Reviews

Carson City: Big Box had won us over from our first encounter, and this return proved just how easily it can become a delightful bloodbath when the group is in the mood.

Kansas Pacific is a simple, roughly hour-long Cube Rail: neither particularly good nor bad, but pleasant enough to make you want another play. Unfortunately, its map and colour choices take a lot of the enjoyment away.

Mystic Vale brings a genuinely fresh idea to the tired deck-building field, but its base box does little to elevate it. The expansion makes it much more interesting, even if it also makes the balance a little wilder.

An honest retheme of That's My Fish!, with Varys wiping out Westeros. It works better with three players; with four, it is over before you get to enjoy it.

The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire made a very good first impression on me: quick, interesting, and free of the dead moments that pull you out of the group. At around 1 hour and 10 minutes, it felt like money well spent.

Wealth of Nations: War Clouds remains our favourite instrument of economic mutual destruction: merciless, almost luck-free, and full of moves that make you pay for everyone else’s mistakes. The second game confirmed that, with experienced players, it becomes even harsher.

Terraforming Mars remains one of my favourites: even when I mostly leave the board aside, it finds a way to reward me. And the Big Box with its plastic pieces makes it look as impressive as it deserves to, even at a steep price.

Cry Havoc gave us a very clear—and rather discouraging—picture of its balance at three players. No matter how impressive the other factions looked, the Humans took the win without breaking a sweat.

Great Western Trail is a very enjoyable point-salad game that flows smoothly without asking you to melt your brain. It is not a game of savage confrontation, but it has just enough competition to keep other players from snatching the important things first.

Empires: Galactic Rebellion promises a smoother, space-themed Age of Empires, but to me it mostly succeeded in “improving” the parts that made the original interesting. It has a strong finale and a rare niche as a light area-control game for six, yet overall it feels like a cash grab with dreadful artwork.

Tesla vs. Edison: Powering Up! remains, for me, one of the most underrated euro-economic games of recent years. With the expansion on the table, it reminded me how solid and beautifully produced it is—and how ready it is to punish you when you misread the market.

Scoville left us with my wife utterly dominating the table. Thankfully, Wongamania: Banana Economy provided the right release, complete with diseases, divorces, and Debtzilla.

A Feast for Odin spreads across the table in an initially intimidating way, but in play it proved very approachable and remarkably smooth. Even with the expansion, it retained its welcoming character while adding things I genuinely liked.

Kohle & Kolonie won us over even though, after wrestling with the manual, errata, and Geek, we probably ended up playing our own version. It is tight, heavy, and very good at what it does—provided you can make sense of the rules.

Tin Goose is an easy-to-teach but far from harmless economic game about troubled airlines. In an hour and a half, it packs auctions, disasters, and enough nastiness to punish YOLO decisions.

With Dynasties, Nations has seriously re-entered the conversation against Through the Ages. My first reservation about dynasties remains, but later plays showed a much tighter, faster, and more aggressive game.