Before affixing my critical goggles in place, I will say from the beginning: Redwood has been one of the most refreshing titles to hit our table in months. Christophe Raimbault’s (Colt Express) design takes the occasional monotony of board game acquisition by the ears and tosses it out on the doorstep with style. I do not know what inspired him to reassign the mechanics of a wargame for use with nature photography, but it just works. Redwood utilizes templates—components of specific shape and size—both for movement and a wholly different sort of shooting, creating a fairly immersive experience. Refreshing. It’s refreshing. 

Sing as you raise your bow

The game is an exercise in spatial estimation. Players select two templates under a strict look-but-don’t-touch restriction, one a ribbon for movement, the other a range-finder for their camera lens. The rules make no explicit prohibition of the ol’ thumb-and-forefinger measurement, but exploiting that technicality saps the game of its most thrilling anticipations. Redwood’s distinct pleasure is in the success and failure of the eyes—and only the eyes—in predicting possibilities. 

Having committed to the template, players then employ their selections, first moving the photographer into place, then capturing the moment, which is occasionally only the shattered dream of the intended moment, on…

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As a fan of the game Tokaido—a game where one of the things you are trying to do is to create these beautiful panoramas—when it was suggested that I check out the game Four Gardens, where panoramas are the focus, I jumped at the chance! Of course, when an aspect of a game shifts to become the entirety of a game, the mechanics will become a bit more involved. This is as it should be. What is needed, however, is for the process to result in a proper payoff. Does Four Gardens deliver?

Setup

The central feature of Four Gardens is a four-level pagoda that needs to be assembled before you can play. This only takes a few minutes. The instructions are clear, and when you are done (despite the size of this thing), the pagoda stores easily within the box thanks to a fairly well designed insert.

When playing, the pagoda is a presence! It dominates the table in the early game, and there is rarely a moment when the players are not looking this thing over, because the central mechanism of this game is dependent upon this feature. The pagoda is not something that is there just to be there and look pretty (like, for instance, the Evertree in Everdell). The pagoda is a pretty…

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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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As I started to make my way through the instruction manual for Five Peaks, from designer Adam Strzelecki and publisher Trefl, I quickly realized that I’d seen this game before. “Oh,” I said, “this is Concordia.”

At this point in my life, having played so many games over the years that my mind is a free-associating cloud of mechanisms and rules, I often read rulebooks and think of comparative benchmarks. It’s only natural. Despite the rumors, I too am human, and we love patterns. I don’t believe I have become uncharitable about this, though. It isn’t often that I look at a game and think, “Oh, this is [insert title].” The bar for that remains high.

Five Peaks clears it with ease.

It uses the same hand management system as Concordia. Each turn, you play one card from your hand and perform the action shown on the card. These cards allow you to move about the board, or collect resources, or buy new cards from the market. Any cards that you play stay down on the table until you play the card that lets you pick up all your cards.

Five Peaks uses the same resource management system as Concordia. You’re restricted to ten items, represented by the ten slots on your individual board. You have to manage…

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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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I don’t generally care for worker placement. Games that focus on that mechanic generally don’t have space for a whole lot of the particular kind of creativity that I look for. It doesn’t help that worker placement is usually paired with resource management, which I find tiresome. I would have had a tough time in the hobby ca. 2012.

Each genre on its own encourages and rewards efficiency above anything else, and that’s simply not my vegetable. The other problem, which is related, is the lack of interactivity. Yes, obviously, you can take someone else’s spot, but that doesn’t quite do it for me. There’s something too black-and-white, the course corrections are too obvious.

Barrage, by designers Tommaso Battista and Simone Luciani and published in 2019 by Cranio Creations, is a worker placement and resource management game. From the above, you’d have to assume that this isn’t promising. I myself was unsure.

Miracle of miracles: I love Barrage.

When the Levee Breaks

It’s the 1930s. The world has consumed all available fossil fuels. The sole remaining power source adequate for the Industrial Revolution is hydroelectric power. Each player is a nationalized hydroelectric company attempting to control power production in the Alps. Over the course of five rounds, you build dams, conduits, and powerhouses with which to produce power.

…

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Undergrove, the latest title from Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, is on its way to crowdfunding in the coming days. Players take up the role of douglas fir trees attempting to spread their seedlings about a mushroom forest replete with elemental resources.

The game itself is a tile-laying, area and resource management affair in which players are cooperatively building the game’s engine in the form of the forest floor and then determining the most fruitful ways to exploit the fungi for dendrological gains.

Remember this is a late prototype, so the descriptions here are only relevant to the pre-campaign conversation. My aim is to give you a basic understanding and point out the way the game feels at this moment in the process. 

Gameplay

Undergrove takes place on an expanding map of mushroom tiles with scalloped corners. These scalloped corners leave cutouts to place seedling discs. The seedlings then have access to lay roots on each of the four adjoining tiles, gaining access to their abilities and, hopefully, their victory points. During the game, the seedlings absorb carbon from the mushrooms, growing to eventually become small trees.

For the most part, the abilities on the mushroom tiles allow for the exchange of resources and the expedition of this absorption…

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The world needs more board games born of nature documentaries. I guess it wouldn’t hurt if designers more often tried on the animus of quarreling creatures, either.

Kelp is the first design credit for Carl Robinson, developed and published with Wonderbow Games. Deeply asymmetrical in design, Kelp pits a shark against a octopus amid a kelp forest, a two-player salt-water game of cat and mouse. Deck building versus bag building. Cards versus dice. A Lego (for moment, anyway) vs. Mahjongg.

The Octopus

The octopus's game is one of survival. The kelp forest is divided into a 3x3 grid, each containing a standing tile facing the octopus player. One tile is the octopus. The others are divided among shells, traps, and (potentially) octopus food.

Players choose two actions in any combination: play a card, draw back up to the hand limit, or discard to hide a revealed tile. Each card bears a cost of revealing zero, one, or two tiles. The actions include learning (adding cards to the deck), swapping adjacent tiles, shuffling tiles randomly, hiding tiles, and eating.

The octopus's aims are twofold: outlast and/or eat. If the shark reaches exhaustion in the hunt, the octopus is victorious. Eating all four food options also results in instant octo-victory. In…

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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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In Shapers of Gaia (Wizkids, 2023), up to three players take on the role of Shapers who work with the Caretaker robot to restore a planet with biomes and populate them with animals. You’ll place tiles, collect and pay resources, and place animals from your player board to unlock unique abilities. Collect more Prestige than your opponents and you’ll join the Caretaker as a permanent guardian of Gaia.

[caption id="attachment_287583" align="aligncenter" width="454"] Shapers of Gaia: The Box[/caption]

Setup

Place the hexagonal common board in the center of the table so it’s accessible by all players. Place the Vault tile in the center of the board, followed by the three starting water tiles, placed along the edges of the Vault hex tile such that there are spaces between each tile. Randomly place the three starting biome tiles in the gaps between the water tiles. Then place the green Caretaker on the water tile with the caretaker icon.

Separate the biome hex tiles based on the number on the back (I, II, and III) and shuffle each set of numbered tiles separately. Place the III tiles face down on the tile icon on the board, then place the II tiles atop those. Finally, place the I tiles on top of…

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After a barren millennium, Rauha is once again ready to host life. As a Shaman entrusted with creating one of the planet’s diverse environments, you must select and place the best biomes to, well, score the most Life Energy points and win the game.

Let’s get the game to the table, shall we?

[caption id="attachment_287568" align="aligncenter" width="544"] Rauha: The Box[/caption]

Setup

In the center of the table, place the central scoring board. Around the board place the two side pieces, and in those side pieces place the matching Divine Entity tiles. 

[caption id="attachment_287567" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The scoring board set up with all seven deities[/caption]

Each player takes the Energy Token and Avatar of their chosen color, as well as a common player board.

[caption id="attachment_287564" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The standard player board[/caption]

Their Energy Token goes on the starting spot of the central scoring board to track their Life Energy; their Avatar goes above the upper left square on their board, just above the moon icon. Give each player four crystals.

[caption id="attachment_287566" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

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What is Dominant Species?

Dominant Species (DS) is a game of adaptation and survival in the face of an encroaching ice age. Players take on the role of 1 of 6 major animal classes: mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, arachnids, and insects. They select and execute actions to improve their animals’ chances of survival and dominance over other species. The player who accumulates the most victory points (VPs) when the ice age reaches its zenith wins and is crowned the dominant species.

[caption id="attachment_286319" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Setup for a 3-player game[/caption]

Each game turn is divided into 3 phases. The first of these is the Planning Phase, where players take turns placing an Action Pawn (AP) on an empty action space on the board’s Action Display. In the Execution Phase, starting from the top action and working down and left-to-right, players take actions removing their APs as they do so. Finally, during the Reset Phase, players check if any species has gone extinct, determine which player has the greatest survival, and then prepare the board for the next turn.

The playing area consists of hexagonal spaces on which players can place Wanderlust Tiles depicting different types of terrain. During the game, players will place their species cubes onto these tiles, as well…

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Meadow is one of my favourite games of 2021, full of tight mechanics that tell surprisingly powerful narratives about how organisms interact and food webs are constructed. It’s an incredibly relaxing game that can somehow also take up all available space in your brain. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out my review here.

As someone who likes board game expansions, I was excited when Meadow: Downstream was announced and then slightly hesitant when I learned just what it involved – how would all the new stuff impact the gorgeously balanced ecosystem of the base game?

Is this an expansion worth canoe-dling with or is it simply oar-ful? Let’s find out!

A River Runs Through It

Expansions come in many types, from those that slot into an existing system with barely a ripple to those that are an extra tributary joining the main flow. Downstream splashes into that second camp: the core essence of Meadow remains the same, but now there’s an additional board and type of card trickling off the edge.

The river board joins the campfire and main boards in the centre of the table, turning table space into a precious resource. A river winds down the new board to a small market of river cards and each player gains…

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