Both were designed by John Clowdus

Art for Exordium by Aaron Nakahara

Art for Cacti by Liz Lahner

All published by Small Box Games

Exordium and Cacti are 2p games

Each takes 20-30 minutes.

Review by Jonathan Franklin

Review copies donated by the publisher without additional compensation

Both games were played at least four times

I have enjoyed games designed by John Clowdus for over ten years. Early games were Elemental Rift, Omen, and Politico.  His first designs were published in 2007 and I have fond memories of playing Omen (2011) with my then young son on the floor. Omen has since grown out of its VHS case packaging and become a very popular two-player card battler.  More recently, John sent a care package with a few more recent releases and I am excited to review them now.

These are some of the less confrontational games he has designed and Small Box Games has published, so if you want an OG battler, only one of these might be for you.

Cacti

Cacti is a very clean 2 player set-collection game that comes in a standard 54-card deckbox. It has a double-sided sheet of rules folded into the box and two greatly appreciated Turn Reference cards. You start the game with five Cacti cards between the two players. Each card has one cactus of one of the four types on it.  There are also five sale cards, which have two types of cacti on them, always with three cacti of one of the four types and two cacti of one of the other three types.

On your turn, you may choose one of two common actions,

1. Grow Action – Take all cacti of a single type from the middle. Often there will be two cards with the same type and one of each of the others, so you might get two or three cacti of the same type in the Grow action. In compensation, your opponent may either take all the remaining cacti from the middle of a single type or Sell, the second possible action.

1. Sell means take one of the sale cards from the middle, which has either two of a certain cacti or three of a certain cacti. The player then gets to orient the sale card to the three side or the two side and place the required number of that type of cactus under the card. If you sell two cacti, you earn 3 points. If you sell three cacti, you earn 4 points.

1. Once per game, you may take a ‘special action’, which is to hold a Special Sale, which means you take all the cacti of a type from the middle, add the cacti from your nursery (all the unsold cacti you have already taken), and place them all under your Special Sale card where they are worth one point per cactus.

After taking one of those three actions, you may place a cactus in your nursery under the main deck and then you refill the middle to 5 cacti and 5 sale cards.  You might want to give up a cactus from your nursery because they are negative points if they are not sold or otherwise disposed of at the end of the game, which is when the deck runs out. Placing a cactus under the main deck can also thereby extend the game.

There are a few other twists, such as each player having a secret wholesale card that can hold leftover cacti of a certain color.

We enjoyed Cacti as a quick two-player game. The deck of 48 cards has a cactus on one side and a Sale contract on the other, so you cannot run out of one or the other. The game is very much as it appears in the first play and is conducive to chatting or otherwise calmly claiming cacti and filling contracts. Would be happy to play, but might not actively seek it out.

Exordium

In contrast to the peaceful Cacti, Exordium is a stressful 2p game with mild area control and a stock market mechanism. If you want to cut someone off from a valuable set of resources, Exordium is your game. It also adds a clever action selection twist that can make a simple game thinker than it appears. The rules for Exordium are even shorter than those for Cacti, but don’t underestimate it.

Imagine a 5 x 5 grid of cards with a monolith in the center. This is a desolate cold hard place where the two of you are competing for resources by exploring, examining, and extracting, not the 3x you were thinking of. There are 24 four cards surrounding the Artifact in the center of the grid, 8 cards of each of three minerals, green, brown, and blue for the purposes of this review.  Each player has a deck of 13 identical cards, with one player taking yellow and the other taking purple. Each player places an outpost at the start.

The three basic actions are to Examine (place one of your cards on the central Artifact), Explore (place one of your cards on top of a card other than the center one that is orthogonally adjacent to one of your existing outposts and take the mineral below it), or Extract (take a mineral card you have taken with the Explore action and flip it over).  Flipping a mineral card turns it into a resource, which will become relevant in the end.

The first twist of Exordium is that there are three action cards, but each one only has two actions on it and you can only choose one action per card (Examine/Explore, Examine/Extract, and Explore/Extract). Player A might take Examine/Explore and Examine. Flipping it over to be unavailable. Player B might take Examine/Extract, examine, and flip it over. Now Player A is left with Explore/Extract. After taking one of those two actions, all three cards are flipped face up and Player B chooses first.  The game is smooth and continues this way until the end, which is reached when one player runs out of their 13 cards or there are no minerals left on the board (each player took 12).

End game scoring is 1 point for every resource plus an additional five points if they have one of each of the three resources (Extracted one of each of the three mineral types). They add the number of cards they placed on the Artifact, called ‘drones’. They then add points equal to the longest straight line times the number of outposts not in that line. So a line of four outposts x five other outposts would be 20 points.  We found the winner was determined by that last factor in every game and tried to Extract one of each type of mineral just to get the 8 total points from that.

At this point, you are probably wondering where the interaction comes in that makes this game more stressful than Cacti.  It comes from the ability to try to build outposts in a way that boxes in your opponent. If you can build around them, then they have no way to grow out and get the long line plus the outposts are not in that line. If you are both friendly, you can each have a parallel line of 5 cards and go picking up minerals and gaining outposts, but at some point, you will see a way to hurt the other person and then you have basically won.  This is a bit too interactive for me, but it is also more a game of position and if you like abstracts, just consider it an abstract game with a great action selection mechanism.