Review: Spirit Island

Game Name:	Spirit Island	Published Year:	2017
Game Publisher:	Greater Than Games	Player Scale:	1-4
Game Designer:	R. Eric Reuss	Run Time:	90 - 120 min

In a distant land, yet unexplored lays a beautiful Island where nature still rules. But with the ever-growing colonial powers reaching further at the end of the world it was a matter of time until they managed to find this place.

Welcome to Spirit Island!



In this coop game, each player will play as one spirit of the island representing the embodiment of nature, from the river, plants or thunder to the darkest beings. You’ll be helping the Dahan, the indigenous inhabitants of this Island, to get rid of the colonial settlers and prevent them to taint this paradise. It won’t be easy, and you’ll have to use your whole arsenal of powers to accomplish this.

How it plays?

Game mechanics are relatively simple to grasp. In every round, you’ll start with the growth phase, your spirits will grow progressively stronger as the game goes on. In this phase you’ve got different options depending on your spirit, but they usually end up in some combination of adding presence to the island, gaining energy, power cards or recovering your hand.



Then everybody will select at the same time the power cards that are going to be played this round.  Fast powers will get played next to no particular player order, followed by the invaders turn and finalising with the slow cards. This is where the game gets complex, there are so many strategies, combinations and combos to do that it can be a bit overwhelming on your first game, but this is the beauty of this game’s system. With simple mechanics it manages to get a brilliant card system that will make your brain hurt thinking the best move working together as a group because believe me, you won’t stand a chance if you don’t cooperate with each other.



Each spirit (There are a total of 8 spirits in the base game, 2 extra in the Branch and Claw expansion, and 2 extra available as a promo) has a starting deck of 4 powers each related to your spirit’s nature. Then throughout the game, you’ll get to increase your hand with new powers from a common pool. You have minor powers and major powers, for this you always get 4 cards, keep one and discard the other 3. This makes the game cycle through the deck at a good pace and you can always find something more useful for your spirit’s gameplay. For the major powers you’ll have to discard one of your other power cards, these ones are usually very powerful and will be more useful as the game advances. Also, each spirit has special rules, and innate powers printed on its board that get activated by certain elements.



The invaders follow simple rules, where they ravage, build and explore in this particular order. But you have knowledge of where this is going to happen with s couple of turns in advance. The way this works is, they explore in an unknown place, next turn they build in the terrains they’ve explored and in the following turn they will ravage in those. So you will have to strategize around this.

Wherever they manage to ravage successfully it will place a blight, which hurts you and if these grow in number can be game over at some point. The game will end in victory depending on the fear level of the invaders, as it will change the victory conditions. In general, the more fear, the easier is to win. By increasing the invader’s fear, you’ll also get fear cards that will be very helpful to win the game. You will lose if blight reaches a certain level or the settlers have finished with the invasion and you haven't reached the victory conditions yet.

With the Branch and Claw expansion, you also add extra terrain effects (diseases, beasts, plants, …) plus the events that change the game a fair bit.



If this didn’t sound like enough content already, the game can be tweaked as you want with certain elements. You can add scenarios, which will change the objective for the game quite significantly, you can add invaders behaviours with different levels of difficulty and also you can add blight cards that will make your game unique once the island gets blighted.

Solo game

The game can be played with just one spirit, some people like it more playing multi-handed, but I have to say that I’ve enjoyed all my games with just one spirit. Some are more difficult depending on how the invaders expand as they start slow but gain inertia and become really powerful at the end, but you need to reach that end. Definitely makes for a good challenge every time and with so much variation not a single game will be the same. Otherwise, there is no real difference with the multiplayer game, as it scales really well. For these reasons is one of the most beloved games in the last few months in BGG's 1PG.

Opinion

I am really impressed with this game. I’ve heard people describing it as a mix of Mage Knight meets pandemic, not sure if I would compare it too much with Pandemic. This you get the same satisfying eureka moment when you find the perfect combo to devastate the invaders when all seems lost like Mage Knight has and I love about it, and the ever-growing invaders in your lands, the invasion can spin out of control quite easily like sometimes it happens in Pandemic. But the game definitely stands on its own.

Art is good, the map is not the prettiest, but it makes it really easy to spot everything once it starts getting crowded. Components are nice, and the card quality is good. Every spirit plays really different, and they all feel balanced to me, I was really impressed by that. Don’t get fooled by the colourful artwork, the game is heavy, strategic and will make your brain hurt to win, even in the lower difficulties. But is not unfair and always feels rewarding to win it.

I would recommend getting the Branch and Claw expansion if you like the game, the base game feels complete on its own, but it adds quite cool features to the game that I wouldn’t go back now and has two more spirits to play with! The game was part of a Kickstarter campaign but is easily found in retail (I bought it this way) and there will be another campaign for it later down this year. If you want the promo spirits it was recently in the BGG geekstore and can be bought in the designer's website, though it seems currently out of stock.

Pros: Rewarding gameplay (love the card system with the fast/slow powers), high variability and flexibility for tweaking the difficulty.

Cons: The game is more complex than it seems, this might be a problem for some people. If you suffer from analysis paralysis the game will get very long for you.

You may like: Mage Knight, Start Trek: Frontiers

What are you waiting for then, go get yourself a box full of deadly spirits!

 

Review: Pax Porfiriana

Game Name:	Pax Porfiriana: Collector’s edition	Published Year:	2012
Game Publisher:	Sierra Madre Games	Player Scale:	1-6
Game Designer:	Phil Eklund, Matt Eklund, Jim Gutt	Run Time:	120 min

¡Bienvenidos a México!

Pax Porfiriana, Latin for "The Porfirian Peace", refers to the 33-year period in the early 20th Century where dictator Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico with an iron hand until toppled in the 1910 revolution.

Your objective in the game, as a rich businessman of the time, is to topple president Díaz. Being a competitive game, you are going against each other to see who gets the position after him. This indeed not a story of friendship. You can topple in different ways, depending on the actual regime while the topple happens, but you only get 4 chances to do this in the whole game, otherwise, there is a Mexican stand-off at the end and whoever has more gold wins.

How it plays?

The game goes in a sequence of turns until the las topple cards get played. Each player performs all the four phases and then play goes to next player.

The first phase is the action phase. Each player gets to do 3 actions (or 2 if jailed) and there are a lot of options to choose from. You can purchase cards from the market, play or sell cards from your hand, upgrade in play cards, move troops around or speculate in the market.

After this, if there is a headline card in the 0 space of the market it gets played and then the market is restored, moving cards towards the lowest cost and filling up the empty spots. Finally, you get your income based on your enterprises without unrest, extortions and connection cubes.

You see that there are lots of options and moving gears in this game, even if the gameplay is quite easy to pick up there is quite a fair amount of complexity in the gameplay. All the meat in this game is in the cards though, the game comes with 220 cards, and depending on the number of players you will play only with half or a third of the cards, so every game can be very different and it will help keep that game fresh. Also, each player gets a Hacienda card, which will grant a special ability and your initial income.

There are 6 kinds of playing cards in this game. The enterprise cards are businesses that you can purchase are where most of your income will come from. There different kind of businesses, some of them they depend on the kind of regime in play as it affects the mines production and economy, others are more stable and can be improved (but beware as they become juicy targets for others to exploit too!) or depend on other enterprises in play.

The partner cards, they are people that you get for your cause and they are faction related. They will give you different abilities or prestige points.

Troop cards are military units that you can use either to defend your businesses or to extort another player's enterprise.  They are faction related also and most of them they can only be used in one of the 3 regions of the game (Sonora, Chihuahua and USA) as they have jurisdiction. Once you pledge for one of the causes you can have troops as a private army.

Black cards represent defamations, lawsuits, assassinations and other dirty tactics against your political rivals. And orange cards represent bandits, strikers, etc. that will create unrest and steal from your businesses. These two types when used the victim usually gets a reward in prestige points.

Finally, we have the headline cards. These act as events and also include the topple cards. These also can trigger a Depression in the game, if two bear cards are played in a row, and the only way to go back to business as usual is playing two bull cards in a row.

This more or less covers all the interactions in the game, there is one last thing, as I've talked about different regimes but I haven’t explained yet. There are 4 different regimes: Pax Porfiriana, Anarchy, Martial Law and US Intervention. These will affect the income of some of your enterprises and how the topple works as each regime is associated with one kind of victory points. When you try to topple, you will need a number of certain prestige points greater than Díaz basic 2, plus the sum of the opponents with the least points of that kind.

Solo game

As you can see from the gameplay this game doesn't seem very solo friendly as there is quite a lot of interaction between players, but it does have a solo variant that you can play. In this case, you will go against Díaz itself. I haven't particularly played it yet solo, but it does look like it makes a very interesting game.

Also, there is a variant made by Ricky Royal that is highly regarded in BGG's 1 Player Guild, if you want to take a look here are the written rules and the videos of Ricky playing it on his YouTube channel (Box of Delights). Definitely worth to give it a go and I'm particularly looking forward to it.

Opinion

I will start saying that I like Phil Eklund's games, they are very particular designs that are not for everybody and usually, the rules are not easy to digest. Nonetheless, I haven't played one of his game that hasn't been rewarding to learn to play it. They are all science or history based and have very intelligent and interesting mechanics. This one is probably the easiest Phil Eklund game to get into that I have played.

This is the first game in the Pax series, it was highly regarded in the 1 Player Guild and in BGG in general so I was looking forward to playing it at some point. I wasn't disappointed at all. It makes for such an interesting gameplay the whole game. Turns are fast, there is a ton of interaction between players and is a deep game. With so many cards and different types of them, it makes for a lot of variation in the game too, you never know what will happen or what will come out in the market. Things can change a lot from turn to turn too so is quite a dynamic game, and getting that victory condition when the topple card comes is very hard to achieve.

The interaction between players is great, but you need to be careful as when you do something to someone else you usually give them a plus in prestige points, and a point in this game can give you the victory, such a brilliant design. This game feels a bit like a COIN-lite game but more focused on the economy, for those who don't know me, I'm a big fan of GMT's COIN games, they are my favourite system, and the interaction in this game with the factions and between players reminds me a bit of that system, with a bit less complexity and a bit shorter too.

Pros: High interaction between players, very rewarding gameplay and lots of variability.

Cons: The artwork and game pieces are not very attractive, so that may put some people off but it won't matter when they start playing. This is quite common with Sierra Madre games, though they are doing a great job in their new releases to improve the aspect of their games without increasing the price to crazy levels. Looking forward to keeping getting their games.

You may also like: Pax Pamir, Pax Renaissance, GMT's COIN games.

That's all folks, I hope you liked it and hopefully, I've convinced you all to try a Phil Eklund game at some point!

Hoplomachus: Origins - Review

Game Name:	Hoplomachus: Origins	Published Year:	2015
Game Publisher:	Chip Theory Games	Player Scale:	1-2
Game Designer:	Adam Carlson, Josh J. Carlson	Run Time:	15-30 min

 

“Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant”

Introduction

The Hoplomachus series brings us back to ancient times, to fight as a group of gladiators in the Roman arena games. There are currently 3 games in the series, but I will talk about the more recent one released, Hoplomachus Origins. On this one, instead of playing in the arenas of Rome, you’ll be playing in 3 different arenas of other civilisations trying to gain fame to finally make it into the greatest arena. This game differentiates from the other two in the series as the fight conditions change and it incorporates a drafting mechanic at the beginning of the game.

How it plays



The first part of the game corresponds to the drafting. The two players will have to choose, one at a time, the gladiators and tactics they wish to use for their combats. There are different gladiator houses that you can choose from and you can mix as you wish. You will choose a total of 8 chips, and in every combat, you will use a maximum of 6. You’re also limited to use only one champion per combat, though you can draft multiple if you wish, these are more powerful gladiators.

There are two different kinds of chips you can choose from. Gladiators, which have different abilities depending on their class, and different stats. There is a wide range of abilities in the game, ranging from basic attacks of different kinds to alternative attacks or passive abilities. This is one of the most interesting parts of the game as depending on the different mix of abilities you have in combat you’ll have different strategies. The other kind of chips are tactics, these are special abilities you can deploy in a fight to temper with your opponent or aid you, but at the expense of taking the space of a gladiator.



Once the draft is done, the fights begin. You will play on the 3 arenas, but at in a randomly chosen order. Every arena has a different objective. In the Atlantis Arena, the first gladiator deployed will be your leader, which will have double the life, and the objective is to kill the other leader. In El Dorado arena, both teams have a treasure chest, and your objective is to carry it to the other side of the arena. And the third arena, Xanadu, you’ll need to control the centre of the arena, where at the beginning of the round you’ll score a point for every gladiator you have in those hexes and whoever gets to 6 points first wins the fight. Alternatively, you can always win by killing all the gladiators from the other team.

The fights play with a very simple set of rules: deploy, move, attack. In a player’s turn you will be able first to deploy a gladiator and/or tactic, then you’ll be able to move all your gladiators deployed in previous rounds and finally attack with those gladiators. Then is the other player’s go. As you can see the gameplay is very simple, but there is a lot of strategy behind your choices, as the fights are brutal and fast to play, every decision matters.



As a handicap for the winner, the player who’s lost will choose one of the chips in the opponent’s pool and will eliminate it from the game. Also as you are running a house of gladiators you will earn and lose reputation as you keep winning or losing. This reputation will hold for all your games of Hoplomachus Origins, and will modify the drafting rules at the beginning of every game just for you. This is a very cool addition to the game, that you don’t need to use if you don’t like it, but is a very cool system to compare scores with your friends, and remain in the top of the reputation chart will be a real challenge, as for every 10 reputation a harder handicap will come in effect.

The solo game



The game comes with specific solo rules, in the form of 20 different trials. In the solo game, you will face different challenges against special champions. You will only draft 6 and the rules for drafting will be different for every trial. These start quite easy but will rapidly increase in difficulty and will be a real challenge in the latest ones. The premise of the solo game is that once you win a trial you can go to the next one, and if you fail you can attempt it once more or you will fall to the previous trial. The opposing team will follow some simple AI rules to move and attack, plus the champions will act depending on the dice rolls.

Opinion

The game system is very simple, so is very easy to explain and get going, but there is so much strategy in those combats with all the different abilities, that makes every game unique and very challenging to master. There is a lot of interaction between the different gladiators that you can exploit in your favour. Fights play in 5/10 min each, so is very fast to play, and it makes for a very interesting game in such short gameplay time. Just using this game, you have 33 different skills, not counting the different basic attacks. The game comes with a total of 20 Gladiators from 5 different schools, plus 8 tactics. But the good thing is that if you own the other games you can mix the units to have a bigger pool for the draft, increasing the choice and replayability of the game even further, which is already big. The solo mode is very well implemented and makes for a challenging and very entertaining game that plays fast and is quite different even if you replay the same trial.



Component wise, this is very high quality, the games are not cheap but they are worth every penny, not just for such a good gameplay but you get top notch components. All the information is displayed in the heavy poker chips and the art is quite good. The arena maps are on neoprene mats with very cool art. This game is the cheapest of the 3 in the series so it makes a good entry point if you are interested. The games can only be purchased from Chips theory games website directly, they do that to keep the cost down as and now they support EU friendly shipping with very reasonable prices. The box is quite big and it comes a bit empty, but they will probably release more content for it in the future, plus there are already a few mini expansions that are compatible if you want to increase the pool of gladiators.

The good: Lots of strategy and tactics involved in the game and it plays fast with simple game mechanics. The components are very good quality. The solo game is excellent. The house reputation is a neat addition to the game.

The bad: The price is high, you get quality, but it might put some people off. For me is worth it, and this is the best entry point being the cheapest of the three. It will take a few games until you see some abilities in play and start forging your tactics.

You might also like: Hoplomachus: The Lost Cities, Hoplomachus: Rise of Rome and Too Many Bones.

That’s it for my review of Hoplomachus Origins folks.

I’ll see you around in the arena and don’t expect mercy!

Jesus