Board game reviews and previews
Board game reviews and previews
Strategy games
Slamming into 2025 with a portmanteau then. A game about the evolution of your civilisation – that’d be Civolution then! It’s a heavily abstracted game about exploring and exploiting a fictional continent while your civilisation evolves and improves. It’s from…
Shackleton base is built around some seemingly simple actions which belie how deep and malleable the game is. Like a drainpipe full of play-doh, maybe.
You can keep your Marvel and Cthulhu cash-ins, it does nothing for me. Yet here I am singing the praises of a game I love that's wearing Tolkien's fantasy garb.
It's a beautiful two-player game that takes less than ten minutes to play and is so simple you wonder why you haven't played it before, while simultaneously making you wish you had.
Did you know there are only a few mammals in the world that lay eggs. They're called monotremes. One member of the monotreme family is the short-beaked echidna. Orbit is a game about tourists in space.
I miss the days when worker-placement games kept things simple and relied on solid core game design to tempt the box off your shelf and onto the table. Mutagen gives me that same feeling again, and I like it all the more for it.
Looot does a lot of things well. It combines two separate geometric puzzles - one shared, one personal - and asks you to figure out the best way to take advantage of the opportunities on each.
The mental gymnastics aren't venturing into Lacerda or Splotter levels here, but there's enough to keep your brain on its toes. Not that brains have toes, but you get the idea.
Sakana Stack is quick, easy, gorgeous to look at, and a lot of fun. It'll join the likes of Scout and Tokkuri Taking in my convention bag for some time to come.
So Mass Effect: The Board Game isn't a 1:1 recreation of any of the video games. It's also not a sprawling TTRPG full of its relationships and intergalactic power struggles. What is it then?