Village Green

• Designer: Peer Sylvester
• Publisher: Osprey Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 15-20 minutes
• Times played: 6, with review copy provided by Osprey Games

In Village Green, you are rival gardeners, tasked by your respective communities with arranging flowers, planting trees, commissioning statues, and building ponds. You must place each element carefully as time is tight and the stakes couldn’t be higher! Split your days between acquiring and installing new features for your green and nominating it for one of the competition’s many awards. Will your village green become the local laughing stock, or make the neighboring villages green with envy?

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The Loop

• Designers: Maxime Rambourg, Theo Riviere
• Publisher: Pandasaurus
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 12+
• TIme: 45min
• Played with review copy provided by Pandasaurus

In The Loop, you are part of a group of Time Agents that will go back through the different eras of time to stop the nefarious plans of Dr Faux.  The different eras of the time space continuum are seen in the seven wedges on the board, and in the center, you will find Dr Faux’s time machine, which is a cleverly disguised dice tower with three exit ramps.

Each wedge of the board gets its own sabotage tile (2 of which are face up at the start of the game).  Your team’s goal is to meet the criteria on these sabotage tiles in order to cripple the time machine.  If you are able to beat 4 sabotage tiles, your group will win!  However, if you fail on a sabotage tile, that era of time becomes a vortex.  If you create 4 vortexes, then your team loses.  They will also lose if you try to make a vortex where there already is one.  Dr Faux’s 7 card deck (one for each era) is shuffled and placed on the HQ board.  There are 3 slots here, and they help track the progress of the game.  The team must complete their task before the Dr Faux deck runs out for the third time!   This is the other way that they can lose the game.   There is a game mode tile – and before the game starts, the group should choose which mode they want to play this game and put the appropriate side face up on the board. 

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Echoes: the Cocktail

• Designers: Matthew Dunstan, Dave Neale
• Publisher: Ravensburger
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 14+
• TIme: 1 hour
• Times played: 1 with review copy provided by Ravensburger NA

Echoes is a new franchise of puzzle games by Ravensburger.  They remind me a lot of the Adventure game series from Kosmos (also designed by Matthew Dunstan).  For both, I am not sure if I classify them as games, they feel more like interactive fiction to me – but in the end, they are games on BGG, and I enjoy both of them regardless of which classification box they get smushed into….

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Super Mega Lucky Box

• Designer: Phil Walker Harding
• Publisher: Gamewright
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Times played: 6 with review copy provided by publisher

Super Mega Lucky Box (SMLB) feels like it’s the tenth new Phil Walker-Harding game I’ve played this summer.  (It’s not… it just feels that way!)  And, amazingly, each of those PWH games has been different in style/genre.    SMLB is PWH’s take on the R+W field – combining aspects that will feel familiar from other games to create a fresh twist for this game.

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Clever Cubed

• Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
• Publisher: Stronghold Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Times played: >12, with prototype from designer, review copy from Stronghold, online versions
• (https://www.schmidtspiele.de/static/onlinespiele/CleverHochDrei/index.html)

Clever Cubed is the third installment in the Ganz schön clever universe.  In many ways, it feels the same, as the active player rolls 6 dice, isolates some, and then everyone makes marks on their scoring sheet – but there are different mini-games in play to still make this feel different from its two predecessors.

If you’ve played either of the other two Clever games (Ganz Schon Clever or Twice as Clever) before, you know most of the rules. If not, read on…

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