April 2025
Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.
Munchkin Panic – 4/10
Munchkin Panic is a hybrid of Castle Panic (a co-operative tower defense game) and Munchkin (a take-that card game). It leans much more towards the Castle Panic side of the equation though, with Munchkin serving mostly as the theme rather than anything mechanically similar.
Players will attempt to defeat monster tokens that appear each turn by playing cards that match the monster’s current location. If a monster token is not defeated, it will advance forward toward the castle. If it reaches the castle, it will begin destroying it, which can cause a loss for all players. For that reason, the players need to cooperate, yet they also are each trying to win individually. When the last monster is destroyed, whoever got the most points for killing monsters is the winner.
While it is possible to play solo or full co-op, the game really isn’t built around those options. Doing so would likely make it extremely easy to win, and the suggested difficulty increases to account for this seem to mostly inject more randomness (e.g., just draw fewer cards than you’d normally be allowed to draw). Instead, the cards lean into the idea that when attempting to defeat a monster, you will need to negotiate a deal with another player in order to help you out.
Of course, if you just draw a good hand, you won’t need help at all. If you draw a weak hand, you will likely have to give some points or treasures to another player to make a deal. And if you draw a truly terrible hand, you won’t score points even with help. You are strongly incentivized to play every card from your hand since it fully refills each turn and the monsters are too unpredictable to attempt to save up cards. This, unfortunately, means there is almost no tactical decision making when it comes to the cards. While there may be some skill in negotiating help from other players, the position from which you negotiate is also entirely random.
Worst of all, there is a terrible amount of downtime in the game. The game can accommodate six players, but even with five there was way too much thumb-twiddling. You don’t refill your hand until the start of your turn, so there is no way to plan ahead even if the monsters were more predictable. And if you had a good turn and emptied your hand, you will be totally unable to make any negotiations between turns either.
With kids who want to have some cartoony fun with the family, I could see this working. But the administration of the monster movements likely requires some parental involvement, even though the rules themselves are simple enough. It’s nicely illustrated and there are some thrills when you find a cool treasure from the deck. But overall, games like Forbidden Island are probably a better option for families looking for a co-op. And there’s nothing here at all for serious gamers.
Rock Hard: 1977 – 7/10
It’s not actually rare these days for a first-time designer to show up on the scene with a well-designed game. After all, breaking into any industry can be tough. And who would know that better than Jackie Fox, bass player for The Runaways, who also just so happens to be the designer of Rock Hard: 1977? Doubtless drawing on her own experiences as a 1970’s rocker, she has distilled them into a competitive game in which players will compete to be the most famous rocker.
When the game starts out, you have a menial job that pays very little money. Yet it’s your only real source of income, as the gigs pay even less. But as you write new songs, hone your craft by practicing, and build your fan base by performing, new financial opportunities will open up. You’ll be more and more tempted to skip your scheduled work shift to focus on your music career. Miss three shifts and you’ll be promoted to “professional musician”, which is a nice way of saying you get fired. This aspect of the game is delightful, both mechanically and thematically.
Your progress in songs, chops, and reputation is tracked on the real plastic dials of your cardboard amplifier board. The paper money in the game is the best I’ve ever seen, both in look and feel. From a components and graphic perspective, they’ve knocked it out of the park.
This is a worker placement game, but the only worker is you. Each day (round) consists of three phases, with each phase providing you a single placement. This really isn’t enough to do all the things you’d like to do. So you’ll probably want to use some “candy” to give you an additional action in a given phase. This candy is pretty clearly a stand-in for drugs, right down to the risks of addiction that come with it (needing to spend a future phase in detox).
And it is here that the cracks begin to show a bit. The game wants to glorify the usefulness of drugs (albeit along with the risks), but is simultaneously unwilling to lean into that reality, creating a strange world in which a jolly rancher can somehow land you in the ICU. Likewise, many of the event cards take a cheeky, winking approach to casual sex with groupies and the like, but without actually spelling it out. This seems intended to create a kind of plausible deniability where we can idolize a lifestyle we know would actually be harmful, which may be a turnoff to some people.
Despite clearly being willing to handwave these realities in certain cases, a strict adherence to verisimilitude in other cases weakens the game. In our play with the full complement of five players, we never had more than one person ever try to hire a roadie in the same round, yet the game provides five spaces so that every player could do this at once. Meanwhile, it’s possible to be locked out of the single, much higher-demand record contract space for several turns in a row. When pressed on this, the designer explained that it was reflective of the recording industry as all groups can find crew but not all groups can get a record deal. I found this justification unsatisfying given the willingness to ignore “real life” in other cases for the purposes of making a better game.
Whether you find this foot-in-both-camps approach to theme versus mechanics to be a successful balancing act or a ham-handed cop-out will likely be a matter of taste. And yet, the overall design is too strong to simply be dismissed. Rock Hard: 1977 can be cutthroat and a bit unpredictable, yet it also generates inevitable moments of joy. The grinding progression of taking a whole action to get one measly dollar is softened by the fact that, thematically, you’re so hard up for cash that you’re selling blood. And when you do finally build up to playing a big show at the arena, you are showered with rewards in a way that feels like you earned it through hard work and overcoming obstacles. Despite a few rough edges, Rock Hard: 1977 is a memorable and worthwhile game to explore.
Pirates of Maricaibo – 8/10
Pirates of Maracaibo is a mid-weight euro in which players compete to become the most famous pirate. You’ll hire a crew, upgrade your ship, and sail to various islands in search of treasure. You can even bury your treasure for additional bonus points.
Notably absent is any kind of player-vs-player combat system, a design decision that seems at odds with the theme but is exactly on-brand for a euro game. Even landing on the same space as another player only requires you to pay them one coin, which is such a small penalty that it almost never impacts your decision about where to sail next. The real interaction comes from the fact that a player who sails quickly and reaches Maracaibo will trigger the end of the round, perhaps before their slower-moving opponents would prefer it.
The game is played over three rounds, with the ships returning to the ocean before each round, and then once again racing towards Maracaibo (with a bonus for getting there first). Again we see the theme being stretched to the breaking point here. The pirates all left Maracaibo, sailed to the middle of the ocean, then said “ready, set, go” and then began exploring while also seeing who could get back home the fastest?
But if you can get past the pasted-on theme, you will find a mechanically fascinating challenge. This is essentially a track-movement game, where you must balance between going faster to get better rewards and going slower to get more rewards. But the “track” is a randomized map made of various islands to explore and collect. This means there isn’t simply one path, with the only decision being how quickly to move. Rather you need to plan your route a few turns ahead, deciding where to go as well as how quickly to get there. Yes, you must always move forward, but you generally want to anyway.
In addition to the ocean board, you will also be given with two other boards to manage. First is your ship, which will receive probably a dozen or so upgrades throughout the game, and each time the choice of what to take is yours. Some are ongoing bonuses and others are immediate one-time rewards, yet another tricky selection. And secondly, you will manage an exploration board, which has you moving your explorer token along yet another track. Move further for endgame bonus points, but do you really want to skip over so many great rewards on the spaces to do so?
If you are looking for a thematic swashbuckling adventure, you should be playing Dead Reckoning instead. But if you are just interested in a well-designed euro that plays like a meatier version of Parks, you should give Pirates of Maracaibo a try. The variety afforded by the randomized cards and upgrades is tantalizing, and makes you want to play again and again to explore the different paths to victory.
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Age – 9/10
The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is a sprawling and complex co-operative adventure game based on the popular video game. Each player will choose a race and class, get some starting items and spells, and set out for adventure with their friends.
Each adventure uses a different map with various locations to explore. You’ll often receive a main quest that sends you towards a particular city, but the map is filled with alluring features that draw you away from your main route. Maybe you should take some fatigue, making your next battle more difficult, so you can move fast enough to take a detour for a dungeon delve while still making it to your target city on time.
The route that you take will contain some mix of combat and peaceful encounters. There is some randomness in the encounters and dice rolls, as you might expect. Yet the system does an admirable job of making everything you come across feel potentially useful. Likewise, all the faces of your dice provide a tangible benefit, even though you’ll have to be slightly flexible in planning exactly which benefit you’ll receive.
The tactical nature of how best to use your dice once they are rolled is paired with the strategic nature of which additional dice you choose to acquire when spending XP. But XP can also be spent in other ways, increasing your health or other stats. Every option is appealing and it seems inconceivable that any two players could choose the exact same upgrade path, even if they did happen to choose the same race/class combination from the dozens available.
Completing an entire quest line takes three sessions, and each session will take from two to four hours. This is, of course, quite long, but it never feels like a slog as the game constantly throws new and interesting challenges at you. Certainly the difficulty of the challenges ramps up as the game goes on, but I haven’t yet played enough to make an educated comment on how difficult the game truly is to win.
At $225 retail for just the base game, this is the kind of experience that you need to be really sure is for you before you jump in. (Or else play a friend’s copy.) But you are rewarded with a tremendous amount of variety and replayability; you could spent dozens of hours without ever encountering a duplicate monster, item, or event. The components and illustrations are very high quality as is the overall experience. Fans of Too Many Bones or Massive Darkness who enjoy the challenge of managing a complex character in a cooperative setting, but who also wish for a longer, more epic, campaign-style game will love this one.
A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.
Chaostle – 9/10
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Chaostle really did come out, for the first time, in 2011. Not 1985. Don’t let the unicorn illustration fool you (it has laser gridlines behind it!). And don’t be deceived by the vast amounts of plastic in the ginormous box. (I once heard the box described as “two inches larger than wherever you’re trying to store it”.) This is a modern game with modern sensibilities that is simultaneously a love letter to the old-school Milton Bradley big box games like Battle Masters.
From a gameplay standpoint, picture something like Parcheesi or Trouble, but now imagine each of your pieces has special abilities that allow them to beat the snot out of each other. Dragons and Unicorns battle Wizards and Knights through a series of dice rolls to determine who gets to stay on the space and who gets sent home. Fortunately on a board this size, you don’t get sent all the way back to start. Each side of the board has a checkpoint that once you pass you can start there instead. When you finally do reach the end, you will have to do battle against the castle itself to break down the wall and get in. This gives players who were just a bit behind and chance to catch up to the leader and defeat them before they can break down the wall. Once through the castle wall though, you win.
Your path through the castle presents many options. There are three different levels you could walk through, with the lower levels being slower, but guaranteeing smoother movement. The top levels are faster (fewer spaces) but full of gaps that must be jumped by exact die rolls in order to succeed. Your characters will receive movement upgrades, attack upgrades, and ability upgrades for defeating other characters, so you are incentivized to win battles for more than just setting back the other players. There are a surprising amount of strategic choices to make for a roll-and-move game. Comparisons to Talisman are warranted, but Chaostle focuses more on the racing elements and less on bullying your opponents.
Each roll of the die not only moves one of your pieces, but also has some other kind of effect. It could be bringing more pieces onto the board, taking an extra turn, or even reading a random event from the lookup table which could upgrade your weapons, send you into the snake pit, heal you to full health, or outright kill you, among many other possibilities. This little bit of narrative spice combined with very evocative weapon names and special abilities of each character (one can time travel to the future and bring back a nuclear bomb) ensures that this long, grindy race game never overstays its welcome. It feels big and epic, even though a certain capriciousness is integral to the experience. |
Ten Years of Opinionated Gaming
I posted my first game review to this site 10 years ago today. It was a review of Hare & Tortoise, the first entry in my 36-part series revisiting the Spiel des Jahres winners. Each entry featured not only a gameplay overview and review, but also a chronicle of the game’s rise and impact. The series had a decent readership (and generated a lot of fun online discussion), and when I finished publishing it months later, I ended up hanging around and becoming one of the regular writers.
Ten years has flown by. I no longer write as much as I used to, since for the past few years, I’ve focused more on designing games. But in a span of a few short years, I wrote more than 300 game reviews, dozens of convention reports, and numerous articles. I ended not only writing for this site, but for the now-defunct Counter Magazine, and for the also-defunct Gamers Alliance.
This is my reflection on ten years of being an opinionated gamers, along with a few fun behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Even my fellow OG writers likely don’t know some of these stories. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this and reflecting on my time writing here, but this is a deviation from our normal content.
Most importantly, thanks for reading my ramblings this past decade. I’ve always been amazed by how many people opened the links to my random musings. Being an OG writer has been one of the highlights of my gaming hobby, and I don’t know that I would have done it for so long if it weren’t for the commentary and encouragement I’ve received over the years.
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