April 2026
Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.
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Barcelona – 7/10
ÂBarcelona is the third Dani Garcia game I’ve played. My first was Arborea, which is well-loved by many, but fell a bit flat for me. I later played Windmill Valley and found it much more to my liking. Barcelona falls somewhere in the middle, being good, but not great. It’s worth noting, however, that my preferential ranking of these games is also inversely proportional to their complexity weight, which is perhaps not a coincidence.
The goal of Barcelona is to score the most points by constructing buildings in the titular city. On your turn, you will choose an intersection and place a stack of two citizens there. This will enable you to take at least two actions, one based on the row and one based on the column. This creates interesting tactical tension, as if the intersection you’d prefer is already occupied, you’ll have to decide whether to prioritize the row or column action as you choose a different spot.
After this, if there are two or more citizens at different intersections of the same city block, and no building adjacent to them, you’ll put one there and score points for it. This also removes the citizens used in its construction, revealing the second citizen in the stack. Thus, after two neighboring buildings are constructed, that prime intersection you wanted will be freed up again.
The actions themselves are varied, but many revolve around collecting and spending resources or moving your bus throughout the city as another means of scoring points. There are some shared goals being competed over which can provide some direction, but largely the game is about adapting your overall strategy to chaos generated by the other players.
There are echoes here of a game I played last month, Minos. Both games are relatively heavy euros with a simple turn structure that nevertheless leads to very complex and lengthy individual turns. And for that reason, both can really overstay their welcomes at maximum player count and/or with indecisive players. Barcelona’s main diversifier is a focus on constructing and moving around the city, a puzzle I personally found slightly less appealing than the unique dice mechanic offered by Minos. Still, there isn’t much here to complain about. A solid if slightly unexciting effort.ÂÂ
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Kavango – 8/10
ÂIf you’re tired of card-tableau engine-building games themed around wildlife, you may want to skip on by this one. But for me, Kavango perfectly captures a lot of what I love about this genre. Playing in just about an hour, players will compete to build the best African nature reserve through synergistic card drafting and sequencing. It’s like if Wingspan and 7 Wonders had a (bush) baby.
Each player starts with just a couple basic habitats (e.g., grassland and water). You could start drafting bottom-of-the-food chain cards to live there, or you could instead add more habitats. You might even consider drafting a card higher up on the food chain that doesn’t quite have a place to live yet. You can save a few cards like this to be played later. Most of the cards you take will have both requirements for playing them as well as provide prerequisites for playing cards higher up the chain.
It might seem at first like the sequencing of these plays is obvious, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Firstly, because the pick-one-and-pass nature of the draft means you won’t always acquire cards in the ideal order. But secondly, you also have to consider the shared competitive goals in each round. It you are going to get bonus points for being the first to have three grassland habitats, should you prioritize that over actually playing animals that need those grasslands? It’s a difficult decision.
These goal cards are tailored to each round of drafting as are the drafted cards themselves. Both the goals and animals that appear in the final round would be impossible to use in the first round, but by that time you have (hopefully) built up enough to make it plausible.
As a final layer, you’ll need to manage your money. Money can be used in a few ways, but the primary one is in building up your habitat protection, poaching protection, and climate protection. Certain animals need certain levels of each of these, with late-game higher-point animals needing the most. Your habitat and poaching protection are your own, but the climate protection threshold is shared by all players, creating another layer of interaction. Maybe everyone else will spend their money on climate and you can just ignore it? Or maybe you’ll need to boost it to play a powerful card, only to inadvertently help your opponent.
Kavango is almost purely tactical. Adapting to the cards you get and the decisions of other players is key. And yet, this interaction rarely feels cutthroat; each player just administers their own board. There is nothing especially innovative here, but it comes together very well. The pacing and player control are perfectly executed. This is the kind of game I really love, but I can understand why someone looking for complex long-term strategy might not.
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A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.
ÂReturn to Dark Tower – 9/10
ÂReturn to Dark Tower is a reimagining of the 80’s classic Dark Tower. The enormous plastic fortress looming over the board is the centerpiece of the board and the central hook of the game. It functions as a dice tower of sorts, dispensing plastic skulls which are dropped down the top like a morbid game of Kerplunk. But it’s also connected via Bluetooth to a mobile app, which can trigger events, light up various sections, and even rotate the interior tower floors, often spewing out even more skulls.
It’s undoubtedly gimmicky, but the gimmick is so well-executed and integrated into the gameplay that it feels unironically serious. You will learn to fear its whimsy. Whether it’s the mechanical randomness of dice rolls and card draws, the digital randomness of negative events and monster attacks, or the physical analog randomness of skulls jostling themselves free of the tower to overtake your kingdom, there are constant groans and laughs as the players work together to overcome these challenges. Which is not to say that the players have no control. On the contrary, I was shocked by just how much teamwork and planning went into each turn. It really has the feel of a strategic co-op game.
Return to Dark Tower is enormous, expensive, innovative, surprising, futuristic, and most of all, fun. In the age of Kickstarter, this game probably would have sold just as well if the game was terrible, simply due to the wow factor. Give credit to the design team (led by the inimitable Rob Daviau) for putting the effort in to making this one of the best co-ops of all time. Halfway through our first game, one of the players exclaimed “Why would we ever play anything else now that this game exists?” If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is. |
