Arcane Wonders’ Video Game Champion has been ushered into the North American market via the Dice Tower Essentials line. This series of games are titles personally selected for publication by prolific board game reviewer Tom Vasel – or, in the case of originally titled O Bom do Video Game, chosen for import. Overall, this has…
Re;ACT – The Arts of War is a byzantine title that’s difficult to parse. Why the semicolon and what’s up with “ACT” being capitalized? Beyond any delineative characteristics, the title serves as a clean indicator for the experience within. This is not a breezy or incurious design, rather, Re;ACT is a sophisticated tactical game that…
I had a thing for Choose Your Own Adventure books in my youth. It was the heyday of the genre, and I looked forward to the next novel more so than the next Nintendo cartridge. Lone Wolf was my favorite of the bunch. This ambitious series sought something greater. It utilized RPG-like character notetaking and…
Paolo Mori and Francesco Sirocchi’s Battalion: War of the Ancients caught my eye not because it’s a modern reworking of the duo’s 15-year-old Pocket Battles, but because it’s operating in a gray area that calls to my affinity for mass battle miniatures games while requiring none of the commitment of such an endeavor. This is…
Duel for Middle-earth is hot out the gates of Mordor and flying along the wind like a fell beast. It will assuredly occupy many top lists for the year, following in the steps of its predecessor, 7 Wonders: Duel. It takes the clever two-player drafting system of that previous title and re-works it with content…
Pinball is utterly cool. Inside a big sloped box, a shiny marble flies around like a caged devil searching for an exit. The demon is batted around, setting off loud whizzes and bangs and beeps. The visibly displayed score shoots upward as lights flicker on and off and the whole thing seizes and jerks under…
Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a grand campaign adventure game with the same genealogy as Kinfire Chronicles, Oathsworn, and Descent: Legends of the Dark. This type of game has really taken off in the crowdfunding space and we owe much of it to the success of Gloomhaven. New titles spring into existence…
Dark Venture is a radical adventure game born of hallucination from one-man-band Rob Lemon. I prodded this quirky design in 2019, writing about it in my monthly Independent Shelf series in Tabletop Gaming Magazine. I found this artifact so becoming that I even included it on my 2019 games of the year list. Well, this…
Plato’s theory of forms posits that there are abstract and unchanging ideals that exist in another realm. These are the non-physical beatific essences of all things. Imagine conceptually the ideal chair in size, shape, and beauty. That’s the form existing in its perfect state. Plato offers that objects in the material world are imitations of…
“Aren’t you the headless fellow that’s been getting around?“ Trying to model a Metroidvania platformer on the tabletop is a pointless endeavor. That’s why this quintet of designers didn’t attempt it. Instead of adapting Dead Cells the brutal twitch action game, they adapted Dead Cells the content-heavy roguelite progression game. The experience presented is one…
Player Elimination 