Let Freedom Ring

Monopoly tends to be a hot-button board game to discuss. Most people grew up with at least one copy floating around somewhere between their family and extended family, and it has remained ubiquitous since its release. There are hundreds of special versions and variations of the game. Famously, Monopoly originated as The Landlord’s Game, designed by American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie. The game wasn’t intended to be a solid bit of game mechanics as much as it was intended to be a statement piece in support of an economic philosophy known as Georgism.

I am not a smart man. If you ask me how the economy works, most times, I would stare at you like a deer in the headlights, grunt, and shrug. But this bit of context is important because Freedom Rings is similar to Monopoly in so many ways. It wears its influence on its sleeve. It’s just that this game happens to be based on a different economic philosophy, taking influence from Stephen Taft’s 2015 book A True Free Market: Conversations on Gaining Liberty and Justice Through Economics. It’s unclear how involved Stephen was in the creation of the game itself, as there are no credits listed on the box or in the rulebook (other than the artist), but the opening…

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I love an archival project. Publisher Eagle-Gryphon Games went through the notes of legendary designer Sid Sackson, creator of Acquire and Can’t Stop amongst others, and selected four of what he considered his best unpublished games. The results are here, in the two volumes of The Sackson Legacy Collection, which combine those four unpublished games with new printings of two Sackson obscurities.

There is no publisher I would rather have do a project like this. Eagle-Gryphon’s production is always exemplary, luxuriant without being fussy. With Eagle-Gryphon’s typical thick box stock and vibrant colors, these are games that would look good on a bookshelf. I suspect that’s exactly what the team had in mind. All they’re missing, as far as I’m concerned, is a spine number.

I love a spine number.

Blue

The blue volume includes three previously unpublished titles: I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game, Banana Blitz, and Scope.

I’m the Boss!: The Dice Game is a negotiation game inspired by Sackson’s own I’m the Boss!. Players take turns rolling dice, attempting to move to the top of various Expertise tracks while jockeying to negotiate different deals. Any time a player earns enough stars to be the Boss, they…

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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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Games are a conversation. In this case, the conversation starts with someone asking how to split up a bunch of money and ends with someone yelling, “I’m the boss!”

I’m the Boss! Which I’m going to not abbreviate so you have to imagine someone yelling it at you every time you read it, is a negotiation game from the 90s from prolific designer Sid Sackson, who is the creator of Acquire, what I consider to be one of the most important branches in game design. He’s also part of a cute BBC documentary that lives on a weird corner of the internet.

If you like your negotiation games light, filled with regular injections of drama, and wrapped up in a little more than an hour, this is the game for you.

The premise of I’m the Boss! is CORPORATION. We’re all departments in a corporation of some kind, business people doing business things. On a turn, you either try to make a deal on the space you’re on, or you roll the dice, moving the deal marker the number of spaces rolled, and then you try to make a deal at the new location, or you draw three cards and your turn is complete. Once a certain number of deals are completed, the game is over.

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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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In 1997, Uwe Rosenberg teamed up with the publisher AMIGO to launch an empire. An empire built on beans.

It wasn’t Rosenberg’s first design effort, but it was his first to get picked up by a publisher, and it was a smash hit. It was so well received, in fact, that it was nominated for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres that same year. If Uwe Rosenberg wasn’t on publishers’ radars at that point, he certainly was now.

There’s no denying that Uwe’s masterpiece Bohnanza is a juggernaut. In the 20+ years since its initial release, Bohnanza has spawned multiple expansions, spin-offs, and rethemes. It’s even been redesigned into different formats: the board game version, Bean Trader, in 2002 and the card and dice version, Würfel Bohnanza (later re-released as Bohnanza: Das Würfelspiel in 2022), in 2012. Surprisingly, Bohnanza hasn’t received the roll and write treatment yet, but if you ask me, it’s just a matter of time.

In Bohnanza, you’re a bean farmer tending to your crops, trying to harvest them when the time is right for the greatest profit. If you’re able to earn more coins than your competitors before the game’s end, you win.

Setup

A game of Bohnanza is set up thusly:

Shuffle all the…

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As part of an upcoming entry in our Publisher Profile series, I am playing games in the Red Raven Games catalog. I recently received a review copy of the first game in Red Raven’s “Arzium” series of adventure titles, 2015’s Above and Below. (Near and Far came next, then Now or Never arrived in 2022.)

Now that I’ve played Megaland, Eight-Minute Empire, and Knight Fall, one thing is clear: Red Raven drives the narrative elements and the world building in their games as well as any publisher in the business. I haven’t played Sleeping Gods, but that game rocketed up the BGG Top 100 list at an incredible pace. My colleague Jesse Fletcher loved the game and many of my friends believe Sleeping Gods is the best game Red Raven has ever produced.

Knowing all of this, I was excited to get Above and Below to the table. It’s a dinosaur in game years—eight years old!! It’s tough to get some of my friends to play games that were released even a year ago, so an eight-year-old game took some selling. But I coerced enough people to the table over the last few weeks to get some plays in, and I cobbled together some thoughts on the game below.

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I would need a Wayback to verify, but I believe Compounded was the first modern era board game to enter my collection. Before Ticket to Ride: Europe or New York 1901—even before Catan (obviously I’m a supremely late bloomer). Certainly before Everdell carried me through the tabletop floodgates, there was this little chemistry engine that could.

My wife is a biochemist and we’ve always sought out games with a scientific setting, but I would hardly label this little box a gateway game. I specifically remember wondering what I had gotten us into as I stickered the wooden discs and punched the tiny little diamond-shaped chits. After laboring through that first play, the game sat on our shelf for quite some time while we tried to develop a mental category for what we had experienced.

Compounded is a game, however, that keeps finding its way back to our table. We weren’t ready for its even moderate complexity the first time. After playing some more suitable welcoming games and familiarizing ourselves with modern mechanics, everything started to make sense, but I’m still not sure I’d say we enjoyed the next few attempts. Having now played hundreds more titles and grasped a bit more of gaming and ourselves as gamers, we’ve found the comfort zone and I’ve grown to really…

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Quo Vadis? is a minor classic, a cult affair. In my experience, it is not the sort of title people speak of with hushed reverence so much as a warm fondness. Even its fans would not argue, I don’t think, that the game is an out-and-out masterpiece. Nonetheless, it has its admirers. First published in 1992, and entirely out of print since 2005, the game hasn’t had much opportunity for reappraisal.

Arizona-based publisher Bitewing Games is doing something about that, bringing Quo Vadis? back in a beautiful new edition under the title Zoo Vadis. This is not a straight reprint. Bitewing and Knizia have worked together to shake up the status Quo. They’re dropping the question mark and adding zoo animals. If Quo Vadis? asks “Where are you going?,” Zoo Vadis calmly tells you, “You are going to the zoo.”

The Rules of the Game

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11:57

I cannot stand the social deduction game Werewolf, nor its dominant variant One Night Ultimate Werewolf. In both, players are assigned secret roles as the denizens of the unfortunate village where the events take place. Perhaps you will be the Troublemaker, swapping player roles while others sleep, or the Insomniac, who wakes up in the middle of the night to check their role. You may well be the werewolf, terrorizing the town and ripping innocents to shreds.

The goal of the game depends on your role, but most of the villagers want to figure out who the werewolf is and execute them. The game alternates between Days, when players discuss and accuse and vote to execute, and Nights, when players close their eyes and specific individuals are prompted to perform actions corresponding to their roles. One player is the Narrator, a thankless position that has been replaced in recent years by an app, who times the Days and leads the other players through the script for the Night phase.

Werewolf is extremely popular, and I’m happy for those who enjoy it. Just don’t make me play. There aren’t many games I would pass up…

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I knew it when I first saw the press release: Free Radicals, an asymmetric Eurogame from designer Nathan Woll and published by WizKids, was going to be intriguing.

That’s because gameplay is unique: every player is playing their own, separate game. In other games, that might mean everyone is competitively trying to beat a shared puzzle.

Using a mix of 10 factions, everyone is playing their own puzzle on their own player board with its own mechanic—polyomino puzzles, programming turns in advance, hand management, pick-up and deliver, fog of war mixed with an action point system. The list goes on and on!

It’s fair to say that Free Radicals borrows liberally from other games. It’s also fair to say that you are mostly staring at your own puzzle. Does the game work?

We Can Share (A Little)

Some of the gameplay elements in Free Radicals are shared. Victory points are tracked in one place on the main board. On that same board, there is a Knowledge track in full view of all players. A token that tracks all 12 rounds is also front and center.

There are Buildings pre-printed on the board, too. Buildings are worker placement spots, although without wooden meeples…

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