I’ve been enjoying solitaire games more lately. It started during the pandemic with the four-game solo campaign version of Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Search for Professor Kutil. I was impressed with how the designers altered the underlying structure of the game to make for a compelling solo experience.  Then I enjoyed the solitaire versions of Dune: Imperium and Ark Nova, not as much as Arnak, but as a decent way to get more familiar with the rules and experience a shadow of the “real” game experience.  And most recently, I’ve enjoyed the challenge of trying to enact the 19th Amendment in the solo version of Votes for Women.  So I jumped at the opportunity to receive a review copy of Michael Erceg’s new solitaire game Cave-In.

I don’t write many reviews, and when I do they tend to be a little bit odd, like this comparative review for Clash of Cultures, or this rambling “review” of Living Forest.  So forgive my comparative and rambling discursion on push-your-luck games and solitaire gaming.

When I hear push-your-luck, I immediately think of Sid Sackson’s 1980 classic Can’t Stop and the Alan Moon and Bruno Faidutti spiritual successor Diamant (now known by some as Incan Gold).  There are of course plenty of other games with push-your-luck elements (Knizia’s Ra comes to mind and even the aforementioned Living Forest in a manner of speaking), but these two games strike me as the purest distillation of the mechanism with the entirety of the game revolving around players deciding whether to play it safe or risk it all.  Upon reflection though, the real joy of Can’t Stop and Diamant for me is largely in the player interaction.  The kibitzing and cajoling seem like a core feature with players encouraging each other to keep going and attempting to shame each other into going for broke.  The peer pressure of rolling those dice just one more time is what makes Can’t Stop so memorable.  And the chanting of “Ra! Ra! Ra!” when your opponent elects to pull another tile from the bag in Knizia’s classic auction game is real joy.

From the back of the box:

Save  marine animals from the fishing nets. The more nets you manage to empty by the end of the game, the better your score will be.

• Play an action card.

• Move the animal cards.

• Free the newly formed groups of marine animals.

A rather underwhelming description for a very engaging game, and to be honest, I’m not a nature gal so this didn’t immediately grab me. But I needed a game to get free shipping, and boy howdy, was I pleasantly surprised! Let’s dive into it (see what I did there?)

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Rebuilding Seattle

• Designer: Quinn Brander
• Publisher: Wizkids
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 12+
• Time: 60-120 minutes

“The great fire of 1889 has burned down most of downtown Seattle, and you are the city planner tasked with rebuilding it. Manage economic resources to improve neighborhoods, erect new buildings and iconic landmarks, and address the needs of an ever-growing population to make Seattle better than ever!  In Rebuilding Seattle, you’re responsible for managing the zoning and expansion of a major neighborhood! Each round your population grows, and you can either build a new building, expand into a new suburb, activate an event, or build a landmark, before earning profit based on your neighborhood’s commerce. You’ll buy building types from a shared market, looking to find shapes that fit your grid and types that fit your strategy. Triggering citywide events can change the tide of the game, offering points, money, and expansions for the players ready for it. You can even enact laws to give yourself the advantage! At the end of the game, whoever’s neighborhood has earned the most points wins.“

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