What a curious beast this is.

Wolffdesigna’s Trick Shot has a reputation as the greatest hockey-themed board game out there. BGG lists 275 titles, so that’s not as hilariously specific a statement as it may read to most of us, myself included. Many of its fans argue that it is, in fact, the single greatest sports board game. I can see why. During those moments when everything clicks, when the puck is shooting back and forth and skaters are ramming into one another, when plays are coming together, you feel, no bones about it, like you are watching a game of hockey.

Trick Shot achieves much of this through simplicity. On your turn, you pick one of your players and have them move, pass the puck, or attempt to shoot a goal. Then, you roll a die. You have a five-in-six chance of success. If you fail, your turn ends. If you succeed, you pick a different player and have them move, pass the puck, or attempt to shoot a goal. Then, you roll two dice. You have a 25–in–36 chance of success. If you succeed, etc. You get the idea.

This is a push-your-luck game, which strikes me now as the perfect format for a sports theme. The emotional effect of rolling more and more dice and getting…

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Shedding games for two players are a difficult breed. I’ve written about this before, in my review of Thomas Lehmann’s admirable-but-middling Chu Han. There’s something about shedding—a family of traditional card games about playing cards in ever-escalating sets—that refuses to shine in the two-player format.

My diagnosis is that fewer players means less tension. Consider Tichu, which is exclusively a game for four. When I meld, I have to sit through the agonizing possibility that any of three other players—including my teammate—might muck up my plans. Every play is followed by a series of three tensions and (hopefully) three releases. There’s a wonderful arc to that. In Haggis, which is primarily for two, you don’t get the same dramatic build. My opponent either beats my set or they don’t. That’s less interesting. A shedding game for two, I believe, has to exceed that limitation.

I don’t mean to say that two-person shedding can’t be done well. I’m sure it’s possible. While a small handful of designers have put a good deal of energy into cracking the formula, it’s not as though our best scientists have been working on this problem for decades. Unlike its close cousin trick-taking, shedding is a relatively ancillary genre within hobby gaming, so there’s little market reward to encourage experiments along the lines of…

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Thingstead falls into that strangest category of board games: I don’t have any interest in playing it, I don’t think it’s particularly good, and I’d also believe entirely anyone who said it’s a masterpiece. Scott Almes’s two-player area-control game is doing just enough new and different things that, though I think it works about as well as a hang glider fashioned from Swiss cheese, I could see it being exactly what certain people are looking for.

The area control works across two dimensions. Each turn, you play a card, either to exert pull on one of the four Clans, or to add influence to one of the seven viking Elders around the central ring. Both options net you points come the end of the game, but you may have other motives at any particular time. The Clans also give you either temporary or permanent access to various powers, depending on which Clan card sits at the top of that particular Clan deck. The Elders, meanwhile, serve as the game’s tempo control. If enough influence is placed on enough Elders, the game comes to an end.

You…

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How about that theme, huh? Bomb Busters is a cooperative deduction game in which you work as a bomb squad, sweatily cutting wires until the bomb is defused. Cooperative games have been around for quite some time now. How has this not happened before? Has it happened before? I don’t know. I’m not a historian, and I’m not googling it lest the balloon of my thesis be deflated by the cold, sharp needle of truth.

In this box, you will find 66 scenarios, a preposterous amount of content for a mass market family game. I don’t know if designer Hisashi Hayashi came to Pegasus Spiele with those scenarios worked out, but I like to imagine not. I prefer to believe in a world where he showed up with Mission 8, the first mission with the full rule set, and the developers at Pegasus Spiele proceeded to lose. their. minds.

The fundamental rules are slim. Players mix up 48 wires, four each in values from 1-12. Players attempt to cut all the wires by looking for pairs. If I have a 5, and I think you have a 5, I point to whichever…

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I love Flamme Rouge. I’m not sure if the Finnish-born cycling simulator is my favorite racing game, but there’s a non-zero chance it is. The rules are straightforward, you are often presented with difficult choices, and you have to make educated guesses about what everyone else is going to do. Better still, the end is almost always a tight race between two or three players, which keeps everyone involved.

While, as I mentioned, the rules for Flamme Rouge are simple, the game is not without its challenges. You have two decks of cards that you have to manage in a slightly counter-intuitive manner, and you have to keep both of your cyclists straight in your head. Add drafting and exhaustion on top of that, and it can often prove to be too much for younger players.

Flamme Rouge BMX is for the younger among us, and it primarily serves them by reducing the scale. Instead of a wending and winding path, one lap around this circular track will do ya. Each player now manages a single cyclist, rather than a team. The cards have been turned into tokens,…

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Concordia- Tom Franklin

After hearing about Concordia for years, I finally bought a copy…and then let it sit on my Shelf o’ Shame for way too long. This is such a great game!

You’re seeking to move around an ancient map, by sail or by foot, building houses in cities that will get you the goods those cities produce. On a turn, you play one of your cards that determine the action you’ll be taking, including a card that allows you to copy someone else’s card or to reclaim all your cards. Resources, places to store those resources, and money are always tight, creating a really fine eurogame puzzle of efficiencies and generating points.

After playing it twice at my weekly game night, I fell into the rabbit hole of Concordia on Steam. I’d still be playing it if I didn’t have this annoying work stuff that gets in my way on a daily basis.

Seriously, if you like Eurogame worker placement games and haven’t tried Concordia yet, you need to play it!

Ease of entry?:
★★★★☆ - The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?:
★★★★★ - Will definitely play it again

Read more articles from Tom Franklin.
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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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Fire Tower - Bob Pazehoski, Jr.

I had a chance to sit with this strange little entity recently. Players each respond to, defend against, and aggressively wield the everlasting fire that has ignited in the center of the board. The aim? Survive—and burn your opponents’ towers to the ground, relegating them to participation in the consolation game known as the Shadow of the Forest. Eliminated players participate in the wiles of the forest fire, exacting revenge upon those who wrought their demise. I won’t lie. It’s weird. 

The game is pretty on the table as the orange fire crystals slowly—and then rapidly—spread across the central grid. The play begins quite slowly before launching to a lightning finish. Players put up blockades of a sort, pour water where they are able, redirect the wind to send the fire elsewhere, and unleash chaotic bursts of flame on the way to a bit of a disappointing finish. Fire Tower is incredibly aggressive. Yes, you can simply play defense the whole time and let fate decide, but a significant portion of the deck begs you to issue militaristic commands to the flames in the name of player elimination. 

At heart, Fire Tower is an abstract area control game with bells and whistles attempting to match the…

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I have fond memories of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the youth-skewing books that allow readers to make decisions for the protagonists. Though they were hardly a fixture of my youth, I read a large number of them during a short period of time. I still remember a particular prompt, which I read on the school bus: “If you climb a fence on your way home from school, turn to page 27. If you don’t climb a fence, turn to page 42.”

War Story: Occupied France, from designers Dave Neale and David Thompson, is a Choose Your Own Adventure all its own. You control a group of covert French operatives, completing a trio of missions in German-occupied Europe. It may be more accurate to say “attempting to complete,” since success in War Story is far from assured.

At least the failure is always your fault. War Story is chock full of choices and doesn’t involve luck. There are no aleatoric flourishes here. Everything that happens comes down to the decisions you make, from which agents you deploy at the start of the mission down to the individual choices that pop up from moment to moment. Do…

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I’d like to take a moment to address the uncomfortable prosody of the title. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is, at the very least, guilty of dropping a “The,” is it not? There’s something about the way “Trick-Taking Game” is thrown in there, with a lack of propriety that brings nothing to mind so much as the words “Cheese Product,” that feels off. The Fellowship of the Ring: The Trick-Taking Game feels better.

I’m Not Stalling, You’re Stalling

The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a cooperative card game, very much in the same spirit as The Crew. Designer Bryan Bornmueller seems to have drawn particular inspiration from the second installment, Mission Deep Sea, which has a wider variety of mission types than The Quest for Planet Nine. Each chapter of Fellowship provides the players with a variety of characters to choose from, each of whom has a specific victory condition that must be met in order for the team to succeed.

In Chapter 1, for example, the players are presented with a choice of Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Pippin. Frodo needs to win a specified number of Ring cards, one…

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Setting everything out on the table, I could feel the excitement bubbling up. It had been a couple of months since I’d played a round of Arcs, 2024’s hottest release. When I finally sat down for my first game of campaign expansion The Blighted Reach, I couldn’t wait to dive back in. I would have told you that I like Arcs without quite tipping over into loving it, but I don’t often feel that sense of anticipation when setting a game up. I was thrilled to be back.

It took a while to get The Blighted Reach to the table because of the animosity several in my gaming group(s) feel towards the base game. The players most likely to show up at 9:00 am on a Sunday to game until 20:00 are also, by and large, the most Arcs-averse. The tweaky, tactile decision space that characterizes the game is a big part of why I like it, but it can rub more intentionally-minded players the wrong way. Arcs isn’t a game that rewards having a plan half as much as it rewards the willingness to ditch your plan and all who sail in her. That isn’t for everybody.

The Blighted Reach is still largely the same game, though it adds just enough small tweaks to the rules to…

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Ticket to Ride: South Korea - K. David Ladage

One of the beautiful aspects of Ticket to Ride is the versatility of the core rules. Adding elements for new maps is a breeze! They have added tunnels and stations (Europe), stocks (Pennsylvania), passengers (Germany), a tech tree (United Kingdom), and exploitable resources (Heart of Africa). The game has been reimagined for smaller player counts and table footprint (New York, London, etc.), there is a print-and-play version that was created for the COVID crisis (Stay at Home), and they recently added a Legacy Campaign version to the series.. Every time they create a new map/expansion for the game, my friends and I are excited all over again to see what is coming next.

South Korea has a map where the track colors are grouped into districts. There is a district board where players are competing for up to ten points in each of the eight districts. In addition, you have three cards that allow you to add a one-time bonus of +1, +2, and +3 to an action: you can draw +1, +2, or +3 more cards (train cards or tickets) on your turn, you can gain +1, +2, or +3 more status in a district with your play, and…

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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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