Suburbia’s last turn isn’t so much calculated as it is a heart attack. You look down at your board with your finger poised just above the population marker… What are my income streams? How can I support this without going beyond the red line penalty? That’s when the game go from creative city planning to … Read more

For example, you drop a big six-hundred-square-foot tile down and realize your castle is architecturally terrible. Your doorways don’t line up. Because you didn’t realize how much it mattered to avoid placing corridors in the wrong spots, those negative hall cost you points every time you pass them. The calculator does the math for you, … Read more

Village Green isn’t so much about having the most gorgeous garden as it is about tallying your score without losing your mind. After three rounds of playing cards (and moving pavilions over ponds, and arranging columns of red flowers along rows for award points), it’s finally time to find out whether two misplaced trees will … Read more

Stone Age separates the good from the great, and it reveals your bad habits in final round. It’s time to play out all the cards and fill the board. Now comes the part where you have to score everything and face reality. Scoring isn’t as simple as tabulating points based off buildings you constructed; it’s … Read more

In Notre Dame de Paris, choosing to drop a marker on the final sector are more than just dropping a piece; it’s making a statement about your overall game plan. It’s about triggering a cascade of scoring events that could either cement your lead or hand the initiative to someone else. Or how do I … Read more

With veteran Alhambra players, an air of silence around table means that there’s some serious number crunching going on. Players is keeping track of which colors have majority. They are pretending to be interested in stock market. Everyone is just waiting until that last scorecard is laid down. Maybe you’ve got two purple towers and … Read more

You may have heard about Trans-Siberian Railway: the epic journey through endless distance and imperial hubris. Actualy, its construction was a hard slog of politics, resources, and logistics. Board games like Russian Railroads does a great job representing the struggle between pushing rails outwards and upgrading engine responsible for pulling them along. You can easily … Read more