Per the publisher: After hiking a local trail, you and your partner have returned to a campsite completely ransacked by pesky critters. Team up to clear your campground of critters before your neighbors. Scram! is a fun & fast team based card game that plays 1 vs 2, 2 vs 2 & 3 vs 3! Each animal has a different card value, and many have a special action. Be careful, there may be critters who are still hiding and waiting for the right moment to present themselves! Call out “Scram!” when you think your team has the fewest animals in your campsite; but will your team be able to toss out the troublesome trespassers before your neighbors?
The heron flies over the Himeji sky while the Daimyo, from the top of the castle, watches his servants move. Gardeners tend the pond, where the koi carp live, warriors stand guard on the walls, and courtiers crowd the gates, pining for an audience that brings them closer to the innermost circles of the court. When night falls, the lanterns are lit and the workers return to their clan.
In The White Castle, players will control one of these clans in order to score more victory points than the rest. To do so, they must amass influence in the court, manage resources boldly, and place their workers in the right place at the right time. [In this game, you will] explore the most imposing fortress in modern Japan, Himeji Castle, where the banner of the Sakai clan flies under the orders of Daimio Sakai Tadakiyo.
The White Castle is a Euro type game with mechanics of resource management, worker placement and dice placement to carry out actions. During the game, over three rounds, players will send members of their clan to tend the gardens, defend the castle or progress up the social ladder of the nobility. At the end of the match, these will award players victory points in a variety of ways.
The results of the 2023 International Gamers Awards (IGAs) have just been announced and the winners, together with their designers and publishers, are:
Best Multiplayer Experience – Revive (Kristian Ostby, Eilif Svensson, Helge Meissner, Anna Wermlund), Aporta Games
Best 2-player Experience – Oranienburger Kanal (Uwe Rosenberg), Spielworxx
Best Solo Experience – Earth (Maxime Tardif), Inside Up Games
Revive had a fairly comfortable victory in the Multiplayer category. Finishing second and third in that field were two games co-designed by Simone Luciani. Darwin’s Journey (Luciani, Nestore Mangone) took the #2 spot, while Tiletum (Luciani, Daniele Tascini) finished third. The other nominated Multiplayer games were Heat, Planet Unknown, Marrakesh, Challenger!, Lacrimosa, and Earth.
Oranienburger Kanal narrowly beat out the competition in the 2-player category and gave Rosenberg his fifth IGA award, the most for any designer. Just missing out were Splendor Duel (Bruno Cathala, Marc Andre), which finished second, and Undaunted: Battle of Britain (Trevor Benjamin, David Thompson), which took third. Lacuna and Wingspan Asia were also nominated.
Finally, in the Solo category, Earth won a tie-breaker with Shem Phillips’ Legacy of Yu to claim the top spot. Other nominated games in the category were Resist! and Eleven.
Congratulations to all the winning designers and publishers!
60-90 minutes per scenario (over 25 scenarios in the book as a campaign, not a legacy game)
I played the tutorial a few times and through the first arc to write this review. I have played it solo, with two, and with three players. The scaling works well and there is no need for the same person to play the same character every game. The game comes with six very different characters. I have not played through even the tutorial with all of them.
Review by Jonathan Franklin
Review copy received without additional compensation from Dragon Dawn Productions
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Beyond the Rift is a cooperative campaign-based card skirmish game in the same line as Perdition’s Mouth: The Abyssal Rift. If you survived Perdition, this campaign picks up where that one ended. If you are new to the IP, you are in the process of escaping a miserable situation in the world of Zanziar, but you need to hack through some rooms and bad guys to get out.
Introduction
Each player plays a character that fits into the player board, custom abilities, and a character-specific deck of cards. Stop rolling your eyes. If you think this is going to be a generic co-op deck-builder, you are wrong. You start each round with Action Points based on your character.
Your player board tracks your Action Points and those are what you spend to play cards. There is no market or river of cards to chuck into your deck. Instead, your deck includes numerous powerful cards that synergize with each other and with certain cards in other decks. Often cards have two different actions, such as attack and defend. You must choose one of the two actions to use it for or hold it over for the next round. Who needs Zero-to-Hero when you can start as a hero?
The players use their cards to work towards the goal of the scenario, which is generally combat-centered. Along with attack and defense, cards can offer more Action Points, such as spending 2 Action Points to get 5, or more complex actions specific to that character. The setup, goals, and details for each scenario come from the excellent scenario book. For each setup, it scales for both the number of players and the desired difficulty level for that number of players.
A turn follows five steps, Hero Phase, Enemy Phase, Quest Phase, Draw Phase, and End Phase. I will not regurgitate the rules, but it is important to know how a turn flows to see what is special about Beyond the Rift. There is no initiative like the column of tokens in Gloomhaven or the Initiative Deck in Aeon’s End. Instead, all players can play in any order, coordinating card plays to vanquish monsters in front of them, try to open doors, support another player, etc. After all the players have decided not to take any more actions, the Hero Phase stops. Suppose you are tired of multiplayer solitaire combat games or a quarterbacking situation. In that case, this game eliminates those two because all cards in hand can be played at any time, so long as the player has enough Action Points . . . and a useful card. Along with playing cards, you can spend Action Points to draw cards, cycle cards, or take your character’s special actions.
Unlike more fiddly tactical skirmish games, combat in Beyond the Rift has only two ranges, 1 for those monsters engaged with you (in the space right in front of you) and 2 for all other monsters, whether in the central quest area or engaged with other players. There is no line-of-sight in the game, just near (range 1) and far (range 2). Since every card has a range that is either 1 or 2, you know which monsters you can target with each card in your hand. Unfortunately, you might not be able to help another player if all your remaining cards are range 1, so ‘think before you play’. After everyone has taken all the actions they want to, the hero phase is over.
This card shows the range in the upper left, the cost to play first in the upper left of each of the two sections, and the follow-on cost in the upper right of the attack part of the card. In the lower left is the part of the body this card applies to, so if you upgrade to a card with the left arm in red, you remove the base cards with the left arm in red from your deck.
Combat is neither luck-driven nor deterministic. If a hero attacks a creature with power 4 and the creature has a defense of 2, the outcome is not determined until after a modifier card is flipped for the creature. If the creature’s defense modifier is -1, 0, or +1, the attacker wins the combat and a wound card is added to the creature. If the modifier is a +2, +3, +4, or +5, then the creature is unharmed. The modifier card system feels a bit like other co-op games, as it offers some trackable information and you can know the distribution of cards in the modifier deck, however, there is a large swing in values and you are never sure what it will be.
The enemy phase is important because unless you have killed everything off, monsters will now come for you. I hope you saved some Action Points and cards for defense. This phase is clever because in each scenario all the enemies act based on a card drawn from the modifier deck. This means you can try to predict what each creature will do, but if a rare card from the modifier deck is drawn, they might do something completely different, for example, disengage instead of attack. Often they will engage and if they are already engaged will attack. There is a system for determining which player will be engaged by each monster.
Following the enemy phase is the quest phase, where the scenario progresses based on a table that varies widely. Then there is the Draw phase where you reset your Action Points and get one extra Action Points for each unplayed card. For example, if you normally start with 7 Action Points and have two cards left over after the Quest phase, you would set your player board to show 9 Action Points for the start of the next turn. The problem is that if you burn through your deck, you add cards that slow you down, so you don’t want to burn through your deck. Since you must always draw 7 cards, for example, then discard down to that number. You got two extra Action Points, but ‘wasted’ two cards – but having a nine-card hand and choosing seven of them is far better than having a seven-card hand. The final phase is the End phase when any End phase effects are triggered. These are often clean-up-type tasks.
After completing or failing the scenario goal, there is a narrative Aftermath that is worth reading because it sets up the next scenario.
Theme
There are six characters in the box, each with special powers, custom illustrations, and a distinctive deck. They are all evocative in terms of having a name and description, such as Elisa (magus, elf), and a brief description, such as (Awakened Inferno or Reluctant Warrior). These help you know what to expect in that character’s deck. The theme comes from the scenario book. While the cards and player boards have good somewhat grim-dark art, the thing that differentiates each scenario is the setup and progression. If you don’t read the narrative and don’t get into character to some extent, the scenarios can be treated like puzzles. There are quite a few clever things you can do on your turn, somewhat like The Loop, but because there are no turns based on initiative, clever card play can come through sequencing cards from different hands which can create a narrative if you take the time to do more than running the numbers. This is a thematic puzzle game and not one to start if you are in a beer-and-pretzels mood.
Mechanisms
This is more of a tactical skirmish game with a cleanly abstracted environment and once everyone knows the decks, they can plan, in case Niffil draws a certain card. There are no extensive deck modifications other than if you play through the entire campaign of over 25 scenarios, adding an occasional item. The primary additions to your deck will be negative cards, such as wounds and fatigue, rather than shiny new loot, so a primary goal is to optimize the use of each card, rather than wasting them. This game packs quite a bit of strategy in a short time if you like card-based combat without a gridded map.
Character Variability
I missed this at first because I played one character through a few scenarios, but the characters are all quite different because they have their special powers, different decks, and scenarios that play to the strengths of different characters. The warriors, Bastian, Niffil, and Tyra, are probably easiest if you are going to solo a mission. The priests, Simma and Olazabal, are more supporting characters but still have substantial strength. For example, Simma can sometimes ignore range and can play reaction cards after seeing the monster’s total. Olazabal has a special ability to name a card type and flip the top four cards of his deck to try to find actions of that type. Olazabal also has very strong cards that can only be used to aid others. Elisa, the magus, is interesting because several of her strong cards do not permit other characters to aid her actions. In addition to six characters, they each have a starting side and a strengthened side, which alters their abilities.
Scenario Variability
The majority of the scenarios I played were combat-oriented, but the designer pointed out a few that were not. I won’t spoil the scenario or how it fits in, but in a sneak scenario, you are actively avoiding enemies attaching to you In addition, you cannot even attack an enemy if there are two or more in the same area, as the one who is not the target will raise the alarm. Another scenario is a quest for information from an NPC, so clearly you cannot just kill them. I’ll leave it to you to come upon the variety of scenarios as you play. That said, there is plenty of blood to spill.
Art, Quality of Components, and Feel
The art in the game is largely on the six characters, the rule book, the scenario book, and some of the fancy item cards, all of which have a suitably dark tone. The player boards are double-thickness and hold the character image, the ability card, and the Action Point tracker. The iconography is largely clear and vital to understanding the game. It is embedded in the scenarios, on all the cards, and throughout the rulebook. If you don’t like icons that represent abilities, this might be a challenge. Other than the cards, player mats, and cardboard items, there are eight functional wooden cubes, but this is not a game that comes with a ton of unnecessary grey plastic if that is something that excites you.
Conclusion
I had a good time visiting the world of Zanziar and appreciated that I could choose between a cakewalk and a merciless foe each time we sat down to play. After a bit, it felt somewhat like the way we play Spirit Island, in that people tend to try to take care of their engaged creatures and ask for help as needed while keeping in mind the scenario’s goal. This balanced the need to take care of what is in front of you without every turn taking 30 minutes to discuss every possible permutation of card sequences.
I look forward to my next adventure in Beyond the Rift when I’m spoiling for a fight.
That Board Gaming Thing ( tbgt.org or BGG Geek link ) is a regional gaming convention that occurs near the airport in Raleigh, NC. It’s been held annually since 2004 and pulls gamers from its sprawling research triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) to one location for five days of gaming.
Ben used to live in Cary and Durham during the summers when he worked at various corporations in Tech and Larry moved to NC last year, making it an idea meetup for food and gaming fun.
We will again be describing our experiences in a joint report. The games are all listed in order of play with the year of publication included to help give you a point of reference. We’ll also be adding our OG-style ratings for each title. Let’s get started!
Lost Ruins of Arnak (“Arnak”) is my #1 game from 2020. Excuse this paragraph of relentless gushing on my part in lieu of a full review. Arnak has earned distinction from myself and the hobby alike by blending well-loved mechanisms, infusing them with fresh concepts, and wrapping them in a tight, well developed package. For a puzzle lover like myself, Arnak is peak optimization competition. A noteworthy portion of that personal acclaim was earned by the first expansion, Expedition Leaders. Expedition Leaders tops my list of all time best expansions in board gaming – essential being the industry buzzword that rings true. Enriching integral game elements, while also adding one new major core mechanism: leaders. Leaders add asymmetry, increased ability, and diversity in strategy, that turned a great game into an all-timer. An inclusion that has solidified Arnak’s life-time spot on my shelves.
