There is a specific kind of panic that sets in during Endless Winter‘s final phase, the Eclipse, as it has a lot of math to get right to earn points. There are four rounds where you’ll be managing resources, burying cards, and placing megaliths. Then, trying to figure out who won just feels like auditing … Read more

And then it’s over. You’re charting unexplored lands, bartering with merchants, and the next thing you know everybody’s banging their fist against the table to determine who has most money. This jumble of competing system all coming together into a single score at end of Expeditions creates sense of chaos during this scoring stage. You … Read more

Darwin’s Journey amps up in final round with some serious stakes. Now you’re not only playing a board game; now you’ve got to audit your life decisions on the Beagle. With help of the calculator, you can add everything, knowledge, coins, tents, crew, stamps, Theory track, specimen and objective cards… To a single victory point … Read more

By the end of each Inventions game, things can get crazy at tax time. Tokens is everywhere, strewn about regions, piled up on your board, and held in your hand. You have cards in your hand, tiles on your board, and tokens scatterd across regions. It is tense. But the arithmetic sucks. That’s when a … Read more

After a lengthy play on Weather Machine, you’re sitting down with a marker inches away from winning the game. Papers is all over the table. Tokens fill up board. Prototypes lie around everywhere. Somehow you know you have some points, just not where they are. The score calculator compiles those scattered points into a single … Read more

The final phase of Architects of the West Kingdom is when you find out if it is a great game or not. All this time you’ve been jockeying for position, moving workers around, trading with other player, and more. But then…you tally up the points. Suddenly everything make sense because it’s all numbers. And then … Read more

The surprise in Nucleum is that it all comes to an abrupt end, which will spook first-time players unless they get used to it. Yes, you lay down your tiles cautiously, but then somebody reaches a limit, or the market depletes its stock, and the game halts. No slow burn; there are points accumulating right … Read more