MLEM is a push-your-luck game with straightforward rules. Every round, each player loads one of their cats onto a rocket ship, starting with the commander for that mission and moving clockwise around the table. The choice of cat matters, since each has a unique power, but we’ll come back to that.

[caption id="attachment_295630" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Full team present and accounted for.[/caption]

Once the rocket is fully manned, the commander gets rolling. The mission starts with six dice, rolled all at once. The results are grouped by value—all the twos together, all the threes, and so on—and the commander decides which groups get used to move the rocket forward. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

The first: the rocket moves the sum of the values of the used dice. If the commander uses two ones and a three, the rocket moves five spaces. The second: used dice are removed from the pool for the rest of the mission, and in order to use any die showing a given value, you have to use all the dice showing that value. The third and final thing: only the values shown on…

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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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When I picked up a copy of Evacuation (2023, Delicious Games) at SPIEL 2023, I had to admit—the thing didn’t look that special.

However, I am a sucker for anything with a big spaceship on the cover, so it had that going for it…and, designer Vladimír Suchý has made a couple games that I’m fond of, including Underwater Cities and the very good Pulsar 2849. Since Suchý crushed it with Pulsar 2849, I figured, hey, the guy seems to like complex space games, right?

On the strength of the review from our friends at ThinkerThemer, I got my copy of Evacuation to the table in recent weeks. Much like the tagline for the old game Mastermind—”Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master”—Evacuation is a straightforward teach, a game that could be taught in about 20 minutes.

But the consequences of the actions across the game’s tight playtime? This is the heaviest Suchý design I’ve played. (BGG seems to agree.)

The World is On Fire (Again)

Evacuation’s approach is straightforward. Our planet is in ruins thanks to rising temperatures, so we’ve got to get everyone off this rock and onto a more habitable planet, stat. (The rulebook’s version of events is much better than that,…

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Board game remakes are having a moment right now. It seems like every publisher is raiding the tombs of titles that have been gathering dust for over a decade and giving them a fresh new look. The 1990s in particular saw a boom in board game releases, with publishers like Avalon Hill putting out many popular games. One such title was Robo Rally, a robot-themed racing game. After lying dormant for years, Renegade Games has resurrected Robo Rally using the services of lawyers and necromancers. They plan to revive several other classic Avalon Hill games in similar fashion, refreshing these titles for a new generation of players.

Robo Rally is a board game that has flown under the radar for many years, but its premise is easily grasped. You and your friends are all robots in a factory. When the workday ends and the humans go home, these robots come alive and decide to have some fun by racing each other around the factory floor after hours by going to checkpoints in a specific order. With lasers, conveyor belts, rotating gears, and bottomless pits littering the makeshift race courses, you can see where the chaos can ensue, assuming OSHA doesn’t get involved.

All of this sounds pretty good until you realize you are all robots. Robots lack human judgment…

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Twisted Metal.

The long-time PlayStation video game car combat series is maybe my favorite all-time PS experience. Although I have enjoyed playing through all of the games—Twisted Metal 2 took up so much of my time that I should have gone blind staring at the screen for so long—Twisted Metal: Black is the undisputed best of those games.

But all of the Twisted Metal titles feature the same things: taking on the “character” of a driver whose car is used to murder every other combatant off the map, using weapons that were picked up in the field of play as well as special abilities that could be triggered a few times in each match. The lore was insane with Twisted Metal; save for one or two characters in each game that were ostensibly “good” (former cops, a priest, etc.), everything about the games really was twisted, right down to the game series’ signature character, Sweet Tooth, a demonic-looking clown that drove an ice cream truck that happened to have a missile launcher.

Sweet, indeed.

Thunder Road: Vendetta (2023, Restoration Games) is a take on the 1980s board game Thunder Road, which may have been one of the inspirations for the original Twisted Metal video games. (Because video game adaptations are hot, yes, there is a Twisted Metal TV…

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Fast forward with me into a future when tourists can hop aboard a Falcon X and visit the moon. Perhaps you have come to the moon to check out the Tycho crater, which you have seen from afar, or the Sea of Tranquility that Neil Armstrong walked upon decades ago. Like him, all of us astro-tourists are jumping and leaping around each other weightlessly. Well, here we are and now we are all vying to get as close to the most coveted craters.

[caption id="attachment_280458" align="alignnone" width="768"] The game box and board partially opened. It's so neat![/caption]

Space flight has been achieved! Which crater shall we visit?

The objective of the game is to score the most points by securing the most advantageous spots on the single-lane raceway made of up craters. Winning points are calculated by multiplying the number on the token with the value on the crater space.

Game play is simple; after each player has chosen their token color, the game begins with the youngest player's starting roll. Players place and move their tokens on the board by matching them with the number on the dice roll. Each astronaut's initial move begins on any of the available red starting craters. In consecutive moves astronaut tokens that match the…

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It’s easy for racing games to go wrong. If the design is too simple, it risks becoming simplistic, with decisions and player investment at a minimum. If the simple fact of not knowing when each piece is going to cross the finish line were enough, racing games would be nothing more than some track, a few molded horses, and a couple of dice.

As they approach complexity, racing games run an equally perilous risk: too much mechanism between players and the board dilutes that racing feeling. Many games are, fundamentally, races. Root is a race to 30 points, but the mechanisms are such that it doesn’t feel like one. That’s fine. It isn’t trying to. Cubitos is explicitly a race, yet doesn’t fully feel like one. Camel Up, Winner’s Circle, Flamme Rouge, these are games that manage to thread the racing needle. They tap into something special. The primal thrill of a race is undeniable. People laugh, they groan, they cheer. Racing may be the most fundamental of all competitive impulses. Who would argue that mancala was invented before the footrace?

So it was with a degree of skepticism that I greeted news of famed war-game publisher GMT’s Charioteer: Race for Glory in Ancient Rome, from designer Matt Calkins. GMT are synonymous with designs that include multiple…

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Before I dived into board games, I was an avid video gamer, and one of my favorite genres was arcade racing games like Top Gear for the Super Nintendo. 

When I immigrated to this colored cardboard land known as board games, one of the first games I acquired was Formula Dé. That was a mistake. Roll to move, hours to finish, and as exciting as unsalted Wheat Thins.

Despite not being satisfied with Formula Dé, I continued trying different racing games. I played Thunder Alley and liked it, but didn't love it. A friend then introduced me to Race! Formula 90, an overly complex Formula racing game that required me to use a whiteboard to know whether my car had made the corner.

When I learned that Heat: Pedal to the Metal (now just called Heat) was coming out, I was intrigued. It was developed by the same people behind Flamme Rouge, a bike racing game where you used cards to move your cyclists instead of dice or complex rules. I wasn’t a fan of Flamme Rouge not because of its concept but its execution. The game felt far too simple for my tastes, and I was hoping Heat would give it the gas it needed. 

It’s time we wave the flag down and get this going.

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When the parents are away, the kids will play.

In Tiny Turbo Cars, you and up to three of your fellow players take on the roles of children who have decided to turn their ordinary home into an extraordinary RC racing track. Each player controls a different racer with its own unique ability. Each round, using an action programming mechanism (in the form of a sliding puzzle), the players will attempt to move along the course without colliding with the various obstacles (and players) that may get in their way. The first player to cross the finish line wins the game.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. If you’ve heard enough and 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 Tiny Turbo Cars.

Racers, Start Your Engines

Here’s how to set up a game of Tiny Turbo Cars:

Gather up the four Track boards. Randomly select three of them and then randomly select a side of each to play on. Place these end to end with the red and blue borders on the same edges. Next, connect the Starting Board to one end and the Finish Line to the other. There…

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A Very Brief History of Flight

In 1903, the Wright Brothers (William and Orville) achieved “first in flight” with a flight of 12 seconds covering 120 feet. That’s a shorter distance than an American football field…from side to side. It was the first documented controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft in history. Less than 5 years later, Wilbur Wright would win the very first Michelin Cup with a flight of 77.5 miles. Quite an improvement from a paltry 120 feet!

A little over 10 years after that famous first flight, in 1914, the first successful commercial flight was flown. Consisting of the pilot, Tony Jannus, and a single passenger, the flight took off from St. Petersburg, Florida in a craft manufactured by Thomas Benoist and touched down in Tampa, Florida 23 minutes later, a distance of about 17 miles.

For the longest time, prop-driven planes reigned supreme. It wasn’t until the invention of the first jet aircraft in 1939, a quarter of a century later, before innovation in aviation would see its next big bump.

Designed by Ernt Heinkel, that aircraft, the Heinkel He…

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As a Dustbunny, your Fate depends on the performance of one colored Fluffball each round. These Fluffballs will start at one end of the home, and race towards the vacuum residing on the other end. However, getting too close to the vacuum means your Fluffball gets sucked in, thus making you lose all your points. So it’s a race to the finish line, but not cross it.

Okay, I’ll admit, this is a nice change of pace. Like every other modern racing board game, you use cards to move around instead of dice. You start with a handful of cards, and each round, you play one card and do what it says. Most of these cards are movement cards that give you a number and an associated Fluffball, so “Pink 3” means you move the Pink Fluffball exactly 3 spaces.

Wait a minute, you can move other people’s pieces? Yes, you can. The Fate tile, which tells you whose Flufflball you own, is hidden from other players, making this game a race and deduction. Weird mix,…

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Introduction

Even in the midst of Covid in 2021, the Ferrari Pit Crew practiced more than 1300 pit stops between April and December—a sign of dedication to their work, to the team, and their desire to get it perfect during race day. I want my car crazy kids to know that greatness comes with hours of work especially when it comes to math practice!

The Prix

Pit Formula is a frenetic card game that requires concentration and quick thinking to be the fastest pit crew to solve your race car’s issues in order to win the race! Different car parts are repaired by different math operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication or numeric intervals, as players simultaneously solve these math problems and find the missing parts to fix their car.

Formation Lap

The game is set up like so:

[caption id="attachment_246698" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The set-up for a 2 player game.[/caption]

Each player receives a Player Car Mat and a Car Marker. The number tokens are set up in 2 random arrays of 7 by 5 and placed within easy reach of all players. These are the tokens that will be used to replace faulty parts throughout the game. The stack of 12 Spare Part tokens should…

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Overview

Sheepy Time is an area movement, push your luck, racing game for one to four players. Players take on the role of the Dream Sheep and over the course of a few rounds, players race to jump the fence as many times over in order to help everyone have a good night’s rest before the Nightmare threatens to rudely wake everyone up.

The game is set up like so:

Buy Sheepy Time on Amazon

The game plays on a circular board upon which the Fence token sits. Players' Sheep tokens, the Nightmare token, and the Web token, if used, are placed on the board. The score board is set up with the corresponding Pillow Reference card for different player counts. Each player places one Wink token at the start and one Pillow token at the end of the scoreboard. The Wink token keeps track of how many Winks…

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