Black Rose Wars: Sator Box

The first challenge is not playing the game at all. It is facing the box: so much material that sorting it feels like a second job, then working out which of those options will make a coherent game. Sator Box adds roughly three times the content of the base game, and on a Tuesday after work that is enough to make a grown person consider a quiet cup of tea instead.

At heart, Black Rose Wars is still a tactical wizard duel with the base game's light spell-slinging shootout. Here, though, the pacing is no longer remotely restrained. The original was a likeable miniature game with some Euro DNA and some real tempo trouble; the expansion pushes it towards Wiz-War territory, less measured and much more liable to go off across the table.

Five new schools of magic, artefacts, equipment, new rooms, and Forgotten Spells containing some properly unhinged ideas mean that wizards are not merely trading spells; they are cheerfully wrecking one another's plans. The new schools are inventive and plainly stronger than the original set, so the interaction becomes twitchy, trashy, and considerably more enjoyable than it was in the base game.

The box's strongest case may be its carefully supported solo mode, complete with its own decks, and its intriguing campaign mode; it is particularly appealing for a group able to leave it set up and avoid the repeated unpacking and packing away. It is not worth the money — as a rule, no game with this much miniature plastic is — but anyone determined to invest in plastic worship could do far worse, and the wizard miniatures really are striking.