Project GIPF is a series of eight abstract strategy games designed by Kris Burm. Each game features a hexagonal playing area and involves a dwindling of either pieces or playing area mechanic. The way they approach these elements is not only unique, but combines what I feel are the best qualities in most abstracts: simple rules that reveal complex game play. 

If you’ve never heard the games within Project GIPF, GIPF, TAMSK, ZÈRTZ, DVONN, YINSH, PÜNCT, TZAAR, and LYNGK, I encourage you to seek them out, either in cardboard and bakelite or digitally online. They are well worth your time.

Today’s game: GIPF

[caption id="attachment_296563" align="aligncenter" width="500"] GIPF: The box[/caption]

GIPF is the first in a series of abstract strategy games known as the GIPF Project. Designed by Kris Burm and released in 1997, GIPF is one of those wonderful games that can be taught in under a minute, yet need careful study to win.

To win, you need to either capture all three of your opponent’s GIPF pieces or have your opponent unable to make a move. 

Playing GIPF

The playing board is a hexagon, with four intersections along each edge. These extend to an emphasized point just past the white border. Two straight lines come from each…

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We’ve talked about Cascadia many times before, from our review of of the Cascadia base game, to our review of the Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, our inclusion of Cascadia in a list of games you can easily play with kids and a humorous list of games which include bears. But I don’t think any of us expected Cascadia to get “the dice game” treatment.

That’s right; this newest member of the family (technically two newest members) is a reimagining of Cascadia as a roll and write game. But let me reassure you that Cascadia: Rolling Hills, and Cascadia: Rolling Rivers aren’t just some money grab. While they do share the same DNA, they’re totally new games.

Let’s dive in and find out what makes these two new entries tick. Note that while my main focus in this review is on Cascadia: Rolling Hills, I do talk about both games.

Cascadia: Rolling Overview

As the name implies, these are dice games built atop the Cascadia framework: the animals and habitats we’ve come to know and love, as well as the hex based layout of the countryside. Over the course of 20 rounds you’ll roll dice to gain various animal and nature token symbols. These symbols allow you…

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Let’s get the obvious out of the way: I love Ingenious. For me, it is THE gold standard by which I judge all other abstract games that claim to scale beyond two. I was amazed the first time I played it with more than two players—there was no difference in the gameplay or scoring. There is an elegance in the way the game expands so effortlessly to additional players.

I think you can tell how well-loved and how well-played a game is by the condition of the box. Take another look at the photo above, with my original Ingenious box next to the new one. Since 2011, that box has traveled with me to game nights, to-and-from work, and has been loaned out to friends. It has earned every scratch, tear, and rip.

That’s how much I love Ingenious and why I’ve pushed it on anyone who has expressed half an interest in the game. And they’ve all come back as serious believers.

[caption id="attachment_295462" align="aligncenter" width="600"] My well-worn 13-year-old copy of Ingenious next to the new, second edition box[/caption]

Playing the Game

In my recent review of Horrified: American Monsters, I asked readers of that review to go back…

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There are no happy endings in Viking sagas. Oh sure, someone lives, but usually not the one you had hoped, and they’re bound to be miserable. Regardless of the outcome, though, sagas are rippin’ good times defined by endless and often widening bouts of deeds and consequences.

Knarr is an engines-building card-game from designer Thomas Dupont and publisher Pandasaurus Games. It is the longship of card games—swift and highly effective. The action escalates and the game sails off into the sunset in 15-30 minutes.

Calculating like Signy

Play a card into one engine, or weaken that engine to build another. These are the choices in every turn of Knarr. Players build a cascading tableau of stunning viking cards arranged by color. When a new card is added to its stack, it provides every boon depicted in the stack—points, reputation, bracelets, and/or helmets. By the time there are four or *gasp* five cards in waiting, the resource engine sings like a tagelharpa.

Undercutting the joy of the engine, however, is the knowledge that those cards are fated for the discard pile, viking brethren spent as currency in the name of exploration. The exploration cards stack near the player’s longship board as part of another engine—one which features three ribbons triggered…

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In the hubbub of Airecon in March 2023 my attention was drawn by the convention centre spotlights glinting off large, polished spheres, lined up like sleeping warriors ready to be awoken. The background noise seemed to fade away as our focus narrowed on this curio and we sat down to play. ‘Come’ said the host, with a knowing calm that suggested he had been expecting us, ‘Sit. And listen.’ A few minutes was enough to etch this game into my memory – no mean feat amongst thousands of others that weekend. Adding to the mystery was the fact I could not seem to find the game for months after – I was starting to think it had all been a dream, when a contact handed me a parcel with the unmistakable clack of marbles within…

Do not use a canon to kill a mosquito

Senryaku’s box is efficiently packaged – a simple card sleeve just about covers the dignity of the game structure itself, which comprises the playing board with shallow wells in a 7 x 6 grid, plus the base. Each player lines up seven spheres, including a monarch (let’s be equal…

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I wanted Pueblo to be an under-appreciated gem in the Kramer & Kiesling catalog. I wanted to tell you, “We are all so blessed to have a title like this back in print, and in such a beautiful edition.” My level of anticipation was reasonable. I didn’t expect it to be a masterpiece; I expected it to be interesting. I wasn’t hoping for a home run so much as a clutch bunt single.

Instead, Pueblo is perfectly okay.

Brick by Brick

The board is a grid, divided into four quadrants. Around the border of the grid, there’s a hawk token, which is used for scoring. On your turn, you place a block and then move the hawk.

There are limitations on both, of course. The blocks, which are unusually shaped, have to be entirely flush to any and all surfaces below them. You can’t leave any vertical gaps. The hawk must be moved, and can only be moved, between one and four spaces.

The hawk is important. It’s the only way points are scored. Each time the hawk is moved, the pieces it can see—i.e., the pieces with horizontal exposure in that direction—score points for their owners. A visible piece on the first floor scores 1 point, on the…

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I could be wrong about this, but I would tell you that I came of age at the tail end of the period when it was considered best to keep your plants as insect-free as possible. Even if we understood it scientifically, the culture hadn’t yet come around to the idea that plants need animals, and vice versa. It was a different time. Richard Powers hadn’t written The Overstory yet. How were we to know?

Gameplay

Players are divided into teams. The goal is to build colonies, and to connect those colonies via a path from one side of the board to the other. This is done with the cards from your team’s deck, each fo which shows one of the four flower types on the board. On your turn, you have a choice of four actions. You can draw cards, you can share cards with one of your teammates, you can build a Colony, or you can connect two Colonies already on the board.

Drawing and sharing are straightforward enough. Each team has two cards, each with one number on each side. 1 and 4 share a card, as do 2 and 3. To either draw or pass, you pick one of the two numbers that are currently…

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In the early Thursday morning bustle of the Essen convention hall, the lightest bustle I would know for the next four days, I came across a booth that caught my eye. Well, it wasn’t the booth so much as the game, but that can be assumed.

“Avalam,” the banner declared. The board was an unusual rounded shape. There were no cards in sight. The pieces were wooden circles. All at once, like a text sent to an iPhone with Echo on, the words “an abstract game” took flight in the inner sanctum of my mind.

Friday Nights I’m Going Nowhere

A man I assume to have been Vincent Sélenne, the gentleman behind Belgian publisher Art of Games, walked me through the rules. It takes about a minute, assuming you stop to sip tea halfway through.

Each player picks a color. On your turn, you pick up one piece or a stack of pieces and place it/them on top of a surrounding piece or stack of pieces. Each player controls any stack with their piece on top. The piece/stack you move can be yours or your opponent’s, but you cannot move a piece/stack to an empty space, and you cannot jump. The only other rule governing movement is the game’s…

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From the rulebook: “It’s summertime. Amid the forest lies the glade. Bring your forest to life with creatures, leaves and forest fruits. Create sets of 3 tiles to place a toadstool into the glade. Complete a set of 4 tiles to add a toadstool into your store. Use toadstools in your store for extra actions.”

That’s The Glade in a nutshell (pun totally intended). In this quaint, abstract, tile-laying game from renowned designer Richard Breese (Keyflower, Keyper), the players will be drawing tiles from a bag, adding them to their tile rack, and then placing tiles into their tableau to create sets and score points. And when all is said and done and the last leaf has fallen, the player with the most points wins.

Of course this is a very high-level overview of the game. If you just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we learn how to play The Glade.

Setup

A game of The Glade is set up thusly:

Place the Glade board in the middle of the playing area. Then, each player receives a Forest board (turned to its basic side*) which they place next to the Glade board, abutting…

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Pyramido is a handsome game. Colourful tiles, playful icons, bold wooden markers, a vertical build, the tempting façade of tabletop satisfaction. It's a charming way to spend half an hour or so. 

It's also simple to play; a pyramid complex this is not. On your turn you’ll take a domino tile, placing it into your personal pyramid and sometimes placing one of those cute wooden markers on top. There are four rounds to the game and during each you’ll build another layer of your pyramid, starting with 10 dominoes (creating a 5x4 grid of half-domino squares) and in the final round capping your pyramid with a single domino.

[caption id="attachment_291531" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The first layer of a pyramid. Please note: The wonderful playmats that feature as a background to the images in this review are not included with the game.[/caption]

At the end of each round you score your 5x4 grid from above. Some dominos have icons on one or both halves and you’re trying to create areas with lots of icons in each of the six colours. However, you can only score an area if you’ve placed a scoring marker in it during the round. Points are awarded for the number of icons in each marked area, with a bonus…

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I think I might be done with heavier games? “Done” is doing a lot of work here. I’m in the middle of a love affair with Barrage. I would play The War of the Ring right now if you asked, and it is 4:30 am. It's just that I’ve noticed over the last several months that my tastes have made a hard turn towards abstracts and party games.

Those are certainly the areas where I’m finding the most joy, and the most memorable play experiences. I picked up a copy of That’s Not a Hat! (Justin’s rating is a solid 1 star lower than my own) recently, and I can’t get enough of it. People cry with laughter over the course of its 10-to-15 minutes. A recent game of Pan t’es mort, a simple and silly push-your-luck game, was wondrous (About three quarters of a star lower than I’d rate it, if Meeple Mountain allowed for quarter-point shenanigans). Yesterday afternoon, I had one of my most reliably heavy-leaning gaming friends over for four or five hours, thinking we might crack into Inferno from GMT.

Instead, we played Carcassonne: The Castle, which I tried for the first time two days ago and was eager to show him. We got in two games of Mindbug, a round…

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Pentago is a two-player abstract created by Tomas Floden and was released in 2005. That year it won the Game of the Year in Sweden. The following year, it won the Game of the Year in both France and Finland and was a winner in the Mensa Mind Games. Not bad for such a small and unassuming game.

This is a tic-tac-toe variant, where players are trying to make a consecutive row of five marbles of your color before their opponent does. The five can be vertically, horizontally, or diagonally in a row.

The board is a six-by-six series of cupped indentations that hold marbles which are placed by either player on their turn. As well, the board is subdivided into four equal squares, each with a set of three-by-three spots.

To begin, players take all the marbles of one of two colors. On each turn, a player must (a) place a marble of their color onto an unoccupied spot on the board and then (b) turn any one of the four sections of the board 90º in either direction.

You read that right: what gives Pentago its unique twist is that you can pull each of those four sections diagonally away from the board. Once pulled away, you can then twist them either clockwise or counter-clockwise, before fitting…

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Ta Yü is a connection game, where you and your opponent are each trying to join one side of the game board to the other. While many connection games are mutually exclusive—that is, only one player can complete the connection and thus win the game—Ta Yü is not. Both players can create multiple pathways that connect their opposite sides. In fact, your final score depends on it.

How to Play

The Ta Yü board is square with 18x18 round indentations set into the playing area. These dimples allow the rectangular game pieces—with three corresponding bumps on their bottoms—to fit onto the board and stay in place, even if the board gets bumped. It’s a simple design and one that’s very well executed.

Players start the game by choosing two identical, opposite sides of the board as their own.

The randomly chosen starting player takes the bag of pieces and blindly chooses one to play. Each piece is a 1x3 rectangle with a single line that terminates at exactly three places along its edge. The first piece played must be played somewhere in the four center indentations on the board. Each piece played thereafter must connect to any other piece already on the board.

When placing a new tile, all three of a piece's connecting lines must be legally…

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