Exuding a spirit of generosity, the review copy of Vinyl: Jukebox arrived with a bonus gift inside: a copy of Vinyl: Holiday Edition. Because there are enough puns to go around when it comes to the music of the Christmas season, Eric Alvarado and the team at Talon Strikes Studios have put together an entirely new game in the spirit of everything Vinyl that has come before.

The heart of the Vinyl series is record collection. Whether it’s the original Vinyl, the Big Band edition, the Metal or 80s expansions, or the distinct and aforementioned Jukebox, each title abounds with slightly knocked off album covers and an affinity for hunting matching icons. Toss in a few colored lights and ornaments and you’re set for the Holiday Edition. 

There’s no place like home for the holidays?

In Holiday Edition, players are building shared Christmas trees to their left and right using cards that feature playful album covers and wintry icons. Each tree begins with a single card at the top, with rows of two, three, four, and two again below (because you need that trunk or the tree won’t stand upright).

Most often, a player turn involves placing one card into position on one of their shared…

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The ice high atop the mountain is melting, and it’s your job to manage the flow of the water to create safe havens for the animals who live on the mountainside. That’s River Wild from Button Shy Games.

[caption id="attachment_287573" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Button Shy wallet for River Wild[/caption]

Hey, There, Wild River

If you’re familiar with Button Shy Games it will come as no surprise that River Wild is a game that comes in a plastic wallet and is made up of a starting card, a scoring card, and 16 two-sided mountain and river cards, for a total of 18 cards.

To play, find the starting mountain top card with pink water spilling out across the full bottom edge of the card, and place it on the table, about arm’s length away. This is the top of the mountain and all your other mountain/water cards will flow ‘down’ from it along the table towards you.

[caption id="attachment_287572" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The starting mountain and river card, along with the two sides of the scoring card[/caption]

Set the scoring card off to the side. Shuffle the…

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Button Shy games have a certain set of characteristics: they are eminently portable (18 cards in a plastic wallet sized sleeve), they’re easy to teach (the rules live on a piece of paper smaller than a paperback book page), they have a surprising depth of gameplay. Super Slopes, one of the newest games from the micro-game titan certainly fits those criteria: a ski run packed with yetis, energy drinks, forest hazards, and as many points as you can grab on the way down the mountain. Let’s find out more about Super Slopes.

Super Slopes Overview

In Super Slopes you’ll build your own unique ski run by drawing cards from a shared face up display. After selecting your card you’ll place it onto your map in “bricklaying fashion”, either side of an existing card, or top and bottom offset. After each player has drawn a number of cards—dictated by player count—the game ends and scoring takes place.

Selecting a card

When cards are initially placed into the main display, they’re arranged in descending order (based on the number in the top left corner). You may only select a card whose “leg” connects to the ski run which begins at the topmost card. There are 3 exceptions to this rule, based…

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How do you rate a board game like Monikers? Much like Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind, which took an old theatre camp game and committed it to paper, Monikers is a curated rendition of an old favorite. I have always called it Salad Bowl. You may know it as The Name Game, The Hat Game, Celebrities, or a number of other options. How do you review something that’s always been there? How, exactly, does one review Charades?

A Rose by Any Other Moniker

In the traditional game, the first stage involves handing out slips of paper and pens, on which everyone writes a word. These can be famous people, events, concepts, whatever you want, really. Like most party games, the exact parameters are up to the group.

Monikers elides that. The box is full of cards with pre-printed prompts, like Oprah, The Kraken, A Russian Nesting Doll. You know, the classics. From there, the structure is identical to the original game. In lieu of pieces of paper, each player is dealt a pile of cards, from which they choose whichever appeal to them. Those cards are shuffled into a deck, which is set in the…

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Fortitude was the codename for one of the major Allied operations of World War II, with field armies attacking in Norway and Pas de Calais. The Japanese ambassador to Germany believed, before the operation, that forces would then strike across the Strait of Dover. The scale of Operation Fortitude was massive, one of the largest in military history.

You may not have heard about Operation Fortitude in school, and there’s a good reason: it was a dummy operation, made up whole cloth by Allied forces. Operation Fortitude was intended to draw Axis forces away from Normandy in preparation for D-Day. It worked.

Fortitude the game, themed after the operation, bills itself as a solo trick-taker, a fascinating proposition I’ve only encountered in For Northwood!, which I haven’t had a chance to play yet. I was immediately hooked by the idea. How do you translate the muddiness of a trick-taker, the high reactivity of the form, into a solo experience?

Mission Briefing

The goal of the game is to make your way, month by month, through 1943 and into the summer of 1944, the launch of D-Day. You and the German AI opponent take turns playing cards to nine different Tricks, evenly split between fronts in Trondheim and Calais. Each front contains four Tricks, one for each suit in the…

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The many novels of Paige Turner loom large in the collective memory of pulp enthusiasts. Academics may not make much of The Angel of Death or Land Out of Time, but collectors have a lot of love for Turner. Her brisk pacing, her sharp prose reminiscent of a less-refined Chandler, and her efficient character development have won hearts for the past seventy years.

Turner’s central gift was her ability to use tropes without leaning on them. You go into Lady of the West knowing the hardscrabble heroine from the hundreds of times you’ve encountered her before, but Turner’s prose keeps her from feeling worn. You can see her, you can’t see through her. Turner likely felt some sense of kinship for Lady. To paraphrase Lady of the West’s tagline, pulp was a man’s world, and then she came along.

Chapter I: Source Material

[caption id="attachment_275242" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The Paperback card market.[/caption]

Paige Turner is the fictitious author responsible for the equally fictitious books showcased on the box for Paperback, Tim Fowers’ 2014 deck-building word game. Paperback is openly modeled on Dominion, Donald X. Vaccarino’s massively influential design. Vaccarino is given thanks in the…

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Resplendent Nature

Are you tired of all the hubbub of city life? Sick of all the constant noise and distractions? It might do you some good to get out of the rat race for a bit and escape to the idyllic countryside. Enjoy the pristine beauty of the countryside, and remember: it’s your responsibility to ensure it stays unspoiled and lush.

Naturopolis is the latest wallet game from publisher Button Shy and is a direct successor in their Sprawlopolis line of games. This game, along with Sprawlopolis and Agropolis and their associated mini-expansions, all feature the same core gameplay mechanics. Either solo or as a duo, you’re working to play cards from an eighteen-card deck and build a landscape of some kind, with different point-scoring mechanisms. Natuoropolis, however, takes a different twist on the theme, focusing on building natural beauty and scenic landscapes, while penalizing you for tainting that beauty with too many roads and asphalt.

[caption id="attachment_272998" align="aligncenter" width="768"] All the contents of Naturopolis fit in this small, wallet-sized folio.[/caption]

Building a Better World

Those familiar with the other games in this series will recognize the gameplay pattern. Setup only takes a few moments. Shuffle all eighteen cards together and pull three off the top. One side…

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“I love my bathysphere, The Orpheus, because it carries me far below the surface of the ocean…and hopefully all the way back up!”

If you’ve ever seen a statement like this one on social media, always accompanied by the hashtag #bbbathysphere, chances are good you’re already familiar with Scott Slomiany’s Bargain Basement Bathysphere. This solo roll-and-write campaign game about piloting a ramshackle submersible made waves when it was first released in 2018 as an entry for BoardGameGeek’s solitaire print-and-play contest. Buoyed by its light campaign/legacy elements and a clever social media marketing scheme that gave players an in-game boost for publicly posting their ship’s name, Bargain Basement Bathysphere spanned two dozen individual scenarios and a whopping 60 pages that needed printing. That’s a bit much for your average gamer (and even me) so when WizKids announced in early 2022 that they would be releasing a physical version of Bargain Basement Bathysphere it felt like a great opportunity for the game’s wry, absurd humor and accessible gameplay to reach a wider audience.

[caption id="attachment_270233" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The game's three foldout maps are enticing and provide different challenges to the unwary diver.[/caption]

Splashdown

The retail version of Bargain Basement Bathysphere has been condensed from its original format without sacrificing much of the content.…

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Spring, 2020. That early timeframe with COVID was something else, right?

Lots of good. Lots of not-as-good. Lots of downright bad. And lots of uncertainty. Was it ever going to really be over?

Jamey Stegmaier, the designer of Scythe and many other tabletop winners, came up with an interesting game during COVID: a roll-and-write that takes a single element from each major Stonemaier Games release and combines them into a single product.

This output is called Rolling Realms, and it falls squarely into what I consider “heavy” roll-and-write experiences. Many other experiences have been lighter, such as Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition, the Welcome To… games, and the Clever series of games from Wolfgang Warsch.

Other roll-and-writes (or “flip-and-fill” games, which use cards instead of dice) are heavier, such as Hadrian’s Wall and Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘N Write. Rolling Realms comes close to those games (in terms of complexity) and provides a fun experience for heavy strategy gamers looking for something “light.”

I just wish it was a little shorter.

[caption id="attachment_252792" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The star of the show: those dice![/caption]

My Favorite Dice? A New Contender Emerges!

Rolling Realms plays out over 27…

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[caption id="attachment_251474" align="aligncenter" width="600"] BurgleBros Intro image[/caption]

During the COVID lockdown, my weekly gaming group moved online. As the months went by, I kept looking longingly at the Burgle Bros. box on my shelf as it slowly collected dust.

Then I discovered Burgle Bros. was on Steam! Could it compete with the tabletop experience?

Set Up

[caption id="attachment_251475" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Burgle Bros Splash screen[/caption]

The main splash screen looked promising. The tiny artwork for the character meeples had not only been used, but increased in size. This gave both the personalities and the special skills of each character a better chance to shine.

In the cardboard game, the advanced character attributes can only be unlocked after winning a game of Burgle Bros. with the standard character traits. Here, however, you can’t cheat. The advanced abilities are clearly locked and inaccessible until you win with them.

…

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I enjoy having light filler games available for those times when I need to start or finish off a night with elevated fare for my heavy strategy gamer friends. Splendor doesn’t work for most of them, but something with even the slightest amount of meat on the bone works wonders.

Floor Plan, from designer Marek Tury and Deep Water Games, is just thinky enough for this type of player. A 20-minute roll-and-write with a mix of polyomino building and a shared series of public goals used to score sheets during the game, Floor Plan places everyone in the role of an architect tasked with designing some of the most unwieldy houses you have ever seen.

Well, at least that’s what happens when I play, and I’m drawing one of the ugliest homes in history. But as long as it aligns with what these crazy clients want, Floor Plan can be a blast when everyone compares their cosmic creations at the end of a game.

Pool View, Wraparound Deck, Shaded Porch, Rock Garden

Turns in Floor Plan are pretty simple. Someone rolls 2 normal 6-sided dice. Based on the result, you can do only one of two things:

• Draw a room.…

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On May 5, 1945, in the waning days of World War II, U.S. Soldiers from the 142nd Infantry Division joined forces with French prisoners of war, Major Josef Gangl, the remains of his Wehrmacht unit, and an Austrian freedom fighter to defend Castle Itter from the advancing 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division. Castle Itter, the second solo Valiant Defense title from designer David Thompson and publisher DVG, has the player lead efforts to defend that castle until the arrival of American reinforcements.

So early in the review, and I can already hear fidgeting in the seats. “I’m here to have fun, not to learn history!” “This sounds an awful lot like a war game.” “A solo game? Poppycock!” My fellow citizens, I understand your concerns. If you are into contemporary warfare as a theme and/or you are an avid solo gamer, you’re already excited. If you aren’t, let me tell you upfront that I actively dislike contemporary warfare as a theme, and while I’m often happy to play a solo game, it’s seldom my first choice. Hear me when I tell you that Castle Itter transcends both of those caveats.

[caption id="attachment_251899" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The setup for the game.[/caption]

Gameplay

The…

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Alone. Outnumbered. No money. No safety. No future. No hope.

During the course of World War II, many people found themselves trying desperately just to survive the existential threat of the Third Reich. In France, which spent much of the war under the Nazi-friendly Vichy government, rebels formed a loose coalition of partisan groups known as Maquis. These independent cells had many different ideologies and strategies, but what they shared was a resistance to the Vichy government and more broadly to the fascist regimes throughout Europe. Bolstered in many areas by official Allied support, these guerilla fighters did their best to both sabotage their oppressors and draw attention to their cause. Though it’s debatable whether their efforts were effective, their place in history is secured by their attempts to do the right thing under impossible circumstances.

Maquis, from Side Room Games, places you in charge of one such group to see whether you can survive the fascist menace or even expel it entirely.

I Rebel, Therefore We Exist

A game of Maquis takes place over 15 rounds, each one representing a day. The goal of the game is to complete two mission cards (randomly or intentionally chosen at setup) before running out of time. Along the way you’ll have to protect your…

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