Geekually Yoked

My 7 year old has become known for his love of games and so occasionally receives birthday or Christmas gifts to reflect this pastime he shares with his old man. Randy Flynn’s 2021 hex and tile laying game Cascadia was one such gift and as a good father, I have frequently yoinked it for games nights when folks request a game that’s got some substance but isn’t too complex

Cascadia falls into what we call the point salad category of games where players compete to earn the most points through a variety of means – in this case by placing hexes that create large contiguous biomes and by placing animal tiles in advantageous positions. Every turn players are given a limited option of 4 paired hexes and tiles and choose which to take and which to leave for their rivals to snap up. You only ever play hexes and tiles to your own play area so that snapping up is the only friction and interaction between players but it’s a doozy.

In any given round you are eyeing this small selection of tiles, sweating when a coveted bear or salmon pops its head out of the hefty bag of animals and you can feel both the elation when you get just what you need and the crushing despair when the player just to your right takes exactly what you needed like an avenging harpy. Luckily, because there are other routes to points, no turn feels wasted. This is aided by the speed of play which is beautifully quick as you only have a limited set of choices before you.

The game offers a few quirks to keep you on your toes. One is that if ever you are faced with three out of the four tiles being the same animal, you can wipe them away and draw three new ones. This is blessedly helpful when no-one wants foxes so the invisible hand of the free market clogs up the board with them. If ever there are four of the same animal, the wiping is automatic which helps speed things up. Another quirk are these cute little pinecones you’ll collect for putting animals on special hexes. These pinecones are worth points by themselves at the end of the game but they can also be spent to give you more flexibility when choosing tiles and hexes.

Cascadia is fast, breezy, and lovely to look at. Scoring takes a bit of time to work out and calculate but isn’t too much of a head scratcher and because there are so many paths to victory, you don’t have the frustration of seeing a clear winner early on and feeling left behind. Replayability is helped by the animal victory conditions being variable and players can choose from a selection of four victory options per animal or they can shuffle and trust fate. It’s a delightful game and I’m grateful my son has earned the ludological reputation he has and that I get to benefit from it.

It’s good to be king. In theory. Leder Games poses the question of just what it means to win a crown and what comes after in their semi-legacy strategy game Oath. Longtime readers will know that one of my favorite games of the last decade is King’s Dilemma which falls more in line with traditional legacy games where you put down stickers, open hidden envelopes, and rip up cards to create a one-time long form experience. Oath is a gentler legacy game where it’s easier to revert back to the default without peeling or gluing anything. Instead, the game offers you a chance to see it shift subtly over time and rewards repeat plays with familiarity and unique stories born at the table.

The base game of Oath involves an asymmetric struggle between an Empire with its Chancellor and Citizens and various Exiles. One player will be the Chancellor and the others will be Citizens and Exiles. The Chancellor wins if they successfully keep the Oath established either at the start of the game or at the end of the previous game. This Oath can be to rule over the most Sites, possess the most Relics and Banners, possess just one of two specific Banners, or run out the clock. Exiles win by fulfilling the Oath better than the Chancellor or by snagging and fulfilling various Vision cards whose requirements mirror the Oaths – ruling Sites, possessing Banners and Relics, etc. The last type of victory belongs to Citizens who work alongside the Chancellor but can snake victory by fulfilling specific requirements on the Oath cards. If playing with a consistent group, the previous winner plays the Chancellor and how they won determines what the current Oath is and thus the general thrust of the game.

All players have a player board that tracks how many actions they can take on their turn, their personal bodyguards, and their treasury of Secrets and Favors which are the two currencies the game uses to Muster troops, Recover Relics, activate powers, or vie for control of the Banners. Actions are tracked through a Supply counter which goes down as they Move, Muster, Trade, Search, Recover, and Campaign (battle other players.) As they play, they’ll also add Advisers to their board who will grant special abilities and also potentially impact the legacy portion of the game.

The map is divided into three Regions – the Cradle, Provinces, and Hinterland. At the start of the game, only one Site is revealed in each Region and the Empire rules over all of them. As players explore, they’ll reveal more of the map and can attempt to Campaign to lay claim to the Sites either from non-playing Bandits or from one another. Along with fighting, players can Search in the shared World Deck or the Region-specific Discard piles for Denizens. Denizens can either join the player as an Adviser or be played to the Site which earns the player Favor and makes them available to help players Muster troops or Trade for more Favors or Secrets. They also have their own powers which can be used either by the player on their Site or the one who Rules their Site. All Denizens belong to specific Suits which act as a sort of faction and impact many of the actions players can take. Hidden in the World Deck with the Denizens are also the Vision cards which are one of the paths the Exiles have toward victory.

As the map fills up, players will spot opportunities to meet the various victory requirements and the game becomes a sort of king of the hill as players try to battle and build up resources to meet all the various requirements and then hope they can defend their position long enough to win. Many of the victories trigger at the start of a player’s turn so there is a lot of tension between trying to chase your own victory vs trying to keep your rivals from winning. There’s a tasty bit of prisoner’s dilemma in trying to decide how much to focus on yourself and trust your other players to do the work of stopping each other from winning.

Combat in Oath is a tricky bit of business. Called Campaigning, when you go to fight someone, you have to decide just what your goal is: claiming their territory, stealing their Banners and Relics, or attacking them in the pocketbook. When you go to fight, you can choose any or all of these targets, increasing the difficulty as every target gives the Defender more dice with which to fend off your attack. The more troops you throw at the fight, the better your odds and the game tantalizingly allows you to see how the dice turn out and then kill off your own soldiers to add to your score and see if it’s enough to win. This gives combat real stakes and makes them dangerous affairs especially as burning all your resources to defeat one enemy leaves you vulnerable to the others at the table.

The asymmetry of the game takes on an extra edge as the Chancellor player can try to seduce the Exiles into joining the Empire and becoming Citizens, pooling their strength to crush the remaining rebels. This is a real devil’s bargain moment for all involved as the Chancellor hopes they gain a vassal and not a future liege and the potential Citizen eyes the new victory requirements to see if they’re in close enough reach to make up for having to bend the knee. Even if they do take the deal, there is still a chance they could wind up Exiled again so there are no secure alliances, only temporary truces on the path to snatching victory for one’s self.

Once a victor manages to win either through clever timing and resource management or by sheer attrition and exhaustion, the game is not over. It’s now time for the Chronicling portion which acts as both clean up and the set up for the next game. First the Oath for the next game is chosen and then the Sites ruled by the winner move to the Cradle region where they’ll form the heart of the next Empire along with the Denizens and Relics there. Based on the Suit the winner’s Advisers belong to, new cards from the same Suit will be added to the World Deck while cards belonging to the losing players or discard piles risk getting removed from the game, possibly never to be seen again. As you play the game over and over, this process repeats, filtering cards in and out until you have a Deck that is truly your own and reflects all the decisions made in previous games.

Along with this ever evolving Deck, seeing Sites and Denizens that proved vital in the previous game as the core of the new Empire creates a clever sense of continuity and history. Coming into the middle of this legacy game is less daunting than some of the other legacy games that depend on everyone having been there when a box was opened or a sticker laid down to get the full impact. In Oath, you can imagine the history of this world and as you play, you can sense how your actions could impact not just this game but future games as well. It’s a neat magician’s trick pulled off with gorgeous art and an evocative system that lets you tell organic stories with your friends.

Space. A lot of games use it as their setting to inspire players and make them feel like heroes, explorers, or conquerors. Many tap into existing movies and books but a few try to create their own lore and history to entice and intrigue and give players a sense of being part of a grand narrative. Leder Games’ ARCS does something different. It eschews specificity and lore for abstraction and ambiguity. When you pick a player color and board, you are not picking a species with reams of backstory. When you draw cards to enhance your galactic empire, you’re invited not to be part of an established story but instead to imagine and invent on the spot. What does it mean to you that you secured the loyalty of the Mining Guild or that your fleet arrived at a planet full of weapons? This is not Star Wars where you have preconceived notions of what it means to go gallivanting off to Tattooine. Planets don’t have names. Nothing does. And in thar blank space, you are free to imagine and invent or just focus on the game.

Leder above all else understands that what they make are games. As someone who is a sucker for themes and experiences, it can be quite a splash of cold water to be presented with something like ARCS that focuses so much on the Games-iness of their games and trusts players to bring their own imagination to fill in the blanks. Part of their confidence can come down to how well they design games and also how skilled and evocative their art is. There’s just enough sci-fi on the cards and board to make the sandbox you’re playing in feel alive and vibrant without overpowering the experience.

ARCS has you chasing down victory points by fulfilling Ambitions that change throughout the game and is determined by the players. At the start, everyone might be trying to hoard fuel or hunt down relics but soon it might be more valuable to blow up ships or conquer your neighbors. The uncertainty of what will earn you points at any given time means that players need to be flexible enough to jump on opportunities but also know that at any time they can grab the reigns and determine the fate of the galaxy. Initiative is a huge part of this game and you can sacrifice a great deal to take it.

Most of the gameplay of ARCS is a deceptively simple suits-based card game where whoever has initiative plays a card that allows certain actions like taxing, moving, building, or attacking and everyone else has to decide whether to follow suit and do the same sort of actions or play cards to do something else but usually not as well. In addition, you’ll be taxing or stealing resources and claiming cards that give you options for ways to enhance your power and strategy but almost always at a cost. Every decision has a sense of weight. Do you burn a card to seize initiative so you can decide which Ambition will earn points or do you let your rivals exhaust themselves? Do you go all in on smashing your fleets into their points-scoring planets or hold back and let your rivals duke it out so you can sneak around the edges and outscore them while they’re rebuilding? Even combat has you decide whether to roll safe but ineffective dice or dangerous but exciting ones.

It can be a very brutal game and players can see their hard earned fleets turned to so much debris or see cards and resources they schemed to acquire purloined by rivals but luckily it moves fast and there are always opportunities for revenge. Despite space being so large, players can very quickly find themselves bumping into one another and getting into all sorts of scrapes. Going after planets is a great way to take your neighbor’s stuff but if things get out of hand and you blow up one of their cities, you provoke Outrage and have to deal with the fallout of being a brutal warlord both mechanically and emotionally.

Despite having a simple structure, every game of ARCS is a novel experience due to just how much weight it puts on player decisions with just enough randomness to keep things largely unpredictable. The base game comes with a handful of optional cards that give your faction some powers and limitations but they are just as evocatively non-specific as the rest of the game. Leder also offers a campaign game to play which I’ve yet to explore but it apparently takes the base game and launches it even further into the cosmic aether.

If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes talking with me about board games, there’s a non-zero chance I’ve talked about Terraforming Mars from FryxGames. Released in 2016 with numerous expansions doled out like clockwork, my friend Jack got me hooked on this game and I’ve subsequently gone all in on it, purchasing almost every expansion and various Etsy game enhancements to feed more yearning desire to make Mars wetter, hotter, and greener.

The base game largely revolves around a map of hexes that represent various geologic features and potential resources on and off the red planet. Every round roughly represents a human generation as players acting as corporations compete for government funding to make Mars livable. Various trackers on the board mark just how progress has been made and when Mars can’t get any more hot, wet, and green, the game is over and everyone counts up their score.

The simplest way to terraform Mars is to throw money at the planet but this makes a slow and tedious process even moreso which is why the game gives you the opportunity to research and implement projects in the form of a massive stack of cards that boost your economy, add alternative scoring options, or throw sand in your rivals’ engines.

Most of the cards boost your player board which both acts as storage for the resources you’ll produce and collect as well as your production reminder so you can see just how much income, metals, biomass, energy, and heat you’ll produce at the end of every round.

Sidenote: this particular set of player boards was purchased from etsy and may be the most game enhancing purchase I made. Because you have to keep your various production levels very clear, the two layered slotted board keeps the cubes from sliding about when the table gets bumped or you sneeze.

Some cards will give you bonus actions, others will create triggering effects, and yet more will let you crash asteroids into your friends or unleash ants into their labs to eat their precious microbes. One particular bit of weirdness this game has is making you pay twice for most of your cards. At the start of the game and then every round you’ll draw a hand of cards and then pay for which ones you want to keep. Then on your turn you have the option to pay the printed card cost to put them into play. This creates tension between trying to prioritize your resources with wanting to fill your hands with exciting projects and sets Terraforming Mars apart from most games.

Another sidenote: the game has rules for drafting cards every round and passing them back and forth between players but I have never enjoyed playing that way and routinely skip that.

Along with dotting Mars with forests and oceans, you also can erect cities which grants some economic boosts but largely is a way to score points at the end of the game as well as claim real estate to block your rivals. Because forests can only be planted next to other tiles, cities let you seed the perchlorate-heavy soil for future growth and development. The board also has unlockable milestones and awards which players can race to unlock for a heavy dollop of points.

As generations pass, Mars will get busier and more filled up and so the game becomes partially a race to terraform faster and better and gobble up the limited planetary resources but because there are so many pathways to victory you can have games where Mars is a lush garden by the end or still a dusty smog-choked hellscape dotted with factories and mines. Some players may be fully invested in planting cities and trees and others may realize controlling the orbit and space lanes with asteroid colonies, space stations, and questionable security forces is worth more victory points at the end of the game. There are lots of fiddly cards and strategies but you can choose to interact with or ignore any of all of them and both are viable strategies.

This flexibility is part of what makes the expansions work as well as they do. The four shown here clockwise from the upper right are Venus Next, Turmoil, Prelude, and Colonies. Venus and Colonies introduce whole new worlds with a bunch of cards, new terraforming goals, and a trade mechanic but you can discard every V card you run across and never set foot on Venus or Pluto and be no worse off. Prelude gives your starting game an initial economic boost so it goes a little faster and gives you a starting direction to explore and of all of these is the one I recommend the most. Turmoil adds about an hour to the game as you do Politics and while I find it a charming mess, don’t recommend it unless you have a very idiosyncratic group. There are also new maps you can play on and my most ridiculous purchase – the 3d pieces. I love both but leave their necessity to your conscience and budget.

(The more recent expansions (Prelude 2 and Automa incorporate a lot more generative AI art and content and as such I opted not to get them.)

So why do I love Terraforming Mars so much? A lot of it has to do with the way the setting and theme click with the gameplay and mechanics. There is something so stirring about starting a game off with a blank, barren canvass and watching it come to life over the course of a few hours. The cards also create a fantastic and organic narrative and their juxtaposition can be hilarious, heartbreaking, or both. In one game, I set up refugee camps only to immediately deploy conscript labor to build a commercial center. In another game, a friend built a meat industry suspiciously soon after starting Mars’ only zoo. The expansions only supercharge this process, giving your imagination ample opportunity to picture colonists on Ganymede watching the skies for hungry trade convoys or Martian separatists storming the administrative domes.

This is a brick of a game with an intimidating teach and a lot of seeming complexity but as you play it starts to zoom along and I have found few games as rewarding and rich for inherent storytelling. But you don’t have to take my word for it. My 7 year old asked if we could play it instead of watch TV which is about the highest praise I can think of.