Happy Holidays to everyone!

As the year comes to a close, another Quick Takes column

We’ve started a tradition of writing a group document with very short takes on the games that we play.  Of course, you’ll not get as much info as in a full review, but as our reviews likely won’t start for awhile, you can at least get a glimpse into what we think about certain games.   The OG writers can leave their initials at the end of a comment if they want attribution…

We’ll post this to the blog every few weeks to give some thoughts on each game.   Here is the next installment on what we think about the games from Spiel 2025

3 Witches – 3 player TT seems super strange, but it worked pretty well with 2 on 1 actions.

3 Witches – I liked this well enough until we realized how easy it is for the non-lead witches to sandbag. It seems as if the only way to actually win as the Lead Witch is to not bid and pass cards to make your hand just mediocre enough to not take more tricks than you bid.

7 Wonders Dice – Didn’t enjoy, seemed a bit convoluted and disjointed

7 Wonders Dice – The most boring roll-and-write I have played in some time. Very few interesting decisions. Also no 7 Wonders flavor.

Angel Share – Interesting economy game with lots of market manipulation. Need to play it a second time..

Ayar – an enjoyable game with diminishing options as the game progresses. That was a welcome change and easier to teach and play. Not great, but well above worthy.

Ayar – I like the system but it’s another game where it seems as if you have to focus entirely on just a few of the possible actions in order to score well. That limits the strategy space.

 Ayar had decent systems, but I didn’t love how you have to focus on two out of four actions to do well – or at least so it appeared.

BiDcoin: A solid TT with an interesting twist on bidding. Worth picking up.

Coloro – a 2p abstract from Steffen / Helvetiq.  Collect colored tiles trying to collect the most of a color.  It worked fine.

Come Sail Away: Not a new release but new to me, and a fantastic game in the vein of Factory Fun/Funner/Funnest/Funniest/etc.. Also an insta-buy, this kind of slow motion puzzle hits just the right notes for me.

Countryside – I really liked this one, lots of decisions. A neat action selection mechanism where you unlock extra actions/abilities as you progress through the achievements.  It’s a game with a big deck of cards, so you’ll be spending a fair amount of time reading the cards and figuring out which ones work best for you.  Everything really gels together nicely here, and a game I hope to play a lot more.

Covenant – seemed unnecessarily complex, even the player boards are asymmetric for no reason.

Covenant: Not for me. There is a good game hiding in there, and props for the disparate actions actually hanging together, but the downtime and potential for screwage on resources makes it a miss in my book. If I wanted to play a game with lots of clever action chains, I would play Arnak instead.

Cultivo – A fine worker placement/area control game.  It didn’t do anything new and exciting, but it was easy to learn and was enjoyable.

Cultivo – I agree it’s not doing anything new but it’s refreshingly old-school Euro in design and works well. My only quibble is that it feels as if market stalls are a bit too good.

Cultivo- Felt like an old-school euro with simple actions with good complex depth was enjoyable.

Dirt & Dust – solo process of weaving your rally car using cards and some minor deck building. I need more plays to decide on this, but so far, so good.

Epona – Tableau builder with just cards. Sanctuary is better although in a bigger box. Neutral 

Fair Enough – It’s fine for what it is. I’d rather play Deep Sea Adventure.

Fair Enough- bit of a deep sea adventure, vibe where the time is running out for you to Shop and get all of your items from Spiel Essen.

Fearless – Interesting TT but players can really pile on the points. With five players, I feel that there is more control than you initially think by turning the tides on those I think they’re getting something over on you.

Fellowship Trick Taking Game with the long title: Just as fantastic as I’d hoped. Love this, looking forward to playing more and actually getting past the birthday party (we called it after 3 rounds because Ark Nova called)

Firefighters on Duty – it’s cooperative (so look away if that’s enough to know), realtime and fun. Quick too, as you have six 2 minutes of speed dice rolling prefaced by discussion on which fire engines to send where, put out fires and rescue people. A firefighter version of Project Elite.

Five Families – As with many Friedemann Friese games I want to like it more than I do. It’s an auction game, which I tend to like, and it plays relatively quickly and has interesting decisions. So why don’t I like it more? Not sure, but possibly because the early auctions tend to feel arbitrary – of course you want to build up some income, but does it matter where? Maybe but it doesn’t feel as if it does.

Five Families – Interesting auction game set around area control in New York City. Turns quick and not a lot of downtime. Not my cup of tea, but I can see why people are enjoying it.

Forest shuffle Dartmoor – A new standalone version of Forest Shuffle. If you like the original, it’s more to love.  If you didn’t, it’s a slightly more complicated version.  Now in addition to trees and shrubs, you also have moor cards which you can play things to.  So many cards to look at and figure out where to play them.  Scoring is still the part that turns me off about the game because there is just so much math to deal with.  I’d be happy to play this if my 2p gaming partner suggests it, but I don’t know if I’m ever proposing it either.

Forestry – Worker placement plus resource optimization plus a little bit of area control thrown in.  There is a lot happening here, and in our first game I was very surprised by the winning strategy. I’ll be curious to try it again as well as to try the advanced mode, which I actually think might streamline the feel of it a bit.

Formidable Farm – It flowed nicely, but it became a bit boring after the first play

Formidable Farm – It’s kind of fun but it’s basically multi-player solitaire, and the difficulty of each player’s tasks can vary a lot.

Fossilum – enjoyed my first play building reptiles in the museum the game nicely mitigates, digging in OK a bag for tiles. Some of the colors or icons on the tiles could’ve been better to easily identify and not be as confusing.

Fountains – nice and comfortable it moved along, but was ultimately forgettable.

Fountains – works fine but it made me want to play Akropolis more rather than Fountains. I would be willing to play it again but it just feels loose.

Garden – 2p game from Taiwan. Abstract game – goal is to make lines of your pieces (3 or 4 long) on a 4×4 grid.  Each piece that you play puts restrictions on where your opponent can play their next piece.

Ghost Lift – Still enjoying this title some people don’t like it some people do- It is an odd duck, but I have changed  the end game scoring Yes, since I don’t like one person loses, and everybody wins.

Ghost Lift – Too few decisions for the length.

Hits and outs – a baseball themed guessing game from itten.  I’ve never been a fan of read-my-mind games, and this hasn’t changed that. Pitcher gets 4 balls and hides a “hit” under one of them and places ond ball at each base.  Batter guesses which ball has the hit.  If batter is right, he puts a runner on the base where he guessed.  With no outs, childhood ghost runner rules apply. With outs, runners only move when forced.  Thematically this falls apart for me, because with 2 outs, the runners are likely running?  anyways, it’s a guessing game, so I’ll leave it to you to guess what I thought of it.

Hot Streak – yeah, was good betting fun randomness, but not as good as magical athletes player powers intertwining  with each other. 

Ink – enjoyable abstract in the form of Framework. Enjoyable for a 20 minute game.

Keyside – my first play post the prototype and it was more enjoyable. Whether it was in any way different or just a different environment I don’t know, but I’d be very happy to play again soon.

Keyside – works well enough but it’s more complicated than it needs to be and the dice mechanism isn’t doing as much work as it should (there should be more point to choosing your own dice values). 

Keyside –  enjoy the play. I think I might like this best of all the newer key titles.

Kilauea – really beautiful.  beautiful and incredibly mean. Oh, you were gonna score that why don’t I just take that and put that on the island so you score less on all the things that you’re currently scoring? ouch

Kilia – a maiden design, published by Huch!  A nice tight game here – trying to collect and ship goods around Kiel in the olden days.  It’s a bit of an engine builder as you work to improve your ship, your capacity to draft cards, gaining special abilities, etc.  It feels fairly old school, and as you might expect, I really liked it for that reason.

Kilia – A pretty good middle-weight Euro. Having played twice I would play it again, but I suspect I will not want to play it too many more times as I think it will get a bit samey.

Kingdom Crossing – Based on the seven bridges puzzle you try to maximize your travel around the board gathering resources for points. Fun and cute. I like it (Lorna)

Magical Athlete – great at max player count.

Magical Athlete – I like it better than the original version but not enough. It takes too long for the amount of enjoyment I get out of the silly interactions, especially since the interactions in a given race might not be that great.

Magical Athlete: Silly party racing game. When it works it works, but it’s very much ‘correct attitude required’. The chunky wooden retro-styled racers are awesome, though. Tentative like.

Movie Fight – recipe for fulfillment, but was not fulfilled after playing twice.

Movie Rivals: Bleagh. Not enough control to be compelling, not for me.

Natera – this was getting good reviews from earlier on in the meeting so I was keen to play it. I enjoyed it, but certainly not as much as others. It moved from “can I buy it?” to happy to play someone else’s copy in due course.

Night Soil – clearing shit from London is an unusual theme and the game had some good ideas. Sadly our group of players were disappointed by the presentation which really reduced our enjoyment. The game board is a cloth mat, but in dirty colours (maybe deliberate), but the workers often covered the action spaces and obscured the action. Other players then had to move each worker before deciding what to do. It just felt like no one had play tested the game in its final version. No more plays for me.

NoKoSu Dice: Okay TT. Geek rating of 7.6 is probably a touch high for me, but it’s ok. Like It, but I would always rather play Tichu, Wizard, or another evergreen.

Orloj – Even with the busyness of the board, the game played really smoothly and felt more simple than the complex actions that I sometimes associate with a heavier euro. Didn’t like the variable scoring set up.

Orloj – The core systems work well enough but it has some extra bits that don’t seem to pull their weight (e.g. the sculptor).

Papyria – I like the system but the randomness of the scoring opportunities really hurts it for me.

Papyria – interesting module set up  but need to play it more to fully understand how player interaction can impact the game and how the modulus set up will change the aspects of planning. Feeling a bit neutral on this one.

Railway Boom – enjoyable root building and auction game with a little Engine building using trains, which was quite clever.

Railway Boom: Love it. This is an amazingly tight rail / auction game that doesn’t feature many of the guardrails that most modern Euros do. If you want to bid yourself into oblivion, go right ahead. A minor quibble that the luck of the draw on the engineering cards can be a little extreme (and the card decks for engines, engineering, etc. are not split into early / late game, which means you can get some dynamite / dogpoop cards if they show up at the wrong times). But just a wonderful design, clean and intuitive graphics… this one goes on the buylist.

Sanctuary – Different enough from AN to keep. Tile/Tableau builder with more luck and in some ways less forgiving than the original. Does have a smaller ruleset. I like it. (Lorna)

Sanctuary – holding up nicely now with three plays under my belt. I don’t think it fires Ark Nova (particularly when you add in the Marine Worlds expansion to the original game) but for those who thought Ark Nova was “too much”, this may be a great choice. It is SUBSTANTIALLY easier to teach than the original game. (Mark Jackson)

Sanctuary – It does most of what I liked in Ark Nova in less time. Die-hard AN fans will probably not love it.

Sanctuary – it seemed fine and was quicker, but I enjoy the puzzle of AN a bit more than this simpler tile version.

Shallow sea – a puzzly game where you are drafting coral tiles, fish and scoring tiles – placing them on your board and trying to get the fish in the right place in order to complete coral tiles.  You’re then also trying to place your coral tiles (or I suppose place your scoring tiles) in the right places so that the completed coral tiles will trigger the bonus of the scoring tiles.  It can be a bit thinky, and in the end, the game took a bit longer that I would have wanted it to play. You get a huge selection of scoring tile types in the box, and you only use ten each game, so each time you play it should feel a little different.

Shallow Sea – I didn’t care for this. The scoring methods don’t tend to interact in interesting ways, especially because the fish can be moved around, so if you don’t score all your coral you just aren’t trying.

Space lab  – another tableau builder from France.  I’m not quite sure I’m ready to coin the term JATB, but I feel like that is coming soon. Here, you have three space capsules and play cards around them.  Each capsule has its own special scoring condition, and you can also draw random ones from a deck as bonuses.  Play up to ten cards, then score every card.  While the game is short, there is enough going on that it is hard to really know how you’re doing versus your opponents until you add everything up at the end.  I’d likely prefer the elegance of Faraway to this.

Take Time – I don’t love it but like it well enough that I have played the first few clocks several times now with different groups. I’d be happy to play more but won’t plan to. 

Take Time – interesting version of group sync similar to the mind. I do prefer Bomb Busters over this new co-op.

The Druids of Endora – dice placement for action, normal Stefan Feld point salad, but this midweight was quite enjoyable.

The Druids of Endora – more comprehensible than some Feld designs but probably still has too many elements to actually think seriously about all of them.

The hobbit there and back again – A roll and write, or maybe better stated as EIGHT roll and writes.  Each player gets a book, and the pages have different boards for eight chapters in the story; each playing out a little differently.  Worked fine as a group game, but for me, this will likely get more play as a solo thing.

Tricky Kids – TT game that you write on the cards based on the amount 21 and then try to win some tricks. Seems to produce much more laughter than a normal trick taking game, but I didn’t feel like I had much control.

Tundra – dice allocation for your actions. Flowed nicely not a lot of AP on this mid weight euro. Would like to play the advanced version.

Wondrous creatures – Another game that is a big ol’ deck of cards, and you’re gonna be trying to find out which ones work best for you.  Add to this a neat worker placement process on the map where you collect resources and get special actions.  An added bonus were the well thought out and humorous creature names (very reminiscent of Pokemon names).

Wondrous Creatures – Has points of interest but it’s too random for the length. You have to get some card synergy going, but you don’t have access to that many cards, so that’s down to luck.