Can you believe we haven't made a main channel Top Ten video since 2017? Such is our commitment to not list (very often) but today our dear fellow patrons we list in style. Please take a seat, grab a plate, here's some napkins, dinner is just being served. Efka's Top Ten Board games.
Introducing - My Favourite Game. A series of videos focusing only the best of the best that board games have to offer. In each episode Efka and/or Elaine will regale us with tales of their favourite representative of a given board game genre. Finally! A video series that is absolutely guaranteed to provoke as many “do you even like board games?” comments as possible.
In our inaugural episode we’ll take a peek at El Grande, a modern classic all the way back from 1995 that very recently got a new coat of beige paint. El Grande is an area majority game a terse calculated fight over how many men you can round up into regions of Spain. It’s got a touch of numbers and heaps of deviousness and if that’s your marmalade - you’re in for a treat!
What's that law about the title being a yes or no question? The answer is always, yes, right? (No one correct me.) Ha ha, well jokes on you, this one is a straight N.O. How would a board game even save the world? With its dashing smile and can-do attitude?
Haaaaaaving said that... I think that maybe Daybreak is as close as we'll get, and I know, I know - that's corny and a tad sensationalist but... I dunno. There's something kinda transcendent about it. Something that makes it more than a board game. Actually, scratch that. That implies that a board game can't ever amount to being transcendent. What I mean is, Daybreak feels like just a bit more.
In both setting and gameplay, Daybreak feels like it's breaking ground, and to see both executed so well is a rare treat. So please, enjoy me gushing about a fantastic board game for 15 minutes - a treat for everyone, I am sure.
I long resisted the idea that board games are getting too expensive. They just cost what they cost. They’re complicated physical products targeted at a niche audience. But when prices reach the level of “I could buy a new kitchen oven or a board game” level, I think it’s time to ask ourselves some difficult questions.
Like, for example, how good does a board game have to be to justify that? Because make no mistake, Kinfire is pretty good. But is pretty good good enough?
And how do we even answer that? Let’s say that it is, but then four months later another $150 board game comes out that’s also exactly as good. And then another. And then another. Who can afford to keep buying them? Where’s the cut-off? At these prices, how do you continue to judge a game’s quality?
I ignored price for a long while as a board game reviewer, but I feel like it’s become unconcionable lately. A lot of people just can’t reasonably justify to keep making purchases like that. And I feel like the cut-off line has come.
The Crew, The Mind, Magic Maze and now Sky Team, each wonderful games that want you to sit down and shut up (ha ha). The premise is simple. Land a passenger airplane without talking. Isn’t that just the best pitch? We’ve all dreamed of being a pilot. Sky Team says - you can do that, without the ridiculous complexity of Flight Simulator and none of the dangers of real planing. Here’s our review.
What follows is a transcript of our video.
Sky Team asks a very simple question: have you ever wanted to land a passenger aeroplane? To which of course the answer is:
Elaine: NO! I don’t know the first thing about planing, I don’t want that kind of responsibility.
Efka: Relax, you’re not piloting an actual aeroplane, just a pretend board game one with dice. Let me show you how it works.
In Sky Team you and one other person will play as the pilot and co-pilot responsible for landing said aeroplane. You will do this by placing dice one at a time on this true to life accurate representation of a pilot’s dashboard.
There’s just one problem, just like in a real aeroplane, you’re not actually allowed to talk to each other. So that’s fun, but if that wasn’t enough, let me show you some other things you shouldn’t do.
Normally when we explain a board game, we like to start by telling you how you win, because that gives you context for what you’re trying to do. With Sky Team, I will instead be telling you how you lose.
This is the altitude track. It goes down by one at the end of every round.
If you haven’t reached the airport by the time it reaches zero - you crash and lose.
If you overshoot the airport at any point - you crash and lose.
If you don’t arrive at the airport before the last round - you crash and lose.
As you fly towards the airport, there will be other aeroplanes in the way. You and your co-pilot can shoot them down from the sky with this radio action. If you fly over any of them - you crash and lose.
Let’s say your aeroplane reaches the airport on the penultimate round. On the last round it needs to have a speed equal or lower to your brakes value. If it doesn’t – you crash and lose.
Let’s say your aeroplane reaches the airport on the penultimate round and on the last round your speed is lower than your break value but you haven’t perfectly balanced out your plane - you crash and lose.
Let’s say your aeroplane reaches the airport on the penultimate round and on the last round your speed is lower than your break value and you balanced out your aeroplane, but you haven’t deployed all your flaps - you crash and lose.
You haven’t deployed all your landing gear - you crash and lose.
You tilt your plane too far to either side - you crash and lose.
You flew through some clouds at the wrong angle - you crash and lose.
You ran out of fuel - you crash and lose.
You haven’t completely trained your intern - obviously that last one is fine, interns don’t really care about on the job training, they’re just doing it for exposure ARE YOU KIDDING ME, YOU CRASH AND LOSE.
Just one or two things for you to worry about as you’re not communicating with your team-mate. Unless, maybe you are.
As mentioned, each turn, one by one you’ll be placing one of the four dice you rolled at the beginning of the round.
You can place these dice anywhere you like, as long as the spot matches your dice colour – blue for pilot, orange for copilot – and the number restrictions. For example, I can only place a one or two here to deploy some of my landing gear. Each time you place a die, you perform the corresponding action.
That’s how you deploy brakes, landing gear, flaps, shoot other planes out of the sky, cross all the dots and i’s or even make some coffee.
Most actions are simple. Place a die, it does the thing. And when I say thing, nothing miraculous happens. If you radio to shoot a plane out of the sky, you just remove that plane. If you increase your brake value – well, you just increase your break value.
However. Two actions, balancing tilt and speed, are mandatory, and require a die from each the pilot and the co-pilot. Which means, two of the four dice you have, are spoken for every round. And that’s where communication comes in.
Let’s say it’s my turn and for my first die I put a 1 on the tilt action. If Elaine also puts a one, our tilt remains the same. If, however, she puts a higher die, such as a three, the tilt will move towards her equal to the difference. Tilt too far to one side - you crash and lose.
So me placing a one here is an outrageously brazen move! I have no idea what’s behind Elaine’s shield, it could be all fives and sixes in which case that’s an instant loss. But think about what I’m communicating with that one.
Because I placed it as my first move, I’m saying to Elaine, this is my problem die.
Elaine: Your face is a problem die.
Efka: It’s true. I haven’t got anything better for there, and if you haven’t got low dice you have four turns to figure out a solution.
I’m also saying, all my other dice are probably low too, so adjust your plans accordingly. Maybe send a die to the coffee space, which, like in a real aeorplane, makes coffee and adjusts die values by plus one or minus one.
And if worst comes to worst, we can always spend the very hard to come by reroll token.
I want you to think about how tense all these situations are in play. I said you’re not allowed to communicate, but I can bet you ten pounds no one’s going to stop themselves from a painful wince if someone places a two on tilt on their last turn when all you have behind your shield is a six.
Or the agony of deciding whether to use a reroll, which lets everyone reroll any dice they want, but you have two of these for the entire game.
And obviously you can’t confer when to use it. You just have to decide to use it. For both players. Whilst the other person is giving you a deadeye stare. And you just sit with that. And stew. I mean, forget hiccups. This game is so sweaty it legit gave me swamp butt.
What truly makes Sky Team a masterclass in board game design is that it knows how to de-escalate that tension in the most dramatic way.
Die by die, move by move, mind read by mind read you watch as you and your partner sync up and read each other and your plan is maybe, possibly, just about coming together.
Still in silence! Until that very last die placement where you’re finally allowed to high five each other and go OMG that was perfect! How did you know I still had a four behind my shield when you put a 3 down on speed?
Or the alternative to that, where someone makes one misstep, like the co-pilot forgetting that they need to shoot down an aeroplane and instead putting the die down to retract the flaps. And the mad silent scramble by both players to somehow find a fix before they literally cause an international catastrophe.
Last year everyone’s darling was Heat, a racing game that didn’t simulate racing, but high drama movies about racing.
Sky Team, along with obviously being a future mega-hit, does exactly the same thing. It simulates not actual aeroplane landings but movies about aeroplane landings.
You’re not playing a pilot, you’re playing Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, maybe even Gerard Butler or Tom Butler.
Elaine: Who’s Tom Butler?
Efka: He’s the actor that plays the pilot in Snakes on a Plane.
Elaine: Oh. Why Snakes on a Plane?
Efka: Cause we needed a segue for the criticisms.
This isn’t gonna be long, don’t worry. My only real criticism is that Sky Team is incredibly precise and particular with the timing of actions. You move forward at the exact moment when someone places the second die on the speed action for example, not at the end of the round.
There’s a reason for that, it lets you set up more strategic moves. If you can’t shoot down the aeroplane that’s two spaces away because you’ve only got dice with like ones or sixes, you can move forward one space, and now your 1 die is eligible to take that enemy passenger plane DOWN!
But that sort of thing can be very fiddly during the portion of the game that has to play out without people talking to each other so when someone forgets - it’s tense, tense, TENSE… Oh wait you forgot to move your flap marker. No longer tense.
Aside from that, I mean, it’s a dice game where you roll dice and the values matter. So at easier difficulty levels, it’s tuned quite well towards that communicating without communicating action. Whereas with the really difficult scenarios, it’s just, did we roll the right dice? No. Okay. Let’s try again I guess?
Which isn’t really a criticism. Sky Team is an experience game. You can get better at it, but you don’t play it to get better at it. You play it for kicks, and let me tell you, this aeroplane’s got legs.
Also, don’t play this with strangers. In fact, don’t even play it with like acquaintances or co-workers or virtually anyone with whom you haven’t developed a level of comfort where you can just chill in each other’s company. Sky Team relies on intimacy to create that tension, so a disaster in the wrong hands.
But as long as we’re talking about scenarios, and as much fun as that base game is, this tiny box is a treasure trove of well thought out game-modes. From an intern you need to train, to fuel you have to manage to ice-breaks, wind - every module (aside from the hackneyed real time mode), offers an interesting spin to make sure that when you’re feeling comfortable with planing, it’s got another spanner to chuck in your face.
Try the intern module after your first game to vary it up a little bit, add the fuel module if you’re into players forgetting to do important actions and watching disastrous consequences unfurl in silence, and put on some ice-breaks when you really feel like taking things up a notch.
Sky Team is a top-notch recommendation from us. If your evenings are getting a bit stale and you’re bored of binge-watching streamers, inject a bit of swamp butt into your routine.
Hey everybody, big space game just dropped. That’s right, once more cardboard is inviting us to put spaceships on hexagons and claim more teritorry than your neighbor. The twist this time is that instead of uneasy alliances, territorial tensions and tumbling dice, every body plays the space lions - methodically calculating the most efficient ratio of action to victory point.
Below is a transcript of our video review of Voidfall.
They say space is impossibly big, but is it big enough to contain Voidfall? Don't answer that.
Take the game's resource system for example. In other games when you produce a resource you just get it. In Voidfall you have five resources: food, energy, materials, credits - which can be spent as the other free but only in certain situations – and science.
To get these resources first you must build an appropriate guild. Food guild for food resources, science guild for science resources, and so on. The number of guilds you have in a given sector is then multiplied by the population value of that sector. Add those values together for all of your sectors - the result is the production value of your guilds of that type. But that's not how much you produce, that's just a value, but that value directly modifies the output value which is how much of that resource you produce when you do the produce action.
This is Voidfall - a big space game of grand strategy, grand spaceships, grand asymmetrical factions, and grand brains. That intro should have given you a pretty good idea of the level of complexity that Voidfall is aiming for. In fact I think the two talking points that will gravitate around this game's orbit are:
· It's just too complicated
· It's just a euro game masquerading as space strategy.
Keep these two in mind through the course of the video.
You'll notice there's one or two game pieces on the table and whilst it definitely adds to the grandness of it all, strangely what's really important is this small area over here.
This is the agenda offering. Each agenda card is another potential way of scoring points and having the most points wins you the game. Your House - that being your space faction - will come with a starting agenda, but you will want to pick up more ideally overlapping in goals so you can score the things that you achieve multiple times.
For example, this is House Nervo, an industrious faction of humans who abandoned flesh for efficiency. Effleshiency? That sounds right. And naturally they'll score points for every sector that has all of their guild and space station slots fully filled up, and advancing as far as they can on the three civilization tracks.
Which means agendas like Industrial Conglomerate which reward you for having Guilds in different sectors and filling them up to capacity will score you points for things that you're already doing anyway, whereas agendas like Bleeding Edge that score you points for combat rewards and improved Technologies force you to divest your energy into things that aren't necessarily profitable.
And almost always the more sectors you have the more times you can multiply these scoring conditions, and that's on top of the resource farms you can build on them, which is where we arrive at the why.
To win, you need points to get points you need agendas and agendas want more sectors so what do you do in this game?
EXPAAAAND! And just in case it wasn't clear what you do in this game - EXPAAAAND!
That was fun for about 3 seconds but now let's get back to our homework.
So at this point you might be wondering 'Okay we have space empires, we have space-agons, how do they translate into space agendas and space points? Well I'm not going to show you this entire game, but I do want to showcase a few mechanisms and how they shake out.
The majority of what you do is determined by focus cards. You play one of these a turn, and choose two out of the three possible actions on them.
For example, this is House Bellitan. Their whole stick is that they've said 'Emotions? That stuff's for crying babies! It's all about RAW CALCULUS POWER!' and also 'RAW MILITARY POWER!' So they grew extra brain tissue outside of the skull and then jacked cables into it. Is that brain tissue protected by anything? No! Do they care? Remember, no emotions - they just don't give a [ships].
Anyway, so you picked a faction that's all about... guns and money. Oh, they looked so nice in the picture.
Naturally you'll be wanting to expand with the guns to get more money to get more guns and so on. The reinforcements card will let you take the muster action by paying two material. Then for each shipyard you have in your sectors, simply make one spaceship.
Other actions are also equally simple. For example, if something lets you build a Guild simply pick any Guild that you would like and just place it in your sector, adjusting the output of the resources it makes based on the sector's population.
Even the resource production system we lampooned in the intro is actually reliably free of hassle once you understand the literal cogs that make it turn - anytime you make a resource simply look up how much of that resource you produce and then add it to your total.
Aside from combat, which we will talk about, later no system in this game is complex or something that a person used to euro games couldn't wrap their head around. It's the consequences of what you do that will make your brain hurt.
Each time you produce more resources than can be stored by your capacity they go to waste, but you immediately get three additional victory points. Is that worth it? Hard to say. But there's also a faction that will give you bonuses each time you overproduce which would incentivise them to build a lot of guilds, but every time you fill up a sector with guilds, that increases the demand for food - which you have to account for at the end of every cycle or lose victory points.
Agenda cards also increase your demand for food, however you can cover up that demand with trade tokens. But you can also spend the trade token from your agenda to take all three actions on your focus card instead of just the requisite two, which is very strong but then everyone is starving again.
Remember building ships? The action is as simple as described, but you can only build spaceships if they're available in your supply. If you don't have any you have to make them available via an action that is on an altogether different card, meaning it will suck up one of the actions for the cycle. Or take the exert action on the temptation card which lets you do both but then corrupts either; one of your sectors, or your agendas, or one of your civilization tracks - which will make them ineligible for scoring.
None of this is hyperbole in fact this is the simplified version of the brain loop roller coaster you're standing in line for if you're considering Voidfall as part of your collection. You could not unreasonably spend 10 minutes just deciding which one card am I going to play, and the tenor of this game is such that your opponents won't even mind because they've very likely been doing the same.
This isn't a criticism, it's in fact the intended experience - further reinforced by galactic event cards. The whole game is split into three cycles, each offering an opportunity to score agenda cards at the end, and then punctuated by the galactic event.
It sets up the stage for what's important this cycle. For example, an event might say 'At the end of the cycle you'll score extra points for controlling sectors with finance guilds', and they're quite a bit more complicated than that.
Often there's two different conditions for getting bonuses and quite frequently they change the game state but all it is a very clever way of funnelling you into new objectives. A galactic event creates play arcs and puzzles, it gives this mishmash of pieces and space-agons a direction.
Which honestly you could ignore if you wanted to, but they're precisely tuned to each scenario. Scenario that has specific factions, technologies, a map layout, and a set of these cards.
Everything speaks to a curated experience and intentionality and you can just feel it during play as you brute force every ounce of efficiency, clawing towards the next space-agon you understand why this map is laid out like that, why you're allowed these technologies and not the others, why these specific Houses are in play. It's very smart and it wants you to glimpse that smartness so you can overcome the challenge its deliberately posing.
By this point of the video you're probably... a bit bored, because I'm talking about a space game and so far I haven't told you about how you forge alliances in betrayals with other players, how you smash your spaceships to take over a hexagon - you know all that juicy space game stuff. Well, here's the thing. None of that happens here.
Technically you can fight other players but mostly you're separated by so much space that getting into territorial skirmishes takes about as much time as realistically depicted interstellar travel.
I'm not saying this as a criticism I'm just managing expectations. Voidfall is 95% a euro game with a few other bits added to pass the visual litmus test of 4X or whatever you want to call this genre. If you're familiar with board games this is more Gaia Project than Eclipse and if you're not familiar with board games this is 'Space! The complicated math game'.
Uh talking of complicated I've got a bit of a bone to pick with how board gamers perceive complexity.
Complexity is a strange thing and we attribute weird qualities to it. Being a board game reviewer makes you privy to a lot of opinions and sometimes they're quite revealing. For example, when we review a complicated game negatively, there will always be some people who are like: 'Well, you are just too stupid to understand it!'
Oh yeah? Well if I'm stupid, would I be wearing this?
That's right I would! Because I *am* stupid! I'm a buffoon! A dunderhead! A nincompoop! A board game village idiot!
I say this because some people who play these uber complex board games think that it requires intelligence to navigate them, and let me tell you right now there is nothing in this manual that is any more complicated than just navigating yourself through daily life.
And that's not to say that this is easy, it's just that daily life is harder. At least here I have a comprehensive stratified guideline that'll tell me the outcome of all of my decisions. This is written in stone. When I'm walking my dog in the park and a stranger asks me 'Hey how you doing?', I can think of 10 possible replies and I have no idea what the result of any of them will be. How do I choose? Where is the rule book for that? And more importantly, what would it look like?
Some people don't like complicated board games not because they're "too hard" or whatever but because that's not what they want. They want immediate fun or immediate complexity. They want to get to the decision space faster because, for them, that's where the meat is.
And also - now I'm just going to upset everyone - complicated board games aren't somehow worse just because they have more rules, they aren't just "complexity for complexity's sake", they deliver a different kind of experience. There's a joy to be found in navigating systems, and exploring and untangling arcane yarn balls and willing them to behave how you want to. It's an incredibly rewarding part of play.
To sum up, simple games are no less complex just because they're not convoluted and complicated games are no less good just because they *are* convoluted. It's simply a matter of preference.
And if you ask me which of these I prefer, the answer is 'yes'. I like games period. I like exploring what their strengths and weaknesses are, not because of what type of game they are, but how they work within the context of the genre or type or whatever.
I think this game will stick around because it evokes the familiar tropes of Eclipse and Twilight Imperium but implements them in a different way. This isn't a game about all out war, on a table spread with beers, curry, and plastic spaceships. It's about efficiently working out what you need to do this turn to get to where you want to be four turns later through a litter of interlocking mechanisms.
It's extremely good at telegraphing its intentions and expectations, at showing you where to start picking out the thread so you can pull it apart at the seams, and just leaves you alone to do it, sometimes coming back to gently check in on you and slightly nudge you back on your path.
One of the most downtrodden phrases in board game marketing is 'innovative action selection mechanism', which makes me want to avoid the games that advertise themselves with it like they were racist relatives. We acknowledge their existence but we're not going to that wedding if they're invited.
The problem is that some games are indeed more complex than they need to be, because they shift the complexity towards taking the action itself. I need to work out a physics problem before I can, I don't know, build a spaceship - let alone weigh the pros and cons of doing it. That's not play, that's the world's slowest hurdle race.
Voidfall, on the other hand, makes every one of these actions as simple as it can be but interlocks it with five other systems introducing a thousand consequences just for putting on a shoe.
So when you do the action you're not sure whether you should wear it on your foot or on your head. Honestly, still not sure which one of these is more efficient.
This is good game design because it leverages what you want against what you want. You can't have everything, so every action you take has consequences that then need to be levelled out and that's before we consider various technologies that affect every design aspect, and the frankly ludicrous number of factions that lean further with strengths, weaknesses, and unique abilities.
There's not much more I need to say about Voidfall. It's cobbled together from so many familiar tropes and it borrows so earnestly that you can easily trace its lineage to a number of other popular games.
Feeding your people? That's like Agricola. A euro game masquerading as a 4X grand strategy game? That's Scythe. Events for every round? I'm looking at you New Orleans, and a bunch of others. Tech upgrades? Twilight Imperium wants a word. Tracks that unlock bonuses? Half the euro games of the world are knocking on your door.
I'd say that out of all of these Scythe has such a profound influence that you can figure out if you like Voidfall if you don't mind the idea of Scythe but in space, but twice as complicated. In both of these games you select an action block and execute a choice of actions from it, you expand at the peril of losing access to your hexagons and the resources they generate, you have asymmetrical factions, and combat is a feature that's technically present but barely rears its head (unless we're talking about fighting the automated neutral faction). And it's not just mechanisms. The vibe and flow of the game is very similar.
What I don't want you to take away from this, is that Voidfall is derivative. I mean, it is, most board games are, and euro games are particularly prone to cannibalize. A measure of a good game isn't whether it reuses mechanisms developed by others, it's how well it understands what makes those mechanisms interesting.
And every time Voidfall borrows, it builds and re-interprets, which is all a very long way of saying that it's fun to figure out how to feed your people in Voidfall.
I do have a couple of criticisms. There's so many different icons in the game that the icon reference, which doesn't even contain all of them, is 4 A4 Pages big. So very often you're told to: 'Place five squiggly cog, arrow down, arrow up, dash, red line, does not equal, wavy blue, ampersand, ampersand.' What?
Again a familiar trope. Board games use iconography because if you memorize 20 pictures you internalize the game's language and then everything flows really smooth. Here's what I learned playing Voidfall:
Every time I see an icon that isn't one of the 10 basic icons I ignore it and don't try to understand it and instead look it up in this glossary, which has the full rules explanation for every card and element in this game. I suspect many people will do the same, because learning that many icons just isn't reasonable.
Quick aside, as much as I loathe the amount of icons, I do have to acknowledge the existence of this glossary. I've just never seen such a comprehensive rules explanation of absolutely every element that exists in this game, and just how useful and practical this was trying to navigate it. I don't think I've ever encountered a glossary like this and I'm very grateful that it exists. Publishers take note, this was invaluable.
Now on to my second criticism. The setup for this game takes an hour. And no, you can't reduce that with experience. That's it. That's my second criticism.
That's a minor gripe and once again I reiterate, I think this game is really good. I like it. I enjoy playing it, and that is the end of this review. Please don't watch anymore because there is nothing else coming afterwards. Ignore the text underneath because this is literally the last bit. Positive board game review! Happy ending for everyone. The End. Goodbye. Konets. Finito. Pabaiga. No more.....
I did mean that by the way, I do like Void fall quite a bit but there's just this one thing surrounding this game's orbit that I want to talk about and no, it's not space colonialism - I'm not touching that with a 10 ft pole - I'm going to touch something that's going to upset people even more.
I did mention that there's scenarios in this game. There are in fact 11 scenarios for each player count, totaling at 33. Plus eight solo scenarios, plus seven scenarios for the two-player co-op mode, six for the three player co-op mode, and four for the four player co-op mode.
And yes, there is a co-op mode adding a cavalcade of extra rules on an already pretty dense game. The way Voidfall is positioned is as everything for everyone. Don't like combat? Well, here's a scenario with little combat. Feel like there's not enough combat? There's a scenario for that too - make it much combat. Want it competitive? Cooperative? Solo operative? Step right up, only a dollar. It's almost like a Bethesda game or a Marvel show – just content on top of content on top of content. For all occasions - weddings, funerals, bar-mitzvas, doesn't matter! Just content!
My experience of playing Voidfall, which I like and this is a positive review, was that I played the tutorial scenario and I enjoyed that, and then I played another scenario and I really enjoyed that. But then when I had the choice of moving on to another scenario I just wanted to play the same one I played before. I didn't, because my job is not to, but there are so many variables and intricacies that to explore all of them would have taken me so many plays. I could literally just play that one scenario forever and I'd be happy with that. Honestly, that would do me fine.
I don't begrudge variety but it's important to recognise that variety always has a cost. Sure, there's 247 scenarios, but how many of them are sound? How many of these special houses, that accommodate the ideas in these scenarios, are sound? How many map layouts? I don't know, but I've definitely encountered a couple of houses with special abilities that made sense on paper but as soon as you put them into the context of how this game plays, their abilities were just not that interesting.
And... the rules for combat. They're advertised as purely deterministic - you can figure out the outcome before you even start the combat. That's not a lie, and I understand why they need to be like that.
The gist is that there's two steps: 'approach' and 'salvo'. First, you go to the approach step, which is where any combatant with approach damage deals one damage and anything that has approach shields shrugs it off. Then there's the salvo step where the same thing happens except only things with salvo damage deal damage and things with salvo shields shrug them off. And then Salvo keeps looping until there's one side remaining.
Sounds simple, but once you start factoring in all the tech and unique ships and special abilities, you have something so arcane that the developers felt like they needed to make an assistant app just to calculate combat results. And then the community decided that the assistant app wasn't good enough and made their own assistant app. And I don't care how you feel about complexity, if that app needed to happen maybe you've taken things one step too far.
But then combine the elements of player combat barely occurring and it being completely deterministic and you end up with a game where this happens:
'I'm going to attack you! ... Wait, just going to look up first the five Corvettes versus one Corvette, one Destroyer, one Star Base, tech... actually forget about it I'm just going to do some economy instead.'
Funny the first time, tedious forever after. I started to wonder why is combat like that? If the goal was to have a game with simple actions but a complicated decision space, why design a fighting system where you need a calculator just to figure out how to do it, but then have the result be so binary and dull?
It is literally the opposite of this game's design ethos. And then I played the game in co-op mode and ohhhh okay, it needs to be like that for co-op to work. Do you see my problem?
The way Co-op works is that you are literally playing the same game but you also have another deck and when you draw a card from that deck it tells you to draw a card from another deck, and when you draw that, it will tell you to do something this turn but with a penalty - or it's going to go on the doom board.
When cards pile up on the doom board - not the official name - they increase the severity of punishment at the end of every cycle, and then if they fill up the doom board they can trigger a catastrophe. Three of those and you lose the game.
I'm avoiding explaining a majority of the rules but the gist of it is that on top of playing this complicated euro game, you're also constantly bombarded with extra things you need to concern yourself with.
And it's not without its intrigue. You could, for example, fill up this doom board with cards and then, with one masterminded action, clear all of them. But it increases the mental load by about 50% for a game that was already 300% of an average euro game.
And on top of that when you check whether you won, you check against the score of the lowest scoring player, which is an abominable rule. The game points a finger at one person and says 'Hey, it's your fault we lost. Feel bad.'
Naturally with this increased load you just can't have a combat system that is anything but deterministic. After all this workout of working things out, the last thing you want is to lose because of a dice roll. Which would be fine in a competitive game. If one person hubrisses it, that's a story. But if it affects the entire table, that's just the game making everyone feel miserable.
At the start of this video I said that there's two criticisms that people will have for this game: that it's too complicated which, I mean, that's just what it is - people enjoy that. And that it's a euro game dressed up as Twilight Imperium.
And you know what? As simplistic as that criticism is, I think that second one is true. That euro game core is a clever, complex puzzle. It feels good to explore it. But everything bolted on top of that euro game feels like a weird mismatch. It strains the design and makes it gloopy so that it can fit into a mold that it was never meant for.
Listen, I don't begrudge this game having a cooperative mode or a solo mode. I bet there's hundreds of you leaving a comment right now saying 'But "insert mode" is my favourite mode!' and that's legit. I don't want you to not have it, I just want you to imagine how much better this game would be if instead of having to develop all the others, it would *only* be 'insert mode' and the design space didn't need to accommodate a car that's also a boat, and also an aeroplane.
In a world where Agricola and Caverna exist, in a world where some people own one or the other or both, I cannot see why Voidfall couldn't have been two distinct games, each leaning into the strengths of what they are trying to achieve.
But that's what games are like right now and it all comes back to my favourite subject - crowdfunding. Let's face it you can't rely on people to be excited about your game and shout about it from the rooftops. But gaming the crowdfunding algorithms, by including every conceivable mode and 5,000 content, all but guarantees at least moderate success.
And thus, we have the contentification of board games. Hey, it's like the title of the video! I want games to be made for people, and not for computers. And I know some of you are like 'I don't see the problem'. No, this is precisely the problem. This is a good game but it has the potential to be a truly astounding one. I can see it in there I just can't fish it out from all the debris of modes and content.
And I don't mean to imply some cynical ploy here, in fact the opposite. It is absolutely clear that Mindclash put so much care into this game - more than I see most publishers do. This is a labour of love.
I just wish that that labour was better applied.
In fact, I think most publishers by now feel the same way about all this extra cruft, they just see it as a necessity to survive in the crowdfunding environment. They need to contentify their board games. They need to make it so that everyone will like this one game forever ... until they buy another one one week later.
Anywho, that's it. I once again reiterate I like Voidfall. I think it's pretty good. This is a positive review, I just went on a tangent about this one thing that I didn't like. And if that outrages you, by all means absolutely please leave those angry comments that boost the visibility of this review, and get immediately deleted anyway.
If you enjoyed my tangent and want to support tangent work, we are entirely independent from publishers - supported just by people like yourselves, who watch us and give us some money every month. So please extend your own financial tangent towards our Patreon.
There’s something to be said about how much The White Castle achieves with so little space and so little cost. Here’s a game that takes up three times less space than a shoebox and, depending on your board game preferences, might last longer than a pair of wellies.
But with utility comes a cost, so let’s take a look at where The White Castle excels, and where it accidentally trims the good bits.
Below, is a transcript of the video.
Efka: Have we got an exciting board game to talk about today
Elaine: Oh, cool, finally a review of Voidfall!
Efka: No, no, no, we can't do Voidfall yet, that review needs a bit more work in the oven so we have to push it back. Again.
Elaine: No! We can’t do that. All day long at Essen Spiel people were coming up to me saying “Why don’t you review euro games anymore Efka?” “Do you hate Eurogames Efka?” “Give me eurogames Efka.”
Efka: Why were they calling you Efka?
Elaine: Because, Efka, we live in a patriarchy.
Efka: That checks out.
Efka: Anyway, today’s game is a euro game, it’s called The White Castle, I don’t want any burger jokes, no Harold and Kumar references, just clean euro game fun.
Elaine: Heeey! White Castle, put it in a square bun!
In The White Castle, 1-4 players navigate through complex internal politics of Feudal Japan, wheedling their way to bribe their lackeys into influential positions of power in court, military and... gardening?
If that sounded a little weird, but exciting!, then immediately erase all of what I said from your brain because what you actually do in this game is take a dice, place it on an action, get some resources, convert some resources, potentially trigger some bonus actions, get some more resources to set yourself up for more bonus actions and at the end someone will have more points than others and will win!
Let me show you how it works.
The visual and game centerpiece of White Castle are these three cardboard bridges, and as we all know,
[together] "humans build bridges so we can place dice on them".
Efka: Every round a bunch of dice will be rolled, and then placed on their respective bridges in ascending order.
On your turn, you must take a die from a bridge and place it on an action, but you can only take dice that are hanging on the sides of the bridges, the lowest and highest values of a given color. If I take this die here, I just place it on an action. But it wouldn’t be a Eurogame if it didn’t have an
[together] "innovative action selection mechanism".
The dice placement spots that let you do actions have values. If you place a die that depicts a higher value, you get money equal to the difference. If you place a die of lower value, you have to pay the difference.
So if you take a die from this side, nothing happens, but it’ likely be a high value dice. Whereas if you take a die from this side, it will probably be low, but [together sing] things start poppin’, like Gandalf’s fireworks on Bilbo’s birthday at the beginning of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings part one Fellowship of the Ring [mismatch tones] movie.
[HIGH FIVE]
So, you’ve opted for a low value dice prize, and are wondering what’s behind door number 2?! Drumroll please.
It’s… a LANTERN!
Efka: Can I have door number 3 instead?
Every time you take the die on the left side of the bridge you get a lantern bonus.
At the beginning of the game, this is likely just a resource or maybe a victory point? A smol thing. But, as you play, cards will travel to your personal action area, changing the actions you can do there, but also bumping the card that was there into your lantern zone.
Meaning that as the game progresses, the lantern zone expands, transforming from a frugal parent who will only buy supermarket brand potato waffles because they’re "just as good as Bird’s Eye" to a generous dopamine benefactor that constantly sates your craving for resources by showering you with gifts.
Efka: Actually I changed my mind, can I have door number 2 again?
Elaine: Are you sure?
Efka: Yes, just give me the lantern! But out of curiosity, what was behind door number 3?
Elaine: Super Mario Wonder.
[CRASHING NOISE]
[TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES]
Efka: I broke the bridge...Elaine: Did you?
Efka: Yeah I did
And that my friends was an accurate depiction of how it feels to play White Castle. You’ll wrack your brain over how and which action to take, and then realise you’ve opened the door for your opponent to do something much more desirable.
Let me explain the actual actions work so everything falls into place.
When you place a die on one of the spaces in the castle, you’ll activate all the action spaces that correspond to the colour of your die. Some spaces sport all three dice colours, meaning you’ll only get to do one of the actions, and some spaces let you double up, which feels very good but those are often contested by other players.
Generally, your big end game points come from the three types of people you deploy onto the board. Courtiers will score based on how high they are in the castle, but first, you need to deploy them to the castle gates for money, and then pay pearls to move them up.
Which is also how you get these cards into your card action slot which then moves them into the lantern bonus area.
Warriors cost steel to place in training camps and won’t score you points by themselves, but each warrior will score points based on how many courtiers you have in the castle.
Gardeners cost food and will score you a fixed number of points based on which garden you place them in but when you place them you get a bonus, and will also get that bonus at the end of every round as long as the bridge next to them still has dice remaining.
So the actions themselves just let you do those things. Maybe get some resources. Ooh nice, I get some steel. Or maybe place one of your pieces. Ooh, I can spend that steel to place a warrior in the training camp. That'll trigger a bonus which will let me place a courtier, except I don’t have enough pearls to move them up oh no I didn’t plan well.
And let’s talk about the elephant in the room, I know you’ve all been thinking to yourselves – what’s up with all these big birds at the top? That is the stork track. If you take the stork action, you move up on the stork track, and whoever is higher on the stork track is the first player. And then at the end of the game, the stork will bring you a baby! And by baby I mean more victory points.
[Elaine] Sounds a lot like Pipeline.
[Efka] This game is nothing like pipeline! Pipeline is a big sprawling strategy economy game. White Castle is a minimalist dry euro.
[Elaine] I just mean this track, it’s a bit like Pipeline, in whoever is highest is first.
[Efka] …And that’s why you thought you would compare it to the greatness, to No Pun Included’s 2019 Game of the Year - Pipeline? Shame on you Elaine, I expected better from you.
Do you know what this game reminds me of? Pipeline. On the outset, they’re incredibly different, but when you boil it down to how they feel…
The one thing we didn’t mention yet, and frankly it warps everything we’ve described about this game so far, is that each player only gets nine actions. Three rounds, three actions each. That’s it.
With these nine actions, you not only want to empty out this yard of fifteen layabouts but also somehow acquire the resources to pay for all of that.
Which is very reminiscent of Pipeline’s restricted number of turns. If you want more comparisons, both games have small actions that you need to set up to trigger a bunch of bonuses to make them effective, both games never give you enough resources, both games feel incredibly opportunistic!
For example, in White Castle, you might take some food and think to yourself, "Oh, cool, next turn I’ll place a gardener". But then by the time your turn comes back round to you, not only is the die gone that you needed to take the action, but also the action itself is gone because someone sent a courtier to that space and stole the action for themselves and replaced it with something entirely different.
White Castle is dynamic and unpredictable, meaning you can’t much plan your turns in advance, like in Pipeline, and have to adapt to the changing gamestate, like in Pipeline, and this dynamic shifting leads to wildly diverging scores where one game you could score seventy points, and then the game afterwards you could score like only twenty five, LIKE IN PIPELINE! Except in Pipeline scores can go up over a thousand sometimes but basically IT’S PIPELINE !
Thank you Efka, for proving my point *hides words behind cough* about the patriarchy.
But whilst we’re comparing White Castle to Pipeline, I can’t help but think, it’s just not Pipeline.
Listen, I have a lot of time for what publisher Devir and designers Isra C. and Shei S. are doing here.
Small box, cheap price, incredibly sleek and clever mechanisms – little game with a lot of punch and crunchy decisions. That’s super.
But it also reminds me of a supermarket brand potato waffle. Cheap, effective, precision manufactured. But it just hasn't got that waffly versatile flavour of Bird’s Eye.
When you play a big strategy euro game, let’s pick a random one like Pipeline, you often get a sense of a narrative scope of what you’re doing. I don’t mean, like a story, but just a sense of your strategy translating to a narrative. I’ve built up an efficient oil refining system which let me corner the market via sales. I’ve leveraged early game loans and technology upgrades into a big payout at the end. That sort of stuff.
The narrative scope of White Castle is that – this game I placed these pieces, instead of these ones. And that’s maybe a petty complaint when this game is twice as elegant and half the price, but whilst we're on complaints – here’s a few more.
Because of this shifting dynamic nature and difficulty of planning, the brisk nine turns take ever such a long time. You can’t plan your turn in advance, and then by the time the turn comes to you, you just hunker down, as you try to evaluate a sea of homogenous-looking action that are now different since the last time you looked at them. What you end up with is a fairly heads down, silent, experience that takes too long for what it delivers.
That’s not to say that there isn’t room for White Castle in your collection. At two players it’s a little less interactive but much pacier, although if you recall our last video, a great two player game needs to be an ice-breaker, and this is at best an ice-maintainer.
Which of course leads to this being a pretty great solo experience. Scores being dynamic lends itself well to a “beat the high-score” experience, and much like the rest of it, the bot is sleek, elegant and doesn’t get in the way. Also, it’s brutal. I played it on easy, and the bot got scores I’ve never seen a human player achieve, so if you’re a glutton for punishment, go to White Castle. Also, get this game.
Elaine: I thought you said “no white castle jokes?”
Efka: yeah but, gotta do a callback to the beginning of the video
Elaine: Do you wanna do a Harold and Kumar reference?
Efka: I’ve never actually seen that film.
Elaine: Neither have I.
Efka: Eh, it's old and probably not ok in some way.
Elaine: How about we sing the song again?
[Both try to harmonize but it’s mismatched and doesn’t work]
Efka: You know what, why don’t instead say that White Castle is ok, good even, but what it shaves on cost it also shaves on experience.
Elaine: I'm gonna go and check on Voidfall in the oven
Efka: Okay...
Might be a while before she comes back. So if you don't want to wait why don't you hit the subscribe button?
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And if you've already done that, check out our board game podcast "Talk Cardboard".
Where we also talk about board games every other Monday.
Last episode, we discussed all the games we played at Essen Spiel.
And then every other, other Monday we have these No Pun Included videos.
And if you've done all of these things, you must be a fan! So why not support us on Patreon? patreon.com/nopunincluded.
That's where you give us a bit of money every month and in return you get bonus episodes of the podcast and you also support independent board game media, so that's very nice.
See you on Monday!
Who doesn’t love a good two player board game? You don’t have to hunt down a lot of friends to have a good time, and they’re often quite crunchy and fun. There’s so many amazing ones to choose from, and there’s no way to cover all of them in one video, but here’s a selection of ones we think are truly fantastic.
Sadly, because this video is unscripted, no transcript this time. See you in two weeks!
I’m not going to mince words, I think we’re entering a new stage in this board game hobby niche thing that we are into - the decline of crowdfunding. Lords of Ragnarok isn’t the first game to drop on our collective lap that’s evidently not very functional, but I think a few more things are happenings.
People are becoming more aware of the dangers of backing big projects, publishers like Awaken Realms have to publish them faster and make more of them to remain sustainable, and then of course, there was the “global event” that made people re-evaluate priorities, and ask themselves harder questions. Questions like: “do I need seven boxes of expensive miniatures that I’m never going to play with?"
This is what today’s episode is about. Sort of. FIrst, I want to show you Lords of Ragnarok, and why exactly it’s a game that simply doesn’t work. Second, I want to talk a little bit about how games end up being like that, and how we should adjust our purchasing habbits.
Below is a transcript of the entire video:
I’ve never seen a board game so confidently shoot itself in the foot and then attempt to run a marathon… is something I said to a reviewer friend of mine when describing Lords of Ragnarok who then said to me
Tom Brewster: That’s a great line
Was that… Elijah Wood? Anyway, I thought, let’s use that line to open the review!... but then I decided it’s a bit cheesy so let me do this instead. In all my time reviewing board games I’ve never ever felt so sure in saying – this is a terrible game.
Tom Brewster: Wait just to be clear, I’m not saying any of this. Cause I never played the game. I don’t want any responsibility in case you’re wrong, - Efka - you know what I’m saying?
OMG grow a backbone Elijah
In Lords of Ragnarok players take on the roles of mythical heroes from Scandinavian folklore,
Lorri, Dorri, Borri, Gorri, Forri and Snorri.
That last one is real, and also a name I used to sleep under. In addition to your hero, you have armies, a ship and some priests. And the big twist is that there’s also future tech, so… ugh… Nordic Lasers? Yeah... sure ok why not.
Not only is Lords of Ragnarok a troops on a map game, a genre where you move armies hoping to control various territories, you know, Risk - but it’s also a sequel to a game that’s moderately well regarded, Greecy Lasers.
With a genre so established and an existing framework, it’s hard to imagine how we got here like that. At worst, I was expecting this game to be mediocre, dull, uninspired. Not busted. So uh, I guess, let’s take a look at how it… works.
The goal of each game is to be the first person to reach one of the three winning conditions.
Nice, clearly signposted territories that we have to fight over. This makes sense.
Lands are these big regions of a single color, and in total three lands are basically half of the board. To achieve this, your opponents would have to be 1) babies, 2) asleep, 3) too busy to pay attention to the game because they’re piloting an aeroplane. Theoretically this is possible. Practically you have nine territories you have to defend, and only six pieces to defend them with.
In every game there is a boss. If you just have the core box – it’s Loki. If you, like me, sadly pledged for… *deep sigh* you have other choices for game bosses.
This one’s going to need more work to untangle, here come some condensed rules.
Let’s contextualize things. The objective of the game is to mostly control territories. But this win condition says – destroy the big dork and you win instead. Which, again, in theory is sound. It’s like political leverage. If you get too many votes I’ll post incriminating deets – that sorta thing.
Naturally, a third of the game’s mechanisms tie around this concept. And a third of the game’s miniatures as well!
You can’t just attempt to defeat Loki, first you need to defeat two other monsters, or partially defeat monsters, I’ll spare you the details.
Fighting either starts a whole mini game of playing combat cards, covering up wound slots, getting rewards.
Is this even a good mechanism? Imagine three people engaged in a fight over territories and one person ignores all of that and plays their own game, which you can’t affect, and then just wins. Is that fun? Well there’s just no way of knowing, sadly, because practically this isn’t doable.
No, really. You can’t do this. First of all, there isn’t enough time to achieve this. I’ll explain why in just a bit. But also, whilst defeating monsters is a moderately fun and marginally rewarding activity – defeating Loki himself is so preposterously hard it might not actually be possible.
As in, I tried defeating him outside of the game by maxing out all my stats and I still couldn’t do it. And don’t take my word for it, according to a review by Charlie Theel on Player Elimination, there was at the time of publishing no known instance of someone being able to achieve this.
Now image me telling you – NONE OF THAT MATTERS. I guess you don’t have to because I just did because it doesn’t. These three win conditions are rendered meaningless because most games of Lords of Ragnarok do not end by someone achieving them.
At some point, the game throws a tantrum, as if upset by your audacity at attempting to enjoy it and just says it’s over now and enacts
This disk is YGGDRASIL and it’s not a territory – it’s the action disk. The weird thing about this game is that what your armies do and what your hero does are sort of separate things.
Armies can move about, fight other armies, control territories, that sort of thing.
Your hero can also take control of a territory but mostly it trundles around the map, collecting resources, building temples, making alliances with neutral factions, fighting monsters.
These are called special actions, and your hero gets to do one each turn by placing a disk on one of the action slots on YGGDRASSIL or take off all disks by building the next part of a giant miniature representing one of the game’s three gods – buff man, buff man, or wisdomous lady.
Are we doing this? Are we still really doing this?
So YGGDRASSIL isn’t really a territory, but if Ragnarok happens, the territories that are adjacent to YGGRADSSIL are the only thing that matter because whoever controls the most of them becomes the winner of the game.
There are five Ragnarok cards, each featuring a condition, like building one of these monument minis or maxing out one of your attributes. If three of these conditions are ever achieved, then Ragnarok is triggered and players have one more round to scramble for the territories near YGGDRASIL.
But note that the original three win conditions are also represented on these Ragnarok cards, but the Ragnarok version is achieved earlier. If for some reason, you’re trying to win by killing Loki, you need to kill two monsters first. But killing two monsters will immediately flip one of the five Ragnarok cards before you can even try to defeat Loki. And other Ragnarok cards, like completing one Monument, sort of just achieve by themselves during the course of play.
Or in other words, for most of the game, three things matter, and thing four doesn’t, but in some plays at the end of the game the three things that mattered stop mattering and the thing that didn’t matter now does.
Which means in 95% of the games trying to achieve the three standard win conditions, including one that has a bunch of mechanisms and miniatures and all kinds of nonsense tied around it, does not matter. Does any of this make any sense to you?
Okay, imagine you’re playing a game of football. Or soccer if you’re American adjacent. You’re on minute 89, it’s nil-nil, for some reason scoring a goal for anyone is impossible. Your coach calls you over, hands you this (picks up a basketball) and says, right I need you to land a three pointer.
And at that moment you realise your entire career was meaningless and now you’re tired, this isn’t worth it, you want to go home.
Our general review philosophy is that we don’t just want to recite the rules for the game, we want to highlight how the game feels. What are the highs, lows, what’s the experience.
But my only experience of Lords of Ragnarok is how its incomprehensible. I mean, I understand the rules. I just don’t understand why these rules are the way they are. What are they doing? What’s the point? And there are cool rules in Lords of Ragnarok, and I deliberately omitted explaining the majority of this game. For example, when you place Loki somewhere, armies can't go into that territory. And that immediatly sounds cool because it's derivative of El Grande. And you think "oh it's the El Grande bit, where you can block a region." But for most of the game, that doesn't matter. Because the other core rules, like the whole idea of the game doesn't function. None of these elements cohere into anything interesting. It's just... pushing miniatures around. For hours. For no reason whatsoever.
That’s just a thing that happens with board games sometimes. Plenty of designers swing wide and, apologies, to extend the sportsball analogy, not every one of them is a home run. But it’s one thing to have a plucky go, and another thing to sell me something that just by the look of it must come with a four wheel drive, leather interior and a six litre engine. This box is just new monsters. A whole box dedicated to a win condition that’s incompletable.
I know we’ve been fairly critical of publisher Awaken Realms in the past, so let me say two things here. First, I promise, next time we cover an Awaken Realms game, it’s gonna be a positive one. Second, I don’t want to make it seem like I think they maliciously designed a bad game. It’s pretty clear that many of these weird mechanisms are design responses to perceived flaws of the Lords of Ragnarok predecessor Lords of Hellas.
But this, this, this, this, this, this and this that all takes time an effort that’s diverted from making just the core rules enjoyable.
There are instances, miracles, where you get five boxes and it’s good. But in most cases, and clearly this case, the publishers don’t leave themselves enough time to actually make the game they’re promising.
So no, I don’t think anyone wanted to make a bad game. But it’s clear that Awaken Realms never figured out how these changes actually play out in practice. That was not their priority. This on the other hand,
And it’s happening more and more and naturally, you could feel frustrated, because you chucked upwards of 250 euros into this thing, depending on whatever options you selected in the crowdfunding campaign.
But to be brutally honest, of course they’ll do that. That is their literal business model, make big boxes with lots of extra boxes, and to sustain growth they need to make even more big boxes with extra boxes FASTER. And they’ll keep doing it and they’ll keep cutting corners as long as you keep buying them.
In isolation, Lords of Ragnarok is an emporium of mistakes. In context, it’s a symptom that this whole “crowdfund a Dubai sized board game” gimmick is unsustainable and will eventually stop producing games that are playable. And you can upend it, by either not backing these projects, or, only backing just the core box.
Fight with your wallet, not with angry comments. If you leave an angry comment, or just a displeased one, you’re just opening the door for a WE HEAR YOU. Whereas if your wallet says “I want less boxes and more game” that actually forces them to rethink their business model.
If you want an alternative recommendation for cool troops on a map game, Kemet is still good, Ankh is the big many box experience that’s somehow actually great and Inis is a neat example of what if this genre but WEIRD.
Whereas Lords of Ragnarok has as much credibility as a floating carrier bag trying to pass as a seagull. It rams every ounce of this box with high street chic and doesn’t stop itself to think why.
Just when you think the well of tile laying games like Carcassone is exhausted, here comes Dorfromantik to say, “what if we change it up just a little?” And turns out changing it up just a little means winning the coveted Spiel des Jahres award for 2023 - phoah! That’s a prize if there was one.
So what’s the change? Well, dorfromantik removes the possibility of losing, and I imagine when I say that you have more questions than excitement. How in the world does it work? How is it fun? Well, that’s what our review is for.
You can watch the video here and read the transcript below.
Dear friend, have you heard the good word of placing a tile? Would you like to sip from the fount of hexagonal delights? Are you familiar with the sumptuous relish of making a landscape that looks like a map that you built yourself by following an eight page rules manual? Then let me seduce you with a little gem called dorfromantik. That’s just… that’s a cool name.
[Efka] You might be asking me,
[Elaine] How do you dorf?
[Efka] Let me show you. Each turn in dorfromantik you take a tile off a pile and place it anywhere you like.
[Elaine] Does it have to match other tiles?
[Efka] No, unless it’s a river or a railroad, those have to match, anything else is fine as long as it’s adjacent, no double dorfing.
[Elaine] How do you win?
[Efka] You always win.
[Elaine] WHAT? Yeah just place the last tile, the game’s over, count up your score – you’ve won.
[Elaine; long pause, taps fingers on the table] Where is the game?
[Efka] That is an excellent question.
So dorfromantik is a pretty cool game, but to explain why, I’m gonna have to get a little game design nerdy, so bear with me. If you enjoy simple elegant games, I think you’re going to have a great time with this despite it bucking every conventional game sensibility, and if you like complex meaty games – I think there’s actually something to learn here.
Every game relies on tension residing in players, and that tension is usually expressed with the question CAN I WIN.
In competitive games you ask this question in relation to the other players. Can I win against Colin? Probably. Maybe? Dunno, Colin can surprise you.
In co-operative games, like dorfromantik you ask this question together with the other players. Can we fight the system? Can we beat the clock? Reach the threshold? Here’s the thing, in dorfromantik the answer to all these is yes, before you even begin playing. And yet, it’s still surprisingly tense. How does it achieve that? It simply expects you to play it more than once.
Like I mentioned, all you do on any given turn is draw a tile and choose where to place it. But at any given time, there are three special tiles on the board.
These look like any tile in the game but additionally they feature a quest. For example, this tile says build a forest extending from this tile that is exactly five tiles big. So if I have this quest, and I draw a tile with a forest, I can place it in such a way that it extends that forest, and as soon as that forest encompasses five tiles, I take the quest marker off and place it in my score pile. I now have five points!
Once this is done, I’ll draw a new tile from the special quest tile pile, and it’ll be a new quest. It’s a village quest! Then I draw a number tile from here, it has a six on it, now I need to work on a village that’s six tiles big.
And you’ll notice, there’s already tricksy things you can achieve. If you’ve been drawing village tiles before but had no village quest, you can still build up an area that’s say, four village tiles big, and then when you draw the village quest, bam, autocomplete, draw a new quest, we need a four tile long railroad bam, autocomplete, a field of six, got that ready, autocomplete – that feels very good, especially since it rewarded pre-planning.
There’s a few extra ways of increasing your score. The longest river and the longest railroad will score you one point for every tile in that river or railroad.
But wait, that’s already getting a bit tricky because if I have a river of seven I can’t put in this quest tile that needs a river of six, I have to start a new river which is now competing with my one longest river oh no what do I do?
And there’s also these flag tiles for forests fields and villages, they’ll also score you one point per tile in those forests fields and villages as long as that area is completely surrounded by other features at the end of the game.
This once again pulls you away from making many little scoring areas and asks you to work on a big one, with the added tension of not going full hubris and never closing it off before the stack runs out. Ugh, I want to place more, but I also need to finish it, and not place more. I’m gonna place more.
At which point you might be asking? Well, what’s the point of points if I win anyway? The simple answer is you’re trying to beat your previous score. But I won’t blame you if you think that’s too milquetoast or not particularly interesting, but hang in there, we’re getting to the actual point.
Let me tell you how our very first game of dorfromantik went. And let me start by saying, it’s just a surprisingly lovely time?
There was something intimately collaborative about drawing a tile, and together figuring out how you expand this landscape. I did say the game is tense, but not tense in a way where much is riding on any one given placement. It’s chill tension basically. Is that a thing? It is now!
So turn to turn you discuss, you collaborate, investigate this map you’ve conjured. How about here, oh I dunno do we really need to expand this forest? Oh wait, wait, look, it fits perfectly here! Yeah it scores zero points tho why would you put it here?
Cause it’s pleasing, and that’s valid. Anyway, we talked, we laughed we ached, the tiles were dwindling and with that stack getting oh so tiny finishing up the last objectives felt very important. Are there even any railroads left? We just need one more!
And then it’s over. We looked at our score pile. We literally cleared every quest tile available in the game. Amazing! Our score must be really good. We could have maybe made our roads and railroads a little longer, opportunities to improve but overall we’re champs. Right?
Ahem. So, there’s this campaign sheet that gives you a score chart. We accumulated a 147 points. And then looked at this and it told us that a possible high score is 400. Whoops.
This was my first clue that there’s just way more going on than I initially gave this credit for. In fact, I don’t even think you could get 400 points from just these initial starting rules. But that’s the thing, once you finish, the game is far from over.
I don’t wanna call this a campaign game, it’s a weird label that gives all kinds of expectations, like having to get the same people together all the time or keep playing it past the point where you want to, or remember all the rules that you’ve unlocked. No no no, nothing like that.
But you do unlock things. Each time you finish a game you check your score. That’ll tell you how many pips you’ve earned, which you can the color into this track. This will lead you to various things you can unlock, and yes there are boxes you open, but they’re not like these massive surprises that are gonna wow you – they are just more different things you can and try and explore.
Achievements that say, hey do this, unlock a new thing. Can you, gonna make something up, dunno if it’s actually in the game, create a long river that loops back onto itself? In the space of one game? Whilst juggling all the other things?
So when I said you win every game by default, I was sort of lying. You do win, but you actually only feel like you’ve won if you achieved the task you set out to do at the very beginning. In that sense it’s almost like you pick your own objective, your own quest. What sounds fun to you? Do that! Can you do two things? Three?
And also, you want to beat your previous score. Which on our second game we totally failed by scoring 146 points – that’s one measly point lower for those keeping track.
And that’s the appeal of dorfromantik, sit down by yourself, or with someone who’s company you enjoy, and have another go. I wouldn’t play this with strangers at like a club or whatever, but it’s perfect for couples or good friends. It’s moreish, relaxed, and it’s got that tile laying goodness. Every game is a little different and offers a new thing to take on. It’s nice.
Some of you might also recognise dorfromantik in its video game form which was how it originally appeared in the world at the height of lockdowns and then sort of petered away like most pandemic things, you know, like sourdough bread, or the sensation that one day everything is going to be fine.
(Weird disclosure time, this is not a review copy. We bought this game. But the video game maker did originally send us a code for the video game back when it came out, so there’s that.)
I actually wasn’t really that excited for dorfromantik the board game, I liked the video game but then just sort of forgot that it exists. But I think this is actually the form this game really works in. Playing with two is just great, and seeing the whole thing you’ve built at all times and planning new placements with a bird’s eye view feels much better than scrolling around an lcd screen of rampant tile growth.
The rules, whilst being nearly identical feel more contained and cohesive – I think this game is in its perfect form. It might be “not for everyone” but I don’t think I’ll stop thinking about dorfromantik the board game. I’ll always want to dorf it just one more time.
NPI always had a bit of a tense history with hidden movement games. Elaine outright does not like them at all (more on that in our last episode of Talk Cardboard) and Efka often finds one side quite dull to play. So when one of them makes at least one team member of NPI happy - we know it’s going to be a hit.
But City of the Great Machine changes up the formula so much, it leaves us asking, is this even hidden movement anymore? And does that even matter when the game is very evidently quite good.
Five years ago we promised you a review of Brass: Birmingham and this very video is not that. But if you want to find out why so many people love Brass - this very video is going to attempt to explain that in the most roundabout way.
If you’ve been asking yourself what the world’s most complicated board game actually looks like? Ask no more. Cones of Dunshire? Pffft. It can get the cone out. Aeon Trespass: Odyssey took every reviewer cog we had (and then some) to figure out and wrangle, and here’s our verdict: it’s fine? That’s right, it’s fine. Just fine.
But I suspect that won’t quite do it for you. You want to see it for yourself. And so here’s an in-depth hour long review.
Hello Spacetrepeneurs. To round out our coverage of solo games both on the podcast and on this very YouTube channel we decided to group together some special mentions and make them into a special. It just so happened that they’re all space themed so it would only makes sense for the special to be space themed. It’s nice when everything just sort of falls into place.
I’m also pretty stoked to talk about these because they’re all very neat in their own little way and each offers a different experience. And this happens to be the first time NPI is covering a solo role-playing game and I don’t think I could have picked a better one.
After this video, we’re diving headlong into some very meaty games so if you’ve been hankering for the BIG NPI videos, they’re right around the corner.
Board games can be a lot to handle. Sometimes that doesn’t stop us. The mythical experience, the promise of something great at the other end of the rules is enough to keep us persevering, learning, untangling. But sometimes you pick apart a rubber band ball to find that all you have left is a bunch of rubber bands. Hoplomachus: Victorum is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon, a rich, indulgent, complex game that hides very little behind it’s bombastic veneer.
I’ve spent many hours engaging in false starts, gripping rulebooks, FAQs, youtube tutorials and playthroughs to understand this system at a level where I felt tactically capable of navigating it only to find that once I got there, there wasn’t much left.
Which is a darn shame. Hoplomachus: Victorum is a one player only game, and I was quite excited to explore a system with so much space exclusively designed as a solo experience. I wanted richness and depth, yet sometimes richness and depth isn’t enough. You also need pacing, structure, a rewarding experience, all things plenty present in other designs.
For more on Hoplomachus: Victorum, watch our video review.
Paperback Adventures is a rogue-lite deck-building solo word game. If that sounded like word salad - don’t toss it away just yet because you might be missing out on just about the most fun you can have with words and cards.
It’s our Game of the Year, and for more you’ll have to watch the video!
Hello dear punsters,
After a slightly longer gap this time there is finally a new video. We've been hunkered down getting to grips with Frosthaven and now we can deliver to you our non verdict. That's right, NON verdict. Since we designed a scenario for Frosthaven, we have recused ourselves from reviewing it, but we still wanted to give you something Frosthaven, and without much further ado - here it is.