Elios is an abstract wooden game where the goal of the game is to be the first player to get rid of all your sticks. To start the game, a sun made up of 2 discs stacked on each other is placed in the center of the table. One beam of each of the 8 colors is placed around the sun in random arrangement.
Welcome to the world of breeding even-toed ungulates! And not just any even-toed ungulates, but very friendly alpacas and their slightly less friendly llama cousins! (Seriously, we don’t recommend getting bitten by a llama!) You have your own pasture, and you need to place your herds on it to score as many points as possible. Animals are happiest with similar animals, so pay attention to common traits in your herds that will help you overtake the other players in a fun gallop to victory.
Yes, you read the headline correctly – HABA has published a legacy game that is not only family-friendly, but really is at its best as a family experience.
For those who’ve stumbled into this review who’ve never heard of “legacy games” before, let me attempt to explain what makes them different.
Legacy games answer the question: “What if a game remembered what had happened during the previous games… and that game told an epic story?” That’s always been true in role-playing games (well, those that didn’t devolve into rules arguments and/or what fellow OG writer Jeff Myers calls the min-maxing of character stats: “Dungeons & Accountants”). Designer Rob Daviau’s brilliant design idea (first seen in Risk Legacy) took the core engine of that 60+ year old game to a whole new mind-warping level as travel to parallel universes begat new conflicts and redrew old maps. Players put stickers on cards and on the map, wrote on the board, tore up certain cards, opened boxes with new types of pieces… it was a completely new kind of board gaming experience.
Since then, we’ve seen an avalanche of games legacy games and games with legacy elements – I personally have played Risk Legacy, all three seasons of Pandemic Legacy, Betrayal Legacy, Machi Koro Legacy, My City, Seafall, Netrunner: Terminal Directive, and Clank! Legacy. (That doesn’t begin to cover some of the other beloved legacy designs that haven’t hit my table, including Gloomhaven, Charterstone, and The King’s Dilemna, to name a few.)
What HABA and designers Christos Giannakoulas & Manolis Zachariadi have done is built a cooperative kids game using legacy elements… and in the process created a really nifty opportunity for families to play and enjoy an ongoing story together while honing their reasoning skills.
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Adult fans of UNO card games will love this daring take on the classic game. It plays like regular UNO matching color and number, but if a Dare Card is played, the player must decide if they are willing to risk doing the dare versus the penalty of drawing cards. There are four levels of dares: mild, medium, spicy, and fuego! A chance roll of the die determines which dare players must perform. A card with a “reverse” icon on it forces the player who played the Dare Card to perform the dare! But the party doesn’t end there, these cards are durable, waterproof plastic cards to make them completely spill-proof and comes with a handy clip to keep them together! Makes a great gift for fans and game lovers ages 18 years old and up.
A city in the mountains was discovered, but no one dares to venture there without having mapped the place. Here is finally a mission for you, an archaeologist with implacable logic.
ArcheOlogic is a competitive deduction game whose goal is to first find the exact location of the buildings of the city. To help you? An Archeoscope, the only research instrument capable of reading the coded cards left by the Ancients. Ask the Archeoscope your questions by adjusting its cogs, note the precious answers, and replace the buildings on your plan. Think carefully as some questions will take more time than others, but maybe their answer will help you win…
Lucre
Design: John Clowdus
Art: Aaron Nakahara
Publisher: Small Box Games
Players: 4
Time: 30 minutes
Played: 4 times
Berries
Design: John Clowdus
Art: Liz Lahner
Publisher: Small Box Games
Players: 3-4
Time: 20-30 minutes
Played 3 times
Review copies provided by the publisher
Reviewed by Jonathan Franklin
Lucre
Lucre is a clever trick-taking game for exactly four players.
Trick-taking is a style of card game like Spades, Hearts, or Euchre where each player sequentially plays a card and the player who played the winning card wins’ the trick.
Lucre has several twists that make it worth your attention.
First, the cards are not dealt. Each player takes an identical deck of 1-13 in one suit with the same number of coins on each card of that number, so everyone’s 9 has one coin on it and everyone’s 12 has three coins on it.
Second, you don’t start with all your cards in hand.
To play the game, remove two random cards from each player’s 13-card deck, shuffle them face down, and place them in the center of the table, called the Purse. Shuffle the 8-card purse face down. Because the player has not seen all their cards, they don’t know which two of their cards are in the Purse.
Next, each player draws three cards from their deck to make up their hand. You may mulligan by placing 0, 1, or 2 cards on the bottom of your deck and draw as many as you discarded, so everyone has a three-card hand.
Turn over the top card of the purse. The coins on that card are the points that the winner of the trick will get. The suit of the card determines the leader, so each player will get to lead twice during the 8-trick game.
The third twist is that before you lead, the player who leads gets to take a card from their hand and score a card from their hand by placing it into their scoring pile face down. They then play a card to lead the trick.
Each subsequent player can play a card face up or face down. A face-up card can be any number not already played or on the purse card. Or you can play a card face down and the back of every card shows one coin. The trick is resolved with the highest numbered card taking the purse card AND their winning played card and placing them both face-up in their scoring pile, called their Wealth. The player who played the lowest card scores the card they played face up. All other players turn over the card they played and score that one coin.
After all eight tricks, the player adds their remaining card into their wealth face up, so remember this when discarding from your hand at the start of the game.
The player with the most coins in their wealth after eight tricks and their final card wins the game.
I have greatly enjoyed all my plays of Lucre and strongly suggest playing it if you have a chance. It does not feel like any other card game because you cannot count cards and you are not even sure which cards are in your deck until you have seen both of your purse cards. Your high cards have fewer coins on them, so if you play a high card (or a very low card), you’ll only get one coin from your face-up, but you might win a sweet purse. Another fun aspect of the game is the flip of the next card in the purse, as that determines the lead player,
This is a keeper for me for two reasons, it is unlike any other trick taker and it is also fun and easy to explain, as the only relevance of the suits is to determine lead, so there are no suits or trump.
Berries
Berries is a casual game of dessert-making with a variable set of ending conditions.
Set out 7 Scones, 6 Pies, and 5 Wine in the center. Each of those 18 cards has Jam on the backside. The remaining 35 berry cards are placed in a deck and two are dealt to each player. Five cards from the deck are placed face up in the center and called the Patch. There are seven copies of each of five berries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, and strawberries. Each berry card has a recipe on it (two wine, two pie, and three scones on each berry type) below the image of the berry itself.
The play of the game is streamlined. After drawing a card from the deck, the active player may either Pick or Make. Picking berries means taking two cards from the Patch. Each other player may then take one berry from the patch, The patch is only replenished after everyone has taken their cards.
‘Make’ is the exciting action because you use the recipe on one of your berry cards to make a dessert using other berry cards of that type. For example, a blueberry pie requires a blueberry card with a pie recipe on it as well as two additional blueberries. Wine uses up 3 berries (so four cards of that berry, 1 recipe plus 3 berries), Pie uses 2 berries, and Scones 1. Jam requires any two different berry cards + one additional different berry for each jam you have already made, If you make jam, you may take a card from any of the three stacks and flip it over. This is a tactical choice, as we will soon see.
Each of the four types of goods has a different winning condition on it. If you meet the condition when you make that good, you instantly win the game! The victory condition is only relevant on the turn you make it, not on subsequent turns.
If after you make a wine any stack is empty, you win.
If you make a third pie, you win.
If you have at least one of each of the four goods after making a scone, you win.
If you have made any five goods after making jam, you win.
Play continues with pick and making until someone wins.
After the pick or make action, each player discards down to five cards, the patch is replenished, and play continues clockwise.
We enjoyed Berries as a family game, because it felt like a filler with twists. Baking is a great theme and the game is clever, in that as the game goes on, some win conditions feel easier as others get harder. For example, if two people are trying to win with pies and there are only six in the game the other two players baking a pie likely cuts off that path to victory, At the same time, making jam gets harder and harder as you need more and more different berries to keep going that way. Wine is extremely hard to make because it requires four of the same kind of berry and there are only seven of each type of berry in the game. If you are looking for a fun game for a summer’s afternoon, Berries is a delicious pick.
