Amongst Many Board Games, The White Castle is a Board Game

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.

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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?

and that way the video will just appear on your YouTube page.

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!

These Two Player Games are Great

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!

Lords of Ragnarok and the Decline of Crowdfunding

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:

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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

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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.

The Unlosable Game - Dorfromantik the Board Game

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.

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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.

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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.

Trailblazers will haunt your nightmares | A review

City of the Great Machine Review

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.

Why is Brass: Birmingham world's Number One board game?

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.

World's Most Complicated Board Game (is okay) | Aeon Trespass: Odyssey Review

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.

These Space Games Are Only For You

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.

Hoplomachus: Victorum Made Me Very Tired

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 Slay the Spire with Words

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.

Flamecraft Review - Cup of Tea and a Biscuit

No Pun Included's Game of the Year 2022

It’s our Game of the Year, and for more you’ll have to watch the video!

How Frosthaven Lets You Build Its World

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.

Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood Review

Oathsworn is easily the most amibitious board game we’ve ever played. And our past experience has taught us that Kickstarter projects with a lot of amibtions rarely deliver on their promise. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that Oathsworn is one of the very few that breaks this rule.

Undaunted: Stalingrad Review - Emotional Gauntlet

Undaunted joins the long list of games to get a campaign mode, but instead of weighning it down the campaign mode lifts the system into one of the most memorable experiences we ever encountered in cardboard. Find out more in the video.

Stars of Akarios Review - Hyperflop

Hello everyone it's me Efka with one of the biggest disasters of the year. That's right, Stars of Akarios is a $170 rubbish, so grab some of that corn that you pop, but don't worry about the pan - I've got that covered.

Return to Dark Tower Review

Hello, it’s me Efka, the adversary of nostalgia, here to review a board game that has been ressurected from the annals of the cardboard eighties. It also features the most ridiculous board game component ever made. Which leads us all to ask - is this just a gimmick? Yes. But also, in a very big way, no. It’s complicated. I made a video about it. That’s what we’re all here for, so go ahead. Press the play button, if you dare 💀

Blood on the Clocktower and the History of Mafia and Werewolf

Ankh: Gods of Egypt Review

I guess that thumbnail is doing a lot of work for me. A big CMON Kickstarter project that I somehow ended up loving - that doesn’t happen every day.

Okay, so what is Ankh: Gods of Egypt? It’s a toys on a map game from Eric Lang, designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun amongst others where 2-5 players have big minis, big fights and generally a big time. Why is it good? Well, that’s what this video is about. Bonus: tune in for some cultural commentary from someone who was very curious to find out how CMON’s treatment of Ancient Egypt stacks up. Spoilers: It’s complicated.