Reviews

Barcelona is an honest, enjoyable point-salad game in the Merv vein: it does not burn your brain immediately, but it has enough depth to make you reconsider your choices. It is not an every-week game, yet for players who enjoy a little brain-frying, it is one of the year's must-haves.

Books of Time has a genuinely clever tableau-building idea, but for me it does not turn that idea into enough depth. I was left with the feeling of a euro VP salad that promises engine building without quite delivering it.

Twisty Tracks is an honest, well-produced rail crossover for light tables and new train drivers. It looks simple at first glance, yet has enough brain-burn to avoid feeling empty.

Last Will immediately wins you over with its playful premise that the road to victory runs through bankruptcy. It is a pleasant, light game with one very practical reason to hit the table: it works well with five players.

Twilight Inscription felt heavy in my first, unfinished encounter with it, but I completely understand why it is considered one of the best roll-and-writes in its genre.

Keydom's Dragons is the summer revelation for larger groups who want laughter, bluffs, and backstabbing. It does not have the weight Key-something fans may expect, but that is precisely its charm.

Guns & Steel is a minimalist half-hour civilization game that proved ideal alongside morning coffee with three players. It demands attention to the whole table and a willingness to cut one another off, or the game can be decided far too early.

Shadow Network is a dry set-collection game with a dusting of engine building, wearing a spy-game coat without ever bothering to become a spy game. It is not bad; it is just remarkably colourless.

Tiletum is not garbage, but to me it is the most bland and greasy “carbonara” from Tascini’s output of the last five years. It carries several of the genre’s habits that tire me out, without giving me enough reason to put up with them.

Great Western Trail: Argentina is an exceptionally clever remix of the classic, with more strategic routes and more demanding decisions. Even so, its added density makes me personally lean slightly toward the leaner original.

Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 1 & 2 turns two already substantial episodes into a far more demanding strategic experience with very little added material. It is excellent—provided you can endure the marathon it asks of you.

People Power is a polished, quick, and pressurised three-player COIN that feels like an ideal entry point to the series without the burden of needless exceptions. It is not immune to harsh events, but its core structure keeps the game engaging from the first card.

Border Reivers is a pleasingly straight-faced dicefest about clans stealing livestock on the Anglo-Scottish border. Far simpler than its 16 pages of rules suggest, yet lively enough that I would gladly play it again.

Trepanation is a tight, enjoyable worker-placement game with an honest macabre theme and a faint resemblance in its setup to Trickerion. It is neither filler nor a heavyweight, but it seems to contain plenty of cheerful sessions for anyone not tired of the genre.

Wayfarers of the South Tigris starts very strongly as a tightly connected, pleasantly demanding entry in Garphill’s new trilogy. On the second play, though, its limited interaction and multiplayer-solitaire feel made it less satisfying than Architects and Paladins.

Ierusalem: Anno Domini takes one of the strangest eurogame themes I have seen and handles it with surprising tact. Better still, beneath that striking premise sits a genuinely good game.

Solar 175 drew me in with its theme and legacy promise, despite my lack of faith in this publisher’s previous releases. Two plays into the campaign, it is still a simple but enjoyable experience that I want to see either develop properly or drown in its own rules.

For Glory is an honest, highly entertaining gladiator deck-builder that is easy to learn and turns the table into an arena with exactly the right amount of noise. I did not expect much, but it ended up being one of my favourite deck-builders with fighting in it.

A pure no-luck economic game where I build a slaughterhouse empire with a little Tetris-like spatial flavour. It is not revolutionary, but it is simple, smooth, and very enjoyable on the table.

Nemesis: Lockdown is smoother than the first game, but for me it does not match the original’s tension and flavour. It is good fun, yet the visitors and its scaling across player counts left me colder.

Marrakesh is, for me, one of Stefan Feld’s tastiest point-salad euros — perhaps his best of this decade of my life. With the expansion, its already clever core becomes richer without losing any of its interest.

Darkest Dungeon’s board-game adaptation preserves an impressive amount of the video game’s atmosphere, but for me it did not preserve its punishing difficulty. It has its moments and needs the right group, yet it does not take Sword and Sorcery’s place for me.

Trinidad is a strange, substantial euro city-builder full of clever ideas, but it ultimately feels less cohesive than I wanted. I had been hunting for it for ages; now that I finally got it to the table, I understand both its appeal and its disappointment.

La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War is a dense, highly complete 2v2 area-control game, ideal for groups who enjoy hidden orders and honest complexity. My only substantial reservation is that the mafia theme, while functional, does not fully exhaust the system’s potential.