If you’ve followed some of my previous content, it’s fair to say that I’ve been playing one too many train games…or you might say that I have a healthy respect for train games. I have a couple groups that are going hard on a wide spectrum of these experiences, from lighter “cube rails” games like Ride the Rails through route-building Euros like Nucluem, all the way to proper 18xx games like Railways of the Lost Atlas, 1880: China, and 18Korea, the latter of which was so ridiculous that it’s a borderline 18xx party game!

So, while I won’t profess to being a hardcore train game junkie, I’m pretty close. When Capstone Games launched a crowdfunding campaign for the fourth game in the Iron Rails series, Age of Rail: South Africa, I stayed in touch to ensure I could get a review copy when the game’s fulfillment began this fall.

Given my network—and the new game’s breezy 60-minute playtime—I knew it would be easy to get Age of Rail: South Africa to the table quickly, so I got three plays done within a three-week stretch. And because my group is familiar with two other games in the Iron Rails series, Irish Gauge and Iberian Gauge, Age of Rail: South Africa was an…

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Monopoly is one of those games that no longer needs an introduction. It is a fair bet that if you are reading this, you were familiar with the game by the time you exited elementary school. Scrabble is not quite as ubiquitous, but it is close. These games are not at all similar. Monopoly is a real estate trading game of cutthroat business transactions intermixed with an exorbitant amount of pure luck, while Scrabble is a game where you are trying to make the most valuable words (crossword style) with the random selection of letters you have and the bonus spaces scattered over the game board. So how do you mix the two?

[caption id="attachment_310351" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A lot being said on the cover of this game. Not much is realized in the game itself.[/caption]

The Mashup

For purposes of this review, I am going to take a Back in the Day approach: I am going to assume that you have at least a cursory knowledge of Monopoly and Scrabble. What I will be describing below is how this game differs as it blends the two games.

The Monopoly Half

In my opinion, Monopoly is not a great game. It is not horrible, by any means, it…

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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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To warm up for a few plays of the recent expansion Nucleum: Australia (2024, Board&Dice), I got the base game to the table to ensure I remembered all the edge case rules around tile placement, network restrictions, end-game scoring, and how to power buildings. I asked two of the guys from my strategy group to join me, and we all committed to watching a teach video to ensure we had all the rules down.

“Nucleum is hard, man,” one player said during the second turn (!!) of our first re-entry play, a reminder of the dozens of times we said that when playing the base game in 2023.

He was right. He is still right. Nucleum IS hard. Of course, that’s the deal when you try to play a lot of hard, heavy strategy games—it’s hard to remember all the rules, it’s hard to build a winning strategy, and it’s really hard to get games like Nucleum to the table. (Oh, to dream of having a neighbor who lives across the street, always looking for a friend or two to play the copy of Voidfall they have already set up in their professional gaming space. If you know anyone like that in Chicago, please call me!)

Nucleum is a tough cookie, but the arc is so satisfying…

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At this stage, I will essentially review anything published by Capstone Games. Clay Ross and his extended network consistently pull in gems that have a certain kind of buzz for the Eurogame design elements I love. Between the “Iron Rail” series of cube rails games, the Terra Mystica family of products, and a little-known zoo simulation game called Ark Nova, Capstone has gotten it right much more often than other publishers.

Stephens (a 2024 release designed by the Portuguese design duo known as Costa & Rȏla) is the latest in a long line of medium-weight Euros with a handsome production, a relatively low playtime, and a simple turn structure and cardboard money chits. (I used the included money for the first of my three review plays before pivoting to poker chips.) It has a novel reset/clean-up system that, in the right hands, leads to snappy play and lots of chances to gather income that will be used to further other in-game goals.

In the wrong hands, this system leads to one of the few problems a Euro design can possess—the ability to actually do everything a game has to offer. Many of these games push hard on finding an ending that ensures that players have the chance to only do some, maybe most, of a…

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Near the end of my first pass of the rules for the new Board&Dice strategy game Windmill Valley, something caught my eye: ”Expert Variant.”

The rules for this lighter-weight game were breezy up to this point, so I was surprised to see that there was a supposedly harder version available to spice things up a bit.

Windmill Valley normally wraps when someone triggers a series of final turns, tied to moving a player’s action wheel a certain number of revolutions. Players finish that round—to ensure everyone has had an equal number of turns—then do one more complete round to give everyone a turn while knowing that this is their final-final turn.

The Expert Variant? No “final-final” turn. Otherwise, no other changes.

I thought this spoke volumes to what I later found to be a very light time at the table. The game’s weight is tied primarily to the sheer number of choices available to a player on their turn, but nothing about each individual action was complex. I thought Windmill Valley could be taught to a core hobbyist gamer (essentially everyone I know) in about 10 minutes.

You can imagine my surprise, then, to find that for a game that plays in about 40 minutes with two players, the sponsored teach video was a whopping THIRTY-FOUR minutes. “You can…

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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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“So…what did you think?”

Along with three members of my review crew, we had just wrapped up our first four-player game of Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity (2024, published by PYTHAGORAS and distributed in the US by Mayfair Games). There was a very long pause before anyone answered my question. I always ask other players for their opinion first before launching into my thoughts.

The opinions ranged wildly. One player loved it, another was still processing the rules load even at the end of our game, for reasons that we’ll come to during a discussion about the game’s scoring elements. The guy who won this first play was most conflicted of all. Winner’s bias is real, we all agreed, so he was in the best position to say whether he loved it or not.

“I really like this one,” he started. “There’s a lot to process with the rules, but ultimately I focused on the area control elements, and that worked out. I just don’t know how often I could see myself getting this to the table.”

This review of Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity has proven to be the toughest review I have written this year, in terms of determining a final score. For almost every element of the game that I liked, there are…

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I stopped by the Arcane Wonders booth at SPIEL 2024 to check out the new game Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering. I was excited about it from the get-go: the cover art looked great, and the box offered one additional stand-out detail—the name of the designer, Matthias Cramer.

That’s because Cramer designed Glen More II: Chronicles, one of my all-time favorite games. While other games use a rondel mechanism to dictate turn order, I think Glen More II does rondels better than any other game I have tried. The combination of Cramer’s name here mixed with the fact that Kraftwagen: Age of Engineering is also a rondel game had me pre-sold on the idea that this would be worth a look.

The new version is based on Cramer’s original game, Kraftwagen, published back in 2015. While I have not played the previous game, two other people in my network had, and both indicated that while that first game was pretty good, there were some elements that rubbed them, as hardcore strategy players, the wrong way.

One of those two people, my buddy John (he of the Dusty Euros series), joined me for a demo of the new Kraftwagen at SPIEL to see how it played. And after our three-player demo game, John and I both agreed…

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At the GAMA Expo in 2024, publishers from all over the country showcased their upcoming releases. One night, in a relatively small room, I had the opportunity to look over close to 150 games from large and small publishers alike. After making a circuit of the room to see what looked interesting, the Stalk Exchange (stylized as $talk Exchange) table from The Op was the first one I came back to, and the only one in which I sat down to play an entire game. I was impressed with the artwork, the simple gameplay, and the play time—around 30 minutes or so. So when The Op offered to send a copy for review, I jumped at the chance. And everyone who’s played it so far has raved about it, some going so far as to say, “This is what a market manipulation game should look like.”

So let me share the love for Stalk Exchange.

“Flowers don’t tell, they show.” — Stephanie Skeem

In Stalk Exchange, 2-5 players compete to build the best floral portfolio, a wealth of dahlias, daffodils, globemasters, snowdrops, and tulips. You do this by planting flowers from “the exchange” into the shared garden, and by trading flowers between the exchange and your hidden portfolio.…

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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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This might sound like a bad thing, but here’s a surprise: I like dice and I like charts. I also like simultaneous play which, for the most part, Lords of Baseball manages to pull off with aplomb.

Cards. Lots of Cards.

The game might be what some would call a CDG (card-driven game), but if you’re looking for something in the vein of Twilight Struggle or COIN, you’re likely going to be disappointed. LoB takes a more loosey-goosey approach to hand and card management.

Basically, it goes like this. You have a player board with your stats. You’ve got a money tracker, a tracker for prospects, a tracker for regular players, a tracker for your GM, Front office, and a few other stats. You add together these stats to determine your team’s quality, which we’ll come back to later.

The game is highly procedural. First, you get dealt “Spring Training” cards (3), plus additional if you have raised your farm system tracker. You can also turn in media tokens to get more cards, but you’re never going to have more than 5 going…

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Man, I love a good mobster theme.

That starts with my love for the mainstream Mafia movie canon. Sure, everyone loves the Godfather films…the classics are classic for a reason. Ditto for Goodfellas, Casino, and nearly everything done by Martin Scorsese. I have a preference for flicks like The Untouchables or newer takes like Gangster Town, The Departed (based on a Hong Kong film called Infernal Affairs—which I think is the better film), Public Enemies, and any of the older flicks reminding us of Prohibition-era crime.

I love gang, mobster, and crime themes, to the point where my wife knows that if there’s a new TV show coming out that gives her “those ‘Narcos’ vibes” (her words), I’m going to watch it. Anything featuring illegal drugs, booze, drive-by shootings, and infamous real-world crime figures is a 100% go for my personal viewing tastes.

My appreciation for mobster themes carries over into board games. Whether it is Scarface 1920, La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War, Speakeasy Blues, or The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire, I am all the way in if a game gives me the chance to celebrate the music of the 1920s and 30s, force opposing gang associates to “swim with the fishes”, or drive a car bomb into a neighborhood.

Given this history, it should come…

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