Tabletop Review 7 – Darwin’s Choice

Before I ever backed a project on Kickstarter (see my review of Circle the Wagons), I was nervous about the whole ordeal. The obscene wait times before a product would arrive –  sometimes years later – at your door long after you’d forgotten you’d even ordered it, my lack of understanding around whether you got your money back if the project failed or not, the rumours floating around of hideous legal dilemmas… To me it was a wonder anyone paid Kickstarter any mind. Yet when I was exploring the tabletop games on offer, I discovered a treasure trove of awesome concepts, exciting add-ons, exclusive perks, all the necessary buzzwords. After doing a little more research and discovering a lot of games are not quite what they seem – but only in the sense that many of the ‘stretch goals’ (adding more content if higher funding levels are reached) bloat and overcomplicate a game to the detriment of the original concept – I narrowed down my criteria appropriately. Keeping a keen eye out for unnecessary expansions and additions, I eventually happened upon a project whose creators, ‘Treecer’, seemed a cut above the rest, pursuing eco-friendly solutions to packaging and manufacturing in line with the game’s themes, and providing almost immediate replies and information to any fan queries. This all besides the fact that the game looked absolutely gorgeous.

Darwin’s Choice sees up to six players (although when a three-player game lasts three hours and takes up more than a entire dining room table with the side-extensions pulled out, god knows why or how you’d play with this many) competing to become the titular most-adapted species. Using head, body, leg, tail and wing cards you will create, mutate and migrate species across four constantly-shifting biomes over four rounds or ‘eras’, battling catastrophic global disasters as well as the monstrosities created by your opponents. Only survival until the very end of the game will secure any points your creatures have received, so constantly developing your strategy and your species is key to securing victory.

Positives first: the component artwork is absolutely sublime, and this should go without saying as it was a major draw towards backing the game for many people, myself included. Artist Rozenn Grosjen did an incredible job, and I’ve since ordered artwork from her Etsy store (not sponsored!) which I am very happy with. However, I’m already a little confused with some animal choices, like a number of animals that look almost identical, and the same body part was used. For example, instead of having, say, a jaguar head and a leopard body, there are leopard and jaguar bodies with no heads available for either. These two cards look identical and have almost identical stats (without getting my copy to check I’m actually 90% sure the stats are the same too because the animals are so similar). It’s a shame that there are many fairly everyday animals that aren’t included at all, like a badger, fox or stag, yet there are easily three or four almost identical ‘generic light brown deerlike creature bodies’, along with some absolutely bizarre examples that even I as an animal-lover and nature enthusiast (an aspect which very much drew me to Darwin’s Choice in the first place) have never heard of, including but not limited to a strange flying marsupial which I cannot for the life of me find on Google as I type this review at my desk.

To be Improved:

• The rulebook. Let’s get the Crocophant in the room out of the way first. My god, never in my life have I run into such a convoluted series of issues as I did trying to work out one specific rule in Darwin’s Choice. I am still adamant that I am not at fault for this. Reading the rulebook, there is a an explanation of what actions you can take on your turn. They are Create (self-explanatory), Mutate (add, remove or replace cards on a creature) and Migrate (move a creature). Whenever you perform an action, you flip the player marker on that creature – denoting it is yours – to the side with the check mark on it. You may perform an action as long as you have at least one player marker face up, as that creature has not used its action yet. However, when you create a creature you place the player marker check side up. So… Looking at the play area, once you’ve created one creature, you have no more player markers without checks. So… Your turn is over. The verbatim rule is “You may perform one action for every creature you have.” Seeing as you only have one creature, that’s your one action. Long story short, I was forced to have a long exchange with the creator over many days in order to clarify this, and all that would have solved it would be a line in the rulebook that says the ACTUAL RULE, which is “You may create as many creatures as you are able with the cards in your hand.” As it stands, nothing of the sort is in the rulebook so I have no idea how I was supposed to just assume this was the case.
• The game-breaking creatures. This is another problem that may lessen with more players, but it’s interesting that it is simply the species with the highest amount of ‘adaptability’ – having traits that match your biome, e.g. ‘swimming’ in the ocean – that gets either two or three points depending on the harshness of the biome. This makes very tactically-played creatures a little pointless, because you don’t get points EQUAL to the number of adaptability traits like I assumed you would because it feels the most natural, e.g. five points for five ‘swimming’ in the ocean biome. All a creature with high adaptability signifies is that you will never have to change or migrate it, and no one (including the person who owns that creature!) will build any more creatures in that particular biome because there’s no point trying to compete with it. It becomes a steady stream of points until the game ends with absolutely no input from the player who created it, so the game starts running itself.
• The setup. My god. Even with three people shuffling the different decks, there are so many cards and tokens to separate and shuffle and place that the setup feels like you’re waiting to evolve from a single-celled organism. Even when you’ve got it down to a science, once you’ve finished setting up there’s definitely a sense, every time I’ve played Darwin’s Choice, of ‘My god, finally, can we play now?’ It becomes an arduous task, and when you have such a long setup time looming over you before you’ve even opened the box to play, it becomes an obstacle to getting it to the table.
• The time. I can safely say I’ve never played a game that takes as long to complete as Darwin’s Choice. Even after our five or so playthroughs we still cannot finish the first three eras in under two hours, making playing it quite an endeavour that must be saved for a rainy afternoon. A LONG rainy afternoon. Maybe a weekend in a tropical rainforest just to be safe. Combine with the above-mentioned setup time and you’ve got a monster of a total runtime on your hands. Whenever I suggest Darwin’s Choice to the group we can’t help but check our watches. ‘Ooh, will we even have time?’ one player will invariably ask.
• The components. Now, this is pretty much a nitpick. As gorgeous as they are, I ran into issues shuffling the cards, especially exacerbated when there are quite literally hundreds to shuffle into one another. Granted, shuffling them in smaller sheafs works very well, but then you’re left with big chunks of cards that are never combined into one whole deck. What makes this unbearable is how difficult the cards are to pick up off any flat surface. All of this can often drag out the above-mentioned setup time even more.
• The translation. While we’re on this topic, some naming has been either strangely translated or not looked over properly, despite the creators informing me they are “Very happy with the translation.” Finding myself with a flat grey body card called a ‘cachalot’ I had to stop the game to do a quick google. Apparently it is the (quote) “Old fashioned term for a sperm whale”. Why would anyone use the archaic form of something instead of the easily-recognisable term? Another example is the ‘tuliqua rugosa’, the latin name for the blue-tongued skink. Wouldn’t… ‘blue-tongued skink’ have been simpler, more recognisable, and just plain better?
• The odd design choices. This is in terms of some of the cards. Some large cards (which are normally double sets of legs or bodies you can attach at least a head, wings and tail to, if not legs) are completed bodies, like that of an eagle. You cannot add feet, legs or a tail but you can add… Wings. Seeing as nearly all of the cards that are comprised of these ‘completed’ bodies are birds, why the hell would I need to add wings to it? It’s already got wings! This comes up a lot in our games because these creatures are all well and good until you run up against the situation I found myself in recently. I had three tails in my hand that added cold resistance, and the biome had just changed to a Polar Desert. I also had three wings, but all of my creatures already had wings, and I didn’t need to add wings to the creature that needed cold resistance because, like I just said, it ALREADY had the ‘flying’ trait on its body card. This demonstrates a number of different problems, not limited to the problem with randomly drawing cards (by this point my partner had already passed the turn after taking a single action then finding herself out of options) and the infuriating reliance the game has on temperature resistance. More on that in a moment. But my partner quickly finding herself unable to do… well, anything on her turn leads onto my next issue.
• The lack of late-game options. By the time you reach the end of the second era, most players have so many species on the board that if they were to make any more they either would’t be as adapted as their existing creatures, or they’d be too adapted and steal food off (consequently killing) their existing species (losing all the points that creature has accrued). This leaves ‘Mutating’ – adding, removing or replacing parts from your creatures – and ‘Migrating’ – moving a creature to a different biome – as your only options. Great, so when the biome changes to the ocean and your creature cannot swim, mutate it and add flippers! Well… This is the ideal scenario. But what happens instead is decidedly less exotic. See the next point.
• The reliance on temperature resistance. What a strange criticism to have to bring up, but I have seen it negatively affect every game of Darwin’s Choice that I’ve played. Let’s go by the numbers: Of the 135 small animal cards in the box, a mere EIGHT heads provide any adaptation other than swimming and/or cold resistance (for reference, there are a whopping 35 heads –  that’s 26% of all the small cards available – that provide ONLY these two traits). Of those eight heads, only three provide something other than heat resistance. The rest of the heads provide nothing other than (if you’re lucky) competitive strength, which will nab you a maximum of three points at the end of each round, so is fairly inconsequential. What’s even worse is that for many of the hot and cold biomes, temperature resistance is the only adaptation that is needed! So, in terms of the above point on lack of options, whenever the biomes change, chances are you will not have to change a single thing about your creature. The polar desert will change to an ice cap, and you already have cold resistance so have nothing to do on your turn. This means that you can essentially coast all the way to the end of the game if you get a lucky starting hand and create an amazing creature with lots of temperature resistance (see the first point on game-breaking creatures; my partner is incredibly good at getting one lucky draw then winning by doing nothing for the rest of the game). If by some miracle the biome changes to a landscape that does not allow temperature resistance (i.e. a creature with cold resistance cannot survive in a desert by default) then you can easily just migrate it – which is about as exciting as picking the cards up and putting them down a few inches to the left, because that’s all it is.
• The randomness. I like that the elements of chance in the game like the random event cards and the biome changes reflect what would happen in the wild. Climate change is real, people! And the dinosaurs didn’t just up and leave of their own accord. But the aspect of Darwin’s Choice I’m starting to detest – and for all my criticisms this is really the only part of the game that makes me genuinely angry every single time – is the randomly drawn player hands. Every single time we’ve played, no matter how we draw the cards (alternating between players, all in one go, free-for-all, dealing clockwise, etc.) we all end up with hands of either five legs and five tails (meaning you cannot make any creatures as they must be at least head and body), or five heads and five bodies (meaning you can make creatures, but good luck if you want any adaptation other than cold resistance or swimming, as already stated only THREE of the heads in the entire game will offer anything but). It all gets a bit messy at this point, and the strategy that feels so good in the first two rounds devolves (*wink wink, nudge nudge*) into fighting against the hand you’ve been dealt and how you can use it the least crap way possible, rather than the best way.

Overall:

You’d think for all my grievances, this game would be nowhere other than the shelf of shame right now. But in all honesty, it’s… still a little enjoyable? I’m the only one at the table aware of all the min-maxy aspects present, these niggling little problems that seem blatant to me because I’m the most nerdy of the group. But when you’re actually sitting down with other people, and a hippo-coco-bok wanders onto the planet, you can’t help but laugh and point and clap, because it’s just silly but it’s so great a lot of the time. Even so, it can’t be overlooked that players do get increasingly frustrated at the persistently useless hands, and how little they have to do during the last two rounds. (Edit: 01/07/19 – Or, I’ve realised after a few more playthroughs, how little they have to do during ANY of the rounds if the wrong biomes come up i.e. ones that don’t require swimming or cold resistance, or even worse, don’t ALLOW cold resistance.) This has drastically lowered my opinion of the game because there are just too many random factors at play here. As there’s no way to influence any of the unseen elements like biome changes and events, there’s ALWAYS the possibility that any of the issues mentioned here will crop up, and consequently… they always do.

FINAL RATING: 4/10

May be Darwin’s choice, but it isn’t mine.

Tabletop Review 6: Keyforge

My first two Keyforge decks, pulled from the Age of Ascension starter set, ended up being a bit of a letdown, though I didn’t think that at first. I should have realised my folly at the time, but one of the decks even prompted me after just two games to ask Reddit “What to do if you think a deck may be competitive?” Suffice to say, after purchasing two more decks – this time from the original Call of the Archons starter box – I quickly deleted that thread as I discovered there is a whole lot more to what makes a deck ‘good’.

Let’s back up a little. Keyforge from Fantasy Flight Games is the first of its kind, and that’s because it’s a ‘Unique Deck Game’. If you, like me, appear to have been living under a Rock-Hurling Giant for the last year, this will raise a few questions. I’ll simply say that yes, every single 37-card sealed deck, drawn from (at the time of writing) a pool of over 570 cards, is completely unique. Thanks to algorithms, there won’t be an identical copy of your deck anywhere in the world… ever. And that’s right down to not only the combination of cards but also the emblem and deck name that makes up on the back of each card in that deck. If you’re keeping up, this means no deck-building a la Magic: The Gathering or recently reviewed Adventure Time: Card Wars. In fact, no altering of your deck in any way. Bewildered? Surprised? Excited? Try all of the above.

The Good:

• The… Now, hold on a moment. This is going to be a little harder than I thought.

In Keyforge, every game is unique. Your mileage may vary. Like, drastically.

I’ve played around ten games with my five decks now. As mentioned in the introductory paragraph, the two from the starter set ended up (despite my initial hopes otherwise) being rather disappointing. Although one deck beat the other in half an hour or less every time, once I purchased two decks from the original Call of the Archons set I played a game with them that lasted two hours before a victor was declared. Does that mean these are incredibly powerful decks? Or perhaps that my first two decks are much weaker by comparison? Well, those last two words are the key (heh) here: “By comparison”.

I believe, when it comes to Keyforge, that it isn’t your deck that matters. Obviously you’ll want a snazzy, epic or hilarious name, perhaps your favourite colour adorning the back (I’m yet to pull a green or blue deck, grrr!), but other than that, I’d strongly argue that there is another factor which is far more important in deciding not just the outcome but the fun that will be had for the duration of the game. And that is the deck you’re playing against.

When I say my first decks were disappointing, this was only after I found some decks that were more powerful. Before these came into the equation, I had a blast playing the original two against each other. And when the new ones arrived, I had a blast playing with them. So what gives? When it comes to the debate of paying the same price for a crap deck as someone who could potentially pull literally the best in the world (anything is possible), I think people overlook that your deck is only as good or bad as the one it is playing against. Besides that, every deck is so random that there is no other objective measure of quality. And I think that’s brilliant.

Edit: 08/08/19

Oh my, in my haste to discuss the unique deck mechanic I didn’t take into account any of the other aspects of a tabletop game! These are the ones I normally just list which is why I forgot to include them, so here we go:

• The artwork! I really, really dig lots of the artwork for Keyforge, especially the ‘Dis’ faction, which is comprised almost entirely of pink-tinged cyberpunk insectoids. A card called ‘Succubus’ has a portrait that is practically frame-and-hang-on-your-wall worthy. But what is even better than the artwork itself, is:
• The artist credit! I was appalled, just really sickened, when I found out that Games Workshop do not credit their artists in their myriad rulebooks, codices and novels. It’s a disgrace. So when I noticed that Fantasy Flight Games had printed, on every single card, the name of the artist who drew the portrait, I was unbelievably proud and pleased of the company. This is a detail most people wouldn’t even blink at, but it’s one of the most commendable aspects of the game.

To be Improved:

I find Keyforge to be incredibly exciting, and it’s inherent uniqueness warrants the sort of lengthy discussion in the above section. So when it comes to the few flaws I’ve encountered so far, I’ll need to go into just as much detail. But then again, take all of these with a pinch of salt, as your experience will almost certainly play out entirely differently to mine (spoilers: that’s great!).

While writing this review (as I am pretty late to the party) Fantasy Flight revealed a new core set and two new houses. This is immensely compelling for the state of the game as a whole… Until I found out that they’re rotating houses in and out of the game from here on out to maintain a ‘seven houses in each set’ schedule. The houses that are being rotated out are… Sanctum and Mars. Across my five decks, with three houses for each deck, that’s fifteen house icons. Four of these are Brobnar, three are Shadows, three are Logos, two are Untamed, one is Dis, one is Sanctum, and one is Mars. All three Shadows decks are also Brobnar decks. So two of the factions I only have 1/15 of (so consequently want more of) are being left out this season.

This makes me so damn wary of buying any decks from the new core set, which would mean I wouldn’t get to experience the new houses. Because now there’s still the same chance I’ll just get Brobnar and Shadows decks, of which I want no more whatsoever. And the worst thing of all is that this is all completely down to chance. I know, I hear you, if I have a problem with that, this is literally the opposite of the game for me. But I don’t; I’ve already explained that I actually really appreciate that you can be into Keyforge for a variety of reasons. Be it buying a few decks and just seeing how they all work, then only buying more once you can truly play them with your eyes shut (like I do); only buying them for the card rarities and getting that dopamine rush of opening a ‘thing’ that we all love so much from childhoods spent with IPs like Pokemon; or searching for the best possible deck you can find. These are all entirely valid, and that’s all accommodated by the randomness.

But I have been experiencing no end of frustration when every single damn deck I pull has the same two houses in it. It meant that the last deck I opened, my reaction was completely soured. Instead of “This deck looks sweeet what a cool house combination” like the last four had elicited, I cringed and audibly groaned at the Brobnar/Shadows combo (even in the same order on the back of the card!), and thought “Oh good, Untamed.” I wasn’t excited to play with that deck. And that’s when I got my first taste of the disappointment that can creep into Keyforge. And the crux of it all makes it even more disheartening in a game entirely based on chance: It’s just. Bad. Luck.

Edit: 08/08/19

As with the above section, I forgot to include the list of basic critiques as I normally do. There’s only one objective issue, really, but it is capital BIG, and that’s:

The component quality. These decks are not cheap. At £9.99 a pop, with the encouragement that you’re supposed to keep buying them lootbox-style until you get the a unique or powerful combination, I’ve already spent more money on Keyforge than I’ve ever paid for an individual boxed game in my entire life. And for money like that, it’s ridiculous that the cards are so flimsy. I was considering whether I should sleeve my decks – as many people claim you should regardless of the quality – and was swayed completely to the affirmative when I flicked through a deck, shuffled it for a game… and realised the middle of the edge of a card had been frayed, revealing the white cardstock. I pulled it out, saw it was the best card in the deck, and tried to smooth it back into place before returning it to the deck. I shuffled it again, and to my utter dismay I could still see the same card, eve in its new position. Again, for the price, this is completely unacceptable. There are packs of regular playing cards that are higher quality than this, and for half the price. Big, big drawback.

Overall: 7/10… Maybe?

I genuinely don’t think I can put an accurate rating on Keyforge. Because your experience of this game is entirely subjective, it’s a massive challenge to objectively review it.

What I can say is that for me, when you’re actually playing Keyforge – not examining the meta behind the card draws, or comparing all your decks to one another, or wishing you had more of a certain house and less of another – something weird happens. The game itself becomes something really pure and contained. Every game, once you sit down to play, becomes condensed down to nothing besides the two decks that are currently butting heads. And this, mind-bogglingly, means (contrary to what the box may tell you) that every game is not unique… Because every game is intensely fun.

Tabletop Review 5: Adventure Time – Card Wars

[Preface: This review has been a long time coming. I actually bought the game over a year ago, but it was only with the purchase of a more complex but in many ways similar game, Keyforge, that I was made aware of some new qualities in Card Wars that I didn’t notice before. Now, on with the review.]

My girlfriend is not into tabletop gaming. She has a passing interest if I buy a new one or if she’s willing to help me playtest the one I’m currently developing, but other than that tabletop is my hobby, nothing more. However, one that she’ll always agree to of a dark and stormy night is Adventure Time: Card Wars.

I would describe Card Wars as an incredibly simplified Magic: The Gathering. In reality, there aren’t all that many similarities besides that fact they’re both collectible card games, or ‘CCGs’, consist of two players facing off using creatures, spells and items, and require you to ‘tap’ a card (flip it 90 degrees left or right depending on your preference, an ongoing debate that will probably outlive the game itself) to perform an attack or ability – referred to as ‘flooping’ in Card Wars.

Beyond these similar basic structural notes – the likes of which could be forgiven for any two games in the same genre – the rules differ from here on out. Instead of playing land cards like you do in Magic, in Card Wars you have four pre-assigned landscapes – chosen by the player before the game – that do not change throughout the game, besides being disable by some cards. And instead of assigning blockers and attackers each turn, in Card Wars everything that can attack must, and they only attack down the lane that they’re in; your opponent can only block with what is opposite that creature. To win, you must directly attack your opponent down an empty lane enough to reduce their lifepoints to zero from thirty.

The Good:

• The theme! Despite having never been a long-time fan or even having a TV license including Cartoon Network, Adventure Time has remained something I’ve been mildly invested in for over five years. For the last half a decade I’ve bought apparel, vinyl figures, graphic novels and artbooks semi-regularly, and Card Wars fast became a standout in the long list of products.
• The simplicity! I’ve already explained a few points that make Card Wars a simpler but not necessarily inferior version of MTG. It really boils down to the fact you don’t need to worry about things like assigning blockers (deciding which creatures will take damage) or keeping track of numerous effects like ‘Flying’ (cannot be blocked by creatures, I think?) or ‘Trample’ (uhm…see what I’m saying?). Regardless, it’s a lot easier to grasp and that makes it more fun for a certain audience. I know what you’re thinking. “Yes, and that audience is children.” Well, despite the game’s simpler rules, I’d like to see a child pull off anything close to some of the Blue Plains synergies I’ve discovered while playing Card Wars!
• The accessibility! Somewhat similar to the above point, but it is the streamlined, less complex rules of Card Wars that make the game such a hit with people like my girlfriend who dabble in the hobby because they know people who enjoy it full-time. This is as well as making it a joy to teach for people like me who are used to having to endure endless ‘practice games’ before everyone (including me) grasps the myriad symbols, rules and caveats.
• The surprising complexity! As my first experience with this sort of game, I quickly discovered that it would be worth purchasing the Fionna and Cake expansion to flesh out my and my partner’s decks. If you want to play straight out of the starter set, you’re more than able, and that’s as far as you need to take it. But if you want to add some more flavour, or play some different styles with the various expansions available, there is more than enough for you to advance the game for months on end as you experiment to your heart’s content.

To be Improved:

• The lack of support. This is less a problem with the game itself and more just me bemoaning the current meta state of a product I enjoy. Despite the game still being sold in the shop I originally bought it from – on the same shelf, nonetheless! – even at this point last year the company behind Card Wars had long since stopped releasing content. This meant it was hard to get invested in it knowing literally everything I could look forward to was already out there to purchase. This lack of any future for the game is why I stopped playing it, and consequently why I haven’t managed to write a review until now.
• The (initial) imbalance. While playing the starter set, I was surprised to see my girlfriend beat me multiple times in a row despite me being the more experienced player. As I was just expecting the starter decks to have been designed to be played against one another, I didn’t even consider it could be a balancing issue for around five games or so. After looking this matter up online, in fact, every single expansion seems to be improperly balanced. This is a shame for both parties: for someone like me who knows this issue requires building my own decks from cards across a variety of expansions, it means I have to spend a fair bit of money; for someone like my girlfriend who doesn’t want or know how to build a deck, the imbalance will result (as it eventually did) in them shelving the game in favour of more user-friendly affairs.
• Some samey artwork. I was disappointed to learn, while looking through some expansions I didn’t end up purchasing for this very reason, that outside the main starter sets many decks were made up of different elemental (which basically translates to ‘recoloured’) varieties of the same creatures. Besides some slightly differing abilities, I wasn’t about to shell out more money for such a minimal change. The game isn’t expensive per say, but it would certainly stop being cheap if you spent £20 a time on set after set of cards with slightly different artwork, and I’m sorry to say that this is a big contributor to why I never bought more than two sets.

Overall: 7/10

I don’t know what I was expecting with Card Wars besides its charming theme, but I’m fairly sure I got more than I initially thought. Now, where I thought I might find a game I could keep coming back to, building on the decks I’d made with ongoing releases and exciting new strategies, I was let down. But where I didn’t expect to get a deceptively complex game despite its size, with a large amount of replayability for less experienced players, I was pleasantly surprised to find all of those aspects. All this on top of acting as a strong gateway game into the world of more involved affairs like Magic and – as you’ll see in an upcoming review – something a little more… unique. 😉

Tabletop Review 4: Odin’s Ravens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I first discovered the existence of Odin’s Ravens when I went into my local board game shop asking if they could recommend any two-player games. They offered few options to say the least, to the point that I thought there was a gap in the market for games with that player count. Thinking about it, that almost definitely influenced my decision to start work on my own (two-player only) cooperative tabletop game, so I guess I have this game to thank for that, in a way. But we’re getting off topic; Odin’s Ravens was one of the handful of games offered, and the £19.99 price tag for a game made of around 100 near identical cards (so essentially two 99p packs of regular playing cards) and two wooden ravens, I was not convinced. But when it recently went on sale for half price online, it suddenly had my attention.

Playing against one another as Huginn and Muninn, Odin’s pair of message-carrying ravens, you will race around the world through colourful landscapes like frosty blue mountain peaks and warm, sunny wheat fields. The first raven to return to Odin’s side is the victor. But you won’t just be using your wings to carry you on your journey; you may also employ the trickster god Loki’s wicked ways to aid your own flight or hinder your opponent’s. You play flight cards matching the landscapes in front of you to move across the cards, and can move the cards around the play area – adding loops, spinning landscapes and blocking your opponent – with the Loki cards. May the best raven win!

The Good:

• The Theme! Now, I don’t do these points in any particular order, instead just writing them as the positives pop into my head. And thinking about Odin’s Ravens, you can’t help but picture the components that make up 99% of the game: the gorgeous landscape cards. Even with only five colours, they’ve managed to really add a nice flavour to this game. The warmth of the wheat fields, the sun through the forest treetops, even the dark, foreboding sky of the desert. The more muted colours mean it doesn’t look childish, instead offering surprisingly rich aesthetics for such simple illustrations.
• The Gamble! One of the most satisfying and simultaneously maddening aspects of Odin’s Ravens is when you find yourself – drawing the third and final card at the end of your turn – having to choose between a one-time-use Loki card and another flight card. You don’t want to use too many Loki cards as you only get 8 for the whole game, and when you’ve already used six but there’s only a one in five chance of the next flight card being the one you need, it’s a very tricky choice indeed.
• The Strategy! I’ve seen a lot of people describe Odin’s Ravens as “all chance” in their negative reviews… I have to wonder if they were playing the same game. The Loki cards are the key here, offering a number of moves that can make your path easier. The real clincher is that you both travel the length of the landscape cards, then crucially double back; anything you do to make your path easier will also shorten your opponent’s. It’s about playing the cards as tactically as possible, setting up massive supermoves where you flip a card, travel all the way across landscapes of matching colour, then slide the card outwards so it’s in your opponent’s way, but behind you where you can forget about it. Until you loop back around, that is…
• The Speed! The game takes only twenty or so minutes to play once you’re familiar with the rather simple (but as we’ve seen, deceptively complex) rules, and the next point shows why this is doubly enjoyable.
• The Moreish-ness! An ingenious rule in Odin’s Ravens is the fact that if you went second at the start, you still have one turn to reach the end, forcing a tie, after the first player wins. This leads to all kinds of nail-biting scenarios when you see the player who went first approaching the finish. You hurriedly place loops in their path and shorten yours in a desperate bid to make up enough time that – if the luck gods favour you on your final turn – you can feasibly reach the end as well. When you do pull just the right combination of land cards to travel those final two, three, I’ve even seen five spaces to tie the game up, it is one of the best feelings I’ve experienced in board gaming yet. It’s actually fairly common to end up in this neck-and-neck scenario; over half the games I’ve played have ended in a tie. And you know what a tie means: a rematch.
• The Balance! All of the above makes for an amazingly balanced game. Because you end your turn by drawing three more cards up to a limit of seven, it’s a completely viable strategy to pass your turn if you either simply don’t have the necessary cards or are just setting up a beefy power move. But I’ve played games where I’ve passed two turns in one round and still emerged the victor… but only by a hair’s breadth.
• The Price? Possibly. For the same amount I paid for my recently reviewed copy of Deep Sea Adventure, a game I think I enjoy slightly less than this one, this is an absolute steal. But the full price? Let’s discuss that below.

To be Improved:

I’m torn with the price, and I do always feel awful about mentioning the money involved, but it’s an important (and in many cases deal-breaking) factor. Despite the lovely clamshell box, opening like some ancient nordic tome, the cards are packaged as three separate decks (white raven, black raven and landscape), leaving a lot of unnecessary empty space taken up by the plastic insert. I want to point out for posterity’s sake that what you are essentially paying for is almost the exact size size as the above-mentioned Deep Sea Adventure. Unfortunately I don’t think even everything mentioned so far can justify the original price. Instead, I’d argue the price that I paid should, objectively at least, be what the game is worth. £19.99 is a lot of money for two packs of playing cards. Subjectively, though, knowing what Odin’s Ravens is like now that I’ve played it, I think I’d be happy to pay the full RRP… at a stretch.

The quality of the components is a tad disappointing. I never really take this into account as I don’t know what to look for, but even I can tell that the cards are a little tricky to shuffle, preferring to stay in two- or three-card clumps rather than slipping nicely between one another, and I didn’t even realise until later but in pictures and videos online the ravens should be far more neatly cut than mine. Whether this is a production error or simply a slightly older version before they refined the process, mine are blobby at best. That said, it’s all abstract enough that you could really be using flat black and white chips and it would still represent it effectively.

Now, even though I discussed the balance above, an opinion I will stand by, we do still have to acknowledge that there is a lot of chance involved in the card draws. We had one absolute anomaly of a round where I happened to draw all five cards I needed in a row not once, but twice. My opponent also just so happened to draw exactly the wrong five cards in a row, not once, but, that’s right, twice. This meant I finished the game with my raven almost one entire length of the board in front of the other. It is frustrating – for both players – to see this happen, as you either spend the duration of the second half knowing you have no chance, or feel guilty for beating someone quite so badly. But even then, as long as you have Loki cards left to draw it’s hard not to feel like it’s you that’s made the wrong choice in this situation. It’s that push-your-luck element that makes you want to juuuust turn over one more flight card and see if it’s the river you need to progress. When it isn’t, well… Looks like you should have give Thor’s wicked brother a call instead.

Conclusion:

But that’s it! That’s all I have to criticise about this game. The price isn’t even an actual part of the game itself, and the cards are all so similar I don’t need them to be ultra-high quality. So the only solid negative boils down to ‘sometimes the wrong cards come up and that can be pooey’. Not exactly a deal-breaker.

Let’s cut to the chase: I’ve had it for little more than a week and Odin’s Ravens is already one of my favourite board games of all time. I’m still fairly new to the hobby, having built up a reasonably small collection over the last four years or so, including but not limited to Sprawlopolis, Circle the Wagons, Underworlds: Shadespire, King of Tokyo, Star Wars: X-Wing, and Adventure Time: Card Wars (expect reviews of many of those in the coming weeks). But I’ve been playing video games (not to mention the occasional tabletop skirmish in the form of Warhammer 40,000) since I was very young, and I know a keeper when I see one. I’ve saved the best quip for last – see below.

Tabletop Review 3: Deep Sea Adventure

I’m not really a fan of quick little experiences when it comes to tabletop games. Smaller games are so often ‘party games’ like the as-popular-as-it-is-terrible Cards Against Humanity which require nothing more than a downright juvenile sense of humour to play. Seriously, there are not many other things that are supposed to be #hilarious where I can keep a straight face for its entirety. 

However, having a partner who finds expansive experiences tiresome and difficult to keep up with, I’ve had to branch out and actually find some small boxes with worthwhile contents. One of these wasn’t even a box, it was a wallet, the amazing Circle the Wagons. My partner also purchased Sushi Go herself, and that’s a treat provided you have enough people. But then I saw a single picture (shown above) of a game in a tabletop magazine that intrigued me. It was a string of cardboard tiles, varying in shape and turning an increasingly darker shade of blue, with little wooden divers traversing them. That game was Deep Sea Adventure, and my partner and I have played it more in the month since I bought it than any other game I’ve owned since we’ve been together.

In Deep Sea Adventure, you are all divers, gradually lowering yourself into the sea to obtain treasure. The deeper you go, the more wealth you will find, but beware! Once any one of you has picked up treasure, you start using oxygen as you exert yourself and struggle to bring your bounty back to the surface. The gold you carry is also heavy, and weighs you down so that you cannot move as far with each roll on your way back to the safety of the submarine. The catch is that all players share the same 25 levels of oxygen, and you don’t even have to be greedy to completely deplete the supply. The game consist of three rounds, the trail of treasure dwindling each time, and the player with the most at the end of the game wins!

The Good:

• The Simplicity! I have taught this game in just one round to everyone I’ve played it with. Appropriately, it’s simply that simple. This also means anyone who is turned off by intimidating tabletop experiences is pleasantly surprised when their resident gamer produces a box from his pocket, which leads nicely onto:
• The Size! As with Circle the Wagons, there’s a sort of beauty in how neatly it all packs away into one palm-sized container. Deep Sea Adventure‘s box is a lovely shade of blue, and elegantly printed with a minimalistic submarine and bubbles.
• The Aesthetics! I’ve already mentioned the blue twice, but I’ve got to say it again here. The tiles perfectly represent travelling deeper into the sea, from the cool, inviting shallows to the rolling blue sea, to the ominous darkness of the depths. So much theming has been achieved with just a handful of shapes and four different shades of the same colour, and that’s one of my favourite things about the game.
• The Competition! I am not actually a fan of competitive board games. I always used to lose Monopoly, and that game’s whole infamy has soured the experience of “going head to head with your dudebros” for me. Competitive board games for more than two players feel too much like sport to me. But with Deep Sea Adventure, the push-your-luck aspect means that it’s mainly (unlucky dice rolling can seal even the most cautious player’s fate) your fault if you drown.
• The Laughs! What’s even better is that it’s often the player who’s just tried to screw over all the others who rolls the dice poorly! Cockiness is the bane of every player’s success in this game, but that makes it all the more satisfying when someone nabs three less valuable treasures at the top of the trail, then rolls ones and twos until they drown just a few steps away from the submarine. Jeez, that’s surprisingly dark for such an adorable little game!
• The Time! There hasn’t been a single time we’ve played Deep Sea Adventure, either just the two of us or with friends, that we haven’t played a second set of three rounds. The sense of “Aw, come on, one more, one more, we’ll get it this time!” is palpable even if players don’t simply cry “Ahh, almost had it!” before setting up the charming, tactile blue tiles all over again.
• The Price! I do hate addressing this when it comes to games, because any game’s individual price is probably influenced by a lot of different factors, and money isn’t everything if you have an amazing time with your family and friends while playing a game you initially thought was a little too dear. But as a student, I have to point it out, and I nabbed Deep Sea Adventure for just £12. Now, it’s a tiny box even for that low price, but I’ve got to say that the ratio of how fun it is to how much I paid for it is astounding regardless of its physical size.
• The Diversity! Although I disposed of them to make room in the box as I didn’t need them, Deep Sea Adventure comes with not one, not two, but five separate fully-printed instruction sheets in different languages. I’ve never seen that before, even in games the size of pillowcases, so this is a welcome little addition. They really squeezed a lot of love into this teeny box.

To be Improved:

Now, there is an elephant seal in the room with Deep Sea Adventure in the form of a difficult balance to be struck while playing. The problem arises when one player rolls far lower than the others and they are forced to stay near the shallows while their opponents probe the depths where the most valuable treasures lie. This wouldn’t be an issue if the oxygen for everyone ran out from the very beginning of each round. But that’s not how it works.

The shared oxygen supply only starts running down once any player picks up a treasure. And because the developers stress that you can win by one point – an comment made to address the trend of overconfidence in the first round – many people will set out with the secret objective of doing just that. This can make play unbalanced as if all players simply didn’t take treasure until they reached the bottom, everyone would have the same chance of winning. But too often does one player roll poorly while the others make their way to the bottom of the sea, and that player decides to just cut their losses and grab two or three low-level treasures and make it back alive. This decision has been dictated purely by dice rolls which you cannot anticipate, but means any other players simply do not have enough oxygen to make it back alive by the end of that round.

This in turn means that all players (including the one who made it back alive) will play incredibly cautiously in the second round, leaving the smallest amount of spaces possible between them and the submarine, and it won’t be very exciting. Everyone will get four or five points, while the hefty 15 point treasures stay where they are at the bottom of the trail. The third round often then predictably goes one way or the other. All players make a mad dash to the bottom, or all players are cautious once again.

It’s unfortunate that this happens, and it’s entirely down to the trust of the players. But it’s difficult to criticise this entirely, because that’s sort of the entire point of the game! You can’t anticipate whether your fellow divers are coming all the way to the bottom with you, or if at any moment they’re going to snatch up a mid-tier treasure and high tail it back to the surface. It’s what keeps you on your toes, and it’s only really frustrating if a player doesn’t understand that they don’t have to double bluff every single time, which hasn’t happened yet.

On the contrary, in fact; if you play with the same few people over and over as I have, it can start to become very predictable what sort of ploy a particular person is likely to make, and if you can be the one to adapt your strategy around that, you’ll win with ease. However, once THEY cotton onto your adapting to their chosen tactics, the process starts all over again!

Conclusion:

Here you have seen another one of those times where the only downside to a product can be immediately justified in the same section of the review. I can’t put it more simply: Deep Sea Adventure is a steal. It’s a tiny box but the experience I’ve had with it and will continue to have for, I expect, years to come, is worth far more than the £12 I spent on it. Everyone I’ve played it with has been intrigued by the tiny box with it’s stylistic imagery, and the little diver meeples are just to di(v)e for. As long as players are willing to develop their strategies in line with what other players try to pull (bearing in mind you have all three rounds and more often than not an entire second game to tweak and perfect your play styles), there’s a wealth of fun to be found here.

Tabletop Review 2: Circle the Wagons

Most people don’t trust Kickstarter. For whatever reason (as there seems to be no factual evidence) many claim that Kickstarter doesn’t support independent sellers, or takes money away from them, despite MANY tabletop kickstarters offering a ‘retail’ level pledge, that gives a large number of copies of the game for a discounted price, and requires proof that you are an actual shop. That argument seems pretty unfounded, to me, and with many safety nets in place to catch bogus projects, I can’t find many people online who have lost money.

Either way, I decided to back a company that has had many successful Kickstarter campaigns before, Button Shy. When their new wallet game, Sprawlopolis, had a reward tier that offered both the new game and their best-selling classic, Circle the Wagons, I as a Western fan just had to get both. I’ll do a separate review of Sprawlopolis, but let’s just say the decision ended up meaning the better game I got wasn’t even the one I backed.

Circle the Wagons sees you and a friend draw three cards to determine the point-scoring objectives for that round (every card has a different objective on the back). These can be a great many things, from ‘Happy Cows’ (not placing cows next to snow tiles) to ‘Boom or Bust’ (points for 1-2 mines, no points for 3-5 mines, and 10 points for 6+ mines). You then place the remaining cards in a circle around the objective cards, and take it in turns selecting cards to place in front of you and add to your Boomtown. You may only move round clockwise, and any cards you skip are automatically given to your opponent, adding an extra sneaky level of strategy. Once all the cards are used up, you tally the scores, using the objective cards as well as receiving points for your largest group of each colour type.

The Good:

• The Size! Easily fitting into the provided wallet, these games can literally be carried around in your back pocket. They’re not beautifully crafted, but they’re certainly very appealing.
• The Speed! I haven’t had a game of Circle the Wagons that’s lasted more than 15 minutes. But what is so good about it is how you can control the length. You can rush through even faster, just taking the next card available and using it as best you can, or take your time and really consider each option.
• The Accessibility! The entire rules have basically been condensed into the paragraph above, bar illustrations. If that ain’t easy to pick up, I don’t know what is! This is especially useful as someone who is one of the only tabletop enthusiasts in my entire family and friend group. Even non-gamers enjoy it because it’s not tediously difficult to explain and learn.
• The Theme! As I already mentioned, I’m a Western fan, so perhaps I’m biased. But I will say that the artwork on these cards is brilliant, and everyone I’ve played with, all with a variety of different interests and gaming backgrounds, has pointed out the steers and gone “Awww!” or pointed at the guns and gone “Aw hell yeah!”
• The Challenge! Okay, so it’s not Super Expert Sudoku difficult, but with some options being genuinely more mathematically viable than others in terms of which cards will score you the most points, there’s some fun brainteasing involved with deciding whether it really is worth giving your opponent those two extra cards just so you can have the one with three guns on it in order to bulk up the posse you’re building.
• The Variety! As my first Button Shy game, I was new to the idea of so few cards being utilised so effectively to create a nearly endless amount of combinations. But Circle the Wagons offers a different challenge every time, and even if you get the same three objective cards, the wagon circle itself will be in a different order every time, so you’ll still have to approach them anew!

To be Improved:

Really, there are only two downsides to Circle the Wagons, one nitpicky, one quite annoying. The nitpick is that because there are only eighteen cards, a little bit of the flare and excitement comes out of the game when you’ve experience all the objectives. Kind of a similar feeling to opening the same advent calendar twice. It doesn’t matter too much, but as you become more familiar with the game it can be annoying to see the ‘Herd’ card (two points per cow in your largest cow group) come up for the fifth time in a row, and almost makes you want to reshuffle.

The bigger downside is that, from my experience, when two players of a similar skill level play the game, one person is forced to win, just by luck of the cards. By this I mean both players can do absolutely everything they possibly could nearly 100% correctly (because, as already mentioned, each card does have a single most mathematically viable position it can be placed in to maximise point gain), and the person who won the toss to pick up a card first will win by five points or less. This is frustrating, as it shows that had the other person gone first, they would have won. In fact, the ‘Herd’ card mentioned above is a great example of this. There is one card with three cows on it, a guaranteed first pickup if the ‘Herd’ objective is drawn. Whoever gets this card has essentially, even if their opponent plays mathematically perfectly for the rest of the game, already won (provided that they also play mathematically perfectly). It can be really frustrating when you get to the end of the game and tally up all the points only for one person to have lost by three or so, and you can both just tell that it’s because the person who won got to go first.

I’ve never experienced a draw in my twenty or so games, but I’ll edit this review if that does happen. For now I’m going to assume it’s been designed so that one person has to win. It’s just annoying when that design choice becomes glaringly obvious.

Overall: 8/10

Circle the Wagons is one of the best games I own, an even more impressive achievement given the size (or the lack of it) of the contents. The accessibility and speed alone mean that it’s a favourite among my friends, as they don’t have to put in too much effort to appease my board-gaming needs, but even then it’s an incredibly enjoyable game. The added challenge isn’t too difficult if you don’t want it to be, and of course some may argue that thinking about it logically and mathematically would take the spontaneity and fun out of it. But I think that just goes to show, along with everything else I’ve mentioned, what a brilliant game this is for all audiences. One for the shelf of fame!

Tabletop Review 1: Hive (Pocket)

As my collection of tabletop games increases in size, my girlfriend suggested that I should review some of them! I think that’s a very good idea, so to mark the start of the series I thought I’d start with something small and simple. That thing is Hive: Pocket Edition, a chess-like hex-based game for two players, all themed around creepy crawlies.

Hive is one of those rare games that consists of A versus B in the most basic sense. I’m talking about games like chess (the hive pieces are even the classic black and white), backgammon, Battleship and Connect Four, where you just sit across from each other and play until one of you wins. Hive sits above the lattermost game in that list, but falls incredibly short when it comes to competing with the others.

The objective is to surround the opponent’s queen, taking it in turns to place various tiles with different abilities and movement. Much like chess, as already mentioned, but with no board; you build the playing field as you go along by placing and moving bugs. It’s that simple, and once you’ve memorised what all the different pieces do it’s easy to just have a best-of-three for half an hour on a rainy afternoon.

The Good:

• The size! Hive Pocket would fit in a boy pocket for sure (because most girls’ jeans have sewn up pockets or don’t even fit a mobile phone), and the handy drawstring carry bag is a lovely orange and stays shut well.
• The price! I don’t think you need to shell out twenty quid for the full-sized version, and the smaller one is only fifteen.
• Includes two expansions! Okay, they’re simple ones, but both the ladybug and mosquito tiles are included for both black and white players in this version, further justifying the above-mentioned lower price. You have to buy them separately if you buy the full-sized version, spending even more money than you’d otherwise need to as the expansions aren’t as common in stores as the base game so can be hard to acquire for their retail price.
• The speed! It’s super easy, as already noted, to just bust it out and play for ten to thirty minutes.
• The feel! The bakelite pieces are divine, with nice weight to them, and I personally find the smaller pieces much more easy to manage, hold, and move around, despite most people stating a preference for the full-sized version of the game.

To be Improved:

The paint applications. Despite the pieces feeling pretty nice, up close they’re kind of gross. There were lots of unexplained yellow stains on the white pieces, despite it being BNIB, and little paint splatters everywhere when you hold them up to the light. It just seems slapdash, and is a shame when it’s a minimalistic game that should be visually polished accordingly.

The fun factor. Unfortunately, this game just does not hold up against its competition, despite said competitors being 1500 years old in some cases. Hive is not as strategic as chess, as there are only a handful of opening gambits due to the lack of board, so most people just place the most useless pieces first. It is not as interesting as backgammon, because there’s no dice-rolling involved so you don’t have the added challenge of having to work with what you get for maximum gain. Nor is it as tactical as Battleship, because your opponent can see all the pieces you have left (and could work it out even if you hid them), so can base their strategy entirely on that.

The main issue I had with Hive is that there is a strong trend towards the player who goes first winning the game, every single time, because they’re always one move ahead. In chess going first can be good or bad, because whether you go second or first it can reveal what your opponent might be trying to do, or allow you to quickly enact a strategy respectively. In Hive, it simply means you have less time to do anything, as it costs you your whole turn to either move or place a tile. Perhaps implementing house rules that you can move one tile and place another on each turn, or you both place then both move, or simply place a certain number of tiles before flipping to see who goes first after that.

The internet even recommends that you play two games each time due to the first player bias, indicating an obvious (and overlooked) flaw in the system as this is not suggested in the rules. On top of this, if one player is at all more skilled than the other, it is impossible for the more experienced person to lose unless you make a stupid mistake. This means you have to be exactly the same skill level, otherwise it just stops being fun. And even then, once you get to higher levels there is only a set number of things you can do. Both players play grasshopper or spider first, the two least useful pieces. Both players play something else, probably placing their queen second, with a 100% chance of placing her by the third turn, in order to get her out early (you can’t move any pieces until you place your queen, which must be done in the first four turns). Then the game just descends into both players placing ants (which can move an infinite number of spaces) so they can block each other’s queens, before placing a beetle next to the opposing queen (as the beetle can move on top of other pieces, turning them the same colour, and you can only place your pieces next to ones of you colour). Then it’s just a race to see who can place things around the other queen first. It’s useless.

Overall: 3/10

This game was one I thought would have just as much depth of strategy as chess, but one that would be even more fun due to the experimental and unpredictable method of creating the board as you go along. What I got instead was a dry, repetitive game that fails to deliver on any of the advertised fun and strategic value. After playing around twenty games, the only pieces that matter are the ant and beetle, and you just end up chasing each other round the board with them. It’s like playing chess but only using the rooks and knights. For me, I have no idea what the hype is about; Hive will stay firmly in the cupboard or, preferably, the attic, from now on.