 May 2025 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.   ÂThe Loop – 5/10 The Loop is a cooperative game in which the players must travel through time to stop Dr. Faux and his army of clones from destroying the world. The theme is novel and the graphic design is garish and eye-catching, though the mechanics themselves are a bit rote. This is essentially another “each player uses their unique power to stop the thing from spreading all over the board” type co-op, made most famous by Pandemic. At the start of each turn, you will add some clones to the board. Then, you will randomly select one of the board sections and point the central cube tower at it. This indicates Dr. Faux’s location for the turn. Then, you will drop some red “rift cubes” into the tower. They are likely to tumble onto Dr. Faux’s board section, but might end up in an adjacent one instead. If there are ever more than three rift cubes in one section, an outbreak -er, I mean, “vortex”- occurs. If a fourth vortex ever happens, you’ve lost the game. The amount of cubes dropped into the tower is equal to two plus the number of clones on that board section, so controlling the amount of clones is an important task. But more importantly, you need to complete missions. These are often things you want to do anyway (defeating clones, removing rift cubes, etc.), but will sometimes specify a specific location they need to be performed at. Complete four missions to win the game. Obviously, there is variance in the difficulty based on how many rift cubes show up where and when. But there is also randomness in the available actions you can take. It’s not as simple is “spend an action to move a space” or “spend an action to remove a rift cube”. Instead, you will draw three cards from your personal deck at the start of each turn, and these will give you your possible actions. Desperately need to clear a rift cube, but didn’t draw a card that allows it? Tough luck. Like many cooperative games, this is essentially just an optimization puzzle with regular random events to add challenge. The initial scenario seemed remarkably easy to win, but scaling up the difficulty really just means adding even more variance. This is an issue I have with most co-operative games, with the very best ones like Pandemic Legacy and Defenders of the Last Stand avoiding this fate through strong thematic elements. But The Loop doesn’t have enough strength of theme to commend it over any other cube-pushing co-op.  ÂKinfire Delve – 6/10 Kinfire Delve draws you in immediately with its beautifully illustrated and foiled cards. Each player gets their own set, representing the character they will play and their abilities. This is a cooperative game, though it really might be closer to a solo experience, since it caps out at two players. The goal of the game is to get through the entire enemy deck, though this does not mean defeating every card in it. Instead, the reward for defeating one of the four monsters is to discard several cards from the top of the deck, before finally replacing the defeated monster with the next monster from the deck. This means that the specific monsters you face can be quite varied game to game. That does incentivize replays, but it also injects a good bid of variance in the difficulty, especially since many monsters have abilities that get stronger in the presence of other specific monsters. Hand management is paramount here. If you run out of useful attacks, you will need to take a turn off, using one of your precious refreshes. Each time you do this, the enemy will give you a curse card that will make your life harder. Get too many of these before getting through the deck and you lose the game. When you finally make it through the deck, you will fight the boss. These boss fights also come in several versions, with the boss abilities randomized each game. They take a long time, as they should, and often feature resetting or healing, creating some groan-worthy moments. This works well, as it really makes the boss fight feel significant and different from the rest of the game. Kinfire Delve is well-designed and well-produced. But, even in two-player, it has a solitaire kind of feel. Much like a bored grandma playing Klondike on her front porch, you might occasionally have a moment of reductive realization, where you go, “So I’m just flipping cards off the deck all by myself?” For some, this may not be a problem. But for me, I strongly prefer games to be played with other people. And even the two-player version doesn’t provide enough interesting team collaboration to elevate the experience.   ÂThe Six of VIII – 7/10 ÂThe Six of VIII is a trick-taking game themed around the six wives of Henry VIII. There are six suits in the game, each representing one of the wives. And the amount of cards in each suit corresponds to the length of time he was married to them. While there is a three-player variant using a dummy hand, this game is specifically designed for four players in two partnerships. I love team vs. team games in general, so this is a plus for me. But it does of course bring with it the drawback of limiting how often you can get this one to the table. Each hand consists of 15 tricks, with the trump suit changing periodically. It starts with the Catherine of Aragon suit as trump, and then after a few tricks changes to the Anne Boleyn suit. This continues through each of the wives, with the amount of tricks corresponding to the length of their marriage. This is the primary twist to the trick-taking genre, and it works well. It creates interesting decisions about whether to throw off a low card now or to save it for later when it will become trump. Teams score a point for each trick they take, with bonus points awarded by some cards taken (usually middle values). Decisions abound here as well, such as whether to throw a high-point, but potentially useful card into a trick your partner is already winning. There are a few other little wrinkles as well, such as giving the losing team the “church” card, which lets them annul any trick that was just taken, once per hand. As you’d expect, the theme is not strongly-integrated here. And yet, it does a reasonable job of “making sense” and serving as a mnemonic to aid in play. Maybe you’ll even learn some history. The Six of VIII succeeds at its goals, but it is nevertheless “yet another trick-taker” in an increasingly crowded field. I’d like to see more designers take the partnership approach to their designs like this, but also to find ways to do this while allowing for more player count flexibility.  ÂFive Tribes – 7/10 ÂIt’s strange that a game that came out over a decade ago and has been in the BGG Top 100 ever since has not made it to the table for me until now. Better late than never, I suppose. Five Tribes uses a Mancala-style mechanic, similar to Trajan or Istanbul, though it feels much closer to its abstract roots than either of these games. On your turn, you will choose a section of the board, pick up all the meeples in it, and then move an equal number of spaces, dropping off one meeple in each space travelled to. There are two aspects that set this apart from a traditional mancala mechanic though. First is that you aren’t obligated to move in just one direction. In fact, with each move you can go up, down, left, or right, though no backtracking is allowed. This opens up a lot of decisions. Second is that your final move must see you dropping off a meeple of a color already present on your destination space. While this does restrict your choices, it also incentivizes planning, sometimes several turns ahead. Each of the five colors of meeple (tribes) lets you score points in a different way. Some give immediate points, some are a competition to get the most of a color, others can be turned in for cards or special abilities, and so on. Many of these are interactive with your opponents, either by competition or by directly interfering with them. As mentioned, there is some planning ahead, but Five Tribes is far more about opportunistic tactics than game-long strategy execution. Five Tribes provides depth of skill with very simple rules, much in the way that an abstract game does. However, this also brings with it a risk of analysis paralysis. It’s often hard to tell who is winning until the very end, which is great if players are willing to make tactical decisions based on vibes. But more analytical folks may have a nagging feeling that they could math it all out if they just took ten minutes per turn, a compulsion that would turn the game from fun to insufferable. And of course, played with more than two players, inadvertent player chaos is a real risk as well, wherein an opponent might mess up your plans without even realizing they’ve done so. Nevertheless, Five Tribes delivers on thoughtful fun in a 60-minute time frame.  ÂBomb Busters – 8/10 Bomb Busters has just been announced as a Spiel des Jahres nominee, so I was excited to give it a try and see what all the buzz was about. I’ve mentioned how co-ops generally need to have a strong thematic element to get me really excited, and that’s not entirely absent here. But there is another way in which a co-op can catch my interest: rewarding mind-melding teamwork. Bomb Busters excels at generating thrilling collaborative moments through limited communication, in the same way that games like Hanabi, The Crew, and Sky Team do. Players will take on the role of a bomb squad, albeit a cute anthropomorphic one, likely to make any failures seem less dark. Each player gets randomly dealt about a dozen “wire” cards, which they arrange in numerical order, but with the actual values hidden from the other players. The goal is then to match a wire number from your own set with a wire number from another player’s. Match up all the wires to win. But of course it can’t be as simple as that. Wrong guesses will give you information, but will also push the team closer to failure. There is also a red wire lurking in one player’s cards, that if selected will cause an immediate loss. And as the 66 scenarios progress, they get even more difficult, with further special wires, rules, and complications. Bomb Busters’ rules are easily grasped, but the strategic elements reveal themselves more gradually over several plays. And those plays are addicting, the failures even more so. “We we’re so close! Just one more try!” you will exclaim. That’s a real positive for a game so simple to learn.  ÂPaper Tales – 8/10 It can be a challenge for a gateway-weight card drafting game to do something that feels different from its competitors, but Paper Tales pulls it off nicely. Rather than focusing on mechanics like set collection, you will try to draft a mini-engine of sorts. But the drafting is the real heart of the game, presenting brutally difficult decisions with every card you choose. The game is played over four rounds, alternating passing left and right each round. Each hand in a round only has five cards, which is quite a small number of total cards drafted throughout the game. Not only that, but each card also has a cost to play it, meaning it’s possible to put yourself in a situation where you can’t actually use all the cards you take. These two factors combine for an experience filled with the satisfaction of being rewarded for making disciplined choices. You can’t just take the flashiest stuff, but you also have to make the most of each one of your draft picks. To further complicate things, the cards you draft will work differently depending on how you arrange them in front of you. Only your front line cards contribute to your attack strength, so taking too many strong cards is pointless since you will have to place some in your back line. You will also have to decide how much to prioritize cards that generate income. Your starting money is likely going to be depleted after the first round, so if you ignore income generation, you’ll be priced into only taking weak cards in the next round. In yet another wrinkle, the cards you take will “age” each round, meaning you are likely to get only two rounds out of each one. It’s rarely possible to keep a card you drafted in the first round until the end of the game, so you will constantly need to adapt your strategy. Should you commit resources to building buildings that generate ongoing value each round? Or is it more important to score points by having higher combat strength than your neighbors? Paper Tales crams a ton of decisions into a 30-minute time frame, while still remaining lightweight enough to be accessible for almost anyone. Since its debut in 2017, it’s received a couple expansions, but only one of them is even available in English. The game seems largely to have gone under the radar, which is a shame. The game is good, and not just on paper.  A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  ÂHeroscape – 10/10 ÂI picked this up in college at Walmart on a whim, thinking at least I could use the cool dragon for another game as this one would probably be bad. But then it wasn’t. And I just kept playing it. And they put out expansion packs. And I kept buying them. I joined a fan site and posted constantly. Within just a few weeks, the gamer who had always said “Oh I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite board game” suddenly could. Heroscape is a tactical minis game where you roll boatloads of dice to try to kill all of your opponent’s figures. (Usually. Scenarios and alternate win conditions are plentiful.) The board is built out of plastic Lego-esque tiles that provide not just visual variety, but actual strategic consideration. The rules themselves are simple and intuitive, but each of the hundreds of offical figures (and thousands of community-made figures) breaks the rules in its own way.  If Heroscape has a drawback, it’s the setup time, but this is a necessary evil for the incredible variety in the maps. You can build anything you want from tundra to jungle to enormous castles. And then fight your dudes all over it. Dudes who can be anything from cowboys to ninjas to robots to orcs riding dinosaurs. Easy to teach to everyone, and everyone I have ever taught has loved it. Lots of dice rolling, yet the real strategy comes from army synergy and clever piece movement. The role of luck is overstated in this game; in tournament play the same names have risen to the top year after year. Infinitely replayable, truly never the same game twice. The permutations of maps and armies are uncountable. If you had to play only one game for the rest of your life, that game should be Heroscape. |
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