The final round in Champions of Midgard is calculated carefuly. After eight rounds of fighting draugr and trolls, it’s time to tally up your resources. Luckily, the calculator do this for you; but understanding what those numbers represent is key. Knowing them means the difference between winning by luck or strategy. While most is concerned … Read more

Raiders of Scythia has a certian sort of tension that isn’t quite strategy, and certainly not pure chaos management. It feels more like managed chaos. You form a party of raider, weighing the brute force needed to topple settlements against difficulty of feeding and protecting your crew. Expansion is aggressively rewarded here, while being reckless … Read more

Scoring for Santa Maria can be tough to wrap your head around. There are three years, there are various resources, there’s shipping routes and religious appointments and happiness tokens. When you draw last blue die, the board freezes and you add it all up. A lot of people have a gut feeling about who won … Read more

Your ship’s built, your crew’s engaged, provisions are loaded in the hold, now do you go raid? Will it pay off in points for you to mount up? That’s where Raiders of the North Sea create a slight tension as you weigh near term treasure versus building toward longer game. Do you bump your Valkyrie … Read more

In Marco Polo II, Round Six is the last round and it is more about counting than strategy. You’ve been shuffling your trader around the Silk Road for five rounds now building up trading posts, stockpiling goods, juggling dice pools. And finally you get to the end… but then the board falls silent. There’s nothing … Read more

In Coimbra, most games do not end with huge sweeping plays. In fact, they ends in small margins; the kind where a single coin or a single guard token makes all the difference between first and second place. After several hours of coordinating three separate action tracks, it’s easy to forget such small numbers. So … Read more

And then, click, the last action card is played. And it’s over. At that point, the game changes into something else. The tile laying strategy come to an end. The busy resource management stop. You’re faced with a board littered with achievements, strewn across table. There are tokens and half-finished tracks. They appear less like … Read more