Games of 2021; a retrospective (Patreon)

For myself 2021 held a lot of different board games alongside the few limited roleplaying games I'm willing to play in my private group. As I wrote in the last post - I'm going to take a little time now to write some mini-reviews/summaries on games I explored for the podcast and haven't yet managed to get around to writing or talking about them (and might not in some cases because I did not enjoy them).

I'll include an arbitrary rating out of 10 for each game based on how I feel at the time of writing. 

Chronicles of Crime Series 

Often I am not much into app based games; but when they are well implemented then they can be a delight. The Chronicles of Crime series managed this with its app based investigations; the particular mechanical highlight of the experience is where one of you gets to hold the phone up to your face and look around inside a 3D virtual crime scene. You talk about what's there; the other player(s) grab the various matching types of evidence and then you decide if you want to spend more time looking or get to scanning. The really neat part of this is if you scan stuff that isn't in the scene; you lose time for nothing - run out of time and the investigation will fail.

This neat time pressure; enjoyable stories, and wild range of settings (including Medieval, Paris in the 1900s, Modern Times and the Future) each with their own twists and spins makes for a great solo or two player experience. 

8/10 - Making crime look good

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective 

Another great game for couples (or solo). The cases in Sherlock Holmes CD are another set of wonderfully crafted experiences, but they overall leave a more sour taste in the mouth because of a combination of sometimes needing to know various elements of the world (at the Holmes period) which are not overtly described in the case and also the very unpleasant experience you have at the end where you get treated like Doctor Watson or Inspector Lestrade - There's a combination of 'you didn't do well enough' combined with ludicrous leaps of logic from Holmes that really do not hold up. 

However, if you can get past the way that the game does its best to make you feel stupid (which is thematically perfect, even if it's not pleasant to experience) the world the game is set in is rich, exciting and expansive. There's loads to explore in every single case and the way things lace back and forth through the newspaper articles is a delight. I still love this one even if its winning mechanics are not great. The journey through each case is always delightful and it reminds me of how great Call of Cthulhu investigations can be.

7/10 - Please stop humiliating everyone Mr Holmes.

(due to the bitter taste it leaves after each case, Chronicles and Detective: City of Angels both do a better job of making the end of the case feel good).

Curious Cargo 

This two player pipelaying puzzle-em-up is a huge brain burner; for people it clicks with it will be a delightfully endless battle of wits. However for us it was quite the flop, the game is absolutely exhausting and suffers from ableism  in its design. If you are someone who has trouble tracking the flow of coloured pipes across your board and even worse your opponents board then this can just feel like chaotic madness.

If you click with it; there is no denying how brilliant the game's puzzle is, it's just not for us. I might revisit it when the solo game comes out.

5/10 - More like Fatiguing Freight. 

Xia: Legends of a Drift System 

Xia absolutely needs its expansion Embers of a Forsaken Star to shine but even without it this is a delightful little sandbox spaceship exploration game filled with emergent storytelling. The biggest obstacle to enjoyment is the fact that you have to roll to move; which as I'm sure anyone can tell you - is not a great mechanic (Embers fixes this in a nice way) - but outside of that this is a delightful game where you can choose your own route to victory. You can be an explorer, a glorified taxi cab driver, a merchant, a pirate or even a bounty hunter (if the other players are especially naughty).

The game has that wonderful mix of exploration, discovery and chaos that makes it incredibly engaging. It also scales well to all group sizes and does everything that I wanted Merchant of Venus to do.

9/10 - Out of this world.

Dream Crush 

I got this one because of Mr Quinns' review of it because it sounded just like what I needed in these Pandemic times (I've been quarantined on Gotland with no-one other than family members and the in-laws to interact with for two years now). He was absolutely right, this game is daft, light hearted and just a fun jolt of meaningless comedy debate straight to the face. I cant tell you how many times someone has picked a date just to be subjected to extreme scrutiny and then furiously defend their reasoning.

It's not something I'd break out every gaming day, but it's absolutely a delight when everyone is on the same page.

6.5/10 - Elijah Wood is OP

Treasure Island 

Treasure Island got knocked out of the Podcast review rotation because of a few experiences that soured it. This is a good game for casual and younger players; but it doesn't hold up if people are really looking to hone their use of the mechanics, as there are some balance issues there. And it's a disaster if the Blackbeard player messes up providing information (or hits an edge case where they're not sure what to do).

Add onto that problems with the physical product such as pen/board visual issues, items breaking and the potential for accidental misinformation and you've got a hot mess. It's a fun version of one against many and many against each other, but be warned that some players may really leverage their special powers in an unfair fashion - Horses and Monkeys in particular.

6/10 - Bit of a Landlubber

Unmatched Series 

This sweet miniatures/card game is a revision of Star Wars: Epic Duels (which is the best Star Wars IP Game period). There is a mix of public domain and Intellectual Property characters fighting it out in head to head matches. It's almost like those trashy 'who would win' theoretical fights, except you get to do it with a bundle of smooth card mechanics and point-to-point movement. 

I would LOVE to own Star Wars: Epic Duels, but given how expensive that game is on the secondary market, Unmatched is a wonderful alternative (here's hoping someone Disney gets involved with a return to Epic Duels now we've seen how intimidating Vader really is during Rogue One). Plus now you too can pit Spike from Buffy against Big Foot.

About the only real shame is the difference in power levels between the various characters, some of them are obviously stronger than others.

7/10 - Still waiting for the release of Deadpool.

Food Chain Magnate 

This game gets it right on almost every single level; it's a sweet little engine builder where the players are entirely responsible for all the pressures that the world puts on them. It's a mean, mean game but remains fun and engaging as long as the player skill level is at the same level. I very much appreciate what Splotter Games try and do in every one of their products, but FCM does it with such confidence and aplomb. 

It's also hard to not love something which is so scathingly satirical about franchises, capitalism and the pursuit of money. I adore this one with 2 to 4 players (length gets a bit too much with more than that). It's also worth mentioning that the expansion is fantastic.

8/10 - Would you like fries with that order of undercutting the prices of your competitors?

Furnace 

I unashamedly adore Engine Builders; Race for the Galaxy, London, Glory to Rome, Fort, Innovation and so on. There's something greatly satisfying about putting together various little things that do small steps each with the end goal of getting lots of winning out of it. Furnace has all of that with this sweet little bidding system baked into it, one where sometimes you're just not trying to win the bid, but get the compensation instead.

It's a really tricksy little game that has a fast play time and multiple different options for how you want to tool it. I'd be rating it a lot higher except the game which follows it does all of that, but in a grander and more satisfying manner. This is the 'snack option' for an engine builder.

7/10 - Satisfying satire in my Capitalistic exploitation game? Yes please!

Sidereal Confluence

Everything that Furnace has, Sidereal has but bigger. This game is one about making deals in order to get the parts to run your engine. Everything in here is counter to the normal experience of playing trading games. You're rewarded for being generous; encouraged to be gregarious and then after all of that negotiation, gifting and barter you get to slide cubes around inside your engine and try to pop out useful things that let you win.

This game is an absolute treat, and the only things which stand out against it is the long playtime, complexity to get into and the requirement for at least six players to get a really good time. There's an expansion coming in 2022, so it's the perfect time to get back into this masterpiece before it returns to the hotness.

9/10 - Now you too can learn what Sidereal means!

Red Rising 

Oh boy, I picked this one up because of three things; it's based on the Red Rising series, it's mechanically inspired by Fantasy Realms and it's designed by Jamie Stegmaier. It should have been a hit. Instead it was such a frustrating experience that every time we tried to play it, it got abandoned. 

It seems to have a large fan base, and as I couldn't really find much positive to say about it, this one got stuck into a cupboard while I figure out what to do with it.

3/10 - Just get Fantasy Realms instead.

Inhuman Conditions 

What if Blade runner's Voight-Kampff test was a board game? 

This two player (sometimes more with variants) deduction game has the players taking the role of an investigator and a suspect. The suspect might be human, they might be a robot, or even worse, they might be violent robot. What unfolds is a neat little bit of cat and mouse between the two players as the investigator tries to successfully identify the suspect's nature, while the suspect attempts to either prove themselves as human or unlock their potential to murder the investigator. 

If you enjoy roleplaying, this one is a fantastic pick up (or print & play) and honestly it is as entertaining to watch as it is to participate in. I've had as much fun watching people play this as I have taking part in it myself. 

8.5/10 - 50 65 72 66 65 63 74 20 67 61 6D 65 20 66 6F 72 20 6D 75 72 64 65 72 69 6E 67 20 68 75 6D 61 6E 73

Mantis Falls 

I know for certainty that I'm going to be reviewing this one on the podcast in the near future, but I want to give you all a heads up on how amazing this two or three player social deduction/traitor game is. If you can find it.

Each of you plays the role of a witness to a terrible crime in the mob controlled town of Mantis Falls; thanks to some powerful contacts you are to meet up with other witnesses at a diner and then move together through the night in order to reach a place where you can be collected in safety. Except one of the people you're travelling with might not be a witness, they might be a hitman who killed the other witness and is now here seeking to get you killed.

The game has a super tough cooperative framework where a combination of publicly known and secret events have to be dealt with. Even if all players turn out to be witnesses it's possible that they may not make it, either through being unable to trust each other enough to cooperate fully or because one of them outright kills the other. When you're told by the other player that the event they drew means that you have to lose health (they can't lie, but they can be obscure) trust erodes quickly.

The game looks a little cheap/homemade in the card design front, and the box is a fair bit too small for the components. But the experience of playing it is like no other - and how many social deduction games are there which cover 2 or 3 players? Normally you need at least 5.

7.5/10 - You'll have to trust me on this jouney

Call of Cthulhu: The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep (RPG)

I love investigative games, I love conspiracies, evidence gathering and deduction. As such, this remastered version of Masks of Nyarlathotep - one where they removed a lot of the rather troublesome racial stereotyping and diversified the cast of NPCs - is a delight. It's not a small endeavor to play, at this point we were just about approaching the halfway point when we decided to take a small break for the new WFRP. But we're getting close to returning to this grand adventure (which inspired Eldritch Horror's creation) and excitement is beginning to peak again.

8.5/10 - Dense and rich, amazing just to read

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The Enemy Within 4th Edition (RPG)

The other competitor for 'the greatest RPG campaign ever written' 4th Edition's The Enemy Within is another remastered edition of an old classic. In this case the goal was to rewrite the fourth book (which sucks in the original edition); bring the fifth book in line with the official cannon and add a lot of extra stuff to tie everything together a bit more cleanly. The Third book (fourth adventure) Power Behind the Throne remains the highest point any pre-written roleplaying campaign has ever reached for me - thanks to its deep, rich characters and intensely enjoyable plotting.

I'm still not super happy with the intense racial friction the game has between the NPC Dwarves and any PC Elves; it's cartoonish and mean without having any real payoff, but you move on from it (and not all Dwarves are like that) plus a certain elderly Lord playing the piano remains one of my favourite NPC characters in any campaign I've ever played in. We'll be finishing Death on the Reik before we return to Masks (above), so I'll have to say goodbye to the world for a little while, but I'm excited knowing that when we come back things are going to become epic.

There are a LOT of flaws with 4th Edition's mechanics (ones that didn't exist in 2nd Edition which this is based on), but the world, plotting and combination of tight investigation plus heroic combat is hard to find anywhere else. This game really does manage to be D&D crossbred with Call of Cthulhu.

9/10 - I have a lot of nostalgia for this one as it was my first RPG, so I'm biased

Heart: The City Beneath (RPG)

New to me in 2021, Heart rapidly became a firm favourite, which is no mean feat because I have very little room for roleplaying games in my life (and also I did not like Spire: A City Must Fall). Set in a bizarre world underneath the aforementioned Spire. Heart is a weird, twisted, body-horror, semi-psychological dungeon crawl in an humid and viscous environment. 

I adored this one so much that I ended up building a custom TTS table for my group to play at. It's very much something that the Games Master ends up having to put a lot of work in for, and the players need to be super into the roleplaying side of things, but it's unique and intriguing in a way that most newer RPGs are not. Only The Void gripped me for short sessions in a similar way.

7.5/10 - It's wet, sanguine sublimity

See you all again on New Years Eve!