Back in June I had reported on Operation: Dandelion, a cooperative game where the players are weeding a garden. It seemed a bit weird to me with it’s obvious Soviet tones and game theme, but had snagged my interest.

I’m glad it did.

Operation Dandelion is played over 5 increasingly difficult rounds. Each round cards in a deck are turned over, and the modular garden starts to get overgrown with weeds. The goal of the players is to manage the weeds before the tiles become completely overgrown, or the weed tokens run out. It’s not as easy as it seems, because each player only gets a few actions per round, and can only perform them if their player card is drawn. To make it even harder, there’s only one card in the deck for each player, plus a shared action card. Oh yeah, the deck gets larger each round, too. There’s a bit of rescue in the form of Overtime cards. Each player gets a certain amount depending on the number of players, and they can be played for more actions.

I played this one with my 10-year-old and 5-year-old. At first I was a bit dissappointed. The game seemed far too easy, and we had no  trouble at all keeping the weeds under control. Then the 5th round arrived, and we quickly lost control of things. The board started to fill with weeds, and it was only through pure luck that we can out with a win…with a really low score. Overall we had a great time, and are looking forward to this hitting the table again.

Operation: Dandelion plays 2-4 players in around 30 minutes. Cooperation really plays a key roll in this one, and there will be plenty of time where you’re all trying to figure out the best actions to take so you don’t lose a tile, or take the last few weeds from the pile. There’s also an expansion, Morning Sun, which adds variable player powers and other mechanics that can be added into the game. We haven’t tried that yet, but will be the next time we play.

Farm on, Comrade!

A copy of Operation: Dandelion was provided free for review my Michael Groll’s Games.

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I’m a big fan of Columbia Games. I love the whole look and feel of their games, and Wizard Kings and Hammer of the Scots  both helped reinvigorate my love of board games in my mid 20’s. My kids are big fans of Slapshot, and it still comes to the table often with them. I have to admit I was a bit hesitant about The Last Spike. While I like train games, this seemed a bit more abstracted, and more focused on money management than anything.

That’s exactly what the game is…and it does a really great job at it. I sat down with my 10-year-old and 5-year-old to play, and I was surprised at the small rulebook and easy gameplay. Everything boils down to how you manage you money, how you purchase cities, and how you keep your opponents from earning more money.

In The Last Spike, you’re all working together to make a continuous railway from  one end of the board to another. You have to pay to lay tile, and buy city cards to earn money when tracks between that city and another is complete. More cards in that city equals more money. There’s also free cards you can get by being the first person to lay track next to a city. The person with the most money at the end of the game wins. It’s a race to make sure you have the most money while quickly completing the rail. You also need to be careful, because completing a segment of track completed may earn you money, but may earn one of the other players more money. Sometimes it’s worth trying for another route that may take longer, cost a bit more, but keep the other players from surpassing you in funds.

It’s a fairly quick game. I played with my two boys in about 45 minutes, my 5-year-old winning the game after stockpiling Saint Louis cards and cashing in huge towards the end of the game. The game keeps the same aesthetic of other Columbia Games with a cardstock board and wooded blocks with stickers for the pieces. It all boxes up in the same bookshelf format Columbia is known for.

This may not be a game for everyone, but it’s certainly a game that it’s audience will enjoy. That being said, it’s a Columbia game that has a broader appeal than their wargame line. The game had a successful Kickstarter campaign, and I’m hoping it spreads out further into the gaming community.

A copy of The Last Spike was provided free for review by Columbia Games.

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Although I’ve played various versions of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve never really played in the Forgotten Realms. (Or any of the published settings for that matter, save Planescape and Spelljammer.) But with Wizards of the Coast’s last three adventure campaigns set the Realm’s Sword Coast, I was excited to see what the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide had in store for someone running games in the setting.

Well, that and the book is a Green Ronin product—a company that makes products I enjoy, including spearheading the Out of the Abyss adventure campaign book—and some people that I know worked on this project. Unfortunately, the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide isn’t a book I would recommend for players of 5th Edition.

Open the book up to the preface and you see on the right-side page a map of the Realms, extending through the gutter to the margins of the left page. Interesting, but it’s poorly executed. To someone new to the setting—players who have only encountered the Sword Coast through the Starter Set, the three campaign books, or the organized play games — the Sword Coast is their reference point to the Realms. The Sword Coast falls in the gutter, swallowed up by the binding and thickness of the book’s signature. There’s “Neverwin” if you fold the page back far enough. The “Mer…ead Men”. “Luskan ford crossing”.

The map also raises another question: why is it even here? To show how large the Realms are? Well, it cuts off all the Dalelands — pretty much everything east of Cormyr is off the page and the place where the Fifth Edition’s adventures take place isn’t readable. The book is called the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, so why not show off a map of just that area? There is no overall Sword Coast map in the book, just this map of the continent and closeups from it scattered throughout the book. (The map and map segements are done by Mike Schley, who has contributed to most of the 5e line. The full map can be purchased at his site for download.)

I’m spending too much on page 5. Let’s move on.

The next section contains incredibly brief passages on areas of the Realms: two paragraphs for The Dalelands (all of them), one on Chessenta, the four nations that make up the Cold Lands get two. There’s a very brief history of the Realms, followed by a lengthy listing of the major deities of the setting. Do you have any of the earlier editions of the setting boxed sets or sourcebooks? More importantly, do you have access to a Forgotten Realms wiki? Not even a minute of searching landed me at the entry for Malar on a Forgotten Realms wiki, which had more information on the Beastlord than this sourcebook.

Page 43 gets us to a section that’s about the Sword Coast… and the North? Okay, so much more than just the Sword Coast, although the we’re really looking at the cities of the Lord’s Alliance in the Sword Coast region covering the top four inches by one-and-a-half inches of that full-page map. Some cities are shown on callout maps, none of the dwarfholds are. This section is full of in-character recollections of various areas by different adventurers, but they feel like they’re written by the same person. This is the only section of the book that is in first person, and some of the entries in this section can have pages go by between sentences where the fictional author inserts themselves, letting you forget that it’s written in first person. If you want overviews of some of the cities and areas (and don’t have access to a wiki), this is a decent section. But there’s no really deep drill-down into the entries. Don’t expect to run a game set in Daggerford based solely on the information here. Consider this more a “Rough Guide to Faerûn” than a detailed setting bible.

This seems unsatisfying, and it feels that opening up the scope of the setting book from just the Sword Coast to take in all of the area of the North in sixty pages is to blame. If those pages were devoted to just the Sword Coast section (Waterdeep and Daggerford on up north, inland to The High Forest), we’d have a book that has more information about that area. As it is, there’s a lot of high-level information that can be easily found elsewhere. However, the sections at the back of the book appear to be more useful for a setting sourcebook.

The Races of Faerûn chapter is more of how various races fit into the setting. Actual game mechanics amount to sentences like “Sun elves have the racial traits of high elves in the Player’s Handbook” or small sidebars. Tieflings start to branch out to the variety of the “race” from the AD&D Planescape days, instead of demonic half-breeds.

The Classes chapter has a few ways to customize your character, but most seem to be a veneer over the actual class customizations in the Player’s Handbook: This monastic order follows this path in the Player’s Handbook. This druidic group follows this circle found in the Player’s Handbook. This paladin order follows this order in the Player’s Handbook. There are a few things that are neat here: an actual new order for Paladins, two Rogue archetypes, a new patronage path for Warlocks, and a fourth edition Warlord-like archetype for Fighters.

More backgrounds in the aptly-named Backgrounds chapter, but the most fascinating thing here is the M C Escher-level wackiness in the artwork introducing this chapter. There’s a Faction Agent background, but I was under the impression from the Starter Set and the various published campaigns that the five factions in the game were things that the characters join up with as the game goes on. But here, you can choose to be part of The Lord’s Alliance from the get-go. As with the races and classes, many references here to use the traits, ideals, and bonds from exisiting backgrounds in the Player’s Handbook. (Of the twelve background options, only one has a set of these.)

Anyway, that’s the book.

This is a book that wanted to either be longer to fill out… well, everything, really. Or it wants to be a book that focuses on just the Sword Coast.

I would have a rough time recommending this book—it simply doesn’t do the job it wants to. As a setting guide, you can get more out of the Dessarin Valley section in Princes of the Apocalypse to run a whole campaign from. The book doesn’t do much more than a basic wiki for the Realms does, except for the backgrounds and some of the class options. There’s nothing particularly compelling about the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide that requires an immediate purchase. A better use of your gaming dollars: buy Mike Schley’s map at his site, and pick up either Princes of the Apocalypse or Out of the Abyss to get enough setting material to run your own overland (Princes) or Underdark (Abyss).

The Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide retails for $39.95 and is available now.

A copy of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide was provided free by Wizards of the Coast for review purposes.

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Love giant monsters fighting it out, but want a little bit more than King of Tokyo has to offer? Ultimate Warriorz may be the game for you! Ultimate Warriorz is a reprinting and updating of Mad Arena, an older game I was in no way familiar with.

I have to admit I was a bit skeptical when this arrived on my doorstep. The whole box-as-the-arena seemed very gimmicky, and the extremely light rules almost turned me off to it right away. After one play with my 5-year-old, I was hooked. A few more plays later Ultimate Warriorz became a staple game in our household.

The game is fairly light, and very easy to learn. The depth in the game comes from the different combatants, their stats, and special moves. Each round you’ll be playing cards simultaneously, and resolving them by their initiative number. These cards allow you to move, melee attack, range attack, or use special moves. Each card also lists your current defense value. Making sure you get early strikes, but trying not to leave yourself in a defenseless state, is an important part of the game.

The game lasts a set number of rounds, determined by the number of players. At the end of the game points are added up and the winner is declared. Basically your points are the amount of damage you’ve dealt during the game. Bonus points are awarded if you’re the first person to damage an enemy. The game can also immediately end if only one player is left standing.

While I’m still a huge fan of King of Tokyo, I almost feel like this has taken it’s place in our household. There’s much less luck, and a bit more planning here. The game are really very different, but I feel the whole “light monster combat” game is where these both would be grouped.

The kids routinely pull this one off the shelf to play, and have a great time trying out different combatants and how they work. My 5-year-old has pretty much called permanent dibs on the giant red dragon, however, and seems to handle the high health/low defense of the monster pretty well.

I went into this game not expecting very much, and was pleasantly surprised. With the holidays coming up, this would be a great gift for a family to enjoy.

A copy of Ultimate Warriorz was provided free for review by Asmodee Editions.

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So we had just finished playing the fully-colored Paizo edition of Kill Doctor Lucky when I received an inquiry from Cheapass Games: would I be interested in reviewing a new edition of the game? Well, with that timing, how could I not?

But instead of just reviewing what was in the box they sent me – and let’s be upfront about this, it was a playtest version with “the finest placeholder art available” – I thought it might be helpful to compare the two editions. So the “really pretty” version you see below in my hastily-taken-in-poor-lighting photos is the older Paizo (aka Titanic Games) version; the “slightly less so” version is the currently-at-Kickstarter 19.5th Anniversary Edition.

The game in a nutshell: It’s Clue (Cluedo) before the murder. You all want Doctor Lucky dead, but everyone wants to do the man in. Follow the codger around as he wanders the halls and try to kill him without being spotted.

Let’s start with the board itself: there have been a few structural changes to stately Lucky Manor since we last tried to knock off the old coot. There are stairs leading up from the Dining Hall to the left and right, opening up sight lines from the Lancaster Room through the Dining Hall to the Lilac Room. Every room is now numbered, which means that the doctor will be stopping in every room, instead of skipping past places the White Room and Wine Cellar. Although he’s taking a slower route through the mansion, the mansion scales with players: playing a three player game? Close both east and west wings (the rooms along the left and right sides). 4 to 5 players? Close one wing.

Foiling the murder attempt with luck for the doctor doesn’t just happen with Failure cards; any possible card can have luck icons on them. Each time you fail in a murder attempt, instead of grabbing a Spite token, you keep one of the luck cards played on you as a “Reason”, but they’re pretty much the same thing.

There’s a few other tweaks: You only draw cards when you aren’t seen by anyone. You don’t count hallways as steps (which means you can go from the Dining Hall almost anywhere in the house – even all the way to the Hedge Maze). Weapons add to your basic murder value of 1. Doctor Lucky is now a cat person instead of a dog person.

So, how does it play?

It is a bit different. Faster for certain. The Paizo version’s game is really one where you bleed the Failure cards out of your opponent’s hands to make that one sudden murder attempt that nobody can counter. That version feels a bit like Munchkin in that way, with the “can anyone stop this guy?” moment and the sheepish looks around the table that heralds the end of the game. But in the new version, the luck symbols are on (nearly) every card. There really isn’t the long first half of the game where you’re actively attempting small murder attempts in order to weed out the Failure cards. Well…there is a slight bit of that, but that phase is significantly shorter due to luck being scattered throughout the deck.

That scattering of luck also adds some strategic planning: you can stop a murder attempt by spending a two-luck card, but when that’s a Move-2 card that could also get you across the mansion, do you really want to? Even with that, the new version is quicker than the earlier version and hits the fun spot a lot more sooner.

The game is more about skulking around the mansion than drawing cards. You’ve got to be hidden from everyone – including Doctor Lucky – to draw cards, but you also want to position yourself to deny the next player an opportunity to kill off the old man. But do that, you don’t get to draw cards yourself. I kind of like that, but I’m disliking how the new mansion feels smaller: more open sight lines, closing rooms down, and having the hallways open – wide open – to let people move around the mansion easier, and folding room cards into the move ones makes it decidedly harder to hide and get those card draws. When playing with three players (which is the size of my family group), there’s half the board you aren’t using. This is tempting me to try out the 19.5th Anniversary Edition rules on the Paizo board, just to see what happens.

Should you back the Kickstarter? Well, if you like Kill Doctor Lucky and have at least four players: yeah, it’s a no-brainer. The game is faster, funner, than before. Three or fewer players? I doubt this will hit the table as often because there’s that half of the board you can’t use just sitting there, game after game. Mocking you and your tiny widdle gaming group. There’s a two-player variant that is included in the playtest rules that introduces two dummy players and opens up one wing, but that’s a very playtest variant and might make it into the final rules.

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Martians are attacking an alternate-reality 1950’s Earth, and it’s up to you to stop them…or is it?

Mars vs Earth is a 3-10 player cooperative game where you’re trying to stop aliens from invading and taking over Earth. The thing is, the Martians have replicated human DNA, and their clones walk among us. In traditional cooperative game fashion, that means there may be one or more traitors in the midst.

Over the course of several rounds new challenges will arise and players must pool their resources to stop them. The game has a cool mechanic where players can only play so many cards to a challenge depending on how far they’re sitting from the current mission leader. Players directly to the left and right of the leader can play more than those sitting 2 or 3 seats away on either side.

The game ends when the humans foil a pre-determined number of Martian threats, or the Martians deplete all the human resources. It’s a relatively fast paced card game, playing in 30-60 minutes. Having played with a max of 4 players, our games tended to run 30-40 minutes. All my game-age kids tested this one with me, and had a great time with it. My 5-year-old needed a bit of help with text, and when he turned out to be working against the other players, but still really got into it. We actually ended up taking the game camping with us, and it worked out really well as a portable game without the board.

Overall this is a great co-op that I can enjoy with my kids. The 1950’s sci-fi feel, and the tense nature of the challenges make this a fantastic game in a short amount of time.

You can snag Mars vs Earth from The Game Crafter for $38.99.

Geek Fever Games is actually located near me in CT, and I’m hoping to get a chance to play the game with the designer soon.

A copy of Mars vs Earth was provided free for review by Geek Fever Games.

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Having seen High Heavens a few years ago a PAX East, I was excited to finally get a copy of my own. I really enjoyed the game when I demoed it, and I’m glad to see not much has changed in the time I’ve spent waiting to play again.

High Heavens is a game of epic battle between the Norse and Greek Gods. Setup and play is super simple, with a nice deal of depth provided by the Gods’ powers and spell cards. Each turn you have 3 actions to summon Gods from your hand, cast spell cards, or have your Gods take action. Actions include moving, attacking, and using some special powers. Each God has a stat for movement, health, range, and melee/range damage. The goal of the game is to wipe out all the opponent’s Gods, or destroy their home base.

One of the coolest mechanics of the game is the rings. High Heavens comes with a pile of stack-able rings. There’s red rings that indicate health. Your Gods will sit upon a tower of these until their health is gradually chipped away. There’s also orange rings for attack bonuses, silver rings for armor, green rings for poison, and black rings traps. You can always tell the condition of a God by looking at the stack they’re standing on. The last color ring is white, which represents obstacles that can be placed on the battlefield. It’s worth noting that weapons and armor a God has are dropped when the die, and can be picked up by other Gods to use.

I ended up playing this one with my 8-year-old daughter, as she’s really shown an interest in games with miniatures. She picked up the rules extremely quickly, and after a close game, she managed to take down my home base after wiping out a majority of my Gods. I have to say I really thought I had the game locked down, but some cleverly played spells turned turned the tide in her favor.

So in closing, I still enjoy the game as much as I did when I demoed it 2 years ago. The final components are really top notch, from the plastic minis to the rings and the excellent Neoprene board. I look forward to checking out some of the add-ons to the game, the largest being the addition of Egyptian Gods.

A copy of High Heavens was provided free for review by Wild Power Games.

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The computer game Portal is an interesting puzzle game with the player using a portal gun—a device that creates wormholes on walls—to navigate through a (usually) trap-filled testing chamber controlled by a demented AI who promises cake at the end. Portal is one of Valve’s award-winning games and a flagship product on the Steam gaming service. In 2012, the computer game company began to develop a tabletop game based on Portal, eventually teaming up with Cryptozoic Entertainment in 2013 to continue development of the game. Now available for pre-order, we’ve had a chance to play the game.

Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game is a game for 2-4 players, each heading up a team of test subjects. Three rows of hexagon-shaped test chambers are connected to form the board (the “laboratory”). Each turn, GLADoS (the active player) removes a test chamber from one edge of the board, and places it at the other end. The effect is an infinite board, much like Thunder Road. When a test chamber is removed, whichever player has a majority of test subjects on that tile gains the rewards listed on the tile which might be the ability to move a gun turret, adding one or more test subjects to the laboratory, or slices of cake. All test subjects are removed from that tile, so you’re sacrificing test subjects to possibly gain a reward. If there is any cake on that tile, it is incinerated. As soon as one player has no test subjects on the board, the game ends. The winner is the player with the largest number of cake slices in the laboratory.

The cards in Portal have “play now” abilities on the front (“Aerial Faith Plate: Move one test subject of any color to an adjacent chamber”), and characters with abilities to be used by all on the back (“Cave Johnson: To earn cake from an activated chamber, all test subjects in that chamber must be the same color.”). Play that card and it sits on top of the discard pile with a character from the game and a rule that stays in play until that character is covered up. So: how to best play the two cards in my hand to not give the other players a powerful ability they can use right away?

The game is all about positioning: With only three test subjects on the board, can I maneuver them to a position where they will be picked by GLADoS? Should I have a test subject pick up my opponent’s cake slice and merrily run a tile that will be incinerated or should I pick up one of mine and move it to a safer room? That’s where the puzzle of this game comes in: positioning and moving your test subjects around.

I can see a bit of analysis paralysis creeping up in this game. Even with a small number of test subjects for a player to manipulate, the player can only choose one chamber’s test subjects to move. Take Ticket to Ride as a counterexample: TTR has only a few things a player can do on your turn, just like Portal does. However, Portal has the chance to trigger AP in some players due to the size of the board and the immediacy of GLADoS removing test chambers.

Speaking of GLADoS, there’s a standee counter for it which you’re supposed to use to indicate which chamber is being removed, but in practice it’s completely useless. Also speaking of completely useless: throw away the insert. The insert is usable as long as you don’t actually remove anything from the punchboards: no place to store the useless GLADoS standee, the cake pieces, the test subjects, or the portal markers. (We’re talking the Asmodee edition of Mission: Red Planet bad.) Cool companion cube and turret figures for the game (even if one of the panels on the turret seems to have arrived broken).

Our two-player games were around twenty minutes long. We’re going to give this a spin with three players later this week.

The game itself is fun and filled with a lot of short-term strategy decisions. I was going to recommend it, but… the MSRP is $50. Quite frankly, it doesn’t feel like similar games at that price point. The packaging has a bit to blame for this: the box has faux-aging on it, like it’s been beaten up a bit and well-loved/used over the years. The back of the box features a bland photo one might see on a family boardgame from the early 1970s. While it all fits to recall the computer game, the boardgame’s exterior has that look from a time before games cost $50; the physical design of the game says “cheap”.

I’m also irrationally upset with that insert.

But that’s balanced by the gameplay. We found it fun. Gameplay is also strategic (which I really enjoy). And the game does come with a Steam code for Portal 2, so…consider this a $40 game with a $10 computer game bundle, I suppose.

A copy of Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game was provided free for review by Cryptozoic Entertainment

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Having gotten an early release copy of the new Dragon Dice Firewalker/Treefolk Starter at PAX East this year, I was very eager to dig back into a game I haven’t played since 1995. The pre-release of this set has finally hit SFR’s online store, so you can actually snag the dice now if you’re interested.

Not having a solid rulebook with the bag of dice I brought home, I used a combination of the official rulebook, this YouTube video by That’s How We Roll, and these great reference sheets from user Herrigold on BoardGameGeek. While Dragon Dice is actually fairly easy to play, years of releases, promo dice, etc… have caused the official rulebook to swell to a considerable size. The video and reference sheets were a huge help to my son and I when we were ready to jump in and play.

The goal in Dragon Dice is to obliterate your opponents army, or two capture 2 of the 3 terrains in play. The game is a very abstract war game where the number on each 8 sided terrain die is how close your army is to capturing that terrain. Each side of the terrain dice also let you know what types of attacks can be made at that distance: magic, missile, or melee. Each player builds an army out of their dice using an agreed upon point amount. When building an army small dice are worth 1 point, medium are 2 points, large are 3 points, and the 10 sided monster dice are worth 4 points. Armies are split into 3 forces between the terrain dice.

Each turn a player will have 2 opportunities to maneuver a terrain die (move it up or down a number), and attack. There’s also a phase for Dragon actions if a dragon has been summoned using magic (These buggers wreak havoc on anyone at the terrain their summoned at. It’s both terrible, and awesome.) Units can also be pulled into reserve so they can move between terrains as needed. I won’t do much more in depth with the mechanics. Just check out the video above for a better overview on how to play.

All that being said, how does it play? First off let me say that back in the day I totally didn’t play Dragon Dice correctly. Now that I know how to play, I’m a bit addicted. The dice are wonderful, and I love the army building aspect of the game. There’s also just something very satisfying about rolling handfuls of dice and raining destruction upon your foes. The magic system adds a huge amount of depth the game, and the sheer amount of dice and expansion dice available has me wishing I could go out and snag it all. There’s a reason Dragon Dice is still around after all these years, and I give SFR a huge amount of credit for keeping the game alive and kicking.

I should also mention that extra dice for the game are solid in the form of Kickers. These are basically booster packs that come with 8 dice. You always know you’re going to get a monster, 4 common dice, 2 uncommon dice, and 1 rare die, but you don’t know what unit each of those dice are going to be. You can also buy more terrains, dragons, and even a few expansion sets that add more to the game. I’m hoping to snag some of these extras soon.

So far this may be one of my favorite games I’ve played this year, and I have a feeling it’s one I’ll be playing it for a long time.

An early release copy of the Firewalker/Treefolk starter was provided free for review by SFR, INC. A kicker for each army was also purchased.

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Just about a year ago I had posted a Kickstarter Preview for Kind Down, a chess-like game by designer Saar Shai. Well I finally got my production copy and had a chance to play the released version of the game. The game has changed a bit since I’ve played, but overall the feel is the same. I will say that the rulebook needs a bit of work, as it’s not the best way to learn the game, but Saar knows people’s concerns with this and is working to tighten things up. In the meantime he’s created the following video, which teaches you what you need to know to jump in and play.

I actually did my first real test of the final game with my 5-year-old son. He was able to fully enjoy the game and play mostly on his own with only a bit of help reading some of the spell cards. I hate to admit it, but he actually took the first victory, claiming my King in the Capitol for the final victory points needed to win the game. I guess I got a bit too greedy, trying to snag too many VP without thinking.

Anyway, the game has a great feel to it. The tension of getting the pieces you want activated and having enough cards to pay all the tolls you need to complete your plans all while your opponent is doing the same is a great thrill. My two main complaints with the game are the rulebook, which I previously mentioned, and the box. The box is basically a fancy shoe box. It’s very nice looking, and fairly sturdy, but is kind of awkward to store. Not a huge deal, but still.

There’s a lot under the hood with King Down, and once you get the swing of things it’s an very rewarding game. There’s plenty of choices and sacrifices to make, and the games I’ve played so far have been both quick, and close. We haven’t had any runaway leader situations yet.

Take the time to watch the video and learn how to play the game. I feel it’s a great add to my collection, and it deserves a look.

A copy of King Down was provided free for review by Saar Shai.

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