Every now and then, I come across a board game design in which the pieces on the board don’t really belong to anyone. It never fails to enchant me. I love building board presence, but there’s something about the impermanence of possession in Pax Pamir, the inability to take ownership for granted, that I find particularly rich. Develop a position all you want; it might play to my advantage. The idea that nothing on the board is yours is antithetical to several decades of board game design. Even in cooperative anti-colonial designs like Spirit Island, you have presence on the board, physical evidence that you, and you in particular, were there.

Though I am hardly an expert, Mac Gerdts’s 2006 release Imperial is the earliest design I know of that fills the board with pieces belonging to no one player. That map of Europe is packed to the gills with the buildings and armies of the Great Nations of Europe, but players aren’t playing as the nations. They are the great barons of capital, manipulating European conflict to their individual advantage. The second version, Imperial 2030, moved things into the (increasingly near) future. For 7 Empires, a new release from publisher PD Verlag, the conflict is moved back a century or two to the age of the Hapsburgs and…

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Over the course of several months, I led a group of six players through the Grand Campaign scenario from Europa Universalis: The Price of Power. For 4-6 hours a day, every other Sunday, we would convene around the gaming table, remind ourselves of where we left off, and get to the business of running the great nations of Europe in the 16th century.

All six players were acquainted with Europa Universalis IV (EUIV), the massive computer game that served as source material for this massive board game. Several of them had put thousands of hours into exploring its nooks and crannies. This isn't, I am told, unusual. EUIV is the type of game that consumes lives. It is one of PC gaming's largest sandboxes. “I mean, it's a Paradox game,” people would say over and over, the developer's name considered enough of an explanation.

The first EU computer game, released back in 2000, was itself adapted from a 1993 board game of the same name. Given that, a modern board game adaptation feels inevitable. It also feels ludicrous. The Price of Power…

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

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

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

Smaller, Cheaper, Easier

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

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

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From Wikipedia: “Sanssouci is a historical building in Potsdam, near Berlin. Built by Prussian King Frederick the Great as his summer palace, it is often counted among the German rivals of Versailles. While Sanssouci is in the more intimate Rococo style and is far smaller than its French Baroque counterpart, it, too, is notable for the numerous temples and follies in the surrounding park. The palace was designed and built by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff between 1745 and 1747 to meet Frederick's need for a private residence where he could escape the pomp and ceremony of the royal court.”

First published in 2013, the board game Sanssouci takes its inspiration from the eponymous palace. Welcomed with a lot of fanfare and attention, it didn’t take long for Sanssouci to find itself  on the Official Recommendation list for the 2014 Spiel des Jahres. Even though it didn’t win the ultimate prize, it was still very well regarded. So much so, in fact, that it received a reprint earlier this year, which is the subject of this review.

In Sanssouci, the players take on the roles of landscapers tasked with improving the grounds surrounding the titular palace. Each player begins the game with a shuffled deck of cards which is identical to their opponents’ decks. On their turn, a…

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Released in 2021 by GMT Games, Bayonets & Tomahawks (or B&T for short) is a simulation of the French & Indian War from first-time designer Marc Rodrigue. A French-Canadian, Mr. Rodrigue has had a lifelong interest in the French & Indian War and is even a reenactor who performs regularly at such notable locales as Fort Ticonderoga (or Fort Carillon as it was first named by the French).

Although Native Americans fought on both sides, the British colonists named the war after their opponents. It began in 1754 and did not officially end until 1763. Two years after it began, the war expanded into a much larger conflict known as the Seven Years War. By this time the war in North America was, to a certain extent, a sideshow of this wider war. Regardless, the French & Indian War eventually led to Britain becoming the world's predominant colonial power and laid the foundations for the American Revolution.

Faction Cards

Most card-driven games use cards that include an event in text and an operations (or ops) value. Players decide whether to use the card for the event or for its ops value (or sometimes both) to move units, put down control markers, bring in reinforcements, etc. Not so with…

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