I’d love to say something here that’s smart, witty, thought-provoking and insightful, but all I’ve got is that I applaud people who throw over-the-top money at under-developed Kickstarter games. The percentage of quality games may be dropping but, the bigger the industry, the more participants we attract, then the higher the number of quality games we see. The fun is in that everyone’s definition of quality is different. Then it’s just a matter of listening out for yours. Here’s one …

Celebrated Australian musical comedian Tim Minchin

DARWIN’S JOURNEY (2023): Rank 387, Rating 8.2 – Luciani / Mangone

Heavy worker-placement Euro but what I love is the direction it gives each player to avoid it being a clean-slate point salad. Each action spot has different colour requirements which a meeple must have in order to go there, but you also get personal goals to develop your meeples in other ways. There are personal collect-this-stuff objectives for benefit. There are round-end objectives to aim for. These are not only different each game but a bunch of worker placement spots change each game as well, providing inter-game variety and new strategies to explore. The action chaining isn’t overwhelming but it is enough to provide satisfying turns. It does provide some downtime at times, and I wouldn’t want to play it 4p, but I enjoyed the game thoroughly and the longish playtime went by in a whisker.

Rating: 8

DICE REALMS (2022): Rank 2628, Rating 7.2 – Lehmann

The game is continuous rounds of rolling dice to first earn upgrades (where you detach a die face and attach a different, better die face), gradually morphing to faces that suit the strategy you’re following – more dollars, straight VPs, more upgrades to earn VPs, etc. There’s no theme. It’s just dice rolling (round after round until the VP pile runs out) but it’s still a fun kind of dice-rolling. Each game has a unique-ish choice of actions / die faces (similar to a Dominion power setup) which provides something new to think about. It’s all over in 20 minutes or so. Apparently it kick-started for big bikkies says Clancy of the overchrome. For those who love this kind of stuff they’ll likely get decent value out of it. For me it seems OTT for a heavy filler, especially as Lego has been doing this for years. See Race 3000. For a tenth of the price. And a theme that works! Which saw quite a bit of play with the kids back in the day so we know the mechanic is a winner at least.

Rating: 7

EXPEDITIONS (2023): Rank 4800, Rating 7.8

This game is perfectly fine. It’s in the mould of Scythe in that there are 7 different scoring objectives and you try to focus on 4. It’s all about balancing moves, board effects, and card plays equally, making sure you’ve always got something progressive in each aspect each turn. And then finding effects that complement each other and hammering them as much as the forced action balance allows. There’s lots of little font though which makes card-reading around the board time-consuming and leads to “let’s focus on something else” which leads to a portion of dis-engagement when you know you’re not optimising. The exploration component is simply revealing known worker action spaces in a random order. Having tried to explain why it didn’t excite me, don’t get me wrong – there’s still lots of enjoyable challenge and replay in the game. While I wouldn’t hunt for it, I’d happily explore it if friends were excited to.

Rating: 7

FRAMEWORK (2022): Rank 3405, Rating 7.3 – Rosenberg

An easier, friendlier, and arguably more pleasant adaption of the Habitats/Nova Luna tile playing system. Here, all the tiles are roughly equal and all can be good in their own way (eventually). They either provide colours, or points if adjacent to X of a colour, or a combination of both. Each round there’s a draft where players take tiles in turn so, watch what your RH neighbours are taking, take different colours, and place them in a thoughtful way to maximise the number of ways and times you can score your colour groups in future. Play moves swiftly. It’s nice. The big question is though … why are there 22 score tokens? Why not 20? Or 21 even? Why 22? It’s not round, it’s not prime! Why 22!?

Rating: 7

LOST CITIES: ROLL & WRITE (2021): Rank 3103, Rating 7.1 – Knizia

There are 6 scoring tracks with the standard Lost Cities place-and-score model – start low in negative pts and keep placing higher numbers to max the track out if you can. Each turn you’ll choose a combination between 2 colour dice and 2 number dice to place the chosen number on the chosen colour track or pass (3 of each on your own turn). Either the dice are kind and the decision is easy or they’re not and the decision is still pretty easy. May the dice be kind. I’ll pass.

Rating: 6

NOKOSU DICE (2016): Rank 3536, Rating 7.5 – Matsumoto

it’s been a while since a trick-taking game I’ll surprised me on the upside. You draft 3 dice from a common pool to complement your hand. The dice are in the same colour/number range as the cards and they’re like Mu’s open cards, playable as card equivalents. The unpicked die determines the number and trump colour, which plays out just like Mu’s number + colour rules. As the hand progresses, you’ll eventually play your dice out. There are big scoring benefits to the other players if you don’t win tricks equal to your last die’s pip value. Which makes for interesting drafting (take a range around what you think you’ll win, in colours in which you’re protected so you’re not forced to play out the die you want to keep, vs not taking dice with colours/numbers that you like as trumps … lots to think about). After the first hand the impression is wow, chaotic, but with each hand control increases, die taking improves, and it becomes more the norm that you make the tricks you need than you don’t. Then, given you score much higher if your opponents don’t hit their score, the game gets Sticheln like, make your own but also try to stick or deny your opponents tricks they don’t want. It’s really quite thoughtful and every hand is interesting. Slow (that’s the downside) but definitely interesting.

Rating: 8

ROBIN OF LOCKSLEY (2019): Rank 2728, Rating 7.0 – Rosenberg

This light 2p affair taps into and re-uses the ideas behind my favourite Bohnanza variant, Bohnroschen (Sleeping Beauty). It’s a race along a track – each space can only be entered by meeting its requirements (eg have these types of tiles, or this many of a tile, etc) or by paying gold as a kind of wildcard (gained by trading in sets of same-coloured tiles). Each turn your other piece moves around a 5×5 grid to collect a tile, and you’re forever looking ahead along the race track to work out the minimum number of tiles within reach that satisfy as many upcoming spaces as possible. Bohnroschen is more fun because it has the whole interactive trading Bohn thing going on whereas this is more a dry tile pickup game with no interaction, but it is 2p, has a shorter (20min-ish) timeframe, and provides the same satisfaction of pulling off multiple-goal-met turns.

Rating: 7

GANG OF DICE (2022): Rank 5926, Rating 6.4 – Knizia

Each of the 12 rounds has a different scoring condition (eg don’t roll a pair, don’t exceed a number, no 1’s, whatever). Each player has one shot (with 2 re-rolls) to meet the condition using as many dice as they dare. Whoever meets it and used the most dice wins the round. While dice rolling is fun for a while, dragging it out for 12 rounds of obviously total randomness when only the last few rounds matter (due to escalating pts) means this one’s consigned to 5’dom.

Rating: 5

STRANGER THINGS: UPSIDE DOWN (2023): Rank 6381, Rating 7.9 – Daviau

It’s a nicely themed co-op, but after the initial rounds of turns gathering items that improve your capabilities, most turns feature a core mechanic that is not my favourite (and is the one that drove me from Arkham Horror: LCG in the end) – you’re playing cards to beat the value of the face-down tiles on your space. You know their number range so how much risk do you bear? Do you play conservatively and risk wasting cards on a massive overshoot? Or play the averages and risk wasting a whole turn while the clock runs down? The more cards you play the more spanners the game throws into the works re bad events, but basically repeat that process until you beat the major piles of tiles. I like co-ops and will enjoy it with friends, but I know there’s going to be some repetitiveness and luck-frustration along the way.

Rating: 7

Nations Box Cover

SPOTLIGHT ON NATIONS (2013): Rank 209, Rating 7.6

I played this when it came out and enjoyed it, but never owned it. I recently traded for it and the good news is it still stands up well. It’s a nice streamlining of Through The Ages. While TtA was about the cards but also had a ton of accounting, this is all about the cards. You start with 5 cards, each of which give you various combinations of money, stone, culture, military, and food. Allocate your 5 meeples among these as you please, and that sets out what your economy will produce. Use gold to buy more efficient cards to replace those you have. Reallocate your meeples to the more efficient cards using stone. Make sure you get enough allocated to military, because even though there’s no direct aggression, being first in military gives you first pick of the new cards next turn (awesome advantage) as well as avoid penalties whenever someone pays for a war card. You can also buy cards to give you one-off benefits, cards that you can pay stone to build wonders (for ongoing benefits), and country cards you can take if you have high enough military (for more ongoing benefits). All of which should sound eerily similar to TtA fans. Build up your culture production as most culture each round earns VPs, but there’s plenty of VPs in building higher level stuff as well. Once you’ve spent your gold, racing in turn order to draft the best cards, then it’s just a matter of doing the non-player-interactive stuff, like allocating your meeples. Reviewing the new cards and re-evaluating when your targets are taken is where the downtime is. The decision tradeoffs are the inevitable ones of foregoing military and/or culture progression for a better production engine, short term vs long term gains and the like. Other than that, the game’s straightforward and relatively easy to teach. There’s an event to compete for each round, produce stuff based on how you’ve set your meeples up, pay for more meeples, etc. Standard stuff, but done neatly. There are oodles of cards, and the order in which they come out makes for different strategies and should make for variety from game to game. As long as you play with fast-ish players it should feel about the right length. There’s obviously plenty to explore which is always attractive.

Rating: 8

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Mitchell T: We played Darwin’s Journey around ten times as a two player. There’s a lot to like about it, especially tromping around the various islands, racing with your opponent for bonuses. The expansion adds more tromping, more exploitation, and more chaos. The worker placement seals are interesting and innovative. Yet we found that we tired of the game after those plays. Perhaps after some time away we’ll get back to it with a fresh look. But at that point will we want to remember all the rules again? I’ll give it an I Like It but I’m not sure we’ll ever get back to it and I would trade it for the right offer.

I was excited about the Dice Realms concept at first, thinking it would be a flagship project for Tom Lehman. However the game play left us underwhelmed as the tedium of building the dice didn’t lead to sufficient gaming rewards. Perhaps with expansions the game will become more dynamic and interactive. I traded Dice Realms but still have high hopes for the potential of the system. I’ll give it a Neutral.

Larry:  A nice group of games in this edition:

Darwin’s Journey – Terrific game.  The Make-Your-Own worker mechanism works really well and gives you plenty of tough decisions.  There are lots of different strategies and they all seem well balanced.  Like most Luciani games, there’s a lot going on and the teach is long, but it never felt overwhelming.  After many production delays, I’m delighted that this has finally been released.  One of this year’s best games.  I love it!

Dice Realms – Speaking of Make-Your-Own, this time you get to do it with dice.  And while I’m sure that Lego did this earlier, they didn’t have Mr. Lehmann working for them.  It’s an enjoyable and fast paced game and there’s lots of different avenues to explore, just as you’d expect with Tom’s stuff.  The price is a barrier and has kept me from picking it up, but I’ve had fun with this whenever I’ve had the chance to play it.  I like it.

Nations – I played this quite a bit when it first came out.  Many people declared that this fixed Through the Ages, which is ludicrous, as TtA is very much a game that doesn’t need fixing.  That aside, Nations is a very nice alternate approach to a card-based Civilization game with interesting gameplay.  It plays faster than TtA, so 4, or even 5 player games are feasible.  However, only a portion of the cards are exposed each game, and while that does give you variety, it also means that certain strategies will be doomed and there’s no way of anticipating how that will play out.  That was a major issue for us and meant that some sort of variant was needed for the game to reach its full potential.  Alas, we stopped playing before one could be identified.  So a game I wanted to love, but which may have fallen just a bit short.

Mark Jackson:

I appreciate Robin of Locksley getting some love (I have really enjoyed my plays of it) but I think comparing Dice Realms to Race 3000 is sad and unfair. (I’m a fan of Dice Realms, as you can probably guess.) Finally, I prefer Nations: The Dice Game to Nations – which has roughly the same “oomph” in about ⅓ of the time.