Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
One of the best things about being in the tabletop media space is that I get a lot of chances to see games move through long, detailed development cycles. From friends and colleagues who design games, to trying games in various stages of development at conventions, to previewing prototypes prior to crowdfunding campaigns, it can be a blast to see a game’s journey from initial concept to final production.
As a fan of the economic market simulation game Brick & Mortar, I connected with that game’s designer and founder of publisher Octoraffe Games, Nick McCollum. Nick likes the kinds of games I like, and I thought Brick & Mortar was an outstanding first design. During visits to other conventions, I spent time with Nick while he was working through the development of Octoraffe’s next game, Bagged & Boarded…and during that time, I have now had the chance to play the game four times at various player counts and see the reaction of about a dozen different people during my play sessions.
Now that Bagged & Boarded is ready for its crowdfunding campaign, I can confirm what I knew during my second play of the game: Bagged & Boarded is very good. It might even be a hair better than Brick & Mortar (sacrilege!), but I want to see if any final changes come to the game in its final retail version before making that commitment. And even in its prototype form, the art is a big winner.
This is My Kind of Convention
Bagged & Boarded is a 2-6 player action selection and programming game. In a game that feels like it is firmly set in “the past” (let’s go with something like the 1960s or 70s), players take on the roles of kids trying to build the most valuable comic book collection, right down to the penny. Literally. The game’s financial backbone is built around buying bargain bin comics for a nickel then selling them at a profit for 10 or 20 cents (and hopefully more) later in the game.
Bagged & Boarded is essentially a “buy low, sell high” game. While players will usually find other ways to make money, winners in my experience have done their best work by finding deals to buy the highest-value comics or selling valuable copies of comics later for a big payday.
In each round, players have 12 cubes that represent the time they will spend over the course of each day taking actions. All the actions fit the game’s theme. Spending time to visit the local comic book store, buying and selling issues of various comics, or hitting the comic convention to get comics autographed are actions that take up time. Players have to efficiently use their time to accomplish as much as they can each day, which might include using a few cubes to get back home in time to go to bed early, so that they can take the first action of the next day to get ahead of their competition.
Players will be fighting over the comic books from as many as six different fictional publishers, each of which produce comics featuring four different fictional heroes. The comics form the game’s core and this is the best reason to play Bagged & Boarded…the cards are hilarious, well-illustrated, and feature names that I’m still laughing about as I write this review. “Could you hand me issue #4 of Project: Quokkamole from the Reserve Bagged area?”, a player might say.
“HA! I just sold my autographed issue of Tatwoman for a dollar!”, another might exclaim.
There are 24 comic heroes in the game, and between the plays-on-words and the associated cover images, there are sure to be big moments. The artwork by Richard Walker does an exceptional job of drawing players into the game’s world.
Actions are simple. Players first seed the board with their time markers, selecting or boosting one action at a time to either select it or make it more valuable. Then, in action order from action #1 through #13, players resolve game effects. This usually makes turns a snap and pushes the game’s clock up a bit, with plenty of simultaneous play or more efficient ways to resolve effects that only involve a small portion of the players.
The game clock is unique heroes, which represent unique comics that have been displayed as a set of 3+ issues featuring a hero in front of all players. When a certain number of heroes have been displayed, based on player count, players get one more day (round) to take actions before play wraps up.
Airtight
Bagged & Boarded is very, very solid. It helps that the Octoraffe team has tested the design across hundreds of demo plays at shows for the last 2+ years. That means that rough edges have been smoothed over, and we are left with a game that very adeptly simulates the experience of being a comic book collector. It’s also an experience that can end up being just as punishing, economically, as Brick & Mortar. (It will feel strange to tell friends that you just got blown off the table by a player who won with a score of $9.40. Trust me, it will!)
The prototype feels like a done deal. The graphic design is excellent, particularly the iconography reminders living in all the right places around the board. The simple player mat reminds players of how end-game scoring works, and also helps players keep their loose comics and their bagged comics separate. The card art, as noted, is gorgeous. The rulebook does a great job of riding the line between information manual and living advertisement, with plenty of fake ads that capture the essence of a mail-order reward system. There seem to be zero loose bits or edge cases…the current version of the game is plenty streamlined, leaving us with only the best bits to explore.
In the right hands, Bagged & Boarded can be played in about an hour. After doing two plays with Nick, I did two more plays with friends in Chicago (one game with three players, another with five), and the five-player game took just under 90 minutes. That game featured a high volume of questions as it was a first play for three of the other four players, and we still wrapped up in an hour and a half.
Paired with Brick & Mortar, Octoraffe is two-for-two in my household. When Bagged & Boarded fulfills its campaign in 2026, I expect this to be one of the top games of the year. And with their next game, Rat Race, on the horizon, Octoraffe is officially a publisher to watch.
