The Beginning is effectively a simplified, faster version of Evolution. Instead of players each carrying out one turn phase, then moving on to the next, and so on, The Beginning has players run through every step before play passes to the next person. It’s a little bit less competitive that way, in that the food you’re working with is in the Watering Hole because you put it there, and if you run out, it’s purely because your species have too high a population to sustain. Other players may leave more or less excess on their turn, but they aren’t taking a pass at what’s available on yours.
The quantity of food you’re working with isn’t as variable, either, nor is the amount of cards in your hand. The number of each added per turn is now static. While you can still discard cards to create a new species, you get one for free every turn, and predation no longer requires that the Carnivore be larger than its prey. It simply needs the appropriate Traits to bypass any defensive Traits its prey may have. Body size isn’t a factor at all! However, both games handle extinction, end-of-game criteria, and scoring (mostly) the same. Collect lots of food to win, and if you tie, order pizza and play again!
I said in my 2015 post that I loved Evolution, and I still do. That’s why I like Evolution: The Beginning so much. It lets me play one of my long-standing favorites even when I don’t want to think enough for the original!
Herd Mentality: the rare time you don’t want to be original. In this game of questions, the goal is to have the same answer as the other players!
Each round starts with a question. Some are multiple choice, while others are completely open-ended, such as “What’s the best pizza topping?” and “Name a famous redhead.” All players secretly write down their answer before conferring. Like I said before, the goal is to overlap – the answer with the highest consensus scores each of those players cows! (Not real cows, unfortunately. We don’t play for steaks.)
If all but one player manage to match with someone, the odd one out is cursed with the Pink Cow, which makes their herd worthless until the curse passes on to someone else. Whoever is curse-free and collects eight cows wins!
I was introduced to Herd Mentality by some friends from the UK, which adds another challenge: the cultural divide of having players from two continents. Popular fast food chains, for instance. It’s one of those games where you learn a lot of neat, random little facts about your fellow players and their interests!
Planet is all about arranging continents to maximize your objective’s Natural Habitat while hosting as much animal life as possible. There are twelve turns, each with a corresponding pile of face-down Continent tiles and face-up Animal cards. In those twelve turns, players fully develop their Planets, and compete to claim species!
To start, each player gets an empty Planet core and a random Natural Habitat card, which will determine their objective. Each has its own scale for points, depending on how much of that habitat exists on the Continent tiles. Of the five Habitats, oceans are most prevalent, while glaciers are rarest, so the thresholds are higher for someone with an ocean objective to win points. Each turn, that round’s five Continent tiles will be spread face-up on the board, and starting with the First Player, everyone will take one tile and add it to their Planet. To facilitate the 3D aspect of assembling a world, Planet cores are, effectively, blank magnetic d12s, which I think is awesome! The First Player token does pass at the end of the round, so everyone gets an even amount of first picks.
For the first two rounds, there are no Animal cards to compete for. From round three onward, however, after Continents are placed, players compare that Animal’s criteria to see who wins the card. There are a few categories of criteria, and some terminology to explain it: an Area is a single triangle of Habitat, of which each tile has five, while a Region is a contiguous collection of Areas of the same Habitat. In the picture above, for instance, there are two visible ocean Regions, each a single Area in size. For some Animals, this is ideal – they develop on the Planet with the most distinct Regions of a Habitat, regardless of their size. Other animals are drawn to the biggest Region of one kind, which must either be adjacent to or in no way adjacent to another specific Habitat. The Octopus belongs to the largest ocean Region touching mountains, while the Shark requires the largest ocean Region that doesn’t touch mountains. Having both in the same game was interesting.
That’s the other thing about Animals: whereas setup uses all fifty Continent tiles, there are only twenty of the forty-five Animal cards in play, so from game to game your objectives will vary a lot!
When the twelfth turn is over, each player counts how many Areas of their objective Habitat they’ve acquired, and receives the corresponding number of points. Then, they score the Animals! Each animal from the same Natural Habitat as their objective is worth one point, while each animal from another Habitat is worth two. As such, the game becomes a balancing act between collecting your Habitat, and diversifying enough to win the other Animals!
I immediately liked this game. I love the 3D aspect, the spatial puzzle, the challenge of juggling multiple objectives, the animals… we only really had one complaint, which is that the objective cards should have text or symbols (like each Area has, if you look closely at the tiles) so players don’t have to rely so much on color to know what their target Habitat is. We may have mistaken the ocean’s blue for glaciers, the first time, not having seen the white glacier card before. And nobody in our house is colorblind. Aside from that, though, it’s fantastic! I look forward to playing it again.
Some dear friends introduced me to the Mapominoes series of games, which are, aptly named, effectively dominoes but with maps. There are several maps to choose from! We played Africa, Europe, and Asia & Australasia, and since those continents connect, they also have mechanics in place to play them all together. Some of the others, like the UK Counties and US States, probably don’t have the option to interconnect, but the gameplay is entertaining nonetheless.
The whole deck of countries (or states or counties) is split between the players, and each player will get a certain number of transit cards, as dictated by that variant’s rules. On their turns, players place one card, which must border every other card it touches. For instance, Switzerland can go next to Germany, but not Belgium, because Switzerland and Belgium don’t share a border in real life. Because each card only has four sides, and some countries have more or less than four neighbors, the map will very quickly devolve to looking nothing like the real deal.
Some cards share borders with a body of water, i.e. Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean, or France, which borders the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea. Some cards, like Madagascar, only share borders with a body of water. This is where transit cards come in. Transit is a bit like a wild card, able to act as any country or body of water. However, unlike wild cards in other games, the place the transit card is substituting must be declared as it’s played, and every card adjacent to it both then and after must share a border with the place it represents. As a result, you may wind up with multiple cards representing the same location at once – in the photo below, we functionally had two Tanzania cards. This only adds to the chaos of the map. This is also why different continents have players start with a different amount of transit cards – if you’re playing Asia & Australasia, you’re going to have a lot more island nations than if you’re playing Europe.
Transit cards or not, there comes a point when playing your cards is impossible. Perhaps the one open space next to South Africa is boxed in by other cards, and you can’t play Swaziland. Perhaps that space would be open, but you’ve reached the edge of the table, which by the rules of the game is “the edge of the world” and cannot be played past. Regardless, you must instead draw a transit card, and play passes on. When someone manages to play all their country cards, they win!
I’ve already mentioned how chaotic the layout of the resulting map is. There’s also a lot of room for adjusting the game’s difficulty, depending on the space you play it in. On the living room floor? You’re less likely to hit space constraints than if you’re playing on, say, a coffee table. And of course it’s educational! This one’s an all-around win for me.
Food Truck is a simple but challenging game in which you and your opponents all run competing food trucks. It employs a combination of luck and predicting what your opponents are likely to do, as you endeavor to serve meals nobody else is offering yet.
Players start by picking a Food Truck and taking the appropriate deck of five Truck cards. They also start with a deck of one Dessert and five Meal cards, though this number will increase as the game goes on. In the center of the table is a general supply of face-up cards equal to the number of players.
Each round, players will flip over the top card of their Truck deck, and arrange all their Meal and Dessert cards in whatever order they choose to form a draw pile. Then, they’ll take turns turning over the top Meal card of their deck. A few things can happen here: 1) it can be a unique item, that nobody else has played yet. This includes all Desserts, which are wild cards and match with nothing. In this case, it stays in front of them and play passes to the next player. 2) It matches one of their own cards, and adds to that pile. 3) It matches someone else’s card, and the player playing the duplicate is eliminated for the round, taking a card of their choice from the general supply and, if they’re the first person eliminated, the first-player marker. 4) Their top card would match someone else’s card, but they can play their Truck card to somehow circumvent that, whether by rearranging their own deck or affecting someone else’s cards. This is where the pile mechanic becomes important; for two of the five Truck cards, you can use your action if (and only if) the card you’re targeting isn’t part of a pile. Once you use your Truck card, you discard it.
The round ends when all but one player have been eliminated. They claim a victory point and the last card from the supply, any unused Truck cards are discarded (and reshuffled, if all five have now been used), and the general supply is restocked. Once someone has three victory points, they win! Otherwise, Meal decks are arranged and the next round begins.
The result of everyone gaining one new Meal card per turn is that planning your deck becomes progressively harder. Either you have more types of food to strategize with, or you have several of the same types of food, or both, and so does your opponent. Accounting for your Truck ability and whether you’re first-player or not is crucial! So Food Truck is easy to learn, hunger-inducing to look at, and a mental workout to play.
Articulate! is a party game one might call the word version of Charades. Someone is trying to convey the word on the card they drew, while someone else is trying to guess it. The difference is that in Articulate! the person conveying the word is doing so with… more words!
Play starts when the timer is upended. There are six categories on each card, and the active player will attempt to describe the word from the category their team’s token is on – for example, the Start space is Object – without using any form of the word itself. If their team guesses it, they get to draw another, and so forth until the timer runs out. They may also pass on one card per turn, unless they’re playing with house rules like we were; in our case it was twice. Occasionally, instead of categories a space corresponds to the spade symbol, which appears next to one random word on each card. I gather the official rules have special mechanics around this, but again, we were playing with house rules. We also didn’t use the spinner.
Once the timer runs out, the team counts how many cards they got right and moves their token that many spaces on the board. This determines what their category is next time! We found that the Person and World categories were UK-biased, so the others were easier for Mom and I to score high on. Especially Nature! Regardless of where you’re from, though, this is one of those games where the better you know your teammates, the more likely you are to do well. Especially if you can use shared fandoms to your advantage!
Victory, unsurprisingly, involves reaching the Finish space.
I also just discovered that Drumond Park (the company behind Articulate!) have all the cards for free on their website so that folks can play remotely! How cool is that?!
Sloths vs Kraken is, perhaps appropriately, a very quick game. However, the mechanics of the competition aren’t quite what the name implies. Instead, players use Sloth cards to prevent their opponents from spelling the word KRAKEN, while racing to build the word themselves.
Players are dealt six cards. As a result, it’s entirely possible to win on the initial deal, if you happen to start the game with all six letters of KRAKEN. Otherwise, players take turns playing cards, whether those be actions or letters. “Playing” a letter at this stage in the game means discarding one and redrawing. Similarly, any action that takes cards from someone’s hands requires that they immediately redraw, so they continue to have six cards. Any player that has five letters of KRAKEN must yell (or speak at a reasonable volume) “Ahoy!” or else they forfeit their hand and have to draw a new one.
In our case, I started with five of the six necessary letters, reversed someone else’s theft, stole the letter I needed, and won before my first turn. On the one hand, it was a perfect length for the time we had to play it in; on the other, victory relied heavily on luck of the deal. Is that the kind of game you want to play? This, I can’t answer.
I gather Rummikub has many variants, but I’m only going to comment on the version I’ve played, for obvious practical reasons. If any of you play by different rules, though, I’d love to hear about it!
The version I’ve played goes like this: everyone draws 14 tiles at random out of the bag, and lays them out on their tray, where only they can see. Your goal is to make sets of 3 or more tiles, in either a consecutive run of the same color, or multiple colors of the same number. The tile selection is effectively two decks of standard playing cards, so there’s two of 1-13, in each of the four colors. There are also two wild tiles, that can be used in place of anything! The goal is to be the first player to empty your tray of tiles.
For your first play, you need to have 30 points of tiles, determined by adding their face values. If you can’t play, you draw another tile from the bag instead; in this fashion, you may find yourself with 26 tiles before you can actually play anything, draw that higher value tile you needed and suddenly clear out half of them! Getting on the board late, then, is not the game-defining disadvantage that it is in so many other games.
Once you’ve made that first play, you no longer have to hit a certain point threshold to play your tiles. Furthermore, you can now use the tiles other people have played to complete your sets, so long as the set they played remains complete! For instance, in the picture, I could take the red 3 from the far right set (which, having 4, 5, and 6, is still a valid run), swap it for the wild tile in the middle, and use it to make a run with… my blue 9 and 10, my yellow 5 and 6, my black 3 and 4, or my black 11 and 13. Or my black and red 13’s… Wild tiles bring a whole host of opportunities! You don’t have to make a new set, either; if you have a stray tile or three that fit an existing line-up, you can just add them on!
All of which is to say, Rummikub requires a lot of strategy and split concentration, to follow the ever-shifting layout of the board, your own tiles, and how to use both to maximum advantage. For a game with such simple mechanics, it’s certainly a challenge!
In Cryo, your colony ship has crash-landed on a frozen world, and your only hope is to wake your crew from cryostasis and relocate underground… before the sun sets, and the surface temperature drops from “inhospitable” to “certain death.” Under those circumstances, I expected this to be a cooperative game, but the ship was felled by anonymous sabotage and the crew has split into factions, each only looking out for their own. Which seems massively inefficient when everyone has the same goal right now, that being “don’t die,” but fear makes people irrational enough that I suppose the story checks out.
As for the mechanics, I was definitely impressed! Each player has their own platform for their faction’s materials, which they get by deploying and recalling drones to and from the shared board. To deploy, they take one drone from their platform and place it on an unobstructed dock, which lets them take one of that dock’s adjacent actions. There are many of these, scattered between the four sections of the ship, but the most important are Stasis Control, Resource Space, and Launch. Stasis Control lets you trade up to three organic materials for an equal number of your crew pods, which move from the stasis chambers on the ship segment to the safety of your platform. Launch – the one dock that can hold any number of drones – is how you transport crew pods from your platform to the underground caves, and Resource Space gives you a resource tile to either redeem for that benefit or place in a slot on your platform.
Those slots on your platform are important because of your other choice of action, to recall. When you do this, all of your drones on the board return to open docks on your platform. Each dock has an associated action. These start the game incomplete, with costs and/or rewards undefined. That’s what the resource tiles are for! Once all of an action’s slots are filled, you can activate it whenever you land a drone there, provided you have the resources to pay the cost. Some tiles even have two benefits, or a choice between two benefits, both of which are especially useful to keep!
One of these benefits is the option of drawing or playing a card. The cards are one of my favorite aspects of this game, because they can each be used in not one, not two, but three different ways! Four, actually, if you count scrapping them for materials. Equipping the card as an upgrade acts as a permanent effect, like Automation in the picture, which lets you take an additional platform action when you recall without having to land a drone there. Upgrades are at the top of each card. On the left is a mission, which gives you additional means of scoring points, and the body of the card is a vehicle. Vehicles are necessary to use the Launch dock, and each have a maximum number of crew pods they can store/carry. Some also have special effects! I think it’s pretty ingenious how they laid out the cards to have several mechanics each, and how they line up with the slots of the platform!
The other effect of recalling is resolving incidents, which serve as the ticking clock towards sunset. Each ship section has one face-up incident token; the active player will choose one to resolve. For most of the game, there are only two options: looting and sabotage. Looting gives you an immediate benefit, whether that’s materials, energy, or card actions. Sabotage destroys all crew pods in the lowest-numbered stasis chamber that hasn’t yet been destroyed. In the picture above, all four tokens are sabotage, so the next person to recall had no choice. But because section one of Engineering was already vacated, the explosion went off safely and no crew members were harmed! The last token to refill an incident space is sunset, the resolution of which ends the game.
The other way to end the game is if all of a player’s crew pods are in caverns or destroyed. Either way, it’s time for scoring! Each player scores points for crew pods in caverns and on their platform, upgrades and vehicles, mission conditions, and who has the most crew pods in each cavern. The player with the most points wins!
Cryo has a lot of moving parts, but because the overarching turn mechanics are simple and the board is well laid out, it isn’t overwhelming or hard to keep track of actions. Keeping track of what you have left to do is harder, but it’s definitely worth it!
According to the website, there are also solo rules.
The Captain is Dead is a cooperative board game reminiscent of Star Trek, in which characters of various color-coded skillsets work together to fend off an alien attack and repair the Jump Drive of their starship.
Characters start in the rooms of the ship that correspond to their skillsets. For example, the Teleporter Chief starts in Engineering. Each room (except the hallways) has Systems that provide useful bonuses while operational but can be damaged by Alerts. Alerts represent the damage done by the alien ship and are drawn after each player’s turn; if External Scanners are operational, you have the benefit of getting to see the next couple in advance before they hit! Some of the more inconvenient Alerts are Anomalies, which stay in play and have a continued effect until you research them away: Alien Ships, which join the one attacking you and amplify damages; and Hostile Aliens, which invade the ship and limit movement. And of course, many Alerts knock Systems offline.
Systems are repaired by a combination of Skill cards and actions. Each character has a set number of actions per turn, a rank to determine turn order, and a special ability – the first game, I played the Cyborg, who’s immune to Anomalies. Some of them also have Skill discounts. The Admiral, for example, has 2 Command discounts, so when that player would need to spend Command cards, they subtract 2 from the cost. This kind of spending also applies to Battle Plans and Upgrades. The former is a single-use advantage obtained in the War Room, while the latter are new Systems that can be researched and installed in the Science Lab. These especially are massive game changers! Our favorite was Epinephrine Ventilation, which gives everyone an extra action.
The victory condition is simple: repair the Jump Drive! Unfortunately, there are many ways to lose before you can. If you take damage that would lower your shields past 0%, have to add more Hostile Aliens to your ship than there are Hostile Aliens left, or have to draw an Alert when there are none left to play, the game is over and the crew has lost. In our first game, the one in the photo, we were so focused on fixing Systems we lost track of the Hostile Aliens and were overrun! The second game, though, we managed to get two Upgrades installed early, and rode that advantage to victory. It all depends on your characters and the cards!
