In order to promote discussion on Lemmy, I’m doing micro-reviews for my favorite boardgames by genre. Please join in, provide your reviews, flame me for my terrible taste or to suggest a category for tomorrow!

Today's game is Solenia

Score: 8/10

Positives:

• Easy to teach

• Feels like a classic euro game, with very unique elements

• Very clever card use

Negatives:

• You can get really screwed with unfortunate card draw

• Low player count is better, in my opinion

The review

Solenia is a planet that no longer has a day-light cycle. Instead, half of the world lives in darkness and the other in constant sunlight. Your job is to go around the world and deliver goods to both emispheres. People in day-cities will want goods only available in the dark half and vice-versa. All players control a single airship that will be going around the world, collecting and delivering goods.

Image credit to Cindy Hauri on bgg, source here

During your turn you will have 3 cards in your hand and you will play one of them. You place the card in any place adjacent to the airship (airship space included). All cards contain a number on the top, a hole in the middle and a bonus portion on the bottom. When you place the card on the map, a resource will be visible through the hole and you will get X amount of that resource, X being the number of the top the card. When you place a card with the number 0 on the top, you don't get any resources but the airship moves forward! After the airship moves, the last portion of the board is removed, flipped and placed as the first portion of the board. If it was a night portion, it will now be a light portion! This is a fantastic idea to simulate movement around the globe. If any cards were on the portion of the board that was removed, their owners gain the "bonus portion" of the cards. Typically these will be aditional resources. The game ends when you run out of cards.

So how do you get points? Similar to other games such as Century: Spice Road, you have objectives tiles that you must fulfill. There are always 5 day-city objectives and 5 dark-city objectives. In order to complete a dark-city objective you must deliver the depicted goods to a dark-city (eg: 1 wheat, 1 wood), and in order to complete a light-city objective you must deliver the depicted goods to a light-city (eg: 2 stones, 1 water).

I think Solenia is yet another hidden gem. The game is very light, short, approachable to people from all ages and feels like a proper euro. This is an excelent gateway game to euro games. The theme is fantastic, going around the world is implemented in a really creative way. The gameplay itself is not particularly revolutionary, fetch and deliver goods has been done a thousand times. The game has merit on the simple way it delivers its premise. The cards with a hole in a middle? I had never seen that before, what a clever and simple way to give me a meaningful choice. When you first move forward with the airship and flip the last portion of the board feels like an Eureka moment "oh wow, we're actually moving around the globe". It's a bit boring when everyone decides to move forward at the same time and you have to do it over and over, for that reason I would recommend lower player counts, 3 at most.

I don't know why this game didn't take off, I think it checks all the boxes for a successful game. It's pretty, light, enjoyable, on the cheaper side, unique. I play a lot of euro games and obviously this isn't going to feel as satisfying as a Brass: Birmingham game... but my mother isn't going to play Brass, is she? This? This she can easily play and enjoy. Definitely worth checking out.

Context Information

• Number of plays: 9

• Suggested player count: 2-3 players at most

• Average playtime: 30 mins

• Win-rate: 66.67%

• Dice-tower video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsTgVa0pNeo

Honorable mentions

• Century: Spice Road - I can’t believe this game is only rank 308. Engine building at family weight? Count me iiin.

• Furnace - This game feels way heavier than it's weight implies. The rules are simple but the gameplay feels deep. Still, it's a fantastic engine-building game with a VERY clever bidding mechanic. I think Furnace is a better game than Solenia, but I don't think my family would be able to enjoy it.

• Chinatown - My friends tell me that this game transforms me into a different person. Not sure I would call it an euro game but I had to put it somewhere. This is a negotiating game, you're going to spend the entire game trading locations with other people or selling them for money or both. Check this one out!

I heard a lot of people say that the Duel variant is the better game.

There is also 7 Wonders or Agricola with full games and duel version. Which one do you prefer?

What did you play in the last week. Recommendations, warnings and experiences are all intersting!

Some games come with gigantic stacks of cards that I find hard to mix with card-friendly methods. Games like Ark Nova, Clank, Hogwarts Battle have unmanageable decks but I hate bending the cards.

Whats the best way?

This obscure Winsome Games offering is not their usual type. You acquire shares of train companies, but instead of building track and running trains on a map, you play train cards to city columns. You can run down your opponent's stocks by running trains - although I worry this is underpowered. It's an ingenious little system, but it's OOP, the components are print-and-play quality and the rules are poor. Deserves a print-and-play re-release.

Finally got the Wingspan Nesting Box. It fits all the current expansions and has room for the future. I swear it must clock in at like 20lbs.

Still a little annoyed that all the Wingspan stuff that holds sleeved cards won’t fit the mote or less widely available and “standard” sleeves (Wingspan cards are not the same size as many other games) but thats not really anything a little 3D printing can’t fix.

What is this?

This is a roundup of new crowdfunding projects launched last week, as well as projects that end the coming week. I have previously posted these lists on /r/boardgames, but I wanted to offer this as an alternative format for those who don't want to use Reddit.

Note that I'm still experimenting with what platforms and formats I'm going to use. I will at least be posting these on Mastodon and Discord on a regular basis for the time being.

This week I'm however also playing around with Lemmy/Kbin, so I'll see how it goes.

I'm currently enjoying Jaws of the Lion and is eyeing Middara next.

I'm looking for something can put on top of an existing table that would turn it into a nice surface to play a boardgame on? I've looked and I see a lot of poker table toppers, but not as much stuff for general purpose boardgaming.

I just finished 3d printing a small boardgame table from the StageTop Kickstarter. I wanted to have a portable surface I could use for playing boardgames on a couch, and can then move to a table, and so far it's working pretty well. It has a little bit of flex, but not enough to move any of the pieces.

Here's the link in case anyone is interested (I'm not affiliated with them, besides backing the Kickstarter):

https://www.myminifactory.com/campaigns/stagetop-the-3d-printed-gaming-table-1550

In case you didn't know, beehaw.org decided to defederate both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. You can read about it here. Essentially it means beehaw.org users can no longer see my posts/comments, it's like they shadow banned my entire server. Thanks to @donio@feddit.de for messaging me about it. I have created this account on feddit.de just to post these reviews, hopefully it reaches our fellow boardgamers in all servers.

Today's game is an underrated gem: Menara

TL;DR

Score: 8.5

Positives

• Very easy to teach

• Cooperative

• Fun for both casual & experienced players

• Sliding difficulty is well ballanced

• Everyone wants to take a picture at the end of the game

Negatives

• Table bumps can prematurely end the end, it's always sad

• Can be frustrating if one person wants to play "mission impossible" on every turn

The review

Menara is one of my most successful gateway games and I definitely recommend it to everyone who enjoys dexterity games.

At the start of the game you randomly draw 3 odd-shapped tiles, called Temple Floors, to create level 0. The Temple Floors have small colored circles on them. During the course of the game you will be placing pillars on these circles. Red pillar goes on red circle, and so on. The objective of the game is to end the game with 4 levels of temple floors, excluding level 0.

Every player has 4 colored columns (depends on number of players and difficulty) and there is a community camp which hosts 6 columns. At the beginning of your turn you can swap your columns with the community camp as you wish. It's important to coordinate with your team and try to distribute the colors among everyone else. Then, you draw a card from the easy, medium or hard pile and perform the corresponding action. The most common action is fairly simple: place a column. All you have to do is place one of your columns in a base with the same color. Easy, right? Well, I'll let you discover the tricky ones by yourself :) If all the circles of your temple floor are occupied you stop your turn and place a new Temple Floor on top of whatever columns you want. Hopefully you added a new level and you're closer to the goal!

At this point you're probably thinking this game is super easy. I assure you, it is not. The game does not end after you made it to level 4. Oh, no. During the course of the game you'll find that you draw a card and the action is impossible to perform. Maybe it asks you to put 2 columns but unfortunately you don't have circles matching your column's colors. Then, the target goal increases by one level. Now you need to make it to level 5. The game only ends when you're either: out of cards, out of columns or out of temple floors. You lose the game if any floor falls.

This game is currently ranked #783 but I think it's one of the best dexterity games out there. It's very easy to teach, very intuitive. You draw a card and place a couple of columns. Easy. What sets it appart from the competition is the cooperative aspect of the game. It REALLY makes everyone very engaged with the game. No one wants to see the whole structure fall and everyone is trying their best. Quarterback/alpha gaming is basically not a thing. People can throw you hints on how do balance the floors or something but you're the one who's gonna have to do it, no one can play for you. The game get increasingly tense with time as the strugle starts to wiggle, everyone starts like controling their breathing to prevent anything from falling. It feels great to succeed in this game and at the end of the game everyone is gonna take a picture of what you built!

Context Information

I only log games with scores so unfortunately I don't have any logs for Menara

Suggested player count: 2-3 players is best, 4 players is also great but you wait longer

Win-rate: Well below 50%

Honorable mentions

• I'd really like to try Crokinole, seems like something I'd enjoy. Unfortunately it's super expensive :(

I have bunch of games with miniatures made of single colour plastics which is a bit boring. I did buy a Warhammer paint kit to eventually try to paint some but so far I was too lazy (or scared? 😅) to try.

Do you colour your miniatures? If yes, what do you do to them - nice single colour coating/detailed multicolor paint job/...?

Edit: "derailed" -> "detailed"

The first game just got nominated for "Kennerspiel des Jahres"

1-8 players (or 1-16 combined with the first)

45min

Really interesting 3d printing project. Not mine, I just got sent the link and felt like I had to share it.

1-5 players Tile placement 10-40 min

In order to promote discussion on Lemmy, I'm doing micro-reviews for my favorite boardgames by genre. Please join in, provide your reviews, flame me for my terrible taste or to suggest a category for tomorrow!

Today's game is Azul. I won't be doing a best abstract game list because Azul is also my favorite abstract strategy game.

TL;DR

Score: 9/10

Positives

• Easy to teach

• Very nice tactile experience

• Interesting gameplay for both casual and heavier gamers

• Fast turns, low-ish downtime

• Drafting tiles is fun

Negatives

• You have to fill the factories with new tiles every round

• Some people like to "hate draft" (ie: take a piece that is useless to you but very useful to your opponent) and not everyone enjoys that interaction

• I wish the board was double-layered, especially the scoring part of the board. It's very easy to misplace your scoring cube by accident.

The review

Family games are very important to me. They are not the type of game I enjoy the most, but it's pretty much the only type of games my family would enjoy. I find that fantastic family weight games are hard to come by. They need to be easy to teach, simple enough my family members would enjoy and complex enough that I don't get bored to death. I think Azul nails it perfectly.

In Azul, you are a tile-laying artist and you are decorating the walls Royal Palace of Evora, in Portugal. I'm portuguese myself so naturally I imediately felt compelled to try it. You have your own personal wall that you will be decorating with differently colored wall tiles.

The premise of the game is rather simple but I don't want to go into in a great detail. Lets face it, if you're here you probably already know exactly what Azul is and how to play it.

There are several "factories" placed at the center of the table, each containing 4 wall tiles. There are 5 different wall tile color/patterns. During your turn you select a color/pattern of a specific factory and take ALL the tiles of the chosen color/pattern. The rest if tiles are placed at the center of the table, which now acts as an additional factory. The tiles you chose are placed on your personal board.

The order in which you fill your personal board is of critical importance because you get extra points by placing a tile adjacent to other tiles you placed before. Sometimes it's tempting to just pick that factory with 3 yellow tiles, but maybe you wouldn't get any adjacency bonus so it's not a great decision. This is were Azul completely nails it. The more casual folks will not give it much thought and just grab the yellow tiles and they've have a blast filling their personal board. The more experienced players will try to put the pieces in the best order in the board and have a fun min-maxing experience as well.

I feel like in Azul you have just the right amount of the randomness expected in a family-weight game and a brilliantly achieved balance on decisions vs complexity.

The pieces are very nice, it feels great to shuffle the pieces in the bag, and handling them feels great. The quality of the pieces is an important part on the enjoyment of the game. The player boards, however, could be better. Scoring is marked with a standard cube and it's very easy to accidently misplace it.

In case you are wondering, I also tried Azul: Glass of Sintra and Azul: Summer Pavilion. While the games are similar, they fail at nailing that crazy simple yet captivating gameplay original Azul has. Azul: Glass of Sintra is fine but I wouldn't recommend Summer Pavilion. Also, the "Joker tiles" mini-expansion is quite meh.

Context Information

• Number of plays: 26+, stopped logging in 2018

• Suggested player count: 2-4 players

• Average playtime: 20 mins

• Win-rate: 35%.. in 2018

Honorable mentions

• Century: Spice Road - I can't believe this game is only rank 308. Engine building at family weight? Count me iiin.

• Ticket to Ride - Europe - Can't argue with the classics. I like the Europe version in particular because it's more forgiving and you know.. I'm from europe...

After waiting 5 months for my order I finally got a copy and boy does it live up to the hype. What a terrific way to map the feeling of racing a car around the track into a boardgame. Pretty easy to teach too, had both my wife and my 10-year-old playing within 10 minutes. Lots of stuff in the box as well to expand the base playing experience.

What are people's thoughts? I like the theme and concept execution but think his games are a bit too heavy for me to get regular play. We keep meaning to get back to The Gallerist but can't find the time. I skimmed two video reviews (Rahdo and Man v. Meeple) and one suggested it was a lighter game (for Lacerda) and the other said it was up there with his more complex.

Your friends have games you like to play.

When do you folks buy your own copy? When are you content to just request or borrow it from time to time?

A pure solo game where you play pinball but with cards!

On a rainy day at the office I brought the board out and taught a friend. We can generally fit a full game into an hour. It's totally worth it for the weird looks everyone gives us.

Generally, I'm more of a lurker, but Lemmy is still young and I think we should all contribute a but more. In order to encourage discussion, I'll be writing micro-reviews for my favorite games by genre in the next couple of days. You're welcome to join in and review yours or flame me for my terrible taste!

I think it's appropriate to start with my favorite game of all time - Brass: Birmingham.

TL;DR

Score: 10/10

Positives:

• Very strategic

• Other players actions can be very positive for you

• Networking is very fun

• The random setup really makes games feel completely different from each other

• At the end of the game, you always have a sense of accomplishment, regardless of your score

Negatives:

• Rules are fiddly, every good has a different rule for transportation

• Because the player order changes by amount of money spent, sometimes you go first in one round and last in the next round. This leads to very large downtime

• Takes 2-3 hours

• Scoring is a pain in the ass

The review

I have never played Brass: Lancashire or the original Brass. I tend not to enjoy games where money is also victory points, which is the case for Brass: Lancashire. I like to spend it all! I ended up buying my copy after their kickstarter. I found a deluxe copy in my LGS and after reading a bunch of reviews I decided to give it a go. I didn't follow the Kickstarter campaign and my opinion was not influenced by it.

In Brass: Birmingham you are playing as an entrepreneur during the UK's industrial revolution. You'll be trying to develop several industries and selling them for profit. The game takes place in 2 eras: the canal era and the train era. In the first era you pretty much work on developing your income and a strong canal network. At the end of the era, all your canals and level 1 buildings are removed from the game. The train era will begin and you'll have to spread tracks along the land.

The thing I love most about this game is how your actions deeply affect your opponent's in a "positive" way. If you realize your opponent is going to need a lot of coal, you can create a coal mine and connect it to their network. They will be forced to consume coal from the nearest source, which is yours. When all coal is consumed, you get a lot of income. Everybody is happy! I mean, your opponent probably wanted to flip its own coal mine for income... But on the other hand no setup turn was required. Beer is an incredibly important resource, you need to sell your industries and other important actions. You definitely want to produce beer but if it's connected to the network, everyone can use it! Do you want to become a beer producer or place it somewhere obscure so only you can use it? I find these decisions to be incredibly fun.

The one thing that is a turnoff about the game is how fiddly it can be. Scoring is a pain in the ass, each build scores by adjacent canal/rail roads and you score at the end of each era. Rules can also be a bit fiddly, every resource (coal, iron and beer) is transported with different rules, which can be a bit intimidating. If you can get past that and enjoy the nature of economic games I'm sure this game will be a hit.

One of the things I think make a masterclass game is the feeling you have when you are heavily beaten. I would consider myself to be very weak at this game, I tend not to do great scorewise. However, at the end of the game, I feel fantastic. The decisions I made may not have been the correct ones, but they were fun. To see all my connected industries and all the things I produced always leaves me with a great sense of accomplishment. I can't recommend it enough.

Context Information

This information is probably not very interesting, but I'll share it anyway.

• Number of plays: 13

• Suggested player count: 3 players

• Average playtime: 2.5h

• Win-rate: 23%

Honorable mentions

• Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar - I suck so hard at this game... But I ALWAYS have a ton of fun. The gears are fantastic, very clever, very satisfying, very different from everything I've played. Definitely something you should try if you enjoy this genre.

• Scythe

What game genre/type would you like to review next?

I couldn't find the game in the stores near where I live, so I made my own. We played on top of a mountain with little stones for coins.