Reviews

I’ve always wanted to like traditional hex and counter wargames more than I actually do. The idea of recreating the strategic intricacies of historical battles is wonderful, but the execution too often involves hundreds of counters, irritating mental maths and quickly becomes dry and stolid. The aspect of Generalship they seem to reward is logistics rather than strategy. Enter Fading Glory. It’s a collection of four scenarios based on Victory Point Game’s Napoleonic 20 series which is simple to learn, has no more than 20 counters per side, and will play in an hour or two....

How much are you willing to pay for a boardgame? Logic dictates that prices will keep on climbing, which is to be expected. It’s just the world we live in, and publishers have to make money somehow. But since the advent of Kickstarter, I’m frankly a little shocked at how high some people are willing to go to get a game. The game that has put this in my mind is Cthulu Wars, which launched its own Kickstarter campaign just last week.

 Come on, it's five bucks.

When I started Drake's Flames, Rio Grande used to send me a lot of games. Then they stopped, mostly because I was rather disparaging of one of their games. Then, several years later, I asked them for a particular game and they sent me three other games instead. This was my chance to make good, to get back in with one of the biggest game companies in the world so I could get free games from them again!

More than any game I’ve written about recently, Terra Mystica is hard to review. I find myself torn between actual enjoyment and the reviewer’s tendency to point out little things that are not to my taste. I don’t really like games like this as a rule. There’s only so much brain-burning for its own sake that I can handle before the game isn’t worth the effort anymore. But in a small way Terra Mystica has taken up residence in my head. After each session, we’ve had a fascinating conversation on strategy and what could be done differently, how the...