Reviews

3 Ring Circus packs tableau building, area majority and a race for position into a compact euro with meaningful decisions and a pleasingly grounded theme. The card draw brings a little more variance than ideal, but later plays show a design with more bite than its friendly length suggests.

The White Castle is a tight euro engine builder that invents little but assembles familiar parts with impressive economy. It is brisk, balanced and satisfyingly demanding without overstaying its welcome.

Planet B is a busy eurotrash worker placement game about future-city developers, easy to teach and happy to provoke some table talk. Its wild, Ameritrash scoring will split groups who regard the final count as sacred.

Black Friday takes an older design with a middling reception and fixes its pacing with small but decisive revisions. The result is a taut stock-market game, and probably the best straightforward option after Rolling Stock for players who do not want an evening-long ordeal.

Vs. System 2PCG: AEW is a straightforward standalone entry point to the system, even if its wrestling theme does not generate much heat on its own. The Boys offers more texture, while The Marvel Battles remains where the system really starts throwing punches.

Rats of Wistar dresses a heavy, moving-parts worker-placement game in a charming rodent theme. Its routes to victory are plentiful, but the patience it demands was not always repaid.

The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition is a magnificent piece of table presence wrapped around a design that now feels its age to me. My group still loves it, but the vineyards variant did not provide the fresh lift we hoped for.

Wild Tiled West is a brisk tile-drafter with a polished presence and more thought in it than its light frame first suggests. It is not flawless, but once everyone understands its rhythm, it becomes an honest, pleasing thing to have on the table.

7th Sea: City of Five Sails is a demanding LCG that takes patience before it starts paying you back. A few deckbuilding experiments and five plays in, its appeal is becoming clear.

Age of Innovation takes the part of Terra Mystica that still appeals to me and gives it room to breathe. It is busy, uneven, and wonderfully generous: a large eurogame that seems pleased to have you there.

Point City keeps Point Salad’s clean immediacy, then turns it into a simple engine builder with a little more depth and some welcome counterdrafting.

Septima is Mindclash in its more approachable, thematic mode, though it still carries enough weight for the publisher’s regular audience. It is beautifully assembled and smoothly built, but it did not leave us hungry for another game in the way its bigger siblings did.

Pilgrim welds 18xx-style route building, engine building and a Trajan-like mancala mechanism into an unlikely but coherent economic puzzle. It is inventive and demanding, though its relentless scarcity can turn tension into labour.

Seas of Havoc is a pirate deck-builder/worker-placement game with almost filler-length ambitions, but not the tension to earn a place in the collection. Its captains’ starting powers feel uneven in a way the game never manages to smooth out.

Barcelona is an honest point salad in the Merv mould: busy enough to engage the brain, but not so scorched that it becomes work. Its apparent winning routes are not necessarily the ones that matter, which gives a return visit real appeal.

Books of Time has a clever tableau-building idea, but mistakes the appearance of an engine for the thing itself. It is a pleasant enough VP salad that leaves rather quickly once the box is shut.

Twisty Tracks is a light railway puzzle with a little Village Rails charm and Tsuro clarity. It looks inviting, plays smoothly, and gives new conductors a very pleasant place to start.

Last Will turns bankruptcy into a polite ambition, then backs the joke up with a light, neatly joined worker-placement and hand-management game. Its real advantage is that it plays well with five without taking the whole evening hostage.

Twilight Inscription is a symbol-heavy roll-and-write whose first play can feel like learning under fire. It is not my genre, but I can plainly see why it sits near the top of it.

Keydom's Dragons turns hidden-strength worker placement into noise, bluffing and cheerful betrayal. With five or more players and the right group, it is far lighter than fans of the Key line may expect.

Guns & Steel is a minimalist half-hour civilisation game with a surprising amount of thought packed into its small frame. At three players, it makes an excellent sharp little companion for coffee or a gamers’ holiday.

Shadow Network is dry set collection with a small engine-building garnish, dressed as a spy game without much interest in espionage. It functions perfectly well; it simply leaves very little behind.

Tiletum is not a disaster, but it is easily my least convincing Tascini release of the past five years. It has dice, a map, and plenty of procedure; regrettably, they make for a rather heavy meal.

Great Western Trail: Argentina remixes the familiar GWT framework into something denser, more open and more race-conscious. It is an excellent reworking, though I still find the original’s restraint more appealing.