Josiah Fiscus is one of our newer members, and he writes up a monthly recap of the games he plays. He is planning to repost his thoughts here.
 March 2024 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments. |
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 Lorcana – 4/10 I have been in tune with the Collectible Card Game world almost since the beginning. For my high school senior project, I wrote a paper on the history of CCGs and designed my own (it wasn’t very good!). So if you haven’t been playing and reading about this genre for the past three decades like I have, and instead are a person who simply “likes Disney”, don’t let me yuck your yum. But Lorcana is, in my view, a simplistic, derivative, soulless game that misunderstands what makes CCGs so great. Magic: The Gathering is, of course, the granddaddy of all CCGs. And really since its inception, there have been people clamoring to remove the variability from its mana (cost) system. The idea of simply playing any card facedown as a mana source, rather than having to draw specific cards that do this, goes back at least 20 years to games like Duel Masters and VS System. And there have been many more since then that have done this as well. Lorcana uses this exact same concept and presents it as innovative. Beyond this, it simply uses the same power/toughness stats and renamed keywords that many other games have already more adroitly copied from Magic. Absent this context, I might find Lorcana to be merely boring. But the lack of innovation combined with runaway success is frustrating to me, in the same way that the success of Taco Bell must be frustrating to authentic mom-and-pop Mexican restaurants. If you slap Disney branding onto something, it will sell more, that’s just a fact. Never mind the fact that Stitch and Sergeant Tibbs and the Duke of Weselton are all functionally the same card. What a missed opportunity to embrace the flavor of the vast library the designers can pull from! I’ve only played with the starter decks, so it’s possible that more complex cards do exist that better capture the flavor of the world. It’s also possible that deck building provides challenges that would elevate the mechanics here in my view. But it won’t ever be able to fully escape the insipid nature of its overall design. |
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 Doomlings – 5/10 Due to its lightweight, take-that gameplay and adorable-yet-irreverent illustrations, Doomlings is likely to remind you of games like Exploding Kittens. But in truth it owes far more of its pedigree to the divisive classic 1000 Blank White Cards. That particular game famously allows players to create and illustrate their own cards mid-session while emphasizing laughs and taking a Who’s Line is it Anyway approach to point scoring.Doomlings has no room for such creativity, nor tolerance for the idea that it might not be a serious competition. Indeed, despite it qualifying as a take-that card game, opportunities for stealing and the like are fairly minimal. Instead, the simple “play a card then draw a card” structure is leveraged into something of a tableau-builder, with most of the cards in said tableau simply offering a number of endgame points between 1 and 4 and no further abilities. The abilities that do exist are rather subdued as well; increase your hand limit, give another player a negative point or two, score a varying number of points based on other cards in play, etc. To its credit, Doomlings is a very clean and accessible design. The rulebook is too simple to provide adjudication of rules questions, but this is seldom necessary. Anyone with reading skills can play this game and potentially even meet with success against more experienced players. Yet the player decisions, scant as they are, really are meaningful; you can’t simply play random cards and expect to win. Keeping an eye on what other players are doing is also relevant. Doomlings is one of those relatively-unobjectionable-but-also-unexciting games. I won’t suggest it, but if you rope me into playing, I might even have a bit of fun. For casual players looking to kill some time with extended family, it could even be a recommendation. |
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 Clue Conspiracy – 6/10 Someone at Hasbro must have seen the popularity of social deduction games and concluded that their Clue IP was the perfect fit. So they tapped an outside designer, Tommy Maranges, whose best-known design is the questionably-themed social deduction game Secret Hitler. Clue Conspiracy certainly takes some cues from Secret Hitler, but that game itself already owed a lot to Don Eskridge’s sublime The Resistance. Players are divided into two secret teams, with the evil team being smaller, but its members knowing the identity of each player. The larger team of good guys has no initial information, and must instead deduce who the evil players are based on actions taken during the game. A leader (who could be good or evil) is randomly selected and tasked with creating a “team” consisting of a subset of players. The team is voted on, and if it is declined, leadership rotates. Once a team is approved, each player on the team will contribute red or blue cards secretly towards a mission, with one color indicating failure. Such a failure means that the team must contain at least one evil player. So far, all of these things could be said about both Clue Conspiracy and The Resistance. Where Clue Conspiracy distinguishes itself is by adding additional complexity in the form of a weapon and location to solve, in addition to the suspect. Rather than have each round of the game include a set number of team members, players can control this somewhat by choosing a particular room (which specifies the team count). Similarly, some rooms count red cards as successes and some count red cards as failures, meaning the cards that are turned in by each player can vary in usefulness as well. These changes do add some variety, but this comes at the cost of a less crisp and flowing structure. Injecting chaos into the system isn’t a net positive, even though it does facilitate novelty. Ultimately, Clue Conspiracy doesn’t offer anything that isn’t done better elsewhere. But neither is it the abject failure that certain other social deduction games are. If you find the theme and the additional variety afforded by rooms and weapons to be appealing, you might even like this more than the alternatives. For me, The Resistance is already filling this role. |
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 Phantom Ink – 6/10 Phantom Ink is a 15 minute team-based party game. Games of this nature always have a gimmick and Phantom Ink is no exception. One member of each team will be the clue-giver, and must give clues by slowly writing one letter at a time, aesthetically simulating the kinds of ghostly writing tricks that were popular around the turn of the century. The clue-giver for the team is assigned a secret word. The other members of the team then ask questions of the clue-giver, but can only do so from a hand of cards that have pre-made questions on them. For example, the secret word might be “cherry” and the team might secretly ask the question “what color is it?” At this point, the clue-giver will slowly start to write “R…E…” at which point the other team members will say “silencio”, and the writing will cease. The reason that the team wants to stop the writing as soon as possible is that the opposing team will be observing all of this. And their clue-giver is competing to get their own team to figure out the very same secret word. But they are not privy to the secret question being asked, so perhaps “RE” doesn’t allow them to figure out that the question being asked was about color. The teams alternate back and forth like this, in a turn-based race to figure out the secret word. The dynamic here is reminiscent of Word Slam, a favorite party game of mine. There are some opportunities for the clue-giver to creatively find just the right thing to write that will give information to only their own team. That said, the other team members are largely in the dark about what question cards will be most useful. In my admittedly limited experience, the game might actually be a bit too easy once players get the hang of it; it can have a tendency to be solved after just a clue or two from each team. Even so, Phantom Ink is an enjoyable diversion that just doesn’t quite make it to the upper echelons of party game greatness. |
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 Star Wars: Unlimited – 6/10 It’s not exactly a new idea to create a CCG set in the Star Wars universe; Star Wars: Unlimited is at least the sixth such game. But CCGs draw a large amount of their appeal from organized play and new expansions, so the “best” Star Wars CCG to get into is likely to be the one that’s currently being supported by the publisher. If you want to go to a convention or local game store and battle your Star Wars deck against a worthy opponent, this new game is probably the only avenue you have.But what about more casual players who just want to grab a couple starter decks and duke it out? Well, you can pick up a two-player starter with two complete decks (Luke vs. Vader) for about $35. But the balance of the force, er, decks, is somewhat questionable. Even so, Star Wars: Unlimited shows good potential as a system, which is likely to be bolstered as expansions are released. Each player starts the game with a leader, who provides a once-per-turn special ability. This leader can, once-per-game, transform into a standard unit and battle until defeated, at which point they return to being your leader. This mechanic works very well, and is far more interesting than similar mechanics in other CCGs. It’s a little tougher to explain what this represents thematically, but this is a minor complaint. Units will be deployed either to the ground area or to the space area. Attacks from your units at either location will reduce your opponent’s life total, unless blocked by your opponent’s units in that same area. This is pretty standard-fare CCG stuff, though splitting the battlefield into two separate areas creates a bit more strategic interest while also avoiding the thematic dissonance of an ewok somehow taking down a star destroyer. Star Wars: Unlimited is only a touch more innovative than the wholly-derivative Lorcana. Yet the tweaks, such as they are, seem to me to demonstrate far more opportunity for tactical gameplay and mechanical iteration. Star Wars: Unlimited hasn’t yet come into its own, but it shows the potential to become a well-rounded game with various modes of play that appeal to gamers of all stripes. But as for now, I don’t think there’s much value to being an early adopter unless you are a huge fan of the IP. |
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 Junk Drawer – 6/10 Junk Drawer is an ultra-light polyomino game that plays in about 10 minutes. It uses the flip-and-write mechanic, meaning all players take their turns at the same time. This allows for snappy games even at high player counts, though the components provided unfortunately set that cap at four. Each player gets their own board, divided into four sections. This represents their junk drawer. Then a card is flipped from the draw pile, representing a piece of “junk” that has to go into each players drawer. Each player takes their own corresponding polyomino tile and places it anywhere they like into any of the four sections of their drawer. When the second card is flipped, it must go into a section not already used. Likewise with the third card and then the fourth, for which there is only one remaining option. At this point, the a new round begins, with any of the four sections being a legal spot for placement. This works very well to create just enough decision-making to be interesting, as it’s human nature to want to continue placing into the same section over and over again, but the rules do not allow it. Additionally, each of the four sections has its own randomized method of scoring. These could be things like filling entire rows or columns, walling off certain sized gaps, or fitting as many or as few objects as possible. When a card is flipped, there is a knack that you must develop of determining just which section most needs that tile based on how it scores. And because the game ends when any one player cannot legally place the current tile, trying to create these impossible positions for yourself is sometimes quite useful. There is very little to complain about here; Junk Drawer knows what it wants to be and it delivers on this promise. But it’s so light and quick that this accessibility comes at the cost of replayability. Like a sugary candy, Junk Drawer gives a burst of sweet flavor, but is ultimately unfulfilling. You won’t turn it down, but you’ll need something meatier for sustenance. |
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 Xylotar – 7/10 (Magic Trick 5/10) A Xylotar is a made up instrument that is a combination keytar/xylophone. And it’s played by a polar bear named Bobby McColdsnap in the lore of this game. In contrast to this off-the-wall theme, Xylotar is a standard-fare trick-taker-with-a-twist. But it’s a good twist.The cards in this game don’t all have the same back. Instead, the back of the card shows only its suit, while the full information of suit and rank is displayed only on the front of each card. After your hand is dealt, it will be ordered numerically by the player next to you and then placed face down into a line in front of you. The mechanical effect of this setup is that you will know for certainty that you can play a card (since you have to follow suit), but will only have vague idea of the rank until you actually play the card. The thematic effect of this setup is that it sure looks like you have a xylotar sitting on the table in front of you, with each card representing one of its colorful keys. Giggle. Also taking advantage of this “vague knowledge” is the scoring system. You will bid on how many tricks you plan to take, receiving a point for each one won and a 5-point bonus for a correct bid. But this bid doesn’t happen at the beginning of the round like most games of this type. Instead, it happens at a time of your choosing during the round. The catch is that you have to reveal a facedown card from your display and that card becomes your bid. So even here, there is some uncertainty. Clever players will also use this reveal to short-suit when necessary, but have to be careful about waiting too late into the round and getting stuck with an impossible bid. Xylotar is a remake of an earlier game called Magic Trick, which I also played this month for the first time. Xylotar tweaked only a few small things, primarily in terms of how scoring works, but it’s amazing how much these small changes improved the quality of the game. Magic Trick is obsolete in my book. I can only hope that now when you Google Magic Trick, it says “Did you mean Xylotar?” |
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 The Voyages of Marco Polo – 7/10 When The Voyages of Marco Polo released in 2015, it had quite a bit of buzz, and it still remains in the BGG Top 100 to this day. But since that time, it seems to have been somewhat forgotten and even received some retrospective backlash. So what does this dice-placement map-movement game offer to today’s gamers, nearly a decade later? The dice placement aspect is more flexible than many other games like this. Almost none of the actions require specific combinations of pairs or runs; rather, higher values simply provide a better version of the action taken while lower values cost less money to use. In this sense, all dice rolls are useful. But there will be times where you need a high roll in order to get all the resources you need to complete contracts, a primary source of points.Traveling around the map is the other primary point source, but this is also prohibitively expensive. Money is tight, and you will constantly be faced with difficult choices about whether to spend your money for this map movement or to pay for optimal dice placements. Perhaps the most divisive aspect of Voyages is the starting characters. Each one is quite powerful, breaking the rules in their own way, a design paradigm I generally see as a positive. But because they are so strong at one particular aspect of the game, they also pigeonhole you into a particular strategy if you intend to have any chance of winning. There are multiple paths to victory here, but you’ll essentially be choosing your path before the game even begins. For gamers that enjoy strategy over tactics, don’t mind locking in a strategy from the start, and enjoy punishing optimization puzzles, The Voyages of Marco Polo still has a lot to offer. My personal tastes tend more towards the tactical and flexible, but I still enjoyed this well enough that I wouldn’t mind giving it another go in the future. |
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 Cross Clues – 7/10 Cross Clues is a co-operative speed game in the vein of Codenames. A deck of word cards is used to randomly label five rows and five columns (letters and numbers) in the middle of the table. This creates a grid, with each of the 25 sectors being a “cross” between two words. Each player then draws a card indicating one of these sectors (for example, B4) and must quickly come up with a single-word clue that fits both of the words. So if the row’s word was Desert and the column’s word was Ankle, you might say “scorpion”. The other players then make a guess for which sector card they think you have, based on this clue. Right or wrong, you draw a new card and play continues. There are no turns in this game. The same player might go through several cards in a row while another player may be struggling to come up with a clue. This is totally fine, and in fact alleviates some of the pressure that clue-givers can feel in Codenames. Likewise, because the challenge is only to connect two words, rather than “as many as possible”, Cross Clues plays in a frantic 10 minutes, instead of a cerebral 20. Cross Clues isn’t especially innovative, but it puts a flourish on a tried-and-true formula that really works. I think this is likely to become a go-to party game for me, one whose minimal rules combine high accessibility with opportunities for satisfyingly clever play. |
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 Hegemony – 7/10 There is a class war brewing. The draconian state seeks legitimacy and power, the greedy capitalists seek to outgain the others, the lazy working class constantly threatens strikes, and the materialistic middle class hybridizes the worst traits of the previous two. You could put a more positive spin on the themes of Hegemony if you so desired, but where’s the fun in that? Hegemony doesn’t read or play like a satire, nor does it lean toward any particular view, but its themes are so enmeshed in the game’s mechanics that it’s impossible not to think in those terms (at least about the three factions your opponents control).Hegemony is designed asymmetrically, so it’s difficult to describe a typical turn without explaining each faction’s specific mechanisms. Suffice it to say that each player has about half a dozen possible basic actions, and in order to take one, they must discard a card from hand. But each of these cards can instead provide an alternative to the basic action. Most of these are just a basic action plus bonuses, but some can really shake up the expected play patterns. Choosing whether to use an action card instead of a basic action (and either way, which one to choose) is the most important decision of the game. And also the most fun. Goals for each faction differ as well, though money is important to all of them. The state needs to balance growing its favor among the classes while also raising enough tax revenue to meet its burdens lest the IMF intervene. The capitalist needs lots of money, but is almost sure to acquire a good bit of debt in the process, which will seriously harm their final score. The working class will likely be the poorest, and so will depend on government programs that tax the capitalist for much of their success. The middle class has smaller businesses, bearing some of the tax burden, but also faces many of the struggles that the working class does, just without the power of unionization. These goals work remarkably well together to create organic interactions that feel dramatically important without feel-bad cutthroat dynamics. Finally, it’s worth mentioning the importance that voting influence has on your faction’s success or failure. There are five different policy positions that can each be set to socialist, centrist, or neo-liberal. And each one affects tax levels and public benefits in a unique way. These policies can change at the end of a round (and sometimes even mid-round) if a faction has enough political influence. The capitalist largely generates this through media companies while the working class generates it through trade unions. The middle class has the hardest time generating influence, but has the benefit of simply throwing support behind whichever class has proposed a move away from either extreme. The state likewise has to play a balancing game here, though its motivations can often feel inscrutable to the other players. There are strong point incentives to support any kind of change at all, but much more so for ones that directly benefit your class. Like all of the other mechanical elements in Hegemony, this system feels remarkably polished and balanced for something so asymmetrical. On the negative side of things, Hegemony takes a pretty long time to play. I can imagine an experienced group getting the time down to about an hour per player, but for a game with four newbies, it was pushing six hours. It also seems clear that the really important players are the capitalist and the working class. In fact, a two-player game always uses only these two. The three-player game adds the middle class, which is really just a mishmash of the other two, while the state only exists in a four-player game, its functions being reasonably easy to automate at lower player counts. This makes the state (and, to a lesser extent, the middle class) feel like an afterthought rather than a critical piece to the design. With those in mind as the two biggest drawbacks, I’m quite curious to see if a 90-minute 2-player game is the ideal way to experience this behemoth of a design. In spite of these serious misgivings, I found myself wanting to play again. Not immediately, not the very same day, but sometime, and even soon. There is an ambition to Hegemony that makes it impossible to brush aside. It’s hard not to admire what’s going on here, even if you ultimately conclude that an hours-long politically-charged heavy euro isn’t for you. Of all the new games this month, Hegemony’s rating feels like the most volatile; it’s either better than I can give it credit for after a single play, or else it simply doesn’t hold up under the weight of its own aspirations. |
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 Unsettled – 8/10 Whatever else you may think about it, Unsettled has a great title. Players take on the roles of space explorers making first contact with strange, sometimes horrifying, planets. And these as-yet-unsettled worlds are indeed unsettling. The base game includes two such worlds, but there are seven others currently available as expansions. Each of these worlds not only includes its own set of thematic discovery tiles, but also utilizes the base components very differently. Since Unsettled is a co-operative game with strong thematic integration, it might be surprising to see the amount of rules and components that it includes; this is a fairly heavy game. But this complexity grants the game a puzzle-like quality, with team discussion and efficiency calculations occurring regularly. On your turn, you will move yourself (and the shared robot companion, LUNA) to a location on the board. This often involves revealing a new location tile. From these tiles, you can gather three different types of and energy, which can be charged up from any location. You may also discover unique tokens that represent the flora of the planet. The value of each of these actions varies a good bit depending on the mission you have undertaken as well as the nature of the planet itself. Actions often require decrementing one of the three dice trackers that you have at your disposal. These limit both the quantity and quality of the actions you can take. It will often be necessary to take rest actions to increment these dice so you can take the more powerful actions again, but it never feels good to take a turn off by doing so. Managing these actions and avoiding hits to your endurance (which is often impossible to recover) are the major strategic choices you will make. It’s impressive to see the way the designers have taken a basic structure and tweaked it enough with each planet so that it creates a new challenge without totally undermining the skills you’ve honed on previous missions. And the atmosphere is also a big selling point, giving a sense of growing dread akin to survival horror. Replaying the same mission will generally make it a good bit easier, although the randomized nature of the location tiles can allay this concern to a degree. Regardless, it seems likely that players will want to move onto the next mission or planet rather than attempt a failed mission again. This attribute likely means that Unsettled has a shelf life similar to a legacy game, but so long as the designers keep churning out new planets, the game can be kept fresh by simply spending unsettling amounts of money. |
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 Kanban EV – 8/10 Kanban EV is a heavy euro about the manufacturing of electric vehicles. While this is a more complex game than I usually enjoy, I was pleasantly surprised by how both the graphic design and game design aid in comprehension, even on a first playthrough. Experienced gamers will not struggle to understand or strategize, but should nevertheless expect a solid 30 minutes of rules explanation. This game is a worker placement game, though you will only ever have one worker. There are five available action spaces, and your worker cannot pick the same action space two turns in a row. Each action space has two spots for workers: a spot where you get to act first and a spot where you get to do more. Of course if you anticipate no one else going to the action space with you, you can freely take the “do more” spot. But sometimes this can lead to another player jumping ahead of you and ruining your plan. Note, saying that there are only five action spaces is a bit misleading, because each action space has several different things you can actually do there, each of which costs a varying amount of “shifts”. Normally you will have two or three shifts, depending on which spot you took, but this can be supplemented from a bank of extra shifts. This is often appealing, if not downright necessary. And yet, banked shifts are a source of points on their own, not just at the end of the game, but throughout it as well. This is just one of the difficult choices you will be asked to make. The action spaces include making car designs, buying car parts, assembling cars, testing them on the track, and upgrading the car technologies. And that’s by no means exhaustive. But each of these actions is thematically resonant. Not enough to create actual narrative, but enough that it’s a useful mnemonic and keeps the game from feeling too dry and abstract. With wonderful chunky wooden components and effective yet subdued graphic design, Kanban EV is a surprisingly inviting game given its intricacy. There is relatively low randomness here, but the wide array of options means that games are unlikely to become procedurally scripted. Interaction exists, but rarely in frustrating ways. The design is so strong that feeling I was most left with at the end of the game was admiration. Admiration won’t translate to enjoyment for all gamers, but there is enough of a spark here that I’d personally like to play again. |
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 A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  Descent: Journeys in the Dark – 10/10 In the late 80’s and early 90’s, games like HeroQuest and Dragon Strike sought to distill the dungeon crawl experience provided by D&D into a board game. These games largely succeeded and still hold up today, trading openness and flexibility for easy rules and minimal prep work. But this lack of prep and creativity also left the ersatz Dungeon Master with little more to do than facilitate the experience for the “real” players. (Fittingly, the new version of HeroQuest offloads this administrivia to an app.) Enter Fantasy Flight Games and Kevin Wilson in the early 2000’s, who combined this one-versus-all dungeon crawl paradigm with a tactical minis game. Suddenly, the players weren’t simply discovering pre-set traps and treasures, they were actively competing against a human adversary. The battle of wits had begun. The rules of Descent are nearly self-explanatory to someone who has played any type of dungeon crawl or minis game. On your turn, you move and attack. Roll dice for damage, subtract armor, deal wounds according to the difference. But that simplicity belies the emergent complexity that comes from the vast array of scenarios, modular map tiles, dozens of monsters, scores of characters, and stacks on stacks of items. In some ways, this is D&D as a board game. But in other ways it is decidedly not. Yes, the theme is the same, combat is very similar, but this is not a game about creativity and problem solving. This is a game of brutal tactical combat that can lead to a TPK in the first room if the players aren’t careful and the overlord does their job. The overlord is not a referee, not your friend, and is playing a totally different game outside of the tactics on the board itself. Descent is a very long “weekend-only” sort of game (4+ hours), but it hits all the right notes for me. The length is a necessity to feel the progress of leveling up. As your hero goes from store items to copper treasures to silver treasures before finally picking up those gold level treasures for the final boss fight, you will feel a real sense of accomplishment. You don’t appreciate the real power of a gold-level weapon until you’ve spent an hour using a silver-level weapon. Descent as a design grants itself space to breathe. The success of Descent led to a second edition and then a third edition. But neither of these fully captures the essence of what made first edition so unique. The length of the game didn’t need to be shorter, that detracts from the experience of leveling. The overlord’s job cannot simply be offloaded to an app without making the joy of beating the scenario feel hollow. And you absolutely cannot play this as an ongoing campaign without unbalancing the entire experience. Descent’s first edition was lightning in a bottle. No publisher could possibly succeed with a design like this in today’s market. People clamor for campaigns, apps, and solo play. But Descent is unapologetically a lengthy, multiplayer, single-session affair and it’s the better game for it. Nothing has ever captured my imagination and obsession quite like it. |
Great writeups for each game. After the first few I realized, in any given month, you go from worst to best but you might not play any good games. Then the ratings got better. But it looks like an overall weaker month this time but I only played half of these.
That was one of the strongest parts of the original Descent. You could play an entire “level up” arc in one playthrough. It made the game hella long, but it realistically should be compared to the multiple games required for a “level up” arc in similarly themed games.
I recently played Euthia and while it did have more of a Mage Knight vibe, it is also self-contained where players level up entirely within the same game. It also is a beast of a time-sink. Levelling up to “40” or whatever (you get stuff every few levels) will take a long game but is so much more satisfying than going a little bit between each game night. If I wanted to progress slowly over many nights I might as well play D&D…
The World of Warcraft game was also nice as its leveling was within-games rather than between-games…
It’s all multiple scenarios, campaign-style things now that realistically take double-digit hours to “complete”…
Great stuff, Josiah. I was surprised to see that there might be some backlash against Voyages of Marco Polo. It is indeed a tight and difficult game, but I think it’s just as great today as when it was released 9 years ago. It’s got a fairly steep learning curve, but once you get past that, I feel it really shines. It continues to be one of my all-time favorites and I don’t think time has passed it by at all.