The Board Games thread

So what is everyone playing at the moment?

We cracked open a copy of Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island this weekend, a weighty co-op survival game that features a number of different scenarios to pit yourself against. It's not the most accessible of games: the rulebook is daunting and setup takes an absolute age, with multiple decks of cards and hundreds of tokens and markers and wooden counters to arrange. (Not helped by terrible box design, that gives you no way of separating this stuff - I'm going to have to make some sort of insert I think). And our first game was very stop-start as we delved back into the rulebook with almost every action we took.

But it's good, I think. There are a lot of choices to make at every stage and all those cards contribute to a strong sense of storytelling: there are hundreds of different things that can happen, most of them bad, and the writing and detail throughout is good. It's hard though. Even playing through the easiest scenario - a castaways situation where we didn't have much to do apart from build a big fire and Not Die - we turned out to be absolutely hopeless. The cook stabbed himself in the leg and got gangrene, unexpected storms destroyed our food supplies and when the weather turned we realised that we probably should have built a roof on our shelter. We lasted half the time we should have with only a miserable pile of twigs on the beach to show for our efforts. Next time we'll prevail, I'm sure.

We're five months into Pandemic Legacy, which is going swimmingly, by which I mean it's an unmitigated disaster and Oh God why do Things Keep Happening.

It's great, but impossible to discuss in any detail because half the fun is a thing happening and realising it's the trigger for the next horrible rules evolution to kick in. To even explain the current board state would be to give away a whole bunch of stuff that would be better to learn on your own.

One thing that's surprised me is how much more… balanced it feels than vanilla Pandemic. Victories have been by the skin of our teeth and losses have had clear causes. I don't know if this is projection, but there's only been one defeat so far that felt unexpected, and even then there were clear steps we could have taken (but didn't) which were obvious in hindsight.

I do wonder if it would be easier with a fourth player, though - it always feels like we're stuck choosing three of the four characters we really need for the given situation. Though I suppose if we had four players we'd just have a fifth essential character to leave in the box.

We're in November for Pandemic Legacy, so very much in the final straight, and it's been a consistently great experience throughout. There have been a couple of minor wobbles (one instance where the rules were a bit unclear, and another point where there was obviously something we should have prioritised but hadn't, so after a couple of months the game kind of shrugged and gave it to us anyway, which kind of broke its own narrative a little) but in general every month has been a nailbiting fight to the finish. I'm consistently struck by just how clever the whole thing is.

I think overall it might actually be easier with two - at the very least you'd have a greater concentration of city cards, whereas with three they always seem to be divided equally between all of us.

the kids and I have been playing a fair bit of Rhino Hero Super Battle; it’s pretty much the same as the basic Rhino Hero only with a sprawling network of interconnected teetering towers rather than just the one, which makes it a bit more forgiving for little ones… oh and the Rhino thing makes a bit more sense in that now each player has their own character who has to climb as high as they can, which means you can be quite evil when building new floors by putting walls around the other heroes

We finished Robnison the other week and are about to move on to First Martians (a slightly worse version, in space). The rules are scandalous for both and the game flow is embarrassing and clunky, but if you let yourself get drenched in the theme it's entertaining. Hopefully he's learned his lesson for his next game (let someone who can write manuals, write your manuals) - but before playing either I'd recommend the "Watch It Played" video, as well as some of the alternative flowcharts on BGG which break down the turn structure. If you have the manual from the first version of Robinson, burn it. If you really get into it, Portal Games has some decent promos and stuff on the website, including extra scenarios which are worth getting.

This week we've been doing Millenium Blades (a CCG simulator in boardgame form - I REALLY like it, but it's had a hit/miss reception in the groups), City of Kings (which I term a 7/10 game in a 10/10 box - a mix of Gloom of Kilforth and a euro. Nice production, but has a very mechanical feel. Too Many Bones is better) and Fog of Love (always amusing). Also a bit of Troyes (great) and Marco Polo (I'd recommend this as the current mid-tier Concordia beater). Oh, and we cracked out Le Harve again, which remains deserving of the title as a classic.

But, the biggest and best game recently has been the EXCEPTIONAL Lisboa, a Lacerda game (of Gallerist/Kanban/Vinhos/CO2 fame). It looks exquisite, and is very, very heavyweight. An interlaced marvel of interlocking systems and balancing which is an absolute delight to try to work out. I was such a fan I instantly went out and picked up The Gallerist too. This dude might overtake Feld as my favourite designer. But I really can't stress enough how absolutely wonderful it looks. Or how wonderfully it plays. Though it is very much a game that only 0.5% of the population will ever want to experience, as it can make your nose bleed with the complexity of the strategic and tactical thought it asks of you.

Finally finished a game of Star Wars Rebellion! Only took 2 evenings of playing…

I won as the rebels, thanks in part to an eleventh-hour Imperial blunder with the Death Star; she moved it into one of my systems with a single-TIE escort and I managed to blow it up. Fourth time's the charm…

I wasn't without casualties of my own, though; Sarah managed to tempt Han Solo to the dark side before I could rescue him.

There's something almost scary, sitting down at the Rebel side of the board for the first time and seeing the might of the Empire arrayed in front of you, against the handful of ships and soldiers the Alliance is able to muster. I felt like I was on the ropes for about 90% of the game, until I suddenly realized just how close I was to winning (Sarah found my first base about halfway through and I had to relocate to Hoth, but she had control over most of the galaxy by that point.) Combat took a while to get the hang of, there are a lot of steps, dice, and cards involved. We got there in the end, though.

Looking forward to having a go from the other side, at some point, and using the full rules (the "first game" version cuts out a couple of mechanics).

There's a big enhancement to combat in the expansion and some really good combat helpers you can download from BGG.

We've been playing the Marvel Legendary deck-building game this week and it's been a real hit. It's pretty simple at heart but has loads of variety due to all the cards it comes with: it comes with 15 heroes (of which you use 5 in a game), 4 evil masterminds (of which you use 1), 8 evil schemes (again you use 1) and 7 villain groups (the number you use depends on the players) so you've immediately got several games you can play right out of the box with completely unique setups even before you start mixing and matching them into different combinations. The characters in the base set are a broad mixture of Avengers and X-Men (plus the inevitable Spidey) but there are, of course, plenty of expansions.

In play it's a nice mix of co-op and competitive: players must work together to defeat the evil mastermind but in truth it's not that hard and the real challenge is coming out the other end with the most victory points, which you get by defeating villains and rescuing bystanders.

In all honesty it's been nice to play something where the rules are straightforward and you're not diving into the rulebook every five minutes. The cards are clear, there's plenty of strategy in terms of building up your hand and we're all keen to play again as soon as we can. Maybe not for everyone here but as a family/casual game it's going to be a regular fixture in this household.

Is that the Legendary one?

I picked up the Firefly and Aliens ones as part of a trade the other week. The Firefly one's art must truly be a contender for the worst art in any modern boardgame.

I've only ever played the Alien one, but that was ages ago. I seem to remember it being OK.

We cracked out an old classic the other night and had a 6 player game of Power Grid. I'm not sure if it's just that gaming has moved on a bit and people are expected to have a bit more mental agility these days, but Power Grid's reputation as being maths heavy is probably ill-deserved.

It's a little dry, and the end game can come in a massive rush after 2 hours of slow build up, but there's a lot to love. The bidding, moving turn order and area control aspects are all solid and the fluctuating resource market is still genius. It's hard to get too excited about building power plants, but as themes go it makes a vague sort of sense.

There aren't that many games that can play 6 well in a fairly engaging fashion either, so fair dos.

Been playing Hero Realms and Star Wars Destiny again in the last week. Now that the little one is sleeping better and going to bed without someone needing to sit with her we have made a commitment to try and play again. Really like the realms games as started to fly through them. Destiny was harder as I 've annoyingly still collected a bit of stuff during our hiatus so had tons of new gear and characters to sort.

I wandered idly into Forbidden Planet at lunch and walked out with their lone copy of Gloomhaven.

Jesus Christ, it's enormous. And heavy.

I've managed to flick through a bit of the rulebook, and though it looks like there's a lot to it, I'm amazed at how well it appears to be designed. No idea when we'll get a crack at it, but I'm really looking forward to it, and I'll definitely update once we do.

Jesus Christ, it's enormous. And heavy.

And expensive…

A quick peruse of the stuff in the box reveals… a whole lot of stuff. About the bottom half is taken up by the character boxes and card decks; another third is just punch-out cardboard dungeon tiles, monsters, tokens, etc; it'll take me an hour just to get the pieces out. There's a four-fold board/world map, party notepad, world state notebook… the rulebook is 52 pages, and then there are 70-something scenarios.

It all seems to be incredibly high-quality, too. I'm a little in awe.

it'll take me an hour just to get the pieces out.

I was wrong about this.

It was closer to 2 hours.

One scenario down, 94 to go.

It's much more brutal than expected; we kind of fudged things just to keep it going, but if you're one of the squishier classes, opening doors is a really bad idea.

Did a 3-player game; I played as Cragheart, Sarah was Spellslinger, and her sister played Mindthief. It took us most of the scenario to get the hang of things, but we started to settle into a more tactical mindset eventually.

We even managed to come away with some loot!

…then promptly lost it all in a rigged dice game as part of a City event.

I didn't understand any of that, but it sounds like you had fun at least!

Would you say it's worth the entry price, or still too early to tell?

Gloomhaven has a great core mechanic, and a lot of positive points. But it's for people who are only going to play Gloomhaven. The content is stretched thin and it hasn't been properly playtested (because it can't be). There's an awful lot of fluff and mechanical maintenance to play it as well - set up and tear down in particular is a killer. It's a real quantity over quality thing. Like a lot of games we found in the end we weren't willing to stop playing a wide variety of great games to dedicate hundreds of hours to a single pretty good one. But some people swear by it. I'd say if you can get a playgroup who want to hammer it and it's one of the only games you have it's a great buy.

I think for marque games in that price bracket nothing touches Too Many Bones though. A beautifully put together game that is essentially a crawler, but strips all the chaff out.

Setting up and putting away was fairly arduous, but I wouldn't say it was significantly more so (for this first dungeon) than, say, Star Wars Rebellion. The biggest issue is that there's no organisation system in the box other than for the character kits; I've tried to roughly bag up bits by type, but there are a lot of bits.

Even with an organisation system setting it up is a pain. It's nothing that most crawlers don't suffer from, which is why TMB is so good. Because it strips away the tedious bit of crawlers, which is generating a map from little bits and moving around it and pretending to open doors.

We did like Gloomhaven, but it's bloated and could've been something excellent if it had half the content and a tighter focus. I guess it is what it is though.

Another crack at Robinson Crusoe and I've really turned against it. The problem is that although you have loads of choices to make each turn, none of them ever really allow you to formulate a strategy because virtually the entire game is random and it's almost all stacked against you. Draw a card at the start of the turn, something bad happens. Go exploring, something bad happens. Try and build something, something bad happens. If you play extremely cautiously and assign two players to every task, you can mitigate some of this, but then you go too slowly to actually complete the objectives and you'll lose in the end anyway.

It's just no fun: a miserable slog where everything feels permanently stacked against you and survival is just down to sheer blind luck. That may be true to the theme but it doesn't make for a fun experience. That, combined with the colossal setup time and needless complexity means that I don't think we'll be returning to this one any time soon, or ever.

You better not play First Martians then…

Have backed ROBA Radiant which is meant to be a card version of a Moba, been trying to get back into board gaming as we've had a lull and mainly been playing Hero Realms so this looks like a step up from that in some ways.

This is interesting: https://www.geeknative.com/62615/solo-four-players-fantasy-flights-new-discover-lands-unknown-board-game/

It's a new game FFG just announced called Discover Lands Unknown. It's a co-op or solo game about exploring and surviving the wilderness but it's USP is that every printing will have slightly different contents guaranteeing a unique experience. Details are fairly sparse just now but I like the concept.

That sounds like a gimmick to me. Most people will only ever own one copy so it’ll make absolutely no difference to them. And it’ll mean some copies will be “better” than others (or at least better balanced). Sounds like a way for them to sell more stuff to collectors more than anything.

Maybe, but it is at least a gimmick which matches the theme well.

Last Saturday we had session 2 of 3 of a 7th Sea RPG I’m running, ship wrecks, giant pyramids and a volcano lair for the boss battle.

After that we had a game of Viticulture- haven’t played it for over a year, and two of the players were new to it. I really love this game, the theme is so easy to sell and the ‘engine’ building for planting vines, harvest grapes, make wine and sell it - is so intuitive that it pulls new players in so quickly.

Finally got my missus to play Tiny Epic defenders with me, and she hated it. Despite me encouraging her to make her own decisions and be part of the overall game strategy she just isn't really into coop games. Despite always saying she wants to try them.

Going to try one deck dungeon as the dice rolling might keep her more involved.

I didn't like Tiny Epic Defenders either. It didn't seem to have much in the way of decision points.

Yeah I get you, she actually loves Burgle Bros so my comment about co-op isn't fair I've since realised. That has way more to it. Just need some time to try Imperial Assault with the app as reckon she'd like that, especially with it being Star Wars too.

Ilweran and I have been playing through the Jack the Ripper expansion for Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. SHCD is one of my favorite boardgames of all time - a unique experience, and surely the best game for couples ever (apart from those rude ones.) However, the Jack the Ripper cases in this expansion are spectacularly misjudged. The cases in the original game had you uncovering ridiculous twists and convoluted relationships between characters, and never strayed away from being fun and entertaining. These Jack the Ripper cases involve descriptions of the horrific mutilations carried out by the real-life Ripper. You also can't get away from the fact that these murders actually happened to real people. Added to this, of course these murders were never solved, so the basic way you play the game doesn't work. In the original game, you followed clues and red herrings, but could work out which was which. In the Ripper cases, who knows what is significant or not? It's a mess. We finished the first case none the wiser, with the questions at the end seeming baffling and arbitrary.

So the Ripper cases are a depressing, grim and ultimately frustrating, a pretty joyless experience, what we played of them. Fortunately the box also comes with five new classic cases, and these are great. We decided to skip the rest of the Ripper cases and go straight to the classic ones, and were immediately rewarded with a couple of silly cases involving a paranoid psychologist and a play about Holmes himself, in which the actor playing Sherlock has been murdered.

The expansion is still worth getting, but definitely get the base game first (I think they're standalone, from memory) and be prepared as the Ripper cases are not for everyone.

My first ever Kickstarter came through yesterday - Fresco - the Big box with all nine expansions. Looks lovely.

I’ll never get anyone to play it.

Had my eye on Mice and Mystics for a while now and it must have got reprinted because copies are generally available. It's really fun, like a simplified co-op version of Super Dungeon Explore with an entertaining story that runs through the game's 11 chapters. Seems remarkably hard for a game that's clearly aimed at a younger audience although we didn't help ourselves on our first game by misinterpreting a key aspect of the combat system (the rulebook, as always, could be better) - hoping a couple more goes will at least see us through the first chapter! But it's got nice miniatures, a really strong theme and I'm sure we'll improve at it with practice.

Our local BrewDog (a Scottish hipster beer label, for anyone unfamiliar with the name) has a board game night on the last Sunday of every month; I went down with a couple of friends tonight and got to try out a couple of things of not played before (also a marathon run of Love Letter and a bunch of Skulls).

First up was the Harry Potter deckbuilder, Battle for Hogwarts (or similar). It's overly complicated for the supposed target audience and the theming isn't all that central to the mechanics of it, but for a pub night it's just about the right balance of accessible and substantial. Plus it's cooperative, so there's room to be social around it.

Later in the night, once people had started drifting off home, we had a go at Fugitive, a 2-player card game. One player, the eponymous Fugitive, is trying to move between a series of hideouts to escape before the pursuing Marshal can guess all of their locations; this is done with a sequence of numbered cards and limited but flexible rules about how many "spaces" the fugitive can move each turn. It's surprisingly tense and very elegant, compared favourably to Love Letter in the Shut Up & Sit Down review, but the competitive nature (and maths) made it feel a little antisocial for a pub setting.

That Harry Potter game is pretty interesting actually, because you start off with a very simple version of the game using only characters and items from the first book and then each successive game you play adds in more rules, items and characters from each book until you're playing with the full set by game 7. Played in this way it ramps up well and is pretty accessible for the target audience.

Mice and Mystics has been a massive hit in this house - my boy thinks it's the best game he's ever played (finally supplanting long-standing favourite Super Dungeon Explore, which to be fair it shares some similarities with). Funnily enough the things I think hold it back slightly - like the limited range of enemies, meaning you'll fight the same rats and cockroaches in every chapter - are part of the reason I think he likes it, as he likes the thrill of fighting a familiar enemy that he knows how to deal with. The story's surprisingly well-written and the different tile layouts and chapter-specific rules keep things fresh.

In fact the main problem is that the expansions are almost unobtainable. I managed to get one copy of the first expansion, Heart of Glorm, which will be an excellent Christmas present, but the second, Downwood Tales, only seems to be available from US ebay sellers which would open us up to all sorts of unexpected customs charges (and it's a big heavy box). If anyone ever sees a new copy of Downwood Tales available anywhere in the UK for less than silly money, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know.

There's also Tail Feathers if he likes the universe. Plays like X-Wing.

I got a copy of Stuffed Fables, the latest game by the same guy with a similar sort of storybook mechanic. Looks very similar to Mice & Mystics and I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun.

Downwood Tales really is completely unavailable in the UK though. I thought I'd tracked down a copy in Ireland but they emailed me a few days later to say they'd made a mistake and they didn't have it after all. :(

Incidentally, it is possible to get a professionally narrated story CD for the transitions in Mice and Mystics. The mp3s were (and probably should still be) available on the Plaid Hat website if you can't track the CD itself.

I got a heads up from a friend about DropMix being on sale at Amazon. It's down from £100 to £25 with a couple of card packs. It's made by Harmonix and doesn't seem to have done all that well but he was pretty adamant it's worth picking up.

I got the message last Saturday and have hummed and hawed about it all week, at least one other friend has jumped on the deal and picked up additional card packs for buttons in Game. I'm on the fence about getting it but figured there might be interest here.

We had our Christmas night out yesterday and I'm struggling to articulate what the thing is, here is a video:

It looks like a really fun thing but the reading I've done about it suggests that it's a fancy toy that they've tried to hang a game around and the game parts aren't that engaging but the toy is good fun. Early reviews make some reference to the launch price but that's probably out the window now. My concerns are that it won't get used, will take up a load of space and one of the reviews I watched said the app is only guaranteed until late 2019, possibly because of licencing around the music but who knows what happens if the app isn't available.

I used to have a Netrunner problem. Well, I had two Netrunner problems: my need to collect it, and my not being very good at it. I never got into MtG – few people ever seem to have nice things to say about it, except in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way – so Netrunner is my only frame of reference for that sort of complicated card game.

Keyforge, which I played for the first time tonight, is a bit of a weird one, though. A lot of my Netrunner headspace was taken up by deckbuilding – looking at lists of the current card pool and figuring out the right cards to construct an engine capable of winning consistently. I built some great engines by the end, but couldn't ever really put them to good use.

But Keyforge doesn't have deckbuilding. You're not actually allowed to change your deck at all. You buy a sealed pack of cards and that's a complete deck, legal for tournament or casual play. Its contents have been generated by an algorithm, each card stamped front and back with the deck's name (they all have names for boring lore reasons), and no cards may be added or removed.

It sounds insane, and it probably is – though I've gone from wondering how they're ever going to make money with this thing without boosters or expansions to owning two decks in the space of about a week. It helps that it's mechanically solid, of course, coming from the guy who designed Magic the Gathering; from what a friend of mine says, there are rules here that seem designed specifically to fix common complaints about Magic.

I've only managed one game so far, dragged out by the rules-googling and debates on resolution order, but I'm really keen to try more. It took a few rounds to settle into a groove with my deck, but eventually I felt like I'd found the core idea of its systems (despite the random generation meaning that there wasn't one – at least not intentionally) and managed to string together enough strategy to narrowly win.

I'd expected it to feel swingier, or less balanced, for one of us to have a clear advantage in the options available in the deck. Some mechanics that, on paper, seemed kind of unwieldy and pointless turned out to be both useful and elegant.

The main criticism I'd level at it is the lack of a coherent theme behind each deck. I remember looking through Netrunner decks, each one with an evocative name and a theory that the creator wanted to try out or just share. Without human input, there's just no way for these decks to have the personal spark that even piloting other people's decks could give.

(For more specifics and better actual criticism than I can manage at 1am, I'd recommend the Shut Up & Sit Down review, which is what convinced me to give the game a shot, despite not actually changing any of my preconceptions about the game. It just kind of… focused my curiosity.)

We have 5 Keyforge Decks now. It's pretty good. It's never going to match the depth and nuance of MTG, but for what it is we've had a lot of fun with it, and some of the systems it uses to get round common complaints with MTG are elegant.

Is the negative Amazon review of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective fair, at all? It's the first negative thing I've heard, but it's well articulated rather than the usual internet moaning.

I'd just gone on to buy.

The spelling mistakes complaint is a common one, but the review as a whole doesn't seem entirely out of line. Sherlock Holmes isn't the kind of game you play to beat, though – it sounds to me like they were maybe rushing things, approaching it like a time trial or score attack rather than the more sedate pace it maybe expects of players.

If the co-operative nature of the game isn't a must-have, you could take a look at Watson & Holmes instead, which I really liked. It's more of a Cluedo-type race to find the solution, with each player keeping notes of the evidence and testimony they gather at the locations they choose to visit. Here's the SU&SD review.

The must-have really was 'games my wife will play'.

She loves Ticket to Ride, and doesn't mind Jaipur, but I always have a bit of a struggle finding new ones. I've got Small World on the way, which a few people have recommended.

My wife isn’t really a board gamer, but loves Pandemic. It’s not too complicated, requires some thought, doesn’t take hours and has a real world theme (which might appeal if she’s a fan of Ticket to Ride). Worth a try maybe?

Bärenpark is also excellent - a pretty simple game (similar to Patchwork, I think?) about building a bears-only (plus koalas) zoo from awkward-shaped jigsaw pieces. Fair warning, though: it has the single worst box organiser I have ever seen.

Thanks guys! We have Pandemic but not sure I've ever played with her. I'll look at Barenpark too.

Just started Stuffed Fables, which is the latest game by Jerry Hawthorne who did family favourite Mice & Mystics. It's a clear development of the same theme - a simple and child-friendly dungeon crawler with a strong narrative.

In this one you play a team of stuffed toys who have to defend a child against evil monsters living under the bed. The narrative elements really come to the fore in this one, as the "board" is an enormous storybook and you play directly on the pages, with various story elements being read out in a choose-your-own-adventure fashion as you go. The choices you make direct you to different pages and therefore entirely different layouts and challenges, and it (sensibly) keeps things very manageable by ensuring the core rules are extremely simple and all the more complex and varied stuff is explained directly by the game as you encounter it. There's a "Legacy"-style deck of cards you only uncover in a certain order as the game progresses and almost every card you draw offers you more choices and diversions in the story. For instance the second page has your toys trying to catch a runaway train and you play entirely different stories depending on whether you manage to catch it, decide to pursue it in a wooden cart or end up missing it and taking a different path.

The story might not be to everyone's taste (the whole theme is pitched very young, more so even than Mice & Mystics) but it's certainly a bold experiment and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Is the negative Amazon review of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective fair, at all? It's the first negative thing I've heard, but it's well articulated rather than the usual internet moaning.

I'd just gone on to buy.

A bit late here, but that review isn't particularly fair, no. There are occasional spelling mistakes, and mistranslations, but they're hardly a major problem. Having played through the first game and half of the Jack The Ripper box, there have been a handful of times when we've ended up on a location where the game expected us to have taken a different route, but this has happened maybe twice in fifteen cases.

All the other criticism is based around the game being too hard. Ilweran and I have not found this to be the case. We don't try to beat Holmes and get to the conclusion as fast as him, we explore every lead, and take our time to discuss possible theories. We ignore the push to use as few locations as possible, and are more likely to go to extra ones on a wild hunch than limit our exploration. This method means we often spread a game out over a couple of evenings, but it means that we do generally solve the cases. You have to stop and take the time to really consider the mad possibilities of the cases. Evil twin? Egyptian curse? Could be!

I think the problem is that the author of that review is a shit detective.

Two further points - make sure to read everything out doing silly accents for all the characters, and avoid the Ripper cases. When you're dealing with horrible murders that actually happened, and considering whether knife slashes to the left side of a victim's face means the murderer was left or right handed, the fun disappears pretty quickly.

"It's not a major problem"

A lot of people were burnt by the translation nightmares of the original - one case in particular still makes my playgroup angry. The fact this issue still had fucking spelling mistakes means it got a harder ride than it perhaps should have.

I'm also not entirely sure it's that good. Some of the cases in both versions are passable, but we often left with the underlying feeling it should be better somehow. It's a lot of text for not a lot of reward. The aha! moments are few and far between. I think there are better Escape Room boxes now, which are better put together and it's a genre waiting for a killer product.

In other boardgaming news, if you haven't tried it, Concordia Venus is EXCELLENT. The original is good, but team play is how it was designed to be played. At six I don't think we have any better games (for larger playgroups we've found only Power Grid and Sidereal Confluence work, as well as the usual social deduction style games) and it's truly brilliant.

Also, a surprise his has been Empires of the Void 2. I like EoTV 1 (and pretty much all Red Raven games) but this has broken out and has been very popular. Think a light 4x, quick to play, with some very intelligent design decisions around combat. Looks nice too.