Played with review copy provided by Indie Boards & Cards
In Kodama Forest, Springtime has come again, and your forest is blooming! However, the magical kodama spirits will only grace the lushest and most beautiful of landscapes. Plant bamboo and flowers to attract friendly pandas and butterflies to beautify your plot of land. Plan carefully to ensure that your two forests can be filled with as many plants and animals as possible in order to please the colorful kodama. This game requires both cooperation and competition in order to succeed.
A player board is placed between each player and their neighbor to either side. The table will have the same number of player boards as players, and each individual player will have one board to their left and one to their right. The forest tiles are placed in the bag, and the other tiles (butterfly, frog, panda) are placed in the center of the table where all players can reach it. Each player then draws three forest tiles from the bag to start the game.
Not quite six months ago, I published a pretty massive review of the Unmatched game system here on the OG… including a substantial bit of writing about how it compares to Star Wars: Epic Duels, the out-of-print mass market game on which it is based. (Important fact that may summarize that portion of the review: I still am more than willing to sell my lovingly used copy of Epic Duels to finance further Unmatched purchases.)
This time around, I’m going to forgo all the preliminaries and get down to the nitty gritty: just how good are the two new boxes in the Unmatched line? I might also comment a bit near the end about our experiences playtesting the announced Unmatched: Marvel boxes…
Played with review copy provided by Pegasus Spiele and Edition Spielwiese
Welcome to Crime City, a city where crime lurks around every corner. Disastrous secrets, devious robberies and cold-blooded murders are the order of the day here. The local police are no longer able to control the situation. Therefore, the work of clever investigators is required. MicroMacro – Crime City is a cooperative detective game. Together, the players solve 16 tricky criminal cases by determining motives, finding evidence and convicting the perpetrators. An attentive eye is just as important as a deductive talent in order to unravel everything riddle on the 75 x 110 cm large game board. A magnifying glass is included in the game to help with finding every detail.
In this inventive game, the board is a paper fold-out map that takes up most of your table. It is a black and white line drawing affair with plenty of detail. Depicted on the map is a snapshot of life in Crime City – you can see the people, buildings, vehicles, etc all drawn out in fine detail.
Our story starts back in March of 2020… which, let’s be clear, feels like a decade ago. (In the words of Ned Ryerson, “Am I right or am I right?”) As my family and I chose to self-quarantine, I began searching for print’n’play solo games on BoardGameGeek. One of the highly recommended solo games I stumbled on was Under Falling Skies – the winner of the 2019 9-Card Nanogame Print and Play contest on BGG.
About the time I found it, Czech Games Editions announced that they were going to publish an upgraded version of the game for Essen 2020… so, after one play (which I enjoyed), I put away my nine-card deck and played other solo games instead. (If you want to know more about my solo game play, check out my Solo Gaming in the Time of Covid post which I just updated to cover all of 2020.)
I wondered if CGE could take Tomáš Uhlíř’s incredibly compact design and expand it without making it too complicated and/or too riddled with unnecessary components and rules… so I was more than pleasantly surprised by the incredible success they packed into the 9 x 7 x 2.75 inch box.
For the last decade or so, I’ve intermittently published my Best New (to me!) Games list each year… and, when I missed a year or two, added the missing lists to the most recent post.
However, before we get properly started with my list for 2020, we need to cover a few games that were excluded from the list for various reasons but still warrant attention being paid to them.
The Grey Area
I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with the following games – these are all games that I played exactly one time prior to 2020.
Expedition to Newdale
This board game version of Pfister’s Oh My Goods was so enjoyable from my first play at a post-Essen weekend in 2019 that I used some of my Christmas money to pick up Oh My Goods and the Longdale expansion. (I’m still looking for the second expansion, which is difficult to find.)
Lots of solo plays of Oh My Goods led to me picking up – no surprise – Expedition to Newdale. I’ve been working my way through the solo campaign and enjoying the blend of careful planning and luck of the draw the characterizes this series.
It’s a Wonderful World
The same post-Essen weekend also involved my first play of It’s A Wonderful World… and this one proved to be a hit with my sons as well as a very good solo game. I like the combination of 7 Wonders-ish drafting and resource management… and I’m really looking forward to the expansions coming out early in 2021. (There’s also a It’s a Wonderful Kingdom on the way… which I know almost nothing about.)
Terraforming Mars
I first played Terraforming Mars nearly three years ago – and while I really liked it, I didn’t think that my sons would enjoy it enough to get it to the table. But I decided to take the plunge in 2020 due to (a) very positive reviews from the solo gaming community, and (b) my boys being older. Success! The game works very well solo and the boys liked it better than I would have imagined. Over the last six months, I’ve picked up the expansions (I think Prelude should have come in the base box), the Broken Token insert set (include player boards with recessed spaces), and, thanks to a gamer friend (hi, Will… remember to feed your people!), a KS pledge for the 3D terrain.
Designers: Wolfgang Warsch, Alex Hague, Justin Vickers
Publisher: CMYK
Players: 2-4
Age: 8+
Time: 10 min per game, 2 min if John Palagyi is playing
Times played: >10 with copy provided by one of the designers
The Fuzzies is the newest release from the design team that brought us Wavelength – but this game is totally different in feel. Whereas Wavelength challenged players to exercise their brains to come up with great clues and try to figure out how your opponents are thinking… the Fuzzies is a dexterity game, where you try to skillfully remove and replace fuzzy balls from their tower.
The game comes in a 24oz plastic tumbler – the sort of cup you might get at a fair or a baseball game. it’s filled with 100 fuzzy balls of five different colors (navy, orange, teal, pink and yellow). All of the balls fit nicely into the cup, and there is a lid on top which holds the rules and the 30 action cards.
To play the game, you remove the lid, slam the cup down on the table and carefully lift it up, leaving a cup shaped pile of fuzzies on the table.
Trust me, it looks precarious, and it is!
Then, the first player has to remove a Fuzzy from the tower which is the same color as the top card on the deck. Then, you must replace this Fuzzy anywhere on the tower that is higher than where it started. You could put it all the way on top, but you don’t have to!
The game includes a set of tweezers that you can use, or you can trust your own fingers. You must stay in your seat during the whole game; so you pretty much can only use the side of the tower that you can see. Though, if you’re careful, you might be able to spin the whole tower around on the base so that you can see a different side of it. Be careful though, you might knock the tower over!
If nothing falls to the table, your turn is over! If one (or a few balls) falls, then you must draw cards from the deck (max of 3) and flip them over; these will have challenges on them that will make your next turn harder – maybe you have to cover one eye, or you are forced to use certain fingers…
The game ends once someone causes the tower to topple – the rules say that this is anytime 10 or more balls fall off the tower. That person loses! Then it’s time to pack the cup with the Fuzzies to set up the next game!
The game is quick and fun. The challenge cards certainly make things a bit more difficult, but for a few of us, just the basic game was hard enough… The amount of stickiness that the Fuzzies have is pretty amazing. sometimes, you can make a ball stick to another one just by touching them together. This, of course, makes it super likely that the next person will dislodge it as the touch the tower.
If you’re looking for another party game, this is a great choice. Anyone can play it, and it’s always good for a laugh. It’s not too serious, and it’s a lot easier to set up then Jenga. Quieter too!
It should also be available through regular channels very soon!
This design team seems to be trying to corner the market on party games, and each of their previous designs has gone in a different direction. I can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeve next.
