Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan—published by Mighty Boards, the exceptionally steady producer of games such as Rebirth, Vengeance: Roll & Fight, and Art Society—was a member of my personal top 10 from 2024, the best pure action/RPG board game I tried last year.

That’s because the dice combat is sensational, but more importantly, getting in and out of scenarios takes about an hour apiece. For a busy parent with limited table space, bite-sized combat games are the move, and the Fateforge system was great to squeeze in-between other activities or expand into an entire Saturday night of solo gaming through a full Act of 5-6 missions.

The game’s second print run goes live on crowdfunding soon, a campaign that also includes the new second expansion, Kin of the Wild. To get ready for the new goodies, I wanted to take some time to try the first expansion, Clash of the Immortals. Clash of the Immortals is a 10+ hour adventure featuring seven main missions and a boss fight, with three camp scenes scattered in-between to allow players to explore side quests and shops.

The other main addition with this first expansion is a new playable character called the Enchantress. The Enchantress has an initially complicated upkeep/management system but features powers that frankly felt too…

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Magic in a Box

PAX Unplugged was a great time this year as I got to play many upcoming games and chat with plenty of developers. But there was one game I couldn’t get off my mind. One game that I kept looking at photos of. One game that drove me to numerous Google searches as I sat at a chair munching on a dry turkey sub. One game that I immediately ripped the shrink wrap off of when I got home from the convention.

At its core, Malediction is a skirmish wargame for anywhere from two to four players on a 2.5-foot-ish square battlefield (size may vary), either as a duel or a tag team battle. Each player chooses a Seeker (aka hero unit) and a deck full of creatures to summon and spells to cast. The goal is to gain enough Mastery (victory points) to win the game. Pretty simple. And that’s the absolute magic of Malediction. The gameplay is straightforward and intuitive. Things work how you think they should. If you’ve never played Magic: The Gathering, these cards are still easy to read and understand everything they do. Measuring your unit's movement and attacks is simple, even if you’ve never played a miniatures game. Unlike those two categories of games, however, Malediction feels like a total…

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Fighting games is one of the most interesting video game genres out there. While the core concept is borderline primal, as the end goal of every fighting game is to beat your opponent’s health to zero, it has earned the reputation of being hard as hell. It’s not a surprise, considering that you need to be absolutely precise with your fighter’s movements, attack execution, and memorizing combos. To even play at a mediocre level, commitment is necessary, and the genre is simply not meant for casual players. Getting beaten by a more experienced player in fighting games often feels oppressive, like someone licking the icing off your cupcake and forcing you to eat it.

Yomi’s intentions are to bring the fighting game spirit into colored cardboard form. No more worries about inputting weird movements with buttons and joysticks. The physical barrier ceases to exist here, and the only bit of fighting game remaining here is the mental aspect. The word “Yomi” derives from the concept of reading one’s mind. At higher levels of competitive fighting games, attacks and movements are too quick to react to, so you must perform your actions through premeditation. In other words, making decisions based on what you think your opponent will do.

Yomi 2 is obviously a sequel to Yomi, Sirlin Games’ first entry…

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Publisher Shadowborne Games burst onto the scene in 2022 with their debut hit Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The sheer enormity of Oathsworn is impressive to say the least, from both a first-time publisher and first-time head designer Jamie Jolly, although the staff is composed of some industry veterans in both the board game and screenwriting industries,  Behemoth in both size and scope, this game comes complete with optional high-quality miniatures, terrain, and even an ‘armory’ of various weapons that can be physically equipped to the character miniatures via a removable push-fit system. Want your hero to swashbuckle two swords at a time? Just pop out their current arms and replace them with the new blades you picked up last session. The armory system and larger-than-life terrain, while completely superfluous, adds to the experience in a fun way. It’s a “they didn’t have to do that” kind of sentiment that you’ll end up seeing throughout the entirety of the game.

[caption id="attachment_310504" align="alignnone" width="1500"] To flail or chop? Decisions, decisions.[/caption]

Into the Woods

Oathsworn is a large campaign game that effectively boils down to two phases: exploration and combat. In a given ‘chapter,’ the formula is the same. Players start with a narrative-driven exploration, making choices throughout, until finally reaching a…

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Slay the Spire is a rogue-like deck-building video game that burst onto the scene in 2019 to great acclaim. Initially launched on Steam, it was an instant critical darling that soon expanded to both console and mobile platforms. While it wasn’t the first deck-building rogue-like game—Dream Quest and Hand of Fate come to mind—it still stands as the pinnacle of the genre that it helped to take mainstream, spawning many imitators but no true challengers to the throne. I’ve personally sunk at least 500 hours across multiple platforms, enthralled by its difficult but addictive gameplay. 

When I heard that a board game version of Slay the Spire was being made, I was a little surprised. Not surprised that people were cashing in on the popularity of a mega-hit and the growing board game hobby. I was surprised because Slay the Spire already feels like a board game in digital form. It has a pretty standard deck-building format. Start with a 10-card deck of basic cards, draw five cards, take actions, repeat and reshuffle as necessary. Throughout the course of the game, you’ll be adding cards to the deck, perhaps removing some of the weaker starting cards, trying to optimize that card deck engine to engineer powerful turns that hopefully translate to winning.

Granted, Slay the Spire super-sizes the format…

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Ironwood represents a bit of a departure for Mindclash Games, publisher of such weighty and extended faire as Trickerion, Anachrony, and Voidfall. Ironwood is for two players. It lasts about an hour. It has only one rulebook, and that rulebook would make a lousy doorstop. While Meeple Mountain usually leaves Mindclash releases to Justin Bell—frankly, nobody else has the time to play any of them enough to write a review—Ironwood seemed like a good opportunity to let someone with fewer friends step up to the plate.

The whole of the premise is there in the title. Ironwood is about the clash between industry and nature, between the Na’vi and the Resources Development Administration, between Storm Troopers and Ewoks. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least 1977. The Ironclad and the Woodwalkers, as they’re called, vie for control of a heavily-forested mountain range. Or maybe that’s a heavily-bemountained forest. It’s hard to say.

Ironwood is a card-driven war-game, and specifically intends to be one that new players can approach without fear and that old pros will find engaging. The turn structure is nice and easy. The Woodwalkers play a card and perform the indicated…

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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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Let’s call it a disconnect. Mechanically, Loco Momo is occasionally interesting. Thematically, Loco Momo makes no sense whatsoever. Animals find a camera in the woods. Knowing immediately what it is for, they devise a contest whereby the best photographer keeps the camera. They then proceed to—stay with me now—stack themselves in a grid where each animal somehow has a different colored background, adhering to specific and abstractly devised patterns, cooperating perfectly for each opponent’s desires to keep it a fair contest?

I guess that’s one possible story.

Occasionally

The central board features four groups of four tiles. The tiles show one of five possible animals with one of three hued backgrounds. Players select any one animal tile, move it according to its rule, and take all the animals in the landing group with a matching color background. After filling the gap with tiles from the bag, play continues.

Meanwhile, the player manages a 5x5 grid, filling tiles from left to right in the row of their choice as they go. Each row has a rule: all the same, all different, paired with the tile above, etc. The goal for each column is matching the background hue.

Because of the move & match mechanic, players acquire tiles at different rates,…

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Inferno is one of those games that’s difficult to describe. The setting is “hell” or the Divine Comedy version of it. But it’s not really a game that has much to do with anything biblically inflected. If anything, the game is about going to Hell University to get your PhD in moving different colored pieces around. It’s bureaucratic, aesthetically garish, and completely delightful.

Here goes: in the game, you’re a family in Renaissance Florence, and you’re trying to get a primo spot in the hell hierarchy by shepherding souls through a plinko board into the appropriate layer of hell. Each of the circles of hell (excluding the topmost, Limbo) has a track associated with it. At the end of the game, each track can score between 4 and 20 points depending on how populated the circle is. If there aren’t enough souls in the circle, the track is worth fewer points. Additionally, to score, you have to have position on the track(s) and a diploma piece for that track. So, you need to acquire diplomas, move up on the tracks you want to score, and make sure there’s soul pieces in the corresponding circle.

[caption id="attachment_309465" align="alignnone" width="768"] Pictured: Hell as MLM scheme[/caption]

If it sounds bizarre, it’s because it is.…

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I sat down with my kids recently to try the new family game Little Alchemists from Czech Games Edition. It’s based on the game Alchemists, both of which are designed by Matúš Kotry, with the latter squarely aimed at serious strategy gamers. The family version has cute box art and a bright, screaming “Ages 7+” stamped on the box’s side runners. I was excited to see if my two kids, ages 10 and 8, would lean in or out on this new design.

On their second turn of the game, my 10-year-old turned and looked me in the eyes. “I love this game,” they said.

I score all family-weight/kids games the same way: is it fun for adults, and did my kids want to play it a second time immediately?

How’s this for a recommendation: we played the game five times over the course of a single weekend.

Actually, Let’s Increase Your Screen Time

Little Alchemists is a 2-4 player deduction game that plays in about 30 minutes regardless of player count. It also has a mini campaign/legacy element—there are six unlockable boxes of new modules (think Dorfromantik: The Board Game) that extend the game from a form of “Baby’s First Deduction Game” to “OK, this is a…

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I’m a huge video game junkie, spending nearly 40 years of my life grinding on the Sega Master System and the Atari 5200 as a child before moving up and around the ranks of every system you can think of through to modern-day consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PS5.

I love video games, but I usually don’t like video games ported into other formats. Movies based on video games? Usually, no thanks. TV shows based on video games? This is a growing category, and one that is getting better (Fallout and The Last of Us were worth it), but it still has a tough legacy to overcome. Board games based on video games? My experiences with board game adaptations of video games have been almost universally atrocious.

Frostpunk: The Board Game? My group thought it was terrible. Fallout: The Board Game? No…just, no. This War of Mine: The Board Game? I’m in the minority on this, but by the time I found myself going through the 18th different deck of cards to find out if my character’s fate was sealed or not, I wanted to chuck This War of Mine out the window. I did a demo of Call of Duty: The Board Game last year and it was a massive disappointment. I wanted…

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As I was packing up the 20-pound box of bits following my fifth session of The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, the new cooperative tabletop adventure game from Chip Theory Games based on The Elder Scrolls video game, a feeling of sadness began to set in.

I was getting that Voidfall feeling. A game this heavy (both literally and strategically) was going to be exceptionally hard to get back to the table, and the life of a tabletop media member can be a bit rough, at least in the “first-world problems” sense…you are always working hard to invest in a new property, only to move on to the next behemoth.

Make no mistake: The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a behemoth.

Beasts, Not Beast Mode

The Elder Scrolls Online—the massive video game world, created by the team at Bethesda Softworks—is an investment. Chip Theory spared no expense in its attempt to bring a slice of that world to life in a board game. In board game form, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era almost scared me away despite the fact that I raised my hand desperately seeking to cover it for our site. (Does “desperately” seem too strong a word? The…

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Updated: December 6, 2024

In my original review of Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, I talked at length about feeling as though I, and the two or three other people who read the rulebook after me, had missed a rule. It seemed far too arduous a process to get tokens out on the board, with games grinding along at a horrendous tempo as a result. I read the rulebook all the way through three different times, and two or three other people read through it in its entirety. None of us were able to identify a missed rule.

Subsequent conversations with other people who've played and enjoyed the game gave me the answer: we had indeed missed a rule. Every time you visit a villager, tokens are distributed to other villagers. I, and everyone I played with, took this to mean that tokens are taken from the visited villager and moved around. It turns out those tokens are taken from the supply and distributed amongst other villagers. Because this rule would make an enormous difference in the experience of the game, and because I will not have the opportunity to revisit the game with the corrected rule in effect, I do not feel comfortable leaving my review as it existed.

If you play Pagan, please note that the distribution of…

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