Dale Yu: Review of Dawn of Ulos

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Dale Yu

Dawn of Ulos

  • Designer: Jason Lentz
  • Publisher: Thunderworks Games
  • Players: 1-5
  • Age: 14+
  • Time: 60-90 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

For untold eons, the mortal races lived in separate planes, unaware of other worlds beyond their own. But now the dragon god Azema forges a new world by opening rifts to other planes…

Dawn of Ulos is an economic tile-laying game for 1-5 players set in the world of Roll Player and Cartographers. You compete in a game among gods of the planarverse, wagering on and manipulating the rise and fall of mortals.

Control the fate of Ulos! Develop a new world, invest in your favorite factions, and pit armies against each other. Choose wisely when to exert your influence. As factions rise and fall, will you earn the most favor with the world creator?

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Voidfall: An Opinionated Conversation

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Mark Jackson

Though the writing team here at Opinionated Gamers site is known for going where angels fear to tread, it seems a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to reinvent the wheel by writing a full review of Voidfall. (Yes, I’ll admit – I tried to cram as many idioms into that sentence as possible – kind of like how the good folks at Mindclash crammed so much stuff into the Galactic Box version of this game.)

The simple reason? One of our newer writers here at the OG also does a bang-up job for Meeple Mountain… and he (Justin Bell) wrote an epic five-chapter preview & review of Voidfall back in December 2023.

  • Part One: The Box
  • To be fair, Justin isn’t just excited about the physical box… but by all the well-designed stuff inside it.
    • Quote: “At some point during my initial sorting, I realized that even if I never played Voidfall (Don’t worry! I’m going to play Voidfall!!), I just love taking new toys out of the box, putting stickers on meeples, punching cardboard chits, and marveling at the quality of a sturdy player board.”
  • Part Two: The Tutorial
    • In which Justin explains just how cool the tutorial to this massive game is…
    • Quote: “The goal of the tutorial is simple: finish the game knowing what the heck you are supposed to be doing. Let’s give credit where credit is due: this is one of the best tutorials I have ever played.”
  • Part Three: Competitive Mode
    • …which also includes a detailed explanation about setting up Voidfall, leading Justin at one point in our OG conversation to write “Mark, I wish you lived here so that I could just play it at your house”, following my comment that I found setting it up an almost Zen-like experience.
    • Quote: “Here’s how much I love Voidfall’s Competitive Mode: I generally hate games with zero interaction, and I almost never intentionally play two player games with anyone besides my wife. But I would play Voidfall at two players any time.”
  • Part Four: Co-op/Solo Mode
    • Though not a solo player, Justin put in the time with Voidfall.
    • Quote: “Where things get interesting—or “interesting”, quotes intentional, depending on your point of view—is when Solo is played on Medium or Hard mode. That’s because the Crisis cards quickly move from “not bad” to “utterly ridiculous” as players are forced to use not only the Level I and Level II Crisis cards, but the Level III Crisis cards too. The Level III Crisis cards feel like Buckle and Turczi were out drinking one night and thought up some of the worst ways they could punish players and still keep the Voidfall gameplay loop intact.”
  • Part Five: The Review
    • Something I appreciate about Justin’s review is his honesty about what he loves AND what he doesn’t love about Voidfall.
    • Quote: “In terms of the marriage of gameplay to production, Voidfall is the hands-down winner in this category for 2023. If this were a metric tracked by BGG, it would get a perfect score. As a value proposition, Voidfall has no peer. You could play it 100 times and still not see every combination of map setup, technology tableau, and House abilities. All of this comes with a production and storage solution that puts almost every other supposedly “deluxe” tabletop experience to shame.”
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There’s a Draft In Here: Solo Gaming with Drafting Games

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Mark Jackson

I enjoy solo games… and I enjoy drafting games. But turning a multiplayer drafting game into a coherent and enjoyable solo drafting game is not a simple proposition. How do you simulate the loss of choices created by the intelligent choices of other players? (Yes, I’ll stipulate that not every human opponent you face is making intelligent choices.)

In this short post, I’ll attempt to highlight a design idea and its variations that has allowed a number of very good multiplayer games to also work quite well as solo game experiences. I’ll be focusing on three excellent recent releases – Blueprints of Mad King Ludwig, Pioneer Rails, and Stonespine Architects – all three from different design teams (Ted Alspach, Jeff Allers & Matthew Dunstan, Jordy Adan) and different publishers (Bezier Games, Dranda Games, Thunderworks Games).

I’m not claiming to make an exhaustive review of the subject – the references I’ll be making to other games are those in my own personal experience.

Pack It Up!

The design idea (or mechanic/mechanism – I am just not interested in that particular niche gamer argument today on which one is “correct”) at the heart of all three solo variants of these games is packets. 

No, not sugar packets or artificial sweetener packets or even packets of various gamer-friendly snacks. (Anyone up for Twizzler Bites or some Red Vines?) Packets of playing cards.

The first time I saw this mechanic was in the city-builder drafting game from 2018, NEOM (which, btw, I highly recommend). The multiplayer game uses a 7 Wonders-style draft of tiles which are then placed onto your individual city board. (To be fair, the first time I saw this style of draft was in Fairy Tale… but 7 Wonders is the game that “put drafting on the map”.)

In order to play NEOM solo, each “age” of tiles (there are three of them) is shuffled and divided into packs. After some slight shifting of tiles to make the early packs larger and the later packs smaller, the solo player picks up each pack in turn and chooses a single tile to place. There are some other small rules changes about purchasing resources and dealing with disaster tiles… but that simple structural choice maintains the drafting feel of the game while limiting your options to keep the task of building an efficient city challenging.

Wonderful Idea

It’s a Wonderful World (2019) is yet another drafting game with its own twists (the production of elements in order to “build” cards into your permanent tableau) that chose to use the packet idea to fuel the solo game. The solo player deals eight “development pools” of five cards each… and then considers each “pool” individually, playing cards as potential constructions or recycling them for resources. The player may also discard two of those cards to draw five more cards from the deck, keeping one of them. After finishing with two “pools” (aka packets), a production phase happens, thus simulating the rhythm of a multiplayer game of It’s A Wonderful World.

Again, the packet design idea helps keep the drafting “feel” of the multiplayer game while offering enough constraints to keep the solo player from cruising to an unearned victory.

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Dale Yu: Review of Matches

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Dale Yu

Matches

  • Designer: Daniel McKinley
  • Publisher: Thing 12 Games
  • Players: 2-6
  • Age: 8+
  • Time: 30-45 minutes
  • Played with review copy provided by publisher

The Whelming Matches factory has burned down, with only this artifact found in the destruction. Cold to touch, it sat amongst the ashen remains of the factory. Why? How? These questions have yet to be unanswered.

Matches is a trick-taking style card game, with a unique spin on scoring and playing. The lead player plays a number card to start the blaze. Each player in turn order must play a card matching that number (which increases the blaze’s heat and point value), or a set of cards that equal the value of the card.

A player can choose to pass, upon which they collect points for each of pairs they have played. The last player to pass wins the trick and collects the points on the blaze card…but will NOT score their pairs they have played.

Deciding if you’ll get more points from the pairs you’ve played, or if you need to try and stay in to get the points on the blaze card, is the heart of Matches.

The game also includes optional powerful “Burn Cards” which can be purchased with points. These Burn Cards can have huge impacts on how the game is played, the possibly points to be scored, and the cards in players hands.

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Vote on the Box Cover for First Monday in October

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Talia Rosen

The incomparable Donal Hegarty has come up with so many awesome concepts for the box cover for my upcoming design First Monday in October (about the history of the U.S. Supreme Court) that we are running a poll for folks to vote on their favorite approach. One lucky voter that posts in this thread on BoardGameGeek will even win a free copy of the game when it is released:

Check out the poll here and vote by June 14

To learn more about the game, check out:

(1) The initial 2020 design diary

(2) The follow-up piece focused on case effects

(3) The BGG News announcement

(4) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Publication (2023)

(5) This video interview with Liz Davidson of Beyond Solitaire

(6) This GeekList: 17 unlikely games that inspired my Supreme Court design

(7) The latest full game rules (16 pages)

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Talia Rosen: More Games, More Fun – Part 2

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Talia Rosen

In my prior post – 7 Days, 67 Games, Infinite Fun – I shared my opinions on the first half of my experience at a weeklong game convention this spring.  Today, I’m back to report on the second half, including prototypes from Friedemann Friese and Tom Lehmann, as well as old favorites like Imperial and Dominant Species, plus new upcoming games like Knizia’s Rebirth.  We left off with the incomparable Stephensons Rocket at the end of Day 3, and we’ll pick back up with the exciting Roll and Write for the Galaxy.

Day 4 – Oathsworn

I started off the day learning a Roll and Write for the Galaxy prototype from Tom Lehmann, who said that I could mention the in-progress game here.  I’m not sure how widely known the concept is, but I had not heard of it before.  I love Roll for the Galaxy, having played it 68 times, so I’m the target market for a new Roll and Write for the Galaxy.  This prototype did not disappoint, even though I had the same difficulty obtaining reassign powers as I do in the original.  I was impressed with how familiar yet different the game felt, so I’m definitely looking forward to picking this one up when it comes out.

I don’t bring a lot of games with me to conventions like this, but I do bring Oath.  I was eager to set it up in a high-traffic area and woo people into giving it a shot.  Oath definitely seems a lot more divisive than Root, which is reasonable because it’s so incredibly different from Root (and I think a lot of people expect a similar game given the same designer/publisher and similar artwork).  Oath actually feels a lot more like Pax Pamir to me as you build a small tableau of cards to control your actions and fate.  There is admittedly not that much control though.  I always warn people that you will most enjoy Oath if you’re okay congratulating an opponent on an epic reversal due to a powerful card revealed after almost 2 hours of play (not entirely unlike Innovation in fact).  Oath also has a highly variable game length (anywhere from 40 minutes up to over 2 hours), but the game creates such a lush and memorable narrative that it feels almost like a lite Dungeons & Dragons in a box.  I was thrilled to spend most of Day 4 playing back-to-back-to-back games of Oath.  This game really excels when you play it several times in a row and this made for a phenomenal afternoon!

Three straight games of Oath can definitely melt your brain a bit, so I followed it up by returning to Captain Flip, which I had played earlier in the week.  I still enjoyed Captain Flip very much, but I’m not so sure it needs space on the shelf after all.  After Captain Flip, the stars aligned for me to finally try Akropolis, which had been on my want-to-try list for years.  I’m a big fan of Java and Antics (plus I enjoyed Taluva), so the three-dimensional hexagonal tile building was very appealing in Akropolis.  I wanted to love Akropolis, but I ended up rating it a 7, which is definitely better than my 5-6 average, but not quite an 8 out of 10, which are the games I want to own.  I’m not convinced that Akropolis has the staying power of Java or Antics, and I’m not sure the scoring conditions for the various colors are at all comparable.  I’d be happy to play a friend’s copy of Akropolis though to explore it further.

I closed out the day with quick plays of the trick-taking game Of What’s Left and the absurd dexterity game Blocky Mountains, followed by an absurdly silly prototype brought by Taylor of Taylor’s Trick-Taking and a fascinating Matt Leacock prototype called Flickering Stars.  I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for Flickering Stars later this year!

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