Pest

Pest is an unusual worker-placement game with a pickup-and-don't-deliver bent, and its theme does a great deal of work: wandering Plague Doctors confronting a magical disease across the kingdom. It is a properly substantial production, the sort that fills the table and makes an ordinary evening after work feel briefly like a clinic under siege.

At heart, you place workers and gather what you need rather than simply ferrying goods from one place to another. Its small sub-systems are joined with the care one hopes for in this kind of Euro, so the choices feel like parts of one treatment rather than a collection of unrelated errands.

The pressure comes from the stream of patients entering the clinic, with an anxiety reminiscent of Messina: you need to keep pace, organise yourself, and avoid taking on more risk than you can carry. Pest is especially unforgiving when players overreach, while the random plague-spread cards each round can suddenly tighten the game for everyone or leave it far too open.

I do not mind when those cards make the game harsh; when they make it abundant enough for everyone to fill every track, though, the tidy satisfaction I want from a Euro starts to disappear. Pest is far from uninteresting, but neither is it essential; it is quietly worthwhile for players who enjoy pressure in their theme and can live with a deck that occasionally changes its mind.