When was the last time you opened a game and were impressed with the components, like really blown away. Voidfall perhaps? Gloomhaven? Just about any game from Eagle-Gryphon games these days? So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened World Wonders, from Arcane Wonders–a $50 game with oodles of production value (at least in my opinion). Over 20 incredible wooden “wonders” (called monuments in the game, but each different and each with an impressive level of detail), dozens of cardboard tiles, a well designed and thought out insert, and an excellent rulebook–really one of the best I’ve read in quite some time.

But how does it play?

World Wonders Overview

In World Wonders, 1-5 players attempt to raise up their city / civilization, increasing their population, gathering resources, and most importantly…building monuments. The game ends after the tenth round, or when one player raises their population to twelve, although in my experience these two things usually happen very close together.

World Wonders is packed full of things you can do on your turn, which means that there’s always something useful to accomplish. Each player starts the game with 7 coins, and 0 each population, wheat, pottery, and engineering, marking them on their personal player board. Over…

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My Island, Reiner Knizia’s follow-up to his 2020 legacy tile-layer My City, has some big shoes to fill. Not everyone at Meeple Mountain agrees, and while I do understand why David didn’t care for it, that three-star rating is a travesty. My City is a wonder. I have played the full legacy game twice, with two different sets of players, and it was an absolute joy both times.

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Beachfront Property

My City and My Island share core mechanics. Each player has an identical set of unique tiles. In the case of My City, they were tetromino buildings. For My Island, the tiles are groups of two-to-four hexagons with different terrain types. A central deck of cards, each showing one tile, is shuffled, and each turn is a lightning quick pair of actions: someone reveals the top card, and everyone has to place their copy of that tile on their player board.

It’s hard to explain more than that, because both My City and My Island alter the rules as you play. What you’re trying to accomplish changes from chapter to chapter (8 in total) and even episode to episode (three per chapter). As with…

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I’m not a tableau guy. I’m not anti-tableau by any means—Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games. They’re not a genre I seek out, though. My distaste is mild enough that the realization only came to me recently, after a game of 51st State. My friend Nathan said, “Tableau builders aren’t my thing, but if I were to play one, this is the one I’d play,” and I realized the same was true for me.

It explains a lot. Wingspan? Nah. Everdell? Eh. Terraforming Mars? Best for all involved that I don’t. I think my distaste comes from the fact that I prefer my games streamlined, and running calculus around a bevy of unique cards turn after turn is not streamlined. There’s also some (irrational) part of me that has come to regard an appetite for combos as one of board gaming’s baser instincts, and I’m suspicious of anything that appeals to it.

Look, nobody’s perfect.

This is not meant to yuck your yum. If anything, these realizations have made me more understanding of the popularity of the above-mentioned games. It also has me trying to figure out why I like 51st State so very much.

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For the longest time, Barcelona was a city behind walls. Initially, this served the city well, keeping out the unwanted while protecting those within. But, the population explosion in the mid-1850s changed all of this. As the population swelled, the space within the walls began to become cramped leading to much higher mortality rates and the easy spread of disease.

Then came Ildefons Cerdà, a civil engineer, with an interesting idea (the Eixample, as he called it). He proposed a new city district beyond the walls, but not just any city district. His idea was to approach urban design scientifically with a layout featuring wide streets so that every building within the district would be able to enjoy the light of the sun. His plan also included plenty of green spaces to make the air more breathable and to provide areas for socialization. And, he also envisioned the district’s iconic octagonal buildings, which would provide more visibility at street crossings.

The game of Barcelona drops the players into the mid-19th century during this expansion. As the game begins, the district is little more than a blueprint composed of building plots, the roads running alongside them, and the intersections where these roads meet. Each of these roads has an action associated with it. On their turns, players draw citizen tiles…

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Between Two Cities is a wonderful game that only gets better when you add the elements of the Capitals expansion. Since I have already covered gameplay in the initial review, this article will cover how the expansion adds to, and changes, the base game.

What’s in the Box?

Between Two Cities is an excellent game on its own. This means that my first question when I became aware of the expansion was: what can they add that would make this game more fun? My first thoughts were empty – I really could not think of much I would want to see added to the game.

The main issue was that the mix of the tiles in the base game was good. I mean really good. If you add in more of those tiles, then they would need to be in the same proportions as the base game, which means why bother? If you were to introduce a bunch of new types of tiles, then they would dilute the originals, making each type harder to accumulate and get good scores.

Nothing came to mind for me. Luckily, Stonemaier Games was not relying on me to come up with new ideas! This is what you get with the expansion:

• Landscape Mats
• Civic Building tiles
• District Cards and scoring tiles

…

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Chénier La Salle’s biography includes international travel, law degrees, marriage, children, and the promotion of Canadian beef. It also includes one board game design, a game which happens to hold a special place in my heart. 

New York 1901 is one of those early titles in my collection, a title that showed me something more than the games of my childhood and whispered to me the sweet nothings of the marriage of mechanics and theme. Area control, polyominoes, variable public objectives—these were relatively new ideas for me. We owned a few modern games with thematic potential in those days, but New York 1901 was the most approachable of the bunch and the one that saw the table the most. 

The artwork from Vincent Dutrait brought the early 20th century vibe to life. We had been to New York City several times for various reasons, giving the setting a bit of heft in our collective memory. The mechanics captured a time of building and rebuilding with pizazz. The game just had a spirit that we enjoyed and still do. 

Building a bigger, better apple

New York 1901 takes place over several blocks of lower Manhattan. Players each have a collection of polyomino buildings in bronze, silver, and gold, representative of the development of the age. The aim is to…

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Sunrise Lane is a beefed-up reimplementation of designer Reiner Knizia’s 2012 game Rondo. On your turn, you either discard cards to build buildings, or you draw two cards. Building is nice and simple: the height and location of the building have to match the cards you’re discarding. If I discard one blue card, for example, I would place a single-story building on a blue space. If I discard three red cards, I would place a three-story building on a red space.

There are two restrictions on building. You have to build adjacent to either the central space or to other buildings, and, while you can build more than one building every turn, they have to continue in a single line from the first building you place on that turn. No popping up all over the board in a single go, and a good thing too; that would be far too powerful.

The bulk of your points come from building placements. Each space has not only a color, but a value, indicated by the number of pips on the space. You score that number multiplied by the number of stories on your building. Once…

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Between Two Cities is a tile-drafting/tile-laying game in which you are collaboratively building two cities, one with the player on your left and one with the player on your right. Each player is attempting to make the livability (point value) of each of their cities as high as possible. In the end, each player’s score is the point value of the lower-valued city upon which they were working.

How to Play Between Two Cities

The seating arrangement is rather important. Before play begins, a card is drawn randomly from a deck of fifteen cards that will describe how to seat the players. Players could be arranged based on their birthdays, the length of their hair, or even a number they were asked to write down. Once everyone is seated, a set of duplex tiles (pieces that have two tiles on them and are played as a unit) are shuffled and placed face down on the table. The remaining singlet tiles are shuffled and placed face down in the box.

Each tile represents a type of building (Factory, House, Office, Park, Shop, or Tavern). When complete, each city will be made up of 16 tiles in a 4×4 grid – while playing, no tile may be placed in such a…

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I’m a big fan of Alban Viard.

Viard, the designer of Clinic: Deluxe Edition, strikes me as the kind of guy who is probably a mad genius. The rulebook for Clinic made me laugh out loud and it was the somewhat cynical approach to the hospital design simulation that made me fall in love with a super-complex system that was one of the hardest games to table in my collection.

I’ll play anything that Viard designs. With that in mind, I reached out to Clay Ross at Capstone Games to see if I could snag a review copy of the Nano9Games series. Viard built a small-box collection of three solo-only games featuring different themes and a gimmick—each of the three volumes features nine cards, nine dice, and nine cubes in a small bookshelf-style box.

I decided to play the games in order, each time on a different trip I had scheduled for personal travel this fall. Below, I’ll share a few thoughts on each box and an overall verdict!

Nano9Games Volume 1: Railways

Railways is a high-score challenge; you are tasked with building an efficient railway network over 120 years (12 rounds, each spanning a decade) to deliver passengers and increase capital and profits.

There are…

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If you know me, you know I’m a fan of Carcassonne. I talked about the base game at length with Andrew Holmes, and many of the early expansions were the basis for my earliest reviews posted on Boardgamegeek. I recently had a chance to sit down to play and review Mists Over Carcassonne. Heck, I even reviewed My First Carcassonne.

My Carcassonne journey has been a pretty good one, but there’s always been one thing I’ve regretted. Back in 2012, six mini-expansions were released for the game, each containing a single tile for a seventh expansion. Life circumstances, coupled with the FLGS I frequented closing its doors, conspired to prevent me from acquiring them at the time. Before I knew it, the opportunity was gone. The aftermarket prices on Ebay and the GeekMarket were obscene. Those six mini-expansions were seemingly forever out of my reach.

And then Carcassonne Big Box 4 came along later that year and changed all of that. Ever since then, I’ve longed to get my hands on one of the Big Boxes, but the price was always just slightly too high for me to justify the purchase, considering I already had everything else in the box. But eleven years later, my copy of Carcassonne has expanded beyond the limits of…

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During my Gen Con meeting with the team at Czech Games Edition, our friend and marketing contact Nathan walked me through the upcoming game Kutná Hora: The City of Silver.

The cover art was…less than breathtaking. Still, Nathan’s brief dive into the rules and walkthrough of how turns worked had me excited. And I love economic games, particularly gems like Brick & Mortar, Power Grid, and Stockpile where prices can change from round to round.

Kutná Hora has a dynamic market at its core, so that was all I needed to get on board. Across plays at two and three players, only one question now remains:

Should I only play Kutná Hora with the full four-player count?

What’s Mine is Mine is That Part of the Mine

Kutná Hora is a 2-4 player area control, hand management, city building, and market manipulation game that plays in about 30 minutes per player. Set in the 13th and 14th century, players must build the real-life city of Kutná Hora (about 30 miles east of Prague) from scratch, including building up its industry and mining the silver and ore deposits located in and below the city. As leaders of a selection of three of the city’s six guilds,…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2022’s New York City, his 35th game.

New York City*, the third game in the lauded Stefan Feld City Collection (SFCC), is a re-implementation of 2013’s Rialto. Of the first four games in the SFCC, New York City is the only one to not also include a solitaire variant or any kind of bonus modules. But that doesn’t mean the game hasn’t seen an almost complete overhaul.

In the following review, I am going to focus solely on What’s Changed?, and What’s New? To fully understand how these changes and additions affect the gameplay, it helps to have an understanding of how Rialto is played. If you’re unfamiliar with the source material, I suggest you go check…

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When a game wins a major tabletop award before you review it, you don’t really have much ground to stand on.

The world already agrees that Dorfromantik: The Board Game (2022, Pegasus Spiele) is at least a very good game, because it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres over the summer.

While there’s always commentary on the games that win this award (in part because there’s always a debate on the shifting sands around the weight of games in this category), time is usually kind to the winners. If you look at the list of winners since CATAN won in 1995, almost every single one is still being celebrated today. This year alone, I’ve been at game nights where we played Just One, Codenames, Pictures, Dominion, Hanabi, Azul, and Kingdomino. Many of these made repeat appearances.

Those are all amazing games. Dorfromantik: The Board Game is no different. That’s because it combines an incredibly simple teach and infinite replayability in a package that can be played solo, multiplayer, campaign-style, and/or as a high-score challenge.

I get it now. Dorfromantik is really good.

Spelling Error

Dorfromantik is a cooperative tile-laying game for 1-6 players, although given the ruleset, I decided to just…

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