I’m a pretty big fan of Smartphone Inc. and Furnace, the two most popular designs by Ivan Lashin. Both games do a great job of creating simple systems in a playspace that usually runs its cycle in about an hour, with a variety of interesting decisions along the way.

At SPIEL 2024, I had the chance to pick up a review copy of Neodreams (2024, Hobby World), Lashin’s newest creation. The setting for this game was eerily similar to the setup of Virtual Revolution, the Studio H strategy game set in a near future where the business of hosting virtual worlds for customers. In Neodreams, players take on the roles of CEOs who run dreamcasting corporations, hunting for new clients while trying to score the most points by building a card tableau that features images from their new dreamscapes that feel right at home in a fantasy setting.

The core hobbyists I introduced to Neodreams thought it was average fare. In a world where there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar games hitting the market each year, even lighter fare such as Castle Combo and its 3x3 tableau-building elements resonated more with the same groups in the same week than Neodreams did. But with my family, the skies opened up a bit more, thanks…

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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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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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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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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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Do you like sci-fi themes in your tabletop experiences? If so, I think 2024 has been an exceptional year. Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon might end the year as the best Euro-style strategy game I got to the table. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was great as well, especially at lower player counts. Maybe you’ve heard of a little-known game called Arcs? Heck, as good as Arcs was, it didn’t excite me the way Andromeda’s Edge did.

In other years, any one of those games might end up being the year’s best game. I’m already stressed out as I think about which of the above-mentioned games is my favorite of the bunch.

You’ve probably heard the expression “it’s all about timing” and in the case of the new sci-fi themed strategy game From the Moon (2024, La Boite de Jeu), the timing for my plays could not have been much worse.

That’s not because From the Moon is bad. In fact, across my two review plays (I tried From the Moon with four players and once solo before realizing I didn’t need a third play to know where I landed), I knew just a few turns in that the game was a by-the-numbers worker placement game that had shades of area majority scoring…

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A few years back I was wandering through various campaigns on Kickstarter (as I am wont to do) and I saw a pair of images that were right up my alley. The images were sci-fi but of the old 1930s to 1950s variety. The sort of images that invoke some of my childhood heroes!

[caption id="attachment_307619" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A return to the golden age of sci-fi![/caption]

Pulp Invasion! I read the description of the game and saw that it was a solo affair. I decided to get two copies: one for me, and one for my friend, Steve (Steve loves solo gaming). I started getting the expansions, too. I stopped, but that is another story (see below).

This game (and Pulp Detective) came about after Mr. Sanders acquired the rights to a whole bunch of pulp magazine covers and interior illustrations. In other words, this is the real deal! These are not modern artists mimicking the pulp era styles, these are authentic pulp era pieces. And they are beautiful!

Engage the hyperdrive!

In Pulp Invasion, you are a Free Captain, a sort of trader and mercenary who roams interstellar space. However, you are no ordinary Captain! In secret, you are an agent of the Intergalactic Council, an arm of the…

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I was starting to sweat just a tad.

My buddy John and I were doing a two-player game of SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2024, Czech Games Edition), and we had just finished a quiet first round of play. SETI is a hand management, area control Eurogame and the first round was breezy—a couple quiet turns as we launched probes into the galaxy to explore planets in search of trace amounts of data that could lead to the discovery of E.T., or something.

It wasn’t offensive, but SETI wasn’t all that interesting either. “This game is going to go fast,” John said. “It doesn’t feel like we are ever going to have any resources to do more stuff, though.”

I had the same concern. I sent a probe to Mars, which meant I had a satellite figure on a cool-looking map of planets off to the side of the main space board, and I scored a few points and got a minor bonus or two. Otherwise, things were quiet. We finished that first round and got an income of a few credits, some energy to power probe movement, and a random card draw.

The second round wasn’t much different. We each took four actions and discovered new technologies, which made our collection of space data a little juicier. One…

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Starmada is a set of rules that allows you to design starships, then (with some miniatures or chits on a hex grid) send them out to reduce other starships to so much space debris. The idea of the game is to be a quick playing, tactical, and universal set of rules for such things. The system for ship design has basic components and myriad add-ons allowing it to simulate just about anything you can think of in a way that ensures that even if you and your friends are simulating different universes, the relative strengths of the ships can be calculated to ensure a fair fight. Want to put a fleet of Star Wars Super Star Destroyers up against a group of Star Trek Borg Cubes or perhaps a few Babylon 5 Vorlon Planet Killers? This game can do that.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Admiralty—the group of volunteers that Daniel Kast (Majestic XII Games) brought together to take Starmada X rules and use them to create a new edition of Starmada a bit over a decade ago. Daniel and the members of the Admiralty were all people that loved many of the previous editions of the game. We each had our thoughts on where the strongest and weakest areas of…

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The best board game I played in 2021 was Dwellings of Eldervale (2020, Breaking Games). It did everything I wanted in a board game—lots of combat, a fantasy setting, Euro-like engine building elements, player powers and cards that all felt a little “broken”, cool miniatures, and Game Trayz. I played it four times that year and was sure it was one of the best games ever made, at least in terms of my play preferences.

Dwellings of Eldervale has the kind of randomness that is fun because the stakes were often quite low. Even when players lose in combat, they seem to always get something useful, and getting damaged units back was as easy as taking a recall action. Sure, that recall action is better when your units are healthy when they return to your play area, but over the course of a three-hour game, everyone took their licks from time to time.

At PAX Unplugged two years ago, I had the chance to demo Andromeda’s Edge, the updated version of Dwellings that changed the setting to space and made mostly minor changes to a variety of the original game’s design elements. Like Dwellings, Andromeda’s Edge is designed by Luke Laurie (adding Maximus Laurie as a co-designer this time around) and Andromeda’s Edge continues to utilize my favorite…

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Don’t tell my erudite friends but skirmish games, in particular, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, got me back into board gaming (even though I find the entirety of the modern Star Wars franchise unbearably boring). I love pushing miniatures around on a grid of some kind and making them shoot each other.

Now, I do love Star Trek, the show about people solving problems with talking, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a highly approachable two-player skirmish game, Star Trek: Away Missions fits the bill. While the way you win can feel slightly disjointed as a game, it often ends up feeling more in the spirit of a Star Trek set piece, where a character has to perform some jargon-filled objective while dodging phaser fire.

Yellow Alert

Away Missions has you selecting your team from amongst Romulans, Klingons, Borg, and Federation factions. For this review, I had access to the starter kits for each. As I understand it, you can get other collections of minis which add characters you can swap in, more cards to build your decks with, and additional options for objectives.

You have a deck of Support Cards, and a deck of Mission Cards. The former contain various pieces of equipment that you…

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I don’t know that I’ve ever played a more divisive game than Arcs. Cole Wehrle's latest design, unquestionably the most-anticipated board game of 2024, won’t even be out at retail for another two months, but seemingly everyone has already played it, and seemingly everyone has an opinion. Most of those opinions are strong.

This is becoming de rigueur for Wehrle releases. While Root and Pax Pamir are consensus classics—even the people who don’t like them wouldn’t generally argue that they’re bad—Oath had a stark divide between fanatics and detractors. You don’t meet many people who think Oath is “fine” and have nothing more to say on the matter. Arcs, from my experience so far, is plowing a similar furrow. For every “I enjoy Arcs, and would happily play it any time” or “Arcs is the greatest board game ever made” you hear, there exists an “I get what it’s trying to do, but I don’t think it does it” or “Oh, I hate Arcs” to balance it out.

It is now my job to not only reconcile these viewpoints, but to assign an objective numerical value to my play experience. It is my job to solve Arcs. Sure. Simple enough.

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