 January 2025 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.  Ito – 5/10 Ito is a party game that was first released in Japan in 2019, but has just recently become available in English. That 2019 release date puts it the same year as Wavelength, so there must have been some parallel thought going on. The players are provided with two terms on a spectrum (e.g., Temporary & Permanent). Then each player must give a clue that fits a designated point on this spectrum. Ito uses a deck of cards numbered 1 through 100 to accomplish this, whereas Wavelength uses a large plastic contraption to allow the clue-giver to randomize the point on the spectrum. This same idea of using numbered cards was also later rather shamelessly copied by 2022’s PinPoint. The primary difference here is that rather than having two teams compete to score points by being the closest to the exact value as in Wavelength, Ito is instead fully co-operative, with all players giving their clues at the same time. The players are then tasked with arranging these clues in ascending order, sight unseen. This leads to lots of discussion, and players at this point may modify their clues. This is advisable in cases where a player feels the team has over or underestimated. When all players are satisfied with the order, the cards are revealed. If all are in the correct order, the players win. Obviously the playing time is quite brief. Scaling is something of a problem here. The more players you have, the more difficult it will be to win, even when using the option to have players give multiple clues at lower player counts. Moreover, the open-ended nature of the discussion can quickly wear thin. It’s common for players to recognize that their numbers must be close to one another, but neither player has any way to know whose is higher. Situations like this essentially come down to a coin toss with a bunch of wasted words beforehand. That said, it’s hard to completely dismiss a party game that plays in just five or ten minutes and can accommodate up to 10 participants. It’s not the kind of thing you’d ever refuse to play and you’d probably have some fun with a big group of friends if you did so. But even party gamers will probably end up craving something slightly meatier before too long.  Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth – 6/10 The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth is a reimplementation of 7 Wonders Duel, a game I found to be rather lackluster. My experience was that the randomness could be a bit overriding. And to its credit, this Lord-of-the-Rings-themed version does mitigate that to a degree. On your turn, you will draft a card from the face-up choices in the middle and immediately play it. Many of these cards simply provide a symbol, which gives a discount on future cards. Cards that have a cost to play must either have that provided by these symbols or else pay a coin for each one you don’t have. Each card that you draft will reveal the cards underneath it, some of which are facedown until revealed. This aspect is the one that creates the most feel-bad moments, as it is possible to have no choice but to reveal these, and then your opponent will get to choose the best one before you do. But as alluded to above, this version offers some mitigation of that problem in the form of fortresses. Instead of taking a card, you can pay a bunch of money (or have a bunch of symbols) to build a fortress on the board. Yes, getting fortresses and/or units into each space of the board is a victory condition. But nearly as important is that building one uses up your turn, essentially giving you a way to “pass” on taking a card that would reveal more options for your opponent. Control of the board is one way to win. But you can also win by collecting ring symbols, which race you toward the end of a progress track. The first player to get to the end will also win instantly. Finally, it is possible to win by collecting six symbols, which are granted by another type of card. These three different methods of victory play nicely against one another; you want to focus on just one, but you cannot simply ignore the others. It should be noted that my opinion on both 7 Wonders Duel and this remake is something of a minority one. A rating of a 6 is far from shameful, but both of these games rest comfortably in the Top 100 of all time on BoardGameGeek. There is a mixture of long-term strategy and opportunistic tactics present here, and usually that allows broad appeal. Certainly the theme is also popular, pasted-on though it may be. It may be one of those situations where my limited plays just haven’t allowed it to really shine. Or maybe everyone else is just incorrect.  Mind Space – 6/10 Mind Space is a flip-and-write polyomino game, which means it shares a lot of similarities with earlier games like Cartographers. Each player receives their own board, representing their brain. As a 9×9 grid, it struggles somewhat to actually look like a brain, though the pre-filled neuron spaces and medulla with rules reminders help in that regard. At any rate, this is not a thematic game. Instead of flipping one card with a polyomino shape that all players copy to their own board, there are five possible shapes. Five differently-colored dice are then rolled, with the number rolled on each matched to one of the shapes. Thus, a single shape may be able to be drawn in a different color by several players, and conversely some shapes may not be able to be drawn at all (no dice having rolled their number). Color is especially relevant since it’s never legal to draw two of the same shape next to each other (this also serves to preserve the initial shapes for certain scoring conditions). But color also dictates the method by which a tile scores. Purple and orange want to be next to each other. Green grants bonus dice and color manipulation. And five sections of the board each grant a bonus for filling them completely. There are a few drawbacks though. Mind Space does have variable goals, but these are minor compared to the locked in “personality” each color retains from game to game. This means it gets stale a bit sooner than Cartographers. Worst of all though are the components: a single set of dry erase markers for five players to share, and of which one was dead on arrival. These are an absolute necessity for the game to function, precipitating a “treat a pink dotted pattern as actually being the purple marker” solution. And how soon until the next color goes Mind Space is satisfying and fun, but flip-and-writes are a crowded field. You shouldn’t have to compromise.  Boop – 7/10 I always find it difficult to rate simple two-player abstracts, and Boop is no exception. So long as such games are not trivially solvable, there is little to complain about and little in the way of possible improvements. Yet their ubiquity imbues them with banality; twists are rare, to the extent that they are even possible. Boop rebels against this by simply being adorable. Players will take turns placing their wooden kittens onto a 6×6 grid. Placing next to another kitten will “boop” it, moving it one space away. Sometimes this will even push a kitten off the board, returning it to its owner’s supply. This can be a useful way to disrupt your opponents’ placements, but booping is mandatory and will apply to your own kittens as well. Given that the goal is to get three in a row, this can make things challenging. When you do manage to get three of your kittens in a row, they all level up into cats and are removed from the board, to be placed on future turns. Cats cannot be booped by kittens (though they can be booped by other cats). Place three of these fully-grown cats in a row and you win the game. The bottom of the box serves as an ersatz bed and the cloth board is placed atop it like a quilt. This creates an amusing mental picture when the cats get booped and fall off the bed. And the chunky wooden pieces are durable and nicely painted. The game would not be nearly as appealing with more abstracted components. Boop fits comfortably alongside games like Blokus Duo in providing a speedy yet satisfying two-player experience.  Shards of Infinity – 7/10 It didn’t take long after Dominion took the gaming world by storm for someone to say “what if this, but combat?” Ascension, Nightfall, Star Realms, and more answered the call. Shards of Infinity falls right into that same spirit, albeit a full decade after Dominion created the genre. So what big innovations are here? Well, none really, but the formula still generates plenty of tactical fun. You will draw a hand of cards from your personal deck, then use those cards to buy new cards. Some cards will remain in play and have permanent or once-per-turn effects. Some cards instead of providing this currency will attack your opponent’s life total instead. Reduce it to zero to win. All cards are purchased from a random central row which refills as purchases are made. There are no “basic” cards that are always available, which means a row of expensive cards early can stall the progression of the game a bit. Once per turn, you can also pay a money to boost your “mastery”. Some cards will grant free mastery boosts as well. This has no inherent effect, but many cards get more powerful the higher your mastery gets. This provides an additional path to deck improvement, aside from the typical “trash the weak cards” approach. Also, if you max out your mastery, one of your starting cards now instantly wins you the game, regardless of your life totals. So this is another axis to consider. Shards of Infinity works best as a 2-player game due to pacing, though the multiplayer variants acquit themselves well enough if you don’t mind it overstaying its welcome a bit. It’s valid to say this isn’t really a game that offers enough to justify its existence, yet the whole genre is so much fun that I really can’t judge it too harshly. If you are not a deckbuilding fan, this is an easy and obvious pass. But if, like me, you can’t get enough deckbuilders, you’ll probably get some enjoyment out of this one too.  The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game – 8/10 Co-operative trick-taking first came to prominence with The Crew, a very fine game. Since then, others like Inside Job have put their own spins on it. This game gets back to its roots though, being very close in gameplay to The Crew, but instead having a Lord of the Rings theme. The rules are a standard trick-taking game, but the lowest card of one suit, the 1 of Rings, represents The One Ring, and can optionally be a trump card. A cute thematic touch. Each player will also receive a character before each hand that specifies their victory conditions (e.g., win exactly 1 or 2 tricks). All players must work together, for if any player fails their goal, the whole scenario is failed and the hand must be replayed. The game proceeds through a couple dozen scenarios, each with increasing difficulty, and each reflecting story beats from the book. For example, in one scenario, you will have to escape from Old Man Willow, represented by a separate deck of cards that makes it harder to win tricks. Naturally, being quite derivative of The Crew, the gameplay is rock-solid. But the thematic flourishes in the scenarios and characters really lend a story-driven richness to those familiar with the book. The beautiful artwork helps as well. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is easy to learn and a fun challenge to master, though certainly not an essential experience.  A Message from the Stars – 8/10 A Message from the Stars is a co-operative deduction game that is primarily word-based, but also integrates a bit of arithmetic. One player will take on the role of the Alien, who knows the six hidden letters. The other players are a team of scientists trying to deduce what the six letters are. Three of the random letters will be assigned a value of 1 point. Two of the random letters will be assigned a value of “times 2”. And the final letter will be assigned a value of “negative”. Each time a word is guessed, the Alien player will give it a total score according to the method above. From that total score, the Scientist players should be able to eliminate or finalize some letters. The Alien will also give the players words along with their score. This is quite powerful, as it can correct false assumptions the players have made or even just remove a lot of possibilities with a single strong clue. Each team will get to write four words, and then the Scientists need to make their final letter guesses. But there is another twist that really elevates the game. Each team also has three secret words that the other team will need to guess from a grid of 18 possibilities. The only way to give hints about these words is by giving clue words that somehow relate to those secret words. So every clue for both teams is a balance between finding a word with just the right letters and a word that actually spells something useful when it comes to figuring out the secret words. A Message from the Stars is standing on the shoulders of giants, but a hybrid of Hooky and Codenames that also throws in a bit of math for good measure is a really excellent formula. It’s not quite as high-pressure and thinky as either of those two, but that fact merely contributes to its accessible nature.  A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  Nexus Ops – 10/10 In the mid-2000’s, Hasbro (who was buying just about every board game company in existence at the time) decided to purchase Avalon Hill, a classic war game and board game company that had fallen on hard times. This allowed them to reprint some classic games under this new banner (“New” Avalon Hill) such as Acquire and Cosmic Encounter. But they also wanted to develop new games for the brand. The logical thing was to assign this task to their Wizards of the Coast division, who was responsible for Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, among other smaller “hobbyist” games. The people from the Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers divisions (yes, they owned these as well) didn’t really fit the bill. This resulted in several people who were barely known as game designers, but had spent years working on the development of Magic: The Gathering getting to try their hand at independent game design. The results ran the gamut, but there were two strong standouts: Henry Stern with Vegas Showdown and Charlie Catino with Nexus Ops. Even today, 15 years on, no other dudes-on-a-map game has quite found that perfect balance of deeply satisfying and quick-playing the way Nexus Ops did. It is a great mix of a “killin’ stuff” game and a resource management game. The combat system is lifted from Axis & Allies, but instead of taking 3-4 hours, Nexus Ops is usually a 60 minute affair. Each player takes on the role of a corporation trying to exploit a newly discovered alien planet for rubium, the currency of the game. This currency will be used to purchase units who range in their ability to mine rubium, fight enemies, and explore to find bonuses. Nexus Ops is too fast and brutal to really have alliances form, but it’s still incredibly interactive. Players are incentivized to start battles for all kinds of reasons that go beyond just seizing territories. Games are won by the first to 12 points, and point will be scored for each battle you win as well as other specific secret goals. It’s quite possible to have a turn where you score 6 or even more points, which means you always have to watch what other players are doing. This game just makes me happy. The energize and secret mission cards create a variety of strategies. Its theme is excellent and its components are perfect for it. And it is short enough to make the table pretty often. Simple enough rules to teach anyone. And they will immediately fall in love with it, since it’s white hot from the first time you play. This game rocks so hard. |
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