Builders of Blankenburg
Designed by Peter Schultz
Art by Liz Stephanoff
Cobblestone Games
2-6 players
60-120 minutes
Ages 13+

Review by Jonathan Franklin

Are you tired of building towns where no one lives? Do you despise resource conversion games that have no point? How much fun is perfect information?

Builders of Blankenburg is a break from the norms where you have imperfect information, need to build to meet the needs of the citizens, and need resources to build those structures. It is a classic town building Euro with a few twists that make it a smooth medium-weight gamer game.

I’ll briefly cover the nuts and bolts of the game, as it would be useful, but won’t dwell on the details, as those can be found online.

The goal of the game is to gain the most points by building structures, achieving majorities in the districts, and having money and resources at game end.

The game ends when the town is full of citizens or full of structures. In general, you can control whether or not to build to trigger the game end, but the citizens come routinely unless an event changes things.

Continue reading →

Maze Racers

• Designer: Andy Geremia
• Publisher: FoxMind
• Players: 2
• Ages: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Times played: 5, with review copy provided by FoxMind Canada

Maze Racers is a game that I had seen at a couple of conventions (GenCon, Essen 2015), but due to the large crowds around the game, I actually didn’t get a chance to try it at either show.  From afar, it looked like a blast as people held the board in their hands and tried to navigate a ball through a maze.  I was tempted to bring home a copy from Essen, but the lack of luggage space come Saturday afternoon discouraged me from that plan…

Fast forward to this spring when an old acquaintance took a new job at FoxMind Canada, and he approached me about taking the game out for a try.  I jumped on the chance, and in a few days, Maze Racers was in the game room ready for play. Continue reading →

Android: Mainframe

• Designers: Jordi Gene and Gregorio Morales
• Publisher:  Fantasy Flight
• Players: 2-4
• Ages: 14+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Fantasy Flight

Android:Mainframe is the fourth game that I know of set in the mythical dystopian Android universe, a creation from the imaginations of the folks at Fantasy Flight – the other games being Android, NetRunner and Infiltration.

From the Android Universe Fan Wiki (http://android-universe-fan.wikia.com/wiki/Android_Universe_Wiki) – and this text is taken from  “The Worlds of Android” @ https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/the-worlds-of-android/products/worlds-android/)

It is the future. Mankind has spread itself out across the solar system with varying degrees of success. The Moon andMars are colonized. A plan to terraform Mars is well underway, hindered only by a civil war that has broken out on that planet. On Earth, a massive space elevator has been built, stretching up into the sky. It is the hub of trade in the solar system, and most people refer to it as the “Beanstalk“.

Computers have continued to advance, and that, combined with discoveries in the field of neurobiology, has led to brain-mapping, a method by which a human mind can be stored electronically. Recently, two rival megacorporations have used this development in different ways to create artificial, sentient life.

Jinteki created human clones that can be matured and educated in the fraction of the normal time. Haas-Bioroid, on the other hand, built robots with brain-mapped, artificially intelligent minds, calling them “bioroids“. Naturally, this has caused no end of trouble. Continue reading →