Stack Nabbit – Justin Bell
Stack Nabbit, another quick card game from the folks who gave us Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, is so light on theme and setting that there’s no backstory regarding what players are doing here at all. Drawing cards to determine which point cards you’ll keep, and which cards you might steal from a neighbor, comprises most of the rules here, as players try to bank as many cards as possible before the draw deck runs out.
What is Stack Nabbit? It’s not quite a push-your-luck game, although there is a hint of that when players try to draw a card that matches one of the cards already in their play area. And the rules around stealing only affect the players to one’s immediate left or right…so, in a three-player game, everyone can rob everyone else, but in a five-player game, you can’t do much at all against a player sitting across the table. The rules are simple enough to teach to a grandparent, and we did just that for two, quick back-to-back plays that totaled about 25 minutes. But even that grandparent, who won the second play, didn’t seem that interested in playing it again. Taco Cat Games has pushed out some of our favorite rules-light gaming experiences, so we’ll pivot back to those before returning to Stack Nabbit.
Ease of entry?
★★★★★ – No sweat
Would I play it again?
★★☆☆☆ – Would play again but would rather play something else
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For All Mankind – Justin Bell
Many days past my first play, I am still torn on For All Mankind, a space race resource collection game that alternatively feels like CATAN, Munchkin, and Sidereal Confluence, all in a four-player-only package that wraps up in about 75 minutes…and that includes the teach.
Players each have a resource generator on the planet Earth, and spend turns exploring other planets and establishing colonies to build an engine that spits out even more of the game’s four different resources (water, fuel, oxygen, and iron). Research is also an option, to gain minor but meaningful technology advantages, and players can also buy espionage cards that break the game’s core rules. Almost everything in the game can be traded, so with a group of dealmakers, For All Mankind could look a lot different than when playing with folks more accustomed to hoarding their own goodies to achieve the requisite 10 victory points to win. Scoring is simple: players place a ship in their color on the main board whenever they build a colony or take a new technology, with three “Longest Road”-style milestones also available to the player that meets certain conditions before anyone else.
The Munchkin comparison? I hate games where frontrunners are mercilessly targeted as they approach a game’s victory point threshold to ensure games keep going. In our first play of For All Mankind, it was comedy to watch players use Tactical Nukes (cards in the espionage deck that can be played after being activated) to take out a competitor’s ship any time someone reached seven or eight points. And, like base CATAN, no one trades with players who are close to winning, limiting that portion of play. The production here is gorgeous, with planet standees that can be inserted into slots on the main solar system map. I like the trade environment created by the fragile alliances formed during play. But the final third of the game becomes a heads-down race to hoard enough fuel to explore outer planets and destroy the infrastructure of the current frontrunner…”do, undo” was a common theme for our final 3-4 rounds. And while For All Mankind can be played with less than four players, a bot stands in anytime the player count falls below four, meaning that For All Mankind technically can be played solo…as long as you are cool managing three other bot players. (Not for me.) For All Mankind does a few things well, but as a person who still (still!) plays CATAN: Cities & Knights regularly, I’ll stick with that one for now.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★☆☆ – Wouldn’t suggest it, but would happily play it
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SPELL – Justin Bell
Over a recent lunch break, I knocked out two plays of the abstract 1-2 player puzzle title SPELL, designed by the same man who designed or co-designed Koinobori and Phoenix New Horizon, Jesús Fuentes (who goes by the pseudonym “Chuz”). SPELL puts two players into the shoes of sorcerers who can levitate and move tiles in a 4×4 grid of spaces (with only 15 of those 16 spaces filled with tiles). Over the course of six rounds, players will move tiles and their own mage tokens around the grid, flip tiles in their player color from inactive to active, and find creative ways to match polyomino shapes on reward cards known as spells, which trigger additional bonuses.
SPELL does a few really interesting things, particularly in the back half of each (very short) game. This leads to a few fun combos on turns four, five and six to score enough points to either trigger an immediate end (16 points) or end up with more points than your rival. The solo is very easy to administer, and as a 15-minute brain burn, SPELL is a good time. The difficulty feels hard even on SPELL’s normal difficulty, and the shape building required to get a player’s mage token in the right place for the right timing feels very satisfying, even if the ramp-up is a tad slow. For the abstract connoisseur, SPELL is worth a look.
(Disclosure: Meeple Mountain contributor Andrew Lynch is credited with the rules translation for SPELL.)
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★★★★☆ – Would like to play it again
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Rainbow Blvd – Justin Bell
Rainbow Blvd is set in a world where rainbows come in three arch sizes (small, medium, large) and six colors of rainbow pieces. Cute 3D-printed cloud tokens are used to hold rainbows in place, and a board with rivers, parks and industrial districts make it somewhat easy to tell where new rainbows can be placed. A market track represents the current value of each color, and as pieces are covered, those values move down…meanwhile, the value of new pieces on top moves up (visible pieces are more valuable). Players serve as architects who must build rainbows using blueprints from a draw deck, and players have to use the resource of time—instead of cash—to determine their output for a round, from building different pieces to taking new contracts.
I think Rainbow Blvd is aiming for a spot on your list of market manipulation games…but there are no shares, nor any money involved. There’s only a chance to score contracts by timing their play based on wildly fluctuating values of each color. Every time someone builds, a color’s value changes, sometimes two colors at once. That ultimately makes building (and scoring one point per completed blueprint card) much less valuable than a completely random system where contracts are the most valuable thing in the game (valued at 1-4 points, based on the complication listed on each card’s color values). This gets worse when considering that the end scores also include milestone scoring tied to completed contracts. That also means that the absolute worst thing you can do—in a game about building rainbows–is to build rainbows, because it is much more valuable to let other players do that and score a points bonanza based on those contract cards.
The worst offender? Rainbow Blvd is just never that much fun. Many—most?—turns in our play sounded just like this: “I’ll spend one time to place a small blue half-arc over there.” Blueprints are pretty bland—score this card if a rainbow on an industrial space has a purple piece in its middle layer and a red piece on the bottom, for example, and the prototype cards are mostly devoid of artwork at this stage. Because unbuilt blueprints are worth negative points by the end of play, you also can’t afford to just ignore the building action. But across three rounds (in a four-player game, scaling to player count), the smarter move was to just take one blueprint per round after the first, and let some other sucker waste their day scoring minimal points while other players used their time to collect contract cards—which have no penalty for being unfulfilled—and hope that at some point, your contracts come up aces, like the value of yellow stock hitting 10 or that blue is more valuable than red, which is more valuable than green, to score three points instead of a measly one. Rainbow Blvd is on crowdfunding as of this publication date, and the designer shared that the rules are a work in progress. But the game is a long way from being interesting.
Ease of entry?
★★★★☆ – The odd bump or two
Would I play it again?
★☆☆☆☆ – Would play again but will cry about it
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Aquaria – Justin Bell
Our friends at Capstone sent a review copy of the Tomáš Holek design Aquaria a few months ago, and this one slipped through the cracks a bit since it arrived around the time I was navigating Gen Con. I recently got the game to the table for a solo play, to prep for a game night with my review crew. Aquaria falls into a strange slot in our hobby: it’s generally solid, has a few fun mechanics, and is a game I recommend…and after even the single solo play, I’m not sure I need to personally see it ever again.
Players are building an aquarium (easily my first game building an aquarium!!), and need to maintain a clean tank and add some of the best clownfish, anemone, and schools you can find to score the most points through four rounds. Despite the setting, Aquaria is an engine-building action selection game, where players take simple actions but need to be mindful of managing resources like food for their fish, maintaining clean water to ensure their fish have the right amount of oxygen, and even keeping their tank’s filter up to snuff. The layers here are tied to dropping fish into the tanks, but this is a Euro, so moving up two different tracks laden with bonuses while keeping up with a bonus component tied to taking actions before other players also becomes important.
Aquaria was fun, and very easy to administer solo because there’s very little interaction between players. (Aquaria, released by Delicious Games, features a solo mode and additional game development from studio head Vladimir Suchy.) But Aquaria feels like it is one round too long, as the points buffet gets massive as one builds out their 4×4 grid of fish cards. Finspan does the marine life tableau game better than Aquaria does, although I enjoyed the mechanic of moving dials around at the end of each row and column to trigger one-time bonuses each round. I think this would be a very long game with four players, so if you are going to dive into the ocean, come alone, or maybe bring a single friend along with you.
Ease of entry?
★★★☆☆ – There were a few questions
Would I play it again?
★★★☆☆ – Wouldn’t suggest it, but would happily play it
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