Flash Review — Great Western Trail (2nd edition)

Players: 1-4
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Good
Age: 12+
Playtime: 75-150 min
Complexity: 8/10

You’re a cowboy driving cattle through the old west, hoping to reach Kansas City with a great herd you can turn into a tidy profit. But the road to riches is rife with hazards, bandits, and difficult decisions at every turn.

The main board depicts the territory players need to cross in order to deliver their cattle; different paths offer different options and challenges, ultimately all leading to Kansas City. Players also have their own boards, used to track their evolving capabilities throughout the game. As for the herd itself, it’s represented by a deck of cards – one cow to a card – that players will manipulate and refine to yield the most bucks come delivery time.

Great Western Trail is both a deck-building game (where you add to and tweak your stack of cow cards) and a worker placement game, albeit with only one worker per player: that worker moves forward along the chosen path and activates one or more of the actions available on the spot it reaches. You can purchase more cattle, hire helpers, move your train forward (to deliver to cities that are further away and more lucrative), build buildings (that help you and/or hinder your opponents), upgrade train stations to earn precious bonuses, and more.
When time runs out, the player who’s amassed the most points – through a variety of means – is declared winner.

Great Western Trail was my game of the year back in 2016, and it’s still one of my favorites. The new edition rebalances a few things that are almost enough to make me want to buy it a second time, but the original remains excellent, and should serve my wrangling needs for another good long while.
The two main changes introduced here are the orange cows (cards you can upgrade to a higher value each time you deliver them to Kansas City) and the solo module, driven by a deck of cards that let Sam the bot go about its business and get in your way.

Whatever edition you decide to play, the game is great (it’s in the title!) and fun, it moves at a brisk pace and never feels quite the same from one session to the next. Saddle up!

Most easily forgotten rule: While purchasing cattle, you can use one of your cowboys to add two new cattle cards to the market.

Flash Review — Cosmic Encounter

Players: 3-5
Age: 12+
Playtime: 60-120 min
Complexity: 5/10

You’ve heard of it, you might even have played it: the game’s been around forever in various incarnations, starting with Eons Publishing back in 1977. The current edition is from Fantasy Flight Games (illustrated above), which is not only still in print – 12 years down the line! – but just got a seventh expansion in the form of Cosmic Odyssey.

With the right crowd, Cosmic Encounter is an absolute riot; there’s a reason it’s been reprinted and refreshed countless times since its inception. And whereas the original could overstay its welcome, the modern version makes it possible for five experienced players to get it all done in less than an hour.
(Of course, if you start piling various optional modules on top of the base game, your cosmic mileage may vary.)

The base game’s overview is ludicrously simple, to the point of sounding almost asinine.

• Each player represents an alien race vying for cosmic supremacy.
• On your turn, you’re told which opponent to attack; you then pick one of their four planets as your target.
• You commit 1 to 4 ships to the attack and invite some players (or all, or none) to join you, while the defender does the same.
• You and your opponent each play an attack card: each participant adds their card’s value to the number of ships on their side, and the higher total wins. Losing ships are sent to the trash, while a victorious attacker earns one colony on the target planet (and so do their allies!).
• First player to establish five colonies wins the game.

Simple, right?
Except that the game throws every monkey wrench it can in its own cogs, which – again, given the right crowd – turns Cosmic Encounter into something that feels like a hilarious, semi-tactical party game.

For starters, each player gets to use their own, personal alien power, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM BREAKS THE GAME. (Really: When players read out loud what their powers do, heads start shaking around the table, because the powers are clearly out of whack. All of them.)
Also, the deck is littered with crazy cards that do all sorts of things, such as canceling another player’s power, making the lower total win, adding trashed ships to the fight, switching out dying ships with an opponent’s… And many of those cards you can play when you’re not even involved in the current encounter.
(“I thought you said you wanted to remain neutral here?!”
“I say a lot of things.”)

Backstabbing is so rampant and expected that you can’t help but feel disappointed when nothing of the sort happens. And of all the times I’ve played this – a lot of sessions – only a handful of games did not end in an upset. Those were the boring ones.

If you can handle chaos and a few sharp knives between your shoulder blades, give Cosmic Encounter a shot. I doubt it’ll be your last.

Most easily forgotten rule: If you fail your first encounter, you don’t get a second one.

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Flash Review — Nemesis

Players: 1-5
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Great
Age: 12+
Playtime: 90-180 min
Complexity: 8/10

Your big starship is slowly making its way across the blackness of space, hopefully pointed at Earth, and hopefully with its engines in good running order. But menacing creatures are popping up all over the place, and what do you know – not everyone seems to be working towards a common goal…

I resisted playing this game for a while: it seemed to me like a cheap Alien knockoff. Instead, I played a host of other games, just because they had the official Alien logo stamped on the box – and they all sucked.
Then I gave in and tried Nemesis and realized I had been a fool.
THIS is the Alien boardgame you’ve been waiting for, and it’s got everything you want. Super strong theme, cool mechanics, with dangerous creatures lurking around every corner, and tension that oozes out of your ears from beginning to end.

You’ll explore a darkened ship, repair whatever’s broken, put out fires that always seem to flare up at the worst possible time, keep the ship running, and fight nightmarish monsters – or die trying. (Most probably the latter.) Combat is fast, simple, and not always effective. So keep quiet as you explore the bowels of the ship…

Each player has their own objective, which might – or not – work with whatever their crewmates need to accomplish. This makes Nemesis a semi-coop game, where working together is paramount to survival… until a certain point.
I mean, I don’t normally enjoy launching my escape pod while watching a fellow crew member being torn limb from limb, but if that bastard’s objective was to make sure I didn’t survive the game, then he probably deserved his horrible and bloody fate.

Sure, you could always fight your way to the generator room and flip the self-destruct switch. But will you make it out alive before the clock runs out and the whole thing becomes a cloud of debris?

Nemesis is an astounding experience, and I’ll never turn down a session.
The solo mode doesn’t disappoint: it uses a different set of objectives, but otherwise the game remains the same. Which is to say, as tough as it is satisfying.

Most easily forgotten rule: Characters get wounded by fire only if they end their turn (not round) in a burning room.

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Flash Review — Boonlake

Players: 1-4

Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Good
Age: 14+
Playtime: 80-160 min
Complexity: 8.5/10

There’s much to do in the abandoned region of Boonlake: exploring, settling, breeding cattle, hiring helpers, sailing, building, modernizing… What will you tackle first?

In addition to a central board depicting the virgin territory of Boonlake (revealed and built throughout the game with hex tiles), each player has their own personal board where they can navigate between production sites to ensure a constant flow of much needed resources, where they track developments and advances that’ll net them juicy bonuses, and where actual levers that they acquired during the game can be pulled for extra actions or other special effects.

There’s also a delightful “flowing river” action board with each action represented by a tile; unchosen actions flow downstream to be worth more when a player finally decides to pick them.

Boonlake is a heavy strategy game full of tough decisions, and where selecting an action tile allows everyone to do something, while giving you a little more (‘cause it’s your turn, after all). I especially love the scoring tiles you can score when you feel like it: if you score them later, they’ll be worth more points, but they’ll also cost you a heftier penalty if it turns out you can’t meet the ever-increasing requirements.

The solo module is a slightly intricate affair (with a dedicated AI board!) that simulates an opponent getting in your way. This one works better than many systems of its kind.

Most easily forgotten rule: If you build a settlement in a region where you already have one, you must pay (lose) 5 points.

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