You know that advertising phrase “new and improved?” It is one of those pieces of fluff text that bugs the heck out of me. If the thing we are discussing is new, then it has not been improved upon because there is nothing that came before to which it should be compared. If the thing we are discussing is improved, then it is not new because the implication is that this was a modified version of something that did come before.

I believe I have found the item that finally makes that mumbo-jumbo make sense. Trekking the World (Second Edition) is a new and improved version of Trekking the World!

Before we get too deep into the comparisons, though, let’s look at how Trekking the World (Second Edition) plays. If you’re already familiar with the game, skip on down to my thoughts at the end of this review.

[caption id="attachment_308898" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Nice new box![/caption]

Overview

In this game, you are a traveler (called a trekker in the rules, but that term reminds me too much of the more serious side of Star Trek fandom, so I am not going to use that term in this review). Your traveler starts on one of the airport spaces on the board (one…

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Dominic Crapuchettes, the co-designer of Evolution, Evolution: Climate, and one of the designers of the Evolution-adjacent Oceans, had a list of design issues with the successful series. Most of them, he found, weren’t fixable. They were inherent to the system. The only solution was to start over. So that’s what he did.

The result is Nature, a game that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Evolution. This is explicitly Evolution 2.0, an attempt to make the game leaner, meaner, and more flexible. The central idea of gameplay remains the same: create and evolve species that are better at eating than anyone else.

First things first, you receive a new species. Isn’t it cute? They always start both physically small and numerically insignificant: a size of 1 and a population to match. This is your blank canvas. You use the cards in your hand to increase size, population, or add traits. Traits are the heart of the game, but they’re better explained after you have a sense of play, so I’ll circle back.

Once everyone has chosen how to evolve their species, it’s time for a road test. Each player, in turn, activates a…

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Wingspan is one of the most popular games in the world. As of this writing, BoardGameGeek has the base game listed as #27. It is interesting to note then, that if you look at the average rating for Wingspan Asia, it is actually higher than the base game. The Geek Rating, which is used to rank the games, is lower. I cannot speak with any authority as to why these are related like this. What I can say is that Wingspan and each of its expansions have been quite popular.

[caption id="attachment_302685" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Wingspan Asia has the lowest rating of the Wingspan expansions. That said, all of the expansions have higher ratings than the base game -- and the base game is #27 overall...[/caption]

In each expansion (including this one) the core game remains untouched; the basic gameplay of Wingspan is as it has always been. Thus, I will not be going into detail when it comes to how the game is played. If you want a primer on the mechanics and such, I suggest reading Mark Iradian’s review of Wingspan, or Tom Franklin’s review of the digital implementation.I will say that I am more of a fan of the game than either of them. That said, their…

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When Greater Than Games Kickstarted a second printing of Compounded (called the Peer Reviewed Edition—stay tuned for our review), they developed a roll & write companion called Lab Notes. I was pretty excited to get my hands on both. Compounded holds a special place in my gaming heart, and we are definitely a scientific gaming family. First up, Lab Notes. 

Putting it all together

The core progression is easy and familiar to the roll and write genre. Each player selects one die, with the spare then becoming the shared community die. Players write their elements onto their sheets in any location, bonding the elements together as desired. 

The extras also make sense. There is a trash bin for unwanted dice that occasionally triggers an ambivalent effect. Player tools—earned by creating simple compounds—allow for rule-breaking, and as compounds are finished, the capacity for using said tools increases. 

The lurking bêtes noires are reasonable. In the sliding market of compound cards, Lab Fires enter the fray, causing players to burn spots on their sheets unless they have an armed fire suppressant tool to stand in the gap. Bunsen burners appear on dice and in the trash bin, which, if managed, provide a free element as they burn a space. 

The…

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Meet MahJong (2023, ThinkFun) is a tricky proposition, and not because it requires four players to share the experience.

It’s because Meet MahJong looks like it belongs to someone’s grandparents. I know this because I couldn’t get my kids, game groups, or wife to play it on its own. But when my wife’s parents came to town, they were VERY excited to whip out Meet MahJong, and that’s ultimately the right call because we had a fantastic time.

Meet MahJong, designed by Cara Weiss with development provided by Sen-Foong Lim (Mind MGMT and Belfort, amongst other games we spoke to Sen about years ago), is a game intended to introduce players to MahJong with not one but two games in the box: Chinese MahJong (the version you might already know), and American MahJong, featuring the “Charleston” tile draft format and a simplified scoring method.

The Old Days

I started in the Chinese version of MahJong on Windows PC platforms a billion years ago. I would play it once or twice a week, and loved it. I still have no idea what any of the symbols on any of the tiles mean, but that didn’t matter to me. I just liked the way that big mountain of…

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Undergrove, the latest title from Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton, is on its way to crowdfunding in the coming days. Players take up the role of douglas fir trees attempting to spread their seedlings about a mushroom forest replete with elemental resources.

The game itself is a tile-laying, area and resource management affair in which players are cooperatively building the game’s engine in the form of the forest floor and then determining the most fruitful ways to exploit the fungi for dendrological gains.

Remember this is a late prototype, so the descriptions here are only relevant to the pre-campaign conversation. My aim is to give you a basic understanding and point out the way the game feels at this moment in the process. 

Gameplay

Undergrove takes place on an expanding map of mushroom tiles with scalloped corners. These scalloped corners leave cutouts to place seedling discs. The seedlings then have access to lay roots on each of the four adjoining tiles, gaining access to their abilities and, hopefully, their victory points. During the game, the seedlings absorb carbon from the mushrooms, growing to eventually become small trees.

For the most part, the abilities on the mushroom tiles allow for the exchange of resources and the expedition of this absorption…

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Mystic Market is a light set collection and price manipulation game with a lovely magical theme. Over the course of the game players will collect such fanciful ingredients as dragon scales, kraken tentacles, and phoenix tears, in order to buy and sell them, or to concoct potions with them. But pay attention, because as each ingredient is sold, it’s value decreases which could tank your next turn. The player with the most money at the end of the game is the most successful potioner.

Mystic Market Overview

Setup for Mystic Market is straightforward.

Players each get 5 coins, 4 Ingredient cards, and 1 Reference card. Then lay out 5 ingredient cards face up to form the market.

Mix up the 6 Supply Shift cards, select 3 of them and add them to the deck of ingredient cards. Shuffle well, then set this deck as the draw deck for the market. Shuffle the Potion cards as well.

Set the initial value of each ingredient on the Value Track according to the rules.

A Turn of Mystic Market

Since the Ingredient cards are at the heart of the game, before we talk about a turn, let’s examine the cards themselves.

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Dear publishers: I will happily play any of your small box, 15-minute gaming experiences because the world can never have enough games like this. Plus, they are perfect for starting or ending any of my review crew gaming experiences between plays.

With that as a primer, let’s talk about Linkto, a 15-minute trivia game that comes in two different flavors: Linkto Travel, and Linkto Food. (I believe these games were available in other countries a few years ago, but they are making their way to US shores for the first time now.)

There are 50 different picture cards in each box, along with 49 question cards with five different prompts on each question card, which represent the game’s difficulty levels. That leaves just one leftover picture card; after sorting through all of the picture cards and matching each one with a prompt/question card, that leftover card is matched up with an answer key to determine if you’ve solved that game’s level or not.

Limited, In Almost Every Way

Each Linkto game is the same in a few ways, which will either make it shine for you or not.

Each of the games has a very handsome price point, about $10 USD at most major tabletop online retailers. Each…

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This is Not A Game

Since we are a board gaming family, it has been on my mind that my kids should learn some classic fundamental games that have withstood the test of time. I wanted to teach critical thinking skills and strategies in game play, and there came a point in my parenting journey that I decided to teach my kids to play chess. But how? It does not stand out as bright and colorful. What is the point in moving the pieces around like so?

If you have kids, you know that theme is everything. You could make kids try really difficult things by putting their favorite character on a box. But how do you get children's buy-in to a "theme-less" abstract strategy game? You reel them in by building up their affection for the chess pieces. You weave a story together that is silly and cute and sometimes ridiculous so that the kids play with the game pieces, very much like they would play with their make-believe toys. That is what Story Time Chess has set out to do with a lot of success.

This is not my first attempt at trying to teach my kids chess. I have an older child who learnt how to…

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Overview

Gamestormers is a 3-6 player game for ages 9+ that clocks in at 45-60 minutes. In Gamestormers, your goal is to collect Character, Item, Mechanic, and Storyline cards to construct a narrative for a new game. Players score victory points from card values, card alignment, arena tokens, and end game voting. The player with the most victory points after 5 rounds wins.

How To Play

[caption id="attachment_274877" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Notebook Playmat for your tableau building pleasure[/caption]

Each player begins with 3-4 dry erase cards, a dry erase marker, an instruction card, and a Notebook Playmat, which is the tableau where the cards of your emerging game narrative are stored. There are separate decks for Characters, Mechanics, Items, and Storylines, all combining to make up your tableau. The goal is to fill your Notebook Playmat with cards that both complement each other and create a compelling game narrative.

Game cards consist of five genres: Civilizations, Fantasy, High Seas, Sci Fi, and Horror. Players can choose whether to acquire a single genre of items, mechanics, and storylines to tell a traditional story, or…

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘loam’ as “a fertile soil of clay and sand containing humus.” It goes on to define the word ‘humus’ as “the organic component of soil, formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant material by soil microorganisms.”

Loam (coming to Gamefound in May of 2023) is a game about plants using chemical inputs in order to build healthy soils on which to thrive. A fitting title considering the subject matter.

In Loam, players take on the roles of the plants, playing cards from their hands in order to lure the various microorganisms from the soil into their own root systems where these organisms will form communities and, ultimately, score points for the players. Microorganisms added to a player’s root system will boost one to three stats and possibly earn the players special, one-time-use bonus cards with powerful effects.

Points come from having diverse communities and also from maintaining a balance between the three stat tracks. At the end of three rounds of play, players will tally up their final scores to determine the winner.

Of course, this is just a high-level overview of the game. If you think you’ve heard enough and just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read…

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Darwin’s Journey, On the Origin of Species (the game), Darwin’s Choice, Darwinauts... Charles Darwin—world-renowned naturalist, botanist, geologist, author of On the Origin of Species—is a hot commodity in board gaming these days. It’s no wonder either. Darwin's journey on the HMS Beagle, exploring distant lands, chronicling what he’s seeing, and ultimately postulating the theory of evolution by natural selection are all aspects of the Darwin phenomenon that are easily gamified. And these games tend to fall squarely into one of two categories: vaguely historical re-enactments of Darwin’s journey or games that are more about evolution than they are about Darwin himself.

In the Footsteps of Darwin isn’t about either of those things. It’s a game that imagines what comes after. The year is 1856 and Charles Darwin’s adventuring days are long behind. His seminal work On the Origin of Species is still a work in progress. It’s been 20 years since the Beagle’s voyage across the lower half of the globe drew to a close, and Darwin’s eye has turned to the upper half. Not fully satisfied that he's gathered enough evidence to support his theory, he’s tapped a new generation of explorers to gather data about these distant lands for him.

Specifically, he’s chosen you.

The HMS Beagle Sails Again!

In the Footsteps of Darwin is a tile…

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