Flash Review — Dune: Imperium

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: acceptable
Age: 13+
Playtime: 60-120 min (barely 60 minutes with 2 players)
Complexity: medium

In the Dune universe, the Great Houses of Landsraad gather resources, forge alliances with powerful factions, and face off in explosive battles for control of the Imperium.
Build the perfect deck to unlock some of the Bene Gesserit’s secrets, learn new tricks from the Spacing Guild, gain much-needed water by making friends with the Fremen, and stay on the Emperor’s good side. But above all, make sure you never run out of spice. (‘Cause it must flow.)

Yes, Dune: Imperium is a deckbuilder, but it’s also a worker-placement game. You’ll find yourself playing cards to gain access to specific spots on the board, usually to generate resources or ready troops for war. You’ll also want to keep some cards for your last turn of the round, when you reveal what’s left of your hand and use the currency found there to buy new cards to add to your discard pile—in addition to triggering the occasional special ability. At the end of every round, combat takes place between those with troops on the battlefield, with a variety of spoils awarded to the top contenders. The game ends after 10 rounds or when someone reaches 10 points.

For a system that simple, it’s surprising how much the theme shines through. Fighting is an ever-present reality that needs to be dealt with, but intrigue and manipulation (of your card deck, for one thing) are also a big part of the game. Experience plays a major role as well: newcomers won’t know how to navigate the intricacies of the system, but will learn after a beating a game or two.

In solo mode, the lone player uses a special card deck (or else a free companion app) to generate worker placements for two virtual rivals. But since the whole thing is random, it feels more like a learning tool than a true “competing against AI” experience. By contrast, the two-player version—which uses the same deck to drive a single virtual opponent—works really well. In this version, the AI is not collecting any resources nor scoring any points: it’s just there to gum up the works, blocking spaces on the board and putting up a surprisingly stiff competition in combat when you might have wished for an easier confrontation.

Overall, Dune: Imperium is a winner. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a solid, exciting design with plenty of depth to explore. Now if we were to talk expansions...

Most easily forgotten rule: At the end of a round, put a spice token on each of the spice-generating spaces that were not visited during the round.

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Flash Review — Watergate

Players: 2
Age: 12+
Playtime: 30-60 min
Complexity: low-med

It’s the Nixon administration against the staff of the Washington Post, and while the latter works to establish a link between the President and the Watergate break-in, the former does its best to conceal evidence and bury the lead.
Play cards to recruit informants, take the initiative, gain momentum, move pieces of evidence within your grasp, and bring your opponent to their knees.

Each turn, you play a card out of your hand and trigger one of its many potential effects. You could try to bring a piece of evidence a few steps towards your side on a tug-of-war track; you could move the momentum token closer to you (to set off special abilities) or do the same with the initiative token (go first next turn!); or else you could execute the card’s powerful event, to recruit an informant, neutralize evidence acquired by your opponent, silence a potential threat forever...

Recruited informants go on the board’s periphery, while acquired pieces of evidence are placed in a chain that the Washington Post hopes will eventually connect the President (in the center) to one of the informants. Unless the Nixon administration manages to take that information out of play, of course. The Washington Post will juggle multiple chains of evidence at once, waiting for one of them to pay off, while the Nixon administration does its damndest to kill the story.

By and large, it’s amazing this game even exists. Many casual gamers will be put off by the theme, whereas hardcore gamers might dismiss the short rulebook as “too simple.” The truth falls somewhere in between, in a situation where the end result is bigger and better than the sum of its parts. The history-dripping theme combined with the accessible ruleset make Watergate an engrossing experience, which is a surprise coming out of such a small package. (In a way, it’s reminiscent of 13 Days, for those familiar with that compact game about the Cuban missile crisis.)

Most easily forgotten rule: Whenever a token (of any type) reaches space no. 5 at either end of the tug-of-war track, the player sitting on that side acquires the token immediately.

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Flash Review — Black Sonata

Players: 1

Age: 12+
Playtime: 30 min
Complexity: low-med

A solo game of deduction and hidden movement, with quite the original theme: you’re roaming 17th century London, trying to ascertain the identity of the “Dark Lady” Shakespeare refers to in several of his sonnets.
Track down the Dark Lady, try to get a glimpse at her to obtain clues about her identity, then state your conclusions out loud (even though it’s just you in the room) and check whether you’re right.

Black Sonata stands as one of most devilishly clever games I’ve ever encountered. The game runs on a deck of movement cards you assemble according to a simple formula, and that deck provides clues as to the Dark Lady’s comings and goings. So let’s say the back of the first movement card shows a beer mug—ah! the Dark Lady starts the game on one of the “inn” spots on the map; if the next card shows a cross, the Dark Lady moved to one of the four “church” spots, but since she was coming from an inn, you can eliminate two of the possibilities; and so on.
Each time the Dark Lady moves, you also move your pawn, and in so doing try to land on her path. If she moves to a location where you stand, you can take that location’s card (which has a hole in a unique area, different on all location cards), place the movement card on top of the location card, and flip both over: if the silhouette of the Dark Lady is showing through the (key) hole, you’ve caught a glimpse of her! The game rewards you with a clue card, and accumulating enough clues in that manner will eventually allow you to deduce the three characteristics that identify the elusive woman. But take too long to accomplish this, and the Lady will vanish into the London fog.

All told, each game lasts between 15 and 30 minutes and is a very pleasant, logical endeavor. It’s not a deep game by any means, but the sheer fact that designer John Kean was able to create a solo engine to rival the classic Scotland Yard completely blows me away. You can also adjust the difficulty level in multiple ways, which ensures everyone will feel comfortable ambling through dark alleys and slinking into one inn after another.

Most easily forgotten rule: In order to try to peek at the Dark Lady, you have to be at a location ALREADY when she shows up there—on your turn you have to move or peek, but not both. (Although Easy Mode allows you to move and peek in the same turn.)

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Flash Review — In the Year of the Dragon

Players: 2-5
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Age: 12+
Playtime: 75-100 min (but that’s very inflated, it never takes that long…)
Complexity: medium

Action selection in medieval China, with a nasty event everyone needs to deal with at the end of each turn.

Build palaces, staff them with doctors (against the plague) farmers (to feed your people during droughts), soldiers (gotta fight those invading Mongols)—hell, even courtesans to keep everyone entertained and score bonus points each turn.

In the Year of the Dragon might be the quintessential Stefan Feld design. You’re faced with interesting (i.e. agonizing) choices all through the game, you get to score points in multiple ways, and the system scales amazingly well from 2 to 5 players (one of Feld’s specialties). The priority track is genius: do you recruit staff that will perform better, or accept a slightly diminished performance in the hopes of going first on the next turn?
The game is also very straightforward; the most difficult concepts to explain are the end-of-turn events, and even those are not complex at all. This means your group is up and running in a matter of minutes, and the game is short enough—an hour on the outside—for someone to request another go at it when the final reckoning comes.

A 10th-anniversary edition was released a few years back, and it contains the Great Wall of China and Super Events expansions. Well worth getting—this is the kind of game that remains in a collection for a long, long time.

Most easily forgotten rule: When you pass to get money, you get BACK to 3 yuan. So if you had 2 already, you only get 1 more. (A lot of people just take 3 yuan, no matter what.)

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Flash Review — Hardback

Players: 2-5
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: fun
Age: 10+
Playtime: 45-60 min
Complexity: low

A deckbuilding game of words!
You start with a basic deck of letters, draw a hand of five cards, and proceed to spell words for points, special effects and/or money that’s used to purchase more letters and add them to your deck. The end goal is to score 60 points, but how you get there is up to each player.

The idea feels so obvious, it’s a wonder nobody did it before. And in fact, the design team did do it before: it was called Paperback and it didn’t turn out great. But the concept was fantastic, so I’m happy they decided to go back to that well and come up with a much-improved sequel.

There’s not much more to add. All the letter cards are shuffled together, and players buy them from a seven-card “offer row” with the money they generate spelling words. Letters come in several colors (themed as literary genres: romance, adventure, horror…) and work best together: in other words (ha!), you’d better stick to a couple of genres, so your cards trigger each other’s bonus effects more often.

Several optional rules (and related materials) are included in the little box, two of which I found essential: adverts, which enable players to convert money into points in the second half of the game (otherwise why not just buy point-scoring cards and cycle through your deck as often as you can); and events, which add some spice to the proceedings, by preventing players from using the letter E in their words, for instance, or by limiting the length of words to four letters.

The solo game is actually a coop mode for 1-5 players. The AI scores points in a variety of ways and acts as a timer: players need to collectively reach 60 points before the AI does (i.e. before the clock runs out).

Hardback is fun, quick and easy. I don’t even like word games that much, but this one’s a winner.

Most easily forgotten rule: If you spend an ink marker to draw an additional card, you must use that letter to spell your word, otherwise you forfeit your whole turn.



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Flash Review — Hallertau

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Okay
Age: 12+
Playtime: 50-140 min

A farming game (again!?) where the main focus is on gathering the necessary materials to upgrade a variety of small craft buildings in order to clear the way for your “community center,” which drives both the number of workers you get to use each turn and the number of basic victory points you score when the whole thing is over.

Yes, Uwe Rosenberg (of Agricola fame) is giving us another heavy farming game; but once again, it’s quite different from what came before and provides its own set of challenges and opportunities. There’s an array of available actions, but costs are incremental: the more people have used the action before you, the more expensive—in quantity of workers—your go at it will be.

You’ll end up drawing a bunch of cards from various decks and trying to tweak your timing so they combine in a cascade of bonuses and kickbacks. But keep an eye on your resources! Some of them you can grow, others you’ll have to trade for. Come the end of each turn, you’d better be sure you’ve stocked up on what you need to upgrade those craft buildings, so your operation can keep expanding.

Solo mode is a beat-your-own-score kind of deal, so your mileage may vary. But multiplayer? It’s one hell of a ride on the swing-plough.

Most easily forgotten rule: You can play a card AT ANY MOMENT, including right in the middle of an action—yours or an opponent’s. This goes counter to so many other games of its kind that I need to keep repeating that rule.




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Flash Review — Bonfire

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: very good
Age: 12+
Playtime: 70-110 min
(but once you know the game, it’s at most 60 min for a 2-player match)

Gnomes and guardians and magical bonfires, plus mystical islands you need to reach by boat…
It’s a fantasy theme wrapped around a tight engine where players need to generate their own Action Tiles (and be clever about it), and then use those tiles to accomplish special tasks, rebuild their cities, rekindle the magic—all the while keeping an eye on dwindling resources.

I don’t care for the theme (which makes the game a bit more difficult to grok than it should be), but the mechanics are fantastic, the components beautiful, and the tension genuine: you always want to do five different things at once. Bonfire is a typical Stefan Feld design, where points come at you from every direction, but which requires some serious optimization if you ever hope to emerge victorious.

Beware, though, that Bonfire is not an entry-level game: while each rule is simple to understand, putting them all together into a coherent strategy can be overwhelming for newcomers, at least in the first couple of games.
But it’s all well worth the effort.

Most easily forgotten rule: You can’t play a Fate Tile if you hold more than 1 Action Tile. (You can discard down to 1 if you want, though.)

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