The game is exclusively for 4 players, divided into two teams, and (usually) played until one team gets a thousand points. Even though there are variants for three and six players, I’d say that these are just for the desperate, even without having played them. The entire game was clearly designed for this strict player count, and the flow of it would be severely interrupted with any modification in that sense. As a supporting argument, every single report I’ve read online says that the variants are just excuses for the publisher to extend the player count in the box back. Since I’m specially picky about player counts, and consider my gaming time to be quite precious, I’d rather play other games with different player counts.

But with four, you can hardly beat Tichu. It takes a little bit to get used to the dynamics, and can be a little uneventful to play with newbies or players who don’t get into the spirit of the game, but it’s such a fun experience and so addictive that I’d be willing to spend an entire game-reunion on an extra-long tichu match. Though the game usually lasts 90 minutes (Varying a bit depending on how the game evolves, it could take twice that time or end in half of it),

The rules are rather straightforward, even if they do take about 10 minutes to explain. You have the traditional hierarchy of cards (2 at the bottom, ace on top) with the phoenix card being the standard joker (stronger than the strongest card that was played so far) and the dragon being the strongest single card out of them all. The mahjong card shows which player will start the dispute and the dog card gives the initiative to your partner, in case you deem it useful to do so. Players play cards until all hands are emptied. When you have the lead, you can begin with a single card, a pair, three-of-a-kind, a full-house or straight sequences with 5 cards or more. After that, all players have to maintain the style of game (you cannot play a pair in a dispute that started with a single card). This goes on until all players have passed, with the player that played the highest card taking the pile of cards and the lead for the next dispute (and thus defining what sort of card combination can be played).

The scoring value of the cards is quite simple: Tens and Kings are worth ten points and Fives are worth 5 points. The dragon is worth 25 points, but you have to give the pile of points to one of your opponents (you only take the lead). The phoenix, due to its flexibility (it can also fill up a hole in a sequence, or add up to a three-of-akind, a true joker-like card) is worth -25 points, as a compensation for its strength.

Up to this moment, what I’ve described is a rather bland game. Play cards, collect points, go on and on. What truly makes this game special is one small thing: the ability to call tichu. Any player can do this as long as he hasn’t played a single card yet from his hand: it’s a bet that says “I’ll be the first one to get rid of all my cards”. If you manage to do so, you get 100 points (which is equivalent to the value of all the cards in the deck.). If you fail (even if it is your partner that beats you to it), you get -100 points. This is the center of the game, to make a gutsy call like that and try to prove yourself afterwards, with your partner trying to help you (as hard as that can be) and your opponents doing everything to stop you. Things may even get really heated if one of the guys in the other team calls tichu as well.

Tichu is about gut feeling. You get your hand of cards, pass one card from your hand to each player (and receive one card from each player’s hand) before you begin, arrange them in a useful order and hope everything works according to plan. The game’s golden rule is the fact that you have to follow the type of combination that was used to initiate the dispute, so while your hand may have a killer 10-card combination, it won’t be useful if everyone keeps playing pairs or three-of-a-kinds. Try to get that initiative somehow, or watch as your killer hand nets you negative points. The juiciest decision in the game, though, is deciding if you should wreck your pre-set hand according to how the disputes are developing or if you should remain patient

I’ve played Tichu over ten times already and I’m pretty far from being sick of it. In fact, I’d guess that this is one of those games where you can play your entire life. I’m pretty sure 8+ kids could play it, since the game is about being reckless (and sometimes having it pay off). It’s not a brain burner like (there are some tough decisions, but most of it is based on instinct) but it’s a guaranteed good time with your friends, specially if you’re the talkative group. I give it a 10/10, I’m always willing to play it. It only takes two or three hands before the newbies get the spirit of it (unless nobody calls tichu, which renders the game quite bland), so I’d say it’s quite accessible. I totally recommend this, unless you hate traditional-like cardgames.

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What makes King of Siam such an impressive board game is its tightness. Each player has a hand of 8 cards (7 different types, one type with two equal cards) and all that the players can do in the game is either pass or play one of those cards, following the instructions. And you never get that card back. Yep, you only get 8 actions per game, so your choices are very, very hard. This board game only lasts eight rounds, with the scoring of a region happening at the end of each round: round ends when all players pass in a row, with a color winning over the territory if it has more cubes in that area than any other color. In the case of a tie, that space goes to Great Britain. With four ties (in a row or not, doesn’t matter), the game ends immediately.

When you play a card, you place the cubes on the board (or switch them around, or switch scoring order) following its specific conditions and you take a cube from the board, anywhere on the map. The cubes you take are placed in front of you, and show your allegiance to the three factions. At the end of the game, the faction with the most territories determines what the cubes are worth: if the Red faction has the most territories, the player with the most red cubes in front of him wins the game. If four regions are tied, then Great Britain has taken over the land, and then the player with the most set of cubes (one of each color, much like the scoring in Tigris & Euphrates) wins. So even if the color you’ve been supporting is in bad shape, you can still fight for a sudden death ending. This board game is tense from start to finish.

What is cruel (deliciously cruel) is that the “cube roster” is rather small: a lead of two cubes, for an example, is rather strong, since it’s the most of a single color you can add with a single card (remembering that each player can only do each action once!). So, at the same time you invest your future in a color, you make it weaker in the area disputes (by removing a bit of its presence from the board). In one specific match, it came to a point where two players had invested so much in the color that the general supply ran out, and the color no longer had the capacity to be placed back on the territories to fight for the majorities.

As you can probably tell, with the reduced number of actions and rounds, it’s a very quick board game. Matches take thirty to thirty five minutes, but it would feel weird to call this one a filler. It’s a tense, tight, and punishing game, with strong possibilities for sudden (and irreversible) turn-arounds. You have to make tough decisions every time it’s your turn: if you’re taking your actions lightly, you’re probably headed for a defeat. One player used up all his cards in the first half of the game and had nothing to do while the other two opponents defined the final configuration of the board, both of them making sure that the sitting duck finished in last place.

This board game is best played with three or four patient players, ages 12 and up. The four player game is particularly evil and nasty. It’s played in partnerships, with teams alternating play. The stroke of genius, or what makes this mode so amazing, is that players are not allowed to communicate between themselves during the game, so it becomes a game of trying to syncronize your thinking with your partner (scoring is team-based, so both of you lose if you go to different directions). I guess it goes without saying that this mode is for experienced gamers only, or at least players that are tolerant to other people’s momentary strategic blindness costing them their match.

Being so brainburny, it’s definitely not a game for everyone. At first it even seems incredibly chaotic and almost random. If it had any random factor other than the setup, I’m sure many would claim it’s a luck-fest. However, with a few plays of it (I have 6) you start understanding the dynamics of the game, which is much different from the usual area majority game. It rewards subtlety, patience and observation. The most useful skill you can learn is not just “what to do” but also “when to remain quiet”: I’ve read about the game people commenting that you have 8 decisions, but they forget that passing is also a decision, and the most difficult one to learn when you should do it.

Managing to make a game out of so little material (8 actions, 8 rounds, etc) and still striking amazing originality with simple and tried-and-true mechanisms (it is an area majority game after all) is a remarkable achievement. Even if I hadn’t enjoyed playing it (and I did, since it’s my kind of game), I’d probably admire it. One player that disliked the game even commented “it’s not fun, but it’s quite impressive”. And even if half and hour of silent brainburn is not for everyone, it’s still a game that I’m glad I own, even if it isn’t played as often as I like. The random setup and the clever design of the regions’ borders definitely give this some longevity, but I’ve only played this half a dozen times, so I can’t say for sure. Still, I give it an 8/10; the partnership game alone would be worth the admission price, but with three this board game is still pretty solid.

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In this game, player respresent magicians that influence a free-for-all battle between eight types of monsters in a Colosseum-like arena, while at the same time placing bets on the monsters they think will make it to the final podium. Any player can influence any monster, even the ones that he didn’t bet on, but if he influences a monster in which he has the strongest bet (being that monster’s “backer”), he gets to use a special power that helps him out, be it on the bets, on the fights or giving you extra cards so that you have more options to choose from.

Turn summary is dead simple, as is usual in knizia board games. You can place a bet (you only have 5 bets to make during the entire game, so choose wisely), you then play a card, you check if the round is finished, then you draw cards until your hand is filled with 8 cards(if you have more, you draw nothing, but you lose nothing). You can play a card in any monster, but if you’re that monster’s backer, you get that monster’s special ability to help you. A round ends when all the monsters have a card played to determine their strength (from 0 to 10) and there is one monster that is currently weaker than all the others. That monster is eliminated from the fight and another round begins.

The game ends when there’s only 3 monsters left or the card pile has run out. Bets on the remaining monsters are worth Vps, bets on monsters that were eliminated are worth nothing. The earlier you bet on a monster, the more that bet is worth in the end, so you have to pick your horses early. You can place several bets on a single monster on the course of many rounds (but each monster can only take one bet per round, so there’s a sort of worker-placement got-there-before-you element to it), but that can be quite risky.

This is definitely my favorite element of Colossal arena, which saves this board game from being a random luckfest to being an interesting fight between conflicting and converging interests. If you place all your bets on a single monster, or if a certain monster has bets from only one player, the game becomes significantly more difficult. You have control of only 33%, 25% or 20% of the cards that are played during the game (in a 3 player, 4 player and 5 player match), so you sometimes you have to make alliances with the other players in order to keep your investments a little safer. If you keep trying to monopolize that troll, the other players will see that if he survives to the end you’ll have an easy victory: it is best to let other players have a piece of that pie (troll pie?) as well.

The board game design seems to encourage this kind of thinking, since the monsters’ powers are far from being balanced. You could probably divide them into three different tiers: super strong, good and near-useless. So those good monsters will probably be snatched up quickly, and the one or two of the weaker ones will end up surviving due to the players trying to eliminate their opponent’s investments. This board game keeps things interesting by allowing players to place one secret bet on the first round, so there’s an element of mystery (which you can sometimes deduce by their actions) that keeps the game from being predictable.

Still, it’s undeniable that the luck factor in this game is high. You have a hand of eight playing cards, and if all of a sudden you don’t get any more cards of the creature you placed the bet in the first round, your life is going to become difficult. If other players gang up on you, there’s very little you can do to defend yourself.

Production values are nice. The art looks good and the information is presented in a very clear fashion. The game consists of a deck of cards and plastic chips to indicate the players’ bets. I’m not a big fan of plastic, but to complain here would be kind of mean of me. This game even gives you four extra monsters, for more variety in your games. Since I don’t play this board game that often, and some monsters are definitely less interesting than others, I prefer to separate these extra 4 monsters from the others for a quicker setup.

This is a nice little card game, totally unpretentious and fun. There’s some interesting thinking to be done during the match, and the special powers keeps things dynamic and quite alive. It’s clearly a better experience with 3 players, even if the box says two to five. Five is too random, and two would probably be very lame. Matches usually take around 45 minutes and the age estimate of 8+ is accurate (if you’re ok with your kids casting demons and trolls and gorgons… I know I’d be). It’s acessible (easy rules) and quick, so it’s definitely one of those quick fillers, and the new edition in a slimmer box looks even better than my large-boxed one. Overall, I give this board game a 7/10, and play it when I’m in the mood for a quick card game with some violence in it.

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What could leave many players confused in the first couple of plays (or at least this was my case) is that this is not a board game of survival: a player that strives to be the one least affected by the disasters will probably lose. The disasters are there not to define the winner, but to keep the players from scoring Vps. The winner is the person who keeps scoring Vps regardless of the disasters. In eight out of the game’s twelve turns you’ll have to deal with a blow that’s about to strike. You’re constantly fighting against a game system that does not seem to be pleased with your existence, or at least your comfort. It’s easy to lose yourself in this fight and forget that your real fight is against the other players, to score more than they do while fighting for survival. It’s damage control, but not to lose the smallest number of personnel, but to lose the smallest amount of scoring capacity, overall.

Thus comes what I see as the only flaw of this board game, or at least the characteristic of the design that pleases me the least: the indirect aspect of the interaction in the game. Don’t get me wrong, this board game definitely has a lot of interaction (specially considering the eurogame average), but it’s essentially one of those games where each player builds his own separate thing and the player that builds the best “thing” wins the match. The interaction is just in the part of getting more stuff for your “thing”, like dozens of other eurogames before it. There’s no messing directly with what other people create or do (just try to keep them from doing what they want). What keeps the game alive is the tightness of the system (the classic “I have one action but I want to do 3 things” problem pops up every turn or so), but it bogs down to how well you now the intricacies of the system (which aren’t really that numerous), with the intricacies of how your opponents play coming at a somewhat distant second place.

One other issue with this board game is the balance. This board game is incredibly well designed and went through very good playtesting, but it may not appear so in your first half dozen matches. There’s one action that a player can take in the beginning that is very strong, rather easy to do and with irreversible benefits, to the point where it was questioned if the game is fair or not. It’s quite possible to beat the player that makes this move, but it requires experienced players. Thus, in a rather unusual way for a eurogame, balance relies mostly on the players, and on game experience. It could be frustrating for the first couple of games, but after a while players understand what’s going on.

This board game scales from 2 to 5, but the 3 player game would be only for beginners. Four or five is the way to go (though full quorum might be too rough for a first go). The two-player game is probably very stale, I’ve never played it and suspect I never will. The number of unblocked options would be too numerous for the biggest interaction of the game (blocking) become as relevant as it should. The machine-building aspect of the board game (not the most interesting part) would be too strong.

I’ve played this board game around fifteen times (some of them online, at Mabiweb) and I’ve always had fun, though the game’s starting to get just a little bit repetitive. This is not something to be played obsessively: even though the random order of the disasters during setup keeps one match different from another, after a while it becomes clear that some disasters weigh more than others, and are the ones you should really focus your construction around. There’s a tiny expansion coming out in a Alea-anniversary box (bundled together with a bunch of expansions for games I don’t own), but from a quick glance at the rules, I imagine it adds some nice variety to this board game.

Some of these fifteen matches have been quite memorable: a come-from-behind victory by the third player by just a single victory point, or one where everyone played very poorly and a “money-acumulation strategy” (a non-strategy, by all rational means) won the game. Even though it’s a machine-building board game, the tightness keeps the interaction high, and the disasters keep everyone at the table interested and laughing. There is no laugh like when you laugh at somebody else’s misery. Because of this cruel element, non board gamers should probably proceed with caution, even though a player does have a good chance at doing well in his first match, if he’s experienced in eurogames and pays enough attention.

Overall, I rate In the Year of the Dragon a 7.5/10. My love of damage control decisions keeps this one in my collection. Some players around here do not like the idea of having to lose so many resources to plagues and such (they prefer to build stuff that remains built, as they say), but overall the reception of this board game in my group has been good. Frustration factor can be high, due to the cruelty of the system, so the 12+ age recommendation is probably wise, but with four or five players and 75-100 minutes, it’s definitely one of the better board games out there.

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First thing you’ll notice about Race for the Galaxy is… holy crap that’s a lot of icons. This board game is very intricate, with many variations upon the same basic actions, each one of them with its specific icon. Your first match or so will be spent just digesting the monstrous amount of information the board game throws at you. Many will be turned off by this high learning curve (you don’t even feel like you’re playing a game, at first, you’re 100% in learning mode), but you’ll be surprised at how intuitive it becomes after a small while. They’ve actually done a fine job in creating the iconography for this: the difficulty here really is the number of possibilities that you have.

Race for the Galaxy is a board gamer’s game, make no mistake. It takes about 15-20 minutes to explain the rules, the newcomer won’t be competitive and the whole match lasts about 30-40 minutes (experienced gamers may be able to take it down to 20 minutes, even). It takes effort to understand everything that’s going on, and since everything is always going on at the same time, everything’s quite a bit harder. It’s probably the most difficult-to-learn board game in my entire collection (though I have quite a few that are more brainburn than this one), so it’s definitely in last place as far as “what game should I show to this non board gamer?”.

What players do in this board game is quite simple: you make a point-machine out of the cards that you play in front of you. Points come from consuming goods and from the intrinsic value of the cards themselves (these values go from 0 to 7, with a few of them being variable, that is, depending on what other cards you have in front of you). To make this machine, what you do mostly is combo different special powers that these cards have: for an example, a card may give discounts for your next purchases, or let you draw a card every time a certain phase occurs, or make one of your abilities more powerful.

So knowledge of the deck, like in most other card games, is quite important for competent playing.. It’s definitely useful to know that the brown product is able to build a mean combo, and that the yellow product is usually very expensive. But the possible relationship between cards is quite clear, and with just a few games you’ll understand what’s going on (there aren’t any degenerate or unintuitive combinations to invent during the game)

Race for the galaxy scales wonderfully from 2 to 4, although with less opponents you’re probably more able to track down what’s going on in their games. This is probably the biggest problem of the game: lack of strong interaction. It’s an efficiency game of combo-building, and although you do take advantage of other people’s actions, this board game is essentially about what you have going on in your hand and in front of you. There’s no element that influences directly other people’s hands or what they’ve built (though the second expansion adds something like this) so what you really have to deal with is essentially what cards appear in your hand and choosing which ones you will build.

In a competitive environment, the small interaction in using the other players’ action is very important for maintaining small leads, but even so, the luck of the draw will sometimes influence the game more strongly. Like in all card games, you’re limited to what the deck gives you. In this case, the game minimizes this problem by giving a lot of options with the cards that you draw (you only need two or three useful cards per hand of ten, the rest is just what you spend to ) but still it’s clearly there, and specially painful when it happens in one of those close, nail-biting game. But, like my friend said, “the game is so fast that a rematch takes less time than your complaint”.

Production values are quite satisfactory. The theme is somewhat vague (though I hear the expansions build up on it) but apparently coherent, and the art is just fantastic. This board game is flat-out gorgeous, with unique art on almost every single one of the 100+ cards. The card stock is nice and resistant, but the card back being black and the title being prone to obsessive and continuous playing, one would be wise to buy cardsleeves to go along with this. The box is a bit too big for what is essentially a deck of cards (oversized player aid or no), but with the expansions that are coming out (two, so far), it’s probably safer to go for bigger rather than smaller.

This actually would be a second complaint of mine regarding this board game’s design, although I’m sure many fans won’t agree with me: it somehow bothers me to know that a board game was designed to have its expansions, to a point where the base game feels a little bit incomplete without them. Without the first expansion, yellow products are a bit too weak; without the second expansion, military strategy is a bit too weak. I don’t mean to say that this board game is insufficient on its own (like some Fantasy Flight Game titles explicitly are), but the overpriced expansions (20 bucks for just a few extra cards?) do improve the game’s balance a bit. In a game of combo-making, balance is essential, so it does bother me that the enthusiast is kind of forced (to the point where a willing customer can be forced) to pay again for the game..

Race for the Galaxy, in the end, is a solid design, one that clearly went through extensive playtesting and design calculations, and is worthy of all the success that it has achieved. Even though I’m not a cardgame enthusiast (take that Dominion away from my sight!) and I usually prefer games with more interaction, I appreciate the speed in which you can play this game (30 minutes tops, with experienced players) and the amount of information you have to process quickly throughout the game: it feels like you have to make more than three decisions every minute. It’s definitely not for the casual board gamer, not for kids (ages 12+, says the box, and seems correct) and not for the player that demands direct conflict in his board games. I’ve played it about 20 times, and the initial excitement (which was tremendous) has worn off already, but I still give it a solid 8/10, with a safe place in my collection.

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What the board game is, with all the frills removed, is a simple rummy variant. Each bad guy would be a suit (the game thus has seven suits) and players try to form sets of . Every time a player significantly contributes to the presence of the suit (ok, ok, bad guy) in the game, more money is added to the reward, making it more worth fighting for.

This board game’s balance is quite well tuned: you need 3 cards to be able to start a suit (or a search for the bad guy), but that only adds up to 6, and a reward is only paid if the total strength of the search is 8 or more. So an element of cooperation among adversaries can occur during this board game, specially considering that other people’s contributions can add up to the final pot (just make sure you’re the one with the most power in the search in the end and not let that reward slip your hands…). There’s even a clever mechanism where a runaway leader in a dispute can end up taking all the money, without having to split it with anyone.

Along with the normal cards, this board game also has a bunch of special cards, called “sheriff” cards. Most of them are generic upgrades to search parties, giving you some flexibility in your disputes against other players. The problem is, you can only play one of these cards per turn, so sometimes you can end up being “stuck” with a bunch of them. The round ends (and midgame scores are added) when a player finishes his turn with no cards in his hand, but unlike many other games this is far from defining the winner of that round: it’s just a small advantage that others weren’t able to react to his last couple of plays. More than once I’ve seen a player be able to end the turn and not do so because it would’ve been bad for him.

The appeal of Wyatt Earp is somewhat undescribable. I’m usually not a fan of light board games (I play games to torture my brain, as I frequently say) and even so the game’s mechanisms do not seem particularly brilliant when coldly analysed (as I am prone to do with the games I play). I am not attacked by super-difficult decisions or face interesting strategic dilemmas during a match. Most of the time when I lose I’m forced to conclude that it was mostly due to bad luck of the draw, instead of any poor decisions that I’ve made. Skill seems like a matter of mere familiarity with the rules, instead of deep knowledge of how the mechanisms interact together, or guessing how your opponents will react. You mostly do what you can, given the cards that you were given.

But still, while in most other board games this would mean that I would rather not play (much less own, like I do), for some reason I really dig this game. It’s fun. There’s really nothing much to say about it. Other players that have liked it expressed it similarly: I don’t know, I just dig it. “Really neat” is a common expression used to describe it by those who like it. Other board gamers in our group that didn’t like it just don’t get it. But, honestly, neither do we, really.

I mean, it even breaks one of my game-enjoyment axioms. Theme to me tends to be somewhat irrelevant: I usually focus on the strategy and the mechanisms. I usually say that theme is like a food’s appearance: nice if it’s good and attractive, but it’s far from being really important. In Wyatt Earp’s case, I actually get into the theme, we sort of narrate among ourselves the little events that occur during the game “Oh, I heard that Billy the Kidd robbed the bank… let’s see if it’s true… nope, he’s a damn coward!”, and so on.

This is not the cold calculating game of Mü, or the I-dare-you laughter-filled matches of Tichu, or even the masochistic endeavor that is Sticheln. It’s not completely random and filled with tension, like 6 Nimmt (or Category 5, whatever). It’s just a relaxing game of rummy, with a cute theme implementation and some nice art.

The art is nice, but it’s still irritating to deal with these super-small cards. Not only are a pain to hold and fan out, but they’re also difficult to find sleeves for. Still, all the cards are pretty clear in what they do and the drawings look nice. The cardboard money is fine and the posters for the criminals look great (they even have a printed-wood back that’s almost so nice it makes you want to leave the posters face-down). The box is a little too big for the components, but not ridiculously so

Overall, I give Wyatt Earp a 7.5/10. I recommend it specially for 3 players, since with four things can get a little too busy with the players getting in each others’ way. A match takes only about half an hour, and pretty much anyone can play (the official age estimate of 12+ is a quite over the top, perhaps due to the criminal theme; my guess would be 8+), given the simple board game rules. It only takes about one hand for the newbie to understand what’s going on, and it’s quite possible to catch up if you fall behind. I’ve played this around ten times already, and even though it’s not something I’d choose every week or so, cardgames tend to be quite replayable, given the variety of the card draw.

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This is essentially an area-majority racing board game: players compete to be the first one to build all seven palaces they have in their personal stock. To do so, players need money, and they get money by fighting area-majority battles (in which the palaces themselves help win, but not too much) throughout the board. Players decide their actions simultaneously using disks and have them resolve in player order, with the players going last having bigger bonuses than the ones going first.

What’s surprising about the game at first is the amount of freedom the game gives the players: movement is free (as long as you pay for it, which isn’t the paradox it sounds like), and you can split up your actions freely as well, as in first-half-of-action-A, action B, then second-half-of-action-A. The only punishment is that if you don’t manage to complete both actions entirely (some of them being two-part affairs), you’re punished by the bank giving every other player 2 bucks (leaving you a bit behind).

All this freedom can make the game feel a bit chaotic at first, specially with the switching of the special power turn-order chits between players (or, in other words, players stealing them from you when you didn’t expect to lose them), but after a few matches you start taking the opponent’s moves and desires into consideration when choosing your actions.

The structure of this board game is rather simple. At the board, one of the seven palaces is being visited by the Maharaja, and that’s the place where the scoring will occur (where money will be paid to the players that have built stuff there). It’s standard area majority: player with the strongest presence gets the most money. What is interesting in the economics of the game is that a palace costs 12 moneys and only gives you 3 points if it was the first one built there (turn order is thus crucial); otherwise, it’s just 1 point, like the houses that cost 1 money. Still, building palaces is what makes you win the game, so you should still do so, even if it’s crazy expensive (you start off with 15 bucks, so that you have an idea, and that’s pretty close to the most money you can make in a scoring round).

It’s a board game that has a strategic quality that I enjoy a lot: you have to learn how to pick your battles. You cannot win every dispute, and you cannot even really fight every dispute: sometimes you just have to go ahead to the are that will (hopefully, since that can be modified too) score next. Even if you can move all around the board, every time you cross a path that you haven’t built you give money to the other players, so you have to be careful with your movements.

The development of each match is interesting to see. The relative freedom of action allows players to move all over the map, influence a bunch of different places, making the game really feel dynamic and alive. Even players that didn’t really enjoy this board game, for not liking simultaneous action as a mechanism, or thinking that the strategies are confusing, admitted that this design is mighty clever. Nobody in the group hated it or thought it was a bad board game.

Matches take anywhere between 90 to 120 minutes, depending on the analysis paralysis of the players in choosing the actions, and also the experience level. This game strongly rewards experience, to the point where a newbie has a very small chance against someone that has played it a couple of times before. Last time I played it I was the the only non-newbie at the table and won by a distance of 2 palaces, which is quite sizeable.

The production values of the game are astonishing. This board game is gorgeous, and the pieces are very functional. Even if the font used to name the palaces on the board is almost unreadable, it hardly matters since we’ve nicknamed every character on the board (Mad hatter, for the guy in the top-middle part of the board). The glass pieces for the palaces are specially good looking, and the art is very nice. The manual is poorly written, in usual Phalanx fashion, but this being a rather normal eurogame, one can figure out the rules through the ambigui

Still, after more than a dozen matches I must say that I’m not as enchanted by this board game as I once was. I still quite like it, and have played some exciting matches (I’ve even won on the second tiebreaker!), but I feel like I’ve pretty much seen all what the game has to offer. I’m not afraid of suggesting it when there’s 4 or 5 people (ages 10 and up, I’d say, even though the publisher says 12+) willing to race non-linearly across a board , but I nowadays I prefer games that have more depth, or at least keep showing new strategic aspects even after a dozen matches. Wolfgang Kramer seems to have recognized this and included a couple of variants at the end of the manual (as he usually does), and while they are interesting and do add some replay value, it’s essentially the same board game, requiring the same kind of thinking with or without the extra rules. It’s a solid area-majority eurogame, one that I enjoy playing and am glad that I own, but it isn’t really essential to my board games collection

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This is by far the most difficult and brainburny board game I’ve ever played. It even scares me a little, and I’m a difficult-game enthusiast: my favorite game is the 18xx series, train games that can last over 6 hours and have so many money transactions that the use of poker chips cuts out over an hour of duration. But this game… this board game scares me.

Rules are simple. First player to reach a certain number of Vps wins. You earn Vps through the construction and activation of buildings. To build and activate these buildings, you have to navigate through a dense (though pretty clear, actually) technology-tree of products and buildings, slowly and carefully advancing so that other players don’t steal away your hard work, or get too free a ride out of it.. On the second turn you’re already 100% into the game, calculating different possibilities and different directions to take on the multiple forks-in-the-path this board game throws at you.

As if walking along a path that divides itself at dozens of different points wasn’t enough, this board game throws another tough choice at you: you must decide how many actions to take in a turn: if you take few actions, you have a bigger chance to play again (and act upon other players’ choices); if you take more actions, you can chain together more decisions. For those of you who have played Tinners’ Trail or Thebes, it’s exactly the same turn order mechanism, applied to a much heavier game. And that was exactly what I was looking for after playing Thebes and Tinners’ Trail: it’s a brilliant mechanism, and here it’s used to its maximum potential.

Even if I loved this board game to death, I must warn all that there is one huge problem with it, entirely unavoidable and un-fixable: analysis paralysis and downtime. You have A LOT to think about all the time, dozens upon dozens of choices, all with their specific consequences, never forgetting where your opponents are during the game. You will do a lot of thinking, but you will also do a bit of waiting for your turn and complaining about the downtime. For this reason, I suspect that this board game is damn-near unplayable with four people. Three is most definitely best, to keep the waiting down and the interaction more dynamic, less head-to-head, zero-sum.

Being essentially a logistics board game (an extremely complex one at that), it’s definitely not for everyone. The theme is bland (even if the art is nice, but more on that later) and the gameplay is quite dry. You will think, think and think when playing this. If there’s any table talk, it’s definitely between players whose turn it currently isn’t: there’s no space in your mind for chit-chat as you plan your next steps. This board game is that intense.

Interaction is definitely high, to a point where explicit conflict breaks out between players, and those last couple of turns can be grueling, if there’s only one building left. This is not one of those board games where you can play it lightly or heavily: the game’s own nature keeps pulling to to the “dark side” of Analysis Paralysis. It came to a point where the chaos-loving player in our group (who loves it when “a lot of crazy random stuff happens”) asked for paper and pencil to plan out his turn. And even he enjoyed this luckless game.

While it’s great that this small-printrun game was picked up by a large publisher, a few terrible missteps got in the way of this game’s success, to the point where it was found with huge discounts only a few months after it was republished. First of all, the manual. It’s impossible to understand the game from the rulebook. The rules are rather simple, and to a point intuitive (once you get the spirit of it), but the confusing way it is written makes it sound like a terribly obscure design. Thankfully, there are plenty of player aids and rulebook re-writes available online, so this should not stop you from trying this board game.

Other major flaw is a couple of tragic rule changes that seriously affect gameplay. Why they added luck in mine construction is beyond me: did they really think they could turn this into a more family-oriented board game? This monster? It’s a horrible change (the other ones are silly, but mostly harmless). Again, you can find guides to revert rules back to what they are in the first edition, which is the only way this board game should be played.

One flaw that cannot be adjusted is the game’s graphic design. It looks nice, drawn by the same guy that did Agricola, but it’s insufficiently clear when you’re first trying to understand the board game. The diagonal building-mat is particularly confusing, with arrows only vaguely pointing towards buildings and little differentiation between one row and the next (“is this coming out or going in?”) After the first match or so you get used to it, but this game’s learning curve is steep enough (hitting close to 90o) without the colorful mess of the building mat. The board looks nice, though, I should say.

So, considering the super-heavy gameplay, the unexciting theme, the incomprehensible rulebook, the lame rule-modifications and the confusing graphic design, it hardly comes at a surprise that this board game wasn’t a huge hit. It’s too bad, this failure encourages game designers to play it safe and keep churning out generic worker placement titles, instead of doing something truly unique and refreshing with their board games. I love it. If my brain is up for this exquisite torture, and I have two other maniacs along with me for this 2h30 hour trip of logistic madness, I can hardly think of a better board game. I give it a 9/10 because of the production issues (sad) and the downtime (unavoidable), but I imagine this board game will bring much more joy beyond the mere three times I managed to get this to the table. I recommend it (for the gamers that are crazy enough). 12+ feels like an optimistic age estimate, here.

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There’s supposedly a theme in this board game, somewhere (Ubongo meaning “head” or “brain” in swahili, or so I recall), of some sort of festival for rain or harvest. My edition is in german, but I can safely say that any theme is pasted on. This is essentially cardboard tetris.

Well, not really tetris: you’re not filing up horizontal lines with tiles that are given you in random aorder and trying to make the tiles disappear. But it’s pretty close to that: At the start of each round, each player picks up a puzzle board and tries, within the period of the sandtimer (45-60 seconds), to fill up the white space with a set of tetris-like pieces (everyone’s set is identical). What pieces you have to use is indicated by a die roll and a unique chart that is printed on each board. When you finish your puzzle, you yell out (or maybe just say it out loud, if you’re the shy type) “Ubongo!” and grab a few shiny rocks. The first person to finish his puzzle has more choices in picking up shiny rocks, but everyone always picks up two. The winner is the player that has the most rocks of a single color after nine rounds of puzzle-solving.

As you can see, it’s dead simple. Games rarely take more than half an hour, regardless of player count. It’s a game where the number of players at the table hardly matters, since the meat of the gameplay is pretty much solitaire (each with his own puzzle), and makes one wonder why they didn’t include piece sets for 5 and 6 players as well (with a few extra puzzle boards along with it).

Even if each player is dealing with this own particular situation, it doesn’t really feel like multiplayer solitaire. The shouting of “ubongo” and the pressure to solve it faster than other players make the game more lively; if you’re the last one left that hasn’t solved his puzzle, you can feel the other players stare at your direction even if you don’t raise your eyes from your board. Shouting out countdowns is fun, too.

The obvious complaint to make about this board game is the scoring system: it’s most definitely pasted on the rest of the game, and worse, it’s unfair. A player can solve all the puzzles given to him and still lose to another player that. I usually play with a set collection variant, that while still feels pasted on is a little more fair towards the endresult (I should note that Ubongo extreme’s scoring also feels artificial). This being such a quick and somewhat mindless (or at least completely lacking in brainburny moments), it’s not a horrible fault that kills the board game, as it would with most board games.

This board game is quite newbie friendly. Rules explanation should take less than 5 minutes, and is probably acessible even to children 6+, if you get a bigger sandtimer and are more lax on the competition aspect (they will probably enjoy the puzzle part by itself). Still, like many puzzle games/activities, one gets clearly better with more experience, a sort of muscle one exercizes over and over, unable to transfer any of his experience to a new player. But, not being the strategy title, it’s still pretty fun if you do badly (or, perhaps I should say, a person’s enjoyment doesn’t depend at all on his performance in the game, unlike what happens sometimes in a few deeper games)

After around a dozen plays, I must say this boad game does become a little on the easy side (something I heard does not happen so quickly with Ubongo Extreme, but having played it only twice I cannot say for myself). You will definitely finish most puzzles, even on the “hard” side of the board (the one that requires four pieces instead of three), but still you’ll get stumped from time to time. In those moments, you will get stressed out and tense, and your opponents will all be looking at you as you helplessly try to solve the puzzle. When the timer runs out, you’ll scream “it’s impossible!”, and toss the board back in the box, just as one opponent decides to pick it up and manages to solve it in five seconds. For those moments, the board game remains entertaining, even after you’ve become really good at it.

This board game is very nicely produced. The publisher, KOSMOS, has wisely picked up on the mainstream appeal of the game, and didn’t save any pennies in the production values: the cover and the graphics are colorful, the pieces are nice and sturdy, and even the (almost irrelevant) player pawns look quite nice. The simple gameplay and nice look has paid off: Ubongo is a best-selling board game, having spawned a whole bunch of spin-offs, with travel editions (that appear quite limited in replay value, from the pictures I’ve seen online), hexagonal “Extreme” editions (that are tougher, but still too similar to the original to be worth owning both of them) and now even a 3D edition, with chunky blocks to be placed on top of each other in some parts. I’ve even bought a “duel” version, in which players try to solve the same puzzle (on different boards, of course) and has a duel-type scoring that at last won’t be tacked-on or random. Normal ubongo is fine with two players, but considering it’s usually played to “fill holes” between matches of more “serious” games, a two-player variant with more tension will probably be welcome.

Like it or not, we’ll see a bunch more of ubongo in the future. I’m not the biggest fan of the series, but I’m usually willing to play, specially if I have non-gamers over. I give it a 7/10.

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Somehow, and quite weirdly, they’ve been correct in their assumption, at least commercially. This board game seems to be selling quite well since it’s release, much to my surprise. It’s by far the unfriendliest and most cruel board game in my collection, and probably the unfriendliest (does that word even exist?) board game I’ve ever played.

The rules are very simple. Player with the most money at the end wins the game. You auction off shares of companies that pay dividends according to their connections on the map. That’s the only source of money in the board game, the dividends paid at the end of each turn: shares are worth nothing by themselves in the endscore calculation. Any shareholder can build tracks for any companies (no majority is necessary to do so) and anybody can auction off any share in any company (except Wabash, which only comes into the board game once a company reaches Chicago). Dividends are paid in proportion to the number of shares sold: the higher the number of shares in the hands of the players, the more smaller the amount each share will pay.

Strategy-wise, this board game is mostly an auction board game where you manipulate incentives for other players: you try to shape their options so that their best moves help you. The construction action is secondary, and the development action is only in third place because there is no fourth spot (it’s used mostly to manipulate who’s the starting player in the next round). The fact that any player can pretty much influence almost anything is a good example of how this board game is supposed to be played.

And this is where the biggest problem in Chicago Express lies: there’s a specific way the board game is supposed to be played, a way that can easily go unnoticed by the people playing, even if they are experienced gamers. More than once I’ve read on the internet comments about people that say “I just don’t get it, what’s so great about this game?”, players that have boardgaming as one of their main hobbies, even.

Make no mistake, the board game itself appears to be quite the bland experience, if you don’t see the complex network of interests involved. The simplicity here creates a depth that is definitely not visible in your first play (or even your first couple of plays). It’s not one of those complex games that intimidate newbies right at the start (I’m looking at you, Age of Steam); it’s one of those board games that appear silly or simplistic but it’s actually quite the gamer’s game. You can see first turns that guarantee unavoidable defeats or runaway leaders. Chicago express does not hold your hand, does not keep you safe, you’re the one that has to do all the work to understand it.

On the plus side, as a sort of compensation for this opacity, the game really does deserve the “express” name: a match is somewhere between 30-60 minutes, including rules explanation. An intrigued group can thus invest three hours and play the game four to five times, to see if they can understand better the details. Although one could fit a match of this between two more time-consuming games, I wouldn’t be surprised that this would end up being the “main event” of the game reunion, strategy-wise.

Queen games claims that the game scales from 2 to 6 players, however I find (and most other players agree with me) that it’s significantly better with 3 or 4, to a point that I would refuse to play it with any other number. Even so, the game’s strategies are significantly different with 3 or four players; you always have to keep a keen eye to see what’s going on, what each opponent wants and is planning at all times.

As you probably can tell from my previous paragraphs, this is hardly the newbie-friendly game. A newbie on a table of experienced players will probably throw the game to another player without knowing, so a little patience is required. Heck, a table consisted entirely of newbies will most probably end up with a random winner (even if the game has no random elements), the lucky person recipient of the bigger amount of benefits from other player’s rookie-mistakes.

Regarding the production values, I have to give the thumbs up to Queen Games: this board game is gorgeous, and the components work perfectly for the game (even if it didn’t have to be anything particularly fancy for it to work). One significant complaint is the box size, way too tall for the components. I’ve seen around the internet a player that cut his box in half (height-wise) and was still able to fit all the components in. It was claimed that this was done so that the expansions would fit in perfectly, but considering that the first expansion consists of around 25 wooden trains, I’m somewhat suspicious that it has to do with mostly shelf-space in board game stores. My shelf-space, on the other hand, seriously dislikes this decision.

Overall, the rating I give to this board game varies quite a lot between different situations. In a table with concentrated gamers who take the match seriously, I give it a 9/10, and I’m willing to play several matches in a row (not a very frequent quality for me). With non-gamers and such, I’d flat out refuse to play it (4/10 or lower). Around these parts, it has proven to be quite admired by a select few players, and disliked by the majority. It’s a cold, calculating game, and the initial (joke-like) age requirement of 29+ years (from the barebones Winsome Games first edition) is perhaps more appropriate than the Queen Games’ 12+. I’d definitely think twice about playing this with teenagers (and I’m sure they’d much rather play something that looks more exciting). If you enjoy board games of financial and incentive manipulation, and you regularly play with the same opponents (and they’re willing to play a game many times for it to really shine), you can’t do much better than Chicago Express. The casual gamer should probably stick to Ticket to Ride, or even Steam (where the challenges are much more apparent).

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