Earthborne Rangers

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Leeman

Folks who have been following this blog know I’m a sucker for a strong theme that grips the imagination and tells a story. Given that, one would be forgiven for assuming I hanker for big campaign or legacy games but fortunately for my wallet that isn’t the case. With the exception of a semi-burgled copy of Pandemic Legacy a friend left at my house and King’s Dilemma I’ve largely stayed away from Legacy games. When I learned about Earthborne Rangers and the way it carried players through a story while also being a game of exploration and ecological management I jumped at the chance.

The game uses cards, tokens, and a campaign book with different read-aloud entries to tell the story of rangers in a far future where humans have opted to live in greater harmony with the environment largely by leaving it alone for centuries before returning to the surface to explore and see how nature has healed. It’s comparable to a cozier Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Players take on the roles of 1 to 4 rangers with skills, gears, and personality aspects that they draw on and play to overcome challenges, connect with the people, beings, and places they come across, and travel around this lush and living world.

Like the best dresses, this game comes with pockets! The creators not only wanted to explore ecological and sustainability themes in their game but produced it to be as environmentally friendly as possible. This leads to an incredible economy of component that feels slick and flexible and robust without needing armies of plastic. With a map, a book, some cards, and an assortment of tokens, players have all the tools they need for adventure and exploration. The storage system neatly allows for quick and easy set up and take down and the game state can be saved to allow for resuming the campaign easily without needing a ton of administration.

At the start of the campaign, players construct a personal Ranger deck either on their own or using a structured Prologue the campaign book provides that walks them through all the different types of cards that go into their deck (as a secret third way, you can also use the premade decks so you can jump right in to the action.) Decks are made up of personality cards, backgrounds that represent your early training, specialities that determines your Role and act like RPG classes, and then an outside interest that can be drawn from any of the starting cards to allow some flexibility and customizing. Along with these decks rangers also choose an Aspect card with 1 to 3 points allocated to four main stats that will get used to determine what all they can do – Awareness, Spirit, Fitness, and Focus.

The campaign is played out in Days which corresponds roughly with an individual game session. At the start of the Day, players draw their hand from their Ranger deck and put energy tokens on their Aspect card. Based on where they last ended their campaign they set out a Location card and create a Path deck based on the environment they’ve been traveling through (woods, grasslands, swamp, mountains, etc) adding in cards based on their location or Valley cards which add random challenges and opportunities. The Path deck will have obstacles, plants, animals, and other humans who will help or hinder the rangers as they travel from location to location. Based on the day, there will be a weather card that will also impact the Rangers as they travel. Finally players will shuffle and set up the Challenge deck that both adds some chance to Tests as well as triggering Challenge Effects on cards already in play.

The Day is broken up into rounds where players will draw new Path cards and play them either directly in front of them (Within Reach) or between them and the current Location card (Along the Way) which represents the range of the particular card and who it can impact. Players can interact freely with cards within reach but if they try to interact with cards further away they run the risk of getting Fatigue. On their turn, players can spend energy tokens from their Aspect card to either play cards from their hands or to attempt Tests on the cards already in play.

Tests are carried out by spending the relevant token and discarding cards with symbols that match the Test and then drawing a Challenge card to see if the total is equal to or higher than the Test’s difficulty. Tests usually result in placing Progress or Harm tokens on different cards in order to Clear them out of the way which makes it easier to interact with other cards, reduces potentially harmful Challenge Effects, and can trigger mission or campaign entries. Players can choose to attempt any Test listed on cards in play or from the four basic tests that are available no matter what. These basic tests allow players to add Progress tokens to the current location in order to travel, adding Progress tokens to animals or humans, avoiding animals or humans by Exhausting (tapping) them, or drawing additional cards from their Ranger deck.

As the players run around they will frequently take Fatigue which pulls cards from their Ranger deck and sets it aside. Other cards and tests can Soothe Fatigue which places those set aside cards back in their hand. Players might also get Injured which increases the rate of Fatigue they take. If they take on too much Fatigue or Injuries and discard their deck down to the point that they can’t draw new cards, that can trigger the end of the Day so managing your health and Fatigue is important to be able to accomplish all you want in any game session. There is no death although taking too many Injuries can lead to players having to add Malady cards into their Ranger deck which junks it up going forward.

The round ends when all players have chosen to rest at which point they can choose to Travel if they have placed enough Progress tokens on their current location. This resets the play area and creates a new Path deck for players to explore. Regardless of if they travel or not, players then draw a card from their Ranger, put energy tokens back on their Aspect cards, Ready (untap) any Exhausted cards and then every player draws a new Path card and the next round begins.

This repeated round structure of spending energy, playing cards, making tests, managing Fatigue, and drawing new cards makes up the real core of the game and players have a lot of choices about how they want to interface with this world and it’s those choices that really bring this game to life. While the game can be played solo it really sings as a cooperative game as players can focus on areas where they’re more skilled and help one another where they aren’t as proficient. If one player is surrounded by snarling predators, their teammates can race to their rescue or leave them to work it out on their own.

A huge choice players have to make is when to move on to their next location as things may be getting dangerous and crowded but there might be fun people to interact with or missions that need to be worked on. Fulfilling these missions is a way to get Rewards which can be swapped into the Ranger deck to provide new options and show progress.

And sometimes you just want to play with your ferret.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with Earthborne Rangers both as a solo game and with friends although I much prefer the latter. The game has all the fun of a choose one’s own adventure game, a roleplaying game, and a clever card game. The way the game triggers different effects and the various cards interact makes it feel alive. When you have a play space full of predators and prey and plant life all feeding or moving each other makes this feel like an ecosystem that responds to your actions as well as living and breathing on its own. There isn’t as much of an emphasis on fighting and taming nature but the possibility for that is there which makes the choice to try to live in peace feel like a genuine and weighted decision.

I’m already eyeing the various expansions but given what all this game starts off with, I will hopefully be able to hold off for some time but I could spend a lot of time in this cozy future. The folks who make it also have great online resources like music, printable character sheets, and standalone adventures if you want a break from the full campaign or want to gently introduce friends to it. Superb game. Highly recommended.

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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Leeman

I love Susanna Clarke’s collection of whimsical footnotes with attached novel and for a longer conversation on the subject I’ll direct you to episode 71 of this very podcast. But today I want to talk about Osprey Games’ 2019 adaptation of what may very well be my favorite book.

Players take on the role of magicians vying to be the greatest spell-slinger of the age through the traditional method of accruing thaumaturgic power – attending parties and acquainting themselves with notable persons. The game plays out over 12 rounds that take on peculiar characteristics by drawing from a deck of Marseilles cards. On a player’s turn, they will accrue books, bolster their magic, travel across London or Europe, attend soirees and/or meet notables, and then if able, carry out Feats of Magic. To win, players must both have a greater Magicianship than their rivals and the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair.

The first decision players must make every turn is which of their six actions they want to use or if they want to refresh those actions. Picking an action makes it unavailable on a future turn until they have been refreshed. These actions include acquiring books, teleporting around the map, or giving the magician more options for doing magic. This last one is incredibly important and requires planning.

The most potent way to increase Magicianship and thus win is to complete Feats of Magic. Each of those feats has a slot for a specific kind of magic (hills, rains, stones, birds, wind, and trees.) To place magic tokens on those slots, players discard Invitation and Introduction cards that have those matching symbols (foregoing social obligations to prioritize their magic.) However, they can only place tokens that match the ones present on this round’s Marseilles card unless they chose to use their action to study the specific magic. Books can also grant some flexibility and allow players to transmute one kind of token for another or increase the tokens they can place. If all the elements line up and a Feat can be accomplished then it adds to their Magicianship and grants them a spell which can do any number of fun things.

As well as improving their magical prowess, players can also increase their Prestige by hobnobbing with figures of note either from history or from the pages of Ms. Clarke’s novel. While Invitations can be spent to either claim Feats of Magic or Introduction cards, Introduction cards are spent to gain Prestige. Prestige determines turn order, breaks ties, and also unlocks bonuses on the player board like faster movement, extra Magicianship, drawing cards, and the like. As mentioned before both cards can also be discarded to eschew society and do magic.

I was surprised when I saw that Osprey was making this game. I associate them more with war games and painstakingly detailed military history books. Nevertheless I was excited to see how they tackled the book and found the end result very frustrating. There are a lot of things I love – the look and design, the way players navigate society and study. Ultimately however the whole thing falls flat for me.

A big problem is the threat of the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. In theory I like the idea of there being a collective threat everyone has to deal with and forcing them to set aside their own issues to take on but that’s not what happens here. Players don’t work together but just try to scramble on their own to build up their score and hope against hope that it’s high enough to both beat out their colleagues and this abstract figure. I would have found it more interesting if players had to choose between their own ambition and the good of the table like Archipelago or Kill Doctor Lucky. It would have also been interesting if the GTH more directly messed with the game like throwing out obstacles or complications instead of just looming abstractly. At the end of the game, if he’s won, players just compare their own scores and take that as the moral victory even as they know they didn’t really win.

The other problem is the number of roadblocks and choke points this game throws up. To fulfill Feats you have to hope the Marseilles card *and* your hand of cards *and* your action wheel options all line up and when they don’t you’re just stuck feeling like you’ve wasted one of a frustratingly few turns. The choices feel less like getting to choose from a bunch of fun things and just picking something in hopes you don’t slam into the various barriers.

Finally, for a game about dueling magicians there is precious little interaction beyond a bit of racing for available Feats and Books. There could have been an interesting tension if players could cooperate or directly mess with each other, particularly in trying to deal with the GTH but aside from a few spells that can poke your rivals here and there, there’s nothing. Not even being on the same space allows for trading or stealing secrets. You’re essentially just doing parallel play which is ok but feels like a lost opportunity.

I’m going to keep poking at this game and hope I find something more fulfilling than I so far have but until then, I’m more likely to reach for the book than the game when I want to experience this world.

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Fallout Shelter

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Leeman

I’ve been giving a kiss to build a dream on since the 90s when I huddled around my friend Cal’s PC to check out this game he was raving about where you fought giant rats and delved into isometric vaults and in the intervening years I have played every iteration of Brian Fargo’s brain child, including the lamentable Brotherhood of Steel PS2 game. I even logged many hours in the iOS base builder that inspired today’s board game review. Fallout Shelter on the iPad is an ok time waster particularly when you’re in COVID isolation but it’s cardboard and plastic version is a genuine delight and one I come back to again and again.

The conceit of the game is that players are competing to improve their shelter, overcome threats, and raise morale to be chosen as Overseer at the end of the game. To accomplish this, players take turns placing workers on the limited spaces in their vault, collecting resources, trading them in for gear, new workers, and new rooms to provide more options for workers to exploit.

As with many resources management games, the real balance in Fallout Shelter comes from pursuing a better engine for collecting and using resources vs going for Happiness which is this games victory points resource. Luckily there are a lot of parallel choices that help both goals so it’s not as stark as a game like Dominion where victory points literally clog up your hands. Still, given the cramped quarters, limited options, and constant blocking by your so called fellow vault dwellers, the game starts with and maintains a decent tension scrambling for the scarce resources.

Resource tracking is managed very cleverly with a player board that has slots for Food, Water, and Power and players slide cubes into those slots to clearly see what they have in abundance or scarcity. Water is mostly used to venture outside the vault and procure gear which can help fight enemies, convert resources from one to another, or provide points at the end of the game. Food is necessary to attract more dwellers and gain more workers and thus more actions every round. Power’s main use is building new rooms which gives you more things to do, earns points, and once a player’s floor is completely filled in, triggers the end of the game.

Threats are these special see through cards that show up at the start of every round and block one of the spaces workers can be assigned to. Most of them are defeated by rolling dice but a few like fires and black outs, require spending resources to handle. Clearing out these threats often earns points or but also risks injuring workers and bringing them back to health is a tedious process that keeps you from being able to do anything else so often there’s negotiations about who’s dealing with the radscorpions in the cafeteria.

For a game based on an iPad game based on a classic videogame franchise, Fallout Shelter punches well above its weight and is a fun and quick game that ends before it gets too repetitive. It’s easy for one player to pull ahead and there can be some frustration in trying to catch up but because it’s relatively short, it doesn’t feel too demoralizing and there’s always the possibility a deathclaw will show up and ruin the frontrunner’s day. All in all it’s a pretty fun game and the metal lunch box it comes in makes it feel all the more…. SPECIAL.

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Dune Imperium

Posted on January 29, 2025 by Leeman

I just finished Max Evry’s A Masterpiece in Disarray, an oral history about David Lynch’s Dune movie and everything that went well and wrong. As such it felt fitting to talk about Paul Dennen’s 2020 game Dune Imperium. While it was released in coordination with the newer Villeneuve movie, the game is likewise an ambitious chimera in keeping with the 1984 film.

Dune Imperium is a competitive game where players take on the roles of characters from the novels and movies sending out agents to curry favor with factions, petition the Landsraad, harvest and sell spice, and mobilize armies on the desert planet with a goal of earning the most points at the end of the game. This is carried out through worker placement where players take turns moving their agents to various spots on the board, activating them and denying access to other players. A twist of the game is that agents can only be sent to spaces unlocked by playing cards that are gained through a deck building mechanic.

Much of the game involves gathering resources and spending them to further your agenda. The three most visible resources are water, spice, and money which typically are gathered and spent to gain each other in turn. Water is needed to go into the desert to harvest spice, spice is needed to sell for money, money can be spent in a number of ways but mostly to manipulate the Landsraad and earn more troops, more agents, and so on. There are two other resources that are more abstract – Influence and Military Strength and they come into play at the end of the round.

There are three kinds of cards that get used in this game – Imperium cards, Intrigue cards and Conflict cards. The Imperium cards are the main cards used for moving agents across the board. Intrigue cards grant surprise bonuses throughout the game to points, resources, combat, etc. Conflict cards are flipped over at the top of the round and determine what the spoils of war will be this round.

Imperium cards are made up of a combination of locations they unlock, bonuses when played, and separate bonuses if saved and cashed in at the end of a round. This leads to constant calculations where players have to decide to use a card during their turn for an immediate use or save it for the end of the round for strategic purposes. One of the main end of round bonuses is gathering Influence which then gets spent to purchase new cards from the cards market. These cards are generally more powerful than the starting default cards and also allow players to hone their strategy by focusing on collecting Fremen cards, cards that improve harvesting spice, military cards, etc.

Much like with 7 Wonders, combat strength builds up over the round but doesn’t come into use until the end of the round. Players have troops either in reserve, in garrisons, or in the battlefield. On top of that, cards (both Intrigue and Imperial) can add combat strength. The stakes of the combat are determined at the top of the round, however, as the Conflict card is flipped and the rewards for coming in first, second, or third (only applicable in a 4 player game) are revealed. These rewards can be resources, points, intrigue cards, and later on, control of various locations on Arrakis. Juggling troops and cards and trying to determine when to go all in is a huge part of the game. Only certain locations allow you to add troops to the battlefield which depends on having the right cards to send agents to activate.

Finally there are the four factions and managing them and competing for their allegiance is a major path to victory. The Fremen provide water and troops. The Bene Gesserit give you Intrigue cards and help you weed out unhelpful cards from your deck. The Spacing Guild helps your agents go anywhere on the board and will trade troops for spice. And the Emperor gives you money and also will trade troops and Intrigue for spice. The more you visit these faction locations the higher their opinion of you grows and at certain levels you gain an Alliance which is a source of points and unlocks other powers.

This game mixes and matches familiar game concepts from across the hobby to create an Ixian ghola of a game that largely works but is a hard sell for casual gamer groups. Because of all the rules and the way they overlap and feed each other it can be very challenging trying to teach any individual part because everything is interconnected. Once you do grasp how everything works the actual game is… Fine? It flows pretty decently until you hit the many road blocks and choke points this game has set up. Want more troops? Better get money. Want money? Better get spice. Want spice? Well you better have water. Want water? Better have a card that lets you visit the Fremen. Don’t have any of that or find that other players have clogged up the locations you need? Then I guess you can’t do the things you want so better hope you draw better cards next round.

This tightness creates tension and cutthroat play which is in keeping with the source material and there are enough hidden cards and secret information so you’re always on your toes. As you race to gobble up resources, your attention is divided and choices have to be made about how best to pursue points and the game is at its best when you are torn between compelling actions and at its worst when you can’t really do anything because the cards and timing don’t add up.

There have been multiple expansions and even an updated edition that apparently address some of these concerns but I don’t feel compelled to spend more on this game although I was sore tempted when I found out the updated edition has a Christopher Walken card. Still, the game is fine but not one I feel folks absolutely need to rush out to get. I’m glad to have it sit next to my 1979 Avalon Hill Dune game on the shelf.

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Cascadia

Posted on January 22, 2025 by Leeman

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.

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Oath

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Leeman

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.

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ARCS

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Leeman

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.

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Terraforming Mars

Posted on January 12, 2025 by Leeman

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.

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Lower Decks Buffer Time

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Leeman

A slightly smaller game than my previous Star Trek simulator, Buffer Time is a cooperative push your luck game of trying to have fun shenanigans while doing the work the bridge crew has assigned you. You earn Leisure (victory) points by playing Side Project cards to finish along with your Assigned Duties. Both cards require time so the more you collectively mess around, the longer it takes to get everything done. The way you get all this done is by drawing from a Shift deck mostly full of numbered cards that subtract from your time requirement. Finish your tasks and score your cards before moving on to the next.

In the same Shift deck lurk the bridge crew, however, and if you draw too many of them, they reprimand you for slacking and you fail the assignment and lose some precious Leisure points. If you run out of assignments before you hit a set number of points you lose but if you successfully dodge your superiors and bank enough points, you win!

Finally to give you some tools to aid in your chicanery are Ability cards that let you maximize your goofing around and help you buy some time or get away from meddling officers. Every turn you choose between chipping away at the tasks at hand, adding more to your plate, or seeing if you can pull a fast one and rig the game in your favor.

Like a lot of cooperative games it is prone to headstrong players trying to dominate the strategy and telling everyone what to do to maximize efficiency so I recommend calling that person a Boimler and focus on having fun. The game is fast and silly and the Lower Decks art and quotes are a delight. Getting caught by officers definitely makes you feel like a naughty ensign and there are few problems the game throws at you that can’t be solved by throwing Romulan Whiskey right back. Fun and sweet but you don’t have to just take my word for it. My 7 year old insisted we play it instead of reading stories at bedtime so take that for what it’s worth.

PS: I went to college with Mike McMahan who created Lower Decks and it’s been a blast watching the show blow up. Garashir forever!

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Star Trek Ascendancy

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Leeman

I took this morning to do a test drive of Gale Force Nine’s 2016 4X space opera generator Star Trek Ascendancy and I have some initial thoughts. This playthrough made use of my Cardassian expansion which I set against the Klingons and Romulans. I’ll try again with the Federation on my next away mission but I got a decent feel with these three.

The core mechanic of the game is building and sending out ships to discover planets and either colonize them, charm them, or blast them into submission in order to harvest the three core resources of Production (abstracted money, material, labor) Research, and Culture. Production is used to churn out ships as well as develop planets so they can produce more resources. Research helps you improve your ships or unlock cards with hopefully useful powers. Culture is spent colonizing or diplomatically adding planets your collection as well as buying the Ascendance tokens that are one of the two main paths to victory as well as essentially leveling up your faction.

At the start of the game there are only the starting planets of each player with a lot of blank space between them. As ships are sent out blindly to explore they’ll build the space lanes and map out the quadrant by plonking down the paths and planets, occasionally connecting them up with other newly discovered worlds until by the end of the game you wind up with the galactic molecule pictured above. Every time you head out into the black you have no idea whether you’re going to find a pristine world, deadly nebulae, valuable artifacts, well armed inhabitants, Crystalline Entities or some charming combination. You also don’t know just how far away anything will be as the dice determine the length of the lanes and whether they might intersect with previously placed planets. There’s room for creative cartography and just how these lines and circles are placed can have huge strategic and logistical implications for the rest of the game.

Before First Contact with other players there will be plenty of dangers facing early star pioneers as various stellar phenomena and deadly planets take pot shots at poorly shielded vessels that dare blunder into them. The rewards for doing so are often quite generous although you can find yourself in my frequent position as well where your plucky craft dodges one initial crisis only to smash immediately into the next. As in life the real dangers are your friends and once you create a pathway that connects your home worlds you are now vulnerable to the other path to victory: galactic conquest. Players can also win by controlling three home worlds including their own and you can’t win at all if your people’s historic lands are occupied by alien invaders so it pays to keep your home well guarded.

In the game I played the Klingons took an early lead by running around gobbling up defenseless planets while the Romulans kept running into cosmic hurdles and occasional Qs and the Cardassians prowled for easy conquests to little avail. Over the rounds, luck changed and an initial trade agreement between Klingons and Cardassians that filled their coffers led to unexpected land swaps and inevitable betrayals while the Romulans quietly used the stellar phenomena in their region to fuel a scientific Renaissance. At the very end the Cardassians’ almost secured victory was snatched away by a coordinated offensive first by the Klingons smashing most of the defenses out of Cardassia Prime followed by the arrogant arrival of Romulan fleets that annihilated the once proud planet to rubble.

This game feels like a helpful second option after your friends turn down your excitable suggestion to play Twilight Imperium. It hits a lot of the same beats but faster and in a familiar setting that can make for an easier sell. It’s still quite the time sink and there are a number of fiddly rules that are not always clear and instinctive. Movement is particularly funky as the game allows you to both move around slowly via impulse engines or warp around the board with stunning speed. Combat can be clunky as you compare the effect of upgraded weapons and shields and try to juggle your various tech upgrades to see if they are applicable. The various environmental dangers give the exploration angle edge but also blow up your small selection of ships with frustrating regularity that it makes one question the survivability of the Enterprise and turns what should be a regular fun bout of discovery into a constant game of Russian roulette or its Gorn equivalent.

The real moments when this game shines is when its theme manages to break through. Playing as the Romulans involves scheming and lurking, Klingons spoil for a fight just because, and Cardassians reward your every worst instinct to subjugate and tyrannize. Every faction has a printed advantage and disadvantage and in some ways the disadvantages are more fun as they give you a real sense of character and purpose as you make your way across the galaxy.

All in all I’d like to get it back on my table and in front of friends but imagine that if they have the willingness for Twilight Imperium I’d rather get that out and if they ask for streamlined space opera business I’ll more likely recommend ARCS. Still, for the folks who want their blood wine not too hot and not too cold, I am glad I have something to offer.

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