Imperial Settlers has one last round where everything comes down to a nail biter of an ending, often won or lost by a margin so thin it feels like luck. You’ll be sitting there with piles of cards all over the board, glancing back and forth at your opponent’s engine and yours. What matters isn’t … Read more

When you sit down to play a round of My City, you think you’re getting an easygoing city planning sim. Place some nice houses, see the score tick upward. That’s when the bottom drops out: The last number shows that your score has plummeted well below what you anticipated. Why? You missed a rock poking … Read more

Isle of Cats, especially the final round, combines tedium and triumph. Three rounds of haggling over tiles, juggling basket size, caging up fish, squirreling away cats. Now it’s time to tally up the score. In a game with as many moving parts as Isle of Cats, there are more variables involved than even most gamers … Read more

That last round of *Between Two Castles*, though, gets in there and makes you panic in a special way. It’s forty-five minutes spent carefully arranging rooms and lining up royal attendants just so. And then it’s time to score. And you’re doing math and it doesn’t feel like math, it feels like a trap. Which … Read more

Between Two Cities is a game where you must build two cities simultaneousy. Each side have a score, and only the lesser of those two totals matter towards your final score. As such, the point of the game isn’t to construct amazing buildings; it’s to maintain mediocre scores across both board as closely as possible. … Read more

In this game, the dragon represent power, but it’s also an endless clock. Each turn is a month in your reign over an empire where politics shift, disasters strike, and taxes are due. The board gets wild fast, creating a frantic pace. Once you’re actualy playing, it can be hard to keep up with where … Read more

And that’s it, the final round in Quadropolis is all about scoring. After three phases of tile stacking, energy management, and haggling over who gets to live where, you’re finally down to the final round and staring at a combination of harbors, parks, and towers. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume … Read more