The Last Spell: The Board Game. A Solo and Cooperative Review

The Last Spell is a solo and cooperative board game (see above) based on a TRPG Tower Defense video game of the same name. The board game has the same idea; it’s a tower defense game where you cooperatively protect your town from the hordes of that monsters descend upon it!

This was a pretty big Kickstarter with lots of expansions and other stuff (sleeves especially: see above). The Last Spell (the board game) was on Kickstarter back in May 2023, and it promised delivery in May 2024. It arrived at my house in early 2026, so it’s about two years late (which is not great).

Let’s take a look! We will ONLY be taking a look at the base game.

Unboxing and Gameplay

The Last Spell is a pretty standard sized box (see Coke can above for scale) except that it’s a little bit taller.

It’s taller because it comes with a bunch of miniatures!

Most of the miniatures are the bad guys (part of the swarm) that invades your town!

Each player takes the role of a single hero! See choices above!

Each player gets the card and corresponding mini (see above). BTW, the colored bases ARE NOT for the players, they are for a particular set of bad guy, but I found they helped me distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They probably should have included bases for the good guys! Each player has a bunch of action tokens (the yellow tokens) and 4 green movement tokens. You can spend the yellow action tokens to “do stuff” (do different attacks usually) and the movement tokens to move around the board.

Each hero also gets some starting equipment and starting cards: see above.

As the game progresses, you can upgrade your equipment and get better stuff!

Interestingly, a lot of upgrades come from building certain building!s So, the players make choices for building: do we want more gold? Do we want more materials? Do we want better weapons? Do we want better magic? The buildings the players choose to build define their upgrade path!

So the game has a weird arc: it takes place over 3 days: each day has a “Day Phase” (see rulebook above) and a “Night Phase” (see rulebook below).

That’s right! Each phase is pretty complicated, and you do it three times! 3 days and 3 nights!

The Day phase is all about spending resources (Gold, Materials), building buildings, fixing buildings from the night before, and generally getting ready for the Night phase. The Day phase is “getting ready” for combat.

The Night Phase is all about combat! The heroes are fighting the hordes as they advance!

In the Night phase, cards full of hordes (see above) sit on the edge of the board and get ready to invade!

Each different type of monster has different Hit points and damage: see some above.

If the players can keep their spellcasters casting and keep all the monsters away from them, they win! If the monsters somehow kill all the spellcasters in the middle of the board, they win!

Of course, you can’t have a video game adaptation without a big boss! The big boss comes in the third night and will mess you up! See above as we were (luckily) able to kill them in that game!

In case it’s not clear, this game embraces 8-bit art (like the video game) for just about all the art, but it uses detailed minis for the monsters on the board!

This is a big mama-jama on the table and takes up quite a bit of space! See above! The components are pretty darn good.

Rulebooks

There are multiple rulebooks: one for The Day and one for The Night. At first, I was kind of upset by this … how big is this game that you need TWO separate rulebooks? But after some introspection, I think I prefer two rulebooks. Why? The alternative is a giant rulebook with a TERRIBLE binding like we saw in Valheim (see review here)! So, having two rulebook which lay flat? I am okay with that!

The rulebooks open nicely onto the chair next to me; the staple-binding keeps both pages open and easy to read. The font is fine and readable (see above) There are enough pictures to be useful has well. On The Chair Test, the rulebooks get an A-; they droop ever so slightly over the edges but generally look good on the chair next to me!

Having said that, I was very triggered by their use of the “Index”: they completely misused the word!!! See above! An Index is a list of keywords with references (page numbers or links of some kind), but an Index is sorted alphabetically so that people can easily search for relevant keywords using binary search! Unfortunately, what they label as an Index is a Table of Contents: phrases and concepts sorted by the page number! See above!!! A table of contents is used to show how the document is organized!! WHAT THEY HAVE IS NOT AN INDEX! That is a Table of Contents!!

I have to admit, this gave me a very worried feel about the rest of the game. If they can’t get this right, what else will they get wrong?

In general the rulebook was sorta “ok”. I didn’t love it, and I had some real trouble finding some rules (especially some edge cases, since they don’t have a real Index), but I guess it was “fine”. I guess. I am still upset about their misuse of the word Index. In both rulebooks.

Solo Play

There is a solo mode! Thank you for following Saunders’ Law! Hurray! It’s not that much more complicated; you start as true solo (with one character), but you can recruit extra heroes. (See the rulebook above with the Solo mode documented in the back of the Day Phase rulebook).

Here’s the thing; for my first play, I wanted the game to run as smoothly as possible without any extra exceptions. I have to teach the cooperative game to my game group, and I want as few changes as possible. In the end, I ended up playing two-handed solo: alternate between two characters and play as-if it were a 2-Player game. I think this is the best way to play your first solo game; get all the base rules under your belt in a two-handed solo mode, and then if you like it, you can try the more complex solo mode given.

So, let’s be very clear: the majority of this game is in the Night Phase fighting monsters! The Day Phase, while important (as you figure out how to spend your resources to protect your town), is over quickly! Most of the time you are fighting monsters!

And you spend a LOT of time fighting monsters. My first day (Day 1/Night 1) probably took me 2 hours to get through. Holy cow! I had to leave the game set-up on the table overnight! I got better at running the game, but I also realized I got a LOT of rules wrong (if only they had a true Index to fix this…)

My second day (Day 2/Night 2) also took about 2 hours to play. I had to leave the game set-up on the table. A lot of this was correcting my incorrect notions from the previous Day and keeping my head in the rulebooks a lot.

My third day (Day 3/Night 3) was also about 2 hours to play. This day would probably have been shorter, as I was getting to know the rules, but then the Big Bad Boss came out! And the Big Bad Boss has her own very special rules that you have to study!

I ended up winning, but the game basically took me 3 REAL days to play … I basically played one “game day” per day, and left the game set-up on my table!

This is a long game. I think the game will probably cut by a third or even a half now that I have the flow of it, but it takes a long time to get the sense of the game.

For the solo player, there is QUITE a bit of maintenance. SO MANY monsters come out and converge on the town! See above! The solo player basically has to spend quite a bit of time moving EVERY single monster towards the city; this is a lot of work. This is partly why the game takes so long to play … all the minis have to move! And the rules are “not great” when there are conflicts; they could have been better (how do I move the monsters?).

I am glad that I played The Last Spell solo to learn the game. I am also glad I played it two-handed solo; there’s just too many rules to keep track of that I don’t want to be wasting any time doing “solo stuff” that’s outside the normal path of execution. Now, tt’s one thing for ME to keep the game set-up on my table for 3 days while I wade through the game, but I cannot imagine trying to learn this with my friends at the same time! There’s just too much going on. Play this solo to learn it; play it two-handed.

Will I ever come back to this as a solo gamer? I don’t think so? There is SO MUCH maintenance for the solo gamer (moving all those minis), I can’t bear going back to this and doing all that work as a solo gamer. It’s not bad solo, but it’s just so much work! Maybe you like living in this world or really like the video game … maybe spending that time moving stuff around might be fun for you? It wasn’t for me.

Cooperative Play (4-Player)

In session 1, we got 4 of us (me not pictured) to play the cooperative game! I was a little worried the game wouldn’t fit on the table, but we made it work … see above.

The major difference between the solo and cooperative game is that NOW the maintenance is shared! Sure, more enemies come out, but the game is a little more managable (and less work per player) as each player moves “their” monsters (on their side of the baord). This might be the best reason to play this cooperatively over solo play; the load is shared.

How does the game balance for more or fewer players? It boils down to how many action tokens you get! See the rulebook above! In my two-handed solo game, both characters got 7 action tokens! In the 4-player game, we each only got 3 action tokens! Now, this is balancing because with 4-players because the players can keep the monsters under control; each player monitors a section of the board! Based on plays, it seems like the balancing “generally” works. In fact, the third day was a 3-Player game (as one player was sick), so we got to see the balancing at all player counts; it seems to work.

Even after playing solo, I was still the “rules guy”, looking up rules as we played. We were able to play 2 days of the game: 1 day, 1 night, 1 day, and 1 night. It took us about 3.5 hours to play 2/3 of the game. It was a little shorter than the solo game because we all shared the load of set-up.

What I am surprised about; how the game unfurled. We accidentally played with Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO) (because it was more fun and more strategic) and because my group knows how to deal with PSTO well. But I am surprised that we DID NOT play with simultaneous play … it seemed like most of our turns were fairly independent (“you deal that that part of board, I’ll deal with that part of the board”) as there were no interactions that we had to carefully sequence. Once the bad guys got closer, we had to be more careful, but I am surprised we didn’t play our turns simultaneously. It seems like we could? And even should have (because it would reduce play time)? I think we didn’t because we wanted to see how things went on each player’s turn? I think? Given how much work there is per turn, I really really thought we’d embrace simultaneous actions. But we didn’t.

So, 2/3 of the game done in 3.5 hours. We saved the game to resolve it later. The good news is that there is a save system … it’s a pad of paper you write on … but we just took pictures (like the picture above).

Game 3 (3-Player Cooperative)

So, we resolved to finish the game. Due to some illness, we had to wait a few waits until we were all available, and even then, we were down to 3-Players instead!

Because the game balances by simply changing the number of action tokens, we were able to jump back into the game with 3-Players, even though the game started with 4 players! It’s also a good sign that everyone wanted to play again!

Here’s the thing; it took us 3.5 hours to play the final day of the game! Some of that was just setting back up (this is a big game after all, and resetting back to the saved state was a lot of work), but some of it was just all the maintenance that has to happen.

We finished and just barely won; I think we cheated on a few things accidentally, so maybe we should have lost. Either way, it was close.

What I Liked

Components: The game was quality and looked good.

Minis: The minis were cool and added a lot of flavor.

Save Game: There was a good system to save the game between sessions. And (even though we didn’t mention it) between campaigns!

What I Not Sure About

Style clash? I know The Last Spell is a video game, so embracing the 8-bit art makes some sense. But the disparity between using nice fluid minis for the monsters (and characters), but 8-bit graphics for everything else seemed to … clash? It made it a little harder to put them together and was a little jarring. Maybe it’s not a big deal …

Sectors: The game uses sectors for ranged attacks (usually not adjacencies or spaces away). The rules are very clear how the sectors work, and yet, they were very unintuitive! I think if you know the video game, then the sector ideas make more sense. In fact, I think a video game will enforce the sector boundaries easily! In the board game, we found the sector idea to be a little clumsy and unintuitive. .. but maybe if we had played The Last Spell the video game more, we would applaud the sector idea is just like the video game? I don’t know.

Combat: Combat is decided by dice, and there are a good number of mitigation mechanisms (things you buy, abilities, etc). But if you roll poorly, you can still get screwed pretty hard. Teresa especially had a bad third and was frustrated. Yet, the combat is simple to describe and simple to play. This simplicity makes it really easy to explain, quick to play, and simple to manage. So, it’s good on those axes, but yet you can really get screwed by bad rolls. So, I don’t know how I feel about this combat. I’ve played the game enough to see “ya, things seem to average out overall”, but when you are the recipient of the bad rolls, it’s very frustrating.

Things I Don’t Like

Minis and art: Because the game uses 8-bit art and the minis are smooth entities, we actually struggled to distinguish the enemies on the board (some of them really look a lot alike). And we struggled to correlate the minis with the monster stats. In fact, in my first game, I put one monster on each stat position so I could tell them apart! (See above) The minis needed a little more differentiation, even if it were something simple like a triangular base for some, square base for others, or something with color. It was frustrating enough to mention.

Maintenance: There is a lot of maintenance to keep this game going. As a solo gamer, it’s probably too much. As a cooperative game, the maintenance is tolerable but only of you friends help. Still, there’s a lot of work to keep the minis moving.

Length: The game just feels too long. I think this is because there are few too many rules? It needed just a smidge fewer rules; we paused too many times to lookup rules …

Index. The Index is NOT an index. If it had been a true index, it would have been significantly more useful.

Icons: The Iconography is REALLY non-intuitive. We struggled with it and frequently had to look up the Icons (especially for ranged actions). It’s even more frustrating because the Icon are defined in exactly one place (the second rulebook). This really should have been on at least 1 more sheet that you could pass around.

Reactions

Sara liked this the best and would give it a 6.5 or 7/10. Teresa was right there with her.
Andrew and I were on the same page: about 5.5/10. Andrew would have called it a 6 earlier, but the Sector idea was so unintuitive, he felt that brought down the rating after the second session.

Conclusion

The Last Spell was divisive among the players in my group. We all liked the minis and the how well the game flowed once we got going, but it was still very long and had lots of maintenance in keeping the game going.

The clash of art styles between the minis and “the rest of the game” was actually a little jarring and some of the 8-bit art (mostly the buildings) was hard to distinguish. We all think the game would have been better if had been consistent between the art styles; the clash actually took us out the game a little. (This might be just because we had the minis Kickstarter version; the base game uses standees)

Interestingly, I liked another tower-defense game called Firesiege better than this (see review here from a few weeks ago), but my friend Sara liked The Last Spell better. I liked how quickly Firesiege played, but Sara seemed to like how The Last Spell played better. That’s two very different opinions!

As a solo game, the maintenance is probably too much for most people; between set-up, play, and tear-down, the solo player has way too much work to do to keep the game going. I’d probably give a 5/10 for solo. I’m not sure I’d play it again.

The Last Spell is better as a cooperative game, as the maintenance gets shared among all players. We even saw that the balancing mechanisms seem to work well at 2, 3, and 4 players! You can even switch the number of players between days! The reactions were mixed, from about 5.5 to 7/10. I think people who know The Last Spell the video game might like this a little more and give it another point.

Hopefully this review helps you decide if this is right for you. I suggest you play it and try it for yourself; there is a single day intro mode you can play to see how it works.

Detective-Heists and Heartbreak. A Solo and Cooperative Review of a new Expansion for Detective: City of Angels

Detective: Heists & Heartbreak is an expansion for the mystery board game Detective: City of Angels. This expansion was originally up on Gamefound as a pre-order December 2025. It pretty much delivered on time in early 2026.

Although the primary way to play Detective: City of Angels is as a 1-vs-many game (the chisel vs the detectives), that’s not the way we choose to play! The base game comes with a cooperative mode (built-in) where the detectives work together to solve the mystery of the week; we always play this cooperatively! And it works great!

There are three mysteries in this box that augment the original game!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The box is probably bigger than it needs to be; see Coke can above for scale.

There’s four case books (one for each player, up to 4 players cooperatively) which include the three new cases.

The Chisel book is included for the new cases … fun fact, you still need the Chisel book for the “final mystery summary” even if you are playing fully cooperatively! It replays the case and all the clues in a final “wrap-up”, kind of like what you expect in your favorite mystery shows like Death in Paradise, Midsomer Murders and other murder mystery shows.

For the cooperative game, there’s a sheet you use to indicate a passage to read … you are basically questioning suspects and witnesses about the murders and getting responses!

The Sleuth Casebook has all the entries for the grid: this is a storybook AND deduction AND mystery game! If you truly want a mystery like Death in Paradise, with all the interactions of witnesses and suspects, this is what you are looking for!

Using sheets from the original game, you make notes to yourself about what you saw and have to solve the mystery!

This expansion fits right in with the original vibe: it looks great! See above.

Case 1: A Twist of the Knife (Solo Play)

So, Detective: City of Angels has both a solo mode and cooperative built-in! Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

The solo mode for the game is a true solo mode: one player plays one detective, wandering around LA and questioning suspects, searching locations, and searching suspects!

The game balances itself by having 12 “days” to discover the solution, where each “day” is one player taking 4 actions. The solo player has it a little harder, because he has to travel all over the map by himself, but this is how the game balances for multiple players: the players (whether one or many) always gets 12 days with 4 actions per day, no matter how many players. The solo player gets all the actions, but the cooperative players have to divvy those actions between themselves.

I played the first mystery, A Twist of the Knife solo partly to remind myself how to play, and partly just because I love solving mysteries! I watch and read a LOT of mysteries, and I am always try to figure them out! And yes, I figured out the first mystery, but only after a second chance … if you fail to get the Motive, Weapon, and Reason within 12 days, you get a second chance … 3 more days …

The solo player is hamstrung a little on travel, because he’s only one detective having to wander all of LA to find things! That is balanced because the solo detective has the clarity of a single vision to push himself forward. It’s also a little harder on the solo player because he has to look up everything by himself! Look at the grid to find the entry, then find the entry in the Sleuth book, then read to himself! It’s not a terrible amount of work, but the game is more work for the solo gamer.

A Twist of the Knife worked great a solo game, and it reminded me why I love this system so much: I feel like a real detective solving a real mystery; I have to find the clues, do the hard work of questioning, follow my instincts, and make suppositions!

I will absolutely play Detective: City of Angels solo in any form. This new expansion fits right in.

Case 2: Hollywood Heartbreak (Cooperative)

Part of the reason I played the first case solo was to remind myself how to play so I could “re-teach” the game to my friends! I think Charlie and Allison like mystery games almost as much as I do! They are my Escape Room/Mystery buddies!

The best part of the cooperative experience is that we share the load! The active player takes their turn, one other player consults the grid when necessary, and a different player reads the entry from the Sleuth book! This really keeps everyone involved as we play, as everyone is active during a player turn!

Not only are we sharing the physical load of consulting and reading, we are sharing the cognitive load! Frequently, puzzle games like this can be better with multiple players because one player may notice something others did not! We come up with, as a group, the shared story of what we think is happening! This cooperative experience of sharing the physical and cognitive load really just works so well.

It’s apropos that this case is called Hollywood Heartbreak because it broke our hearts that we didn’t solve this! We even took a second chance and still couldn’t break it. Granted, this case is a Veteran level mystery, but we think we missed something along the way; we “somehow” missed a clue. We think it was in the cluebook, and maybe we were SUPPOSED to see it, but we missed it? That one clue made all the difference.

Still, even when we lost, the experience was still great. My friends and I were solving (well, trying) to solve a mystery together!

Case 3: Curse of the Jade Jaguar (Cooperative)

The final case unfolded very similarly to Case 2. The one thing I noticed more explicitly is that three detectives were able to cover a lot more ground than the single detective! By splitting up and covering different parts of LA, we were able to get a lot of suspects questioned quickly! Of course, there is a little less clarity of vision with three detectives trying to come to consensus, so it balances out a little.

I have to say, this mystery was one of my favorite of all time! All the suppositions that flew around the room that were proved and disproven were so interesting! We literally figured the mystery out on the VERY LAST ACTION! I took a chance on my last question, and that proved to be the vital piece of the puzzle! It felt very tension-filled and thematic as we figured it at the last minute!

Then we read the final summary and it felt like such a satisfying conclusion! This mystery was also a Veteran mystery, but we got it!

Conclusion

Why watch a mystery show on TV tonight when you can play one? Detective: Heists & Heartbreaks is the best kind of expansion: more content! You also DO NOT have to get it unless you have completed all the cases from the original game and other expansions! This is like a new season of your favorite detective show! You can watch it after you have watched the previous seasons! (To be fair, the mysteries do not have to played in any order; they don’t depend upon each other).

Detective: City of Angels is truly one of my favorite detective games of all time: It’s #2 on my Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games, but maybe it should be #1! I always come back to this game because it’s so much fun and I really do feel like I am solving a mystery. I might have to move Detective: City of Angels to a 10/10 because I will ALWAYS play it and there is so much content for it!

A few weeks ago, my friends and I really enjoyed LA-1 (see review here); it’s a storybook game with all the trappings of a detective game, but it’s not a detective game … you don’t solve mysteries in LA-1, you explore the city and advance the plot with exploration reading from story cards. But it’s not really a mystery. It’s a great game, but you don’t solve mysteries using your brain.

Detective: City of Angels is a real mystery game with mysteries coming to life with story and clues and intuition. Detective: Heists & Heartbreak is just a new season your favorite detective show and it’s just as good as the first few seasons. It’s still very very very good.

Ace of Spades Solo and Cooperative Review. Would You Call This A Cozy Game?

What kind of crazy person would call this a cozy game? This is set in a hard and unforgiving old west town, with gunfighters battling bad guys! The art is great but kind of harsh, the theme is hard, and the game … just doesn’t look cozy. But I argue that it kinda is! Check out why below …

Ace of Spaces is a solo or 2-Player cooperative game: players battle bad guys using Poker Hands to do damage; bigger and more powerful bad guys emerge as play continues!

Although Ace of Spades was originally released in 2025, the original publication was recalled because of some offensive cards. So, the publisher Devir re-released this game fairly recently in 2026, so we are calling this a 2026 release? I guess?

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Ace of Spades is a smaller box (see Coke can above for scale) mostly because it’s just cards (and one giant notater for hit points).

Players use poker hands to do damage to bad guys, so the game includes a “standard” deck of cards (see the fake “worn” veneer above) with a special “Foil” ace of spades card.

There are enemies you fight along the way to the big boss. The starting enemies are simple (like the 5 hit point Mule above) …

… and the final enemy is Lord Overkill (above with 50 hit points!) And that’s the easy boss!!

How do you do damage to enemies? You play poker hands, and each poker hand has a “damage” it does! See above as the Flush does 5 points of damage, the Full House does 6 and so on. You’ll also notice that face cards (JQK) do extra +1 damage, and Aces do +3!!

Each enemy you face has an “environment” (like the one above) which describes how many poker hands you can play, and how many redraws you get. The bullets (4) are the number of poker hands you can play, and the deck arrow (4) is the number of redraws you get.

There are 11 bad guys overall on the way to Lord Overkill!! See above! If you can take all 12, you win! You lose if you can’t take out an enemy with the given number of poker hands.

If you look at the bottom of the cards of the enemies, you’ll see that killing them gets you a “one-time” or “ongoing” power you can use in later combats. For example, if you take out the Sheriff above, you get the ongoing power that Kings to do extra extra damage!

If you can make it all the way to the end and kill Lord Overkill, you win!

It’s really just playing poker hands to do damage to bad guys.

Controversy

So, I didn’t know too much about the Ace of Spades controversy until I got my copy! I got a 1st edition used from a Board Game auction from my LFGS … and it turns out the 1st edition has the controversial cards! One of them is above (the slaver) and the others … I don’t to want to show. One of them is a slave card.

If you want to know more about the controversy, see this board game geek thread. You probably want to get the 2nd edition WITHOUT the slaver, slave, and other cards. It’s the 2nd edition that came out in 2026 and that’s probably the one you want.

When I played with my friend Teresa, we just kinda put the controversial cards off to the side and didn’t play with them.

Solo Play

So, this is either a solo game or a 2-Player cooperative game. See above. Thanks for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode!

The solo game unfolds as you expect: you get poker hands and try to damage to your current bad guy! In the solo game, you get a full hand of 8 cards and play 5 at a time (fewer if you are playing easy mode) to play a poker hand to do damage. There are also ways to scale to make it easier and harder.

As a solo game, it was fine. The problem is that you are very dependent on the cards you get! Sure, that’s how poker is, but I found this really hard to win: it was very random. Sure, you can play smart and use the one-shot and ongoing abilities, and sure you can play the odds and get better hands. But I have yet to win a game.

And here’s the weird thing: since I know it’s kind of random and I’ll just have to do the best I can, it’s not stressful. I know that my game is completely defined by the cards I draw, and if I do great, HUZZAH! If I do poorly, oh well. I can try to play smart and I can try to think my way out, but since I know it can be very random … I don’t care? Not in a bad way but in a “Eh, that’s the way it goes”. I am going to make a controversial statement: this is a cozy game. You do the best you can, but meh, whatever.

I have played quite a number of games and haven’t won. I don’t care that I haven’t won … in a good way? It’s kinda fun.

Cooperative Play

As a 2-Player game, the game basically plays the same, but you alternate between the two players. There are still 8 cards out, but 3 are shared between the players, while each player has his own hand of 5. Here’s the thing: you have limited communication between the 2 Players. You cannot communicate what you have, except vague stuff.

I generally don’t like limited communication games; the rules are generally pretty vague except for “you can’t shared exactly what you have”. So, we probably stepped over the line a little. I think I would have preferred some limited communication rules more like The Crew (where you get a single communication per round) or something like that.

There were also no rules for sharing. To be fair, the 3 cards in the middle are shared between the two players, but it would have been nice to have other limited sharing rules.

I actually think (but I am not sure) the game would have been more fun with either some sharing or more explicit communication rules. Having said that, my favorite way to play this is 2-Player. Why? As I said before: it’s a cozy game! I am pretty sure I stuck getting what cards I get, so if I lose, whatever.

Again, calling this cozy is not necessarily a bad thing. I can sit with my friend for hours just playing and hoping we can get a good run to win! But we know the odds are against us. If we win, great! In not, oh well. That’s my definition of a cozy game: I can keep playing and not be stressed. My friend and I can hang out. Since I know the luck of the cards governs the winning, I don’t be stressed because I know I can’t do too muich about it (mostly) and I just play and have fun.

Conclusion

Play poker solo (or cooperatively with your friend ) and beat-up bad guys! It’s a simple premise, and it’s probably easy to get anyone to play it because most people know how to play poker! (Just make sure you get the 2nd Edition so you don’t offend anyone). I really like the idea that I can pull this game out for non-gamers and show them how a cooperative game works using poker hands! That’s a really neat way to introduce people to cooperative games! Most people know how poker hands work!

I also love the art in this game; it’s very comic-booky (Jonah Hex?) and very striking.

I am calling this a cozy game because I know the game is too random to take it too seriously: I will be always be at the whim of my draws, so I can lean back, play the best I can, and say “oh well” when I lose … because I will lose quite a bit. I know! With art and theme like this, how can you call this a cozy game? A cozy game for me is just sitting back and playing and saying “ok” as we play.

In the end, I prefer Ace of Spades 2-Player. It’s a cozy game where I can hang our with my friend and play a friendly (a truly friendly) game of poker. We can play all night and probably lose, but we’re still playing together and hanging out and having fun.

6.5/10 for solo play (too random to want to play all the time), but 7.5/10 or 8/10 for the 2-player game.

Appendix: Coziness vs Agency

I wonder … if we added house rules for sharing and/or communicating if I would like the game more or less? I KNOW the game is too random so I don’t care too much, that’s why it’s cozy for me … I can’t do much about how the cards come out for me and my friend, so I just say “whatever”; that makes it cozy for me. But if I added some sharing rules (“we can give one card per turn”) or communication rules (“we share show one card per turn”), maybe I would start caring more? Then maybe I would be more stressed and it wouldn’t be a cozy game anymore? Or maybe I’d like it more because I had more agency? I don’t know!

Cozy Stickerville: A Series of Fortunate Events

Without embellishment, I can honestly say that playing all the way through Cozy Stickerville has been one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. It’s easily cooperative, it’s very engaging, it’s truly cozy as you and your friends work together to build a town.

I became aware of Cozy Stickerville from many sources. It turns out the designer of Cozy Stickerville (Cory Koniecza) designed my favorite games of 2023: The Initiative! See review here. So, I was super excited for this! I ended up ordering Cozy Stickerville directly from the website in early 2026 to get it as soon as I could. My friends were excited to play it; I presented the game as “Stardew Valley in a board game!” and my friends, especially Teresa (who is a big Stardew Valley fan) were excited.

 

The nature of this game meant we had to play it OUTSIDE our normal circles. What do I mean by this? Stardrew Valley … sorry, I mean Cozy Stickerville, is a legacy game lasting ten episodes. A legacy game mean means a couple of things: 1) we’ll be changing the state of game as we play and 2) The game spans multiple sessions, so we’ll have to make a committed effort to get the same group together to play again and again! My playgroups are fairly fluid; people come and go, work gets in the way, and it’s sometimes hard to always get the same group together. So, to play Cozy Stickerville, me and Sara and Teresa had to commit to playing all ten games together, even outside our normal gaming rotations.

Over the course of two months, we played “about” every two weeks, and playing two or three of the episodes of the ten episode arc.

Stickers!

If you aren’t quite sure what a legacy game is, it’s usually tearing up cards and/or adding stickers to things. In the case of Cozy Stickerville, they have completely embraced the sticker part of the game! The game comes with a huge book full of stickers; no joke, it’s about 12 page full of stickers! As you play new games, you add stickers to board and stickers to story points and stickers stickers stickers!

Cozy Stickerville is a game all about building your town. The stickers you put in the board help define the character of the town! The structures you build, the people you choose, the families, the businesses! You put people stickers, flower stickers, bird stickers, animal stickers … on your board! And this is what Cozy Stickerville is! It’s all about making decisions, as a group, about the town you want to build! The mechanism it uses to build the town is stickers.

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty easy; there are twelve events per episode, and each player takes an event card (which usually forces a decision), and then gets to do “something” in town.

Sometimes the “something” is getting resources (you might need wood to build some business, you might need money to add a new building, you might need food to feed your people), and sometimes the something is adding a sticker!

Each turn is really simple; draw an event, deal with it, then do something. And that’s it! But it’s the conversations that come out of all this are what make this so fun! As a group, we decide what flavor of town we want to build! Each player still has agency on their turn, as they are the final arbiter of what they do on their turn, but we found that we were always talking and discussing!

Each single game (a single episode) only last about 15 to 20 minutes. And that’s it! That’s why we were able to play two to three games (episodes) per session.

To be clear, once we are done playing all ten episodes, the game is done. The game is full of stickers and you have defined your town (but see below).

Cozy

This is definitely a cozy game. It’s not taxing at all to play. It’s simple gameplay; it’s fun and silly to place the stickers. But it’s the overall experience that makes this cozy. Me and my friends are just hanging out, making little decisions about our town, and placing stickers. You might think it sounds “stressful” to build a town … oh, it is so not stressful. You just make little choices and see what happens.

This is probably the coziest game I have ever played.

Conclusion

I wasn’t quite sure where I would land on this, but I think I have to give this a 10/10. I had more fun playing this little silly game than anything I have played in a while. This game became something I looked forward to; it became an event! Teresa would make some crazy food from the Star Wars cookbook, or the Stardrew Valley cookbook, and we would eat and chat! We would reminisce about the last session, as we came up to speed on all the decisions we made!

Cozy Stickerville became an event in every sense of the word; we planned schedules around it, we planned food around it, and we looked forward to each session.

I have to admit to feeling a little sad once our final game was over. It was a fantastic journey and a series of fortunate events made this so fun. 10/10 for me and my friends, and probably my cooperative game of the year.

Appendix (It’s Not QUITE Over!)

It turns out, even after you are done, you can still play the game one more time! You flip the board over and build a new town using the stickers that are still leftover! All the decisions you made in the previous game exclude some of the cards from the game, but you can actually play it again!

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes. A Solo and Cooperative Review After Full Playthrough

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is a cooperative game about being firefighters rescuing people from a fire! It’s the third or fourth (or even fifth?) version of the Flash Point series of games. This particular one was on Kickstarter back in June 2025, promising delivery in January 2026. It arrived at my house in April 2026, so it’s about 4 months late (which isn’t bad in Kickstarter land).

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty thick oversized box!  See the Coke Can above for scale

The reason it’s so thick is because there are 4 double-sided boards!  (2 of them go together to make a third board, so there are really only 6 different “boards”).

Each player assumes the role of a firefighter, each with different abilities!  The firefighter markers are above …

But you want to pick one of the characters.  The base game comes with 9 different characters (and if you got the Back In Action expansion, a bunch more!)   Each character has a special power that really changes how they interact with the game!

You might notice “Hey! Those are envelopes! Rich, why are they envelopes? That’s weird!!” Yup, this is a campaign game, and you will get to keep your gear in those envelopes between games.

So, this is a campaign game, with a 6 episode arc!  Don’t get TOO excited, because there’s not really that much stuff that follows you between games.  Really, the only thing that follows you is your gear.  Now, each GAME is actually quite different, as described by the Call Guide book above. 

Each episode of the Campaign has some new rules/new concepts for just that game: see above for the rules for episode 4.  It’s not really much of a spoiler; there’s no real story unfolding between games that will be revealed.

The gear is pretty cool; you usually get 4 and choose 2 at the start of the game (in later games, you draw 2 and use the previous gear).  But you get to CHOOSE extra powers to augment your built-in power!  

See as Lisa Beckett (whose base power is to mitigate Fire cards) chose stuff related the Supression Blast actions, so they can augment each other!  That’s some of the fun of this game, is that you get to CHOOSE some of your gear to go along with your innate power!

To win, you have to save 7 people (dogs and cats are people too) before the building collapses, or before 4 people get burned up!  That’s right, if you fail to save someone (because the fire engulfs them), people (dogs and cats are people too) will die!  So, this is a race to save 7 people!

Players traverse a map, looking for POIs: “Points of Interest” (the blue ? markers above).  Usually, the POIs are people (remember, dogs and cats are people too), but sometimes the POI is empty! NO!  

To save a POI (after you flip to a people side), you have to carry them out.  Sometimes, they are healthy enough to walk out on their own, but you need to get them to a “safe place” (usually the ambulance) to count as a “saved person”!

Along the way, smoke and fires comes out!  Every turn, you will roll dice and place a smoke on the cross: see as we place a Threat on 6-8!  Now, normally that would be a smoke (which isn’t QUITE fire), but since it’s adjacent to fire already there … that smoke immediately becomes fire!

This is an action point game: each player has a certain number of action points to spend per turn: see chart above.  (These are nice player summary cards).   It’s only one action to extinguish smoke, but two actions to extinguish fire!  Usually, it’s just one action point to move, but saving people around is pretty intensive, it’s 2 AP to move a victim with you…. 

To be clear, this is NOT a real-time firefighter game!  Players decide how to spend their actions WITHOUT a timer.  If you wanted a more frantic real-time Firefighter game, check out Firefighters on Duty!  See our review of that here! 

There are lots of other little rules, but the most important is that if you have to place a threat on a place with fire, it explodes!  This might a little like  Pandemic, but instead of disease cubes exploding, fire explodes out in all 4 directions!  It’s so much harder to fight fires after the fire explodes and spreads!! Even worse … those fires it may weaken the structure of the building and it may collapse!  Fires are bad, mkay?

This game has a LOT of nice components.  Nothing is super awesome, but all the components are good quality and easy to read.   And there are QUITE a few components in here (see above), which is why you need the extra tall box for this!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good; I have a few issues with it.  

The rulebook gets an A- on The Chair Test!  It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it has plenty of pictures that are easy to see, and a font that’s easy to read!  It doesn’t waste too much space.  I think the only reason it isn’t an A is that I wish the font were just a little bit bigger.  But Solid A- on the Chair Test!  This rulebook is the perfect size and doesn’t droop AT ALL on the chair next to me!

The Components and intro are good enough, if a little cramped.  

The rules are generally well-spelled out, but as you get into the game, there are a lot of new rules that come out and some of these interactions are not well-specified. There’s going to cracks, helicopters, lift-basket, new gear, new spaces, new vehicles, new rubble, … all sorts of new stuff!  You’ll have questions about how things interact.  Sometimes it will be there, sometimes it won’t.  The nice thing is that this is a VERY thematic game, so can kinda make a call based on theme.

A simple example is my rock, Camila Ruiz (Camila followed me throughout all my 6 games of the campaign).  She can remove a threat marker for free.   I assumed that a threat marker was anything that was a threat!  Fire, smoke, hazmat, livewires … right?  Those are all threats?  I was beginning to think that was overpowered so I went searching.  I downloaded the PDF rulebook and searched for the word threat.  There were ONLY two places; one was a mention (without a definition) and the other was a picture of THREAT next to fire and smoke at the very front!!  So, yes, a “threat” token is sparsely defined to be ONLY a smoke or fire token.  Seriously, we could have used a sentence anywhere in the rulebook, even on Camila’s card (“A threat is a smoke or fire token”).  There’s not even an excuse for not enough space:  see how little writing is on Camila’s card and how much is on Lisa Beckett’s??? See above.

This was just an example of things could have been a little clearer.  It’s not a bad rulebook, and there was a lot of good stuff.

You know, this might be a textbook defintion of why we need an Index or Glossary:  If you had to put together an Index or Glossary, they would have realized “Oh! We don’t have a real good definition of Threat to refer to!”  There are SO MANY new rules that come out as you play, that an Index or Glossary with all the rules might have been helpful?

Anyway, I learned the game from the rulebook, but I made some mistakes.  You might too. 

 

The Campaign

As a campaign, this is probably the least campaigny campaign I have ever played.  Basically, every game was completely independent from the previous games (the final game just uses rules from previous games).

It’s cool that at the end of each game, you get more stuff; Gear and Boost usually.  See above after the end of call 1 (game 1).  I don’t feel any guilt about spoilers because it’s just a few things!

The campaign tries real hard to have an ongoing story: see above for some flavor text after game 3.  I gotta be honest, I never read the flavor text.  It really didn’t add much to the game for me.  My friends enjoy the flavor text a little more than me, so we read some of it in the cooperative game, but … it didn’t really add a lot.

What the campaign is, more than anything, is an excuse to play through 6 different games that come in the box.  There’s really just 6 different games with a little more gear and boosts available.  The grand finale (the 6th and final game) does a little bit more by bringing in rules from previous games, but even then there’s no “state” between games.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the campaign.  It was a fun excuse to play all 6 boards in the box!  But there’s realllllly not a story or any state that moves from game to game (you can save gear, but that’s about it).   The flavor text that’s there is there if you want it.  I didn’t really read it.  Shrug?  Maybe you and your group will really like it?  It’s there?

Solo Game

So, Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is very clear on how to play solo!  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) .  On page 4, the rulebook very clearly states you simply play with 2 (or more) and the solo player operates them! See above!

So, this is not true solo play, but neither do we have to worry about any wonky new rules to adjust solo play!  Just play the game as it was meant to be played!  Like I said, Camila Ruiz was my rock as a I played; she was in every game of the campaign. 

Interestingly, during set-up (each call has its own set-up in the call book) encourages you to use one of the characters explicitly! Call 1 (game 1) encourages using Steve Sullivan by giving him a little bonus at the start of the game! (See the text above in blue).    This was a nice way to make players cycle through all the the different characters in the game to really get a sense of everything in the board.  I applaud this; it gave you a “reason” to cycle through different characters!

I played the entire campaign with Camila as one of two characters.  Each game adds some very different rules (firefighting on a boat, in an amusement park, on the edge of a cliff!), so it was nice to know one of the characters really well so I could concentrate on the new rules being added every game.  Don’t get me wrong, the base game doesn’t change THAT much, but there was some very different and interesting firefights.

I played through the entire campaign solo.  Each game was its own thing; remember there’s not “really” any holdover state from the previous games, but each board was VERY different!

I liked playing through this solo, modulo one or two issues (see below for discussion).  I would play it again.  Playing two characters worked great!

 

Cooperative Game

I wanted to see where this would land with the cooperative game.   I was hoping I could convince my friends to play through the campaign with me, or at least a few games!

What happened: we didn’t do great in the first game.   Or rather, the dice didn’t go our way.  We cleaned out the board quickly when we started, but we got some explosions and empty POIS at the WRONG times.  We played for about two hours and lost.  We lost two ways, out of building cubes and 4 people died!  We weren’t sure what we would have done differently, and I think that really depressed my friends.  

Sara made the comment: “Ya, this is how the game went last time we played”.   We have played previous versions of Flash Point (Legacy of Flame), and had a similar result.

Last week, when we lost our first game of  Firesiege, my friends wanted to play again to redeem themselves! (See review here!)  This week, they were just done and didn’t want to play again.  The game wasn’t broken or anything, but it just felt like it might have been a little too random.  Losing the dog in the fire was the last straw.

Randomness

This is the hardest part of the game to come to terms with; there’s a lot of randomness.  EVERY turn, you roll two dice and place a smoke/fire (see above) … and sometimes you place more!  If you roll poorly, you can cause explosions all over the place!  The more explosions there are, the more fire there is, which makes it easier to have more explosions and fire!   A few bad rolls can really wreck your game.

I got lucky when I played the solo game, but maybe this game is a little easier with two firefighters. 

Flash Point is very similar to another cooperative game called Pandemic in many ways: players travel around a map trying to keep something under control (diseases or fire), players have action points, players have special powers, players need to keep things under control or they will explode (diseases or fire)!  For a while, when I was trying to introduce new people to cooperative games, I pointed to Flash Point!  Who doesn’t love working together as fire fighters to stop a fire?  Over time, I have deferred more to Pandemic as the better game and less random (as there’s fewer axes of randomness), so I would recommend Pandemic first … it’s just the theme of Pandemic is harder to get over sometimes.  We all lived it at some point.

Which Flash Point?

Flash Point has actually been around for some time!  I Kickstarted the original Flash Point back in July 2011!  And then the Extreme Danger Kickstarter too! See picture above!  But, as you can also see … I never got my Extreme Danger out of shrink wrap!  

Then I was SO EXCITED when Flash Point: Legacy of Flame went on Kickstarter in March 2024!  See above!  The game arrived in 2025, and I fully expected this to be as great as Pandemic Legacy!  But after two games of Legacy of Flame, it just fizzled out.  No one wanted to play again. And it all boils down (no pun intended) to the randomness of the game.  No one wanted to play a Legacy game where there was SOOO MUCH Randomness in the dice rolls!  If you start off with a few bad games, you’ll completely screw yourself!  My friends, I think saw this and didn’t want to pursue Legacy of Flame.

The nice thing about Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is that each game IS so independent, you don’t have to worry about being screwed by your previous game!  I think that of ALL of the Flash Points I have played, Flash Point Golden State Heroes is my favorite version.  Why? Because you get 6 VERY different firefighting scenarios that you can play at any time!  You don’t HAVE to play the campaign: you can just jump into any game you want!   The legacy issues of Legacy of Flame don’t become an issue.

House Rule

There’s one House Rule that I don’t think the game can live without.  Sure, the game can be random on dice rolls when the smoke/fire comes out, but the fire dice rolls “generally” distributes the fire pretty evenly over the board.  The game is random at you; that’s what games do.

The problem is the Fire Suppression action.  You spend your entire turn (4 actions) to roll dice and you MIGHT hit some fire.    Are you an incompetent fire fighter?  Can you not see where the fire is?  This is so ridiculous that you roll dice and pretty much have no control over this!

You might remember Lisa Beckett (see above) we mentioned earlier: I went ALL OUT trying to make her the Fire Suppressions expert!  I gave her two Gear related to that!  See above!  And she still sucked!  Because I rolled bad!  Now she’s not just rolling poorly, but she is actively contributing to losing because she has 4 actions THAT DO NOTHING!

The Fire Suppression, I think, is broken.  In fact, I remember playing the original Flash Point, and I tended to eschew the action!  “Oh, you have to roll to see if it’s successful?  And it takes all 4 actions?  And it may not do anything?  No thanks, I’d rather just do something that I know will make some progress”.

We added a house rule: you have more control.  The players, as a group, get 4 tokens. THAT YOU CAN ONLY SPEND ONCE!!  For a  Fire Suppression action,  roll the dice normally (with flips), then you can spend a token to up/down any/either dice any number of times (up to 4).  This makes it so you can maybe can’t cheat and just Fire Suppression the rest of the game, but the few times you do need it, you have SOME control, and not just random crap! This kind of limits the Fire Suppression to 1 or 2 shots … but that’s kinda what you want?

I won’t play without this House Rule.  If I do, I simply won’t do any Fire Suppression.  It is SO AGGRAVATING to spend 4 actions and do nothing.

Conclusion

We’ve sorta been all over the place in this review, and it may sounds we don’t like Flash Point.  We do like it!  It just … it can be frustrating.   As a solo gamer, I really enjoyed playing through all the campaign (even though it’s not REALLY a campaign, just 6 different boards).  I pretty much had to add the house rule about cleaning up the Fire Suppression action, or I might have hated it too.

The cooperative game didn’t go as well unfortunately.  I think my friends would play the game again but the randomness that can happen will prevent them from ever playing any campaign.  

I personally think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes IS the best of the Flash Point games.  If you like the idea of a cooperative fire-fighting game that has a Pandemic feel, I think this is the one to get.  It has so much variety (the 6 boards are all so very different) and you can play any game you want!  It’s not REALLY a campaign; it’s just an excuse to play all the boards!

I think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes has to get a ranged rating from [6-8] out of 10.  Whenever I give a ranged rating, it means the randomness can overwhelm the game and make it not fun, but when the game “behaves”, it can be fun!  The lower end of 6 is when the dice don’t behave; the game still works but it’s much less fun.  When the game is challenging but not too random, it’s fun and can be an 8!  

If you take away my house rule for Fire Suppression, this rating falls an entire point and would be [5-7]. 

 

Firesiege: Underdone But Still Tasty! A Solo and Cooperative Review

Firesiege is a cooperative Tower Defense games that was on Kickstarter back in May 2024.  It promised delivery in April 2025, and missed by about a year.  I got my copy in early 2026.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a fairly standard sized boxed.  See Coke can above for scale.

Players each take the role of a warrior that can earn special powers!

Each warrior starts with NO special powers, and has one of two conditions to flip them to their more “powerful” side with more hits, some powers, and usually more hit points.  See above as Gestha can flip to the other side if she either (a) she spends 5 energy or (b) has any bar reaches its max.

Once the warrior flips, they are more powerful!  And actually have special powers!  One of the tensions in the game is trying to figure when to keep the invading hordes under control and when to work on powering-up your character!

What’s being invaded you might ask?  The citadel!  The citadel is the center of the tower above!  If a bad guy reaches the center, players immediately lose!  Note that there are three lanes in which in the invaders may invade: red, green, and yellow.  

At various points during the game, the “bad news” cards will come out (see above) and cause the bad guys to spawn and move.

There are actually all sorts of different bad guys in the game but the main ones are the Skrell hunters (smaller: with 1 hit point) and Skrell Mothers (large 3 hit points).  See above.  They look NOTHING like Aliens from the movie Alien or Aliens.  Or maybe they do.   We pretty much called them “aliens” when we played.

There are also some “super” bad guys that can come out during the game at various points.  See above.  These typically have a special power and a few more hit points.

Luckily, the good guys summon little white warriors (see above) to help them or even “someone distinct from Hela, but is pretty much Hela”.

How do you win?  You need to get 6 Victory Points, and you win!  There are 3 cards that control the 3 main ways to get those 6 victory points.  The first one (far left) shows victory points you get from killing spawn points in the game … you always have this.  Killing a green spawn point nets 1 Victory Point, killing a yellow Spawn Point 2, and red 3.  Summoning Hela can help you in different ways (and summoning her gets you 1 VP).   Basically, the game can vary quite a bit, depending on the cards you get! 

There is shared tracker which tracks (1) movement (2) summoning (3) extra swords and (4) energy.  As you play, you can choose (as a group) to move these tracks up and down!  The higher the movement, the more you can mover per turn!  The higher the summoning, the more white warriors per turn!  The higher the swords, the extra oomph you can add to a combat! The higher the energy, the more you can power the special powers of the characters!

Each character has a bag of tokens that they draw from to form their turn.  The tokens are unique to the character (and color).

The player draws 3 tokens for their turn and places it on their board.  Note that the tokens have a white side and a black side!  The light side is good things the player can do with that token: actions, healing, energy, moving the V track, adding/removing walls, and a few others things  See the white tokens above.  The black side is (usually) bad stuff!  Roll the black dice!  Advance the V track!  Summon/spawn Skrell!

An interesting thing about this system is that when you choose a tile, you must do BOTH sides!  Good news is on one side, and BAD news is on the other!  So, you must do both sides!  This is a real interesting idea as you are choosing BOTH the good news and the bad news at the same time!

Even weirder is that you can’t see both sides of the tile!  When you draw, you can only see one side, but the REST of your teammates CAN see the other side!  If you have ever heard of Indian Head Poker or Hanabi, this is exactly the same idea! 

Players basically just play until they win (get 6 Victory Points) or they lose (someone dies or the hoarde track reaches the middle).  

The way the game proceeds is quite interesting; the act of selecting a tile causes things to happen (good and bad).   The game is activated by every tile you choose.  It’s kinda different and interesting.

This is a tower defense game where we, as a group try to keep the Skrell and other bad guys from reaching the middle and killing us!

 

Rulebook

Sadly, this is not a great rulebook.

Firstly, it does poorly on the Chair Test.  I think this is a D-; it droops really badly on the edges, has a small font, as is very hard to consult on the chair next to me.  It doesn’t fail completely because I can sorta use it on the chair next to me.

The components page starts on a good note: the components are well-labelled with a little pictures.

The set-up is “fine”, but it’s where also start noticing rulebook issues.  Some things aren’t even labelled (step 7?) and so we have to guess at a few things.  

Over the course of the first night with my game, I had SO MANY questions and issues with the rulebook that I started writing them down! 

I ended up with 2 full pages of questions and notes!  This was not a good rulebook.

If I just had a few rules questions, I would typically head on over to BoardGameGeek and try to get them resolved.  The problem was that there were just too many questions.  I was generally able to “make an assumption” and move forward for most if not all of them.  But this will be a non-starter for some gamers.

This rulebook is missing a lot.  But it has some good things too.  I like that they have a campaign, I like that it has rules clarifications for all the special cards (victory cards, super bad guys, warriors, etc).  But the rulebook is missing too much to be able to call this a good rulebook: it underspecifies the game.

Solo

So, there is a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! 

This is a true solo mode, with one player taking the role of one warrior.   The only real differences are that TWO bad guys must enter the Citadel (instead of one) to lose … AND the solo player can elect to flip a token using one energy.  Other than that, the game plays the same!

There’s a lot of maintenance for the solo player (Skrell, super bad guys, the track, spawn deck), but it’s not that bad.  It slightly brings down the game (it’s better in cooperative mode when all those systems are shared).    I was able to get my first game going pretty well … I don’t think I made too many rules mistakes (despite the underspecificity of the rulebook).  I had fun.

My second game went a little better as I understood how the systems worked together.  I was looking forward to my second game.

Something about this world is very appealing: it’s easy to get into, the components are top-notch, and generally the game flows really well.  I liked the solo game and would play it again.

The only thing I would change; the game is a little neutered because you don’t have others “sharing” what tiles you might have … the solo game tries to compensate for that by forcing you to spend an energy if you want to flip a tile.  I feel that energy cost  to flip a token isn’t in the “spirit” of the game … I think a better way to handle that is simply: “If you ever have all white or all black tiles in you hand, you may flip one for free.”   That way, you can still make decisions but don’t get “stuck” with all white or black tokens.  It’s a very minor house rule.

Cooperative Play

So, my group played two cooperative games in a row: we lost the first one but wanted to redeem ourselves with the second game!  And we did!  Once we had a “flavor” of the game, we were able to plan and come up with some strategies to win the game!  This is always a good sign when your groups wants to play AGAIN!

We probably could have done better with the limited communication; we sometimes probably overshared.    I hate to say this, but limited communication games typically have this problem!  Unless you are Hanabi with explicit exact rules on what you can say, then most limited communication rules are wonky.  “How Much Can I share?”  To not bog the game down, we just moved forward if we weren’t quite sure.   

Another thing we did which helped the game was share the load: Teresa took care of the super bad guys, Sara handled the Skrell, Andrew handled the spawn cards, I took care of the shared tracks.  Doing this much maintenance for the solo game does bring down my solo score a little, but sharing the load made it so we could concentrate on playing the game rather than maintaining the game as we played.

We did end up using a House Rule: we used Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained: see discussions here) .   This allowed us to be more strategic about choosing the good news/bad news token!  “That’s a real good good news … but can we take the bad news?”  I really did NOT think this Hanabi like mechanism (where everyone can see everyone else’s token, but not their own), but it really did promote discussion as we played.  And I am surprised that it worked.

I kind of think I would only recommend Firesiege when using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained).  Why?  Because without PSTO, then you are STUCK with the tokens you have and you have to play them (your only choice would be the order the 3 tokens you have are played) … that’s the game playing you!   But if all players can discuss playing their tokens, it becomes more interactive, more cooperative, more strategic, as it gives the players more choice!   I played a token, then Andrew played two, then Teresa played one … we got to choose which bad news to take and which good news in the order that was more strategic!  THOSE conversations in the cooperative game made the game for me!

Conclusion

Here’s the thing; objectively, this game has a lot of problems with the randomness, the underspecificity, and the vagueness of the limited communication.  Objectively, I’d probably have to give this game a 4.5/10 or 5/10.  There’s too many problems.

But here’s the thing; I kinda liked it.  I liked the pieces, I liked how much variety is in the game, I liked the ideas that we get to choose how we move forward (bad news/good news) and I liked the way the game unfolded.  Granted, I had to throw a few house rules at this game to like it (fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order especially for the cooperative game), and a few “I think this is how you play” rules.  But I enjoyed every game I played, despite all the issues.   Subjectively, I personally would give this a 7/10; I’d be happy to play it again and teach it again.  But this HAS to be using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) to get the 7/10!

My friends were a little more underwhelmed and might give this a 6/10.  There’s a little bit of caveat with that score:  I gave my friends the best games possible (by limiting their exposure to all the wonky issues), but they did want to play it twice in a a row after we lost the first game, so that’s a good sign.  If they had to learn this from the rulebook, I am sure this would have been a 4/10 … my group would hate the underspecificity.

Obectively: 5/10, Subjectively 7/10. Overall probably 6/10.  

The game was underdone, but was still tasty!

Tembo: Survival on the Savanna. A Solo and Cooperative Review.

Those of you paying attention might say “Wait, didn’t you already publish this?” And you are right! We did! It turns out we got a critical rule wrong, so our review was a little unfair! So, we took down our original review and adjusted it after replaying. Here we go with an updated review!

Tembo: Survival on the Savanna is a solo and cooperative tile-laying/tile-placement game from The Op Games.

This is a game all about exploring the Savanna but keeping the elephants alive and away from the Lion and Lioness!

This is a lighter game for players ages 10 and up.  The time range seems about right at 30 to 45 minutes.  It can play solo.

Is this game good enough to make our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement games?  Let’s take a look!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent.

The game set-up and components are on opposite pages and this works great.  The components are annotated and the set-up is well-labelled.  This part of the rulebook is excellent.

The rulebook is generally okay.  It’s not great on some edge cases: For example: when you rotate a card, can you can also rotate it 45 degree to get diagonals?  There’s no discussion of that!  From a consistency point of view, it seems like you can (because diagonal is considered adjacent), but it’s not clear.  Why are some spaces purple and white on the final board?  Do you have to place final elephants in the white zone?  When the Matriarch is by herself on the board, what does playing the Matriarch card means? When an elephant line gets disconnected, are there any special rules?  If the Lioness eats an elephant, and goes to sleep, then the Lion moves to her space with the Matriarch … it seems like you SHOULD NOT lose (because the Lioness is sleepy), but the rules make it clear whenever the Lioness and Lion are together .with the Matriarch … you lose!  This seems inconsistent with the theme of the game (sleepy Lions).

Oh yes, after a few passes over the rulebook, it’s clear that each player MUST DRAW TO THREE CARDS no matter what, on their turn.  So, they keep drawing. They should have made that clearer, instead it’s kind of buried in the text.

The rulebook was decent, you can learn the game, but don’t expect there to be a ton on edge case clarifications.  You’ll have to make your determinations in a few places.

Unboxing and Gameplay

Tembo is a fairly standard sized box. See Coke can above for scale.

Each player will take the role of one of four herds of elephants.  See the gorgeous wood elephant meeples (elepheeples?) above.

The thing is, there is only ONE matriarch who guides ALL the elephants!  See is the bigger blue elepheeple above.  Her job is to try to keep her elephant herds away from the Lioness and Lion!  See above for the gorgeous wooden pieces! Elepheeple and Lioneeples!

See above as the matriarch is shepherding the pink and grey elephants above (in a 2-player game).  Every new elephant placed on the Savanna MUST be adjacent to another elephant!  It doesn’t matter what color because this is a cooperative game: you can place your new elephants next to any adjacent elephant.  It’s worth noting that elephants are considered adjacent in both orthogonal and diagonal directions!  This is important  to note for later.

Each player has three cards that do double-duty; they form the grid for the Savanna (this is a tile-laying game after all) AND they allow placing the elephants to the Savanna.   Each player always has three cards at the start of their turn: each turn starts with the active player playing a card to the grid THEN playing another card to determine how to place elephants onto the grid.  (Actually; this was the rule we messed up.  You play EITHER to place a grid space OR to place elephats.  This rule was clear in the rulebook, so I have no excuses other than I misread it.  I do think having a player summary would have helped me; anyway, don’t be me and make this mistake).

How you are sitting at the table actually determines HOW you can place your card and your elephants!  Note the arrow in the upper left corner of the card above: if you are facing the grid, you can only play this card to the grid IN THE DIRECTION OF THE ARROW.

If I am facing the grid, you’ll notice all my cards (above) in the grid pointing away.

Interestingly, when you place a card/tile onto the board, the spot you choose has a special power (usually how many elephants to energize).    See above: one spot energizes 2 elephants for ALL players, one spot gives just you 4 energized elephants! You start with only 3 energized elephants, but you can only place energized elephants on your turn!

The secondway you can play a card: the  card you play is discarded, but it allows you to place elephants on the grid ONLY IN THE PATTERN (or just a single elephant) specified on the upper left corner of the card.  If we discarded the card above to place elephants, we could ONLY place 2 energized elephants east-west (next to a previously played elephant somewhere on the board).

To win the game, players must have the elephants visit 6 Landmarks on the board AND make it to the final location.  To “visit” a Landmark, some elephants need to occupy the purple spots of the Landmark.  See above as 2 grey elephants and 1 pink elephant visit the waterfall Landmark and earn the waterfall standee!

If you want to “scoop up” all the elephants on the board, you can play the Matriarch card (elephant card above) which returns all elephants to the players!  You might do this at certain points to limit how many elephants get chased away by Lions (but see below).

The only problem is that it costs 2 (or 5) energy to engage the Matriarch to gather all the elephants!  See the energy track above.  If you ever go to zero energy, you lose!

You can place elephants on the trees to get more energy!  See the red trees above!  If I can place two elephants there, I can get more energy! Yum!

As you play, the Lion and Lioness move.  If they are ever in a Location with elephants, all the elephants are chased off!  (They are not eaten, no.  Even though they are taken out of the game forever).  If you ever get BOTH the Lion and Lioness on the same space as the Matriarch, you also lose!  If you ever run out of elephants, you lose! If you ever run out of energy, you lose! If you ever run out of cards, you lose!

You can only win if your elephants visit all 6 Landmarks AND you make to to the final spots at the top of the board!  See above for  a winning game!

This production is gorgeous and will enchant you.  The Vicente Dutraite art and the wooden meeples are just so beautiful.

Mixing Bad News and Good News

Many cooperative games have a separate deck of “Bad News” cards, that is, cards that keep the game flowing against the players.   Interestingly, the “Bad News” cards are all interspersed into the same draw deck as the player cards!   In this case, there are two “bad” cards.

The first is the Liones/Lion cards.  When the players draw these cards, they activate the Lioness and Lion (in that order): the Lioness/Lion moves, and then will eat (pardon me, “chase”) all elephants in its region.

If a Lioness/Lion eats (chases) some elephants, it has to rest (until it stands again).

Although the Matriarch cards are “Good” cards (you can play them to move the Matriarch and collect all elephants on the board), you are FORCED to play them if you ever get two of them!  This is a unique kind of bad news because (a) you don’t have a choice and (b) the energy cost is much more significant at 5 (rather than 2).   Getting a Double Matriarch (like above) is actually bad!!

Intermixing the Good cards and Bad cards into one deck reminds us a little of The Siege of Runegar (see review here) where the Troll cards were interspersed into the playter decks of this deck-building game.

The Game Can Kinda Play You

You have to be a little careful when you play; the game kinda plays you just a little.

First, there’s not much strategy with the Matriarch cards because you are pretty much forced to play them as soon as you get them.   If you don’t, you will almost certainly get a Double Matriarch where you are FORCED to play them and lose 5 energy.  Energy is a  very limited resource; you can maybe handle losing 5 energy once … maybe.  You are almost guaranteed to lose if you take 2 Double Matriarchs.  That’s 10 Energy, … and you start with 10 or less (depending on the number of players).

After playing a bunch of games, I found that you pretty much want to play the Matriarch card AS SOON AS YOU GET IT (which costs 2 energy) so that you aren’t forced into a double Matriarch (which costs 5 energy).   That’s not really a strategy; you can’t save it up until you need it.   Every time I tried to “be clever” or “push my luck” by saving Matriarch cards, I got screwed by the double Matriarch and immediately lost.   It seems like the best “strategy” is to immediately play a Matriarch card, even if it doesn’t make any sense. 

Now this isn’t quite as bad as I first thought (on my first wrong playthroughs), because the game moves forward more slowly (I originally though you were drawing two cards per turn; BUT you are only playing one and draing one).  But it still seems imperative to play a Matriarch as soon as you can.

The game is kinda playing you.

The other problem is that the “Bad News” cards cluster and cause major havoc.  You ALWAYS have to draw up to 3 cards, even if you don’t want to!  “I’ve got a Matriarch card, I’ll just defer drawing for now!”  NOPE! You can’t do that!  There’s no choice.

The game is kinda playing you.

Games like Pandemic try to mitigate this clustering a little by distributing the bad news cards more equally over the deck (by separating the deck into 4 pieces and distributing the bad cards in those 4 sections).  I wish Tembo did something like this to help mitigate this clustering.  Or give me a choice to NOT draw.  Nope.

The above has a list of the distribution of cards. 

At the end of the day, your game will probably be won or lost by how the bad news cards cluster, despite how well you play during your turn.  But it’s not as bad as I originally thought.

Solo Game

There is a solo mode built-in (thanks for following Saunders’ Law).  

The solo player gets about 24 elephants (collected from two colors: see above as a I mix pink and grey).   The game plays “about” the same, but the solo player doesn’t get the special powers when they play a card on the board: you always just get 4 elephants when the play a card to the board.   And you can, at one time during the game, discard a Matriarch to avoid a double Matriarch,  The solo player just plays turn after turn by themselves until they win or lose.

This true solo way is “okay” to learn the game, but I don’t think it’s the best way to play the game solo.  The problems are two-fold: First, you don’t get the special abilities on the board, which is one of the only ways you can be “smart” in the game …so the solo mode takes away one of the ways you can be clever and sort of dulls the games.  Second, the double Matriarch “fix” isn’t that great.   Sure, you can choose to get rid of a Matriarch ONCE, but as I pointed out earlier, the double Matriarch problem is pretty steeped into the game.  It’s just not fun to play when are you are MORE likely the get a double Matriarch (see below).

A better way to play solo is to play two-handed solo: the solo player plays two elephant tribes, alternating between them as-if it were a 2-Player game.  I think this is a better solo mode for many reasons: 1) You are playing the game the way it was meant to be played: no special rules for solo player.  2) The odds of getting a double Matriarch are actually reduced because you are distributing the Matriarch cards between two hands!   In the true solo mode, you are much more likely to draw double Matriarchs because you have exactly one hand!  At least with two hands, the double Matriarch is less likely.  Finally: 3) Being able to use the special powers on the board allows you to be more clever.

I’ve seen this in so many games recently: a two-handed solo game is always the better way to play solo.

 

Cooperative

I”ll be honest, the cooperative play turned me around a little. I “leaked” the strategy that you must play your Matriarch as soon you get it (to avoid the double Matriarch) and we had a pretty good time playing cooperatively.

As a cooperative game, it’s pretty quick, and the game flows quickly if someone can explain everything. Having played at least ten times, I was able to shepherd Teresa and I through a game … and I had fun.

We didn’t get too unlucky on our deck, and generally we were able to me smart (when to play certain cards, when to eat trees). We were still forced to play our Matriarchs ASAP, but Teresa said she liked knowing that because it made it “easier” to think about.

The cooperative game was fun, we had to strategize together, and the game looks gorgeous. I had much more fun playing cooperatively than solo.

What I Liked

The Production: The production on this game, with the wooden meeples, the linen-finished cards, the gorgeous Vincent Dutraite art, and the quality of the everything really shines.

Specials: There are special one-time tokens that allow you to be “do something” special on your turn. The basic game allows you to start with 5 of them. I think without these tokens, you won’t feel like you can ever be smart, as you can be “stuck” with what you get. I will never play without these tokens.

Special Activations: I really like the decision space around the cards you play on the board. This allows you to feel clever! Do I need more elephants? Then I’ll take the +4 elephants! Does everyone need elephants? Then I’ll activate the +2 for everyone space! But I still need to connect the landmark sites, so maybe I’ll place a tile on a location JUST so I can connect locations! This was one of the most important parts of the game to make you feel smart. Taking this away from the 1-player game seems to neuter the game a little bit.

Diagonal: I really appreciate that diagonals are adjacent! You get so tired of games where everything has to be orthogonally adjacent! I feel like this opened up the decision space a little more!

What I Didn’t Like

Games Plays You. I hated that there is almost no mitigation of the double Matriarch. Can I choose not to draw? Can we distribute the matriarchs and/or Lions over parts? Nope. I sometimes feels like the game just is playing me because you pretty much forced to play the Matriarch when you get it.

It has an edge of randomness. It’s can be frustrating to lose because of the way the deck is laid-out. Or sometimes you get the Lions and all clustered and the Lion and Lioness sneak up on the Matriarch and you lose! Your game can be determined by how well you shuffle! The bad news cards can cluster and completely screw you …

The Rulebook:  The rulebook was great on the form factor, and the rules that were presented were presented clearly.  But the lack of some edge cases might really throw some gamers for a loop.  I have no problem moving forward if a rule is unclear, but some of my friends get stuck and can’t move forward.  I worry that this lack of specificity might turn off some gamers.

Conclusion

I am struggling with the score to give Tembo. I did have a good time playing once I figured out you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it. But I still struggled with how the order of the deck can completely determine whether you can win or lose: the game can play you. BUT after replaying the game correctly, it’s not quite as bad as I thought. I still had fun.

In the end, I am giving this a ranged score: [6.5/10 to 7.5/10]. I needed to capture that I like the game when the deck is fairly well behaved, but I wanted to give a warning that the game can a little too random and frustrating. If I brought this certain groups, they might get a little frustrated by the game playing you (“you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it …is that really strategy?”). Other groups would just enjoy the setting and production and art … and the fact that it’s a little random is mitigated by the fact the the game is quick.

I think my friends Max and Cassidy would really like this game (with a little strategy hint); they would like the cute and quick game herein.

Oh, and the given solo game is fine for learning the game, but I think it neuters the gameplay a little. If you want to play solo, play two-handed solo instead to enjoy the cleverness and choice that is still in the game (modulo the deck shuffle issues).

Tembo might make my Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement Games now that I have played it correctly! If I had to redo that list, it would need to be redone anyways to make sure Mists Over Carcassone (see review here) were on it! Tembo too.

Star Trek: Star Realms + Borg Invasion = Great Solo and Cooperative Experience!

So, I downloaded Star Realms to my iPad years ago … and I play it all the time. Even after all these years! It’s so easy to play on the iPad! You can play it solo against the computer, and that’s the only way I play. So, Star Realms to me is a solo game.

I even have the original Star Realms little box game (see above).  I think I have played that physical copy … once?  

I was kind of interested in Star Trek: Star Realms because I love the Star Trek theme. The back of the box even claims there is a cooperative mode in here!

Let’s be 100% clear; what the box (see above) is referring to is a team-based mode, where teams of more than one person play against each other … the teams are cooperative within themselves, but this is NOT what we mean when we say a game is cooperative!! This base game is a team-based game; there is no cooperative mode.

And that’s why we are here! The expansion Borg: Invasion DOES indeed add solo and cooperative play to Star Trek: Star Realms!

Let’s take a look!!

Unboxing Star Trek: Star Realms

See game box above with Coke can for scale.

This is obviously a little nicer than my little Star Realms box! It has a full rulebooks! (The original Star Realms little box has a fold-out for a rulebook!! UGH!!!) It has a mat to keep things straight, and hit point tokens. Oh yes, and the cards.

This is a simple deck-building game: see decks above. The decks above are the four different factions in the game: Federation, Klingon, Romulon, and Dominion. Honestly, these are pretty much exactly the same four factions from the original Star Realms, but using Star Trek empires!

There’s also starting hands (Scouts and Raiders, see above). You use coin (gold coins on cards like Scouts generate coin) to buy new cards every turn, hoping to upgrade your deck. Each card does damage (see red 1 on Raider) to do damage to your opponent.

Each player starts with 50 authority. It’s weird! I would have called it Hit Points (because when you get to 0, you lose/die), but the game uses the more … thematic? less-damagey? more PC? term of authority. Weird. I will probably slip and call it Hit Points.

Me vs. Me

Everything I have seen leads me to believe that Star Trek: Star Realms is exactly like Star Realms (modulo the theme). After playing a Me vs Me game (a solo game where I play against myself by jumping from side to side), I can tell you with 100% certainty: this is Star Realms … with a different coat of paint, but the exact same game and cards underneath.

I didn’t do a card-by-card comparison, but everything I saw was an exact copy of a card from the original game. That’s a good thing in some ways, because it means the balance and original luster and gameplay of the original game has been preserved: it’s just now Star Trek.

Just so you know what you are getting.

Borg: Invasion Unboxing and Gameplay

Let’s be 100% clear!  A copy of Star Trek: Star Realms is required to play with Borg: Invasion! 

See box above with Coke can for scale.  Note that this is exactly the same size as the Star Trek: Star Realms game!

The Borg (which will be played by some AI rules) has its own mat: see above.  The Borg ship you start with depends on the number of players!  See above as the Borg Sphere (not as powerful as the Borg Cube) is the starting Borg ship for the solo or 2-player game; it has 25 Hit Points to start with.  There is a notion of starting hand, but that’s only is a player is playing the Borg! One player can play the Borg against the other players, but we are concentrating on the solo and cooperative rules where the Borg are played by an AI.

To the far-left of the Borg mat are the force-field cards!  When you hit the Borg with some damage, the Borg “modulates” their shields so that race can’t do damage next turn! Gulp!  This is super thematic as it reminds us of the Federation modulating the frequency of the their phasers to keep doing damage to the Borg!

The marauders are deemed “neutral” damage, and even they can be defended against! by the Borg!!  Luckily, if three force-fields come out, they will be dispersed at the end of a player’s turn.  So the force fields don’t stay out forever … but they are really annoying. 

The right side of the Borg mat has places for Hive Assimilation cards! Whenever the Borg assimilates a card, it activates a Hive Assimilation card of the appropriate color!  These are placed on the right side of the Borg mat and activated.

In the middle of the mat are all the cards the Borg have assimilated!  The number of cards is the value of the attack by the Borg that turn!  GULP! The more cards the Borg assimilate, the more damage it does every turn!

The Borg ship itself moves left-and-right on its mat; it’s trying to assimilate the “best” technology (where the card of the highest cost is considered the best).  Like many places in this game, if there are ties for a decision for the Borg (two ships cost the same) , the players get to choose. The Borg always assimilates the ship it’s over (it just tries to move one space towards the expensive), and that’s when the Hive Activation cards activate!  See above as the Borg assimilates the 7 cost card!

The card is then placed on the Borg ship!  It hasn’t FULLY assimilated yet!  If the players can do enough damage to the Ship being assimilated, they can detach it from the Borg ship and put it in their discard!  

The players have to be able to do enough damage (same as the cost of the card).  If the players can’t extricate the card from the Borg, it becomes fully assimilated!  From then on, it counts as another damage towards the players!

The Borg have another avenue to attack … they beam Drones (see above) to you!  About 30 of these cards are shuffled into the Market deck.  If you ever draw one, they immediately go the active players area!  As long as you keep drawing drones, they go to your area!  And they will immediately assimilate cards from your discard onto the Borg Ship!  If you have 5 drones land in your area, they will assimilate cards that cost 5 (starting with the biggest cost cards).   They steal from your discard!

You can fight the drones on your turn (one damage per drone) and they go to the scrap yard.

Now, it sounds like the Borg have WAAAAY too many advantages … and they do!  But, each player  also get two gambit cards. 

These gambit cards can come out at any time of the player choosing, so that they can use a special power.

Basically, the Borg attacks, then the players attack. The AI for the Borg is relatively straight-foward, if a little wordy (just to describe what’s pretty clear).

And yet, when the player takes a turn, it’s mostly like a normal turn of Star Realms! Attack the enemy (the Borg)! Buy ships! The difference is that they player can also attack the Drones (if any have beamed onto his space) OR try to de-assimilate a card that’s about to be assimilated!

Players go back and forth with the Borg until (a) either the Borg is defeated (and the player instantly win) or (b) all players are defeated (and the Borg win)! As long as one player survives to destroy the Borg, all players win!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent to pretty good.

This gets an B on the Chair Test. It fits well on the chair next to me, the font is a decent size,  but it is a little too “thematic” a font; I think it detracts from the rules just a little. Also, the pages are black with white text, which I usually hate for rulebooks.  This probably should be an A on the Chair Test, but the color choice  (white on black) and font choice drop it to a B.

The components pages are nice, but they tends to drift over a few pages, explaining as they go.

It works.

The set-up also works.

 

The rulebook works decently.  I would have made a few changes (for example: you discard all the Hive Integration cards at the start of the Borg turn … I would put that as an explicit step for this instead of it being buried in the description of the Hive Integration cards).  I think all the rules were here, but sometimes you had a took a little to find them.

Does this rulebook need an Index? I don’t think so, and it doesn’t have one so that’s fine.

 

Solo Play

So, we finally have a true solo mode for Star Realms! (I could argue that my iPad had Star Realms solo for years, but that’s an iPad thing, not a board game thing). Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

The solo mode is a true solo mode as you operate one position against the Borg! It’s you vs. the Borg!

Set-up is some work: you have to shuffle 30 drone cards into the market deck. I mean, the market card deck is pretty big (151 cards?) so shuffling in about 30 cards is kind of a lot of work! You need to make sure the drone cards get shuffled in well, and that requires some real good shuffling; I pile shuffle because I don’t know many people who can riffle shuffle 180 cards!

It takes a little bit of time to get into the groove of the game. The player turns are pretty quick (play some cards, buy some ships, do some damage), but the Borg turns are a little more work. Once you have played a number of Borg turns, it starts to go much quicker. At some point, both sides take their turns pretty quickly. The game gets into a good groove.

I have played a number of solo games, and it always feels like the Borg are just crushing you! See as the Borg assimilate a cost 6 card early in the game!  I can’t get that back early in the game!  “No!  The Borg is totally kicking my butt! I’m screwed!!!” 

After those initial few turns, you start to feel a little more power, but man, the Hive Integration cards really do a number on you in the first few turns.

After a few turns, you finally get your deck going and you feel like the tide is turning!  Well, usually.  Sometimes you just lose because the Borg does so much better … they got all the good cards!

To be fair, this arc really reminds me a lot of Star Realms solo mode on the iPad.  I have played SO MANY games of Star Realms that you think I’d always win, right?  Nope!  Sometimes you are just at the whim of luck and will get bad cards while the opponent gets good cards!  And it will be frustrating! But I keep playing because it’s fun.

After a few solo games, I can pronounce … I like this! I can see myself playing again!  The game feels very thematic as you watch the Borg assimilate cards, then try to wrest those cards from them before they get fully assimilated!  The drone cards in the market deck are an interesting twist, and feel thematic as Borg just “teleport” to your ship!  This game really embraced the Borg theme well.

One thing we like to talk about in a solo game is maintenance: how much maintenance does the solo player have to do in a game?  That usually divides into three sections:

  1. Set-up Maintenance
  2. Game Maintenance
  3. Tear-down Maintenance

The absolute WORST part of this solo game is tear-down!  Set-up is annoying, but not terrible.  The Borg turn maintenance, once the game gets going, is doable.  Once you get to tear-down, you may cry a little!  You have to separate all the drone cards from the market deck, separate the Borg Invasion cards from the Star Trek: Star Realms cards and generally sort a lot of cards.  

Sleeve Your Cards!

This is deck-building game; you should sleeve your cards,  I played my solo games without sleeving, but after touching the cards a lot, I realized I should probably sleeve them,  See above as Teresa sleeves them.

The Borg: Invasion cards fit in sleeved … barely. See above.

The Star Trek: Star Realms cards ONLY fit if you remove the insert.  If you sleeve, you will have to probably nuke the insert.

Cooperative Play: Pregame

Before we played a cooperative game, we did a quick head-to-head game (with two people per side managing one deck); this is the way the original Star Realms is meant to be played, and the easiest way to learn the flavor of the game.   None of the my friends had ever played ANY kind of Star Realms!  Granted, they are all experienced players, but they don’t know this variety of deck-building that Star Realms  offers.

It was a pretty quick game (as are most Star Realms games) and my friends got the feel of this deck-building game before jumping into the cooperative game.

I think I recommend playing a quick head-to-head game of Star Realms to learn the system before you jump into the solo or cooperative game.  It just makes it easy to absorb all the new rules that the Borg: Invasion introduces if you already know the flavor of gameplay.  And it’s quick enough, you don’t have an excuse not to!

Cooperative Play

We played a 4-Player cooperative game of Borg: Invasion.  The games scales simply: when the Borg does damage, it does the same amount of damage to everyone!  Thats’ really the only scaling the game has; no other mechanisms really need to change.

There were a bunch of things we noticed.  

  1.  4 players works, but we feel like it is not the best player count. The game stretches out a little longer and it does take a while to play.  We kind of think that 2 or 3 might be better.
  2. Having more players definitely helped with the load and keeping the game running!  Andrew managed the force fields, Sara managed the Hive Reactions, Teresa handled hit points and counters, and I ran the Borg.  This shared load made it a lot easier to keep the game running.  It also helped out a lot when we had to tear-down!  The worst part, the tear-down, was made a lot better by simply having everyone sort and shuffle together.  It may sounds silly to dwell on this, but as someone who tends to always set-up and tear-down games, it’s really nice when the players all help.
  3. There was frustration.  Sara in particular kind of got shut-out of her deck (the Drones kept stealing her tech) and didn’t have a great game.  The force-fields can be really frustrating in the beginning of the game!  You can’t do anything to stop the drones or assimilation or anything because you have such a weak deck!  Everyone was surprised by the game arc; The Borg tromps you, and if you can survive and build a deck … you have a chance!  This is a very different arc than many cooperative games!
  4. There aren’t a lot of cooperative mechanisms. .  There aren’t that many mechanisms in the game to help each other!  You can’t kill drones in someone else’s area, you can’t share cards during normal gameplay, you can’t share healing.  In fact, the only real mechanism in the game for helping others is when you die: You are allowed to throw one card at someone! This game is very multiplayer solitaire.
  5. There is some high-level strategy.   We did notice some high-level discussions emerge as we played. “Don’t do damage this turn!  I have to kill the drones!”  Honestly, almost all the discussion centered on the force-fields!  We would discuss when/why someone would do damage so that we wouldn’t get locked out on damaging things!  It was a little surprising that so much of our conversation was on those (very annoying) force-fields.

Although the game is pretty multi-player solitaire, there was lots of discussion (esp. on the force-fields) and the load was shared well among all the players.   The arc of the game was strange and different for a cooperative game, but it was interesting.

In general, I think the game was a hit, if a little long and a few moments of frustration.

House Rule

The Gambit cards are really cool, and generally have an effect on how you play the game, but you really don’t have any choice on what you get!  You just get 2 gambits and that’s it!  I think a much more fun house rule is that you get 4 Gambit cards (see above) and get to choose 2!   It just makes it feel like you have more choice, and maybe you can even get Gambit cards that suit your play style a little more.

Conclusion

Star Trek: Star Realms is a great game, as it’s just the great Star Realms with a Star Trek theme pasted on. Up until now, you have no way of playing solo unless you got the iPad! Now, with Borg: Invasion, you can fend off the Borg either solo or cooperatively! EDIT: I think there are some ways to play the original Star Realms is solo/cooperative, but this is the first solo/co-op for Star Trek: Star Realms.

I think the Borg: Invasion is a fantastic expansion! Sometimes I worry that “expansions that make a game solo/cooperative” either do too much (so there’s too many rules: Dice Throne Adventures, I am looking at you…) or do too little (so the game is just some shared victory points: Amber Mines, I am looking at you…). This expansion adds just enough rules to make the game thematic, challenging, and interesting but not so many rules that the game becomes unwieldy! There seem to be just enough new rules, and the game just seems soooo thematic!

The cooperative game is very much multiplayer solitaire, as there aren’t really any cooperative mechanisms for helping each other out (just one: when you die!). Having said that, the high-level discussions about the force-fields and the Market and the drones really do seem to keep everyone engaged and caring about other players turns, so there is some cooperation that definitely emerges.

Solo: I’d probably give this a 7.5 or 8/10. Cooperatively about 7.5 or 8/10. The only reason this isn’t a little higher is that there is a little frustration that emerges in the early game that can be debilitating; that game arc is weird, but still interesting! I suppose if embrace that early-game frustrating arc, this could be an 8.5 or even a 9. It’s so thematic! Just like an episode of Star Trek with the Borg!

Neat game. Fantastic Expansion.

Tales Of The Arabian Nights: 40th Anniversary Edition Review: There’s a Solo Mode??? And If You Squint … A Cooperative Mode???

Tales of the The Arabian Nights is a game I both hate and love. When it’s at its worst, it’s random with banal crap happening to you that you have almost no control over; it’s long and tedious. At its best, it creates some of the most memorable stories (with laughter and tears) on game nights that you’ll remember forever. It’s the best of times that I remember, and so that’s why I chose to back the 40th edition on Gamefound (see above) when it came out.

The original edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights (see above) got quite a bit of play back in my playgroups in Las Cruces. And at first, I hated it. It seemed so random; things would just happen to you!! If you were “lucky” (if you had the right skill at the right time), … things would just go your way. But, if you were unlucky, your entire story became a slog as you failed check after check. If, however, you just realize this is an adventure that “just happens to you”, and you just enjoy it for what it is, you can really have a good time. But ya, you could still have a very bad game. And it could still suck.

BUT in order for this to be a good experience, everyone has to know what they are getting into, and how random this, and how you just “gotta grin and bear it” sometimes. If you play with someone who is too serious, or who get aggravated by random stuff, or who just think “this is unfair” … you will not have a good time. Everyone has to be in on the joke. And you kinda have to be in the mood for it. That one person who doesn’t enjoy this will bring this game down very quickly. So, in some ways, this is a very brittle game because one player can easily ruin it. But if you get the right group, with the right frame of mind, with the right mood, with the right sense of humor, this can be a magical Arabian Night!

Does It Need An App?

So, this is a storybook game with a great physical storybook (see above and below). You read lots and lots of flowery text to each other.

I remember when we used to play the original version of Tales of Arabian Nights, and we’d all say “Ah, I think this game would so much better if it had an App. These books are huge! It’s so hard to remember how to look stuff up! And there’s some fiddliness! It would be better as an App!” Sure, an App could make looking up the text simpler. Sure, an App could handle the fiddliness. Sure, an App might make this easier to haul around if there were no books. But now, after reflecting back to the original version and the new version: it’s better with the books.

The books invest people into the game; people have to dig into the book and get involved! It’s a commitment to consult the grid and find the right entry! The person on your left and the person on your right are helping you look-up things in physical books! You make the choices, but everyone is staying involved! There’s a certain sweat equity in looking up and reading passages from a book;“This had better be good, darn it, because I am doing some work to make sure it moves forward!” You are invested because you are making the choices, and your neighbors are invested because they are consulting grids and charts! Everyone is invested in your ridiculous story!

It’s the physical investment in books and charts that makes this game magic. That’s the magic word; invested. You are physically and mentally and emotionally invested.

Don’t get me wrong; some of my favorite storybook games have Apps: Forgotten Waters, Freelancers, Wandering Galaxy are all excellent storybook games that take great advantage of the electronic genre with voice acting, dynamically generated content, and constantly improving stories!

Yet, Plaid Hat games did go out of their way to make physical copies of their storybooks (see above). Why? Because there is a certain magic to the physical books.

Solo Mode

Crazily enough, they made a solo mode for this game. Whaaaaat? Let’s be 100% clear here: the original Tales of the Arabian Nights did not have a solo mode! And it seems weird to have a solo mode because the fun of the multi-player game is the shared reading and shared experiences in this world. But, I think the randomness of the base game is just too much for a solo player. In the multi-player game, we can laugh at the stupid and random things that happen to each other (“Remember the time that Efreet enslaved you? That was hilarious!” “Yes It was!” ), but somehow that seems less fun in a solo mode.

So, PlayToZ wrote some solo adventures and added it to the box! The solo adventures come in their own booklet (see above) with about 15+ directed adventures. Note my use of the word directed—you still explore this world, but there’s a real underlying and scripted story that unfolds for each adventure in the game. To be clear, there are still plenty of random moments (as you still take some turns like the original game), but about half of the game is a story that’s really unfolding (from the Solo Tales book) and the other half of the game are the silly and random stuff from the base game (from the main Storybook).

My first adventure felt like I was playing a novel! The writing seemed quite good and the story was engaging! This was more like a Choose Your Own Adventures tale with real story and real writing!

The only problem with the solo mode is that the stories are limited: there are only 15+ adventures in the Solo Storybook (see above). Sure, that’s probably enough for most people, but it can limit replayability. The good news is that the story path you take does change if you make different choices, so you can play an episode again and get a different story line, a different timeline. Anyways, after 15+ stories, I will probably forget them and so I could start over. If you have an eidetic memory, you won’t be able to play the stories over without some repeats.

I am shocked this has a solo mode. But it really works well.

Base Game

So, this is a cooperative games blog, but the base game, the game everyone knows and loves, is not cooperative; it’s competitive! Tales of the Arabian Nights is a competitive game about who can get the right glory and destiny (two kinds of victory points) and make it back to Baghdad! “But Rich, you can’t talk about games that aren’t cooperative! That’s off brand for you!! You only talk about cooperative games! And sometime solo games!”

Ah, but there’s two issues here I want to address;

  1. The game is cooperative in the sense in that you are having a shared experience and working together to read the adventures out of the book.
  2. With the advent of the solo adventures, you can make this game truly cooperative by playing team solo: play the solo mode as a group pretending to be the solo player!

Granted, the base game actually has a lot of take-that mechanisms (“Choose a reaction for your opponent!“ “If you have a disease, you can give it to others!”), so I have to admit it’s not really cooperative. Okay, you got me there. But the reading of the storybook gives you that shared experience which feels like a cooperative game.

But the team solo is truly cooperative! You can play through the solo adventures as a team! The solo mode is a little clunky, as the solo player has to choose reactions, look-up in the grid, find the storybook entry, read it to himself, then “pretend” not to see too much on the page (so he doesn’t cheat). With a group of friends playing team solo, all this maintenance (like the base game) can be shared.

So, ya. The team solo is totally a fake thing that’s not in the game; it’s a house rule we made up. But it really works as a cooperative game.

The Base Competitive Game

Like I said, I love and hate the base game. And me and my friends played a competitive game of Tales of Arabian Nights the way it should be played … and I loved it and hated it.

I love it because I loved all the shared mechanisms, the cooperation, the interaction as everyone stays involved. See a 3-Player game above: everyone is involved in reading , listening, and consulting.

And yet, I still kinda hated it. The randomness from the original game is still there if you play the competitive game. It’s still goofy, it’s still fun, you still have to be in the right state of mind, and I still loved it, but I still kinda hated the randomness of the base game. I would maybe give the base competitive game a 6 or 7/10 … it’s very random. But still fun.

Team Solo!

We played as Team Solo one night! All 4 of us playing the solo mode as a group! What happened was that we simply played the game like the solo game, but the books and active player would rotate through everybody. I thought the game would be more cooperative, but what ended up happening was more that the active player tended to make “the choice” and we’d just say “I don’t know if that’s a good idea …” or “That sounds great!”

But, like I’ve said so many times in this review, just the act of consulting charts and reading books is very cooperative! So, instead of inflecting disease upon our fellows, we participate in the shared story … with one person being in the hot seat every turn “making decisions”.

I personally prefer Team Solo mode much more than the base competitive game, but some of my friends actually prefer the base competitive game (“because there are more choices”). So, I had more fun this week (Team Solo!) and Andrew and Teresa had more fun last week (competitive mode). In fact, Teresa likes Tales of Arthurian Knights better in the cooperative mode!

I think the team solo works for a cooperative mode (I liked it), but Tales of Arthurian Knights (see review here) is a stronger cooperative game.

Conclusion

So, this 40th edition of the game is really nice. The base game essentially feels the same as the original Tales of the Arabian Nights! If you play in the original mode, this still feels like the original game. Like I said, it’s a game I both love and hate. If you have a group in the right mood with the right sense of humor, the crazy and random things that happen to you can be hilarious! It can also be very brittle: a single player who isn’t getting it can bring down an entire game, or too many random events can just make the game feel unfun.

The solo mode is probably the most surprising addition to the game, partly because it works so well! It takes the base gameplay and adds direction and true story to the game, giving the solo player a very satisfying experience! I was also very impressed by the writing in the solo mode stories!

But, if you squint, you can also make this a cooperative game! The team solo idea works reasonably well; we tried it out one game and were happy with the gameplay. If you want Tales of Arabian Nights to be a truly cooperative game, you can do it!! Just play the solo mode as team solo … but it wasn’t everyone’s favorite way to play.

If you think you will hate the basic ideas (reading from storybooks to each other, suffering random effects as you play, even in the solo and cooperative mode), you will hate this; you know you. But if this idea of a storybook game with crazy things and lots of reading appeals to you, I think you can have some amazing experiences! And if your group is looking for a little more story, a little more cohesion, a little more cooperation, the solo mode can bring it … for both the solo player or team solo.

9 out of 10 for me for everything this does for solo! This is a fantastic production! I love it! Just be aware of what this is; you may hate it. I honestly would give this a 7/10 if it were only the original base game, but the new solo mode really expands the ways you can play the game! Solo! Cooperative! Competitive! And I liked the cooperative mode of team solo, but my friends still like the original competitive mode better.. as broken and random as that can be.

If you just want a good cooperative storybook game, Tales of Arthurian Knights is better. For a more directed solo game, Tales of Arabian Nights is better. For the competitive game, I think whichever theme appeals to you is probably better.