[caption id="attachment_311521" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Revive: The Box[/caption]

Intro

Five thousand years ago, The Devastation took hold of the planet as temperatures dropped. Ice replaced the planet’s once thriving ecosystems. Thick ice. Deep ice. Civilization, or rather, those few surviving tribes, went underground to await The Great Thawing that they hoped would one day come.

Or something like that.

The rule book for Revive is short on backstory—short as in non-existent. With regard to gameplay, however, the narrative is as unclear as it is unnecessary. This is an exploration/deckbuilder/worker placement game, pure and simple. But, does a lack of backstory mean the gameplay wasn’t well-thought out as well? Read on to find out! 

Setup

In Revive, you’re working to rebuild the planet and restore your tribe better than your opponents. When the game ends, you’ll review your progress, tally your scores, and the player with the most points wins. 

Each player will have a slightly asymmetric faction board to represent their tribe. You’ll populate the central area of this board with seven meeple and five scoring tokens. Along the left edge, you’ll place three big buildings and five smaller buildings.

That faction board will fit into the left side of your…

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Modern Euro-style strategy game design is in full swing.

I know that some of our peers in the media and content creation space have bailed on the concept of medium-weight Euros. These types of strategy games are sometimes getting too complex without matching the elegance that similar games possessed even five years ago. However, 2024 has been a banner year for games that shake up the formula just enough to warrant a second or third look.

A case in point: Men-Nefer (2024, Ludonova), the newest design from German P. Milián, who has given us Bitoku, Bitoku: Resutoran, Sabika, and Bamboo. Bamboo was lighter fare, a game that ultimately proved to be more interesting as a production than a decision space.

Both Bitoku and Sabika proved resilient within my gaming circles, particularly with the turn mechanic of Bitoku and the rondel element of Sabika. I’ve held onto both games because I had so much fun exploring each one, even if I think they will be really hard to table on a consistent basis. You know greatness when you see it, right? For the players in my game-o-sphere, Milián is clearly onto something.

Milián’s success continues with Men-Nefer, a thematic sibling to Sabika, right down to a…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In my Focused on Feld series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2024’s Civolution, his 41st game. This game marks a couple of firsts for Stefan Feld. For one, it’s his first ever collaboration with publisher Deep Print Games. Secondly, Civolution is Stefan Feld’s first foray into the realm of classic science fiction (unless you’re counting 2014’s Aquasphere, in which case it’s his second). Regardless, as you’ll soon see, there’s no arguing that Civolution is his heaviest game to date.

Overview

In Civolution, players take on the roles of deities that are taking the final exam in their Civilization Building 101 class. The exam is being proctored by a highly-developed AI called Agera. Over the course of the game, players will be tasked with things such as exploring the map set before them (populating it and exploiting it for its resources) and developing their civilization to…

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At last year’s SPIEL event in Essen, Germany, I had the chance to try The Warp, a game I followed during its crowdfunding campaign because I was intrigued by its approach to the 4X genre of spacefaring adventure games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate). The campaign, which ended in late 2020, gave me the sense that there would be a real chance at being blown off the map, so the “eXterminate” portion of the 4X mechanic here looked real…and many games in this category do not really follow through on that promise.

I’ve now played The Warp in both three-player and four-player arrangements, and after these plays and a promising demo back in Germany, I know that The Warp does a lot of things well, particularly in the way objective scoring takes place. While it falls a tier below the best 4X and 4X-adjacent games I have played, such as Voidfall, Scythe, Circadians: Chaos Order and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, I think The Warp delivers on many fronts.

The real challenge? Finding it, especially if you live in North America.

“Do You Want to Follow?”

The Warp is a relatively rules-light, 1-4 player area control and hand management experience that can be…

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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’ve been on a hunt to play as many games from the purported “4X Family” on BoardGameGeek as possible. Over the last three years, I’ve added quite a few 4X plays to my arsenal, and when an opportunity arose to grab a review copy of Empires of the Void II (2018, Red Raven Games), I scooped one up.

First, let’s talk 4X. This family was created on BGG based on the idea that many large-scale adventure/exploration games feature a bunch of the same elements. First, you’ll eXplore a mostly undiscovered map, featuring a “fog of war” or maybe face-down tiles that need to be touched by a player’s civilization members, a spaceship, etc. to be discovered. Area control elements enter play as players eXpand their presence on the map as it is revealed.

eXploitation takes place as player factions do their best to make use of the map’s natural resources…and in some of the 4X games I’ve tried recently, this is where engine building really shines. Finally, conflict leads to players attempting to eXterminate each other and possibly the locals who currently possess a given territory, as everyone tries to make a land grab for the map’s best spaces. Extermination usually leads to major consequences for the loser of these combat scenarios.

The 4X family of games…

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Here are the scariest words in the English language: “During your turn, you may take any of the following actions, any number of times, in any order and combination you want, as long as you have the resources needed to carry them out.”

This line, on page five of the English rulebook for the 4X-ish deckbuilding skirmish game Monumental (2020, Funforge), frightened me when I read it. In the wrong hands, a player could take a lot of actions on their turn while taking time to consider what they wanted to do on a turn…all while three other players would be waiting for the active player to wrap things up.

And during our very first review play of Monumental—on the fourth turn of the first round!!—a player strung together a series of actions that took maybe six or seven minutes. Not long in the scheme of things, right?

Then the next two players also took turns that ran about five minutes each. That left me waiting for about 15 minutes to take my second turn of the game.

Monumental does quite a few things well. Unfortunately, the game is buried in downtime, which takes away from an experience that should shine at higher player counts but assures that I will never play it again with four players.

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Two of my friends love Innovation. They play it constantly. Both backed the new edition while it was on crowdfunding, and every time I receive a review copy in the mail, they vibrate with the possibility that it might be Innovation Ultimate.

I sat down with one of them to give Aegean Sea a crack, since Carl Chudyk designs are often a bear to learn. It’s not that his games are all that complicated; the issue is that they are deeply uninterested in any notion of “intuitive.” That isn’t intended as a criticism. He’s a unique designer, and his idiosyncrasies are what make him distinct, but it is a barrier to entry. Anyone who’s ever tried to teach Mottainai knows.

Even with experience, we found ourselves struggling. On top of the unintuitive rules, there are no labels anywhere for the various and numerous tucked cards. Chudyk loves a tucked card, and in all of his other designs, the locations in which those cards get tucked. Not so here. What’s more, this is Chudyk’s first asymmetrical design.

There are five groups in the game—Athens, Crete, Ephesus, Rhodes, and Sparta—and each plays differently. Not like Root, not in mechanically distinct ways, but…

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There are games with flawed rulebooks. There are games with unfortunate misprints and iconographies that make you second guess yourself and the production. There are even games whose endings seem fraught with inconsistencies that make you wonder if you’ve missed something very important. When a game, rarely, boasts all three, I have no choice but to ask: 

Why do I like The Flow of History as much as I do? 

Get thee a government

The game’s sixty-seven cards are divided into six types and span five Ages. The heart of The Flow of History is the bidding mechanism by which players gain these cards. Players declare their intentions by investing resource tokens on a card and waiting for the investment to clear on a forthcoming turn. Opponents have the option of sniping that investment, though, compensating the investor and instantly claiming the card. This means investments may not be investments at all, but rather deft machinations designed to entice neighbors to act rashly in exchange for compensations and a smug sense of control. 

When an investment succeeds, the goofy iconography kicks in. Potentially, cards have icons in three places: across the bottom, in the center, and under a magnifying glass north of center. Upon acquisition, the icon depicted under…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I ran into another reviewer at SPIEL 2023, and he discussed his meeting with Portal Games about their 2023-2024 lineup.

“I played Imperial Miners during the meeting. Between the teach and playing a full game, it was all done in about 22 minutes.”

Not believing that this was possible—an Imperial Settlers-adjacent game in 20 minutes!!—I made my way to the Portal team to talk shop. Then we dove into the game. We stopped two rounds short of the normal end condition because I botched one of the rules…and that was around the 18-minute mark of our meeting.

Successive plays of Imperial Miners back home yielded similar timing. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get a game to last longer than 30 minutes. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m obsessed with time. I’m a parent who gets limited chances to play a lot of games. As much fun as the act of playing games is, I want maximum fun per minute. One of my favorite gaming highlights from 2021 occurred when I got a group together to play six games in seven hours. All the games were full of rich choices and abundant laughter.

Imperial Miners is fun. It’s not legendary, but it manages both its aspirations and my expectations exceptionally well for a quick tableau builder.

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What is Gaia Project?

Gaia Project is the sequel to the highly successful Terra Mystica. But whereas Terra Mystica had a fantasy theme, Gaia Project takes place in outer space in the far future of the “Terra Mystica universe.” Players try to settle and terraform new worlds, advance their technology, create multi-planet federations, and achieve in- and end-game objectives. The player who accumulates the most Victory Points (VPs) by the end of the sixth-round wins.

[caption id="attachment_284595" align="aligncenter" width="533"] Set up for a 3-player game.[/caption]

Each round of Gaia Project is played in 4 phases. During the Income Phase, players look at their Faction Board, Round Booster tile, tech tiles, and position of their Player Tokens on the Research Board. Wherever they see the palm-up hand symbol they gain those resources. In the Gaia Phase players complete any Gaiaforming operations they may have started the previous turn. The Actions Phase is the heart of the game where players take turns performing one main action. Once a player passes, they turn in their Round Booster tile and take one of the other available tiles. The first player to take the Pass action also takes the first player token. Finally, the Clean-Up Phase resets everything for the next round.

Mechanics and Features

…

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