I was perusing the game library at a convention recently and happened to stumble upon Seikatsu, a gorgeous gardening game that makes excellent use of perspective!
All players share the same garden, enhancing the view from their color-coded pagodas by populating it with bird/flower combos, scoring points for matching adjacent birds as they do. Once the garden is full, they score again, this time for flowers! Flowers are scored in rows instead of clusters, still by type, and the rows are determined by the perspective of each player’s pagoda. I adore this mechanic – the use of shared space combined with directional scoring parameters? The dance of scoring points now and later for yourself, without also helping your opponents? Absolutely fascinating. And the koi of course can pair with anything.
It’s always a delight when a game can multitask! Wingspan is one of those strategy games with lots of moving parts and several ways to earn points. We’ve played it four times now and I haven’t used the same strategy twice! It’s also an educational deep-dive into the birds of North America.
It’s essential that the core mechanics are simple – everything else is as complicated as you let it be, and as informational as you let it be, but the actual pattern all play follows is pretty straightforward! Each player has little colored cubes and a player board. Each turn, there are four actions available to them. The first is to play a bird in the leftmost open space in one of their three habitats, marking the column with a cube. After the first column, playing birds costs eggs.
The other three actions are specific to those habitats. In each case, your cube starts in the rightmost open space of the habitat, on the habitat’s ability itself, and then moves left, giving you the choice of activating each bird it passes over, provided they have a “When Activated” ability. (Also possible are “When Played” and “Once Between Turns.”) The habitats themselves are the forest, which lets you gain food – necessary to play most birds – from the birdfeeder; the grasslands, which let your birds lay eggs; and the wetlands, which let you draw more bird cards. A round is over when all cubes have been placed, and one is then used to mark end-of-round scoring. The result is that your number of actions each round goes down as the number of things each action does goes up. The game has four rounds. Scoring is a tally of the point values of your birds themselves, end-of-round goals, bonus cards (you pick one at the beginning of the game and can draw more later), eggs, food on cards (bird ability), and tucked cards (also a bird ability). Like I said – many ways to earn points!
And then, of course, there’s the technical aspects. The educational aspects. The part I’m nerding out over the most. Including the swift-start, the cards cover 180 North American bird species, including: their common names, Latin names, their habitats, what they eat, the continents they live on, nest type, wingspan, and how many eggs they lay in a year – that last one was brought down to scale. Some of these are just neat – continents, Latin names – and some are mechanically relevant! Various cards and end-of-round goals are dependent on nest type, or number of eggs in a particular nest type. (There’s a wild type that counts as everything, and in reality they have non-standard nesting habits. Like black terns, which apparently nest on water.) How many eggs the species naturally lays determines the limit for how many they can have in the game. Wingspan is relevant specifically when certain predatory birds are preying on the top card of the deck – if it’s below a certain wingspan, it’s edible. There is so much love and care and research permeating every inch of this game; it’s palpable and contagious. I expect the same is true of the expansions, too, which feature other continents! Someday…
Meeple Party is, in fact, a game in which Meeple throw a party. Who knew? Better yet, it’s cooperative, so you’re all throwing a party together! As parties generally should be.
There are, by default, five Roommates throwing the party. Players each pick one to play and the rest are NPCs. All players can move all Roommates, just like they can move all guests, but certain Surprises will give or take Stress from specific Roommates, which is the only time your specific character matters. The backs of the character tiles double as rooms – those rooms specifically are optional, but there are a certain set required in the house, namely a Kitchen, Living Room, Dining Room, Bathroom, Bedroom, Door, and Outside. Rooms are arranged however the players want.
Each Roommate’s turn starts by welcoming a new Meeple to the party. This means drawing one out of a bag, and then placing them in a room of your choice and activating their effect – each color of Meeple is a different personality type, with can draw Meeple toward them or push them away. The exception is the white Meeple, which cause a Surprise and then disappear back into the bag, to cause more later! In the photo below, we drew The Conga Line as our Surprise – it moves all Meeple in the room with the most to the room with the least, which is how we wound up with five in the Bathroom. You then move a Meeple of your choice to an adjacent room and activate their effect. The goal is meet your Photo criteria!
We’ll get to Photos, but first – Disasters. The difficulty level you chose at the beginning of the game will determine whether you get individual or communal Disasters, or both! Disasters list criteria you must not meet, lest you gain Stress. If all players get three Stress, the party ends prematurely because you blew up and kicked everyone out. If you have individual Disasters, they only trigger on your turn.
After that, you get to check for Photo opportunities! Everyone has two Photos in hand that they’re trying to take, with either a minimum or exact requirement. Sometimes these clash painfully with Disasters, like when I needed exactly one Flirt and one Jerk in a Bathroom, and also couldn’t have Jerks and Flirts in the same room without incurring Stress.
The good news is, 3, 6, 9, and 12 o’clock on the Clock refresh Disasters! The Clock activates after you check for Photos, and after you move it up one space per Photo you completed this turn. There are a few different effects, some more inconvenient than others. (*cough* laying down Meeple *cough*) (Laying down Meeple can’t be moved until you’ve taken a turn to stand them back up. They’re napping, sick, etc.) You then replace any Photos or Disasters you triggered this turn.
The length of the party is also determined at the beginning of the game; in the (out-of-game) photos, we were playing Casual, or a 12-Photo goal. The objective is to reach the end of the party without completely stressing out!
This one has a colorful and entertaining realism (which is not a word I thought I’d assign to Meeple) and the mix of cards, chosen room arrangements, chosen difficulties (in multiple ways), and optional items and pets (each with their own mechanics) all combine to give Meeple Party a whole lot of replay value! We haven’t played the alternate game modes yet, but I look forward to trying the Hot Tub Party, where you aim to get as many Meeple into the Hot Tub before stressing out.
Capitals has, unsurprisingly, the same basic mechanics as the original Globle (post with those here), with two changes. One, you’re deducing national capitals instead of the nations themselves. Assuming the average person knows more countries than countries’ capitals, this is inherently the harder game. The second difference makes it a bit easier; an arc appears between each guess and the previous, and like the capitals themselves, the arc is color-coded! This is especially useful if the correct answer falls somewhere between your entries.
Unsurprisingly, I like Capitals for the same reasons I like Globle (and Metazooa, and Metaflora). It’s a low-pressure deduction game that teaches me more about the world every day! And this world is such a fascinating place.
I’ve mentioned the game Globle before – a sort of Wordle offshoot centered around geography. I recently discovered that the same group behind Globle, Trainwreck Labs, also had an animal game! That game is Metazooa.
My favorite part of Metazooa is that each wrong answer gives you the common order, class, etc. that your answer and the correct one share, so each guess fills out a sort of family tree. From a game perspective, it’s useful to extrapolate what this isn’t more closely related to; from an aesthetic perspective, it looks cool; and from a life perspective, I’m garnering a much more detailed understanding of the animal kingdom than I knew before.
And the same is true for plants! Metazooa has a sibling game, called Metaflora, which is similarly fascinating. As it’s harder (for people who don’t study plants), Metaflora gives you 25 guesses, while Metazooa gives you 20. In both games, you can trade three guesses for a hint: the next taxonomic rank down. They also have practice games if the one plant/animal daily isn’t enough for you!
I’m clearly fond of both of these; if you love these branches of science, or just want to understand them better, then this is probably the fun, educational game for you.
Surprise! I’m not done with Hearthstone yet. If you haven’t read my first two posts on it, you can find those here and here. All caught up? Great! The third play style is Tavern Brawl, which has a new set of rules each week. For instance, “[y]our deck is full of wannabes who cast a random spell at a random target when played.” Some rules, like this one, provide you with a deck, while other times you’ll have to build your own. Depends on the week!
The fourth option on the main menu is “Modes,” which leads you to… four other options. Arena and Duels are both a three-strikes system in which you build a deck and try to win as many games as you can before you’re out; each can be played using Gold or Tavern Tickets, and each wins you more prizes the longer you last. Duels also has a Casual mode, which costs nothing but has no reward. As for the mechanics, Arena features the traditional characters and rules, while Duels has its own characters, with extra abilities and increasing Health and deck size the further in you get. I personally prefer Duels, both because it has that Casual option and because it’s my kind of chaotic. I especially like how the addition of new cards each turn forces my strategy to grow and adapt; it’s ever-changing, which means it’s never boring!
Solo Adventures are Hearthstone’s story mode, where you can play through the characters’ origin stories and learn more about their history with each other. Functionally, it’s a lot like traditional Hearthstone, but against an NPC and with dialogue. Some arcs have you rooting for yourself more than others; March of the Lich King was painful because I didn’t want Arthas to win, knowing full well the villain he was becoming. Others are clearly the hero of the story, regardless of whether they’re in the Book of Heroes. (Rokara is in the Book of Mercenaries. She’s also the most consistently heroic character I’ve played so far.)
The final game mode is Mercenaries, which is by far the most unique. Whereas the others are about picking the right cards, success in Mercenaries is more about what you do with the cards you’ve picked. It works like this: to take on a Bounty, you put together a party of six Mercenaries. Protectors deal double damage to Fighters, who deal double to Casters, who deal double to Protectors, so you might base who you bring on which type your opponent is. However, your opponent is the last in a whole lineup of NPCs you’ll have to fight to reach them, so the ideal party has a little bit of everything. Pick wisely, because once you start the Bounty, you’re locked into those six cards. Success is instead contingent on picking, 1) the right three to have in play for any given combat, and 2) the right abilities from each of them to maximize effect. Each ability has a speed, with the lower numbers going first, and you can see what your opponents have picked before choosing moves yourself. Be exceedingly careful with the Health of your characters, though, because if a Mercenary dies, they’re out for the rest of the Bounty! And if everybody dies, big surprise, you’ve lost. There are a few major perks to this game mode, too. First is that, like in Duels, you’ll get a new upgrade after each fight, which lasts for the duration of the Bounty. The second is that, unlike Duels – or any other Hearthstone mode – each combat grants your Mercenaries XP, which unlocks new permanent abilities! You’ll also receive Merc-specific Coins, which can be used to upgrade those abilities.
The closest that traditional Hearthstone gets to this is the Reward Track – by playing games and completing daily or weekly quests, you progress along a track that earns you Gold, cards, Tavern Tickets, and Card Packs, which can be opened for five cards apiece. Battlegrounds also has its own track, where you can earn Hero skins and emotes.
And that’s Hearthstone! I definitely didn’t cover everything, but we’d be here for a very long time if I did. Hearthstone is near and dear to me, so I hope I’ve managed to impart at least the impression of everything, in case any piece of it interests you, too. See you in the Tavern!
Actually, time to be the Reckoners! The Reckoners board game is based off the Brandon Sanderson series of the same name, following a group of rebels (the Reckoners) as they challenge superpowered megalomaniacs like the Epic Steelheart. Appropriately, it’s a cooperative game, featuring a team of 1-6 players coordinating to defeat Steelheart before he wipes out the population.
That’s more complicated than it sounds, naturally. Steelheart has a lot of lackeys hanging about the city making life difficult, and whenever you defeat one, another takes their place. You have to defeat them, though, as left unchecked these Epics will devastate both the population and your efforts at defeating their boss.
The short version is this: players each have a character ability and dice, and each turn everyone rolls up to three times to determine their actions for the round. These include wiping out Enforcement (which accelerate the rate at which Epics grow more destructive), containing Epic abilities (the ways that they’re destructive), researching Epics’ weaknesses (to lower their health or, if they have a prime invincibility, to render them mortal), attacking Epics, and acquiring Plan Tokens or money. Plan Tokens act as wild dice, and dice in general are also used to move between parts of the city and take down barricades. The Reckoners will take their actions, cash in the rewards for any Epics they’ve killed, and purchase nifty gadgets to make their jobs easier. The Epics, in turn, will repopulate the vacant City Districts and activate their abilities, including Steelheart’s, who then moves to a random location. This is especially inconvenient, as you have to be in the same City District as an Epic to affect them. Steelheart also has a prime invincibility, so you have to research his weakness before you can deal him any damage.
The first time we played this, it wound up being a slow and calculated damage race between Steelheart’s health and the remaining population, won only barely. The second and third times, the damage part proved to be our strength. It helped that we played with Megan, whose character ability is turning one containment die into three attacks, and helped even more when we got her an Equipment Card that turned one anti-Enforcement die into three containments. In the picture below, she had the potential to do twenty-seven damage in one turn, or more if she used her Plan Tokens. Yeah… Steelheart didn’t stand a chance.
If you can’t tell by the fact that I’ve played it repeatedly, I adore this game. I loved the books, and to see them adapted so well into a board game I can play with my fellow fans is perpetually exciting! It’s heavy in both strategy and luck, and no matter what difficulty you play it at, a plan well-executed is always something to celebrate.
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.
Good news! There’s 80 of them. Which is a lot of puzzles, and you may not want to do them all in one sitting, but they’re there!
Noodlers is a spatial reasoning game. Each of the 80 cards (puzzles) has an array of symbols across its face and a number of plastic noodles that you’re allowed to use in solving it. The goal is to section off every symbol into its own, separate space… like quarantining with spaghetti.
The puzzles vary from 3 sticks (easy) to 6 sticks (hard), and while the concept is wonderfully simple, actually solving some of those 6-stick cards is not. Straightforward, perhaps, but only in that the sticks you’re working with are linear. It’s a neat challenge! More so for those with an abundance of patience, or extreme talent in spatial logic. Either works!
A few months ago, I posted about the suddenly ubiquitous game Wordle. Since then, I’ve been introduced to quite a few variants (at varying levels of masochism), but the handful I consistently come back to are foreign language Wordles (Duolingo‘s blog has a list of those here) and Globle.
Globle is effectively the geography edition of Wordle. Each day there’s a mystery country, and as you guess each nation it gets color-coded by its geographical distance from the correct answer. That distance is listed numerically as well, under the map and the list of your previous guesses. Your list can be organized by order of input or by which is closest; personally, I’ve found the latter quite useful when dealing with island nations, where I can at least approximate which continental areas it’s closest to.
Since there are so many countries in the world, this game has no guess limit; you only lose if you give up. Because of that, I consider it to be a low-pressure, fun and challenging sort of educational resource: I’ve become a lot more familiar with where countries are in the world – and in relation to each other – and even learned about countries I hadn’t known existed. It’s fantastic!
