For his part, Sauron advances his Stories by nurturing several plots, and he commands many minions and monsters to intercept and attack the good guys. The heroes are assigned quests (hence the title), gain counsel from canonical Middle-Earth personalities, sabotage the enemy’s plots, and advance themselves through encounters as they travel. Once the markers reach the end of the Story Track, the “dominant” faction wins if it completed its mission; otherwise the winner is determined by one last combat of champions. The game is epic in both scale and size (the map is huge), and no part of it is done in a small way. There’s a lot of strategy to plumb and plenty of clever game mechanics, but it’s prohibitively long.

The object of the game is to have your team’s mission accomplished when the Story markers reach the end of the Story Track. One player portrays Sauron, massing his forces to take over the world, and one to three additional players are the heroes, holding the line while Gandalf gathers his army. Turns alternate between the two sides as they consolidate their positions, hopscotching their Story markers over each other down the track.

Sauron’s three types of actions gain him Influence, cards, and servants. He can double up on these actions, but they lose effectiveness this way. Influence markers are how he affects the game. He places these in adjoining cities, creating a web of his power that makes travel perilous for heroes, or he puts them in a pool. The bigger his Influence Pool is, the more potent are the Plots and cards available to him. His monsters and minions can guard locations, move to surround someone, or attack Sauron’s enemies. Minions are the notable underlings of the books like the Ringwraiths, while monsters are cheaper critters like the warg riders pulled randomly from a token pool. Some tokens are empty bluffs but most are painfully real. Finally, the Dark Lord can draw Plot and Shadow cards to empower himself. Plots are strictly regulated – he can only have three of them going at once, so their management is critical for his strategy. Like Plots, Shadow cards require a minimum Influence Pool, but their use is far easier and can affect combat, corrupt the heroes, and more.

When the heroes step up to bat they have a lot of ground to cover, figuratively and literally. There are five available characters, all original to this game and each with his own stats, abilities, and Hero Cards. These cards are used to execute most actions. Movement between locations demands a card with a matching terrain symbol, so for example, a swamp card could bridge two areas in a marsh. Movement is still possible without the right terrain but only by expending multiple cards to muscle through, and cards are also a character’s life in this game.

Adventuring tires and wounds a character, so cards are discarded separately according to why they were lost, and retrieving them is no trivial thing. A character rests to get his Rest Pool back, but if he does so Sauron’s Story tokens move forward. Healing returns his Damage Pool to him as well, but to do that he must be in a Haven, one of the citadels where heroes are protected from the effects of Sauron’s machinations. If a hero’s cards are all in discarded pools he has been defeated; he moves to a Haven and heals but now he loses equipment or favor as well, and favor is a hero’s best friend.

Favor, like Influence for Sauron, is the coin of the realm by which heroes accomplish their great deeds. Spending it eliminates Sauron’s plots and removes the effects of Corruption cards on a character.

Combat utilizes subtle strategy. At the outset of every fight, a hero’s agility score either adds cards to his hand or extends his endurance for the fight (see below). The antagonists secretly choose a card from their hand and reveal it. (Monsters and minions fall into one of three “levels” of villain, and draw cards from the matching deck when a fight starts.) Some cards are straightforward – they list attack and defense values, usually inversely (a heavy offense means lowering one’s defense). The fighters compare these values to find how much damage each inflicts and suffers. To mix things up, cards have special rules that affect the outcome. A savage attack may be so focused as to leave the aggressor defenseless, forcing him to take extra damage, or an aimed shot might do increased wounds on a subsequent round. Everyone (and everything) in the game is rated for his relative melee and ranged combat skills, giving opponents critical information about their card mix. Cards and fighters both have strength scores, and when someone plays cards in excess of this number he’s too tired to go on. The enemy may end up pummeling him senseless (though often he ends up exhausted as well).

The Story markers continue down the track, with the peril increasing at each stage. On Stage III, if one side completed its mission and can claim dominance (proximity to the end of the track), they win. If these criteria don’t determine a winner, a final, decisive battle occurs between Sauron’s Ringwraiths and the heroes’ champion, chosen from among their numbers.

Most of the components are up to the high standards Fantasy Flight Games has set for itself, including a vast map that offers a library of necessary information printed along the edges. If there’s a weak link in the chain it’s the ambitious miniatures: They’re something else, with a few that are absolute standouts, but some bend or even break under their own awesomeness. The game also uses region reference jewels, little colored dots that tell what cards apply to certain areas of the board. There are enough of these that the colors blend together, and determining which is which renders everyone squinty-eyed.

play on the whole is a lot like the figurines – it breaks its own arm batting for the fences. Middle-Earth Quest encompasses a big story, and even though the heroes are not “the” story, it’s a big game with a learning curve forged in the flames of Mordor. At the same time, one’s participation in it can seem like such a small thing. Combat is interesting, especially intellectually, but it’s not really thrilling. There’s all this space on the map, so much to see and do, but you’ll never get to most of it. Your small quests leave you feeling like a small player on an epic stage – that’s well within the idiom, but as a player you want more. There are plenty of options, though, so not only does it speak well to FFG’s attention to game balance, it means there’s always one more unexplored, unexploited advantage for a character in peril to pursue. (Corruption cards are one good example – as Mr. Frodo well knows, taking on one of these cards for some extra benefit would make just this one thing so easy . . .) Subtle things can swing the game, and laggers can make rapid advances. Then again, the missions can be dull: There are five for Sauron, and three of those are “Advance Story marker A/B/C to Stage III,” which is what you’re trying to do anyway. If, as it is too easy to do, the Story Track doesn’t determine the winner, having a mano-a-mano combat with only one chosen hero at the end seems anticlimactic – you’ve been doing that all game, too.

One thing about Corey Koneiczka and Christian T. Petersen’s design certainly makes this feel epic, and it may be the straw for someone on the fence about whether to buy: It’s a long game. The publishers suggest three hours and up and that’s accurate, in the same way that a geological epoch is three hours and up. In the time it takes to play your first game you can watch the entire special-edition movie trilogy. Getting better at it requires playing through it a few times, if everyone wasn’t alienated by it the first go-round. Middle-Earth Quest enjoys multifaceted strategy and an interesting give-and-take both in execution and in its combat system, but the time requirement and learning curve limit its value to all but the most patient and advanced players.

My biggest complaint with Tara is really no fault of the game: I just don’t have many opportunities to play two-player games. That disappoints me quite a bit, because Tara holds a lot of promise. The components are well made, the gameplay is compelling, and there are enough variants included to keep the game interesting. I wouldn’t exactly call the rules “intuitive,” but once you wrap your head around them, they’re easy to hold on to. Given the opportunity, I could see playing quite a bit of Tara.

I will admit to being at a disadvantage as I try to write this review. I’ve never reviewed an abstract strategy game before; I’ve never even thought of reviewing an abstract strategy game before. The version of Tara I have is a review copy, sent to me several months ago. In addition to trying to shoehorn games into my schedule, it’s taken me quite a while to figure out how to write this.

As such, let’s start off easy and say that that Tara’s playing pieces are attractive and well made. The board is fairly basic, made of thick cardboard, with cutouts for the ring fort pieces to fit into. The ring forts are octagons that have a colored, rounded square running around a central square divot, which acts as a placeholder for the king pieces, and the piece’s insertion point on the board. The bridge pieces are of the same color and fit snugly into the ring forts, extending the lines across all the linked pieces. When the board is full at the end of a game, it looks like a piece of Celtic knotwork, and every game creates a different piece of art. The king pieces are royal, crowned busts that have a surprising amount of detail for their small size, and all the pieces are made of a solid, sturdy plastic.

I guess that’s really it, as far as the “easy part” goes. Writing about the game mechanics intimidates me a bit, not least of the reasons being that Tara includes four different rules variations, two scoring options, and two “levels” of rules for each of the game variants. It’s a lot to take in when you first start flipping through the book.

Each of the variants, though, works on a central theme: expand your territory by placing ring forts or capturing your opponent’s ring forts, and protect the territory you have by linking ring forts together. When the board is full and all the forts have been linked, the player with the fewest number of kingdoms (or the fewest number of knots) is the winner.

I hesitate to go too deeply into the rules, as they are kind of confusing even when the board is sitting in front of you. Without the game around, I’m afraid they’ll just be gobbledygook. That said, once you actually start playing the game, the mechanics come easily enough, and the rules never really get in the way of enjoying the strategy of the game.

Each of the game variants stands on its own quite well, and they range from simple to fairly complex. On the simple end, you and your opponent take turns placing ring forts (but not linking them) until the board is full; then, you take turns switching out opposing pieces and placing one bridge to link one set of forts. It’s probably the easiest variant to learn and play, but it still has a lot of depth and strategy, as you’re given a way to break links your opponent has made.

On the complex end of the scale is a variant where you’re placing and capturing ring forts, building kingdoms and trying to manage your three king pieces who have their own movement and capturing rules. In the couple of games I had the opportunity to play, I felt like I hadn’t even scratched the surface of that variant game.

Unfortunately, that last sentence really sums up my entire experience with Tara. I like the artwork, I like the depth, I like the variability, but I just don’t have the opportunity to play two-player games like this. I’m glad that this game is in my collection, because I would like, at some point, to coerce someone to play this with me on a regular basis. If you’ve got better luck than me, and have someone to play two-player abstract-strategy games with, definitely pick up Tara.

Unfortunately, the big box has landed with a massive thud of disappointment. Although at its heart it has a strong idea and some clever mechanics, it suffers from too many flaws and weaknesses to cut the mustard in the modern game industry. That’s the problem with living in a Golden Age of boardgaming (which we most certainly are) – being adequate is just not enough. Five years ago, Conquests would have been considered pretty. Ten years ago it would have been considered clever. Twenty years ago it might even have been considered simple. But even then, at no time would have been considered fully playtested, and that more than anything prevents it from being worthy of attention.

The central mechanic of the game is one of area control. The massively-thick and very glossy six-panel board features a criss-crossed nexus of about sixty circles, each representing a different system or planet in the EVE universe of New Eden. I don’t play the MMORPG but I’m guessing some of these will be familiar to players, which will add to the thrill of the game. Also presumably familiar will be the choice of player-pieces: the mega-corporations (aka races of the MMORPG) Minmatar, Gallente, Caldari and Amarr. Unfortunately all the corps have identical powers, which seems like a lost opportunity, especially since each corp gets a massive info card explaining the costs for things and actions you can take.

The other problem with the pieces is that two of the four corporation logos are very hard to distinguish from each other. This is a big problem because there are other display vectors at play. To wit: when it comes to ordering your moves on the yearly calendar, the token you place will be shaped like your corp logo but its color will be determined by the kind of action you intend to take – producing units is brown, expanding territory is orange and attacking is blue. These colors are separate from the colors of your corp pieces, of course (gold, green, white, red), and the colors don’t stop there: each system on the board also has a color, indicating its relative points value. Green and blue are worth less than yellow and red. Nor should that be confused with the red, green or blue-black of the victory point indicators which are used to label which systems are currently worth points for controlling.

This last point is extremely important, because the only way to win is to control the systems worth VPs – and only then if they have a matching color or letter with another VP-marker. Since these systems are determined randomly by flipping over card decks, and change constantly during the game, being able to spot them constantly is vital to any kind of planning. So, while it doesn’t help that they are yet another color confusion, it equally doesn’t help that the markers that indicate them are quite hard to see on on the board – doubly so thanks to the mirrored black surface. Visually, this game is one big headache – in an age when most games are pure, high-sucrose eye-candy.

And I haven’t even got to the confusion about stacking poker chips. Players can own a system by placing their token on it first, but later players may place agents in the same system, placing their token on top of yours. This makes it difficult to tell at a glance, who owns what, but that’s vital, because only by owning or having an agent in every adjacent system (sometimes six or seven of them) can you build an outpost on the system in question. So to see who can build or who cannot, you have to consult both top and bottom – and MIDDLE too, because if you build an outpost on a system you own, you have to mark that it’s your outpost by putting a token on top. Of course, it is important to tell at a glance how many chips are in each system (because they equal military strength) and which ones you have moved this turn (because like many such games, you can only move each token once).

The head-ache becomes a migraine.

Of course, much of this can be adjusted to, if enough time is taken to learn the game. But there’s no reason for it to be so counter-intuitive in the first place. What’s more, there’s no reason the game couldn’t have done everything possible to clear these things up, such as providing clear, illustrared examples in a well-written rulebook. Alas, the rulebook isn’t very clear (suffering, I suspect, from English not being the first language of the designer) and the few times it seems to be trying to help out, the game takes something away with the other hand. For example, I’ve mentioned the rules summary cards each player gets, but these are written in an eye-blindingly tiny font, with a confusing use of symbols that helps nobody. Nor do these cards tell you anything about your corp, so the unintiated to the setting get no sense of character. That’s just sloppy.

Also lacking in character are the base tokens, which are cheaply made and poorly moulded, making it impossible to discern what they represent. It’s also unfortunate that the board art reveals nothing about the nature of each system. And that the colors and letters of the random victory point tokens tell us nothing about why those planets are suddenly important in the galactic scheme of things. So not only is the game poorly designed from a rules point of view, it is equally unengaged with its setting. And the one time Conquests does engage you with the setting – the special cards which give you random advantages when you play them – they make a mistake. The cards have evocative art and titles to explain their benefits, but cards with the exact same rules text have different names, just making it even harder to learn the game. There are so many simple mis-steps like this that I have to wonder just how much this was blind-playtested.

This is a shame because there is a good game underneath all this – though even then it is a game with very narrow appeal. To wit: it’s a force-building, area control game of the complexity of old-school Avalon Hill games like Shogun and Axis and Allies. While the game gives options for short play, only at four hours do you get the most out of this, and you have to be prepared to crunch numbers the whole time. The timing mechanic is unique but to get the most out of it means a careful balancing of investments, because the length between your different kinds of turns is determined by how much you do on those turns (so big turns come around less often, with the exception of attacking turns, where bigger attacks happen more often). Attacking and claiming territory is extremely complex because moving and attacking require different types of turns, and you can only attack from an adjacent planet (”hmm, why did you put ten guys next to my system, Bob?”) and of course getting those guys made in the first place also takes another different kind of turn. But for those who like a mental challenge, this kind of triple-axes thinking could be fantastic brain-work.

The random appearance of scoring areas can be a fun part of this puzzle. At times, they just appear deep in the center of someone’s empire, thus giving them instant points for no effort (which can end the game unsatisfactorily), but the randomness means you can’t just turtle, because you never know when and where the scoring systems will appear. A winning empire must be ready to change position at a moment’s notice, while holding onto its outposts at the same time. This is why the game suffers in the short play mode: since some turns only happen every six months, two years of game time is nowhere near enough to do much of anything. Until you actually set up attacks and counter-attacks, it’s a little bit ponderous, as all you are doing is trying to grab adjacent systems so you can build outposts. Indeed, the two player game feels not unlike two hours of set up.

So at four hours, in full tactical swing, there is a decent game here, if you can get past the graphical problems and the confusing rules. But even then, there are already games on the market that scratch these kinds of itches. Fantasy Flight Games has expansion and defense tied up in War of the Ring, in RuneWars, and different kinds of game turns in StarCraft and Game of Thrones, and none of those are anywhere near as hard to learn, as unintuitive to play, as uninspiring in setting or as misshapen in design as Eve: Conquests. What’s more, Chaos in the Old World has shifting scoring areas and Small World has the need to suddenly shift to whole new goals when old ones wane. Or you could just dig out Shogun, which despite being twenty five years old is still a great game for those who want their brains to explode – and is still better presented than this modern monstrosity. In short, as my group said, unless you are absolutely madly in love with the setting – which is barely engaged in this game – there seems no reason to play Eve: Conquests when so many other games do the same thing, only better.

Not all of my playtesters said that, of course. Some of them fell over twitching and screaming until I promised to put the big bad game away and never make them play it again. I got my copy for free, but I’m still out for the therapy bills. Save your money and your sanity and look elsewhere for space gaming thrills. One star.

Despite that abstractness, Ra is an engaging game, and I would call it a modern classic. It packs palpable tension into choices that seem straightforward, to a degree unmatched by any other game. Even choosing whether or not to draw a tile often provokes delicious angst. Gamers that demand immersive theming will find Ra lacking, but other gamers – even casual gamers and non-gamers – will get sucked in by the game’s deceptive simplicity.

Ra will already be familiar to those with who follow Euro or German board games closely. It helped launch the popular alea big box line of games in 1999, and has already been republished once by the defunct American company Überplay. Now Ra is returning to game shelves courtesy its original English-language publisher Rio Grande Games, in partnership with German publisher Amigo Spiele.

The fundamental act of Ra is drawing tiles one at a time, in turn. These tiles form the auction lot, and eventually one player will decide that the prize is rich enough. Instead of drawing a tile, that player initiates an auction, putting the tiles drawn so far on sale. An auction also begins if a player draws a red Ra tile.

Even now, years after Ra’s initial publication, the auction mechanic has only been duplicated once, in a Ra variant designed by Knizia himself. Each player starts the game with three or four “Suns,” and no two Suns have the same value. When an auction occurs, each player, beginning with the player to the left of the one that initiated the auction, may bid one of his suns; Suns cannot be combined to increase their buying power, and there is no making change in the game. The highest bid wins the auction and takes the tiles currently in the display. At the start of the game, the Sun valued 1 is placed on the board. Auction winners take the sun currently on the board, replacing it with the sun he made the winning bid with. The sun taken is placed face down in front of him until the start of the next “epoch” of play.

An epoch ends when a certain number of Ra tiles are drawn or when all of the players have spent all of their Suns for the current epoch. At the end of each epoch players score the tiles they have collected, discarding certain types and carrying others over into the next epoch. Players then turn up their face-down Suns to bid with them in the new epoch.

Each type of tile is scored in a different way. Pharaohs, for example, only grant points to the player(s) that have collected more of them than any other player but the player(s) that have collected the fewest of them actually lose a couple points. Nile tiles are worth one point each, but only score if the player has collected at least one Flood tile. Players keep the Nile tiles at the end of an epoch, but they must discard their flood tiles. Players collect monuments for the entire game, but only get to score them at the end, receiving points for diversity and for collecting multiples of the same subtype.

Laid out like this, Ra probably seems a bit dreary and processional. It has many virtues that may not be apparent from a cursory rules description, though.

First, it is a simple game. The rules can be explained in a couple minutes, maybe five if you are very thorough with your demonstrations. Only the scoring system is at all complex, with more than a half-dozen subsystems. Fortunately, there is a convenient scoring reference on the board which players can glance at when they are confused. One small difference between auctions started voluntarily versus those started when a Ra tile is drawn can hang new players up now and again, too. Most players will have a good grasp of the game by the end of the second epoch, though.

Ra also plays quickly. Turns consist of single straightforward decision, usually whether to draw or invoke Ra. Once that decision is made, it only takes a couple of seconds to carry out. The bidding system – once around, only use one sun, no change – also features straightforward decisions. At most, a player has five options (four if there are four or five players) – pass, or bid one of four (three) suns.

Knizia manages to wring a surprising amount of tension out of these simple decisions, though, which keeps Ra from being a bland game. While you usually want to draw a tile when there is none or only one in the display, things get more interesting in a hurry. You have to weigh how much you want the tiles that are available against how attractive they are to your opponents and against which Suns each of you has available.

On top of this is the Sun (currency) economy. Because you are collecting the suns that you bid with in the following epoch, you have to keep one eye on what Suns you get with your auction lots, as well. A lot can continue growing just because no one wants the mediocre Sun that goes with it. Also, buying a big lot with a high value Sun makes the next auction lot extra shiny.

It’s not as simple as high Suns=good, low Suns=bad, either. Low Suns offer players a degree of flexibility that higher suns don’t. With a small sun in hand, you can invoke Ra almost every time it is your turn, since small lots are still a good deal. As long as the lot contains at least one quality tile, you can put the screws to the other players. Do they let you have a nice tile on the cheap, or do they burn through their precious suns in a hurry while keeping good tiles away from you?

All of these factors add up to tension, not analysis paralysis, though. A lot of the analysis is carried out on the fly as other players are taking their turns, and the situation usually changes incrementally. Each player will have two or three times a game when evaluation will take some time. These are usually obvious to the other players, though, so they should be understanding, and may even need the time for their own consideration. These pauses are still unlikely to last more than 30-45 seconds, and they also serve to give the experience of play some rhythm and texture. The rest of the game, there is virtually no downtime.

There are two exceptions to this. When there are five players the small, quick turns get spread apart far enough to be unfulfilling. This is compounded by a lack of control over events, since you can lose the ability to invoke Ra or use a God tile before a situation gets out of hand. When you or the player after you draws a powerful tile, or when you are stuck with weak Suns, you cannot do much to rein in the other players; the time between your turns tips over into a frustrating lack of control. Ponderous players can also bog the game down at this point, too.

Likewise, if you spend all of your Suns in a hurry – wisely or otherwise – you are stuck with nothing to do but chant “Ra” for several minutes. This is a good time to go to the bathroom or grab a drink, so it’s not a total waste, but if you are just stuck watching the other players draw valuable tile after valuable tile it can get annoying.

While it can be frustrating with five players, Ra is one of the best three-player games ever created. There is little opportunity for two players to accidentally beat up on the third and you make one out of every three decisions. Each player also has four suns each epoch, not three, which makes the bidding tactics deeper and more interesting. If you haven’t played Ra with three, you haven’t played it at its best.

The biggest fly in the ointment with Ra is that its theme is nothing more than window dressing. While nothing in the game conflicts with the idea that you are currying Ra’s favor, it never really enters into the experience of the game much either. Perhaps the most thematic part of the game doesn’t even come up in the rules – it is traditional to chant “Ra” repeatedly when you are out of the action. Hopefully this will cause Ra tiles to come out of the bag before your opponents can take advantage of your absence. Otherwise, the theme is little more than an inspiration for the beautiful artwork that graces the games components.

And the components are beautiful; Ra features some of Vohwinkel’s finest work. The art is clearly inspired by real Ancient Egyptian art, but it is distinctive as well. Just as important, this beautiful art is also magnificently functional. Each type of tile has its own distinctive background color, and it is easy to see what your opponents have from across the table. The board is a thematic sand brown, so the tiles in the auction display really stand out, too. The tiles in the Rio Grande edition are noticeably smaller than those in the older Überplay edition – a little over half as long on a side, a little over a third as large in surface area – which hurts readability some. This should only pose a problem when playing on a really large table, though. The art seems better suited to tiles of this size, too, since it has more texture and a sense of depth, like carvings in stone. One significant step back from the Überplay printing is that there is no physical indication of which tiles to keep and which to discard at the end of an epoch. While there were flaws with how Überplay did this, it was better than no indication at all.

Ra is an essential board game. Unless you absolutely cannot abide its thin theme, there is no reason not to buy a copy. The mechanics are an object lesson in game design, creating the perfect amount of tension to allow gamers and non-gamers to sit at the same table and have fun together. Better yet, the pace of the game keeps everyone involved in the game at all times. The bidding mechanics even manage to generate a frisson of “you bastard” play without the targeted viciousness of take-that games. Combine with absolutely beautiful components, and the result is a nearly perfect gaming experience.

Once upon a time, the planet was a blank canvas with many areas waiting for discovery by the seafaring people of Europe. Endeavor asks players to cover the globe with their influence, using a simplified system for colonization and conquest. Spreading across the seas, men move from their homes, across the continents, and into the history books. Seeking the highest glory, players parlay their successes into overall victory.

As they pass through multiple phases for developing their empires, players build and use buildings; attract new subjects (and soldiers) through cultural improvements; pay out moneys to run the machinery of government; and use the tools of their society to move into new lands through conquest and political favor. They may even resort to slavery to mold their new government, though this costs them in the end. As they exert control over regions and cities, explorers are in a position to collect the many Trade Tokens from around the board. These are useful for both victory and in-game advantages as they give a nation options for attacks and additional trading. The player who claims the most glory points wins. By weighing political influence against outright war, and direct transactions against control of the sea lanes, a player chooses the path he thinks can win it for his country. It’s a simple but gameable system, accessible to most tweens and adults, that sums up a sizable chunk of human history into about 90 strategic minutes.

The object of the game is to amass the most glory by the end of the game.

A game runs over the course of seven turns, with three to five players vying for control of territories worldwide and the sea routes connecting them. Each player gets a set of tokens in his color and a mat that tracks his actions and progress. The unexplored world is an abstract map of far-flung locations; their Shipping Tracks; and their card decks. Liberally dotting the board are Trade Tokens that give players more glory points and a host of actions with which to build up their faction. Just about anywhere a player might put his token has a counter on it – if he claims the space with his wooden token, he may take and keep the counter that was there for later use.

Each turn the action plays out in sequence, with a build, grow, salary, and action phase. During the build phase explorers erect infrastructure, creating Warehouses, Museums, Barracks, government buildings and so on that give them abilities that decide the course of nations. During the grow phase, culture increases, drawing in new settlers. Represented in the game as wooden tokens, these are placed in the harbor where they stand ready to activate the powers on the various buildings. The colonists are then paid salaries for their work, which brings them back to the harbor and readies their building for reuse. Finally, the meat of the game is the action phase wherein players take turns performing actions to increase the size and scope of their empire.

Players can ship, occupy, attack, pay, draw, or pass. They ship materials to newfound ports, and in doing so build up cachet with the local population and colonists. For each such action the Shipping Track for that region of the world fills up with players’ population markers to show the influx of his people. Any number of explorers may send goods to these new lands, but when the track fills up it determines the outcome of an election: the player who contributed the most to that territory’s development is made governor (and he gets the last card of the deck).

As the area swells with newcomers, those contributors draw cards from its deck. These offer a boost to the player’s statistics – his ability to build buildings may jump up, or his finances could improve and let him pay for the services of more colonists. These same cards can be drawn from the home area, along with Slavery cards. If someone needs a quick infusion of materials they can take this unfortunate step and build on the backs of forced labor. Once an area has a full Shipping Track it is “open” – it is a fully functional outpost and it can be used (or exploited, if you prefer) for other things.

Regions have cities that can be claimed for the glory of the empire, and if someone else owns them then they may be attacked. While occupation is as simple as putting down one’s counter, attacks are more costly – it requires two tokens, one of which is lost in combat and sent back to the supply (as opposed to the harbor; the player must spend precious time and effort to reintroduce that piece back into play). Should a nation gain the cities on both ends of a sea lane, they control that route as well and again get any Trade Tokens that may be there.

Although payments are usually made during the salary phase of the game, some buildings or Trade Tokens allow a nation to open up one of its buildings for use once again. Numerous strategies may hinge on this mid-phase calculation, and the timing of the various available actions can make or break a fledgling superpower. Unlike the other phases where players perform actions together, the action phase lets players do one thing at a time in order, and some folks may have more actions open to them than others. Those with nothing to do are forced to pass while the more capable nations continue until they’re done. Once the seventh turn is executed, the players count up their Trade Token bonuses, cities, worker pools, and cards to see who has amassed the most points. After any subtractions for resorting to slavery, the country with the most glory is the winner.

The components are equal to that of many a Euro-style game, with wooden pieces, mounted maps, and full tiles and player aids, but perhaps it’s not the pieces that deserve the honorable mentions so much as the rules and graphic executions (for which it would appear Joshua Cappel deserves most of the accolades). Not only are the mechanics pleasantly intuitive, they’re complemented by the rules and the player mats. Both are arranged in the same manner, so that the first phase, build, is placed at the top of the sheet and subsequent phases descend in order. It all works together so the rules are easily digested and self-reinforcing. Even the timing of the game comes down to use of the pieces: Since everyone must take a building each turn, when you take your seventh structure you know it’s the last turn of the game.

Endeavor is too abstract to provide an effective learning experience as far as subjects like geography or politics are concerned, but this doesn’t prevent it from being a solidly enjoyable strategy game. Designers Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray’s use of slavery as a temptation to those looking for a quick fix is an interesting twist that gives atmosphere, if not depth, to the play of the game. It’s easy enough for youngsters to pick it up while challenging all comers. With several viable paths to victory, replay value is high, and a 90-minute playing time makes fitting it into any game night’s schedule a breeze.

Players deploy action cards that determine what actions everyone takes, and in what order. Those who best anticipate their rivals’ plays can capitalize on them, letting someone else do some of the work needed to take the lead. It’s a non-random and (mostly) non-interference-based system that nevertheless allows heavy competition and short-term cooperation. Ad Astra is an easy introduction for all ages and skill levels, but it remains complicated enough that it holds the attention of even seasoned gamers looking for a fast, fun exploration game.

Players play mankind’s descendants, competing for new resources. They travel from one system to another, exploring the planets contained therein for the tools that make victory possible. Everyone starts the game with a starship in deep space and a factory on one of the planets in the home system. They have a hand of action cards, and one each of all the resources in the game as “seed.” After selecting someone for the first player position, the turn begins. During each round, players select three actions from their deck to build ships or structures, travel to new worlds, produce resources, and score points.

While everyone has the same number and type of cards, they don’t have identical options on those cards. For example, everyone has three production cards for generating resources, and on each card is a choice of either of two resources, but where one player may have a choice of water or food, another may have to decide between water or Xanthium ore. In the former case, the player can never generate water and food on the same round… if he wants both, he’d better hope someone else plays a card that mines the desired “missing” resource. Little variations like this mean some things cannot be accomplished until another player unwittingly uses a card that proves useful to his rivals.

Cards are placed on the numbered planning board, starting with the first player and going clockwise. Production cards make planets generate their designated resource; Movement allows ships to travel from planet to planet or system to system; Build cards create new ships and structures; players exchange needed resources with a Trade card; and Score cards add to players’ victory point totals. When everyone has placed three cards apiece (or four, depending on the number of players), the cards are turned over one at a time and resolved in order, starting with the first player. Everyone makes use of all the cards. That is, if a card turns out to be a scoring card, the owner of the card gets to decide what is scored (ships, colonies, perhaps even resources), but all the players get points for whatever gets chosen. The owning player does get some benefit – with a building card, for example, he gets to create multiple items while his rivals make only one.

A player need not place cards in order on the numbered spaces of the planning board, though, so someone who plays a scoring card may put it near the end of the order so he gains maximum play opportunities from anything that happens during the turn before scoring. If he wants to score for the number of ships he has, he may hope someone else played a Production card (to create new resources for everyone) and someone else played their Build card (so he can use those new resources to create yet another ship). A big part of the game is second-guessing one’s opposition, though, so if someone has a big fleet of ships, it’s a good bet he’ll try to score them. Rushing to build another ship might therefore earn a few more points before the turn is over.

Making planetfall on a new star system positions an explorer to gain more resources. They get to look at all the planets in that system and, if it’s available, choose the one that produces the resource they want. The remaining planets stay secret until someone lands at that system again. Having a ship at, say, a water planet generates one water resource card when someone plays a matching production card. If he has a ship and a colony, two cards come out, and the colony can be upgraded to a factory for even more cards. A terraformer is an imposing structure – it creates no cards, but it’s worth a lot of victory points at the end of the game. Some of these worlds are called “alien planets” (their terminology – would not all such worlds be “alien”?). These produce nothing, but by landing on them an explorer immediately receives a random Alien Artifact card that allows them some special power. For example, they may have the chance to retrieve a Scoring card early (see below) or win the game by achieving a specific point total.

When a turn ends, the players retrieve all their cards – all, that is, except the Scoring cards. Those only come back once the owner has played all three of his Scoring cards. If he has a good fleet of ships, he can’t just keep scoring for those over and over – he needs to cycle through the other forms of scoring before he can get any of them back. Once someone has hit or surpassed the 50-point mark on the planning sheet’s victory point track, he triggers the end game. When that round is finished, whoever has the highest point total is the winner.

Production values are high, with a lot of fun plastic miniatures and bits. Alas, a few come out of the box with a bend in the ship’s wing or some such, but mostly they’re well-molded and interesting shapes that hold up well and are easily identifiable. The same cannot always be said about the rest of the pieces. The blue, green, and gray action decks are easy to confuse, and one must train oneself to remember some star system symbols differ in size but not in design (“large star red” and “small star red,” for example). There are three kinds of ore, each with a different name (using an XYZ pattern of nomenclature), so that’s not exactly as intuitive as wool, lumber, and wood. You end up calling them as they look, not as what they are (“I’ll trade in one ‘gold’ and uhh… the one that looks like apple crumble”). The rules are mostly clear with some good examples of play, though the movement rules awkwardly contradict themselves within a couple of sentences. The player reference sheets are indispensable – literally, because the Alien Artifact card names are in Latin, and the translation and explanation of use are only to be found on the backs of those sheets. Kieran Yanner, Justin Albers, Fabio Maiorana, and Abyssal Studios are variously to be commended for the look and graphic appeal of the game. It’s splendid work, though some of the alien artifact illustrations can be downright goofy, reminiscent of Eon’s early Cosmic Encounter releases.

If Ad Astra sounds similar to an entry in the Catan game series, that’s because it is. About the only things missing are dice rolls and robbers, neither of which is much missed in this exercise. The name of this game is anticipation – calculating what your opponents are thinking and monitoring their plays during the turn to figure out what they’re likely to try next. Thus, anyone who can read their rivals is going to do well. Even if you can’t predict their actions properly, seeing what an opponent does during the game can give away elements of their strategy; follow in those footsteps and you’ll keep the scores close. Barring that, your opponents need a lot of energy cards to propel those craft; take over a lot of energy-producing worlds and they’re sure to trade with you.

The blurbs on the box are the usual bits of publisher puffery, making the whole thing seem more grand and involved than it really is, and what Ad Astra really is… is a whole lot of fun. The first in Fantasy Flight Games’ Nexus Designer Series, intended to highlight famous game authors, it’s a fully formed piece of family entertainment. (This one centers on the design team of Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget.) No laser attacks, minimal interference between players, but still plenty of interaction – everything needed to keep the table’s attention focused on play without sacrificing an elegant system.

Bill of Rights has a perfect niche. It is simple enough to teach non-gamers, but it has a deeper strategy for die-hards. The game is fun and should get everyone talking around the table as different bills get proposed, voted on and accepted. Plus, the game scales for up to eight players, so it is a great game to break out at parties or get-togethers.

Bill of Rights comes with a small box full of great sturdy components, a short rulebook, a game board, pawns for each of the ideologies, eight 6-card activist decks, four 40-card Amendment Decks, eight sets of 7 Vote counters, and eight quick-play reference cards. The game supports 3-8 players of ages eight and up, and takes between 20-40 minutes to play. Bill of Rights is part of Bucephalus Games’ Top Ten series and uses rules similar to their Ten Commandments game.

Players start by randomly choosing their Political Ideology – Warmonger, Peacenik, Social Conservative, Economic Conservative, Social Liberal, Economic Liberal, Totalitarian, and Revolutionary. They then randomly select their Activist card that tells them what kind of goals they will be looking for when trying to pass Amendments. These can range anywhere from Soup Kitchen Preacher for the Economic Liberal, which favors The Economic Liberal Amendments and disfavors the Economic Conservative ones, to the Neo-fascist for the Totalitarian Ideology that favors the Totalitarian amendments and disfavors the Revolutionary ones. These Activist cards will make every game goal slightly different, and players keep them secret to keep opponents guessing what their true agendas are.

Players then draw a card from each of the four amendment decks. These decks are weighted, so the common cards are worth fewer points, and the rare cards are worth more points. The more common a card is the more likely it will appeal to everyone, while the rare cards are the ones that you will have the most trouble passing. Each card has a quote on it to add flavor, and instructions that activate when it passes. For example, the “Right to Die” Amendment card is worth four points, appeals to Economic Liberals and Warmongers, and if the Amendment passes the special instructions on the card allow the player with the fewest points to discard their hand and redraw that many cards.

Each round, players draw one Amendment card from any deck and play it in the center of the table, face up. Players can try to convince the others to join their cause during this process. Then each player takes their vote counters, which are equal to the number of players minus one, and puts them on the amendments in the order they favor them. If duplicate Amendments are played, their votes are added together, giving those Amendments a better chance of passing. Amendments that have already been played are discarded. The votes are tallied and the winning Amendment is placed on the board. When all ten slots are taken up, the game ends.

Scoring is straightforward, with the owner of the winning card getting points equal to the vote counter he played on the card (up to one less than the number of players) and the point value of the card. At the end of the game, the players go through each Amendment, and use their Activist cards total their scores. In our above example, the Neo-Fascist scoring the “Right to Die” Amendment would get +0 Points for the Economic Liberal Icon on the card and +2 points for the Warmonger Icon. These points are added to the player’s current score, and the winner is the player with the most points.

If you don’t like the political theme, Bucephalus Games also has The Ten Commandments in their Top Ten Game Series, which uses the same rules system but changes it to a biblical theme. Players vote on commandments that best fit their organizations goals, just like in Bill of Rights.

Bill of Rights is a great start from a fairly new game company. The game is simple and easy to learn and a good gateway for non-gamers. I plan on teaching it to my wife and other non-gamer friends next time we have a party. If you want a great game to this is a good place to start.

The concern about transforming a computer game into a board game is more warranted when addressing a product like Star*Craft. After all, computer strategy games arose out of tabletop wargames precisely because people didn’t like keeping track of lots of little details and chits. This is an undeniable issue with the game: it works hard to model as much as it possibly can from the computer game, in order to really provide the full range of choices the RTS provides, but in doing so it cannot avoid being significantly complex and noticeably slow-paced. However, with some deftness within those limitations, the extensive time and mental demands of the game are definitely rewarded with an engaging game experience, one nothing like the RTS game. But whether it rewards enough to justify the effort is a difficult question to answer.

The core mechanic is simple enough, and clever too. At the start of each turn, players take turns placing orders on the random selection of planets chosen for the game. The orders are placed face down and are resolved in reverse order, allowing players to react to other’s actions or bluff about their intentions. Indeed, if a player covers all his opponent’s orders with his own, he can ensure having several actions while his opponent has none. Everyone still gets their four orders executed however, and not being able to act for a round gives you a chance to collect more event cards, so a cut off player is neither heavily disadvantaged nor do they miss out on fun.

Since the actions are relatively simple, and there are only three of them, resolving each turn tends to be pretty quick, even if there is a lot of fighting. The analysis paralysis comes when choosing which orders to play and when to play them – especially since you need to think four moves ahead. A similar mechanic is used in FFG’s A Game of Thrones strategy board game, but there you have much greater flexibility in when and how you resolve those orders, and you can also all place your orders simultaneously, so it can go much quicker. Of course, this doesn’t allow for the reactions and counter-moves that Star*Craft provides, but unfortunately it is in the order placement that things tend to get the most bogged down. Like a lot of strategy games, time limits may be a good idea.

The orders in Star*Craft are much simpler than in A Game of Thrones. One is Research, which simply adds more combat cards and event cards to the player’s hand. One is Build, which allows you to build units on the planet in question. The last is Maneuver, which includes both moving troops and resolving the attack that arises. To further increase simplicity, you can only perform one attack per turn. You can also only move onto the planet at hand and each zone on the planet has a very tiny troop maximum for defenders and attackers, so fights can’t get huge. Building is also relatively straightforward, and clearly guided by cards. It involves moving your worker chits from your pool onto cards which represent the planetary resources you control. Put two workers on a gas card and one on a crystal card to build a unit that costs two gas and one crystal. Run out of workers and you’re done.

So far, all quite straightforward. The complexity comes in the many-fold things you can build, all their many different powers, and the complicated rules for how all their powers interact.

There are of course three different races, as per the computer game: the fast but weak Zerg, the slow but strong Protoss, and the inbetween Humans. Each race has two different factions, allowing for up to six players. Each race has the same units available, but have different starting forces and different win conditions, demanding quite different styles of play. Thankfully, every player’s reference sheet lists these goals so you can keep a check on your opponents.

The reference sheet is accompanied by a building track sheet, full of slots to place chits and card decks. Each advancement permits new units to be built, each of which has its strength and armor ratings, is a ground or air vehicle, can attack ground, air or both and may also be able to Cloak, or have the Detector ability, or cause Splash Damage – and may also have access to several upgrades through researching more technology. With all of these options, it takes many instances of play to understand which units are good at doing which things (and that some units are simply far better than others). Of course, just because you know what you want to build doesn’t mean you’ll be able to, because you can only build one upgrade per build order. It makes sense that the more powerful troops take a while to get online but that relationship doesn’t always hold true, and even when it does it often reduces early game turns to nothing but consolidation.

Consolidation turns wouldn’t be quite so bad if the end game wasn’t quite so fast and cutthroat. The game has a timing mechanism which prevents anyone from winning until the third phase has begun. However, from that point on, anyone can win and some of the win conditions are quite easy to get, especially for the Zerg players. Unless everyone is watching closely and ensuring every player is being checked in their moves by someone else, a player can easily sneak in a victory by going unnoticed. In fact, in early games we had players winning without even them noticing they had won for a while. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of “keep everyone down until one slips through the net” set-up, but it can be unsatisfying that the real decisions are made at the end, making those consolidation turns kind of meaningless. They can be immensely satisfying if you like building your empire, of course – but you might also make a slip, get slapped down and never quite recover before a speedy Zerg crosses the line.

Another case where randomness is a problem is in the actual combats. Each skirmish is decided by playing cards from a combat hand or from the tech deck. Each unit has an average strength and armor, but if you draw good cards it may exceed that, and if you draw weak cards you may not reach the average. Add in the countless interacting special effects and tech and it becomes quite difficult to predict the outcome of a battle. Again, this can be fun and exciting to play out, but it can also be frustrating to those looking for deep strategy.

I must stress again that the game play is lots of fun. The usual incredible high standard art design and construction from FFG provides delightful pieces, and moving your pieces around as you build your empire and expand across the different planets is enormously satisfying. It is fun to explore the tech deck each game and try out new troops and new approaches. It is fun to see how a single planet placement or starting neighbor can totally dominate an entire game. The problem is this is coupled with a game that is just too detailed and too long for casual play or for introducing to newbies with ease. Even after several sessions, we have trouble keeping games under five hours, and we continue to dive into the rulebook for clarifications. This wouldn’t be a problem at all if the game was better suited to those willing to take the time to play and study the rules in depth – but the strategy doesn’t quite seem to be there. There is too much randomness in every stage of the game to make it a really solid tactical exercise.

So we return back to the first issue once again: is it really worth playing, when you could play the computer game instead? The answer is still “maybe”. The board game has plenty to enjoy in it, particularly the fun of building and expanding through each new random set up and card draw. It is also has some degree of strategy. It has some depth and scope to explore. But unless your group is really used to dealing with games so full of detail and really enjoys longer games, they will probably not find quite enough strategy or quite enough fun to return to it. And that’s a damn shame, because Star*Craft is fun, and it has strengths. But it is also ultimately more likely to be more a shelf-warmer than a recurring favorite – and thus is better saved for completists. Two and a half stars.

Fabrice Besson’s game is a solid effort. It keeps players busy with resource management and never quite lets them run out of things to do. It can end suddenly if you aren’t careful and there’s not enough time to do everything you’d like to do, so it has a built-in sense of urgency. Giants is both well rounded and well designed.

Every round, a new, random set of moai comes up for bid. Players reveal simultaneously how many workers and tribe markers they’re bidding. If you bid the most markers you get your choice of stone heads to build, but you still must commit enough workers to the job. Underbid and you haven’t the manpower to work on the bigger creations; bid too many workers and no one’s left to move the statue across the terrain. Once everyone selects their moai, remaining tribesmen are strewn across the island. Many of these are set up to transport the great heads in an unbroken line, but the sorcerer can be committed to securing more resources like lumber, tribal markers, added workers, and pukao (the cylindrical headdresses that adorn some of the statues).

Points are scored by displaying the moai on the ahu that ring the island. Some positions are more valuable than others, and a headdress is better still (see below). The map board shows the island with a hex-grid overlay, and a player can move a moai through every space that has the requisite number of workers. For example, a small statue needs only one worker to pass through a hex, but it’s worth fewer points upon placement. A large moai scores more but requires three people in every space. Workers need not be from one’s own tribe, but every time a rival worker is employed, that color scores points for the assist. The forest can be chopped down and used as rollers to shift the statues, but the logs last only one turn before being discarded and Rapa Nui is typically deforested by game’s end.

Each tribe has a number of platform counters in its color depending on the number of players; these are used to stake a claim to an ahu. When a group puts a moai on its last site, the game is over. Each ahu lists two numbers: the first is multiplied by the size of the moai placed there (times 1 for little ones, times 3 for the large) and the second is a bonus awarded for providing a headdress. Additional points are scored for unused Rongo tablets (see below), and the highest total wins.

Besson’s fine design is complemented by Miguel Coimbra’s artwork. It’s rough stuff when it comes to detail, but it has a primitive feel suited to the tribal subject matter, and the map is just begging to be used. Better still is the uncredited sculptor who created the pieces for the game. The tribal markers and characters are okay, but the real treat is the moai set. They’re not detailed either – no more than the real ones were – but they’re a whole lot of fun to play with. Alas, the headdresses don’t always fit atop the heads as they should, but rumor has it the company is trying to correct the situation by offering replacement pieces.

As one might expect, the rules suffer from the vagaries of translation from another language. Some passages need to be reread a few times, but they are complete (and contain a history of the island to boot, all in English, German, and French). The plastic storage tray has a neat moai-in-profile cavity, but the pieces just barely fit – and even then it’s trial and error to see just how it’s meant to come together. The screens are a nice player reference, but the banners don’t work well. These “flags” are attached to the top of a screen to show that player is done. It’s good news that these are mostly superfluous because putting them on and off the tops of the shields is going to wear one or the other down before very long. The wooden logs are neat, but round… easy to roll away, easy to lose once they do. You get all this for $69.99.

Best to concentrate on what the game does well, which is to be a cool pastime. Giants requires both thought and forethought, because most everything in it has two uses. Tribal markers are good for bidding on moai, but they also mark as yours a head you haven’t yet muscled into place and get you a Rongo half-tablet. Two such tablets let the chief exercise the same powers as the sorcerer (mostly obtaining extra workers and tribal markers to serve the cause), but they’re worth extra points at the end of the game if they’re not spent. The chief is also your best worker (he does the work of three of his followers), so short-changing yourself of his services can be trouble. If you line up your clansmen at all the right locations, you might be able to get them to do their specialized tasks and move the moai to boot.

For all that happens during a game, this is a quick play. It can be finished in under an hour, especially by a group that gets the rules down, and there’s also a quick-start rule that pares the time down further. The end comes quickly, so it’s important not only to monitor to whom you give those points for helping your tribe but to track who has placed how many of their platforms. Once that last moai is in place… Giants has an intuitive set of rules and good replayability, so as resource management games go, it may not be perfect but it’s at the top of the rankings.

– Andy Vetromile

They’d be served well with the results. Pandemic is a game that exercises the brain in a mathematical way but never appears to be doing so. The gameplay remains fun and engaging, the counters are kinesthetically pleasing and the setting exciting and fun: to wit, stopping the spread of international diseases manages to have a scientific feel as well as action-movie excitement, and up-to-the-minute relevance thanks to the fame of Avian Flu and Swine Flu. But this isn’t just a game for teachers and families: this is a game every board gamer will enjoy.

In the last decade – thanks to games like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride – board games have gone mainstream. Games with the kind of clever design normally reserved for Germanic hobby games and production values normally reserved for art books have filtered onto the dining tables of the Average American Family. The last time this happened, a few counselors with deranged minds feared competition so much they created the travesty known as The Ungame, which is like Trivial Pursuit only the questions ask things like “how do you feel right now?” and “what’s a memory you like?” and everybody wins through sharing. The point is that families and children (not to mention other people trapped together for a long time, like astronauts) tend to be wary of competition. They aren’t all going to start roleplaying, so the world needs more co-operative games and fast. Pandemic is one of the first to fit the bill, and that alone makes it worthy of note.

As mentioned, it also gets points for not featuring guns and swords on its cover – or alien beasties or monsters or spaceships. Granted, that does make look a little lackluster but it also makes it free of the taint of genre fiction. Like it or not, fantasy still belongs to children and science fiction to nerds, and hardly anyone in the mainstream has even heard of Call of Cthulhu. If you’re going to sell a game to the Average American Family, it needs to be set in the real world, with real things like trains or battleships or silver dogs the size of cars and top hats that pay for hotel rooms.

Pandemic is set very much in the real world, and in the news headlines. The board depicts the globe, crisscrossed with connections between major cities (good for learning geography – parents take note!). A random selection of these cities begins play with one to three colored cubes on them. The color represents both different strains of disease and different areas of the world – Asia gets red cubes, Europe and the states get blue, and so on. The aim of the game is to cure all four diseases before the spreading cubes reach plague proportions.

By collecting cards of the corresponding color and taking them to a research station, players work together to cure each disease. The problem is that you only get two cards a turn and passing them between players is not easy. You’re also going to want to use many of your cards to move around between cities, because sliding around on the connected lines takes time. And time you do not have, because each turn you only get four actions. After that you get two more cards, but then the board’s deck of cards generates two cards of its own. These increase the disease in the cities that are turned over, and if a city ever gets more than three blocks, it causes an outbreak, spreading the disease to each neighboring city. Too many outbreaks worldwide, and you all lose. Too many cubes on the board, and you all lose. Take too many turns, and you all lose. Saving the world from disease isn’t like dusting crops, boy.

Adding to the pressure is the really clever mechanic of rebooting the card deck: the player’s deck contains semi-randomly seeded Epidemic cards. When they appear, the disease cards you’ve turned over so far get shuffled and put back on top. This ensures that the diseases keep hitting the same cities over and over again, so random deck scatter can’t lead to a cake-walk scenario. There will always be cascading diseases, coming over and over again. This reboot also gives you some idea of what’s coming though, allowing you to better plan your strategy. It also provides a difficulty-scaling mechanic: you can increase the number of Epidemics from three (very easy) up to six (extremely hard). I’ve been playing for a year now and we’re still afraid of the six level.

Which is to say Pandemic is a game you can learn. Key survival strategies and danger points become obvious quickly. Other, more subtle tactics come a bit slower. Barring bad luck, your average board game geek will win all the time on level four and after a while be hitting 70-80% on level five. Yet it still maintains its appeal. Players get different roles, each with their own unique special rules, changing how you play, if not the overall strategy. The randomness of the cities that come up and the timing of the Epidemics keeps each game unique – the challenge can become pulling back a game from a bad start, or seeing how completely you can succeed after a good run of luck. Of course, randomness has its downside: those who love tactics may find it annoying that even the best strategy may not survive really harsh luck, but you can always just start over and try again – and the simple fun of moving the blocks around is engaging enough to ensure you’ll want to.

Best of all – and maybe most importantly of all – the game is quick to set up and always plays in less than 45 minutes. Thanks to the full-color, well-written rules it is also a breeze to learn and easy to teach. Yet it is still a worthy intellectual challenge and an engaging bit of gaming fun. For a game which, like Ticket to Ride before it, has awesome “cross-over” potential, this simplicity and speed are probably its greatest assets of all. In a world where games seem to be getting longer and longer and bigger and bigger, quick and easy become even more precious commodities. It’s an advertising cliché bordering on the hideously patronizing but it’s still true, whether you’re talking about game design or marketing potential: sometimes the simplest things really are the best. Pandemic is as simple as catching the flu, but is also as clever as a clinical epidemiologist and as addictive as a morphine drip. Gotta cure ‘em all.