The initial impressions of this game are average to good. The game is easily explained, plays out very quickly, yet is interesting to keep you busy because of the assymetry in what both sides can and cannot do. In essence, it's a game of cat and mouse where the cat has been somewhat declawed and the mouse is high on steroids and speed. I've not yet seen the French win (and a cynical streak in me might accuse the Spanish author of this game with less than noble intentions) but I attribute this to bad play and not making full use of various features on the map due to inexperience. Subsequent plays confirmed this suspicion: the French must truly be as nasty as they can be, and show no mercy whatsoever towards those pesky Spaniards. I nearly won the last time I played this, but I got greedy and got the hammer-and-anvil tactic (or is that strategy) I was following all messed up.

As far as accessible historical wargames go, this one is pretty good. Okay, it isn't Hannibal (or anything else, for that matter). But given the rather bloody background of the game, I was a bit surprised to see my girlfriend liking this title. I'm very much inclined to give the game one point deduction because of pretty much abysmal physical appearance, though. The cards are not particularly good nor easily legible, the board is tiny and easily obscured by hordes of French forces, and there's but one leaflet for people to write their orders out on. Why bother including that if players must provide their own paper and pencils to begin with?

Yet another title from Martin Wallace where a newcomer suddenly wonderes who the hell aimed a blowtorch at his brain. Just as any other Wallace title, this game must be played several times for the strategies to emerge. Until then, this game acquires no rating.

So far, I have only played the game with 2 players. Once you get over the feeling that this game really, really doesn't like you, it is fun to play. In fact, the most important realisation is that the game really doesn't care whether you ever break even or not before it ends; it merely compares relative performance to other players. The only real threat facing players is ending up with no cash and a maximum amount of issued stock, but most maps are so friendly that you really have to make an effort to make this event occur. There are maps designated in the correct AoS jargon as tight where you do have be on your guard, though.

I created a beautiful remake of this map using my pitiful skills in Corel DRAW because my girlfriend has special ties to this huge chunk of land. Being able to play Age of Steam in a Siberian setting was too big a dangling carrot to ignore. Unfortunately, when playing we found the map really, really harsh; this was due to the very high terrain costs and very meager return of investment. Mines were closed nearly as quickly as they went into production; cities did not need the goods we produced. I rand headling into bankruptcy halfway through the game and have not played this map since.

I understand that there have been some changes to the basic rules (based on a modification date in the lengthy rules discussion), so perhaps the map will now be simpler. I guess I'll have to try again one of these days.

I liked this game better than I thought I would. At first, it seems a deathly dull affair: after all, what can you do? Create a new recipe, copy one, or pass in order to secure new ingredients. There's no toxic fumes, funny colours or stacks of lead waiting to be turned into gold: in fact, it's all cubes and a few tokens. But looks are deceiving. Underneath the dull exterior hides a rather clever little game which in my opinion gets less attention and perhaps even praise than it deserves. The problems the players face is that they only score points for their recipe once, when it is first created; thereafter, they only get one resource cube from the recipe's ingredients while the person using that recipe gets the points. So an 'easy' recipe should not be coupled with a high point value: you'll just be handing easy cubes and points to the competition. So what the game forces you to do is set up a rather complex trading sequence in which other players use your cheap recipe to transform some components into others netting you a cheap resource, and then using those cheap resources to use someone else's expensive recipe to give you points. A great and subtle way of using Nash equilibria, without creating lockout problems.

If in addition you also manage to create a monopoly for a given colour, you can hold back the expensive recipes until the game is nearly over so that others don't really profit from their price. Now since experienced players know about this they will be on the lookout for cheap routes as well, so I suspect that the points obtained for most used ingredient are actually more significant than some reviewers make them out to be. The asymmetric patterns thus set up make sure that different players focus on different ingredients instead of simply piggybacking the cheapest route.

In some remote way, Alchemist reminds me of Die Dolmengötter, but in reverse. Now it's not helping another player in exchange for a position in the dolmen stack; it's setting up something for other players so they help you elsewhere. Viewed like this, Alchemist is actually quite clever and not at all so easy and average as it is generally made out to be. Unfortunately, you have to learn the ropes by failing a few times, and seeing how the game 'works' in the hands of an experienced player. The style of play may be odd, starting up your strategy too, but they are not so difficult that you won't pick them up in a game or two. So: don't be fooled by its exterior; play a few games and think about what you're trying to achieve; and then try to see how it 'works' before passing judgement. It was an unlikely addition to my collection, but one I'm not in the least having second thoughts about.

I like Amazone. It is a quick and light game, but since money is a tight resource, the game can force quite a few nasty decisions on you. Once players are in the playing rythm it also plays quite quickly, making it an ideal warming-up or cooling-down game. The graphics are bright and cheerful, and simply quite inviting to play with. Marring the otherwise good design are errors in the white tie-breaker numbers on the cards which in the German edition are skewed towards particular colours; and somewhat imbalanced secret assignment cards which make things too easy for some, and too difficult for others. Nevertheless, I forgive the game these flaws because I've not felt them to be very problematic in practice; and even if they were, I play the game not sufficiently often to notice them.

This game has the honour of being the first title I ever played at a game convention after I 'got into the hobby' more or less officially; it is also the first genuine big box boardgame I bought for myself. Regrettably, Amon Ra suffered from a number of problems which might have otherwise stayed my hand, had I had the experience I now have. First of all, it's not a good game to play with 3 players, at 4 it's okay, and it's not until you play with 5 that you play 'as intended'. 5 players is a problem in my neck of the woods. Second issue: the fact that there are so many little rules and twists means that the people you play it with must be able to put up with the game for a number of times at least. So I need 4 other experienced players. That's an even bigger problem.

Other than that it is a solid, if a little dry title with plenty of tiny agonising little twists, especially in the second half of the game when the presence of the pyramids and stones makes the right choice of province to buy and work far from easy. You need players with a good intuitive sense of numbers and return on investments to play Amon Ra: the game will therefore not appeal to everyone. Amon Ra is not easy on newcomers: explaning the many little rules can be brutal; nor is it easy on experienced players: one mistake/upstart in your cashflow will probably cost you the victory as you don't have the time to make up for the loss. Which is of course the challenge. The little shortcomings made me decide to give Amon Ra a slightly lower rating that it otherwise would've gotten.

Basically an engaging multiple ways to victory-game although the number of ways with which to achieve victory is somewhat small. Players attempt to score the highest amount of points against the backdrop of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Randomly laid-out craftsmen can be hired for ever increasing prices: they allow you to obtain tradable goods, camels, and influence in the temples as well as irrigate canals running through the Gardens. Goods and camels can be traded away for plants which bring you a lot of goodies, but since a plant depends on water brought into the Gardens by irrigation, it is not easy (and quite frankly, impossible) to play your own game and see it through.

I admit I'm rather puzzled why I like this game. For all intents and purposes it should be rife with multiplayer chaos: absolutely not my favourite mechanism. I think that it has a lot to do with Amyitis' incremental nature and the fact that there is nearly always something sensible for you to do. In other words: players get in each other's way in important areas, but not to the extent that it appears to be decisively crippling. It's this finely tuned balance which sits very right with me: it isn't a game of pure economic growth yet does allow you to develop in a slow fashion; it does have multiple ways to victory, but does allow you to hamper an opponent without too great a sacrifice to your own position; etcetera. It is simply a well-crafted game which provides an interesting challenge in a moderate amount of time.

Andromeda I approached with mixed sentiments. Uncomfortably often reviews stressed the randomness factor. This is indeed the case: if you are into games where you want to take sole responsibility for your success or failure, then stay clear from Andromeda: you won't like it. Andromeda revolves solely around the infamous 'cosmic ashtray': This brainstorm is what single-handedly makes the game. It somehow makes you forget you're dealing with dice on steroids, no mean feat. The fact that you are never 'out' of the game, even when it is not your turn, is something I like as well. However, what really surprises me is that despite the fact that the game itself is quite pointless from a mathematical point of view, I still like it. I cannot rationally explain this: perhaps it's just the very good presentation...? Summarising so far, a nice friendly game which goes over very well with non-boardgamers. A bit of luck, a bit of tactics, a bit of good-natured taunting if you kick someone off of a planet, really not bad stuff. But... It takes too long to play to completion. If the game were to last about a third less, it would have seen regular table time. But in its current inception it begins to drag near the end. Unfortunately I cannot think of a good way to shorten Andromeda, and that forces me to give the game a lower rating than it actually deserves based on my positive feelings for it.

Antike was pointed out to me I think because it was repeatedly mentioned in any list where the infamous and hypothetical 'Civilization Light' game was discussed. At one point I made a note to give it a try during Spiel, and was lucky enough to find it during its 2006-edition. Although I had a few doubts about the viability at three players (which was the number of our test game), I bought a copy, and began to play with other people. After several games (all at different player numbers), the feeling that Antike was not what I had hoped it to be grew ever stronger. It plays fast due to its very business-like mechanics, but at times they are boring and mindless excercises. Oh, is it my turn already? is not an uncommong exclamation at my table. However, far more problematic turned out to be the realisation that they also turn the game into a barren campaign of ruthless efficiency where the first one to blink loses. Attacks are non-existent in the 3- and 4-player games; and in the 5-player game the attacker becomes a sitting duck for everyone else in the vicinity. The author of the game published a document in which dozens of units are destroyed to sack just one temple—an impressive use of the simple movement and combat rules, granted... But at the same time both civs are completely bereft of cannon fodder and are likely to be overrun in the next few turns. Therefore Antike suffers greatly from the fact that the attacker will not profit from his actions, pushing the game into the territory of trench warfare with a quick and unstoppable jaunt to the finish. Various ideas were offered to remedy the situation. Antike should be played in a much more tactical and less empire-building sense, acquiring VPs whenever the possibility presents itself. But that means that whomever happens to be the most efficient at turning resources into VP wins as there is not a smidgen of luck or uncertainty to take into account. You can let a computer calculate the optimum moves to get your 'economy' up and running as fast as possible, depending on whether you'd like cities, knowledge, or expansion. The variety is completely due to the players interacting with each other, making this title very prone to multiplayer chaos. I dislike such designs, and Antike is no exception.

Another thing which slowly began to work on my nerves is the rondel, Mac Gerdts' token mechanic. He used in every big box game of his (Antike, Imperial, Hamburgum, and hidden away in a horrible map, Princes of Machu Picchu) but he never addressed what I perceive to be its core problem. The rondel works in such a way that the steps you take along its 'track' have a fixed difference. Since Antike is a game of efficiency you will not be wanting to spend a lot of coins moving your pawn further than the standard three paces. But the rondel has been constructed in such a fashion that the pace of your 'engine' is deliberately broken up into inefficient and irritating steps. To me the rondel attains all the characteristics of a stair with steps at an improper height: there is simply no way to walk smoothly across it, always you are forced to break the pace at some point. Of course, were one to introduce a sort-of adaptive rondel, which took care of the problem, then there would need to be other mechanisms in place to reign in a runaway leader. In Antike, those do not exist, save for when the leader is beset upon by all players equally. However, geographical restrictions forbid this already.

Antike began to irritate me more and more, and at the moment of writing it hasn't been out of its box for more than 2 years. I'd love to get rid of this example of what happens if you turn players into human computers, but unfortunately I am not permitted to do so by SWMBO. So in the end, the box will continue to gather dust.

Another charming little thing for 2 from Queen Games. I have played this about a dozen times now, and I think I like it. It has a bit of Rat Hot's setting up the other player to force him to loose points, but not to the extremes I manage it with my main gaming partner. (We really play a mean game there.) Architekton isn't a super title, but it makes for a fun and short diversion without too much hassle. If you can get it at a reduced price and like the other 2-player games from Queen, give it a go. One thing which still puzzles me is BigWoo's exceedingly negative review / opinion. My gaming partner and I are not friendly towards each other (our Rat Hot games are epic) but to date we have not succeeded in managing to end the game before its normal end. I need to run a few trial games to see what he means.

I was never very keen on trying (much less purchasing) this title. The reasons: the designer Emanuele Ornella and an interview he gave to Eric Martin as part of the latter's preview for Spiel 2009. In short: Emanuele likes choices in his games, and will try to cram his designs full of them. I've experienced this with Hermagor and with Il Principe; in these two titles the amount of choices is so large that they in my opinion become a little meaningless. It's like standing at a crossroads and seeing that the two forks in the road meet up a little further ahead just the same.

Assyria is, regrettably, no exception to this design philosophy. The players are able to obtain points in two ways: either immediately or in the future. There is nothing wrong with such a design arc: many games use it quite succesfully. But where Assyria lets me down is that the future points—in many ways obtained by obtaining and then spending camels—do not have sufficient time to mature as it were. The game is divided into three epochs, and the future points are awarded at the end of each epoch. Since there are not many meaningful items carried over from epoch to epoch, those future points become more or less 'nearby future' points, turning the game into the crossroads example I mentioned earlier. It doesn't seem to matter what you chose; you'll get there eventually because the design cannot let you get away with it too much. For me, that means Assyria is one of the worst Ystaris to hit the market in quite some time.

However, my girlfriend sees things differently. Instead of worrying about a difficult long term-gamble which may or may not pay off (as can occur in Amyitis, for example) she sees the game more like an activity with lots of little choices along the way. It doesn't matter that these choices in the end amount to not a lot of differences, the important bit is that they are there. That's a completely different way to view this game, and consequently she likes this title rather a lot. Your opinion of this game will probably follow one of these paths: if you like a risky long term gamble, then you will dislike Assyria. If you like involved and possibly even rich tactical maneuvring, you will like this game.

It ended up in my collection because of my girlfriend, and I'll probably join in a game from time to time—but I will not actively pursue playing this title.

Fast majority game for 2 with sufficient twists to keep you occupied for quite a while. The majority aspect 'works' in this case because of the multiple paths to victory, which keeps both players alert, and forces the tit-for-tat game into the background: you cannot concentrate on one aspect and hope to win, because someone else might pull off a sudden death victory on you. This keeps the game fresh, and shows that a lot of thought went into Aton's conception. What I dislike a little in the game is the card draw: although you are usually served with usable cards, they do make the game lighter than it could have been. Here Aton loses out to Mykerinos and San Marco: in Mykerinos luck is only present to a minor extent in the shape of the playing area, while in San Marco the divide-and-chose mechanism washes out the randomness of the card draw: both players have to make do with a single draw, after all. Nevertheless, Aton plays a lot quicker than these two, which is sometimes a plus as well. It's not a supergame, but it isn't mediocre either, and comes in an attractice and affordable package.

UPDATE After several more games, I'm beginning to wonder a bit about the effectiveness of some of the strategies. If you are into points, then control of the 4th temple blue squares, and the black squares is crucial. A nice surplus can be had from the double difference on cartouche 1. The problem is that points are obtained all the time, and thus form a sort of steady income which will see you win if you can keep it up long enough. If the other player is trying to pull off a sudden-death victory, he won't get a similar steady income in points to make up if his strategy fails. Therefore the game is not really forgiving in the sense that you can switch from one strategy to another in mid-game: once you are committed, you are committed, and must see it through to the end. Unfortunately, this means relying on a good card draw more than I deem proper. I will not say that it diminishes my playing pleasure at this point, but it did force me to revise my rating. If both players are after the same thing then it can become an exciting and quick game, despite the randomness as this this evens out between players. Not so when their targets differ, and that's a bit of a shame.

Despite my initial hesitation about not buying this game it did eventually find its way into my collection: when it is on offer at a sale with 70% off its normal retail price, who can resist. The first games I played were not very succesful because of the fact that there are no markers provided to mark the buildings with you already placed, so I cannibalised another game for wooden discs and boy did that improve matters. It is still annoying that the board itself isn't very clear so that looking for that particular building still takes too much time, but at least you can immediately see which buildings are nicely 'in line' for free placement. I'll definitely order a custom set of markers to make for a permanent addition.

As for the game itself: I find it's growing on me, which is quite unusual given my initial reservations. As with Marcel-André's other big box game I own (Taluva), the devil seems to be in the fact that there are multiple distinct ways to win this game. Fast placement can secure a victory because of connectivity; slow placement can block such a victory from occurring. I'm not quite sure yet how the luck of the draw affects your game, although it goes without saying that a really good draw will have you walk away with the game easily. (This can only be avoided by the other players actively conspiring against you, and this is rare.) There is indeed a 'newbie on the right'-syndrome with this game, but once the newbie gains some experience, Attika definitely becomes interesting and worthwhile fare.

Backgammon has been 'cracked' in the sense that all possible moves have been computed. Some scientists at, I think, IBM got a little bored... In any case, the database is still far too big for a mere human to memorise, so for the time being you're stuck with a fast-moving dice fest. There isn't much strategy to the game, but it has a strong 'just one more go' appeal which means that once it is on the table, it won't be replaced for a good while. It just doesn't hit the table very often. (Probably because I'm better at it than my girlfriend, and this irks her to no end.)

Reading back my original comment dating from—at the time of writing—well over two years ago, I admit to being a little puzzled over it. Yes, Bizon is a rather standard majority game with a few cute twists. The graphics are not as contrasting as one would hope, although good light will go a good way to solve that problem. The most annoying aspect is the 'waviness' of it all which makes it difficult to see where areas begin and end. I suspect it was a combination of the latter aspect and a not-too great rules explanation which soured me on this title.

Forward to the time I'm writing now. The publisher organised a sale during which I was able to get this title for a very agreeable price, and so could attempt the game anew. I liked it a lot better than way back when, mostly because I understood what needed to be done. It's actually a bit more clever than meets the eye because of the fact that you cannot simply dump influence cubes at will: you are restricted to the tile you place to bring fresh ones into play. That means you will easily drain your stock of animals in getting hunters to the fields, but if you don't use them as planned, you'll be having trouble the next round. Quite the balancing act. Yes, it's a simple-looking game, but to play it well requires a bit of brains! So... apart from the design, which admittedly could be better, what was not to like again?

In my original comment I wrote something about not really liking this game because of a bad experience at a fair in 2003, and that I didn't like the high price so that the game would probably only end up in my collection once the publisher liquidated his stock. Well, the publisher did liquidate part of his stock the other day, so I was able to get this game at a discount of a whopping 75%. At that price, it is a simple and compelling abstract, easily one of Colovini's better designs and far better than the simple crap he is cranking out nowadays. Small chits in various denominations travel around a map; the objective is to get as many of your own kind on the map at the end of the game. You can augment their number by simple 'growth', or by travelling around, which can cause other people to lose their chits. The problem is that travel is a one-way street: once you travelled across one bridge, it is removed.

The rules have an appealing simplicity to them which despite my initial reservations lead to a good game. My rating has therefore improved considerably, especially because the 2P-variant listed on this site works just fine. However, I'm not yet so sure about the 3P game. I had the misfortune of getting caught in the crossfire of the other two players with the result that I was squeezed out of every town I gained a foothold in. And in another game, my fellow players by chance cooperated so well that I didn't stand a chance. According to 'JC' there is a way out of this death pit: go where the other players are not, and make use of the fact that players who use up a lot of tokens that way cannot easily defend themselves until they get those tokens back, i.e., are run off. I've tried very hard to put these ideas into practice, but it's not as easy as it looks. The experimentation continues...

The subject of this game is nice, but gameplay is a bit weird. You want low-numbered pirates in stacks you control and then cover them with a high-numbered pirate of your own, but people are usually way too clever for this to happen uncontestedly. It becomes a bit of a muddled memory game at that point which in my limited experience has a tendency to get in the way of the game itself, although it has some interesting game-of-chicken mechanics. I also noticed that the chits are not that important; they make up only about 15% of your total score. That might be sufficient to win the game, but in general the only viable strategy is 'entering a ship with the lowest required number of pirates, most of which are under your command'.

Despite numerous lengthy conversations with the people I played with, we were not able to come up with good strategic ideas. My partners did stress time and time again that 'there was a lot in this game', but I have a slightly nagging feeling this is slang for 'we're not sure what to make of it yet'. I might sell this game off one day, as there are better games in my collection which scratch the same itch.

Well... what to say. I've played this game a few times now, mostly with non-gamers. This is clearly a family game, so let's focus on that aspect first. Compared to Coloretto, Zooloretto achieves this by removing the aspect of suits of different colours (a.k.a. animal species) costing more and more points the more you have in a single type. Instead, a fixed amount is deducted, no matter how many animals of an unwanted species you have. Then there are a few additions to be able to move animals around and / or steal them from your opponents. This allows you to focus on your own little game while, from time to time, smuggle a strange animal into your own cages. The result: friendly competition. Non-gamers like the setting, are mellowed by the young critters, and generally appreciate the low-intensity game flow. Viewed like that, ok game.

For gamers however the much more lenient malus points have effectively removed much of the game's bite, making it slow, dull and boring. Point totals are nearly always within close range simply because there aren't many ways in which they can add up. There is not much tension, and the subject matter with all its little extras to enhance the experience becomes a hindrance rather than an asset. Coloretto is in all ways imaginable the superior game.

Finally, I've played both the original Zoloretto as well as the Dutch release Burgers' Zoo. I'm rather sorry to say that the latter is not a particularly nice game to look at. Graphics are childish, bland, and impossible to mix with other extensions. The 'special variant' conceived for this release plays out with difficulty, and nets the player a disproportionally small reward. Yet it is for this variant that the original's cute kitschy design was abandoned. It's that I got the game for free, otherwise I'd never have added it to my collection as-is.

The rating is for Burgers' Zoo given experienced Coloretto players; add 1 point for the original Zooloretto design.

Byzantium is a weird game to play. It has what I think are typical Martin Wallace characteristics in the sense that it doesn't resemble any mainstream mechanisms; and it takes some real effort in figuring out what you must do to play the title succesfully. If you just 'muck about', the game doesn't cooperate and becomes rather boring and 'is that it?' You play two sides of a conflict in Byzantian times and obtain points for both. If your highest score is over half the lower, only the highest counts, otherwise they are added. (If you went huh? at that, then you've experienced the Martin Wallace touch.)

The background in this game is the rise of the Arab empire, decline of the Persian one (which noone plays), and holding-on-to-things Byzantine empire. Money is invested in both sides in order to strengthen cities and attack them according to very simple rules. At the end of a full game turn, armies cost money to maintain so there is a tendency to run them into the ground just to save on costs, but on the other hand, building them up again costs a lot of money, and a lot of turns too. You are basically attempting to channel money as effectively and as efficiently as possible.

The game is indeed, as the rules make out, simple in that the mechanisms are fairly straightforward. There are a few nasty details because the two sides aren't quite the same, but all in all, once you've played a game, you'll have most of 'em pinned down. What is difficult is the strategy. I found out the hard way that you should not, under any circumstances, have Byzantian and Arab cities of yourself next to eachother. You gain points by attacking cities of other people, so spread out! In addition, do not make the region of the Greek peninsula your hidey-hole, for other players will delight in kicking you out with the pesky Bulgars and gain Arab points to boot. Granted, all these things are in the designer's notes, but it is still gratifying to learn these on your own. I'm not quite sure about the 2P game yet, though. With 2 players, it is rather difficult to find cities to conquer—after all, there's but four armies running around on the map. Therefore you tend to use the civil war-option rather a lot, and this feels a little constraining. The game works better with 3 players, and things will proably really heat up with 4. What I like a lot less are the dice. They can make or break a campaign very easily. It's basically a 50% chance that you lose 1 unit of your armies per die thrown against you: easy to calculate, sure, but at times brutal. Not a member of the Dice Done Right Club™...

For now: lots of headscratching, being fairly sure there is more to things than meets the eye, and making another appointment with the empires of the Middle East around 650 AD.

Cabale is, I think, a somewhat underrated abstract, and I cannot think of a good reason why, to be honest. It may have to do with the game's age; it may have to do with a certain aspect which resembles Checkers (although it is not the core idea of the game); it may also have to do with the fact that with more players, downtime unavoidably goes up.

My first games with 2 players were intuitive affairs where we just mucked about without any good idea what we were supposed to be doing. At first our games were races to the centre of the board, each building from a scaffolding of sorts so that the central pieces would have a sufficient 'backing' to hold out on their own. But this led to uninteresting races, and so we started following eachother about. This led to extremely agressive games until at some point so many blockades were down that at least some self-contained structure could survive. But we still didn't know what we were supposed to be doing. It wasn't until I played my first games with 3 players that the first basic tactical rules of the game became apparent. For example, any stone is safe if it is bordered on either 3 consecutive edges or 3 alternating edges by something which cannot be passed over, meaning either board edge, blockade, another stone, or a runner. And then the game becomes very interesting.

For example, building such a scaffolding yourself takes time. You could start from the edge of the board, but before you are at the centre (where most points are to be had), but someone else might already have a strong(ish) position there and thus win the game. You could also piggyback on another player's efforts, as the basic rule I outlined above only stipulates the existence of a border, not what it consists of. Players must put down playing pieces as part of their turn, and it is not always possible to secure such a piece right away. Will you now sacrifice a 'good' spot in order to attack an opponent from an undefended angle? And how about those blockades? Will you use them to create your own scaffolding, or will you use them to block the movements of other players' runners? No, there is plenty to think about in this game, and it is not as simple as it looks. Abstract games which work well with more than 2 players are rare, and that makes it all the more surprising to see this title languishing in the sub-2000 range on this site. I'm going to take good care of my copy, and look forward to playing anew to discover other little tidbits of gaming goodness here.

Caprice is, no doubt about it, a weak game. It looks and feels very nice due to the large wooden pieces of course, but the actual game is not very interesting. Players get a hidden 'assignment' of sorts and are then required to bring the big wooden pieces into play, arranging them in stacks which match their 'assignment' as well as possible. They are also allowed to move the top piece of a stack to another stack in order to prevent silly do-and-undo movements. Although nice in conception, the game play is decidedly off. You have to infer from another player's actions what he is up to, but there isn't much you can infer, let alone that the game lasts sufficiently long for players to bring any tactical or strategical plans to fruition. Move what you can, and bollocks to the rest. This makes Caprice a silly game, resembling burning time rather than actual activity.

The only reason I keep this game in my collection is that Goldsieber's Royal Line of black boxes is hard to find these days. I severely doubt it will see much table time in the future, though.

Carcassonne... This game is only in my collection because my girlfriend was of the opinion we should have a small set of 'classics'. I am not particularly fond of buying multiple copies of slightly altered games unless there is good reason to. Since I started out with 'De Burcht' en 'Jagers & Verzamelaars' I really saw no need to own original Caracassonne too. But the ways of women are shrouded in mystery for mere males, of course.

The funny thing is that this game did not once come out of its box, too. We always play one of the other titles I already mentioned: they provide sufficient variation and fun. The somewhat strange rules governing the original (what's up with those hard to form churches??) have been replaced by much more fun and workable variants in the other titles. I really ought to 'lose' this title, but I'm afraid then I'll 'lose' several body parts too.

This was my second installment of the Carcassonne series (after The Castle) and I always enjoy playing this game, although it doesn't get out much these days. What I like about it, in comparison to the original, is that players are not really dependent on drawing the correct tiles as much: this is a Good Thing. (The 9-square regions of Carcassonne are nice and all, but require quite a lot of luck with the tile draw.) Not so in H&G: its point gathering structures don't require a leap of faith as big. The game is easy to teach, plays well with any number of players, is over quickly, and despite the fact that luck is exceedingly dominant you can mitigate it easily due to the sheer amount of possibilities to put a new tile. It is also a direct hit with non-gamers. To make a long story short: simply fun.

I vaguely recall playing the Scout-extention once, several years before the time I am writing this message. I remember not being impressed by the extra tiles, so we never played Carcassonne with this extension again.

For some reason or another I've always liked this version of Carcassonne better than the other titles in the series. I think this is because of the topographical restrictions, it is not possible to create 'islands of blissful quiet' where the other player is not to be seen. No, we're talking some interaction with bite here. In addition, there is the nagging question in one's head of skipping over a bonus tile or not. Granted, they may not be helpful, but at the same time leaving them for your opponent to pick up is not a very good idea either. This increases the tension in the game too.

Reiner Knizia did an excellent job of creating a version of Carcassonne which plays wonderfully with just 2 players, much more so than its 'unrestricted' brethren which always feel rather tame. De Burcht results in quite a fight as far as the series goes, and is therefore hands-down my favourite of the lot.

This game is one intruiging game. Players decide on turn order by playing a disc with a number between 1 and 5, but they are not allowed to pick a number already chosen by someone else, and do not get their discs back until all five have been played. Then they play a double majority game on a shrinking playing field. By increasing the influence over a particular colour, you eventually obtain a marker indicating you are the top dog in that colour, and as a result all influence in that colour on actual the playing area becomes yours. Then when the king—Charles the Great—ends his turn on a province, it is established who has the most influence points lying there, and that player gets to place citadels. By having citadels on neighbouring provinces, you are obligated to consolidate provinces into larger and harder to subvert regions. However, owing to the capriciousness of the influence points, they can still be made to switch sides. Really quite good stuff. For such a short game it packs a lot of gaming goodness in it.

Nevertheless, there's one 'but', although I'm not so sure it is a bad 'but'. I'm talking about replenishment of your influence cubes. These are handed out by throwing dice, and more than once cause for losing a majority to another player simply because the dice didn't give you the right colour. For example, during one game I was bowled out of any serious position of influence, but still won in the end because the dice eventually gave me enough cubes to at least claw back one majority, while they at the same time denied good cubes to my opponent. I find such swings of good and bad fortune a bit out of place in a game which has this kind of precision: had the game lasted two turns less, I would not have won. In its current shape the game is therefore not a member of the Dice Done Right Club™. Consequently, I'm not much impressed by some of the discussion here which states you should strive for a 'balanced' development in all colours—how this is to be made to work with a pretty random dice input is something I don't understand. That all said, I'm not sure the suggested variants are needed, let alone that they actually are good. The most popular fix would lead to a less fluid passing back and forth of the five influence markers, and shift the balance of playing high and low turn order markers towards getting a good selection of cubes instead of forcing an opponent to make certain moves with his cubes. I'm stubbornly playing with the rules as written for now so that when I use this variant, I'm able to better judge its strong and weak points.

Nevertheless I am very fond of this title, and always enjoy playing it, even if the dice are cause for a few screwups now and then. It's probably weird that I like it as much as I do, given my propensity for games which do not have such raw luck implemented.

My experiences with Cartagena to date have been mixed. The first time I played this title I was taught by family members of my girlfriend, who played like genuine pirates: giving no quarter, and expecting none, too. Under these conditions, the simple movement mechanics offered plenty of opportunity for creative play. Based on that experience, we purchased this title. But when we opened the box and replayed this title with just the two of us... I almost fell asleep, although it took several plays some time later for me to realise the cause. You can monopolise a few symbols much more easily in the two player game, turning off interaction quite effectively. With more players, symbol contention becomes almost impossible to avoid, meaning that where one player puts his meeples can have much more effect on what the other players do. The game is then much more of a fight on the edge of a knife where tiny mistakes are exacerbated to the point of quick loss.

Although my point of eventually retrying the game with 2 (i.e., the final session where I realised what had been plagueing the game at that number) was to come up with empirical evidence that the game sucks and should be sold off, I've decided to hold on to it for a while longer. It should be better with more players, and it is simple enough to have a good time with non-gamer friends and family members. If that is indeed the case, the rate will be adjusted accordingly, although it'll probably never rise beyond a 6.

Castello (the Dutch name) is a bit of an oddity for a Colovini: usually his designs are luckless, but not this one. Players take alternating turns in building walls in a grassy landscape, and then after throwing three dice, towers and a house on either side of the wall. As soon as an area is enclosed by walls a 'city' is formed, triggering a scoring round. All players can play up to 2 cards from their hand, indicating what they want to score. It all plays smoothly and quickly: it has that indescribable feeling of 'polished' or 'finished'. As with all Colovinis, the subject is quite abstracted, and could have been easily left out. But somehow, it seems to 'fit' the game rather well.

The main problem plagueing this title is that there is no way to predict what cards your opponents are holding onto. There might be some merit in watching patterns like someone placing along the coast or something, but it doesn't tell you how much points they intend to bag. What I did notice is that it is rare that other players can match the amount you yourself obtained in a scoring round, leading to the obvious strategy of scoring as efficiently as possible on your turn, and as high as possible on your opponent's. While you have quite a few liberties how to set up such scoring events, you are mostly playing your own game, with only unintentional interference from your opponents. This is exacerbated with more than 2 players, where you *really* have to make the most of what you are dealt.

Initially, I harboured some hope that there was more to Castello than throwing dice and scoring as well as you can, but repeated plays proved me wrong. It is friendly, and good starter material, but there is almost no game here, unless you want to equate a variant of 'throw dice and see who has the highest number' with 'game'. I've dropped my rating considerably because of this. The only reason it stays in my collection is because it looks kind-of nice, and therefore cannoy be wrong in the eyes of my sweetheart.

The first time I played Cavum I was at QWG HQ for a large prototype day. I had more or less finalised the rules, and was sort-of eager to give the game a go. I was a little worried that the game would result in a chaotic mess, which is not at all my favourite 'mechanism'. Fortunately, the game was a lot less chaotic than I feared, although a thorough post-mortem analysis revealed several weaknesses in our strategy. I attempted to fix these in later games, and came to the conclusion that my ideas were only partially correct: having lots of assignments can actually be a hindrance rather than an asset since all of your efforts must then be focussed on getting lots of gems. That leaves you vulnerable to subtle city-strategies. Case in point is one game in which I finished twice as many assignments as my girlfriend, but she ended just two points away from me: she had been hiding in cities where I hadn't, and the result was that she could very easily keep up. Gem auctions are merely icing on the cake and not really worth it unless you're sure you have lots of rare gems which others do not. I've not seen this happen in the games I've played to date.

Cavum in itself is a game with strong subject matter, but the actual gameplay is a bit... well, boring. You are continually evaluating a path through the mountain, and this is simply not something I find interesting, although it does engage the brain in a nice way. What I truly don't like very much is the shape of the game itself. The gems are too small, and easily fumbled when delving them; and the dynamiting causes shifts in the fragile tile network. It is not a very usable game, and that leaves me a little less enthusiastic to this title than I otherwise should be. The lineage to the mask games is apparent; the game also requires the same 'schwung' to play as is the case with Tikal and Java lest people slip in to AP-mode. It will also draw the same kind of negative comment, too.

Having played this with 2, 3 and 5 now, I'm beginning to think that this game, while clever in its conception, is not for me. First of all there is the balance between playing time and actual game progression. With 5 (even players who know the rules), this game simply takes too long. While there are definitely different 'phases' where the emphasis shifts to different things, sitting down and resolving the same road over and over and over again becomes a chore at the end. If the game progressed as quickly as it does in the last few rounds, then we're talking. But the beginning is very cramped. With 2 players, the game is too repetitive to last the time it does. And in between, it's a mix.

Caylus at its heart is a complex excercise in the rich getting richer. If someone manages to get a good head start on the rest, it is almost impossible to catch him later on without grinding the game to an agonising halt (by means of provost and bailiff). That means making sure that noone gets a comfortable lead, implying that you should be creative and experienced enough at keeping things close until the end. In Caylus, a lot can depend on a little, and if these little details are not fully understood, the game's structure begins to buckle. The game also lacks any form of randomness to keep everyone on their toes. Caylus does nearly completely away with randomness save for the initial distribution of the pink buildings and the player order, but after a few turns the provost and bailiff have moved too far afield for it to matter anymore. The lack of randomness is also the cause for the requirement of player finetuning: if there is randomness, player level differences are washed out to some extent. In Caylus, player chaos runs wild, although there is a sufficient number of playing rounds for this to be dampened to acceptable levels. Especially later on I don't feel as constrained as in the game's beginning, although other players can still be a nuisance because of them blocking access to important structures.

I wish it were different, but I cannot feel but indifferently about this design. For me, the card game, which many Caylus-addicts scoff at because of its watered-down nature, deals with all of the above issues. I see little reason to play the boardgame now that I have the cardgame in my possession, and wouldn't be at all surprised if I eventually sold this title off.

After glancing through the rules and seeing Cyril Demaegd demonstrate the game on a video, I decided that if I were going to play Caylus at all (see my comments over there), it'd be this title. CMC appears, in my opinion, the superior game because it captures the essence of Caylus without piling a lot of extra details and mechanisms on top. Of course, it will not hold the same amount of strategic appeal, but a game should be playable too. So, after giving the game a whirl at all player numbers, what do I think of it?

Well, I like it better than its big brother, and so do the people I played it with. It's less cluttered, it takes less time, it gives a more pronounced feeling of control over what you're doing, there's still a lot of tough decisions to be made, and the game appears a lot more variable because of the card drafting and a lack of pink buildings (especially at low player numbers). CMC achieves all this at the expense of 'deep' stragegy, additional layers of game mechanics and a helluvalot of player-induced chaos. In my opinion, the expense is worth every penny.

That is not to say I wholeheartedly agree with the game. It is at heart a multiplayer rich-get-richer game, which needs to be timed in such a way that the big payoff occurs when the game ends. Unfortunately, it is hard for players to interfere with one another, and by the time the richest are preparing to build prestige buildings, resource buildinds which are still useful for the poor are being shut down. A player in the rear has no defenses against this, and might as well give up. There really is no point in continuing. In other words, CMC's mechanisms still require players who have some idea of what they're doing in order to prevent their falling behind. For if that happens, they are out. I consider this a flaw of the system. Now catch-up mechanics other than the provost would probably have lead to a clunky game, so I can't have everything. (In fact, I think the provost is too tame. People rarely have sufficient funds to move him about.) At least CMC allows for some post mortem-analysis.

In terms of presenting the mechanisms which make Caylus Caylus, CMC does a much better job in less time. At the same time, it shows quite clearly its basic structure with all its strengths and weaknesses. Time will tell if I'll be able to master the weaknesses sufficiently to survive and even win a game. But I can sure appreciate the game a lot better.

For some reason my girlfriend saw fit to buy this game without my okaying the purchase. I suppose it's some form of retribution for me buying Perikles, all at the same fair (Spiel 2008). Still, I wish she'd asked first—we already have Web of Power and that title suffices. Upon playing I found that it indeed resembles that game fairly closely with a slightly more generous card draw mechanic and an easier (read: more gradual) way of scoring points. In WoP, you score two times, which can be a bit brutal; in China, scoring is done as soon as a province is filled up.

Hard to say which game is better; they could very well be variants of each other. I think I prefer the original because that has more of a historical meaning for me given the geography.

I brought this game with me on a holiday trip after purchasing it at Spellenspektakel 2008, and found out, to my surprise, that the game is beginning to grow on me in quite a good way. Normally I'm not one for solitary puzzles, but Cities is aparently an exception to the rule. At its heart it is of course a barren min-maxing engine which is quite easily solved, but still it is striking to see that some actually do better at it than others. There is of course no interaction or blocking, but despite that it still seems to work pretty well. This is not a game I would like to play all the time, but as a closing title, or as something to entice newcomers to the world of boardgames...? Bring it on!

The more I play La Città, the more I'm beginning to feel that my initial enthusiasm wasn't warranted. At first I felt intrigued by the sprawling cities and opportunities to find sufficient food and water for the masses, but at the same time it's nearly all you do in this game. Plus, of course, getting money and erecting prestigeous buildings. For a game which lasts as long as it does, that's not much to keep the players occupied. What makes things worse is that the game gets in the way of the players at times. Take for example the Voice of the People: it takes a relatively large amount of actions to yield sufficient information; and if you know what the people think there is still the problem of acting on it without causing food shortages in your own cities. The political display tends to clog up with useless cards unless you play with a variant which sees a healthy rotation of them. And then the little meeples! The game looks very cool because of them, absolutely true, but the neverending associated counting and bookkeeping becomes a chore. Finally, the game seems to be prone to a sort of reversed runaway leader issue which reminds me of the process called Ostwald ripening: large cities are always more powerful than small ones, meaning that small cities stay small and tend to decrease in size while large cities stay large and tend to grow slowly because of the attractive pull they exert. The action 'Found a New Castello' is therefore practically worthless after a while. In summary: although there are some nice aspects, there is plenty of roughly hewn stone which could stand a lot of finishing work.

Truth be told, I've always played the game using the standard setup, where I was able to more or less prove rigorously that players should always go for exactly 3 castellos. With 2 their empire grows too slowly, and with 4 it inevitably runs into food problems which offset the larger scale population growth. What I do not know is whether the full game, with randomly placed resource tiles, suffers from a similar problem or not. I suspect it does as the maths don't change, and in grain-rich areas there will be such strong competition that this is a limit in itself. If this is indeed the case, then La Città's rating will take a big nosedive.

You either love or hate Civilization. I enjoy it tremendously despite only playing it once or twice a year: it is a great way to spend the time with serious board game fanatics. All aspects of the evolution of a civilization—trade, expansion, conflict, progress and disaster—are blended in a way which remains attractive and unequalled despite the game's age. The downside: you need lots of players and lots of time. And I've never grown accustomed to the idea of having pyramid cities in Illyria resulting from resolving the Civil War calamity. But that's probably me.

UPDATE After playing this game for about 10 times now, I've decided to I'm going to lower the rating somewhat. The game wears well with age, but I've begun to notice that careless trading can result in game-breaking imbalances. It is nearly impossible to keep up with what everyone is doing until you reach the civicard acquisition phase where more often than I would like I have seen people boasting a hand of cards which they would never have amassed if the others kept a bit of an ear out. In addition, the game really requires you to actively hit on others to keep them from growing too quickly; the AST won't do it in those circumstances. The game takes too long for the rather childish tit-for-tat disaster exchange which does nothing but hinder trade and makes everyone distrust each other. If you don't hit on the others, someone will inevitably take the lead from which it is game-technically impossible to dislodge him, or rather, impossible without becoming really nasty. I would be in favour of a variant which doles out all of the various disasters openly, and somewhat strengthens the role of conflict. However, the current limitations on civicards should be maintained as this makes you think about your long-term goals instead of just blindly buying what you need.

For a 1980's game, Civilization is still an impressive achievement. But it's not perfect for every group as it requires a strict mode of play (not to mention a lot of time) which does not appeal to everyone.

6 PLAYERS: Remains unplayed so far.

6 PLAYERS + WEM: Avoid. The game was not a great success: although we could actually play to completion within 8 hours, I also noted that the surplus of trade goods and relative lack of disasters meant the game was very quiet and boring indeed. Rating: 4.

7 PLAYERS: Remains unplayed so far.

7 PLAYERS + WEM: Remains unplayed so far.

I've made my own map, and so can you. See the Files section for more info.

The first few years I owned this game, I was extremely hesitant to suggest Clans to visitors. I felt it wasn't sufficiently fun. But after a few games on BrettSpielWelt, I grew more confident, and discovered that its star was rising the more I played it. It also helped that I am now better able to hide what colour I play. That particular mechanic is what rally makes the game, by the way: if you cannot master it, you will dislike the game. Unfortunately that is something you just have to find out in practice. Rules are short and simple, but at times a little contrived. The gameplay can be quite involved because of almost Faidutti-like reverse psychology, but it has a satisfying crescendo finale notwithstanding. The presentation is also very good. A solid and fun game, clearly one of Colovini's better titles.

For some reason I do not understand, I am very good at this game. At my gaming club (which by the way I stopped frequenting when I moved to a different city), I'm at best an average player, but put this on the table and I beat everyone without even trying hard. I also think why: my opponents tend to play very conservatively and often stop at just a single card, for example a chameleon or +2-bonus card. Such cards are valuable, but only if you have many cards. And chickening out early simply makes you lose on that front. But I'm not going to explain all this to my opponents, of course... Coloretto is simple to explain, quick to play, and has a mild and fun 'take that' factor. Even after dozens of plays it remains a very attractive cardgame without hassle; it is also better than its boardgame offspring Zooloretto—at least in its basic form, for I understand that there are some expansions which give the boardgame some bite.

Confucius is an interesting game, but also one which is difficult to 'label'. At first glance it appears to be an action point game in which the players, imagining themselves nobles in the' Chinese Ming dynasty, attempt to transform money and licenses into VP (through sea voyages and military conquest) or money into political influence in the various ministries which in turn yields VP too. These little subgames are not very complex and are in fact rather boring were it not for the thing which makes Confucius Confucius: gifts. Gifts are bought and then given to other players, putting them under an obligation towards you. They must, for example, support your candidates for the ministry in favour of their own; or side with you when it is time to choose a minister for a department. Gifts introduce all sorts of limitations which you really do not want nor need.

The result is a rather interesting melange of backstabbing and hindring other players without outright dealmaking: the system does not allow you to make deals turning it into a 'every player for themselves' kinda thing. All of a sudden those other simple objectives become rather difficult to attain, requiring careful management of your scarce financial resources. Cancelling a gift from another player is after all a costly affair, and said moneys could probably have been spent elsewhere in a more leisurely and more surely VP-yielding fashion. Now this game should be rife with multiplayer chaos, and to some extent it is—but because the other mechanisms have been kept simple and rather straightforward, it doesn't make me uncomfortable.

All in all a pleasant gaming experience. That is not to say it was all roses. Given that money and licences are an important resource, the fact that you get these more or less randomly throws a wrench into your plans on more than one occasion. The rule forbidding you to carry over too much of these items to the next round means that it becomes extra difficult to manage what you are doing. All players suffer from this scarcity, so it is not a truly big deal, but it does give the game a somewhat artificially constrained feel. It's a bit like trying to plug a hole into a leaky bucket with a plug which is not entirely reliable. Still, an interesting title which will definitely see more play in the future.

Cerebral. Carcasonne squared. Much, much better than its parent game El Grande. Too bad I always got the tile laying rules wrong, which is why I had to create a player guide explaining them in the clearest possible language. Next time I play the game (the fifth or sixth), it will be according to the correct rules. I'm deeply embarrased by this.

UPDATE Finally, at bloody long lost, a serious game according to the rules with 3 players. This game turns out to be a strong majority game with quite a few twists and original ideas to keep you playing for quite a while. Considering its age this is definitely good stuff. The only snag I encountered was that you must be exceedingly careful in the placement of your Grande. This guy tends to ends up in the center of the tile area, where he can quite simply be outclassed by players adding to the area's borders. However, it will take a while for an area to grow to an interesting size, and by that time your Grande might be locked in place because moving it causes an even greater point loss to yourself. With subsequent play, the timing of the introduction of the Grande must be honed.

It took me a while to realise what it is that Cuba attempts to accomplish. It looks like a standard resource snowball engine, but it isn't. In fact, it is the opposite. Where games like Macao, Puerto Rico, and many more have the players construct little engines, Cuba goes in the other direction. It is all tactics, all scoring for the moment, and modifying the player sequence order to make sure that profitable shipping spaces and other shared game elements are available when you want them to be available. This requires a completely different mode and style of play: one which is far more opportunistic. Now that is a perfectly legal way to construct a game; I just wonder whether such a mode of play has lasting appeal. It is hard to say why a player won a particular game: he just weaseled better than the others, that's about as far as you can go.

There are plenty of moments where you 'feel' the presence of the other players, however: this isn't a game where you can afford to keep busy with your own little playing field. At the same time, the game is sometimes frustrating in that moves which give you points are simply no longer available, requiring you to make what feels like sure suboptimal moves. My greatest source of frustration is that there are a lot of buildings which appear to do absolutely nothing interesting at all. Take, for example, the Cement Factory. It costs 1 wood and 2 stone to build, and converts 4 stone into 4 VP. A player can only get 3 stone per turn: one from the tradeswoman (and then only using a specific action which is available to a single player per round only), two from his plantation board. But stone is required for other buildings (worth 2 VP at the end of the game), and at some point you may want to put your worker in a different spot, use the foreman in a different way, or use the tradeswoman in a different way. It doesn't at all sound like a good deal to me save for dotting a few i's. The same goes for money-making buildings. It takes quite a bit of effort to set up, and then gives you very little cash in return. Often you want money now or in the next turn; not in three turns or so. The market is seldom interesting because the prices of goods are often too low to sell against an interesting price, and often too high for regular purchasing. And so forth. The more I play the game, the more I get irritated with the game's senseless friction which does nothing worthwhile save have every player hunting for scraps and morsels which turned up at some point; indeed, weasling for all they're worth.

As a result, I've lowered my rating. There are good ideas lurking in Cuba, but they didn't come out nearly as well as I would have liked.

The ruleset for this game is far too big to support the core idea of Memory, and as a consequence causes massive play disruption for which there is no reason. I always have trouble remembering what I can and cannot do, and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference either way. I will be selling off this title in the near future.

Demetra with just 2 players doesn't appear to be that good. You can only buy plots of land from another player, so he can very easily decide that what you have on offer is not worth the price and leave you stranded. You cannot afford having your buying spaces blocked, and have to buy the tile yourself as a consequence. This allows the other player to play the game at the expense of your own, unless you completely change your tactics, relying on lots of open spaces in your lands to be able to get any tile you're interested in. It's annoying that the game forces you into a certain mode of playing just to get around the randomness of the draw. So what happens with more players? The tactic outlined above is much more risky, as the overlap between land areas is greater. You may not be able to get the tiles you need to connect your lose patches together. In addition, there needs to be a sort of groupthink active which sees everyone buying a plot from themselves from time to time to keep inflation under control. If you don't do this, preferring to play agressively by purchasing tiles from other players, the game breaks down very badly because of soaring inflation. In both cases, the game becomes quite repetitive near the end. The sack full of land tiles is nearly always emptied, and by that time the event tiles are more of a disruptive nuisance than a provider of interesting variety allowing you to hinder other players with. There isn't much fun in the auctions to be found, and land masses are as good as finished at this stage.

All in all, Demetra is a bit of a sloppy mess of a game. It works only when you remain friendly towards other players (a trademark of Breese games, by the way, he objects to agressiveness with Reef Encounter being the clear exception), there's some issues with the game deciding your strategy for you instead of the other way aroud, and you need to look very carefully at the game boards in order to figure out someone's position. The artwork by Juliet Breese, although cute as usual, is not the most ergnomical to be playing this game. The contrast between fore- and background is too small; and the tiles are too small. To sum it up: takes too long for what it offers, might be fun once in a while, but certainly not worth getting as your main auction-set collecting title.

A nice and not-too-difficult majority game which plays very quickly and has a few subtle twists. The majority aspect is simple but delightful, but it's not as easy as you'd think at first. For one thing, if you allow yourself to get caught in a create majority-get even-create majority cycle, you'll just be aiding another player while you get stuck with a position on the bottom of the dolmen stack. So at times—quite a lot of times, in fact—you'll simply move a druid without placing a stone in order to maneuver your druid into a position where you can score a nice whallop of points in return for giving someone else a point boost. However, you cannot dally too much (especially not in the beginning, when you just have 4 points to play with) because once your stones run out, you're no longer in a position to influence any stack of dolmens because you want to change them. The game is full of these little subtleties which you only begin to notice after several plays. The only thing which really is a bit out of whack is the fact that the dolmen are placed face down and therefore a source of double guessing and uncertainty. But in a game without any source of luck whatsoever there should be a little something to keep everyone on their toes.

Something which really irks me is the lack of a good 2-player variant. With just the two of you, it is quite easy to avoid each other to the point where the game breaks down. With 3 players, it is easier to start up a little duet to attempt to lock out the third player, and from that moment on the game begins to live. I like this game for what it sets out to do and eventually achieves. It should be rife with multiple player chaos, but it's not because the overall game can be easily broken up into several mini-games, all connected together in ever-changing ways through the stones and the druids. As I'm writing this, the closest game I can think of which pulls this off is the venerable Go. Not a bad game to borrow some ideas from, even if, perhaps, the similarity was unintentional.

Simple and straighforward. Fun with people who stay away from complex boardgames or cannot play those anymore due to old age. I really enjoyed playing this as a child with my cousins: we could spend hours and hours trying to outdo each other. Nowadays, I think I would get bored very quickly, but for nostalgia's sake, I give it a 4.

For me, fell flat when I played it numerous times with 3 and 4 players. First the problem was about figuring out what good special cards were: that was soon solved. Multiple '1 beliebige Warenkarte'-n early in the game are devastating: you have a noticable edge over the rest which is hard to counter. You simply have more cards to 'poker' with, and that increases your chances of winning points. Then we saw a run on decks you knew contained many of these cards, and after that the game lost its appeal, because winning was essentially striking it lucky with these cards. Then we tried a variant which had the special cards lying open. That certainly improved the game to the point runaway leaders became shuffleaway leaders. We also implemented the variant where bidding is done consecutively instead of simultaneously. That also helped in making the game more interesting. I recommened you implement these changes even if you have no problems with the rules as written.

Unfortunately, it simply didn't do much to improve my liking of it all. Dschunke is a weird hodgepodge of all sorts of elements which cooperate well from a technical point of view, but not from a player's point of view: limited action choice, bluffing and special cards...? It is tricky to explain this game, there is little sense of achievement or direction... No. Definitely a try before you buy.

DVONN is the second Project GIPF game I purchased, after YINSH. At first I scoffed a bit at it for its simpler gameplay when compared to YINSH, but over time I found my appreciation of this stacking game growing. YINSH can become a really heavy-duty abstract at times, while DVONN keeps on purring ahead all the same. People not familiar with abstracts usually like this aspect better, and I find DVONN's style of play suits my mood more often. But at the same time the lack of a genuine challenge means that after having played it, I don't immediately need to put it out again the next day. Another minor quibble I have with DVONN is the fact that at some point you must be very careful in how you make your final moves. The odd thing is that in the beginning it doesn't really matter all that much, resulting in a bit of a strange way of playing the game. But it remains a good all-purpose abstract all the same.

I like this cardgame, although it is not meant to be played at all seriously. Players take on the roles of 'low tide' and 'high tide' to play cards and move them, just like the motion of the sea near a rocky shore, to a designated spot on the other side of the playing area. The subject is delightful, and play is tight. But it is hampered by luck of the draw, and the memory aspect is hard to incorporate into your own strategy because the board can change to extremes between turns. I've lowered my rating because of the perceived pointlessness of the game, but I will play it on occasion.

Elfengold is the expansion to Elfenland. Where Elfenland was too easy, Elfengold makes it too complex—the game suffers from serious analysis paralysis because there are so little travel cards to choose from that you want to make every single one count. That wouldn't be so bad were it not for the fact that players build up their hand consecutively. You think up an idea, and then re-evaluate that idea the next time it is your turn because the cards are no longer there. This is an exceedingly annoying phase to sit through time and time again, especially with slow thinkers. An egg timer would do miracles here, but I'd much rather play something else instead if I have to resort to this level of cattle prodding. Since I last played it over a few years ago (reckoned from the time of writing this) the box has not been opened again. Therefore I dropped the rating to its low current point. If I feel the rare urge to play something simple with more people, I'll stick with Elfenland, thank you very much.

I am exceedingly tempted to sell this game off, by the way, as it fetches very high prices. Unfortunately, my pleasure in seeing this train wreck of an expansion leave my collection would be short-lived. Literally: my life would be swiftly terminated by my sweetheart girlfriend...

If this game plays as badly with more players as it does with two, then it really is very sucky. The problem is that I don't really dare experiment on other players out of fear they won't play with me any more. The reason: the annoying planning phase. Players are completely at the mercy of the cards they are dealt and cannot easily break themselves free from its yoke. Drawing extra cards costs you one card per draw; and you can purchase at most three new ones. These constraints, plus the amount of obstacles the other player(s?) will put up, see to it that Elfenkoning quickly becomes a grating experience, completely unlike the fluid nature of the boardgame original. You cannot really plan a good, worthwhile journey as you usually lack the cards to do so. The other player can thwart your journey by placing a village card you cannot pass because you lack the required travel card. Adding insult to injury, the examples given in the rulebook are quite theoretical in nature: I've never had a hand of 10 cards which added up prefectly to the extent shown. All in all I wonder if this game was ever playtested. It certainly doesn't look like it.

I've never finished a game of Elfenkoning ever since I purchased the box as a gift for my girlfriend, but she refuses to let me sell off this piece of garbage claiming that we shouldn't break up the Elfenset.

Elfenland is a human-solvable version of the classic Travelling Salesman Problem: creating the shortest itinerary between a given number of cities and an arbitrary constraint like for example shortest distance, avoidance of certain roads. In Elfenland, the players are young elves setting out to see as many of their homeland's cities as possible in the four rounds that this game takes to play; the constraints are the available means to travel on various roads. Of course you put up obstacles for other players so that their travel costs are altered to the point of not completing a particular leg of their journey.

The subject is very friendly and carries over well. People I play it with almost universally agree to it being a nice game to play—which is, when you think about it, quite difficult to pull off. What I have against this title is that it simply isn't very exciting to play. You're solving a small optimisation puzzle which a computer would excel in; there is no room for a bit of creative play save hoping that more people travel along the same road as you yourself do. This allows you to travel further in a number of cases and thus puts you ahead of the city tour race. Nowadays I always play it with the variant which requires people to end at different cities in order to keep things at least a little bit interesting. That is, if I play at all. In conclusion: it's not a bad game, but I don't think it's very good either. Elfenland for me defines what I consider to be a '5'-type of game.

Family games are not my forte because they seldomly offer an interesting challenge to me as a player. But on rare occasions, an author creates a game which breaks this unwritten rule. Rüdiger Dorn did with this game. The movement rules in this game are very simple, and so are the tactics to decide whether to go for gold or gems. But trying to win from equally shrewd players is, for some reason, an entirely different matter. Movement is perfectly calculable, but the group dynamics in the caves are not. You need other players to be reasonably safe from the mother dragon, but staying together also limits what you can grab in terms of cards. It is very unusual (well, I think it's unusual) to see this behaviour in what appears to be a family game.

Some minor quibbles then. The cards are not the most ideal form to cast the gems and money in; cardboard tokens would have been much more pleasant. And the game doesn't scale very well. With 5 players the game is an incredible slaughter; with 4 it's quite challenging for such a simple game. But the fact that I more or less immediately replaced a copy ruined by a glass of cola and an elbow of a careless girlfriend shows that I value having this game in my collection. And that is very high praise for a game of this nature indeed.

When Endeavor was first announced for Spiel 2008, I wasn't too thrilled about it. It was touted as a growth/snowball game, and I generally don't like those very much. But when the game was finalised and made its appearance in Europe during Spiel 2009, I had already turned around considerably. The reason: the well-written rulebook which gave me the impression that the game would at least be very clear and accessible, a must if I am to like such a game with growth strategies. With but an hour to spare for the closing of the day, I and four other people were rushed through the game, and I liked it sufficiently to take it home with me.

At the time of writing I've played a few more times, and can report that the feeling of playing a well-crafted game persisted. In fact, I probably like the game even more now that I'm beginning to understand how it 'ticks'. In most snowball games everything is locked up in the main positive feedback loop. You start out with money; money begets cards, personages, and buildings; these give you more money; then other components give you points; the end. But not so in Endeavor, where some of the corresponding items of the above scenario have been more or less taken out of the loop and are just 'given' to the player based on a very simple development setting. In this way, noone can truly be left behind (a very sore point with me in these games), allowing the players to focus on the fun part of the game: applying a strategy and attempting to see it through. The entire process reminds me, oddly enough, of Sylla, where a similar approach to model 'growth' has been taken. It all seems to work quite well and very smoothly, contributing to the game's feel good-factor.

Also helping the appreciation is the game's lavish production with large player mats and bright, clear iconography. My girlfriend likes the game too, although she isn't convinced that the game works at lower player numbers. The board is too big, she then complains. But I think that is precisely the beauty of this game: players use what they need so there is no actual need to open up more areas. In other words, Endeavor appears to scale very well, too. All in all: a more than pleasant surprise. Depending on how alternative strategies hold up (I've only used one so far, because of a missed rule), I'll push up the note given.

Eufraat & Tigris (that's the Dutch title for this game) is Reiner Knizia's undisputed masterpiece. Reiner made other fine games: Through the Desert, Ra, Amun Re, Taj Maha, to name a few. But none can hold a candle to this title. There are several reasons for this; I'll handle the technical ones first. First of all is that the rules of this games are simple and straightforward. Some complain about the opacity of the two types of conflict, and I agree that the game can be a bit rough until you get these nailed down pat. But they honestly aren't difficult: as usual with these things it takes more effort to write it down than it is to actually do. Second: no gamey rules. Everything is there for a reason. Nothing can be taken out, nothing needs to be added. Third: despite a random influx of tiles, there is plenty of opportunity to play around the luck of the draw. Randomness in this game is used as a means to introduce variety, not as an equaliser of different player levels. Fourth and final reason: the game scales well, whether you play with two, three, or four players. To get all these aspects right is hard to begin with. But there are a few more things...

For players, the ruleset means that they need to get creative on their own. For me that is a hallmark of a good game. There is nothing resembling a feedback mechanism in E&T: everything that happens on the board is a result of what the players plan and act on. You cannot play this game automatically. Secondly, the game knows about emergent patterns. E&T isn't about randomly placing tiles and hoping for the best: no, the game settles into a certain pattern of growth and destruction of kingdoms which you need to know very well in order to exploit it to the full. It even allows you to get back from a tough position because at some point the attention of your opponents will shift to other places on the board: if someone is gouging themselves full on, say, red cubes, he is not very interested to put up a fight to hold on to a red temple. Good players will remember what a player collects and exploit that knowledge.

All in all, what remains is a wonderful title to learn, explore, and play. There is an addictive balance between strategic and tactical notions, and the various subgames occuring on the board result in a tremendous amount of variety. This is an exceedingly solid title which never fails to disappoint. And what makes it more exceptional is the fact that the game appeared in 1997. If you take into account the onslaught the game has had from the new gaming kids on the block, and that it still remains in the top 10 of this site without ever having left it... That is impressive.

TIP Having trouble explaining or understanding the scoring rules? Try the following. The purpose of this game is to collect sets of cubes, with a set being 1 red, 1 blue, 1 green and 1 black cube. The player who has the highest amount of sets at the end of the game wins. Is there a tie? Remove the most limiting colour and compare again.

With me liking the full boardgame to a very considerable degree, buying the cardgame was a no-brainer. After a brief session at Spiel 2005, I waited until the Dutch edition came out and bought it immediately. At first I was very enthusiastic, but quite rapidly my interest began to wane. The cardgame is a fairly accurate translation of the boardgame with a few minor changes; enthusiasts of the original will find themselves quickly at home. But what killed the fun was the contrived scoring mechanic (you only score when discarding a card in the same colour, and you cannot see what you scored) combined with the fact that you cannot exchange with the deck if you have a lousy hand. These issues are not present in the original, and result in a rather dull and somewhat grating play experience. The second issue I have with the game is that strategically it is not as challenging as the original. Attacks can only come from placing cards between columns, leading to a very static display. In the original you can attack from all directions, leading to a much more fluid and interesting game.

It would be fairly easy to port over all the good stuff from the original to improve on this title, but why bother? You'd just be recreating the original which you probably already have. Now in all honesty, it isn't fair to compare a game to another and then come the conclusion that it is lacking. But because of the striking similarity I feel the comparison is warranted. Simply put: every time I play the cardgame I wonder why I didn't pull out the boardgame instead. (It sees little enough tabletime as it is already.) I can see next to nothing which this title has over the original, not even in portability: print the board on a cloth, and you're done.

A clear miss from Herr Doktor Knizia, who probably wanted to jump onto the train of converting classics to simpler card versions—but as this title shows, it takes more for this to be a success. (He seriously botched things with Ra and Razzia, too.) This game is going to leave my collection sooner or later.

This game boasts disarmingly cute drawings, a pleasing rythm picked up very easily by newcomers and non-gamers, a die, and a fairly unique mechanism to alter the playing board via the 'climate'. It is fun to see your dinos 'evolve' and become more resilient to the various areas, and as such the game certainly has an appealing character. On the other hand, for a game this randomised, it takes quite long; also the first few turns are very boring because everyone is miles away from eachother so that survival isn't a big issue. It only began to get interesting in the last three of four rounds, but since it takes so long to get there...

There has been some talk devoted to various variants with this game. First is the rulebook-suggested 'X-1' variant, which has players bidding on one gene less than the number of players. When I compare the games with and without the extra gene, the games with the extra gene were rather tight affairs with slow starts. The fun comes in from evolving your way out of tight spots, and mildly annoying your opponents with the right card(s). When genes are drawn totally at random, introducing an artificial shortage doesn't seem the way to go, really. So I don't play with X-1 anymore. The second is actually a group of changes proposed by fellow geek ronlee. Number of genes = number of players; no cards at the beginning of the game; cards open for all the world to see. Much like Aladdin's Dragons, really, where that concept works wonders in removing the annoying sting out of powerful magic cards. This too led to a rather boring game because the first half sees everyone just walking about without major issues; and if no card genes are drawn the game becomes too static.

It is annoying to conclude that the game in fact derives much of its competitiveness from the fact that unpredictability is introduced via gene cards; but these render the game a bit unfair too as you directly interfere with the ability of players to grow, and thus to obtain points. You don't get sufficient genes over the course of the game to evolve your way out of a tight spot; after all, your opponents get genes too. All in all, I dropped the rate another notch, where it will probably stay indefinitely.

Clans light. Or is that Clans with a big wink? Chose a colour / genetic trait blindly, keep it hidden, and then try to score well with that trait by creation of a hilarious family tree using simple and makeshift but surprisingly functional genetics. The game isn't quite as easy as you'd think at first, but this is offset by the overwhelming luck of the draw which can put you out of the race through no fault of your own. The game's mechanic of keeping your colour hidden works against the obvious house rule of holding a few cards in reserve, and this is quite a shame. I was given this game as a gift when I placed an order through an on-line webstore, so I'm not really complaining, but at the same time I cannot help but feel disappointed. The core idea is marvellous and really deserved a better execution. My advice would be to play the game at the close of a gaming session, or when a lot of alcohol has already been consumed. Otherwise, avoid, as Clans is in all ways imaginable its superior.

UPDATE It's always wise to visit the game's forums after a long time to see if something interesting came up. A fellow geek proposed, very straightforwardly, that more cards are drawn as to allow players more control over what traits they'd like to see appear. Must give the game a go with this idea; if it works, the rate will very likely go up.

Evocative artwork by Frank Dion. Impossible to translate to different languages which lack a rich wood spirit mythology—in Dutch, for example, there is no such thing as a difference between a 'lutin', a 'korrigan' or a 'farfadet'. Rather simple and at first sight rather silly card game which doesn't work for 2 unless cards are removed to keep the incessent 'people swapping' within limits. Should try with more to see how it works out.

My first acquaintance with Fiji was made during Spiel 2006, where I and my sweetheart gave it a try when we were both close to exhaustion. Understandably, this didn't go down too well. A few months later I played with someone else's copy and decided there and then that we should have a copy. Even though my partner grumbled initially, after a first proper game she conceded it was a fun game, and that owning it was not a bad idea.

First and foremost, Fiji is a blind bidding game, so if you don't like those, you can stop reading now. Blind bidding is a tricky beast to get right, because for it to work, the players must be able to successfully conduct I think that you think that I think-games. And Fiji does these quite well indeed. The number of gems players are able to bid is very small, and it is not entirely impossible to keep track of what other players have in terms of bidding power either. It is also not too difficult to work out the relation between the goal and bidding assignment cards. Put it all together and you end up with a quick title with good gameplay which allows for rather a lot of subtleties. I've heard many people complain that it is too random, but personally, I think you should read that as 'I suck at putting in the effort to try and play well'. I do very well at this title, and that cannot be all due to luck! Don't treat it as something beer-and-pretzel like, or you'll get burned.

There are a few ifs and buts, though. I dislike the rewards which mess with the goal cards. There aren't many of them, but still, the entire process of bidding gets jammed with a crowbar if those appear. I also dislike the the plastic gems: they are too small and roll away too easily. It fits in with the subject matter though; and they probably form the most expensive part of the game (visit a shop which sells beads to make your own necklaces if you don't believe me). Still, a size or two bigger would have been nice.

After a few games, I'm regretting my purchase at Spiel 2007. It isn't a regret which makes itself felt in a Big Way (the game is far too cheap for that), but still, had I playtested first, I wouldn't have bought it. The game is fairly simple: choose a card, lay it down in a row, turn over the first card in the row, and start bidding for the entire row which still has undisclosed cards in it. Pass, and you get a tiny sum of money ('mice' in this game); persevere and you hopefully win a lot of points. What I find exceedingly annoying about this game—and this is a trait it shares with a game like High Society—is that it is nearly impossible to 'steer' into a meaningful direction. You are at the mercy of your fellow players and must hope that your guess or bluff holds up over time. It might do that; it might equally well not. There is a subtle strategy to master regarding the spot where exactly in the bidding row you place your own card, but it isn't more than that: subtle. There isn't much game in this title; it's more of an activity of going through the motions, tallying up an arbitrary score, and then noticing that the handles on the clock have moved forward by some amount. The fact that I am able to play the game picking a card at random from my deck and laying it down after giving it a cursory glance says it all, really.

If I want to wind down from a gaming session, it won't be with this cat in the bag; for me, its purchase was precisely that. I'll take a bit mercy on it for executing its chosen subject matter quite well.

Very decent blind bidding game in an enchanted setting. Don't expect this to be another Citadels: it isn't. Not by a long shot. The game material itself is wonderful: the artwork on the cards is phenomenal, and you get lots of bits to play with. It is great fun to do as a filler, but since there are only two new cards every bidding round, it tends to become quite repetitive after a while. This game should be played sparingly, with great lapses of time in between lest people get bored too easily. Also, if a single person has already scored two points, it is nearly impossible to keep him from winning unless there are some interesting cards in the auction deck. It does add nice tension, though. The rating is based on the feeling you have during the game, and not for its overall lasting and let's-do-another-game-shall-we appeal, for you really wouldn't want to see the notes the game would get then. Sad but true.

Funkenschlag is a cruel and harsh mistress, sleek and seductive in her skintight greenish outfit, befitting her German ancestry. She calls out to me softly, and expects to be obeyed. I lay her out on the table, careful, as not to upset her. She is still angry with me for making a tiny tear in one of the game boards. I keep out a wary eye for her little 'toys': money, plants, houses and a city grid. I am eager for my lesson, but she restrains me. She gives me permission to speak and briefly explain the rules. My mistress delights in making things difficult for me, and distracting me with questions when I am thinking. Sometimes she lets out a shrill laugh of triumph when I need to refer to the rules again. It's all part of my lesson.

Then my torment begins. My mistress tempts me in all ways imaginable. She moves her body in mesmerising ways when I need to caress her with a house. When she is not pleased with my touch, she immediately whips me mercilessly, so that I cannot close my fingers to hold on to the money and have to make do with small change. She lures me with powerful plants, only to deny them to me. Sometimes she is pleased with me and gives me a good plant as a bone to a good dog, but cackles frighteningly as she withholds the necessary fuel. I weep in anguish, but know my torment is not over. No, not yet.

She begins to favour those... others. My mistress laughs at my pain and tells me in that sweet, sweet voice of hers that I cannot give her what they can. She shows me in graphic detail, pointing out all the spots where I failed to pleasure her. Laughing hard at my contorted features, she pays no more attention to me. I beg, I grovel before her, only to have her kick me away brutally. The expression of her face and the sound of her voice as she turns her attention elsewhere cut through my soul.

Whip me more, mistress, punish me harder. Perhaps next time I shall please you sufficiently for you to let me win a game.

BRAZIL: Remains unplayed sofar.

SPAIN & PORTUGAL: Remains unplayed sofar.

FRANCE: I don't think the extra attractiveness of fission plants is worth the money of this map. Their number is simply too limited to make an impact, and with fewer players the person specialising in uranium may find himself shafted because of the random removal of cards. The only thing it does is add geopgraphical variation to the base game. Rating: 4.

ITALY: Good map for people who by nature do not bid very highly on power plants. You should, of course, since this is the main sink of money. Then artificial resource shortage and higher connection costs make up for some of the lack of competitiveness. (I'm in one of those groups where competitive bidding on plants is rare.) One of the better maps for Funkenschlag. Rating: 6 - 7.

Remains unplayed sofar. I treat it as a silly gimmick, nice to have for completeness. It won't get shuffled into the deck of a game I play.

KOREA: Remains unplayed sofar.

CHINA: Remains unplayed sofar.

Remains unplayed sofar. I treat it as a silly gimmick, nice to have for completeness. It won't get shuffled into the deck of a game I play.

BENELUX: Left me on the cold side of lukewarm when played with 5. The game is fast, indeed, but my impression is that it captures the race-feeling you have when playing the base game with 2. Funkenschlag is fun when there's a shortage of resources and when you have to make nasty decisions because of a shortage of funds—the Benelux map is not much of a challenge unless people can create the challenge themselves. Fell flat for my group. Rating: 4 - 5.

CENTRAL EUROPE: The designer allowed himself to be a bit more audacious with this map. It's not just a different map, but it also introduces topographical restrictions in that nuclear energy cannot be used in certain countries. This actually does something to the way people are developing their games instead of just altering the place of the proverbial dots and crosses of i's and t's. Seems like a fun and solid map to play, but as with most Funkenschlag maps, not really worth the effort of tracking it down. Rating: 6.

Remains unplayed so far. To be honest, their higher efficiency-to-price ratio makes me hesitant to try it out. People are already not bidding high enough in my games; this expansion will just make it worse by emphasising the race aspect of Funkenschlag.

Introductory game with the girlfriend had her exclaiming Oh, I like this better than I thought I would, it's not just about grabbing tiles, but it's also about adding them together semi-intelligently. Exactly. Why else would I have bought the game...?

After having played about 8 games or so, I conclude that the part grabbing mechanism is nice and works well, and that you get a lot of evocative bits to play with. Unfortunately, this is not a game I'd want to play all the time. There are several reasons for this. First, it all becomes a bit repetitive. There really isn't much variation in what space throws at you, and so the basic requirements your ship should meet are nearly always the same. Lots of guns, lots of engines, lots of cabins, a bit of cargo room, and a few batteries. A shield can be a boon now and then, but that's it, really. Therefore there is no need to be truly creative when building ships, and once you begin to get the hang of it, the only thing holding you back is not finding the components you need on time. Second, although precognition is a very important tactic in this game, there are events which are nigh impossible to plan against. Large meteors and large cannon fire will chip away at your ship (almost) no matter what, so although you can fit your ship with the necessary tools to blast pirates apart and take over abandoned stations, it won't be certain that you actually have them by the time those cards are turned over. This is a mite annoying, as the payoff for these cards is rather big. Third, there is no direct competition between the players once they are on their way. It is difficult to claw back from a last position, and most of the good stuff will be taken before you can. This forces the building into a bigger gamble than I deem proper: someone who is lucky and builds a slapdash ship might actually survive before someone who constructs a mighty cruiser which can take anything. There should have a been a reward per unit ship flown in as well—after all, this is about supplying stuff to the outer reaches of the Galaxy, not just flying there—to encourage somewhat more thoughtful ship construction. Finally, the game takes too long for what it then, all things considered, becomes. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable.

As a result I'm not really sure how to rate the game. Technically, it's pretty groovy, making use of a rare simultaneous tile grabbing mechanism. And indeed, better players have higher chances of pulling off a journey, but then the burden shifts to your skills in crafting together a ship in record time—is that a good way of setting up a competition between players...? I don't know. I feel there are two sides to Galaxy Trucker: one is novelty and subject, where the game easily reaches an 8, perhaps even a lofty 9. But in terms of gameplay, wellll... I doubt it goes beyond a 6. The journey is one of humour as well as a bit of luck, and like all things funny, should be taken in moderation. I like the game, make no mistake, but not sufficiently to play it all the time with its current ruleset.

Remains unplayed so far.

The finish on the tiles is better than that of the 1st edition, and the cosmic credits are much more managable thanks to their slanted corners. Too bad the boards were not replaced as well... All in all, considering that I got this for free with my Big Expansion, a good purchase .

Will not ever acquire a rating, though.

Remains unplayed sofar.

Die Gärten der Alhambra is a simple area control game which is easily teached and quickly played. It doesn't involve much thought, just a little dexterity in flipping over the building tiles. Fun as filler or at the end of a long day of playing games.

I have acquired its parent game Carat at Spiel 2006, and must say that that version plays a lot better, as the board is so much clearer, and the central influence discs are circles instead of snugly fitting diamonds. The only snag: Carat doesn't have a scoring track... If you like the game, and play it often, I recommend you hunt this one down.

Genius is a simple tile-laying game with a curious option to play it against yourself. The scoring mechanism seems straightforward, but you have to take into account that if you score a lot of points, a player after you might score even more. Luck seems to have a large influence despite the rule which allows you to exchange the tiles in your hand for new ones, but the game is over quickly enough for it to be too big of a problem. It plays smoothly with any number of players and has a pleasing one-more-go appeal, but it misses character. Not a bad abstract, but not spectacular either.

In my collection the majority of games is heavy, complex stuff, aimed at the gamer enthusiast who does not mind leafing through a booklet of between 8 to 12 pages, and who makes appointments with other enthusiasts to actually play these titles. However, at times such a gamer will find himself in the company of people who would like to play a game which is simple, fun and not too difficult. Finding titles which meet those criteria is hard, as there is a fine line between 'simple but too silly' and 'simple, a tad silly, with a bit of bite yet still fun'. Zack & Pack falls into the latter category.

In this game you try and fill up a truck as well as possible given a random selection of various goods; you lose points for still having room left in the truck as well as not being able to load everything on the truck. Trucks are drawn at random, put on the table and then grabbed as fast as possible before the players can quietly puzzle the optimum loading configuration to their heart's desire. This is repeated until one player loses all his points he started out the game with, with the winner being the one who still has the most left. Now if you read through all the negative comments, you'll see remarks about it not being a game, that randomness can really hose you, and so forth, und so weiter. But I found it not easy to win this game at all. More than once I found myself staring at a truck I wouldn't have taken had I put some more thought in. But if had, I would have taken too much time and have forced to draw a random card. There is a real game here, testing a proper mental ability: that of spatial intelligence. Some people have tons of it and think it all 'obvious'. but I am not so similarly endowed.

Precisely because the puzzle is friendly, and the overall game fairly short (lasting no more than 20 minutes or so), this title works well with non-gamers, and is good material for starting up or winding down from a long session. Do not attempt to take this game as serious as the gamer's games in your possession: the tile will not survive this comparison, and holding this against it is more than a little silly. Relax, and enjoy the ride.

Ghost Stories is a story of the downfall of good intentions and great expectations. My interest in this title when it was announced before Spiel 2008 was immediate: strong subject matter, colourful and evocative artwork, and cooperation. Repos may as well have offered crack-on-a-stick for all I cared. I bought the game after a quick session in which about 10 ghosts were dispatched and then took the game with me on holiday to play a few solo games. Welll... they didn't go as I had hoped. I was quickly overrun from all sides and after two frustrating evenings put the game away. Then I started playing with other people and watched my initial enthusiasm burn away, to replaced with disbelief, which then gave away to plain exasperation, eventually ending up in indifference. We could not win a single game in the +/- 15 I played, we rarely succeeded in getting Wu-feng on the boards, even. The feeling of fighting a losing battle soon became too overpowering for me to enjoy the game much, and as a result the game has been gathering dust ever since.

I have thought long and hard about this, especially since there are people who are obviously full of enthusiasm for this game. Once the initial confusion about the rules subsided, it turned out that many wins against the game were achieved in 'solo mode' where some rules have been introduced to make up for the fact that no live players participate. The game is easier to play under these circumstances as the power tokens allow for powerful combos to appear which do not exist in the genuine multiplayer game; also, the ghost deck is smaller. A few experienced soloplayers have offered to try to beat the game at the lowest level in 'multiplayer mode' with some tweaks to make the game as hard as possible; and to their credit (and, admittedly, my amazement) they succeeded, but not without a big amount of trouble, and certainly not as smoothly as in solo mode. I've been forced to revise my opinion that the game is therefore 'doable' on all low levels, although I don't really see people winning multiplayer games on the most difficult levels Nightmare and Hell.

The question then becomes one of it being fun to play. Opinions on that of course differ. I think that for a coop to succeed, players should have a certainty that their planned actions succeed with at least a very high probability. Ghost Stories fails on that account: just look at the tao dice. You can take an exorcism-action, but in a lot of cases you don't know whether it will succeed or not. Such a pronounced element of chance ruins the game for me, just as it ruins Witches of Salem. I don't like the idea of playing a game and then realising the outcome was not only due to me playing a sound strategy or applying sound tactics, but also because the dice and cards cooperated or may have cooperated. (After all, in solo mode impressive win rates have been mentioned, so there it cannot be all chance.) I find it very hard to disentangle good play from chancy play in this game, especially while in multiplayer mode, and as a result I haven't touched it in quite a while. I prefer Pandemic and even the ageing Lord of the Rings coops, simply because there everything a player does has precise consequences. It is understandable why a designer would want to introduce an element of randomness into these certainties, but the price—loss of control—is not one I am willing to pay for a coop.

I was introduced to this game while visiting a gaming café in Paris sometime in 2007, I believe. At the time, I played the game with at least one rule error which more or less made the game disfunction. Still, the rather unique design of an economic snowball captured within the mechanics of dice throwing was captivating enough to put the title on my wishlist. During Spiel 2009, I made a conscious effort of tracking down a copy, and eventually found one at the dump booth of Queen Games themselves.

Although snowballs are not my forte and therefore subject to me avoiding them, Giganten der Lüfte is an exception. The reason is that its core growth mechanism is very simple and straightforward, without complex machinery cluttering things up and making it difficult for me. You start out with two white dice, and then have to 'grow' to red and black dice by throwing a particular sum indicated on clearly illustrated playing cards. You either achieve this or you don't: if you do you get a better card which increases your options somewhat, and if you don't you get a bonus chip which you can use to increase the value of your future throws (thus making them a little more likely to appear) or to take another action. A very nice touch is that your own playing board only has room for one card of each of the six types present in the game, and that you just can't go about collecting those cards randomly lest you shoot yourself squarely in the foot by blocking access to one or more dice. Then there is a bit of juggling and timely guessing when the game will end, risking a few quick throws against more complex and involved and ultimately more rewarding ones.

Usually I'm not too fond of dice games as the way the raw luck of the dice is implemented ruins the game. It's just too harsh, and allows for too little player control. Giganten der Lüfte is a rare exception to that almost universal problem, and in my opinion deserves to be included into the very small and select group of games with Dice Done Right™. Yes, you can botch all your throws, we're talking dice, of course. But the cards are usually 'generous': if you look carefully there's usually some card with very easy requirements which might give you a boost to aim for the next level... It's not a super game and you can equally well wonder what dice throwing has to do with the construction of airships, but it has an easygoing feel to it which will appeal to a lot of gamers just the same. I'm putting it at a 6 for now, but I wouldn't be at all surprised as my experience with this game grows and I begin to explore the intricacies of the endgame more that it will be pushed up to a 7.

Played at Spiel 2007, got a copy there, and played it about two dozen times since then at various player numbers. In conclusion: I like this game. Initially just a simplied version of area encirclement games like Through the Desert or go, the real fun comes in when people decide to pass and be the first in line to place cabin wagons for the next lake. The only snag is that the decision to pass is nearly always quite obvious, especially in the case of very long chains of wagons. With more players, these chains decrease in value to the point where they are competitive point-wise with the value of the lakes you're trying to surround—but by that time the lack of control makes itself felt.

Nevertheless, provided you don't try to coax too much meaning out of it, this game is fast, furious, and goes over very well. In terms of depth and satisfaction for a 'normal' game, you'd be well advised to look at the two titles I already mentioned, but when it's late, you don't have much time anymore, spirits are high, and people are asking for 'one more for the road'...? Gipsy King is your man. (Or game.) The first game from Cwali which didn't feel somewhat 'off' for some reason, and one I'm glad to own.

The undisputed king of abstract games, usurpassed in terms of complexity and elegance (although if you look at some rule sets they contain enough dispute to put any rules-lawyering 'euroist' to shame). Initially I thought this was because of the large amount of possible moves you can make, but in actual games you're actually quite confined. (Read: most moves don't make a lot of sense.) No, the complexity sets in because of the fact that at some point you'll actually be playing several games of mini-go on the board, attempting to make up for loss in one such minigame with winning in another. This is quite a unique situation which other classical abstract games like chess or checkers know very little about.

I think I like this game, although I was unpleasantly surprised by my girlfriend who found it merely 'ok' even when played on the 9x9 board. After a bit of discussion it transpired that she found the game to be unpleasantly abstract in the sense that in her opinion I beat her too easily. She likes games with (reverse) psychology and intuition better because it allows her to push my buttons better and in the process give her a better chance of winning. That is not possible with go. Unfortunately that very much relegates the game to the gathering dust-stockpile, and me to playing on-line. Which I hardly ever do; I dislike on-line play except for a few rare cases.

What I also noticed is that it is really hard to form the live-giving eyes. All these tutorials teach you that they are very important (and rightly so), but the game is much more about the dance which forms or seeks to prevent them in the first place. It's rather like chess in the way I remember it from my youth: you are given all these little excercises which require you to give mate in one, two, three or four—but then you learn that a game hardly ever ends that way. Another issue I had was with scoring, or to be more precise, determining when the game had ended. With Japanese rules, it is expected that both players are sufficiently experienced to recognise which shapes and areas live and which ones are dead, alleviating a lot of tediousness in the endgame. Continuing play beyond that point can actually be detrimental to your own position. Under Chinese rules however you are not penalised for making 'stupid' moves. This allows beginners to 'play things out', which is absolutely necessary for the development of their understanding of common joseki. Once you realise how these work you don't need to 'play things out' all the time anymore, and more or less automatically 'evolve' towards the Japanese ruleset.

I'll keep the game in mind for when I can invest a good deal of time in it. Tentative rating: none, although I am fairly sure it would end up very high on my list.

Goa has taken quite a lot time and a few strategy guides to grow on me. I don't play it very often, but each time I take it out and play it, the game treats me like a good old friend full of fresh, interesting stories. That was different in the beginning, where I was just floundering about and not really paying attention to what would secure me points. In that sense, it has proven to have quite a steep learning curve for me. Ever since I managed to wrap my head aroung the the VP-gathering mechanisms, I could begin to actually play and make life really difficult for the other players: through the auctions. If people are complaining about a strategy being too dominant, what they mean is that they stink at this part of the game. If people are saying it is too much multiplayer solitaire, what they mean is that they've got their playing priorities reversed. Goa is an auction game with a few actions in between; look at it the other way at your own peril.

The second thing you need to learn to manage in this game is time. There's only 8 rounds of play, so make every action you take count, and don't waste your time (and money) on pointless auctions. Learning to balance the cash flow against the actions you must take with the added constraint of there being not enough time to do it in, wasn't an easy task. That is why the game offers many seamingly pointless tiles worth a few points: sometimes buying such a tile is a better alternative than going for the development chart and/or colonies. I had this terrible Pavlovian urge to play the game 'properly' and move all my cubes down the tracks in an orderly fashion: screw that. Points is what you're after, don't go wasting actions on items you won't be using before the end of the game.

The result is a rich and challenging game which, despite it sometimes rather mechanical feel and not particularly evocative theme (what do auctions have to do with spice trade?), offers plenty of possibilities to have you work out the best course of action. Inexperienced players have the disadvantage, but the 'reset' of the action tableau halfway and the fact that the game only takes 8 rounds means that even as an experienced player you cannot take things too easily. There will come a time when Goa no longer holds your interest because players tend to pick fruitful auction locations, but at the rate I am going, that will not be in the forseeable future.

Remains unplayed so far.

I'm in two minds about Hameln. The core idea is wonderful, and provides a very strong background which sets the mood if nothing else. A lot of thought has gone into the game itself, keeping it close to its subject. You pick up the rules fairly easily too. But where I'm completely left in the dark is how to win at this game. You obtain points for a lot of things, and most points are approximately equal too. Since you score fixed amounts of points, things tend to end up rather balanced—although sending off children to Transylvania can be absolute murder. But it still doesn't help me decide whether to go and marry a male or female, or sell goods, or buy influence, or bribe the Piper, or... There is nothing to help you along the way, and focusing on one aspect of the game will usually be offset by detrimental performance in another. Every game I played to date has resulted in a surprise win or loss, turning Hameln more into a game where the activity is more important than following a brilliant strategy and showing the other players who's boss.

Apart from the unintuitive gameplay (despite the easy rules), the physical design isn't helping either. The board is too small, making it busy and cluttered, especially when there are four or more King Rats on it. Often the rats themselves block the view to determine whether a house belongs to a certain area or not, and even that information is visible only by thin lines at best. The number of numbers with circles on a house is ridiculous, and an endless source of confusion for newcomers. It makes 'reading' the board quite an aborbing task which stands in the way of fluid gameplay.

In the end, I think there is some truth to the criticism that the game is not quite there yet. I think I'll keep on playing it from time to time, but it'll never be more than a 5 to 6-type of game.

Wowza. The rules to this game (VG edition, arrived at long last) are tough. Not as in difficult, but as in 'copious'. And wargamers think that these are average in terms of complexity...? Closest masochists, the lot of them.

My initial play against my significant other of just 3 rounds was a sobering experience with many mistakes made and learned from. Like: 'Don't have Hannibal walk into Italy without a hidey-hole to retreat to'. Hannibal is a powerful general, true, but he can be beaten and Carthage should only risk the odds if the odds are heavily in his favour. Another don't is 'Land a Roman army squat in the middle of Hispania when that area is blue as far as the eye can see'. A powerful do is 'Major Campaign cards are very useful in saving multiple strategy cards for it allows you to move multiple generals with just one card'. All in all, it's a lot more ad hoc and uncertain than I imagined from reading the rules: this is a Good Thing. I disliked Revolution intensely because it didn't have a lot of uncertainty to work with—unfortunately, I cannot at this moment say with any certainty whether the randomness of the cards is 'too much' or 'just right' or simply 'okay'.

There has been considerably discussion about the battle cards: despite me being an absolute rookie, I'm not sure I like them a great deal. The game is the strategy cards; playing a dozen different cards in an 'I think that you think that I think ...'-subgame feels a bit off for some reason. I could live very easily with a simpler system or just plain dice like, for example, found in Mare Nostrum. Yes, I know, Hannibal should have not actually have something like in MN: I'm merely using it to illustrate that simple systems are not always a Bad Thing™. The reason for me preferring dice is their speed: a couple of throws, and you're done. Next strategy card, please! Of course, you'd lose out on an important tactic: withdrawal.

But this is all coming from an absolute rookie of course, so don't pay him any attention :-). Nevertheless, this game is serious business, and should be treated as such. I think the diversity with the cards will pull it through in the end; now it's just table time which it desperately requires so you're not buried in a rule book all the time.

No tentative rating yet.

Remains unplayed so far.

Hansa is a typical Schacht design: simple rules, easily explained, but with a surprising and fiendish depth in gameplay, and hard to master. The game is in fact an action point-based game, with 'money' dubbing as the action points. However, the restriction that you can only take one action in a city where the ship is located, and that it can only be a single action, makes for some tough gameplay. You don't need to think hard all the time, but at times you need to consider the effects of your move on the player coming after you. It is a screw-your-neighbour effect, but only mildly so. Between experienced players, the game can get very tight indeed, because the places where you put your markets can yield a significant amount of points. Therefore the game looks simple, and plays with that similar greased lightning feeling as Web of Power, but to play well you'll need to be a bit more devious than usual. Because it is an AP game in disguise, the game has a steep (but not long) learning curve. After that, it never fails to satisfy, not even after long breaks from it. In other words, it is simply a good game. For further variation you can try and find the map 'Wechselende Winde' which comes with altered trading routes and various rule changes. Satisfaction guaranteed if you have a good feeling of the most important nodes in the original map.

In my previous version of this comment I wrote the recommendation that if you like Web of Power, you can blind Hansa blindly. That is something I don't recommend anymore because Web of Power is a majority game. However, the recommendation remains if you like the feeling of small, fast, but not too simple games.

Remains unplayed so far. (The printing errors in this game are annoying... And unfortunately they cannot be corrected with stickers as all the pictograms are a different size.)

Originally, Havana was off my to try-list for Spiel 2009 as eggertSpiele took their bloody time releasing details for it. But when they released the rules, I nearly immediately put it on said list. The best way to think about Havana is really 'Cuba—The Cardgame'. Players attempt to build buildings which do nothing besides taking in resources during construction and then yielding a fixed amount of VP. The game is in actually obtaining those resources. Every player has an identical deck of cards, picturing various characters we've already met in Cuba and its expansion El Presidente. These cards carry numbers, and also an action. Like, for example, 'take one worker from the supply', or 'take all the waste from the supply'. You begin by selecting two of these characters, turning them over and then rearranging them in numerical order. The 'number' thus formed indicates your place in the play sequence: the lower, the earlier. The actions on those cards are the two actions at your disposal. Every new turn, you are obliged to cover one of those cards with a new one from your hand, altering your position in the turn order as well as having you do something different. When you can exchange a number of collected resources for a building, you do so; and whoever reaches a number of VP first, wins.

The game is rather delightful in conception, but to play it well is an entirely different matter. It's not just about playing good cards, it's also about timing them correctly. This is not easy given that the other players are after the same resources just like you. I find that especially at 4 players, card and resource contention can create really nasty lockout situations beyond the player's control. You must then play rather more agressively and opportunistically than I deem proper for a game of this stature. With 2 players, the game is plain boring; so I prefer it mostly with 3. As a result, despite its simple appearance I'm not too enthusiastic about its scaling properties, hence the somewhat lower rating than it could've gotten instead. But it remains a nice in-between nonetheless.

When I was first taught the game I thought it a somewhat boring affair: 3 actions per turn, most of which seemed obvious. But my sweetheart was more persistent about it and eventually bought it, and since then, this game's star has been rising. This is partially due to the lovely production, but also due to the game's interesting mix of area enclosure and area control. Those are things you seldomly see in modern boardgames, and I happen to like them a great deal. How I could have missed this during the first play is a little unclear, though.

In any case, the players attempt to grow their little livestock empire on the Argentinian pampa by claiming plots of land forming chains, and then placing herds of different animals in contact with those landchains in order to bring them to market. For that they get money with which the players can make further investments. An alternative way to get cash is by harvesting a long land chain, offering another way to play this title—but like with any game offering such strategies, you must stick to them to maximise their performance. That said, Hazienda is is not a snowball game as the amount of money you get out of getting your animals to market is too little to make it grow substantially before the game ends; it is better to view upon it as a mechanic to make sure the game continues. Players can attempt to create 'holes' in their empire which they can subsequently fill with water pools: these bring in a lot of points and can be very effective if used in a timely and correct fashion. All in all, there is a good balance between expansion and deciding to block other players, although this only becomes readily apparent with 4, and is but noticable with 3. With 2 players, and on standard maps, the game is a dull race which I cannot recommend.

What I somewhat dislike about Hazienda is that markets in the basic setup are worth a great deal of points. You can make up to some or even a great extent with water pools or very long land chains, but you can't win without them. The strategies are not as 'pure' as I ideally would like to see 'em, but I guess you can't have everything. In any case, it doesn't seem to diminish my pleasure playing this title, and seeing someone utilise some other means than the markets to remain in a competitive position is a pleasant confirmation that there is more to this game than meets the eye. A fun title to play, and a good title to own.

I cannot remember why I decided to buy this game: I think it was because of the pictures here on the Geek. I bought this game without trying it first, and have not regretted it one bit. Just place two camels each round, and work your way from there: do you go for territories? Long caravans? Oasis control? Your choice. With two players this game is excruciatingly tense and quick. With four players it is different, and slightly slower, but still highly enjoyable. At the start the board is so cluttered that one quickly decides to ignore one or even two of their caravans and concentrate on the remaining ones instead, which is shame, sort-of. The game clearly belongs in Knizia's top 3, though not at first place because of the clunkiness of the set-up and odd (but understandable) asymmetry when actually commencing play. Nevertheless, once the first camels are on the board, the game refuses to let you go, drawing you deeper and deeper into its heart devoid of unnecessary frills. This is an abstract game in a delightful setting with an extremely high what I'd call in Dutch 'aaibaarheidsfactor'—'pettability factor'—which always meets with approval whenever it hits the table.

Upon (many!) repeated plays, I found that this game wears well with age, and after giving Go a go, I've come to appreciate it even more. It isn't exactly Go, of course, but there are elements which remind me of it. The fact that you encircle other caravans, for example, while trying to deny them space so they can't create territory, for example. The fact that making a move here automatically weakens you there. There are differences too: Go doesn't know about important spots on the board as does Through the Desert, so the game play focuses on other elements too besides making territory: making long caravans, and connecting them to oases and water holes. It's interesting to speculate on these aspects.

I find Hive to be a curious title. One would be inclined to say that there cannot be much 'game' in two sets of 11 pieces with insects depicted on them. And after about 15 games, there remains a tiny nagging little voice in my head which does not succeed in making itself heard.

Hive is pleasantly simple enough, plays in a very short amount of time, and it sure isn't easy to win against a determined opponent... Subtle strategies started appearing the more and more I played against my main gaming partner. She dislikes hard thought and insects, but this combination actually meets her approval. Simple things like blocking dangerous pieces by attaching a lonely piece to them to they'd be held down by the 'no splitting the hive'-rule. The Beetle began to show its significant power more readily, and now forms a fixed ingredient in any of our games. Creating bypasses to free up much-needed tied-down pieces is an important tactic. Trying to separate the enemy Bee from her subjects so she makes for an easier target: present and accounted for. And so forth. The fact that you're learning the ropes of the game this way indicates to me that I'm dealing with a good game, namely one which allows you discover tricks on your own.

I think my main complaint is that to date I haven't been able to actually force a certain strategy to be succesful. Then again, Hive may not actually allow that, as the playing area can go in any direction when there's still a small number of stones on the table. But how and when you should add new stones remains a bit of a mystery to me. The balance between using specialty movements and bringing in fresh insects is a subtle one, highly dependent on what is already in play, and where. I'm hoping that more plays will help me (us) hone that talent so that I have a bit more sense of purpose than I have now. I'm not expecting this, really, but at the same time, when I look at how my tactics sense developed... This is not a game you should diss immediately after playing. And completely unrelated, its portability makes me wish for other games which were as durable.

Remains unplayed so far—first I want to have the base game nailed down pretty good.

I played this game at the children's corner of a museum in Jelling, Denmark, and both me and my girlfriend were quite surprised at its fiendish gameplay which is a lot deeper than you would think at first. The movement and capturing rules are simple and elegant, while the game it short enough to demand a rematch. We were tempted to buy the edition on sale at the museum, but the high price made us believe we'd be able to pick up a cheaper copy elsewhere. Alas, 't was not to be... Eventually, I bought a copy off eBay, and played more.

There seems to be an imbalance in the strength of the pieces, but this is very likely caused by unfamiliarity and difference in player level. It is a somewhat fun excercise in cornering and blocking off paths, but I discovered that a single mistake can cause an unexpected victory. In other words, the game requires you to be on your toes all the time. This is definitely a good trait. Yet despite this, the game seems to be lacking appeal. It's a classical abstract you would do well to try at least once, but I'm afraid it just didn't click with me.

Iguazu was never meant to end up in my collection after I tried to play it with the Knizia-trick (2 players playing for 4). The basic strategy is quickly learned: low numbers are to be used for going downstream, and for upstream you want to hold on to the biggies. So far so good. It gets even better as people begin to see how the river 'flows', and sending a boat over the edge of the falls is always cause for much 'delight'. But where it begins to break down is that the game with the basic rules takes far too long. There isn't much variety in what goes on, and then the winning conditions seem awfully hard to obtain. 4 equal gems is hard (and easy to block), 5 different gems is nigh impossible as the red gems are very sought after and thus easily nicked, meaning that the game is most likely to end with the 7 random gems-condition. Getting 7 gems ashore will take a while. Quite a while—and that's the only thing which stands in the way of Iguazu becoming a good game.

So how did the game end up in my collection? A sale at the distributor netted me this title at a whopping discount, and my intention was to present it as a gift to others. But that never seemed to happen, and when I moved house I decided that spending two years in foil was long enough, and opened the box. In the meantime, some variants had appeared: some clever geeks have come up with an idea to make it less of a chore and more of an interesting race by altering some of the victory conditions. I played several times with that variant, and it seems to work okay in that the game now ends in a reasonable amount of time. To say that this is a good game is too much praise, but to take it out once every while with the family suits its nature perfectly now.

The subject is nice, and the game is actually fun to play. However, the form is bad: it should have been cast into a boardgame. There are cards all over the place, overlapping, touching, in stacks, and so forth, and this is really annoying after about half an hour. I must get this to the table again to see whether I still like it or not.

In de Ban van de Ring is, to my knowledge, the first cooperative title. It took a very long time for this central idea to catch root in the gaming industry; probably because of the very strong coupling between subject (the story of Tolkien) to the mechanics (cooperation). Nowadays we have Pandemic, Ghost Stories, and quite a few others, but that didn't use to be the case.

As in all cooperative games, you play together against the game, in this case to destroy the One Ring before Sauron corrupts all the Hobbits of the (changed) Fellowship. You work your way through 4 scenarios, each highlighting a section of the story. You are attacked from all sides, and will have to discard many valuable items and resources to survive. You will also have to make choices because you can't do everything. All in all the story is very accurately followed, leading to a strong sense of actually playing it yourself. Unfortunately the resource management pushes back some of the magic: you're not playing the Aragorn-card, but a card with two jokers on it. But it's not a big deal. What is a big deal is the fact that the randomisation of the event chips can screw you over bigtime. If you are unlucky, you hit Bad News upon Bad News, ending the game before you have had an opportunity to build up some defense. The game can be over on the second board, but equally well on the fourth, and this variation beyond the players' control diminishes the fun. This is a well-known problem of coops, and none of them truly solves the issue to satisfaction (although Pandemic comes close). Still, this game is an interesting title to play once every while.

Remains unplayed so far.

Played only once in a 2-player game. We won by defeating all the foes, which seems a rather strange way to win. Lord of the Rings is about destroying the Ring, not about robbing Sauron of all his minions... We probably did something wrong, but we haven't checked so far to establish precisely what.

I purchased this game during Spiel 2009 after two trial games; the first went very much awry because of the rather odd rules explanation which didn't seem to make any sense until I read through the rule book. Since then I've played about a dozen games, each time losing badly against my main gaming partner (the girlfriend), and ever since I figured out how to turn the tables a little, my appreciation for this card game has grown.

The idea is very simple, really. Open cards in various kinds (goods and camels) allow you to trade (meaning that you take two or more goods and replace them by cards in your hand and/or previously gathered camels), purchase (meaning taking one good and replacing it with a card drawn from the pile) or simply to get all camels, (which are then all replaced by cards taken from the draw pile). At some point you want to be collecting sets and sell them, for which you get a equal number of chips with points on them and, if you sold enough in one go, a bonus chip. The trick is that the value of the chips diminishes so that selling the same goods later in the game won't net you as many points as in the beginning.

As I said: simple, and you'd be absolutely right. But to play it well is not simple, despite what you would be able to read in the negative comments. The main problem is that any action which fills the open spaces of taken-up cards by cards from the draw pile might give your opponent a very valuable set which he then sells on his own. But at the same time you cannot keep on selling forever because the net result is too meager as the chips are too low in value. You need to obtain sets in that case, and that means hoarding cards and biding your time. These and other simple dynamics create an atmosphere where both players must watch each other like hawks, and be forever on the lookout to score lots of points as efficiently as possible, to the point where card counting becomes a necessity of sorts. The bonus chips introduce a little uncertainty in the entire procedure to prevent complete control, which keeps things fresh and interesting without undue worries—although theoretically the game can be lost on the randomised point difference. More worrying is that in some cases a player getting a very good selection of extremely valuable goods out of sheer luck of the draw more or less walks away with victory right there and then. In a game where timing, hand management and a bit of memory are key components, such occurrences feel like jamming the proverbial wrench in the gears. True, the game is fast enough to demand a rematch, but still.

Despite this tiny rough edge I found myself liking this game quite a lot, and would heartily recommend it over that ageing Lost Cities. Jaipur scratches the same itch, but deciding what to do when is a more involved, making it more of an interesting experience to see if your luck paid off. I'm quite interested to see whether I will hit a point beyond which I will not play this game any longer.

Java is an exhausting game to play. Action points tax the brain more than usual already, but adding a third dimension in tile laying really gives the grey matter a run for its money. Playing this game well is a tricky job, but the experience is always satisfying, save in one particular case. More on that later.

When I compare Java with Tikal (as one is wont to do since the titles are so closely related and Java came second in the Mask Trilogy), then a few things stand out. Java doles out less AP to the players, and introduces the concept of scoring as you play. Tikal only gives the players points during scoring rounds; Java only has one big scoring round, right at the end of the game. Less AP seems to be limiting, but the three dimensional aspect makes more than up for it. Don't think your choices are diminished in any way. What truly is different between the two games is that Java's tile laying aspect is much more challenging. You can attack other players in three dimensions, and positions you thought safe can be compromised with a few deftly placed tiles. You notice the difference in playing the two games: Tikal has more schwung to it and can be played intuitively (well, at least by me); Java requires some thought.

Now to Java's dark side: playing with 4 players. The problem is that the final scoring round gives the player a large chunk of points. A decisive chunk of points. So you'd think that everyone gets a fair share of the pie. That is not the case: the positioning which goes on at that time usually screws the fourth player bigtime. All easily accessible spots are taken at that point, and there are no big tiles anymore with which to create connections to squeeze in here and there. The result: go last and lose. The only remedy is an agressive pre-positioning strategy, but pulling this off is difficult to say the least, and not fair on the player who is preparing this way, as he might not need such preparations in the first place. It's simply better to gamble on not being the sucker who's going last. I suggested a variant here to deal with this issue, but never received feedback, nor was able to get the game to the table in the meantime to test it out myself. It remains an open issue with this game, and for as long it persists, the game gets one point deduction.

Kahuna is one of the first modern style boardgames I ever bought. It was way back in 2003, when I just met my sweetheart, and we were bored and looking for a nice game to play. One of the local shops had a sale at that time, where we got the SoC cardgame and this title. I had no idea whether it would be fun or not, but the bright colours of the box and its description intruiged me. (My, how far I've progressed beyond box appeal to decide whether or not to buy a game...) Kahuna is a modern variety on a tug of war. Players play cards from their hands, strengthening their influence on imaginary islands with Polynesian-sounding names. Once your influence reaches more than half of the available 'slots' on the island, it becomes yours, and allows you to kick out all the influence your opponent built up. Since influence always ties two islands together, clever play can cause a chain reaction of players losing ownership of islands.

Although I don't play Kahuna anymore save with my sweet dear mother, the game has never lost its appeal completely. Although it has a tendency to become a little repetitive, and make it very difficult for a player to come back from a weakened position in time for scoring (which feels artificial and out of place, to be honest), there is something satisfying in setting up a kick-the-other-off-of-his-islands trap and executing it without a hitch.

Kardinaal & Koning (Web of Power in English) is a game I long overlooked because the subject matter seemed rather boring and detached: power struggles between kings and clergy in the 12th century...? Sounds almost as interesting as being a tax inspector in Central Europe. However, when it eventually did end up in the collection, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that lurking beneath that odd exterior is a clean and very polished majority game with a game play resembling that of greased lightning, especially with 3 players. There is nothing in this game which needs to be taken out, and anything you add would just be superfluous. There are just two problems with it: one is that there is a considerable amount of luck of the draw, although I've found that it usually allows me to play around it (which is a Good Thing™) so I'm inclined not to complain much about it. The second issue is that as the number of players goes up, the playability drops faster than a lead balloon. With 4 players it's tolerable, with 5 it causes intense convulsions and brain haemorrhage. The reason: far too little control over what you can do and achieve, lethal for a game as precise as this. So giving the game a single rating is a tad hard. I play it as a 3 player-game almost exclusively, and then it gets the rate shown.

The author of this game reworked it into China a few years later, which is more or less the same idea with a few changes which seem to help at higher player numbers.

Remains unplayed so far. I don't really see the need to, to be honest.

This expansion makes Web of Power very tough; much tougher in fact than playing with a third person. I am still not sure whether I think this is a Good or Bad Thing as part of its charm is the deceptive ease with which you play the game. I'm beginning to swing to the Bad Thing-side of things, though. The idea of the King being (ab)used by both players certainly makes the game playable with 2, but it's beginning to resemble hard work instead of a light game. Placement of the King's houses or councellors is crucial, especially if you need to consider the impact on your own position as well as that of your opponent. I think I'd rather have a situation when the third player is more passive, as is the case in for example San Marco or Mykerinos. There the mechanism works rather well.

Keythedral is everything Settlers of Catan should have been. The game is easy to teach, plays smoothly, has lots of player interaction even if you don't manage to score a lot of resources in a round, and knows a definite point where the game ends. And that all without that bane of modern games: the die. There is not much room for long-term strategic planning (save for when you are building up the playing area), but the decisions you have to make still require some thought.

If there is any criticism to this game, then it would have to be that after numerous games it seems a bit bland. It is a simple gather-resource-and-build-engine, where the value of the resources can be doubled for every keythedral tile you buy. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you buy these tiles early or late in the game; you get the same bang for the buck. Interaction occurs predominantly through taking up resources before someone else can; gates are as quickly demolished as they are built; cards are sometimes quite artificial and weak, with a few powerful exceptions. There is some interesting stuff going on with the initial placement, but it remains a constant throughout the game thereafter. Keythedral remains a good and friendly game, but seems to have some superfluous mechanisms, causing it to lack a certain 'bite'. Downgraded from 8 to 7, where it will remain indefinitely.

So, after a disastrous first game with 2 players where I ignored the cards for the most part, I was able to sit down with 3 players and try again. I must say that things improved considerably if you're not jumping around like a flea, and instead try and make do with your cards. Then the game shows what it's capable of, and that is indeed quite a lot. Khronos is gruesome to teach because it requires you to memorise all the rules in advance, but once you play a few turns, most rules fall into place, and you can begin hunting around for agressive combos to knock your opponents down. The flash tutorial does a good job of presenting a few of the tactics you can employ—in fact, more than I expected because of the way it demonstrates the use of the demolishment of smaller buildings. This is a fun part of the game: setting up a domino scheme, topple the first one, and watch the rules take care of the rest.

That attempt with 3 players was relatively quick and painless; the fact that your hand limits your actions sees to this. Unfortunately, it can also limit you too much: the examples of the demo also illustrate this implicitly, for if you didn't have the right cards, then the beautiful tactics are simply not possible. I consider the rules variant in the 2nd edition rules with an open card draw set a must if you want to have some competitive play. It doesn't stop there, though. The game is also highly tactical in nature. You cannot plan your move for the next turn as the board will have changed too much, let alone that you have your cards already. I expect this game will not be much fun when played with 5: too much downtime, too much salvaging what you can, too much opportunism. Why on Earth it was marketed as such is beyond me.

If you can live with these disadvantages, then a fun game remains, if only because of the original 'time rippling' mechanic. I hope it will see more play in the future.

This was my second 'genuine' boardgame I ever played (after Avalon Hill's Civilization), and the experience was not pleasant. I played with 3 players, and we were soon leafing through the rules to establish whether we'd done anything wrong. We were rolling dice and growing, but there wasn't any sense of progression or challenge. I then played a few games with 4 players, and became intimately familiar with the rather annoying phenomenon of getting no useful resources for a long period of time simply because the dice didn't land on their expected values. (The game material hints that 7 is the commonest outcome, followed by 6 and 8, and so forth, but this is only true for very long games, when both dice are thrown a large amount of times, at least 500 to 600 times or so. So basically there is only a tendency for the ideal distribution to appear, and that throws a spanner into the clockwork rather brutally.) People usually retort that you need to trade to alleviate this problem, but if you't have anything to trade the problem remains.

SoC deserves humoungous credit for its relative simplicity and presence of dice—which are a quite familiar and necessary element to many non-gamers—and the fact that it was 'the' boardgame which opened the eyes of quite a lot of people to the availability of games other than Monopoly or Risk. But as a game I find it boring and uninteresting. The capriciousness of the dice (not a member of the Dice Done Right Club™), and the simplicity of the tactics and strategies make it so simple for other games to surpass it that I won't suggest it to anyone, save for the one time I want them to feel what SoC is all about. Especially people who indicate that they have played this (once) are subject to Gentle Persuasion to try something else first before we do a game of Settlers. And since nobody asks for Settlers afterwards, I figure I must be doing a good job.

Decent cardgame for two, and much better than the boardgame it is derived from. The rules can be fiddly and complex, but these become natural after a while. I've played this quite a number of times when I was still learning the ropes of all these new board and cardgames, but at some point I and my partner simply stopped. The game hasn't been out of the box in (at the time of writing) about 5 years or so, and although I wouldn't mind giving it a go, I'm quite sure it would be for nostalgic reasons only, as there are several problems with this game we no longer accept or take for granted. For one thing, in about half of the cases you can predict in advance which player is going to win just by looking at the amount and diversity of the resources at his disposal. A high number of these guarantees a steady income no matter what number the die lands on, and thus a swift victory. Second issue: even though this game follows a linear distribution to determine who gets which goods, the die can still be a capricious bugger. A good player with bad die throws loses to a good player with good throws, and that began to influence our enthusiasm. Third: related to resources and willful dice, there are not sufficient catch-up mechanisms, save for the windmill, to reign the leader in. The other player can only do so much to counter a runaway leader: usually it is not worth the effort of collecting 'nasty' cards because by the time you are in a position to use them effectively, you cannot build anything when the die is rolled favourably. I remember from my last sessions that we rarely played to completion simply because it was obvious that someone was going to win within the next five to six turns. I'm not quite sure whether that qualifies as a good trait in my book nowadays.

All in all, it was nice to have met this game's acquaintance, and truth be told, the effect of the raw randomness is rather damped, far more so than is the case in the original game. Playing this game once every while is not overasking, and might even be fun as you work out various tactics and strategies. But to think I actually wanted to give this game an '8' at some point in the past... With hindsight that seems incredible. Then again, most things do in that perspective.

Remains unplayed so far.

Of the 'old' expansions available for the base SoC cardgame (there have been a few more in the time I played the game last), I and my partner liked 'P&I' best. And for one simple reason: the expansion expands the original game, truly adding to it in the same style and flavour. The rest of the expansions are just mediocre or do not really add anything extra, just more of the same.

I must have played this expansion once or twice, but it has been a few years already, and the fact that I cannot really remember the outcome says quite a lot, in my opinion.

This is one of the worst expansions you can buy for the SoC cardgame. When I was still playing the cardgame (at the time I am writing this it hasn't left its box for more than 3 years or so) I was eagerly looking forward to this little set: the idea of being able to use magic and thus create a sort-of cheapish knockoff of a true CCG was very appealing. But the set doesn't work. The player who focuses on magic is decimated by the player who does not and sticks to regular cities. I was then shown a 'killer combo' which would show me what the expansion was capable of. Let me summarise that combo: much ado about bloody nothing. The expansion was created for one, and one purpose only: deck-building and thus tournament play, and even then in small amounts, just enough to get a few interesting spells out of your hand and onto the table. If you add just one expansion to the base game every time, and don't do that deck-building crap—for the love of God, get a proper CCG if you want to do that—avoid this waste of perfectly fine cardstock.

I must have played this expansion once or twice, but it has been a few years already, and the fact that I cannot really remember the outcome says quite a lot, in my opinion.

I must have played this expansion once or twice, but it has been a few years already, and the fact that I cannot really remember the outcome says quite a lot, in my opinion.

It is a definite improvement over the original Settlers of Catan if you are into more strategical and less luck-driven games. It also adds a cardgame-like feel to the boardgame, and the uniform chance distribution to get merchandise cards is very, very welcome indeed. Rating is likely to improve upon repeated play: the rule changes are a bit finicky and take some getting used to, especially in comparison to the nearly non-existent rules of the original.

Remains unplayed so far. Based on my experience with the similar expansion set for the base game, I have a hunch it will remain unplayed until I get rid of it.

Played this once with someone else's expansion: NEVER again. Settlers of Catan doesn't work with such high player numbers. Game play is interrupted by the endless stream of trade rounds which become mind-shatteringly boring after a while. The base game—which is kinda sucky to begin with—is meant to be quick and simple, but both extra trade and player contention introduced by this expansion stretch it far beyond its breaking point. For that, it gets the lowest possible rating. This is a clear example of Monopoly-style marketing prevailing over common sense and play testing.

Remains unplayed so far. This is the oldest unplayed game in my collection.

Remains unplayed so far. Based on my experience with the similar expansion set for the base game, I have a hunch it will remain unplayed until I get rid of it.

Even though I've played it on numerous occasions, I'm still not sure how I feel about this game, exactly. It is a clever design, without doubt, and shows that there's still life left in the age-old mechanism of majority control. As with all good games, I'm slowly learning to 'see' the strategies and patterns, so no problems there, too. The most difficult part of the game is the beginning: you have no idea what to do and how to accomplish it. Just grab something, and see where it leads from there. All in all, a tight affair which has the players thinking surprisingly hard and long for such a small affair.

What I'm not sure about is whether or not the game is too complex for its own good. The tiebreaker rules are annoying to remember, but must be remembered as finishes can (and are likely to) be close. The last card cannot be played unless you win with it-rule is also annoying, because it means that the game pace slows down considerably as players begin weighing and calculating their options to the last decimal. Finally, I'm not sure I like the team player option which supposedly makes this game playable for 4. Truth be told, I don't mind the team aspect much because I know that there is no hidden information: all players start out with exactly the same hand of cards so there is no need for complex 'signalling' or plain hoping that the partner has a good hand or whatever. Still, I've gritted my teeth over avoidable mistakes made by my partner on more than one occasion. Teams should be composed of equally experienced players, otherwise it isn't much fun. This relegates King of Siam to the 2- and 3-player gamepile. Where, as I predicted, it works much better simply because there is no need to wonder about what your teammate is going to do, too. I designated this game to be 'best of show' while at Spiel 2007, and I still think it ranks amongst the best I've played there. But there is now a little doubt whether I wasn't too enthusiastic at that moment. The game is still good, but those rules feel unnecessarily 'gamey' to me.

I've decided to settle on 7 for now, for the 3P-game; this is a good and tight affair causing many interesting decisions. 4P is between 5 and 6 unless the players are all experienced and know each other well—something which regrettably doesn't happen very often in my gaming groups.

This game is a thematic addition to my collection: my girlfriend just Had To Have This upon seeing the genuine Russian 'посыльный царя' (pah-silh'-nee tsah-rjah') on the box itself, although she claims it is weird Russian. The game features a pleasantly simple mechanism to transport a message from the vast planes of Siberia to the czar in Moscow. This works rather well, and allows for some fun tactical manoeuvring without things getting too complex. This part of the game is okay. What is not okay is the part where you draw random money chips to bribe your way into the palace. So now we have this fun move-the-parcel-around bit which is afflicted with a stupid throw-a-die-to-determine-the-winner issue. (Figuratively speaking of course, there are no dice in this game.) I'll be kind with the rating for now, in anticipation of the Muscat/Czar++/GeoMan-enhanced ruleset which appears to be something to solve this glaring issue.

A single game with 3 players at the Spellenspektakel 2007-convention was sufficient to convince me to get this game. I have played on many occasions since, and stick to my initial opinion. This is a simple and fast game of bidding, bluff and reverse psychology; in my opinion better than Filou which came out at the same time. It's not super, but it isn't mediocre either, and gets the blind bidding-aspect just right by not cluttering up the core mechanic with too much information the players can not plan for. The playing rythm is pleasant and smooth, and the results more than once cause for a good humorous laugh. Quintessential starting up, filler, and winding-down material.

I got League of Six at Spiel 2007 after a very quick partial demo with just 3 players, but my girlfriend and I liked the general playing rythm to the point where we decided the risk was worth it. After a far too long hiatus, I was able to get this game to the table in a 4-player setting, and I was happy to conclude that the feeling of the demo had persisted. Unfortunately, repeated playings led to a waning of interest as some worrying tendencies began to assert themselves.

It may look so simple, but hiding beneath its simple exterior is a hard muscling-in-on-eachother's-turf kinda game. First the players dish it out to determine which city they will be taxing, but they bribe and extort each other in the process. If played cleverly, one player can use the please-move-out bribe of one player to finance his please-move-out bribe in another town. The upshot is that he is very cheaply piggybacking on the flow of guards—payment—and saving a lot of points in the process. This is clever, true, but also very dangerous as an agressive player can cause such violent fluctuations that one or more players are simply locked out of the game. They don't have the guards to bribe others, and are likely not getting them either because they are forced to unimportant towns from which they cannot claw back. The little power plays are interesting to watch, but being the butt of them is definitely not fun—to the point of wanting to quit, really. After everyone's place has been determined, you get to tax the city, resulting in various goods. These are then transported to the royal or civic vaults, and even here players get to interfere with one another.

I found it hard to get a feeling for this game, and for some reason I never managed to utilise the piggyback-trick; I was always being siphoned off of my guards (read: I was always the butt). I also didn't really like the somewhat long playing time, which is destined to worsen with 5: what you need to do isn't difficult, but it must be done in succession. Only experience can help here. Then there is a slightly lingering doubt about turn-to-turn differences: basically you're doing the same thing for 6 turns in a row, with only points, guards and turn order being carried over into the next turn. Planners hate this—look at the comments of 5 and lower—but at the same time it is pretty obvious this game is simply not about planning. At first I liked this game, and when played with 3 it is tame and quiet and altogether a bit boring. But with increasing number of players the swings in fortune are so capricious that it ruins any fun I might have derived from it. So this game turned out to be a case of 'wrong first impressions'.

UPDATE Upon a repeated playing with 5 players, I decided to attempt a different tactic: immediately occupying a 'worthless' city, subject to the condition that it had lots of horses so I could determine where the goods were delivered, and only attempting a good city if I had sufficient guards to make it interesting. I scored a huge end-of-game bonus by having the majority in all three social classes, but still came about 10 to 12 points short of the players who grabbed lots of cubes. I could have played a little more efficiently by memorising the social classes cards, but the effort would have been pretty much for naught all the same. Cubes are everything as the cumulative value will swamp everything else even if you have few horses. If you manage to obtain many (± 5–7) cubes in more than half of the rounds, you win. There was also one player—thankfully not me this time—who began to fall behind by round three, and could not get back in a meaningful way. I enjoyed myself better, but I still maintain that this game is rigged in some way, and thus not very pleasant for at least one player.

Liberté was a blind purchase: it was either this or Age of Steam. I cannot recall how I stumbled onto it: I think it was because I was traversing the list of games available at the store I placed my order. The pictures of all those stacks of blocks with colourful discs on them piqued my interest. Unfortunately it took much, much longer to get to the table than I had envisaged. This game is for the enthusiast with at least 2 hours to spare, and there were so many other titles I wanted to try first... Choices, choices.

Righty. Game. Liberté is a funky excercise in area majority gaming, but it has quite a unique feel to it which you won't find anywhere else. For starters, there's a cap to the amount of influence you can have in a province, causing numerous tiebraking rounds. This also makes it genuinely hard to predict which faction will eventually end up in the government: you're counting like '7 provinces sure victory, 4 ties. Oh, now it's 8 sure victories and 3 ties'. It's hard to get into the government, so there's other ways in which you can score points, and these seem quite effective too. Finally, you have to be on the lookout for the sudden-death victory conditions. These can occur completely outside of your control, and the fact that all obtained points are voids at that time can leave a sour aftertaste. Only with repeated plays will you learn how to 'read' the board and understand how everything fits together so you can actively strive for a sudden death victory—or to avert one.

All in all, the game is weird, but attractive in its own right. It's tough to get a feel for because it is hard to keep track of /- 30 provinces with stacks of blocks in them, and if this could somehow be made easier, the game would gain a lot of appeal almost instantaneously. Nevertheless, it has a lot of interesting and original ideas going for it.

Lost Cities has a subject so thin you coud shave with it. The cards, while beautifully illustrated, are not pleasant to shuffle and handle due to their size. The board is not needed for play. The scoring system is artificial. Okay, that sums up a lot of modern-style boardgames, so I can't really hold it against the game. What I do hold against this title is the absence of interesting strategies: luck and a bit of elemental tactics are all you need. And that's precisely the rub. If both players use the best available tactics, it becomes the luck of the draw. If one of them doesn't, the other is bored stiff from lack of interesting play. I had a nice time figuring out the game, but after a while it grew repetitive because the decisions all amounted to the same thing. I tried playing it online, and turned away in disgust after seeing how bad people were. I haven't played it since, and prefer games with a bit more meat on their bones.

The first play of this game was rather disastrous as me and my fellow players expected it to be something it wasn't. Will replay once I have read the extensive FAQ and studied some basic strategy guides.

In the beginning I wasn't too thrilled about Louis XIV. It took me ages to finally place an order with Adam Spielt (now defunct, unfortunately), and the first sessions left me with a splitting headache from absorbing the rules. The game isn't that difficult when shown how to play, but learning from the rule book requires quite a lot of reading. However, I persevered despite being shown every corner of the board(s?) by my main gaming partner, and now, after many games, it has become a title I would not easily part with.

Louis XIV is a funky excercise in majority gaming where big kahunas of the Sun King's court (i.e., Louis XIV) are bribed, bought and sucked up to for various goodies which can be used to complete 'missions'—basically ways to gain even more influence and money. Subject-wise this link is a bit weak, but it works nonetheless. The cool thing is that once a kahuna has given out a reward, (s)he changes the conditions for receiving that reward in the next round. This gives the game an incredibly dynamic feel, as there are many ways in which the players can achieve their goal, while being curtailed by the others. Delicious stuff.

Randomness? Yes, there is randomness. First in the cards you play to decide where you place influence. However, I've noticed that you can 'work around' a seemingly ill draw by focusing your attention elsewhere instead of trying to stick to your guns. Bend is the operative verb here, not break. The second source deals with the coats of arms. But these aren't as random as you might think. Of the 40+ points I score nowadays, only 2 to 4 are there by pure chance. And it is not like you don't know there will be 6 bonus points handed out at the end, so you'd best work you ass off to make sure those bonus points will not cause a nasty surprise! Things can get close, but they would have been close anyway, especially given the proficiency of the players in my group. The fun is more in how you got to where you are, not where you are. That makes it less of an issue for me, too.

Although I appreciate Louis XIV's design much more than in the beginning, grown to like and perhaps even love it too, I still slightly prefer the clean sober play of Mykerinos over the rock'n'roll of Louis when it comes to relatively short area majority games for 2 to 4 players. I am very happy to own both, though, and will play both with equal enjoyment and interest. For those interested: I play the 2P game with two variants suggested here on BGG. First, a passive 3rd and 4th player are added (2 influence for player 3, 1 influence for player 4). This crowds the board sufficiently to keep things interesting. But for ultimate fun, you need live dummies.

The tagline of this game reads 'mega fun with mini rules', but after playing through a number of games, most of them 2P, I'm not so sure about either. A long time ago, when I was still wasting my time playing computer games instead of seeking out female companionship, I stumbled across a game called Alchemy. You can find it here. It's a quiet puzzle game in which you try to turn a slab of lead into gold piece by piece by arranging magical runes with different shapes and colours on it according to a very simple rule: neighbouring runes must share at least one characteristic, namely shape or colour. It becomes really hard pretty fast, which is why I never played it for long. M is Alchemy in boardgame format with a few changes.

M is a simple abstract tile laying game in which players try to add tiles with abstract drawings and 3 characteristics each (colour, value and center image) on them into a grid of at most 6 by 6. At least one aspect of a tile much match that of an immediate neighbour; if the tile is placed adjacent to two tiles, both neighbours each have at least one similarity, and so forth. You get chips (worth 10 points each) from your right neighbour for particularly good placements. If you make a row 5 or 6 cards long, and the card you place shares two aspects with an arbitrary neighbour, the game is momentarily halted. You are then allowed to pick up any card from that row as long as it doesn't cut the cards already placed into two or more separate 'islands', they must remain a single interconnected whole. You do this because such cards are worth points: at the end you count up the cards in two colours you have the most points of, and deduct the points from the other colours. (Yes, that sounds a lot like Coloretto.) Chips add a little extra, highest score wins.

All in all, albeit being easily explained, the rules are really not that mini, and contain a few weird frills. Do they result in a 'mega fun' game? No, I don't think so. I have a pretty good hunch that the author started out with the placement mechanic and created a game around it, since it feels a bit too artifical. The cards you need to place are drawn at random, and you can never be sure that someone doesn't start a pick-up round cheating you out of that high value card you've had your eyes on for a while now. It's not even a given that you can initiate one because of the 2-characteristic rule. Tactics are therefore relegated to picking up a clever card once there is an opportunity to do so, but this doesn't happen that often. About 80 to 90% of the time you will be staring at the grid, wondering where there is a match sufficiently valuable to cheat an opponent out of his chips. Given that the game takes about 45 to 60 minutes to play, it is simply overasking the core idea.

Therefore I think M is top-heavy, trying to stretch things to a point where they aren't meant to go. That feeling won't sbsisde if you take it less seriously. There are no funny jokes to tell (it being an abstract) and the artwork isn't as clear as you would like, although it does the job tolerably well. Mini rules, perhaps; but mega fun, no.

As card games go, Citadels is an excellent game of sly maneuvring, reverse psychology, opportunism and deceit. Things can get surprisingly complex for a cardgame this size: it is a good 'filler', if a little heavy at times. However, the game has a tendency to drag on, especially as the number of players rises above 4: speedy builders are delayed, character powers become repetitive. Seasoned players also begin to target 'well known' characters and follow 'well known' tactics: the merchant is surprisingly often robbed; the architect is surprisingly often stabbed. (Or vice versa.) Should the architect survive a round, his owner becomes a sitting duck for the magician, and so forth. I hadn't played the game sufficiently often to notice this at first, but of late I have. Presumably this is why the expansion was released. Machiavelli also has a sweet spot at 4 and 5 players; all other numbers don't really work or aren't as much fun.

Remains unplayed so far. (To be very honest, I'm not really all that interested in playing this expansion. I have had quite a bit of a falling out with the base game to begin with—I see little sense in adding to the agony.)

The Game of Sparrows is a game of luck and some skill. The luck is readily apparent from the drawing of the rather mysterious tiles, at times beautifully engraved with indecipherable characters. The noise they make when shuffled is unmistakable, and although there is no need at all to construct the Wall, people do it anyway to give the game a more luxurious and serious appearance. The skill comes in from attempting to construct an as high a score as possible given that variable input, and some constraints shown to you by your fellow players. You can train this skill, and become better than other players. In case you were wondering why I say this: I've played about 1250 games in my life, at least half competitively, and can thus substantiate this claim rather easily. Unfortunately for me, the 'algorithm' in my head isn't particularly good, making me an average player at the very best.

After the discovery of modern boardgames I have rarely put Mah-Jongg on the table. Part of the reason is that I've grown out of the game, although I will still happily teach it to newcomers if they're interested. Another part is that the internationalisation of the game in recent years has pushed the traditional ways of scoring all the way to the background (there are no tournaments anymore featuring the rules I grew up with). Nowadays, most players play Riichi or Japanse Mah-Jongg, which features simpler scoring, which is perhaps farer too—the doubling aspect of the traditional rules could be absolutely murder due to nothing but sheer luck. But to me, it feels like Frankenstein has been at the game. I never bothered to learn Riichi, and even now while writing this comment I find reading through the official rulesets to be a hapless and uninteresting task.

Mah-Jongg is a hard game to rate, because it all depends on the set of rules and scoring you use. The way I was taught and played exclusively ('Chinese traditional') is, I think, not so good for serious play. The doubling factor can be absolute murder, and if I had a dime for all the grumbling and cheering I overheard because someone managed to score in excess of 5 doublings, I'd be able to purchase a shiny new set by now. For tournament play, these rules are not really fair. Also, the fact that a minimum of two doublings is imposed to make the game worthwhile for those who strive for a good hand instead of completing the hand as fast as possible, tells me that these scoring rules are less than optimal. A 5 is terribly harsh for a game I played that often, but given my lack of interest in the last few years...

Mare Nostrum took some time to settle on its final note. It features gorgeous artwork (although the markers could have been better), simple and elegant rules, and little luck. It is very unfortunate that the game with the utmost standard rules is not balanced optimally; fortunately the suggested fixes are elegant and solve the problem nearly completely. My rating is based on games with those fixes in place—perhaps not fair, but since I wouldn't want to play without them, defensible. Play suffers when not with the maximum amount of players: some cultures will expand more easily, others can lay low and quietly collect the victory cards. You need that tension on all the sides. On the other hand, with 4 players it is still without doubt a highly enjoyable and at times quite confrontational game which will keep you busy for quite some time.

Oh, ignore people who complain that Mare Nostrum is 'not Civilization': indeed, it isn't. Don't play as if it is, or should be. You'll miss out on the game of Mare Nostrum.

I am literally in two minds about this expansion. The first mind is telling me that the addition of all the new units, gods and heroes, and the changes to the old ones, works miracles in fixing the somewhat problematic balance of the original. All civilizations are now a force to be reckoned with, you can no longer single out any particular one during a particular phase. That is definitely a Good Thing. I also like the new mythological units.

However, the other mind abhorrs the big mess Mare Nostrum has now become. The clean simplicity of the original (with fixes) is gone, replaced by a mixture of over 40 different units, gods, heroes and wonders. Variety is guaranteed, but since this is not a game you play all the time—usually, anyway—making a choice becomes an annoying chore. You really need player guides and even then making a good decision is difficult. The author clearly loves his Magic way too much. Second, in my opinion, the appeal of Mare Nostrum is to be creative with what little you have; with the expansion that feeling is rather lost because there is always something you can use. Third, the leanness of the explanatory text resulting in many rule ambiguities. They are quickly resolved thanks to excellent support from the author, but it shouldn't have been necessary. Fourth, the artwork doesn't compare to the beautiful drawings of the original: Instead of having a muscular wargod-like bearing, Mars appears as a fatso in dire need of a proper workout, while Athena is trying to hide the fact that her pencilspear is broken in two. The final nail in the coffin is the parsimonity of the supplied cards: some heroes have been altered, some have not, but only the altered ones have been provided. You have to manually search through the base game deck to find out which ones you need—it would have been so easy to provide the extra 10 cards or so...

With more extensive rules, 1/3rd of the amount of new heroes, proper artwork, a careful selection of gods (if at all) this expansion would have been a corker. If you play MN: ME out of the box, it turns MN into Magic in an ancient-Mediterranean boardgame setting. So, if it is all about 'fixing' the original while maintaining its simple core, it's back to fiddling on your own again, and that is a terrible shame. I have played this expansion once, and decided there and then that it was enough. The base game works very well for me, therefore I see little need to augment it.

Medina is a somewhat clever game of zugzwang coupled with positional manoeuvring. Players are forced by the rules to jointly erect palaces, claim them, and then put some finishing touches on them to increase their point value. It is interesting to see how the game develops. First there is plenty of room, so noone wants to give away too great a palace. Because sticking close to walls gives extra points, the first palaces are located there predominantly. But as soon as the board begins to fill up you can force new palaces to be erected in very inaccessible places where they will never grow to a useful or threatening size, although this is of limited use since an unclaimed palace which cannot grow any further is considered to be 'finished' meaning that a new one may be started elsewhere. It forces the players to burn through their pieces and turns the entire game into a counting excercise—provided of course you're sufficiently astute at keeping tabs about this. Despite their somewhat meager potential, the tactics and game flow are nice to see unfold.

In the end however I think there is too much zugzwang involved plus too much fear of doing something which will not profit you, but will profit the player coming after you; and too little incentive to strike out on your own. Walls, markets and stables are in fact ways to pass a turn, shifting the zugzwang onto the next player. Mastering the balance between these two aspects is not easy, so don't think Medina will yields its secrets after just a handful of games. Still, I vastly prefer games like Through the Desert and Go where the emphasis lies on how far you trust yourself to go, rather than preventing setting up positions other players will benefit from. There is much more give and take there.

Beautiful production, nice idea, but the quirks and problems caused me to raise my eyebrows more and more until I had to tape them to my face lest they leave it. Every game I have played so far has ended in a win for one player with the other one or two turns behind. The reason is obvious: there is a rather fixed amount of steps you need to take in order to deliver the fourth offering to the temple, and it being a game of efficiency, any action which does not help you to reach that goal puts you at a disadvantage. If you hinder one player, you are merely allowing another player to catch up, or even pass you on your unguarded side. So you only hinder when you are able to strengthen your own position, which happens almost never.

Since the game is a snowball race game, I also get the feeling that there are far too many silly rules going into the design. You need wood for this, stone for that, there are weird blocking rules, mana can be obtained in several ways, and so forth. Wrede obviously wanted to create such a title, but I'm not sure that the core idea is a good one, not when everyone shares the same goal and the same limitations. I don't think including different goals would have weighed down on the current ruleset all that much. There has been extensive discussion about various rules variants, but I found none of them to my liking as they do not change what I perceive to be the core issues of this title: they are meant to increase player interaction, but they do not really increase the incentive to do so, nor do they introduce different ways to obtain one's goal.

I think it's a crying shame that so much effort went into the physical design of Mesopotamia. You want the game to work: how can it be otherwise given the smart interlocking tiles and bright, clear artwork? But alas, this title appears to be yet another miss from the early Phalanx days. I really wish my sweetheart would wise up about the game, forget her love for the design, and let me sell off this PoS—the threat of major bodily harm is the only thing which keeps this title in our collection at the moment.

This game is in my collection because my girlfriend has a penchant for games with strong subject matter, and rather likes the city of Paris. (To be honest, it's not a bad place, but it's so freakingly uniform that I wouldn't want to live within the boundaries of the Périphérique Intérieur.) At first I found it boring, until I discovered we'd playing with the wrong scoring rule: points go to the colour of the completed line, not to the player completing the track. And then it suddenly became an agreeable and very lightweight pastime built around the continuing dilemma: do I block others, or do I score myself? To call this game stellar is the overstatement of the century, but it is easy to learn and plays pretty fast. I do not, on any occasion, take this title seriously, but I do play it with people who are not really into boardgames, or prefer such simple games. And under those circumstances it has yet to fail me, and for that it gets a very strong rating boost. But avoid more than 4 players: things become too chaotic then.

Metropolys is a subtle bidding game which, especially in the advanced version, can induce a lot of min-maxing on the part of the players as there are many contrary options to consider. Do you take your losses to avoid someone else from gaining an important foothold? Do you sacrifice a large building to consolidate a position here and now? As such, it packs a pleasant amount of punch for its rather simple appearance. In some vague way it reminds me of Ra or League of Six—there's a similarity in bidding amounts up to a certain limit but knowing that you will lose bidding power in doing so; plus that different areas are rated differently for different players. The game is definitely more interesing in the advanced version as the relic-tiles can take on positive values as well, otherwise they are just blind areas you really would do well to avoid. It is precisely the extra amount of options which give Metropolys the little extra bite it needs.

However, there has been some nagging doubt as to whether the assignment cards are properly balanced. Take for example the card which nets you five points for having 3 buildings around a lake. It is very difficult to get any meaningful amount of points from that, especially if you must block others from gathering around statues or forming strings of buildings. There simply are not many neighbourhoods on which you can end a 'bid', and your bidding options are limited: basically place the highest of your buildings on the right area. The rules indicate that you must try to 'read' an opponent, and this sort of thing is a dead giveaway, allowing others to easily block you. If you have another assignment, you can afford to let others guess longer. I'm not really sure I like the idea of the players to guesstimate what their opponents do as a requirement for the game to be balanced properly.

What also gets to me is the garish design, however. The box is beautiful, but apparently money was gone at that point. The board is dark, drab, and at times confusing: lakes are hard to distinguish from canals, why on earth are parks yellow, goals on cards need meticulous explanations to point out the proper landmarks and goals, ... . What a corker it would have been would the box art have made it to the interior... Nevertheless, fun and interesting game.

The cardgame is actually quite a clever little thing with some intruiging character selection. However, stay clear from the reported 2-player variant floating around here: it doesn't work. With the full compliment of 4 players it is much better, but is hampered by one annoying fact: there doesn't seem to be sufficient conflict because of the small number of conflict cards. With just 7 conflict cards in play (one being the Mate) and 4 players, approximately 3 are in play in a given round. That is enough to instigate a mutiny, but if you are not able to support either side based on what is lying open, you will not chose any of the corresponding cards because other cards might be more beneficial to your own position. For example, I have seen quite often that people chose the Merchant over one of the others simply because the Merchant at least netted them a good amount of points. The Boy is hardly ever chosen: you get 2 points, true, but you aid someone else in becoming Captain, and are stuck in the same position you started out with—worse, even, because you may have been asked to play a sword which you could have used to become the Mutineer on your own! To summarise: player intervention is rather diffuse, you can't target someone specifically. More problematically, the Captain tends to stay Captain, especially if he managed to travel to a few good islands and can then afford to bribe the mate every round. These factors marr an otherwise nice design with cute reverse psychological tricks.

Mexica is the smaller brother of Tikal and Java. I've never been able to pinpoint exactly why I liked it less than its brethren; even realising they are in some way or another majority games didn't help all that much. I do think that this element is the most pronounced with Mexica: Tikal only requires you to have the majority at the time you score, so everyone more or less gets a shot at the maximum number of points. Java more or less uses this mechanism too: you only get points if you are on the highest position; other players can hinder you if you want to hold a party. But Mexica uses the 1st, 2nd and rest-mechanism. This makes 'leeching' a far more interesting strategy (in other words, letting someone else do the hard work of staying in first place, while you yourself do just enough to remain second), with construction of neighbourhoods placing a far greater emphasis on scoring than you'd think at first. The open districts near the end can be a real killer if you're not careful, and you should always be on the lookout for someone emptying the channel draw stack before you get to place a coveted calpulli chip. Another difference is that Mexica is a completely open information game. Tikal and Java are not: those two have the element of surprise or chance (which I like considerably with Tikal). As such, Mexica feels, is more analytical: you can compute exactly how many points you are behind (or in front of) someone else. It turns out that it is fairly computable to determine whether a difference can be bridged or not; if it can't, the game is fairly pointless from that moment onward. In Java this aspect is less pronounced (though the last player is royally screwed), and Tikal has it far less. Finally, Mexica is the only one of the trio which is not so good to play with 2. It is either a boring race, or an insanely cut-throat game. Causes are the emphasis on majority play and the complete lack of unknown, or hindring elements. It will be much better if San Marco- or Mykerinos-style rule variants were to be proposed.

All in all: a good game in its own right, but just less than Tikal and Java. If a better 2-player variant becomes available, then I might consider upgrading the rating, as I like the AP-mechanism a great deal.

Purchased a copy, only to find one of the sprues so badly die cut I have to order another one. I guess I'll have to wait for a bit, then :-(.

I first learnt of Moai while at Spiel 2007, and played a game with 5 players there. The game is rather unique in that it is based on a destruction rather than a building engine, meaning that players are likely going to play quite agressively. Subject-wise, this is a very good translation of historical events in 16th and 17th century Easter Island, when the entire island ecology collapsed as a result of too big a human population. The designer did a great job on this aspect.

However, where it is a bit lacking is the game itself. After several games, despite everyone actually liking the game despite the bitter competition leading to destruction of moai and farm lands and even a dab of cannibalism, I find that the blind bidding aspect is actually somewhat weak. Perhaps it was chosen to increase the sense of dread, in other words, that you can never be sure what someone else is up to until it is too late. But the game itself turns into a somewhat mechanical—even somewhat dull—excercise as a consequence of it. Perhaps this is inevitable given the black theme: allowing the players to build up too much makes them attached to that particular aspect.

Playing material looks great, although I'm experiencing significant board warp. Looking at the box itself, I quickly found out why: Made in China™... For the price I had to pay at Essen I think the game is not worth it. It is not a title which will be played to death, but rather be consumed in small nibbles. So there is some doubt about its staying power. But there are good aspects to it too, and for the combination the game gets a '6'.

Why this game is so popular is really beyond me. It probably has something to do with its utter simplicity requiring absolutely zero brain activity: roll dice, advance marker, pay rent or buy property, or, in the case of little money, make deals. Rinse and repeat, for hours and hours and hours. You don't have any say in where you will end up, meaning that you might as well shuffle all of the property cards, hand them out to players, and determine the winner based on the total property value. You could perhaps add some variation based on a Markov chain-analysis, but that's it.

In the end, it is not the luck fest which bothers me. I own Andromeda, which is just as much a luck fest, but which I happen to like a great deal. No, I despise Monopoly because of the mind-numbing boredom which sets in after 10 minutes. The cards don't provide enough diversity nor influence; if you have relatively bad investments you cannot do anything about it, and once you are eliminated you need to wait a couple of hours before the rest of the players is available for a new game again. This is also why I give Monopoly the lowest possible rating. It says a lot about the human condition that Monopoly remains the best-selling boardgame ever.

My initial enthusiasm cooled after several plays. Aladdin's Dragons is a fine game by any standard, with an interesting mechanic of blind bluffing to achieve your goal. It is always great fun to turn over the chips to find out who wins the privilege of a certain playing field. However, once people begin to collect artefacts and magic cards, things become rather ad hoc and chaotic. The fine and subtle balance of the first third to half of the game gives way to a 'take that!'-type of title. The magic cards are not that balanced either, meaning that you tend not to use them—or grin mischievously because you were extremely lucky. It helps considerably if you play this game with a variant in which you turn up the cards on offer to allow people to decide on their own whether they would like to pursue that option or not. Blind bidding is, after all, a good mechanic to use in a game, but one should be very careful with anything that upsets the subtle psychological play, and with closed cards that is precisely what happens.

With the gameplay settled to full satisfaction, all that remains to be sorted out is the annoying amount of tiny rules questions which invariably turn up when a game with lots of special character powers is released. Can you do X before Y, with Z, after Z-prime, and so forth. I think I ought to mail to Richard Breese one of these days to get an authorative answer to settle the questions once and for all.

While not an totally original design (majority, special powers), Mykerinos has a few intriguiging novelties. Quite cool is the second majority game you play—namely in the museum. You also play against time, because there's only 4 rounds of play, with the 2nd giving you special powers and 4th having 50% more playing area. Every twist and turn you could exploit has been blocked off very precisely. You will follow the tortuous route set out by the designer. Yet surprisingly, it never feels overly scripted. The game works wonderfully for 2, 3 and 4 players; is relatively short, too; and comes at a very fair price. Game-technically, this is a clear '8'.

But.

But for that awful graphical design. The little pictograms are not very clear. The scoring board is too small: none of the player markers fit, they hang out over the edge. The cubes are too tiny. The player markers contrast very badly with the board; the graphic of the intrepid explorer should have been left out as there is no other visual difference anyway. The grid on the cards doesn't match up. The more I play with the game, the more these flaws begin to irritate me. Therefore, a rare occasion: point deduction because of bad graphical design. Ystari needs to rework the graphics for a second edition to make them more managable. Then, Mykerinos can be awarded with the note it rightly deserves.

UPDATE I've bought my own set of new cubes and other things to make Mykerinos a bit more 'playable'. See this picture. I've also increased the note to '8' although I still think we should all receive free upgrades from Ystari.

This is a relatively simple and fun addition to the already excellent base game. Its main appeal for me lies in the fact that Greenwish allows players to somewhat block Brown-activity in the museum, who can be extraordinarily powerful if not checked. Experienced players know how dangerous that patron is and will take appropriate measures, but it always nagged me a little that I have to invest quite heavily in order to prevent someone from having a too easy time. With this expansion, Brown's power is checked just sufficiently to allow players to pursue other means of obtaining points in a way somewhat more of their own choosing. In addition, the 'joker' use of Greenwish cards makes set collecting a much more viable way of obtaining points; and of course the 17 extra points injected through the Nile tiles will make things a bit easier too.

Still, because there is now more flexibility in the way players obtain points, it also means that effectively blocking others is less simple—a block is easier 'to play around', so to speak. That means that some tension is lost. But that doesn't mean the game is less fun for it, it's just that things are a bit different. If you like the base game, give this expansion a go.

Not sure what to make of this. The game is more complex than you'd hazard at first, and winning isn't exactly easy. After a game or two you begin to realise that you want to create clumps of alternating coloured mushrooms so that your opponent(s) cannot create coloured rows of their own Scrabble-style. Still allowing for sufficient scoring possibilities isn't exactly easy. Gamewise, I'd say something of a 5 or 6. Unfortunately, Nach dem Regen is bogged down by the rather psychedelic central image on the board, and the so-so production quality. The bases of my mushrooms aren't properly sanded so that they tend to roll over sometimes because of a major burr still sticking out. The game feels like something you'd find at a thrift store or yard sale, really. The cutesie appearance as well as the cutesie background story weren't really necessary: this game is an abstract at heart and should have been produced as one.

I was never quite sure about buying this game: there was talk about too much luck in the discovery of the treasures. But after a few plays, I have grown rather attached to the little explorers and submarines working their way along the depths of the ocean. The game material looks absolutely gorgeous and sets the mood if nothing else. As for the luck... The problem I have with the game is that there is a rather solid manoeuvring game going on which has the players vying for the best spots on the sea floor. Here you can build and manipulate and decide in which technical areas you want to be the best. Unfortunately, they make up just half of the points. The other half is found by exploration, and although there are means to do this cheaply and effectively, the distribution of chits can be a killer. Players simply cannot look at everything, and if the distribution happens to be 'off' (no mollusks of the right type in the immediate vicinity, no treasure chests), then you can play all you want, but you will lose. Money is very tight in this game, and if a player is lucky enough to get an influx from treasures, there is almost no stopping him. For a game which lasts as long as Nautilus does, that is a serious setback. I closed my eyes against this issue for far too long, hoping that the luck would prove to be 'fair', but it isn't. If in a game the randomness is against you, you may deduct another point from the game's current rating.

This game always leaves a favourable impression whenever it is put out on the table. The game is an interesting mix of various bidding mechanics and purrs along at a very nice pace. Players place merchants on markets in order to earn the right to buy gifts or obtain money in a certain order; but the conditions under which the markets close and the aforementioned choice is acted upon are different for each market. The gifts create surprising tension between the players because of the fact that the value of the cards devaluates as more players get hold of them. Once players begin to realise this, the character cards become very annoying (but in a good way). The one thing a player should not do (in a 4P game), on any occasion, is to spend all his money early in the game. Because of the closed economy, the other players will lock him out automagically, and this isn't at all fun. (Guess who found that out the hard way.) If there is a downside to this game then it has to be its rather mathy calculation of the value of various gifts and consequently how to act: bid higher, bid lower, and so forth. I use heuristics and still manage quite well, but I can certainly see that some people would sit down and calculate everything to the last decimal. Néfertiti should be avoided in that case.

One play in with 3 players and two sub-expansions (Memphis harbour and a few new character cards). There are some issues with rules and components (see here), but once these were sorted out, it was smooth sailing all the way. Personally, I think the harbour is not that interesting for lower player numbers. There is too much room to place your meeples, and the irregular 'closing', although fun to see, seems to throw a wrench into a finely crafted money strategy. I think it'd be much better with more players. As for the character cards in play... Well, different, of course. But not to the point where I'd say they are a musthave.

Further experiments are planned.

Reading the rules and explaining them is always a lot easier than I envisage. There is a rythm to them which makes learning them easier, even more so once you begin to learn what the symbols on the game material mean. I could even point out a mistake in the original German edition: when bribing the Bishop, you are allowed to take an action of the quarter you move the cube too; this is not mentioned in the rules. However, some of the pictograms are not very clear, but you can't have everything.

The game itself is a fairly standard but well-executed excercise in 'multiple ways to victory'. (But see below.) Players must juggle various actions and conflicting goals in order to obtain as much victory points as possible; according to the rule book this indicates proper taking care of a district of medieval Paris. As far as I'm concerned, that's a load of thematic crap: the only thing which ties the game to Paris is the Notre Dame, and even that building just represents an action amongst many. The game could have been easily called 'Kölner Dom' or 'Westminster Abbey' instead. Oh, and there's a hunchback. Okay, two items which tie the game to Paris then.

Contrary to popular opinion, I am of the opinion that player interaction in this game is minimal. You see your opponents on three occasions: card swapping, the Notre Dame, and the carriages. The card swapping has you sending off two cards to your neighbours, but since you have little control over what you get, in most cases you keep the card which is the best for your own position. When another player is 'obviously' persuing a certain strategy, then yes, your choices will be influenced by it. Otherwise, you simply maximise your own profits. As for the carriage racing: the game imposes a strict set collection routine which equalises interaction even further. The Notre Dame, yes, that's a place where people can truly 'fight' each other. But it's a limited part of the game. Conclusion: most of the time you're on your own, so why bother at all with what the others do? My first games were with 2 players, but I doubt that things would be very different with 3 or more. (Later games with 3 players confirmed this suspicion.) The game is tantalisingly calculable: I never felt that agonising decisions were forced upon me. In some games, I played fairly calculatingly, ignoring rats for most of the game, and miraculously finished first without too much effort. There didn't seem to be anything else to do. In other games, the cards didn't cooperate, forcing all kinds of untimely decisions on me, and so I finished nearly last. Once again, there didn't seem to be anything else to do.

In the end, Notre Dame left me on the cool side of luke warm. The busy and frilly artwork isn't particularly appealing, although the odd board shape is an eyecatcher for sure. It had me thinking of Hermagor at one point: a nearly endless source of small amounts of points which seem to accumulate no matter what you do. My sweetheart is by now very astute at reading my body language and cut me off before the first sentence left my mouth: 'We are NOT selling this game, I like it!'. (I have a habit of selling games I don't like much.) Very well, the game will not be sold. But neither will it be loved very much.

One of my favourite childhood games. I did not come to appreciate it in full until I was 10 or 11, and even as an adult I still like to play the occasional game. There is something strangely fascinating about watching your wheels turn and hearing mysterious clicking noises. (It must be how a cat watching a mouse hole feels...) Unfortunately, my girlfriend knows exactly where all of the slots are, so I don't stand much of a chance in winning—I yearn for a version where you can change their relative position.

Othello is quite abstract and offers quite a lot of variety despite its simple rules and standard setup. Unfortunately, everyone knows the tactical ground rules (corners first, edges second, and then see what you can do to annoy the other), turning a match into a very defensive business. Fortunately not as bad as Abalone, but still. With the arrival of the much more fluid and better-balanced Yinsh, I never play Othello anymore.

Packhuys is a must for anyone living in Amsterdam—so my girlfriend decided she should have it. At its heart, it is a card game where you try to build closed-off districts with wharehouses ('packhuys' in 17th century Dutch). The fun comes in when you pester your opponent: you can force him to pay money to build whatever he was planning to build, or you can alert the port authorities and instruct them to remove an 'illegal' wharehouse. It is definitely not easy to balance expansion of your trade empire and keeping the other player busy with the law or the bean counters. The game plays smoothly, despite the ever troublesome scoring of completed districts. I have not yet played the game sufficiently to shake off the desire to build large districts: the idea is to build lots of 'em, because large and small districts score one point each—if they make it to the top five of biggest districts, that is.

My girlfriend has a number of cousins who are into playing games, not as much as we, but still always interested in what kind of stuff we buy and eager to give them a try. Pandemie (I have the German edition) proved to be a very interesting in couple dynamics. The cousin is a sweet woman who likes the social aspect of games. Her husband really likes to play it rough, and when the two are together in a game things can get pretty, ehm, lively. Pandemie was a direct hit by a multi-megaton nuclear warhead for the cousin. She coaxed us into breaking my record of number of same games played in a single gaming session. Her husband, on the other hand, is more or less conflict personified, and watched with horror as his wife became almost as fanatical as himself, but then not to oppose him, but to cooperate with him.

I think we'll put this game on the table more often. It's so much more fun to watch our 'wargamer' being subdued by his normally quiet wife...

Anyway, the record attempt was marred by the fact that I misapplied a rule which made things really hard for us, and so the game defeated us three times in a row. We were on the verge of winning our fourth game, but due to yet another rule issue (this time with the Dispatcher) the pandemics again got the better hand of us. After that, the husband had had more than enough and insisted we do something else. Yet no matter what, I could see why the game shot up the charts. It is a cooperative title, but one which is fairly easy to grasp, and does not make use of any wierd subjects like Tolkien's fantasy world, ghosts, horror creatures and more. Despite its simplicity it pulls off its subject very well; there's very little gamey elements in it which were put in there just to work out the game balance... It's a Good Thing™ that the game is going to be picked up by a Dutch label.

Remains unplayed sofar.

First impressions: cute little abstract with a bite. Balancing the possibilities of your actions against the future when you might still need them is not easy. However, repeated playings have led me to conclude that the game itself, while beautifully presented, is lacking in precisely that area. It is virtually impossible to predict what your opponent is going to do, or what the board will look like after two or three moves, making it a very tactical game. Which is fine, but after a while your choices become so limited that winning or losing is dependent on a move you made near the beginning of the game, or the outcome of what a person threw with the panic die. There simply isn't much of a game here. In addition, the rules are full of little details which are annoying to learn and hard to remember—there should have been a rigorous review of what was in the game before it was picked up by the major labels.

UPDATE Shear Panic started out as something awfully cute and fun, but now I find myself subject to the human version of 'shear panic' when I see people bringing this to the table. I won't exactly bolt, but to say that I'm eagerly anticipating its arrival would be a lie.

This game reminds me to some extent of a cross between Pachisi and Emerald. Players slip into the role of islanders captured by cannibals and attempt to escape the cooking pot and the subsequent jungle in small groups. But there's a catch: the boat can only hold one person... So while in the jungle it's 'all for one, and one for all', on the jetty it's 'winner takes all'. A simple idea that is kept so simple that all emphasis shifts to the psychological aspect of the game. You need to rely on the other players to help you through, but you will get screwed too. So who gets to screw who and when and where? My only complaints are that the road out of the jungle is really too long so that the game becomes repetitive too quickly. Also, people not used to the game begin to annoy each other too early, and once you're in the lead with a few others none of you will actively derail that group. That means that you should make sure you are in it, but since this can already be decided the moment you leave the encampment, strategic planning becomes rather futile. It's a bloody shame, for with some additional development the game would become good as well as very, very nasty. It does feature a die, but you have so many options to choose from that the randomness does not become readily apparent. Nevertheless, if you like simple backstabbing and dealmaking, go for this title with its macabre theme.

Of course, once you own Yavalath you also immediately own Pentalath so this entry is a bit double, but the current database model isn't really capable of handling such oddities. In any case, Pentalath is rather more difficult and brain-burning-y than Yavalath. Instead of just forcing moves, you now have encirclement to contend with, and once that happens you're the way to losing the game: removed stones leave a gap which offers great opportunities to create the necessary five-in-a-row. It's rather fun to have these two games in one package, I think.

Bought the game at Spiel 2008, where again it was offered for the bargain price of €15. I resisted in 2007, I did not resist in 2008. Remains unplayed so far, although I have a nagging doubt it won't be a terrific game due to the dice.

Simple and colourful game with perhaps a tad too much take-that. It takes a bit of thought to look for optimum rotations and translations. Between skilled players, the luck of the draw becomes quite influential, and that is, to be honest, problematic. You really ought to play a full manche of 3 games, but I can't be bothered to do more than 2 in a row. And that means that luck isn't washed out sufficiently. In addition, there are cards in the deck which allow you to mess with your opponent. This keeps the game lively, true, but they also cause the game to take on a take that-feel from time to time. Try before you buy.

I bought this game because it was on sale cheap somewhere, and I'm not sure I should've done that. (Yesyes, I know, cheap usually doesn't mean quality, but you've got to take the bad with the good, right...?) After a few plays with the sweetheart, I'm in two minds about this game. The part where you build up the pyramid is quite cool and quite psychological too, with some interesting conflicts and tensions along the way. The part where it is determined who won the game is not cool: in fact, it's boring and annoying, having very little to do with the game itself, and feeling utterly out of place and simply tacked on for the sake of having something to measure the end of the game with. That's why I simply ignored this part (just as one should do with the bizarre action cards in Knizias Tower of Babel), and just played 3 games in a row to determine the winner. (Later I learned that's more or less what this game's predecessor Pacal does.)

So far, I've just played 2-player games with the variants listed on this site. These tend not to be very satisfying as you don't require much evolution to worm your way out of predicaments. In other words: the game becomes a race who can hang onto his amoebas the longest. Nevertheless, the game design is very good. I'm looking forward to playing this with more players.

You don't remember reading that I own this game. You don't remember a word I wrote. You don't even remember why you arrived at this page in the first place. And since you won't remember, I can tell you why I own this title: it's all my girlfriend's fault.

A very unusual design which made it to my wishlist thanks to Fawkes' excellent review. When I saw it at a sale, I bought it blindly. This game is downright nasty despite the simplicity of the playing pieces, and although it remains a somewhat dry counting excercise, the construction of the pueblo makes it a worthwhile effort. It is not often that you actually *get* to build something in a game! I like the 2p-game sufficiently to attempt to play it with other people, but I have to be exceedingly careful not to play it with friends or relatives prone to analysis paralysis.

UPDATE So at long last (at least several years after writing the above), I played this with more than 2 players. To be honest I found the experience disappointing. This game is basically a multiplayer puzzle where one can quite thoroughly figure out the cost of placing various game pieces. There isn't any tension of being a more clever builder than your opponents here: it is a repetitive business of avoiding the game of the overseer while pointing out the flaws of other players all the time. Blocking other players is hard to do: everyone wants to stay compact and small and hide behind the others. Players are penalised for creating constructs which seek to make building blocks difficult, and the result is a tepid experience. Probably this is why various variants were introduced—I'll make a point of attempting the game with the sacrificial sites. Perhaps then it'll become a bit more lively (although the point counting will remain).

Good abstract game with charming wooden pieces. Quarto! is at its best when both players are growing a bit tired so that 'stupid' mistakes become an issue—you become your own worst enemy, and that heightens the playing pleasure considerably. Not something I'd like to do all the time, but certainly not something I am ashamed of to have in my collection. The rating floats a bit between 6 and 7, to be honest, but it lacks the depth you find in some GIPF-games, so a '6' it has to be.

This is a silly little game which is best played with two or three players; with four the balance between action and gem cards is lost. You require a good memory and a bit of a poker face to emerge succesfully. The problem I have with this game is that the sales are pretty much a crap shoot. There is almost no way to predict in advance which cards someone will lay down, even if you somehow manage to keep track of what your opponents collect. (Helped or not by an occasional peek.) The sheer number of cards sold off is not exactly helping either. If there's a seasoned card counter amongst the players, the rest don't have a chance; and you need to be card counters in order to have a chance in the first place. These I think that you think that I think-games are best played in short rounds; with The Queen's Necklace there is just too much happening in between for mere mortals. The game material is great, and the subject fits the game nicely, but in practice it simply doesn't work as well as you would hope.

Ra is a bit of a pendulum in terms of my appreciation for it. At first I found it cool, then I went through a phase of 'average', and now its star is slowly rising again. But I'll add a very important 'but' here: you should always play with people who know what they are doing, and know the basic strategies. Then, and only then, does the game stand a chance of showing what it's capable of. In other words: don't take games with newcomers too seriously until they've grown a decent feel of how the game works. (I should probably be more lenient with other games where this is a factor, too.)

Ra is a auction game with very clean and lean mechanics, and thus allows the players to fight it out amongst themselves. The scoring is typical of Knizia: convoluted like hell, and thus a source of confusion for the newbies. You must correctly assess what is on display to be able to decide what to do. Subject-wise, this game is pointless, but it provides for a nice background which still seems to work. Presentation-wise, I prefer the BSW-interface as it's clearer what other players have amassed so far. There is no genuine turn angst save in a few special cases: the decision space is rather limited, after all, and in most cases, easily collapses into a single decision. But don't let this fool you: playing this game well depends on a lot of exceedingly subtle factors, and mastering those will keep you busy for quite a while. The fact that the original alea- and 999 Games-editions function exceedingly well with a 2 player-variant which now has been promoted to an official ruleset should increase the amount of table time in any household.

Fun little game for two which is harder than you would think at first—blame the stacking. But it makes you think in a nice way; it isn't as hard as, for example, Java. Of course its simplicity didn't stop me and my girlfriend from getting a crucial rule wrong: we played that three rats of a single colour meant *instant* death for the unlukcy person, instead of *at the end of his turn*. My, how the game improved once I corrected that error (thanks, B Weage and Liumas!). Originally a thin 7, I dropped it to a 6 as luck of the draw really is quite influential, even when considering that it is balanced by the fact you can try to build impossible-to-bridge constructs and even, if you're lucky, manage to force a player to lose because he can't cover his rats. It's a 'thick' 6, though. One very minor suggestion: have the yellow disc count for 3 points instead of 2.

Raub Ritter always leaves me with a somewhat odd feeling, as if it tries to do more than it is capable of. Or, perhaps more accurately, that it is capable of more but is now stuck to this relatively simple 'interface'.

What is immediately obvious is that the game is tremendous value for money. You get a truckload of Carcassonne-like tiles; in fact, even more than in that game. Then add 120 wooden discs; that's more wood than the meeples. The only gripe I have with the tiles is that the artwork is a bit bland and sometimes difficult to recognise. On to the game, then: with 2 players I like it considerably. It is short and tactical, but the game forces you to consider the long-term effects of your actions as well. With 4 players, I'm not so sure yet. I played a few games which were exceedingly close right until the final tiles were placed: some people got lucky and managed to collect 6 to 8 points each because they drew a castle and could place their final knights uncontested. This is a rather brutal end which does not seem to square well with the rest of the game. This cannot be easily fixed, and that is a bit of a shame.

It is unfortunate that with 4 players the feel of the game is so different (and in my opinion, less) than it is with 2. With 2, the game is cerebral and very strategic—rather like a chess match, but in a completely different way. With 4 there is distinct downtime, lack of player interaction (resistance against your plans is much more diffuse), and probably worst of all too much change on the boards between player turns. There are precisely two moments when you need to pay attention to what others do: when they eat a coral, and when they take new tiles. The rest is simply not important (unless you desire to pick up new tricks).

Despite the somewhat questionable scalability, the game structure is so unique and so completely non-linear (read: circular) that you are likely to find yourself doing things which are seemingly the complete opposite of your Grand Master Plan. You can interpret this as a weakness, because you not only have your opponent to deal with, but also the admittedly hard game mechanics which, at times, seem to delight in making things really hard for you. This is an issue you should not underestimate: putting this game on the table 'just to see what it is like' is a clear mistake. Players will wonder what happened to their brains, and noone will have a proper idea how to go about making things happen in a way they envisage. But playing more often, gaining experience as you go, is definitely rewarded. It becomes less of a fight against the mechanics and more of 'going with the flow'. As beginner you simply don't fully comprehend their scope yet. Every time you play you learn a little more, meaning that this is a title you won't soon tire of. Even when I need to consider the rather painful fact that my most common opponent is my girlfriend who is an absolutely ruthless player who beats the living daylights out of me, and delights in making things really, REALLY hard for me.

This game is not for wussies: you need to think here. But if that is not a problem, go for it. Clear rules, beautiful graphics in whatever version, and a depth and uniqueness in gameplay to put any regular boardgame to shame. It is sometimes compared to Euphrat & Tigris, but the comparison only goes so far. Knizias title is more incremental, whereas Reef Encounter is ... well, circular. Or perhaps wavy, if that makes any sense. Reef Encounter is by far the best of Richard Breese's designs to date as well one of the best boardgames I have ever played—my sincere compliments to him.

Not sure about this expansion yet. I like the new tiles and the blue shrimp as they offer a bit more manoevring on the coral reef boards. I do not like the cards, as they interject random events into what is a finely tuned engine to grow and protect corals. I'll happily admit to liking some of their effects, say, getting free tiles or allowing to grow a coral first before feeding it to the parrotfish, but other players cannot really defend against such events save by drawing a good card themselves. I plan to play a few times without the cards to see what happens. (All the other elements will stay in place.)

I am not one for card games, but I make an exception for this title, especially when played with the variant in which everyone passes along his own set of cards to his neighbour. This evens out luck of the draw in a very clever way, gives players an idea of where the cards are hiding (introducing a bit of Memory on the fly), and allows for some strategic play insofar such is possible with a double guessing game. After all, knowing what the other has does not equal knowing what the other will play. I did not expect to like the game when we started, but to my surprise I did in the end. Too bad it's rather hard to find nowadays.

I purchased this game when Spiel 2008 was about to close. After a bit of irritating hassle with the publisher—the cards in my copy had numerous annoying printing errors—I got a new set and played the game with SWMBO. Although we both liked the game at first, the dominant strategy we hit upon after game four or five became so dominating that it all became a matter of the cards you were dealt at the beginning of the game. You can fairly easily deduce which rows or columns provide the greatest rewards for your opponent, and then block those with a card which gives you the greatest potential reward. If the opponent has no cards to fight you, you win. I had hoped it would take longer than it did, but regrettably, it was not to be. We haven't played the game since, unfortunately. It's too bad, really, the artwork is nice and the core idea is pleasantly simple... But there isn't much of a challenge in this game once you figure it out.

When this game was announced, I didn't even bother to look at it during Spiel. Civilization meets Yathzee, that's the gist of it. While both games scratch a certain itch at times, I don't think the marriage of both ideas is a particularly fruitful one. Players throw a number of dice Yathzee-style, then do things with the values which turn up. Food is necessary to feed cities (which are 1:1 related to the number of dice you are allowed to throw); vases give you goods which allow you to purchase discoveries (and VP); little guys give you new cities or monuments (and VP); coins give you, well, coins for discoveries; skulls are disasters and usually cause point loss. It's all fairly simple and straightforward, and from what I've read, that's what Matt Leacock intended.

I have two problems with this game. Well, three to be honest, but number three is not an issue in practice. The first problem is that I dislike the way the game was produced. The cribbage boards probably were meant to add sturdiness to the proceedings so that the game became portable, but people with big hands will find them fiddly and small. In addition, the game is so multiplayer solitaire that you don't need to see what other people are doing, so why a simpler and lighter solution was not devised (magnets!) is beyond me. Second issue I have that in the basic setup it can be over before you know it. The game appears to be a multiple-ways-to-victory thingy, but in practice the goals are reached so quickly that this doesn't come to pass. I understand that Matt has released a longer version with altered scoring sheet for those who prefer their games to last a little longer. But still, it's unsatisfactory. There's quite a bit of stuff to keep track of, and it's over before you know it. Top-heavy ruleset, choices mean little, you name it, it all boils down to the same issue with this design.

RttA is not a bad game, but neither do I find it very good or engaging. It is simple enough to play with my mother, but I doubt she'd able to grasp the details, and that means it will probably fail as a family game as well. The rating hovers between 5 and 6: if my mother understands it it'll become a 6, otherwise the rating will stay put at 5.

I was never sure about buying this game, and when I eventually decided 'what the heck', it was already gone from many shops: the Dutch distributor stopped making it a while ago. With hindsight, I am glad I put in the effort of tracking down a copy. It is easily one of the better 2 player-titles from Kosmos/999 Games, with a rather curious scoring mechanic which forces players to keep on adding to big stretches of land, and do their utmost best to break up that of others. Such is the effect of a square power! Intersparsed is the continuous temptation to use a power card, which are really best saved until the last possible moment, but in all games I've played sofar, temptation was too great. Because all cards are open, one can plan ahead a little, although the luck of the draw can still have an exceedingly brutal influence. Nevertheless, a rematch is easily agreed upon. The main disadvantage is its weak theme, and despite the sometimes confrontational gameplay, my sweetheart girlfriend keeps insisting it is 'very romantic' because of all the beautiful roses on the board, the cards, and the stones. I think that making this a wedding gift is not such a good idea, however...

This is my favourite in the Catan series as emphasis is much more on having a good memory rather than what you throw with that stupid die. It has been compared to a race and perhaps that is precisely why I like it above all the other Catans. It is a major hassle to set up (way too much fiddly bits), the artwork of the space ships is way too complex, the subject is weird at best (not even like the other Catans at all), but game play can be excrutiatingly tense. However, the fact that not everyone has a good temporary memory means you should be careful in choosing your opponent.

San Marco is a majority game with a fairly unique divide-and-chose mechanism. One person divides a set of cards, the other person gets to chose first. This makes interaction a very obligatory and sometimes quite tricky process. I've read some accounts of people succumbing to analysis paralysis, but honestly, I can't figure out why. The in my opinion great thing is that interaction is limited to one player most of the time, namely the person you share the cards with. Although with 2 players the game is more predictable and less chaotic than with 4, I think the levels in the latter game are more than acceptable to keep it fun and interesting. If I compare it to El Grande, San Marco doesn't have such a large decision space to work out, and has a quicker and less heavy feel to it. The fact that there is some randomness involved also helps in losening up the entire process. I like this game consideraby.

Upon repeated plays, I've come to the conclusion that with 4, it becomes a mite chaotic. It is still a very good game, and lightyears better than El Grande (another chaotic majority game), because there you continually evaluate your decision space—in other words, introducing strategy in a game where strategy is hard to find in the first place. Not so in San Marco. Still, the game is still hard to control with 4, and gameplay suffers somewhat because of this. It is a very good game you can have lots of fun with, but for the 8 which I originally envisaged, it lacks in small, but noticable ways. They can all be summarised as 'lack of control', a typical characteristic of Alan Moon.

It is genuinely too bad that this game only genuinely works with a lot of players. It is a relatively simple game: bid on crop farms, put them down to form adjacent areas, and bribe a continuously changing overseer to water your crops. With 3 players, there is way too much room for everuone, ruining the subtle balance between bidding, bribing and group thought. The game becomes much better with 4, and is great with 5.

At first I was rather hesitant in buying this title because I did not know how well it would play with 4. But it does an admirable job. I like Santiago's zany charm with very subtle powerplays and not-so-easy decisions on when to become overseer and when to make a killer move without helping the others too much, and so forth. In fact, I'm actually quite impressed that such an apparently simple game just seems to work so very well without feeling artificial. With my sweetheart liking this too, this was a purchase we can both look back on with satisfaction, and the prospect of many hours' worth of play in which we silently curse each other's sneaky behaviour.

I played chess in primary school because that's what smart kids did. However, I liked the puzzle aspect of chess more than I did the game itself. I was never able to fathom nor appreciate the finer points of chess strategy (strength of 2 bisshops are stronger than one bisshop and a knight, or that a rook and a bishop are more powerful than a queen) and so abandoned the game when there were no more puzzles left for me to solve. The lack of players equal in my pitiful level, a pocket computer which beats me effortlessly, and the superduper analyses in extremis surrounding professionals have turned me off. It is a timeless classic, but in order to play interesting games I'd need to invest more time than I can and am willing to spare. I much prefer the 'simplicity' of go which at least cuts down on the amount of types of playing pieces, and can be scaled down to smaller boards instead.

Scrabble is fairly simple and provides a nice test of one's linguistical skills, but the ever present dictionary to settle disputes over the correct spelling of words puts me off. Nevertheless, it does have its merits (letter games are rare), and the utter joy of completing a word with crazy letters on the triple word score square has to be experienced at least once in one's gaming career.

I have rarely played this cardgame, and to be honest, I find it difficult to remember what happened exactly. I do remember I found it a bit lacklustre, without interesting choices. But I'd have to play again to see why I didn't like it much, to be honest.

A lovely short game, perfect for any moment you need to pass a short time. It is a game based on the I divide-you chose mechanic, and features two separate scoring mechanisms to make the dividing and chosing a little trickier than you'd think at first. I do not yet know how the game works at high player numbers: I do know that the power of the dollops of cream goes down, and that of the majorities goes up as there are simply less pieces of pie per player available. But it's simple, doesn't take more than a few moments to explain, and looks gorgeous. Why aren't more games like this?

Sint Petersburg was an early acquisition in my gaming 'career': my girlfriend and I played the game when we were at Spiel in 2004 for the first time, but waited until the Dutch edition hit the market. I can't remember much of our early attempts, but given my sentiments about this game, a lot of the 'theory' behind the strategies we pursued must have been faulty or even plain wrong. As a result, the game has been stuck in a dark corner of my gaming cabinet for a very long time. I could not sell it on as my girlfriend has special ties with the city upon which the game is based, so it kept on gathering dust.

Fast forward a few years, when an acquaintance of ours dug his copy ouf of his cabinet, and invited us to play. I did so with some reluctance: snowball engine and vague memories didn't make me truly enthusiastic. But I persevered, and didn't do too bad in the end although I made some stupid errors. It felt a lot more natural to assess the path I had to take to get the engine up and running, and so could dispell a few myths which I had allowed to cloud my judgment. For one thing, there is no truly dominating strategy in the sense that you should always focus on one make of card. Do that and you'll probably lose. Sint Petersburg is much more about being flexible with what you're given as well as what you plan to do in the next few turns. Failing to recognise opportunity as well as some basic rules of hand and money management will result in loss. What didn't change was the feeling that the human players are attempting to solve a sort of optimisation puzzle. The subject matter isn't carried over well into the main mechanics, let alone the game material. All that matters is the price per VP for every action you take. I won't say it is easy to transform your money engine into a point engine as the game progresses, and will say that there is plenty of opportunity to hone your skills here—but in your mind it remains a matter of rational economising and not of constructing a city in the middle of a mosquito-forsaken swamp.

My previous rating was a little too harsh. The engine is fairly clean and fairly straightforward and thus simple enough for me to grasp, even if many subtleties elude me for the time being. In the future I'll probably not be as adverse against playing this game as I was, but at the same time I'd rather play titles with a bit more story arc or drama in them.

A thrift *attic* find at my sweetheart's turned up this game. Feels like 'pesten' with a staple Dutch activity: biking through windy weather and coping with flat tyres. The box is already very old, so this one will not be sold off. Nor will it be played, there are better card games out there.

Reiner Knizia's take on Acquire, just as Union Pacific is Alan Moon's. You might want to play Acquire a few times first before moving to Stephenson's Rocket because it gives you a much better feel of what you need to do. Starting off with SR is really not recommended. Nevertheless, the convoluted scoring and complete absence of any luck whatsoever makes this a tough bugger to teach and play. As a result, it doesn't come out anymore these days, and is on the list of games to be sold off.

A blind purchase at Spiel 2006 in Essen for the low price of just €5. When we played it, we discovered that at this price, it is great value for money. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a crap shoot in how to go about winning the game. At some point you will focus on just a few treasures, and other players will not find it so easy to stop you in that situation. It's a nice game to own thanks to its lovely appearance; in terms of gameplay it can be a bit, if you pardon the obvious pun, dry, although the hand management can bite you if you're not careful.

Given to me as a gift; unfortunately, upon opening I found it is a weird mix of various trick taking games, poker, and additional complexity of pairing up with another player. All elements on their own I can appreciate to more or lesser extents; combined I draw the line. I'm sure it is a good cardgame, but it's just not my cup of tea. I won't play this game unless forced, and will therefore keep the game unrated.

Taj Mahal is basically the adage of 'chicken' cast into a modern jacket.I like the game a lot: the rules are really not that difficult; play is quick and sometimes very tense; and there's a pleasant mix of short term tactics versus long term strategics—although the fact that cards turn up at random (though you get to choose) means that your strategy needs to be fluid and adjustable. This becomes more important as the number of players increases: strategies change their effectiveness, and player contention can cause major problems. If you don't 'get' this part of the game, you will lose, and dislike Taj Mahal immensely. It also means that you cannot really stop other players in a determined effort as it relies too much on the cards you have in your hand. Your best bet is to maximise your own source of points and hope that hindring the others at much as possible keeps them behind you at the end of the game. It can be a bit of a weird ride, but it remains a fun one.

Fun tile-laying game with beautiful bits which add considerably to the game. The fact that you can grow your little island upwards gives it extra appeal. However, I'm not so sure yet about the game play. Originally I envisioned something of a Rat Hot, which can become really, really mean at times. Taluva is far tamer than that, as huts already placed already count for you. The only way to hinder someone then is by cutting short the size of their settlements so they can't build temples. But as I haven't seen a victory by placing all tiles, I fear the temples are rather redundant to begin with, and are just useful to threaten with. As it is, there isn't much 'game' in there.

I think I'm going to fiddle with house rules in order to emphasize nasty play. The game's rating is an undeserved 6, and should go up to a 7 once I'm done with it.

I had high hopes for this title, but I regret to say that they didn't come to fruition. The game does a truly excellent job of portraying the wasps' nest that was New York in the late 19th century, and gives the players a wonderful opportunity to practice Machiavellian tactics on each other. Everything the Italian author wrote about can be found to some extent in the full game. Helping along the entire affair is a set of relatively clean majority mechanics with a few twists which, in theory, ought to keep things interesting to the final voting procedure.

But in practice... The game suffers to a great extent from the problem that someone with little board presence is effectively knocked out of the game itself. He cannot take on the other players because he lacks the influence to do so, and the game won't give him a single shred of it—not even with judicious use of his ability to slander another player or the actions allowed to him by whoever turned out to be Mayor for that round of turns. It is very easy for a strong player to remain strong; it is also very easy for a weak player to remain weak; and the end result is an unsatisfying game experience for at least one and sometimes two players. That is, if you define 'unsatisfying' in terms of 'amount of control a player has over his own destiny to win this game'. It is entirely possible that a playing holding a strong previous position is brought low, but this is difficult to achieve and may cause more harm than good in the end, as it usually brings another player to power who must then be besieged in turn. This is where the Machiavellian scheming makes its appearance... but whether this is a good thing is not something I am very sure about.

The problem is that nearly every solution you can think of to remedy this situation completely destroys the strong coupling of subject and mechanics. Every solution is a gamey 'fix' to make sure that the game works as is usually expected of them, rather than as a vehicle to tell a story no matter who gets his ass kicked. It feels like sacrilege to introduce a house rule like 'the weakest player gets to slander for free' or 'the weakest player gets double influence'. Why on Earth would such a weakling be able to do these things? Because of his successful grassroots campaign or something? I have this naive hope that I can think of something that will make Tammany Hall a much better game without violating the subject (much), but the more I play the game under the normal rules, the more I see that hope disappearing. Tammany Hall was designed to function in a specific way, and changing that way involves changing very basic game elements.

Tempus suffered from a great amount of hype when it was announced that Martin Wallace was working on a civ-light game, but due to printing issues the game was delayed for so long that people started confusing their withdrawal symptoms with the game's actual performance. The game took another hit when the awful graphics of the ProLudo edition began circulating amongst the gamer population, and hohum-reviews quickly pushed the game into oblivion. I got it very late, when the publisher was dumping his stock in a vain attempt to get at least some money for the boxes.

The first game, with 5 players, suffered from a major rules mistake. I completely forgot that you cannot build cities next to each other—correcting that rule will cause a lot more contention and bickering for sure. So the game was rather tame and dull. Then I played with 3, using the corret rule, but it was still a tame and boring affair: If players pick a good spot to start off with, they won't see each other until the game is half done, and then combat can be expensive and annoying. So I'm still not sure about the game's actual performance. I think I'm going to bring it out during a session with 4 players, as the wisdom of the Collective seems to indicate the game is best that way. I certainly do not intend to play the game anew with 3 with the current ruleset, in any case.

As for the game itself: it is pleasing in its simplicity, but the tech tree is awful. There is no clear incentive to be in the lead as the game's mechanics make sure you are swept up no matter what. As a civ-light game, it fails; I tend to think of it more as Vinci-light. Then a few words for the production quality: Although my ProLudo-edition is absolute shit in this department, I soon discovered that you don't need the horrible player aids at all. The actions themselves are very straightforward, the effects of various improvements are on the cards, and the era effects can be gleaned from the table. I might be tempted to create my own deck of cards: even with the cards in sleeves they still shuffle badly.

In conclusion: a typical Wallace in that a good idea doesn't seem to work as well as you'd have hoped.

3 PLAYERS: 3

4 PLAYERS: Remains unplayed so far.

5 PLAYERS: Tentatively, about a 5 or so.

Terra Nova is a fun game of area encirclement in the spirit of Go and Through The Desert. That is not to say that these games are absolutely identical, but they share certain elements which cause resemblence nerves to fire. The encirclement in this game is handled by little meeples walking over a rather pretty map and then dropping stones in their immediate vicinity. Players must be careful in not setting up 'easy areas' for other players, something which seems to be causing me no end of trouble, and drawing cackles of maniacal glee from my girlfriend. She complains that I always beat her in this type of game, but here she finally has a title where she can win. Adding insult to injury: I have no idea why I make such stupid moves. I probably need to do a few small joseki on my own to see how I should move and not move.

The game is not completely about area encirclement: you must take into account the point totals for the encircled areas. If you don't, you will lose. This isn't difficult, and once you get the hang of it, Terra Nova is compelling and clever, and, not entirely unimportant, delightfully simple with nice bits and artwork. The game stayed a bit underneath the radar even when it came out during Spiel 2006, something I don't think the game deserves. It may not be stellar, but I can certainly think of a whole lot of other titles I'd rather pass up on.

This game is in my collection because I got it for free with Gipsy King. A few games in, I'm not sure I would have bought it on its own merits. I 'got' this game much more quickly than my poor girlfriend, and was therefore able to control her game to the point where it because pointless to continue. I do not quite understand yet where the strategy comes in when the two players are equally matched: it might very well boil down to two or three key fences being placed very early in the game. Not quite sure whether that is a Good Thing™.

Tikal is a beautiful game to look at and play with, and features an excellent subject supported by intruiging mechanisms based on action points, or AP for short. Wolfgang Kramer has made many games in which AP play a role, and this is his best. The players are explorers in the jungles of Central America and are searching for overgrown temples. The higher these temples, or the more excavated they are, the more points they are worth; and more points mean a higher chance at achieving victory. All available actions have a certain fixed 'cost' associated with them, and within a small handful of boundary rules the player is free to chose which actions he will take... Until his 'credit' for his turn runs out. A lovely mechanism as it rewards player creativity.

Tikal scales well with any number of players, but has a slightly annoying tendency to cause analysis paralysis in inexperienced players. Some people enjoy to calculate their way out of this game; I prefer to play by heuristics and a little intuition, using the action points only as a sort of bookkeeping aid. I don't believe it is necessary to become a human computer either: usually the board position is such that it is fairly obvious how your main plan should work out for this and the next few turns. The random tile element does not please some people, I find it adds a little schwung to the game which fits the exploration theme very, very well. I tried playing the game with the auction variant once, and me and my partners broke off halfway through. What is a nice and pleasing rythmical game becomes a grating and calculative mess. There is more to this game than blatant min-maxing: it's also about not painting yourself into a corner, and that is not as easy as it looks.

I hadn't played Tongiaki in a good while, but when it hit the table I immediately made up my mind to degrade it. It is simply too chaotic and random to be much fun. Oh, I like the subject and the presentation (although the boats are easily knocked over and the beaches are too crowded, obscuring how many moorings there are), but the game seems to be lacking. In quite a number cases players will find themselves without a possibility of getting a lot of boats onto the islands. They are then out of the game, completely unable to threaten the position of someone who does have a lot of tongiaki. They have no say where they end up, being dispersed as dandelion seeds before the wind. Add to this the brutal luck factor which can leave you with impassable ocean and/or crummy islands, or the exact opposite. I have seen games where the point ratio of the winner versus the loser was in excess of 3 to 1: that simply leaves no other explanation save a bad game design. Tongiaki feels like it ought to work, and it is disappointing to learn that it doesn't.

Tyros is not a game which I played a lot despite its attractive subject, and it took me a while to work out why: the scoring. Figuring out how many points you'll be getting is not an easy task, and if you just sail around and build cities (as I did), you are (or so I thought) not playing the game correctly. You should focus on a subset of the trade empires, and keep in mind the bonus awarded for having the largest number of cities there. You can then also assign a relative value to the trade cards instead of just trading them 1 on 1.

However, repeated playing with the above in mind still led to a somewhat lackluster experience. The main problem I've encountered is that people tend to prefer trading with the stack to trading with other humans—at least in my groups—because they are after a specific type of card. If the other players indicate they don't have such cards or do not want to trade under the stated conditions, the trade stack is the only option left to you. Being allowed to carry over just three cards from a previous round also isn't helping very much: there's quite a bit of tactical play involved, and a plan of building a lot of cities in a small empire may strand because that empire becomes the biggest of the lot, or because you don't get the right cards to see that plan through. There is very little you can do about this save for trading like a maniac with the draw deck before it runs out. The trading with other players which is supposed to make the game a bit more interesting simply does not work very well here.

I will not go as far to condemn the game, because if you change your expectations, the game is still a friendly and thematically interesting card game. I will concede that for such simplicity the scoring is far too convoluted, and that to date, none of the games I played involved the other players knowing their scores until the end. Tyros seems to be more about a little hand management until someone is rather unexpectedly declared winner rather than a clever excercise in logistics optimisation.

Not a favourite, but not quite bad either, although I suspect it will be many, many years ere I play it again after I've finished with this comment.

Fast game of bluff mixed with Roshambo. Not very original, but at the price I got it for, I'm not complaining. The components are worth more than that already. Not particularly spectacular, but it plays quick and can cause a bit of hilarity to see how the bluff works out.

I played this game for the first time at Spiel 2007, and decided there and then I'd get a copy some time in the future. Fast forward to May 2008, when I noticed my FLGS carried a few unmarked pre-release editions of this game, and presto, one more title in my collection. I know, there's a newer edition coming out, with somewhat better paint jobs, but the silver worked just as fine.

TZAAR is the most addictive game of Project GIPF. Stones in three types form a unity of sorts; if one type is no longer on the board, you lose. Since the first of your two moves is required by the rules to be a hit, you also lose if you can't hit another stone. Movement is delightfully simple and combines the jumping of YINSH with the stacking of DVONN, but is devoid of the somewhat cumbersome limitation that you can only move as far as the height of your stack. There's a bit of ZÈRTZ in there too, if I remember the few games I played correctly. As a result, TZAAR is much more about setting up subtle traps and forcing the other player to make moves which cause him to lose sente. However, if you think this is just dumb checkers, you have it wrong. If you hit too many other stones, you can still lose because there are no other stones left for you to hit... I have a strong hunch that a skilled player can still win in this stage. Another thing I really like about TZAAR is that a game lasts no more than 10 to 15 minutes, which is perfect for what it attempts to do. You are easily tempted to try another game, and another, and yet another... Something I've never experienced with YINSH or any other GIPF-game.

Now for some grumbling. There isn't much strategic variety in the game no matter what people will say or write: noone ever addresses the issue that it makes perfect sense to reduce the rarest piece to even rarer levels. (It is not an issue if from 15 pieces you go to 14; it definitely is if you go from 2 to 1—ou allow yourself to be put into sente in the latter case.) Therefore games invariably start with a battle for the tzaars. Whatever is left is then put into stacks so they don't get hit too easily. After that it's either chasing ever growing tzaar-stacks, or killing off the tzarras, the second commonest piece. These usually end up in stacks (albeit smaller) too, and at that point you must be very careful where you place your stones for the game is about to end for lack of other stones to hit. There is plenty of tactical maneuvring along the way, but don't confuse the depth of the game decision tree (which is hefty) with strategic options. There are very few. I fear that the lack of them will seriously hurt game replayability in the long run, even if learning the subtle dance of when to steer for what kind of victory is a complex one.

For now I'm giving the game an 8, but I expect this will drop over time.

Remains unplayed so far.

Brought home as a souvenir from a trip to Grenoble, France. The game is lightweight, but very fun, and never fails to evoke hoots of laughter or appreciative comments. Why this game was never picked up by any major Dutch label will be forever beyond me: it has delightful mechanics, a rock-solid theme, plenty of good-natured take-that gameplay which turns the most peace-loving person into a rabid sadist once the lava, erm, 'gets' another victim, and is easy to learn as a final bonus. It reminds me of Emerald in many ways, but the subject is better tied to the mechanics, although I'm still not sure why people get to have more movement points as meeples are clustered together. It's also somewhat odd that you can get to safety near a city gate on the foot of the volcano... But other than that, good, clean fun in a simple package. Go get it while it's 'hot'!

An interesting but far from easy game. After you've mastered the rules and its many corrections and explanations (the English rules are not very good), you end up with a clever little thing which has a bit of E&T and Mykerinos in it. Your aim is set collection with ziggurats acting as a wildcard resource; you grow your influence in a way which reminds me of the landgrab game of Ystari's offspring. What you can do is limited by the tile in your hand, which you have to exchange with another (unoccupied) tile at the end of your turn.

There is certainly much more to this game then meets the eye, and this only becomes apparent after a few games. You want to spread quickly because that nets you a lot of tiles—but then you lose control of when the game will be finished as you lack the numerical power to make a ziggurat. You also have to expand across the proper tiles, otherwise you don't get points. But you may not get the tile you need to make your plans succeed, because only unoccupied tiles are available to be swapped. (This in some vague way reminds me of Reef Encounter too, where a similar thing happens as all coral strength tiles become locked over the course of the game.) Conflicting choices abound, therefore.

I'm not sure about the player number, though. With 3 players it is a little too easy to stay out of the game. People tend to stay well away from each other, but then begin to complain that their civilisations don't grow sufficiently fast. That is easily solved by moving towards eachother, but then you run the risk of warfare with the third player, who was wise enough to stay out of the other players' way, walks away with victory. I must try and get this game to the table more often to see whether 'The Lake' variant (to be found in the Variants subforum) is required for me or not. All that said, I can see why some people prefer Ur to E&T. I can also see why some people claim that the game ends when it becomes interesting. But it is a tight thing in a rather short amount of time. If you like this sort of thing, give it a go, and don't be put off if the game seems weird to you at first.

The first play left a favourable impression. The game itself isn't very complex: in fact, it's nothing really more than an area influence game where influence can be moved about in order to optimise the point gathering engine. As such I think it is a clear example of a 'well-polished' title, where nearly everything which can be taken out has been taken out as part of the design process. Some rules feel a little weird (especially those gouverning the playing sequence), but I expect that as the players' experience grows, so will their eye for this aspect.

If there is anything to gripe about it is the somewhat cumbersome graphical execution which isn't too clear in the case of the players' own markers as the matching buildings are not printed on them; and the lack of strong contrast between those markers and the board. This is a case of artistry winning out over ergonomics, and that is a shame as there really is no need for such a strange victory. To make matters worse the graphics on the action cards is in some cases different yet again, leading me to the conclusion that the French authors really must have been sleeping on the job. As a result, I think that the overall asking price is far too high even if the rest of the game just has this gorgeous and lavish execution—but for the price, you expect nothing short of perfection. If you can get the game at a reduced price, like clean area influence mechanics, and don't mind cobbling a small player aid of your own, then you should check out Utopia. I'm looking forward to attempting this game anew.

Vinci has been on my 'to get' list for quite some time (light civ-building games with 'manageable' luck hold my interest), but as I was looking for a French edition to avoid translation errors which plague Descarted Éditeur/Eurogames productions, it took a while for me to find it. Vinci looks deceptively simple, but is in practice much more cerebral, for it takes a while for the rules to sink in. It also takes longer to play than I expected; both factors make teaching the game hard, as you have to explain at least some of the civmarkers a few times. On the other hand, they also make the game appealingly replayable: literally, no two civs are alike. The game's mechanics are straightforward and elegant, if not original. The subject has been abstracted considerably, but the ebb and flow of the decline and fall of civilisations is remarkably well-presented nonetheless. However, with the wrong people (not used to a lot of information, or prone to analysis paralysis) this game will fall flat and take too long.

There is a certain leanness to the entire game which I find quite appealing. There are no spurious mechanisms in place, so players can concentrate fully on the game instead of doing things properly. This is offset somewhat by at times quite brutal luck of the draw, when someone picks a civ which works exceptionally well—and thus can be reeled back in only with great difficulty. However, this doesn't marr the game in any way. With fast players this is a challenging game which goes over quite well in the large majority of cases.

Over the years, this old dinosaur has been given an overhaul in the form of Smallworld, and it pleases me considerably that that game has made quite an impact, to the point where it can be had in a Dutch edition too. I feel little need to own Vinci's offspring since there aren't many differences... But still, the game was deemed good enough to be brought back into production by a popular publisher. Yay!

I finally managed to get a game of Vino in, this time according to the proper rules—the first time I played the rules were completely wrong. Unfortunately I cannot at all remember what the first game was like so cannot say for sure whether the game felt significantly different. Vino is a pure economic game, but not really a snowball: what you get is spent quite rapidly in the next turn, courtesy of the victory condition. The fun comes in from changing the relative values of the various wines which forces players to pay attention to others as well as to diversify to other regions.

Vino isn't a great game, and without custom markers it is nearly unplayable too. But it is not totally silly either, even though many moves you make are fairly straightforward. If you are forced to give up vinyards, you may want to try to be the first or second player in the next turn so you can occupy very cheap places in a region. Since in the end the amount of vinyards counts, this might not be a completely stupid thing to do.

Thanks to the purchase of two new stashes of Icehouse pieces, I now had 6 different colours, and thus was able to play a game of regular Volcano. The game is delightfully abstract, and actually a bit more clever than I first envisaged. You get a lot of points for completed trees—be them of a single or of multiple colours—but the game ends when someone collects all 5 colours. This puts a great deal of pressure on the players, especially when someone collects their fourth colour. It also means you should be actively trying to end the game once you're in the lead, but be careful that the other player(s) don't catch up! Looking forward to more playing time.

I have played about a dozen games to date at all players numbers, but the game simply refuses to ignite the spark of the gun powder keg, and I have no idea why. When I first bought the game, I had to make do with the Alea-edition, which like every Alea-game is bland and not printed on very 'playable' material. The recent re-release by QWG—for which I provided the Dutch rules translation—makes the material more pleasant to handle, although there are still some minor usability issues. Of course there is more to the game than just artistic design, but the more I play it, the more I am convinced the concept of 'prestige' is something which does not easily translate into an exciting subject. It is quite abstracted and quantified, which is sort-of at odds with the entire meaning of the word 'prestige'. It pushes PoF's underlying mechanisms (auctioning, actions) closer towards the limelight than I would like.

Not that the game is in any way 'bad'. It is a tight affair, victories can be close, there is some tension in how to play the psychological game of picking an object you don't really want but someone else might removing that player as a competitor for your 'true' auction, and I can recognise that there are multiple strategies you can attempt—as with any good game I'm 'noticing' these on my own. Game-technically, there isn't that much wrong apart from relatively long player downtime in the 5-player version.

But it simply refuses to appeal to me. I prefer the rock'n'roll of Goa, which is just as artificial, and probably weaker design-wise because of the perceived dominant expedition card-strategy (although I have yet to see that happen). My response is always 'meh', even if I win, and even if my winning was a tight long-term affair. And after playing all these games, I still don't know why. As a consequence I'm at a loss how to rate this game. How does one arrive at a number when one is able to clearly recognise the game's good design qualities, but not able to derive enjoyment from playing ...?

In other words: take the rate with a grain of salt.

The trouble with Wadi is, I feel, that it takes far too long to set up the game compared to the time it takes to actually play it. Subject-wise, it is quite nicely done, but there is always a feeling that something is missing from the box once I have created a wadi for my opponents. It rarely comes to the table nowadays as I prefer the author's other game Cities at the time of writing, and I expect the game will continue to gather dust until it is finally removed from my collection.

Remains unplayed so far. This game has been added to my collection because my partner insisted on purchasing this title along with some spare game parts; it hasn't been played, let alone that the rules have been read ever since we got it in 2006. It is her game, and I continue to wait for the first trial session.

Remains unplayed as I wasn't sure whether I owned a sufficient number of TreeHouse sets. I do, so now I can play the game . First impressions are that the game is a bit silly, but I'd need to play more often to see whether there's something I missed.

Given to me as a gift. It remains unplayed so far, and I expect it to stay that way until I either have children of my own or conveniently 'lose' it.

Only fun against the computer to prevent the 'oops, let me correct this entry here, see, I *did* get the bonus of 35 points!'- effect. Not a member of the Dice Done Right Club™.

Four-in-a-row, but if you make a stand-alone three-in-a-row (as a four-in-a-row automatically entails a three-in-a-row, or course), you lose. Very simple rules, very fast play with lots of forced moves, highly portable. What's not to like?

I was introduced to YINSH at Essen 2004 and bought a copy there too. It can be described as a combination of Othello and Gobang on steroids. You create rows of five stones in your own colour as in Gobang, but are only allowed to place stones in 'rings' which after a placement need to be moved elsewhere. In addition, any stones skipped between the stone you placed and where the rings end up are turned over, revealing the other colour—a clear nod to Othello. If you have five stones of your own colour in a row, they are removed, as well as one ring of your choice. Whoever wins his third ring wins the game.

YINSH is a strong and beautiful abstract. What I've always disliked about Othello is that the board has strong and weak fields: because a corner cannot be taken it is automatically a desirable place to occupy. YINSH does not know about such fields as it is the rings which form the end of a row of stones to be turned over; and because a row of 5 is removed from the game. These simple changes give the players a very strong feeling of control over their own destiny, both from a tactical as well as from a strategical point of view. And then there is a great little bite in that the better player has to keep playing better in order to win, for he will have less rings on the board.

If you like abstracts, this one is a must-play at the very least.

This game carries a bit of personal history with it which is somewhat embarassing to record. I distinctly remember the first time we chanced upon this game: it was our first Spiel (in 2004) and my girlfriend was immediately drawn to the small stand of the then almost unknown label Ystari. Say what you will, Ys looks very pretty. She talked a bit with Cyril, who explained it, but owing to a lack of other interested people we couldn't play the game. As it was a tad expensive we decided to hold off the purchase, but she always regretted that decision. So she insisted that one year later (when everyone was drooling over Caylus) we pick up a copy. And who am I to say 'no' to her? When we began playing the game, it was with the 2P-variant exclusively. I didn't like the game at this number. The rules require that you play with a neutral 3rd player controlled by both opponents, and this complicates the blind bidding to an unpleasant degree. Add the rather mathy gem prices at the end of the game, and I was secretly plotting to sell off Ys at the end of our second game. But no, that would be a killing offense, so the box remained in our closet, unplayed, unloved, unattended, from 2005 onwards.

Until 2009, almost 4 years later (!). With the aid of a fellow boardgame fan I had been playing all games in my closet which did not get any attention for one reason or another, and so I dug out Ys once more. This would be the clinger: if the game failed now it would end up on the trade pile for sure. To my utter amazement, the game played rather well with 3: the difficult double guessing was made much simpler; the gem market was easier to keep track of (just look at majorities and don't try to calculate your way out of 'em, but follow someone else instead); and a few other things. I had been sitting on a title which was actually somewhat fun to play for so long, and I hadn't even known it. Duh! Needless to say, the status 'to be sold off' was changed to 'kept in the collection', and as a result I've been playing it some more too.

So do I think it is a great game? Well, yes and no. It works well and takes skill to play correctly—as such it is an oft-forgotten Ystari title simply because for many Caylus was the first game which put Ystari on the map. It appears well-balanced and with correct play you can easily ignore one gem colour altogether. But at the same time it is a rather thought-heavy title which doesn't sit quite comfortably with the half blind-bidding mechanism. Power cards can be quite annoying to the point where you really must fight the other players for them lest they are used against you. Some cards are outrageously powerful: the card which forces everyone else to place their influence open is a gamebreaker in my opinion. To summarise, they influence your destiny more than I deem proper for the half blind bidding mechanism. If I compare to Aladdin's Dragons, then the latter is much easier to play as it is simpler to see what you obtain, and what it is worth. Speculation is simple and straightforward, which keeps the game purring along at a nice pace. The tie braker is very simple, whereas in Ys there can be a cascade of options which are unpleasant to remember.

For a first-time design Ys is a good game, and somehow I still pride myself that I'd discovered Ystari before they scored their hit with Caylus, but it's not a game I'd put out on every occasion. There are definitely a few rough spots which could stand some coarse sanding and subsequent polishing. This is reflected in the opinion of my opponents: some like it, some don't, citing exactly the 'fiddliness' of the mechanisms causing too much pondering where it should be a quick and smart decision. Nevertheless, the original rate has been altered to bring it in line with how I look upon the game nowadays. But whatever you do, don't play Ys with 2.

I got this expansion at the same time I bought the base game which in itself was the 'Special Essen Edition' with ceramic gems. I didn't learn until later that the regular editions feature wooden cubes for gems—yuck! So, is it worth searching out this expansion? I think so, especially if you like Ys. It gives the game a more luxurious feel, and simply looks better and prettier too.

Remains unplayed so far.

Players compete in a fictional town somewhere near Yspahan to have their goods transported to Yspahan. They do this by setting up shop in various districts, and then have the overseer pick their goods to be sent off. The game features a novel dice rolling mechanism which works rather well, and overall has a very friendly feeling to it. The game's long term strategies are deceptive, as is illustrated by the fact that many people don't utilise the caravan to score: if used properly, it can be devastating. Nevertheless, the presence of the dice means that some lucky throws can end the game prematurely. I've not seen this happen very often, but the way the selection mechanic works *does* lead to a somewhat constrained feel in the 4P-game. I like the 2P-game better because of the ability to do 2 mostly good actions instead of just 1 average to below-average one. Nevertheless, a fun game, doesn't take too long, and doesn't feel artificially complex either.

However, where the game really shines is the masterful way in which all the mechanics have been balanced. No single mechanic results in stronger strategies and tactics than another, and for every disadvantage there is an advantage. The overall amount of strategies may be limited, but seeing them come together as effortlessly as they do lends the game a feel-good aura I haven't experienced in quite a while. I've increased my rating because of this.

After Mykerinos my favourite from Ystari; and a proud member of the Dice Done Right Club™.

Sporadically played to date. The Yspahan-expansion has some nice ideas in it, but I got such a solid trouncing when I played a 2P-game that I cannot judge the expansion with a good conscience ...

Curious game which appeals only to certain people. I thought I'd like it (and I do), but logic puzzles are not everyone's cup of tea. I bought the game so I have sufficient stashes for other Icehouse games.