Games should be more restrictive about player count. I sympathize with publishers and recognize the act of commercial suicide that is a game requiring an exact player count. Look what happened to Deal with the Devil. Granted, I don’t think the restrictive player count had anything to do with that game’s disappearance. If anything, the requirement of exactly four players got Deal more attention than it would have otherwise gotten. It would have helped if the game were any good.

Alas, it wasn’t, and Deal with the Devil immediately faded from public awareness. For a brief, glimmering moment, I knew hope that the buzz around Deal might lead us all a little closer to the light, towards an age of radically honest player counts. You can tell me Votes for Women is for 2-4, but we both know it’s a two-person affair. You can slap a 2-4 on the side of Flamme Rouge, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game needs at least three.

All of this is to say that The Princes of Florence is a five-player game, and only a five-player game. The box says 1-5, and you can technically play it at any of those counts, but you only experience The Princes of Florence properly when you play it at five. Any…

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Admittedly, my tastes bend toward austere-looking games with a brown color palette, so I’m naturally predisposed to like a game that features tan, olive, brown, beige, ochre, and a smattering of puce. That said, this sucker has quite a lot going on under the hood.

This game is a reimplementation of one of the earliest published designs of Acchittocca (the design team of Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto, and Antonio Tinto–collectively responsible for Alma Mater, Egizia: Shifting Sands, and several other games in loose collaboration), Leonardo da Vinci. Codex Leicester has one more designer thrown in the mix for good measure, Changhyun Baek.

I haven’t played the original game, so you won’t find any comparing and contrasting here, though there are significant differences between this version of the game and the original, or at least that’s the sense I get from reading the original game’s rules.

But here’s a thousand-foot summary. Codex Leicester is a worker placement game with a high degree of interaction. Players start with a single workshop, which can be upgraded with various bits and bobs to make it more powerful, and they can also add a second workshop as the game moves forward.

[caption id="attachment_287152" align="alignnone" width="1125"] Workshops in action.[/caption]

What do you do…

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I have already written about Spirit Island, designer R. Eric Reuss’s masterful cooperative game. It’s one of my favorites, a densely layered puzzle that rewards repetition. Since publication in 2017, the game has received one substantial expansion, Branch and Claw, and one absolutely gargantuan expansion, Jagged Earth.

Between those three boxes, you have enough gaming content to last you a lifetime. I own all of it, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Nonetheless, ours is not a species known for being content, and so I was filled with glee when publisher Greater Than Games announced last fall that they would be releasing Horizons of Spirit Island. More content good.

More intriguing still: it was announced as a Target exclusive. If ever you’ve needed a sign that board games have broken into the mainstream, this is it.

Smaller, Cheaper, Easier

I will keep this rules summary pretty pared down. If you are new to Spirit Island and you find yourself looking for a more detailed comprehensive summary, you should take a look at my previous review. 

Spirit Island is a cooperative game in which players work together to dispel invading colonists by destroying their settlements and filling them with fear. You spread presence around the island while playing…

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I was strolling PAX Unplugged’s 2021 event, and while I was chatting with Dan DiLorenzo at R&R Games about Witchstone, we walked around his booth.

Dan walked into one edge of the booth and pointed at a title. “Trust me, this one always does great. I still play it, even today,” Dan shared as he showed me a copy of Rajas of the Ganges. “I don’t even use all of the expansions; the base game is just a classic.”

Rajas of the Ganges was released all the way back in 2017 but is still the kind of delightful, non-confrontational Euro that I can get my wife to play, and it scales well at all player counts by providing the snappy turns and non-existent round clean-up I love. AND it has great-looking dice! Now I see why Rajas of the Ganges is so reliable.

Worker Placement? Check

Rajas of the Ganges—which we’ll just call Rajas for this review—was designed by Inka & Markus Brand, the brains behind such well-regarded classics such as Village and Recto Verso as well as the Exit: The Game (I have a particular fondness for Exit: The Game—Advent Calendar: The Hunt for the Golden Book) series. Like these escape…

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That was laid on with a trowel

It was a fleeting moment, little more, in which I contemplated setting out to write a fair review with poetry. But when I realized that I lacked the skill and patience needed, I forsook the whole endeavor in the middle of a line. Who writes in iambs and pentameter today? In rhyme or blank, the business is but lost, forever damned to high school English class.

But man, that Shakespeare fellow had a gift. I guess you don’t receive a nickname like the Bard without a talent worth the moniker. And while our time is better spent before the poetry and plays that brought him fame, a goodly set of games exist that try to aptly celebrate his name and work.

The board game trade that opened up the gates and set me on a path where I would learn to curate my collection introduced Hervé Rigal’s Shakespeare into my life. Ystari Games in 2015 gave the world a taste of theater and bent the Globe’s unrivaled playwright so to match Elizabethan times with modern ways.

And thus an invitation I extend that you might better know a favorite game.

Be not afraid of greatness

Shakespeare invites players to spend six days putting together a production worthy of the Queen by…

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After getting in more plays of my top game from last year, Tiletum, I wanted to revisit some of the other games I own from designer Simone Luciani. After doing a quick browse of the shelf, I pulled out a game that I always enjoy playing that I was pretty sure to be a Luciani design.

It turns out that Coimbra (2018, eggertspiele) is not actually a Luciani design. But it is from “The Italians”, which is my catch-all name for the design collective of Luciani and a few other Italian tabletop luminaries, including Flaminia Brasini and Virginio Gigli. Brasini and Gigli are the actual designers of Coimbra, and these two also had their hands all over Golem, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Alma Mater, and/or Grand Austria Hotel and the Let’s Waltz! expansion. (The artwork of Chris Quilliams from Coimbra and Alma Mater is essentially the same, adding to the confusion.)

This means I had no choice but to love Coimbra. I’ve played Coimbra a few times but the plays have been spread out over many years. After getting this back to the table in recent weeks, it’s been fun to remember why I enjoy the game so much, and why the game needs a boost in one key area.

Coimbra Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2013’s Rialto, his 17th game.

Rialto is an area control game that is governed by an open drafting mechanic. The game is played over the course of six rounds, which are divided into a number of different steps. Central to the game is a deck of cards featuring cards corresponding to these steps. Each step serves a different function within the game such as jockeying for turn order position, adding councilmen to the city’s districts, and influencing the overall point value of the districts.

At the start of a round, several sets of randomly drawn cards are created and players take turns choosing one of these sets to take control of for the remainder of the round. Then the round is played out, step by step. As each step is played, the players will take…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2013’s Bruges, his 18th game.

In the Feldiverse, Bruges holds a couple of important distinctions. For starters, it’s Feld’s very first game to feature multi-use cards (and arguably one of the best games in existence to have ever done so). Secondly, it was the first game selected to be overhauled for the much lauded Stefan Feld City Collection from Queen Games. What us old-timers know as Bruges, future generations will know as Hamburg.

Overview

In Bruges, players take on the roles of merchants who work to maintain their relationships with those in power in the titular city while competing against one another for influence, power, and status. This is accomplished through the aforementioned multi-use cards. On a player’s turn, they will have a hand of cards that they can discard to build canals, gain…

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“Did you like Tekhenu?”

I was sitting at Gen Con 2022 with Ola Sklodowska, Head of Marketing from Board&Dice. We were walking through the set up for their new game, Tiletum.

Even though we were wearing masks, I could tell my response surprised her:

“No,” I responded. “I didn’t like Tekhenu. But I’ve enjoyed most of the other games I’ve played from Board&Dice, and the designers on the cover of this one tell me I really want to know about Tiletum.”

The designers of Tiletum are Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini. The latter is the co-designer of some of the most celebrated strategy games of the last 10 years, including the “T” games (heavy strategy endeavors, all of which start with the letter T): T’zolkin: The Mayan Calendar, Teotihuacan: City of Gods, The Voyages of Marco Polo, and Tekhenu.

But Luciani was the reason I was sitting at the demo table. Luciani has co-designed some of the best games I have ever played: Grand Austria Hotel (and the Let’s Waltz! expansion), Golem, and Lorenzo il Magnifico. In the case of two of these games—Grand Austria Hotel and Lorenzo il Magnifico—they hit the sweet spot for me: lots of interesting choices, medium weight games that I can play with casual or experienced gamers, efficiency…

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Back in the olden times—before COVID—I played a game called Coimbra. Designed by some of the same people who gave us Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and later Golem, Coimbra checked a lot of boxes for me and has since entered the BGG list of top 200 games.

All those games are Euro efficiency puzzle classics, and while I think Golem is not an all-timer, it’s still pretty strong. After playing Coimbra, I knew I had to pick up Alma Mater (2020, eggertspiele) because I needed to know for myself if that same design team could strike gold again.

Tight on Cash

Alma Mater is a six-round worker placement game. Each round, players will use a pool of 4-6 Masters (workers) to take actions as they try to score the most Prestige Points running a successful university.

Thematically, the game nails a lot of things: you are going to take actions to do research, which in turn will help you sell books that are the most prestigious books in the land thanks to your school’s growing reputation. Your player board is your school, and you’ll slowly add new students to your school each round that will in turn boost your school’s reputation during end-game scoring.

…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way backwards through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed that there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups active on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2013’s Amerigo, his 19th game.

Amerigo holds several distinctions within the Feldiverse. For beginners, Amerigo was the first ever crowdfunded Feld title. Secondly, it was Stefan Feld’s very first game to feature a cube tower (his upcoming title, Marrakesh also uses one). And lastly, Amerigo has a box far larger than any of his other games (at least for now). In a 2019 interview with Dice Tower’s Jason Levine, Stefan Feld hinted that he was working on a game featuring miniatures. Will Amerigo be dethroned by an even bigger game? I guess we’ll see!

Overview

In Amerigo, the players take on the roles of explorers much like Amerigo Vespucci—a famous 15th century Italian explorer (America is named after him)—as they sail the seas, discover new lands, and colonize them.

The game is played…

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Is there anything left to be said about Love Letter? Doubtful, but let’s give it a shot.

The Simplicity of Love Letter

Love Letter (2019) consists of a deck of 21 cards and a handful of resin Favor tokens. The cards are numbered zero through nine, with each card bearing the name and image of a character along with instructions for the card’s play. 

After setting aside a single, random card that will not enter play for the round, players each receive one card, with the remaining cards forming a face-down deck. On a turn, players draw a single card and then choose which card to play, face-up, to the table, resolving its effect. 

The object is simple: be the last remaining player or the remaining player with the highest card in hand once the round is complete. The player who wins the round receives a Favor token before the cards are gathered and dealt once more. Once someone reaches the number of Favor tokens prescribed for the player count, the game ends and someone gets happy. 

Players itching for the classic 2012 sixteen-card experience can remove the Spies and Chancellors, valued zero and six respectively, along with one Guard and carry on as normal. Players itching for more…

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“So, we have seats at Gutenberg, Golem, Bitoku, and Iberian Gauge. Which one do you want to play?”

“Golem,” I said without hesitation. Golem is designed by Virginio Gigli, Flaminia Brasini, and Simone Luciani. At least one of these 3 Italian luminaries had a hand in the design of all the following games: Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Alma Mater, Barrage, Coimbra, The Voyages of Marco Polo, and T’zolkin: The Mayan Calendar.

Yeah.

Lorenzo il Magnifico and Coimbra are two of my favorite games ever, so it was a no-brainer to take a stab at Golem. I left the table pretty impressed...but, this IS a “First Take” of Golem, so while I won’t give you a full breakdown of the rules here, I will tell you what I liked and what I didn’t in this hot take of the experience.

[caption id="attachment_240530" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Burying a golem never felt so good[/caption]

Systems Upon Systems

Golem…

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