Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 8)

There are a few in my gaming group who really enjoy It’s A Wonderful World. Which is unfortunate – they’re now only able to play it if I’m playing something else as it’s drawn my permanent veto. It starts as a simple card drafting game 7 Wonders style. Draft 7 cards, chuck some for their insta-resource to help build other cards which will boost production, which at end of round should allow you to build yet more card if you’ve planned properly and got lucky with the draft. Repeat for 4 rounds. As the rounds progress it gets more challenging to keep track of how all the production chain reactions are going to work out, and exactly how many resources you’re going to get at each stage. That’s the challenge. It slows the game down. The other problem is you either draw into the big-scoring cards that match your engine or you lose – which becomes more obvious and more irritating with each play. It’s now a 6 and dropping.

Why am I regurgitating this? Well I stupidly decided to try the 2p version, It’s A Wonderful Kingdom, to see if it improved things. Quite the contrary as it turns out. The full verdict lies in wait below.

Don’t expect too much with this list but fwiw new-to-me games played recently include …

BLACK FOREST (2022): Rank 2047, Rating 7.7 – Lorenz / Rosenberg

An improved version of Glass Road (doing away with its turn order/building availability/card-action-copying issues). Here we have 20 action tiles spread around a map, 4 to each village, and you spend provisions to travel to the pair of actions you want (as long as no one else is there) and doing Glass Roady type things – getting resources, converting them, clearing your estate, buying more estate, filling your estate with grain/water/pastures, buying buildings, etc. You’re aiming to build an engine that gets you lots of things cheaply and then score those things. I liked the mechanism for moving the actions around, providing another decision point. But it’s still a Glass Roady type grind of eking out resources, spending them, getting more resources, spending them, but now for 2 hours. On the positive side, you have more control over your destiny, the buildings will differ each game, the action choices are interesting and will array differently, all of which should provide sufficient variety.

Rating: 7

BIOS: ORIGINS (SECOND EDITION) (2019): Rank 1762, Rating 7.8 – Eklund / Manker

It’s all about the cards and icons, baby, cards and icons. All your actions come from them, gotta get ‘em. But let’s make a hundred different icons and let’s make them as tiny as possible so they’re squinty to tell apart. Playability? Who cares? This is Eklund. If you don’t appreciate the glory of the vision, we don’t want you playing anyway. Also let’s make it really unforgiving – if you fall behind due to an unfortunate circumstance, let’s make sure you can’t escape the vicious poverty cycle for the next 3 hours. Think of it as more time to bask in the glory of the vision.  Because the game is engineered for the strong to get advantage from hammering the weak. And if you’re doing really well and choose to flip a game clock event card, let’s make sure you can suffer a game-losing setback so as to disincentivise that … and ensure the game goes as long as possible so everyone can enjoy the glory of the vision for longer. Despite all that, I still somehow enjoyed exploring it, trying to find cards that helped me progress, appreciating the intent and scope. But yeah, don’t emotionally invest, the replay comes from seeing where the game takes you and what cool action sequences you might be able to engineer this time out.

Rating: 6

FOUNDATIONS OF METROPOLIS (2024): Rank 2503, Rating 7.7

An old-school Euro that’s 20 years late to the party. Either get money, spend it to buy a plot (A1 – I9 on the common board) from the display, or place a building on plots you’ve bought. You’ve got 3 choices in buildings – commercial to get more money, residential for race-points, or civic buildings which earn pts based on what’s around it. Not much strategic choice. Hope adjacent plots appear in the display at a steady pace to allow you to get more money between purchases and acquire before anyone else adjacent to it. And build otherwise. It felt fully explored after a single play – your next play is going to be remarkably similar in feel and choice as your previous.

Rating: 6

IT’S A WONDERFUL KINGDOM (2021): Rank 1365, Rating 7.1

This takes an average game and, in an attempt to make an interesting 2p version, somehow makes everything worse. It’s much the same as ‘World’ except it replaces the 7 Wonders style card selection draft with the most hated mechanic on the planet – a San Marco style Solomon’s Choice. Each player draws 7 cards plus 1 calamity and then take turns placing 2 cards, either both into 1 offer or split among both offers. The opponent chooses one offer and then places 2 cards themselves, with the choice to add to the non-taken offer and/or starting a new one. Of your 8 cards 2 will be placed face-down, the rest face-up. Much of this sordid and elongated task is guess-work, trying to avoid the calamity cards, struggling to find a card split that will leave you something you want only to watch it get poisoned. Oh what fun. When done, mechanically play out what you get. Repeat for 4 rounds.

Rating: 5

NINJAN (2024): Rank 23538, Rating 5.5

In scenes reminiscent of 6 Nimmt, everyone simul-reveals a card (ranges -6 to 10 in 3 suits) and resolve them high to low, either taking one of the 3 piles of cards (if your colour beats its top card’s colour) or add your card to a pile and score nothing. At game-end score the face value of cards collected. There’s a smidgen of thought as to whether to play high or low and the likely best colour, which generates some group-think, but it turns out you mostly play a card, hope for the best, and settle for whatever you get. And be happy the game is no longer than 5 minutes.

Rating: 5

PARTY PANDA PIRATES (2024): Rank 12524, Rating 8.5

The game comes with a stack of cards, each describing a little game – dexterity dice stacking, Tsuro-style tile taking, flicking cards into a box, etc. Each game is preceded by shooting a meeple down a pirate ship slide, Crokinole-style. Don’t ask why or how it all hangs together, that’s not the point. But you do get points for doing well in all these little games. On the plus-side, every game is going to be a different mix of games. On the downside, you have no idea if you’re going to enjoy them or not. It may well be lots of fun with the right people at the right time but it’s too long at 45+ mins for a party game on game night for me.

Rating: 5

PYRAMIDO: FORGOTTEN TREASURES (2024): Rank N/a, Rating N/a

Take a King-domino style tile (different colour at either end) and a gem from one of the 3 stacks and build your personal pyramid. When each of the 4 levels are built, score a point for icon in each coloured area, as long as you spend a gem in that colour. Which makes the tiles and the gems equally important in the choosing. The icons on the outside ring of each level stay visible throughout the game which adds a nice element to the colour placement considerations. But most turns are trivial (making the best of what’s available), there’s no story/drama, and the length is too long for its abstract nature to hold interest all the way.

Rating: 6

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SAN FRANCISCO (2023): Rank 4464, Rating 6.7 – Knizia

You either add to a set of cards or take a set (a la Coloretto). The cards and scoring are more complicated though. The cards you take get placed in your tableau in the appropriate colour row and you want to be the first to have 5 in a colour but also have cards with lots of people on them, and tram tracks, and bonus symbols, and those which allow you to build skyscrapers – all of which earn points. There’s a fancy system of ensuring you can’t take too many cards without the others catching up but the continual enforcing is irritating, no doubt. It also got a bit too downtime-y at the end trying to work out what cards were needed to steal first or second in each colour which, in a low-score type of game, is important. Still, it’s Knizia, it works, it’s playable.

Rating: 6

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Larry:  I haven’t gotten the chance to try Black Forest yet (I definitely want to), but I’m happy to see that you feel the same way that I do about Glass Road, Alison.  I thought the card play in that one, which felt more like guesswork and random good/bad fortune than anything else, spoiled what should have been a solid game.  With its removal, I’m hoping I enjoy Black Forest considerably more.

And to continue the trend, I haven’t played Foundations of Metropolis, but I have played the game it was derived from, Foundations of Rome.  And that game felt like a very slight exercise which was dominated by its massively overproduced appearance.  Not awful, but not something I really need to play again.

Jeff: I have enjoyed Foundations of Rome, the deluxe version of Foundations of Metropolis, several times now, and found the games to play out differently enough. It feels like a city building Ticket to Ride to me, which is a compliment, as the latter game is still as enjoyable and popular as it was 20 years ago. So “20 years late to the party”?  I don’t think this kind of game will ever go out of style.  I do wish there was a happy medium between the expensive 3D version and the flat cardboard version, something with cheaper plastic buildings like those other great Euro city builders like Metropolis and Big City.

As for It’s A Wonderful World, I have the exact same issue as Alison. I like the engine-building aspect, but the turns do get same-y and you either randomly get the scoring cards at the end that match your engine or you don’t. No need for me to try Kingdom, then.

Mark: Unlike Alison & Jeff, I like It’s A Wonderful World a lot. My younger son & I played a good deal of it during lockdown – and his win rate against me head to head is 80% out of 21 plays. (When we add other people, his win rate drops to 74% out of 27 plays.) So I’m not sure I buy the “get good scoring cards at the end” argument – or he’s an anomalous exception to it.

Sadly, they’re not wrong about Wonderful Kingdom. The first few plays were fine, but even with the different variants, it didn’t hold up.