February 2025
Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.Â
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Slavika – 3/10
ÂSlavika is a take-that card game with a theme of Slavic folklore. These less-familiar creatures are a refreshing change of pace, but that’s the only real selling point. The rest of the game is plodding, capricious, and tactically shallow.Â
Players will compete with one another to defeat the monster cards in the middle of the table. Each monster lists points that will be awarded for defeating it and a total strength threshold required to do so. Players take turns adding heroes from their hands to add to this strength. The player who contributes the most will get the best reward. It is technically possible for the maximum amount of heroes to be added but still not meet the threshold, in which case no one gets anything. But this is quite rare, to the point that the strength threshold seems almost entirely unnecessary; you could just have players competing for the highest total strength and the game would barely change.Â
You are not allowed to play more than one card to the same monster in a turn and cards you play are locked on the table until the monster is defeated. The makes it so you are at the mercy of other players to help you meet the required amount of heroes or you won’t have many choices of what card to play. Also, the table fills up very quickly, and it is common for players to have entire turns where they only have one legal monster they can add cards to. These two factors create a situation where many (perhaps even the majority) of turns give you no interesting decisions to make.Â
The box declares that Slavika is a 30-minute game, which may be true at lower player counts, but it’s probably closer to 20 minutes per player. This is unforgivably long with the full complement of five. There is nothing to do on other players’ turns but wait for yours, and when it finally comes, you won’t have anything interesting to do anyway. With just 2 or 3 players, I could reasonably call this “not my cup of tea”. With more than that, I can’t see how anyone could enjoy it.ÂÂ
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Among Cultists – 6/10
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Among Cultists is a social deduction game for 4-8 players in which one or two secret cultists attempt to undermine the investigators. Like many such games, the cultists win by killing a certain number of investigators, while the the investigators win by identifying the cultists.
However, there is another win condition layered on top of this. The investigators will travel from room to room on the board, representing a university, collecting books from each room (including the cafeteria, for some reason). If they collect enough books, they will win the game. Conversely, if ten rounds pass without them collecting enough books, they will lose. In our single play of the game, nearly everyone was dead by only round five, and none of the required twelve points for book collecting had been scored. It’s possible that was an anomaly, but it certainly seemed like this secondary win condition was less likely to occur.
To its credit, Among Cultists does provide helpful things for the dead characters to do. Once killed, you become a ghost and are now able to teleport around the board, but have a more limited set of actions you can perform. It’s even possible that you are dead but don’t know it yet, a mechanic that allows the cultists to clandestinely murder you without being immediately suspected. Nevertheless, at the point a murder is revealed, an immediate vote occurs, with players choosing a character to put to death. This is the investigators’ only means to turn the tables and kill the cultists. But accidentally killing one of their own with this vote will almost certainly lead to them losing the game.
There are no grievous failings of the design here. But social deduction is a crowded space. And personally, I’m more partial to games like The Resistance or Blood on the Clocktower that really distill the formula down to its essence (and are consequently much faster-playing). Still, those who prefer the Battlestar Galactica or Dead of Winter approach to social deduction will probably find something here to latch onto to.ÂÂ
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Dune – 7/10
ÂHow do you even begin to discuss such a venerable classic? Dune has been around since 1979 and I’m just getting to play it in 2025? Better late than never I guess. Based on Frank Herbert’s seminal novel, Dune was long considered a “grail game” for collectors and players. The Herbert estate was highly opposed to licensing, and so after the author’s death in 1986, the game became very hard to find and was not reprinted. As you might have guessed, with the success of the more recent films, the promise of piles of money has assuaged the consciences of Mr. Herbert’s heirs, and many Dune–themed games are now in print or back in print. So how does the first of such games hold up today?
Each player will take the role of one of the factions from the book (Bene Gesserit, Harkonnen, etc.), each of which has its own special rules and powers. This concept of “variable player powers” was pioneered a couple years earlier by the same design team with Cosmic Encounter. But here the powers are more complex, as is the game itself.
The goal of the game is to control three of the strongholds on the map. These are the most important territories for that reason, but players will be obliged to deploy troops onto other map spaces as well, since they may contain spice. Spice is the currency of the game, and is used to fund the recruiting of more troops. Combat is resolved with a “blind bid” mechanism that strongly influenced later games like Scythe. Spice is also used to bid on treachery cards in each round. These cards can provide surprise combat advantages or perform other rule-breaking types of actions that can give your faction the edge.
Accurate assessment of the strength of each player’s position is an important skill, especially when it comes to alliances. These are formalized alliances via game rules and are unbreakable until allowed by the game. In fact, these alliances often lead to joint victories between players, a compromise that is nearly always required for success.
It’s easy to see why Dune captured gamers’ hearts when it first released. Even today, it’s rare to see so much thematic integration lovingly woven into a game’s mechanics. And at the time it was all but unheard of. Yet this faithfulness to the source material is a double-edged sword. It creates moments of rarely-useful rules exceptions and fiddliness that would likely be ironed out if it were released today. Moreover, it lacks the grand openness of possibility that Cosmic Encounter brings by virtue of its hundreds of variable player powers instead of “the six from the book”.
Dune will connect with players who love the book and want a way to live it out. Yet it also works well for those seeking an hours-long negotiation/war game, theme aside. You’d do better choosing Dune than Diplomacy or A Game of Thrones, for example. Most modern gamers don’t see this as a niche that needs to be filled in their gaming lives, but for those who do, it’s easy to see why Dune has stood the test of time.ÂÂ
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Orapa Mine – 7/10
ÂOrapa Mine is a fast-playing yet brain-burning deduction game that will test both your spatial skills and deductive reasoning. One player secretly sets up a board of tangram pieces onto a grid. Their opponent(s) will then make a series of guesses to determine the position of those pieces. The first player to provide the correct location of all pieces will win the game.
In multiplayer, this means that the player who knows the solution is not actually a participant, but rather a facilitator. For that reason, the two-player variant seems preferable, wherein each of the two players sets up a secret board and then takes turns guessing the positions of the other player’s board.
While the alphanumeric grid might initially conjure up childhood memories of Battleship, the guesses are far more complex than that. You cannot merely guess a location on the grid and be told what is there. Instead, you choose a location on the edge of the board and imagine shooting a laser or billiard ball from that spot. Your opponent will then tell you where this projectile eventually exits the board. What shapes and positions could have caused such a ricochet is then up to you to determine.
The different shapes are also color-coded. This is helpful because you also have the option to ask a follow-up question instead of simply guessing another location. To do this, ask for the color of a guess you’ve previously made. If it hit the red tangram, you will be told red. If it hit red and yellow, you’ll be told orange. If it hit red and white, you’ll be told pink. And so on. Between the color information and the ricochet information, you have all you need to determine each position of every piece. But how quickly you can do so will determine your success.
And after a single play, that’s the part that I wonder about. I know that I did not play well, and could improve with practice, but that’s more a limitation of my familiarity with the system. Once both players have grasped the implications and possibilities of each answer, does Orapa Mine simply devolve into the randomness of Battleship, where a lucky guess at just the right location is the true determining factor in who wins? In any case, I imagine that this potential stalemate is still dozens of plays away, especially when using the optional (more difficult) pieces. Orapa Mine will leave you feeling satisfied in your cunning when you win, and wanting to play again win or lose.ÂÂ
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Finspan – 8/10Â
Finspan is the final entry in the “span trilogy” that includes Wingspan and Wyrmspan. Birds, dragons, and now, finally, fish. Finspan is very easy to learn if you’ve played either of its predecessors, but it’s also the simplest to learn of the three regardless. Still, you could certainly justify simply purchasing the one with the theme that most appeals to you, as the play experiences are rather similar.
Finspan reduces the possible actions on your turn to merely all costs are paid by covering existing fish or discarding eggs or other cards. Moreover, each fish can only hold one egg, so there are no egg capacities to consider as in the other two games. This is certainly a clean design choice, but it also reduces the decision space more than I’d prefer.
Fish will give you points, as will the eggs you lay on them. But these eggs can also be hatched into “young”, which then swim around your board trying to find others. Each egg and young is worth a point. But if you can hatch and consolidate three young into one spot, they double in value, forming a “school” worth six. These young and schools have no restrictions on how many can be on a space, and some fish will give bonuses or penalties for young and schools on their space. Like the simplified food costs, this is a very clean and easy to understand system. But again it suffers from sometimes feeling too simple. The movement and hatching decisions are nearly always obvious, and sometimes even irrelevant. The saving grace of course is that you are never forced to take this action if that’s the case; instead, you simply choose a different, more relevant action.
I don’t want to be too hard on poor Finspan. It’s a cut below the other two games, but not by much. And while it is simpler, it’s certainly not “Wingspan Jr.” as some have dismissively suggested. Rather, it’s a great entry point to this type of game, a more suitable gateway game than the others are. It also plays a good bit faster. I can see reaching for this one above the others with more casual gamers, but I’d still be happy to play it with more serious ones. It’s just that, ironically enough, it lacks the depth of its forebears.ÂÂ
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Windmill Valley – 8/10Â
Having played Dani Garcia’s earlier game, Arborea, I wasn’t sure what to expect with Windmill Valley. Arborea showed the designer’s skill, but also lacked thematic resonance and tacked on a few too many mechanics for its own good. I’m happy to report that Windmill Valley is much more to my taste in both regards: a slightly lighter game with a theme that aids in understanding the mechanics instead of fighting them.
Each player takes on the role of a tulip merchant in the Netherlands in the 19th century. You will purchase tulip bulbs at the market, plant them into nice neat rows (scoring accordingly for how orderly they are), conduct foreign trade, and expand and improve your network of windmills to power it all. And all of these actions are powered by a rondel, themed as the gears of your windmill.
How much your gears move, and thus what action you can take, is dictated by the water level behind the dike. Open or close the floodgate to change this flow, but be aware that doing so will also help or hinder the other players depending on how far they want their own gears to move. Your main gear gives you the most desirable actions, with your secondary gear generally giving alternatives that you’d only take in a desperate circumstance. However, these wheels can be upgraded throughout the game, replacing the spaces with more efficient options, including many that allow you to take the action on both gears in the same turn.
This desire to create a more efficient engine is balanced by the race to place your windmill meeples onto the board as early as possible. Getting there sooner not only gives you first choice of the bonuses, it also gives you an ongoing source of income: each time an opponent places their windmill on the same path as yours, they’ll owe you guilders (money).
And then of course there are the tulips. After collecting the bulbs from the market or harbor (and being limited by how many you can hold), you’ll want to plant them. Points are really only given for planting the same color in rows and different colors in columns. But there are also bonuses in those fields that might incentivize you to forgo some endgame points for a helpful bonus now. These decisions tend towards the intuitive, rather than the calculable, an ethos that I adore.
Windmill Valley is still much more mechanically-driven than thematically so. But the aesthetic is so pleasant and inviting it’s forgivable. The game constantly presents fascinating player choices and looks great while doing it. It provides just the right amount of difficult challenge while primarily giving the satisfaction of executing a grand strategy.ÂÂÂ
A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.
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Shadows of Brimstone – 9/10Â
Shadows of Brimstone is not just a game, but an entire game system. It’s a co-operative dungeon crawl, following in the footsteps of games like Advanced Heroquest, but with a significantly crunchier rule set. While it’s certainly possible to play each scenario as a standalone adventure, it really shines as an extended campaign game.
You start the game as a cowboy or samurai, setting off for adventure. Well, hold on, actually you start the game by cutting and assembling at least dozens (maybe hundreds) of plastic minis. And then also painting them if you really want the full immersive experience. For better or for worse, Shadows of Brimstone transitioned its publisher from a board game company to a minis company. (They’ve figured out that’s where the real money is.) But this is undoubtedly a barrier to entry for board gamers not used to this approach.
With assembly complete, it’s time for that aforementioned adventure. The game is scenario-based, with success or failure affecting your future missions. And this is the way in which the system really shines. I truly believe that is the best campaign system I’ve ever seen. It’s just the right balance between self-contained modular adventures and ongoing story. It punishes you for failing and rewards you for succeeding, but does so without ever tilting the game horribly towards one side or the other (a problem with other such games).
As you continue through the missions, your stats will improve (or in some unfortunate cases worsen), you will acquire new gear, and you’ll gain abilities. To unlock the really powerful stuff though, you’ll want to collect dark stone. Dark stone is an alien substance that has been discovered to be quite useful in the construction of powerful weaponry, but also has the unfortunate side effect of causing mutations in its bearers. Indeed, the end of a character’s career often comes about not through in-game death, but from a desire to retire this once-spry adventurer who is now more tentacled horror than man. But what a story you’ll be left with.
Speaking of story, your character is not merely locked in the Old West fighting spiders and bats or Feudal Japan fighting ninjas and oni. Instead, the adventures sometimes feature portal gates that will transport the party to an “otherworld”: lava caverns, a frozen wasteland, a treacherous jungle, a derelict spacecraft, or even inside the guts of a monstrous beast. How many possibilities are there? I don’t know, how many expansions are you willing to purchase? Yet these options create a thematic richness that makes the world feel larger-than-life and the adventures limitless.
Doesn’t it become unwieldy to track dozens of items and stat changes? Sure it does. Not all of the available items even have item cards. You’ll eventually be all-but-forced into switching to an RPG-style character sheet as opposed to the static character card the game provides you. To be clear, this is genuinely a board game. And yet those unwilling to at least flirt with the trappings of RPGs and minis games may find this a tough sell. But all of these obstacles simply fade away as the experience of the game itself coalesces. It’s never been more fun to level up, go shopping in town, or even to die in horrible ways. |
