Look, I’m an easy sell. I’m a sucker for novelty. Tell me you’ve got a legacy game for children, and I’m going to be curious. Legacy games generally cater to adults, which makes sense. They require paying attention to the same thing for an extended period of time. This is not a strength for which children are celebrated. More importantly, the stories are usually only suggested through fragments of information, rather than fleshed out like a storybook.

[caption id="attachment_288322" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The boat during setup.[/caption]

Along Came Pepe

Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy! aims to change all that. Over the course of twenty-five episodes, you follow the adventures of the good capt’n and his anthropomorphic crew, helping them track down seven magic treasures in their quest to stop the evil Captain Goldtooth.

The game itself is a straightforward sliding puzzle. Working together, players move the various crew members of the Melody to their stations. Passing Capt’n Pepe from player to player, the active player moves one crew member one space. That’s it. You keep going until all the crew members are where…

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Admittedly, my tastes bend toward austere-looking games with a brown color palette, so I’m naturally predisposed to like a game that features tan, olive, brown, beige, ochre, and a smattering of puce. That said, this sucker has quite a lot going on under the hood.

This game is a reimplementation of one of the earliest published designs of Acchittocca (the design team of Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto, and Antonio Tinto–collectively responsible for Alma Mater, Egizia: Shifting Sands, and several other games in loose collaboration), Leonardo da Vinci. Codex Leicester has one more designer thrown in the mix for good measure, Changhyun Baek.

I haven’t played the original game, so you won’t find any comparing and contrasting here, though there are significant differences between this version of the game and the original, or at least that’s the sense I get from reading the original game’s rules.

But here’s a thousand-foot summary. Codex Leicester is a worker placement game with a high degree of interaction. Players start with a single workshop, which can be upgraded with various bits and bobs to make it more powerful, and they can also add a second workshop as the game moves forward.

[caption id="attachment_287152" align="alignnone" width="1125"] Workshops in action.[/caption]

What do you do…

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Let me be clear before we start: I am not into Harry Potter.

My only exposure to the series is the first book that I read back during the slow periods in high school (it’s been that long?) and getting dragged by my childhood friend to see the third movie with her. I didn’t see the first two movies, so I was on a one-way cruise trip to an ocean of confusion. I felt like an out-of-touch parent watching the First Pokemon Movie with their kids.

Yet my lack of interest in a game’s franchise wasn't a barrier to me in other titles. I never watched Spartacus, but I still reviewed the game. I owned the board game Sons of Anarchy with all the expansions and never eyeballed a single episode of the show. 

As if that weren’t enough, this game is also a worker placement game, a genre that I often avoid. Why would I be interested in this game then? After reviewing The Alpha, I was a bit more open to worker placements if it had an entry-level profile and a short time.

Sorting Hats

As one would expect from a Harry Potter game, you'll be shuffling these famous fictional characters around to earn resources…

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Harry Potter: House Cup Competition is a light strategy worker placement game for 2-4 players. In this game players each select a house and send their Students (read: workers) to attend classes and complete lessons in order to upgrade their skills.

How it Works

The game is played over 7 rounds (because it's Harry Potter themed, so of course it is). Each round has 2 phases: Classes and Challenges. In the first phase, Classes, players take turns placing 1 of their 3 Students on the board and optionally completing a Lesson (either before or after placement). Lessons are cards that will require some level of skill in one of the three subjects (Potions, Charms, and Defence Against the Dark Arts) and will give the active player a reward when they are complete.

[caption id="attachment_79494" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Here's what the board looks like when set up.[/caption]

During the first phase of a round, there are 4 areas of the board where Students can be placed: the Library, Professor’s Office, Classrooms, or any face-up Location. Each area will have multiple spots for workers, some with costs and some that are free. I’ll quickly go over what can be gained from each area of the board.

• Library: Here Students can collect Knowledge,…

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Spire’s End is billed as a dungeon-crawling solo or co-op Choose Your Own Adventure escapade packaged neatly into a deck of cards, and that’s a pretty apt reference point. For those who aren’t familiar, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were a collection of interactive novels that centered the reader as the hero of each story. As each book went on, the reader would be asked to make choices about what s/he would do, flipping to the corresponding numbered page to find out what the results of that choice were, which would lead to another set of decisions, and so forth. The result is that each reading of the book followed its own distinct path, branching and unfolding based on the whims of the reader.

While the CYOA books were quite good on their own, Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series and the Fighting Fantasy titles took the interactive novel a step further by incorporating a number of RPG-like features such as character sheets, special abilities, and combat encounters that had to be played out by the reader to survive and advance the plot. Essentially, these books provided a single-player RPG experience, and part of the fun was playing through them over and over to figure out the best path through the variety of…

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Flashback, more years ago than I am ready to admit to… I was still in school, and like all other kids my age I was trying to fit in and just get through it all.  Trying to fit in was hard for me because I wasn’t like the other girls my age. I had a secret - one that I fiercely protected. It had the power to jeopardize my unstable standing with the social groups with whom I aligned myself.

Weekly I would sneak into the local comic book store to pick up my subscriptions.   If someone did see me, I told them I was picking them up for my cousin. At home, they were hidden in a dark corner of my closet, out of sight of the friends that came over. I would tear through them as soon as I was safely ensconced in my bedroom with the door closed.  I would read them over and over again, waiting impatiently for the next issue to come out. As I grew older, I continued to read comics, and graphic novels. Then one day I discovered video games and board games, and my love for these things grew as well. I never lost this love for comic books, video games, and board games, bringing…

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