Rebirth is not what you would expect at first glance. That beautiful box, with art from Anna Przybylska and Kate Redesiuk, shows an elaborate castle on a hill, surrounded by vibrant countryside. Stare at it for a moment and you start to notice the little details, the greenhouse and the highland coos, the windmills, the steampunk blimp. Everything about the presentation suggests that Rebirth is some sort of RPG-inspired epic, and a good one at that.

In reality, Rebirth is but a humble tile-layer, though you are still right to assume that it’s pretty good. This is not surprising. Designer Reiner Knizia does many things well, but he does few things better than creating rules that govern the ways in which a group of people can lay tiles upon a flat surface. Here, players take turns adding a single tile to the board, gaining points and bonuses as a result.

Turns are simple. All of your tiles sit in a shuffled, facedown pile on the table in front of you. After you play a tile for your turn, you draw in preparation for your next turn. I have grown to love the simplicity of that, the…

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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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From the rulebook: “It was our darkest hour. All the warnings, all the screams of the desperates. Nobody wanted to hear them. Until it was almost too late. Until only burned soil was left. We couldn’t save ourselves, but the trees could. As if they knew that their time for action had come. They showed us what mattered. We understood them and connected with them. Now we know what to do and we support them as good (sic) as possible with the little technology that [is] left. But also with a new, more natural technology, the Arbors showed us. We need green energy and oxygen, to turn burned soil into live-giving green. You can find it everywhere in our new and promising world of Overgrown…”

In Planta Nubo, the players tend the sky gardens atop the canopies of the Arbors. Flower beds produce flowers which are harvested, carried away, and turned into the green energy that keeps civilization running. The soil left behind is fertile ground for planting new forestation which, in turn, creates the life-sustaining oxygen the planet so desperately needs. Each element of the system feeds into the next in a self-perpetuating cycle.

Zoomed Out - A Brief Overview of the Layout and Some General Concepts

At its heart, Planta Nubo is an engine-building game governed by…

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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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Dorfromantik: the Duel attempts to capture the charm of its namesake Dorfromantik: the Board Game and transform it from an idyllic cooperative venture into a fierce, head-to-head competition. As you’ll soon see: while the game succeeds on most fronts, there are a few aspects of it that I find bothersome. How bothersome? Read on to find out.

How Is This Game Played?

In Dorfromantik: the Duel (Duel), you and your opponent are competing to see which one of you can score the most points. Each player is provided a set of Terrain tiles, a set of Task tiles, and a set of Task markers in their color, and (save for the player color on the back of the tiles) their sets match their opponent’s sets exactly. This is important because one player—who I will refer to as the ‘caller’ (for lack of a better term)—will flip either a Task tile (if either of the two players ever have fewer than three Tasks) or a Terrain tile, and this is the tile that both players must play into their personal tableau. We’ll call the other player the ‘follower’.

Once all of the Terrain tiles have been played, the game comes to an end and final scoring is performed to…

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Three years in, Ark Nova is still pretty hot.

The 2021 release—published by Feuerland Spiele in some parts of the world, Capstone Games in the US—stands at #4 on the BGG list of all-time fan favorites, and every time I go to conventions I see the big Ark Nova sign at the Capstone booth with fans diving headfirst into their personal zoo mats, sponsor cards, partner universities and hundreds of animal cards.

I am always pleasantly surprised how often I go to board game cafes or group game nights and see a copy of Ark Nova on a table. Some of the gaming couples I know say that Ark Nova is still their most frequent two-player game activity, particularly those that have kids and wrap up a long weekend with a quiet night of hunting through a massive discard pile for the first reptile card they can surface.

It was only a matter of time before we got our first “real” expansion. (While I won’t discount the release of Ark Nova: Zoo Map Pack 1, my britches weren’t exactly on fire when I learned that new player mats were released into the world without any extras. Look, I get it—the publishers and designer Mathias Wigge have gotta make money. Still, I would have preferred new maps…

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I had a bonsai tree once. It was a gift that, unfortunately, didn’t survive long enough to discover its character. My black thumb may have killed the tree, but it didn’t quell my appreciation of the artistic impulse responsible for the little potted personalities.

Bonsai are surprisingly hardy, a testimony to my inability to care for green things. Cardboard, thankfully, is already dead and happily hardy, which elevated my hopes for Bonsai from DV Games. Rosaria Battiato and Massimo Borzì have teamed up with Martino Chiacchiera to bring an innovative aesthetic idea to the table in which players create bonsai from hex tiles to meet various scoring criteria.

The Moyoji?

The bonsai container, complete with a touch of Kintsugi, begins with a stump. Players visit the market—an action referred to as “meditation”—to acquire cards, gathering hex tokens in tow. The tokens feature wood, leaves, flowers, and fruit, destined to become part of the tree during a cultivation turn. 

At the outset, players are restricted to storing five tiles and cultivating three at a time. In addition to expanding these capacities, the cards grant extra tiles, allow for untimely cultivation, or provide endgame scoring bonuses (related to the cards collected). As the cards slide through the market, each slot…

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Before affixing my critical goggles in place, I will say from the beginning: Redwood has been one of the most refreshing titles to hit our table in months. Christophe Raimbault’s (Colt Express) design takes the occasional monotony of board game acquisition by the ears and tosses it out on the doorstep with style. I do not know what inspired him to reassign the mechanics of a wargame for use with nature photography, but it just works. Redwood utilizes templates—components of specific shape and size—both for movement and a wholly different sort of shooting, creating a fairly immersive experience. Refreshing. It’s refreshing. 

Sing as you raise your bow

The game is an exercise in spatial estimation. Players select two templates under a strict look-but-don’t-touch restriction, one a ribbon for movement, the other a range-finder for their camera lens. The rules make no explicit prohibition of the ol’ thumb-and-forefinger measurement, but exploiting that technicality saps the game of its most thrilling anticipations. Redwood’s distinct pleasure is in the success and failure of the eyes—and only the eyes—in predicting possibilities. 

Having committed to the template, players then employ their selections, first moving the photographer into place, then capturing the moment, which is occasionally only the shattered dream of the intended moment, on…

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As a fan of the game Tokaido—a game where one of the things you are trying to do is to create these beautiful panoramas—when it was suggested that I check out the game Four Gardens, where panoramas are the focus, I jumped at the chance! Of course, when an aspect of a game shifts to become the entirety of a game, the mechanics will become a bit more involved. This is as it should be. What is needed, however, is for the process to result in a proper payoff. Does Four Gardens deliver?

Setup

The central feature of Four Gardens is a four-level pagoda that needs to be assembled before you can play. This only takes a few minutes. The instructions are clear, and when you are done (despite the size of this thing), the pagoda stores easily within the box thanks to a fairly well designed insert.

When playing, the pagoda is a presence! It dominates the table in the early game, and there is rarely a moment when the players are not looking this thing over, because the central mechanism of this game is dependent upon this feature. The pagoda is not something that is there just to be there and look pretty (like, for instance, the Evertree in Everdell). The pagoda is a pretty…

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We’ve talked about Cascadia many times before, from our review of of the Cascadia base game, to our review of the Cascadia: Landmarks expansion, our inclusion of Cascadia in a list of games you can easily play with kids and a humorous list of games which include bears. But I don’t think any of us expected Cascadia to get “the dice game” treatment.

That’s right; this newest member of the family (technically two newest members) is a reimagining of Cascadia as a roll and write game. But let me reassure you that Cascadia: Rolling Hills, and Cascadia: Rolling Rivers aren’t just some money grab. While they do share the same DNA, they’re totally new games.

Let’s dive in and find out what makes these two new entries tick. Note that while my main focus in this review is on Cascadia: Rolling Hills, I do talk about both games.

Cascadia: Rolling Overview

As the name implies, these are dice games built atop the Cascadia framework: the animals and habitats we’ve come to know and love, as well as the hex based layout of the countryside. Over the course of 20 rounds you’ll roll dice to gain various animal and nature token symbols. These symbols allow you…

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As I started to make my way through the instruction manual for Five Peaks, from designer Adam Strzelecki and publisher Trefl, I quickly realized that I’d seen this game before. “Oh,” I said, “this is Concordia.”

At this point in my life, having played so many games over the years that my mind is a free-associating cloud of mechanisms and rules, I often read rulebooks and think of comparative benchmarks. It’s only natural. Despite the rumors, I too am human, and we love patterns. I don’t believe I have become uncharitable about this, though. It isn’t often that I look at a game and think, “Oh, this is [insert title].” The bar for that remains high.

Five Peaks clears it with ease.

It uses the same hand management system as Concordia. Each turn, you play one card from your hand and perform the action shown on the card. These cards allow you to move about the board, or collect resources, or buy new cards from the market. Any cards that you play stay down on the table until you play the card that lets you pick up all your cards.

Five Peaks uses the same resource management system as Concordia. You’re restricted to ten items, represented by the ten slots on your individual board. You have to manage…

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From the rulebook: “It’s summertime. Amid the forest lies the glade. Bring your forest to life with creatures, leaves and forest fruits. Create sets of 3 tiles to place a toadstool into the glade. Complete a set of 4 tiles to add a toadstool into your store. Use toadstools in your store for extra actions.”

That’s The Glade in a nutshell (pun totally intended). In this quaint, abstract, tile-laying game from renowned designer Richard Breese (Keyflower, Keyper), the players will be drawing tiles from a bag, adding them to their tile rack, and then placing tiles into their tableau to create sets and score points. And when all is said and done and the last leaf has fallen, the player with the most points wins.

Of course this is a very high-level overview of the game. If you just want to know what I think, feel free to skip ahead to the Thoughts section. Otherwise, read on as we learn how to play The Glade.

Setup

A game of The Glade is set up thusly:

Place the Glade board in the middle of the playing area. Then, each player receives a Forest board (turned to its basic side*) which they place next to the Glade board, abutting…

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