A love letter to the series, in the form of a lavish, rewarding masterpiece of game design, and I cannot wait to play it again. I honestly can't. I want to dig around in the fantasy sandbox and see what happens next. Just remember what I've told you here today. Forewarned is forearmed, adventurer.
Galactic Cruise is a Joy. It'll be a tough act for Kinson Key to follow, and I really hope they manage to. Stellar stuff.
The designers have built the game on the back of a cool card masking gimmick, helping it deliver a cracking deduction game in half an hour. Think Clue meets The Search for Planet X and you're getting somewhere close.
Inventions is a great game. It's a very expensive game, so make sure it's one that will fit with your group, but if does, you'll love it. It's an ever-changing puzzle which your brain will simultaneously love and hate while you try to solve it.
My chosen board game world is one of muted beige and dry themes, so Tenpenny Parks stands out like a neon helter-skelter in the middle of it. I love it for that.
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.
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.
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?