the right group gets hold of it. With enough people and no one treating it like a board meeting, it becomes a splendid little engine for lies, favours and glorious fines.

Sidereal Confluence looks like a table-wide disaster at first, then reveals itself as one of the liveliest negotiation games around. Bring enough people, a little nerve, and a group willing to trade without choking the clock.

The recent Kickstarter version of Paranoia keeps the beloved RPG’s malicious streak, only with a lighter and more contemporary rhythm. Give it a group willing to plot against one another and it pays back in laughter and a small mountain of dead characters.

Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls is, for me, the best dungeon crawler of its generation: a notably solid system that does not drown in cooperative niceness. It deserved far more support and visibility than it has received.

Hexpanse is an honest, brisk area-control game with more depth than its spare rules initially suggest. It will not suit every group, but the right table can get a great deal out of it.

Pax Renaissance has the teeth and spite for a properly memorable card game, but its rules burden and questionable balance make reaching that point a chore. There is a terrific dirty fight in here; the game simply declines to make it easy to find.

1805: Sea of Glory is less a conventional wargame than a demanding simulation of naval pressure in the Napoleonic era. It needs time, reading and a table given over to the cause, but it looks set to reward all three with a deeply asymmetric experience.