Bayonets & Tomahawks is an enthralling wargame. It’s a beautiful two player strategic simulation covering the entirety of the French & Indian War. It has novel mechanisms, astute detail, and a very slim and focused core. All of this surprisingly coming from first time designer Marc Rodrigue and published by GMT Games. The achievement of…
The PG series is a collection of articles featuring analysis incorporating the perspective of my eight year old daughter, Lila. It goes like this: each player is dealt a marker and a colorful laminated sheet. They also get a card that says “Rogue”, “Wizard”, “Fighter”, or “Cleric” as this is clothed in D&D and not…
I’m a Mantic fan. Hellboy: The Board Game is a top shelf dungeon crawler. The Walking Dead: All Out War is one of the most clever skirmish miniatures games of the past decade. Among their sports titles, OverDrive recently impressed. Now I’m here to claim that Deadzone may be the pinnacle of their work. Deadzone…
I don’t write about party games nearly as often as I play them. This is partially because it’s difficult to analyze this type of game through the lens of philosophy or as an introspective revelation of the self. It’s difficult to say anything interesting at all really. These products are simple things designed to scrape…
This is a nearly impossible task. Take a 40 year old board game – one which is a stunning masterpiece – and trim off three of the four hours while retaining something meaningful. It takes a certain degree of fortitude, or hubris, to look back at such a classic and even attempt to modernize it.…
Christian Marcussen is mystifying. Between 2010-2012, two prolific titles with this Dane’s name on the box were released. Each in turn domesticated their respective genres and remain to this day pinnacles of exemplary design. Merchants & Marauders came first, the definitive high-concept pirate game that remains relevant and exciting. It’s one of my favorite experiences…
Gascony’s Legacy is all wrong. In the current climate these types of games come stuffed with minis. Not three or four, but a whole damn tray and even better if there’s a second underneath. Here there’s nary a mini in sight. To snub the prevailing ethos in such a manner is almost offensive. That sense…
OverDrive is a new kind of sports game that is best described as the flow of Dreadball with the format of TimeSplitters 2 and the showmanship of the WWE. Perhaps that makes sense and your attention is secured. Maybe it doesn’t and I may as well be speaking whatever language the big shark-man on the…
Coalition forces perform a massive sweep, working with the local populace and enacting COIN doctrine to locate and identify Taliban guerillas in and around the provinces of Helmland, Kandahar, Oruzgan, and Ghazni. Local government police prove invaluable in identifying the few concealed insurgents remaining underground. A joint operation between the United States and the Afghan…
I don’t really know a whole lot about Legends of Andor. I’ve never played it and I’ve never felt a strong desire to. I know it’s an adventure game with some modern Euro-style sensibilities, such as deferring to optimization and puzzle solving over immersion and drama. But Andor: The Family Fantasy Game did appeal to…
Player Elimination 