 March 2025 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.  Mind Map – 5/10 Mind Map is just the latest in a trend of party games, likely kicked off by Wavelength, in which teammates will attempt to guess where a particular word falls on a spectrum of possibilities. Mind Map’s primary distinction is that it uses a two-axis system instead of just a single one. Players are divided into two teams. On your team’s turn, cards will be revealed equal to the number of players on your team. Then, each teammate will secretly be assigned one of those words. Each teammate will then place a token somewhere on the two-axis chart that they believe best corresponds to their word. For instance, your word might be “four-leaf clover” and you will have to place that on the chart where the x-axis is “easy to use” and the y-axis is “more often used by old people”. If you don’t think there’s a particularly sensible location to place “four-leaf clover” on that grid, you’re already starting to see some of the problem with the design. Once all teammates have placed their tokens, they then proceed to guess which word belongs to each other teammate, based on their locations on the chart. Each time you guess correctly, you score a point for your team. Each time a teammate guesses yours correctly, you score a point for your team as well. The opposing team also gets to make a guess for each word, allowing them to have some degree of involvement while waiting around for you. Conversely, with smaller groups, you can play this with each player scoring only for themselves. If you don’t take the game particularly seriously, you can have a good time, as is the case with any party game with the right group of friends. Still, Mind Map doesn’t acquit itself well when going up against competitors like Wavelength. There is too much variation in the usefulness of the words, and the game overstays its welcome at higher player counts.  Star Wars: Bounty Hunters – 6/10 Star Wars: Bounty Hunters is a drafting game themed around bounty hunters seeking out targets. Yes, you get to be the “bad guys” and try to capture Chewie and Leia and Grogu, among many other characters from the cartoons that I didn’t recognize. The design’s best idea is that you always draft from a hand of five cards. You get four cards passed to you, draw an additional one, and then choose one and pass. This system improves on the experience of some draft-and-pass games where a hand proceeds from an overwhelming number of options down to pointlessly few. Additionally, it provides some in-game control over the cards you are passed, since that card you draw is chosen from four different draw piles, broken up by card type. It’s very simple to grasp and maintains that draft-and-pass feel, but with more consistency and control. On the downside, the actual cards you draft don’t score in particularly interesting ways. There isn’t much set collection and certainly no combos to seek out. Instead, you draft Target Cards with numbers on them and need to then draft Bounty Hunter cards with corresponding numbers that need to meet or exceed those target numbers. It will often take a few bounty hunters added up to take down a single target. Some people seem to find this system frustrating if they can’t find the exact cards they need. But I found it simply requires some flexibility so that you can make use of a variety of cards and always get passed something useful. Along those lines, another type of card, droids, allow for even more planning ahead. These cards assist your bounty hunters in getting more numbers towards their targets, but can only be purchased with credits. Credits are acquired by discarding a card you draft instead of playing it. You can even draft a droid you don’t yet have the credits for, planning to pay for it in the future. The decision not just about which card to draft, but whether to draft one at all or instead invest in credits adds another layer of interest. There’s nothing especially groundbreaking about a lightweight 20-minute drafting game, nor a game with the Star Wars IP hastily slapped onto it. And yet, I think Bounty Hunters has something to offer to people who enjoy games like Sushi Go but want a twist on the idea. Or maybe who prefer laser blasters to raw fish.  Mint Works – 6/10 Mint Works is a very tiny, 15-minute worker placement game. That already probably sounds odd to you, and rightly so. Worker placement games tend to be complex and lengthy but Mint Works is neither. The goal in design seems to have been to make a very portable (fits in a mint tin) and speedy game that can be played in a restaurant while waiting for your food to arrive, yet still has some “game” to it. You start with a few wooden mints, which are your workers. You will assign these worker mints to spaces to perform actions, such as getting more worker mints or building buildings. As you would expect, taking a particular action with your worker mints makes it unavailable for anyone else to use in that round. Buildings are the only method of scoring points and the game will likely end after you’ve built three or four. Oddly, these buildings have nothing to do with the theme of mints and although your workers function more like “builders”, they are still referred to as “mints”. It’s a bit thematically jarring. Rather atypically for games like this, the mint workers that you use are spent and do not return to you at the end of the round. And you only get one free mint between rounds, so there is some strategy to saving up unused mints rather than spending them sub-optimally as the prime spaces become blocked. Nevertheless, the game is too fast to really even have much of an arc. The player who happens to have the first turn and the needed worker mints when a valuable building becomes available is likely to win. And certainly some buildings are much stronger than others. In view of that, it’s fair to say that Mint Works does what it sets out to accomplish. But that also shoehorns it into a very specific niche, such that you’re not likely to choose it over another game unless you have no other choice due to time constraints.  Twilight Inscription – 6/10 Twilight Inscription is a roll-and-write game set in the universe of Twilight Imperium, a well-regarded but famously interminable 4X game. And while it’s true that this game is less complex and faster-playing than its progenitor, that could also be said for nearly every other board game in existence. Distilling the true essence of an eight-hour behemoth into a mere ninety minutes is probably too much to ask. So we need to instead consider Twilight Inscription on its own merits. Each player will receive four dry-erase boards. Each one roughly corresponds to one of the aspects of a 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate). For example, on one of them you will need to draw lines from your starting planet to discover new planets. These explored planets then unlock new options for expansion on a separate board. Likewise, checking off boxes on your exploit board will provide resources that can be used for combat against your opponents (exterminate). While each player will receive a board of each of the four types, each board itself is actually unique, providing an incredible amount of variety in the setup. The lines you may draw and boxes you may check are determined by dice rolls. And, in typical roll-and-write fashion, the dice are rolled once per round and all players use them. However, as the game goes on, you can unlock additional dice. These unlockable dice are always rolled, but simply ignored by the players early on in the game, which provides a tantalizing incentive to unlock them quickly as you wistfully gaze at dice you can’t use each round. Overall, the feel here is as if you were playing That’s Pretty Clever, Twice As Clever, Clever Cubed, and Clever 4Ever all at the same time. And each time the dice are rolled, you have to pick only one of your sheets to write on. This undoubtedly creates meaningful choices, but it also creates a nagging doubt that maybe this game would just be better if it took a quarter of the time and only used one sheet. I like the ambition and innovation that Twilight Inscription brings to the roll-and-write world. But I’m not convinced that simply stuffing four different roll-and-writes into a trench coat is the best way to accomplish the goal of creating a more meaty entry to the genre.  Torchlit – 7/10 These days it’s hard to go a month without playing a new trick-taking game. This month, that torch is being borne by Torchlit, a tricker-taker themed around dungeon delving. Most of the typical trick-taking conventions are here. The twist comes from the fact that every trick taken pushes you deeper into the dungeon. This generally results in scoring more points, but you must split the treasure (points) at your dungeon level with anyone else at the same level. In other words, a primary goal is to score a different amount of tricks than any other player. Interestingly, playing an off-suit card of the same value as the winning number also allows you to advance, even if you don’t win the trick. There is a secondary goal as well, which is to score a specific amount of tricks. This number is determined by placing a card from your hand facedown at the start of the hand. This allows you to modify your opening hand somewhat (short-suiting, for example), while also creating an interesting tension between crafting a better hand and making a bid you feel confident in winning. On the final card of the hand, you pick up this facedown card, giving you two choices of what to play (and you don’t have to follow suit in this case). The remaining card becomes your target amount of tricks to win. So while you could always keep your initial bid, this does allow you some late-round control over modifying it. There is also some player control over just how many points will be split amongst the players at each amount of tricks taken. Indeed, on the face of it, there are quite a few decisions to make. Nevertheless, it’s not abundantly clear to me that these decisions translate into actual player control. Do the best players win more often? Or does the amount of chaos injected by the players constantly changing their positions and point values mean that games are essentially random? My feeling after a single play is that the truth lies somewhere in between, similar to my feelings on Fishing. But also like that game, there is a lot of fun to be had here. Whether I simply enjoy the occasional play of Torchlit or else deeply delve into becoming an experienced player, I expect the experience to be a positive one.  Seaside – 7/10 Seaside is the kind of board game that makes non-gamers say things like “that’s not a board game, where’s the board?” And in this case, even a correction to “tabletop game” might well be met with a rejoinder, as the marketing copy encourages you to play it outdoors on a sandy beach. So where to begin? Seaside is a canvas sack of wooden discs with rules to facilitate a competitive tactical competition. Let’s go with that. The goal is simple. Collect as many wooden discs as you can. On your turn, you draw a wooden tile from the bag and then make a decision: which side of the disc do you want to use? This mechanic is reminiscent of Captain Flip. Yet it ends up being even more lightweight because there are no decisions about the placement of your disc afterwards; you simply do whatever the action on that side of the disc says to do. Three of the possible symbols (Crabs, Shells, and Isopods) will not be collected by the player when chosen. Instead, they are placed into the central communal area (the sea). But if you do so, you get to draw another disc immediately. Other symbols will allow you to collect these discs from the sea when played, so there is a push-your-luck element here to how many discs you are willing to add to the sea that may not end up benefiting you. Also, about a quarter of the discs have no such option, meaning whichever side you choose, it will be your last disc until your turn comes back around. There are some basic strategies here, many of which require keeping a close eye on what other players are going for and responding accordingly. But ultimately, this is an ultra-lightweight game that anyone can easily learn to play. And quite wisely on the part of the designer, it only takes about 15 minutes to finish a game, with scoring being as simple as counting your pieces. Seaside is too insubstantial for it to engender hatred from anyone, but I think it pushes beyond merely passable. It generates exactly the kinds of thrills and disappointments that you want to experience in a game like this. Fans of Cheeky Monkey or Flip 7 should probably throw a copy of Seaside into their beach bags this summer. Heavier gamers who turn up their noses at such frivolity will just have to read a book under the umbrella instead.  Middle Ages – 8/10 Marc André had a smash hit with Splendor, a game with breakneck pacing that sees new players often shocked that the game is over just as they were starting to make progress. Middle Ages is my second experience with his designs, and it likewise features a fascinating gameplay arc over a relatively short period of time. Middle Ages is an open drafting game where you collect tiles of different types, each of which provides a bonus when collected. While collecting multiples of the same type will grant better and better bonuses, failing to collect one of each type by the end of the game will harshly penalize you. This creates a pleasant tension in the tiles you draft. In each round, a row of tiles equal to the number of players is available to draft, and each player will get exactly one of them. Stronger tiles will be placed to the right of the row with weaker ones to the left. But the weaker a tile you take, the earlier you get to draft in the next round. Since the tiles are laid out up to three rounds ahead, it’s quite possible to plan ahead at least a couple turns, and even new players will find themselves doing this quite naturally. Nearly all of the tiles will give you coins (points) in some way. As an example, when you draft a Field tile, you get two coins for every field tile you’ve collected so far. Because of this structure, the amount of coins that you get each round will ramp up dramatically as the game goes on, nearly to the point of making early coin gains meaningless. This is especially true because of tiles like the Mill, which steals two coins from each opponent with fewer Mills. Early on, this will often leave players on the receiving end with no coins at all. But in the late game, it’s merely a minor inconvenience. This arc leaves the early game feeling nasty and interactive while the late game evolves into a more engine-focused experience as players hone in on the strength of the tile types they’ve invested in for big gains. Learning the rules of each of the eight tile types, along with each game having 4 of 16 possible events that occur, gives Middle Ages a bit more rules complexity than Splendor and makes it run a bit longer as well. But my first impression is that this additional overhead pays off quite well in tactical interest. Make no mistake, Middle Ages is still a gateway-weight game, but I think those who quickly grew bored of Splendor might find this one to have a bit more staying power.  Backstories: Alone Under the Ice – 8/10 While I’m not much of a video gamer, some of my favorite video game experiences have been with point-and-click adventures, like the ones Sierra used to make or the Monkey Island series from LucasArts. The Backstories games are strongly inspired by these old classics and utilize their aesthetics and mechanics to create a fully-analog card game experience. This is accomplished by means of a very large deck of cards. Some cards represent your character or status effects that your character may have, such as wounds drawing them nearer to death or reputation with certain NPCs. Other cards will be read aloud to progress the narrative. Still others will be laid out adjacent to each other into a 3×2 grid, forming a panoramic view of your current location. By choosing an action card (e.g., “talk to”) which has a cutout on it, you can overlay this cutout onto the back of a section of a panorama and read only the result that comes from that particular action. Each section of your area can thus be interacted with independently. And each section has multiple results based on the actions you choose. For example, decide to use the “take” action card on a section of the board with an item on it, and the game will instruct you to replace that section of the panorama with a nearly identical card, just with the item no longer depicted. I’m hesitant to delve into the specifics of this particular game, because nearly any plot point mentioned could be considered a spoiler. And naturally, there is scant replayability here. Backstories should be viewed as an experience that you might go through a second time only “to see what would have happened” or else to try again if you lost. You can, of course, solo these games if you feel so inclined, but we had a wonderful time with a large group of us debating what to do next and shouting out actions to try. In that respect, the Backstories games are perhaps closest to the Exit or Unlock series, though with more narrative and less pressure. That is a winning formula in my book, and I am eagerly awaiting the release of the next adventure.  A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  Acquire – 9/10 With a theme of corporate America and a bland-looking board covered in nothing but letters and numbers, it might seem odd that I find this game as enjoyable as I do. And indeed, there is a strong feeling of abstraction. But stronger still is the feeling of tension that exists here. Acquire is chock-full of moments that literally get your heart racing, not in excitement, but in suspense. The turn structure (and the game itself) are quite simple. You place a tile, buy up to three stocks, and draw a new tile. Two adjacent tiles starts a corporation, which will grow in stock price with the addition of further tiles. When two corporations are joined, the bigger one takes over the smaller one. Those with stock in the smaller one get a payout, either in cash or stock of the larger company. This continues until the board is full, and everyone gets a final payout for the stocks they hold. The strategy here is about getting majority ownership in as many companies as possible. This requires getting others to help you merge companies (by having some stock in them) but with you holding the most. It also requires careful managing of your cash flow so you can always spend your money on new stocks, predicting the right moment of the merger. Your stocks never lose value, which I like, but it can definitely be bad to invest heavily in a company that only sees minor growth. I own the 1999 edition (pictured above), which is the kind of production a game of this caliber really deserves. But for many years, only copies using cardboard chits instead of lavish plastic buildings were available. Fortunately, the most recent edition is readily available and does feature similar components to my beloved version. This one is a very fun game, not just for when it came out (1964!), but even today. |
Recent Comments
Two (ok, 2.5) thoughts:
1. Twilight: Inscription is “a lot” – and would have been helped by some extra cardboard markers to remind you of what “special” symbols you’d unlocked.
1a. That said, it’s pretty enjoyable as a solo game.
2. Acquire is a classic and we all owe Sid Sackson a debt of gratitude for creating it. It’s a pity that I just don’t ever enjoy playing the game. (It’s in my Hall of Games I Admire But Don’t Particularly Like – which includes Euphrat & Tigris, Power Grid, and Age of Steam.)
Totally fair. That said, I really enjoy all the games you mentioned. 😀
Not a fan of middle ages, I felt the destructive options were too harsh on the other players and, depending on the cards that come up, can be difficult to defend against.
Of course, I’ve only played a couple games and have yet to win. Then again, I don’t recall anyone pulling off a win (just a decent second) without a fairly robust anti or pro-destruction strategy…
Twilight Inscription – second what Larry said. Cool solo, lots of stuff to remember. Not sure I’d want to play it multiplayer. Roll & Writes are so often group solitaire games – this one slightly less than most due to the “combat”.
Mint Works – I think the way to put it in the best possible light would be to think of it as a quick (portable) “intro to worker placement” game. As such, it’s pretty decent (albeit with some randomness) but it won’t be a go-to game for a group very long, best as an introduction to games of more depth.
Good thoughts!
I found that as Middle Ages gets towards the second half of the game, the attacks aren’t such a big deal anymore. You may be right though that you need to either defend or attack to have success.
I have been enjoying Torchlit on Trickster’s Table. I played thousands of hands of Hearts back in college and high school. I always disliked the last few tricks of each hand as the cards just played themselves. Being able to change your bid means you have something to play for till the end of your hand. I have also found the spatial element of bidding helpful to learn the mechanics. Hope this game gets a larger second printing.