The Old King’s Crown is beautiful. It’s a lavishly illustrated craft with peerless style. This charisma reverberates in the game’s excellent writing, with passages leaping from the page in order to set the scene of a King Lear-like situation with a vacant throne. Expectedly, the gears of the work are likewise dashing, powering the entity…
Cyclades‘ release in 2009 was a watershed moment. Alongside Chaos in the Old World, it was responsible for the conception of the hybrid design, blending together elements of Ameritrash and classic Euro principles. The hybrid movement is one of the most important developments in modern board gaming. It irrefutably influenced the hobby, resulting in contemporary…
I’m all about high falutin experiences that treat games as Art, but sometimes I just want to punch a cretin in the mouth and send chiclets flying. This is the hard knock life that Aldarra comes from. You might not know it by the Elvish sounding name or the pastoral cover, but this honkin’ beast…
Bloodstones is the antithesis of modern production. Instead of heaps of miniatures, it has stacks of oblong tiles. Rather than thick mounted boards, it has silky cloth maps. Instead of vacuformed inserts and trays, it has soft bags emblazoned with faction symbols. Instead of an air of disposability, this Martin Wallace creation feels like an…
The Last Kingdom is a Netflix series that found modest success across its five seasons. Based on a collection of novels from Bernard Cornwell called The Saxon Stories, this historical drama follows Uhtred of Bebbanburg, an enigmatic and ambitious warrior who was born a Saxon but raised by Vikings. It emerged in a cluttered historical…
Robotech means nothing to me. Maybe less than nothing as the general anime aesthetic is not something I find appealing. Thus, I can’t speak to how well Robotech: Reconstruction captures its intellectual property or evokes themes therein, but I do know a little something about GMT’s COIN (COunter INsurgency) series, enough to identify the throughline…
I began my Cosmic Frog review by pointing out how weird of a board game it was. This has always been true of Jim Felli’s designs, even in the beginning with Shadows of Malice. The Mirroring of Mary King fits right in by once again establishing that it doesn’t. The Mirroring of Mary King is…
I wonder how the crew at Leder Games feel about every asymmetric post-2018 game being directly compared to Root. Cole Wehrle’s bellwether design has become the genre reference point, for better or for worse. Here though, it’s totally appropriate. A competitive bout between anthropomorphs. Check. Asymmetric factions with unique player boards and distinct mechanisms. Check.…
It’s easy to lose the thread on this one. The problem is that we’ve breached the upper threshold of games based on Frank Herbert’s Dune and they’re all starting to blend together. This one is the latest from Gale Force Nine and is effectively a re-working of the 1982 Eon title Borderlands. Fantasy Flight Games…
There’s a mystique about Crescent Moon. Some of this is attributable to the Eastern setting, and some to its strategically dense ecosystem. This is an opaque game, one that can be difficult to discern, but it possesses an inviting presence that is deceptive. These are the types of titles I seek, ones I can fall…
Player Elimination 