Two of my friends love Innovation. They play it constantly. Both backed the new edition while it was on crowdfunding, and every time I receive a review copy in the mail, they vibrate with the possibility that it might be Innovation Ultimate.

I sat down with one of them to give Aegean Sea a crack, since Carl Chudyk designs are often a bear to learn. It’s not that his games are all that complicated; the issue is that they are deeply uninterested in any notion of “intuitive.” That isn’t intended as a criticism. He’s a unique designer, and his idiosyncrasies are what make him distinct, but it is a barrier to entry. Anyone who’s ever tried to teach Mottainai knows.

Even with experience, we found ourselves struggling. On top of the unintuitive rules, there are no labels anywhere for the various and numerous tucked cards. Chudyk loves a tucked card, and in all of his other designs, the locations in which those cards get tucked. Not so here. What’s more, this is Chudyk’s first asymmetrical design.

There are five groups in the game—Athens, Crete, Ephesus, Rhodes, and Sparta—and each plays differently. Not like Root, not in mechanically distinct ways, but…

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There are games with flawed rulebooks. There are games with unfortunate misprints and iconographies that make you second guess yourself and the production. There are even games whose endings seem fraught with inconsistencies that make you wonder if you’ve missed something very important. When a game, rarely, boasts all three, I have no choice but to ask: 

Why do I like The Flow of History as much as I do? 

Get thee a government

The game’s sixty-seven cards are divided into six types and span five Ages. The heart of The Flow of History is the bidding mechanism by which players gain these cards. Players declare their intentions by investing resource tokens on a card and waiting for the investment to clear on a forthcoming turn. Opponents have the option of sniping that investment, though, compensating the investor and instantly claiming the card. This means investments may not be investments at all, but rather deft machinations designed to entice neighbors to act rashly in exchange for compensations and a smug sense of control. 

When an investment succeeds, the goofy iconography kicks in. Potentially, cards have icons in three places: across the bottom, in the center, and under a magnifying glass north of center. Upon acquisition, the icon depicted under…

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I knew it by the end of my single Cycle demo play of Voidfall during SPIEL 2022: Voidfall was going to be great.

The only question I needed to answer, after backing the Galactic Box deluxe edition of the game and playing it 14 times—once for each of the included factions—was whether this was going to be my favorite game of 2023 or not.

I’ve already written 9,840 words about Voidfall, so if you have specific questions about individual parts of my experience, check out the links at the bottom. In this review, I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on my Voidfall experience.

1. Voidfall is the best design Mindclash has ever produced. Although I enjoy two of their other designs quite a bit, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion and Anachrony, Voidfall feels incredibly well balanced, deeper than their other games, and is tied to a core that still excites me so many plays into the experience.
2. In terms of the marriage of gameplay to production, Voidfall is the hands-down winner in this category for 2023. If this were a metric tracked by BGG, it would get a perfect score. As a value proposition, Voidfall has no peer. You could play it 100 times and still not…

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If you have a chance to review any of my previous content, you’ll see a lot of glowing words attached to the reviews of games designed or co-designed by Simone Luciani.

To me, Luciani is gaming royalty. Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar are some of the best games I have ever played. Luciani’s “T” game release with Daniele Tascini, Tiletum, was my pick for the best game of 2022.

With all of that in mind, there was never a doubt that I would play Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods (2023, Cranio Creations), a co-design with Danilo Sabia. Sabia and Luciani also designed Rats of Wistar, which will soon make its way to gamers in the US.

I’m not going to lie to you: Anunnaki didn’t hit it out of the park, to use a baseball reference. It’s not that the game is bad—in fact, it is occasionally interesting, particularly with its action selection mechanism—but it is very likely that my standards for Luciani games have gotten too high. Grand Austria Hotel is the best Euro-style game I have ever played; as a film buff, when you love a film director and that director puts out middling fare, you…

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I ran into another reviewer at SPIEL 2023, and he discussed his meeting with Portal Games about their 2023-2024 lineup.

“I played Imperial Miners during the meeting. Between the teach and playing a full game, it was all done in about 22 minutes.”

Not believing that this was possible—an Imperial Settlers-adjacent game in 20 minutes!!—I made my way to the Portal team to talk shop. Then we dove into the game. We stopped two rounds short of the normal end condition because I botched one of the rules…and that was around the 18-minute mark of our meeting.

Successive plays of Imperial Miners back home yielded similar timing. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get a game to last longer than 30 minutes. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m obsessed with time. I’m a parent who gets limited chances to play a lot of games. As much fun as the act of playing games is, I want maximum fun per minute. One of my favorite gaming highlights from 2021 occurred when I got a group together to play six games in seven hours. All the games were full of rich choices and abundant laughter.

Imperial Miners is fun. It’s not legendary, but it manages both its aspirations and my expectations exceptionally well for a quick tableau builder.

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What is Gaia Project?

Gaia Project is the sequel to the highly successful Terra Mystica. But whereas Terra Mystica had a fantasy theme, Gaia Project takes place in outer space in the far future of the “Terra Mystica universe.” Players try to settle and terraform new worlds, advance their technology, create multi-planet federations, and achieve in- and end-game objectives. The player who accumulates the most Victory Points (VPs) by the end of the sixth-round wins.

[caption id="attachment_284595" align="aligncenter" width="533"] Set up for a 3-player game.[/caption]

Each round of Gaia Project is played in 4 phases. During the Income Phase, players look at their Faction Board, Round Booster tile, tech tiles, and position of their Player Tokens on the Research Board. Wherever they see the palm-up hand symbol they gain those resources. In the Gaia Phase players complete any Gaiaforming operations they may have started the previous turn. The Actions Phase is the heart of the game where players take turns performing one main action. Once a player passes, they turn in their Round Booster tile and take one of the other available tiles. The first player to take the Pass action also takes the first player token. Finally, the Clean-Up Phase resets everything for the next round.

Mechanics and Features

…

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boon (n.): a gift; a benefit enjoyed, blessing, advantage, a thing to be thankful for: sometimes without even the notion of giving, but always with that of something one has no claim to, or that might have been absent.

lake (n.): a large body of water entirely surrounded by land; properly, one sufficiently large to form a geographical feature. Or, in some board games, a syllable of misdirection in the title of a game about traveling along a river.

The thematic arc of Boonlake takes place on a normal sized board featuring a river that apparently travels around the region of Boon Lake (not pictured). Each player operates from their own ranch, a holding tank of production sites, inhabitants, cattle, houses, and settlements with ample room for a dozen modernizations that unleash beefy abilities. The game is a concoction of exploring the map, harvesting goodies, creating a tableau of project cards, and establishing fruitful settlements.

The real game of Boonlake, however, takes place on a small board holding seven action tiles. Each tile is a progression of activity that begins with the current player and radiates out to involve everyone at the table. Once a tile is employed, it is placed at the bottom of the board’s track and pushed up to close the gap. In this way, there…

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Expanding Your Horizons

Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (henceforth simply referred to as Eclipse) retools the original space-faring 4X game. For many people in the hobby, the words “space” and “4X” are synonymous with Twilight Imperium, the de facto king of the genre. Rather than aiming for a full day or weekend of politicking and gaming, Eclipse condenses the interstellar 4X experience down to a few hours of tight, fraught conquest.

Each game of Eclipse is fairly simple in structure. Up to six players take control of one of seven different civilizations. These include six distinct civilizations with specific strengths and weaknesses, or the “default” Terran civilization on the back of each species’ board. Each turn, you take one of six actions or pass. Play continues the turn around the table until all players have passed, at which point, the next round begins. At the end of eight rounds, the civilization with the most victory points is declared the winner.

The six actions represent the core paths your civilizations can take to score points. 

Exploring allows you to reveal new tiles in the galaxy and place them in strategic ways to either connect to the larger galaxy or seal yourself off and turtle away, and offers the…

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Imperium: Classics (and its sibling Imperium: Legends) are deck-building civilization-building games with highly asymmetric factions. Read on to see if Imperium constructs a mighty empire, or becomes lost to the annals of time in our review of the Imperium series.

(Note: Imperium: Classics and Imperium: Legends are two versions of the same game, but each with different sets of factions. I will henceforth refer to both collectively as Imperium unless otherwise specified.)

Imperium is a combination deck-building, civilization-building game coming from the design combo of Nigel Buckle and David Turczi. If the name David Turczi sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s well-known for both his complex Euro games like Anachrony, his work on the “T” series (Tekhenu, Tawantinsuyu, etc.) as well as his prolific work in designing solo modes for dozens of other games like Kanban EV, So You’ve Been Eaten, Mosaic: A Story of Civilization, Tiletum and many more.

Although my excitement was high for a seemingly oddball combo of a civ game mixed with a deck-building game, I have to admit that based on Turczi’s design track record, I was more than a little trepidatious going into my first play of Imperium. Ultimately, my love for civilization games, deck-building, and player asymmetry overruled my concerns about complexity. Speaking of complexity, here’s…

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Scythe. Scythe. Scythe.

I love the game Scythe. I love playing it at all player counts. Heck, I love it so much that when I first bought the game in 2017, I played it solo when solo play was completely unheard of in my house. Scythe is an incredible production—my first Stonemaier game—and it is so rich with strategic options based on the asymmetry of the available factions.

The Scythe player mats were one of my first experiences with a dual-layer board that was all mine. Those mechs, the public scoring mechanic tied to popularity, the way bonuses might trigger when a neighbor took actions, the concept that combat was sometimes a threat, and other times combat was a massive ball fake. All of this came together so well with the world building; the artwork, that striking cover image on the box, the flavor text for the encounter and objective cards.

Scythe is so good! The only reason I don’t have my copy any more is that my gaming circles have moved on. Playing the base game 50+ times (between the physical and the digital version), then playing expansion content, then doing the legacy campaign The Rise of Fenris…even I had to admit I was Scythe-d out by the time COVID arrived.

But I still love…

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John D. Clair appears to be everywhere these days. One of the most prolific designers of the last three years had his hands on many of AEG’s most popular titles, like Space Base, Ready Set Bet, Mystic Vale, and this year’s Dead Reckoning.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I stopped by the Brotherwise Games booth at Gen Con 2022 to see a new title on one of their demo tables designed by someone named… John D. Clair. I just assumed that Clair only designed for AEG, so that was surprise #1. Surprise #2 was that Brotherwise, best known for lighter games such as Boss Monster and Overboss, was bringing a Clair game, along with his design pedigree, into the fold.

Empire’s End, Clair’s latest creation, has players attempting to stave off the end of civilization. The game features some interesting “Clair” moments that’ll remind you of Space Base or No Thanks. But Empire’s End is a game all its own.

Christopher and Johnny O’Neal (the brothers behind Brotherwise) were kind enough to send a preview copy of Empire’s End ahead of the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Now that I’ve gotten a few plays in, Empire’s End has some interesting moments, but these moments are upended by a game that, at this point, runs…

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Back Copan: Dying City on Kickstarter

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If you’re on our site, then you probably know the brand: CATAN Studio, the world of CATAN, all the CATAN board games…at this point, CATAN is synonymous with “the hobby.”

So, let’s not get bogged down in what CATAN is, or what it stands for in our space. CATAN: Dawn of Humankind (2022, CATAN Studio) is the newest addition and is a reimplementation of 2002’s Settlers of the Stone Age.

This new version has created two questions that I still can’t answer:

1. Why the game’s title places CATAN in all capital letters, and more importantly,
2. What is the market for CATAN: Dawn of Humankind (CATAN DoH)?

It’s the market for this game that will be the focus of our article. By the end, I think I have a guess, but I welcome your insights!

It’s All About the Flint

CATAN DoH is definitely a CATAN game. The first player to earn 10 points wins. There are hexes, resources, towns, and two dice. Settling on hexes that have higher chances of producing is still a good thing, and rolling a seven is still a bad thing, especially if you want to get resources or you don’t have anyone to rob. There’s still a robber, too. This time…

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