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Hidden Gems

Hidden Gems: The Witcher – Old World

I got a chance to play The Witcher – Old World this last week and I have to say right up front, I was not disappointed.

Adventure board games fall into many different categories, I would say it’s a genre with quite a few different sub-genres, but The Witcher – Old World kind of felt like a new sub-genre was invented and that is perhaps what attracted me to the game.

In a way, Old World is a very strategic game that combines deck building, resource management and time-pressured competition. You have some of the classic things you hope to find in adventure board games via story telling through cards and other things that create a relationship with role-playing games like special abilities, leveling up, finding loot and fighting monsters, but at the heart of the game it’s all about that most optimal move each round. Trying to squeeze as many actions and gain as many benefits as possible each turn because to a certain degree, the game is a race to the finish line, giving the entire experience a more gamist feel, more like a competitive board game than what you might expect from a typical adventure game.

You can’t just sit back and do things when you are ready, the pressure comes from the other players progress and as soon as one player pushes forward, you are left with little choice but to do the same because if you’re not keeping up closely with the leader, you start to fall behind and are essentially in catch up mode.

There is also this harshness to the games monsters that you fight. There aren’t many of them and the adventurers you represent in the game are initially pretty ill-equipped to deal with these monsters. Your goal is to get yourself prepared as quickly as possible and it becomes a game of risk vs. reward. Go in to early and you get crushed, go in to late and someone might beat you to it.

I also really liked the built-in catch-up mechanic that worked very well to counterbalance players who get too far ahead of the pact. Each time you lose a battle, you gain a lot of benefits for the effort, while winning a battle costs your resources and reduces your strength, forcing you to take time to rebuild yourself. This gives the game a nice tight feel and makes taking bigger risks a plausible effort which results in you getting more of those exciting “let’s see what happens” moments.

The quality of the game components are outstanding, the art especially captures The Witcher franchise with perfection, they just nailed it with the presentation of this game.

Altogether, I really enjoyed this one, a big improvement over the last Witcher game I tried called “The Witcher Adventure Game”, which I thought was pretty shit.

Board Game Reviews, Gaming Articles, On The Table

Big Board Gaming Weekend 2024

Every year like clockwork, my crew and I get together for a 4 day super weekend of nothing but BBQ, beer, and board gaming. We call it the “Hassela Weekend”, named after the sleepy little Swedish town where the event takes place. It is always the gaming highlight of every year and this, our 8th year of the event was no different.

Today we talk about all the games that were played, how they landed with everyone, and what I think. Enjoy the article!

Bang The Dice Game

Bang The Dice Game has been a Hassela tradition since 2019 when it was first introduced and has become a group favorite filler, usually played before or after dinner. This year the weekend kicked off with it and as always the game was played several times with the usual chaotic antics and gaming group chemistry that comes naturally for us.

It’s about the most basic hidden identity game around, you have effectively three factions (The Sherrif and his deputies, The Outlaws, and The Renegade(s). The makeup of who’s who depends on how many players you have, but this is a game where the more merrier. It’s more or less a simple guessing game where everyone wants to appear to be whatever they think will keep them safe, long enough to figure out who everyone else actually is. You roll some dice and shoot people and hope you kill the right person who is not on your team.

It’s fun, quick, and quite perfect as an entertaining way to spend a half hour while you nurse a beer. It’s not something you want to take seriously and I would argue it’s only barely a hidden identity game as the revelations/discovery is pretty quick. For more robust hidden identity games that focus more on the hidden identity theme and mechanics, I would probably recommend Coup or One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Still Bang The Dice Game lands well mainly because you don’t have to go through any weird opening phases like you do in One Night Ultimate Werewolf which can suck up a lot of time nor do you need to fully grasp the powers of the hidden identities like you do in Coup. Here hidden identities are clearly just teams and the discovery is mostly just about trying to figure out who is actually on your team. If you get it wrong you are likely to shoot the wrong person and that is the punchline of the hidden joke within the game.

It’s silly and very basic fun, it’s universally loved in our group.

Jabba’s Palace – Love Letter

Love Letter is a staple filler for any gaming collection and has been for a couple of years for us. It’s got a bit more strategy and “umpf” in my opinion than most fillers. This is one you’re going to really want to win as it’s very satisfying when you do. I’m not at all surprised that Love Letter makes so many “favorites” lists out there.

For all intents and purposes, Jabba’s Palace is a standard Love Letter with Star Wars art, a basic game of trying to keep track of what cards are played and using the special abilities of the card you play on your turn and the strength of the card you keep each round to ensure you are as protected as you can manage to outlast all of your opponents.

There is quite a bit of luck involved in successfully navigating any round of play, but over the course of several hands that make up a full game, usually, the most clever player will win, so it’s definitely not just luck of the draw here, there is a reasonable level of skill and strategy involved.

Love Letter is a perfect filler game, find a theme you like and there is a Love Letter version out there just for you. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like the game, it’s one of those card games that works with everyone, gamers and non-gamers alike.

Game of Thrones: The Board Game

Game of Thrones – The Board Game is another Hassela tradition in my gaming group going back all the way to the early years of the event. In fact, I would say for most of us the term “Hassela Weekend” is synonymous with a round of Game of Thrones The Board Game.

It’s a brutally tough game to win with a lot of strategy and politics at its core. It handles the Game of Thrones theme with perfection, with all of the amazing feints and double-crossing you would expect. There are so many trick plays, subtle chess moves with big pushes, and usually big finishes. In particular, if everyone at the table has a firm grasp of the game’s many subtleties. Our game this weekend was no different, it was a struggle all the way to the bitter end with huge ups and downs, massive upsets and ultimately being decided in a single final battle in the last round of the game. It’s exactly how you hope a Game of Thrones game will go down.

The game does have a few lumps that can be both frustrating and can at times spoil the fun. For one, this is a 6 player game, practically unplayable in my opinion with any other player count. I say that with my group having tried and tried on my occasions, it just doesn’t work. It’s 6 players or bust.

It’s also an absurdly long game, your mileage will vary but you can count on a roughly 5-6 hour game like money in the bank, and if you go the full 10 rounds, you may very well exceed 6+ hours.

It also has some very obvious “balancing” flaws that are very difficult to massage out. For one, Lannister’s position on the board, their starting conditions, and early game options are extremely poor and limited. I would say if you can win as the Lannisters in Game of Thrones the Board Game, you are either a freakish master of strategy or playing against incompetence because they stand very little of doing much more than being a fly to swat at worse to kingmakers at best.

You also have some issues like the Grey Joys which opposite to the Lannisters just have outstanding options and starting conditions as well as a stupidly strong character deck. They are beatable so I wouldn’t call them broken as I definitely would the Lannisters, but it’s going to be a group effort to keep them under control. Starks are also very strong and the Baratheons can quite literally win the game in two rounds if people aren’t very attentive and actively invading them from all sides from the very start. They are like a time clock that tests your knowledge of the game, if you don’t know what to do, THEY WILL win.

Some of these things are just nuances of the game and are part of the charm and challenge. I might make a few changes, via some house rules to help out the Lannisters, but warts and all this is a fantastic strategy game even though it’s very tough to get to the table and is definitely a “once in a long while” type of game at best. I would not want to play this game with any regularity but it’s always welcome at Hassela (as long as we have 6!)

Game of Thrones Trivia

When it comes to judging or even speaking about trivia games, my feeling is that they are basically all the same. It’s a game of questions and you try to answer them, you either like that sort of thing or you don’t. Trivia games with a theme like Game of Thrones, challenge your knowledge in a specific area, so if you are into a show, book, movie or whatever and you can find a trivia game on that topic it can be fun.

I’m a bit indifferent to this sort of thing, I mean, I like trivia well enough so I have no issue sitting around a table and trying to test my knowledge for a bit in particular on a subject I enjoy, but I don’t think this sort of thing falls into the realm of “boardgame” in the same sense of the word in which I normally would use it.

Still, this particular trivia game has an area control mechanic, the questions had multiple choice answers, and the difficulty, at least for my gaming crew who are all Game of Thrones fans was relatively easy. I think about 80% of the questions asked were answered correctly so the game played quickly, it was fun to reminisce about the show, and as a group of fans, it went over pretty well.

I don’t know that I have much more to say about it, trivia games are trivia games. They neither surprise nor disappoint, they just do what they do and you either like that sort of thing or you don’t, the specific version or topic of a trivia game isn’t going to change your mind.

Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy

Eclipse was number 6 on my all-time favorite games list from this year and I was excited to bring it to Hassela for a big 4x game event, showdown. This epic level 4x game is a cross-over game between classic Ameri-Trash war games and modern Euro’s which might seem like a strange combination but is actually the norm for most 4x games in general. Twilight Imperium of course immediately comes to mind which also had classic Euro game mechanics like role-selection and token-based action economy mixed in with rolling handfuls of dice.

Eclipse I always felt should be great at bringing a Twilight Imperium experience to the table in a much more reasonable amount of time with a lot less nuance, but more “core gameplay”. The mechanics of Eclipse are very efficient and streamlined, there is a very quick progression toward conflict and the hope is that you end up with games filled with big battles and tight final moments as players try to squeeze out as many points as they can out of every aspect of the 4x civilization building experience.

Unfortunately, our experience this weekend was considerably less exciting than that in my opinion, in fact I would say it brushed up against being boring.

I think part of the problem with Eclipse is that many of the games mechanics don’t play out like you hope or imagine they should. The game is about controlling space with spaceships, expanding your civilization, building technologies and upgrading your ships and it tries to encourage conflicts between players through generous victory point rewards for fighting. All the mechanics and the play loops are there to encourage exciting games, but typically what ends up happening is just a lot of turtling and build-up to a very anti-climatic end.

There is just no push and pull on the territory control part of the game and because your economy controls your action economy, very often once you have built some ships, did some research and some upgrades, you are out of steam. Since the game is a race to build up and there is a lot of pressure to “keep up”, you end up getting the build-up without the release.

There are 8 rounds in the game and with a 5-6 player game, it can and does still take 5-6 hours to complete, so in the end the main sales pitch “Twilight Imperium – Light” really is very marginal at best. You shave off a couple of hours, but I’m not sure the investment of time is well spent. I think I would much rather play a 7-8 hour game of Twilight Imperium than a 5-6 hour game of Eclipse and after this weekend’s play, I’m seriously questioning Eclipse’s position on my best-of list.

I think it’s a game with a lot of potential, but this last playthrough was disappointing, there just wasn’t any fire, and no memorable moments. It played like a stale and very uninspired cube pusher. It was a bit of a bummer because this was the game I think I was most excited to get to the table this year and ended up being the biggest disappointment of the weekend for me.

Red Rising

Red Rising was introduced to the crew at the event for the first time. It’s a relatively simple game of hand management and building combinations of cards to create a victory-scoring bonus at the end.

This was a tricky game because, in addition to the scoring points on the cards and the combo bonuses, you also had some secondary resources and tracks to manage which also scored points and were key to triggering the end game. It kind of made the game a race to build up your hand, but you had to keep up on the tracks because your hand was not going to be sufficient to win on its own.

One of the key features of the game is of course the setting and having read the first book (Red Rising), I had a connection to the game that not all the players shared, but as a whole, it was a very abstract card game that really focused on mechanics more then bringing the setting to the forefront. If you are looking to play a game in this Dystopian future, know that besides some familiar names and setting concepts like Hellium and The Institute, the representation here is pretty light.

There is a lot of timing and manipulation in the game that determines your decisions but the moves boil down to play a card and pick up a card from four different tracks. The “player choices” are fairly slim as is the impact of any single play. I would put this into the “light” game category, even though it takes about 45-60 minutes to play, it sort of felt like a fun little filler that went on a bit longer than most fillers would.

I thought it was a competent game mechanic but there really was no twist to the game, it kind of had limited energy that was mostly spent after the first play. I can’t see myself getting excited to have repeat plays of this one, though I would not object to either. It was a fine, middle-of-the-road card game. I will say, I thought the art style was great, it was very easy to learn and there was something very intuitive about how it played. It didn’t require anyone to explain the strategy of the game to me, it unfolded in front of you very quickly and obviously. There are many different routes to victory and I’m not sure I uncovered anything specifically that I could point to and say “do that and you can win”, but it was very clear which cards went with which cards and how you could combo them. The issue wasn’t understanding what cards you wanted into your hand, but manipulating the game to ensure that you got what you wanted.

Tapestry

Tapestry is one of those games that is difficult to define, you just know you like it and you want to play. In our gaming group, this one has shown up in the Hassela weekend lineup several times over the years and is one of the very few games that ever see’s repeat plays at the same event. We ended up playing it twice this year again.

I think if push comes to shove, the only thing I can say about it is, play it at least 3 times before you decide if you like it or not. It may seem strange but this is a game of subtlety and nuance, there is so much genius built into this very simple mechanic of moving cubes up a track. It’s absolutely fascinating to see the kind of growth and expansion you can create from such humble beginnings as the starting conditions of this game. 4 resources turn into a massive, sprawling empire!

There are no “big moves” in this game (usually). It’s a slow and methodical manipulation of resources to squeeze every last ounce of juice out of them. It’s a game about optimization of your actions and efficiency.

Frankly, it’s addictive, I play this game a lot on BoardGameArena and even though I have probably played it more than 30 times just this year, I still feel drawn to it.

To play it in person has its own charm because this is also one of the most beautiful games you could ever put on the table, the production quality is extreme. It’s Kickstarter magic and we are lucky that a member of our group is a super fan and has purchased all of the expansions.

If there is any drawback to the game is that experience = points. When you play with people who have taken the time to unravel the puzzle that is Tapestry, you can have very tight and competitive games, but new players, no matter how competent they are as gamers are going to struggle for quite a few games before they hit those 300-400 point scores that are pretty standard finishes for experienced players. I recall the first game I ever played of Tapestry I barely managed to score 60 points, these days I consider any score under 250 a complete failure. The road to experience is filled with brain-busting analysis and acquisition of micro experiences which for a gamer is basically “the juice” that keeps them coming back.

I love this game, I think it’s one of the finest examples of original and modern game design.

Dumber Than A Box Of Rocks

It’s a silly trivia game, we play it, we like it, and no one knows why. It’s the board game equivalent of a youtube video of a guy taking a golf ball to the balls, I don’t care who you are, that shit is funny and so is competing in a trivia game in which a literal rock can outsmart you.

Valor and Villany: Minions of Mordak

When we played this one, I was ready right then and there to call this “The Best of Hassela 2024”. It was so good.

When it comes to these “you get a character, let’s fight monsters” games, I’m usually not a fan and I have played a lot of them. The main logic is almost always the same for me…. Why are we playing this? Why not just play a role-playing game like D&D?

Valor & Villainy separates itself from the pack of “adventures fighting monsters” games in so many ways. I think its charm above all else is that it doesn’t take itself seriously, in fact, the game is, itself from the instruction book, to the spells, to the monsters, just a series of fantasy genre-driven gags that fit neatly into a well-executed combat mechanic. This is a game where you draw a loot card, read it and laugh, because whoever created that card, has clearly played a lot of D&D. They know the inside jokes and the silliness of the fantasy genre and just leans right into it.

Valor & Villainy is about as close as you can get to watching a comedy cartoon as a board game. Beyond silliness, however, you have very smooth mechanics with a ton of strategy and challenge. It doesn’t punish you for failure as so many of these games often do and so the game never pumps the breaks, it’s always full-force action sequences.

The combat mechanics in this game are perfectly tuned to the theme, the flow of the game is quick and the results are always fun. Right now if you asked me what the best fantasy adventure board game I have ever played was, even after a single play I would instantly point you to Valor and Villainy. It was just perfect.

The core premise of the game is simple, one player is the main villain and for the first 5-6 rounds, they are spreading “evil” in the land in the form of monsters and curses that the player characters, aka, the heroes have to deal with. The main purpose of these early encounters is the same for both the villains and the heroes. For the villain, it’s to try to kill the adventurers so the villain can gain power in preparation for the big fight and for the players it’s to kill monsters and find loot, for the same reason.

After a few rounds, the villain arrives on the battlefield and you have a big fight for the win. There are exploration mechanics, spell mechanics, and several distinctively different characters to choose from. Everything you want out of a fantasy adventure game.

So why is it not “The Best Game of Hassela 2024”? Well, the competition was pretty stiff, more on that later.

Suffice it to say if you love fantasy adventure board games, whip out the credit card, this one is worth every penny!

Condottiere

This 1995 classic filler shows up to the big Hassela weekend event every year like clockwork and this year was no different.

This trick-taking game with an area control element is all about trying to get the most out of your hand so that you can either win the battle, or exit it with sufficient strength to win the next one. You stretch your hand but you have to be careful about overcommitting because you might find yourself winning one hand, but then not even able to functionally participate in the next.

The decisions about which fights are important are driven by the area control mechanic which defines the lands you fight over and you need to pick your battles carefully. It’s not about winning every trick you can, it’s about winning the trick that matters.

It’s a straight shooter kind of a trick-taking game, no big bells and whistles, just play your cards right and know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em and know when to run.

Fun game, I think it’s a staple game that belongs in everyone’s collection.

Factory Funner

I’m a bit hesitant on this one, which is not to say I didn’t like it, in fact, I liked it quite a bit but…. there was something off about the sequence of the play that spoiled it a bit.

In Factory Funner you get some tiles that represent machines that produce things, requiring a couple of inputs of “fluid” of different colors and producing some kind of “fluid” output of different colors. As you lay out tiles and build connections between machines you score points for your efficiency. The fewer pipes and connectors you put down the more points you earn. It is effectively a puzzle game you have to solve on the fly without knowing what all of the pieces you will need to put down will be.

It’s a bit strange, but the factory building part and the stress of trying to make things fit and figuring out the puzzle was fantastic, I loved it right out of the gate. However, the method of how you get the tiles you are actually using has this live-action “grab it quickly or miss out” part, which sort of lacked fluidity and ended up kind of roughing up an otherwise good game.

I can see what they are going for here. You have to build a factory from a limited selection of tiles and you have to decide which tile you are going to take quickly to add extra stress to that key decision. I think that is fine, I actually like it, it reminds me a bit of Galaxy Truckers. I just don’t think they got the sequence of play right.

I would have preferred a drafting mechanic, or some sort of draw 3 tiles, you have 5 seconds to pick one, or some sort of turn-based thing. Anything but the “how fast can you grab the stuff you want before the other players do” thing which works fine in Galaxy Trucker but it’s because you have tons of tiles to pick from in Galaxy Trucker. Here you have as many tiles as there are players and you end up picking your own tiles most of the time just because you at least have some semblance of control that way.

I don’t know, for me the whole “grab a tile quickly” thing spoiled a pretty fascinating puzzle game of building factories. With this mechanic, I put it in the “ok” category without it, meaning the puzzly bit alone, I thought it was very good.

Hunt For The Ring

A hidden movement game based on the classic Lord Of The Rings story where Frodo (one of the players) and his companions make their way from The Shire to Rivendell while trying to avoid the pursuit of Nazgul represented by the rest of the players.

There are not very many hidden movement games out there and even fewer good ones. I’m reminded of another game on my shelf collecting dust with a similar premise called Fury of Dracula which I used to favor but have found over the years is just a bit overcooked in certain places.

Hunt For The Ring succeeds where Fury of Dracula fails in that they really focus on the “searching for them” part of the game and don’t try to overcomplicate the “finding them part”. In Fury of Dracula when you finally locate Dracula you have to fight him using one of the most convoluted combat mechanics I have ever seen put into a game. The result is this weird anti-climatic ending to this great first part of the game where you play hide and go seek with a pointlessly complex combat mechanic to resolve the winner of the game.

Hunt For The Ring keeps that “we found him” part of the game simple using a familiar corruption mechanic from War of The Ring (a game made by the same designer). The result is very satisfying and Hunt For The Ring ended up being one of the highlights of the Hassela weekend as a result for me.

They nailed the hide-and-go-seek part of the game, they did a great job keeping the rules simple and interruption shinanigans to a minimum. It’s a straightforward game of trying to find and trap the fellowship.

I like this one, I would happily play it again. The great thing about hidden movement games like Hunt For The Ring is that they are generally very simple, Hunt For The Ring did have some complexity to it but most of it was there to serve the hide-and-go-seek game which is exactly where the focus should be in a game like this.

A+ from me on this one.

Hegemony

Last but certainly not least is Hegemony, the game I would put as the firm winner of the 4-day weekend and even a contender for my pick for game of the year.

Holy shit my mind was blown by this one. I don’t even know exactly how to put it into words, but this was without question one of the most unique games I have played in a long time. It’s fair to say the game is pretty complex, in fact, I know we did several important things incorrectly on our first playthrough, but even with that, it was abundantly clear that this game was going to be hitting the table in the future. There is a lot of juice to explore here and right now, I’m completely fascinated by the possibilities.

Essentially the game is about navigating the very real feeling issues of social economics from the perspective of one of the four asymmetrical classes (factions in the game) of society (Working Class, Middle Class, Capitalists, and The State). A concept so thematically executed in these mechanics, that it’s almost uncomfortable.

In the game each player has to navigate their social class to success by scoring victory points related to the class’s core function in society. The catch is that the requirements for success aren’t always crystal clear in the sense that there are many combined causes and effects that are not always in your control or fully predictable. The game has a lot of complex interactions in which you are trying to adjust society to serve you, while making sure your competitors are also served, because they are ultimately responsible for serving you in many regards as well (their success is often your success), even though by serving you they are also screwing you most of the time. I don’t know if that makes sense, it shouldn’t, but it’s how it works and the weirdest thing about it is that you end up feeling both the connection to the real world and a sense of compassion for the class you’re representing whether you agree with the abstracted political implications or not.

There is a kind of rhythm to the game that feels very personal in a way. You are hitched up to a mode of thinking depending on your faction and there are basic instincts and an almost belligerent-like execution of actions sometimes where you forget that you’re playing a game and your brain gets wrapped up in the abstracted politics of the fictitious world your playing in. Emotions can run quite high.

For example, the tax rate, a critical policy in the game has a wide sweeping impact on everyone, but there are both benefits and consequences for having a high or a low tax rate for everyone. Meaning it’s never exclusively good or bad. Make the tax rate too high and suddenly businesses start shutting down and creating unemployment, make the tax rate too low and the state might fail resulting in massive penalties for everyone including wage reductions, tax hikes, and potentially mass unemployment.

There are various policies like this each with their own very global impact, but managing these isn’t the only social issue to contend with. The economics of an always-growing population create all manner of issues for everyone and the working class in particular has a core reliance on everyone else’s ability to manage their faction. More to the point, if players fail to manage the society well enough the working class can create stiff consequences which include strikes and demonstrations that can cost everyone both production, money, and victory points.

As such there is a need to cooperate to a certain degree even between the most obvious competitors like the working class and the capitalists, but how do you cooperate with someone who wants the exact opposite thing as you do and neither side can win the game if the other gets what they want.

The whole game falls firmly into the “impossible to resolve” category and so the trick to the whole thing becomes one of maneuvering and clever and well-timed strategic moves in an attempt to simply out-pace everyone else on the victory point track as society is catapulted towards inevitable disaster. Failure in a word is imminent, but from the ashes, one of these classes will emerge to claim victory.

A big part of the game that sort of “breaks the rules” is in the action cards each player has, which are also asymmetrical decks unique for each class. These cards allow you to do things the basic actions don’t and it’s in the smart use of these cards that most players will find their victory. As a general rule, each time you are forced to take a basic action instead of leveraging the effects of a card, it is a step towards defeat as it’s only through the use of these cards you can get ahead. Basic actions are a recovery or corrective measure, not a plan. Playing these cards however, is tricky because you have to create just the right conditions in most cases to really get the most out of them. If you are constantly forced to take corrective measures by discarding cards for basic actions rather than focusing on the execution of a plan that involves the effects of your cards, your chances of success dwindle in the very esoteric and hard-to-see math behind how victory point acquisition works.

There is a natural rhythm to the game that creates inevitable hostility. Basically in a status-quo environment in which everyone cooperates and the game simply plays out at a “medium” give and take, the state is the automatic winner, this is by design as the state essentially wants to keep everyone at an even keel. No one can keep up on points with the state if they are simply collecting medium salaries, paying medium prices for goods, at a medium tax rate with the population growing at a medium level. For each class, there has to be some major advantage in the policies in their favor for them to get an edge in the victory point acrobatics.

Each class has its Achilles heel sort of speak, a single policy that when it’s in their favor to an extreme will guarantee that they will continually outscore everyone else during the scoring round. Manipulating circumstances to get that in place is difficult, usually unlikely as long as all the players are aware of the impact, but inevitably there are short-term gains to be had sometimes by siding with someone to give them what they want.

For example, having a low tax rate can help the working class to expand a little quicker and have some reserve cash so that they can react a little better to a constantly changing game state, but low tax causes problems for the state and the reserves of affordable resources dries up opening an opportunity for the capitalist to capitalize on a starving market. The result is a working class that goes plus-minus, a failed state while the capitalist and middle class score obscene amounts of points.

Often you have to make unfavorable decisions to keep a particular class from failing outright because each class has a failsafe response that screws everyone when they are pushed too hard. The working class can demonstrate and protest shutting down production, the state can fail and do a hard reset causing high taxation and the capitalists and middle class can sell off companies and cut deeply into everyone’s bottom line sending them to the unemployment line. The results are always pretty devastating to everyone when any class fails to remain stable and most often the person least affected is the person’s faction that failed, which is key to the balance of the game. It forces others to worry about your success to some extent. You don’t want to be too helpful, but you also don’t want to outright crush anyone either.

There is so much more to say about this game and its many nuances if you can imagine that all the above is from a single play of the game.

If there is a negative to Hegemony, it’s that the rules are quite intricate and it’s very easy to get them wrong and when you do, even if it’s just a small rule, it has a huge impact. For example in our first play-through, we did the check IMF test after paying taxes, but you actually do the IMF check first and the taxes second. This completely changes the game, yet there is only one line in the entire rulebook that mentions it despite it being a very critical rule. The rulebook however is well written and the cheat sheets that come with the game are very helpful, so once you learn to play the game properly, that initial difficulty of the game which coincidently adds a lot to the length, goes away. Our first game took the better part of 7 hours, but I’m 100% certain we will cut that time in half quite easily for our next playthrough.

Hands one of the best games I have played this year!

Conclusion

All I can ever say about our Hassela weekends each year is that it’s the gaming highlight of the year for me. A fantastic weekend of pure and uninterrupted fun time in the company of the best group of guys I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. It is pure bliss!

Every year I hope that when I return from the weekend I have made a new discovery and most years that ends up being true. This year Hegemony blew the doors off, but I think a big nod of approval has to go out to both Hunt For The Ring and Valor and Villany, two absolute gems.

Can’t wait for next year!

Best of List

Top 5 Boardgames that were almost great, but had a flaw that ruined them

I have not been writing enough as of late for this blog, but my life is busy, and writing is a hobby not a job so I often have to take breaks. One type of article that is usually easy and fast for me to write is a top X list, so today that is what we are going to try to achieve.

This might be a wonky list but I do find that many games out there look amazing, have a cool franchise behind them or just seem like they will be great and end up letting me down. It’s how and why they end up on my shelf and on this list. Today we pick out 5 and talk about them. Here we go!

5. Crusader Kings by Free League Publishing

Crusader Kings the PC game is one of my all-time favorite strategy games, I have played it for more hours and years than I care to admit.

A big part of the joy of Crusader Kings is that you essentially re-write history from the perspective of a single historical person, influencing people and nations around them. You create a legacy over time (a family dynasty) and you try to keep that legacy alive and thriving through your blood relatives, offspring, and noble claims. It’s a lot of fun.

When Crusader Kings the board game was announced, I didn’t hesitate even for a second, it was on my shelf and the table at the first opportunity.

From the reading of the rules, the aesthetic, and the very clear attempt at replicating the PC game experience, Crusader Kings the board game had everything going for it and it seemed like it was going to make a nice smooth tabletop transition.

Unfortunately for all of its mechanics that do replicate the feel of the PC game and capture that experience, the one thing that didn’t transition particularly well and ultimately caused this one to flop is the overindulgence in randomness.

One of the key mechanics of this game was random draws from a bag to resolve conflicts between players or between player and game, but unfortunately, the impact of this one mechanic simply had too much impact on the game, so much so that it overwhelmed any aspect of a strategy. Good consecutive draws from this bag that was used for resolving various conflicts could and often did result in such a huge impact on the outcome of the game that in the end, that is all the game is. Draw tokens from the bag, do it well, you will win, do it poorly and you will lose.

It’s really sad because a lot of the mechanics in the game are well thought out, but this random token draw resolution system just breaks it.

For such an expensive game, I honestly can’t recommend it, but it was quite ok the first couple of plays as it takes time for people to notice the flaw, but once everyone does, it’s a bit like a movie trailer that spoils the plot of the movie. At that point, there is no longer any reason to see the movie, other than just to go through the motions and that is exactly how Crusader Kings feels after a couple of plays.

4. Archipelago by Ludically

Archipelago is a game with a questionable theme, colonization, which rubs some people the wrong way. To me, it’s history, and I’m not phased by the fact that the history of mankind is filled with ugliness. I like playing games with a good historical theme and when that is mixed with dynamic world or engine building mechanics, I’m always ready to try it.

Archipelago promised to be a kind of civilization builder with exploration mechanics built around a dynamically constructed hexagon game board. It had all sorts of clever mechanics, a kind of mixture of Euro mechanics with resource management, and some cool development elements.

All together the game played quite well and although I will point out that some of the art was unnecessarily extra racist which did not sit well with me, the core flaw of the game was the hidden victory conditions.

All victory conditions are hidden, you don’t know how to win the game or what to focus on. You find out at the end of the game what the victory conditions are and how you faired. As the victory conditions could be quite varied and there can be odd mixtures of things that matter at the end of the game, who won was completely random.

It’s about the most nonsensical way of handling victory conditions I have ever seen in any game, it felt a bit like playing chess except that if you get checkmated, there is a 50% chance that you win the game and a 50% chance that you will lose.

It completely ruins this game and unfortunately, this victory conditions mechanic is buried into the core game so deeply that there is no good way to house rule or alter it without fundamentally changing how the game is played.

I hope that someday someone with some sensitivity training and some common sense game design experience makes a 2nd edition of Archipelago because I think there is a lot of potential in this one, but as it is, this is a very hard pass.

3. Exodus Proxima Centauri by NSKN Games

Proxima Centauri is marketed as “Twilight Imperium Light”, a promise many games make but few deliver. Of all the ones I have tried, only Eclipse The 2nd Dawn for the Galaxy and Proxima Centauri come close.

Unfortunately, where Eclipse succeeds, Proxima Centauri fails pretty hard in my opinion.

I will make the assumption that you know what Twilight Imperium is, if not, the basics are this. It’s a space civilization builder that is driven by classic 4x gameplay ala classic Master of Orion in which players are a space-faring civilization fighting for control of the galaxy. It’s a simple enough concept but the one aspect of this genre of gaming is that in principle, it’s driven by politics, negotiations, trade deals, and deception. In a way these games are two games in one, the one taking place on the table and the one taking place in everyone’s head. These are games where an action you take can be seen as aggressive, a pre-emptive strike, or even a prelude to war, and as such players often act in character and respond in ways that aren’t necessarily strategic, but personal within the context of the game’s story that ultimately becomes a sort of made up history between players.

It’s part of the fun of these games and really at the core of why the fan base loves them.

Games that claim to be like “Twilight Imperium”, which by all accounts is considered the premiere and undisputed king of this genre of games are making a pretty bold claim and have a lot to live up to.

The issue with Exodus is that while it has all the troupes of the genre you would expect, in effect that core 4x gameplay, the game gives players no good reason to interact in that all-important diplomatic/negotiation-social interaction space. In essence, you just play the mechanics like you would any Euro game. Sure what people do affects you, but you don’t have enough take-that mechanics or reactions you could take to give the game that diplomatic and political edge or fear of retaliation or consequences to people’s actions created by other players for which Twilight Imperium is famous for.

Additionally, there are some quirky and very intensive shuffling of tokens that just adds to the administrative end of the game, but adds virtually nothing strategically. It’s one of those games in which there are some great ideas but none of the mechanics are all that refined.

What is worse is that it’s only marginally shorter than Twilight Imperium, which is important because one of the only reasons anyone ever really looks for alternatives to Twilight Imperium is game length. TI4, for example, takes 6 to 8 hours to play and one of the core reasons why often Eclipse is recommended is that it can be played in half that time with much of that Twilight Imperium core 4x gameplay intact. Exodus can’t even claim that as the game takes a minimum of 5 to 6 hours to complete and commonly exceeds that time.

In the end, it just doesn’t make the cut as a 4x game. I think it’s an ok game, I’m not suggesting it’s bad but if you are looking to get into the 4x space civilization-building games, Twilight Imperium and Eclipse are superior in every category so I’m not sure why you would pick this one over those two fantastic options.

2. Kemet by Matagot

Kemet is, or at least, was kind of a moderately famous game mainly because they had Dice Tower that gave it a lot of free advertisement. I would argue, in its own way it’s a cool, very fair war game built around mythology which I think is a great theme for a war game.

In Kemet which is a kind of worker placement war game, players essentially build up armies that include mythical monsters and fight each other for control of the map and ultimately victory points. One of the key mechanics is making “advancement” purchases that give you various benefits. Each of these advancements has a color associated with it and a kind of general theme to that color.

The nice thing is that it’s not a dice chucker so there is a cool card mechanic to resolving battles, so all and all it’s very tactical and strategic. It is great, except for one flaw which once you discover it, the game is completely ruined.

Spoiler alert, but the white advancement is at least 3 to 1 more powerful than the advancement of other colors. Buy those and you auto-win. If everyone is aware of this, the game is a race to buy up as many white advancements as possible, it is a mathematically impossible strategy to defeat. In fact, if everyone is aware of this flaw in the game, the game is decided by turn order and nothing else.

This broken mechanic ruins the game once discovered, its a real bummer.

1. Western Empires (Eastern Empires) by 999 Games

I’m going to make this short and sweet because I think Western and Easter Empires, also known together as Mega Civilization, also known as Advanced Civilization, also known as Civilization is one of the all-time classic “BIG” strategic civilization building games out there. It’s not just a game, but a staple of gaming history and Western and Eastern Empires are the modern remakes that only make minor adjustments to the original with nicer art and components, maintaining its core, classic formula.

It’s not just a game, it’s an experience, but it does have one huge fucking flaw (pardon my French but I want to scream it) and that is that the game has player elimination.

This game was originally designed in the early 80’s and here we are in 2024 and this core, fundamental and game-breaking flaw that will keep this off your table is still built into the game. In fact, Western and Eastern Empires lean into this and have created an official rule on how to “give up and go home” if you’re doing badly in the game.

The issue is that the game can and does take about 9-12 hours to play, maybe even longer if you combine both games into a Mega civilization for up to 18 players. It’s a major event game which is fine, an event game is an event game, it takes a long time to play because that’s what events are. That is not a flaw, but if 4 hours into the event you can be put in a position where you are asked to leave… hey thanks for coming, go home! Fuck that….

To me that is just unacceptable, I would never invite people to my house to play an all-day event game and then halfway through it eliminates them from the event because they sucked too much at it. It’s no problem that there are winners and losers, but to get eliminated from play, I can’t get over it.

I can understand that in the 80’s board game design theory was in its infancy but what a missed opportunity for 999 games to correct what is undoubtedly the most destructive and game-breaking part of the game. I own Western Empires but I know that I will never put it on the table, not as long as this flaw exists. It’s crazy but it’s quite literally a game mechanic that is extremely toxic and rude to the players, aka, the guests at your house that came over to have fun.

It is the unquestionable king of stupid shit ever put in a game, I can’t believe no one has corrected it over the last nearly 40 years of its existence.

Best of List, Board Game Reviews

Top 10 Gaming Experiences Of 2023

2024 was a great year for gaming for me, but as I started this list originally set to be the best games fo 2023 I realized that a lot of the games that I played weren’t technically games released in 2023. Hence, this year, the list is more about my top 10 gaming experiences rather than the top 10 games of 2023.

I did however create a small section at the end of the article talking about some 2023 releases that I thought where worthy of note.

Ok enough foreplay, let’s get into it!

10. Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy

I picked up the 2nd edition of Eclipse on a whim, not so much because I felt the 1st edition was so great, quite to the contrary, but because there was so much positive word on this follow-up that I had to try it.

I’m glad I did, 2nd edition Eclipse is a great game, a vast improvement over 1st edition and it hits a sweet spot in the area of science-fiction-based galactic civilization games with an epic feel.

I think to understand what I mean about sweet spot you have to understand that I love my Twilight Imperium when it comes to this genre, it’s my go-to game for science-fiction civilization-building games. This comes with a BIG but, as it is a six to eight-hour game that is pretty difficult to get to the table with a structure that doesn’t exactly speak to my and many other gaming crews universally. In fact in my group we so very rarely play Twilight Imperium at this point, it’s collecting a lot of dust, to such a degree that were it not among my favorite board games of all time I might consider cutting it from my collection.

Twilight Imperium 4th edition without any question in my mind is a much better game than Eclipse, but it’s such a massive all-day event that it is difficult to get to the table. Case in point, it was not played in 2023 at all!

Eclipse 2nd edition on the other hand hits a lot of the same highlights as a game for me but it does it in under 4 hours, or less even if you have a group that knows the rules well.

More than that it’s a game that gets right to the meat of the action from turn 1, there isn’t a whole lot of posturing and political pre-gaming in the game like there is in Twilight Imperium, which means it’s a lot more of a game than an experience. TI4 is very much an event-focused gaming experience but Eclipse manages to be a board game you really can just pull out and play like any other. This puts it in a unique position in my collection.

I still don’t think it’s anywhere close to as good a game as Twilight Imperium is, to me TI4 remains the king of science-fiction-based galactic conquests and civilization-building games, but Eclipse is much easier to get to the table and it is a very fun gaming experience.

For fans of the genre, I think this discussion is well-known and common. Suffice it to say if you’re a fan of Civ-Builders, this is one of the best ones around as it finds that all-important middle ground that allows it to hit the table without a lot of fuss.

9. Viticulture

Strangely enough, this game was on my shelf in shrink wrap for the better part of 3 years before I got it to the table. This year I finally managed to pull it out, learn how to play and get it to the table.

I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. This is a very solid worker placement game with a lot of variation both in strategy (ways to win) and calculation of moves (planning ahead). The game rules were really clear so even when learning to play on the first pass, you are immediately deep-diving into the possibilities, there was no major learning curve. Almost as if all previous experiences with other worker placement games apply and you’re just playing kind of a different take on the same core principles common in all of these types of games.

That said, it wasn’t boring. There are a lot of really clever combinations, it was a very tight game rather than your typical super point structure where one guy has 200 VP’s at the end of the game and another 350. Everyone in our games was in the running with the winner edging out by 2-3 points typically. The game is available on boardgamearena.com which is a great bonus.

Very competitive and interesting game, didn’t overstay its welcome, in fact, it felt kind of short which adds to the pressure of scoring points as soon as possible as much as possible as you could as you can see way in advance that the game would end in a few turns.

Just a good solid, worker placement game well worth getting with plenty of replayability. Great stuff, highly recommended.

8. Sekigahara: The Unification Of Japan

This one was on my must-try list for a very long time, several years at least. I had heard so many good things about it and it checks all my boxes as I love anything based on Medieval Japan, I love war games, I love two-player games, I love card-driven games and I have for so long wanted to try a block game. I was very excited when the game was finally reprinted and became available and snagged it up.

Sekigahara is a part strategy but mostly a tactical game about positioning and outthinking your opponent with a lot of timing-based master planning built into it. It isn’t just about getting your armies in place, but it’s about making sure you have the right cards, at the right time for the right battle.

It’s one of those games where you need to have a plan for the hand of cards you are dealt and the right strategy for the unit position. It’s not enough to have one or the other, this game is all about timing things perfectly.

The game moves at a neck-breaking pace, which is awesome for a war game as you can sit down and play two or three matches back to back. I would say each game lasts at the most two hours and if you have two players that know the rules, you can finish a match in under an hour.

It has a static start, but the dynamics of the game create a lot of variability as so much of the game is focused on the cards in your hand. There is a kind of veteran learning element to the game, if you know the deck and you know the map you are going to have a big advantage over a novice but by the same token, the learning curve is quite short so it doesn’t take long for you to get to a point where you are dissecting the games core properties.

I would not recommend this game to all gamers universally, I think it’s important that you enjoy competitive war games and have a healthy love for card games, as this game does not apologize for being kind of a straight-to-it card-based war game. It’s that, if that is not your thing, this game does not offer or cater to other aspects of board gaming, if it is, this game is right up your alley.

Definitely one of my favorite new additions to my collection in 2023.

7. Vampire: Prince Of The City

This is a bit of a strange one, as it is a game released back in 2006 and it was a completely random unprompted purchase by a member of my gaming crew which made its debut at our yearly big board gaming weekend.

My gaming crew loves all things Vampire The Masquerade, originally a role-playing game made by a company back in the 90’s called White Wolf. The world of darkness is the setting in which Vampires live and these days there are quite a few new games that have come out for this universe including Vampire: The Masquerade Heritage which came out in 2020, Vampire: The Masquerade Chapters (2023) and Vampire: The Masquerade – Vendetta (2020) just to name a few. All great, modern games, but Vampire: Prince of the City is an older model.

Vampire Vendetta, another game in the world of darkness is a much faster and more mechanically driven take on a similar concept. To date, this remains one of my favorite Vampire The Masquerade-based games.

Vampire: Prince Of The City is a game about controlling a modern-day city from behind the scenes through the manipulation of politics and economics. Vampires don’t play by the rules of course, they indoctrinate their pawns using supernatural methods.

In the game you represent an elder vampire that uses influence to take control of areas on a map and the only other competitors are other elder vampires (other players). Players collect “assets” that help them to do this more efficiently of course, which can range from collecting people, equipment or unique strategy cards.

The game is quite long and has quite a bit of diplomacy between players in which they plot against each other, sometimes working together and sometimes betraying each other. The goal of the game is to come out on top, but the game is structured in a way where if two players decide to gang up on you, things are going to become difficult if not impossible. The driving force is of course that when two players work together, often one of them comes out of it better than the other, leading to the inevitable betrayal and restructuring of alliances.

These politics which remind me a lot of the classic game of Diplomacy, are really what pushes the game forward far more than actual mechanical actions players take which is a style of play that is really right in my gaming crews wheelhouse.

The point is that this is not a game you win on mechanics, it’s a game you win through political and diplomatic manipulation between the players, in a lot of ways, its a game of psychology.

This is a very long game and this is probably the only black mark against it and notably one of the key complaints from most reviewers. Its an event-style game but I would say if you are into games that cause heated debates and player-to-player diplomacy, this one brings that sort of playstyle to the table in spades.

Fantastic game in my humble opinion, with a great theme, but not for the faint of heart. This is a bit of a pig that is going to take some time to get done, but so well worth it in my opinion. Exactly the sort of vampire-focused experience that represents the world of darkness setting on which it’s based.

6. Spirit Island

I say this all the time, I’m not a huge fan of cooperative games typically, except when I am and then I love them. A great example is Lord of the Rings LCG, it’s one of my most played and beloved games that I have collected like a total fanatic.

Spirit Island is warming up to be another exception for me. I have only played a couple of times, but this game is just so well designed, so tight, so difficult, and handles the cooperative element so well.

My biggest problem with cooperative games is that when I play, I often feel like I don’t need the other players to win and/or I need the players to do very specific things under my instruction in order to win, so when they take unoptimized actions that cause us to lose (even when I know better) it annoys me. This covers most cooperative games and it’s why generally, I do not enjoy them.

Spirit Island is different because it is far too complex and has far too many moving parts, not to mention unknowns like other player’s cards to a point where micro-managing each other as players is impossible. You just have to rely on each player to handle their own business and leverage their own strategy and ask for help when they need it.

This means that each player has to create and execute their own approach to the game which is supported by the fact that each spirit in the game is asymmetrical. Everyone must be generally aware of high-level events and be ready to assist others who run into trouble why dealing with the problems on their side of the board.

This setup is quite fantastic in particular in the scope of the game’s very high level of difficulty and increably diverse dynamics. There is so much going on in this game, so many different strategies thanks in large part to the huge diversity of “spirits” players can select. Each spirit has its play style, its special powers and power cards.

It’s a really deep and very long game, a gamer’s game essentially, definitely not for the dabbler. There is a big learning curve both to learn how to play and how to play well. There is also a lot of levels of difficulty so you’re never going to find a way to “beat” the game, its replayability is effectively unlimited.

Fantastic game in my book, definitely deserving of all the awards and praise it has received over the last couple of years since its release. Highly recommended, but only for the truly fanatically hardcore and highly dedicated gamers, this is not something you pull out on family board game night.

5. Lord Of The Rings LCG

My all-time favorite solo and cooperative game.

Like almost every year since I started collecting, Lord of the Rings the LCG has been a central part of my weekly gaming routine. It’s a rare week that I don’t pick up a game or two of LotR LCG, it has been and continues to be one of my favorite games to pull out.

Now I normally play this cooperative game solo, but this year I managed to get a few multiplayer games going and like me, my gaming crew enjoys this one as well. Of course, the big fun of this game is getting super into it, building your own decks, creating your own solutions to the countless quests that have been released for this game as well as doing the big campaign. Not everyone gets into the game on that level and frankly, as a dabble it’s okay, but this is a game for fanatics who are ready to do serious deck building and that means collecting. Still, it’s a lot of fun to play on any level and pretty easy to do as this game has a pretty low learning curve.

I have talked about this game so many times on this site, I don’t see any reason to say more, just have a browse, there are plenty of articles about this one. I love it and true love lasts forever!

4. Caesar: Rome vs. Gaul

The card-driven influence control genre which at this point has become quite broad is one of my favorite in board gaming. This includes games like Washingtons War, Twilight Struggle and Imperial Struggle just to name a few.

I have introduced this particular one to several people this year, members of my gaming crew as well as my brother-in-law who is a bit of a board gaming dabbler.

Each time this one comes out, it gets solid reviews across the board from everyone which is more than I can say for all other influence control games that tend to be a bit more niche. Not to say that this is the best of the bunch, in my opinion, it’s not, that honor falls to Imperial Struggle. What I find to be the core reason this one tends to do better is that in Rome vs. Gaul thanks to its dichotomous sides, one being (Rome) far more difficult to play and succeed at and one (Gaul) being much simpler, it works great for introductions.

The end result is that the first-time experience is fun for both players (experienced and novice) and creates a great competitive game. This tends not to be true about most influence control games that have many specialized strategies. Typically when teaching someone something like Twilight Struggle, as an experienced player you are going to crush your opponent the first 5-10 games before they catch on.

That however I don’t think is the only thing that separates Rome Vs. Gaul. I think it has a cool historical theme, looks amazing on the table and has very clear winning conditions that are easy to grasp without a heavy chrome layer of exceptions. It’s just a very intuitive design, a great competitive take on the card-driven influence control genre.

Its main flaw is that once both players become experienced with the game you will find that winning as the Rome player becomes exceedingly difficult, there are just too many almost impossible-to-overcome Gaul strategies so the game tends to be a bit unbalanced when two players of equal skill are playing the game. I find the game needs some house rules to correct this.

That doesn’t change my opinion about it as I find most of the time when I pull it out I’m dealing with a new or less experienced player and this game is great for that purpose.

Highly recommend this one if you are a fan of CDG influence control games like Twilight Struggle and Washington’s War in particular.

3. Great Western Trail

I play a lot of Great Western Trail, mainly because it’s available on Boardgamearena.com. As of this writing, I have played 110 games with 35 victories. That is a lot of Great Western Trail and most of that I did last year which means I was averaging several games a week.

I think a big part of the reason I like Great Western Trail is that each time you play you must be adaptive. There is no winning formula, the circumstances of each game are different and what your opponents are doing matters a lot in this game which is not always, in fact, rarely the case in Euro games like this. This is a game where after 110 games, I can still get completely crushed because of circumstances and risky moves that did not pay off. It’s really what I love about the game, it remains a challenge to win no matter how much I play it.

The interaction between players in Great Western Trail is subtle but profound and I think it does a great job of being simultaneously easy to learn but deep strategically. I think its one of the most unique and intriguing Euro games that has come out this side of the decade.

It’s without a doubt my current favorite, chill back and play game and I find every time I go to boardgameareana.com for a fix, this is the one I reach for. I own the hardcopy as well and every time I pull it out with my friends or family it lands well.

Just a really good all-around board game for all occasions. It’s my go-to Euro game.

2. War Room

The truth is that my gaming group and I play War Room once per year on my birthday since I got it a few years back. It’s become something of a tradition at this point but this one never disappoints. I can remember the details of every game of War Room I have played and it’s always a great time.

This is not a particularly deep game, it is, for the most part, a bit more complex version of RISK or Axis and Allies and while I know some people take it quite seriously as a war game, for me, this is just a good time in a box. For my gaming group it’s more of a fun party game where we play war for the day, roll some dice and come up with new inside jokes that will play out for the rest of the year.

I do love War Room as a game though, I do think it’s a fun strategic puzzle and there are plenty of great/difficult decisions to make and you can in fact get pretty serious with it. Given how long and huge it is, this is not a game you just spring on a group, so I can understand why many group give it this serious treatment. This is an event where you have to arrange food, snacks, and drinks and make a whole thing out of it, because 12 hours is about the average play time. It’s essentially a kind of party war game to me.

I love it, it’s been my favorite board game of all time since I discovered it and I think that will remain to be true for a long time.

1. Empire Of The Sun

Empire of the Sun is a very complex game and is not recommended for the uninitiated.

There is no question that all my really serious and competitive gaming in 2023 was done with Empire Of The Sun. I have completely abandoned any hope of ever getting this one to the table with my local gaming group, it’s just too big of a commitment for them and it’s too niche so this year I went online to search for opponents.

I found plenty and ever since I have had several active games going online over vassal of Empire of the Sun and it has become an absolute obsession for me. This highly complex game with a massive learning curve only works when you have two players completely dedicated to not only learning how to play but enforcing those rules with impunity.

I found exactly such opponents and I have been overthinking this one for the entire year and it’s been an amazing experience.

While War Room is my favorite game of all time, Empire of the Sun is the best game design I have ever run across. Mark Herman is a genius in my book and I have said it before, but this is the Mona Lisa of his career.

In Empire of the Sun you execute World War II in the Pacific Theatre as either Japan or the Allies in extreme detail on an operational level. It boasts an intimidating 50 page rulebook with a ridiculous amount of chrome for what I can only describe to be one of the best simulations you will ever experience.

I do not recommend this to anyone except the most dedicated fan of war games. This is not something you dabble or “learn to play”, this is the equivalent of studying chess as a hobby. You will spend hundreds of hours studying every unit, every detail of the map, and every rule that governs the game and creates endless strategies for you to test. It’s exhilarating if you are into that sort of thing, it’s a complete nightmare of a board game if you are not.

I love it with a deep passion.

2023 releases worth a mention

I’m not the sort of gamer that chases the cult of the new anymore and I find that my gaming selections are more based on what I already love than chasing the dragon. That said there were a few interesting games that came out this year and I think they deserve some mentioning for better or worse.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory

This one is gaining a lot of momentum in the gaming community, slowly climbing the boardgamegeek ladder and for good reason. Without question one of the most interesting designs on an unusual subject. It’s an asymmetrical game where players work together to develop a functioning society represented by each player acting as a part of the government or social order. Based on politics and economics, this is a game about governing, a combination of cooperation and competition. It made my must-buy list in 2023.

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game

I know, we need another deckbuilding game like we need a hole in our head, but ever since Star Wars Destiny tragically ended, finding a replacement for it has been something of a desire I suppose. There are a few games actually in the works, but this one made its debut in 2023 and it certainly looks to be the frontrunner.

Great art, simple mechanics with a straight to it approach in the competitive dueling space.

Deck building games of course require the game to have longevity, which is the most difficult element to asses at the start of a games run. Star Wars Destiny for example started out on fire in terms of popularity, but petered out quite quickly and didn’t survive its adolescence. A common problem in the collectable card game space, a fate that may very well be in this games future.

That said, I’m always hopeful and this one certainly has my attention.

Board Game Reviews, Gaming Articles

Lord of the Rings: LCG revisited

Lord of the Rings the Living Card game turned 10 years old not too long ago and as part of that celebration we not only got a new revised edition of the game, but a sort of guarantee that the game will continue to remain in print.

Now so far as Living Card Games go, that makes Lord of the Ring LCG, quite unique, currently one of the oldest of its kind at the moment still in print.

As a super fan of this game with a nearly complete collection barring all the nightmare stuff in which I never found much appeal, this is kind of a big deal. I thought I would throw a few words down for those of you out there considering getting into this one, let’s call it a do’s and don’t list with some pitfalls and suggestions that I can offer.

1st Edition vs. Revised Edition

Just a quick note here because this question comes up all the time. Is there a difference between these two editions? The answer is no, they are exactly, word for word, card for card, the same game. It is just a second printing of the same game and while the core sets have different quantities of card, the Revised Core Set has been revised to have sufficient cards for 4 players, they are for all intense and purposes the same game.

As a rule, you don’t need more than 3 copies of any card as this is all that is legal to put into a deck, but of course, many players support more than their own decks, as such, it’s nice to have more copies of certain key cards. If you already have an original core set, you might still consider getting the new Revised Core Set anyway just for this reason.

Buyers Guide For Newbies

Core Set

If you are fresh and own nothing, the obvious first thing to do is to purchase a core set. Now it’s still possible to get the old core set, but I would advise against it and recommend getting the new revised core set.

The primary reason for this is that the original core set left a lot to be desired when it came to the card list. Many “staple” cards, meaning, cards you will often put into decks don’t come in sets of three in the original core set and this means when you are trying to optimize your deck you often can’t get exactly what you want.

The new revised core set sticks to the minimum 3 cards per card type and it gives you a lot of extras of the more commonly used cards like Gandalf (x8) and Dark Knowledge for example.

The revised core set also comes with the Campaign Mode cards which is the only new thing in the revised edition of the game which really enhances play. It effectively lets you run campaign mode as you do with the Saga sets, but for the core set adventures. It also has sufficient components for 4 players which might not matter to you but with the original core set you barely have enough for two players while the revised set gives you more than enough for 4 players.

In a word, it’s just a better core set. Back in the day most people resolved card shortages in the core set by buying two of them, but with this new revised core set you don’t have to do that.

Initial Expansions

I think most players want to get a good start with their collections and there is a notion that you should start at the begining with the 1st cycle but the reality is that the first 3 full cycles of this game were only so-so and in some cases actually quite bad.

This is evidenced by the fact that when FFG started with re-releases (repackaging) of the original game cycles they started with Angmar Awakened and Dream Chaser cycles. This is because the first three cycles (Shadows of Mirkwood, Dwarrowdelf & Against The Shadows) left a lot to be desired.

Older sets like Heirs of Numenor were extremely difficult to the point of not being fun, but as you become really good at the game, some of these old challenges can actually be fun to go back on. I wouldn’t discourage their collecting, but its good to know what your getting into.

So far as adventures (quests) go, Shadows of Mirkwood is without a doubt the weakest cycle in the game, rather boring to be honest and I would argue can be skipped entirely. Dwarrowdelf is just ok at best and Against The Shadows is horrifically unbalanced, hard to the point of not being fun. Now all these cycles have great player cards and that is reason enough to collect them at some point but the really good (fun) adventure sets start with the Ring Maker cycle and just get better and better with each release afterward and the player cards in the cycles that followed are also a lot more interesting, allowing for far more diverse player deck building possibilities.

I would also avoid buying under the old format (packaging). It has been rather frustrating to try to collect (and complete) each cycle buying the individual packs, in fact even today I have a couple of cycles where I’m missing a pack and can’t it track down. When I say frustrating, I mean it, it annoys me to no end.

The new format allows you to buy the player cards and adventures separately and when you do buy the adventure pack, you get the entire cycle in one go. It’s more expensive than any single pack, but altogether the price is about the same. Player & adventure expansion together is about $115, and buying the separate cycles is about $120, so same stuff, slightly cheaper and with considerably less hassle trying to collect everything.

The fact that they started the repacked cycles with Angmar Awakened and now Dream-chaser is just icing on the cake as these are the first two I would advise you to pick up either way. These adventures (quests) are both fantastic throughout, and the player cards and heroes they come with are far more diverse and interesting than anything you get prior.

Sets like Dream Chaser introduce entirely new sub-mechanics to the game that offer new challenges and call for completely unique ways to build decks. This expansion really shows off the diversity of this game and are really great investments.

I would honestly not try to go back and collect the first three cycles at all unless you can find complete sets in one go and in either case, I would not bother with the first cycle (Shadows of Mirkwood) at all. You can just skip that one, it really was not very good at all and is regarded in the community as the most skippable cycle in the collection.

The Saga Sets

After picking up the two repackaged sets that are available now, you might have your eye on the Saga set. Originally this was broken down into 6 boxes for the Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers and Return of the King story and two sets for the Hobbit.

In the repackage they are being released in 3 sets covering each book. The price and content is the same, but as of this writing Return of the King is not yet available or even announced, though you can count on it being released sometime in the future while the original releases are still quite readily available.

The Saga expansions are I think, an intrical part of the Lord of the Rings LCG experience, but I would not rush to it. It’s sort of like the end game content, which, if attempted too early, can be quite frustrating, but if done when your ready is pure magic.

The saga’s are really great, they use the campaign format which used to be unique to the Saga sets, but is now available with all of the repacked sets including the revised core sets. It allows for a sort of leveling up of characters and deck improvements as you go through and given the difficulty of the Saga sets, this is actually quite crucial to success.

While these are all fantastic sets, the difficulty of the Saga sets is quite high, in particular when trying to complete the entire Saga in campaign mode. I would only caution getting the Saga sets last simply to avoid having it and being frustrated because you don’t have the card pool needed to successfully complete them.

When I say hard, I mean, super hard. You WILL need a pretty wide collection to complete the Saga set with constant deck adjustments and frankly, without some homebrew rules adaptations I don’t think it’s very solo-able, this is definitely at least a two-player (or double-fisting – 1 player playing two hands). I would argue however this is best with 3-4 players for that epic feel.

I would consider these must have’s for your collection, they are quite fantastic and in a sense really are what the game is about. You want to do the lord of the rings core story and while all of the adventure sets have fun narratives, the nostalgic visit to the original story in card form can’t be beat.

Do’s & Don’ts

Over the years of collecting and playing this game, there are quite a few things I have learned that will do wonders for your experience and your wallet.

Do’s

Always and I mean always with the exception of the core sets, look into the 3rd party market when tracking down cycles/sets. You can find used stuff dirt cheap and often buy a complete collection of a cycle in one fell swoop which even if you have to shell out a few nickles is going to be better than fussing about trying to find a single missing pack.

More importantly, you can often find stuff not available through retail for the game as many adventure packs have been released under the “limited release” tag as part of convention events which you are definitely going to want.

Your collection will grow over time and there is quite a bit to collect, but buying this game at full retail is not only expensive but rarely an option as any given cycle is rarely ever available at the same time. In the 3rd party market its quite easy to find complete sets and in my mind this is the best way to collect.
Do’s

Do pimp out your game. There are lots of really amazing accessories for LotR LCG and they are well worth it. Most notably a good playmat and a good storage solution are quite important. I would also recommend sleeving your decks but not doing so for the rest of your collection as there is a lot of shuffling and handling of cards in this (duh) card game.

Don’ts

Don’t ever pay full retail for anything, even recently released sets. You can always find discounted stuff if your patient and it can make a huge difference. For example, the Revised core set retails at 70 bucks, but if you sniff around a bit, you can pick it up for 10-20% discount on that price. In fact, I don’t recall ever paying full price for anything for this game, you can always find discounts.

Don’ts

Don’t buy the limited edition collectors edition or the online version of this game. It’s the worst deal in Lord of the Rings and people have been trying to make it sound special and expensive, when the reality is that all you get is a shitty mat, a poorly produced MP3 soundtrack that is freely available, a crappy plastic ring, some poorly produced art prints and a two-player limited edition of the game that has less stuff in it than the core set.

This was a raw deal and mostly a money grabbed designed to promote the digital version of the game which quite literarly had absolutetly nothing to do with the paper version. These are two entirely different games, in fact the LCG has more in common with Arkham Horror LCG and Marvel Champions than it does with the digital version. Avoid it like the plague.

More to the point though is that the digital version of LotR LCG is a completely different game, than the paper version. These two games have only the name of the game in common and the entire production of the digital game is just a massive cash grab for what really is one of the shittiest CCG’s anyone ever scraped together. It’s a hard pass.

Don’t

Don’t bother with the nightmare decks. Generally speaking, they don’t really add much to the game and even if you find that you have become so good at the game that you need more challenge there are many free game variants for increased difficulty available that are far more interesting than the nightmare decks.

I’m not saying these are bad, just saying they are not worth it.

You don’t get any new content with the nightmare decks, all it is-is the same cards you already have with slightly higher stats on monsters for the most part. They are not worth the 5-7 bucks you will pay for each one.

Don’t

Don’t bother with the Starter Decks. You are eventually going to collect all of the cards anyway and for 22 bucks for 1 starter deck which is half of the cost of a repackaged expansion player box, it’s about the most expensive way to get these cards you can find. What’s worse, there are repeated cards in these and you don’t always get 3 sets of each card so you end up with an incomplete collection even if you get them all. Worst still is that you are going to collect all the sets most likely anyway so you end up with duplicates of stuff you don’t need. There are no unique cards in these sets, all cards are released in other sets.

If you are just dabbling into the LCG, this can be a great way to get some great cards right out of the gate, but if you plan to collect, this is the most expensive and inefficient way to get these cards available.

As a side note, most of these decks are actually not that great, so far as “good deck building goes” they are also pretty mediocre.

Tips & Tricks

Lord of the Rings LCG can be a pretty frustrating game, you are going to lose… a lot and this can’t really be helped, but there are a few things I always recommend to players to keep themselves engaged.

  1. Fail It Forward
    One thing I really recommend is that you try to complete each quest in a cycle 2, max 3 times and if you can’t beat it, move on to the next one. You can always go back to take a crack at it again, but playing the same adventure over and over again endlessly until you beat it will take a lot of steam out of you and you may end up giving up before continuing. There is no shame in realizing there is a quest here and there you can’t beat, these are future challenges and eventually, you will build better decks as your game improves. Don’t let yourself get stuck.

  2. Easy Mode Recommended
    I would strongly advise new players to make extensive use of easy mode when first starting out. I know that it stings but it takes a fairly long time to get good at the game and when you initially get the game (core set) you won’t have the necessary card pool to beat even the core set quests. In fact, the 3rd quest in the core set is universally considered among the hardest to beat even for veteran players with full collections.

    Easy mode turns the impossible into the possible, as you get better, again, you can always go back on any of these and take a crack at them again.

  3. Find a partner or two
    While LotR LCG is infinitely solo-able and it’s a lot of fun, it’s not balanced for solo play and generally speaking, solo play is kind of for experts as you must build very specialized decks to find any measure of success. Some get around this by playing the game two-handed (called double-fisting) but, naturally, the preference would be to have a partner.

    This game is best played with 2, 3 or 4 players. I would not recommend more than that. 4 player games can be a bit slow, I think 2-3 is the sweet spot.

    More than that though, LotR LCG has a tendency to be a very fun experience as there are so many ghastly failures and triumphant successes, it’s something to be shared in my experience.

Final Words

Lord of the Rings LCG is a great cooperative game, but it’s quite expensive to collect and the producers of the game know the pinch players feel when invested in a game and new content comes out. In the end, the instinct is to collect everything but I can assure you this is neither necessary or worth it.

One thing to keep in mind is that a typical quest (one quest) for 2-3 players is basically an entire evening of entertainment. As such if you collect say a single cycle which has 9 quests, that is enough content to fill 7-9 sessions of gaming. Point here is that you don’t need a lot to keep you going for a long time. I have collected everything released and I estimate it will take me the better part of a decade to get through it all.

You can safely skip some of the old stuff and focus on collecting the new stuff. Sure your collection won’t be complete, but the reality is that 1 good quest is worth 10 bad ones and a lot of the older stuff before the Ring Maker cycle can be safely skipped.

Of all the cycles I have played through there are three that I think stand out. The Dream Chaser, Haradrim and Angmar Awakened cycles. Since these are being re-released in the new re-packaged format there honestly is little reason to look back as it seems everything will be re-released in this new format after the Angmar Awakened cycle.

I would argue the Ring Maker cycle and perhaps some of the special release stuff like Murder At The Prancing Pony are exceptions, but I think as new players coming into the game, it’s best to simply look forward not backward.

Now whether you want to track down some of the older releases, pre-re-release is up to you, but if you are going to do it, I highly recommend pretty much everything after and including The Ring Maker cycle but cautioning that you should be ready to wait to finish collections. Very often you can get one or two things from one or another cycle, but rarely is everything available at the same time and as time passes some of this stuff is going to be harder and harder to find. You may end up not being able to finish any given of the older cycles.

There is some debate among the community whether or not Voice of Isengard is a good expansion or not, FFG seems to think its skippable given they started their re-release schedule with the Angmar cycle but personally I think this is a really good one, worth picking up.

Looking at the production schedule of FFG, there is absolutely nothing coming from the old sets, so what is out there today may be all that will ever be available. They seem to be very focused on the new stuff, which makes sense of course. They might still surprise us but I would always approach collecting with the information you have at hand.