Heartcatchers is a quick to play, two-player bluffing game, in which hearts catch other hearts and collect Secrets. It’s also extremely quick to learn!
The game starts with six face-up heart cards in two rows of three, three cards in each player’s hand, and the rest set aside as a draw pile. On a player’s turn, they may “catch” a stack in front on them – red hearts catch green, green hearts catch blue, and blue hearts catch red – by playing the correct color of heart face-up on top of it, catch an opponent’s stack and swap it for any one of their own, or play a card as a Secret, face-down at the bottom of a stack and perpendicular to those that are face-up. There are also two Uncatchable cards, which can catch any color but cannot be caught! Players draw after playing.
The game continues until all cards have been played, which doesn’t take long, seeing as there are only twenty. Then, scoring! Any face-up cards in a player’s stack are worth one point. Some cards, when played as Secrets, may add or subtract points, or swap the stack with the one directly across from it. We’ve played this game twice so far, and both times we hit a “reverse, reverse!” situation where a stack had two Change-of-Heart cards under it.
And… that’s it! Whoever has the most points wins, and if there’s a tie then the game’s so short you just play it again. Alongside being quick, pretty (look at those sparkles), and simple yet tricky, it’s also a compact game, so it’s easy to find room on your shelves for! Ours are pretty packed, so “this game is small” is a major bonus.
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!
Hearthstone is a virtual collectible card game with several game modes and a warm, comfy tavern theme. If you have your volume on, you’ll find yourself greeted as the main menu appears.
Your first option is traditional Hearthstone. In this, you pick one of the eleven character classes – each with a signature ability – to build a 30-card deck for, then compete one-on-one with another player. The first player starts with three cards in hand, the second starts with four, and they each get one opportunity to reshuffle some back into their deck and draw replacements. This is most often useful when the card costs a high amount of Mana, because players have one Mana on their first turn, two on their second, three on their third, etc. up to ten. Starting with an 8-cost card, then, isn’t immediately useful. The second player also gets The Coin, a free card which grants them one extra Mana Crystal on the turn that it’s played.
The goal of the game is fairly simple: each Hero starts with 30 Health, and through the use of minions, spells, and weapons (all played by spending Mana*), you’re trying to knock the other Hero’s Health to or below 0 before they can do the same to you. You start your turn by drawing a card, and the text on each explains its abilities. There’s also bolded text, which you can hover over for the definition; for example, Windfury means a character may attack twice each turn, and Taunt means enemies must defeat your Taunt minions before they can attack any of your other characters. Each minion has Attack and Health stats. There’s also a time limit, to each turn, but also to the game: once your deck runs out of cards, each time you should draw deals you an increasing amount of Fatigue damage instead.
Alongside all this, there are several maps (randomly chosen from), each of which has interactive features! They give the game that little bit of extra character I adore. Strategy? Yes. Firing a catapult while you wait for your opponent to take their turn? Also yes!
On the subject of waiting, this post turned out extremely long, so I’ve split it into three parts. For my commentary on the next game mode, Battlegrounds, come back next week!
*Except for the rare cards that cost Health instead.
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.
Don’t worry, Dizios shouldn’t actually make you dizzy. It’s effectively the spiral tie-dye version of dominoes! Because of the spiral, each corner of the square tile has a color, allowing up to two colors per side. Like in dominoes, the tile has to match whatever it’s adjacent to!
Each time you play a tile, you score points based on the dot value of the tiles next to it. For example, if you nestled your tile between two three-dot tiles, you’d score six points! As usual, you can’t move tiles around once they’ve been played. The game ends once you’ve played the whole deck (or as much of it as you can, before no tiles can legally be placed anymore), and the player with the most points wins. And even if you lose, you made something pretty! The aesthetic is one of my favorite parts about Dizios, honestly. It looks fun!
Manga Manga functions similarly to Crazy Ates or Uno, but with manga-style art and a few unique twists.
The first is that play is simultaneous, making gameplay faster and substantially more chaotic. You do, however, have to wait until someone else has played a card before you can play again. The second twist is that, unlike in the other games where you can match by color or number, there’s only one criterion to match by. Each Combatant has its own color and symbol… and the color and symbol of which to play next. Rainbow Dragons act as the wild card, playable at any time and allowing whoever played it to pick the next Combatant.
Players race to empty their entire hand, and the first to succeed draws a face-down Victory Disk. If the Dragon on the disk is “glowing” it’s worth two points, while regular Dragon Spheres are worth one. In a game with three or more players, the person with the most cards left in hand would draw a Consolation Disk, providing some advantage they could redeem it for later. We were playing with two players though, where there are no Consolation Disks, you can play immediately after yourself (lest it become a turn-based game), and players may draw new cards to increase their options. No matter how many players you have, the game lasts for nine rounds, after which the player with the most points wins!
I got a little distracted deciding who each Combatant reminds me of, because I’m a dork like that. For instance, I think the purple character resembles Hunter from The Owl House!
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!
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.
