King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

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Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

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There’s really no getting around it—the theme of Mombasa (2015, eggertspiele) is a little dicey, particularly for gamers who bristle at the idea that clever hand management mechanics have to go hand-in-hand with buying shares in companies trying to colonize parts of 18th-century Africa. My colleague Thomas Wells dove into some of these issues with his write-up on colonialism a few years ago.

So, designers Alexander Pfister (who designed the original game) and Viktor Kobilke took Mombasa and reimagined the game’s theme to a space race aimed at the pursuit of colonizing the moon.

Now we are left with an easier question: what if you took the same great gameplay from Mombasa, repackaged it with the space theme, and asked players for forgiveness that the first game’s theme was legitimately awful? We’re good, right?

Skymines (2022, Pegasus Spiele) plays it smart. This feels exactly like the original game, with all the great programming elements and tough decisions tied to a card recall mechanism that still feels wholly unique. Pfister and Kobilke added a second side of the main map to introduce a more complicated area majority system that affects the share prices of the four major corporations. There’s a solo mode now, a mode that is in the early lead for the best solo…

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I’m not a tableau guy. I’m not anti-tableau by any means—Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games. They’re not a genre I seek out, though. My distaste is mild enough that the realization only came to me recently, after a game of 51st State. My friend Nathan said, “Tableau builders aren’t my thing, but if I were to play one, this is the one I’d play,” and I realized the same was true for me.

It explains a lot. Wingspan? Nah. Everdell? Eh. Terraforming Mars? Best for all involved that I don’t. I think my distaste comes from the fact that I prefer my games streamlined, and running calculus around a bevy of unique cards turn after turn is not streamlined. There’s also some (irrational) part of me that has come to regard an appetite for combos as one of board gaming’s baser instincts, and I’m suspicious of anything that appeals to it.

Look, nobody’s perfect.

This is not meant to yuck your yum. If anything, these realizations have made me more understanding of the popularity of the above-mentioned games. It also has me trying to figure out why I like 51st State so very much.

[caption id="attachment_296089" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

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Back in 2010 Matt Leacock was fresh off the release of Pandemic—one of the first, and definitely one of the most successful, cooperative games in the world. I don’t know his motivation, but I think he wanted another cooperative game that was perhaps a bit simpler and more family friendly. And thus Forbidden Island was born. It used a similar framework as Pandemic: multiple, distinct player roles (each with their own special abilities); a card driven system which both advanced the game and provided benefits and penalties to players; and a goal (rescue 4 artifacts and get on the helicopter before the island sank).

Two other  Games in the Forbidden series have been released: the excellent and challenging Forbidden Desert, and the less-than-stellar Forbidden Skies. And now Gamewright Games has released the 4th title in the series, and I’m pleased to tell you that Forbidden Jungle is a return to the formula which made the first two titles so successful.

You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby.

In Forbidden Jungle, 2-5 players attempt to search and conquer an alien jungle landscape in search of four crystals which will powe the portal—which you must also find—escape through. All the while, you must avoid the deadly…

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I picked up a copy of Virtual Revolution (2023, Studio H) during Gen Con 2023, but this one sat on the shelf for a bit. Despite the cool cover and the fact that publisher Studio H has never done me wrong, buzz was quiet on this game so I worked through my SPIEL haul during most of the fall season.

In December, I got Virtual Revolution to the table. I first decided to investigate the source material. The game Virtual Revolution is based on a 2016 film titled 2047 Virtual Revolution. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I spent 90 minutes watching the film to get ready for the game.

The movie was…OK. The best part of the movie is the premise: in the near future, almost everyone is living out their life in a virtual world featuring “Verses” where people play out their fantasies serving as in-game avatars in medieval and sci-fi environments. So many people are living in Second Life-style worlds that the streets of “Neo Paris” are essentially dead. When the movie’s lead character, an agent named Nash (Canadian stuntman Mike Dopud), walks the streets, it looks like Neo Paris is completely deserted…because everyone is essentially playing video games.

The film’s references to so many other works are straightforward. Nash has the look and feel…

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Welcome (Back) to Arrakis

I wrote a glowing review of the original Dune: Imperium earlier this year. To say that I was enamored with it would be an understatement. The game has risen in the ranks to claim its spot among my top board games of all time, and I jump at the chance to introduce new players to it. I even snagged the new digital version on Steam and have already sunk about 20 hours into the challenges and weekly scenario modes there. This is all coming from someone who isn’t that taken by the world of the original Frank Herbert novels and has seen the Denis Villeneuve film a grand total of once.

At Gen Con this year, Dire Wolf Digital announced a “standalone spinoff” for the game titled Dune: Imperium - Uprising. Initially, much of the conversation around the new game was slightly confusing for the gaming community because it wasn’t clear how this would work with the existing Dune: Imperium properties. The publisher quickly clarified that both expansions for the base game can also work with this new spinoff game and that cards from the base game can be mixed and matched. It is an example of making the waters a bit too muddy for my liking. It’s a sequel and a spinoff, but…

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Council of Shadows is a 2022 release published by alea (intentionally not capitalized), the strategy games imprint of hobby games and puzzle-producing giant Ravensburger. I got a copy a few months ago and cleared my fall convention haul before getting Council of Shadows to the table.

Part of why I waited, though, was tied to the lack of buzz for this game, which I thought was strange given alea’s pedigree. Over the last two decades, alea has published games such as Puerto Rico, The Castles of Burgundy and The Princes of Florence, amongst dozens of other greats. When Council of Shadows hit the US market in early 2023, I didn’t even know about it until our Ravensburger partners brought the game to my attention.

I got in three plays over the course of just two days, and I mostly like what’s here. Council of Shadows is a bit uneven thanks to its approach, and while it is a game I recommend, I have questions about some of the design choices. Council of Shadows also left some players exasperated by the scoring system, which is both a feature and a bug, depending on your point of view.

All-Knowing

Council of Shadows is a little tricky to…

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I knew it by the end of my single Cycle demo play of Voidfall during SPIEL 2022: Voidfall was going to be great.

The only question I needed to answer, after backing the Galactic Box deluxe edition of the game and playing it 14 times—once for each of the included factions—was whether this was going to be my favorite game of 2023 or not.

I’ve already written 9,840 words about Voidfall, so if you have specific questions about individual parts of my experience, check out the links at the bottom. In this review, I’ll quickly summarize my thoughts on my Voidfall experience.

1. Voidfall is the best design Mindclash has ever produced. Although I enjoy two of their other designs quite a bit, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion and Anachrony, Voidfall feels incredibly well balanced, deeper than their other games, and is tied to a core that still excites me so many plays into the experience.
2. In terms of the marriage of gameplay to production, Voidfall is the hands-down winner in this category for 2023. If this were a metric tracked by BGG, it would get a perfect score. As a value proposition, Voidfall has no peer. You could play it 100 times and still not…

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Before diving into the two new expansions for Mindbug, the cocaine-addled card dueler I first reviewed back in 2021, I pulled the base game off the shelf for a refresher. It had taken me a while to warm up to this strange, spasmodic design. Mindbug is so streamlined, so reactive, so fundamentally swingy, that my first several games felt like they didn’t involve any decisions at all.

That definitely wasn’t the case, as I came to see with experience. Mindbug is full of interesting decisions. Except for when it isn’t. It’s complicated.

My feelings about the base game haven’t changed, though they have muted. My admiration has diminished. Returning, I found myself a bit bored, which was never a feeling I had when it first came out, even when I hadn’t found my way in yet. Sounds like a perfect time to inject some novelty.

Don’t Mindbug If I Do

Any given Mindbug deck, be it the base game or any of the three expansions, is full of creature cards. Each creature is obscenely powerful in one way or another. Some are strong. Some are disruptive. Some are both. Nearly every card, by design,…

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If you have a chance to review any of my previous content, you’ll see a lot of glowing words attached to the reviews of games designed or co-designed by Simone Luciani.

To me, Luciani is gaming royalty. Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar are some of the best games I have ever played. Luciani’s “T” game release with Daniele Tascini, Tiletum, was my pick for the best game of 2022.

With all of that in mind, there was never a doubt that I would play Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods (2023, Cranio Creations), a co-design with Danilo Sabia. Sabia and Luciani also designed Rats of Wistar, which will soon make its way to gamers in the US.

I’m not going to lie to you: Anunnaki didn’t hit it out of the park, to use a baseball reference. It’s not that the game is bad—in fact, it is occasionally interesting, particularly with its action selection mechanism—but it is very likely that my standards for Luciani games have gotten too high. Grand Austria Hotel is the best Euro-style game I have ever played; as a film buff, when you love a film director and that director puts out middling fare, you…

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I’m going to make a new law.

It’s a simple one. The more complex and longer the game is, the higher the chance there will be a dice version of it in the future.

We've already seen popular, complex board games simplified into quicker, more random dice games, perhaps to appeal to a wider audience. The epic scifi 4X game Twilight Imperium was condensed into a simpler dice-based version more reminiscent of an April Fools' joke without a punchline. Nations, an already lengthy civilization game, underwent a similar transformation. Now here we are with Terraforming Mars, an intricate 3+ hour strategic card game and engine builder that has now been distilled down into a stripped down dice game.

And like the previous versions of Terraforming Mars, the story is still the same. Players take on the role of CEOs tasked with terraforming Mars by raising its oxygen levels, temperature, and ocean coverage along three tracks. Where this dice version differs is that only two of these parameters need to be maxed out to trigger the end of the game, streamlining playtime to the advertised 45 minutes - a rarity among board games. So while veteran fans will recognize the essential experience of racing to make Mars habitable, it has been pared down to its most basic bones, shedding complexity…

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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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