Before we begin, please sanitize your hands. Don your lab coat. Wipe your glasses clean. Take a deep breath. And another. Remember that science class was separate from English class. Therefore, I’ll need you to pardon the prepositional and grammatical stumbles caused by the game’s title. Good? Good.

What do you do in For Science!?

Players place cards next to cards, then blocks on top of other blocks, so some blocks touch other blocks, but other blocks can’t touch those blocks. After stacking the blocks, someone verifies all the proper shapes and colors are properly - and not improperly - touching the other shapes and colors. The reward for stacking blocks is puzzle pieces with pictures. Piece together the puzzle pieces to enclose enough pictures, and you win!

It’s confusing and stressful and chaotic and random, and that’s before you introduce the countdown clock! If you want it even confusinger and stressfuller and chaoticer and randomer, shorten the clock and introduce more events!

I’ve said too much. Also, not enough.

In For Science!, 1-6 lab workers cooperate to concoct the universal vaccine. To do so, players uses their unique abilities as they research designs for cures. Cures are built to match the blueprints constructed from design cards, each showing a series of blocks along one, two, or three strands…

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Like so many long-term gamers, I have dozens of unopened game boxes lingering on my Shelf of Shame. Whether I lack the table space, the time, or the proper audience, I’m constantly lacking something. Some games don’t get played because the games didn’t supply rulebooks. I may not be able to do anything about tables or people, but after decades of playing board games, I’m confident I can make sense of any game from the components alone.

Game 1: Cosmic Eidex:

In Cosmic Eidex, 2-4 enterprises strive to colonize the Red Planet. To do so, they must complete three objectives: (1) collectively oxidize the atmosphere by stocking arboretums; (2) establish the greatest of lakes; (3) properly set the thermostat so the CEOs of the organizations can argue with their wives about how expensive it is to heat an entire planet. These goals are accomplished through a series of events initiated through card play, then funded by carefully calculated resources management.

You might think such a game would require multiple decks of cards, individual player boards, a game board with the planet dissected into 61 available hexes, three metallic flavors of cubes, a half dozen colorful cubes that don’t taste at all like the corresponding-colored fruit, and sufficient cardboard to make…

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Why would Funko wait nearly 28 years to release a game about a classic movie? I’d like to think it transpired something like this:

April 11, 1993: Mike Becker (no relation), the founder of a future company that won’t incorporate for five more years, sits in the theater watching Bill Murray’s movie all by his lonesome. His friends gathered that evening for rousing rounds of Pictionary, a game he stinks at because all of the stick figures Becker draws have ginormous heads. Plus, while he cherishes pop culture more than anyone he knows, he finds board games boring and uninspired.

April 11, 1996: Becker joins a table of casual acquaintances for a marathon session of Trivial Pursuit, while a VCR copy of Batman Forever plays in the background. Something in the back of his mind aspires to someday create superheroes with disproportionately sized craniums. Conversely, he rage quits and flips the table because he couldn’t remember who invaded Spain in the eighth century.

April 11, 1998: One month after incorporating Funko, he sits in on a meeting with a female Hasbro executive who appears to have intellectual property rights for everything. Becker’s efforts to cooperate are thwarted, as Hasbro hoards its IP so it can produce countless incarnations of…

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This game? Bites?
This game, Bites.
This game bites!
It’s all about the punctuation.

It’s inaccurate to say Bites bites, but how could I resist that intro? Take two:

In the late 90s, DreamWorks went head-to-head against Pixar in movies about insects: Antz versus A Bug’s Life. Antz boasted star power, with roles voiced by Woody Allen, Sylvester Stallone, J-Lo, and Christopher Walken. Pixar countered with Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Phyllis Diller, but for sheer name recognition, DreamWorks prevailed. Yet, when considering both films, the actors alone weren’t enough to make a better movie. For all the glitz and glamour with A-listers, I strongly preferred the film with better characters and story.

Bites has beautiful pieces. Brightly colored, double-sided cardboard foods. Big, die-cut, wooden ant meeples. An five-level-tall, towering anthill for the finish line. All very tactile. It’s an impressive table presence, and also something of a space hog. The components reminded me of Eric Carle’s artwork, and I suspect getting this to the table often would make me a Very Hungry Cater-player.

[caption id="attachment_219822" align="alignnone" width="768"] For maximum effect, use a picnic blanket as your game mat[/caption]

Setup is simple enough. Construct the anthill and set aside one food of each type: green grapes, tan toast,…

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I like to harken back to yesteryore, when me and my imp brethren would dig tunnels under the cruel whip of our ogre overlord or mine for gold. Occasionally, we’d get to use a Production Room, and the really lucky among us got to use the Reproduction Room. Ah, the good old days…

Those were the days of Dungeon Lords, before the warriors, healers, and bards (oh my)! Back when imps were valued for their natural abilities. Every now and then, a lucky goblin cousin was even recruited to fight. But those dungeons shut down long ago. Frigging paladins. 

[caption id="attachment_217785" align="aligncenter" width="901"] You can’t keep a good imp down.[/caption]

Vlaada Chvatil is a remarkable man with an unpronounceable name. His creative mind has conceived an exhaustive list of diverse masterpieces including Through The Ages, Dungeon Lords, Galaxy Trucker, Mage Knight, Bunny Bunny Moose Moose, and Codenames. I suspect he wanders through Wikipedia, clicks randomly, and designs a game from whatever subject matter displays. How else to explain Dungeon Petz?

In Dungeon Petz, players are pet store owners who purchase monster hatchlings, cage the beasts as they grow increasingly demanding, showcase the creatures to Westminster’s rejected judges, and eventually sell off their…

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Over the past year of Covid-inspired isolation, I’ve seen things I’d never seen before. Surgical masks with pacifiers for babies to wear and keep quiet. Viking-helmeted “demonstrations” in the Capitol. And a unicorn: my entire family sitting together, binge watching two seasons of a television show, with all five of us enjoying it. The Umbrella Academy offered interesting character development, snappy humor, bizarre storylines with suspenseful conflicts, and enough stylized costumes and special effects to replicate the wackiness I’d watched on the tube and read in the comics created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba.

When I heard it announced that Dark Horse Comics was joining Studio 71 Games to follow up with a Kickstarter game campaign, it sounded right up my alley - the kind of alley where siblings suddenly drop from the sky in varying years of the early 1960s.

[caption id="attachment_216960" align="alignnone" width="1024"] I could’ve gone for a game that handled cross-species blood transfusions, tell-all memoirs of a jaded, less-than-super sibling, and blowing up the moon. This is not that game.[/caption]

Plays up to six players? Perfect! Co-op? Even better, as that leads to less fights in our house! Art done by the creators? Ideal! Maybe even worthy of remembering my Kickstarter password!

Is it a cash grab?…

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* * * * * * SPOILER ALERT! * * * * * *

STOP

Do not draw, reveal, look at, handle, or otherwise disturb these cards until instructed.

That’s what it says on the initial card in Pandemic Legacy Season 1. But I didn’t heed that warning. I drew, looked at, and handled those cards as instructed until I was eventually disturbed. Now, my gaming group has encountered, adventured, and survived the legacies in Seasons 1, 2, and 0, and I find myself struggling with an addiction to Pandemic Legacy.

Unable to sleep, I wander the dark corners of the interwebs for rumors and hints about what’s to come. I dissected every connection between the CDC and BGG. I’m desperate for Daviau, longing for Leacock, jonesing for the next epidemic card to flip. Adamantly refusing to accept the designers’ claim that Season 0 ended the trilogy, I searched and researched, patched and dispatched, dotted my tees and crossed my eyes, and…

…I think I found something.

YES!

I FOUND IT!

Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock may have tried to keep this secret, but I unearthed their prototype for the TRUE final chapter in Pandemic Legacy Gaming.

If you want the truth - if you…

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I’ve never been to Japan. It’s not even on my bucket list of things to do. I’ve seen entire websites devoted to innovative, Japanese inventions and solutions to problems I never knew existed: Nursing bras for men. Floor-length umbrellas. Cubic watermelons. Vending machines full of eccentric oddities.

Is it any wonder someone created a Japanese board game about Hopscotch? No. It’s not. (You may have to read the previous sentences multiple times to get the proper meaning.)

[caption id="attachment_14248" align="alignnone" width="730"] Isn’t Fish & Chips British?[/caption]

Tokaido is a game where players journey across Japan. Inspired by the Tokaido road that connects Tokyo and Kyoto (bonus points to anyone who noticed the anagram), each journey will offer a selection of inns, temples, and souvenir shops. Along the way, they can paint panoramas of the landscapes, dine at fine restaurants, relax in traditional hot springs, and/or work at farms to collect enough income to finance their trips. Encounters can alter the expedition, and when everyone eventually reaches the destination for a celebratory meal, they compare experiences to see who made the most of the 53 possible locations along the way.

[caption id="attachment_14247" align="alignnone" width="491"]…

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I know what you’re thinking. After so many games optimizing your engine to maximize production so you can execute multiple chain-reactions building, harvesting, executing, developing, and rerouting your trains on a foreign planet, underwater, in the winter of 1843, what you’re looking for is a quick-hitting card game. Something light enough to bang out in 30 minutes or less, but interesting enough to merit replays. Something like a Spiel des Jahres nominee from 1998 with a terribly inaccurate tagline “The Game Where Size Doesn’t Matter!”

I’m talking about David & Goliath, a trick taking game for 3-6 players.

While there are several incarnations of illustrations, the 90-card deck is divided into five colored suits, each numbered from 1-18. Deal 15 cards to each player, and you’re ready to go. (Depending on your player count, you may need to remove corresponding high cards from each suit, but the entire remaining deck gets dealt out evenly.)

[caption id="attachment_13893" align="alignnone" width="730"] Things to look forward to as you grow: Bigger muscles and a receding hairline.[/caption]

The player to the left of the dealer plays one card in front of himself, and play rotates clockwise. Each other player must follow the lead suit if possible. Once everyone has contributed to the trick, David and Goliath…

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It’s elegantly simple. It’s simply elegant. It’s fun, quick, and I’ve yet to find a person who dislikes it. Coloretto contains seven suits, plus three wild cards, ten +2 cards, and some game guides. More importantly, Coloretto is a set collection game where each turn offers you one of two choices:

1. Flip the top card of the deck and add it to a placeholder or stack.
2. Take one stack of cards and its placeholder.

Setup merely requires lining up one placeholder cards per player. Shuffle the deck of cards, count out 15 from the bottom, insert the “last round” card, and set the remainder of cards on top of it for the draw deck.

Each round, the first player must flip the top card of the draw deck and set it on one of the placeholders. The next player may either flip the next card and add it to any placeholder or stack, or they may collect one stack of cards and its placeholder. No placeholder can hold more than three cards, so if all of the stacks are three cards deep, players must each collect one of the stacks.

[caption id="attachment_13538" align="aligncenter" width="730"]

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As most card games and the cliché go, you can only play the cards you’re dealt. But what if you don’t know what those cards are? In that case, you’d be playing Hanabi.

Hanabi is the Japanese word for fireworks, and the goal of this cooperative game is to construct five different sequences of fireworks by playing the appropriate cards in order. The deck contains five suits, each represented by a different color. Each suit has 10 cards - three 1s, two 2s, 3s, and 4s, and a lone 5.  Shuffle the deck and deal four or five cards to each player (depending on how many people are playing). It all sounds easy enough.

Now comes the beginning of the hard part: don’t look at your cards. Rather, pick them up facing away from yourself. You will mess this up your first time. It’s counterintuitive. When you do look at your cards, scrap that deal, shuffle and re-deal as your friends remind you that picking up your hand is still the easy part of the game.

The person with the most colorful outfit starts the game. On each player’s turn, they choose one of three options:

1. Give a clue.
2. Discard a card.
3. Play a card.

When giving…

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What’s a demigod gotta do to carve out his Lordship around here? I’ve lorded over Waterdeep, Dogtown, Vegas, Xidit, Flatbush, and Catan. I love being a Dungeon Lord, and I once gathered a fellowship of a couple friends and lorded some rings. And now Hellas? What’s so special about Lords of Hellas?

The gameplay, that’s what.

Five regions, each with four territories (except the Southeast brown lands with three). Nine temples, including the Oracle of Delphi. Cities aplenty, including the mega-recruiting Sparta. A trio of five-sectioned statues to be constructed and worshipped. Quests aplenty. Ancient artifacts. Cyber-Greek monsters roaming the grounds slaughtering hoplites, wounding heroes, and offering glory to anyone who lands the killing blow upon them.

It’s - dare I say - epic? I dare!

To win the game, your demigod must complete any one of the following: (1) control two entire regions, (2) control five territories containing temples, (3) kill three monsters, or (4) control the territory with a fully-built statue on the third turn after it was built. All of the above come into play as viable options. None of the above are easy.

First, your armies consist of fifteen hoplites. That’s all.

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